TALKERS, OLD AND YOUNG.
„ RL. S." completes this month his former comment on. • "Talk and Talkers" in the Cornhill,—a comment which he admits to have been, as we held it to be, too much con- cerned with mere debate,—by remarks on the best kinds of talk which is not debate, —the talk of those who in conversation, to use his own phrase, "seek rather contact with their fellow-men than increase of knowledge or clarity of thought." And surely almost all the best talk is of this kind. A man who happens to know all that is known upon a particular subject, or oven much more than his interlocutor knows, may be a very instructive talker, just as a book which is a compendium of a whole subject will be a very instructive book. But where talk is used mainly to beat out a subject, so as to exhibit all its main outlines in a very short time, it is hardly so much talk as exposition,—exposition in the form of answers to ques- tions and dissertations upon them, perhaps, but still exposition ; and exposition is talk only by accident, for very often it had much better be dissertation. Real talk, even when it is such talk as that of Plato's "Dialogues "—intended, that is, in the main, to bring out the aspects of truth—contributes to the mastery of truth chiefly by showing what is the fascination of various aspects of truth or untruth for particular kinds of mind ; how these minds are affected by the influence of certain ideas, and whether they are sensitive or insensible to the control of these ideas. And this seems to us to be the real characteristic of good conversation, — to be able to show simply how you are yourself affected by the predominant interests of the hour, and to make others feel at once that they contribute something, and what it is that they contribute, to your apprecia- tion of those interests ; and, at the same time, to make your interlocutors feel that their own appreciation of these in- terests is genuinely affected by the vivid perception of how they affect you. The mere accident that two talkers may between them be able to thrash out a subject, though it lends, of course, great interest to any particular talk, is a mere accident, and much more likely to be an illusion than an impression which you could seriously justify. At all events, that is not the value of talk as talk. The value of talk as talk is the fresh insight you get and give into the various vital ways of looking at things and persons, the experience you obtain and the experience you impart of the various influences at work around you, so far as these really contribute to the better kinds of social life, and do not increase the danger of its disorganisation. All talk, that is talk, and not analysis, should be essentially dramatic; that is, it should help the world on, by creating new mutual understandings without endangering the old. Genuine talk is only secondarily, even when it is in any degree, an instrument for finding abstract truth. lathe first instance, it is mere true communication between mind and mind, so far as such true communication is desirable ; but of course, truth, in any broad sense, is hardly within the reach of any mind which has not had a large experience of the way in which different minds are affected by different characters, thoughts, and situations.
" L. S." speaks as if the most instructive element in talk of this kind were the teaching it secures for us of the relative value of things as estimated by those who have lived longest, and concerning our own follies. He considers con- versation with the old the best talk of this kind, because one learns from it what are "the real, long-lived things"
which survive everything in the experience of the old, and because old ladies especially are the most effective,—at once the kindliest and the severest,—critics of the character and thought of the young. But this seems to us every superficial mode of estimating the effect of talk. Conversation with the old and wise undoubtedly gives more sense of the perspective of life, than talk of any other kind ; but it gives you much less new insight into the fullness of various kinds of life than the talk of the young. Shakespeare almost invariably makes the young learn more of the meaning of life from their conversations with each other than from their conversations with the old ; and rightly too, for the dialect of the young is not the dialect of the old, the latter being in a manner sealed, and hardly intelli-
gible to the former. The vibrating string awakens into vibra- tion only neighbouring chords of the same length, and the minds of the young and the old are not vibrating chords of the same length. The mere mode in which a word is placed, the mere stress of an emphasis, makes youth intelligible to youth, or age to age, where neither would youth have affected age, nor age youth, for want of this open-sesame to the natural current of the feelings.
We differ indeed from this accomplished writer, for we
hold that, far from the talk of age being superior to the talk of youth in its influence on others, it is superior only in its ease, and clearness, and confidence. The argument of age may be better than the argument of youth. Age knows the pitfalls of argu- ment better, and what it is needful to provide against. But age.is apt to be deficient in the power of thrilling listeners with a new impression, and often cannot even adequately represent the depth and intensity of its own convictions. A great deal of its moral heat has become latent heat, and is no longer given out in conversation as it used to be. On the other hand, youth, if it realise its own feelings adequately at all, almost always manages to touch the keys which open up its real impressions. The talk of the young is exploring talk, while the talk of the old is generally at best defining talk. Now exploring talk does much more to open up the universe to the young than defining talk. This is the reason why young men and young women at college do so much more to educate each other than their teachers can do for them. Their teachers lay down certain important lines of formal consideration which have to be taken into account, but the talk of the youngsters pushes re- connoitring parties into all the ground right and left of these given lines, and often results in making the importance of the given tracks from which they depart, seem very much exaggerated, if not wholly factitious. Compare, for instance, the late Lord Beacons- field's talk as it was when he was a young man,—as it is reflected in "Vivian G-ray,"—as it is depicted in the accounts of his youth which we have on every side,—with his talk as a middle-aged or old man, when he minted epigrams so skilfully, and we see that the difference almost wholly con- sists in that far greater wealth of impressions which he was able to rain on his interlocutors when young, as compared with the witty definitions with which he amused them when he was old. We do not doubt for a moment that the former was far the more influential talk of the two, and produced in a far higher degree that sense of a bewildering wealth of new ex- periences governed by an ambitious purpose,—that effect of a moral chaos cloven only by an imperious will,—which was the supreme feature of all Mr. Disraeli's writings, for the atten- tive student of his life and career. }{ere is the picture of him as a youthful talker :— "The conversation on the evening Mr. Willis celebrates turned on Beckford of Fonthill. D'Israeli ' continues the writer, was the only one at the table who knew 'him (Beckford), and the style in Which ho gave a sketch of his habits and manners was worthy of himself. I might as well attempt to gather up the foam of the sea as to convey an idea of the extraordinary language in which he olothed his description. There were at least five words in every sentence that must have been very much astonished at the use they were put to, and yet no others apparently could so well have con- veyed his idea. Ile talked like a racehorse approaching the win. lung-Irak—every muscle in action, and the utmost energy of ex- pression flung out into every burst. Victor Hugo, and his extra- ordinary novels, came next under discussion and D'Israeli, who was fired by his own eloquence, started off, clprop'es des bottes with a long
story of impalement y
ent he had seen in U per Egypt. pt It w' as as good, and ea) as authentic, as the description of the Chow-tow-tow in VI Grey.' The circumstantiality of the account was equally horrible and amusing. Then followed the sufferer's history, with a score of murders and barbarities heaped together, to ether, like Martius's 'Feast of Belshazzar,' with a mixture of horror and splendour that p was unparalleled in my experience of improvisation. No mystic priest of the Corybantes could have worked himself n into p
to a finer frenzy
of language. Count d'Orsay kept up during till: whole conversation
and narration a running fire of witty parentheses, half French and half English ; and with champagne in all the pores, the hours flew on very dashingly. Lady Blessiegton left us towards midnight, and then the conversation took a rather political turn, and something was said of O'Connell. D'Israeli's lips were playing upon the edge of his champagne glass, which he had just drained, and off he was again with a description of the interview he had had with the agitator the day before, ending in a story of an Irish dragoon who was killed in the Peninsula. His name was Sarsfield. His arm was shot off, and he was bleeding to death. When told he could not live, he called for a large silver goblet, out of which usually he drank claret. He held to it the gushing artery, and filled it to the brim with blood. Looking at it for a moment, he turned it slowly upon the ground, muttering to himself, If that had been for Ireland!' and expired. You can have no idea how thrillingly this story was told. Ponblanque, who is a cold, political satirist, saw nothing in the man's 'decanting his claret,' and so Vivian Grey got into a passion, and for a while was silent."
That is just the impression left by the conversations of Vivian Grey,—the conversations of a man who dashed like a racehorse through all the experiences, emotional or active, through which young blood and unlimited audacity could carry him. Such conversation would produce an almost indelible and most mis- chievous impression of the enormous value of reckless experience, no matter how obtained, or at what cost. Just so the early talk of Carlyle,—which was no more argumentative than Mr. Disraeli's, but was extremely imaginative and concentrated on a.few groat ideas,—produced an indelible impression of the oppo- site kind, of the worthlessness and ruinousness of all experience that was not governed by some fixed law, of the shallowness of all experience that did not land men in a world of spiritual reality, and finally, of the misleadingness of all experience that was based upon mere precedent, habit, and convention. Carlyle, of course, testified to the same truths in his age to which he testi- fied in his youth; but his testimony had in later life a more hackneyed flavour about it, and never, we think, produced the same thrilling effect again. If we had to defend the influential- nese, if we may coin the word, of the conversation of the young against that of the conversation of the old, we should be content to base it on the comparison between the impression produced by the youthful and elderly talk of Disraeli and Carlyle.
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