[Note 3: _Pyramids ... dule trees_. For pyramids, see our note 25 of
chapter II above... _Dule trees_. More properly spelled "dool." A dool
was a stake or post used to mark boundaries.]

[Note 4: _The trumpets might sound_. "For if the trumpet give an
uncertain sound, who shall prepare himself to the battle?" I _Cor_.
XIV, 8.]

[Note 5: _The blue-peter might-fly at the truck_. The blue-peter is a
term used in the British navy and widely elsewhere; it is a blue flag
with a white square employed often as a signal for sailing. The word
is corrupted from _Blue Repeater_, a signal flag. _Truck_ is a very
small platform at the top of a mast.]

[Note 6: _Balaclava_. A little port near Sebastopol, in the Crimea.
During the Crimean War, on the 25 October 1854, occurred the cavalry
charge of some six hundred Englishmen, celebrated by Tennyson's
universally known poem, _The Charge of the Light Brigade_. It has
recently been asserted that the number reported as actually killed in
this headlong charge referred to the horses, not to the men.]

[Note 7: _Curtius_. Referring to the story of the Roman youth, Metius
Curtius, who in 362 B.C. leaped into a chasm in the Forum, in order to
save his country. The chasm immediately closed over him, and Rome was
saved. Although the truth of the story has naturally failed to survive
the investigations of historical critics, its moral inspiration has
been effective in many historical instances.]

[Note 8: _Party for the Derby_. Derby Day, which is the occasion of
the most famous annual running race for horses in the world, takes
place in the south of England during the week preceding Whitsunday.
The race was founded by the Earl of Derby in 1780. It is now one of
the greatest holidays in England, and the whole city of London turns
out for the event. It is a great spectacle to see the crowd going from
London and returning. The most faithful description of the event, the
crowds, and the interest excited, may be found in George Moore's
novel, _Esther Waters_ (1894).]

[Note 9: _The deified Caligula_. Caius Caligula was Roman Emperor from
37 to 41 A. D. He was brought up among the soldiers, who gave him the
name Caligula, because he wore the soldier's leather shoe, or
half-boot, (Latin _caliga_). Caligula was deified, but that did not
prevent him from becoming a madman, which seems to be the best way to
account for his wanton cruelty and extraordinary caprices.]

[Note 10: _Baiae_ was a small town on the Campanian Coast, ten miles
from Naples. It was a favorite summer resort of the Roman
aristocracy.]

[Note 11: The _Praetorian Guard_ was the body-guard of the Roman
emperors. The incident Stevenson speaks of may be found in Tacitus.]

[Note 12: _Job_ ... _Walt Whitman_. The book of _Job_ is usually
regarded as the most poetical work in the Bible, even exceeding
_Psalms_ and _Isaiah_ in its splendid imaginative language and
extraordinary figures of speech. For a literary study of it, the
student is recommended to Professor Moulton's edition. Omar Khayyam
was a Persian poet of mediaeval times, who became known to English
readers through the beautiful paraphrase of some of his stanzas by
Edward Fitzgerald, in 1859. If any one will take the trouble to
compare a literal prose rendering of Omar (as in N.H. Dole's variorum
edition) with the version by Fitzgerald, he will speedily see that the
power and beauty of the poem is due far more to the skill of "Old
Fitz" than to the original. Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) was perhaps the
foremost writer of English prose in the nineteenth century. Although a
consummate literary artist, he was even more influential as a moral
tonic. His philosophy and that of Omar represent as wide a contrast as
could easily be found. Walt Whitman, the strange American poet
(1819-1892), whose famous _Leaves_ _of Grass_ (1855) excited an uproar
in America, and gave the author a much more serious reputation in
Europe. Stevenson's interest in him was genuine, but not partisan, and
his essay, _The Gospel According to Walt Whitman (The New Quarterly
Magazine_, Oct. 1878), is perhaps the most judicious appreciation in
the English language of this singular poet. Job, Omar Khayyam, Carlyle
and Whitman, taken together, certainly give a curious collection of
what the Germans call _Weltanschauungen_.]

[Note 13: _A vapour, or a show, or made out of the same stuff with
dreams_. For constant comparisons of life with a vapour or a show, see
Quarles's _Emblems_ (1635), though these conventional figures may be
found thousands of times in general literature. The latter part of the
sentence refers to the _Tempest_, Act IV, Scene I.

              "We are such stuff
  As dreams are made on, and our little life
  Is rounded with a sleep."]

[Note 14: _Permanent Possibility of Sensation_. "Matter then, may be
defined, a Permanent Possibility of Sensation."--John Stuart Mill,
_Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy_, Vol. I. Chap. XI.]

[Note 15: _Like the Commander's Statue_. In the familiar story of Don
Juan, where the audacious rake accepts the Commander's invitation to
supper. For treatments of this theme, see MoliГЁre's play _Don Juan_,
or Mozart's opera _Don Giovanni_; see also Bernard Shaw's paradoxical
play, _Man and Superman_.... _We have something else in hand, thank
God, and let him knock_. It is possible that Stevenson's words here
are an unconscious reminiscence of Colley Cibber's letter to the
novelist Richardson. This unabashed old profligate celebrated the
Christmas Day of his eightieth year by writing to the apostle of
domestic virtue in the following strain: "Though Death has been
cooling his heels at my door these three weeks, I have not had time to
see him. The daily conversation of my friends has kept me so agreeably
alive, that I have not passed my time better a great while. If you
have a mind to make one of us, I will order Death to come another
day."]

[Note 16: _All the world over, and every hour_. He might truthfully
have said, "every second."]

[Note 17: _A mere bag's end, as the French say. A cul de sac._]

[Note 18: _Our respected lexicographer ... Highland tour ... triple
brass ... twenty-seven individual cups of tea._ Dr. Samuel Johnson's
Dictionary appeared in 1755. For his horror of death, his fondness for
tea, and his Highland tour with Boswell, see the latter's _Life of
Johnson_; consult the late Dr. Hill's admirable index in his edition
of the _Life_.]

[Note 19: _Mim-mouthed friends_. See J. Wright's _English Dialect
Dictionary_. "Mim-mouthed" means "affectedly prim or proper in
speech."]

[Note 20: "_A peerage or Westminster Abbey!_" Horatio Nelson
(1758-1805), the most famous admiral in England's naval history, who
won the great battle of Trafalgar and lost his life in the moment of
victory. Nelson was as ambitious as he was brave, and his cry that
Stevenson quotes was characteristic.]

[Note 21: _Tread down the nettle danger_. Hotspur's words in _King
Henry IV_, Part I, Act II, Sc. 3. "Out of this nettle, danger, we
pluck this flower, safety."]

[Note 22: _After Thackeray and Dickens had each fallen in mid-course?_
Thackeray and Dickens, dying in 1863 and in 1870 respectively, left
unfinished _Denis Duval_ and _The Mystery of Edwin Drood_. Stevenson
himself left unfinished what would in all probability have been his
unquestioned masterpiece, _Weir of Hermiston_.]

[Note 23: _All who have meant good work with their whole hearts, have
done good work_. See Browning's inspiring poem, _Rabbi Ben Ezra_,
XXIII, XXIV, XXV:--

    "Not on the vulgar mass
    Called "work," must sentence pass,
  Things done, which took the eye and had the price;
    O'er which, from level stand,
    The low world laid its hand,
  Found straightway to its mind, could value in a trice:

    But all, the world's coarse thumb
    And finger failed to plumb,
  So passed in making up the main account;
    All instincts immature,
    All purposes unsure,
  That weighed not as his work, yet swelled the man's amount:

    Thoughts hardly to be packed
    Into a narrow act,
  Fancies that broke through language and escaped;
    All I could never be,
    All, men ignored in me,
  This, I was worth to God, whose wheel the pitcher shaped."]

[Note 24: _Whom the Gods love die young._ "Quem di diligunt adolescens
moritur."--Plautus, _Bacchides_, Act IV, Sc. 7.]

[Note 25: _Trailing with him clouds of glory._ This passage, from
Wordsworth's _Ode on the Intimations of Immortality_ (1807), was a
favorite one with Stevenson, and he quotes it several times in various
essays.]


IV

TALK AND TALKERS

I

"Sir, we had a good talk."[1]--JOHNSON.

"As we must account[2] for every idle word, so we must for every idle
silence."--FRANKLIN.

There can be no fairer ambition than to excel in talk; to be affable,
gay, ready, clear and welcome; to have a fact, a thought, or an
illustration, pat to every subject; and not only to cheer the flight
of time among our intimates, but bear our part in that great
international congress, always sitting, where public wrongs are first
declared, public errors first corrected, and the course of public
opinion shaped, day by day, a little nearer to the right. No measure
comes before Parliament but it has been long ago prepared by the grand
jury of the talkers; no book is written that has not been largely
composed by their assistance. Literature in many of its branches is no
other than the shadow of good talk; but the imitation falls far short
of the original in life, freedom and effect. There are always two to a
talk, giving and taking, comparing experience and according
conclusions. Talk is fluid, tentative, continually "in further search
and progress;" while written words remain fixed, become idols even to
the writer, found wooden dogmatisms, and preserve flies of obvious
error in the amber[3] of the truth. Last and chief, while literature,
gagged with linsey-woolsey, can only deal with a fraction of the life
of man, talk goes fancy free[4] and may call a spade a spade.[5] It
cannot, even if it would, become merely aesthetic or merely classical
like literature. A jest intervenes, the solemn humbug is dissolved in
laughter, and speech runs forth out of the contemporary groove into
the open fields of nature, cheery and cheering, like schoolboys out of
school. And it is in talk alone that we can learn our period and
ourselves. In short, the first duty of a man is to speak; that is his
chief business in this world; and talk, which is the harmonious speech
of two or more, is by far the most accessible of pleasures. It costs
nothing in money; it is all profit; it completes our education, founds
and fosters our friendships, and can be enjoyed at any age and in
almost any state of health.

The spice of life is battle; the friendliest relations are still a
kind of contest; and if we would not forego all that is valuable in
our lot, we must continually face some other person, eye to eye, and
wrestle a fall whether in love or enmity. It is still by force of
body, or power of character or intellect; that we attain to worthy
pleasures. Men and women contend for each other in the lists of love,
like rival mesmerists; the active and adroit decide their challenges
in the sports of the body; and the sedentary sit down to chess or
conversation. All sluggish and pacific pleasures are, to the same
degree, solitary and selfish; and every durable bond between human
beings is founded in or heightened by some element of competition.
Now, the relation that has the least root in matter is undoubtedly
that airy one of friendship; and hence, I suppose, it is that good
talk most commonly arises among friends. Talk is, indeed, both the
scene and instrument of friendship. It is in talk alone that the
friends can measure strength, and enjoy that amicable
counter-assertion of personality which is the gauge of relations and
the sport of life.

A good talk is not to be had for the asking. Humours must first be
accorded in a kind of overture or prologue; hour, company and
circumstance be suited; and then, at a fit juncture, the subject, the
quarry of two heated minds, spring up like a deer out of the wood. Not
that the talker has any of the hunter's pride, though he has all and
more than all his ardour. The genuine artist follows the stream of
conversation as an angler follows the windings of a brook, not
dallying where he fails to "kill." He trusts implicitly to hazard; and
he is rewarded by continual variety, continual pleasure, and those
changing prospects of the truth that are the best of education. There
is nothing in a subject, so called, that we should regard it as an
idol, or follow it beyond the promptings of desire. Indeed, there are
few subjects; and so far as they are truly talkable, more than the
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. Wherever talk may range, it still runs half the time
on these eternal lines. The theme being set, each plays on himself as
on an instrument; asserts and justifies himself; ransacks his brain
for instances and opinions, and brings them forth new-minted, to his
own surprise and the admiration of his adversary. All natural talk is
a festival of ostentation; and by the laws of the game each accepts
and fans the vanity of the other. It is from that reason that we
venture to lay ourselves so open, that we dare to be so warmly
eloquent, and that we swell in each other's eyes to such a vast
proportion. For talkers, once launched, begin to overflow the limits
of their ordinary selves, tower up to the height of their secret
pretensions, and give themselves out for the heroes, brave, pious,
musical and wise, that in their most shining moments they aspire to
be. So they weave for themselves with words and for a while inhabit a
palace of delights, temple at once and theatre, where they fill the
round of the world's dignities, and feast with the gods, exulting in
Kudos. And when the talk is over, each goes his way, still flushed
with vanity and admiration, still trailing clouds of glory;[6] each
declines from the height of his ideal orgie, not in a moment, but by
slow declension. I remember, in the _entr'acte_ of an afternoon
performance, coming forth into the sunshine, in a beautiful green,
gardened corner of a romantic city; and as I sat and smoked, the music
moving in my blood, I seemed to sit there and evaporate _The Flying
Dutchman_[7] (for it was that I had been hearing) with a wonderful
sense of life, warmth, well-being and pride; and the noises of the
city, voices, bells and marching feet, fell together in my ears like a
symphonious orchestra. In the same way, the excitement of a good talk
lives for a long while after in the blood, the heart still hot within
you, the brain still simmering, and the physical earth swimming around
you with the colours of the sunset.

Natural talk, like ploughing, should turn up a large surface of life,
rather than dig mines into geological strata. Masses of experience,
anecdote, incident, cross-lights, quotation, historical instances, the
whole flotsam and jetsam of two minds forced in and in upon the matter
in hand from every point of the compass, and from every degree of
mental elevation and abasement--these are the material with which talk
is fortified, the food on which the talkers thrive. Such argument as
is proper to the exercise should still be brief and seizing. Talk
should proceed by instances; by the apposite, not the expository. It
should keep close along the lines of humanity, near the bosoms and
businesses of men, at the level where history, fiction and experience
intersect and illuminate each other. I am I, and You are You, with all
my heart; but conceive how these lean propositions change and brighten
when, instead of words, the actual you and I sit cheek by jowl, the
spirit housed in the live body, and the very clothes uttering voices
to corroborate the story in the face. Not less surprising is the
change when we leave off to speak of generalities--the bad, the good,
the miser, and all the characters of Theophrastus[8]--and call up
other men, by anecdote or instance, in their very trick and feature;
or trading on a common knowledge, toss each other famous names, still
glowing with the hues of life. Communication is no longer by words,
but by the instancing of whole biographies, epics, systems of
philosophy, and epochs of history, in bulk. That which is understood
excels that which is spoken in quantity and quality alike; ideas thus
figured and personified, change hands, as we may say, like coin; and
the speakers imply without effort the most obscure and intricate
thoughts. Strangers who have a large common ground of reading will,
for this reason, come the sooner to the grapple of genuine converse.
If they know Othello and Napoleon, Consuelo and Clarissa Harlowe,
Vautrin and Steenie Steenson,[9] they can leave generalities and begin
at once to speak by figures.

Conduct and art are the two subjects that arise most frequently and
that embrace the widest range of facts. A few pleasures bear
discussion for their own sake, but only those which are most social or
most radically human; and even these can only be discussed among their
devotees. A technicality is always welcome to the expert, whether in
athletics, art or law; I have heard the best kind of talk on
technicalities from such rare and happy persons as both know and love
their business. No human being[10] ever spoke of scenery for above two
minutes at a time, which makes me suspect we hear too much of it in
literature. The weather is regarded as the very nadir and scoff of
conversational topics. And yet the weather, the dramatic element in
scenery, is far more tractable in language, and far more human both in
import and suggestion than the stable features of the landscape.
Sailors and shepherds, and the people generally of coast and mountain,
talk well of it; and it is often excitingly presented in literature.
But the tendency of all living talk draws it back and back into the
common focus of humanity. Talk is a 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. You can keep no men long, nor Scotchmen[11] at all, off
moral or theological discussion. These are to all the world what law
is to lawyers; they are everybody's technicalities; the medium through
which all consider life, and the dialect in which they express their
judgments. I knew three young men who walked together daily for some
two months in a solemn and beautiful forest and in cloudless summer
weather; daily they talked with unabated zest, and yet scarce wandered
that whole time beyond two subjects--theology and love. And perhaps
neither a court of love[12] nor an assembly of divines would have
granted their premises or welcomed their conclusions.

Conclusions, indeed, are not often reached by talk any more than by
private thinking. That is not the profit. The profit is in the
exercise, and above all in the experience; for when we reason at large
on any subject, we review our state and history in life. From time to
time, however, and specially, I think, in talking art, talk becomes
effective, conquering like war, widening the boundaries of knowledge
like an exploration. A point arises; the question takes a
problematical, a baffling, yet a likely air; the talkers begin to feel
lively presentiments of some conclusion near at hand; towards this
they strive with emulous ardour, each by his own path, and struggling
for first utterance; and then one leaps upon the summit of that matter
with a shout, and almost at the same moment the other is beside him;
and behold they are agreed. Like enough, the progress is illusory, a
mere cat's cradle having been wound and unwound out of words. But the
sense of joint discovery is none the less giddy and inspiring. And in
the life of the talker such triumphs, though imaginary, are neither
few nor far apart; they are attained with speed and pleasure, in the
hour of mirth; and by the nature of the process, they are always
worthily shared.

There is a certain attitude, combative at once and deferential, eager
to fight yet most averse to quarrel, which marks out at once the
talkable man. It is not eloquence, not fairness, not obstinacy, but a
certain proportion of all of these that I love to encounter in my
amicable adversaries. They must not be pontiffs holding doctrine, but
huntsmen questing after elements of truth. Neither must they be boys
to be instructed, but fellow-teachers with whom I may, wrangle and
agree on equal terms. We must reach some solution, some shadow of
consent; for without that, eager talk becomes a torture. But we do not
wish to reach it cheaply, or quickly, or without the tussle and effort
wherein pleasure lies.

The very best talker, with me, is one whom I shall call Spring-Heel'd
Jack.[13] I say so, because I never knew anyone who mingled so largely
the possible ingredients of converse. In the Spanish proverb, the
fourth man necessary to compound a salad, is a madman to mix it: Jack
is that madman. I know not what is more remarkable; the insane
lucidity of his conclusions, the humorous eloquence of his language,
or his power of method, bringing the whole of life into the focus of
the subject treated, mixing the conversational salad like a drunken
god. He doubles like the serpent, changes and flashes like the shaken
kaleidoscope, transmigrates bodily into the views of others, and so,
in the twinkling of an eye and with a heady rapture, turns questions
inside out and flings them empty before you on the ground, like a
triumphant conjuror. It is my common practice when a piece of conduct
puzzles me, to attack it in the presence of Jack with such grossness,
such partiality and such wearing iteration, as at length shall spur
him up in its defence. In a moment he transmigrates, dons the required
character, and with moonstruck philosophy justifies the act in
question. I can fancy nothing to compare with the _vim_ of these
impersonations, the strange scale of language, flying from Shakespeare
to Kant, and from Kant to Major Dyngwell[14]--

  "As fast as a musician scatters sounds
  Out of an instrument--"

the sudden, sweeping generalisations, the absurd irrelevant
particularities, the wit, wisdom, folly, humour, eloquence and bathos,
each startling in its kind, and yet all luminous in the admired
disorder of their combination. A talker of a different calibre, though
belonging to the same school, is Burly.[15] Burly is a man of great
presence; he commands a larger atmosphere, gives the impression of a
grosser mass of character than most men. It has been said of him that
his presence could be felt in a room you entered blindfold; and the
same, I think, has been said of other powerful constitutions condemned
to much physical inaction. There is something boisterous and piratic
in Burly's manner of talk which suits well enough with this
impression. He will roar you down, he will bury his face in his hands,
he will undergo passions of revolt and agony; and meanwhile his
attitude of mind is really both conciliatory and receptive; and after
Pistol has been out-Pistol'd,[16] and the welkin rung for hours, you
begin to perceive a certain subsidence in these spring torrents,
points of agreement issue, and you end arm-in-arm, and in a glow of
mutual admiration. The outcry only serves to make your final union the
more unexpected and precious. Throughout there has been perfect
sincerity, perfect intelligence, a desire to hear although not always
to listen, and an unaffected eagerness to meet concessions. You have,
with Burly, none of the dangers that attend debate with Spring-Heel'd
Jack; who may at any moment turn his powers of transmigration on
yourself, create for you a view you never held, and then furiously
fall on you for holding it. These, at least, are my two favourites,
and both are loud, copious intolerant talkers. This argues that I
myself am in the same category; for if we love talking at all, we love
a bright, fierce adversary, who will hold his ground, foot by foot, in
much our own manner, sell his attention dearly, and give us our full
measure of the dust and exertion of battle. Both these men can be beat
from a position, but it takes six hours to do it; a high and hard
adventure, worth attempting. With both you can pass days in an
enchanted country of the mind, with people, scenery and manners of its
own; live a life apart, more arduous, active and glowing than any real
existence; and come forth again when the talk is over, as out of a
theatre or a dream, to find the east wind still blowing and the
chimney-pots of the old battered city still around you. Jack has the
far finer mind, Burly the far more honest; Jack gives us the animated
poetry, Burly the romantic prose, of similar themes; the one glances
high like a meteor and makes a light in darkness; the other, with many
changing hues of fire, burns at the sea-level, like a conflagration;
but both have the same humour and artistic interests, the same
unquenched ardour in pursuit, the same gusts of talk and thunderclaps
of contradiction.

Cockshot[17] is a different article, but vastly entertaining, and has
been meat and drink to me for many a long evening. His manner is dry,
brisk and pertinacious, and the choice of words not much. The point
about him is his extraordinary readiness and spirit. You can propound
nothing but he has either a theory about it ready-made, or will have
one instantly on the stocks, and proceed to lay its timbers and launch
it in your presence. "Let me see," he will say. "Give me a moment. I
_should_ have some theory for that." A blither spectacle than the
vigour with which he sets about the task, it were hard to fancy. He is
possessed by a demoniac energy, welding the elements for his life, and
bending ideas, as an athlete bends a horseshoe, with a visible and
lively effort. He has, in theorising, a compass, an art; what I would
call the synthetic gusto; something of a Herbert Spencer,[18] who
should see the fun of the thing. You are not bound, and no more is he,
to place your faith in these brand-new opinions. But some of them are
right enough, durable even for life; and the poorest serve for a
cock-shy--as when idle people, after picnics, float a bottle on a pond
and have an hour's diversion ere it sinks. Whichever they are, serious
opinions or humours of the moment, he still defends his ventures with
indefatigable wit and spirit, hitting savagely himself, but taking
punishment like a man. He knows and never forgets that people talk,
first of all, for the sake of talking; conducts himself in the ring,
to use the old slang, like a thorough "glutton,"[19] and honestly
enjoys a telling facer from his adversary. Cockshot is bottled
effervescency, the sworn foe of sleep. Three-in-the-morning Cockshot,
says a victim. His talk is like the driest of all imaginable dry
champagnes. Sleight of hand and inimitable quickness are the qualities
by which he lives. Athelred,[20] on the other hand, presents you with
the spectacle of a sincere and somewhat slow nature thinking aloud. He
is the most unready man I ever knew to shine in conversation. You may
see him sometimes wrestle with a refractory jest for a minute or two
together, and perhaps fail to throw it in the end. And there is
something singularly engaging, often instructive, in the simplicity
with which he thus exposes the process as well as the result, the
works as well as the dial of the clock. Withal he has his hours of
inspiration. Apt words come to him as if by accident, and, coming from
deeper down, they smack the more personally, they have the more of
fine old crusted humanity, rich in sediment and humour. There are
sayings of his in which he has stamped himself into the very grain of
the language; you would think he must have worn the words next his
skin and slept with them. Yet it is not as a sayer of particular good
things that Athelred is most to be regarded, rather as the stalwart
woodman of thought. I have pulled on a light cord often enough, while
he has been wielding the broad-axe; and between us, on this unequal
division, many a specious fallacy has fallen. I have known him to
battle the same question night after night for years, keeping it in
the reign of talk, constantly applying it and re-applying it to life
with humorous or grave intention, and all the while, never hurrying,
nor flagging, nor taking an unfair advantage of the facts. Jack at a
given moment, when arising, as it were, from the tripod, can be more
radiantly just to those from whom he differs; but then the tenor of
his thoughts is even calumnious; while Athelred, slower to forge
excuses, is yet slower to condemn, and sits over the welter of the
world, vacillating but still judicial, and still faithfully contending
with his doubts.

Both the last talkers deal much in points of conduct and religion
studied in the "dry light"[21] of prose. Indirectly and as if against
his will the same elements from time to time appear in the troubled
and poetic talk of Opalstein.[22] His various and exotic knowledge,
complete although unready sympathies, and fine, full, discriminative
flow of language, fit him out to be the best of talkers; so perhaps he
is with some, not _quite_ with me--_proxime accessit_,[23] I should
say. He sings the praises of the earth and the arts, flowers and
jewels, wine and music, in a moonlight, serenading manner, as to the
light guitar; even wisdom comes from his tongue like singing; no one
is, indeed, more tuneful in the upper notes. But even while he sings
the song of the Sirens, he still hearkens to the barking of the
Sphinx. Jarring Byronic notes interrupt the flow of his Horatian
humours. His mirth has something of the tragedy of the world for its
perpetual background; and he feasts like Don Giovanni to a double
orchestra, one lightly sounding for the dance, one pealing
Beethoven[24] in the distance. He is not truly reconciled either with
life or with himself; and this instant war in his members sometimes
divides the man's attention. He does not always, perhaps not often,
frankly surrender himself in conversation. He brings into the talk
other thoughts than those which he expresses; you are conscious that
he keeps an eye on something else, that he does not shake off the
world, nor quite forget himself. Hence arise occasional
disappointments; even an occasional unfairness for his companions, who
find themselves one day giving too much, and the next, when they are
wary out of season, giving perhaps too little. Purcel[25] is in
another class from any I have mentioned. He is no debater, but appears
in conversation, as occasion rises, in two distinct characters, one of
which I admire and fear, and the other love. In the first, he is
radiantly civil and rather silent, sits on a high, courtly hilltop,
and from that vantage-ground drops you his remarks like favours. He
seems not to share in our sublunary contentions; he wears no sign of
interest; when on a sudden there falls in a crystal of wit, so
polished that the dull do not perceive it, but so right that the
sensitive are silenced. True talk should have more body and blood,
should be louder, vainer and more declaratory of the man; the true
talker should not hold so steady an advantage over whom he speaks
with; and that is one reason out of a score why I prefer my Purcel in
his second character, when he unbends into a strain of graceful
gossip, singing like the fireside kettle. In these moods he has an
elegant homeliness that rings of the true Queen Anne. I know another
person[26] who attains, in his moments, to the insolence of a
Restoration comedy, speaking, I declare, as Congreve[27] wrote; but
that is a sport of nature, and scarce falls under the rubric, for
there is none, alas! to give him answer.

One last remark occurs: It is the mark of genuine conversation that
the sayings can scarce be quoted with their full effect beyond the
circle of common friends. To have their proper weight they should
appear in a biography, and with the portrait of the speaker. Good talk
is dramatic; it is like an impromptu piece of acting where each should
represent himself to the greatest advantage; and that is the best kind
of talk where each speaker is most fully and candidly himself, and
where, if you were to shift the speeches round from one to another,
there would be the greatest loss in significance and perspicuity. It
is for this reason that talk depends so wholly on our company. We
should like to introduce Falstaff and Mercutio, or Falstaff and Sir
Toby; but Falstaff in talk with Cordelia seems even painful. Most of
us, by the Protean[28] quality of man, can talk to some degree with
all; but the true talk, that strikes out all the slumbering best of
us, comes only with the peculiar brethren of our spirits, is founded
as deep as love in the constitution of our being, and is a thing to
relish with all our energy, while, yet we have it, and to be grateful
for forever.


II[29]

In the last paper there was perhaps too much about mere debate; and
there was nothing said at all about that kind of talk which is merely
luminous and restful, a higher power of silence, the quiet of the
evening shared by ruminating friends. There is something, aside from
personal preference, to be alleged in support of this omission. Those
who are no chimney-cornerers, who rejoice in the social thunderstorm,
have a ground in reason for their choice. They get little rest indeed;
but restfulness is a quality for cattle; the virtues are all active,
life is alert, and it is in repose that men prepare themselves for
evil. On the other hand, they are bruised into a knowledge of
themselves and others; they have in a high degree the fencer's
pleasure in dexterity displayed and proved; what they get they get
upon life's terms, paying for it as they go; and once the talk is
launched, they are assured of honest dealing from an adversary eager
like themselves. The aboriginal man within us, the cave-dweller, still
lusty as when he fought tooth and nail for roots and berries, scents
this kind of equal battle from afar; it is like his old primaeval days
upon the crags, a return to the sincerity of savage life from the
comfortable fictions of the civilised. And if it be delightful to the
Old Man, it is none the less profitable to his younger brother, the
conscientious gentleman. I feel never quite sure of your urbane and
smiling coteries; I fear they indulge a man's vanities in silence,
suffer him to encroach, encourage him on to be an ass, and send him
forth again, not merely contemned for the moment, but radically more
contemptible than when he entered. But if I have a flushed, blustering
fellow for my opposite, bent on carrying a point, my vanity is sure to
have its ears rubbed, once at least, in the course of the debate. He
will not spare me when we differ; he will not fear to demonstrate my
folly to my face.

For many natures there is not much charm in the still, chambered
society, the circle of bland countenances, the digestive silence, the
admired remark, the flutter of affectionate approval. They demand more
atmosphere and exercise; "a gale upon their spirits," as our pious
ancestors would phrase it; to have their wits well breathed in an
uproarious Valhalla.[30] And I suspect that the choice, given their
character and faults, is one to be defended. The purely wise are
silenced by facts; they talk in a clear atmosphere, problems lying
around them like a view in nature; if they can be shown to be somewhat
in the wrong, they digest the reproof like a thrashing, and make
better intellectual blood. They stand corrected by a whisper; a word
or a glance reminds them of the great eternal law. But it is not so
with all. Others in conversation seek rather contact with their
fellow-men than increase of knowledge or clarity of thought. The
drama, not the philosophy, of life is the sphere of their intellectual
activity. Even when they pursue truth, they desire as much as possible
of what we may call human scenery along the road they follow. They
dwell in the heart of life; the blood sounding in their ears, their
eyes laying hold of what delights them with a brutal avidity that
makes them blind to all besides, their interest riveted on people,
living, loving, talking, tangible people. To a man of this
description, the sphere of argument seems very pale and ghostly. By a
strong expression, a perturbed countenance, floods of tears, an insult
which his conscience obliges him to swallow, he is brought round to
knowledge which no syllogism would have conveyed to him. His own
experience is so vivid, he is so superlatively conscious of himself,
that if, day after day, he is allowed to hector and hear nothing but
approving echoes, he will lose his hold on the soberness of things and
take himself in earnest for a god. Talk might be to such an one the
very way of moral ruin; the school where he might learn to be at once
intolerable and ridiculous.

This character is perhaps commoner than philosophers suppose. And for
persons of that stamp to learn much by conversation, they must speak
with their superiors, not in intellect, for that is a superiority that
must be proved, but in station. If they cannot find a friend to bully
them for their good, they must find either an old man, a woman, or
some one so far below them in the artificial order of society, that
courtesy may be particularly exercised.

The best teachers are the aged. To the old our mouths are always
partly closed; we must swallow our obvious retorts and listen. They
sit above our heads, on life's raised dais, and appeal at once to our
respect and pity. A flavour of the old school, a touch of something
different in their manner--which is freer and rounder, if they come of
what is called a good family, and often more timid and precise if they
are of the middle class--serves, in these days, to accentuate the
difference of age and add a distinction to gray hairs. But their
superiority is founded more deeply than by outward marks or gestures.
They are before us in the march of man; they have more or less solved
the irking problem; they have battled through the equinox of life; in
good and evil they have held their course; and now, without open
shame, they near the crown and harbour. It may be we have been struck
with one of fortune's darts; we can scarce be civil, so cruelly is our
spirit tossed. Yet long before we were so much as thought upon, the
like calamity befell the old man or woman that now, with pleasant
humour, rallies us upon our inattention, sitting composed in the holy
evening of man's life, in the clear shining after rain. We grow
ashamed of our distresses new and hot and coarse, like villainous
roadside brandy; we see life in aerial perspective, under the heavens
of faith; and out of the worst, in the mere presence of contented
elders, look forward and take patience. Fear shrinks before them "like
a thing reproved," not the flitting and ineffectual fear of death, but
the instant, dwelling terror of the responsibilities and revenges of
life. Their speech, indeed, is timid; they report lions in the path;
they counsel a meticulous[31] footing; but their serene, marred faces
are more eloquent and tell another story. Where they have gone, we
will go also, not very greatly fearing; what they have endured
unbroken, we also, God helping us, will make a shift to bear.

Not only is the presence of the aged in itself remedial, but their
minds are stored with antidotes, wisdom's simples, plain
considerations overlooked by youth. They have matter to communicate,
be they never so stupid. Their talk is not merely literature, it is
great literature; classic in virtue of the speaker's detachment,
studded, like a book of travel, with things we should not otherwise
have learnt. In virtue, I have said, of the speaker's detachment--and
this is why, of two old men, the one who is not your father speaks to
you with the more sensible authority; for in the paternal relation the
oldest have lively interests and remain still young. Thus I have known
two young men great friends; each swore by the other's father; the
father of each swore by the other lad; and yet each pair of parent and
child were perpetually by the ears. This is typical: it reads like the
germ of some kindly[32] comedy.

The old appear in conversation in two characters: the critically
silent and the garrulous anecdotic. The last is perhaps what we look
for; it is perhaps the more instructive. An old gentleman, well on in
years, sits handsomely and naturally in the bow-window of his age,
scanning experience with reverted eye; and chirping and smiling,
communicates the accidents and reads the lesson of his long career.
Opinions are strengthened, indeed, but they are also weeded out in the
course of years. What remains steadily present to the eye of the
retired veteran in his hermitage, what still ministers to his content,
what still quickens his old honest heart--these are "the real
long-lived things"[33] that Whitman tells us to prefer. Where youth
agrees with age, not where they differ, wisdom lies; and it is when
the young disciple finds his heart to beat in tune with his
grey-bearded teacher's that a lesson may be learned. I have known one
old gentleman, whom I may name, for he is now gathered to his
stock--Robert Hunter, Sheriff of Dumbarton,[34] and author of an
excellent law-book still re-edited and republished. Whether he was
originally big or little is more than I can guess. When I knew him he
was all fallen away and fallen in; crooked and shrunken; buckled into
a stiff waistcoat for support; troubled by ailments, which kept him
hobbling in and out of the room; one foot gouty; a wig for decency,
not for deception, on his head; close shaved, except under his
chin--and for that he never failed to apologise, for it went sore
against the traditions of his life. You can imagine how he would fare
in a novel by Miss Mather;[35] yet this rag of a Chelsea[36] veteran
lived to his last year in the plenitude of all that is best in man,
brimming with human kindness, and staunch as a Roman soldier under his
manifold infirmities. You could not say that he had lost his memory,
for he would repeat Shakespeare and Webster and Jeremy Taylor and
Burke[37] by the page together; but the parchment was filled up, there
was no room for fresh inscriptions, and he was capable of repeating
the same anecdote on many successive visits. His voice survived in its
full power, and he took a pride in using it. On his last voyage as
Commissioner of Lighthouses, he hailed a ship at sea and made himself
clearly audible without a speaking trumpet, ruffing the while with a
proper vanity in his achievement. He had a habit of eking out his
words with interrogative hems, which was puzzling and a little
wearisome, suited ill with his appearance, and seemed a survival from
some former stage of bodily portliness. Of yore, when he was a great
pedestrian and no enemy to good claret, he may have pointed with these
minute guns his allocutions to the bench. His humour was perfectly
equable, set beyond the reach of fate; gout, rheumatism, stone and
gravel might have combined their forces against that frail tabernacle,
but when I came round on Sunday evening, he would lay aside Jeremy
Taylor's _Life of Christ_ and greet me with the same open brow, the
same kind formality of manner. His opinions and sympathies dated the
man almost to a decade. He had begun life, under his mother's
influence, as an admirer of Junius,[38] but on maturer knowledge had
transferred his admiration to Burke. He cautioned me, with entire
gravity, to be punctilious in writing English; never to forget that I
was a Scotchman, that English was a foreign tongue, and that if I
attempted the colloquial, I should certainly be shamed: the remark was
apposite, I suppose, in the days of David Hume.[39] Scott was too new
for him; he had known the author--known him, too, for a Tory; and to
the genuine classic a contemporary is always something of a trouble.
He had the old, serious love of the play; had even, as he was proud to
tell, played a certain part in the history of Shakespearian revivals,
for he had successfully pressed on Murray, of the old Edinburgh
Theatre, the idea of producing Shakespeare's fairy pieces with great
scenic display.[40] A moderate in religion, he was much struck in the
last years of his life by a conversation with two young lads,
revivalists. "H'm," he would say--"new to me. I have had--h'm--no such
experience." It struck him, not with pain, rather with a solemn
philosophic interest, that he, a Christian as he hoped, and a
Christian of so old a standing, should hear these young fellows
talking of his own subject, his own weapons that he had fought the
battle of life with,--"and--h'm--not understand." In this wise and
grateful attitude he did justice to himself and others, reposed
unshaken in his old beliefs, and recognised their limits without anger
or alarm. His last recorded remark, on the last night of his life, was
after he had been arguing against Calvinism[41] with his minister and
was interrupted by an intolerable pang. "After all," he said, "of all
the 'isms, I know none so bad as rheumatism." My own last sight of him
was some time before, when we dined together at an inn; he had been on
circuit, for he stuck to his duties like a chief part of his
existence; and I remember it as the only occasion on which he ever
soiled his lips with slang--a thing he loathed. We were both Roberts;
and as we took our places at table, he addressed me with a twinkle:
"We are just what you would call two bob."[42] He offered me port, I
remember, as the proper milk of youth; spoke of "twenty-shilling
notes"; and throughout the meal was full of old-world pleasantry and
quaintness, like an ancient boy on a holiday. But what I recall
chiefly was his confession that he had never read _Othello_ to an
end.[43] Shakespeare was his continual study. He loved nothing better
than to display his knowledge and memory by adducing parallel passages
from Shakespeare, passages where the same word was employed, or the
same idea differently treated. But _Othello_ had beaten him. "That
noble gentleman and that noble lady--h'm--too painful for me." The
same night the boardings were covered with posters, "Burlesque of
_Othello_," and the contrast blazed up in my mind like a bonfire. An
unforgettable look it gave me into that kind man's soul. His
acquaintance was indeed a liberal and pious education.[44] All the
humanities were taught in that bare dining-room beside his gouty
footstool. He was a piece of good advice; he was himself the instance
that pointed and adorned his various talk. Nor could a young man have
found elsewhere a place so set apart from envy, fear, discontent, or
any of the passions that debase; a life so honest and composed; a soul
like an ancient violin, so subdued to harmony, responding to a touch
in music--as in that dining-room, with Mr. Hunter chatting at the
eleventh hour, under the shadow of eternity, fearless and gentle.

The second class of old people are not anecdotic; they are rather
hearers than talkers, listening to the young with an amused and
critical attention. To have this sort of intercourse to perfection, I
think we must go to old ladies. Women are better hearers than men, to
begin with; they learn, I fear in anguish, to bear with the tedious
and infantile vanity of the other sex; and we will take more from a
woman than even from the oldest man in the way of biting comment.
Biting comment is the chief part, whether for profit or amusement, in
this business. The old lady that I have in my eye is a very caustic
speaker, her tongue, after years of practice, in absolute command,
whether for silence or attack. If she chance to dislike you, you will
be tempted to curse the malignity of age. But if you chance to please
even slightly, you will be listened to with a particular laughing
grace of sympathy, and from time to time chastised, as if in play,
with a parasol as heavy as a pole-axe. It requires a singular art, as
well as the vantage-ground of age, to deal these stunning corrections
among the coxcombs of the young. The pill is disguised in sugar of
wit; it is administered as a compliment--if you had not pleased, you
would not have been censured; it is a personal affair--a hyphen, _a
trait d'union,_[45] between you and your censor; age's philandering,
for her pleasure and your good. Incontestably the young man feels very
much of a fool; but he must be a perfect Malvolio,[46] sick with
self-love, if he cannot take an open buffet and still smile. The
correction of silence is what kills; when you know you have
transgressed, and your friend says nothing and avoids your eye. If a
man were made of gutta-percha, his heart would quail at such a moment.
But when the word is out, the worst is over; and a fellow with any
good-humour at all may pass through a perfect hail of witty criticism,
every bare place on his soul hit to the quick with a shrewd missile,
and reappear, as if after a dive, tingling with a fine moral reaction,
and ready, with a shrinking readiness, one-third loath, for a
repetition of the discipline.

There are few women, not well sunned and ripened, and perhaps
toughened, who can thus stand apart from a man and say the true thing
with a kind of genial cruelty. Still there are some--and I doubt if
there be any man who can return the compliment.

The class of men represented by Vernon Whitford in _The Egoist_,[47]
says, indeed, the true thing, but he says it stockishly. Vernon is a
noble fellow, and makes, by the way, a noble and instructive contrast
to Daniel Deronda; his conduct is the conduct of a man of honour; but
we agree with him, against our consciences, when he remorsefully
considers "its astonishing dryness." He is the best of men, but the
best of women manage to combine all that and something more. Their
very faults assist them; they are helped even by the falseness of
their position in life. They can retire into the fortified camp of the
proprieties. They can touch a subject and suppress it. The most adroit
employ a somewhat elaborate reserve as a means to be frank, much as
they wear gloves when they shake hands. But a man has the full
responsibility of his freedom, cannot evade a question, can scarce be
silent without rudeness, must answer for his words upon the moment,
and is not seldom left face to face with a damning choice, between the
more or less dishonourable wriggling of Deronda and the downright
woodenness of Vernon Whitford.