THE ART OF CONVERSATION.
Certain things are supposed to come by the grace of nature and the free gift of providence; and the Art of Conversation is one of them. No one dreams of cultivating this art, either in its perfected form or in those rudiments which stand as a ‘grammar in use for beginners;’ that is—correct diction, just expression, that inflection of the voice which shall be eloquent without being theatrical, and that emphasis which shall be indicative without being exaggerated. People drawl out their words into long tails or clip them into docked stumps; they loop them on to the other with a running chain of ‘ers,’ or they bite them off short, each word falling plumb and isolated, disconnected from all the rest; they let their labials go by the board, and bury their rs in the recesses of their larynx; they throw the accent on the wrong syllable, and transform their vowels according to their liking; they say ‘wuz’ for ‘was,’ ‘onnibus’ for ‘omnibus,’ and ‘y’ are’ for ‘you are;’ they shoulder out all the middle aspirates and some of the initial, and forget that words ending in ‘ing’ have a final g which is neither to be burked out of existence nor hardened into a ringing k. All which lingual misdemeanours they commit with a clear conscience and a light heart, because ignorant that they have committed any misdemeanour at all.
Even people of birth and breeding, who should be without offence in those matters, fail in their grammar, and say the queerest things in the world. ‘These sort of things;’ ‘Who have you asked?’ ‘Every one of them know you;’ ‘Between you and I;’ ‘Neither men or women;’ ‘No one’ as the antecedent, and ‘they’ as the relative—these are just a few of the commonest errors of daily speech of which no one is ashamed, and to which were you to make a formal objection, you would be thought a pedant for your pains, and laughed at when your back was turned. If these things are done in the green tree of method, what may not be looked for in the dry of substance? And sure it is that we find very queer things indeed in that dry of substance, and prove for ourselves how the Art of Conversation is reduced to its primitive elements, which few give themselves the trouble to embellish, and fewer still to perfect.
To begin at the beginning, how seldom people pay undivided attention to the conversation on hand, and how often their thoughts wander and stray everywhere but where they should be! The most absurd, the most trivial, thing distracts them. A spider on the wall breaks the thread of an enthralling narrative, and a butterfly on the lawn breaks into the gravest, or the most poetic, talk as ruthlessly as the proverbial bull smashes into the proverbial china-shop. Another alumnus in the same school, though of a different class, will not let you speak without interruption. Like a cockerel, spurring and springing at its brother, this kind dashes at you with an answer before you have half stated your case. ‘You mean this?’ he says, performing that feat called ‘taking the words out of your mouth.’ And forthwith he begins his refutation of that which you have not said and probably had no intention of saying. Another will not wait until you have finished. His words cross and intermingle with yours in hopeless confusion of both sound and sense. You both speak together, and neither listens to the other—you, because you ‘have the floor,’ and he, because he wishes to have it. Conversation with such is impossible. It is a battle of words—mere words—like a heap of loose stones shot pell-mell out of a cart; and not that orderly interchange of ideas which is what true conversation should be.
Others, cousins-german to these, interfere in talk with which they have no business. They do not join in; thus enlarging the basis and enriching the superstructure; but they break in with something quite irrelevant, destroying the most interesting discussion on the most puerile pretence, as a feather whisk might knock down a Sèvres vase. This form of bad-breeding is much in use among women when they are jealous, and want to make themselves unpleasant to each other. The poet or the lord, the bishop or the general, that grand name or this great fortune—the man who is the feminine cynosure and whose attention confers distinction—is talking to some one singled out from the rest. He has to be detached and made to transfer himself. Accordingly, one of the boldest of the discontented outsiders goes up to the charge, and in the midst of a talk on literature, art, politics, on his travels or her experiences, cuts in with a question about the next flower-show or the last murder; with Who? What? When? How? no nearer to the subject on hand than the moon is near to Middlesex. This is an offence of daily occurrence, even among well-bred people—human nature having the ugly trick of breaking out of the delicate swaddling-clothes in which education and refinement would fain confine it.
Sometimes your interlocutor is a mother abnormally occupied with her children, and unable for two consecutive minutes to free her thoughts from the petty details of their lives. She does not even pretend to listen to what you are saying. All the time you are speaking, her eyes are wandering about the room, to make sure that Tom is not forgetting his manners, and that Jane is not making holes in hers—that Frank is where he should be, and Sarah not where she should not be—that Edith is not talking too much, and that Charley is not talking too little: it does not matter what she is anxious about, seeing that if it be not one thing it will be another. And you need not be offended, nor take her inattention as a slight special to yourself. The Golden-mouthed himself could not fix her thoughts, wandering as they always are over the pathless spaces of her maternal fear. She is one of the most disagreeable of the whole tribe of the conversational awkward-squad. You have nothing for it but to stop dead—in the midst of a sentence, if need be—until she has brought her roving eyes back to the point which presupposes attention, and appears to be conscious that you are speaking to her.
Others yawn in your face with frank and undisguised weariness; and some put up the transparent screen of a fan or two fingers; others, again, make that constrained grimace which accompanies the eating and the swallowing of the yawn, and think that their sudden gulp and hesitation will pass unobserved. Some give wrong answers, with their eyes fixed on yours, as if listening devoutly to all you say, and absorbed in your conversation. They have mastered this part of the form, and can look as if drinking in to the last verbal drop. The reality is analogous to that condition of Baron Münchhausen’s horse with which we are all familiar, and which we express by the phrase: ‘Going in at one ear and out by another.’ One who had learned this art of looking attention without giving it, once fell into a pit whence was no possible extraction. ‘Do you call gentlemen in England It?’ said an English-speaking German who thought his sweet companion had been entirely interested in his talk. Her eyes—and what eyes they were!—had been all he could desire—fixed, listening, interested. Meanwhile, her ears had been occupied elsewhere. At her back, on the ottoman where she was sitting, was being carried on a conversation in which she was deeply interested. Before her sat her German, labouring heavily among the stiff clay-clods of his imperfect English. Her answer to his remark betrayed the absence of the mind underneath all the steadfastness of her bewildering eyes. ‘Do you call gentlemen in England It?’ he repeated with mingled reproach, sorrow, and—enlightenment. That random answer to his previous question cost her the offer of a spray of orange blossom—and him the pain of its refusal.
Beyond these rudiments comes the higher art reaching into grace, and needing enlightened intelligence for its perfection. The section which we have been considering belongs only to the grammar, the beginning, the mere infancy of things, like the New Zealander’s tattoo for personal decoration, or his hideous idol for representative art. Beyond the good-breeding of attention comes the supreme art, we had almost said the science of conversation—of all things the most difficult, to judge by its rarity at least in England. It is more common in France, where it is better understood, and where a good conversationalist is prized as a Master in his own degree. And be it observed—a good conversationalist is not the same thing as a good anecdotist, a good debater, a good talker—this last too often sinning with Coleridge in monopolising all the talk to himself, and granting only some ‘brilliant flashes of silence’ wherein the ruck may have their innings. A good conversationalist, on the contrary, is essentially reciprocal. He flings his own ball, but he catches the return and waits for its throw. He has a light touch, and that kind of skill which glances off rather than hits fair and square. He has also the power of suggestiveness and direction, as perfect in its way as the skill with which certain adepts can make a ball wind in and out of stumps and stakes by the clever twist of their first throw off. He is not one of those who run a subject to earth and finish it all the same as one would finish a fox; but he keeps it alive and going with the neatest, deftest, little fillips possible—as the Japanese keep up their paper butterflies with airy puffs of their flimsy fans, or as a thaumaturgist guides his spinning-plates with the tip of his forefinger. When it is all over, and you ask yourself what you have got by it, you are forced to confess, Nothing. You have been superficially amused, and for the moment interested; but you have learned nothing, and are no richer mentally than you were before the verbal butterfly began to flutter and the wordy plate to spin.
We in England, however, know but little of this kind of talk. We have men who argue, and men who assert; and we have men, and women too, who come down with a thud on the toes of all whom they encounter in the various walks of conversation. But of the light bright thrust and parry, the brilliant quarte and tierce, the flashing ‘pinked’ and quick riposte characteristic of the palmy days of Parisian society, we have but very little. For foils we use bludgeons; for paper butterflies, leaden bullets. We are too much in earnest to be graceful, and too anxious about our subject to be careful of our method. Hence we have better dialecticians than conversationalists, and better fighters than fencers. But really, say, at a dinner, or in the crowded corners of a fashionable soirée, you cannot go into the mazes of ‘evidences,’ nor discuss the value of esoteric Buddhism, nor yet winnow your sheaf of political economy, beginning with Adam Smith and ending with Henry George. You can only play with words and toss up airy bubbles of ideas. And he who can play with most dexterity, and whose airy bubbles have the brightest iridescence, is the hero of the moment and the master of the situation.
As a rule, authors are but dull dogs in conversation. They keep their good things for their books. Those who expect in literary society the feast of reason and the flow of soul, find themselves for the most part wofully disappointed. More is to be got out of the amateurist set—that fringe which would be if it could, and which hangs on to the main body as the best thing it can do in the circumstances. But authors of the professional and bread-winning class will talk only of things already known, repeating what they have written, but taking care not to forestall what they have not yet printed. They, and all professionals of any denomination whatsoever, are also given to talk shop among themselves; and shop is usually disagreeable to the outsider.
We might do worse than cultivate Conversation as an Art. Time has room for all things in his hand, and life has need of variety. Desperately busy and terribly in earnest as we may be, blowing bubbles has yet its value. Moreover, the true art of conversation is a lesson in good-breeding, which, in its turn, is the fine fleur of civilisation; and thus, from the rootwork of manner to the efflorescence of matter, there is something to be gained by the perfection of the art.