John Stuart Mill: A Criticism with Personal Recollections

GIVING AND TAKING IN CONVERSATION. 189
voice, to begin with ; and his modulation was simply correct
and colourless elocution..
I can account for his seeming hesitation of manner. Although
he did not study grand and imposing talk, he always aimed at
saying the right thing clearly and shortly. He was perfectly
fluent, but yet would pause for an instant to get the best word,
or the neatest collocation : and he also liked to finish with an
epigrammatic turn. He was one day expressing his admiration
of Charles Buller, and then, alluding to Roebuck, remarked he
"
was equally good in his way, but it was not so good a ". way
His demeanour with reference to the other participants in
the conversation was sufficiently marked. He never lectured
or declaimed, or engrossed the talk. He paused at due inter
vals, to hear what the others had to say ;
and not merely heard,
but took in, and embodied that in his reply. With him, talk
was, what it ought to be, an exchange of information, thought,
and argument, when it assumed the form of discussion ; and
an exchange of sympathies when the feelings were concerned.
He did not care to converse on any other terms than perfect
mutuality. He would expound or narrate at length when it
was specially wished ; and there were, of course, subjects that
it was agreeable to him to dilate upon ; but he wished to be
in accord with his hearers, and to feel that they also had due
openings for expressing concurrence or otherwise.*
I have sometimes been surprised at his readiness to answer
any question or plunge into any topic that might be propounded.
I should have often expected him to resist such rapid transi
tions of subject as I have seen him led into ; but, in talk with
people that he cared for, he did not resent a desultory chace.
It is mainly with reference to his conversation, that we are
* He had a good-humoured contempt for the monologue talkers. When
Sydney Smith s well-known saying on Macaulay came out (unusually brilliant,
some splendid flashes of silence), Mill capped it with a story of two Frenchmen
of this species, pitted against each other. One was in full possession, but so
intent was the other upon striking in, that a third person watching the contest,
exclaimed,
"
If he spits, he s done ".