A CONSPIRACY OF SILENCE

Why do we go on talking?  It is a serious question, one on which the happiness of thousands depends.  For there is no more wearing social demand than that of compulsory conversation.  All day long we must either talk, or—­dread alternative—­listen.  Now, that were very well if we had something to say, or our fellow-sufferer something to tell, or, best of all, if either of us possessed the gift of clothing the old commonplaces with charm.  But men with that great gift are not to be met with in every railway-carriage, or at every dinner.  The man we actually meet is one whose joke, though we have signalled it a mile off, we are powerless to stop, whose opinions come out with a whirr as of clockwork.  Besides, it always happens in life that the man—­or woman—­with whom we would like to talk is at the next table.  Those who really have something to say to each other so seldom have a chance of saying it.

Why, oh why, do we go on talking?  We ask the question in all seriousness, not merely in the hope of making some cheap paradoxical fun out of the answer.  It is a cry from the deeps of ineffable boredom.

Is it to impart information?  At the best it is a dreary ideal.  But, at any rate, it is a mistaken use of the tongue, for there is no information we can impart which has not been far more accurately stated in book-form.  Even if it should happen to be a quite new fact, an accident happily rare as the transit of Venus—­a new fact about the North Pole, for instance—­well, a book, not a conversation, is the place for it.  To talk book, past, present, or to come, is not to converse.

To converse, as with every other art, is out of three platitudes to make not a fourth platitude—­’but a star.’  Newness of information is no necessity of conversation:  else were the Central News Agency the best of talkers.  Indeed, the oldest information is perhaps the best material for the artist as talker:  though, truly, as with every other artist, material matters little.  There are just two or three men of letters left to us, who provide us examples of that inspired soliloquy, those conversations of one, which are our nearest approach to the talk of other days.  How good it is to listen to one of these!—­for it is the great charm of their talk that we remember nothing.  There were no prickly bits of information to stick on one’s mind like burrs.  Their talk had no regular features, but, like a sunrise, was all music and glory.

The friend who talks the night through with his friend, till the dawn climbs in like a pallid rose at the window; the lovers who, while the sun is setting, sit in the greenwood and say, ‘Is it thou?  It is I!’ in awestruck antiphony, till the stars appear; and, holiest converse of all, the mystic prattle of mother and babe:  why are all these such wonderful talk if not because we remember no word of them—­only the glory?  They leave us nothing, in image worthy of the time, to ‘pigeon-hole,’ nothing to store with our vouchers in the ‘pigeon-holes’ of memory.