to be asked a
foolish question; to find that the first principles are not understood!
You are thrown on your back immediately; the conversation is stopt like
a country-dance by those who do not know the figure. But when a set of
adepts, of _illuminati_, get about a question, it is worth while to hear
them talk."

If we are to have a rising generation of good talkers, by our own choice
and deliberate aim social intercourse should be freed from the
barbarisms which so often hamper it. Conversation at its highest is the
most delightful of intellectual stimulants; at its lowest the most
deadening to intellect. Better be as silent as a deaf-mute than to
indulge carelessly in imperturbable glibness which impedes rather than
encourages good conversation. Really clever people dislike to compete in
a race with talkers who rarely speak from the abundance of their hearts
and often from the emptiness of their heads. On the other hand, one can
easily imagine a sage like Emerson the victim of conceited prigs,
listening to their vapid conversational performances, and can readily
understand why he considered conversation between two congenial souls
the only really good talk.

Marked conversational powers are in some measure natural and in some
acquired; "and to maintain," says Mr. Mahaffy, "that they depend
entirely upon natural gifts is one of the commonest and most
widely-spread popular errors.... It is based on the mistake that art is
opposed to nature; that natural means _merely_ what is spontaneous and
unprepared, and artistic what is _manifestly_ studied and artificial....
Ask any child of five or six years old, anywhere over Europe, to draw
you the figure of a man, and it will always produce very much the same
kind of thing. You might therefore assert that this was the _natural_
way for a child to draw a man, and yet how remote from nature it is. If
one or two children out of a thousand made a fair attempt, you would
attribute this either to special genius or special training--and why?
because the child had really approached nature." Just as a child, either
with talent for drawing or without it, can draw a better picture of a
man after he has been trained, than before, so can those not endowed by
nature with ready speech polish and amend their natural defects. Neither
need there be artificiality or affectation in talk that is consciously
cultivated; no more indeed than it is affectation to eat with a fork
because one knows th