CONFIDENCES..
FOR most of us half the pleasure of knowing consists in telling, and half the pain of knowing is taken away by confiding. There are men who would refuse to be told the most interesting secret in the world at the price of an absolute secrecy ; and the instinct to confess has been known to over- come the fear of the death sentence. The desire to confide in those we love is universal : it is part of the human instinct to seek sympathy. That a man should desire to tell his affairs to some one whose wisdom he reveres is, again, natural. He has an underlying idea of asking advice, or at least a vague hope that the wise man's words may strengthen him in his opinion or allay his scruples in regard to the course of action which he has determined upon, or perhaps already taken. That the wish to confess, though quite illogical, is more or less instinctive was long ago divined by the Roman Church, which provided a means by which the instinct could be secretly indulged, turned a craving into a virtue, and transformed the aggregate of human weakness into a source of corporate power.
Intimate friendship, mental reverence, agony of conscience, all lead comprehensibly enough to the making of confidences; the difficulty is to explain the temptation to tell where it exists without any sense of guilt, and almost irrespective of the character of the person told. There are some men and some women so little able to keep their own counsel that at times they will confide in a stranger. Why ? Probably just because he is a stranger. The person who does so is no doubt constitutionally confidential, and has already made and regretted a good many confidences. He has very likely confided his private affairs more than once to some one he knew well, and has realised what it is to wish he had never seen that some one. He has been reluctant to meet him, feeling sure he would see in his eyes the knowledge which he himself gave in a moment of aberration. There are times when such a man as this appears not able to bear mental solitude. He is possessed by the desire to speak, and to speak about himself. Yet lie is not so far crazed but that there is method in his madness, and he decides to tell a stranger that he may escape the terrors of remorse. It is difficult to account for this state of feeling. Probably it has various causes. An attack of vanity is one of them. We say an attack advisedly, for vanity is a recurrent moral fever rather than a chronic moral disease. Very few people are always vain. A giddy moment of vanity is a dreadful thing to look back on, and the sufferer may very well be conscious, even during the seizure, that some time or other he will have to look back. The thought that the man before whom he played the fool is either a complete stranger, or some one who knows him too little to be greatly interested, will be, he knows, the only possible consolation in the inevitable day of reckoning. Again, there are a good many people who suffer mentally from over-long sight. They see indistinctly and out of proportion all events which touch them very near. Un- fortunately, there are no mental spectacles by which such a defect can be remedied. Suddenly their path in life leads them across some painful or pleasurable event. They do not know how big it is. They long to see for a moment with some one else's eyes, and instinctively ask the first comer to look, imagining they will be able to divine how the situation strikes the man whom it does not concern, and so to correct their own point of view.
There is no doubt that among the smaller causes of such confidences as we are discussing comes dearth of conversation. The free expression of opinion on any subject, however inti- mate, which is now the fashion among the intellectual, very much takes the place of confidences. But where ideas are few there generally exists an extraordinary modesty about express- ing any " views " whatever, except upon topics of no special interest ; consequently, a man who is seized with that sudden desire for human intercourse which at times seems not only to break the lock, but actually to wrench the lid off the mind, has no vent for his feelings except in pouring out his private affairs. Notable instances of this fact are to be seen among the poor. Poor women confide their private affairs to each other for want of more general subjects of talk. Judging by events, they must often regret it, and this regret accounts for their surprising readi- ness to confide in their social superiors. Those in widely different ranks of life must always be in some sense strangers although they are friends. All the uncultivated "appear almost always to be talking about themselves, but it is easy for a superficial observer to exaggerate the extent to which this is the case. For instance, if you discuss with a cultivated man a. question of morals, or the wisdom or rectitude of any particular line of conduct, he will tell you what he thinks right or what he thinks wrong, or what strikes him as wise or foolish, with very little use of the personal pronoun. He can see the situation from the outside. But if you discuss it with an uneducated man, he is incapable of this detached attitude of mind. The uneducated man can only picture the circum- stances to himself by picturing himself in the midst of them. What he thinks right and wise is, no doubt, often a great deal better and wiser than what he would actually have done. "Such-and-such a tiling was wrong ; I should not have done it," he says ; or—" Such-and-such was foolish. Now, had it been me, I should have done so-and-so." To the sophisticated listener he gives an impression of appalling self-righteousness, and even, perhaps, of hypocrisy ; but the impression is a mistaken one. He argues in the vocative case because it is the one in which he can most easily express himself. • Some people, it must be admitted, attract confidences from those who have no weakness for making them. We are not alluding to those persons who by a method of deft cross- questioning manage to abstract information with which they have no business. Such information is not confided by its original owner, but stolen from him, or at least wormed out of him. The people we mean have that in their face and bearing which makes all the world at home with them. Whoever meets them may know that they are incapable of giving a snub or a rebuff to any one who claims their sympathy, be he never so silly. They go about the world unarmed and unafraid, and, to give human nature its due, unhurt. Unconsciously, it is they who make the first con- fidence, telling those who see them, even for the first time, that they are sympathetic and detached, and as shrewd as they are harmless.
Generally speaking, the habit of making confidences is dangerous. We do not mean that they are often betrayed— we think it is surprising how well they are kept—but it is a weakening form of self-indulgence. A man ought to be able to keep his private affairs away from those whom they do not concern. A craving for small doses of sympathy unsweetened by friendship, and frequently adulterated, as such sympathy so often must be, with amusement and curiosity, is an ex- ceedingly unwholesome craving. Where it exists in company with a will strong enough to control it, we sometimes find 'it transformed into the literary instinct. It is easy to laugh at the man who makes "copy" out of his greatest joys and woes; but it is inevitable that he should do so if he is going to make good " copy " at all. The stock-in-trade of the writer is his ideas, and he cannot be ignorant that his best ideas come, to him through his emotions,—that is, through his most painful and most pleasurable experiences. Neither can he be ignorant that those experiences are, quite apart from the intimate delight or misery that they actually give him, so many literary assets. It is hard to blame him for making use of these. When all is said, is not the public the best stranger in whom to confide ? If a man can get the world to listen to his confidence (and the man of letters who would tell the world something worth hearing must, whatever disguise he may choose to wear, be willing to confide), it is idle to say that the sympathy of the world is not delightful. If the world will not listen, he has at least had as much as most confidence-makers have any right to expect,—the relief -of telling; and, unlike them, he can still comfort himself with the assurance that, after all, nobody knows.
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