Society and solitude: Twelve chapters
that money does not more burn in a boy’s pocket than a piece of news
burns in our memory until we can tell it. And, in higher activity of
mind, every new perception is attended with a thrill of pleasure, and
the imparting of it to others is also attended with pleasure. Thought
is the child of the intellect, and this child is conceived with joy and
born with joy.
Conversation is the laboratory and workshop of the student. The
affection or sympathy helps. The wish to speak to the want of another
mind assists to clear your own. A certain truth possesses us, which we
in all ways strive to utter. Every time we say a thing in conversation,
we get a mechanical advantage in detaching it well and delivery. I
prize the mechanics of conversation. ’Tis pulley and lever and screw.
To fairly disengage the mass, and send it jingling down, a good
boulder,--a block of quartz and gold, to be worked up at leisure in the
useful arts of life,--is a wonderful relief.
What are the best days in memory? Those in which we met a companion who
was truly such. How sweet those hours when the day was not long enough
to communicate and compare our intellectual jewels,--the favorite
passages of each book, the proud anecdotes of our heroes, the delicious
verses we had hoarded! What a motive had then our solitary days! How
the countenance of our friend still left some light after he had gone!
We remember the time when the best gift we could ask of fortune was
to fall in with a valuable companion in a ship’s cabin, or on a long
journey in the old stage-coach, where, each passenger being forced
to know every other, and other employments being out of question,
conversation naturally flowed, people became rapidly acquainted, and,
if well adapted, more intimate in a day than if they had been neighbors
for years.
In youth, in the fury of curiosity and acquisition, the day is too
short for books and the crowd of thoughts, and we are impatient of
interruption. Later, when books tire, thought has a more languid flow;
and the days come when we are alarmed, and say there are no thoughts.
‘What a barren-witted pate is mine!’ the student says; ‘I will go and
learn whether I have lost my reason.’ He seeks intelligent persons,
whether more wise or less wise than he, who give him provocation,
and at once and easily the old motion begins in his brain: thoughts,
fancies, humors flow; the cloud lifts; the horizon broadens; and
the infinite opulence of things is again shown him. But the right
conditions must be observed. Mainly he must have leave to be himself.
Sancho Panza blessed the man who invented sleep. So I prize the good
invention whereby everybody is provided with somebody who is glad to
see him.
If men are less when together than they are alone, they are also in
some respects enlarged. They kindle each other; and such is the power
of suggestion, that each sprightly story calls out more; and sometimes
a fact that had long slept in the recesses of memory hears the voice,
is welcomed to daylight, and proves of rare value. Every metaphysician
must have observed, not only that no thought is alone, but that
thoughts commonly go in pairs; though the related thoughts first
appeared in his mind at long distances of time. Things are in pairs:
a natural fact has only half its value, until a fact in moral nature,
its counterpart, is stated. Then they confirm and adorn each other; a
story is matched by another story. And that may be the reason why, when
a gentleman has told a good thing, he immediately tells it again.
Nothing seems so cheap as the benefit of conversation: nothing is more
rare. ’Tis wonderful how you are balked and baffled. There is plenty
of intelligence, reading, curiosity; but serious, happy discourse,
avoiding personalities, dealing with results, is rare: and I seldom
meet with a reading and thoughtful person but he tells me, as if it
were his exceptional mishap, that he has no companion.
Suppose such a one to go out exploring different circles in search
of this wise and genial counterpart,--he might inquire far and
wide. Conversation in society is found to be on a platform so low
as to exclude science, the saint, and the poet. Amidst all the gay
banter, sentiment cannot profane itself and venture out. The reply
of old Isocrates comes so often to mind,--“The things which are now
seasonable I cannot say; and for the things which I can say it is not
now the time.” Besides, who can resist the charm of talent? The lover
of letters loves power too. Among the men of wit and learning, he
could not withhold his homage from the gayety, grasp of memory, luck,
splendor, and speed; such exploits of discourse, such feats of society!
What new powers, what mines of wealth! But when he came home, his brave
sequins were dry leaves. He found either that the fact they had thus
dizened and adorned was of no value, or that he already knew all and
more than all they had told him. He could not find that he was helped
by so much as one thought or principle, one solid fact, one commanding
impulse: great was the dazzle, but the gain was small. He uses his
occasions; he seeks the company of those who have convivial talent. But
the moment they meet, to be sure they begin to be something else than
they were; they play pranks, dance jigs, run on each other, pun, tell
stories, try many fantastic tricks, under some superstition that there
must be excitement and elevation;--and they kill conversation at once.
I know well the rusticity of the shy hermit. No doubt he does not make
allowance enough for men of more active blood and habit. But it is only
on natural ground that conversation can be rich. It must not begin with
uproar and violence. Let it keep the ground, let it feel the connection
with the battery. Men must not be off their centres.
Some men love only to talk where they are masters. They like to go to
school-girls, or to boys, or into the shops where the sauntering people
gladly lend an ear to any one. On these terms they give information,
and please themselves by sallies and chat which are admired by the
idlers; and the talker is at his ease and jolly, for he can walk out
without ceremony when he pleases. They go rarely to their equals, and
then as for their own convenience simply, making too much haste to
introduce and impart their new whim or discovery; listen badly, or
do not listen to the comment or to the thought by which the company
strive to repay them; rather, as soon as their own speech is done,
they take their hats. Then there are the gladiators, to whom it is
always a battle; ’tis no matter on which side, they fight for victory;
then the heady men, the egotists, the monotones, the steriles, and the
impracticables.
It does not help that you find as good or a better man than yourself,
if he is not timed and fitted to you. The greatest sufferers are
often those who have the most to say,--men of a delicate sympathy,
who are dumb in mixed company. Able people, if they do not know how
to make allowance for them, paralyze them. One of those conceited
prigs who value nature only as it feeds and exhibits them is equally
a pest with the roysterers. There must be large reception as well
as giving. How delightful after these disturbers is the radiant,
playful wit of--one whom I need not name,--for in every society there
is his representative. Good-nature is stronger than tomahawks. His
conversation is all pictures: he can reproduce whatever he has seen;
he tells the best story in the county, and is of such genial temper
that he disposes all others irresistibly to good-humor and discourse.
Diderot said of the Abbé Galiani: “He was a treasure in rainy days; and
if the cabinet-makers made such things, everybody would have one in the
country.”
One lesson we learn early,--that, in spite of seeming difference, men
are all of one pattern. We readily assume this with our mates, and are
disappointed and angry if we find that we are premature, and that their
watches are slower than ours. In fact, the only sin which we never
forgive in each other is difference of opinion. We know beforehand that
yonder man must think as we do. Has he not two hands,--two feet,--hair
and nails? Does he not eat,--bleed,--laugh,--cry? His dissent from
me is the veriest affectation. This conclusion is at once the logic
of persecution and of love. And the ground of our indignation is our
conviction that his dissent is some wilfulness he practises on himself.
He checks the flow of his opinion, as the cross cow holds up her milk.
Yes, and we look into his eye, and see that he knows it and hides his
eye from ours.
But to come a little nearer to my mark, I am to say that there may
easily be obstacles in the way of finding the pure article we are in
search of; but when we find it, it is worth the pursuit, for beside
its comfort as medicine and cordial, once in the right company, new
and vast values do not fail to appear. All that man can do for man is
to be found in that market. There are great prizes in this game. Our
fortunes in the world are as our mental equipment for this competition
is. Yonder is a man who can answer the questions which I cannot. Is
it so? Hence comes to me boundless curiosity to know his experiences
and his wit. Hence competition for the stakes dearest to man. What is
a match at whist, or draughts, or billiards, or chess, to a match of
mother-wit, of knowledge, and of resources? However courteously we
conceal it, it is social rank and spiritual power that are compared;
whether in the parlor, the courts, the caucus, the senate, or the
chamber of science,--which are only less or larger theatres for this
competition.
He that can define, he that can answer a question so as to admit of no
further answer, is the best man. This was the meaning of the story of
the Sphinx. In the old time conundrums were sent from king to king by
ambassadors. The seven wise masters at Periander’s banquet spent their
time in answering them. The life of Socrates is a propounding and a
solution of these. So, in the hagiology of each nation, the lawgiver
was in each case some man of eloquent tongue, whose sympathy brought
him face to face with the extremes of society. Jesus, Menu, the first
Buddhist, Mahomet, Zertusht, Pythagoras, are examples.
Jesus spent his life in discoursing with humble people on life and
duty, in giving wise answers, showing that he saw at a larger angle
of vision, and at least silencing those who were not generous enough
to accept his thoughts. Luther spent his life so; and it is not his
theologic works,--his “Commentary on the Galatians,” and the rest,
but his “Table-Talk” which is still read by men. Dr. Johnson was
a man of no profound mind,--full of English limitations, English
politics, English Church, Oxford philosophy; yet having a large heart,
mother-wit, and good sense, which impatiently overleaped his customary
bounds, his conversation as reported by Boswell has a lasting charm.
Conversation is the vent of character as well as of thought; and Dr.
Johnson impresses his company, not only by the point of the remark, but
also, when the point fails, because _he_ makes it. His obvious religion
or superstition, his deep wish that they should think so or so, weighs
with them,--so rare is depth of feeling, or a constitutional value for
a thought or opinion, among the light-minded men and women who make up
society; and though they know that there is in the speaker a degree
of shortcoming, of insincerity, and of talking for victory, yet the
existence of character, and habitual reverence for principles over
talent or learning, is felt by the frivolous.
One of the best records of the great German master, who towered over
all his contemporaries in the first thirty years of this century, is