LOOSE-UPPED FOLK.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XIII, Issue XVIII, 3 November 1894, Page 416

LOOSE-UPPED FOLK.

THE PEOPLE WHO MUST AND WILL TALK BY MRS LYNN LYNTON. Their power of honourable reticence is on a par with that of a sieve to carry water from the well to the house. Whatever they hear they retail to the next comer, and their promises of secrecy are as likely to hold as one of Michael Scot’s ropes of sand. Even when the confidence tells against themselves, they must make it under pain of worse to follow ; as, when a man betrays his married mistress, with an angry busband, the divorce court, and exemplary damages to follow—when a woman betrays herself, and gives to her friend to keep for her the story of ber own dishonouring armour. The secrets of others confided to them are safe no longer than it takes a piece of touchwood to burn. Within the four walls they have vowed the fidelity of silence to the grave. When the street-door has closed behind them, the thing they have promised to keep buried in their heart flutters to their lips and escapes to the ears of the first friend they meet. Like that bole which money burns in a spendthrift’s pocket, SO DOES A CONFIDENCE BURN THE TONGUE OF THE LOOSELIPPED. Not that they are ill-natured, as a class distinction accounting for, and the reason why. They are often the besthearted people in the world—genial, generous, sympathetic, and all the rest of it. But they are hopelessly incontinent of speech ; and their generosity leads them to share and share alike with all the world indiscriminately that dangerous bit of knowledge just confided to them.

Most people who know anything of the best rules of society and how to get along in life with least friction to

themselves and least damage to others, observe that imperative law of good-breeding as well as of right feeling, forbearing to repeat conversations, even without the pressure of a promise—giving no voice to private suspicions—making public no fortuitous discoveries—and, above all, refraining from passing on scandalous stories about people unknown ; —stories impossible to verify and more likely to be false than true. They will not run off to make a present of all you have been saying, to Tom, Dick, and Harry—lamenting your * dangerous opinions ’ —criticising your * queer notions ’ — scattering your intellectual confidences as so many members of a slaughtered personality, no two of which join to make a coherent whole. They observe that unwritten law, and hold to the * calm sough.’ But

THE LOOSE LIPPED FOLK CAN KEEP NOTHING TO THEMSELVES.

What they see they detail, what they hear they repeat; and in their disregard for all confidential sacredness in talk they go far beyond the traditional sapper. It is they who set the snowball rolling, and once set rolling, that snowball of gossip increases daily and hourly. Accietions of suspicion, excrescences of exaggeration, distort the original nucleus of what was perhaps an insignificant little fact into a monstrous formation. The game of * Russian Scandal ’ is repeated in grave and tragic earnest, and, by the mindless chatter of the loose lipped, the old dogma is proved wrong, for something is made out of nothing. In the ear of Dionysius at Syracuse, the tearing of a piece of paper reverberates like thunder. Very few people have

THAT ABSOLUTE PROBITY OF SILENCE which will bear any kind of strain and come triumphant out of any kind of ordeal. Unassailable by fear many yield to favour, and give to love the infraction of confidence they deny to authority. The one they love comes into a different category from the rest of the world. To share with a second self is not breaking faith with a confidant. Even Horace himself, erstwise so strict and strong on the need of keeping sacred all the secrets confided to one’s ear, makes an exception in the case of the friend, with whom to share is not to divulge. In like manner, many men and most women think themselves free to pass on confidences—the one to the wife, the other to the husband. And this with a perfectly clear conscience will certain worthy folk do, who would rather pierce their tongue with a bodkin than basely betray the secret confided to them. With love is no baseness ; and with love as the solvent, secrecy may honourably melt as wax in the purifying flame. This is one reason why it would never be safe to trust women with political secrets dangerous to limpart to husbands or lovers. They would carry them safely enough against foes or strangers ; but she would be a rare exception out of whom the lover could not coax or kiss the pass word on which depended the safety of the camp I For the matter of that, indeed, some men are no stronger to resist the blandishmenet of a mistress than is the average woman with her lover. Statecraft understands this—has always understood it—and practises to-day what it practised thousands of years ago. Those keen and facile souricieres exist now in London as they existed in Paris in Fouche’s time ; and if the secret history of certain concessions and unpatriotic truckling? to foreign Powers could be written, it would be found to reside in the fine eyes of a clever and unscrupulous mousetrap—with a susceptible Minister frisking around and finally caught and held. And when caught, and when held, the good of an alien and inimical country is squeezed out of him, and the interests of his own lie like dead flies oi> the floor. It is enrious how TALKING ON A THING SOMETIMES SEEMS TO EXHAUST ITS VITALITY. Sometimes, of course, talking out a thought helps its better moulding ; and the analogy of the flint and the steel holds good for the striking out of sparks and coruscations. But more often, to detail the plan of a book—to discuss the characters and incidents it is intended to describe—drains the brain of its creative faculty, and speech remains the only vehicle of the idea. 'Had we kept silent, imitating Nature in this dumb shaping of our thought—letting it silently grow from thought to image, and then striking that image into the crystallization of words—had we done this we should have achieved a success. Carrying water in a sieve we let it all run through, and the tangible beauty of crystallization was lost for ever. No wise-like artist talks of his intended work. No capable projector confides the details of his scheme while yet those details are incomplete and the scheme itself is not assured. THE LOOSE-LIPPED FOLK WHO TALK BIG OF THEIR PLANS AND INTENTIONS ARE THE FAILURES who never accomplish, building, as they do, all their castles in the air and fashioning the caryatides of their temple out of clouds. In a word, the loose-lipped are both dangerous folk for others to know and unsatisfactory in their own lives from end to end. However good-natured they may be they are gossips and scandal mongers ; and, however noble in other things, like Diana of the Crossways they will betray the most important seciet without turning a hair or suffering one pang of conscience. To themselves they are traitors, and of their own interests the worst betrayers. Wherefore he is wisest who gives them the widest berth and who has least social ‘truck’ with them anyhow. St. James' Budget.