My Humble Opinion

Auckland Star, Volume XXXVIII, Issue 65, 16 March 1907, Page 12

My Humble Opinion

[IlyHnmbSeOpinioii] I PIERROT. |

tTHE LOST ART OF TALKING.

If one of our attractive ancestors in velvet and frills and knee-breeches were to step down in spirit from his picture and pass into an Auckland street, he would naturally have many surprises. But I am not sure that the telegraph and electric traction would be the greatest. What would he think of our raucous, tuneless voices, our jerky, staccato utterance, our miserable clumsiness Of expression? Brought into" a world where little now mattered but utility, he would find the strange contradiction that the elemental necessity for making ourselves clearly understood was not even considered. No speech remains clear for long unless it has something of grace; and he would find that our words were obscure because they were used brutally. We would talk faster than he, but how much of it would be the merest hotchpotch of misfitting ugly phrases, reflecting the mental barrenness of a business age! He would hear us talking of education, and he would laugh in spirit with all his-old portwiny vigour, and with a "Gadzooks!" ask where in Heaven's name our education was. He would hear the vapidest subjects treated in eager, if unfinished sentences; he would hear the grandest topics dismissed because they were beyond the understanding of the meanest intelligence within earshot. No one would be listening to anyone else, but the odious "That's right" would ring in at fixed intervals like a high note from a concertina in the midst of a Quakers' meeting. If he listened closely enough our ancient visitor would hear a man saying, "That's right" to opinions with which he was utterly at variance. He would learn that everyone was there to talk and nobody to listen; that everyone was the intellectual superior of everybody else; and that' plutocracy was wondrously overbearing as compared with the politely communistic methods of a bygone aristocracy. He would note that the diffident man was always assumed to be ignorant, and the slow and careful speaker to be stupid; he would see that the failings of both were corrected by impetuous and bullying interruption.

Don't think I am setting myself on a pinnacle, because I happen, as a matter of fact, to be as lame and halting a talker as you will easily find. But I urge improvement in the same spirit that leads mc, although a bachelor, to urge that my fellow-victims equally with myself, should pay a tax for the miserable privilege of being what we are. lamalways whipping myself for not being able to talk like a reasonable, civilised creature, and I don't see why I should take all the blows to myself. A lithe, readytongued debater—who is another conversational monstrosity at the other choice of extremes—will run rings round mc and leave mc helpless and exhausted until I have found out the trickery by which he scored his illicit points; which is usually well after '"due date" for retaliation. The quick conversational fencer with fixed opinions is really as much of a cheap product of commercialism as the clumsy stammerer over whom he claims innumerable victories. Good talk is born of repose; it discusses but never argues; it ripens towards midnight and is dead in the luncheon hour; it claims no triumphs, but it wins unwittingly by its eternal freshness and variety; it is gentle and human; its surprises must be unheralded and its jests unaccented. The voice of the good talker is soft and mellow; his words are simple Saxon when he can manage it, and firmly and accurately polysyllabic when he can't; his sentences are graceful but never sonorous; his silence is as eloquent as his speech and his method of drawing you out a miracle of clever method. Such men are as rare as saints or good tenors, but when they are to be found they are as refreshing as rain in the desert.

Perhaps it is partly because reading is so easy that talkers are so rare. But how much there is that no book can ever give! Conversation solves problems for which the printed letter offers no solution. Opinions dissolve like ice in the genial warmth of good talk. For in good talk Conservative does not meet Socialist, nor freeholder leaseholder with the labels on; they meet with generous readiness of grasp, quick sympathy, perfect tolerance, and the desire to learn. Talk about persons and localities for their own sake will be avoided; they must have a wider reference or be left alone. Grievances can only be treated lightly, and not at length; and even then with no egotistical emphasis. Of course you will not accuse mc of suggesting as an ideal that

the laws of true conversation should never be broken in our waking hours; that doctrine would be too insane for advancement even by mc. Obviously, we have tc speak as well as to talk, and- a complaint about lost luggage for instance, does not lend itself to conversational graces. Nevertheless, that is no reason why there should not be good talking equally with the ugly and necessary speaking of our business hours. Most of us will never learn the art ourselves, because there must be the fundamental power of co-ordinating thought and speech which at the best is rare; but at least it would be a mighty privilege merely to sit and listen to people who have it in full measure. I have been looking through quite a number of speeches of Australian politicians lately, and I notice that one and all they are "satisfied" that something is so and so, that they "commence" but never "be«in" to do anything, and that they will offer their "assistance" but never their "help." They all seem to use. precisely tbe same words to express the same idea, which must make listening- to public speakers in the Commonwealth a little wearisome. In public men you would think there would be some serious effort to avoid stereotype; in private, of course, you expect it. and you want to dance with joy when you get anything else; and if the public man does not set the example, what chance is there for the i conversational advancement of the majority, who cannot have leaders without being led, even to the choosing of the same words ? And conversation can be so fresh, so bright, so splendidly wayward, that it can turn any dross to gold and take inspiration from every moment. But then, since it must not be conscious, and the speech maker never talks well, in what lies our remedy? In admiration, I think, and by joining mc in paying the compliment of listening to and encouraging the man who can talk at once gracefully and modestly, and with a sense of the exquisite range of expression that lies in the spoken as well las tbrnmrnm liUllll, j --