Ii — Conversation
Good humor, flowing spirits, a sprightly wit, are essentials of good discourse. Add genial dispositions, graceful elocution, and to these accomplishments diffidence as the flower of the rest. There can be no eloquence where these are wanting. Any amount of sense, of logic, matter, leaves the discourse incomplete, interest flags, and disappointment ensues. None has command of himself till he can wield his powers sportfully, life sparkling from all his gifts and taking captive alike speaker and hearer, as they were docile children of his genius and surprised converts for the moment. “And I,” says Socrates, “through my youth often change my mind, but looking to you and apprehending that you speak the things that are divine, I think so too.” If one cannot inspire faith in what he says, no arts avail. Earnestness, sincerity, are orators whose persuasions are irresistible; they hold all gifts in fusion, magnetize, divinize, harmonize all. Good conversation is lyrical: a pentecost of tongues, touching the chords of melody in all minds, it prompts to the best each had to give, to better than any knew they had, what none claims as his own, as if he were the organ of some invisible player behind the scenes. What abandonments, reserves, which no premeditation, no cunning could have checked or called forth. What chasms are spanned with a trope, what pits forded, summits climbed, prospects commanded, perspectives gained,—the tour of the spheres made at a glance, a sitting; the circle coming safely out of the adventure. All men talk, few converse; of gossip we have enough, of argument more than enough, rhetoric, debate—omit these, speak from the heart to the heart underlying all differences, and we have conversation. For disputing there is the crowd; for ruminating, the woods; the clubs for wit and the superficial fellowship.
Companionableness comes by nature. For though culture may mellow and refine, it cannot give the flush of nobility to the current wherein ride our credentials for the posts of persuasion and of power. We meet magically, and pass with sounding manners; else encounter repulses, strokes of fate; temperament telling against temperament, precipitating us into vortices from which the nimblest finds no escape. We pity the person who shows himself unequal to the occasion; the scholar, for example, whose intellect is so exacting, so precise, that he cannot meet his company otherwise than critically; cannot descend to meet, through the senses or the sentiments, that common level where intercourse is possible with most. We pity him the more, who, from caprice or confusion can meet through these only. Still more, the case of him who can meet neither as sentimentalist nor idealist, or, rather, not at all in a human way. Intellect interblends with sentiment in the companionable mind, wit with humor. We detain the flowing tide at the cost of lapsing out of perception into memory, into the limbo of fools. Excellent people wonder why they cannot meet and converse. They cannot. No. Their wits have ebbed away, and left them helpless. Why, but because of hostile temperaments, states of animation? The personal magnetism finds no conductor. One is individual, the other is individual no less. Individuals repel. Persons meet. And only as one’s personality is sufficiently overpowering to dissolve the other’s individualism, can the parties flow together and become one. But individuals have no power of the sort. They are two, not one, perhaps many. Prisoned within themselves by reason of their egotism, like animals, they stand aloof, are separate even when they touch; are solitary in any company, having none in themselves. But the freed personal mind meets all, is apprehended by all, by the least cultivated, the most gifted; magnetizes all; is the spell-binder, the liberator of every one. We speak of sympathies, antipathies, fascinations, fates, for this reason.
IV
Friendship
“So great a happiness do I esteem it to be loved, that I really fancy every blessing both from gods and men ready to descend spontaneously upon him who is loved.”
—Xenophon.