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."