by Laman Blanchard.
Originally published in Ainsworth's Magazine: A Miscellany of Romance (Chapman and Hall) vol.2 #8 (Sep 1842).
—"If friends, they read you dead."—Pope.
—Talk of sounds—the sweetest that ever rang in the world's ear, is the sound of the human voice. Nature invented no musical instrument like that, when she invented the wind's whisper and the murmur of the stream, the bird's song and the bee's hum. There may be something, to be sure, in the chink of coin to a soul without a sou, in the creaking of a prison door to the listener within, or in the peculiarly melodious squeak which accompanies the drawing of a cork. But all sounds are miserably flat and meaningless in comparison with it—from the cannon and the kettle-drum, to harmonicons which melt rocks, and harps which might make Eolus motionless—only, it must not be the human voice which belongs to my friend Knabbs! By no means.—
I always preferred the sound of human voices to the tinkling of sheep-bells on the hills, and the never-silent music of the sea—nay, even to the miracles of instrumental performance when thousands of Paganinis and Thalbergs seem gathered together in the accomplishment of one crash; but it does depend a little upon whose voice it is, and what the voice may happen to say. Now, when Knabbs is reading—
But there may be people who do not yet know what it is to be read to! Rose-leaf couches for the lucky few, racks for the rest. Rest! what a word to use! Who ever found rest with a resolute reader for his companion!
Gentle and courteous peruser of these pages, know you—for you may have committed unheard of crimes, and may merit torture unspeakable—know you yet what it is to be read to? Did any monster in the likeness of man, any original fiend having the preternatural faculty of imitating the human voice—horridly—ever lure you within four mortal walls, and, first double-locking the door, seize a volume of Shakspeare, and commence a deliberate, cold-blooded, remorseless reading of Romeo and Juliet,—beginning with—
"Act I. Scene I. A public place in Verona, Enter Sampson and Gregory, armed with swords and bucklers. Sampson. Gregory," &c.
It is one thing to be talked to, another to be sung to—but to be read to!
We get the first "good talking to" at school, and afterwards, perhaps, when we marry—so we become used to it. It is disagreeable at a play, when during a solemn scene, amidst the dead silence, a loquacious neighbour with a hard voice, persists in describing to you "how Mrs. Siddons did it." To be seated at dinner next to a man who eats nothing, but abounds in obliging remarks, which enforce a reply from you between every mouthful, is not unmixed happiness; nor is it absolute bliss to be fastened upon by a pertinacious whisperer in a reading room, with the disturbed students looking daggers. But a life-time made up of such trials, would be felicity, compared with an agonized three months consumed in listening to an inveterate and indefatigable reader.
Burns thought he had done something when he conceived the idea of a twelvemonths' tooth-ache. If he had ever known what it is to have the ear-ache! But he did not know Knabbs.
There are musical enemies to man's peace and comfort—vocalists who, upon the least hint, will sing you, not an 'twere any nightingale, but a whole grove. They do not act upon the swan's principle of singing themselves to death—but other people. It is, however, a very lingering decay to which they doom us. The ditty varies, it must be remembered; and moreover, we have our relief by joining in chorus now and then. Besides, they are seldom barbarous enough to inflict upon us words as well as music.
But with the Reader—that is, with Knabbs—there is no relief. Insensible to fatigue himself, he has no compassion for you. The object for which he was born is to read, and it follows that the thing you came into the world to do is to listen. Nature has bestowed upon you two ears, but his one tongue will soon tire them out, and you have not the remotest chance of ever getting hold of the book (a Book of Martyrs) and taking your turn. It is true, Knabbs loves passionately the sound of the human voice, but it must always be his own. To imagine that he would dream of allowing you to read to him, is to fancy the executioner submitting gracefully to his victim, the fly ensnaring the spider. Nay, should you simply propose to read to him, for his especial and most needful information, an extract from a private letter, he would be sure (though the politest fellow in the world, apart from this particular enthusiasm,) to take the said private letter from your reluctant hand, with an "Allow me to read it."
Now private letters are not more than books things that we desire to read for ourselves. What possessor of a soul, having also his eyesight, would, as a matter either of pleasure or of profit, allow another to read to him from the pages of some golden volume, whose precious stores were equally open to his own eyes! It would be almost like asking somebody to go and see a Raphael or a Titian for him, or to save him the trouble of eating venison. If the book be one of grave and devout meaning, the more we ponder over it in our own way—weighing and sifting, tracing out and making sure—the better. If it be one of poetry or romance, we demand equally to read for ourselves. Gray's luxuriant fancy was not so false to the sense of true pleasure, as to demand, with his sofa and "eternal new novels," somebody to read them to him. He knew that this stupid excess of indolence would be fatal to the coveted enjoyment, and that there can be no such thing as reading a novel by deputy.
It would turn the reality into a fiction—it would be dressing up the images of a rapturous imagination in common-place—translating poetry into the vulgar tongue. All the nature, the enthusiasm, the truth of the story, would become but hearsay—it would transform the fond and cherished convictions of the soul into an on dit. Sentiment would be but chit-chat, and passion an idle neighbour's gossip. The actor is a great agent; but the voice of the reader would break the spell that should be binding upon us. It would instantly reduce the rich legend, the fairy vision, to a newspaper—a report from Doctors' Commons, a chronicle of fashionable events, and intelligence of the assizes. Let no Knabbs, thrusting himself between you and the author, ever snatch the volume from your hand; for like a magician's wand, it is only powerful while you hold it.
But although it be true that we naturally wish to dally with our beloved author, and to linger at our own sweet will in the mazes of his delicious story—pausing at this point, hurrying forward now, and reading here and there a passage over again—Knabbs never had the smallest idea of anything of the kind. So long as he reads with an audible voice, and misses not one line of the long narrative, he is convinced that your enjoyment must be complete. When his voice is at the highest, he assumes that your rapture is at the highest; and that the inexhaustibility of his lungs is the true measure of the auditor's excitement.
If Knabbs had been Hamlet, he would most certainly, in the scene where the prince enters book in hand, have gratified the curiosity of Polonius, by reading the sayings of the satirical rogue right through, from title-page to finis.
The number of pages, or volumes, that Knabbs will succeed in reading to a listening friend in one day, depends solely on the number of hours the listening friend may happen to pass in his company. If they meet at breakfast, Knabbs only reads aloud until dinner time; if y meet at dinner, Knabbs conceives it to be his duty to read aloud until past midnight, and then, pausing over his bishop and his bone, he is in honour bound to resume the unfinished folio, concluding, very often, before daybreak. Knabbs's practice is not favourable to the doctrine, but still there is an end to all things; although it is sometimes a little depressing, at one in the morning, to think of the three acts of the delightful play which yet remain to be read.
The consequences of meddling with a wasp's nest are not more certain than the results of a call upon Knabbs. His books are numberless, his leisure interminable, his health unintermitting, and his voice is unsusceptible of even a momentary hoarseness. Charmin would it be to catch him some day with a sore throat. If ready for nothing else, you will be sure to find Knabbs ready to read. You are lucky if you light upon him with nothing in his hand more voluminous and crushing than a new pamphlet upon Corn. He has, perhaps, arrived at the last page of it as you enter; but, in the noblest spirit of self-sacrifice, he will resist every entreaty on your part, and begin it again, from the passage from Huskisson at the beginning, to the passage from Huskisson at the end. This is decidedly better than finding him armed with one of the early editions of Richardson, which he greatly prefers, because he is enabled to interest your feelings by reading to you all the omitted passages, as he proves by reference to later editions lying open at his side.
It is, however, of little consequence—after the first four hours have passed away—what the volume is which lies open before the indefatigable Enthusiast. I well remember, when a little party broke up at a late hour, the discussion which arose as we were going home relative to a trifling circumstance that, nevertheless, interested us mightily;—nothing less than the name of the work which Knabbs had, with such kindness and with such ability, been reading to us during that long sitting. Three of us had a vague impression that it was Pope's Homer, five were decidedly in favour of Maculloch, and one entertained a dreamy notion that it must have been the Pilgrim's Progress. We never settled the point.
And here we get a glimpse of an advantage attendant upon being "read to," which it would be ungenerous not to acknowledge. After a certain interval, more or less brief according to the hour of the night or day, each of the little audience finds himself able, by some mysterious process, to change, according to his own taste, the subject on which the reader is engaged. Influenced by the monotony of one ceaseless voice, however nicely modulated its tones, the listener begins to hear with his imagination, and easily substitutes, for the protracted contest of Brutus and Cassius, then and there going on, the pleasant quarrel of Peachum and Lockit.
"Blest be the great for what they take away,
And what they leave you, if they leave you—gay."
Nobody may hope to escape Knabbs—Knabbs in his glory—by inviting him from his home. It is only tempting the tiger to spring from his jungle. When his friends ask him to dinner, he is sure, after the first glass has gone round, to find in his pocket something particularly curious—miraculously rare—that he must just dip into; a little bit of black-letter—a stray version of a ballad—a few queer notes about nothing—an article just out—some oddity old or new, either very dry or quite wet. And as for stopping him in medias res, you might as well have thought of stopping Turpin on the highway. But you may resort, if you will, to the forlorn experiment of producing a older edition, or a newer pamphlet, than his; and, when it has once caught his eye, as sure as you are not deaf, though you wish you were, he'll read that to you instead.
No time or place is appointed for sanctuary—all scenes, all seasons, are the same to him. What a charming little excursion was that which we planned last year to Richmond, taking care to make Knabbs drive us down, that there might be no reading on the road. The instant we were on the hill, with the "book of nature" open before us, (more than a "rivulet of text with a meadow of margin,") he drew from his pocket a very rare—and deservedly rare—treatise on the art of Watch-making, the profound interest of which he illustrated at a considerable expenditure of time. He would have done the same on the top of Skiddaw, or on the walls of Nineveh.
What was the name of the author, who, when apprized that the illustrious critic to whom he desired to read his tragedy, had not an hour to live, smoothed away all difficulties by the declaration—"But my manuscript will not occupy half an hour?" His name must have been Knabbs.
If we meet Knabbs in the morning stroll, he has a charming letter to shew us from a mutual friend, and it happens—yes, luckily it does happen to be in his pocket. If we stumble upon him in a steamer, he has something curious to read to us from a weekly journal. If we encounter him at the sea-side, he has the last Report of the last Commissioners of Inquiry into the causes of the last Earthquake, which, as it is the only copy out of the office or the fire, he will read to you with pleasure. "Not a word," he interposes, in peremptory dismissal of your objection—"not a word, my dear fellow, you shall hear it all." It begins, most likely—"In pursuance," and proceeds charmingly. If at a quiet party you met Knabbs, and mentioned last night's opera, fortunate would you be if he failed to produce a book of the same, for the purpose of reading to you the two versions in contrast, Italian and English.
There is an old saying—"Who runs may read;" and it is a true one, for the man who most inveterately reads, is incessantly running at my heels.
Bores there are, of both sexes, thousands upon thousands of them, who can never hear a fellow-creature talking plain prose, without garnishing the conversation with faded verse—dragging in quotations less noticeable for their appositeness than their amplification, and reciting, by the score, verses which all know, or none wish to know. But this evil is short-lived, even if they have long memories; to a stand-still they must come at last. Not so with Knabbs. He never speaks "without book," and he can go on for ever. There is nothing to hope from his memory; everything to fear from his mouth, which is never shut. To stop the supplies, it would be necessary to lock up the Libraries. Faustus was willing to burn his books, but Knabbs is for kindling the consuming flames in his auditor's bosom. Prospero drowned his volume; Knabbs hath no tears for human suffering, or his would long ago have shared the same fate—buried, fathoms deep, beneath a briny flood of pity for the miseries he is the author of.
For other plagues there may be remedies; but there is none for the plague of being preyed upon by book-worms while yet in the flesh. From Knabbs, the head of that ever-feeding family, there is no escape; let him but once fasten upon you, and you are—it is impossible to employ a stronger term—you are booked.