p. 27 | A Talk About Talking

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Jan 19, 1882

A Talk About Talking.

THERE has been a time when conversation was considered an accomplishment worthy of cultivation, but the newspapers and circulating library are helping us to read ourselves into a silent race, and conversation is almost relegated to a place among the lost arts.

The ability to converse well is rare. Few have the scintillating wit of Sheridan; not many are endowed with the genial flow of spirits and the dramatic and picturesque power of Scott; and where can be found the genius that can hold his listeners spell-bound by the magic of his words like Coleridge?

Some one has said that no particular method or rule can be applied to talking; yet the brilliant Madame de Stael studied conversation as an art, and she could so intoxicate an audience with the wine distilled from thought as to make it unconscious of a thunder-storm raging without.

An attempt to imitate any great converser would only end in failure, but an adaptation of good points to one’s own individual power and the observance of certain obvious requirements would surely lead to some success.

How to talk and of what, are questions of importance in this connection. We are forbidden to talk “shop,” yet if one cannot speak of what he knows, how much does he contribute to general knowledge?

A monologue is not conversation. Good conversation is illumined by “brilliant flashes of silence”—pauses in speech are “like rests in music; sounds following silence are always sweetest.”

Etiquette demands polite listening as well as agreeable talking. Swift’s maxim was to talk as many half minutes as possible, but never talk more than half a minute without pausing and giving others a chance to strike in. Questions are a stimulus to conversation. Bacon says, “He that questioneth much, shall learn much, and content much.”

Argument and satire hold no place in pleasant converse.

Sound discourse based on a knowledge of a subject, or desire for it, enlivened by wit and appropriate anecdotes, is most entertaining.

See the picture the Sage of Concord draws: “In excited conversation we have glimpses of the universe, hints of power native to the soul, far-darting lights and shadows of an Andes landscape, such as we can hardly attain in lone meditation. Here are oracles sometimes given to which the memory goes back in barren hours.

Do not bottle up brilliant ideas for the sake of letting them off with a “pop” in a magazine article; remember, “a pleasant thought repeated becomes a loaf whereby a multitude is fed.” To steer safely between the Scylla of egotism and the Charybdis of self-distrust is necessary to successful conversation; minuteness of detail on unimportant subjects is to be avoided, and, to quote Emerson again, “There is one topic peremptorily forbidden to all well-bred, rational mortals, namely, their distempers.”

The Bible gives the best general rules for conversation. “Let your speech be always with grace seasoned with salt, that you may know how you ought to answer every man.” “Speak evil of no man.” “Let no corrupt communication proceed out of your mouth, but that which is good to the use of edifying.” “A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in pictures of silver.” “By thy words shalt thou be justified, and by thy words shalt thou be condemned.”—Northwestern Christian Advocate.