"WE
ALL LOVE TO INSTRUCT, THOUGH WE CAN TEACH ONLY WHAT IS NOT WORTH KNOWING.” ---
Eliza Bennet to sister Jane in Pride
& Prejudice
"Oh!
if that is all, I have a very poor opinion of young men who live in Derbyshire;
and their intimate friends who live in Hertfordshire are not much better. I am
sick of them all. Thank Heaven! I am going to-morrow where I shall find a man
who has not one agreeable quality, who has neither manner nor sense to
recommend him. STUPID MEN ARE THE ONLY ONES WORTH KNOWING, after all." –
Eliza Bennet, earlier in Pride &
Prejudice.
“ …she could NEVER LEARN OR
UNDERSTAND ANYTHING BEFORE SHE WAS TAUGHT…” –narrator of Northanger Abbey, re heroine Catherine Morland
"You
think me foolish to call instruction a torment, but if you had been as much
used as myself to hear poor little children first learning their letters and
then learning to spell, if you had ever seen how stupid they can be for a whole
morning together, and how tired my poor mother is at the end of it, as I am in
the habit of seeing almost every day of my life at home, you would allow that 'TO
TORMENT' AND 'TO INSTRUCT' might sometimes be used as SYNONYMOUS WORDS." –
Catherine Morland to Henry Tilney
“She
is a shrewd, intelligent, sensible woman. Hers is a line for seeing human
nature; and she has a fund of good sense and observation, which, as a
companion, make her infinitely superior to thousands of those who, having only
received "the best education in the world," KNOW NOTHING WORTH ATTENDING
TO. Call it gossip, if you will, but when Nurse Rooke has half an hour's
leisure to bestow on me, she is sure to have something to relate that is
entertaining and profitable: something that makes one know one's species
better. One likes to hear what is going on, to be au fait as to the newest modes of being trifling and silly. To me,
who live so much alone, her conversation, I assure you, is a treat." –
Anne Elliot, re Nurse Rooke in Persuasion
'Education
is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that
nothing that is worth knowing can be taught…The fact is, that
the public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything except what is worth knowing….the man who is so occupied in trying
to educate others, that he has never had any time to educate himself.” ---All
three aphorisms by Oscar Wilde
H.L. Mencken:
"Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not
worth knowing.
I’ll bet many of you who love Jane Austen, and Pride & Prejudice in particular, were
surprised to read the first of the above two quotations spoken by Eliza Bennet,
and wondered what was the context Eliza speaks those particular words to her
sister, as they seem to be a Zen Buddhist bolt from the blue. As far as I am
aware, they’ve never found their way into any film adaptation of Pride & Prejudice.
The context is that Lizzy has been teasing and, if
you will, “instructing” her sister Jane about Bingley’s return being evidence
of Jane’s renewed love for him, but Lizzy quickly disarms Jane with self-deprecating
humor, after Jane, feeling sensitive, gets prickly with her. But that alone
does not account for Lizzy’s sudden aphoristic turn, especially when viewed in
the context of her sour grapes aphorism to her aunt after getting jilted by
Wickham, in the second quotation. They both strike me strongly as having been
written by someone who was pretty familiar with the kind of startling paradox
that is a key aspect of Zen Buddhism and similar East Asian spiritual/psychological
practice and thought.
No
one knows, or probably will ever know, for sure, whether Jane Austen ever read
any Buddhist or Hindu texts or commentaries. The conventional view of Jane
Austen is that these would have been the furthest thing from her mind while
writing her novels and living he r(supposedly) pious and humble Anglican life.
But I have long been convinced that the above quotations are strong evidence
that Jane Austen, who my research has shown me a thousand times must have been one
of intellectual history’s great autodidacts, did somehow come into contact
with, and become seriously engaged with, such unsettlingly paradoxical thought.
In
particular, Jane might have had a very informative source and guide into those
ideas via her elder cousin/sister in law, the brilliant and formally educated
Eliza Hancock de Feuillide Austen, who was the goddaughter (and, I believe, also
the illegitimate biological daughter) of Warren Hastings, controversial
Governor General of India whose impeachment trial dominated the headlines
during Jane Austen’s teenage years. Hastings was, as it happens, also a lifelong
scholar of, and advocate for greater Western awareness of, East Asian
religions.
One
way or another, once Jane Austen was exposed to it, I am certain she was irresistibly
drawn to the subtle, paradoxical irony and psychology of Zen Buddhism. Above
all, I see the influence of such ideas on her fiction, in her full embrace of the
central Buddhism tenet that all human beings are in a real sense prisoners of
our own fallible pride & prejudice, and our sense & sensibility, and
all too prone to persuading ourselves that what we see is objectively true, when
it is actually highly subjective. And I think the above quotations from three
of her novels, all presenting radically subversive views regarding the nature
of a real and meaningful education, and of what constitutes meaningful
knowledge, are a reflection of her enduring interest in same.
Which
brings us to the above quotations by Oscar Wilde and HL Mencken. I also
believe, based on those quotations, and other textual evidence in the writings
of Wilde and Mencken that I’ve found which are beyond the scope of this essay, that
these two literary titans were both Janeites who took serious note of those
quotations from JA’s fiction, and the spirit and insight they reveal in their
author, and therefore paid homage to JA’s parallel interest in East Asian
philosophy.
We
also have hard evidence that Oscar Wilde was steeped in Zen Buddhism. In Jerusha McCormack’s ."From
Chinese wisdom to Irish wit: Zhuangzi and Oscar Wilde." Irish
University Review: a journal of Irish Studies 37.2 (2007): 302+, we read
the following: “….…In the broadest terms, both Zhuangzi and Wilde
are what we might call 'contrarians'. This is a useful term for describing
those who think against prevailing conventions in a way that appears to be
systematically perverse, hence 'contrary' to the dominant discourse. Thus Wilde
is often accused of merely inverting common epigrams in his own philosophical
sayings, such as: 'Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember
from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught' ('The
Critic as Artist: Part I', p.1114)--a sentiment derived directly from the
teachings of Zhuangzi, who tells the story of the wheelwright who, after many
years as master of his craft, still could not transmit his skills to his son
(Chuang Tsu, Chapter 13).”
However,
McCormack apparently was unaware that Wilde also likely took the latter part of
that aphorism, “nothing that is worth knowing can be taught”, from Eliza Bennet’s
strikingly similar corollary: “"We
all love to instruct, though we can teach only what is not worth knowing.”
And
finally, HL Mencken, who, as I said, was a Janeite, and surely also knew Wilde’s
writings as well, seems to me, by his witty aphorism about theology, to very
likely have written it in direct and loving emulation of and homage to those
two earlier masters of irony. And, last but not least, if you don’t believe a
word of what I’ve written above, then it only goes to prove that Elizabeth
Bennet was right!
Cheers,
ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode
on Twitter
P.S. added 12/20/15:
P.S. added 12/20/15:
Perhaps another source that Austen, Wilde, and/Mencken had in the back of the mind:
Proverbs 12:1 Whoso
loveth instruction loveth knowledge: but he that hateth reproof is brutish.
