Two virtues are generally ignored in the systematic books on morals
and in the informal admonitions of fathers to sons, yet upon these
virtues depends most of the ease, delight and profit which comes to us
in human fellowship. Let me illustrate.
There is in the Metropolitan Museum a very handsome funeral slab of a
certain bailiff of Sesostris I., Menthu-Weser. This steward prepared
his own epitaph with conviction and most carefully. Among many
assertions of his own merits the most striking is, "I was one who
really listened." Here seems evidence that in Egypt early in the
second millennium before Christ the virtues of reticence and tact were
valued. Ever since they have had scant enough recognition in the
world. In our own days particularly the robust virtues have the
preference. We acclaim the square deal. We are socially minded,
meaning that we aggressively mind the business of others. Naturally
such quiet and unsensational virtues as tact and reticence are gone
out of fashion. In a land where all are equals, tact is likely to pass
for truckling, or worse for condescension, whereas reticence must
perforce be abhorrent to a generation which has trusted to an
unlimited publicity the remedying of most earthly ills. Lest we think
too hardly of our own generation, let me hasten to repeat that no age
has done full justice to these dubious virtues. Holy Writ, to be sure,
extols the value of the "word in season," while to the much married
Solomon is ascribed the proverbs, "He that keepeth his mouth keepeth
his life, but he that openeth wide his lips shall have destruction."
But this sinister aspect of loquaciousness is evidently proper to an
oriental despotism and not to a free republic. We gain but faint
glimpses of our unscheduled virtues from moralist and theologian. The
Roman Church, always meticulously analytical of both the virtues and
vices, finds no official rubric either for tact or reticence. These
capacities, indispensable stay and safeguard of the confessional, may
indeed have been regarded as the trade secret of the clergy, and, as
tending to produce too astute a laity, unfit for promulgation. However
that be, it is not to the pious manuals that we must go for examples
of tactful sayings or happy silences, but to the extra-clerical
expressions of such vagrom clerics as Boccaccio and Bandello. From
their collections of ready and witty retorts many instances of tact
might be selected, but neither of these storytellers can be said
conspicuously to illustrate the virtue of reticence.
Reticence in fact is perhaps the most unpopular of virtues. What most
people like is loquaciousness and its kindred vice tactlessness. The
reticent man is seldom that meritorious thing, a good mixer, and he
suffers from the suspicion of moroseness. Open-heartedness, on the
contrary, is charitably credited to the habitual chatterer. He is, as
the Irish happily say, an easy spoken man, joyously gregarious. A
similar credit attaches itself to the habitually tactless person. You
know where to find him. He speaks his mind without regard to your
sensibilities. At bottom, an expression which a clever French writer
has shrewdly remarked always means exceptionally, he is surely
amiable, a thoroughly good sort--at bottom. It is significant,
however, that reticence and tact may be partially condoned by the
possession of great wealth. Only recently a multimillionaire won
prominence in his obscure class, and a nickname, merely on his
silence, while another who was all things to all men, and to many
women, is still remembered as a prince charming whether among
sportsmen or statesmen. All of which goes to show that our twin
virtues are essentially aristocratic or at least capitalistic, and
appraised accordingly. A statesman or politician, being in a democracy
a hybrid between the classes and masses, must practice the virtue of
tactfulness but by the same token resolutely eschew that of reticence.
The political aspirant is heard for his much speaking, and when silent
may be said to cease to exist.
Now for such misvaluations there is generally a specious and
respectable reason. Indeed one reason will doubtless explain
nine-tenths of popular delusions--the habit of judging not from the
long but from the short run. The blurting way is the easiest way of
meeting a situation and wins the praise of frankness. It takes time
and pains to weigh a situation and adjust one's attitude to that of
another, and such considerateness often passes for obliquity. Of
course the blurting habit itself is often merely a form of pose;
confidence men practice it for good business reasons. The man who
overrides you will as often be pursuing a tactic as he cajoles you.
Indeed the professionally downright man is often more devious than the
tactful person. Battering you with a confusing flow of argument,
imposing his will at random, he is precisely the man you do not know
where to find. You yield to him in small matters out of weariness and
avoid him in great. But at any particular moment he does seem
outspoken, and he leaves a general impression of strength and candor.
Beyond such false appearances an untrained mind will rarely inquire.
The tactful man who watches his opportunity to set his matter
agreeably before you, taking you on your best side, is proceeding
quite straight-forwardly, but to an impatient or unattentive or
irresolute person the processes of tact may well seem both dilatory
and crooked. Thus the merely assertive man will usually get undue
credit on first hearing while the tactful man generally wins his
standing only on prolonged acquaintance. The great painter Delacroix,
a fastidious man if there ever was one, used to deplore the ease with
which at first meeting persons of a certain persistent aggressiveness
took him in.
Talkativeness, like tactlessness, has an undeniable face value that
largely disappears on inspection. Ten times a day in casual contacts
it might be pleasanter and easier to deal with a chatty person than
with a silent one, that is, easier and pleasanter for one to whom time
was small object. The commercial traveller is proverbially loquacious,
though in the higher ranges of the calling doubtless a businesslike
taciturnity prevails. An ex-grocer's clerk has been publishing some
amusing confessions in a popular magazine--in our unreticent age
confessions singularly abound--and he tells that his sole instructions
were "Chin the women." Evidently what was assumed of his fair
customers was rather amenability than intelligence or thrift. In a
world where there was little or no intelligence, tact and reticence
would be unnecessary virtues, rational persuasion being impossible. In
such a world the human compact would imply infinite blundering and
unrestrained conversability. Such is still the unwritten law of life
among people who have not wholly reached the conscious stage. "Yes, I
burnt it," my cook says beamingly with the air of inviting a
compliment, carelessness being quite normal in her code.
The trouble with the virtues of reticence and tact--and naturally the
ground of their unpopularity--is precisely that they are products not
of the heart but of the head. To possess these qualities opens one to
the suspicion of being a cold fish. Nobody objects to the warmer and
less rationalized virtues. If we accept the convenient and I believe
quite psychologically defensible list drawn up by the mediæval
schoolmen, we shall find that the standard virtues are almost without
exception of the heart. Obviously this is true of the prime
theological virtues, Faith, Hope, and Charity. Despite utilitarian
interpretations, these remain temperamental qualities. We are born
believing, hopeful, and loving, or not. And even such of us as are
deficient in these merits by heredity or from policy at least will
accord to the entire Pauline triad the tribute of a distant
admiration. When we approach the pagan list, Fortitude, Prudence,
Temperance and Justice, the virtues begin to make enemies. With
Fortitude no one quarrels, for that is an instinctive virtue, an
expression largely of ample circulation and steady nerves. It is the
only secular virtue that is completely popular. Justice may share such
esteem in a measure, for the inclination towards the square deal and a
rough sense of its needfulness are deeply seated in the race. Prudence
and Temperance, on the contrary, within which larger categories our
special virtues of reticence and tact are comprised, have ever been
grudgingly practiced and even theoretically disallowed. Humanity has
ever boasted a sporting contingent to whom to be prudent and temperate
was anathema. The deeply rooted feeling that every young man must sow
his wild oats is the express disavowal of these virtues so far as
male youth is concerned. Reticence and tact, then, must be content to
share the unpopularity of all the cerebral virtues. The man who is
delicately considerate of his neighbor's case must be content to be
regarded as a schemer, and he who cautiously weighs his utterances
must bear the reproach of ungeniality.
But as soon as a society becomes conscious and complicated, tact and
reticence assume high and even indispensable value. No physician who
had the confidential ways of a country postmistress would be
tolerated. Why is a parvenu stranded in a society which may consist of
his inferiors in capacity and morals? Because he has no clear notion
of his attitude to his new fellows or of theirs to him and to each
other, he lacks the tact for an untried situation. The grace of a
reticent observation may gain him time and save him appalling
blunders. If his social intelligence be keen, he will adopt such
Fabian tactics until some opening in mutual sympathy establishes
itself. But this implies reticence. As a matter of fact, he will
usually be restive, and will talk at random and constrainedly, being
ignorant of what that particular company likes to hear said or left
unsaid. His utterances successively betray him and he progressively
writes himself down an ass. Nor is his case made better, as
humanitarians confidently profess, by kindliness. His heart may be the
best in the world and understanding of the minds and manners of new
people denied him. His kindliness may condone the spectacle he
cuts, but to make his position good wants intelligence which
good-heartedness may supplement but not supplant. Nor is his dilemma
due, as Socialists will perhaps maintain, merely to the fact that his
difference is arrogantly ascribed by snobbishness to personal
inferiority. In the same circumstances a far humbler person, a
forest-guide or a sailor, will comport himself agreeably and without
constraint. Perhaps the close quarters of tent and forecastle conduce
to tolerant understanding between very different individuals, and set
natural limits to forced or heedless talk.
Between the reticent and the merely taciturn person there is constant
confusion. The silent man may simply be devoid of interests, morose
and with nothing to say. A trappist is merely speechless; not
reticent. The reticent man has much to say, but for reason says only
the part that his judgment approves. He is his own censor. His
abstentions are due to a fundamental conviction that many things never
need to be said at all, and that most personal difficulties best
adjust themselves with fewest words. His attitude evinces respect for
certain privacies. His intimate business is not in the show window nor
on the bargain counter, and he assumes as much of the personal
concerns of his fellows. If there be a human type peculiarly
intolerable, it is that which insists on stated explanations of every
trifling misunderstanding. There are minds for which no slightest
transaction is outlawed and no statute of limitations admitted. What
shall that woman say who wastes five minutes explaining why she didn't
bow to me yesterday when a real occasion of conference arises? How
shall I respect the man who insists on divulging most physiologically
the mysteries of his bed and board? How shall I bear that my own
humble Lares and Penates be bywords on reckless lips? On the whole the
finest gentleman I have ever met was the Japanese Samurai and art
critic, the late Okakura Kakuzo. I recall as vividly his courteous and
expectant silences as I do his always eloquent and brilliant
discourse. Indulgent to the small talk of others, he declined to share
it. If he ever gave utterance to a mere prejudice or to any petty
personal concern, it was not in my hearing. He appeared to husband
himself until the talk should take a wide impersonal range, and then
his comment was fervent and illuminating. A noted American poet and
critic has somewhat similar habits. His prolonged silences are
comfortable, even deferential, his rare speech instinct with
sympathetic understanding of men and books and nature. The late John
LaFarge who was in congenial society a continuous talker offered an
interesting equivalent for reticence in the allusiveness of his touch
and in a beautiful perception of the kind of sympathetic response you
would have made had you not been better occupied in listening to him.
He had what most free talkers signally lack, perfect tact.
Perhaps the most distressing and alarming feature of our American
civilization is the complete lack of any ideal of reticence.
Scientists babble for the press, clergymen fan the prurient flame of
curiosity after each especially noxious _cause célèbre_, chorus girls
divulge the hygiene of their personal charms, nameless outrage becomes
the favorite theme of venal dramatists, young girls make small talk of
the pros and cons of marriage and free love, shallow journalists
glorify the vices of the city slums, an unprincipled press and an
untrained laity freely review the findings of the courts, clever but
irresponsible scribblers pillory wholesale our industry and
finance--in short we live in an age when to expose anything is the
highest good, and to conceal anything passes for a manner of treason.
When everything conceivable has been said, boggled and muddled out, a
reaction must come. Wearied by the vociferations of the nostrum
vendors, the plain man will come to realize that what is read counts
little in comparison with what is marked and inwardly digested. In a
thoroughly unreticent age we get mere data, much of it false, far too
fast. We have yet to learn the elementary lesson of the Stoics, to
learn and fix upon that which concerns ourselves. A chief merit of the
Pragmatic philosophy, with most of which I cordially disagree, is to
have shown that we must bring words and thought to the test of action,
and a very simple test of the worth or worthlessness of talk or
writing on social matters would be whether the residual impression is
a mere perturbation, or titillation, or a firm purpose to do some
definite remedial thing. If I am taught to be merely uneasy about the
sharp practices of my retail grocer, or more likely of his wholesale
grocer, without seeking for tangible relief and redress, my last
estate is worse than my first. I merely eat in bitterness of spirit
the preservatives and adulterants which otherwise I might have
negotiated at the cost of a slight dyspepsia. Where Mr. Roosevelt has
most deserved ill of the republic is in fomenting this general
atmosphere of suspicion in the people while lodging both the
recognition of the criminal and his proper punishment in some
transcendental capacity of his own personality. He is the Dr. Munyon
of the diseased body politic, and his power consists largely in
continual and breathless reiteration of universal symptoms under which
each man may have the grateful illusion of registering his own
particular ache. Mr. Roosevelt seems to me a supreme example of the
inconveniences, nay danger, of incorrigible and thoroughly well
meaning garrulity in a political leader. But Mr. Roosevelt's tact is
often as noteworthy as his prolixity, even his indiscretions are
calculated or inspired to meet the call of the occasion. Why of X? was
his remark when a scholar of international repute was introduced at
the White House as "of X University."
The case of Mr. Roosevelt and in a quite different sense that of John
LaFarge make me question sometimes what really seems axiomatic that no
free talker can be completely tactful. Carlyle, Ruskin, Gladstone seem
to illustrate the rule, and even Lowell, as his intimates admit, long
retained certain asperities. It seems obvious that one who has never
quietly looked into himself and seen clearly, nor studied his fellow
man at leisure and accurately, can acquire the art of compatibility.
To think otherwise is to assert that the tactful man, poetlike, is
born not made. Were this so, cases of tact among young children should
be fairly common, and I doubt if the fondest parent could supply any
genuine instance. So I feel that such apparent exceptions to the rule
as John LaFarge and Mr. Roosevelt would fall into line if one knew the
whole story. There must have been a time when both, like the steward,
Menthu-Weser, listened much and took keenest note of the ways and
moods of other men.
Tact is so readily divined and so difficult of definition that I have
avoided what might seem an essayist's plain duty. Yet a tactful reader
will not require a pedantic formulation in these matters of common
experience. I suppose the basis of tact is a good understanding with
one's self, a comprehension of the permanent disposition and passing
moods of those with whom one deals, a desire to approach men on their
best side, combined with the force and initiative that enable one to
act promptly on such knowledge. Tact may or may not be coupled with
expansive kind-heartedness. In such association it gains an added
grace. Tact implies at the least a vivid human curiosity hardly
distinguishable from sympathy. If it were otherwise there would be no
motive for exercising tact in cases which involve no material
interest. And I suppose the genuinely tactful person finds his
greatest incentives and rewards in emergencies that offer only the
satisfaction of a neatly played game. In the whole matter the sense of
timeliness is everything. To wait for a softening expression, to
suppress a cherished witticism the appositeness of which has passed,
to exhaust without insistence a happy vein, to rise sharply to any
worthy lure and refuse an unworthy one without offence--such are some
of the delightful and legitimate arts of the tactful person. Whether
men or women possess these gentle arts in fuller measure would be
matter for a separate essay. The impression prevails that women do,
indeed the phrase "feminine tact" is quite stereotyped among us. I
presume that a scrutiny of the memoirs of the most highly developed
society of modern times, the French salons of the old régime, would
confirm this judgment. From my own limited experience I can only say
that while I have met ten tactful women for one tactful man, the
consummate exemplars of this virtue in my acquaintance have been of
the so-called sterner sex, and I am inclined to believe that the
finest flower of considerateness grows best in the rocky soil of the
masculine intelligence. The mere fact that the personal adjustment is
more difficult between men with no reconciling tradition of chivalry
prevailing may make for finer transactions. Possibly too, the absence
of a conventional sex loyalty, a relatively detached and impersonal
habit of thought, a somewhat ruthless will to understand, a practice
of moving resolutely in difficult affairs, may make the tact of a man
when it occurs at all a more precious and complicated product. So at
least it strikes one who confessedly knows the world largely through
books. I would rather have overheard the talk and silences of David
and Jonathan, or for that matter of Charles Eliot Norton and Carlyle,
than that of any man and woman or of any two women recorded by
historian or novelist. If, fair reader, this be treason, make the most
of it.
To the notion that tact requires both a perceptive and an active part,
I must for a moment return. The fact seems to me to explain the oft
discussed case of the shy person. In my observation shy people are
usually quite delicately perceptive, victims in fact of an almost
morbid open-mindedness and sympathy. Where they lack is in prompt
decision between diverging courses, in the sense of relativity which
brings the right word or silence at the right moment, and precisely
and only for that moment's sake. I fancy many shy persons are not
egotists, as an impatient and genial world is prone to hold them, but
absolutists, expecting of human intercourse a sort of abstract fitness
in the light of an eternal aspect which for the really tactful man has
no practical existence. In heaven and probably in hell the shy should
get along capitally. In the celestial domain active tact would be
unnecessary--it would merely trouble the perpetual beatitude; in the
nether realm tact would simply mitigate those tense affinities and
antipathies which are implied in a future punitive state. The damned,
if really tactful folk, would never have to be strictly regimented
among their infernal peers with the inevitability which a Dante or a
Swedenborg describes. In the sphere of intelligence indeed
inevitability has no meaning. Alternatives always exist. A
determinist's god cannot be tactful, and if Professors James and Royce
have been allured by the idea of a conditioned deity, I fancy it has
been largely with the hope of shading the arid conception of
omnipotence with one of the most amiable human qualities. It is a
compromise which the Christian effects less philosophically in the
doctrine of the God-man. Yet the Jesus of the Gospels remains for the
philosopher much more of a God than of a man, despite the efforts of
orthodox and skeptical criticism to elucidate the historic figure. His
sayings transcend tact, and the Jews, eminently a negotiating,
compromising and tactful race, bore true report when they said "He
speaks as never man spake."
Such serious and remote but I trust illuminating aspects of our topic
may merely be glanced at. In closing I may note that while the finest
exhibitions of tact arise between individuals or in small groups,
there is also a collective type of tact which must be mastered by the
artist, the actor, and the orator. St. Paul manifested it in the
highest degree when he addressed the curious Babists, Vedantists,
Christian Scientists, Spiritualists, Vitalists, Relativists, and
Materialists (my Greek has lapsed so I offer modern equivalents) of
Athens as men "pre-eminently religious." And it is characteristic of
the touch and go quality of every sort of tact that nothing much moved
the loiterers on Mars Hill except the Apostle's beginning. Need I add
that tact itself loyally obeys the law of measure and occasion which
it imposes on its subservient material? The high exercise of tact
requires high occasions. Of this sort was John Hancock's grim and
enlightening jest in the Continental Congress on all hanging together
lest they all hang separately. It took perhaps a singularly tactless
personality to husband this supreme and isolated flash for a lifetime
until the right occasion should occur. Merely one among countless
examples of Lincoln's tact was his solicitous inquiry as to the brand
of Grant's whiskey when a meddler brought gossip of the great
General's potations. Charles II's famous apology for unconscionable
delay in dying is frequently cited as a consummate example of tact. To
me it seems merely witty, containing as it does a hint that the
attendants had let something of impatience or weariness transpire.
It is the negative part of tact always to save at least two
faces--leaving neither party to a transaction discomforted. The most
solemn example of entire tactlessness within my knowledge was
perpetrated by a very learned man, the by no means inconspicuous
father of a far more famous son, Dr. John Rubens. During a prolonged
absence of that rather unsatisfactory husband, William of Orange, Dr.
John deeply engaged the volatile affections of Queen Anna. When the
affair was uncovered he wrote to the Prince a letter of apology, the
tenor of which was that such infelicities had been the common lot of
monarchs, as history showed, and the present mishap was the more
tolerable that he himself, Dr. John Rubens, was a man of parts and
station, a Doctor of Laws from no mean university, and at court the
equal of a baron. It does not appear that such plain intimation that
the queen might have erred with some base fellow, perhaps a mere
Bachelor of Arts, in any way comforted the taciturn Prince. When Dr.
Rubens left prison it was not because of this letter but through the
importunity of a singularly loyal wife. To emphasize the relativity of
tact let me cite a family anecdote, the appositeness of which must
condone a certain lack of reticence in its telling. My father once in
conducting a defence before a magistrate, by directing a single
crucial question to the plaintiff put him overtly in the wrong, and
noting the judge's involuntary nod of assent, rested the case,
promptly obtaining a favorable verdict. As regards the judge this was
perfect tact, but not as regards the client. He rightly expected a
more ample parade of professional skill and probably still grudges the
fee.
How much needless travail and fuss a truly reticent and tactful man
might spare himself and his neighbors--privacies profaned, trifling
misunderstandings magnified, maimed reputations, distracted aims,
thwarted accomplishment! Upon all this I could still enlarge, but I am
already rebuked by the ambiguously smiling shade of Samuel Butler of
"Erewhon" who remarks in his "Notebooks:"
"No man should try even to allude to the greater part of what he sees
in his subject, and there is hardly a limit to what he may omit. What
is required is that he shall say what he elects to say discreetly,
that he shall be quick to see the gist of a matter, and give it
pithily without either prolixity or stint of words."