II
In the last paper there was perhaps too much about mere debate; and there
was nothing said at all about that kind of talk which is merely luminous
and restful, a higher power of silence, the quiet of the evening shared
by ruminating friends. There is something, aside from personal
preference, to be alleged in support of this omission. Those who are no
chimney-cornerers, who rejoice in the social thunderstorm, have a ground
in reason for their choice. They get little rest indeed; but restfulness
is a quality for cattle; the virtues are all active, life is alert, and
it is in repose that men prepare themselves for evil. On the other hand,
they are bruised into a knowledge of themselves and others; they have in
a high degree the fencer’s pleasure in dexterity displayed and proved;
what they get they get upon life’s terms, paying for it as they go; and
once the talk is launched, they are assured of honest dealing from an
adversary eager like themselves. The aboriginal man within us, the
cave-dweller, still lusty as when he fought tooth and nail for roots and
berries, scents this kind of equal battle from afar; it is like his old
primæval days upon the crags, a return to the sincerity of savage life
from the comfortable fictions of the civilised. And if it be delightful
to the Old Man, it is none the less profitable to his younger brother,
the conscientious gentleman I feel never quite sure of your urbane and
smiling coteries; I fear they indulge a man’s vanities in silence, suffer
him to encroach, encourage him on to be an ass, and send him forth again,
not merely contemned for the moment, but radically more contemptible than
when he entered. But if I have a flushed, blustering fellow for my
opposite, bent on carrying a point, my vanity is sure to have its ears
rubbed, once at least, in the course of the debate. He will not spare me
when we differ; he will not fear to demonstrate my folly to my face.
For many natures there is not much charm in the still, chambered society,
the circle of bland countenances, the digestive silence, the admired
remark, the flutter of affectionate approval. They demand more
atmosphere and exercise; “a gale upon their spirits,” as our pious
ancestors would phrase it; to have their wits well breathed in an
uproarious Valhalla. And I suspect that the choice, given their
character and faults, is one to be defended. The purely wise are
silenced by facts; they talk in a clear atmosphere, problems lying around
them like a view in nature; if they can be shown to be somewhat in the
wrong, they digest the reproof like a thrashing, and make better
intellectual blood. They stand corrected by a whisper; a word or a
glance reminds them of the great eternal law. But it is not so with all.
Others in conversation seek rather contact with their fellow-men than
increase of knowledge or clarity of thought. The drama, not the
philosophy, of life is the sphere of their intellectual activity. Even
when they pursue truth, they desire as much as possible of what we may
call human scenery along the road they follow. They dwell in the heart
of life; the blood sounding in their ears, their eyes laying hold of what
delights them with a brutal avidity that makes them blind to all besides,
their interest riveted on people, living, loving, talking, tangible
people. To a man of this description, the sphere of argument seems very
pale and ghostly. By a strong expression, a perturbed countenance,
floods of tears, an insult which his conscience obliges him to swallow,
he is brought round to knowledge which no syllogism would have conveyed
to him. His own experience is so vivid, he is so superlatively conscious
of himself, that if, day after day, he is allowed to hector and hear
nothing but approving echoes, he will lose his hold on the soberness of
things and take himself in earnest for a god. Talk might be to such an
one the very way of moral ruin; the school where he might learn to be at
once intolerable and ridiculous.
This character is perhaps commoner than philosophers suppose. And for
persons of that stamp to learn much by conversation, they must speak with
their superiors, not in intellect, for that is a superiority that must be
proved, but in station. If they cannot find a friend to bully them for
their good, they must find either an old man, a woman, or some one so far
below them in the artificial order of society, that courtesy may be
particularly exercised.
The best teachers are the aged. To the old our mouths are always partly
closed; we must swallow our obvious retorts and listen. They sit above
our heads, on life’s raised dais, and appeal at once to our respect and
pity. A flavour of the old school, a touch of something different in
their manner—which is freer and rounder, if they come of what is called a
good family, and often more timid and precise if they are of the middle
class—serves, in these days, to accentuate the difference of age and add
a distinction to gray hairs. But their superiority is founded more
deeply than by outward marks or gestures. They are before us in the
march of man; they have more or less solved the irking problem; they have
battled through the equinox of life; in good and evil they have held
their course; and now, without open shame, they near the crown and
harbour. It may be we have been struck with one of fortune’s darts; we
can scarce be civil, so cruelly is our spirit tossed. Yet long before we
were so much as thought upon, the like calamity befell the old man or
woman that now, with pleasant humour, rallies us upon our inattention,
sitting composed in the holy evening of man’s life, in the clear shining
after rain. We grow ashamed of our distresses, new and hot and coarse,
like villainous roadside brandy; we see life in aerial perspective, under
the heavens of faith; and out of the worst, in the mere presence of
contented elders, look forward and take patience. Fear shrinks before
them “like a thing reproved,” not the flitting and ineffectual fear of
death, but the instant, dwelling terror of the responsibilities and
revenges of life. Their speech, indeed, is timid; they report lions in
the path; they counsel a meticulous footing; but their serene, marred
faces are more eloquent and tell another story. Where they have gone, we
will go also, not very greatly fearing; what they have endured unbroken,
we also, God helping us, will make a shift to bear.
Not only is the presence of the aged in itself remedial, but their minds
are stored with antidotes, wisdom’s simples, plain considerations
overlooked by youth. They have matter to communicate, be they never so
stupid. Their talk is not merely literature, it is great literature;
classic in virtue of the speaker’s detachment, studded, like a book of
travel, with things we should not otherwise have learnt. In virtue, I
have said, of the speaker’s detachment,—and this is why, of two old men,
the one who is not your father speaks to you with the more sensible
authority; for in the paternal relation the oldest have lively interests
and remain still young. Thus I have known two young men great friends;
each swore by the other’s father; the father of each swore by the other
lad; and yet each pair of parent and child were perpetually by the ears.
This is typical: it reads like the germ of some kindly comedy.
The old appear in conversation in two characters: the critically silent
and the garrulous anecdotic. The last is perhaps what we look for; it is
perhaps the more instructive. An old gentleman, well on in years, sits
handsomely and naturally in the bow-window of his age, scanning
experience with reverted eye; and chirping and smiling, communicates the
accidents and reads the lesson of his long career. Opinions are
strengthened, indeed, but they are also weeded out in the course of
years. What remains steadily present to the eye of the retired veteran
in his hermitage, what still ministers to his content, what still
quickens his old honest heart—these are “the real long-lived things” that
Whitman tells us to prefer. Where youth agrees with age, not where they
differ, wisdom lies; and it is when the young disciple finds his heart to
beat in tune with his gray-bearded teacher’s that a lesson may be
learned. I have known one old gentleman, whom I may name, for he is now
gathered to his stock—Robert Hunter, Sheriff of Dumbarton, and author of
an excellent law-book still re-edited and republished. Whether he was
originally big or little is more than I can guess. When I knew him he
was all fallen away and fallen in; crooked and shrunken; buckled into a
stiff waistcoat for support; troubled by ailments, which kept him
hobbling in and out of the room; one foot gouty; a wig for decency, not
for deception, on his head; close shaved, except under his chin—and for
that he never failed to apologise, for it went sore against the
traditions of his life. You can imagine how he would fare in a novel by
Miss Mather; yet this rag of a Chelsea veteran lived to his last year in
the plenitude of all that is best in man, brimming with human kindness,
and staunch as a Roman soldier under his manifold infirmities. You could
not say that he had lost his memory, for he would repeat Shakespeare and
Webster and Jeremy Taylor and Burke by the page together; but the
parchment was filled up, there was no room for fresh inscriptions, and he
was capable of repeating the same anecdote on many successive visits.
His voice survived in its full power, and he took a pride in using it.
On his last voyage as Commissioner of lighthouses, he hailed a ship at
sea and made himself clearly audible without a speaking trumpet, ruffling
the while with a proper vanity in his achievement. He had a habit of
eking out his words with interrogative hems, which was puzzling and a
little wearisome, suited ill with his appearance, and seemed a survival
from some former stage of bodily portliness. Of yore, when he was a
great pedestrian and no enemy to good claret, he may have pointed with
these minute guns his allocutions to the bench. His humour was perfectly
equable, set beyond the reach of fate; gout, rheumatism, stone and gravel
might have combined their forces against that frail tabernacle, but when
I came round on Sunday evening, he would lay aside Jeremy Taylor’s _Life
of Christ_ and greet me with the same open brow, the same kind formality
of manner. His opinions and sympathies dated the man almost to a decade.
He had begun life, under his mother’s influence, as an admirer of Junius,
but on maturer knowledge had transferred his admiration to Burke. He
cautioned me, with entire gravity, to be punctilious in writing English;
never to forget that I was a Scotchman, that English was a foreign
tongue, and that if I attempted the colloquial, I should certainly, be
shamed: the remark was apposite, I suppose, in the days of David Hume.
Scott was too new for him; he had known the author—known him, too, for a
Tory; and to the genuine classic a contemporary is always something of a
trouble. He had the old, serious love of the play; had even, as he was
proud to tell, played a certain part in the history of Shakespearian
revivals, for he had successfully pressed on Murray, of the old Edinburgh
Theatre, the idea of producing Shakespeare’s fairy pieces with great
scenic display. A moderate in religion, he was much struck in the last
years of his life by a conversation with two young lads, revivalists
“H’m,” he would say—“new to me. I have had—h’m—no such experience.” It
struck him, not with pain, rather with a solemn philosophic interest,
that he, a Christian as he hoped, and a Christian of so old a standing,
should hear these young fellows talking of his own subject, his own
weapons that he had fought the battle of life with,—“and—h’m—not
understand.” In this wise and graceful attitude he did justice to
himself and others, reposed unshaken in his old beliefs, and recognised
their limits without anger or alarm. His last recorded remark, on the
last night of his life, was after he had been arguing against Calvinism
with his minister and was interrupted by an intolerable pang. “After
all,” he said, “of all the ’isms, I know none so bad as rheumatism.” My
own last sight of him was some time before, when we dined together at an
inn; he had been on circuit, for he stuck to his duties like a chief part
of his existence; and I remember it as the only occasion on which he ever
soiled his lips with slang—a thing he loathed. We were both Roberts; and
as we took our places at table, he addressed me with a twinkle: “We are
just what you would call two bob.” He offered me port, I remember, as
the proper milk of youth; spoke of “twenty-shilling notes”; and
throughout the meal was full of old-world pleasantry and quaintness, like
an ancient boy on a holiday. But what I recall chiefly was his
confession that he had never read _Othello_ to an end. Shakespeare was
his continual study. He loved nothing better than to display his
knowledge and memory by adducing parallel passages from Shakespeare,
passages where the same word was employed, or the same idea differently
treated. But _Othello_ had beaten him. “That noble gentleman and that
noble lady—h’m—too painful for me.” The same night the hoardings were
covered with posters, “Burlesque of _Othello_,” and the contrast blazed
up in my mind like a bonfire. An unforgettable look it gave me into that
kind man’s soul. His acquaintance was indeed a liberal and pious
education. All the humanities were taught in that bare dining-room
beside his gouty footstool. He was a piece of good advice; he was
himself the instance that pointed and adorned his various talk. Nor
could a young man have found elsewhere a place so set apart from envy,
fear, discontent, or any of the passions that debase; a life so honest
and composed; a soul like an ancient violin, so subdued to harmony,
responding to a touch in music—as in that dining-room, with Mr. Hunter
chatting at the eleventh hour, under the shadow of eternity, fearless and
gentle.
The second class of old people are not anecdotic; they are rather hearers
than talkers, listening to the young with an amused and critical
attention. To have this sort of intercourse to perfection, I think we
must go to old ladies. Women are better hearers than men, to begin with;
they learn, I fear in anguish, to bear with the tedious and infantile
vanity of the other sex; and we will take more from a woman than even
from the oldest man in the way of biting comment. Biting comment is the
chief part, whether for profit or amusement, in this business. The old
lady that I have in my eye is a very caustic speaker, her tongue, after
years of practice, in absolute command, whether for silence or attack.
If she chance to dislike you, you will be tempted to curse the malignity
of age. But if you chance to please even slightly, you will be listened
to with a particular laughing grace of sympathy, and from time to time
chastised, as if in play, with a parasol as heavy as a pole-axe. It
requires a singular art, as well as the vantage-ground of age, to deal
these stunning corrections among the coxcombs of the young. The pill is
disguised in sugar of wit; it is administered as a compliment—if you had
not pleased, you would not have been censured; it is a personal affair—a
hyphen, _a trait d’union_, between you and your censor; age’s
philandering, for her pleasure and your good. Incontestably the young
man feels very much of a fool; but he must be a perfect Malvolio, sick
with self-love, if he cannot take an open buffet and still smile. The
correction of silence is what kills; when you know you have transgressed,
and your friend says nothing and avoids your eye. If a man were made of
gutta-percha, his heart would quail at such a moment. But when the word
is out, the worst is over; and a fellow with any good-humour at all may
pass through a perfect hail of witty criticism, every bare place on his
soul hit to the quick with a shrewd missile, and reappear, as if after a
dive, tingling with a fine moral reaction, and ready, with a shrinking
readiness, one-third loath, for a repetition of the discipline.
There are few women, not well sunned and ripened, and perhaps toughened,
who can thus stand apart from a man and say the true thing with a kind of
genial cruelty. Still there are some—and I doubt if there be any man who
can return the compliment. The class of man represented by Vernon
Whitford in _The Egoist_ says, indeed, the true thing, but he says it
stockishly. Vernon is a noble fellow, and makes, by the way, a noble and
instructive contrast to Daniel Deronda; his conduct is the conduct of a
man of honour; but we agree with him, against our consciences, when he
remorsefully considers “its astonishing dryness.” He is the best of men,
but the best of women manage to combine all that and something more.
Their very faults assist them; they are helped even by the falseness of
their position in life. They can retire into the fortified camp of the
proprieties. They can touch a subject and suppress it. The most adroit
employ a somewhat elaborate reserve as a means to be frank, much as they
wear gloves when they shake hands. But a man has the full responsibility
of his freedom, cannot evade a question, can scarce be silent without
rudeness, must answer for his words upon the moment, and is not seldom
left face to face with a damning choice, between the more or less
dishonourable wriggling of Deronda and the downright woodenness of Vernon
Whitford.
But the superiority of women is perpetually menaced; they do not sit
throned on infirmities like the old; they are suitors as well as
sovereigns; their vanity is engaged, their affections are too apt to
follow; and hence much of the talk between the sexes degenerates into
something unworthy of the name. The desire to please, to shine with a
certain softness of lustre and to draw a fascinating picture of oneself,
banishes from conversation all that is sterling and most of what is
humorous. As soon as a strong current of mutual admiration begins to
flow, the human interest triumphs entirely over the intellectual, and the
commerce of words, consciously or not, becomes secondary to the
commercing of eyes. But even where this ridiculous danger is avoided,
and a man and woman converse equally and honestly, something in their
nature or their education falsifies the strain. An instinct prompts them
to agree; and where that is impossible, to agree to differ. Should they
neglect the warning, at the first suspicion of an argument, they find
themselves in different hemispheres. About any point of business or
conduct, any actual affair demanding settlement, a woman will speak and
listen, hear and answer arguments, not only with natural wisdom, but with
candour and logical honesty. But if the subject of debate be something
in the air, an abstraction, an excuse for talk, a logical Aunt Sally,
then may the male debater instantly abandon hope; he may employ reason,
adduce facts, be supple, be smiling, be angry, all shall avail him
nothing; what the woman said first, that (unless she has forgotten it)
she will repeat at the end. Hence, at the very junctures when a talk
between men grows brighter and quicker and begins to promise to bear
fruit, talk between the sexes is menaced with dissolution. The point of
difference, the point of interest, is evaded by the brilliant woman,
under a shower of irrelevant conversational rockets; it is bridged by the
discreet woman with a rustle of silk, as she passes smoothly forward to
the nearest point of safety. And this sort of prestidigitation, juggling
the dangerous topic out of sight until it can be reintroduced with safety
in an altered shape, is a piece of tactics among the true drawing-room
queens.
The drawing-room is, indeed, an artificial place; it is so by our choice
and for our sins. The subjection of women; the ideal imposed upon them
from the cradle, and worn, like a hair-shirt, with so much constancy;
their motherly, superior tenderness to man’s vanity and self-importance;
their managing arts—the arts of a civilised slave among good-natured
barbarians—are all painful ingredients and all help to falsify relations.
It is not till we get clear of that amusing artificial scene that genuine
relations are founded, or ideas honestly compared. In the garden, on the
road or the hillside, or _tête-à-tête_ and apart from interruptions,
occasions arise when we may learn much from any single woman; and nowhere
more often than in married life. Marriage is one long conversation,
chequered by disputes. The disputes are valueless; they but ingrain the
difference; the heroic heart of woman prompting her at once to nail her
colours to the mast. But in the intervals, almost unconsciously and with
no desire to shine, the whole material of life is turned over and over,
ideas are struck out and shared, the two persons more and more adapt
their notions one to suit the other, and in process of time, without
sound of trumpet, they conduct each other into new worlds of thought.