TALKING FOR VICTORY

BY EDWARD A. THURBER

He who talks for victory is the happiest and most stimulating of mortals. He strives neither to speak the truth nor to be profound. For there dwells within him an awareness that truth does not flow from clear waters and reason, as well as beauty, rides upon the foam. He may be a man of devoutness, but when he talks he kneels only before the altar of mind. Therefore, though he may be steeped in prejudice, this prejudice in talking is to choose the side that offers momentary resistance. And if he is confuted, it does not greatly matter; to-morrow the confuters will be easy prey-they always run in the furrow. Not that he yields lightly-nothing is further from his purpose. In worshiping mind, he comes more and more to realize its limitlessness, and he therefore battles for his opinions furiously. One who takes mind for his champion is fairly unconquerable.

To one who talks for victory, the paradox is a serviceable weapon. He never seeks it; it lies with its handle toward him. He always hits upon what is superfluous and spendthrift, what is unnecessary and inconceivable; these are the officers of the mind. The expedient and the necessary succor only the body. His relation to truth is therefore an openmindedness, for truth will not be coddled and sought for; she is various, her chief comrade is integrity; she visits only those who are scarred. Thus he who talks for victory tears asunder the barriers of ancient truthshe scatters them about him; they are to him mere impediments. He rides between the wings of his own assertions; his Pegasus is both the seeker and the sought.

One who talks for victory is not solicitous that his words be recorded. There will be record enough of them, for there are always men about with cups, and if what falls into these cups be crystalline, they cherish it. But to record adequately victorious talk, the recorders themselves must be men of radiance, and their

quality is always different from that of the talker, so that the record is sifted twice, through two ecstatic souls. The third sifting comes from the reader.

Of the many records of victorious talk, I think of two, those of a Greek and of an Englishman; in the first instance, the recorder was a renowned philosopher, in the second, a rather negligible man of the world; both were sovereign artists. And in many respects the Britisher seems to have had the advantage. Socrates knows rather cannily whither his talk is leading; there is too little waste in his assertions-their sequence is too well thought out, the asides too adroit, too finished; too artistically careless. Thus, although there is no doubt that the rough Socrates is there, abundant room is left for the regal Plato; it is share and share alike, thoughts sifted through the minds of peers. Boswell, on the other hand, is free of the preoccupations of Plato; his philosophy is of the slightest tissue imaginable-it would do service for a collegian. Thus he is the more attentive to his hero's personality; his posture is that of a disciple. Boswell protests against talking for victory; he catches his master in contradictions; he rambles off into irrelevancies; yet so vital is his artistic impulse that a genuine portrait crowns his pages. You can see his hero in every gesture; the recorder's mind is of clay; it takes the slightest imprint of its subject. And yet withal there is selection-talk unrecorded; you leave the banquet at its height.

"To the utter astonishment of all the passengers but myself, who knew that he could talk upon any side of a question, he defended the Inquisition.

A Dutchman inveighed against the barbarity of putting an accused person to the torture in order to force a confession. But Johnson was ready for this as for the Inquisition. "Why, Sir, you do not, I find, understand the law of your own country. To torture in Holland is considered as a favor to an accused person; for no man is put to the torture there, unless there is as much evidence against him as would amount to conviction in England. An accused person among you, therefore, has one chance more to escape punishment than those who are tried among us."

This is the victorious method; it is talk of pure rapture, but

not quite in the manner in which it is recorded by Plato. To be sure, Plato was not writing the life of Socrates. His account is the epic of a philosopher; Boswell's of a man.

Johnson's aggressiveness was not self-conscious; his vigorous mind drove him of its own exigency into battle. He fostered opponents, he hunted them from their hiding places, dragged them into the arena. Two or three citadels he defended at all hazards-piety, Toryism and clean language. And yet even here the weakly good did not venture far; Johnson could too easily prick the bubble of impotence.

Johnson burned his bridges behind him; retreat was impossible. In health or in sickness he had no qualms of having borne heavily upon an adversary. "What harm does it do any man to be contradicted?" he asked. "Who is the worse for being harshly treated? I do not know weak-nerved people." "When I was ill," he said, "I desired he would tell me sincerely in what he thought my life was faulty. Sir, he brought me a sheet of paper on which he had written down several texts of Scripture, recommending Christian charity. And when I questioned him what occasion I had given for such an animadversion, all that he could say amounted to this, that I sometimes contradicted people in conversation." "It was a scene for a comedy," said Sir Joshua; "a penitent in a violent passion belaboring his confessor.' And Burke remarked: "It is well if when a man comes to die he has nothing heavier upon his conscience than having been a little rough in conversation."

Talking for victory is out of place between two intimates. The flights of words in the study and at the club are not commensurable. One does not groom a family horse for the race track. Furthermore talking for victory entails no pedantry. The astonishing monologues of Macaulay did not stimulate his hearers for long; when they had got used to him, they were not averse to the ebbing of the tide. Possibly Carlyle might have talked well for victory. One condition, however, he lacked; there is a question whether he was clubable. A real talker for victory must be cognizant of taverns; he must fit into the leisure that ale houses demand. There is a suggestion, not absolute, that the club Carlyle belonged to was for mutual improvement. Nobody

frequented the Mermaid, or Will's, or the Mitre for culture. Men gathered about those boards for fellowship and joy, and the talk was pure delight and victory.

It is creative talk, talk for adventure. There is no preparation for it; it springs spontaneously from a virile mind. It may be that the mistress of a salon plots whither the conversation is to lead, yet she herself is a mere arbiter. She dangles the bait, which is seized and torn by her ravenous guests. Thus the victorious talker holds with the artists. Whatever his vocation may be, whether he be a man of science, a student of politics, a philosopher, when he and his comrades meet in fellowship, the humdrum of life is sloughed away; he goes fishing into the very depth of his consciousness; he fares into new seas, overtakes undreamed of argosies,-fleets laden with plunder,—and he ushers them home with him, scattering their wealth lavishly about him. He is a shepherd pasturing his thoughts; he sees them take form and value, or rather these thoughts seek him, for excellence is always striving for expression and beauty; he and his thoughts call to one another for a rendezvous which they may denominate home. He puts in the window a candle-they come, they come; they are diverse, headstrong, shy, but his light beckons them to the fold.

The talker for victory never says to himself: "Ah, to-day I shall confute that man." He never knows whether he is to agree or not; the side he takes is not for him to choose, it belongs to the occasion.

The victorious talker therefore treads the path of freedom. He is not bound by usage; he is spontaneous, unprecedented; his originality rests solely upon character. His contradictions are gossamers flung off to the wind. The limits of logic do not oppress him-he harbors a rich faith in doubts. His words, like creatures of art, have no object beyond themselves. No system harries him; he systematizes rapture. His love of triumph gives triumph charm. Self awareness is his goal; his words are a challenge to the depths of consciousness. The hour is in his grasp, the moment exultant. His carack rocks upon vast seas, and in steering for a new passage drops anchor at a continent. EDWARD A. THURBER,

CHAPONE, GREGORY, AND PENNINGTON

BY MARTIN ARMSTRONG

If we wish to recreate for ourselves the intimate life of our forbears-their manners, thoughts, ideals, the intellectual and spiritual climate in which they lived and moved-we must look for it not in official histories but in the diaries, albums, fiction, sermons, and books of moral instruction in which, being bent on other matters than conscious history, they give themselves away, so to speak, at every turn. Such a work is Chapone, Gregory, and Pennington: a book whose sub-title is not, but certainly should be, The Perfect Ingénue. Nowhere is there a more complete portrait-I had almost said, exposure of the ideal Miss of the period between the middle of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The book was published, but not written, in 1844. It is the trinity in unity of three works, one composed over eighty, and the others seventy, years earlier; and it is an astounding and significant fact that they should have enjoyed popularity for the better part of a century. The books in question are Letters On The Improvement Of The Mind, A Father's Legacy To His Daughters, and An Unfortunate Mother's Advice To Her Absent Daughters, three masterpieces of which Chapone, Gregory and Pennington were respectively the authors. "The reception they have met with from the public," says the preface, referring to the first two members of the trinity, "is the best criterion of their merit" (and, it might be added, of their public), "so that it would be as useless to censure as it is unnecessary to praise either of these productions." I am inclined to agree, and shall content myself for the most part with investigating, comparing, and quoting, for, though it sometimes becomes impossible to refrain from censure, the productions themselves, if given a fair chance, can generally be trusted to damn themselves without external help.