BORES.
" THE attempt to classify one's acquaintance is the common sport of the thinker," we read in an amusing little American book about bores—and people who are not bores, for whom no name exists in the King's English (" Are You a Bromide?" by Gelett Burgess; A. F. Bird ; 2s. 6d. net). It Beems that in New York it has lately become the fashion to call bores " bromides " and entertaining people "sulphites." The present writer is not chemist enough to be quite certain about the literal meaning of the latter term, but the psychic distinction is clear, and its interest does not rest upon correctness of analogy.
Every generation has its own bores. They change with the fashion; but there are never any less of them. To quote our American author again, "the bromidic tendency" is innate. Both it and the "eulphitie " tendency may be traced in almost all children. The question is which in time will prevail. There is no talker in the world so thought-provoking as an intelligent child, ana even stupid children ask questions which go to the root of all matters. In a single sentence they will cleave their way through rubbish-heaps of words which have been accumulating for years, and touch one of those quick problems which the philosophers have covered up with reasoning, but have never in reality solved. The multi- tudes of stories about clever children have a broad foundation in fact. The childish mind will often emit a spark which looks very like genuine, though of course in the vast majority of eases it all comes to nothing. On the other hand, all children, even the sharpest, show at times an inane pleasure in reiteration. Some instinct seems to move them to sterilise their minds by repetition. They will tell or will demand the same story, chant the same rhyme, or sing the same tune or bar of a tune, till their elders implore them for mercy, while a given word or cifche will appear in almost every sentence they utter for days on end.
Either they grow out of this tendency as time goes on or they do not. If not, they become bores of different patterns, according to their ability, bent of mind, and education. Suppose, for instance, that they are naturally very sensitive. The sensitive bore is no sooner grown up than he has a grievance. Some one, he assures the world, has treated him badly, and he cannot bring himself to drop the subject. Or perhaps he is of too generous a disposition to entertain a grudge against any individual. In that case the broad backs of Providence and the public bear the brunt of his perpetual irritation. The rates, the Radicals, the wrongs of the middle and upper classes, or else the wicked selfishness of the rich in with- standing the popular desire for revolution are never out of his mouth, except when he is cursing the climate. Now there is no one in the world with whom it is so difficult to sympathise as the habitual grumbler. The most the kindest person can do is to pretend. The world—even the small world of , the village, class, or circle—is seldom very kind, and it never makes any pretence. So the man with a grievance is apt to find himself alone with it. His acquaintance flee from him. "He bores me to death," they say, as they prepare to live without him.
Then there is the bore of a naturally arbitrary disposition. He is always harping upon his conclusions. According as he is pugnacious or the reverse, be takes it for granted that his interlocutor does or does not agree with him. He will make the strongest statements in the most violent terms, apparently buoyed up by the assurance that he is carrying his audience with him. Should he meet with little response, he will make them all over again with more explanation and more adjectives and adverbs, and having reduced his audience to silence, he experiences all the joy of a man who has given grand expression to the common sentiments of the many, and feels a glow of goodwill towards all men. Possibly, however, the same arbitrary disposition may express itself differently. He may throw down a challenge—almost always the same challenge in different words—to every one be comes across ; and if they do not pick it up, he will do so himself, making lame answers to his own theses, and throw it down again till his adversary consents to fight or shamelessly runs away. Now and then an arbitrary bore will follow a middle course and become instructive. He has a message, and is heroically determined that all men shall listen to it. Sometimes they have beard it before, and sometimes they do not want to hear it at all; but deliver it he will, again and again, and at length.
Perhaps the most subtle of all bores is what we may call the plausible bore,—the man whom you do not find out at first to be a bore at all, who, perhaps, you never do find out, but who succeeds in making you bore yourself. He has very often something of a mesmeric effect. As a rule his views and sentiments are conventional in the extreme, and he has a strong tendency to moralise; or he may be studiously non- moral and unconventional; but anyway, his power over words is considerable. The tone of his mind is catching, like some tones of voice or peculiarities of accent; and those whom he talks to find themselves talking like him, and are alternately amused and shocked at the insincerity or banality of expres- sion towards which they find themselves tempted in his company. They long for a third person to break the spell, and determine to avoid all further filte•ii-tete with the erypto-bore.
Naturally ambitions people, again, should they happen to be bores, are terribly wearing. Au inordinate desire to shine in conversation generally ends by making a man a wet-blanket. Should he feel himself to be humorous, and become facetious, he will probably lead every man in his company to rivet his attention upon means of escape. It is a remarkable fact that a facetious woman is a rare—we had almost said an unknown—phenomenon. The present writer never met one, but no one knows what the fates may have in store; and after such a boast of good fortune it might be a desirable precaution to "touch wood." But if there are no women in this subdivision of the bores, they have subdivisions to themselves. There is a manifestation of "the bromidic tendency" in women which is perhaps more mentally suffocating than any which it assumes in the other sex. It is not -easy to describe, though it is common enough among a certain section of the cnkivated, and perhaps we might call it the angelic POEM- They stand perpetually in an attitude of pardon towards the world at large, and in order to maintain this beautiful position they are forced to bemuse themselves and bore their friends with a constant repetition of certain transcendental formulae. Good and evil, pain and ecstasy, black and white, are, they assure their bewildered listeners, all the same if only one can soar so high above the actual as not to see the differ- ence between them, avid at this height they assert ad nauseam that they themselves have successfully arrived. One practical question forces itself upon the mind after con- sidming these various types of bores. Can bores improve ? Is there any process of psychic chemistry whereby a " bromide " may become a "sulphite." Perhaps the disease is curable in its earlier stages by the will-power of the patient. But it will be said "Do bores know. that they are bores ? " That is a question which every man must ask himself. Most of us have put away in a seldom visited corner of our minds a distasteful remembrance of having been on some occasion or occasions a great bore. We insisted on talking about some- thing we were full of, or we persisted in running on about nothing at all. Or perhaps, if we were too polite to ask for any undue share in the conversational game, we purposely "crabbed" the other players. The odd thing is that we bad at the back of our mind all the time a consciousness of what we were doing, but we seemed to ourselves to be possessed. Has it not happened to us since to see another man do the same thing, and to feel a little sorry for him at the bottom of our hearts even while we were wishing him at Jericho ? At such a moment of social self-examination we may perhaps have been led to consider the means we took to cure ourselves. Probably, however, our meditations may have been cut short by one of those unconquerable doubts which can only be laid by a change of subject,-.--Are we cared ?
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