“Live by law, not like the fool,
But like the bard, who freely sings
In strictest bonds of rhyme and rule,
And finds in them, not bonds, but wings.”
They who so live are in every sense the happier, without an “except
these bonds,” but because of them. They find in them not bonds, but
wings; and thenceforth have free course, and go on their way rejoicing.
They, like the repentant rebels in Shakspeare’s “King John,” and by the
same river metaphor,
“Leaving their rankness and irregular course,
Stoop low within those bounds they had o’erlook’d,
And calmly run on in obedience.”
What they are no longer free to do, is to do ill. And that freedom is
as perfect servitude as the service of God is perfect freedom. In fine,
and in the words (but expanding the meaning) of one of Samuel Butler’s
metrical reflections:—
“Law does not put the least restraint
Upon our freedom, but maintain’t;
Or if it does, ’tis for our good,
To give us freer latitude;
For wholesome laws preserve us free
By stinting of our liberty.”
_THE DISCREET SILENCE OF FOLLY._
PROVERBS xvii. 28.
It is written among the Proverbs of Solomon, that “Even a fool, when he
holdeth his peace, is counted wise.” Even the fool that shutteth his lips
is esteemed a man of understanding. The wise king declares in another
place, that a fool’s mouth is his destruction, and that his lips are
the snare of his soul. Let him keep his mouth closed, and his folly is
an unknown quantity; out of sight, out of mind. Let him keep his lips
shut, and wisdom shall be imputed unto him. Of him lookers-on will say, a
discreet man that. For they are only lookers-on, not listeners. To listen
would break the spell. As it is, they are apt to count him as deep as he
is still. Do not still waters run deep?
Sir Thomas Browne—himself a silent man, but no fool; quite the other
way—bids us, in one of his stately sentences, think not silence the
wisdom of fools; but if rightly timed, the honour of wise men, who have
not the infirmity, but the virtue of taciturnity, and speak not out of
the abundance, but the well-weighed thoughts of the heart. “Such silence
may be eloquence, and speak thy worth above the power of words.” Would
the author of “Vulgar Errors,” however, have sanctioned for one moment
the reference of the proverb on reticent foolishness to that limbo?
On the contrary, the drift of his argument is wholly in favour of the
proverb; for, if the silence of the wise is wisdom, as he contends, much
more is a tongue-tied condition expedient in the fool.
_Stultitiam dissimulare non potes nisi taciturnitate_, says the Latin
adage: there is no way to conceal folly but by holding your tongue.
There is something at once of pathos and almost of humorous reproach, in
the appeal of the Man of Uz, in his extremity, to his too didactic and
complacently dogmatical friends: “Oh that ye would altogether hold your
peace! and it should be your wisdom.”
Montaigne exclaims, “To how many blockheads of my time has a cold and
taciturn demeanour procured the credit of prudence and capacity!” Note
the counsel of Carlo to Sogliardo, in one of Ben Jonson’s heaviest
comedies: “When anything is propounded above your capacity, smile at
it, make two or three faces, and ’tis excellent; they’ll think you’ve
travelled; though you argue a whole day in silence thus, and discourse
in nothing but laughter, ’twill pass.” Elsewhere rare Ben cites
approvingly the “witty saying,” about one who was taken for a great and
weighty man so long as he held his peace: “This man might have been a
counsellor of state, till he spoke; but having spoken, not the beadle
of the ward.” Denouncing in his strong dialect the vapid verbiage of
shallow praters, Mr. Carlyle exclaims, “Even Triviality, Imbecility,
that can sit silent, how respectable is it in comparison!” Michelet says
of the Spanish grandees of Charles the Fifth’s time, that the haughty
silence they maintained, scarce deigning even a syllable of reply,
served them admirably to conceal their dearth of ideas. Silence and
imperturbability, according to the author of “The Gentle Life,” are the
two requisites for a man to get on in the world.
If there are two things not to be hidden—love and a cough—there is a
third, contends Nello, the barber of Florence, and that is ignorance,
when once a man is obliged to do something besides wagging his head.
Charles Lamb shrewdly observes that a man may do very well with a very
little knowledge, and scarce be found out, in a mixed company; everybody
being so much more ready to produce his own than to call for a display
of your acquisitions. But in a _tête-à-tête_, he adds, there is no
shuffling; the truth will out.
The Abbé de Choisy hugged himself on the success of a discreet silence
during his residence in Batavia, where he had special reasons to beware
of committing, and of exposing, himself. “Often when I utter not a word,
they suppose it is because I don’t choose to talk; whereas the real
motive for my silence is a profound ignorance, such as it is best to
keep concealed from the gaze of mortals.” Molière’s sprightly chevalier,
Dorante, counsels a fatuous marquis not to talk of what he knows nothing
at all about—bidding him hope that in virtue of a scrupulously observed
silence, he and the like of him may haply come to be regarded as clever
fellows. “Et songez qu’en ne disant mot, on croira peut-être que vous
êtes d’habiles gens.” A story is told of Zeuxis, how he reproved a
certain Megabyzus, high priest of great Diana of the Ephesians, who
discoursed of pictures in the painter’s studio with so reckless an
audacity of ignorance, that the very lads who were grinding colours
there could not refrain from giggling; whereupon quoth Zeuxis to his
too-eloquent friend, “As long as you kept from talking, you were the
admiration of these boys, who were all wonder at your rich attire, and
the number of your servants; but now that you have ventured to expatiate
upon the arts, of which you know simply nothing, they are laughing at
you outright.” Plutarch tells the same story of Apelles. Again to draw
upon Molière: a fool who keeps his folly tongue-tied, is not to be
distinguished from a savant who hold his peace:
“Un sot qui ne dit mot ne se distingue pas
D’un savant qui se tait.”
Not to be distinguished, possibly, from a savant who talks, and talks to
the purpose too.
There are two opposite ways, on Washington Irving’s showing, by which
some men get into notice—one by talking a vast deal and thinking a
little, and the other by holding their tongues and not thinking at
all. By the first, he says, many a vapouring, superficial pretender
acquires the reputation of a man of quick parts; by the other, many a
vacant dunder-pate, like the owl, the stupidest of birds, comes to be
complimented, by a discerning world, with all the attributes of wisdom.
Silent, quiet people, as Miss Jewsbury incidentally remarks, have a
charmed mystery about them which gives them a great advantage over more
demonstrative mortals; “nobody knows exactly what they think, nor the
impression made on them by anything; all within them has the prestige of
an oracle; the extent of what they indicate is unknown; and what little
is uttered goes so far.” The best, perhaps, as well as the best-known
of all stories illustrative of our theme, is that of Coleridge admiring
a certain dinner-guest, so impregnable in his sublime reserve, so
inexorably proof against every temptation to join in the table-talk, such
a model (in appearance) of dignified superiority—until there was carried
in that unlucky dish of apple-dumplings, the very first glance at which
roused Sir Oracle to the enthusiastic outburst, “Them are the jockeys for
me!” Goldsmith had, long before, recorded a somewhat parallel passage
of disenchantment. His travelled Chinese, Lien Chi Altangi, is present
at a dinner-party of dignitaries and dons in whose company and from
whose converse he expects to find a feast of reason as well as turtle,
and a flow of soul as well as claret. Their silence before dinner is
served, rather puzzles and disappoints the eager expectant; who, however,
accounts for and excuses it by the reflection, that men of wisdom are
ever slow of speech, and deliver nothing unadvisedly. “Silence,” says
Confucius, “is a friend that will never betray.” The dons and dignitaries
were now by the mandarin’s surmise, inventing maxims, or hard sayings,
for their mutual instruction, when some one should think proper to begin.
“My curiosity was now wrought up to the highest pitch; I impatiently
looked round to see if any were going to interrupt the mighty pause;
when at last one of the company declared that there was a sow in his
neighbourhood that farrowed fifteen pigs at a litter.” Broken at once was
the spell, and disillusion was the Chinaman’s doom.
Pope, being satirist of the first class, as well as poet of (say) the
second, took care, in his imitative stanzas on Silence, not to be all
sentiment and rhapsodical rapture on that subject. Hence, one or his
stanzas begins, “Silence, the knave’s repute;” and another declares
Dulness to be her bosom-friend:
“And in thy bosom lurks in Thought’s disguise;
Thou varnisher of fools, and cheat of all the wise.”
The moral of one of Gay’s fables is to the purpose—that one, namely, in
which a young dog, ignorant of game, gives tongue as lustily as if he
knew all about it, and gets well lashed for his pains. To the astounded
puppy’s remonstrance the whip-bearing huntsman replies:—
“Had not thy forward noisy tongue
Proclaim’d thee always in the wrong,
Thou might’st have mingled with the rest,
And ne’er thy foolish nose confess’d;
But fools, to talking ever prone,
Are sure to make their follies known.”
So a French satirist of the last century bids _le sot_ remember, that by
simply holding his tongue, he will acquire not a little respect—hopeless
as the reminder in such a case may be; for you might as well counsel the
coward not to tremble, as the fool not to expose himself in words, words,
words:
“Souvenez-vous qu’un sot doit garder le silence,
Il serait respecté beaucoup plus qu’il ne pense;
Mais vouloir le contraindre à ne jamais parler,
C’est, sans espoir, défendre au poltron ne trembler.”
Could it but be enforced, the one injunction to be laid upon the fool
might be condensed into an applied line from Molière, where Orgon bids
Dorine hold her tongue, and regard that as a standing order:—
“Taisez-vous. C’est le mot qu’il vous faut toujours dire.”
All silent people, Lord Lytton affirms, can seem conventionally elegant.
And he tells the story of a groom married to a rich lady, and in
consequent trepidation as to the probability of being ridiculed by the
guests in his new home and her old one, to whom an Oxford clergyman
gave this bit of advice: “Wear a black coat, and hold your tongue.” The
groom took the hint, and, we are assured, was always considered the
most gentlemanly man in the county. Elsewhere, again, the same author
relates his meeting with a diplomatist of weighty name, a stock example
of political success, but of whom he could make nothing whatever, except
indeed that he was a preposterous numskull. When, therefore, the Prime
Minister, some days later, spoke to our author of this “superior man,” he
got for a reply, “Well, I don’t think much of him. I spent the other day
with him, and found him insufferably dull.” “Indeed!” said the minister,
with something of horror in his tone; “why then, I see how it is. Lord
⸺ has been positively talking to you!” Had he but altogether held his
peace, it had been his wisdom.
According to La Bruyère, everything tells in favour of the man who talks
but little; the presumption is that he is a superior man; and if, in
point of fact, he is not a sheer blockhead, the presumption then is
that he is very superior indeed. His comparative freedom from folly is
positively presumed to exist in the superlative degree. In another place
the same observant philosopher describes in his best style the sort of
people who, by a grand talent for silence, win golden opinions from all
sorts of men; they look wise, and now and then enforce and re-enforce
the look by a timely shrug of the shoulders, or significant shake of the
head; but the assumed depth of wisdom don’t really go two inches down;
scratch the surface, and you come to the bottom at once.
For, as Shakspeare has it,
“There are a sort of men whose visages
Do cream and mantle like a standing pond;
And do a wilful stillness entertain,
With purpose to be dress’d in an opinion
Of wisdom, gravity, profound conceit.
...
O, my Antonio, I do know of those,
That therefore only are reputed wise,
For saying nothing; who, I am very sure,
If they should speak, would⸺”
_not_ be reputed wise, but the uttermost opposite, whatever that may be
called.
_PENAL PREVISION._