rpassed by many men of all nations, notably by Socrates, who is
probably the most famous and certainly by far the most influential of
talkers. Of course his talk comes to us chiefly through the medium of
a man of transcendent genius; and Plato may have transcended his master
as well as other things. But on the whole all the evidence goes to
show that the talk of Socrates was the force which set ideas in motion,
which modified the whole subsequent moral and intellectual life of
Greece and Rome, and through them of the world; in fact, that the
spoken word of Socrates has played a greater {158} part in the world
than any written word whatsoever, except the Gospels and the Koran,
both themselves, it may be noted, the record of a spoken word greater
than the written book. Beside anything of this kind Johnson sinks of
course into entire insignificance. But as an artist in talk, that is a
man who talked well for the pleasure of it, as an end in itself, and
whose talk was heard gladly as a thing of triumph and delight, bringing
with it its own justification, he probably far surpassed Socrates. If
he, too, had got to his trial he probably would have been as scornful
as Socrates of the judgment of popular opinion. But he never would
have got there, not only because he was too conservative to deny the
established divinities, but because he was so entertaining that
everybody liked listening to him, whatever he denied or affirmed.
Socrates, on the other hand, was evidently something of a bore, with a
bore's unrelieved earnestness and inopportune persistence. His saying
about "letting the talk lead us where it will," is an exact description
of Johnson's practice, but nothing could be less like his own. He is
always relentlessly guiding it towards a particular goal, from the path
to which he will not have it for a moment diverted. Johnson, on the
other hand, takes no thought whatever for the argumentative {159}
morrow, never starts a subject, never sets out to prove anything. He
talks as an artist paints, just for the joy of doing what he is
conscious of doing well. The talk, like the picture, is its own
sufficient reward.

The same sort of inferiority puts other famous talkers, Coleridge for
instance, and Luther, below Johnson. They had too much purpose in
their talk to be artists about it. The endless eloquence of the
Highgate days, to say nothing about the greater days before Highgate,
was a powerful element in that re