According to the old Scandinavian fable of the cosmos, the whole world
is encircled in the coils of a vast serpent. The ancient name for it was
the Midgard serpent, and doubtless, for the old myth-maker, it had
another significance. Today, however, the symbol may still hold good of
a certain terrible and hideous reality.
Still, as of old, the world is encircled in the coils of a vast serpent;
and the name of the serpent is Gossip. Wherever man is, there may you
hear its sibilant whisper, and its foul spawn squirm and sting and
poison in nests of hidden noisomeness, myriad as the spores of
corruption in a putrefying carcass, varying in size from some
hydra-headed infamy endangering whole nations and even races with its
deadly breath, to the microscopic wrigglers that multiply, a million a
minute, in the covered cesspools of private life.
Printed history is so infested with this vermin, in the form of secret
memoirs, back-stairs diarists, and boudoir eavesdroppers, that it is
almost impossible to feel sure of the actual fact of any history
whatsoever. The fame of great personages may be literally compared to
the heroic figures in the well-known group of the Laocoön, battling in
vain with the strangling coils of the sea-serpent of Poseidon. We
scarcely know what to believe of the dead; and for the living, is it not
true, as Tennyson puts it, that "each man walks with his head in a cloud
of poisonous flies"?
What is this evil leaven that seems to have been mixed in with man's
clay at the very beginning, making one almost ready to believe in the
old Manichean heresy of a principle of evil operating through nature,
everywhere doing battle with the good? Even from the courts of heaven,
as we learn from the Book of Job, the gossip was not excluded; and how
eternally true to the methods of the gossip in all ages was Satan's way
of going to work in that immortal allegory! Let us recall the familiar
scene with a quoted verse or two:
Now there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves
before the Lord, and Satan [otherwise, the Adversary] came also
among them.
And the Lord said unto Satan, "Whence comest thou?" Then Satan
answered the Lord, and said: "From going to and fro in the earth,
and from walking up and down in it."
And the Lord said unto Satan: "Hast thou considered my servant Job,
that there is none like him in the earth, a perfect and an upright
man, one that feareth God, and escheweth evil?"
Then Satan answered the Lord, and said, "Doth Job fear God for
nought?"
Here we have in a nutshell the whole _modus operandi_ of the gossip in
all ages, and as he may be observed at any hour of the day or night,
slimily engaged in his cowardly business. "Going to and fro in the
earth, walking up and down in it," everywhere peering and listening,
smiling and shrugging, here and there dropping a hint, sowing a seed,
leering an innuendo; seldom saying, only implying; leaving everywhere
trails of slime, yet trails too vague and broken to track him by, secure
in his very cowardice.
"Doth Job fear God for nought?" He only asks, observe. Affirms nothing.
Only innocently wonders. Sows a doubt, that's all--and leaves it to
work.
The victim may possibly be set right in the end, as was Job; but
meanwhile he has lost his flocks and his herds, his sons and his
daughters, and suffered no little inconvenience from a loathsome plague
of boils. Actually--life not being, like the Book of Job, an
allegory--he very seldom is set right, but must bear his losses and his
boils with what philosophy he can master till the end of the chapter.
The race to which Job belonged presents perhaps the most conspicuous
example of a whole people burdened throughout its history with a
heritage of malignant gossip. In the town of Lincoln, in England, there
exists to this day, as one of its show places, the famous "Jew's House,"
associated with the gruesome legend of "the boy of Lincoln"--a child,
it was whispered, sacrificed by the Jews at one of their pastoral
feasts. Such a wild belief in child-sacrifice by the Jews was widespread
in the Middle Ages, and is largely responsible, I understand, even at
the present day, for the Jewish massacres in Russia.
Think of the wild liar who first put that fearful thought into the mind
of Europe! Think of the holocausts of human lives, and all the attendant
agony of which his diabolical invention has been the cause! What
criminal in history compares in infamy with that unknown--gossip?
A similar madness of superstition, responsible for a like cruel
sacrifice of innocent lives, was the terrible belief in witchcraft.
Having its origin in ignorance and fear, it was chiefly the creation of
hearsay carried from lip to lip, beginning with the deliberate invention
of lying tongues, delighting in evil for its own sake, or taking
advantage of a ready weapon to pay off scores of personal enmity. At any
time to a period as near to our own day as the early eighteenth century,
nothing was easier than to rid oneself of an enemy by starting a whisper
going that he or she held secret commerce with evil spirits, was a
reader of magical books, and could at will cast spells of disease and
death upon the neighbours or their cattle.
You had but to be recluse in your habits and eccentric in your
appearance, with perhaps a little more wisdom in your head and your
conversation than your fellows, to be at the mercy of the first fool or
knave who could gather a mob at his heels, and hale you to the nearest
horse-pond. Statement and proof were one, and how ready, and indeed
eager, human nature was to believe the wildest nonsense told by witless
fool or unscrupulous liar, the records of such manias as the famous
Salem trials appallingly evidence. Men high in the state, as well as
helpless old women in their dotage, disfigured with "witch-moles" or
incriminating beards on their withered faces, were equally vulnerable to
this most fearful of weapons ever placed by ignorance in the hands of
the malignant gossip.
In such epidemics of tragic gossip we see plainly that, whatever
individuals are originally responsible, society at large is all too
culpably _particeps criminis_ in this phenomenon under consideration. If
the prosperity of a jest be in the ears that hear it, the like is
certainly true of any piece of gossip. Whoever it may be that sows the
evil seed of slander, the human soil is all too evilly ready to receive
it, to give it nurture, and to reproduce it in crops persistent as the
wild carrot and flamboyant as the wild mustard.
There is something mean in human nature that prefers to think evil, that
gives a willing ear and a ready welcome to calumny, a sort of jealousy
of goodness and greatness and things of good report.
Races and nations are thus ever ready to believe the worst of one
another. In all times it has been in this field of inter-racial and
international prejudice that the gossip has found the widest scope for
his gleeful activity, sowing broadcast dissensions and misunderstandings
which have persisted for centuries. They are the fruitful cause of wars,
insuperable barriers to progress, fabulous growths which the
enlightenment of the world painfully labours to weed out, but will
perhaps never entirely eradicate.
Race-hatred is undoubtedly nine-tenths the heritage of ancient gossip.
Think of the generations of ill-feeling that kept England and France,
though divided but by a narrow strait, "natural enemies" and
misunderstood monsters to each other. In a less degree, the friendship
of England and America has been retarded by international gossips on
both sides. And as for races and nations more widely separated by
distance or customs, no lies have been bad enough for them to believe
about one another.
It is only of late years that Europe has come to regard the peoples of
the Orient as human beings at all. And all this misunderstanding has
largely been the work of gossip acting upon ignorance.
It is easy to see how in the days of difficult communication, before
nations were able to get about in really representative numbers to make
mutual acquaintance, they were completely at the mercy of a few
irresponsible travellers, who said or wrote what they pleased, and had
no compunction about lying in the interests of entertainment. The
proverbial "gaiety of nations" has always, in a great degree, consisted
in each nation believing that it was superior to all others, and that
the natives of other countries were invariably hopelessly dirty and
immoral, to say the least. Such reports the traveller was expected to
bring home with him, and such he seldom failed to bring.
Even at the present time, when intercourse is so cosmopolitan, and some
approach to a sense of human brotherhood has been arrived at, the old
misconceptions die hard. Nations need still to be constantly on their
guard in believing all that the telegraph or the wireless is willing to
tell them about other countries. Electricity, many as are its advantages
for cosmopolitan _rapprochements_, is not invariably employed in the
interests of truth, and newspaper correspondents, if not watched, are
liable to be an even more dangerous form of international gossip than
the more leisurely fabulist of ancient time.
When we come to consider the operation of gossip in the lives of
individuals, the disposition of human nature to relish discrediting
rumour is pitifully conspicuous. We know _Hamlet's_ opinion on the
matter:
Let Hercules himself do what he may,
The cat will mew, and dog will have his day.
And again:
Be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as snow,
Thou shalt not escape calumny.
This, it is to be feared, is merely the sad truth, for mankind, while it
admires both greatness and goodness, would seem to resent the one and
only half believe in the other. At all events, nothing is more to its
taste than the rumour that detracts from the great or sullies the good;
and so long as the rumour be entertaining, it has little concern for its
truth.
Froude, in writing of Caesar, has this to say admirably to our purpose:
In ages which we call heroic, the saint works miracles, the warrior
performs exploits beyond the strength of natural man. In ages less
visionary, which are given to ease and enjoyment, the tendency is to
bring a great man down to the common level, and to discover or
invent faults which shall show that he is or was but a little man
after all. Our vanity is soothed by evidence that those who have
eclipsed us in the race of life are no better than ourselves, or in
some respects worse than ourselves; and if to these general impulses
be added political or personal animosity, accusations of depravity
are circulated as surely about such men, and are credited as readily
as under other influences are the marvellous achievements of a Cid
or a St. Francis.
The absurdity of a calumny may be as evident as the absurdity of a
miracle; the ground for belief may be no more than a lightness of
mind, and a less pardonable wish that it may be true. But the idle
tale floats in society, and by and by is written down in books and
passes into the region of established realities.
The proportion of such idle tales seriously printed as history can
never, of course, be computed. Sometimes one is tempted to think that
history is mainly "whole cloth." Certainly the lives of such men as
Caesar are largely made up of what one might term illustrative fictions
rather than actual facts. The story of Caesar and Cleopatra is probably
such an "illustrative fiction," representing something that might very
well have happened to Caesar, whether it did so or not. At all events,
it does his fame no great harm, unlike another calumny, which, as it
does not seem "illustrative"--that is, not in keeping with his general
character--we are at liberty to reject. Both alike, however, were
the product of the gossip, the embodied littleness of human nature
endeavouring then, as always, to minimize and discredit the strong man,
who, whatever his actual faults, at least strenuously shoulders for his
fellows the hard work of the world.
The great have usually been strong enough to smile contempt on their
traducers--Caesar's answer to an infamous epigram of the poet Catullus
was to ask him to dinner--but even so, at what extra cost, what "expense
of spirit in a waste of shame," have their achievements been bought,
because of these curs that bark forever at the heels of fame!
And not always have they thus prevailed against the pack. Too often has
the sorry spectacle been seen of greatness and goodness going down
before the poisonous tongues and the licking jaws. Even Caesar himself
had to fall at last, his strong soul perhaps not sorry to escape through
his dagger-wounds from so pitiably small a world; and the poison in the
death-cup of Socrates was not so much the juice of the hemlock as the
venom of the gossips of Athens.
In later times, no service to his country, no greatness of character,
can save the noble Raleigh from the tongues determined to bring him to
the block; and, when the haughty head of Marie Antoinette must bow at
last upon the scaffold, the true guillotine was the guillotine of
gossip. It was such lying tales as that of the diamond necklace that had
brought her there. All Queen Elizabeth's popularity could not save her
from the ribaldry of scandal, nor Shakespeare's genius protect his name
from the foulest of stains.
In our own time, the mere mention of the name of Dreyfus suffices to
remind us of the terrible nets woven by this dark spinner. Within the
last year or two, have we not seen the loved king of a great nation
driven to seek protection from the spectre of innuendo in the courts of
law? But gossip laughs at such tribunals. It knows that where once it
has affixed its foul stain, the mark remains forever, indelible as that
imaginary stain which not all the multitudinous seas could wash from the
little hand of Lady Macbeth. The more the stain is washed, the more
persistently it reappears, like Rizzio's blood, as they say, in Holyrood
Palace. To deny a rumour is but to spread it. An action for libel,
however it may be decided, has at least the one inevitable result of
perpetuating it.
Take the historical case of the Man with the Iron Mask. Out of pure
deviltry, it would appear, Voltaire started the story, as mere a fiction
as one of his written romances, that the mysterious prisoner was no less
than a half-brother of Louis XIV; and Dumas, seeing the dramatic
possibilities of the legend, picturesquely elaborates it in _Le Vicomte
de Bragelonne_. Never, probably, was so impudent an invention, and
surely never one so successful; for it is in vain that historians expose
it over and over again. Learned editors have proved with no shadow of a
doubt that the real man of the mask was an obscure Italian political
adventurer; but though scholars may be convinced, the world will have
nothing of your Count Matthioli, and will probably go on believing
Voltaire's story to the end of time.
"At least there must have been something in it" is always the last word
on such debatable matters; and the curious thing is that, whenever a
doubt of the truth is expressed, it is never the victim, but always the
scandal, to which the benefit of the doubt is extended. Whatever the
proven fact, the world always prefers to hold fast by the disreputable
doubt.
All that is necessary is to find the dog a bad name. The world will see
that he never loses it. In this regard the oft-reiterated confidence of
the dead in the justice of posterity is one of the most pathetic of
illusions. "Posterity will see me righted," cries some poor victim of
human wrong, as he goes down into the darkness; but of all appeals, the
appeal to posterity is the most hopeless.
What posterity relishes is rather new scandals about its immortals than
tiresome belated justifications. It prefers its villains to grow blacker
with time, and welcomes proof of fallibility and frailty in its immortal
exemplars. For rehabilitation it has neither time nor inclination,
and it pursues certain luckless reputations beyond the grave with a
mysterious malignity.
Such a reputation is that of Edgar Allan Poe. One would have thought
that posterity would be eager to make up to his shade for the criminal
animus of Rufus Griswold, his first biographer. On the contrary, it
prefers to perpetuate the lying portrait; and no consideration of the
bequests of Poe's genius, or of his tragic struggles with adverse
conditions, no editorial advocacy, or documentary evidence in his
favour, has persuaded posterity to reverse the unduly harsh judgment of
his fatuous contemporaries.
Fortunately, it all matters nothing to Poe now. It is only to us that it
matters.
Saddening, surely, it is, to say the least, to realize that the humanity
of which we are a part is tainted with so subtle a disease of lying, and
so depraved an appetite for lies. Under such conditions, it is
surprising that greatness and goodness are ever found willing to serve
humanity at all, and that any but scoundrels can be found to dare the
risks of the high places of the world. For this social disease of gossip
resembles that distemper which, at the present moment, threatens the
chestnut forests of America. It first attacks the noblest trees. Like
it, too, it would seem to baffle all remedies, and like it, it would
seem to be the work of indestructible microscopic worms.
It is this vermicular insignificance of the gossip that makes his
detection so difficult, and gives him his security. A great reputation
may feel itself worm-eaten, and may suddenly go down with a crash, but
it will look around in vain for the social vermin that have brought
about its fall. It is the cowardice of gossip that its victims have
seldom an opportunity of coming face to face with their destroyers; for
the gossip is as small as he is ubiquitous--
Not half so big as a round little worm
Prick'd from the lazy finger of a maid.
In all societies, there are men and women who are vaguely known as
gossips; but they are seldom caught red-handed. For one thing, they do
not often speak at first hand. They profess only to repeat something
that they have heard--something, they are careful to add, which is
probably quite untrue, and which they themselves do not believe for a
moment.
Then the fact stated or hinted is probably no concern of ours. It is not
for us to sift its truth, or to bring it to the attention of the
individual it tarnishes. Obviously, society would become altogether
impossible if each one of us were to constitute ourselves a sort of
social police to arraign every accuser before the accused. We should
thus, it is to be feared, only make things worse, and involuntarily play
the gossip's own game. The best we can do is as far as possible to
banish the tattle from our minds, and, at all events, to keep our own
mouths shut.
Even so, however, some harm will have been done. We shall never be quite
sure but that the rumour was true, and when we next meet the person
concerned, it will probably in some degree colour our attitude toward
him.
And with others, less high-minded than ourselves, the gossip will have
had greater success. Not, of course, meaning any harm, they will inquire
of someone else if what So-and-so hinted of So-and-so can possibly be
true. And so it will go on _ad infinitum_. The formula is simple, and it
is only a matter of arithmetical progression for a private lie, once
started on its journey, to become a public scandal, with a reputation
gone, and no one visibly responsible.
Of course, not all gossip is purposely harmful in its intention. The
deliberate, creative gossip is probably rare. In fact, gossip usually
represents the need of a bored world to be entertained at any price, the
restless _ennui_ that must be forever talking or listening to fill the
vacuity of its existence, to supply its lack of really vital interests.
This demand naturally creates a supply of idle talkers, whose social
existence depends on their ability to provide the entertainment desired;
and nothing would seem to be so well-pleasing to the idle human ear as
the whisper that discredits, or the story that ridicules, the
distinction it envies, and the goodness it cannot understand.
The mystery of gossip is bound up with the mysterious human need of
talking. Talk we must, though we say nothing, or talk evil from sheer
lack of subject-matter. When we know why man talks so much, apparently
for the mere sake of talking, we shall probably be nearer to knowing why
he prefers to speak and hear evil rather than good of his fellows.
Possibly the gossip would be just as ready to speak well of his victims,
to circulate stories to their credit rather than the reverse, but for
the melancholy fact that he would thus be left without an audience. For
the world has no anxiety to hear good of its neighbour, and there is no
piquancy in the disclosure of hidden virtues.
'Tis true, 'tis pity; pity 'tis, 'tis true; and the only poor
consolation to be got out of it is that the victims of gossip may, if
they feel so inclined, feel flattered rather than angered by its
attentions; for, at all events, it argues their possession of gifts
and qualities transcending the common. At least it presupposes
individuality; and, all things considered, it may be held as true that
those most gossiped about are usually those who can best afford to pay
this tax levied by society on any form of distinction.
After all, the great and good man has his greatness and goodness to
support him, though the world should unite in depreciating him. The
artist has his genius, the beautiful woman has her beauty. 'Tis in
ourselves that we are thus and thus; and if fame must have gossip for
its seamy side, there are some satisfactions that cannot be stolen away,
and some laurels that defy the worm.