The old saying “Silence is golden” comes from the Latin “Silentium est aureum” and it exists in many languages. Plutarch drew attention to what Simonides, who was famous for his epigrams, said, to the effect that “he never repented that he had held his tongue but often that he had spoken”.
But the gentle Belfast Presbyterian Robert Lynd (1879-1949), who was at his best as a writer of light, humorous essays, was having none of this in his piece entitled On Holding the Tongue, published in his collection Both Sides of the Road (1934). There he expressed himself “rather sceptical in regard to all eloquent attacks on speech”.
He accepted that the tongue could be unruly, “given to bitterness and lying as well as to truth and gentleness”, but he didn’t accept that silence was superior to speech. One argument he put forward is that “we do not choose our friends from among the silent”. We’re not inclined to choose people who never say a word as our dinner-guests, tending to much prefer talkative people for such occasions. “And the dinner-parties that we remember most kindly are those at which there has been an excess of conversation, not those at which there have been numerous lapses into silence.”
Is there a worse purgatory for a quiet man, Lynd asks, than to be between two silent women at a dinner-party. One of the main problems about silence is that it makes people nervous, and we don’t enjoy situations in which we’re nervous. Not being an eloquent conversationalist himself, he was under no illusions about the virtues of silence. “When I hold my tongue, it is not through strength of character; it is because I cannot do anything else.” Among his worst memories of parties was being introduced to a tongue-tied girl to whom he didn’t know what to say.
He’s sure few people would agree with Simonides in regretting what they’ve said more often than what they’ve left unsaid and he gives the example of letter-writing. He regrets scarcely three letters he’s written in his life but deeply regrets the 3,000 he should have written and didn’t.
“And is it not the same in regard to many of the things one might have said and did not?”
