foolish, this is assigning a great importance to words; but then it must be remembered that the weak, vain, and foolish are not the most active spirits, and that, even if they are captured, comparatively little has been obtained. No doubt we may splash up words, may juggle with them, and may make a great parade of their power, but in the end men are swayed not by the words, but by the thoughts on which the words rest. It is like the case of hypnotism. Theoretically, the best and most successful hypnotiser ought to be the greatest man in the world. His suggestions to the politicians and the capitalists should give him the command of society. Yet, as a matter of fact, the power of the hypnotiser is a dream, and cannot be employed in practice. So with the magician of words. His power is much more apparent than real. He can label the universal movements with his phrases, and can directly affect the weak and foolish part of the community; but the label, though it may sell, does not make, the champagne.

55

A STUDY IN CONVERSATION

I

PEOPLE are rather too apt to regard discursiveness as the sign of a weak mind, and to suspect that a man who has something to say on every question, from the proper basis for actuarial calculations to the causes of fugitiveness in water-colour pigments, is never worth listening to, and is merely an idle prater. It is impossible, they argue, that a man should know anything worth knowing about so many subjects, and they go on to talk about 'Jack-of-all-trades and master of none,' and to speak of the mind being debilitated and the mental energy sapped by discursiveness. 'A man should talk about what he knows, and only about that. Then he may say something worth hearing. As regards other things, he should hold his tongue, and then he won't make a fool of himself.' So says the parlour oracle, and shuts his mouth with a snap. And no doubt the logical position is, or appears to be, a very strong one.

No man can know more than a very few things thoroughly. A man can only say what is worth hearing on things he knows thoroughly. A man should not talk except he says things worth hearing. Therefore a man should not be discursive, and should confine himself to his own subjects. Such is the outline of the syllogisms

by which the discursive talker is put down, pulverised, and, if not reduced to silence, at any rate conclusively proved to be a babbling jackass. But in spite of the excellence of the logic, we all know that in fact the discursive talker can be, and often is, a most delightful talker. In spite of all the rules and all the schools, one may gain a great deal more not only of amusement, but of information, from the man who is not afraid of talking of anything in heaven above or the earth beneath than from the correct and pedantic gentleman who is always lying in wait for his own subject to turn up, and when it does turn up promptly blows it to pieces by discharging at its head an eightyone-ton gun loaded to the muzzle with facts and statistics. The discursive sportsman would have neatly put a bullet through the brain, and would have brought the game down unspoiled. The expert, who has bottled up his knowledge for a year, knocks it to smithereens, and leaves nothing but a few scraps of fur and feather.

Than the notion that the discursive talker is a weakminded man none is more utterly and ridiculously absurd. Some of the hardest-headed of men have been the most ubiquitous talkers imaginable. Macaulay was one. Whatever game you might start, he would be ready to hunt it with you. He never chose the pedant's part or refused to let fly because, in the words of the Oxford don, the subject started 'was not in his period.' Instead, he would stand (as Fanny Kemble describes him) all day long on the hearth-rug of the library at Bowood and do battle with anybody and everybody on any conceivable topic.

We shall not, we trust, be passing the bounds of privacy in instancing Mr. Gladstone as another example of the great discursives. Read the account of a conversation held with him by that singular and attractive person John MacGregor (the hero of the 'Rob Roy' canoe), given in his Life. Mr. MacGregor records in his Diary how he met Mr. Gladstone and his daughter 'on board Lawton's yacht "Lenore." 'Here had most intensely interesting confab with Chancellor of Exchequer on following subjects among others :-Shoeblacks; crossing-sweepers; Refuge Field-line; translation of Bible; Syria and Palestine Fund; Return of the Jews; Iron, brass, and stone age; Copper ore, Canada; bridges in streets; arching over whole Thames; ventilation of London; Ecce Homo; Gladstone's letter to author and his reply in clerk's hand to keep unknown; speculation as to his being a young man who wrote it; Language of Sound at Society of Arts; Dr. Wolff's Travels; Vambéry and his travels; poster with Reform resolutions at Norwich; use of the word "unscrupulously;" marginal notes on Scripture.' The comment on this delightful entry is too good to be omitted. 'Took leave deeply impressed with the talent, courtesy, and boundless suppleness of Gladstone's intellect, and of his deep reverence for God and the Bible and firm hold of Christ.'

Our readers will note that these were not the sole topics, but only the subjects among others' touched on by Mr. Gladstone. Now, according to the principle which so many people profess to regard as the true one, Mr. Gladstone's opinion would have been only worth having on his own subjects-i.e. politics and theology,

and possibly philanthropy, as a mixture of the two. He ought to have stood mute on the stone age, copper ore, Canada, street bridges, and the converting of the Thames into a great sewer. Even the excursus on the use of the word 'unscrupulously' in the Norwich poster ought strictly to have been torn from him and handed over to a lexicographer. But can any sane man declare that Mr. Gladstone would not have been worth listening to on all the subjects in the list, and that his acute and supple mind would not have contributed something noteworthy upon each and all of them?

Take again the two greatest talkers the world has known-one of them an ancient, the other a modernSocrates and Dr. Johnson. Socrates, no doubt, talked on fewer subjects than Johnson, but that was only because there were fewer subjects of conversation available. The Athenian world was far smaller, simpler, and therefore far less complex, than that of London in the eighteenth century. There were fewer books as well as fewer men, and less technical knowledge had been accumulated in the arts and sciences. Socrates was as discursive as he could be, considering his time and opportunities. Dr. Johnson's talk must have been quite as discursive as that of any man who ever lived. index to Boswell' is like that to an encyclopædia. Analyse any of the great talks between Dr. Johnson and his friends, and the subjects will not be found less numerous or less varied than those recorded in the extract from Mr. MacGregor's Diary.

The

In truth, discursiveness, instead of being the sign of a weak mind, is the sign of a strong and active mind. It is the torpid and unoriginal mind that sticks solely