The best talk is that which escapes up the open chimney and cannot be
repeated. The finest woods make the best fire and pass away with the
least residuum. I hope the next generation will not accept the reports
of "interviews" as specimens of the conversations of these years of
grace.
But do we talk as well as our fathers and mothers did? We hear wonderful
stories of the bright generation that sat about the wide fireplaces
of New England. Good talk has so much short-hand that it cannot be
reported,--the inflection, the change of voice, the shrug, cannot be
caught on paper. The best of it is when the subject unexpectedly
goes cross-lots, by a flash of short-cut, to a conclusion so suddenly
revealed that it has the effect of wit. It needs the highest culture and
the finest breeding to prevent the conversation from running into mere
persiflage on the one hand--its common fate--or monologue on the
other. Our conversation is largely chaff. I am not sure but the former
generation preached a good deal, but it had great practice in fireside
talk, and must have talked well. There were narrators in those days who
could charm a circle all the evening long with stories. When each day
brought comparatively little new to read, there was leisure for
talk, and the rare book and the in-frequent magazine were thoroughly
discussed. Families now are swamped by the printed matter that comes
daily upon the center-table. There must be a division of labor, one
reading this, and another that, to make any impression on it. The
telegraph brings the only common food, and works this daily miracle,
that every mind in Christendom is excited by one topic simultaneously
with every other mind; it enables a concurrent mental action, a burst
of sympathy, or a universal prayer to be made, which must be, if we
have any faith in the immaterial left, one of the chief forces in modern
life. It is fit that an agent so subtle as electricity should be the
minister of it.
When there is so much to read, there is little time for conversation;
nor is there leisure for another pastime of the ancient firesides,
called reading aloud. The listeners, who heard while they looked into
the wide chimney-place, saw there pass in stately procession the events
and the grand persons of history, were kindled with the delights of
travel, touched by the romance of true love, or made restless by tales
of adventure;--the hearth became a sort of magic stone that could
transport those who sat by it to the most distant places and times, as
soon as the book was opened and the reader began, of a winter's night.
Perhaps the Puritan reader read through his nose, and all the little
Puritans made the most dreadful nasal inquiries as the entertainment
went on. The prominent nose of the intellectual New-Englander
is evidence of the constant linguistic exercise of the organ for
generations. It grew by talking through. But I have no doubt that
practice made good readers in those days. Good reading aloud is almost
a lost accomplishment now. It is little thought of in the schools. It is
disused at home. It is rare to find any one who can read, even from the
newspaper, well. Reading is so universal, even with the uncultivated,
that it is common to hear people mispronounce words that you did not
suppose they had ever seen. In reading to themselves they glide over
these words, in reading aloud they stumble over them. Besides, our
every-day books and newspapers are so larded with French that the
ordinary reader is obliged marcher a pas de loup,--for instance.
The newspaper is probably responsible for making current many words with
which the general reader is familiar, but which he rises to in the
flow of conversation, and strikes at with a splash and an unsuccessful
attempt at appropriation; the word, which he perfectly knows, hooks him
in the gills, and he cannot master it. The newspaper is thus widening
the language in use, and vastly increasing the number of words which
enter into common talk. The Americans of the lowest intellectual class
probably use more words to express their ideas than the similar class
of any other people; but this prodigality is partially balanced by the
parsimony of words in some higher regions, in which a few phrases of
current slang are made to do the whole duty of exchange of ideas; if
that can be called exchange of ideas when one intellect flashes forth
to another the remark, concerning some report, that "you know how it is
yourself," and is met by the response of "that's what's the matter," and
rejoins with the perfectly conclusive "that's so." It requires a high
degree of culture to use slang with elegance and effect; and we are yet
very far from the Greek attainment.