Memories and Portraits

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Conclusions, indeed, are not often reached by talk any more than by
private thinking. That is not the profit. The profit is in the
exercise, and above all in the experience; for when we reason at
large on any subject, we review our state and history in life.
From time to time, however, and specially, I think, in talking art,
talk becomes elective, conquering like war, widening the boundaries
of knowledge like an exploration. A point arises; the question
takes a problematical, a baffling, yet a likely air; the talkers
begin to feel lively presentiments of some conclusion near at hand;
towards this they strive with emulous ardour, each by his own path,
and struggling for first utterance; and then one leaps upon the
summit of that matter with a shout, and almost at the same moment
the other is beside him; and behold they are agreed. Like enough,
the progress is illusory, a mere cat's cradle having been wound and
unwound out of words. But the sense of joint discovery is none the
less giddy and inspiriting. And in the life of the talker such
triumphs, though imaginary, are neither few nor far apart; they are
attained with speed and pleasure, in the hour of mirth; and by the
nature of the process, they are always worthily shared.

There is a certain attitude, combative at once and deferential,
eager to fight yet most averse to quarrel, which marks out at once
the talkable man. It is not eloquence, not fairness, not
obstinacy, but a certain proportion of all of these that I love to
encounter in my amicable adversaries. They must not be pontiffs
holding doctrine, but huntsmen questing after elements of truth.
Neither must they be boys to be instructed, but fellow-teachers
with whom I may wrangle and agree on equal terms. We must reach
some solution, some shadow of consent; for without that, eager talk
becomes a torture. But we do not wish to reach it cheaply, or
quickly, or without the tussle and effort wherein pleasure lies.

The very best talker, with me, is one whom I shall call Spring-
Heel'd Jack. I say so, because I never knew any one who mingled so
largely the possible ingredients of converse. In the Spanish
proverb, the fourth man necessary to compound a salad, is a madman
to mix it: Jack is that madman. I know not which is more
remarkable; the insane lucidity of his conclusions the humorous
eloquence of his language, or his power of method, bringing the
whole of life into the focus of the subject treated, mixing the
conversational salad like a drunken god. He doubles like the
serpent, changes and flashes like the shaken kaleidoscope,
transmigrates bodily into the views of others, and so, in the
twinkling of an eye and with a heady rapture, turns questions
inside out and flings them empty before you on the ground, like a
triumphant conjuror. It is my common practice when a piece of
conduct puzzles me, to attack it in the presence of Jack with such
grossness, such partiality and such wearing iteration, as at length
shall spur him up in its defence. In a moment he transmigrates,
dons the required character, and with moonstruck philosophy
justifies the act in question. I can fancy nothing to compare with
the VIM of these impersonations, the strange scale of language,
flying from Shakespeare to Kant, and from Kant to Major Dyngwell -

"As fast as a musician scatters sounds
Out of an instrument"

the sudden, sweeping generalisations, the absurd irrelevant
particularities, the wit, wisdom, folly, humour, eloquence and
bathos, each startling in its kind, and yet all luminous in the
admired disorder of their combination. A talker of a different
calibre, though belonging to the same school, is Burly. Burly is a
man of a great presence; he commands a larger atmosphere, gives the
impression of a grosser mass of character than most men. It has
been said of him that his presence could be felt in a room you
entered blindfold; and the same, I think, has been said of other
powerful constitutions condemned to much physical inaction. There
is something boisterous and piratic in Burly's manner of talk which
suits well enough with this impression. He will roar you down, he
will bury his face in his hands, he will undergo passions of revolt
and agony; and meanwhile his attitude of mind is really both
conciliatory and receptive; and after Pistol has been out Pistol'd,
and the welkin rung for hours, you begin to perceive a certain
subsidence in these spring torrents, points of agreement issue, and
you end arm-in-arm, and in a glow of mutual admiration. The outcry
only serves to make your final union the more unexpected and
precious. Throughout there has been perfect sincerity, perfect
intelligence, a desire to hear although not always to listen, and
an unaffected eagerness to meet concessions. You have, with Burly,
none of the dangers that attend debate with Spring-Heel'd Jack; who
may at any moment turn his powers of transmigration on yourself,
create for you a view you never held, and then furiously fall on
you for holding it. These, at least, are my two favourites, and
both are loud, copious, intolerant talkers. This argues that I
myself am in the same category; for if we love talking at all, we
love a bright, fierce adversary, who will hold his ground, foot by
foot, in much our own manner, sell his attention dearly, and give
us our full measure of the dust and exertion of battle. Both these
men can be beat from a position, but it takes six hours to do it; a
high and hard adventure, worth attempting. With both you can pass
days in an enchanted country of the mind, with people, scenery and
manners of its own; live a life apart, more arduous, active and
glowing than any real existence; and come forth again when the talk
is over, as out of a theatre or a dream, to find the east wind
still blowing and the chimney-pots of the old battered city still
around you. Jack has the far finer mind, Burly the far more
honest; Jack gives us the animated poetry, Burly the romantic
prose, of similar themes; the one glances high like a meteor and
makes a light in darkness; the other, with many changing hues of
fire, burns at the sea-level, like a conflagration; but both have
the same humour and artistic interests, the same unquenched ardour
in pursuit, the same gusts of talk and thunderclaps of
contradiction.

Cockshot (5) is a different article, but vastly entertaining, and
has been meat and drink to me for many a long evening. His manner
is dry, brisk and pertinacious, and the choice of words not much.
The point about him is his extraordinary readiness and spirit. You
can propound nothing but he has either a theory about it ready-
made, or will have one instantly on the stocks, and proceed to lay
its timbers and launch it in your presence. "Let me see," he will
say. "Give me a moment. I SHOULD have some theory for that." A
blither spectacle than the vigour with which he sets about the
task, it were hard to fancy. He is possessed by a demoniac energy,
welding the elements for his life, and bending ideas, as an athlete
bends a horse-shoe, with a visible and lively effort. He has, in
theorising, a compass, an art; what I would call the synthetic
gusto; something of a Herbert Spencer, who should see the fun of
the thing. You are not bound, and no more is he, to place your
faith in these brand-new opinions. But some of them are right
enough, durable even for life; and the poorest serve for a cock shy
- as when idle people, after picnics, float a bottle on a pond and
have an hour's diversion ere it sinks. Whichever they are, serious
opinions or humours of the moment, he still defends his ventures
with indefatigable wit and spirit, hitting savagely himself, but
taking punishment like a man. He knows and never forgets that
people talk, first of all, for the sake of talking; conducts
himself in the ring, to use the old slang, like a thorough
"glutton," and honestly enjoys a telling facer from his adversary.
Cockshot is bottled effervescency, the sworn foe of sleep. Three-
in-the-morning Cockshot, says a victim. His talk is like the
driest of all imaginable dry champagnes. Sleight of hand and
inimitable quickness are the qualities by which he lives.
Athelred, on the other hand, presents you with the spectacle of a
sincere and somewhat slow nature thinking aloud. He is the most
unready man I ever knew to shine in conversation. You may see him
sometimes wrestle with a refractory jest for a minute or two
together, and perhaps fail to throw it in the end. And there is
something singularly engaging, often instructive, in the simplicity
with which he thus exposes the process as well as the result, the
works as well as the dial of the clock. Withal he has his hours of
inspiration. Apt words come to him as if by accident, and, coming
from deeper down, they smack the more personally, they have the
more of fine old crusted humanity, rich in sediment and humour.
There are sayings of his in which he has stamped himself into the
very grain of the language; you would think he must have worn the
words next his skin and slept with them. Yet it is not as a sayer
of particular good things that Athelred is most to he regarded,
rather as the stalwart woodman of thought. I have pulled on a
light cord often enough, while he has been wielding the broad-axe;
and between us, on this unequal division, many a specious fallacy
has fallen. I have known him to battle the same question night
after night for years, keeping it in the reign of talk, constantly
applying it and re-applying it to life with humorous or grave
intention, and all the while, never hurrying, nor flagging, nor
taking an unfair advantage of the facts. Jack at a given moment,
when arising, as it were, from the tripod, can be more radiantly
just to those from whom he differs; but then the tenor of his
thoughts is even calumnious; while Athelred, slower to forge
excuses, is yet slower to condemn, and sits over the welter of the
world, vacillating but still judicial, and still faithfully
contending with his doubts.

Both the last talkers deal much in points of conduct and religion
studied in the "dry light" of prose. Indirectly and as if against
his will the same elements from time to time appear in the troubled
and poetic talk of Opalstein. His various and exotic knowledge,
complete although unready sympathies, and fine, full,
discriminative flow of language, fit him out to be the best of
talkers; so perhaps he is with some, not quite with me - PROXIME
ACCESSIT, I should say. He sings the praises of the earth and the
arts, flowers and jewels, wine and music, in a moonlight,
serenading manner, as to the light guitar; even wisdom comes from
his tongue like singing; no one is, indeed, more tuneful in the
upper notes. But even while he sings the song of the Sirens, he
still hearkens to the barking of the Sphinx. Jarring Byronic notes
interrupt the flow of his Horatian humours. His mirth has
something of the tragedy of the world for its perpetual background;
and he feasts like Don Giovanni to a double orchestra, one lightly
sounding for the dance, one pealing Beethoven in the distance. He
is not truly reconciled either with life or with himself; and this
instant war in his members sometimes divides the man's attention.
He does not always, perhaps not often, frankly surrender himself in
conversation. He brings into the talk other thoughts than those
which he expresses; you are conscious that he keeps an eye on
something else, that he does not shake off the world, nor quite
forget himself. Hence arise occasional disappointments; even an
occasional unfairness for his companions, who find themselves one
day giving too much, and the next, when they are wary out of
season, giving perhaps too little. Purcel is in another class from
any I have mentioned. He is no debater, but appears in
conversation, as occasion rises, in two distinct characters, one of
which I admire and fear, and the other love. In the first, he is
radiantly civil and rather silent, sits on a high, courtly hilltop,
and from that vantage-ground drops you his remarks like favours.
He seems not to share in our sublunary contentions; he wears no
sign of interest; when on a sudden there falls in a crystal of wit,
so polished that the dull do not perceive it, but so right that the
sensitive are silenced. True talk should have more body and blood,
should be louder, vainer and more declaratory of the man; the true
talker should not hold so steady an advantage over whom he speaks
with; and that is one reason out of a score why I prefer my Purcel
in his second character, when he unbends into a strain of graceful
gossip, singing like the fireside kettle. In these moods he has an
elegant homeliness that rings of the true Queen Anne. I know
another person who attains, in his moments, to the insolence of a
Restoration comedy, speaking, I declare, as Congreve wrote; but
that is a sport of nature, and scarce falls under the rubric, for
there is none, alas! to give him answer.

One last remark occurs: It is the mark of genuine conversation that
the sayings can scarce be quoted with their full effect beyond the
circle of common friends. To have their proper weight they should
appear in a biography, and with the portrait of the speaker. Good
talk is dramatic; it is like an impromptu piece of acting where
each should represent himself to the greatest advantage; and that
is the best kind of talk where each speaker is most fully and
candidly himself, and where, if you were to shift the speeches
round from one to another, there would be the greatest loss in
significance and perspicuity. It is for this reason that talk
depends so wholly on our company. We should like to introduce
Falstaff and Mercutio, or Falstaff and Sir Toby; but Falstaff in
talk with Cordelia seems even painful. Most of us, by the Protean
quality of man, can talk to some degree with all; but the true
talk, that strikes out all the slumbering best of us, comes only
with the peculiar brethren of our spirits, is founded as deep as
love in the constitution of our being, and is a thing to relish
with all our energy, while yet we have it, and to be grateful for
forever.

CHAPTER XI. TALK AND TALKERS (6)

II

IN the last paper there was perhaps too much about mere debate; and
there was nothing said at all about that kind of talk which is
merely luminous and restful, a higher power of silence, the quiet
of the evening shared by ruminating friends. There is something,
aside from personal preference, to be alleged in support of this
omission. Those who are no chimney-cornerers, who rejoice in the
social thunderstorm, have a ground in reason for their choice.
They get little rest indeed; but restfulness is a quality for
cattle; the virtues are all active, life is alert, and it is in
repose that men prepare themselves for evil. On the other hand,
they are bruised into a knowledge of themselves and others; they
have in a high degree the fencer's pleasure in dexterity displayed
and proved; what they get they get upon life's terms, paying for it
as they go; and once the talk is launched, they are assured of
honest dealing from an adversary eager like themselves. The
aboriginal man within us, the cave-dweller, still lusty as when he
fought tooth and nail for roots and berries, scents this kind of
equal battle from afar; it is like his old primaeval days upon the
crags, a return to the sincerity of savage life from the
comfortable fictions of the civilised. And if it be delightful to
the Old Man, it is none the less profitable to his younger brother,
the conscientious gentleman I feel never quite sure of your urbane
and smiling coteries; I fear they indulge a man's vanities in
silence, suffer him to encroach, encourage him on to be an ass, and
send him forth again, not merely contemned for the moment, but
radically more contemptible than when he entered. But if I have a
flushed, blustering fellow for my opposite, bent on carrying a
point, my vanity is sure to have its ears rubbed, once at least, in
the course of the debate. He will not spare me when we differ; he
will not fear to demonstrate my folly to my face.

For many natures there is not much charm in the still, chambered
society, the circle of bland countenances, the digestive silence,
the admired remark, the flutter of affectionate approval. They
demand more atmosphere and exercise; "a gale upon their spirits,"
as our pious ancestors would phrase it; to have their wits well
breathed in an uproarious Valhalla. And I suspect that the choice,
given their character and faults, is one to be defended. The
purely wise are silenced by facts; they talk in a clear atmosphere,
problems lying around them like a view in nature; if they can be
shown to be somewhat in the wrong, they digest the reproof like a
thrashing, and make better intellectual blood. They stand
corrected by a whisper; a word or a glance reminds them of the
great eternal law. But it is not so with all. Others in
conversation seek rather contact with their fellow-men than
increase of knowledge or clarity of thought. The drama, not the
philosophy, of life is the sphere of their intellectual activity.
Even when they pursue truth, they desire as much as possible of
what we may call human scenery along the road they follow. They
dwell in the heart of life; the blood sounding in their ears, their
eyes laying hold of what delights them with a brutal avidity that
makes them blind to all besides, their interest riveted on people,
living, loving, talking, tangible people. To a man of this
description, the sphere of argument seems very pale and ghostly.
By a strong expression, a perturbed countenance, floods of tears,
an insult which his conscience obliges him to swallow, he is
brought round to knowledge which no syllogism would have conveyed
to him. His own experience is so vivid, he is so superlatively
conscious of himself, that if, day after day, he is allowed to
hector and hear nothing but approving echoes, he will lose his hold
on the soberness of things and take himself in earnest for a god.
Talk might be to such an one the very way of moral ruin; the school
where he might learn to be at once intolerable and ridiculous.

This character is perhaps commoner than philosophers suppose. And
for persons of that stamp to learn much by conversation, they must
speak with their superiors, not in intellect, for that is a
superiority that must be proved, but in station. If they cannot
find a friend to bully them for their good, they must find either
an old man, a woman, or some one so far below them in the
artificial order of society, that courtesy may he particularly
exercised.

The best teachers are the aged. To the old our mouths are always
partly closed; we must swallow our obvious retorts and listen.
They sit above our heads, on life's raised dais, and appeal at once
to our respect and pity. A flavour of the old school, a touch of
something different in their manner - which is freer and rounder,
if they come of what is called a good family, and often more timid
and precise if they are of the middle class - serves, in these
days, to accentuate the difference of age and add a distinction to
gray hairs. But their superiority is founded more deeply than by
outward marks or gestures. They are before us in the march of man;
they have more or less solved the irking problem; they have battled
through the equinox of life; in good and evil they have held their
course; and now, without open shame, they near the crown and
harbour. It may be we have been struck with one of fortune's
darts; we can scarce be civil, so cruelly is our spirit tossed.
Yet long before we were so much as thought upon, the like calamity
befell the old man or woman that now, with pleasant humour, rallies
us upon our inattention, sitting composed in the holy evening of
man's life, in the clear shining after rain. We grow ashamed of
our distresses, new and hot and coarse, like villainous roadside
brandy; we see life in aerial perspective, under the heavens of
faith; and out of the worst, in the mere presence of contented
elders, look forward and take patience. Fear shrinks before them
"like a thing reproved," not the flitting and ineffectual fear of
death, but the instant, dwelling terror of the responsibilities and
revenges of life. Their speech, indeed, is timid; they report
lions in the path; they counsel a meticulous footing; but their
serene, marred faces are more eloquent and tell another story.
Where they have gone, we will go also, not very greatly fearing;
what they have endured unbroken, we also, God helping us, will make
a shift to bear.

Not only is the presence of the aged in itself remedial, but their
minds are stored with antidotes, wisdom's simples, plain
considerations overlooked by youth. They have matter to
communicate, be they never so stupid. Their talk is not merely
literature, it is great literature; classic in virtue of the
speaker's detachment, studded, like a book of travel, with things
we should not otherwise have learnt. In virtue, I have said, of
the speaker's detachment, - and this is why, of two old men, the
one who is not your father speaks to you with the more sensible
authority; for in the paternal relation the oldest have lively
interests and remain still young. Thus I have known two young men
great friends; each swore by the other's father; the father of each
swore by the other lad; and yet each pair of parent and child were
perpetually by the ears. This is typical: it reads like the germ
of some kindly comedy.

The old appear in conversation in two characters: the critically
silent and the garrulous anecdotic. The last is perhaps what we
look for; it is perhaps the more instructive. An old gentleman,
well on in years, sits handsomely and naturally in the bow-window
of his age, scanning experience with reverted eye; and chirping and
smiling, communicates the accidents and reads the lesson of his
long career. Opinions are strengthened, indeed, but they are also
weeded out in the course of years. What remains steadily present
to the eye of the retired veteran in his hermitage, what still
ministers to his content, what still quickens his old honest heart
- these are "the real long-lived things" that Whitman tells us to
prefer. Where youth agrees with age, not where they differ, wisdom
lies; and it is when the young disciple finds his heart to beat in
tune with his gray-bearded teacher's that a lesson may be learned.
I have known one old gentleman, whom I may name, for he in now
gathered to his stock - Robert Hunter, Sheriff of Dumbarton, and
author of an excellent law-book still re-edited and republished.
Whether he was originally big or little is more than I can guess.
When I knew him he was all fallen away and fallen in; crooked and
shrunken; buckled into a stiff waistcoat for support; troubled by
ailments, which kept him hobbling in and out of the room; one foot
gouty; a wig for decency, not for deception, on his head; close
shaved, except under his chin - and for that he never failed to
apologise, for it went sore against the traditions of his life.
You can imagine how he would fare in a novel by Miss Mather; yet
this rag of a Chelsea veteran lived to his last year in the
plenitude of all that is best in man, brimming with human kindness,
and staunch as a Roman soldier under his manifold infirmities. You
could not say that he had lost his memory, for he would repeat
Shakespeare and Webster and Jeremy Taylor and Burke by the page
together; but the parchment was filled up, there was no room for
fresh inscriptions, and he was capable of repeating the same
anecdote on many successive visits. His voice survived in its full
power, and he took a pride in using it. On his last voyage as
Commissioner of lighthouses, he hailed a ship at sea and made
himself clearly audible without a speaking trumpet, ruffling the
while with a proper vanity in his achievement. He had a habit of
eking out his words with interrogative hems, which was puzzling and
a little wearisome, suited ill with his appearance, and seemed a
survival from some former stage of bodily portliness. Of yore,
when he was a great pedestrian and no enemy to good claret, he may
have pointed with these minute guns his allocutions to the bench.
His humour was perfectly equable, set beyond the reach of fate;
gout, rheumatism, stone and gravel might have combined their forces
against that frail tabernacle, but when I came round on Sunday
evening, he would lay aside Jeremy Taylor's LIFE OF CHRIST and
greet me with the same open brow, the same kind formality of
manner. His opinions and sympathies dated the man almost to a
decade. He had begun life, under his mother's influence, as an
admirer of Junius, but on maturer knowledge had transferred his
admiration to Burke. He cautioned me, with entire gravity, to be
punctilious in writing English; never to forget that I was a
Scotchman, that English was a foreign tongue, and that if I
attempted the colloquial, I should certainly, be shamed: the remark
was apposite, I suppose, in the days of David Hume. Scott was too
new for him; he had known the author - known him, too, for a Tory;
and to the genuine classic a contemporary is always something of a
trouble. He had the old, serious love of the play; had even, as he
was proud to tell, played a certain part in the history of
Shakespearian revivals, for he had successfully pressed on Murray,
of the old Edinburgh Theatre, the idea of producing Shakespeare's
fairy pieces with great scenic display. A moderate in religion, he
was much struck in the last years of his life by a conversation
with two young lads, revivalists "H'm," he would say - "new to me.
I have had - h'm - no such experience." It struck him, not with
pain, rather with a solemn philosophic interest, that he, a
Christian as he hoped, and a Christian of so old a standing, should
hear these young fellows talking of his own subject, his own
weapons that he had fought the battle of life with, - "and - h'm -
not understand." In this wise and graceful attitude he did justice
to himself and others, reposed unshaken in his old beliefs, and
recognised their limits without anger or alarm. His last recorded
remark, on the last night of his life, was after he had been
arguing against Calvinism with his minister and was interrupted by
an intolerable pang. "After all," he said, "of all the 'isms, I
know none so bad as rheumatism." My own last sight of him was some
time before, when we dined together at an inn; he had been on
circuit, for he stuck to his duties like a chief part of his
existence; and I remember it as the only occasion on which he ever
soiled his lips with slang - a thing he loathed. We were both
Roberts; and as we took our places at table, he addressed me with a
twinkle: "We are just what you would call two bob." He offered me
port, I remember, as the proper milk of youth; spoke of "twenty-
shilling notes"; and throughout the meal was full of old-world
pleasantry and quaintness, like an ancient boy on a holiday. But
what I recall chiefly was his confession that he had never read
OTHELLO to an end. Shakespeare was his continual study. He loved
nothing better than to display his knowledge and memory by adducing
parallel passages from Shakespeare, passages where the same word
was employed, or the same idea differently treated. But OTHELLO
had beaten him. "That noble gentleman and that noble lady - h'm -
too painful for me." The same night the hoardings were covered
with posters, "Burlesque of OTHELLO," and the contrast blazed up in
my mind like a bonfire. An unforgettable look it gave me into that
kind man's soul. His acquaintance was indeed a liberal and pious
education. All the humanities were taught in that bare dining-room
beside his gouty footstool. He was a piece of good advice; he was
himself the instance that pointed and adorned his various talk.
Nor could a young man have found elsewhere a place so set apart
from envy, fear, discontent, or any of the passions that debase; a
life so honest and composed; a soul like an ancient violin, so
subdued to harmony, responding to a touch in music - as in that
dining-room, with Mr. Hunter chatting at the eleventh hour, under
the shadow of eternity, fearless and gentle.

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