THE VALUE OF DIALECTICS.
CONVERSATION has been called "the commerce of minds," and in this respect some men are born traders. They desire other men's mental goods, and they have no instinct for hoarding their own. They never see a stranger but they want to make him unload his pack of ideas, though it look never so humble from the outside, in case he may have
something in it which they would Iihe to have, or at least to look at; and they are Willing to give him their 'own treasures in return. To others this spirit of barter is incomprehensible. Their real thoughts, feelings, and convictions they keep to themselves. They may turn them into action perhaps, but never into merchandise. Their sense of mental posses. sion is over-developed ; they touch no one else's goods, and they allow no one to touch theirs. Such people, if they belong to the better classes, are by no means always either morose or silent; they commonly speak a good deal. They may chatter and chaff and flirt, or they may narrate, instruct, or explain, according to their disposi- tions and circumstances, but they pride themselves that they never speculate in ideas, or gamble with their inner con- victions, or force the hand of their interlocutor, and stand to lose or to learn, as does the born talker. All good talkers make bad debts ; all men who say a great deal that they really think spend a proportion of their time in wishing they had not spoken. That is inevitable. The question is, do their profits exceed their losses? How do they stand when they come to square accounts?
On the whole, we believe the talker gets more out of life, and has the more to give away. Yet there is something about the man who tells nothing, who keeps his napkinful of just judgments, firm convic- tions, sad suspicions, and bitter doubts in the farthest corner of his own breast, which appeals to the English mind. People feel that the self-contained man is strong, and they admire strength for its own sake. Besides, they have a lingering belief, in the old idea that those who say little think the more. Talk and action are, in some men's sight, naturally opposed to one another. They feel a slight contempt for the man who can show his real self and wants to see his neighbour's real self ; whose ideas cannot mature shut up within the narrow walls of his own mind; whose power of expression is to him a true relief, a real source of strength ; whose mind is never at its best but in contact with the minds of his fellow-creatures; who desires, in fact, to live in a mental crowd. There is something to be said, no doubt, for the non-talker. He is generally a man who has courage, who never complains. At the bottom of his class lies the clod; but at the top stands the hero. At the top of the talker's class we get the man of genius ; at the bottom— something much worse than the clod. We get the man to whom nothing is sacred, to whom life gives nothing but "copy" for his tongue or his pen,—the born teller, who respects no confidence, not even that of his Maker, whose soul, if he has one, is on his lips. In some respects he is a useful person, a corpus vile for those philosophers who want to inform them- selves about the morbid anatomy of the spirit.
But the mass of the world is made up neither of clods, nor heroes, nor men of genius; and for the crowds who make up the bulk of society talking is, we believe, after all, the most strengthening form of mind-food. It may not be good as an exclusive, diet, but it will preserve mental life. Take the whole world of women. Begin at the bottom of the scale. Compare an uneducated plough- man with his uneducated wife. The history of the human race seems to prove that, on the whole, men's brains are the better ; but an observer who had not got that fundamental dogma well fixed in his mind would never deduce it from a study of the English agricultural class. The field labourer is occupied all day in the same round of work, and he becomes bemused by solitude, fresh air, and labour. The women have, to all appearance, far more wits than the men, a fact which is largely accounted for by the commerce of minds which goes on in the village street. But, it may be said, the gossip of a village street deserves no such name. Call it a retail business of tongues, and you will be nearer the mark. Is that so? We are inclined to doubt it. Frivolous conversation among educated people is intentionally frivolous. Grave matters are excluded of set purpose, and with some difficulty the serious side of life is tacitly put away. To bring it in is to make a mistake in the game. But uneducated people have not the skill to do this. Frivolity withers under the sinister shade of hunger and the workhouse. The problems of pain and accident, life and death, love and hate, recall the talkers roughly to reality. In some lives very little happens; others bring up the average of good and evil fortane.
People who lead monotonous lives, if they only thought' of their own business, would have little but sordid details to think of ; but the women of 'the agricultural class talk of other people's business, to the great enlargement -of- their minds and sympathies. Their vote counts for less in tie house than their husbands' vote, but they try to "educate their masters," and their influence is large. They sway their children, and govern them, on the whole, fairly well. They know their characters, "and to know our way about four or five growing minds in process of a better training than their parents ever had is to know—at least in some ways—more than a man. That delightful poet," Moira O'Neill," published a short time ago some verses which described an Irish peasant woman's attitude towards her husband. We think the instance is typical on this side of the sea also. The poet's heroine regards her husband with great affection as a very powerful child. Husbands, she explains, must be dealt with as children, but children who require great skill in manage- ment -
"For you've got to teach 'em better, and you've got to make 'em mind
And you've got to kape 'em aisy all the while.".
That keeping " aisy " is, of course, a terrible complication, fraught with danger, physical as well as mental ; but know. ledge is power. Human nature is the peasant woman's book, and in that book, by dint of much talking, she has learned to read more chapters than her husband. Again, the clever women of a village generally exercise their minds a little on the one intellectual subject free to the illiterate, and that is theology. A 'village woman will often argue with the parson, and sometimes may be able to give the parson points. As a rule she is stolidly on the side of moderation ; wholly in favour of the compromise, about which, of course, she knows nothing theoretically. Innovations she does not like, nor has she much sympathy with the meeting extremes of evangelicalism and sacerdotalism. "He comes here and he talks," said a woman lately to a friend of the present writer," and what he says is either Chapel or else it's Catholic, and I don't know which; but anyhow it's not Church."—The remark is comparable to that of the squire who declared that a new-corner in the village was an " atheist," and who when he was corrected to " Baptist " cheerfully replied: " Yes ; Baptist or atheist, or something of the kind."—Until quite lately the women of the upper classes have had very little book-learning; yet how many of them have minds exercised to the top of their bent, and are able to give a shrewd and original opinion on sub- jects about which they have never read. What they have learned they have learned from talking. The education of women is a fine thing, most of all needed perhaps in the lower middle class, whose daughters are protected from the stern realities of poverty, and where there is least good talk.
Books are no substitute for talk. They come out of talk and go back into talk. We doubt if reading alone ever made " a full man." It has been said that reading is thinking with some one else's head; but talking is think. ing—if we may borrow a simile from the motor-car—with two-head power. As a bookworm is to the man of the world, so is the silent thinker to the talking thinker. The man who does not talk is a stranger upon earth. He does not know his fellows, and they do not Imow him, and those we do not know we cannot greatly like. " Little do men perceive what solitude is, and how far it extendeth ; for a crowd is not company, and faces are but a gallery of pictures, and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love." Yet a man may do heroic deeds and never talk at all in our sense of the word, and he may be a learned man and never express an opinion on any subject of the first consequence. All the same, we agree with Bacon that, inasmuch as he is shut up in himself, " Closeness doth impair and a little perish his understanding."
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