contemporaries. "A man of genius," said Professor Wilson, ❝is always a man of genius, and, unless he has been too much of a recluse, pleasant and instructive in all companies worthy of him; but he rarely desires to play first fiddle,”—and indeed, as the Ettrick Shepherd insists, there should never be a first fiddle in a private concert. Another critical authority has said of another man of genius, that although not wanting either wit or polish, he tasked his powers too severely on great subjects not to be sometimes dull upon small ones; yet, when he was "either excited or at home,* he was not without-what man of genius is? his peculiar powers of conversation." Thackeray tells us of his Warrington, fresh from and full of the glories of Nature he has been seeing while in Switzerland, that he will write ardently and frankly about that which he is shy of saying; the thoughts and experience of his travel will come Some natures are only "at home" tête-à-tête. Two are company, by this rule and practice; raise the figure, and you reduce the result. They can only get on with one other at a time, and that one must be a congenial spirit. It is a saying to be met with in several of Emerson's books, that where we look for the highest benefits of conversation, "the Spartan rule of one to one is in force. It by no means follows, on his showing, that we are not fit for society, because soirées are tedious, and because the soirée finds us tedious. A backwoodsman, who had been sent to "the university," told him that when he heard the best-loved young men at the law-school talk together, he reckoned himself a boor; but whenever he caught them apart, and had one to himself alone, then they were the boors, and he the better man. "I find this law of one to one, peremptory for conversation, which is the practice and consummation of friendship.' Margaret Fuller said to one of her biographers, referring to a common acquaintance,—"You fancy you know him. It is too absurd; you have never seen him. . . . You suppose him a mere man of talent. He is so with you. But the moment I was alone with him he was another creature," as though, in fact, the animating lady's own creation. Washington Irving was complained of as mighty dull at a dinner party, but delightful at home," or where he felt to be there. So of Etty we are told by Mr. Gilchrist that in "general society" he could never, to the last, be got to take a part: he "would often, at a dinner party, sit without saying a word." It was only with an intimate friend that Wilkie could "get on or come out. Sir James Stephen contrasts the reserve which hnng upon Thomas Gisborne in crowded saloons, with his affluence and effluence of cordial talk with some one congenial spirit. 66 66 forth in his writings, as the learning, which he never displays in talk, enriches his style with pregnant allusion and brilliant illustration, colours his generous eloquence, and points his wit. What more essential for conversational success, Mr. Lister asks, than imagination and facility of expression? yet the poet has it not necessarily, nor the orator. "Anything, however good, that anybody may have written or spoken, is no more a security for his colloquial talents than for his personal good looks." Isaac Disraeli devotes a section of his Curiosities of Literature to men of genius deficient in conversation; and his examples are Corneille, Descartes, Nicole, Addison (that "silent parson in a tie-wig," as he seemed to Mandeville), Dryden (who avowed himself "slow and dull in conversation), besides Isocrates and Virgil among the ancients, and La Fontaine among the moderns. La Bruyère described La Fontaine as coarse, heavy, and stupid in society. And Ménage described La Bruyère as pas un grand parleur, while D'Olivet charged him with "craignant toute sorte d'ambition, même celle de montrer de l'esprit." Montesquieu was deficient in conversation, nor was either Buffon or Rousseau eloquent or pleasing in table-talk. Hume told Boswell that the Abbé Raynal could not have written his books himself, for "he is a dull man in conversation"—which Boswell discreetly rejected as a certain rule for judging that a man cannot write well. And Hume it was of whom Walpole said, that his writings so excelled his conversation that the historian seemed to understand nothing till he had written upon it. Gray, according to Walpole, was the worst company in the world, for he never talked easily. Yet Walpole himself talked ill, remarks Mr. Forster; and so, he adds, did Gay; and so did Pope, and Swift, and Addison, besides other Queen Anne men already named. THE XXXVII. THE FALL OF EUTYCHUS. ACTS xx. 9—12. 66 HE preacher who sends you to sleep may quote the precedent of St. Paul. But it does not at all follow that he is a great apostle. Nor is it absolutely clear that St. Paul took to himself none of the responsibility of the accident that befell the young man Eutychus in consequence of a discourse prolonged until midnight. In direct consequence : as Paul was long preaching, he [Eutychus] sunk down with sleep." There is, at any rate, not a word of rebuke or expostulation on the Apostle's part, towards the young man that, having fallen from the third loft, was taken up dead, and whom he so gladly and gratefully restored to his friends alive, with a cordial embrace, and without so much as a parting monition, Go, and sleep no more-in sermon-time. Eutychus may be held forth as a frightful example, by way of warning. And there is something to be said on that side of the question. But there is something to be said for Eutychus too. There are allowances to be made for him-at least Scripture appears to have made them by its very abstention from one syllable of censure. The author of the Acts of the Apostles obviously takes the accident to have been fully accounted for by the length of the preaching; and he appears to have studiously refrained from giving an ethical and improving or cautionary tone to his narrative of the incident. Or, if there be anything cautionary discoverable in it, the caution may as legitimately be addressed to those illimitable discoursers whose ignorance of when and where to stop sends people to sleep, as to the involuntary drowsy-heads who are thus overtaken with a fault, if not, like Eutychus, with a fall. Is this designed, then, by way of justification of sleeping in sermon-time? A thousand times, no! But it is designed to hint that St. Paul himself might sympathize, in certain cases, rather with the droppers-off who can resist sleep no longer under a pulpit spell so somniferous, than with the scolding preacher who resents the affront, and who descries and proclaims "a judgment" in the midnight catastrophe at Troas. Of all misbehaviour, none is comparable to that of those who go to church to sleep, says Dean Swift, in a sermon on the fall of Eutychus. Opium, he adds, is not so stupefying to many persons as an afternoon sermon: perpetual custom has so brought it about, that the words of whatever preacher become only a sort of uniform sound at a distance, than which nothing is more effectual to lull the senses. "For that it is the very sound of the sermon which bindeth up their faculties is manifest from hence, because they all awake so very regularly as soon as it ceaseth, and with much devotion receive the blessing." In a contribution to The Tatler he makes an imaginary parishioner complain of a perhaps not imaginary vicar that " generally, when his curate preaches in the afternoon, he sleeps sotting in the desk on a hassock." Cowper has such a picture in The Task-only, in his instance, it is the curate who dozes, and the rector who drones overhead; here too the clerk is fast: * "Sweet sleep enjoys the curate in his desk, The Indian King in The Spectator (also by Swift), who describes his experiences in this country, records a Sunday visit to one of our churches, or "holy houses," and his inability to discover any circumstances of devotion in the behaviour of the people. "There was indeed a man in black, who was mounted above the rest, and seemed to utter something with a great deal of vehemence; but as for * The beadle in the Scotch story is ready with a mollifying excuse. How was it, the minister demanded, that that functionary managed to keep briskly attentive whenever a stranger preached, and invariably dozed under the discourses of his own pastor? "Deed, sir, I can soon explain that. When ye're in the poupit yoursel', I ken it's a' richt; but when a stranger preaches, I like to watch his doctrine a wee." those underneath him, a considerable number were fast asleep." So with Goldsmith's Chinese citizen of the world, in his notes of travel: "The priest himself [no vehemence of manner here], in a drowsy tone, read over the duties of the day. Bless my eyes, cried I, as I happened to look towards the door, what do I see? one of the worshippers fallen asleep, and actually sunk down on his cushion: is he now enjoying the benefit of a trance, or does he receive the influence of some mysterious vision? 'Alas! alas!' replied my companion, 'no such thing; he has only had the misfortune of eating too hearty a dinner, and finds it impossible to keep his eyes open."" Addison gives a characteristic touch of nature to his Sir Roger de Coverley at church, when he describes him as landlord to the whole congregation, and as such keeping them in very good order, and suffering nobody to sleep during service besides himself; for if by chance he has been surprised into a short nap at sermon, upon recovering out of it he stands up and looks about him, and if he sees anybody else nodding, either wakes them himself, or sends his servant to them. There is something in the self-assertion of the waker to remind one of Squire Dale in the Last Chronicle of Barset: "Uncle Christopher certainly does go to sleep when Mr. Boyce preaches," Lily Dale admits; "and he hasn't studied any scientific little movements during his slumbers to make the people believe that he's all alive. I gave him a hint one day, and he got so angry with me!" Nonagenarian Dr. Barnes being rallied by a companion on his having nodded now and then in his pew, insisted that he had been awake all the time. "Well, then," said his friend, can you tell me what the sermon was about?" "Yes, I can," he answered, "it was about half an hour too long." Lily Dale takes exception to Mr. Boyce's sermons on that ground, and pleads for her uncle, "He doesn't like to go to sleep, and he has to suffer a purgatory in keeping himself awake." The Reverend Homer Wilbur, of the Biglow Papers, is concerned at having to number among his parishioners some whose gift of somnolence rivals that of the Cretan Rip van Winkle, Epimenides, 66 |