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 elective, 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 inspiriting.  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.  I say so, because I never knew any one 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 which 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 -

"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.  Burly is a 
man of a 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, 
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 (5) 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 horse-shoe, 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, 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," 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, 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 he 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" 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.  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, 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 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 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 who attains, in his moments, to the insolence of a 
Restoration comedy, speaking, I declare, as Congreve 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 
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.





CHAPTER XI. TALK AND TALKERS (6)


II


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.  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 he 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 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 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" 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 gray-bearded teacher's that a lesson may be learned.  
I have known one old gentleman, whom I may name, for he in now 
gathered to his stock - Robert Hunter, Sheriff of Dumbarton, 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; yet 
this rag of a Chelsea 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 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, ruffling 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, 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.  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.  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 graceful 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 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."  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.  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 hoardings 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.  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, 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, 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 man represented by Vernon Whitford in THE EGOIST 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.

But the superiority of women is perpetually menaced; they do not 
sit throned on infirmities like the old; they are suitors as well 
as sovereigns; their vanity is engaged, their affections are too 
apt to follow; and hence much of the talk between the sexes 
degenerates into something unworthy of the name.  The desire to 
please, to shine with a certain softness of lustre and to draw a 
fascinating picture of oneself, banishes from conversation all that 
is sterling and most of what is humorous.  As soon as a strong 
current of mutual admiration begins to flow, the human interest 
triumphs entirely over the intellectual, and the commerce of words, 
consciously or not, becomes secondary to the commencing of eyes.  
But even where this ridiculous danger is avoided, and a man and 
woman converse equally and honestly, something in their nature or 
their education falsifies the strain.  An instinct prompts them to 
agree; and where that is impossible, to agree to differ.  Should 
they neglect the warning, at the first suspicion of an argument, 
they find themselves in different hemispheres.  About any point of 
business or conduct, any actual affair demanding settlement, a 
woman will speak and listen, hear and answer arguments, not only 
with natural wisdom, but with candour and logical honesty.  But if 
the subject of debate be something in the air, an abstraction, an 
excuse for talk, a logical Aunt Sally, then may the male debater 
instantly abandon hope; he may employ reason, adduce facts, be 
supple, be smiling, be angry, all shall avail him nothing; what the 
woman said first, that (unless she has forgotten it) she will 
repeat at the end.  Hence, at the very junctures when a talk 
between men grows brighter and quicker and begins to promise to 
bear fruit, talk between the sexes is menaced with dissolution.  
The point of difference, the point of interest, is evaded by the 
brilliant woman, under a shower of irrelevant conversational 
rockets; it is bridged by the discreet woman with a rustle of silk, 
as she passes smoothly forward to the nearest point of safety.  And 
this sort of prestidigitation, juggling the dangerous topic out of 
sight until it can be reintroduced with safety in an altered shape, 
is a piece of tactics among the true drawing-room queens.

The drawing-room is, indeed, an artificial place; it is so by our 
choice and for our sins.  The subjection of women; the ideal 
imposed upon them from the cradle, and worn, like a hair-shirt, 
with so much constancy; their motherly, superior tenderness to 
man's vanity and self-importance; their managing arts - the arts of 
a civilised slave among good-natured barbarians - are all painful 
ingredients and all help to falsify relations.  It is not till we 
get clear of that amusing artificial scene that genuine relations 
are founded, or ideas honestly compared.  In the garden, on the 
road or the hillside, or TETE-A-TETE and apart from interruptions, 
occasions arise when we may learn much from any single woman; and 
nowhere more often than in married life.  Marriage is one long 
conversation, chequered by disputes.  The disputes are valueless; 
they but ingrain the difference; the heroic heart of woman 
prompting her at once to nail her colours to the mast.  But in the 
intervals, almost unconsciously and with no desire to shine, the 
whole material of life is turned over and over, ideas are struck 
out and shared, the two persons more and more adapt their notions 
one to suit the other, and in process of time, without sound of 
trumpet, they conduct each other into new worlds of thought.





CHAPTER XII. THE CHARACTER OF DOGS


THE civilisation, the manners, and the morals of dog-kind are to a 
great extent subordinated to those of his ancestral master, man.  
This animal, in many ways so superior, has accepted a position of 
inferiority, shares the domestic life, and humours the caprices of 
the tyrant.  But the potentate, like the British in India, pays 
small regard to the character of his willing client, judges him 
with listless glances, and condemns him in a byword.  Listless have 
been the looks of his admirers, who have exhausted idle terms of 
praise, and buried the poor soul below exaggerations.  And yet more 
idle and, if possible, more unintelligent has been the attitude of 
his express detractors; those who are very fond of dogs "but in 
their proper place"; who say "poo' fellow, poo' fellow," and are 
themselves far poorer; who whet the knife of the vivisectionist or 
heat his oven; who are not ashamed to admire "the creature's 
instinct"; and flying far beyond folly, have dared to resuscitate 
the theory of animal machines.  The "dog's instinct" and the 
"automaton-dog," in this age of psychology and science, sound like 
strange anachronisms.  An automaton he certainly is; a machine 
working independently of his control, the heart, like the mill-
wheel, keeping all in motion, and the consciousness, like a person 
shut in the mill garret, enjoying the view out of the window and 
shaken by the thunder of the stones; an automaton in one corner of 
which a living spirit is confined: an automaton like man.  Instinct 
again he certainly possesses.  Inherited aptitudes are his, 
inherited frailties.  Some things he at once views and understands, 
as though he were awakened from a sleep, as though he came 
"trailing clouds of glory."  But with him, as with man, the field 
of instinct is limited; its utterances are obscure and occasional; 
and about the far larger part of life both the dog and his master 
must conduct their steps by deduction and observation.

The leading distinction between dog and man, after and perhaps 
before the different duration of their lives, is that the one can 
speak and that the other cannot.  The absence of the power of 
speech confines the dog in the development of his intellect.  It 
hinders him from many speculations, for words are the beginning of 
meta-physic.  At the same blow it saves him from many 
superstitions, and his silence has won for him a higher name for 
virtue than his conduct justifies.  The faults of the dog are many.  
He is vainer than man, singularly greedy of notice, singularly 
intolerant of ridicule, suspicious like the deaf, jealous to the 
degree of frenzy, and radically devoid of truth.  The day of an 
intelligent small dog is passed in the manufacture and the 
laborious communication of falsehood; he lies with his tail, he 
lies with his eye, he lies with his protesting paw; and when he 
rattles his dish or scratches at the door his purpose is other than 
appears.  But he has some apology to offer for the vice.  Many of 
the signs which form his dialect have come to bear an arbitrary 
meaning, clearly understood both by his master and himself; yet 
when a new want arises he must either invent a new vehicle of 
meaning or wrest an old one to a different purpose; and this 
necessity frequently recurring must tend to lessen his idea of the 
sanctity of symbols.  Meanwhile the dog is clear in his own 
conscience, and draws, with a human nicety, the distinction between 
formal and essential truth.  Of his punning perversions, his 
legitimate dexterity with symbols, he is even vain; but when he has 
told and been detected in a lie, there is not a hair upon his body 
but confesses guilt.  To a dog of gentlemanly feeling theft and 
falsehood are disgraceful vices.  The canine, like the human, 
gentleman demands in his misdemeanours Montaigne's "JE NE SAIS QUOI 
DE GENEREUX."  He is never more than half ashamed of having barked 
or bitten; and for those faults into which he has been led by the 
desire to shine before a lady of his race, he retains, even under 
physical correction, a share of pride.  But to be caught lying, if 
he understands it, instantly uncurls his fleece.

Just as among dull observers he preserves a name for truth, the dog 
has been credited with modesty.  It is amazing how the use of 
language blunts the faculties of man - that because vain glory 
finds no vent in words, creatures supplied with eyes have been 
unable to detect a fault so gross and obvious.  If a small spoiled 
dog were suddenly to be endowed with speech, he would prate 
interminably, and still about himself; when we had friends, we 
should be forced to lock him in a garret; and what with his whining 
jealousies and his foible for falsehood, in a year's time he would 
have gone far to weary out our love.  I was about to compare him to 
Sir Willoughby Patterne, but the Patternes have a manlier sense of 
their own merits; and the parallel, besides, is ready.  Hans 
Christian Andersen, as we behold him in his startling memoirs, 
thrilling from top to toe with an excruciating vanity, and scouting 
even along the street for shadows of offence - here was the talking 
dog.

It is just this rage for consideration that has betrayed the dog 
into his satellite position as the friend of man.  The cat, an 
animal of franker appetites, preserves his independence.  But the 
dog, with one eye ever on the audience, has been wheedled into 
slavery, and praised and patted into the renunciation of his 
nature.  Once he ceased hunting and became man's plate-licker, the 
Rubicon was crossed.  Thenceforth he was a gentleman of leisure; 
and except the few whom we keep working, the whole race grew more 
and more self-conscious, mannered and affected.  The number of 
things that a small dog does naturally is strangely small.  
Enjoying better spirits and not crushed under material cares, he is 
far more theatrical than average man.  His whole life, if he be a 
dog of any pretension to gallantry, is spent in a vain show, and in 
the hot pursuit of admiration.  Take out your puppy for a walk, and 
you will find the little ball of fur clumsy, stupid, bewildered, 
but natural.  Let but a few months pass, and when you repeat the 
process you will find nature buried in convention.  He will do 
nothing plainly; but the simplest processes of our material life 
will all be bent into the forms of an elaborate and mysterious 
etiquette.  Instinct, says the fool, has awakened.  But it is not 
so.  Some dogs - some, at the very least - if they be kept separate 
from others, remain quite natural; and these, when at length they 
meet with a companion of experience, and have the game explained to 
them, distinguish themselves by the severity of their devotion to 
its rules.  I wish I were allowed to tell a story which would 
radiantly illuminate the point; but men, like dogs, have an 
elaborate and mysterious etiquette.  It is their bond of sympathy 
that both are the children of convention.

The person, man or dog, who has a conscience is eternally condemned 
to some degree of humbug; the sense of the law in their members 
fatally precipitates either towards a frozen and affected bearing.  
And the converse is true; and in the elaborate and conscious 
manners of the dog, moral opinions and the love of the ideal stand 
confessed.  To follow for ten minutes in the street some 
swaggering, canine cavalier, is to receive a lesson in dramatic art 
and the cultured conduct of the body; in every act and gesture you 
see him true to a refined conception; and the dullest cur, 
beholding him, pricks up his ear and proceeds to imitate and parody 
that charming ease.  For to be a high-mannered and high-minded 
gentleman, careless, affable, and gay, is the inborn pretension of 
the dog.  The large dog, so much lazier, so much more weighed upon 
with matter, so majestic in repose, so beautiful in effort, is born 
with the dramatic means to wholly represent the part.  And it is 
more pathetic and perhaps more instructive to consider the small 
dog in his conscientious and imperfect efforts to outdo Sir Philip 
Sidney.  For the ideal of the dog is feudal and religious; the 
ever-present polytheism, the whip-bearing Olympus of mankind, rules 
them on the one hand; on the other, their singular difference of 
size and strength among themselves effectually prevents the 
appearance of the democratic notion.  Or we might more exactly 
compare their society to the curious spectacle presented by a 
school - ushers, monitors, and big and little boys - qualified by 
one circumstance, the introduction of the other sex.  In each, we 
should observe a somewhat similar tension of manner, and somewhat 
similar points of honour.  In each the larger animal keeps a 
contemptuous good humour; in each the smaller annoys him with wasp-
like impudence, certain of practical immunity; in each we shall 
find a double life producing double characters, and an excursive 
and noisy heroism combined with a fair amount of practical 
timidity.  I have known dogs, and I have known school heroes that, 
set aside the fur, could hardly have been told apart; and if we 
desire to understand the chivalry of old, we must turn to the 
school playfields or the dungheap where the dogs are trooping.

Woman, with the dog, has been long enfranchised.  Incessant 
massacre of female innocents has changed the proportions of the 
sexes and perverted their relations.  Thus, when we regard the 
manners of the dog, we see a romantic and monogamous animal, once 
perhaps as delicate as the cat, at war with impossible conditions.  
Man has much to answer for; and the part he plays is yet more 
damnable and parlous than Corin's in the eyes of Touchstone.  But 
his intervention has at least created an imperial situation for the 
rare surviving ladies.  In that society they reign without a rival: 
conscious queens; and in the only instance of a canine wife-beater 
that has ever fallen under my notice, the criminal was somewhat 
excused by the circumstances of his story.  He is a little, very 
alert, well-bred, intelligent Skye, as black as a hat, with a wet 
bramble for a nose and two cairngorms for eyes.  To the human 
observer, he is decidedly well-looking; but to the ladies of his 
race he seems abhorrent.  A thorough elaborate gentleman, of the 
plume and sword-knot order, he was born with a nice sense of 
gallantry to women.  He took at their hands the most outrageous 
treatment; I have heard him bleating like a sheep, I have seen him 
streaming blood, and his ear tattered like a regimental banner; and 
yet he would scorn to make reprisals.  Nay more, when a human lady 
upraised the contumelious whip against the very dame who had been 
so cruelly misusing him, my little great-heart gave but one hoarse 
cry and fell upon the tyrant tooth and nail.  This is the tale of a 
soul's tragedy.  After three years of unavailing chivalry, he 
suddenly, in one hour, threw off the yoke of obligation; had he 
been Shakespeare he would then have written TROILUS AND CRESSIDA to 
brand the offending sex; but being only a little dog, he began to 
bite them.  The surprise of the ladies whom he attacked indicated 
the monstrosity of his offence; but he had fairly beaten off his 
better angel, fairly committed moral suicide; for almost in the 
same hour, throwing aside the last rags of decency, he proceeded to 
attack the aged also.  The fact is worth remark, showing, as it 
does, that ethical laws are common both to dogs and men; and that 
with both a single deliberate violation of the conscience loosens 
all.  "But while the lamp holds on to burn," says the paraphrase, 
"the greatest sinner may return."  I have been cheered to see 
symptoms of effectual penitence in my sweet ruffian; and by the 
handling that he accepted uncomplainingly the other day from an 
indignant fair one, I begin to hope the period of STURM UND DRANG 
is closed.

All these little gentlemen are subtle casuists.  The duty to the 
female dog is plain; but where competing duties rise, down they 
will sit and study them out, like Jesuit confessors.  I knew 
another little Skye, somewhat plain in manner and appearance, but a 
creature compact of amiability and solid wisdom.  His family going 
abroad for a winter, he was received for that period by an uncle in 
the same city.  The winter over, his own family home again, and his 
own house (of which he was very proud) reopened, he found himself 
in a dilemma between two conflicting duties of loyalty and 
gratitude.  His old friends were not to be neglected, but it seemed 
hardly decent to desert the new.  This was how he solved the 
problem.  Every morning, as soon as the door was opened, of posted 
Coolin to his uncle's, visited the children in the nursery, saluted 
the whole family, and was back at home in time for breakfast and 
his bit of fish.  Nor was this done without a sacrifice on his 
part, sharply felt; for he had to forego the particular honour and 
jewel of his day - his morning's walk with my father.  And, perhaps 
from this cause, he gradually wearied of and relaxed the practice, 
and at length returned entirely to his ancient habits.  But the 
same decision served him in another and more distressing case of 
divided duty, which happened not long after.  He was not at all a 
kitchen dog, but the cook had nursed him with unusual kindness 
during the distemper; and though he did not adore her as he adored 
my father - although (born snob) he was critically conscious of her 
position as "only a servant" - he still cherished for her a special 
gratitude.  Well, the cook left, and retired some streets away to 
lodgings of her own; and there was Coolin in precisely the same 
situation with any young gentleman who has had the inestimable 
benefit of a faithful nurse.  The canine conscience did not solve 
the problem with a pound of tea at Christmas.  No longer content to 
pay a flying visit, it was the whole forenoon that he dedicated to 
his solitary friend.  And so, day by day, he continued to comfort 
her solitude until (for some reason which I could never understand 
and cannot approve) he was kept locked up to break him of the 
graceful habit.  Here, it is not the similarity, it is the 
difference, that is worthy of remark; the clearly marked degrees of 
gratitude and the proportional duration of his visits.  Anything 
further removed from instinct it were hard to fancy; and one is 
even stirred to a certain impatience with a character so destitute 
of spontaneity, so passionless in justice, and so priggishly 
obedient to the voice of reason.