SINGLE-SPEECH SOUNDPOST. A CUE FROM SHAKSPEARE. BY FRANCIS JACOX. THE reader that curiously concrete abstract-may be reasonably familiar with Shakspeare, and yet have clean forgotten who in the world was James Soundpost. Only once does James Soundpost open his lips. And when he does, it is but to avow his ignorance. He is No. 3 of three musicians, who are hired to play the wedding march and all that, at Juliet's nuptials. Nos. 1 and 2 are less reserved of speech. The former, Simon Catling, can bandy bantering speeches with Peter, in the hall of the Capulets; and so can No. 2, Hugh Rebeck by name. But No. 3, our undemonstrative James Soundpost, never speaks but when he is directly spoken to, and hardly then; even then, only to declare that really he knows nothing of what he is asked about. Peter is amusing himself with a grammatical analysis of a line he has just quoted, "Then music, with her silver sound,"-and demands of all three musicians in turn the reason why of "silver sound." Simon Catling has a reason ready at once: "Marry, sir, because silver hath a sweet sound." So too has Hugh Rebeck: "Because musicians sound for silver." But when it comes to No. 3, and "What say you, James Soundpost ?" that decent, reticent, unpretentious man comes out with a candid' and there an end. It is not much to say, as the words stand. But it is a multum in parvo; it is his áñaέ Xeyouevov; and James Soundpost may stand forth as an ensample, to all time, of the scattered few of humankind, who have the candour and the courage to say, under trying circumstances, I DON'T KNOW. True, there may be characters and circumstances to which the frank negative answer is infinitely more convenient than any other. Pour moi, je ne sais rien; n'attendez rien du notre,† is Petit Jean's eager affirmation, in dread of a tiresome commission. So too with Molière's impatient ultimatum to a boring questionist, whom he can shake off no other way: "Tenez, monsieur, [MOLIÈRE loquitur] je suis le plus ignorant homme du monde. Je ne sais rien de tout ce que vous pourrez me demander, je vous jure."+ A Know-Nothing would seem, as Mr. Peacock remarks, in certain strictures of his on that and other transatlantic misnomers, to imply a liberal self-diffidence,-on the Scriptural principle that the beginning of knowledge is to be aware of one's own ignorance. But no such thing. It implies furious political dogmatism, enforced by bludgeons and revolvers.§ * Romeo and Juliet, Act IV. Sc. 5. L'Impromptu de Versailles, Sc. 2. † Racine, Les Plaideurs, II. 14. Gryll Grange. In nothing but the name would such a man as, for instance, Frederick Perthes, recognise affinity with such a crew. This honoured associate, though but a bookseller, of Niebuhr, Müller, Jacobi, and their peers, owed his perfect ease in their company to his conscious desire of passing for no more than he was. "I know who and what I am, and am always anxious to reveal rather than to conceal my ignorance, in order to prevent waste of time. Do not, however, give me too much credit for modesty, for though I am aware that I know nothing, I am also aware that I can do much."* There are some sorts of ignorance, it has been remarked, that are evidently not at all disagreeable to what may be called their possessors; insomuch that pride in knowledge might sometimes seem to have given place to pride in ignorance; and we are become used to hear men boast of knowing nothing on such-and-such a subject, of being profoundly ignorant on matters which engage the common attention, and of which most people have a smattering; and thus have learnt to understand, by the obtrusive confession, either that the speaker's time has been better employed, or that Nature, liberal to him in great things, has inflicted on him some slight defect or incapacity separating him from less gifted men by an idiosyncrasy. Or, it may be, he has such high and superior notions of what constitutes knowledge, that nothing less than entire mastery, amounting to an exclusive possession, of a subject deserves the name, and that everything short of this is ignorance. "Again, there is feminine ignorance, recognised on all hands for what it really is, yet held in high esteem as an engine of coquetry, and as a conscious fascination. A pretty or a charming woman feels herself more pretty and more charming for not knowing anything hard, deep, or recondite. It costs her nothing to disown the slightest acquaintance with the dead languages, or science, or anything that calls for abstract thought. In the opinion of those whose approval she most cares for, she might as well assume Miss Blimber's spectacles as come out in any one of them." The essayist we have been quoting suggests, however, that if our ignorance in certain fashionable points of knowledge presses on us, the best plan is to get up some subject of which we stand a chance of being sole student in our own circle. It matters not how trifling the speciality, he assures us—if a man only knows something that nobody else knows, the world will respect him." "Only be an authority upon beetles, or even seaweeds, and you may have small Latin and less Greek, you may know nothing of literature, and be grossly in the dark on politics, and it may all tend to your honour. If you know absolutely nothing else, how much must you know about beetles!"+ One of Mrs. Gore's young ladies, all frivolity and fashion, in telling a friend of some prosy senior who talks to papa about the " money-market," is careful to add, "though what the word means I can scarcely con Perthes to J. von Müller, Life, ch. x. "It is a case of concentration of the powers, of force of will, of single aim, of that ardent, indomitable pursuit of knowledge which is passion. And this is, perhaps, only a caricature of the truth-a truth of which, in an age of new sciences and perpetual discoveries, it is a comfort to be reminded-that a wise man must, after all, be content to be ignorant of many things."-Essay on Ignorance, in the Saturday Review, vol. xvi. pp. 79 sq. jecture." Her brother, "who had not always patience with his sister's affectation," hereupon instructs her that it means a sort of Covent Garden, situated in the heart of the city, where sovereigns are sold in quart measures, like French beans, and dollars in sacks, like potatoes.* La Bruyère records how, in his time, "Quelques femmes de la ville ont de la délicatesse de ne pas savoir le nom des rues, des places, et de quelques endroits publics, qu'elles ne croient pas assez nobles pour être connus." It is just the same in our own day and country, when a Belgravian belle affects never to have heard of Baker-street, or a Tyburnienne of twenty to be unconscious of Bloomsbury-square. Molière's Clitandre expressed a common, and, in some sort, a wholesome feeling on the part of his sex, when he said of the demoiselle of his choice, Et j'aime que souvent, aux questions qu'on fait, Catherine Morland "was heartily ashamed of her ignorance-a misplaced shame," says Miss Austen, in that style of placid but piquant irony which is all her own; and adds: "Where people wish to attach, they should always be ignorant. To come with a well-informed mind, is to come with an inability of administering to the vanity of others, which a sensible person would always wish to avoid. A woman especially, if she have the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can."§ Orator Henley, disputing once with some shallow babbler in a coffeehouse, is said to have suddenly arrested his noisy antagonist by telling him that in one short sentence he had perpetrated two enormous mythologic blunders, having interchangeably confounded Plutus, the blind god of wealth, with Pluto, the gloomy tyrant of the infernal realms. "Confound them, did I?" said the offender: "well, so much the better; confound them both for two old rogues." "But," said Henley, "you have done them both unspeakable wrong." "With all my heart," rejoined the other; "they are heartily welcome to everything unspeakable beneath the moon: thank Heaven, I know very little of such ruffians." "But how?" said Henley; "do I understand you to mean that you thank Heaven for your ignorance ?" "Well, suppose I do," said the respondent, "what have you to do with that ?" "Oh, nothing," cried Henley; "only I should say that in that case, you had a great deal to be thankful for." A rejoinder that may remind one of what Sydney Smith replied to some young person who objected at various stages of a discussion "I don't know that." "Ah!" said the Canon, with a smile, "what you don't know would make a great book." Sydney's retort, however, for once was second-hand. The late Lord Melbourne loved to affect a gentlemanly ignorance of business matters: On vantait en tous lieux son ignorance aimable, *Preferment, ch. iii. Les Caractères de La Bruyère, ch. v. § Northanger Abbey, ch. xiv. Works, vol. xiii. p. 154. Les Femmes Savantes, Acte I. Sc. 4. says Boileau,* of a certain pleasant and highly-popular marquis; and our insouciant Premier seems to have aspired to a like reputation. Sydney Smith rallied him on this weakness of his. Instead of being the ignorant man he pretends to be, says his clerical critic,-before he meets the deputation of Tallow-Chandlers in the morning, he sits up half the night talking with Thomas Young about melting and skimming; and then, though he has acquired knowledge enough to work off a whole vat of prime Leicester tallow, he pretends next morning not to know the difference between a dip and a mould.† Il faut que l'ignorance ait pour lui de grands charmes, as Trissotint says. La Bruyère, ridiculing another class of professed Know-Nothings (at least out of their own little circle of science), says that "leur ignorance est volontaire, et fondée sur l'estime qu'ils ont pour leur profession et pour leur talens,"§ which they disdain to apply to common topics. Horace's Cur nescire, pudens pravè, quàm discere malo? is no obstinate self-questioning of theirs. Rather would poco-curantism of the Melbourne type adopt a motto from Sophocles,—ἐν τῷ φρονεῖν γὰρ undèv, idiotos Bios: to know nothing is the happiest life. It saves trouble, you know, and all that. In the particular case of Lord Melbourne, the spokesman of the Tallow-Chandlers might-if supposably conversant with Shakspearehave given his lordship a rap on the knuckles in Lord Angelo's style saying, Either you are ignorant, Or seem so, craftily; and that's not good.]] A distinguished essay-writer bids us look at the ignorance constantly displayed upon all manner of subjects in the House of Commons, and at the air of something like pride with which it is exhibited. "A member the other day, having occasion to refer in a clumsy way to Dr. Newman's Apology, observed that Dr. Newman had been led to Rome by considering the Donatic controversy,' as to the merits of which, said the speaker, 'no man is more ignorant than myself.' It would be absurd, remarks his critic, to expect every member of Parliament to be a great historian and divine, but surely he ought to know the name of the Donatists, and to have at any rate a general notion as to who they were, and as to the meaning of Dr. Newman's parallel between them and Protestants. In flagrant contrast with Single-speech James Soundpost, honest man, -if not with the affected ignoramus, his counterfeit, dishonest man,stands such an impostor as La Bruyère's Arrias, who would rather invent a lie than own to ignorance of anything in the heavens above, or the earth beneath, or the waters under the earth. "Il aime mieux mentir que de se taire, ou de paroître ignorer quelque chose."** It is a markworthy feature in Swift's self-portraiture as a satirist, that Those who their ignorance confess'd * Epître ix. † Sydney Smith's Second Letter to Archdeacon Singleton. Les Femmes Savantes, IV. 3. Les Caractères de La Bruyère, ch. vii. P. 44. Measure for Measure, Act II. Sc. 4. See the essay headed “Qur Noble Selves," in vol. xviii. of the Saturday Review, **Les Caractères de La Bruyère, ch. v., De La Société. †† On the Death of Dr. Swift. How the Dean dealt with those who unconsciously paraded, while elaborately dissembling, their ignorance, every student of his life and works can pretty well guess. Mr. John Locke set an example not too widely and none too easily followed, when he wrote, as he now and then did, such passages as the following, in his chapter on Simple Modes of Space:"If it be demanded (as usually it is) whether this space, void of body, be substance or aceident? I shall readily answer, I know not: nor shall be ashamed to own my ignorance, till they that ask, show me a clear distinct idea of substance."* Which they that ask would, very likely, undertake to show forthwith-rather than row in the same boat of contented ignorance with Mr. Locke. For, as Chesterfield says, on quite another subject, our conjectures pass upon us for truths; we will know what we do not know, and often what we cannot know: so mortifying to our pride is the base suspicion of ignorance.† Moins on sait, moins on doute, observes one of France's foremost thinkers; and he adds: Quand les hommes sont ignorans, il est aisé de tout savoir. Pithy and pointed is Archbishop Whately's saying, that a fool can ask more questions than a wise man can answer; but a wise man cannot ask more questions than he will find a fool ready to answer. It is the charlatan in Butler who -knew whatever's to be known, But much more than he knew would own.§ It takes a Cicero to say, Nec me pudet, ut istos, fateri nescire quod nesciam. Hail, Tully, for that saying: we bid the Father of his country hail! In parts superior what advantage lies? When Mr. Peacock's Marionetta, striving in vain to get a plain answer to a plain question of hers, from Mr. Flosky, desires to know whether he knows or does not know what to say, that gentleman sublimely replies, that to say he did not know, would be to say that he was ignorant of something; and Heaven forbid that a transcendental metaphysician, who had pure anticipated cognitions of everything, and carried the whole science of geometry in his head, &c., &c., should fall into so empirical an error as to declare himself ignorant of anything.T When Arabs are puzzled by questions about the identification of Scriptural localities, by eager and easy travellers from the far West, they "find it easier," says Mr. Porter, ** " and more satisfactory to invent answers than to confess ignorance;"-and this intelligent guide warns us, as well he may, of the De Sauley school of antiquarians, ingenious and inventive exceedingly. Southey tells us†† of a Frenchman once, who, not being ashamed of appearing ignorant on such a subject, asked another who with some reputa Locke's Essay concerning Human Understanding, book ii. ch. xiii. § 17. † Lord Chesterfield's Letters to his Son, Dec. 14, 1756. Turgot, Discours en Sorbonne. Hudibras, part ii. canto iii. tt In ch. clxxxvii. of The Doctor. Pope, Essay on Man, ep. iv. ** Handbook for Syria and Palestine. |