Under Your Hat
T T a party the other evening I listened while a man who holds a position of trust at the centre of affairs gave an entertaining account of the blunders and vacillations recently committed by his chief and his chief's principal associates. It seemed to me an odd thing to do. The speaker gave away no secrets of importance, but he disbursed with a bountiful hand the small change of malicious gossip, the sort of back-stage tittle-tattle on which his hearers—with several of whom he was barely acquainted—were almost bound to dine out. Everything he told us was calculated to damage, however trivially, the reputation of the man he served. When I said, rather officiously, that I did not think he ought to talk like this, he looked genuinely surprised, but stopped.
* * * Are we (I wondered afterwards) less good at keeping secrets than we used to be? And if so, what is the cause? Neither question can be answered with certainty; but if I had to guess I should say that absolute discretion is a rarer quality than it was fifty years ago, and that one of the reasons for this is that honour, an abstract conception, has ceased to be an explicit one.
Honour, originally the product of a strait and jealous code of conduct, is now assumed to be the birthright of every Briton. Since we are all ex officio honourable, nobody talks about honour any more. An idea, or an ideal, which in the Dark Ages supplied a salutary though fitful gleam, has been put on the shelf along with other, more negative virtues which our society has acquired and which we now take for granted. But the whole conception of honour is positive, not negative. It is safe to assume that we have grown out of the habit of burning witches and owning slaves; but it is not safe to assume that we have grown into the habit of honour.
Except in the law courts, and at courts martial, the word is hardly ever heard in its original sense. For every time phrases like 'the honour of the school' or 'the honour of the regiment' are used seriously, they are used ten times by wags or comedians to raise a smile. An intelligent foreigner, listening to our occasional references to the subject, might be excused for deducing that we regard honour as an archaic and slightly ridiculous appendage, like a bustle.
Variant meanings of the word have combined to overlay and elbow into obsolescence the old, chivalric one. The honour, for instance, in 'honour and glory' is the reward, not the fount of action—a reward which it is not dishonourable to disdain. To be made a baronet, to be dealt the Knave of Clubs, to drive off the tee before your opponent—each of these involves you, etymologically, with honour. It is small wonder that an image which was once real and vivid has got blurred.
* * * Small boys used to—perhaps still do—underwrite promises with their honour.
'Swear you won't tell?'
'All right.'
'Swear on your honour?? 'Yes.'
'You've got to say it, you know.'
'All right. I swear on my honour I won't tell.'
This rigmarole had a certain potency. You were not quite sure what your honour was, but you realised that it was some- thing important, precious and personal to you. An enlightened grown-up once told us to jettison this formula. There was no need, he said, to bring honour into it; it was enough to give your word, and wrong to suggest that there could be anything more sacred and binding than a plain promise. Academically this was a perfectly sound point; but I think it was bad doc- trine, because it was another nail in the coffin of one's honour, or perhaps another layer of dust on its glass case. If, among adults nowadays, 'Swear on your honour you won't tell' were substituted for the more usual 'Keep it under your hat, won't you?' I suspect that there would be fewer breaches of confidence.
* In the last war I found, or thought I found, that women were better at keeping secrets than men. One reason for this may have been that women are not particularly interested in operational matters and would far rather talk about something else; but I believe a less obvious but more fundamental reason is that women are on the whole less self-important than men. For it is self-importance, nine times out of ten, which makes men give away secrets and betray confidences. How curious is this urge to impart inside information, to epater the dinner- table with news which is first-hand and exclusive, and which from that moment ceases to be either! How curious, how strong, how infrequently resisted Malice, or anyhow a lack of charity, is often a lubricant to the workings of the ego in these contexts; the best-kept secrets are almost certainly those which involve nobody in discredit. Primed, in confidence, with the information that his friend X is going to be made a bishop or that his neighbour Y is going to endow some charitable project, even the most indiscreet of men quite often succeeds in keeping a guard upon his tongue. But if the circumstances are different—if X is in danger of being defrocked or Y of going bankrupt—how many of those to whom this sad intelligence is privily imparted will, in fact, keep it under their hats? A perfect world would be a chill place; and to frequent a society in which nobody ever disparaged those who had a right to their loyalty, nobody ever betrayed secrets or was gratuitously unkind, would be like living on cold mutton. But the converse is perhaps almost equally true. If all blab, all amusingly denigrate, if the standard conversational opening becomes, 'I oughtn't really to tell you this, but I know you won't let it go any farther,' the law of diminishing returns begins to operate. If no secrets are safe, if all reputations are automatically Aunt Sallies and it is smart to cart those who ought to be able to trust you, we are back in the world of Restoration comedy. It is an agreeable world to visit for an hour or two, but 1 suspect it would be a boring world to live in.
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