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.
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