DOI Artikel:
Waugh, Arthur: Reticence in literature
DOI Seite / Zitierlink:https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.20196#0208
202
Reticence in Literature
reticence in Gray, a reticence alien without doubt to the English
character, but still more alieri to English literature. Reticence is
not a national characteristic—far otherwise. The phrase " national
characteristic " is, I know well, a cant phrase, and, as such, füll of
the dangers of abuse. Historical and ethnographical criticism,
proceeding on populär lines, has tried from time to time to fix
certain tendencies to certain races, and to argue from individuals
to generalities with a freedom that every law of induction belies.
And so we have come to endow the Frenchman, universally and
without exception, with politeness, the Indian, equally univer-
sally, with cunning, the American with the commercial talent, the
German with the educational, and so forth. Generalisations of
this kind must, of course, be accepted with limitations. But it is
not too much, perhaps, to say that the Englishman has always
prided himself upon his frankness. He is always for speaking out;
and it is this faculty of outspokenness that he is anxious to
attribute to those characters which he sets up in the market-places
of his religion and his literature, as those whom he chiefiy delights
to honour. The demigods of our national verse, the heroes of our
national fiction, are brow-bound, above all other laureis, with this
glorious freedom of free speech and open manners, and we have
come to regard this broad, untrammelled virtue of ours, as all
individual virtues will be regarded with the revolution of the cycle
of provinciality, as a guerdon above question or control. We have
become inclined to forget that every good thing has, as Aristotle
pointed out so long ago, its corresponding evil, and that the cor-
ruption of the best is always worst of all. Frankness is so great a
boon, we say : we can forgive anything to the man who has the
courage of his convictions, the feavlessness of freedom—the man,
in a word, who speaks out.
But we have to distinguish, I think, at the outset between a
national
Reticence in Literature
reticence in Gray, a reticence alien without doubt to the English
character, but still more alieri to English literature. Reticence is
not a national characteristic—far otherwise. The phrase " national
characteristic " is, I know well, a cant phrase, and, as such, füll of
the dangers of abuse. Historical and ethnographical criticism,
proceeding on populär lines, has tried from time to time to fix
certain tendencies to certain races, and to argue from individuals
to generalities with a freedom that every law of induction belies.
And so we have come to endow the Frenchman, universally and
without exception, with politeness, the Indian, equally univer-
sally, with cunning, the American with the commercial talent, the
German with the educational, and so forth. Generalisations of
this kind must, of course, be accepted with limitations. But it is
not too much, perhaps, to say that the Englishman has always
prided himself upon his frankness. He is always for speaking out;
and it is this faculty of outspokenness that he is anxious to
attribute to those characters which he sets up in the market-places
of his religion and his literature, as those whom he chiefiy delights
to honour. The demigods of our national verse, the heroes of our
national fiction, are brow-bound, above all other laureis, with this
glorious freedom of free speech and open manners, and we have
come to regard this broad, untrammelled virtue of ours, as all
individual virtues will be regarded with the revolution of the cycle
of provinciality, as a guerdon above question or control. We have
become inclined to forget that every good thing has, as Aristotle
pointed out so long ago, its corresponding evil, and that the cor-
ruption of the best is always worst of all. Frankness is so great a
boon, we say : we can forgive anything to the man who has the
courage of his convictions, the feavlessness of freedom—the man,
in a word, who speaks out.
But we have to distinguish, I think, at the outset between a
national