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 æsthetic 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 bond 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 effective,
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 {100} 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 be 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.