Mr. Matthew Arnold once said to me:  “People think that I can teach them style.  What stuff it all is!  Have something to say, and say it as clearly as you can.  That is the only secret of style.”  This dictum applies, I think, at least as well to conversation as to literature.  The one thing needful is to have something to say.  The way of saying it may best be left to take care of itself.  A young man about town once remarked to me, in the tone of one who utters an accepted truism:  “It is so much more interesting to talk about people than things.”  The sentiment was highly characteristic of the mental calibre and associations of the speaker; and certainly the habitual talk—­for it is not conversation—­of that section of society which calls itself “smart” seems to touch the lowest depth of spiteful and sordid dullness.  But still, when the mischiefs of habitual personality have been admitted to the uttermost, there remains something to be said on the other side.  We are not inhabitants of Jupiter or Saturn, but human beings to whom nothing that is human is wholly alien.  And if in the pursuit of high abstractions and improving themes we imitate too closely Wordsworth’s avoidance of Personal Talk, our dinner-table will run much risk of becoming as dull as that poet’s own fireside.

Granting, then, that to have something to say which is worth hearing is the substance of good conversation, we must reckon among its accidents and ornaments a manner which knows how to be easy and free without being free-and-easy; a habitual deference to the tastes and even the prejudices of other people; a hearty desire to be, or at least to seem, interested in their concerns; and a constant recollection that even the most patient hearers may sometimes wish to be speakers.  Above all else, the agreeable talker cultivates gentleness and delicacy of speech, avoids aggressive and overwhelming displays, and remembers the tortured cry of the neurotic bard:—­

    “Vociferated logic kills me quite;
    A noisy man is always in the right—­
    I twirl my thumbs, fall back into my chair,
    Fix on the wainscot a distressful stare;
    And when I hope his blunders all are out,
    Reply discreetly, ‘To be sure—­no doubt!’”

If these, or something like these, are the attributes of good conversation, in whom do we find them best exemplified?  Who best understands the Art of Conversation?  Who, in a word, are our best talkers?  I hope that I shall not be considered ungallant if I say nothing about the part borne in conversation by ladies.  Really it is a sacred awe that makes me mute.  London is happy in possessing not a few hostesses, excellently accomplished, and not more accomplished than gracious, of whom it is no flattery to say that to know them is a liberal education.  But, as Lord Beaconsfield observes in a more than usually grotesque passage of Lothair, “We must not profane the mysteries of Bona Dea.”  We will not “peep and botanize” on sacred soil, nor submit our most refined delights to the impertinences of critical analysis.