§ 43. Let us now turn to the other side and consider the proper
principles of conversation with inferiors. And here, too, it is more
practical to take our standpoint in the middle class of society, and not
among those who must habitually talk to inferiors owing to their own
high condition. The same key unlocks the secret of success. If it be
indispensable for good conversation to make your superiors feel you for
the time their equal, so it is indispensable that your inferiors should
feel that they too are upon a social level with you during their talk.
Of course, the first thing is to banish all traces of _condescension_,
that odious ape of humility and urbanity, which is the loud expression
of want of brains and want of tact, for it emphasises the very
differences which conversation seeks to obliterate. On the other hand,
there is an extreme of _familiarity_ which shocks and alarms the
inferior, for he justly expects a sudden revulsion from it, as we are
told in Polybius of the common people of Antioch, into whose humble
entertainments or amusements Antiochus Epiphanes would come, and sit
down to drink and joke with them. These vagaries on the part of their
despotic sovran so frightened them that they would get up and run away.
The just mean is to strike out a line of conversation, either of common
interest, or in which the inferior is a specialist, and therefore your
superior. He will then feel that he is speaking with authority, and the
honest expression of your ignorance and your desire to learn will give
him confidence to tell you freely what he knows.
§ 44. It is in the lower ranks of society that national differences
become really great. The highly bred or highly cultivated people of any
European nation have attained a certain unity of type, and are
interested by the same sort of conversation; it is very different with
English, French, Italian, and German peasants. Nay, even within our
islands, there is a marked difference in the social abilities of
English, Scotch, and Irish peasants. It is customary to set this down to
race, and be satisfied with some such vague generality. But I fancy the
causes of these social differences are rather recent than primeval; they
do not depend directly upon climate or atmosphere, and if I may quote
the opinion of a wise friend on this large question, I should say that
one chief cause of the talking or social ability of some peasantries
over others is the fact that their proximate ancestors were a bilingual
people. Thus the great majority of West Irish and North Scotch peasants
are descended from grandfathers, whose talk oscillated between Celtic
and English, and who were therefore constantly educated in intelligence
by the problem of _translating_ ideas from one language into another,
not to mention the distinct inheritance of the special ideas peculiar to
each and every language. This is an education in expression, in
thinking, and therefore in conversation, wholly foreign to the English
Midland boor, who has never heard more than two or three hundred words
of a very rude provincial dialect of English, and therefore commands
neither the words nor the ideas of the outlying provinces. A great part
of the French peasantry are likewise proximately descended from
bilingual ancestors, French being the old language of but a small part
of their now recognised territory. Breton, Bearnais, Provençal, Walloon,
are even still living languages in large parts of France (as was German
up to 1871), and so the peasantry were under like favourable conditions.
But I must not diverge further from the subject in hand. Thus much was
naturally suggested to me by the best and most diverting conversation I
know with inferiors—that which sporting men have with those whose
livelihood has been earned by studying the habits and ways of fish and
game. There are few men who shoot, fish, or hunt in Ireland, who do not
know specimens of that remarkable though small class whose natural
ability, combined with long experience, makes them masters of their
craft, and whose long association with their superiors in matters of
sport has given them perfect ease and even charm of manners.
Conversation with these people, which is often prolonged through many
hours, is not only very instructive—a secondary matter to us now—but
exceedingly amusing, from the perfect frankness as well as tact with
which they speak their mind to the sporting friend, whom they regard as
their inferior or equal from a professional point of view. It is this
perfect liberty, this spiritual equality, often designated as the free
masonry of sport, from which arises the charm of talking upon subjects
of common interest to one confessedly inferior in many respects. But in
one he is commonly your superior, even apart from his sport. It has been
far more important to him all his life to study and know the characters
of his employers than it has been for them to study his, and so he is
generally your superior in perceiving what will please, and what topics
are to be selected or avoided in conversation. Nothing has struck me
more in many such talks than the acute estimate which these people form
of the strength and weakness of those who are their patrons.
These are illustrations of a general kind, to show how inferiority in
social station may not imply inferiority for the purposes of
conversation, so that we may even here attain that equality which I
regard as essential for its success.
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