IF YOU CAN TALK WELL
When Charles W. Eliot was president of Harvard, he said, "I recognize
but one mental acquisition as an essential part of the education of a
lady or gentleman, namely, an accurate and refined use of the
mother-tongue."
Sir Walter Scott defined "a good conversationalist" as "one who has
ideas, who reads, thinks, listens, and who has therefore something to
say."
There is no other one thing which enables us to make so good an
impression, especially upon those who do not know us thoroughly, as the
ability to converse well.
To be a good conversationalist, able to interest people, to rivet their
attention, to draw them to you naturally, by the very superiority of
your conversational ability, is to be the possessor of a very great
accomplishment, one which is superior to all others. It not only helps
you to make a good impression upon strangers, it also helps you to make
and keep friends. It opens doors and softens hearts. It makes you
interesting in all sorts of company. It helps you to get on in the
world. It sends you clients, patients, customers. It helps you into
the best society, even though you are poor.
A man who can talk well, who has the art of putting things in an
attractive way, who can interest others immediately by his power of
speech, has a very great advantage over one who may know more than he,
but who cannot express himself with ease or eloquence.
No matter how expert you may be in any other art or accomplishment, you
cannot use your expertness always and everywhere as you can the power
to converse well. If you are a musician, no matter how talented you
may be, or how many years you may have spent in perfecting yourself in
your specialty, or how much it may have cost you, only comparatively
few people can ever hear or appreciate your music.
You may be a fine singer, and yet travel around the world without
having an opportunity of showing your accomplishment, or without anyone
guessing your specialty. But wherever you go and in whatever society
you are, no matter what your station in life may be, you talk.
You may be a painter, you may have spent years with great masters, and
yet, unless you have very marked ability so that your pictures are hung
in the salons or in the great art galleries, comparatively few people
will ever see them. But if you are an artist in conversation, everyone
who comes in contact with you will see your life-picture, which you
have been painting ever since you began to talk. Everyone knows
whether you are an artist or a bungler.
In fact, you may have a great many accomplishments which people
occasionally see or enjoy, and you may have a very beautiful home and a
lot of property which comparatively few people ever know about; but if
you are a good converser, everyone with whom you talk will feel the
influence of your skill and charm.
A noted society leader, who has been very successful in the launching
of _débutantes_ in society, always gives this advice to her _protégés_,
"Talk, talk. It does not matter much what you say, but chatter away
lightly and gayly. Nothing embarrasses and bores the average man so
much as a girl who has to be entertained."
There is a helpful suggestion in this advice. The way to learn to talk
is to talk. The temptation for people who are unaccustomed to society,
and who feel diffident, is to say nothing themselves and listen to what
others say.
Good talkers are always sought after in society. Everybody wants to
invite Mrs. So-and-So to dinners or receptions because she is such a
good talker. She entertains. She may have many defects, but people
enjoy her society because she can talk well.
Conversation, if used as an educator, is a tremendous power developer;
but talking without thinking, without an effort to express oneself with
clearness, conciseness, or efficiency, mere chattering, or gossiping,
the average society small talk, will never get hold of the best thing
in a man. It lies too deep for such superficial effort.
Thousands of young people who envy such of their mates as are getting
on faster than they are keep on wasting their precious evenings and
their half-holidays, saying nothing but the most frivolous, frothy,
senseless things--things which do not rise to the level of humor, but
the foolish, silly talk which demoralizes one's ambition, lowers one's
ideals and all the standards of life, because it begets habits of
superficial and senseless thinking. On the streets, on the cars, and
in public places, loud, coarse voices are heard in light, flippant,
slipshod speech, in coarse slang expressions. "You're talking through
your hat"; "Search me"; "You just bet"; "Well, that's the limit"; "I
hate that man; he gets on my nerves," and a score of other such
vulgarities we often hear.
Nothing else will indicate your fineness or coarseness of culture, your
breeding or lack of it, so quickly as your conversation. It will tell
your whole life's story. What you say, and how you say it, will betray
all your secrets, will give the world your true measure.
There is no accomplishment, no attainment which you can use so
constantly and effectively, which will give so much pleasure to your
friends, as fine conversation. There is no doubt that the gift of
language was intended to be a much greater accomplishment than the
majority of us have ever made of it.
Most of us are bunglers in our conversation, because we do not make an
art of it; we do not take the trouble or pains to learn to talk well.
We do not read enough or think enough. Most of us express ourselves in
sloppy, slipshod English, because it is so much easier to do so than it
is to think before we speak, to make an effort to express ourselves
with elegance, ease, and power.
Poor conversers excuse themselves for not trying to improve by saying
that "good talkers are born, not made." We might as well say that good
lawyers, good physicians, or good merchants are born, not made. None
of them would ever get very far without hard work. This is the price
of all achievement that is of value.
Many a man owes his advancement very largely to his ability to converse
well. The ability to interest people in your conversation, to hold
them, is a great power. The man who has a bungling expression, who
knows a thing, but never can put it in logical, interesting, or
commanding language, is always placed at a great disadvantage.
I know a business man who has cultivated the art of conversation to
such an extent that it is a great treat to listen to him. His language
flows with such liquid, limpid beauty, his words are chosen with such
exquisite delicacy, taste, and accuracy, there is such a refinement in
his diction that he charms everyone who hears him speak. All his life
he has been a reader of the finest prose and poetry, and has cultivated
conversation as a fine art.
You may think you are poor and have no chance in life. You may be
situated so that others are dependent upon you, and you may not be able
to go to school or college, or to study music or art, as you long to;
you may be tied down to an iron environment; you may be tortured with
an unsatisfied, disappointed ambition; and yet you can become an
interesting talker, because in every sentence you utter you can
practise the best form of expression. Every book you read, every
person with whom you converse, who uses good English, can help you.
Few people think very much about how they are going to express
themselves. They use the first words that come to them. They do not
think of forming a sentence so that it will have beauty, brevity,
transparency, power. The words flow from their lips helter-skelter,
with little thought of arrangement or order.
Now and then we meet a real artist in conversation, and it is such a
treat and delight that we wonder why the most of us should be such
bunglers in our conversation, that we should make such a botch of the
medium of communication between human beings, when it is capable of
being made the art of arts.
I have met a dozen persons in my lifetime who have given me such a
glimpse of its superb possibilities that it has made all other arts
seem comparatively unimportant to me.
I was once a visitor at Wendell Phillips's home in Boston, and the
music of his voice, the liquid charm of his words, the purity, the
transparency of his diction, the profundity of his knowledge, the
fascination of his personality, and his marvelous art of putting
things, I shall never forget. He sat down on the sofa beside me and
talked as he would to an old schoolmate, and it seemed to me that I had
never heard such exquisite and polished English. I have met several
English people who possessed that marvelous power of "soul in
conversation which charms all who come under its spell."
Mrs. Mary A. Livermore, Julia Ward Howe, and Elizabeth S. P. Ward, had
this wonderful conversational charm, as has ex-President Eliot of
Harvard.
The quality of the conversation is everything. We all know people who
use the choicest language and express their thoughts in fluent, liquid
diction, who impress us by the wonderful flow of their conversation;
but that is all there is to it. They do not impress us with their
thoughts; they do not stimulate us to action. We do not feel any more
determined to do something in the world, to be somebody, after we have
heard them talk than we felt before.
We know other people who talk very little, but whose words are so full
of meat and stimulating brain force that we feel ourselves multiplied
many times by the power they have injected into us.
In olden times the art of conversation reached a much higher standard
than that of to-day. The deterioration is due to the complete
revolution in the conditions of modern civilization. Formerly people
had almost no other way of communicating their thoughts than by speech.
Knowledge of all kinds was disseminated almost wholly through the
spoken word. There were no great daily newspapers, no magazines or
periodicals of any kind.
The great discoveries of vast wealth in the precious minerals, the new
world opened up by inventions and discoveries, and the great impetus to
ambition have changed all this. In this lightning-express age, in
these strenuous times, when everybody has the mania to attain wealth
and position, we no longer have time to reflect with deliberation, and
to develop our powers of conversation. In these great newspaper and
periodical days, when everybody can get for one or a few cents the news
and information which it has cost thousands of dollars to collect,
everybody sits behind the morning sheet or is buried in a book or
magazine. There is no longer the same need of communicating thought by
the spoken word.
Oratory is becoming a lost art for the same reason. Printing has
become so cheap that even the poorest homes can get more reading for a
few dollars than kings and noblemen could afford in the Middle Ages.
It is a rare thing to find a polished conversationalist to-day. So
rare is it to hear one speaking exquisite English, and using a superb
diction, that it is indeed a luxury.
Good reading, however, will not only broaden the mind and give new
ideas, but it will also increase one's vocabulary, and that is a great
aid to conversation. Many people have good thoughts and ideas, but
they cannot express them because of the poverty of their vocabulary.
They have not words enough to clothe their ideas and make them
attractive. They talk around in a circle, repeat and repeat, because,
when they want a particular word to convey their exact meaning, they
cannot find it.
If you are ambitious to talk well, you must be as much as possible in
the society of well-bred, cultured people. If you seclude yourself,
though you are a college graduate, you will be a poor converser.
We all sympathize with people, especially the timid and shy, who have
that awful feeling of repression and stifling of thought, when they
make an effort to say something and cannot. Timid young people often
suffer keenly in this way in attempting to declaim at school or
college. But many a great orator went through the same sort of
experience, when he first attempted to speak in public and was often
deeply humiliated by his blunders and failures. There is no other way,
however, to become an orator or a good conversationalist than by
constantly trying to express oneself efficiently and elegantly.
If you find that your ideas fly from you when you attempt to express
them, that you stammer and flounder about for words which you are
unable to find, you may be sure that every honest effort you make, even
if you fail in your attempt, will make it all the easier for you to
speak well the next time. It is remarkable, if one keeps on trying,
how quickly he will conquer his awkwardness and self-consciousness, and
will gain ease of manner and facility of expression.
Everywhere we see people placed at a tremendous disadvantage because
they have never learned the art of putting their ideas into
interesting, telling language. We see brainy men at public gatherings,
when momentous questions are being discussed, sit silent, unable to
tell what they know, when they are infinitely better informed than
those who are making a great deal of display of oratory or smooth talk.
People with a lot of ability, who know a great deal, often appear like
a set of dummies in company, while some superficial, shallow-brained
person holds the attention of those present simply because he can tell
what he knows in an interesting way. They are constantly humiliated
and embarrassed when away from those who happen to know their real
worth, because they can not carry on an intelligent conversation upon
any topic. There are hundreds of these silent people at our national
capital--many of them wives of husbands who have suddenly and
unexpectedly come into political prominence.
Many people--and this is especially true of scholars--seem to think
that the great _desideratum_ in life is to get as much valuable
information into the head as possible. But it is just as important to
know how to give out knowledge in a palatable manner as to acquire it.
You may be a profound scholar, you may be well read in history and in
politics, you may be wonderfully well-posted in science, literature,
and art, and yet, if your knowledge is locked up within you, you will
always be placed at a great disadvantage.
Locked-up ability may give the individual some satisfaction, but it
must be exhibited, expressed in some attractive way, before the world
will appreciate it or give credit for it. It does not matter how
valuable the rough diamond may be, no explaining, no describing its
marvels of beauty within, and its great value, would avail; nobody
would appreciate it until it was ground and polished and the light let
into its depths to reveal its hidden brilliancy. Conversation is to
the man what the cutting of the diamond is to the stone. The grinding
does not add anything to the diamond. It merely reveals its wealth.
How little parents realize the harm they are doing their children by
allowing them to grow up ignorant of or indifferent to the marvelous
possibilities in the art of conversation! In the majority of homes,
children are allowed to mangle the English language in a most painful
way.
Nothing else will develop the brain and character more than the
constant effort to talk well, intelligently, interestingly, upon all
sorts of topics. There is a splendid discipline in the constant effort
to express one's thoughts in clear language and in an interesting
manner. We know people who are such superb conversers that no one
would ever dream that they have not had the advantages of the higher
schools. Many a college graduate has been silenced and put to shame by
people who have never even been to a high school, but who have
cultivated the art of self-expression.
The school and the college employ the student comparatively a few hours
a day for a few years; conversation is a training in a perpetual
school. Many get the best part of their education in this school.
Conversation is a great ability discoverer, a great revealer of
possibilities and resources. It stimulates thought wonderfully. We
think more of ourselves if we can talk well, if we can interest and
hold others. The power to do so increases our self-respect, our
self-confidence.
No man knows what he really possesses until he makes his best effort to
express to others what is in him. Then the avenues of the mind fly
open, the faculties are on the alert. Every good converser has felt a
power come to him from the listener which he never felt before, and
which often stimulates and inspires to fresh endeavor. The mingling of
thought with thought, the contact of mind with mind, develops new
powers, as the mixing of two chemicals often produces a new third
substance.
To converse well one must listen well also--hold oneself in a receptive
attitude.
We are not only poor conversationalists, but we are poor listeners as
well. We are too impatient to listen. Instead of being attentive and
eager to drink in the story or the information, we have not enough
respect for the talker to keep quiet. We look about impatiently,
perhaps snap our watch, play a tattoo with our fingers on a chair or a
table, hitch about as if we were bored and were anxious to get away,
and interrupt the speaker before he reaches his conclusion. In fact,
we are such an impatient people that we have no time for anything
excepting to push ahead, to elbow our way through the crowd to get the
position or the money we desire. Our life is feverish and unnatural.
We have no time to develop charm of manner, or elegance of diction.
"We are too intense for epigram or repartee. We lack time."
Nervous impatience is a conspicuous characteristic of the American
people. Everything bores us which does not bring us more business, or
more money, or which does not help us to attain the position for which
we are striving. Instead of enjoying our friends, we are inclined to
look upon them as so many rungs in a ladder, and to value them in
proportion as they furnish readers for our books, send us patients,
clients, customers or show their ability to give us a boost for
political position.
Before these days of hurry and drive, before this age of excitement, it
was considered one of the greatest luxuries possible to be a listener
in a group surrounding an intelligent talker. It was better than most
modern lectures, than anything one could find in a book; for there was
a touch of personality, a charm of style, a magnetism which held, a
superb personality which fascinated. For the hungry soul, yearning for
an education, to drink in knowledge from those wise lips was to be fed
with a royal feast indeed.
But to-day everything is "touch and go." We have no time to stop on
the street and give a decent salutation. It is: "How do?" or
"Morning," accompanied by a sharp nod of the head, instead of by a
graceful bow. We have no time for the graces and the charms.
Everything must give way to the material.
We have no time for the development of a fine manner; the charm of the
days of chivalry and leisure has almost vanished from our civilization.
A new type of individual has sprung up. We work like Trojans during
the day, and then rush to a theater or other place of amusement in the
evening. We have no time to make our own amusement or to develop the
faculty of humor and fun-making as people used to do. We pay people
for doing that while we sit and laugh. We are like some college boys,
who depend upon tutors to carry them through their examinations--they
expect to buy their education ready-made.
Life is becoming so artificial, so forced, so diverse from naturalness,
we drive our human engines at such a fearful speed, that our finer life
is crushed out. Spontaneity and humor, and the possibility of a fine
culture and a superb charm of personality in us are almost impossible
and extremely rare.
One cause for our conversational decline is a lack of sympathy. We are
too selfish, too busily engaged in our own welfare, and wrapped up in
our own little world, too intent upon our own self-promotion to be
interested in others. No one can make a good conversationalist who is
not sympathetic. You must be able to enter into another's life, to
live it with the other person, to be a good listener or a good talker.
Walter Besant used to tell of a clever woman who had a great reputation
as a conversationalist, though she talked very little. She had such a
cordial, sympathetic manner that she helped the timid and the shy to
say their best things, and made them feel at home. She dissipated
their fears, and they could say things to her which they could not say
to anyone else. People thought her an interesting conversationalist
because she had this ability to call out the best in others.
If you would make yourself agreeable you must be able to enter into the
life of the people you are conversing with, and you must touch them
along the lines of their interest. No matter how much you may know
about a subject, if it does not happen to interest those to whom you
are talking your efforts will be largely lost.
It is pitiable, sometimes, to see men standing around at the average
reception or club gathering, dumb, almost helpless, and powerless to
enter heartily into the conversation because they are in a subjective
mood. They are thinking, thinking, thinking business, business,
business; thinking how they can get on a little faster--get more
business, more clients, more patients, or more readers for their
books--or a better house to live in; how they can make more show. They
do not enter heartily into the lives of others, or abandon themselves
to the occasion enough to make good talkers. They are cold and
reserved, distant, because their minds are somewhere else, their
affections on themselves and their own affairs. There are only two
things that interest them; business and their own little world. If you
talk about these things, they are interested at once; but they do not
care a snap about your affairs, how you get on, or what your ambition
is, or how they can help you. Our conversation will never reach a high
standard while we live in such a feverish, selfish, and unsympathetic
state.
Great conversationalists have always been very tactful--interesting
without offending. It does not do to stab people if you would interest
them, nor to drag out their family skeletons. Some people have the
peculiar quality of touching the best that is in us; others stir up the
bad. Every time they come into our presence they irritate us. Others
allay all that is disagreeable. They never touch our sensitive spots,
and they call out all that is spontaneous and sweet and beautiful.
Lincoln was master of the art of making himself interesting to
everybody he met. He put people at ease with his stories and jokes,
and made them feel so completely at home in his presence that they
opened up their mental treasures to him without reserve. Strangers
were always glad to talk with him because he was so cordial and quaint,
and always gave more than he got.
A sense of humor such as Lincoln had is, of course, a great addition to
one's conversational power. But not everyone can be funny; and, if you
lack the sense of humor, you will make yourself ludicrous by attempting
to be funny.
A good conversationalist, however, is not too serious. He does not
deal too much with facts, no matter how important. Facts, statistics,
weary. Vivacity is absolutely necessary. Heavy conversation bores;
too light, disgusts.
Therefore, to be a good conversationalist you must be spontaneous,
buoyant, natural, sympathetic, and must show a spirit of good will.
You must feel a spirit of helpfulness, and must enter heart and soul
into things which interest others. You must get the attention of
people and hold it by interesting them, and you can only interest them
by a warm sympathy--a real friendly sympathy. If you are cold,
distant, and unsympathetic you can not hold their attention.
You must be broad, tolerant. A narrow stingy soul never talks well. A
man who is always violating your sense of taste, of justice, and of
fairness, never interests you. You lock tight all the approaches to
your inner self, every avenue is closed to him. Your magnetism and
your helpfulness are thus cut off, and the conversation is perfunctory,
mechanical, and without life or feeling.
You must bring your listener close to you, must open your heart wide,
and exhibit a broad free nature, and an open mind. You must be
responsive, so that he will throw wide open every avenue of his nature
and give you free access to his heart of hearts.
If a man is a success anywhere, it ought to be in his personality, in
his power to express himself in strong, effective, interesting
language. He should not be obliged to give a stranger an inventory of
his possessions in order to show that he has achieved something. A
greater wealth should flow from his lips, and express itself in his
manner.
No amount of natural ability or education or good clothes, no amount of
money, will make you appear well if you use poor English.