THE RARITY OF TRUE CONVERSATION.
TN speak ing last week of the best mode of putting our-
selves in the proper attitude towards those with whom we converse, we ventured to say that, at all events when con- versing for amusement, and not for instruction, it is desirable to study the humour of our interlocutor, and to conciliate him, by either meeting him half-way, if he likes to be met half-way, or assuming an attitude of rather more than the real amount of antagonism, if he is one who distinctly prefers a stand-up fight. But, as a rule, the best conversation cannot be classed as taking place either for instruction or amuse- ment. The man who converses for the purpose of instructing others, unless in response to the wish of those others, is very apt to be a prig ; and the man who consciously converses for amusement only, is very apt to be a ficineur and a gossip. The best conversation,—and good conversation, in the sense in which we were speaking last week, is very much rarer than people suppose,—is not intended to answer any purpose at all, except that of placing two minds in distinct relation to each other on some subject in which both are interested. Such conversation is really its own end. In the old meaning of the word, the Scriptural meaning, " conversation " did not necessarily imply dialogue at all. It implied a common con- centration of attention on the same subjects, and whatever resulted from that common concentration of attention on the same subjects. "For our conversation is in Heaven" clearly did not mean "for our dialogue is in Heaven," but rather, the subjects with which our mind is most conversant are of a spiritual kind. Matthew Arnold (with a host of other writers) speaks of conversing by the eyes alone :
"With eyes which sought thine eyes thou did'st converse, And that soul-searching vision fell on me," he says ; and devotes a whole poem to the thoughts which this conversation awakened in himself. And, indeed, though conversation in the commonest sense may very often either instruct or amuse, or, on the contrary, may bore the inter- locutors, it is very much less common for it either to instruct or amuse or bore solely by virtue of what is said than by virtue of the manner and expression with which it is said. For of all true conversation, manner and expression constitute three- fourths of the whole effect produced. You may start a friendship without talking of anything but the weather, or the poor-rate, or the flavour of a dish. It is not by the individual taste or opinion or news conveyed, half as much as by the charac- teristic mode in which it is conveyed, that people are attracted or repelled. A wet day is taken either humorously, or piteously, or peevishly, or cheerily, or patiently by different people, and the smiles, or frowns, or complacency, or irritability, or resignation, or different combinations of those tempers of mind, produce an effect on the minds of those who observe them, which is far more important than the propositions themselves which the spoken words convey. The importance of ninety-nine things out of every hundred that a man or woman says, so far as it has importance, is not in the erroneousness or accuracy of the statements made, but in the impression produced as to the animus of the speaker, or as to his vivacity, or his phlegm, or his serenity of mind, or the eagerness of his curiosity, or the delicacy of his discrimination.
But to come to the point of what is the true object of con- versation, if its purpose be not to instruct or to amuse, or to receive instruction or amusement. All true con- versation must not only include, and include as some of its essentials, the general impressions of taste, feeling, and character which it conveys, but should go further, and aim at producing so much of common intellectual understanding on the special subject raised in it, as will enable the interlocutors really to understand each other's point of view and state of mind. True conversation is not content with mere thrust and parry, with mere sword-play of any kind, but should lay mind to mind, and show the real lines of agreement and the real lines of divergence and antagonism. Now, this is the kind of conversation which seems to us so very rare. Of course, it involves a great number of conditions which cannot be satisfied without the play of the countenance, nor without free and open speech, nor without a rather rare kind of speech, a speech at once sympathetic and yet frankly laying bare even the profoundest differences of principle. Such conversation as this cannot, of course, take place with the eyes alone. When Mr. Arnold's eyes conversed with those of the gipsy child on the shore of the Isle of Man, he certainly drew some conclusions as to the tale which those eyes told which would hardly have been borne out by a more thoroughgoing conversation. For instance, when Mr. Arnold concluded that
"No exile's dream was ever half so sad Nor any angel's sorrow so forlorn," as that of the gipsy child he was contemplating, it is very probable that conversation with the lips, as well as with the eyes, might have undeceived him, and that he might have found with Canning's "friend of humanity" that the gipsy child's story was not so " pitiful " as be had imagined, and not perhaps, much worth the telling. On the other hand. what he had learned from the child's eyes, namely, that it had "foreseen the vanity of hope," that the experience of its forefathers, verified by its own, had taught it to expect ivy little happiness from life, would probably have been confirmed, and it is pretty certain that the dreariness and wistfulness of its glance would have spoken more truly of its experience, outward and inward, than any language for which its lips could have found utterance. On the other hand, it is uot likely that Mr. Arnold's eyes told any very intelligible story to the gipsy child, and certainly nothing like the story which his verses tell. The conversation of the eyes is, indeed only eloquent between those who have long learned to understand each other by every kind of converse of which our mutual isolation admits. For the real object of all true con- versation, whether gay or grave, or only trivial, is to elicit the different bearings in which any subject stands to the different people who are conversing upon it. To our minds, then, any artificiality of either complaisance or combativeness which tends to obscure this mutual understanding, is not really conversation ; but, so far as it goes, what might per- hips be termed diversation,—that is, it diverts the mind from perceiving the radical difference of different peoples' view of the same subject. M. Renan's favourite eirenicon, " Vous avez mine fois raison," even when he intended ultimately to convey that nothing could be farther from his riew of the matter than the view lo w'ait h he had just given so hearty an assent, was not true conversation at all. It distracted instead of preparing his interlocutor's mind for what was coming. It tended to obscure, not to illuminate, the mutual understanding which it is the object of conver- sation to produce. And so, too, either the artificial con- tradictoriness (except, of course, in joke), or, still worse, the pretence of disagreement, where there is no disagreement, in the hope of reconciling a combative reasoner to an unpalatable harmony, is an artifice of circumlocution which, like an approach to a house which turns away from it in order to reach it by a more pleasing route, can only be justified at all on the principle on which some people take a hot bath as pre- paring them for a plunge in cold water; or give themselves up to the fascination of a brilliant operetta, by way of lending the force of contrast to a spiritual "retreat." These artificial openings are not an organic part of conversation, but pre- liminary bars which are meant (whether wisely or not) to in- crease the impressiveness of the conversation when at last it really begins.
It is very curious to note how very much dialogue there is in the world, and how very little true conversation; how very little, that is, of the genuine attempt to compare the different bearing of the same subject on the minds of different people. You may look through the greatest of Shakespeare's plays and hardly find in this sense a true conversation in any one of them. And, indeed, conversation in this sense is very seldom truly dramatic, and cannot often be so. Nevertheless, one would expect to find instances of real comparison of the state of different minds on the same subject, in Walter Savage Landor's "Imaginary Conversations," and yet you will hardly Rad one of them in which the attempt was made, even by the author, much less by any of the imaginary interlocutors, to enter thoroughly into the views of those with whom he had been dealing. There is plenty of characteristic and con- trasted prejudice in Landor's "Imaginary Conversations," but hardly any trace of the real probing of each other's minds. Plato understood true conversation,—conversation in the higher sense. His Socrates continually succeeds in probing the mind of another, and making that other enter into his own. The late Cardinal Newman understood true conversation in this sense. There is more of the upshot of real conversa- tion in the various Oxford sermons, especially the University sermons, in spite of the absence of anything like dialogue, than there is in any other sermons of our day, and that is, no doubt, one secret of their great charm. Again, his two remarkable religious tales, "Loss and Gain" and " Callista," are full of true conversation of the kind we mean. But for the most part dialogue is gossip, or wrangling, or plotting, o- counter-plotting, or menacing, or conciliating, or com- plimenting, or submitting. It is the rarest thing in the world to come, even in the best authors, on a successful picture of the different views taken by different minds of the same subject, and the grounds of the difference. Even in politics we seldom meet with it, though the late Mr. Charles Buxton and his son have carefully prepared the way for such an appreciation, by placing in close comparison the different views taken of the same political subject. That, however, is not political conversation, but only the raw material for such conversation. We cannot but wonder that in a day 89 full as this of real and careful study, so few should have the patience to present the various contrasts of opinion, thought, and feeling on some of the most important subjects of human life, in the living and picturesque form in which Plato has given us the moral antagonisms of Greece, and Newman the theological antagonisms of modern England.
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