Conversation, Mary Greer Conklin [popular books to read txt] 📗

sentiments to his own. 'Coquetting with an echo,' Carlyle called it. For, tho it may make a man feel mentally masterful at first, it makes him feel mentally maudlin at last; and, as the Abbé says, to be bored one's self is a sure sign that one's companion is also weary."

Tho polite dissent is desirable in discussion, flat contradiction is contemptible. Dean Swift affirms that a person given to contradiction is more fit for Bedlam than for conversation. In discussion, far more than in lighter talk, decency as well as honor commands that each partner to the conversational game conform to the niceties and fairness of it. "I don't think so," "It isn't so," "I don't agree with you at all," are too flat and positive for true delicacy and refinement in conversation. "I have been inclined to think otherwise," "I should be pleased to hear your reasons," "Aren't you mistaken?" are more acceptable phrases with which to introduce dissent. In French society a discrepancy of views is always manifested by some courtesy-phrase, such as "Mais, ne pensez-vous pas" or "Je vous demande pardon"—the urbane substitutes for "No, you are wrong," "No, it isn't." Our own Benjamin Franklin, whose appreciation of the conversational art in France won completely the hearts of the French people, tells us in his autobiography that in later life he found it necessary to throw off habits acquired in youth: "I continued this positive method for some years, but gradually left it, retaining only the habit of expressing myself in terms of modest diffidence: never using when I advanced anything that might possibly be disputed, the words 'certainly,' 'undoubtedly,' or any others that give the air of positiveness to an opinion, but rather say, 'it appears to me,' or 'I should think it so-and-so, for such-and-such a reason,' or 'I imagine it to be so,' or it is so 'if I am not mistaken.'"

Unyielding obstinacy in discussion is deadening to conversation, and yet the extreme contrary is crippling. Open resentment of any attempt at warmth of speech is paralysis and torpor to talk. When one meets a hostess, or a conversational partner, "whose only pleasure is to be displeased," one is reminded of the railway superintendent who kept the wires hot with fault-finding messages bearing his initials "H. F. C." until he came to be known along the road as "Hell For Certain." People of a resentful turn of mind, whose every sentence is a wager, and who convert every word into a missile, are fit for polemical squabbles, but not for polite discussion. Those raucous persons who, when their opponents attempt to speak, cry out against it as a monstrous unfairness, are very well adapted to association with Kilkenny cats, but not with human beings. It is in order to vanquish by this means one who might otherwise outmatch them entirely that they thus seek to reduce their opponent to a mere interjection. "A man of culture," says Mr. Robert Waters, "is not intolerant of opposition. He frankly states his views on any given subject, without hesitating to say wherein he is ignorant or doubtful, and he is ready for correction and enlightenment wherever he finds it." Such a man never presses his hearers to accept his views; he not only tolerates but considers opposed opinions and listens attentively and respectfully to them. Hazlitt said of the charming discussion of Northcote, the painter: "He lends an ear to an observation as if you had brought him a piece of news, and enters into it with as much avidity and earnestness as if it interested only himself personally."

Of all the tenets of good conversation to which the French give heed, their devotion to listening is the most notable. From this judiciously receptive attitude springs their uninterrupting shrug of assent or disapproval. But listening is only one of their many established conversational dicta: "The conversation of Parisians is neither dissertation nor epigram; they have pleasantry without buffoonery; they associate with skill, with genius, and with reason, maxims and flashes of wit, sharp satire, and severe ethics. They run through all subjects that each may have something to say; they exhaust no subject for fear of tiring their hearer; they propose their themes casually and they treat them rapidly; each succeeding subject grows naturally out of the preceding one; each talker delivers his opinion and supports it briefly; no one attacks with undue heat the supposition of another, nor defends obstinately his own; they examine in order to enlighten, and stop before the discussion becomes a dispute." Such was Rousseau's description of Parisian conversation; and some one else has declared that the French are the only nation in the world who understand a salon whether in upholstery or talk. "Every Britisher," said Novalis more than a hundred years ago, "is an island"; and Heine once defined silence as "a conversation with Englishmen." We Americans, tho not so reserved in talk as our English brothers, are less respectful to conversational amenities; and both of us are far behind the French in the gracious art of verbal expression. Not only is the spoken English of the cultured Irish the most cosmopolitan and best modulated of any English in the world, but the conversation of cultivated Irishmen more adequately approaches the perfection of the French.

It is as illuminating to study the best models in human intercourse as to study the best models in literature, or painting, or any other art. One of the distinct elements in French conversation is that it is invariably kept general; and by general I mean including in the talk all the conversational group as opposed to tête-à-tête dialog. Many people disagree with the French in this. Addison declared that there is no such thing as conversation except between two persons; and Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walter Savage Landor said something of the same sort. Shelley was distinctly a tête-à-tête talker, as Mr. Benson, the present-day essayist, in some of his intimate discourses, proclaims himself to be. But Burke and Browning, the best conversationalists in the history of the Anglo-Saxon race, like all the famous women of the French salon, from Mme. Roland to Mme. de Staël, kept pace with any number of interlocutors on any number of subjects, from the most abstruse science to the lightest jeu d'esprit. Good talk between two is no doubt a duet of exquisite sympathy; but true conversation is more like a fugue in four or eight parts than like a duet. Furthermore, general and tête-à-tête conversation have both their place and occasion. At a dinner-table in France private chats are very quickly dispelled by some thoughtful moderator. Dinner guests who devote themselves to each other alone are not tolerated by the French hostess as by the English and American. Because tête-à-tête conversation is considered good form so generally among English-speaking peoples, I have in other essays adapted my comments on this subject to our customs; but talk which is distributed among several who conform to the courtesies and laws of good conversation is the best kind of talk. In general talk every one ought to have a voice. It is the undue humility of some and the arrogance and polemical tendency of others that prevent good general conversation. People have only to begin with three axioms: the first, that everybody is entitled, and often bound, to form his own opinion; second, that everybody is equally entitled to express that opinion; and third, that everybody's opinion is entitled to a hearing and to consideration, not only on the ground of courtesy, but because any opinion honestly and independently formed is worth something and contributes to the discussion.

Another principle of French conversation is that it is kept personal, in the sense, I mean, that the personality of the speakers suffuses it. "The theme being taken," as Stevenson says, "each talker plays on himself as on an instrument, affirming and justifying himself." This counter-assertion of personality, to all appearances, is combat, but at bottom is amicable. An issue which is essentially general and impersonal is lost in the accidental conflicts of personalities, because the quality which plays the most important part is presence of mind, not correct reasoning. A conversationalist whose argument is wholly fallacious will often, by exercise of verbal adroitness, dispose of an objection which is really fatal. The full swing of the personalities of the speakers in a conversation is what makes the flint strike fire. It is only from heated minds that the true essence of conversation springs; and it is in talk which glances from one to another of a group, more than in dialog, that this personality is reflected. "It is curious to note," says an editorial in The Spectator, "how very much dialog there is in the world, and how little true conversation; how very little, that is, of the genuine attempt to compare the different bearing of the same subject on the minds of different people. It is the rarest thing in the world to come, even in the best authors, on a successful picture of the different views taken by different minds on the same subject, and the grounds of the difference."

Quite as noticeable an element in French conversation is the attitude of the conversers to their subject. They never try to settle matters as if their decisions were the last court of appeal, and as if they must make frantic effort to carry their side of the question to victory. They discuss for the pleasure of discussing; not for the pleasure of vanquishing, nor even of convincing. They discuss, merely; they do not debate, nor do they enter into controversy.

One of the greatest conversational charms of the French is their amenity in leading talk. This grows out of a universal eagerness in France to take pains in conversation and to learn its unwritten behests. The uninitiated suspect little of the insight and care which matures even the natural conversational ability of a Madame de Staël or a Francisque Sarcey. The initiated know that the same principles which make the French prodigious conversationalists make them capable and charming hosts and hostesses. The talker who can follow in conversation knows how to lead, and vice versa. Without a leader or "moderator," as the admirable Scotch word has it, conversation is apt to become either tepid or demoralized; and often, for the want of proper and sophisticated leading, discussion that would otherwise be brilliant deteriorates into pandemonium. As paradoxical as it sounds on first thought, it is nevertheless true that thoroughly good conversation is impossible where there is too much talk. Some sort of order must be imperceptibly if not unconsciously maintained, or the sentences clash in general conversation. Leading conversation is the adroit speech which checks the refractory conversationalist and changes imperceptibly the subject when it is sufficiently threshed or grows over-heated; it is guiding the talk without palpable break into fresh fields of thought; it is the tact with which, unperceived, the too slow narration of a guest is hurried by such courteous interpolations as "So you got to the inn, and what then?" or, "Did the marriage take place after all?"; it is the art with which the skilful host or hostess sees that all are drawn into the conversational group; it is the watchfulness that sends the shuttle of talk in all directions instead of allowing it to rebound between a few; it is the interest with which a host or hostess solicits the opinions of guests, and develops whatever their answers may vaguely suggest; it is the care with which an accidentally interrupted speech of a guest is resuscitated; it is the consideration which puts one who arrives late in touch with the subject