GOSSIP
Gossip in Literature—Gossip Comes from Being of One Kindred Under God—Gossip and the Misanthrope—Personal History of People We Know and People We Don't Know—Gossip of Books of Biography—Interest in Others Gives Fellowship and Warmth to Life—Essential Difference Between Slander and Innocent Gossip—The Psychology of the Slanderer—The Apocryphal Slanderer—"Talking Behind Another's Back"—Personal Chat the Current Coin of Conversation.
CHAPTER III
GOSSIP
It seems strange that, in all the long list of brilliant dissertations on every subject under the sun, no English essayist should have yielded a word under the seductive title of "Gossip." Even Leigh Hunt, who wrote vivaciously and exquisitely on so many light topics, was not attracted by the enticing possibilities of this subject to which both the learned and the unlearned are ready at all times to bestow a willing ear or eye. One usually conceives gossip as something to which one lends only one's ear, and never one's eye; but what are "Plutarch's Lives" but the right sort of gossip? That so many literary men and women have vaguely suspected the alluring tone-color of the word "gossip" is proved by: A Gossip in Romance, Robert Louis Stevenson; Gossip in a Library, Edmund William Gosse; Gossip of the Caribbees, William R. H. Trowbridge, Jr.; Gossip from Paris During the Second Empire, Anthony North Peet; Gossip in the First Decade of Victoria's Reign, Jane West; Gossip of the Century, Julia Clara Byrne; Gossiping Guide to Wales, Askew Roberts and Edward Woodall; Gossip with Girls and Maidens Betrothed and Free, Blanche St. John Bellairs. Yet no one has ever thought of writing about gossip for its own sweet sake.
Among every-day words perhaps the word "gossip" is more to be reckoned with than any other in our language. The child who runs confidingly to mother to report his grievance is a gossip; he is also an historian. Certainly gossip is in its tone familiar and personal; it is the familiar and personal touch which makes Plutarch's Lives interesting. At the root of the word "gossip," say etymologists, there lies an honest Saxon meaning, "God's sib"—"of one kindred under God."
It would be only a misanthrope who would assert that he has no interest in his fellows. He is invariably a selfish person who shuns personality in talk and refuses to know anything about people; who says: "What is it to me whether this person has heard Slezak in [Tannhäuser]; what do I care whether Mrs. So-and-So has visited the French play; what concern is it of mine if Mr. Millions of eighty marries Miss Beautiful of eighteen; what is it to me whether you have watched the agonies of a furnishing party at Marshall Field's and have observed the bridegroom of tender years victimized by his wife and mother-in-law with their appeals to his excellent taste; of what interest to me are the accounts of the dissolute excesses which interspersed the wild outbreaks of religious fanaticism of Henry the Third of France?" This selfish person is also very stupid, for nothing so augments conversation as a normal interest in other people.
"I shook him well from side to side
Until his face was blue.
Come, tell me how you live, I cried,
And what it is you do."