Part 7

“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._

1 SAMUEL xxvii. 19, 20.

Why had Saul disquieted Samuel, to bring him up from the place of the dead, by the midnight agency of the “wise woman” of Endor? Because he would fain pry into futurity, and learn from supernatural sources his coming fate. The desired foresight was vouchsafed him. By to-morrow he and his sons were to be with the dead-and-gone seer, whose spirit he had rashly invoked. The prevision had its present penalty. “Then Saul fell straightway all along on the earth, and was sore afraid, because of the words of Samuel.” The secret things belong unto the Lord our God, and only those things which are revealed belong unto us and to our children. The tree of foreknowledge of good and evil may offer fruit that is pleasant to the sight, and seemingly to be desired to make one wise; but it is fatal food, not to be eaten of, nor to be touched, by any but the venturesome profane.

Indulged to his cost with previsions of what should befall his posterity, Milton’s Adam, at sight of the Flood and its ravages, breaks out into the exclamation,

“O visions ill foreseen! Better had I Lived ignorant of future! so had borne My part of evil only, each day’s lot Enough to bear.”

Warned by so distressful an experience, he would have no man seek henceforth to be foretold what shall befall him or his children; “evil he may be sure, which neither his foreknowing can prevent; and he the future evil shall, no less in apprehension than in substance, feel grievous to bear.” It has been asked what would become of men, were their future absolutely foreknown by them: would they not become in imagination, and therefore in reality, the passive slaves of an inevitable fate, with all hope extinguished, all fear intensified, awaiting in terror the foreseen evil, and looking with indifference on the promised good, darkened as it would be by the shadow of intervening calamities, and stripped of the bright colouring of hope? And yet,

“With eager search to dart the soul, Curiously vain, from pole to pole, And from the planets’ wandering spheres To extort the number of our years, And whether all those years shall flow Serenely smooth, and free from woe, Or rude misfortune shall deform Our life with one continual storm; Or if the scene shall motley be Alternate joy and misery,— Is a desire which, more or less, All men feel, though few confess.”

So at least affirms the author of the “Rosciad,”—who in another of his writings puts the query:

“Tell me, philosopher, is it a crime To pry into the secret womb of time; Or, born in ignorance, must we despair To reach events, and read the future there?”

Assuredly, says Cicero, the ignorance of evils to come is of more advantage than the knowledge of them: _certe ignoratio futurorum malorum utilior est quam scientia_. And Horace, in a celebrated passage:

“Prudens futuri temporis exitum Caliginosâ nocte premit Deus: Ridetque, si mortalis ultra Fas trepidat.”...

_Caliginosa nox_ forms a thick black curtain.

“What hangs behind that curtain?—would’st thou learn? If thou art wise, thou would’st not.”

A thoughtful mind, sententiously observes Miss Clarissa Harlowe, is not a blessing to be coveted, unless it has such a happy vivacity with it as her friend Miss Howe’s: a vivacity which enables one to enjoy the present, without being anxious about the future. It is, according to Goldsmith, the happy confidence in bright illusions that gives life its true relish, and keeps up our spirits amidst every distress and disappointment. “How much less would be done, if a man knew how little he can do! How wretched a creature would he be, if he saw the end as well as the beginning of his projects! He would have nothing left but to sit down in torpid despair, and exchange enjoyment for actual calamity.” The warrior in Mr. Roscoe’s tragedy argues judiciously when he says,

“What is’t to me, that I should vex my soul In dim forebodings of what is to be? It is enough I know, and ache to know, What on this bridge of time I have to do, Not overlook the abysm till my head fail.”

Fortunately for us mortals, Mr. Froude says, necessary as any future may be, and inevitable as by our own actions we may have made it, it is kindly kept from us wrapt up in clouds, and we are not made wretched about it by anticipation. “O my fortune,” prays Agrippina, in one of Jonson’s Roman tragedies, “let it be sudden thou preparest against me; strike all my powers of understanding blind, and ignorant of destiny to come!”

Seek to know no more, is in vain the joint appeal of the three witches to Macbeth, beside the magic caldron in the cave; but as to the future of Banquo’s issue he _will_ be satisfied. Cranmer, predicting a glorious reign for the infant Elizabeth, parenthesises a sigh on the common lot—

“Would I had known no more! but she must die.”

Shakspeare’s King Henry the Fourth, again, in one place utters the aspiration, “O Heaven! that one might read the book of fate!” Hardly an aspiration, however, as the context shows; a privilege to be deprecated rather; for could there be foreseen all the changes and chances of one’s mortal life, “how chances mock, and changes fill the cup of alteration with divers liquors,”

“O, if this were seen, The happiest youth,—viewing his progress through, What perils past, what crosses to ensue,— Would shut the book, and sit him down and die.”

Mr. de Quincey describes an Installation of the Knights of St. Patrick at which he was present, during the Lord-Lieutenancy of Lord Cornwallis—the narrator’s companions on that occasion being Lord and Lady Castlereagh, who “were both young at this time, and both wore an impressive appearance of youthful happiness; neither, happily for their peace of mind, able to pierce that cloud of years, not much more than twenty, which divided them from the day destined in one hour to wreck the happiness of both.” Vision ill foreseen it were to know the times and the seasons, the manner how, and the place where.

“O tell me, cried Ereenia, for from thee Nought can be hidden, when the end will be. Seek not to know, old Casyapa replied, What pleaseth Heaven to hide. Dark is the abyss of Time. But light enough to guide your steps is given; Whatever weal or woe betide, Turn never from the way of truth aside, And leave the event, in holy hope, to Heaven.”

The hermit in Scott’s “Talisman,” who, after failing to read aright the fate of others, has to own himself uncertain whether he may not have miscalculated his own,—withdraws from the action of the story with the reflection that God will not have us break into His council-house, or spy out His hidden mysteries. “We must wait His time with watching and prayer—with fear and with hope. I came hither the stern seer—the proud prophet, skilled, as I thought, to instruct princes, and gifted even with supernatural powers, but burdened with a weight which I deemed no shoulders but mine could have borne. But my bands have been broken! I go hence humble in mine ignorance,” etc. In Scott’s other and less popular Tale of the Crusaders, Eveline deprecates the Lady of Baldringham’s offer to show her niece how the balance of fate inclines, and shrinks from the asserted privilege “enjoyed” by their house of looking forward beyond the points of present time, and seeing in the very bud the thorns or flowers which are one day to encircle their head. “For my own sake, noble kinswoman,” answered Eveline, “I would decline such foreknowledge, even were it possible to acquire it without transgressing the rules of the Church. Could I have foreseen what has befallen me within these last unhappy days, I had lost the enjoyment of every happy moment before that time.” So again reasons the Italian adept, Baptista Damiotti, in one of Sir Walter’s shorter tales, when dismissing the two agitated ladies who have been consulting his magic mirror. “Few,” he added, in a melancholy tone, “leave this house as well in health as they entered it. Such being the consequence of seeking knowledge by mysterious means, I leave you to judge of the condition of those who have the power of gratifying such irregular curiosity.” Cowper observes in one of his letters that man often prophesies without knowing it; but that did he foresee, what is always foreseen by him who dictates what he supposes to be his own, he would suffer by anticipation as well as by consequence; and wish perhaps as ardently for the happy ignorance to which he is at present so much indebted, as some have foolishly and inconsiderately done, for a knowledge that would be but another name for misery. Even in the ecstasy of rapturous foresight the Seer exclaims,

“Visions of glory, spare my aching sight, Ye unborn ages, crowd not on my soul!”

When Harold and Haco, “pale king and dark youth,” in Lord Lytton’s historical novel, would read the riddle of the future, and “climb to heaven through the mysteries of hell,” the witch bids them—poor “worms”—crawl back to the clay—to the earth: “One such night as the hag ye despise enjoys as her sport and her glee, would freeze your veins, and sear the life in your eyeballs,” etc., etc. What says the wizard, again, in Tasso?

“But that I should the sure events unfold Of things to come, or destinies foretel, Too rash is your desire, your wish too bold.”

Cagliostro, professing to foresee the fate of La Perouse, is importunately asked by his fellow-guests at that memorable dinner-party commemorated by M. Dumas, why then he did not forewarn and save that brave man before setting out. At the very least, why not have told him to “beware of unknown isles”—that he might at any rate have had the chance of avoiding them? But, “I assure you no, count,” is the mystic’s reply; “and, if he had believed me, it would only have been the more horrible, for the unfortunate man would have seen himself approaching those isles destined to be fatal to him, without the power to escape from them. Therefore he would have died, not one, but a hundred deaths, for he would have gone through it all by anticipation. Hope, of which I should have deprived him, is what best sustains a man under all trials.” “Yes,” says Condorcet, the sceptical and sententious, “the veil which hides from us our future, is the only real good which God has vouchsafed to man.” And what again, to the same purport, says the Hermit Monk to Alpine’s Lord:—

“Roderick, it is a fearful strife For man endowed with mortal life, Whose shroud of sentient clay can still Feel feverish pang and fainting chill, ... ’Tis hard for such to view, unfurl’d, The curtain of the future world. Yet witness every quaking limb, My sunken pulse, mine eyeballs dim, My soul with harrowing anguish torn,— This for my chieftain have I borne!”

And therefore, says Sir Thomas Browne, in his moralisings on the undesirableness of all such foresight, “and therefore the wisdom of astrologers, who speak of future things, hath wisely softened the severity of their doctrines; and even in their sad predictions, while they tell us of inclination not coaction from the stars, they kill us not with Stygian oaths and merciless necessity, but leave us hopes of evasion.” _Tant mieux_ for those who, like Hudibras,

... “still gape to anticipate The cabinet-designs of fate, Apply to wizards to foresee What shall, and what shall never be;”

like Hudibras, bursting with the wish,

“Oh, that I could enucleate And solve the problem of my fate; Or find, by necromantic art, How far the destinies take my part!”

Vanity and vexation of spirit, these visionary previsions all. Sacred, therefore, be, in Thomson’s phrase, the veil that kindly clouds a light too keen for mortals,