On the Eloquence of Silent Things
Being certain private reflections on the matter of communication conducted without recourse to speech, and on the education required to receive it. Set down for no purpose other than that of private satisfaction, and not intended for the eyes of gentlemen. Lady Canard, 1861
I have been acquainted with Mrs. Hartley-Vane for eleven years, and in that time I have never once found it necessary to tell her anything of importance in words. This is not because we are incommunicative women—anyone who has spent an evening in Mrs. Hartley-Vane’s drawing room will confirm that the reverse is entirely the case—but because we have at our disposal a language of such comprehensiveness and such precision that the occasions requiring supplementation by direct speech are, in practice, remarkably few.
Last Thursday evening at the Pemberton’s, I communicated to her, across a room in which we could not approach each other without attracting notice, the following intelligence: that the woman in the yellow silk was saying something about Mrs. Hartley-Vane’s eldest daughter that Mrs. Hartley-Vane ought to know; that the source of this intelligence was the wife of a man Mrs. Hartley-Vane knows from a particular connection I cannot name here; that the matter was urgent but not yet beyond remedy; and that I would call upon her in the morning with fuller particulars.
I communicated all of this in the time it took me to cross from one side of the fireplace to the other, with my fan, my gloves, and the angle at which I held my head. Mrs. Hartley-Vane received the message entire, altered her expression by not one visible degree, and moved toward the supper room with the particular deliberateness that told me she had understood completely.
I set this down not as evidence of any extraordinary gift on my part, for there is nothing extraordinary in it. Any woman of my acquaintance and my formation has learned this language as thoroughly as she has learned French, and with more practical application, for French is useful primarily on the Continent, while the language of which I speak is in daily employment throughout every drawing room and ballroom and morning call and theatre box in this city. It is the native tongue of our particular civilisation, and a woman who cannot speak it is as disadvantaged in society as a woman who cannot read, though the disadvantage in the former case is less likely to be remarked upon by those who caused it.
I shall attempt to set down some portion of this language, as one might set down the grammar of any tongue—not because it requires the assistance of instruction, since most women acquire it by a process of absorption so gradual and so continuous that they cannot identify the moment of learning any more than they can identify the moment they first understood that a look of mild surprise directed at a remark communicates something quite different from a look of mild surprise directed at a person—but because I find myself, at fifty-one years of age, possessed of a conviction that the things women know are as worthy of record as the things men know, and that the languages women speak deserve as much attention as the languages of diplomacy and scholarship, in which I was not educated and which I have accordingly not set down.
The fan is the most versatile instrument in our vocabulary, and I begin with it because it operates at the greatest distance and therefore serves most urgently the purposes of communication across rooms where approach is impossible or inadvisable. The fan open and held before the face means: I am watching, and what I see interests me. The fan half-open, resting in the right hand: a provisional statement, a thing said tentatively, susceptible of revision. The fan closed and held vertically against the cheek: agreement, confirmation, yes. The fan closed and drawn across the cheek from right to left: a warning—the gesture of crossing out, the cancellation of what has been proposed, the negation delivered as a languid motion that to the uninitiated appears merely a cooling of the complexion. The fan open and moved slowly, with an almost studied leisure, before the face: here is someone I do not trust. The fan snapped shut with a precision that stops just short of violence: here is someone I do not trust and I wish you to know that my opinion is fixed on the matter.
The speed of the fan’s motion carries its own vocabulary within these meanings. A rapid movement intensifies; a slow one qualifies; the fan held entirely still, in a hand that would naturally be moving it, signals the opposite of cooling—it signals that the woman holding it is attending with an attention so complete that she has forgotten the ordinary gesture of the thing. This stillness is, in my experience, the most eloquent thing a fan can do, and the woman who produces it in the right company and the right context communicates a quality of concentrated intelligence that no words would convey with equal elegance.
The flowers require longer treatment, for their vocabulary is the most extensive and the most ancient of the languages I am describing, and also the most susceptible to regional variation and the passage of time, so that a nosegay that communicated a particular meaning in one’s grandmother’s drawing room may have shifted its sense by now in the way that words shift, accumulating connotation, shedding precision, acquiring an irony they did not originally carry. The rose communicates love, which every schoolgirl knows, but the rose does not communicate only love—it communicates the kind of love, the degree of love, and the state of the love according to its colour, its stage of bloom, its presentation, and the flowers with which it is combined. A red rose fully open speaks differently from a red rose still in bud. A rose with its thorns left on speaks differently from one stripped of them. A single rose presented in the right hand differs from the same rose presented in the left. These distinctions are not arbitrary: they are a grammar of degree and intention that rewards the educated reader and communicates nothing whatsoever to the uneducated one, which is precisely the condition of useful language.
The yellow rose has acquired, in recent years, a quality of ambiguity that it did not formerly possess, and I mention it here because the ambiguity is itself instructive. It began as a communication of jealousy—the sour note in the chromatic scale of love—and has been used as such with great precision by women who wished to communicate to rivals that their rivalry was perceived and would not go uncontested. But it has also been used, in certain circles, to communicate something that I can only describe by indirection: a sympathy between women that exceeds what the occasion publicly permits, a warmth that the surface friendship does not entirely account for, a recognition that passes between certain women with the specificity of a word in a private language. I say this without further elaboration, for further elaboration would require me to say things in English that the yellow rose communicates with such admirable obliqueness, and the obliqueness is the point.
The language of dress is the most continuously operative of these vocabularies, because dress cannot be set down and picked up as a fan can—it speaks from the moment one appears until the moment one departs, and it speaks to every observer simultaneously, without selectivity, which means the art of dressing communicates deliberately to its intended audience while providing the unintended audience with nothing they can act upon. A woman of my acquaintance—I shall call her Lady M., for she is still living and I am still fond of her—attended a reception some years ago in mourning colours that were not quite mourning colours: the black present but lightened, the grey present but deepened, the whole composition hovering at an edge that any woman in the room would read immediately and that no man, I am confident, noticed at all. She was in mourning, and she was not in mourning. She communicated, in the single choice of her dress, that she had sustained a loss which the conventions of formal mourning did not cover, because the conventions of formal mourning do not cover every loss a woman sustains, only the losses that society is prepared to acknowledge. The women who knew her received this communication. They gathered around her, over the course of the evening, in the way that women gather when something has been understood. No one said anything about it directly. The dress had said it.
Colour in general operates as the most democratic element of our vocabulary, because it can be read across greater distances than almost any other signal, and because its grammar, while susceptible to nuance, rests on foundations that most women of our class have absorbed by the age of seventeen. White communicates innocence or grief or surrender or the deliberate performance of any of these things for strategic purposes. Black communicates mourning or authority or, in certain cuts and contexts, a particular kind of dangerous elegance. Purple communicates a claim to significance that the wearer may or may not be able to sustain. Green, in sufficient quantity and the right shade, communicates something about hope that I have always found more honest than the verbal declaration of hope, which in my experience tends to overstate. Blue is the most versatile colour in the vocabulary and the most difficult to read without context, because it modulates between the spiritual and the romantic and the merely practical depending on the shade, the company, and the occasion, and can be deployed to communicate all three simultaneously by a woman of sufficient skill and composure.
The glove is a word that many women overlook because they regard it as a practical object rather than a communicative one, and in this they lose a vocabulary that operates at a very useful level of subtlety. The act of drawing on a glove in company is different from the act of drawing off a glove in company, and both are different from the act of holding a glove that has been removed, or of tapping it against one’s palm, or of allowing it to fall and not immediately retrieving it. These are not accidents of manner. They are deliberate communications, performed with the degree of deniability that all our best language provides: a glove falls; a woman is momentarily careless; nothing has been said. And yet, to the right reader, something has been said very plainly.
I want to conclude with a remark about the nature of this language as a whole, its purposes and its conditions. The women of my acquaintance who speak it best are not, by some coincidence, the women of my acquaintance who also have most cause to speak it. They are the women whose situations—domestic, marital, social, financial—have provided the greatest incentive to communicate precisely without the liability of having communicated at all. I do not intend this as a complaint. I intend it as an observation about the relationship between necessity and eloquence, which relationship is, in my experience, intimate and consistent. Language of the highest refinement does not arise from leisure. It arises from the acute requirement to say something in conditions that do not permit the saying of it by the obvious means.
The obvious means are available to men, who may speak directly about most things that concern them and who are not required to translate their meaning into the angle of a fan or the choice of a buttonhole or the particular way a woman stands near a door. Men have their own codes, naturally—the society of men runs on signals and conventions as elaborate as any I have described, but men do not, as a rule, develop them under the same variety of pressure, and consequently do not, as a rule, develop them to the same degree of precision.
Mrs. Hartley-Vane called upon me on Friday morning, as I had indicated she might expect. We sat for one hour and forty minutes and drank three cups of tea apiece and discussed everything that required discussion, and the footman who admitted her and the maid who brought the tea and the butler who showed her out heard nothing they should not have heard, and saw nothing they could have reported, and that this was the case was not an accident of fortune.
It was a matter of language. It is always a matter of language.
We learn it because we must. We perfect it because we can. And we keep it among ourselves because, in the end, the language is the only territory that has always been entirely ours.
Note
The foregoing was set down in the knowledge that the conventions governing what a woman of my position may say in public are considerably more restrictive than the conventions governing what she may think in private. I have confined myself, accordingly, to the private document, which is the form in which women have always done their most honest work.
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