There is a grim tradition that a person should never say anything behind another's back which he would not say before his face. This is all very well so far as it relates to venomous tales repeated purposely to injure; but how colorless are the people who never have critical opinions on anything or anybody; or people who, having them, never express them! Criticism and cavil are two very different things. Absence of criticism is absence of the power of distinction. This age of science has taught people to look truth straight in the face and learn to discriminate. That person to whom everything is sweet does not know what sweet is. The sophisticated world, unlike the unsophisticated, is not afraid of "passing remarks." There is no doubt that criticism, whether it comes directly or roundabout, adds a terror to life as soon as one goes below a certain level of cultivation. The uneducated are frightened at the mere thought of criticism; the cultivated are not. Perhaps the reason for this difference is that ordinary people have a brutal and entirely uncritical criticism to fear. In that society sensitiveness is not very common. They are not dishonorable; they are merely hardy and can see no distinctions. It is not given to these people to praise rationally and to censure discriminatingly. Vilifying remarks are made and repeated among them which clever people would be incapable of uttering. The educated not only use a softened mode of speech, but they avoid repeating remarks, unless with a discerning wish to be helpful to others. The cultivated who have brought life to a far higher point than the uncultivated have protected their liberty by a social rule. They say what they like, and it does not get to the ears of the person about whom they have said it. And if it did it wouldn't much matter. Criticism which is critically given is usually critically received. The maliciousness of adverse criticism seldom lies in the person who voices it, but in the person who carries a tale. The moment sophisticated people learn that one among them has venomously repeated an adversely critical remark, they immediately know that that person is not to the manner born. There is no surer proof.
If the born advocate is not always a saint, the born critic is not always a sinner. Robert Louis Stevenson understood the importance of the personal touch in conversation when he wrote: "So far as conversational subjects are truly talkable, more than half of them may be reduced to three: that I am I, that you are you, and that there are other people dimly understood to be not quite the same as either." So, also, did Mr. J. M. Barrie, when he told us that his beloved Margaret Ogilvy, in spite of no personal interest in Gladstone, "had a profound faith in him as an aid to conversation. If there were silent men in the company, she would give him to them to talk about precisely as she would divide a cake among children."
It is often hinted by men that women are made good conversationalists by a sense of irresponsibility. But I am inclined to think that a little gossip now and then is relished by the best of men as well as women. The tendency to gossip with which men constantly credit women, and in which tendency the men themselves keep pace, helps both men and women very effectually to good conversation. "It is more important," says Stevenson again, "that a person should be a good gossip and talk pleasantly and smartly of common friends and the thousand and one nothings of the day and hour, than speak with the tongues of men and angels.... Talk is the creature of the street and market-place, feeding on gossip; and its last resort is still in a discussion on morals. That is the heroic form of gossip; heroic in virtue of its high pretensions; but still gossip because it turns on personalities."
Gossip, we must admit, has a perennial interest for all of us. Personal chat is the current coin of conversational capital. Society lives by gossip as it lives by bread. The most absurd rule in the world is to avoid personalities in conversation. To annihilate gossip would be to cut conversational topics in half. There is musical gossip, art gossip, theatrical gossip, literary gossip, and court gossip; there is political gossip, and fashionable gossip, and military gossip; there is mercantile gossip and commercial gossip of all kinds; there is physicians' gossip and professional gossip of every sort; there is scientists' gossip; and there is the gossip of the schools indulged in by masters and students all over the educational world. Of all the gossip in the world the most prodigious and prolific is religious gossip. Archbishops, bishops, deans, rectors, and curates are discussed unreservedly; and the questions put and answered are not whether they are apostolic teachers, but whether they are high, low, broad, or no church; whether they wear scarlet or black, intone or read, say "shibboleth" or "sibboleth."
The roots of gossip are deep in human interest; and, despite the nearly universal opinion of moralists, great reputations are more often built out of gossip than destroyed by it. Discriminating people do not create enemies by personalities, nor separate friends, because they gossip with a heart full of love, with charity for all, and with malice toward none. Gossip as a legitimate part of conversation is defended by one of the greatest of present-day scholars; and I cannot do better than to quote, in closing, what Mr. Mahaffy has said about it: "The topic which ought to be always interesting is the discussion of human character and human motives. If the novel be so popular a form of literature, how can the novel in real life fail to interest an intelligent company? People of serious temper and philosophic habit will be able to confine themselves to large ethical views and the general dealings of men; but to average people, both men and women, and perhaps most of all to busy men who desire to find in society relaxation from their toil, that lighter and more personal kind of criticism on human affairs will prevail which is known as gossip. It is idle to deny that there is no kind of conversation more fascinating than this. But its immorality may easily become such as to shock honest minds, and the man who indulges in it too freely at the expense of others will probably have to pay the cost of it himself in the long run; for those who hear him will fear him, and will retire into themselves in his presence. On the other hand, nothing is more honorable than to stand forth as the defender or the palliator of the faults imputed to others, and nothing is easier than to expand such a defense into general considerations as to the purity of human motives, which will raise the conversation from its unwholesome grounds into the upper air."
CHAPTER IV
WHAT SHOULD GUESTS TALK ABOUT AT DINNER?
Guests' Talk During the Quarter of an Hour before Dinner—What Guests May Talk About—Talking to One's Dinner-Companion—Guests' Duty to Host and Hostess—The Dominant Note in Table-Talk—General and Tête-à-Tête Conversation between Guests—The Raconteur at Dinner.