of general interest. He should, so to speak, kick-off. And then he
should either feel, or at least artfully simulate, an interest in
other people's point of view. He should ask questions, reply to
arguments, encourage, elicit expressions of opinion. He should not
desire to steer his own course, but follow the line that the talk
happens to take. If he aims at the reputation of being a good
talker, he will win a far higher fame by pursuing this course; for
it is a lamentable fact that, after a lively talk, one is apt to
remember far better what one has oneself contributed to the
discussion than what other people have said; and if you can send
guests away from a gathering feeling that they have talked well,
they will be disposed in that genial mood to concede conversational
merit to the other participators. A naive and simple-minded friend
of my own once cast an extraordinary light on the subject, by
saying to me, the day after an agreeable symposium at my own house,
"We had a very pleasant evening with you yesterday. I was in great
form"!

The only two kinds of talker that I find tiresome are the talker of
paradoxes and the egotist. A few paradoxes are all very well; they
are stimulating and gently provocative. But one gets tired of a
string of them; they become little more than a sort of fence
erected round a man's mind; one despairs of ever knowing what a
paradoxical talker really thinks. Half the charm of good talk
consists in the glimpses and peeps one gets into the stuff of a
man's thoughts; and it is wearisome to feel that a talker is for
ever tossing subjects on his horns, perpetually trying to say the
unexpected, the startling thing. In the best talk of all, a glade
suddenly opens up, like the glades in the Alpine forests through
which they bring the timber down to the valley; one sees a long