THE CAPACITY TO CONVERSE.
PROFESSOR MAHAFFY, in the little book, or rather pamphlet, which he has recently issued upon " The Art of Conversation," raises a question as to the cause of the great differences in the power of conversing observable in different races, and different classes of the same people. That such differences exist is certain, and it is certain, also, that they are not attributable to differences of knowledge. The boor of the English Midland counties, says, or rather suggests, the Professor, cannot converse at all ; and though that is an exaggeration, it is true that he converses, if at all, with a kind of difficulty. He says only what he is obliged to say, he is slow to reply to a question, and he never throws back the ball of conversation merely for the sake of throwing it. To engage him in chat, in an easy interchange of ideas even on subjects within his range, is for a superior impossible, and for an equal an arduous under- taking. He seldom speaks even to his wife except in the way of a direct request, and will labour side by side with a comrade for hours without ever exchanging a syllable, unless it be in the shape of an order, or of that sort of question into which a farm-hand usually throws any remonstrance he may have to make. " What bee'st a doing now?" is his notion of humorous reproof. He guides his lads as he guides his cattle, and will reprove a fellow-worker with along stare, often, we are bound to say, more effective than words. The men of some other districts are nearly, though not quite, as silent, and do not relax even over their outdoor meals. They will eat together and drink together, and say nothing. Mr. H. Kingsley, who knew the rural folk well, declares that this is true even of their love-making, and that lad and maiden will walk aide by aide for weeks, and neither say a word to the other, either of pleading, or of compliment, or of gossip. That may be an exaggeration ; but certainly the peasantry, and, indeed, the whole lower class of England, are—of course with bright exceptions, and with men among them who are generally humorous, and use a singularly racy speech—ignorant of the art of conversing. They will narrate, sometimes at great length, actual occurrences, or reports of occurrences, received from others, spoiling the narration usually with apologetic digressions, intended, one would fain believe, to guard against even a suspicion of inaccuracy. They think they are saying too much or too little, and pull themselves up to insert what, in their minds, if not in the ears of their hearers, is an expedient qualification. They also criticise persons, often with keen insight, but always in single, disconnected sentences, of which the gist is usually an epithet. "He's a copperative kind of cove," is, for instance, a fine description of a mean gentleman fond of buying at Co- operative Stores, couched in as few words as it is possible to use. They will also, if strongly pressed, pass an opinion upon work, or upon a thing purchased, or a cottage built;
but in such cases ten words is a flow of talk. But they never seem to converse, to give and take in words uttered because it is a pleasure to utter them, or because their interlocutors' sentences have provoked their own. There is no chat in the average labourer, even if he is moderately drunk. The Scot, even if he will not converse, will usually argue, and the Londoner will tell anecdotes ; but the English peasant is, as a rule, a person with a gift for empty meditation. The Irish peasant, on the other hand, talks readily and pleasantly, in short sentences usually full of expression ; so does the Italian, who knows less than the Englishman; and so does the Bengalee, who knows hardly more than the animals around him. The latter, indeed, talks frequently and with animation, though almost always on a single subject,— money. It has been said by one who wrote after years of obser- vation, that if two Bengalees talk for five minutes, the word paisa (pence) will always be heard ; but talk they do, with remark, answer, rejoinder, and repartee. What is the cause of that difference ?
Professor Mahaffy suggests an answer which seems to us to savour of artificial profundity, and therefore to be very unlike Professor Mahaffy, who usually says his true thought, even if it is a little out of place :—" I fancy the causes of these social differences arc rather recent than primeval ; they do not depend directly upon climate or atmosphere, and if I may quote the opinion of a wise friend on this large question, I should say that one chief cause of the talking or social ability of some peasantries over others is the fact that their proximate ancestors were a bilingual people. Thus the great majority of West Irish and North Scotch peasants are descended from grandfathers whose talk oscillated between Celtic and English, and who were there- fore constantly educated in intelligence by the problem of trans- lating ideas from one language into another, not to mention the distinct inheritance of the special ideas peculiar to each and every language. This is an education in expression, in thinking, and therefore in conversation, wholly foreign to the English Midland boor, who has never heard more than two or three hundred words of a very rade provincial dialect of English, and therefore commands neither the words nor the ideas of the outlying provinces." A theory of that kind should explain the facts, and this does not explain them. If it were true, the women would be as silent as the men, having even less of culture ; but they are not. On the contrary, the wives of these silent rural folk can often chat agreeably, and give and take in conversation. They do not only narrate; they discuss, and are capable even of rough badinage, which helps the argument directly on. Moreover, the chattering peoples, the Neapolitans, for instance, are not bilingual; and the best talkers in the world, the born Parisians, spring of ancestors who knew no language but their own. The border peoples, too, are not exceptionally talkative, as we see in Wales ; and the Swiss peasantry, for all their linguistic acquirements, are exceptionally taciturn. Nobody would say that an Alsatian, accustomed from childhood to two languages, and those among the richest in the world, was more conversable than a Lyonnais, who hardly knows of the existence of two ; while a Parisian seems nimble in talk by the side of a Bruxellois, who is never for an instant out of the hearing of two tongues. The man who is bilingual, either in fact or by tradition, has no doubt a larger command of words ; but is the command of words the key to the secret ? If so, why do the women, as we said before, talk better than the men, and why are not all the cultivated equally capable of conver- sation? How often can a Professor's comparatively ignorant wife talk well, while the learned husband is incapable of conver- sation ! And, finally, if the difference is a question of knowledge of any sort, why does wine no often, and up to a point, brighten talk and talkers ? It cannot add thoughts, or increase a limited repertoire of words. At most, alcohol, in any form, can but impart courage, and perhaps a little speed to the movements of the brain. We should say that the power to talk, in the sense of conversing, came first of all from the wish to talk, the desire to manifest one's self to others; and that this was in the first instance exactly what the Professor says it is not,—a race peculiarity. Nothing runs more completely in families than the habit of conversing much, and a race is nothing but a big family. Did Mr. Mahaffy, in his whole life, ever meet a Jew who could not talk, or who did not wish to talk, or who, if circumstances favoured him, did not talk a little too readily P Persians and Arabs, who know nothing, chat twice as readily as Scotch
farmers, who know much ; and the populace of Naples, men as ignorant as the fishes of their bay, talk, and talk well, all day. The Greeks have been chatterboxes for three thousand years, and have lived for eight hundred of them side by side with Turks, who in the lower classes scarcely converse at all. It is not even true, so far as our observation goes, that, outside the Teutonic race, class makes any perceptible difference, an Italian or Greek or French workman talking quite as readily as his superior, and enjoying talk quite as much. What he says has not much in it, but he likes saying it, and if talk is going on, he feels silence as an irksome restraint. He begins, too, readily, saying the first thing that comes to his lips, and using no common form, such as a reference to the weather, to announce, as the Englishman does, that he will talk if you like. We fear that the truth is one which Professor Mahaffy's courtesy induces him only to hint,—viz., that the Teuton of all three branches, German, Englishman, and American, though he is filling the world, and may possibly master it, is a slow-witted being who does not by nature enjoy talk, but rather feels it a worry to be called on to understand words and make a response to them so quickly. He does not take in readily, and therefore has little plea- sure in hearing talk; and he cannot give out quickly, and therefore suffers in uttering it. Cultivation, habit, and necessity remove in certain classes this disability more or less completely, so that some Englishmen have been among the beet talkers in the world— Lord Chesterfield, for example, was a true Englishman, and so is Lord Sherbrooke—but even the educated classes remain, in the eyes of Continentals, unready and cumbrous in conversation. Americans, as a body, though with exceptions, give Englishmen precisely the same impression, and the silence in a group of Americans who do not know each other is worse than the silence in an English railway-carriage. As to the cause of such a peculiarity of race, it is tiresome, or at all events useless, even to speculate. We might say that the Teuton was rather ashamed of his speech as an ineffective thing, while most other races were proud of theirs ; but there would be little that is nutritive in that remark, for it only pushes the question back one step further ; while another explanation, which has real weight with our own minds, will seem to one-half of our readers a joke or an absurdity. Only one race is more silent than the Teuton, the Red Indian of the forests ; and it was but yesterday, as com- pared, for instance, with the Jew or the Greek, that the Teuton came out of them. He may learn to talk yet,—say in another thousand years,—though he may possibly become, when he has learned, a little more disagreeable than he is at present.
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