Part 3 (1/2)
In their zeal to give their friends pleasure, a host or hostess often tells a guest that he is to take a particularly brilliant woman in to dinner, and the woman is informed that she is to be the neighbor of a notably clever man. To one whose powers are brought out by being put on his mettle this might prove the best sort of conversational tonic; on the other hand it might be better tact to say that tho a certain person has the reputation of being exceptionally clever, he is, in truth, as natural as an old shoe; that all one has to do to entertain him is to talk ordinarily about commonplace topics. In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred this is so. Some one is responsible for the epigram: ”A great man always lives a great way off”; and it is true that when we come to know really great people we find that they are as much interested as any one else in the commonplaces of life. Indeed, the more intellectual people are, the more the homely things of life interest them. When Tennyson was once a pa.s.senger on a steamer crossing the English Channel, some people who had been a.s.signed to seats opposite him in the dining saloon learned that their neighbor at table was the great poet. In a flutter of interest they listened for the wisdom which would drop from the distinguished man's mouth and heard the hearty words, ”What fine potatoes these are!” This particular point requires nice discernment on the part of host and hostess; they should know when they may safely impress one guest with the cleverness of the other, and when it would be disastrous to do so. Suppose the consequence is that each guest waits for the sparkling flow of wit from the other, and to the consternation of the host and hostess there is profound silence between two really interesting people on whose cleverness they had counted to make their dinner a success!
It is also the province of a host and hostess tactfully to steer the drift of general table-talk away from topics likely to offend the sensibilities of any one guest. Hosts owe not only attention but protection to every person whom they ask to their home, and it devolves upon them to interpose and come to the rescue if a guest is disabled in any way from doing himself any sort of conversational justice. Swaying conversation round and over topics embarra.s.sing to any guest requires the utmost tact and delicacy on the part of a host and hostess; for in keeping one guest from being wounded or embarra.s.sed, the offender himself must not be made to feel conscious of his misstep. Indeed he may be, and usually is, quite unconscious of the effect his words are having on those whom he does not know well. Any subject which is being handled dangerously must be _juggled_ out of sight, and the determination to juggle it must be concealed. Tho it is quite correct for one to say one's self, ”I beg pardon for changing the subject abruptly,” nothing is worse form than to say to another, ”Change the subject,” or, ”Let us change the subject.” To do this is both rude and crude. Directing conversation means leading talkers unconsciously to talk of something else. Any guest, as well as a host or hostess, may graciously steer conversation when it touches a subject some phase of which is likely to offend sensitive and unsophisticated people. At a series of dinners given to a circle of philosophic minds religious intolerance was largely the subject of discussion. The circle, for the most part well known to each other, was of liberal belief. A guest appeared among them, and it was known only to one or two that this man was a sincere Catholic. As the talk turned upon religious discussion, one of the guests so directed the conversation as to bring out the information that the stranger was a Catholic by faith and rearing. This was a very kind and appropriate thing to do. It acquainted the hostess with a fact of which she was ignorant; and it gave all present a feeling of security in whatever they might say.
A hospitable host and hostess will not absorb the conversation at their table. They will render the gracious service of furnis.h.i.+ng a background for the cleverness of others, rather than display unsparingly their own brilliancy. Indeed, a man or woman does not have to be brilliant or intellectual to succeed in this most gracious of social arts. The host or hostess who possesses sympathy and tact will surpa.s.s in dinner-giving the most brilliant person in the world who selfishly monopolizes conversation at his own table. If guests cannot go away from a dinner-table feeling better pleased with themselves, that campaign of hospitality has been a failure. When the self-satisfaction on their faces betrays the subtle art of the host and hostess in having convinced all their guests that they have made themselves interesting, then the acme of hospitality has been achieved. One of the most good-natured but most inane of men was one day chuckling at having been royally diverted at a dinner-party.
”He was at Mrs. X's,” said some one.
”How do you know that?”
”Indeed! Don't I know her way? She'd make a raven go home rivaling the nightingale.”
To be able to make your guests better pleased with themselves is the greatest of all social accomplishments.
”An ideal dinner party,” says a famous London hostess, ”resembles nothing so much as a masterpiece of the jeweler's art in the center of which is some crystalline gem in the form of a sparkling and sympathetic hostess round whom the guests are arranged in an effective setting.” It would seem quite as necessary that a host prove a crystalline gem in this masterpiece of the jeweler's art. To be signally successful at dinner-giving, care to make the talk interesting is as necessary as care in the preparation of viands. Really successful hosts and hostesses take as much precaution against fatalities in conversation as against those which offend the palate. While attending carefully to the polis.h.i.+ng of the crystal and to the preparing of the menu which will make their table a delight, they remember that the intellect of their guests must be satisfied no less than their eyes and their stomachs.
CHAPTER VI
INTERRUPTION IN CONVERSATION
_Its Deadening Effect on Conversation--Habitual Interruption--Nervous Interruption--Glib Talkers--Interrupting by Over-Accuracy--Interruptions Outside the Conversation-Circle--Children and Their Interruption--Good Talk at Table--Anecdotes of Children's Appreciation of Good Conversation--The Hostess Who Is ”Mistress of Herself Tho China Fall.”_
CHAPTER VI
INTERRUPTION IN CONVERSATION
Interruption, more surely than anything else, kills conversation. The effusive talker who, in spite of his facility for words, is in no sense a conversationalist, refuses to recognize the fact that conversation involves a partners.h.i.+p; that in this company of joint interest each party has a right to his turn in the conversational engagement. He ignores his conversational partners; he breaks into their sentences with his own speech before they have their words well out of their mouths. He has grown so habitual in his interrupting that he rattles on unconscious of the disgust he is producing in the mind of any well-bred, discriminating conversationalist who hears him. The best of talkers interrupt occasionally in conversation; but the unconscious, rude interruption of the habitual interrupter, and the unintentional, conscious interruption of the cultivated talker are easily discernible, and are two very different things.
We are accustomed to think that children are the only offenders in interrupting; but, shades of the French _salon_, the crimes of the adults! The great pity about this positive phase of interrupting is that all habitual interrupters are totally unconscious that they continually break into the speeches of their conversers and literally knock their very words back into their mouths. Robert Louis Stevenson p.r.o.nounced this eulogy over his friend, James Walter Ferrier: ”He was the only man I ever knew who did not habitually interrupt.” Now, you who read this may not believe that you are one of the violators of this first commandment of good conversation, ”thou shalt not interrupt”; but stop to think what small chance you have of escape when only _one_ acquaintance of Stevenson's was acquitted of this crime. One must become conscious of the fact that he continually interrupts before he can cease interrupting. The unconsciousness is what const.i.tutes the crime; for conscious interruption ceases to be interruption. The moment a good talker is aware of having broken into the speech of his converser, he forestalls interruption by waiting to hear what was about to be said. He instantly cuts off his own speech with the conventional courtesy-phrase, ”I beg your pardon,” which is the same as saying, ”Pardon me for seeming to be unwilling to listen to you; I really am both willing and glad to hear what you have to say.” And he proves his willingness by waiting until the other person can finish the thought he ventured upon. What better proof that conversation is listening as well as talking?
Sheer, nervous inability to listen is responsible for one phase of interruption to conversation. It is the interruption of the wandering eye which tells that one's words have not been heard. ”The person next to you must be bored by my conversation, for it is going into one of your ears and out of the other,” said a talker rather testily to his inattentive dinner-companion whose absent-minded and tardy replies had been snapping the thread of the thought until it grew intolerable. She was perhaps only a little less irritating than the man who became so unconscious in the habit of inattention that on one occasion his converser had scarcely finished when he began abstractedly: ”Yes, very odd, very odd,” and told the identical anecdote all over again.
There is another phase of interrupting which proceeds from the jerky talker whose remarks are not provoked by what his conversational partner is saying, with observation and answer, affirmation and rejoinder, but who waits breathlessly for a pause to jump in and tell some thought of his own. Of this sort of talker Dean Swift wrote: ”There are people whose manners will not suffer them to interrupt you directly, but what is almost as bad, will discover abundance of impatience, and lie upon the watch until you have done, because they have started something in their own thoughts, which they long to be delivered of. Meantime, they are so far from regarding what pa.s.ses that their imaginations are wholly turned upon what they have in reserve, for fear it should slip out of their memory; and thus they confine their invention, which might otherwise range over a hundred things full as good, and that might be much more naturally introduced.” An anecdote or a remark will keep. We are not under the necessity of begrudging every moment that shortens our own innings; of interrupting our companion by our looks and voting him an impediment to our own much better remarks.
A less objectionable phase of interrupting, because it as often springs from kind thought as from arrogance, is that of the conversationalist so anxious to prove his quickness of perception that he a.s.sumes to know what you are going to say before you have finished your sentence in your own mind, and to put an interpretation on your arguments before you are done stating them. His interpretation is as often exactly the opposite of your own as it is identical; and, right or wrong, the foisted-in explanation serves only to interrupt the sequence of thought. As early as 1832 a writer in the _New England Magazine_ waxed wroth to pugilistic outburst against this form of interruption: ”I have heard individuals praised for this, as indicating a rapidity of mind which arrived at the end before the other was half through. But I should feel as much disposed to knock a man down who took my words out of my mouth, as one who stole my money out of my pocket. Such a habit may be a credit to one's powers, but not to one's modesty or good feeling. What is it but saying, 'My dear sir, you are making a very bungling piece of work with that sentence of yours; allow me to finish it for you in proper style.'”
Tho one is inclined to feel that this author could well have reserved his verbal scourging for more irritating forms of impertinent interruption, it is nevertheless true that people are more entirely considerate who allow their conversational partners to finish their statements without fear of being tript up.
It is only lack of discrimination on the part of glib talkers to suppose that those who express themselves more deliberately are less interesting in conversation. The pig is one of the most rapidly loquacious of animals, yet no one would say that the pig is an attractive conversationalist. Pope may have been slow in forming the mosaic of symbols which express so superbly the fact that
”Words are like leaves; and where they most abound Much fruit of sense beneath is rarely found,”
but his deliberateness did not dim the wisdom, or interest, or beauty, of his lines. Slow talkers, if allowed to express themselves in their own way, only add to the attractiveness of any group. Why should we enjoy characterization more in literature and in drama than in life?
”Good talking,” says Stevenson, ”is declarative of the man; it is dramatic like an impromptu piece of acting where each should represent himself to the greatest advantage; and that is the best kind of talk where each speaker is most fully and candidly himself, and where, if you should s.h.i.+ft the speeches round from one to another, there would be the greatest loss in significance and perspicuity.”
The Gradgrinds of society who are always coming down upon us with some horrible and unnecessary piece of fact are another form of interruption to good conversation. They stop you to remind you that the accident happened in Tremont Street, not in Boylston; and they suspend a pertinent point in the air to inform you that it was Mr. Jones's eldest sister, not his youngest, who was abroad at the time of the San Francisco earthquake. If some one refers to an incident as having occurred on the tenth of the month, they deem it necessary to stop the talker because they happen to know that it was on the ninth. People are often their own Gradgrinds, interrupting themselves in the midst of a narration to correct some trivial mistake which has no bearing one way or the other on what they are saying.