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.