ves only to add to the
charm of private life and to secure social success. Where it is united
with real talents it not only enables its possessor to use these talents
to the greatest advantage; it also often leads those about him greatly
to magnify their amount. The presence or absence of this gift is one of
the chief causes why the relative value of different men is often so
differently judged by contemporaries and by posterity; by those who have
come in direct personal contact with them, and by those who judge them
from without, and by the broad results of their lives. Real tact, like
good manners, is or becomes a spontaneous and natural thing. The man of
perfectly refined manners does not consciously and deliberately on each
occasion observe the courtesies and amenities of good society. They have
become to him a second nature, and he observes them as by a kind of
instinct, without thought or effort. In the same way true tact is
something wholly different from the elaborate and artificial attempts to
conciliate and attract which may often be seen, and which usually bring
with them the impression of manoeuvre and insincerity.

Though it may be found in men of very different characters and grades of
intellect, tact has its natural affinities. Seeking beyond all things to
avoid unnecessary friction, and therefore with a strong leaning towards
compromise, it does not generally or naturally go with intense
convictions, with strong enthusiasms, with an ardently impulsive or
emotional temperament. Nor is it commonly found among men of deep and
concentrated genius, intensely absorbed in some special subject. Such
men are often among the most unobservant of the social sides of life,
and very bad judges of character, though there will frequently be found
among them an almost childlike unworldliness and simplicity of nature,
and an essential moderation of temperament which, combined with their
superiority of intellect, gives them a charm peculiarly their own.
Tact, however, has a natural affinity to a calm, equable, and
good-natured temper. It allies itself with a quick sense of opportunity,
proportion, and degree; with the power of distinguishing readily and
truly between the essential and the unimportant; with that soundness of
judgment which not only guides men among the varied events of life, and
in their estimate of those about them, but also enables them to take a
true measure of their own capacities, of the tasks that are