Prose Fancies | Page 3

across a boy gathering palm. He is a
town boy, and has come all the way from Whitechapel thus early. He
has already gathered a great bundle--worth five shillings to him, he
says. This same palm will to-morrow be distributed over London, and
those who buy sprigs of it by the Bank will know nothing of the
blue-eyed boy who gathered it, and the murmuring river by which it
grew. And the lad, once more lost in some squalid court, will be a sort
of Sir John Mandeville to his companions--a Sir John Mandeville of the
fields, with their water-rats, their birds' eggs, and many other wonders.
And one can imagine him saying, 'And the sparrows there fly right up
into the sun, and sing like angels!' But he won't get his comrades to
believe that.
IV
Spring has a wonderful way of bringing out hidden traits of character.
Through my window I look out upon a tiny farm. It is kept by a tall,

hard-looking, rough-bearded fellow, whom I have watched striding
about his fields all winter, with but little sympathy. Yet it would seem I
have been doing him wrong. For this morning, as he passed along the
outside of the railing wherein his two sheep were grazing, suddenly
they came bounding towards him with every manifestation of delight,
literally recalling the lambkins which Wordsworth saw bound 'as to the
tabor's sound.' They followed as far as the railing permitted, pushing
their noses through at him; nay, when at last he moved out of reach,
they were evidently so much in love that they leaped the fence and
made after him. And he, instead of turning brutally on them, as I had
expected, smiled and played with them awhile. Indeed, he had some
difficulty in disengaging himself from their persistent affection. So,
evidently, they knew him better than I.

A CONSPIRACY OF SILENCE
Why do we go on talking? It is a serious question, one on which the
happiness of thousands depends. For there is no more wearing social
demand than that of compulsory conversation. All day long we must
either talk, or--dread alternative--listen. Now, that were very well if we
had something to say, or our fellow-sufferer something to tell, or, best
of all, if either of us possessed the gift of clothing the old
commonplaces with charm. But men with that great gift are not to be
met with in every railway-carriage, or at every dinner. The man we
actually meet is one whose joke, though we have signalled it a mile off,
we are powerless to stop, whose opinions come out with a whirr as of
clockwork. Besides, it always happens in life that the man--or
woman--with whom we would like to talk is at the next table. Those
who really have something to say to each other so seldom have a
chance of saying it.
Why, oh why, do we go on talking? We ask the question in all
seriousness, not merely in the hope of making some cheap paradoxical
fun out of the answer. It is a cry from the deeps of ineffable boredom.
Is it to impart information? At the best it is a dreary ideal. But, at any

rate, it is a mistaken use of the tongue, for there is no information we
can impart which has not been far more accurately stated in book-form.
Even if it should happen to be a quite new fact, an accident happily rare
as the transit of Venus--a new fact about the North Pole, for
instance--well, a book, not a conversation, is the place for it. To talk
book, past, present, or to come, is not to converse.
To converse, as with every other art, is out of three platitudes to make
not a fourth platitude--'but a star.' Newness of information is no
necessity of conversation: else were the Central News Agency the best
of talkers. Indeed, the oldest information is perhaps the best material
for the artist as talker: though, truly, as with every other artist, material
matters little. There are just two or three men of letters left to us, who
provide us examples of that inspired soliloquy, those conversations of
one, which are our nearest approach to the talk of other days. How
good it is to listen to one of these!--for it is the great charm of their talk
that we remember nothing. There were no prickly bits of information to
stick on one's mind like burrs. Their talk had no regular features, but,
like a sunrise, was all music and glory.
The friend who talks the night through with his friend, till the dawn
climbs in like a pallid rose at the window; the lovers who, while the sun
is setting, sit in the greenwood and say, 'Is it thou?