THE ART OF CONVERSATION.

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CCORDING to the old saying attributed to Sir Henry Wotton, and sometimes held by the profane to be a pun, ambassadors are said to "lie abroad for the good of their country." I must protest that our present ambassador at Paris did us great wrong when he wrote: He may do without friends,

He may do without books,

But civilised man cannot do without cooks.

What sort of thing is this life, or rather existence, below the diaphragm? Do we not all exclaim," Away with books if it must be, but at least allow that civilised man cannot do without friends."

Society, in truth, is one of the highest wants of the healthy mind. But a society of silence, or in which human intercourse was carried on by signs, were indeed, for us, scarcely society at all. Therefore conversation is involved in the very idea of society. Hence, he who writes or conversation starts with a subject admittedly of the greatest interest. He has not, like the vegetarian, or the anti-tobaccoist, or the believer in "Anglo-Israel Identity," to begin by showing that his topic is really one of high concern. Hence, too, he has an advantage over those who treat of almost any other fine art (for we may claim this rank for conversation). The claims of this art over society are of the widest possible kind, and, indeed, are less imperfectly understood than those of other arts. To know great works of painting or sculpture, and to distinguish them from the false and trivial, is almost the business of a lifetime. The mere light of nature carries us but a little way, and that often in a wrong direction. To see the plain man toiling through a picture gallery, catalogue in hand, and trying to admire what he would at least neglect if he dared to be honest, is no doubt enough to make a painter or a student of painting despair of any popular capacity to enjoy great pictures.

The artist in words, the man of letters, is not much better off. He has a larger public; but in the last resort we neglect him too. We then remember Plato's saying that books can neither ask nor answer. Wordsworth wrote three sonnets entitled "Personal Talk." His own

talk seems to have been rather narrow and dreary, and from these poems we learn that he did not think much of the talk of other people. Better than such discourse, he tells us is "long barren silence"; and he consoles himself with dreams and books, especially books. We have all had moods in which we say, in our haste, that all men are foolish except Wordsworth, and that he was right. But with years that bring us nearer what he himself calls the "philosophic mind," we tend, unless our experience is very unfortunate, to reject Wordsworth's opinion. A greater poet even than Wordsworth has in one of the most famous passages of the Inferno told us how Francesca da Rimini "read no more that day." The dialogue form gives a special life to certain forms of literature because it seems to bring us nearer to a representation of the discourse of the living. Great novelists, from Fielding to Thackeray, and even the analytic Henry James, always, in their finest passages, abandon narration, and give us the dialogue. Mark Pattison, a scholar and a lover of books, if ever there were one, looking back on life wrote, in the later pages of his Memoirs, that after years of extrication of thought he rose to the conception that "the highest life is the art to live, and that both men, women, and books are equally essential ingredients of such a life." In small sorrows we resort to books; but in the last resort we may come to hate books. Not literature, but talk with living men and women, is found the great recreation in health and consolation in sorrow.

Relish for conversation has always been shown amongst the Greeks and the French-that is to say, amongst the races which have produced the most refined society. Aristotle, when writing on morals, found it necessary to describe even the voice and speech of his ideal "high-minded man." It is indeed almost droll to read how far the Greeks in their best age, carried it. They appear to have expected a doctor first to persuade and then to prescribe for the patient. Nay, we are told of one most persuasive rhetorician who was taken round by the physicians to persuade the patients to adopt the prescriptions. As to France, if Madame de Staël is to be believed, conversation exists only there. De Quincey, who is one of the few who have written upon conversation, says truly enough that the French, by temperament and qualities of their language, are prompt to rapid and vivacious exchanges of thought. Montaigne, the most gossiping of Frenchmen, confesses to his love of the society of "sincere and able men." "The conversation also of beautiful and well-bred women," says he, "is for me a sweet commerce." He adds a quotation from Cicero to the effect that he (Montaigne) has a large experience in this matter. Montaigne must have had a pleasant

The Art of Conversation.

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time, for if he were put to it, he would, as he tells us, sooner lose his sight than his hearing and speech. The study of books he holds a "languishing and feeble motion that heats not, whereas conversation teaches and exercises at once." Who, too, that has read Mr. John Morley's brilliant sketch of the social life of Diderot and the Encyclopedists, doubts the high place that conversation held in France in the last century? "All is lost," said one, when Roland appeared at the Court of Louis XVI. without buckles in his shoes. Yet such recent pictures as Mr. Orchardson's Salon de Madame Récamier, and such recent books as the "Life of Madame Mohl" show that these social traditions were not lost with the shoebuckles. French literature and life, in truth, from the time of Montaigne to our own day are full of proofs of the large place which conversation held, and still holds, in their ideas of enjoyment.

Nor need we be so humble as to put in no claim for ourselves. We are, no doubt, too serious a race. But amongst Englishmen of vigorous understanding there would always be short shrift for the Scotch gentleman who said that "the great bane of all society is conversation." When that famous company, which included Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, used to meet at the "Mermaid " Tavern, the talk must have been a thing to remember. "What things we have

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seen done at the Mermaid’".

Heard words that have been so nimble and so full of subtle flame,
As if that every one from whom they came

Had meant to put his whole wit into a jest,

And had resolved to live a fool the rest

Of his dull life.

In a later generation Milton, who was but half a Puritan, was far too much of an artist to make his angels slavish nuisances, ever kneeling before a throne or playing on harps. No, "they eat, they drink, and in communion sweet quaff immortality and joy." What a picture of refined enjoyment occurs in Clarendon's well-known character of Falkland! After saying that the Lord Viscount Falkland was a great cherisher of wit and fancy and good parts in any man," he relates that Falkland had "resolved not to see London, which he loved above all places, till he had perfectly learned the Greek tongue," and so Falkland went to his house in the country. And this is how Clarendon describes life there :—

In this time, his house being within ten miles of Oxford, he contracted familiarity and friendship with the most polite and accurate men of that University, who found such an immenseness of wit and such a solidity of judgment in him, so infinite a fancy, bound in by most logical ratiocination, such a vast knowledge that he was not ignorant in anything, yet such an excessive humility as if he had known nothing, that they frequently resorted and dwelt with him, as in

a college situated in a purer air; that his house was a university bound in a less volume; whither they came, not so much for repose as study, and to examine and refine those grosser propositions which laziness and consent made current in vulgar conversation,

But even this is not the classical illustration of English conversation. The book is "Boswell's Life of Johnson." Belief in this book is, for many, not a literary opinion, but a pious conviction. It is superfluous to praise it or quote from it. When various people were lately called upon by a newspaper to state their notions of the best books, Mr. H. M. Stanley told how he took "Boswell" with him into the heart of Africa; and Professor Mahaffy, in the only systematic treatise we have on conversation, rightly asks, "What book has ever acquired more deserved and lasting reputation than 'Boswell's Life of Johnson'?"

In Johnson's case there was both the hour and the man for conversation. They have both gone. Lord Beaconsfield, in one of his novels, says that the high style of conversation ceased in this country with Johnson and Burke. The famous circle of "Boswell's Life" and Goldsmith's "Retaliation was one in which a man could "fold his legs and have his talk out"; and there were men ready for it in that quieter eighteenth century.

Talleyrand, looking back, declared that he who had not lived before the French Revolution knew nothing of the charm of living. Now, however, in England at least, conversation, like letter-writing and a hundred other social joys of a quiet and leisurely age, is fled, and in their place we have telegrams, slang, and slovenliness. There seems to be a general agreement that, in our time, conversation is in a bad way. Without repose, without a certain strain of old-world courtesy, without manners, in short, conversation is impossible. Many will agree with M. Renan, who finds this to be a pushing, selfish, democratic age, of which "first come first served" is the rule, and which has ceased to pay any heed to civility. Nor is this a question only of manners. When the philosopher Schopenhauer used to dine in tail coat and white tie at the table d'hôte in Frankfort, he used daily to place a gold piece beside his plate. "That," he explained when asked, "is to go to the poor whenever I hear the officers discuss anything more serious than women, dogs, and horses." The gold piece always reappeared, and I fear it would do so in places nearer than Frankfort. Forty years ago Sir Arthur Helps, in "Friends in Council," pronounced the "main current of society dreary and dull." It has not improved since. A Fortnightly Reviewer recently referred to the decay of the art of conversation. The men of the "Mermaid," or the friends of Falkland, or of Johnson, would be dis

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gusted with the "wealthy curled darlings of our nation." journal speaks of the "thin smart, bald talk of the present day"; and Mr. Mallock, in that rather impudent but clever book, the New Republic, says "that men are just as immoral as in the time of Charles II., and much more stupid. Instead of decking their immorality with the jewels of wit, they clumsily try to cover it with the tarpaulin of respectability. The fop of Charles's time aimed at being a wit and a scholar. The fop of ours aims at being a fool and a dunce."

To discuss the remedies for these evils might lead us far. The disgust of the Scotch farmers who bought Mr. Ruskin's "Notes on Sheepfolds" only to find a treatise on the pastoral office, would perhaps hardly be greater than would be that of the readers of this article if it were converted into a dissertation on Christianity, or Socialism, or popular culture; and yet it were quite possible to do this, and show the connection with conversation. For this subject as a social art has relation to all other matters affecting human society. However, it is not intended to branch so wide. We cannot here debate the whole environment of talkers and everybody else. Reforms, social, political, and moral, the desirability of plain living and high thinking-these are great and attractive themes, but we must pass them by. Here let us consider some of the conditions of good conversation, so far as immediately concerns the talkers and the listeners, and some of the remedies for poverty in talk.

But even where such

Some may say that the talker, like the poet, is born, and not made. But, after all, the "warbling-his-native-woodnotes-wild" theory is a very doubtful one. Nature must do much, but art must add thereto. Ben Jonson, in his lines to the memory of Shakespeare, debates this question and concludes that "a good poet's made as well as born." The same may be said of a good talker. He is in part born and in part made. There are, of course, some people without the proper mental qualifications. natural qualifications exist, they do not suffice. A very little social experience makes us shudder at the idea of the untutored talker. We are sometimes tempted to believe that men of the Polonius stamp are sent to remind us that the curse is not yet removed. But there is a greater nuisance than Polonius. There is the bore of another species-who is brutal and calls it sincerity, or impertinent and calls it anxiety for your soul. Let us have art, then, as well as nature. Distinction in conversation is a very rare thing, more rare even than oratorical power. One great reason for this is that, even among those who would desire it, many do not find the requisite social con