Brave men have lived since as well as before Agamemnon, and those who know the present society of London may not unreasonably ask whether, even granting the heavy losses which I enumerated in my last chapter, the Art of Conversation is really extinct.  Are the talkers of to-day in truth so immeasurably inferior to the great men who preceded them?  Before we can answer these questions, even tentatively, we must try to define our idea of good conversation, and this can best be done by rigidly ruling out what is bad.  To begin with, all affectation, unreality, and straining aftereffect are intolerable; scarcely less so are rhetoric, declamation, and whatever tends towards speech-making.  Mimicry is a very dangerous trick, rare in perfection, and contemptible when imperfect.  An apt story well told is delicious, but there was sound philosophy in Mr. Pinto’s view that “when a man fell into his anecdotage it was a sign for him to retire from the world.”  One touch of ill-nature makes the whole world kin, and a spice of malice tickles the intellectual palate; but a conversation which is mainly malicious is entirely dull.  Constant joking is a weariness to the flesh; but, on the other hand, a sustained seriousness of discourse is fatally apt to recall the conversation between the Hon. Elijah Pogram and the Three Literary Ladies—­“How Pogram got out of his depth instantly, and how the Three L.L.’s were never in theirs, is a piece of history not worth recording.  Suffice it that, being all four out of their depths and all unable to swim, they splashed up words in all directions, and floundered about famously.  On the whole, it was considered to have been the severest mental exercise ever heard in the National Hotel, and the whole company observed that their heads ached with the effort—­as well they might.”

A talker who monopolizes the conversation is by common consent insufferable, and a man who regulates his choice of topics by reference to what interests not his hearers but himself has yet to learn the alphabet of the art.  Conversation is like lawn-tennis, and requires alacrity in return at least as much as vigour in service.  A happy phrase, an unexpected collocation of words, a habitual precision in the choice of terms, are rare and shining ornaments of conversation, but they do not for an instant supply the place of lively and interesting matter, and an excessive care for them is apt to tell unfavourably on the substance of discourse.

“I might as well attempt to gather up the foam of the sea as to convey an idea of the extraordinary language in which he clothed his description.  There were at least five words in every sentence that must have been very much astonished at the use they were put to, and yet no others apparently could so well have expressed his idea.  He talked like a racehorse approaching the winning-post—­every muscle in action, and the utmost energy of expression flung out into every burst.”  This is a contemporary description of Lord Beaconsfield’s conversation in those distant days when, as a young man about town, he was talking and dressing his way into social fame.  Though written in admiration, it seems to me to describe the most intolerable performance that could ever have afflicted society. He talked like a racehorse approaching the winning-post.  Could the wit of man devise a more appalling image?