With Inferiors
§ 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.
The Relations of Sex and Age
§ 45. So far we have been considering the quality of the company as determined by social position, which, if not an absolutely artificial distinction, is at least frequently such, so that it may be even reversed by circumstances. There are great distinctions made by nature which are indelible, and which must therefore be reckoned with as permanent factors in our theory—I mean those of age and sex.
There are, properly speaking, three grades of age worth considering—youth, maturity, and old age; but from our point of view we are justified in regarding mature life as the normal state, and shall therefore consider the duties of the mature man and woman as they come in contact with the extremes. It is not worth while writing any advices for the old, as they are beyond the age of improvement, though by no means always stripped of their social qualities; indeed, the position of very old people, who have maintained their faculties, is quite exceptional in modern society, and will require a few words of comment in the present connection.