DISCUSSION VERSUS CONTROVERSY

Many people object to discussion, but they are invariably those on the midway rounds of the conversational ladder; people to whom the joy of the amicable intellectual tussle is unknown, and to whom the highest standards of the art of talking do not appeal. Where there is much intellectual activity discussion is sure to arise, for the simple reason that people will not think alike. Polite discussion is the most difficult and the most happy attainment of society as it is of literature; and why should oral discussion be less attractive than written? Dr. Johnson used to express unbounded contempt for all talk that was not discussion; and Robert Louis Stevenson has given us frankly his view: “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, nor fairness, nor obstinacy, but a certain proportion of all 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-students with whom I may argue on equal terms.” From Mr. John B. Yeats, one of the many Irishmen who have written tellingly on this interesting subject of human intercourse, we have: “Conversation is an art, as literature is, as painting is, as poetry is, and subject to the same laws from which nothing human is excluded, not even argument. There is literature which argues, and painting which argues, and poetry which argues, so why not conversation which argues? Only argument is the most difficult to mold into the most blessed shape of art.”

Some people conceive an everlasting opposition between politeness and earnest discussion. Politeness consists, they think, in always saying, “yes, yes,” or at most a non-committal “indeed?” to every word addrest to them. This is apt to be our American vice of conversation, where, for lack of courage in taking up discussion, talk often falls into a series of anecdotes. In Germany the tendency is to be swept away in discussion to the point of a verbal dispute.

There is no greater bore in society than the person who agrees with everybody. Discussion is the arena in which we measure the strength of one another’s minds and run a friendly tilt in pleasing self-assertiveness; it is the common meeting-ground where it is understood that Barnabas will take gentle reproof from Paul, and Paul take gentle reproof from Barnabas. Those who look upon any dissent from their views as a personal affront to be visited with signs of resentment are no more fit for brilliant talk than they are fit for life and its vicissitudes. “Whoso keepeth his mouth and his tongue keepeth his soul in peace,” it is true; but he also keeps himself dead to all human intercourse and as colorless in the world as an oyster. “Too great a desire to please,” says Stevenson, “banishes from conversation all that is sterling.... It is better to emit a scream in the shape of a theory than to be entirely insensible to the jars and incongruities of life and take everything as it comes in a forlorn stupidity.” This is equivalent to telling the individual who treads too nicely and fears a shock that he had pleased us better had he pleased us less, which is the subtle observation of Mr. Price Collier writing in the North American Review: “It is perhaps more often true of women than of men that they conceive affability as a concession. At any rate, it is not unusual to find a hostess busying herself with attempts to agree with all that is said, with the idea that she is thereby doing homage to the effeminate categorical imperative of etiquette, when in reality nothing becomes more quickly tiresome than incessant affirmatives, no matter how pleasantly they are modulated. Nor can one avoid one of two conclusions when one’s talk is thus negligently agreed to: either the speaker is confining herself entirely to incontradictable platitudes, or the listener has no mind of her own; and in either case silence were golden. In this connection it were well to recall the really brilliant epigram of the Abbe de Saint-Real, that ’On s’ennuie presque toujours avec ceux que l’on ennuie.’ For not even a lover can fail to be bored at last by the constant lassitude of assent expressing itself in twin sentiments to his own. ‘Coquetting with an echo,’ Carlyle called it. For, tho it may make a man feel mentally masterful at first, it makes him feel mentally maudlin at last; and, as the Abbe says, to be bored one’s self is a sure sign that one’s companion is also weary.”

Tho polite dissent is desirable in discussion, flat contradiction is contemptible. Dean Swift affirms that a person given to contradiction is more fit for Bedlam than for conversation. In discussion, far more than in lighter talk, decency as well as honor commands that each partner to the conversational game conform to the niceties and fairness of it. “I don’t think so,” “It isn’t so,” “I don’t agree with you at all,” are too flat and positive for true delicacy and refinement in conversation. “I have been inclined to think otherwise,” “I should be pleased to hear your reasons,” “Aren’t you mistaken?” are more acceptable phrases with which to introduce dissent. In French society a discrepancy of views is always manifested by some courtesy-phrase, such as “Mais, ne pensez-vous pas” or “Je vous demande pardon” the urbane substitutes for “No, you are wrong,” “No, it isn’t.” Our own Benjamin Franklin, whose appreciation of the conversational art in France won completely the hearts of the French people, tells us in his autobiography that in later life he found it necessary to throw off habits acquired in youth: “I continued this positive method for some years, but gradually left it, retaining only the habit of expressing myself in terms of modest diffidence: never using when I advanced anything that might possibly be disputed, the words ‘certainly,’ ‘undoubtedly,’ or any others that give the air of positiveness to an opinion, but rather say, ’it appears to me,’ or ‘I should think it so-and-so, for such-and-such a reason,’ or ’I imagine it to be so,’ or it is so ‘if I am not mistaken.’”

Unyielding obstinacy in discussion is deadening to conversation, and yet the extreme contrary is crippling. Open resentment of any attempt at warmth of speech is paralysis and torpor to talk. When one meets a hostess, or a conversational partner, “whose only pleasure is to be displeased,” one is reminded of the railway superintendent who kept the wires hot with fault-finding messages bearing his initials “H. F. C.” until he came to be known along the road as “Hell For Certain.” People of a resentful turn of mind, whose every sentence is a wager, and who convert every word into a missile, are fit for polemical squabbles, but not for polite discussion. Those raucous persons who, when their opponents attempt to speak, cry out against it as a monstrous unfairness, are very well adapted to association with Kilkenny cats, but not with human beings. It is in order to vanquish by this means one who might otherwise outmatch them entirely that they thus seek to reduce their opponent to a mere interjection. “A man of culture,” says Mr. Robert Waters, “is not intolerant of opposition. He frankly states his views on any given subject, without hesitating to say wherein he is ignorant or doubtful, and he is ready for correction and enlightenment wherever he finds it.” Such a man never presses his hearers to accept his views; he not only tolerates but considers opposed opinions and listens attentively and respectfully to them. Hazlitt said of the charming discussion of Northcote, the painter: “He lends an ear to an observation as if you had brought him a piece of news, and enters into it with as much avidity and earnestness as if it interested only himself personally.”

Of all the tenets of good conversation to which the French give heed, their devotion to listening is the most notable. From this judiciously receptive attitude springs their uninterrupting shrug of assent or disapproval. But listening is only one of their many established conversational dicta: “The conversation of Parisians is neither dissertation nor epigram; they have pleasantry without buffoonery; they associate with skill, with genius, and with reason, maxims and flashes of wit, sharp satire, and severe ethics. They run through all subjects that each may have something to say; they exhaust no subject for fear of tiring their hearer; they propose their themes casually and they treat them rapidly; each succeeding subject grows naturally out of the preceding one; each talker delivers his opinion and supports it briefly; no one attacks with undue heat the supposition of another, nor defends obstinately his own; they examine in order to enlighten, and stop before the discussion becomes a dispute.” Such was Rousseau’s description of Parisian conversation; and some one else has declared that the French are the only nation in the world who understand a salon whether in upholstery or talk. “Every Britisher,” said Novalis more than a hundred years ago, “is an island”; and Heine once defined silence as “a conversation with Englishmen.” We Americans, tho not so reserved in talk as our English brothers, are less respectful to conversational amenities; and both of us are far behind the French in the gracious art of verbal expression. Not only is the spoken English of the cultured Irish the most cosmopolitan and best modulated of any English in the world, but the conversation of cultivated Irishmen more adequately approaches the perfection of the French.

It is as illuminating to study the best models in human intercourse as to study the best models in literature, or painting, or any other art. One of the distinct elements in French conversation is that it is invariably kept general; and by general I mean including in the talk all the conversational group as opposed to tete-a-tete dialog. Many people disagree with the French in this. Addison declared that there is no such thing as conversation except between two persons; and Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walter Savage Landor said something of the same sort. Shelley was distinctly a tete-a-tete talker, as Mr. Benson, the present-day essayist, in some of his intimate discourses, proclaims himself to be. But Burke and Browning, the best conversationalists in the history of the Anglo-Saxon race, like all the famous women of the French salon, from Mme. Roland to Mme. de Stael, kept pace with any number of interlocutors on any number of subjects, from the most abstruse science to the lightest jeu d’esprit. Good talk between two is no doubt a duet of exquisite sympathy; but true conversation is more like a fugue in four or eight parts than like a duet. Furthermore, general and tete-a-tete conversation have both their place and occasion. At a dinner-table in France private chats are very quickly dispelled by some thoughtful moderator. Dinner guests who devote themselves to each other alone are not tolerated by the French hostess as by the English and American. Because tete-a-tete conversation is considered good form so generally among English-speaking peoples, I have in other essays adapted my comments on this subject to our customs; but talk which is distributed among several who conform to the courtesies and laws of good conversation is the best kind of talk. In general talk every one ought to have a voice. It is the undue humility of some and the arrogance and polemical tendency of others that prevent good general conversation. People have only to begin with three axioms: the first, that everybody is entitled, and often bound, to form his own opinion; second, that everybody is equally entitled to express that opinion; and third, that everybody’s opinion is entitled to a hearing and to consideration, not only on the ground of courtesy, but because any opinion honestly and independently formed is worth something and contributes to the discussion.

Another principle of French conversation is that it is kept personal, in the sense, I mean, that the personality of the speakers suffuses it. “The theme being taken,” as Stevenson says, “each talker plays on himself as on an instrument, affirming and justifying himself.” This counter-assertion of personality, to all appearances, is combat, but at bottom is amicable. An issue which is essentially general and impersonal is lost in the accidental conflicts of personalities, because the quality which plays the most important part is presence of mind, not correct reasoning. A conversationalist whose argument is wholly fallacious will often, by exercise of verbal adroitness, dispose of an objection which is really fatal. The full swing of the personalities of the speakers in a conversation is what makes the flint strike fire. It is only from heated minds that the true essence of conversation springs; and it is in talk which glances from one to another of a group, more than in dialog, that this personality is reflected. “It is curious to note,” says an editorial in The Spectator, “how very much dialog there is in the world, and how little true conversation; how very little, that is, of the genuine attempt to compare the different bearing of the same subject on the minds of different people. It is the rarest thing in the world to come, even in the best authors, on a successful picture of the different views taken by different minds on the same subject, and the grounds of the difference.”

Quite as noticeable an element in French conversation is the attitude of the conversers to their subject. They never try to settle matters as if their decisions were the last court of appeal, and as if they must make frantic effort to carry their side of the question to victory. They discuss for the pleasure of discussing; not for the pleasure of vanquishing, nor even of convincing. They discuss, merely; they do not debate, nor do they enter into controversy.

One of the greatest conversational charms of the French is their amenity in leading talk. This grows out of a universal eagerness in France to take pains in conversation and to learn its unwritten behests. The uninitiated suspect little of the insight and care which matures even the natural conversational ability of a Madame de Stael or a Francisque Sarcey. The initiated know that the same principles which make the French prodigious conversationalists make them capable and charming hosts and hostesses. The talker who can follow in conversation knows how to lead, and vice versa. Without a leader or “moderator,” as the admirable Scotch word has it, conversation is apt to become either tepid or demoralized; and often, for the want of proper and sophisticated leading, discussion that would otherwise be brilliant deteriorates into pandemonium. As paradoxical as it sounds on first thought, it is nevertheless true that thoroughly good conversation is impossible where there is too much talk. Some sort of order must be imperceptibly if not unconsciously maintained, or the sentences clash in general conversation. Leading conversation is the adroit speech which checks the refractory conversationalist and changes imperceptibly the subject when it is sufficiently threshed or grows over-heated; it is guiding the talk without palpable break into fresh fields of thought; it is the tact with which, unperceived, the too slow narration of a guest is hurried by such courteous interpolations as “So you got to the inn, and what then?” or, “Did the marriage take place after all?”; it is the art with which the skilful host or hostess sees that all are drawn into the conversational group; it is the watchfulness that sends the shuttle of talk in all directions instead of allowing it to rebound between a few; it is the interest with which a host or hostess solicits the opinions of guests, and develops whatever their answers may vaguely suggest; it is the care with which an accidentally interrupted speech of a guest is resuscitated; it is the consideration which puts one who arrives late in touch with the subject which was being discust just before his appearance. It is this concern for conversational cues which gives any host or hostess an almost unbounded power in social intercourse; for he is the best talker who can lead others to talk well.

It goes without saying that a people who have assimilated all the foregoing tenets of good conversation are never disjointed in their talk. Their consummate art of listening is responsible for their skill in following the logical trend of the discourse. This may be considered a national trait. In decent French society there are no abrupt transitions of thought in the different speeches. The speech of each speaker grows naturally out of what some one of his conversational partners has just been saying, or it is duly prefaced by an introductory sentence connecting it with a certain preceding speech. They know that, once embarked, no converser can tell where the give and take of talk will carry him; but they also know that this does not necessitate awkward and direct changes of subject. The weakness of inattention and of unconscious shunting in conversation is virtually unknown in good society in France.

Is it any wonder that in a country where conversation is considered an art capable of cultivation and having certain fixt principles, so many French women of humble birth, like Sophie Arnould and Julie Lespinasse, have earned their way to fame by their conversational powers? Is it any wonder that in France polite discussion is made the most exhilarating and delightful exercise in the world?

One reason there is so little acceptable conversational discussion is the indisposition of people in society to say what they think; their unwillingness to express their whole minds on any one subject. It is this element of unfettered expression or revelation which makes literature entertaining; why then withhold thought too cautiously from conversation? The habit of evasion is cowardly as well as unsocial; and nothing so augments conversation as being pleasantly downright; letting people know where to find you. The most preposterous views get respect if uttered intrepidly. Sincere speech is necessary to good conversation of any kind, and especially is it essential to discussion. One of the stupidest of conversational sins is quibbling talking insincerely, just for the sake of using words, and shifting the point at issue to some incidental, subordinate argument on which the decision does not at all depend. It is the intellectually honest person who sparkles in discussion.

Another reason why discussion is waning is the disrespect we feel for great subjects. We only mention them, or hint at them; and this cannot lead to very brilliant talk. Tho prattle and persiflage have their place in conversation, talkers of the highest order tire of continually encouraging chit-chat. “What a piece of business; monstrous! I have not read it; impossible to get a box at the opera for another fortnight; how do you like my dress? It was immensely admired yesterday at the B s; how badly your cravat is tied! Did you know that lost heavily by the crash of Thursday? That dear man’s death gave me a good fit of crying; do you travel this summer? Is Blank really a man of genius? It is incomprehensible; they married only two years ago.” This sort of nimble talk is all very well; but because one likes sillibub occasionally is no proof that one is willing to discard meat entirely. Conversational topics can be too trivial for recreation as well as too serious; and even important subjects can be handled in a light way if necessary. “Clever people are the best encyclopedias,” said Goethe; and the great premier Gladstone was a charming man in society, though he never talked on any but serious subjects. He was noted for his ability to pump people dry without seeming in the least to probe. “True conversation is not content with thrust and parry, with mere sword-play of any kind, but should lay mind to mind and show the real lines of agreement and the real lines of divergence. Yet this is the very kind of conversation which seems to me so very rare.” In order that a great subject shall be a good topic of conversation, it must provoke an enthusiasm of belief or disbelief; people must have decided opinions one way or the other. I believe with Stevenson that theology, of all subjects, is a suitable topic for conversational discussion, and for the reason he gives: that religion is the medium through which all the world considers life, and the dialect in which people express their judgments. Try to talk for any length of time with people to whom you must not mention creeds, morals, politics, or any other vital interest in life, and see how inane and fettered talk becomes.

The tranquil and yet spirited discussion of great subjects is the most stimulating of all talk. The thing to be desired is not the avoidance of discussion but the encouragement of it according to its unwritten codes and precepts. “The first condition of any conversation at all,” says Professor Mahaffy of Dublin, “is that people should have their minds so far in sympathy that they are willing to talk upon the same subject, and to hear what each member of the company thinks about it. The higher condition which now comes before us is, that the speaker, apart from the matter of the conversation, feels an interest in his hearers as distinct persons, whose opinions and feelings he desires to know.... Sympathy, however, should not be excessive in quality, which makes it demonstrative. We have an excellent word which describes the over-sympathetic person, and marks the judgment of society, when we say that he or she is gushing. To be too sympathetic makes discussion, which implies difference of opinion, impossible.” Those who try to discover how far conversation is advanced by sympathy and hindered by over-sympathy; those who attempt to detect to what extent wholesome discussion is degraded by acrid controversy, need not be afraid of vigorous intellectual buffeting. Discussion springs from human nature when it is under the influence of strong feeling, and is as much an ingredient of conversation as the vocalizing of sounds is a part of the effort of expressing thought.