fect
moderator should have a large stock of subjects of general interest. He
should, so to speak, kick-off. And then he should either feel, or at
least artfully simulate, an interest in other people's point of view.
He should ask questions, reply to arguments, encourage, elicit
expressions of opinion. He should not desire to steer his own course,
but follow the line that the talk happens to take. If he aims at the
reputation of being a good talker, he will win a far higher fame by
pursuing this course; for it is a lamentable fact that, after a lively
talk, one is apt to remember far better what one has oneself
contributed to the discussion than what other people have said; and if
you can send guests away from a gathering feeling that they have talked
well, they will be disposed in that genial mood to concede
conversational merit to the other participators. A naive and
simple-minded friend of my own once cast an extraordinary light on the
subject, by saying to me, the day after an agreeable symposium at my
own house, "We had a very pleasant evening with you yesterday. I was in
great form"!

The only two kinds of talker that I find tiresome are the talker of
paradoxes and the egotist. A few paradoxes are all very well; they are
stimulating and gently provocative. But one gets tired of a string of
them; they become little more than a sort of fence erected round a
man's mind; one despairs of ever knowing what a paradoxical talker
really thinks. Half the charm of good talk consists in the glimpses and
peeps one gets into the stuff of a man's thoughts; and it is wearisome
to feel that a talker is for ever tossing subjects on his horns,
perpetually trying to say the unexpected, the startling thing. In the
best talk of all, a glade suddenly opens up, like the glades in the
Alpine forests through which they bring the timber down to the valley;
one sees a long green vista, all bathed in shimmering sunshine, with
the dark head of a mountain at the top. So in the best talk one has a
sudden sight of something high, sweet, serious, austere.

The other kind of talk that I find very disagreeable is the talk of a
full-fledged egotist, who converses without reference to his hearers,
and brings out what is in his mind. One gets interesting things in this
way from time to time; but the essence, as I have said, of good talk is
that one should have provoking and stimulating peeps into other minds,
not that one should be compelled to gaze a