CONVERSATION IN LONDON.

Otago Witness, Issue 1932, 30 November 1888, Page 31

CONVERSATION IN LONDON.

The men who spanned the conversational gulf between the last and the present generation were Lord Beaconsfield, Mr Gladstone, Lord Houghton, Mr Hayward, Oharles Villiers, and others less known to the general public, writes Mr Smalley in the Tribune. Each of them deserves a full discussion, but here I note only one or two points, and of some I wrote long since. Lord Beaconsfield, indeed, never passed in society for a great talker. It was not always that he chose to talk. There is a significant passage in one of his letters to his sister. He had gone in to dinner with someone for whom he did not care, but this someone to whom he would not talk insisted on talking to him, and so, sighs Disraeli, " I had not even the consolation of a silent stuff." When in the mood and company for conversation he was essentially modern. He delivered no oration, poured out no flood of knowledge, was epigrammatic, sententious, brief. He was brilliant when he chose, changed with the changing times, a " vigilant observer of social fashions, always, as Gambetta said of himself, a man of his own time. Perhaps he was even more so during the later years of his life than at the beginning. The times had come round io him.

There was a long period during which Lord Houghton and Mr Hayward were rivals ; when each, like the Turk, could beai no brother near the throne. They had to bear it, however, for neither ever obtained an undisputed supremacy. Each of them did something to bring in the new manner ; together they did much. They met often at the same table ; seldom without a collision. The collision was not of the kind which expresses itself by throwing decanters at each other's heads.

A stranger need seldom have noticed that these two men disliked each other, or were talking against each other. But neither would suffer his rival to be too long in possession of the ear of the table. Houghton had a voice, which, in his younger days, must have been caressing. Hayward's washard, somewhat harsh. He has been known to growl out as his competitor quitted the room : " Time he did go — interrupting everybody all the evening."

Hayward was by nature the more con* tinuous and contentious talker of the two, more arbitrary, caring more to conquer than to charm. Houghton delighted to captivate his hearers. The poet came out in his talk, or rather the poetic nature. Hayward wa» peremptory, sometimes tyrannical. He knew what he knew with an accuracy which brooked no denial, which tolerated no inaccuracy in others.

No two men were more interesting together if their host or, still better, their hostess knew how to keep them in order, as Lady Waldegrave, for example, did. Houghton started with position, wealth, and some literary fame. Hayward fought his way up from a solicitor's office. Once on a level, society treated them both just alike. Houghton was the greater favourite ; Hayward tho more feared. With his knowledge, his courage, his determination to be heard, his conviction that nobody else so well deserved being heard, he was the best illustration I ever knew of La Rochefoucauld's maxim: " La confiance fournit plus a la conversation que V esprit? He was not indeed wanting in esprit of a certain sort. Of mere wit he had none ; of intelligence a high degree ; but his confidence in himself was superabounding. Whoever has that, and. as much to justify it as Hayward had, may count on .repeating Hayward's extraordinary success in the society of London.

There remains to this generation one talker who may be likened to Macaulay. I mean Mr Gladstone. To write about a living celebrity as freely as about one who already belongs to history is impossible ; it is equally impossible to give in a few sentences a complete account of Mr Gladstone's characteristics as a talker. I name him not as a type but as an anti-type. His manner belongs to a period that is past, if that can be said to belong to any period which is in fact entirely individual. If I liken him to Macaulay it is because he also has in a degree that habit of monologue which Macaulay had, and with him other less famous personages of his time. His talk is a stream ; a stream like the Oxus in Arnold's verse :

Brimming and bright and large . . . Nor does anybody, like Horace's rustic, wait for it to flow out ; it is a stream you would like to flow on for ever.

Macaulay I never heard; he had carried bis talk elsewhither before I first came to England. Mr Gladstone I have "heard'often, and if Macaulay. were at all like him all the jealous criticism of his contemporaries who survived him, and who say he would sow be

nought a bore, is sheer nonsense. But there fc&ust have been points of contrast between the methods of these two great talkers not less sharp than between the men themselves. Roughly speaking, Macaulay passed his life among books ; Mr Gladstone has passed his in affairs. Man of the world in one sense he is not, but pre-eminently a man of affairs ; of English affairs ; all his lifelong engaged in the transaction of the weightest public business. His conversation reflects the habit of mind which all this continuing experience has formed. No one ever lived who knew the political history of his own time so well, and no English statesman ever had no many interests outside of statesmanship, literary, religious, and the rest. There is no subject on which he will not talk. His memory is the marvel of everybody who has been his associate or acquaintance. 3carce a topic can be started on which he has not a store o£ facts. He takes little thought of his audience or of what may be supposed to interest them. His subject interests him, and it never occurs to him that it may not interest others. And he is quite right ; in his hands, whatever it be, it is entertaining. He has been known to discourse to k his neighbour through the greater part of a long dinner on the doctrine of copyright and of international copyright. His neighbour was a beautiful woman, who cared no more for copyright than for the Cherokees. She listened to him throughout with unfailing delight.