The frank good-nature and gravity of
twelve-year-old critics makes their operations quite painless, and they
are accepted with equal good humour and gravity, no one wasting any
emotion and a great deal of good sense being exchanged.
Conversation, as conversation, is hard to teach, we can only lead the
way and lay down a few principles which keep it in the right path. These
commonplaces of warning, as old as civilization itself, belong to
manners and to fundamental unselfishness, but obvious as they are they
have to be said and to be repeated and enforced until they become
matters of course. Not to seem bored, not to interrupt, not to
contradict, not to make personal remarks, not to talk of oneself (some
one was naive enough to say "then what is there to talk of"), not to get
heated and not to look cold, not to do all the talking and not to be
silent, not to advance if the ground seems uncertain, and to be
sensitively attentive to what jars--all these and other things are
troublesome to obtain, but exceedingly necessary. And even observing
them all we may be just as far from conversation as before; how often
among English people, through shyness or otherwise, it simply faints
from inanition. We can at least teach that a first essential is to have
something to say, and that the best preparation of mind is thought and
reading and observation, to be interested in many things, and to give
enough personal application to a few things as to have something worth
saying about them.
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