Shallow wits may laugh at such talk, but neither the publishers’ lists nor the Cowes Regatta, neither the Veto nor the Insurance Act can compare for a moment with the question whether it will rain this week.  Why, then, should we not talk about rain, and leave plays and books and pictures and politics and scandal to narrow and abnormal minds?  To adapt a Baconian phrase, the weather is the one subject that you cannot dull by jading it too far.

Nor does it arouse the evil passions of imparting information or contradicting opinions.  When someone says, “It is a fine day,” or “It’s good weather for ducks,” he does not wish to convey a new fact.  I have known only one man who desired to contradict such statements, and, looking up at the sky, would have liked to order the sun in or out rather than agree; and he was a Territorial officer, so that command was in his nature.  But mention the Lords, or the Church, or the Suffrage, and what a turmoil and tearing of hair!  What sandstorms of information, what semi-courteous contradiction!  Whither has the sweet gregariousness of human converse strayed?  Black looks flash from the miracle of a seeing eye; bad blood rushes to thinking foreheads; the bonds of hell are loosed; pale gods sit trembling in their twilight.  “O sons of Adam, the sun still shines, and a spell of fair weather never did no harm, as we heard tell on; but don’t you think a drop of rain to-night would favour the roots?  You’ll excuse a farmer’s grumbling.”

People do not associate in order to receive epigrammatic shocks, nor to be fed up with information and have their views put right.  They associate for society.  They feel more secure, more open-hearted and cheerful, when together.  Sheep know in their hearts that numbers are no protection against the dog, who is so much cleverer and more terrible than they; but still they like to keep in the flock.  It is always comfortable to sit beside a man as foolish as oneself and hear him say that East is East and West is West; or that men are men, and women are women; or that the world is a small place after all, truth is stranger than fiction, listeners never hear any good of themselves, and a true friend is known in adversity.  That gives the sense of perfect comradeship.  There is here no tiresome rivalry of wits, no plaguy intellectual effort.  One feels one’s proper level at once, and needs no longer go scrambling up the heights with banners of strange devices.  At such moments of pleasant and unadventurous intercourse, it will be found very soothing to reply that cold hands show a warm heart, that only town-dwellers really love the country, that night is darkest before the dawn, that there are always faults on both sides, that an Englishman’s home is his castle, but travel expands the mind, and marriage is a lottery.