GOSSIP

It seems strange that, in all the long list of brilliant dissertations on every subject under the sun, no English essayist should have yielded a word under the seductive title of “Gossip.” Even Leigh Hunt, who wrote vivaciously and exquisitely on so many light topics, was not attracted by the enticing possibilities of this subject to which both the learned and the unlearned are ready at all times to bestow a willing ear or eye. One usually conceives gossip as something to which one lends only one’s ear, and never one’s eye; but what are “Plutarch’s Lives” but the right sort of gossip? That so many literary men and women have vaguely suspected the alluring tone-color of the word “gossip” is proved by: A Gossip in Romance, Robert Louis Stevenson; Gossip in a Library, Edmund William Gosse; Gossip of the Caribbees, William R. H. Trowbridge, Jr.; Gossip from Paris During the Second Empire, Anthony North Peet; Gossip in the First Decade of Victoria’s Reign, Jane West; Gossip of the Century, Julia Clara Byrne; Gossiping Guide to Wales, Askew Roberts and Edward Woodall; Gossip with Girls and Maidens Betrothed and Free, Blanche St. John Bellairs. Yet no one has ever thought of writing about gossip for its own sweet sake.

Among every-day words perhaps the word “gossip” is more to be reckoned with than any other in our language. The child who runs confidingly to mother to report his grievance is a gossip; he is also an historian. Certainly gossip is in its tone familiar and personal; it is the familiar and personal touch which makes Plutarch’s Lives interesting. At the root of the word “gossip,” say etymologists, there lies an honest Saxon meaning, “God’s sib” “of one kindred under God.”

It would be only a misanthrope who would assert that he has no interest in his fellows. He is invariably a selfish person who shuns personality in talk and refuses to know anything about people; who says: “What is it to me whether this person has heard Slezak in Tannhaeuser; what do I care whether Mrs. So-and-So has visited the French play; what concern is it of mine if Mr. Millions of eighty marries Miss Beautiful of eighteen; what is it to me whether you have watched the agonies of a furnishing party at Marshall Field’s and have observed the bridegroom of tender years victimized by his wife and mother-in-law with their appeals to his excellent taste; of what interest to me are the accounts of the dissolute excesses which interspersed the wild outbreaks of religious fanaticism of Henry the Third of France?” This selfish person is also very stupid, for nothing so augments conversation as a normal interest in other people.

“I shook him well from side to side
Until his face was blue.
Come, tell me how you live, I cried,
And what it is you do.”

This plan of Alice’s Through the Looking Glass ballad singer for shaking conversation out of people, tho somewhat too strenuous, is less fatiguing than Sherlock Holmes’s inductive methods. Like Sherlock without his excuse, the kind and generous must confess to a colossal interest in the affairs of others. Gossip is the dialog of the drama of mankind; and we have a right to introduce any innocent and graceful means of thawing their stories from the actors, and of unraveling dramatic knots. People with keen judgment of men and things gather the harvest of a quiet eye; they see in the little world of private life histories as wonderful and issues as great as those that get our attention in literature, or in the theater, or in public life. Personal gossip in its intellectual form has a charm not unhealthy; and it gives new lights on character more often favorable than unfavorable.

There is no difference, between enjoying this personal talk and enjoying The Mill on the Floss or books of biography. Boswell, in his Life of Johnson, and Mrs. Thrale, in her Letters, were inveterate gossips about the great man. And what an incomparable little tattler was Fanny Burney Madame d’Arblay! Lord William Lennox, in his Drafts on My Memory, is full of irrepressible and fascinating memorabilia, from the story of General Bullard’s salad-dressing to important dramatic history connected with the theater of his time. The Spectator was the quintessence of gossip in an age of gossip and good conversation. We could go a great deal further back to the gossips of Theocritus, who are as living and life-like as if we had just met them in the park. All biography is a putting together of trifles which in the aggregate make up the engrossing life-stories of men and women of former and contemporary preeminence. It is to the gossips of all ages that we owe much of value in literary history.

Without the personal interest in the affairs of others which makes gossip possible, there would be no fellowship or warmth in life; social intercourse and conversation would be inhuman and lifeless. Mr. Benson in his essay “Conversation” tells us that an impersonal talker is likely to be a dull dog. Mr. Henry van Dyke says that the quality of talkability does not mark a distinction among things; that it denotes a difference among people. And Chateaubriand, in his Memoirs d’Outre-tombe, confides to us that he has heard some very pleasant reports become irksome and malicious in the mouths of ill-disposed verbal historians.

One can interest one’s self in the dramatic incidents in the lives of one’s acquaintances without ventilating or vilifying their character. Gossip is capable of a more genial purpose than traducing people. It is the malignity which turns gossip into scandal against which temperate conversationalists revolt; the sort of thing which Sheridan gibbeted in his celebrated play, The School for Scandal:

“Give me the papers, (lisp) how bold and free!
Last night Lord L. was caught with Lady D.!
. . . . . . . .
“So strong, so swift, the monster there’s no gagging:
Cut scandal’s head off, still the tongue is wagging.”

But this is scandal, not gossip, and scandal comes from people incapable of anything better either in mind or conversation. Among those who understand the art of conversation, libelous talk is rarely heard; with those who cultivate it to perfection, never. It is the first commandment of the slanderer to repeat promptly all the vitriolic talk he hears, but to keep strictly to himself all pleasant words or kindly gossip. Those who draw no distinction between scandal and gossip should reflect that gossip may be good-natured and commendatory as well as hostile and adverse. In the published letters of the late James Russell Lowell is an account of his meeting Professor Mahaffy of Trinity College, Dublin, who is known to be one of the most agreeable of men. They met at the house of a friend in Birmingham, England, and when Lowell took leave of Mr. Mahaffy he said to his host: “Well, that’s one of the most delightful fellows I ever met, and I don’t mind if you tell him so!” When Lowell’s remark was repeated to Mr. Mahaffy, he exclaimed, “Poor Lowell! to think that he can never have met an Irishman before!” And this was gossip as surely as the inimical prattle about Lord and Lady Byron was gossip. No, indeed, slander and libelous talk are not necessary ingredients of gossip. People who take malicious pleasure in using speech for malign purposes suffer from a mental disorder which does not come under the scope of conversation.

Regarding the mental deficiencies of those who love to wallow in the mire of salacious news about others, the psychologists have come to some interesting conclusions. To them it seems that there is an essential identity between the gossip and the genius. In both, the mental processes work with the same tendency to reproduce every fragment of past experience, because both think by what is known as “total recall.” From the thought of one thing their minds pass to all sorts of remote connections, sane and silly, rational and grotesque, relevant and irrelevant. The essential difference between the gossip mind and the genius mind is the power of genius to distinguish between the worthy and the unworthy, the trivial and the relevant, the true and the false. The thoughts of the gossip, so the psychologists tell us, have connection but not coherence; the thoughts of the genius have coherence and likewise connection and unity. Thus we discover that scandal-mongers are at fault in the mind more than in the heart; and that it behooves people who do not wish to have themselves voted mentally defective to draw a distinction between scandal and innocent gossip. As I have already said, there is nothing so interesting as the dramatic incidents in the lives of human beings. Despite the nature-study enthusiasts who seem to refuse mankind a place in nature, “the proper study of mankind is man” and will forever remain so. But this does not mean that mental weaklings should be allowed to discover and talk about only salacious episodes in the history of their acquaintances. The vicious scandal-monger who defames another, or hears him defamed or scandalized, and then runs to him with enlarged and considerably colored tales of what was said about him, is the poison of the serpent and should not be tolerated in society. A sanitarium for mental delinquents is the only proper place for such a person.

And let me add that the apocryphal slanderer, the person who never says but hints all sorts of malicious things, is the worst sort of scandal-monger. The cultivated conversationalist who talks gossip in its intellectual form does not indulge in oblique hints and insinuations. He says what he has to say intrepidly because he says it discriminatingly.

Keen judgment which discovers the fundamental distinction between scandal and suitable personality in talk raises gossip to the perfection of an art and the dignity of a science. Undiscriminating people, therefore, had better leave personalities alone and stick to the more general and less resilient topics of conversation. Good gossip is attainable only by minds that are capable of much higher talk than gossip. Cultivated, well-poised, well-disposed persons need never be afraid of indulging their conversation to a certain extent with gossip, because they indulge it in the right way. And provided their personal and familiar talk is listened to by equally cultivated, well-poised, and well-disposed people, their gossip need not necessarily be limited to the mention of only pleasant and complimentary history; no more, indeed, than Plutarch found it necessary to tell of the glory of Demosthenes without mention that there were those who whispered graft and bribery in connection with his name. There are a few very good and very dull people who try to stop all adverse criticism. All raillery strikes them as cruel. They would like to see every parody murdered by the common hangman. Even the best of comedy is constitutionally repellent to them. They want only highly colored characters from which every mellow shade of fault has been obliterated. One cannot say that they have a real love of human nature, because they do not know what human nature is. They are ready to take up arms with it at every turn. Such people cannot see that ridicule, or gossip, can be either innocent or malignant; that history can be either prejudiced or unbiased.

With many, refusing to hear adverse criticism is a mere pose, while with others it is cynicism. In intercourse with the uneducated, any well-bred person is properly shocked by their pleasure in detraction and in bad news of all sorts. But the detestable people who seek every occasion to vilify, and who wish to hear only harm of the world, are so exceptional as to be negligible. These rare villains are eliminated when one speaks of inability to distinguish between detraction and adverse criticism. Those who can praise well are always adepts at criticizing adversely. They never carry their criticism too far, nor give purposely an acrid touch to it.

There is a grim tradition that a person should never say anything behind another’s back which he would not say before his face. This is all very well so far as it relates to venomous tales repeated purposely to injure; but how colorless are the people who never have critical opinions on anything or anybody; or people who, having them, never express them! Criticism and cavil are two very different things. Absence of criticism is absence of the power of distinction. This age of science has taught people to look truth straight in the face and learn to discriminate. That person to whom everything is sweet does not know what sweet is. The sophisticated world, unlike the unsophisticated, is not afraid of “passing remarks.” There is no doubt that criticism, whether it comes directly or roundabout, adds a terror to life as soon as one goes below a certain level of cultivation. The uneducated are frightened at the mere thought of criticism; the cultivated are not. Perhaps the reason for this difference is that ordinary people have a brutal and entirely uncritical criticism to fear. In that society sensitiveness is not very common. They are not dishonorable; they are merely hardy and can see no distinctions. It is not given to these people to praise rationally and to censure discriminatingly. Vilifying remarks are made and repeated among them which clever people would be incapable of uttering. The educated not only use a softened mode of speech, but they avoid repeating remarks, unless with a discerning wish to be helpful to others. The cultivated who have brought life to a far higher point than the uncultivated have protected their liberty by a social rule. They say what they like, and it does not get to the ears of the person about whom they have said it. And if it did it wouldn’t much matter. Criticism which is critically given is usually critically received. The maliciousness of adverse criticism seldom lies in the person who voices it, but in the person who carries a tale. The moment sophisticated people learn that one among them has venomously repeated an adversely critical remark, they immediately know that that person is not to the manner born. There is no surer proof.

If the born advocate is not always a saint, the born critic is not always a sinner. Robert Louis Stevenson understood the importance of the personal touch in conversation when he wrote: “So far as conversational subjects are truly talkable, more than half of them may be reduced to three: that I am I, that you are you, and that there are other people dimly understood to be not quite the same as either.” So, also, did Mr. J. M. Barrie, when he told us that his beloved Margaret Ogilvy, in spite of no personal interest in Gladstone, “had a profound faith in him as an aid to conversation. If there were silent men in the company, she would give him to them to talk about precisely as she would divide a cake among children.”

It is often hinted by men that women are made good conversationalists by a sense of irresponsibility. But I am inclined to think that a little gossip now and then is relished by the best of men as well as women. The tendency to gossip with which men constantly credit women, and in which tendency the men themselves keep pace, helps both men and women very effectually to good conversation. “It is more important,” says Stevenson again, “that a person should be a good gossip and talk pleasantly and smartly of common friends and the thousand and one nothings of the day and hour, than speak with the tongues of men and angels.... Talk is the creature of the street and market-place, feeding on gossip; and its last resort is still in a discussion on morals. That is the heroic form of gossip; heroic in virtue of its high pretensions; but still gossip because it turns on personalities.”

Gossip, we must admit, has a perennial interest for all of us. Personal chat is the current coin of conversational capital. Society lives by gossip as it lives by bread. The most absurd rule in the world is to avoid personalities in conversation. To annihilate gossip would be to cut conversational topics in half. There is musical gossip, art gossip, theatrical gossip, literary gossip, and court gossip; there is political gossip, and fashionable gossip, and military gossip; there is mercantile gossip and commercial gossip of all kinds; there is physicians’ gossip and professional gossip of every sort; there is scientists’ gossip; and there is the gossip of the schools indulged in by masters and students all over the educational world. Of all the gossip in the world the most prodigious and prolific is religious gossip. Archbishops, bishops, deans, rectors, and curates are discussed unreservedly; and the questions put and answered are not whether they are apostolic teachers, but whether they are high, low, broad, or no church; whether they wear scarlet or black, intone or read, say “shibboleth” or “sibboleth.”

The roots of gossip are deep in human interest; and, despite the nearly universal opinion of moralists, great reputations are more often built out of gossip than destroyed by it. Discriminating people do not create enemies by personalities, nor separate friends, because they gossip with a heart full of love, with charity for all, and with malice toward none. Gossip as a legitimate part of conversation is defended by one of the greatest of present-day scholars; and I cannot do better than to quote, in closing, what Mr. Mahaffy has said about it: “The topic which ought to be always interesting is the discussion of human character and human motives. If the novel be so popular a form of literature, how can the novel in real life fail to interest an intelligent company? People of serious temper and philosophic habit will be able to confine themselves to large ethical views and the general dealings of men; but to average people, both men and women, and perhaps most of all to busy men who desire to find in society relaxation from their toil, that lighter and more personal kind of criticism on human affairs will prevail which is known as gossip. It is idle to deny that there is no kind of conversation more fascinating than this. But its immorality may easily become such as to shock honest minds, and the man who indulges in it too freely at the expense of others will probably have to pay the cost of it himself in the long run; for those who hear him will fear him, and will retire into themselves in his presence. On the other hand, nothing is more honorable than to stand forth as the defender or the palliator of the faults imputed to others, and nothing is easier than to expand such a defense into general considerations as to the purity of human motives, which will raise the conversation from its unwholesome grounds into the upper air.”