I knew a man once (I will not name him even with an initial) who was
malignant to the core. Learned, industrious, accomplished, he kept
all his talents at the service of a perfect genius for hatred. If
you crossed his path but once, he would never cease to curse you.
The grave might close over you, but he would revile your epitaph and
mock at your memory. It was not even necessary that you should do
anything to incur his enmity. It was enough to be upright and
sincere and successful, to waken the wrath of this Shimei.
Integrity was an offence to him, and excellence of any kind filled
him with spleen. There was no good cause within his horizon that he
did not give a bad word to, and no decent man in the community whom
he did not try either to use or to abuse. To listen to him or to
read what he had written was to learn to think a little worse of
every one that he mentioned, and worst of all of him. He had the
air of a gentleman, the vocabulary of a scholar, the style of a
Junius, and the heart of a Thersites.
Talk, in such company, is impossible. The sense of something evil,
lurking beneath the play of wit, is like the knowledge that there
are snakes in the grass. Every step must be taken with fear. But
the real pleasure of a walk through the meadow comes from the
feeling of security, of ease, of safe and happy abandon to the mood
of the moment. This ungirdled and unguarded felicity in mutual
discourse depends, after all, upon the assurance of real goodness in
your companion. I do not mean a stiff impeccability of conduct.
Prudes and Pharisees are poor comrades. I mean simply goodness of
heart, the wholesome, generous, kindly quality which thinketh no
evil, rejoiceth not in iniquity, hopeth all things, endureth all
things, and wisheth well to all men. Where you feel this quality
you can let yourself go, in the ease of hearty talk.
FREEDOM is the second note that Montaigne strikes, and it is
essential to the harmony of talking. Very careful, prudent, precise
persons are seldom entertaining in familiar speech. They are like
tennis players in too fine clothes. They think more of their
costume than of the game.
A mania for absolutely correct pronunciation is fatal. The people
who are afflicted with this painful ailment are as anxious about
their utterance as dyspeptics about their diet. They move through
their sentences as delicately as Agag walked. Their little airs of
nicety, their starched cadences and frilled phrases seem as if they
had just been taken out of a literary bandbox. If perchance you
happen to misplace an accent, you shall see their eyebrows curl up
like an interrogation mark, and they will ask you what authority you
have for that pronunciation. As if, forsooth, a man could not talk
without book-license! As if he must have a permit from some dusty
lexicon before he can take a good word into his mouth and speak it
out like the people with whom he has lived!
The truth is that the man who is very particular not to commit
himself, in pronunciation or otherwise, and talks as if his remarks
were being taken down in shorthand, and shudders at the thought of
making a mistake, will hardly be able to open your heart or let out
the best that is in his own.
Reserve and precision are a great protection to overrated
reputations; but they are death to talk.
In talk it is not correctness of grammar nor elegance of enunciation
that charms us; it is spirit, VERVE, the sudden turn of humour, the
keen, pungent taste of life. For this reason a touch of dialect, a
flavour of brogue, is delightful. Any dialect is classic that has
conveyed beautiful thoughts. Who that ever talked with the poet
Tennyson, when he let himself go, over the pipes, would miss the
savour of his broad-rolling Lincolnshire vowels, now heightening the
humour, now deepening the pathos, of his genuine manly speech?
There are many good stories lingering in the memories of those who
knew Dr. James McCosh, the late president of Princeton University,--
stories too good, I fear, to get into a biography; but the best of
them, in print, would not have the snap and vigour of the poorest of
them, in talk, with his own inimitable Scotch-Irish brogue to set it
forth.
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