to know.... Sympathy,
however, should not be excessive in quality, which makes it
demonstrative. We have an excellent word which describes the
over-sympathetic person, and marks the judgment of society, when we say
that he or she is _gushing_. To be too sympathetic makes discussion,
which implies difference of opinion, impossible." Those who try to
discover how far conversation is advanced by sympathy and hindered by
over-sympathy; those who attempt to detect to what extent wholesome
discussion is degraded by acrid controversy, need not be afraid of
vigorous intellectual buffeting. Discussion springs from human nature
when it is under the influence of strong feeling, and is as much an
ingredient of conversation as the vocalizing of sounds is a part of the
effort of expressing thought.

CHAPTER III

GOSSIP

_Gossip in Literature--Gossip Comes from Being of One Kindred Under
God--Gossip and the Misanthrope--Personal History of People We Know
and People We Don't Know--Gossip of Books of Biography--Interest in
Others Gives Fellowship and Warmth to Life--Essential Difference
Between Slander and Innocent Gossip--The Psychology of the
Slanderer--The Apocryphal Slanderer--"Talking Behind Another's
Back"--Personal Chat the Current Coin of Conversation._

CHAPTER III

GOSSIP

It seems strange that, in all the long list of brilliant dissertations
on every subject under the sun, no English essayist should have yielded
a word under the seductive title of "Gossip." Even Leigh Hunt, who wrote
vivaciously and exquisitely on so many light topics, was not attracted
by the enticing possibilities of this subject to which both the learned
and the unlearned are ready at all times to bestow a willing ear or eye.
One usually conceives gossip as something to which one lends only one's
ear, and never one's eye; but what are "Plutarch's Lives" but the right
sort of gossip? That so many literary men and women have vaguely
suspected the alluring tone-color of the word "gossip" is proved by: _A
Gossip in Romance_, Robert Louis Stevenson; _Gossip in a Library_,
Edmund William Gosse; _Gossip of the Caribbees_, William R. H.
Trowbridge, Jr.; _Gossip from Paris During the Second Empire_, Anthony
North Peet; _Gossip in the First Decade of Victoria's Reign_, Jane West;
_Gossip of the Century_, Julia Clara Byrne; _Gossiping Guide to Wales_,
Askew Roberts and Edward Woodall; _Gossip with Girls and Ma