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