The Mentor

5. One must learn – if one can – to stick to the subject under consideration. Pausing to remark upon the irrelevant that may be suggested in the course of a conversation is a characteristic of the female mind. Many men, however, are as great sinners in this direction as are women generally. This is a fault peculiar to persons of hazy mental vision, and is very trying to those of clearer perceptions.

6. One must learn not to laugh at one’s own wit, nor to chuckle at one’s own remarks. There are men that cannot take part in a conversation without falling into a broad grin, which frequently develops into a chuckle that renders their articulation indistinct. This is a habit that is among the easiest to correct.

7. One must learn to control one’s temper. There are those that habitually – and involuntarily, perhaps – take refuge in indignation the moment they are opposed, and especially if they are opposed with reasons that are too weighty for their logic. Then there are others that have so exalted an opinion of their own opinions that they think it presumption on the part of another to question their correctness and resent any opposition as an indignity. It is not the wise that are least respectful to those that venture to differ from them.

8. One must be careful to avoid a certain labial gesticulation, and a certain “Jakey” toss of the head that some unbred people indulge in, when they talk. Of all the vulgar habits that vulgar people indulge in in conversation, this is one of the most vulgar.

9. Never, anywhere or under any circumstances, talk with a toothpick, a cigar, or a cigarette in your mouth. Anything more disrespectful or more thoroughly low we rarely have to complain of. And yet we sometimes see men standing in the street talking to women – not ladies, for a lady does not allow herself to be treated with such disrespect – with cigars in their mouths.

The author of “Mixing in Good Society” says: “We must not bring our gloomy moods or irritable temper with us into society. To look pleasant is a duty we owe to others. One is bound to listen with the appearance of interest even to the most inveterate proser who fastens upon us in society; to smile at a twice-told tale; and, in short, to make such minor sacrifices of sincerity as good manners and good feeling demand.

“In conversation the face should wear something that is akin to a smile; a smile, as it were, below the surface.

“We should always look at the person who addresses us, and listen deferentially to whatever he says. When we make answer, we should endeavor to express our best thoughts in our best manner. A loose manner of expression injures ourselves more than our interlocutor; since, if we talk carelessly to those whom we will not take the trouble to please, we shall feel at a loss for apt words and correct elocution when we need them.

“Always think before you speak; as thus only can you acquire the habit of speaking to the purpose.”

Good talkers are generally deliberate talkers.

“Polite vulgarisms must be scrupulously guarded against. A well-educated person proclaims himself by the simplicity and terseness of his language. It is only the half-educated who indulge in fine language, and think that long words and high-sounding phrases are distingué.

“Everything approaching to extravagance in conversation is objectionable. We should endeavor to ascertain the precise meaning of the words we employ, and employ them at the right time only. Such phrases as ‘awfully hot,’ ‘immensely jolly,’ ‘abominably dull,’ ‘disgustingly mean,’ etc. etc., are used in the most reckless manner. This hyperbolical way of speaking is mere flippancy, without wit or novelty to recommend it.”

The late Dr. George Ripley was wont to say that the secret of being agreeable in conversation was to be hospitable to the ideas of others. He affirmed that some people only half listened to you, because they were considering, even while you spoke, with what fine words, what wealth of wit, they should reply, and they began to speak almost before your sentence had died from your lips. Those people, he said, might be brilliant, witty, dazzling, but never could they be agreeable. You do not love to talk to them. You feel that they are impatient for their turn to come, and that they have no hospitality toward your thoughts – none of that gentle friendliness that asks your idea in and makes much of it.

“Dean Swift,” says an English writer, “with his keen eye for the foibles of his fellows, has put on record some faults in conversation that every one that wishes to be an agreeable talker should make it his business to avoid.

“He justly condemns the habit of talking too much. No man in a company has a right to predominate in length and frequency of speech, any more than a player in an orchestra has a right to convert the performance into a solo. Even if a man can talk as well as a Macaulay, he has no right to prevent others from talking. They have come not to hear a lecture, but to converse; to talk as well as to listen; to contribute as well as to receive. Even the listeners and admirers that gathered around Macaulay sometimes longed for a ‘flash of silence.’ Oh, the misery of it, when some inordinate gossip gets you by the buttonhole and drums away at your aching tympanum with an incessant crash of prattle!

“Still more wearisome is the talk of those who will talk only of themselves; whose everlasting ‘I’ recurs in their speech as certainly as the head of Charles the First turned up in the speech of Mr. Dick. They deluge their hearers with the milk-and-water history of their sayings and doings from childhood upward; and relate the annals of their diseases with all the symptoms and attendant circumstances. To a talker of this sort to have the measles is a delight – the small-pox a boon. A gentleman will never admit that his constitution is anything but sound – in conversation. Of all bores the greatest is he that carries his pills, powders, and plasters into the society of his friends; that bids the world listen when he sneezes, and thinks his rheumatism a matter of national concern.

“Others, as the Dean remarks, are more dexterous, and with great art will lie on the watch to hook in their own praise: ‘They will call a witness to remember they always foretold what would happen in such a case, but none would believe them; they advised such a man from the beginning, and told him the consequences just as they happened, but he would have his own way. Others make a vanity of telling their own faults; they are the strangest men in the world; they cannot dissemble; they own it is a folly; they have lost abundance of advantages by it; but if you should give them the world they could not help it; there is something in their nature that abhors insincerity and constraint – with many other insufferable topics of the same altitude.’

“The most successful talker is the man that has most to say that is sensible and entertaining on the greatest number of subjects. A specialist can never make a good conversationist; his mind runs always in one groove.

“Swift comments upon two faults in conversation that appear very different, yet spring from the same root and are equally blamable; the first, an impatience to interrupt others; the second, a great uneasiness when we are ourselves interrupted. The chief objects of all conversation, whether conversation proper or small talk, are to entertain and improve our companions, and in our own persons to be improved and entertained. If we steadily aim at these objects, we shall certainly escape the two faults indicated by the dean. If any man speak in company, we may suppose he does it for his hearers’ sake, and not for his own; so that common discretion will teach him not to force their attention if they are unwilling to lend it, nor, on the other hand, to interrupt him who is in possession, because that is the grossest manner to indicate his conviction of his own superiority.

“There are some people,” says Swift, “whose good manners will not suffer them to interrupt you; but, what is almost as bad, they will discover abundance of impatience, and be upon the watch until you have done, because they have started something in their own thoughts that they long to be delivered of. Meantime, they are so far from regarding what passes that their imaginations are wholly turned upon what they have in reserve, for fear it should slip out of their memory; and thus they confine their invention, which might otherwise range over a hundred things fully as good and that might be much more naturally introduced.

“I think that wit must be introduced into conversation with great reserve. Such a caution seems, however, little called for, considering the limited number of persons to whom it applies; but there is a cheap form of wit that most ill-natured persons can plagiarize, and in a mixed company its effects are not seldom disagreeable; that is, the repartee, or smart answer, which assuredly does not turn away wrath; the epigrammatic impertinence that young speakers suppose to be wit. ‘It now passes for raillery,’ says Swift, ‘to run a man down in discourse, to put him out of countenance and make him ridiculous; sometimes to expose the defects of his person or understanding; on all which occasions he is obliged not to be angry, to avoid the imputation of not being able to take a jest. It is admirable to observe one who is dexterous at this art singling out a weak adversary, getting the laugh on his side, and then carrying all before him. The French, whence we borrow the word ‘raillery,’ have a quite different idea of the thing, and so had we in the politer ages of our fathers. Raillery was to say something that at first appeared a reproach or reflection, but by some turn of wit, unexpected and surprising, ended always in a compliment, and to the advantage of the person it was addressed to. And, surely, one of the best rules in conversation is, never to say a thing that any of the company can reasonably wish we had left unsaid; nor can there well be anything more contrary to the ends for which people meet together than to part dissatisfied with one another or with themselves.

“This fatal kind of smartness, which all may master who have no regard for the feelings of others, is very much more common now, I imagine, than in Swift’s time, when people could hardly be persuaded that wit and rudeness were synonymous. It has found its way into the House of Commons, where it is assiduously practised by men that have little hope by more worthy means of achieving a reputation; and on the stage, where, in ‘drawing-rooms richly upholstered,’ the characters pass their time in saying impertinent things to one another. That such flippancy should pass muster as wit cannot, however, be wondered at in a generation that mistakes sensuousness for poetry, æstheticism for art, and charlatanism for statesmanship!

“I have already made a distinction between conversation and small talk; but after all, the cautions that apply to the one have a distinct reference to the other. I presume that a good conversationist is also a good small-talker; though, of course, the reverse does not follow; a man may shine in small talk, and prove very dull in conversation. It is not my object or desire to depreciate small talk, which, in the present condition of society, is a substitute for conversation, and in any condition would be a necessary complement of it. We cannot always be passing our five-pound notes; we must sometimes descend to inferior currency, and not only sovereigns, but crowns and two-shilling pieces have their value. Besides, we cannot afford to carry on an exchange by which we always lose. We cannot give our five-pound notes when others stake but shillings and sixpences. Barter is fair and profitable only when we get as much as we give. Our pockets may be full of sovereigns, and yet we shall hesitate to give one for a penny roll; but to a man that has nothing but counters in his pocket, it does not matter whether the roll cost a penny or a shilling. The moral of this is, that we must put pence into our purse as well as pounds. For want of such a precaution, the meditative scholar is often, in society, at a loss to find topics of conversation; he has nothing small enough to give, and his companions have nothing with which to conduct an exchange. It is wisdom, therefore, to pay close attention to this matter of small talk, and endeavor to arrive at a certain command of and proficiency in it. Men of the highest gifts cannot dispense with it if they wish to be at no disadvantage in their ordinary intercourse with mankind.

“There are many spheres in which, I grant, the small-talker would be out of place. He would make a sorry figure in an assembly of scholars and thinkers, engaged in the discussion of subjects as momentous and as profound as those with which Goethe overwhelmed the hapless Excelmann. His true arena is the dinner-table. It is there he can make the best use of the old, familiar weapons. He does not shun the traditional allusions to the weather or the crops; and, indeed, it is clear that he must begin on some topic that he and his companions have in common. That once found, others will naturally spring out of it; but in passing to and from them, much dexterity is required. If the small-talker shows any doubt of his own powers, or puts himself forward too obtrusively, he will come to grief, as we all instinctively rebel against an attempt to drag us into conversation. The string that leads us must be invisible. The exchange of small talk is like a game of battledoor in which an accomplished player will sometimes designedly drop his shuttlecock, partly to flatter and propitiate his partner, and partly for the sake of a prospective advantage. When once he has full command of the game, he will quietly take the lead, and guide it surely but gently into the direction best adapted for the display of his powers. The attractiveness of skilfully managed talk of this kind is felt by everybody; and we remember with pleasure the evening when, unwittingly, we were taken captive by some man or woman whose intellectual superiority, perhaps, we should not be willing to admit, but who, we readily own, enabled us to pass some very pleasant hours.

“But this small talk that so agreeably flavors conversation is different indeed from that very small talk in which society nowadays indulges so unblushingly, go where you will – not necessarily, as Mr. Hale remarks, into the society of the suburban ‘Row’ or ‘Terrace’ of semi-detached villas, nor into that of the small provincial town, or the colonial garrison; but into that found in the homes and among the families of English gentlemen. Mr. Hale does not, I think, exaggerate when he says it is painful to listen to the general conversation; the name of a common friend is mentioned, and something that he or she has said or done is commented upon with a freedom that, to be in any way justifiable, presupposes a thorough knowledge of all sides of the case; and the minor worries of life, servants, babies, and the like, furnish the theme for a multifarious and protracted discussion. If there is talk that should disgust all refined tastes and ordinarily intelligent minds, it is the farrago of trivialities that makes the daily staple of conversation in some of our English homes. As a proof that I do not exaggerate, let any one refrain for four-and-twenty hours from dealing with such ‘small beer,’ and observe how great a difficulty he will experience in discovering subjects for conversation. This shows how injurious the habit is. We feed so long on infant’s food that we can digest nothing more substantial. Our small talk resembles a hand-organ, which is set to a certain number of airs, and grinds through these with monotonous regularity.

“I have dwelt at some length on this subject, because it seems to me of great importance. The whole tone of society would be raised if we could raise its conversational standard; if we could lift it from very small talk to small talk and thence to conversation. Women especially may help toward a satisfactory result, for at present women are the great manufacturers of very small talk. Let them rise to the measure of their duties; men will soon follow their example, and we shall live to see the end of the very small-talk era.

“In certain ‘Hints upon Etiquette,’ by Αγωγος, published nearly half a century ago, but characterized by a good sense that must always render them valuable, I find a wise caution in reference to ‘talking shop,’ which I may add to my own emphatic warning against this particularly disagreeable custom. ‘There are few things,’ he says, ‘that display worse taste than the introduction of professional topics in general conversation, especially if there be ladies present; the minds of those men must be miserably ill-stored who cannot find other subjects for conversation than their own professions. Who has not felt this on having been compelled to listen to “clerical slang,” musty college jokes, and anecdotes divested of all interest beyond the atmosphere of a university; or “law-jokes,” with “good stories” of “learned counsel;” “long yarns,” or the equally tiresome muster-roll of “our regiment” – colonels dead, maimed majors retired on pensions, subs lost or “exchanged,” gravitating between Boulogne and the “Bankruptcy Court”?

“‘All such exclusive topics are signs either of a limited intellect or the most lamentable ignorance.’ They are signs, too, of exceedingly bad breeding; for the introduction of a topic on which no one can discourse but the speaker necessarily chokes out the life of a conversation, and for the lively talk of the many substitutes a dreary monologue. They imply an almost supernatural egotism, as if the speaker believed that all the world must perforce be interested in whatever concerns him. Needless to say that these remarks do not apply to the case of an acknowledged ‘expert’ whose opinion has been invited on the questions that of right fall within his special province. Now, as a rule, society cares nothing for the individual; and there can be no greater error than for a man to put forward in conversation his individual tastes, opinions, views, unless he has attained to a position that entitles him to speak as one having authority. And even then what he says should be general in tone and application, with as little allusion as possible to himself. Nor should he suffer his remarks to assume the form and proportions of an oration, lest his hearers, in spite of themselves, betray their weariness. A St. Paul may preach, and yet Eutychus fall asleep! In spite of his reputation as the Aristarchus of his day, Samuel Johnson could irritate his hearers into administering a rebuke to his verbosity.

“The colloquial inferiority of the present generation is attributed by Mr. Hannay purely to the action of the press. Newspapers, novels, magazines, reviews, he says, gather up the intellectual elements of our life like so many electric machines, drawing electricity from the atmosphere into themselves. Everything, he adds, is recorded and discussed in print, and subjects have lost their freshness long before friends have assembled for the evening. And he concludes: ‘Where there is talk of a superior character, it appears to affect the epigrammatic form; and this is an unhealthy sign. If there were no other objection, how rarely can it avoid that appearance of self-consciousness and effort that is fatal to all elegance and ease.’

“Topics of conversation are not far to seek in these active days of ours, when the thoughts of men are widened by the process of the suns. The current history of the time – the last drama or opera or newest book, the scene of war – and there is always war somewhere – the last device of some scrupulously great or greatly unscrupulous statesman, the latest exploit of swimmer or mountain-climber, the last invention – these, and similar themes, will call forth and maintain an agreeable discussion.

“You must learn to express yourself with conciseness and accuracy, and, if possible, with a happy turn of expression that, though it will not be wit, will sound witty. Your talk should not be in epigrams, yet should it be epigrammatic. Around the dinner-table, elaborate criticism or argument, pathos or profundity would be out of place. You are not to soliloquize like Hamlet, but to bandy light speeches and sharp sayings like Mercutio. Of course you will avoid bitterness; there must be no vinegar, but a touch of lemon-juice will flavor the mixture.

“The epigrammatic is a valuable element, but should never predominate, since good conversation flows from a happy union of all the powers. To approximate to this, a certain amount of painstaking is necessary; and, though artifice is detestable, we must submit, that talk may be as legitimately made a subject of care and thought as any other part of a man’s humanity, and that it is ridiculous to send your mind abroad in a state of slovenliness while you bestow on your body the most refined care.

“I would establish but one great rule in conversation,” said Richard Steele, “which is this, that men should not talk to please themselves, but to please those that hear them. This would make them consider whether what they speak be worth hearing; whether there be either wit or sense in what they are about to say, and whether it be adapted to the time when, the place where, and the person to whom it is spoken.

“Conversation is a reflex of character. The envious, the pretentious, the impatient, the illiterate, will as surely betray their idiosyncrasies in conversation as the modest, the even-tempered, and the generous. Strive as we may, we cannot always be acting.

“Let us, therefore, cultivate a tone of mind and a habit of life, the betrayal of which need not put us to shame in any company; the rest will be easy.

“If we make ourselves worthy of refined and intelligent society, we shall not be rejected from it; and in such society we shall acquire by example all that we have failed to learn by precept.

“There is a certain distinct but subdued tone of voice that is peculiar to persons of the best breeding. It is better to err by the use of too low than of too loud a tone.

“A half opened mouth, a smile ready to overflow at any moment into a laugh, a vacant stare, a wandering eye, are all evidences of ill-breeding.

“Next to unexceptional diction, correct pronunciation, distinct enunciation, and a frank, self-controlled bearing, it is necessary to be genial. Do not go into society unless you can make up your mind to be cheerful, sympathetic, animating as well as animated.”

Of the late George Eliot, who was one of the most agreeable talkers of her time, some one has said: “She had one rare characteristic that gave a peculiar charm to her conversation. She had no petty egotism, no spirit of contradiction; she never talked for effect. A happy thought, well expressed, filled her with delight; in a moment she would seize the thought and improve upon it, so that common people felt themselves wise in her presence, and perhaps years after she would remind them, to their pride and surprise, of the good things they had said.”

Avoid slang as you would the plague. It is a great mistake to suppose that slang is in any way a substitute for wit. It is always low, generally coarse, and not unfrequently foolish. With the exception of cant, there is nothing that is more to be shunned. We sometimes meet with persons of considerable culture that interlard their talk with slang expressions, but it is safe to assert that they are always persons of coarse natures.

“Eschew everything that savors of the irreverent, and, as you love me, let not your tongue give way to slang! The slang of the æsthetic disciple of sweetness and light – the slang of the new school of erotic poets – the slang of the art-critic – the slang of the studios – the slang of the green room – the slang of Mayfair – and the slang of the Haymarket; shun each and all as you would flee from the shield of Medusa! Plain English and pure, from the well undefiled of the best writers and speakers – let that be the vehicle in which your opinions are conveyed, and the plainer and purer the better.”

Profanity is absolutely incompatible with genuine refinement; it is always ungentlemanly, and, therefore, to be avoided. If those men that habitually interlard their talk with oaths could be made to see how offensive to decency their profanity is, they would, perhaps, be less profane. Really well-bred men are very careful to avoid the use of improper language of every description.