ng
expectation of the rest. No one can talk well amidst a rude jabber of
voices, or a perpetual succession of interruptions. Subtile thought,
sacred sentiment, eloquent emotion, and artistic speech, are coy:
they must have the encouragement of respectful audience. Conversation
becomes the crowning art and luxury of life, the most completely
satisfying of all employments, when groups of friends regularly meet,
under the rules of gracious breeding, with leisure, with confidence
in each other, with no jealous ambitions, no intolerant partisanship,
but with catholic purposes of improvement. Instead of such meetings
of choice friends, we now have mobs of people, drawn together by
every sort of factitious motive--crowds who crush each other's
dresses, desperately bow and smirk at each other; exchange
intolerable commonplaces, with unmeaning conventionality; affect to
listen to music, which no one can hear or would care for if he could
hear; mix all their buzzing voices in one oceanic roar; or, when
there is room, break up into whispering knots; then charge together
upon the supper-table, as if it were a fortress to be taken by storm,
and are unspeakably relieved when the assembly is over. As company is
held in fashionable society now, the talk is not tenaciously kept to
important themes, for ends of conviction, culture, light, or joy, but
is a hodge-podge of trifles, an incoherent succession of unconsidered
remarks. Each one speaks with his neighbor, regardless of all the
rest of the guests, as if it were an evil to be silent, or an
absurdity to expect that anybody could say any thing worth being
listened to by all. Some one has said, with much piquancy, "Lectures
are soliloquies reared on the ruins of conversation." Madame Mole
suggestively remarks, "At the Hotel Rambouillet conversation was the
all-sufficient amusement: we hear of neither cards nor music; for,
wizen the habit of changing all thoughts and sentiments into words
has become natural and easy, it offers so great a variety in itself
that society needs no other. That form of talk alone can be called
conversation in which what we really think and feel is called out,
and flows the quicker from the pleasure of seeing it excite thoughts
and feelings in others."

Those who, now-a-days, have a reputation as good talkers are rather
declaimers, haranguers, orators, than conversers. True
conversationalists seem to be nearly obsolete; because our social
gatherings, whether