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.