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_ Sir, we had a good talk. - JOHNSON.
As we must account for every idle word, so we must for every idle
silence. - FRANKLIN.
THERE can be no fairer ambition than to excel in talk; to be
affable, gay, ready, clear and welcome; to have a fact, a thought,
or an illustration, pat to every subject; and not only to cheer the
flight of time among our intimates, but bear our part in that great
international congress, always sitting, where public wrongs are
first declared, public errors first corrected, and the course of
public opinion shaped, day by day, a little nearer to the right.
No measure comes before Parliament but it has been long ago
prepared by the grand jury of the talkers; no book is written that
has not been largely composed by their assistance. Literature in
many of its branches is no other than the shadow of good talk; but
the imitation falls far short of the original in life, freedom and
effect. There are always two to a talk, giving and taking,
comparing experience and according conclusions. Talk is fluid,
tentative, continually "in further search and progress"; while
written words remain fixed, become idols even to the writer, found
wooden dogmatisms, and preserve flies of obvious error in the amber
of the truth. Last and chief, while literature, gagged with
linsey-woolsey, can only deal with a fraction of the life of man,
talk goes fancy free and may call a spade a spade. Talk has none
of the freezing immunities of the pulpit. It cannot, even if it
would, become merely aesthetic or merely classical like literature.
A jest intervenes, the solemn humbug is dissolved in laughter, and
speech runs forth out of the contemporary groove into the open
fields of nature, cheery and cheering, like schoolboys out of
school. And it is in talk alone that we can learn our period and
ourselves. In short, the first duty of a man is to speak; that is
his chief business in this world; and talk, which is the harmonious
speech of two or more, is by far the most accessible of pleasures.
It costs nothing in money; it is all profit; it completes our
education, founds and fosters our friendships, and can be enjoyed
at any age and in almost any state of health.
The spice of life is battle; the friendliest relations are still a
kind of contest; and if we would not forego all that is valuable in
our lot, we must continually face some other person, eye to eye,
and wrestle a fall whether in love or enmity. It is still by force
of body, or power of character or intellect, that we attain to
worthy pleasures. Men and women contend for each other in the
lists of love, like rival mesmerists; the active and adroit decide
their challenges in the sports of the body; and the sedentary sit
down to chess or conversation. All sluggish and pacific pleasures
are, to the same degree, solitary and selfish; and every durable
band between human beings is founded in or heightened by some
element of competition. Now, the relation that has the least root
in matter is undoubtedly that airy one of friendship; and hence, I
suppose, it is that good talk most commonly arises among friends.
Talk is, indeed, both the scene and instrument of friendship. It
is in talk alone that the friends can measure strength, and enjoy
that amicable counter-assertion of personality which is the gauge
of relations and the sport of life.
A good talk is not to be had for the asking. Humours must first be
accorded in a kind of overture or prologue; hour, company and
circumstance be suited; and then, at a fit juncture, the subject,
the quarry of two heated minds, spring up like a deer out of the
wood. Not that the talker has any of the hunter's pride, though he
has all and more than all his ardour. The genuine artist follows
the stream of conversation as an angler follows the windings of a
brook, not dallying where he fails to "kill." He trusts implicitly
to hazard; and he is rewarded by continual variety, continual
pleasure, and those changing prospects of the truth that are the
best of education. There is nothing in a subject, so called, that
we should regard it as an idol, or follow it beyond the promptings
of desire. Indeed, there are few subjects; and so far as they are
truly talkable, more than the half of them may be reduced to three:
that I am I, that you are you, and that there are other people
dimly understood to be not quite the same as either. Wherever talk
may range, it still runs half the time on these eternal lines. The
theme being set, each plays on himself as on an instrument; asserts
and justifies himself; ransacks his brain for instances and
opinions, and brings them forth new-minted, to his own surprise and
the admiration of his adversary. All natural talk is a festival of
ostentation; and by the laws of the game each accepts and fans the
vanity of the other. It is from that reason that we venture to lay
ourselves so open, that we dare to be so warmly eloquent, and that
we swell in each other's eyes to such a vast proportion. For
talkers, once launched, begin to overflow the limits of their
ordinary selves, tower up to the height of their secret
pretensions, and give themselves out for the heroes, brave, pious,
musical and wise, that in their most shining moments they aspire to
be. So they weave for themselves with words and for a while
inhabit a palace of delights, temple at once and theatre, where
they fill the round of the world's dignities, and feast with the
gods, exulting in Kudos. And when the talk is over, each goes his
way, still flushed with vanity and admiration, still trailing
clouds of glory; each declines from the height of his ideal orgie,
not in a moment, but by slow declension. I remember, in the
ENTR'ACTE of an afternoon performance, coming forth into the
sunshine, in a beautiful green, gardened corner of a romantic city;
and as I sat and smoked, the music moving in my blood, I seemed to
sit there and evaporate THE FLYING DUTCHMAN (for it was that I had
been hearing) with a wonderful sense of life, warmth, well-being
and pride; and the noises of the city, voices, bells and marching
feet, fell together in my ears like a symphonious orchestra. In
the same way, the excitement of a good talk lives for a long while
after in the blood, the heart still hot within you, the brain still
simmering, and the physical earth swimming around you with the
colours of the sunset.
Natural talk, like ploughing, should turn up a large surface of
life, rather than dig mines into geological strata. Masses of
experience, anecdote, incident, cross-lights, quotation, historical
instances, the whole flotsam and jetsam of two minds forced in and
in upon the matter in hand from every point of the compass, and
from every degree of mental elevation and abasement - these are the
material with which talk is fortified, the food on which the
talkers thrive. Such argument as is proper to the exercise should
still be brief and seizing. Talk should proceed by instances; by
the apposite, not the expository. It should keep close along the
lines of humanity, near the bosoms and businesses of men, at the
level where history, fiction and experience intersect and
illuminate each other. I am I, and You are You, with all my heart;
but conceive how these lean propositions change and brighten when,
instead of words, the actual you and I sit cheek by jowl, the
spirit housed in the live body, and the very clothes uttering
voices to corroborate the story in the face. Not less surprising
is the change when we leave off to speak of generalities - the bad,
the good, the miser, and all the characters of Theophrastus - and
call up other men, by anecdote or instance, in their very trick and
feature; or trading on a common knowledge, toss each other famous
names, still glowing with the hues of life. Communication is no
longer by words, but by the instancing of whole biographies, epics,
systems of philosophy, and epochs of history, in bulk. That which
is understood excels that which is spoken in quantity and quality
alike; ideas thus figured and personified, change hands, as we may
say, like coin; and the speakers imply without effort the most
obscure and intricate thoughts. Strangers who have a large common
ground of reading will, for this reason, come the sooner to the
grapple of genuine converse. If they know Othello and Napoleon,
Consuelo and Clarissa Harlowe, Vautrin and Steenie Steenson, they
can leave generalities and begin at once to speak by figures.
Conduct and art are the two subjects that arise most frequently and
that embrace the widest range of facts. A few pleasures bear
discussion for their own sake, but only those which are most social
or most radically human; and even these can only be discussed among
their devotees. A technicality is always welcome to the expert,
whether in athletics, art or law; I have heard the best kind of
talk on technicalities from such rare and happy persons as both
know and love their business. No human being ever spoke of scenery
for above two minutes at a time, which makes me suspect we hear too
much of it in literature. The weather is regarded as the very
nadir and scoff of conversational topics. And yet the weather, the
dramatic element in scenery, is far more tractable in language, and
far more human both in import and suggestion than the stable
features of the landscape. Sailors and shepherds, and the people
generally of coast and mountain, talk well of it; and it is often
excitingly presented in literature. But the tendency of all living
talk draws it back and back into the common focus of humanity.
Talk is a creature of the street and market-place, feeding on
gossip; and its last resort is still in a discussion on morals.
That is the heroic form of gossip; heroic in virtue of its high
pretensions; but still gossip, because it turns on personalities.
You can keep no men long, nor Scotchmen at all, off moral or
theological discussion. These are to all the world what law is to
lawyers; they are everybody's technicalities; the medium through
which all consider life, and the dialect in which they express
their judgments. I knew three young men who walked together daily
for some two months in a solemn and beautiful forest and in
cloudless summer weather; daily they talked with unabated zest, and
yet scarce wandered that whole time beyond two subjects - theology
and love. And perhaps neither a court of love nor an assembly of
divines would have granted their premisses or welcomed their
conclusions.
Conclusions, indeed, are not often reached by talk any more than by
private thinking. That is not the profit. The profit is in the
exercise, and above all in the experience; for when we reason at
large on any subject, we review our state and history in life.
From time to time, however, and specially, I think, in talking art,
talk becomes elective, conquering like war, widening the boundaries
of knowledge like an exploration. A point arises; the question
takes a problematical, a baffling, yet a likely air; the talkers
begin to feel lively presentiments of some conclusion near at hand;
towards this they strive with emulous ardour, each by his own path,
and struggling for first utterance; and then one leaps upon the
summit of that matter with a shout, and almost at the same moment
the other is beside him; and behold they are agreed. Like enough,
the progress is illusory, a mere cat's cradle having been wound and
unwound out of words. But the sense of joint discovery is none the
less giddy and inspiriting. And in the life of the talker such
triumphs, though imaginary, are neither few nor far apart; they are
attained with speed and pleasure, in the hour of mirth; and by the
nature of the process, they are always worthily shared.
There is a certain attitude, combative at once and deferential,
eager to fight yet most averse to quarrel, which marks out at once
the talkable man. It is not eloquence, not fairness, not
obstinacy, but a certain proportion of all of these that I love to
encounter in my amicable adversaries. They must not be pontiffs
holding doctrine, but huntsmen questing after elements of truth.
Neither must they be boys to be instructed, but fellow-teachers
with whom I may wrangle and agree on equal terms. We must reach
some solution, some shadow of consent; for without that, eager talk
becomes a torture. But we do not wish to reach it cheaply, or
quickly, or without the tussle and effort wherein pleasure lies.
The very best talker, with me, is one whom I shall call Spring-
Heel'd Jack. I say so, because I never knew any one who mingled so
largely the possible ingredients of converse. In the Spanish
proverb, the fourth man necessary to compound a salad, is a madman
to mix it: Jack is that madman. I know not which is more
remarkable; the insane lucidity of his conclusions the humorous
eloquence of his language, or his power of method, bringing the
whole of life into the focus of the subject treated, mixing the
conversational salad like a drunken god. He doubles like the
serpent, changes and flashes like the shaken kaleidoscope,
transmigrates bodily into the views of others, and so, in the
twinkling of an eye and with a heady rapture, turns questions
inside out and flings them empty before you on the ground, like a
triumphant conjuror. It is my common practice when a piece of
conduct puzzles me, to attack it in the presence of Jack with such
grossness, such partiality and such wearing iteration, as at length
shall spur him up in its defence. In a moment he transmigrates,
dons the required character, and with moonstruck philosophy
justifies the act in question. I can fancy nothing to compare with
the VIM of these impersonations, the strange scale of language,
flying from Shakespeare to Kant, and from Kant to Major Dyngwell -
"As fast as a musician scatters sounds
Out of an instrument"
the sudden, sweeping generalisations, the absurd irrelevant
particularities, the wit, wisdom, folly, humour, eloquence and
bathos, each startling in its kind, and yet all luminous in the
admired disorder of their combination. A talker of a different
calibre, though belonging to the same school, is Burly. Burly is a
man of a great presence; he commands a larger atmosphere, gives the
impression of a grosser mass of character than most men. It has
been said of him that his presence could be felt in a room you
entered blindfold; and the same, I think, has been said of other
powerful constitutions condemned to much physical inaction. There
is something boisterous and piratic in Burly's manner of talk which
suits well enough with this impression. He will roar you down, he
will bury his face in his hands, he will undergo passions of revolt
and agony; and meanwhile his attitude of mind is really both
conciliatory and receptive; and after Pistol has been out Pistol'd,
and the welkin rung for hours, you begin to perceive a certain
subsidence in these spring torrents, points of agreement issue, and
you end arm-in-arm, and in a glow of mutual admiration. The outcry
only serves to make your final union the more unexpected and
precious. Throughout there has been perfect sincerity, perfect
intelligence, a desire to hear although not always to listen, and
an unaffected eagerness to meet concessions. You have, with Burly,
none of the dangers that attend debate with Spring-Heel'd Jack; who
may at any moment turn his powers of transmigration on yourself,
create for you a view you never held, and then furiously fall on
you for holding it. These, at least, are my two favourites, and
both are loud, copious, intolerant talkers. This argues that I
myself am in the same category; for if we love talking at all, we
love a bright, fierce adversary, who will hold his ground, foot by
foot, in much our own manner, sell his attention dearly, and give
us our full measure of the dust and exertion of battle. Both these
men can be beat from a position, but it takes six hours to do it; a
high and hard adventure, worth attempting. With both you can pass
days in an enchanted country of the mind, with people, scenery and
manners of its own; live a life apart, more arduous, active and
glowing than any real existence; and come forth again when the talk
is over, as out of a theatre or a dream, to find the east wind
still blowing and the chimney-pots of the old battered city still
around you. Jack has the far finer mind, Burly the far more
honest; Jack gives us the animated poetry, Burly the romantic
prose, of similar themes; the one glances high like a meteor and
makes a light in darkness; the other, with many changing hues of
fire, burns at the sea-level, like a conflagration; but both have
the same humour and artistic interests, the same unquenched ardour
in pursuit, the same gusts of talk and thunderclaps of
contradiction.
Cockshot (5) is a different article, but vastly entertaining, and
has been meat and drink to me for many a long evening. His manner
is dry, brisk and pertinacious, and the choice of words not much.
The point about him is his extraordinary readiness and spirit. You
can propound nothing but he has either a theory about it ready-
made, or will have one instantly on the stocks, and proceed to lay
its timbers and launch it in your presence. "Let me see," he will
say. "Give me a moment. I SHOULD have some theory for that." A
blither spectacle than the vigour with which he sets about the
task, it were hard to fancy. He is possessed by a demoniac energy,
welding the elements for his life, and bending ideas, as an athlete
bends a horse-shoe, with a visible and lively effort. He has, in
theorising, a compass, an art; what I would call the synthetic
gusto; something of a Herbert Spencer, who should see the fun of
the thing. You are not bound, and no more is he, to place your
faith in these brand-new opinions. But some of them are right
enough, durable even for life; and the poorest serve for a cock shy
- as when idle people, after picnics, float a bottle on a pond and
have an hour's diversion ere it sinks. Whichever they are, serious
opinions or humours of the moment, he still defends his ventures
with indefatigable wit and spirit, hitting savagely himself, but
taking punishment like a man. He knows and never forgets that
people talk, first of all, for the sake of talking; conducts
himself in the ring, to use the old slang, like a thorough
"glutton," and honestly enjoys a telling facer from his adversary.
Cockshot is bottled effervescency, the sworn foe of sleep. Three-
in-the-morning Cockshot, says a victim. His talk is like the
driest of all imaginable dry champagnes. Sleight of hand and
inimitable quickness are the qualities by which he lives.
Athelred, on the other hand, presents you with the spectacle of a
sincere and somewhat slow nature thinking aloud. He is the most
unready man I ever knew to shine in conversation. You may see him
sometimes wrestle with a refractory jest for a minute or two
together, and perhaps fail to throw it in the end. And there is
something singularly engaging, often instructive, in the simplicity
with which he thus exposes the process as well as the result, the
works as well as the dial of the clock. Withal he has his hours of
inspiration. Apt words come to him as if by accident, and, coming
from deeper down, they smack the more personally, they have the
more of fine old crusted humanity, rich in sediment and humour.
There are sayings of his in which he has stamped himself into the
very grain of the language; you would think he must have worn the
words next his skin and slept with them. Yet it is not as a sayer
of particular good things that Athelred is most to he regarded,
rather as the stalwart woodman of thought. I have pulled on a
light cord often enough, while he has been wielding the broad-axe;
and between us, on this unequal division, many a specious fallacy
has fallen. I have known him to battle the same question night
after night for years, keeping it in the reign of talk, constantly
applying it and re-applying it to life with humorous or grave
intention, and all the while, never hurrying, nor flagging, nor
taking an unfair advantage of the facts. Jack at a given moment,
when arising, as it were, from the tripod, can be more radiantly
just to those from whom he differs; but then the tenor of his
thoughts is even calumnious; while Athelred, slower to forge
excuses, is yet slower to condemn, and sits over the welter of the
world, vacillating but still judicial, and still faithfully
contending with his doubts.
Both the last talkers deal much in points of conduct and religion
studied in the "dry light" of prose. Indirectly and as if against
his will the same elements from time to time appear in the troubled
and poetic talk of Opalstein. His various and exotic knowledge,
complete although unready sympathies, and fine, full,
discriminative flow of language, fit him out to be the best of
talkers; so perhaps he is with some, not quite with me - PROXIME
ACCESSIT, I should say. He sings the praises of the earth and the
arts, flowers and jewels, wine and music, in a moonlight,
serenading manner, as to the light guitar; even wisdom comes from
his tongue like singing; no one is, indeed, more tuneful in the
upper notes. But even while he sings the song of the Sirens, he
still hearkens to the barking of the Sphinx. Jarring Byronic notes
interrupt the flow of his Horatian humours. His mirth has
something of the tragedy of the world for its perpetual background;
and he feasts like Don Giovanni to a double orchestra, one lightly
sounding for the dance, one pealing Beethoven in the distance. He
is not truly reconciled either with life or with himself; and this
instant war in his members sometimes divides the man's attention.
He does not always, perhaps not often, frankly surrender himself in
conversation. He brings into the talk other thoughts than those
which he expresses; you are conscious that he keeps an eye on
something else, that he does not shake off the world, nor quite
forget himself. Hence arise occasional disappointments; even an
occasional unfairness for his companions, who find themselves one
day giving too much, and the next, when they are wary out of
season, giving perhaps too little. Purcel is in another class from
any I have mentioned. He is no debater, but appears in
conversation, as occasion rises, in two distinct characters, one of
which I admire and fear, and the other love. In the first, he is
radiantly civil and rather silent, sits on a high, courtly hilltop,
and from that vantage-ground drops you his remarks like favours.
He seems not to share in our sublunary contentions; he wears no
sign of interest; when on a sudden there falls in a crystal of wit,
so polished that the dull do not perceive it, but so right that the
sensitive are silenced. True talk should have more body and blood,
should be louder, vainer and more declaratory of the man; the true
talker should not hold so steady an advantage over whom he speaks
with; and that is one reason out of a score why I prefer my Purcel
in his second character, when he unbends into a strain of graceful
gossip, singing like the fireside kettle. In these moods he has an
elegant homeliness that rings of the true Queen Anne. I know
another person who attains, in his moments, to the insolence of a
Restoration comedy, speaking, I declare, as Congreve wrote; but
that is a sport of nature, and scarce falls under the rubric, for
there is none, alas! to give him answer.
One last remark occurs: It is the mark of genuine conversation that
the sayings can scarce be quoted with their full effect beyond the
circle of common friends. To have their proper weight they should
appear in a biography, and with the portrait of the speaker. Good
talk is dramatic; it is like an impromptu piece of acting where
each should represent himself to the greatest advantage; and that
is the best kind of talk where each speaker is most fully and
candidly himself, and where, if you were to shift the speeches
round from one to another, there would be the greatest loss in
significance and perspicuity. It is for this reason that talk
depends so wholly on our company. We should like to introduce
Falstaff and Mercutio, or Falstaff and Sir Toby; but Falstaff in
talk with Cordelia seems even painful. Most of us, by the Protean
quality of man, can talk to some degree with all; but the true
talk, that strikes out all the slumbering best of us, comes only
with the peculiar brethren of our spirits, is founded as deep as
love in the constitution of our being, and is a thing to relish
with all our energy, while yet we have it, and to be grateful for
forever. _
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