Is there any such thing as conversation? It is a delicate subject to
touch, because many people understand conversation to be talk; not the
exchange of ideas, but of words; and we would not like to say anything to
increase the flow of the latter. We read of times and salons in which
real conversation existed, held by men and women. Are they altogether in
the past? We believe that men do sometimes converse. Do women ever?
Perhaps so. In those hours sacred to the relaxation of undress and the
back hair, in the upper penetralia of the household, where two or three
or six are gathered together on and about the cushioned frame intended
for repose, do they converse, or indulge in that sort of chat from which
not one idea is carried away? No one reports, fortunately, and we do not
know. But do all the women like this method of spending hour after hour,
day after day-indeed, a lifetime? Is it invigorating, even restful? Think
of the talk this past summer, the rivers and oceans of it, on piazzas and
galleries in the warm evenings or the fresher mornings, in private
houses, on hotel verandas, in the shade of thousands of cottages by the
sea and in the hills! As you recall it, what was it all about? Was the
mind in a vapid condition after an evening of it? And there is so much to
read, and so much to think about, and the world is so interesting, if you
do think about it, and nearly every person has some peculiarity of mind
that would be worth study if you could only get at it! It is really, we
repeat, such an interesting world, and most people get so little out of
it. Now there is the conversation of hens, when the hens are busy and not
self-conscious; there is something fascinating about it, because the
imagination may invest it with a recondite and spicy meaning; but the
common talk of people! We infer sometimes that the hens are not saying
anything, because they do not read, and consequently their minds are
empty. And perhaps we are right. As to conversation, there is no use in
sending the bucket into the well when the well is dry--it only makes a
rattling of windlass and chain. We do not wish to be understood to be an
enemy of the light traffic of human speech. Deliver us from the didactic
and the everlastingly improving style of thing! Conversation, in order to
be good, and intellectually inspiring, and spiritually restful, need not
always be serious. It must be alert and intelligent, and mean more by its
suggestions and allusions than is said. There is the light touch-and-go
play about topics more or less profound that is as agreeable as
heat-lightning in a sultry evening. Why may not a person express the
whims and vagaries of a lambent mind (if he can get a lambent mind)
without being hauled up short for it, and plunged into a heated dispute?
In the freedom of real conversation the mind throws out half-thoughts,
paradoxes, for which a man is not to be held strictly responsible to the
very roots of his being, and which need to be caught up and played with
in the same tentative spirit. The dispute and the hot argument are
usually the bane of conversation and the death of originality. We like to
express a notion, a fancy, without being called upon to defend it, then
and there, in all its possible consequences, as if it were to be an
article in a creed or a plank in a platform. Must we be always either
vapid or serious?
We have been obliged to take notice of the extraordinary tendency of
American women to cultivation, to the improvement of the mind, by means
of reading, clubs, and other intellectual exercises, and to acknowledge
that they are leaving the men behind; that is, the men not in the
so-called professions. Is this intellectualization beginning to show in
the conversation of women when they are together, say in the hours of
relaxation in the penetralia spoken of, or in general society? Is there
less talk about the fashion of dress, and the dearness or cheapness of
materials, and about servants, and the ways of the inchoate citizen
called the baby, and the infinitely little details of the private life of
other people? Is it true that if a group of men are talking, say about
politics, or robust business, or literature, and they are joined by women
(whose company is always welcome), the conversation is pretty sure to
take a lower mental plane, to become more personal, more frivolous,
accommodating itself to quite a different range? Do the well-read,
thoughtful women, however beautiful and brilliant and capable of the
gayest persiflage, prefer to talk with men, to listen to the conversation
of men, rather than to converse with or listen to their own sex? If this
is true, why is it? Women, as a rule, in “society” at any rate, have more
leisure than men. In the facilities and felicities of speech they
commonly excel men, and usually they have more of that vivacious dramatic
power which is called “setting out a thing to the life.” With all these
advantages, and all the world open to them in newspapers and in books,
they ought to be the leaders and stimulators of the best conversation.
With them it should never drop down to the too-common flatness and
banality. Women have made this world one of the most beautiful places of
residence to be conceived. They might make it one of the most
interesting.