great carouses of words in
which the young can still indulge? We were most of us young once, odd as
it appears; and some of us can remember our youthful discussions, our
salad-day talks, prolonged to hours, trespassing on to subjects, which
added such a fine spice of the forbidden and therefore the free! The joy
of asking reasons where you have hitherto answered school queries; of
extemporizing replies, magnificent, irresponsible, instead of
laboriously remembering mere solutions; of describing, analyzing, and
generally laying bold mental eyes, irreverent intellectual hands, on
personalities whose real presence would merely make you stumble over a
chair or drop a tea-cup! For talking is the great equalizer of
positions, turning the humble, the painfully immature, into judges with
rope and torch; and in a kindlier way allowing the totally obscure to
share the life of kings, and queens, and generals, and opera-singers;
which is the reason that items of Court news or of "dramatic gossip"
are so frequently exchanged in omnibuses and at small, decent
dinner-tables.

Moreover, talking has for the young the joys of personal exuberance; it
is all honeycombed, or rather, filled (like champagne) with the generous
gaseousness of self-analysis, self-accusation, self-pity,
self-righteousness, and autobiography. The poor mortal, in that delusive
sense of sympathy and perfect understanding which comes of perfect
indifference to one's neighbour's presence, has quicker pulses, higher
temperature, more vigorous movements than are compatible with the sober
sense of human unimportance. In conversation, clever young people--vain,
kindly, selfish, ridiculous, happy young people--actually take body and
weight, expand. And are you quite sure, my own dear, mature, efficient,
and thoroughly productive friends and contemporaries, that it is not
this expansion of youthful rubbish which makes the true movement of the
centuries?... Poor stuff enough, very likely, they talked, those
long-haired, loose-collared Romanticists of the Hotel Pimodan and the
literary cafes recorded by Balzac, _Jeunes Frances_, or whatever their
names; and priggery, as well as blood-and-thunder, those lads round the
table d'hote at Strasburg, where Jung-Stilling noticed the entrance of a
certain tall, Apolline young man answering to the name of Goethe.
Rubbish, of course; but rubbish necessary, yes, every empty bubble and
scum and mess thereof, for the making of a great lite