quality being fluidity, which is a bad thing to rest on. Take them in
their family quarrels--and they are always quarrelling among
themselves--you think they must have broken with each other for ever;
that surely they can never forget or forgive all the insolent
expressions, the hard words, the full-flavoured epithets which they
have flung at one another; but the next time you meet them they are
quite good friends again, and going on in the old fluid way as if no
fiery storms had lately troubled the domestic horizon. Perhaps they
have induced you to take sides; if so, you may look out, for you are
certain to be thrown over and to have the enmity of both parties
instead of only one. They are much given to this kind of thing, and
fond of making pellets for you to shoot; when, after the shot, they
disclaim and disown you. They speak against each other furiously, tell
you all the family secrets and make them worse and greater than they
really are. If you are credulous for your own part you take them
literally; and if highly moral, you probably act on their accusations
in a spirit of rhadamanthine justice, and the absolute need of
rewarding sin according to its sinfulness. Beware; their accusations
are baseless as the wind, and acting on them will lead to your certain
discomfiture. The only safe way with limp people is never to believe
what they say; or, if you are forced to believe, never to translate
your faith into deeds nor even words; never to commit yourself to
partizanship in any form whatever. They do not intend it, in all
probability, but by very force of their weakness limp people are
almost invariably untruthful and treacherous. By the force too, of
this same weakness, they are incapable of anything like true
friendship, and in fact make the most dangerous friends to be found.
They are so plastic that they take the shape of every hand which holds
them; and if you do not know them well, you may be deceived by their
softness of touch, and think them sympathetic because they are fluid.
They leave you full of promises to hold all you have told them sacred,
and before an hour is out they have repeated to your greatest enemy
every word you have said. They had not the faintest intention of doing
so when they left you, but they 'slop about,' as the Americans say;
and sloppy folk cannot hold secrets. The traitors of life are the
limp, much more than the wicked--people who let things be wormed out
of them rather than intentionally betray them. They repent likely
enough; Judas hanged himself; but of what good is their repentance
when the mischief is done? Not all the tears in the world can put out
the fire when once lighted, and to hang oneself because one has
betrayed another will make no difference save in the number of victims
which one's own weakness has created.
Limp men are invariably under petticoat government, and it all depends
on chance and the run of circumstance whose petticoat is dominant. The
mother's, for a long period; then the sisters'. If the wife's, there
is sure to be war in the camp belonging to the invertebrate commander;
for such a man creates infinitely more jealousy among his womankind
than the most discursive and the most unjust. He is a power, not to
act, but to be used; and the woman who can hold him with the firmest
grasp has necessarily the largest share of good things belonging. She
can close or draw his purse-strings at pleasure. She can use his name
and mask herself behind his authority at pleasure. He is the undying
Jorkins who is never without a Spenlow to set him well up in front;
and we can scarcely wonder that the various female Spenlows who shoot
with his bow and manipulate his circumstances are jealous of each
other to a frantic pitch--regarding his limpness, as they do, as so
much raw material from which they can spin out their own strength.
As the mollusc has to become the prey of some one, the question simply
resolves itself into whose? the new wife's or the old sisters'? Who
shall govern, sitting on his shoulders? and to whom shall he be
assigned captive? He generally inclines to his wife, if she is younger
than he and has a backbone of her own; and you may see a limp man of
this kind, with a fringe of old-rooted female epiphytes, gradually
drop one after another of the ancient stock, till at last his wife and
her relations take up all the space and are the only ones he supports.
His own kith and kin go bare while he clothes her and hers in purple
and fine linen; and the fatted calves in his stalls are liberally
slain for the prodigals on her side of the house, while the dutiful
sons on his own get nothing better than the husks.
Another characteristic of limp people is their curious ingratitude.
Give them nine-tenths of your substance, and they will turn against
you if you refuse them the remaining tenth. Lend them all the money
you can spare, and lend in utter hopelessness of any future day of
reckoning, but refrain once for your own imperative needs, and they
will leave your house open-mouthed at your stinginess. To be grateful
implies some kind of retentive faculty; and this is just what the limp
have not. Another characteristic of a different kind is the rashness
with which they throw themselves into circumstances which they
afterwards find they cannot bear. They never know how to calculate
their forces, and spend the latter half of their life in regretting
what they had spent the former half in endeavouring to attain, or to
get rid of, as it might chance. If they marry A. they wish they had
taken B. instead; as house-mistresses they turn away their servants at
short notice after long complaint, and then beg them to remain if by
any means they can bribe them to stay. They know nothing of that clear
incisive action which sets men and women at ease with themselves, and
enables them to bear consequences, be they good or ill, with dignity
and resignation.
A limp backboneless creature always falls foul of conditions, whatever
they may be; thinking the right side better than the left, and the
left so much nicer than the right, according to its own place of
standing for the moment; and what heads plan and hands execute, lips
are never weary of bemoaning. In fact the limp, like fretful babies,
do not know what they want, being unconscious that the whole mischief
lies in their having a vertebral column of gristle instead of one of
bone. They spread themselves abroad and take the world into their
confidence--weep in public and rave in private--and cry aloud to the
priest and the Levite passing by on the other side (maybe heavily
laden for their own share) to come over and help them, poor sprawling
molluscs, when no man but themselves can set them upright.
The confidences of the limp are told through a trumpet to all four
corners of the sky, and are as easy to get at, with the very gentlest
pressure, as the juice of an over-ripe grape. And no lessons of
experience will ever teach them reticence, or caution in their choice
of confidants.
Not difficult to press into the service of any cause whatever, they
are the very curse of all causes which they assume to serve. They
collapse at the first touch of persecution, of misunderstanding, of
harsh judgment, and fall abroad in hopeless panic at the mere tread of
the coming foe. Always convinced by the last speaker, facile to catch
and impossible to hold, they are the prizes, the decoy ducks, for
which contending parties fight, perpetually oscillating between the
maintenance of old abuses and the advocacy of dangerous reforms; but
the side to which they have pledged themselves on Monday they forsake
on Tuesday under the plea of reconversion. Neither can they carry out
any design of their own, if their friends take it in hand to
over-persuade them.
If a man of this stamp has painted a picture he can be induced to
change the whole key, the central circumstance and the principal
figure, at the suggestion of a confident critic who is only a pupil in
the art of which he is, at least technically, a master. If he is
preaching or lecturing, he thinks more of the people he is addressing
than of what he has to say; and, though impelled at times to use the
scalping-knife, hopes he doesn't wound. Vehement advocates at times,
these men's enthusiasm is merely temporary, and burns itself out by
its own energy of expression; and how fierce soever their aspect when
they ruffle their feathers and make believe to fight, one vigorous
peck from their opponent proves their anatomy as that of a creature
without vertebræ, pulpy, gristly, gelatinous, and limp. All things
have their uses and good issues; but what portion of the general good
the limp are designed to subserve is one of those mysteries not to be
revealed in time nor space.
_THE ART OF RETICENCE._
Among other classifications we may divide the world into those who
live by impulse and the undirected flow of circumstance, and those who
map out their lives according to art and a definite design. These last
however, are rare; few people having capacity enough to construct any
persistent plan of life or to carry it through if even begun--it being
so much easier to follow nature than to work by rule and square, and
to drift with the stream than to build up even a beaver's dam. Now, in
the matter of reticence;--How few people understand this as an art,
and how almost entirely it is by the mere chance of temperament
whether a person is confidential or reticent--with his heart on his
sleeve or not to be got at by a pickaxe--irritatingly silent or
contemptibly loquacious. Sometimes indeed we do find one who, like
Talleyrand, has mastered the art of an eloquent reticence from alpha
to omega, and knows how to conceal everything without showing that he
conceals anything; but we find such a person very seldom, and we do
not always understand his value when we have him.
Any one not a born fool can resolve to keep silence on certain points,
but it takes a master-mind to be able to talk, and yet not tell.
Silence indeed, self-evident and without disguise, though a safe
method, is but a clumsy one, and to be tolerated only in very timid or
very young people. "Le silence est le parti plus sûr pour celui qui se
défie de soi-même," says Rochefoucauld. So is total abstinence for him
who cannot control himself. Yet we do not preach total abstinence as
the best order of life for a wise and disciplined person, any more
than we would put strong ankles into leg-irons, or forbid a rational
man to handle a sword. Besides, silence may be as expressive, as
tell-tale even, as speech; and at the best there is no science in
shutting one's lips and sitting mute; though indeed too few people
have got even so far as this in the art of reticence, but tell
everything they know so surely as water flows through a sieve, and are
safe just in proportion to their ignorance.
But there is art, the most consummate art, in appearing absolutely
frank, yet never telling anything which it is not wished should be
known; in being pleasantly chatty and conversational, yet never
committing oneself to a statement nor an opinion which might be used
against one afterwards--_ars celare artem_ being a true maxim in
keeping one's own counsel as well as in other things. It is only after
a long acquaintance with this kind of person that you find out he has
been substantially reticent throughout, though apparently so frank.
Caught by his easy manner, his genial talk, his ready sympathy, you
have confided to him not only all that you have of your own, but all
that you have of other people's; and it is only long after, when you
reflect quietly, undisturbed by the magnetism of his presence, that
you come to the knowledge of how reticent he has been in the midst of
his seeming frankness, and how little reciprocity there has been in
your confidences together. You know such people for years, and you
never really know more of them at the end than you did in the
beginning. You cannot lay your finger on a fact that would in any way
place them in your power; and though you did not notice it at the
time, and do not know how it has been done now, you feel that they
have never trusted you, and have all along carefully avoided anything
like confidence. But you are at their mercy by your own rashness, and
if they do not destroy you it is because they are reticent for you as
well as towards you; perhaps because they are good-natured; perhaps
because they despise you for your very frankness too much to hurt you;
but above all things not because they are unable. How you hate them
when you think of the skill with which they took all that was offered
to them, yet never let you see they gave back nothing for their own
part--rather by the jugglery of manner made you believe that they were
giving back as much as they were receiving! Perhaps it was a little
ungenerous; but they had the right to argue that if you could not
keep your own counsel you would not be likely to keep theirs, and it
was only kind at the time to let you hoodwink yourself so that you
might not be offended.
In manner genial, frank, conversational, sympathetic--in substance
absolutely secret, cautious, never taken off their guard, never
seduced into dangerous confidences, as careful for their friends as
they are for themselves, and careful even for strangers unknown to
them--these people are the salvation as they are the charm of society;
never making mischief, and, by their habitual reticence, raising up
barriers at which gossip halts and rumour dies. No slander is ever
traced to them, and what they know is as though it were not. Yet they
do not make the clumsy mistake of letting you see that they are better
informed than yourself on certain subjects, and know more about the
current scandals of the day than they choose to reveal. On the
contrary, they listen to your crude mistakes with a highly edified
air, and leave you elated with the idea that you have let them behind
the scenes and told them more than they knew before. If only they had
spoken, your elation would not have been very long-lived.
Of all personal qualities this art of reticence is the most important
and most valuable for a professional man to possess. Lawyer or
physician, he must be able to hold all and hear all without betraying
by word or look--by injudicious defence no more than by overt
treachery--by anger at a malicious accusation no more than by a smile
at an egregious mistake. His business is to be reticent, not
exculpatory; to maintain silence, not set up a defence nor yet
proclaim the truth. To do this well requires a rare combination of
good qualities--among which are tact and self-respect in about equal
amount--self-command and the power of hitting that fine line which
marks off reticence from deception. No man was ever thoroughly
successful as either a lawyer or physician who did not possess this
combination; and with it even a modest amount of technical skill can
be made to go a long way.
Valuable in society, at home the reticent are so many forms of living
death. Eyes have they and see not; ears and hear not; and the faculty
of speech seems to have been given them in vain. They go out and they
come home, and they tell you nothing of all they have seen. They have
heard all sorts of news and seen no end of pleasant things, but they
come down to breakfast the next morning as mute as fishes, and if you
want it you must dig out your own information bit by bit by
sequential, categorical questioning. Not that they are surly nor
ill-natured; they are only reticent. They are really disastrous to
those who are associated with them, and make the worst partners in the
world in business or marriage; for you never know what is going on,
nor where you are, and you must be content to walk blindfold if you
walk with them. They tell you nothing beyond what they are obliged to
tell; take you into no confidence; never consult you; never arrest
their own action for your concurrence; and the consequence is that you
live with them in the dark, for ever afraid of looming catastrophes,
and more like a captive bound to the car of their fortunes than like
the coadjutor with a voice in the manner of the driving and the right
to assist in the direction of the journey. This is the reticence of
temperament, and we see it in children from quite an early age--those
children who are trusted by the servants, and are their favourites in
consequence, because they tell no tales; but it is a disposition that
may become dangerous unless watched, and that is always liable to
degenerate into falsehood. For reticence is just on the boundary of
deception, and it needs but a very little step to take one over the
border.
That obtrusive kind of reticence which parades itself--which makes
mysteries and lets you see there are mysteries--which keeps silence
and flaunts it in your face as an intentional silence brooding over
things you are not worthy to know--that silence which is as loud as
words, is one of the most irritating things in the world and can be
made one of the most insulting. If words are sharp arrows, this kind
of dumbness is paralysis, and all the worse to bear because it puts it
out of your power to complain. You cannot bring into court a list of
looks and shrugs, nor make it a grievance that a man held his tongue
while you raved, and to all appearance kept his temper when you lost
yours. Yet all of us who have had any experience that way know that
his holding his tongue was the very reason why you raved, and that if
he had spoken for his own share the worst of the tempest would have
been allayed. This is a common manner of tormenting with reticent
people who have a moral twist; and to fling stones at you from behind
the shield of silence by which they have sheltered themselves is a
pastime that hurts only one of the combatants. Reticence, though at
times one of the greatest social virtues we possess, is also at times
one of the most disastrous personal conditions.
Half our modern novels turn on the misery brought about by mistaken
reticence; and though novelists generally exaggerate the circumstances
they deal with, they are not wrong in their facts. If the waters of
strife have been let loose because of many words, there have been
broken hearts before now because of none. Old proverbs, to be sure,
inculcate the value of reticence, and the wisdom of keeping one's own
counsel. If speech is silvern, silence is golden, in popular
philosophy; and the youth is ever enjoined to be like the wise man,
and keep himself free from the peril of words. Yet for all that, next
to truth, on which society rests, mutual knowledge is the best working
virtue, and a state of reticent distrust is more prudent than noble.
Many people think it a fine thing to live with their most intimate
friends as if they would one day become their enemies, and never let
even their deepest affections strike root so far down as confidence.
They rearrange La Bruyère's famous maxim, 'L'on peut avoir la
confiance de quelqu'un sans en avoir le coeur,' and take it quite the
contrary way; but perhaps the heart which gives itself, divorced from
confidence, is not worth accepting; and reticence where there is love
sounds almost a contradiction in terms. Indeed, the certainty of
unlimited confidences where there is love is one of the strongest of
all the arguments in favour of general reticence. For in nine cases
out of ten you tell your secrets and open your heart, not only to your
friend, but to your friend's wife, or husband, or lover; and
secondhand confidence is rarely held sacred if it can be betrayed with
impunity.
By an apparent contradiction, reticent people who tell nothing are
often the most charming letter-writers. Full of chit-chat, of
descriptions dashed off with a warm and flowing pen, giving all the
latest news well authenticated and not scandalous, and breathing just
the right amount of affection according to the circumstances of the
correspondents--a naturally eloquent person who has cultivated the art
of reticence writes letters unequalled for charm of manner. The first
impression of them is superb, enchanting, enthralling, like the
bouquet of old wine; but, on reconsideration, what have they said?
Absolutely nothing. This charming letter, apparently so full of
matter, is an answer to a great, good, honest outpour wherein you laid
bare that foolish heart of yours and delivered up your soul for
anatomical examination; and you looked for a reply based on the same
lines. At first delighted, you are soon chilled and depressed by such
a return, and you feel that you have made a fool of yourself, and that
your correspondent is laughing in his sleeve at your insane propensity
to gush. So must it be till that good time comes when man shall have
no need to defend himself against his fellows; when confidence shall
not bring sorrow nor trust betrayal; and when the art of reticence
shall be as obsolete as the art of fence, or the Socratic method.
_MEN'S FAVOURITES._
We often hear women speak with a certain curious disdain of one of
themselves as a 'gentlemen's favourite;' generally adding that
gentlemen's favourites are never liked by their own sex, and giving
you to understand that they are minxes rather than otherwise, and
objectionable in proportion to their attractiveness. They never can
understand why they should be so attractive, they say; and hold it as
one of the unfathomable mysteries of men's bad taste--the girls to
whom no man addresses half a dozen words in the course of the evening
being far prettier and nicer than the favourite with whom everybody is
talking, and for whom all men are contending. Yet see how utterly they
are neglected, while she is surrounded with admirers. But then she is
an artful little flirt, they say, who lays herself out to attract,
while the others are content to stay quietly in the shade until they
are sought. And they speak as if to attract men's admiration was a
sin, and not one of the final causes of woman as well as one of her
chief social duties.
There is always war between the women who are gentlemen's favourites
and those who are not; and if the last dislike the first, the first
despise the last, and go out of their way to provoke them; a thing not
difficult to do when a woman gives her mind to it. A gentlemen's
favourite is generally attacked on the score of her morality, not to
speak of her manners, which are pronounced as bad as they can be;
while, how pretty soever men may think her, her own sex decry her, and
pick her to pieces with such effect that they do not leave her a
single charm. She is assumed to be incapable of anything like real
earnestness of feeling; of anything like true womanliness of
sentiment; to be ignorant of the higher rules of modesty; to be fast
or sly, according to her speciality of style; and if you listen to her
dissector you will find in time that she has every fault incidental to
a frail humanity, while her noblest virtue is in all probability a
'kind of good nature' which does not count for much. In return, the
favourite sneers at the wallflower, whom she calls stupid and
spiteful, and whom she rejoices to annoy by the excess of her
popularity; nothing pleasing her so much as to make herself look worse
than she is in the way of men's liking--except it be to carry off the
one tup lamb belonging to a wallflower, and brand him as of her own
multitudinous herd. The quarrel is a deadly one as regards the
combatants, but it has very little effect on the 'ring;' for,
notwithstanding the faults and frailties of which they hear so much,
the men flock round the one and make her the public favourite of the
set. But, as the valid result, probably the prize match of the circle
chooses a stupid wallflower for life; and the favourite who has
ridiculed the successful prizeholder scores of times, and who would
give ten years of her life to be in her place, has to swallow her
confusion as she best can, and accept her discomfiture as if she liked
it.
If a men's favourite begins her career unmarried, she most frequently
remains unmarried to the end; fulfilling her mission of charming all
and fixing none till she comes to the age when her sex has no mission
at all. If she is married she has developed after the event; in her
nonage having been a shy if observant wallflower, quietly watching the
methods which later she has so ably applied, and taking lessons from
the very girls who queened it over her with that insolent supremacy
which, more than all else, she noted, envied and profited by. If she
marries while a favourite and in the full swing of her triumphs, she
probably gets pulled up by her husband (unless she is in India, or
wherever else women are at a premium and mistresses of the situation),
and subsides into the best and most domestic kind of 'brooding hen.'
However that may be, marriage, which is the great transforming agent
of a woman's character, seldom leaves her on the same lines as before;
though sometimes of course the foolish virgin developes into the
frisky matron, and the girl who begins life as a men's favourite ends
it as a mature siren.
There are two kinds of men's favourites--the bright women who amuse
them and the sympathetic ones who love them. But these last are of a
doubtful, what country people call 'chancy,' kind; women who show
their feelings too openly, who fall in love too seriously, or perhaps
unasked altogether, being more likely to irritate and repel than to
charm. But the bright, animated women who know how to talk and do not
preach; who say innocent things in an audacious way and audacious
things in an innocent way; who are clever without pedantry; frank
without impudence; quick to follow a lead when shown them; and who
know the difference between badinage and earnestness, flirting and
serious intentions--these are the women who are liked by men and whose
social success in no wise depends on their beauty.