The second most deadly instrument of destruction is the dynamite
gun,—the first is the human tongue. The gun merely kills bodies; the
tongue kills reputations and, ofttimes, ruins characters. Each gun works
alone; each loaded tongue has a hundred accomplices. The havoc of the
gun is visible at once. The full evil of the tongue lives through all
the years; even the eye of Omniscience might grow tired in tracing it to
its finality.
The crimes of the tongue are words of unkindness, of anger, of malice,
of envy, of bitterness, of harsh criticism, gossip, lying and scandal.
Theft and murder are awful crimes, yet in any single year the aggregate
sorrow, pain and suffering they cause in a nation is microscopic when
compared with the sorrows that come from the crimes of the tongue. Place
in one of the scale-pans of Justice the evils resulting from the acts of
criminals, and in the other the grief and tears and suffering resulting
from the crimes of respectability, and you will start back in amazement
as you see the scale you thought the heavier shoot high in air.
At the hands of thief or murderer few of us suffer, even indirectly. But
from the careless tongue of friend, the cruel tongue of enemy, who is
free? No human being can live a life so true, so fair, so pure as to be
beyond the reach of malice, or immune from the poisonous emanations of
envy. The insidious attacks against one’s reputation, the loathsome
innuendoes, slurs, half-lies, by which jealous mediocrity seeks to ruin
its superiors, are like those insect parasites that kill the heart and
life of a mighty oak. So cowardly is the method, so stealthy the
shooting of the poisoned thorns, so insignificant the separate acts in
their seeming, that one is not on guard against them. It is easier to
dodge an elephant than a microbe.
In London they have recently formed an Anti-Scandal League. The members
promise to combat in every way in their power “the prevalent custom of
talking scandal, the terrible and unending consequences of which are not
generally estimated.”
Scandal is one of the crimes of the tongue, but it is only one. Every
individual who breathes a word of scandal is an active stockholder in a
society for the spread of moral contagion. He is instantly punished by
Nature by having his mental eyes dimmed to sweetness and purity, and his
mind deadened to the sunlight and glow of charity. There is developed a
wondrous, ingenious perversion of mental vision, by which every act of
others is explained and interpreted from the lowest possible motives.
They become like certain carrion flies, that pass lightly over acres of
rose-gardens, to feast on a piece of putrid meat. They have developed a
keen scent for the foul matter upon which they feed.
There are pillows wet by sobs; there are noble hearts broken in the
silence whence comes no cry of protest; there are gentle, sensitive
natures seared and warped; there are old-time friends separated and
walking their lonely ways with hope dead and memory but a pang; there
are cruel misunderstandings that make all life look dark,—these are but
a few of the sorrows that come from the crimes of the tongue.
A man may lead a life of honesty and purity, battling bravely for all he
holds dearest, so firm and sure of the rightness of his life that he
never thinks for an instant of the diabolic ingenuity that makes evil
and evil report where naught but good really exists. A few words lightly
spoken by the tongue of slander, a significant expression of the eyes, a
cruel shrug of the shoulders, with a pursing of the lips,—and then,
friendly hands grow cold, the accustomed smile is displaced by a sneer,
and one stands alone and aloof with a dazed feeling of wonder at the
vague, intangible something that has caused it all.
For this craze for scandal, sensational newspapers of to-day are largely
responsible. Each newspaper is not one tongue, but a thousand or a
million tongues, telling the same foul story to as many pairs of
listening ears. The vultures of sensationalism scent the carcass of
immorality afar off. From the uttermost parts of the earth they collect
the sin, disgrace and folly of humanity, and show them bare to the
world. They do not even require _facts_, for morbid memories and fertile
imaginations make even the worst of the world’s happenings seem tame
when compared with their monstrosities of invention. These stories, and
the discussions they excite, develop in readers a cheap, shrewd power of
distortion of the acts of all around them.
If a rich man give a donation to some charity, they say: “He is doing it
to get his name talked about,—to help his business.” If he give it
anonymously, they say, “Oh, it’s some millionaire who is clever enough
to know that refraining from giving his name will pique curiosity; he
will see that the public is informed later.” If he do not give to
charity, they say: “Oh, he’s stingy with his money, of course, like the
rest of the millionaires.” To the vile tongue of gossip and slander,
Virtue is ever deemed but a mask, noble ideals but a pretense,
generosity a bribe.
The man who stands above his fellows must expect to be the target for
the envious arrows of their inferiority. It is part of the price he must
pay for his advance. One of the most detestable characters in all
literature is Iago.
Envious of the promotion of Cassio above his head, he hated Othello. His
was one of those low natures that become absorbed in sustaining his
dignity, talking of “preserving his honor,”—forgetting it has so long
been dead that even embalming could not preserve it. Day by day Iago
dropped his poison; day by day did subtle resentment and studied
vengeance distill the poison of distrust and suspicion into more
powerfully insidious doses. With a mind wonderfully concentrated by the
blackness of his purpose, he wove a network of circumstantial evidence
around the pure-hearted Desdemona, and then murdered her vicariously, by
the hand of Othello. Her very simplicity, confidence, innocence and
artlessness made Desdemona the easier mark for the diabolic tactics of
Iago.
Iago still lives in the hearts of thousands, who have all his despicable
meanness without his cleverness. The constant dropping of their lying
words of malice and envy have in too many instances at last worn away
the noble reputations of their superiors.
To sustain ourselves in our own hasty judgments we sometimes say, as we
listen, and accept without investigation, the words of these modern
Iagos: “Well, where there is so much smoke, there must be _some_ fire.”
Yes, but the fire may be only the fire of malice, the incendiary firing
of the reputation of another by the lighted torch of envy, thrown into
the innocent facts of a life of superiority.