Chapter 12

Conclusion

While we think of eating as largely a pleasure, we know it is also the means of keeping us alive. Similarly we think of conversation as a satisfaction and amusement, yet do not quite so well realize that it is also the sustenance of our mental life. It is an ocean that never dries up, but which, when it stagnates causes a shriveling up of everything else, and which, when it ebbs and flows and pushes in all the streams and inlets, gives a livelier pulse to life everywhere.

The conversation of the people — of the whole people, high brow and low brow — is the pulse of the level of culture and enterprise of a sect or of a nation. Conversation is the blossom of man's thoughts and ideas as they are about to go into action. What the scholar discovers in his library and the scientist in his laboratory only goes into general beneficial effect after all the people talk about it. The more Christian the world we live in is, and the more democratic, the more this is true.

A country may be said to have notable conversation when the best ideas of the libraries and laboratories quickly get into the stream of common talk. The brotherhood of Christ requires that any good ideas be shared as quickly as possible and become an integral part of all human beings. This integration is not accomplished until the ideas come out of books into the talk and repartee of the people. Galileo   published   his   earth-moves-around-the-sun   theory way back in 1632. Two hundred years later, according to one anecdote, the young people of Illinois still thought the earth was flat. When one young man, Abe Lincoln, in his New Salem store started talking of the round, revolving earth, his young hearers shook their heads dubiously. But they repeated the strange theory to others — and now everybody in Illinois has been talked into knowing that the earth is round.

That is the way truth prevails: discovered by the "prophet," packaged to remote parts by journalists, taken up by the best talkers in every locality, until it finds its way into everybody's mouth. Only then is it fulfilled, only then has it been integrated into the pattern of culture of the people. Lincoln talked the same way about the equality of man and the wrong of slavery. By and by, so many people talked about it in the same spirit that a movement for a free country followed. Unfortunately not enough people did the right kind of talking all over the country — and so a long, bloody civil war brought about what free and vigorous conversation should have brought about peacefully.

One writer, Esme Wingfield-Stratford, writes startlingly, "The salon was the mother of the guillotine." He describes how in eighteenth-century France, it became the fashion to talk philosophies, to extend, as it was held, the new "empire of light and reason." Established faiths and sanctities were questioned and ridiculed, and one might be godless if only one were not dull. The writer goes on,

The salon was thus the means by which the civilization of Versailles accomplished its own eventual downfall. The forces of authority were completely powerless to silence the voice of criticism; they might order dangerous literature, when they were capable of detecting its sting, to be burnt by a common hangman, but what booted that, when the elite of the class they were supposed to represent was in league with the enemy; when more subversive propaganda than anything that got into print was being disseminated by word of mouth; when the master iconoclasts were lionized and bidden to roar again? The salon was the mother of the guillotine (Good Talk [London: Lovat, Dickson, 1936], p. 223).

A society is as good or as bad, as wise or as stupid, as its general conversation. Conversation is the bloom which brings forth the fruit. If it is indecent, silly, wrongheaded, secular, the fruits will be sin, secularism, injustice, and decay. If people may talk about everything except religion, then a creeping secularism will inevitably overtake their whole civilization. If people never rise above gossip, other people whose conversation does rise above it, will eventually take them over.

Conversation is the real lay apostolate. "Go out and teach all nations," said Christ to His disciples. His disciples are the arteries of culture and civilization, the arteries of His Mystical Body. But you and I, the ordinary talkers, must be the capillaries that carry the gospel of the good, the true, the beautiful to the outermost and lowliest members of the human race — to everyone we meet along life's way.

Our ambition will be to live up to St. Paul's instruction: "Your manner of speaking must always be gracious, with an edge of liveliness, ready to give each questioner the right answer." The world is a collection of souls all groping for the right answer. As good conversationalists we will throw sweetness and light into the troubled anxiety of our fellow men.

We will  realize  that  most  of  them  are  knee-deep  in problems of shelter and clothing, of food and health, of marriage and children, of salaries and taxes, and therefore we will talk graciously and sympathetically and interestingly about these matters. But in doing so we will not forget that these things are after all merely the shell of man's higher nature. We will always assume that every man is secretly trying to follow the gleam, is trying to fashion his character to the image of his Maker. Therefore we will talk about the necessary earthy things always with an eye to man's final end, and sometimes, in the right time and place, we will talk about that final end itself.

If we talk like that, we cannot easily be tactless and offensive, and it is hard to see how we could be really dull or boresome. Surely we cannot then fail to "make friends and influence people," and, what is most important, influence them the way their better nature wants to be influenced.

As a teacher of literature, I cannot resist the urge to end this book on conversation with a sonnet an English poet, Robert Herrick, a clergyman, put at the head of his book of lyrics. If one changes the verbs sing and write, to talk, it can most appropriately be quoted to describe the range of good conversation from what creeps, crawls, and marries, to what paints, speculates, and moralizes, from nature to the supernatural, from ourselves to our fellows — and never quite loses sight of the heavenly goal post.

I sing of brooks, of blossoms, birds, and bowers, Of April, May, of June, and July flowers; I sing of May-poles, hock-carts, wassails, wakes, Of bridegrooms, brides, and of their bridal cakes.

I write of Youth, of Love, and have access By these, to sing of cleanly wantonness; I sing of dews, of rains, and, piece by piece, Of balm, of oil, of spice, and ambergris;

I sing of times trans-shifting; and I write How roses first came red, and lilies white; I write of groves, of twilights, and I sing The court of Mab, and of the Fairy King.

I write of Hell; I sing and ever shall, Of Heaven, and hope to have it after all.