g with an echo,' Carlyle called it.
For, tho it may make a man feel mentally masterful at first, it makes
him feel mentally maudlin at last; and, as the Abbe says, to be bored
one's self is a sure sign that one's companion is also weary."

Tho polite dissent is desirable in discussion, flat contradiction is
contemptible. Dean Swift affirms that a person given to contradiction is
more fit for Bedlam than for conversation. In discussion, far more than
in lighter talk, decency as well as honor commands that each partner to
the conversational game conform to the niceties and fairness of it. "I
don't think so," "It isn't so," "I don't agree with you at all," are too
flat and positive for true delicacy and refinement in conversation. "I
have been inclined to think otherwise," "I should be pleased to hear
your reasons," "Aren't you mistaken?" are more acceptable phrases with
which to introduce dissent. In French society a discrepancy of views is
always manifested by some courtesy-phrase, such as "_Mais, ne
pensez-vous pas_" or "_Je vous demande pardon_"--the urbane substitutes
for "No, you are wrong," "No, it isn't." Our own Benjamin Franklin,
whose appreciation of the conversational art in France won completely
the hearts of the French people, tells us in his autobiography that in
later life he found it necessary to throw off habits acquired in youth:
"I continued this positive method for some years, but gradually left
it, retaining only the habit of expressing myself in terms of modest
diffidence: never using when I advanced anything that might possibly be
disputed, the words 'certainly,' 'undoubtedly,' or any others that give
the air of positiveness to an opinion, but rather say, 'it appears to
me,' or 'I should think it so-and-so, for such-and-such a reason,' or 'I
imagine it to be so,' or it is so 'if I am not mistaken.'"

Unyielding obstinacy in discussion is deadening to conversation, and yet
the extreme contrary is crippling. Open resentment of any attempt at
warmth of speech is paralysis and torpor to talk. When one meets a
hostess, or a conversational partner, "whose only pleasure is to be
displeased," one is reminded of the railway superintendent who kept the
wires hot with fault-finding messages bearing his initials "H. F. C."
until he came to be known along the road as "Hell For Certain." People
of a resentful turn of mind, whose every sentence is a wager, and who
convert every word into a missile, are fit for pol