Complete Works of Wilkie Collins (1662 page)

Has anybody, ever met Colonel Hopkirk in society? And does anybody think that the Great Glib could possibly have held forth in the company of that persistently-compliant gentleman, as he is alleged, by his admiring biographer, to have held forth in the peculiar society of his own time? The thing is clearly impossible. Let us leave Glib, congratulating him on having died when the Hopkirks of these latter days were as yet hardly weaned; let us leave him, and ascertain how some other great talker might have got on in the society of some other modern obstructer of the flow of eloquent conversation.

I have just been reading the Life, Letters, Labours, Opinions, and Table-Talk of the matchless Mr. Oily; edited — as to the Life, by his mother-in-law; as to the Letters, by his granddaughter’s husband; and as to the Labours, Opinions, and Table-Talk, by three of his intimate friends, who dined with him every other Sunday throughout the whole of his long and distinguished life. It is a very pretty book in a great many volumes, with pleasing anecdotes — not only of the eminent man himself, but of all his family connections as well. His shortest notes are preserved, and the shortest notes of others to him. “My dear O., how is your poor head? Yours, P.” “My dear P., hotter than ever. Yours, O.” And so on. Portraits of Oily, in infancy, childhood, youth, manhood, old age active, and old age infirm, concluding with a post-mortem mask, abound in the book — so do fac-similes of his handwriting, showing the curious modifications which it underwent when he occasionally exchanged a quill for a steel pen. But it will be more to my present purpose to announce for the benefit of unfortunate people who have not yet read the Memoirs, that Oily was, as a matter of course, a delightful and incessant talker. He poured out words, and his audience imbibed the same perpetually three times a week from tea-time to past midnight. Women especially reveled in his conversation. They hung, so to speak, palpitating on his lips. All this is told me in the Memoirs at great length, and in several places; but not a word occurs anywhere tending to show that Oily ever met with the slightest interruption on any one of the thousand occasions when he held forth. In relation to him, as in relation to the Great Glib, I seem bound to infer that he was never staggered by an unexpected question, never affronted by a black sheep among the flock, in the shape of an inattentive listener, never silenced by some careless man capable of unconsciously cutting him short and starting another topic before he had half done with his own particular subject. I am bound to believe all this — and yet, when I look about me at society as it is constituted now, I could fill a room, at a day’s notice, with people who would shut up the mouth of Oily before it had been open five minutes, quite as a matter of course, and without the remotest suspicion that they were misbehaving themselves in the slightest degree. “What (I ask myself), to take only one example, and that from the fair sex — what would have become of Oily’s delightful and incessant talk, if he had known my friend Mrs. Marblemug, and had taken her down to dinner in his enviable capacity of distinguished man?

Mrs. Marblemug has one subject of conversation — her own vices. On all other topics she is sarcastically indifferent and scornfully mute. General conversation she consequently never indulges in; but the person who sits next to her is sure to be interrupted as soon as he attracts her attention by talking to her, by receiving a confession of her vices — not made repentantly, or confusedly, or jocularly — but slowly declaimed with an ostentatious cynicism, with a hard eye, a hard voice, a hard — no, an adamantine — manner. In early youth, Mrs. Marblemug discovered that her business in life was to be eccentric and disagreeable, and she is one of the women of England who fulfills her mission.

I fancy I see the ever-flowing Oily sitting next to this lady at dinner, and innocently trying to make her hang on his lips like the rest of his tea-table harem. His conversation is reported by his affectionate biographers as having been for the most part of the sweetly pastoral sort. I find that he drove that much-enduring subject, Nature, in his conversational car of triumph, longer and harder than most men. I see him, in my mind’s eye, starting in his insinuating way from some parsley garnish round a dish of lobsters — confessing, in his rich, full, and yet low voice (vide Memoirs) that garnish delights him, because his favorite colour is green — and so getting easily on to the fields, the great subject . from which he always got his largest conversational crop. I imagine his tongue to be, as it were, cutting its first preliminary capers on the grass for the benefit of Mrs. Marblemug; and I hear that calmly-brazen lady throw him flat on his back by the utterance of some such words as these:

“Mr. Oily, I ought to have told you, perhaps, that I hate the fields. I think Nature in general something eminently disagreeable — the country, in short, quite odious. If you ask me why, I can’t tell you. I know I’m wrong; but hating Nature is one of my vices.”

Mr. Oily eloquently remonstrates. Mrs. Marblemug only says, “Yes, very likely — but, you see, it’s one of my vices.” Mr. Oily tries a dexterous compliment. Mrs. Marblemug only answers, “Don’t! I see through that. It’s wrong in me to see through compliments, being a woman, I know. But I can’t help seeing through them, and saying I do. That’s another of my vices.” Mr. Oily shifts the subject to Literature, and thence, gently but surely, to his own books — his second great topic after the fields. Mrs. Marblemug lets him go on, because she has something to finish on her plate — then lays down her knife and fork — looks at him with a kind of wondering indifference, and breaks into his next sentence thus:

“I’m afraid I don’t seem quite so much interested as I know I ought to be,” she says; “but I should have told you, perhaps, when we first sat down, that I have given up reading.”

“Given up reading?” exclaims Mr. Oily, thunderstruck by the monstrous confession. “You mean only the trash that has come into vogue lately; the morbid, unhealthy — ”

“No, not at all,” rejoins Mrs. Marblemug. “If I read anything, it would be morbid literature. My taste is unhealthy. That’s another of my vices.”

“My dear madam, you amaze — you alarm me — you do, indeed!” cries Mr. Oily, waving his hand in graceful deprecation and polite horror.

“Don’t!” says Mrs. Marblemug; “you’ll knock down some of the wine-glasses, and hurt yourself. You had better keep your hand quiet — you had, indeed. No; I have given up reading, because all books do me harm — the best — the healthiest. Your books even, I suppose, I ought to say; but I can’t, because I see through compliments, and despise my own, of course, as much as other people’s! Suppose, we say, I don’t read, because books do me harm — and leave it there. The thing is not worth pursuing. You think it is? Well, then, books do me harm, because they increase my tendency to be envious (one of my worst vices). The better the book is, the more I hate the man for being clever enough to write it — so much cleverer than me, you know, who couldn’t write it at all. I believe you call that Envy. Whatever it is, it has been one of my vices from a child. No, no wine — a little water. I think wine nasty, that’s another of my vices — or, no, perhaps, that is only one of my misfortunes. Thank you. I wish I could talk to you about books; but I really can’t read them — they make me so envious.”

Perhaps Oily (who, as I infer from certain passages in his Memoirs, could be a sufficiently dogged and resolute man on occasions when his dignity was in danger) still valiantly declines to submit and be silent, and, shifting his ground, endeavors to draw Mrs. Marblemug out by asking her questions. The new effort, however, avails him nothing. Do what he will, he is always met and worsted by the lady in the same quiet, easy, indifferent way; and, sooner or later, even his distinguished mouth is muzzled by Mrs. Marblemug, like the mouths of all the degenerate talkers of my own time whom I have ever seen in contact with her. Are Mr. Oily’s biographers not to be depended on, or can it really be the fact that, in the course of all his long conversational career, that illustrious man never once met with a check in the shape of a Mrs. Marblemug? I have no tender prepossession in favor of the lady; but when I reflect on the character of Mr. Oily, as exhibited in his Memoirs, I am almost inclined to regret that he and Mrs. Marblemug never met. In relation to some people, I involuntarily regard . her as a dose of strong moral physic; and I really think she might have done my distinguished countryman some permanent good.

To take another instance, there is the case of the once brilliant social luminary, Mr. Endless — extinguished, unfortunately for the new generation, about the time when we were most of us only little boys and girls.

What a talker this sparkling creature must have been, if one may judge by that racy anonymous publication (racy was, I think, the word chiefly used in reviewing the book by the critics of the period), “Evenings with Endless, by A Constant Listener!” “I could hardly believe,” I remember the Listener writes, “that the world was the same after Endless had flashed out of this mortal scene. It was morning while he lived — it was twilight, or worse, when he died. I was very intimate with him. Often has the hand that writes these trembling lines smacked that familiar back — often have those thrilling and matchless accents syllabled the fond diminutive of my Christian name. It was not so much that his talk was ceaseless (though that is something), as that it moved incessantly over all topics from heaven to earth. His variety of subject was the most amazing part of this amazing man. His fertility of allusion to topics of the past and present alike, was truly inexhaustible. He hopped, he skipped, he fluttered, he swooped from theme to theme. The butterfly in the garden, the bee in the flower-bed, the changes of the kaleidoscope, the sun and shower of an April morning, are but faint emblems of him.” With much more to the same eloquent purpose; but not a word from the first page to the last to hint even that Endless was ever brought to a full stop, on any single occasion, by any one of the hundreds of enchanted listeners before whom he figured in his wonderful performances with the tongue from morning to night.

And yet there must surely have been Talk-Stoppers in the world, in the time of the brilliant Endless — talk-stoppers, in all probability, possessing characteristics similar to those now displayed in society by my exasperating connection by marriage, Mr. Spoke Wheeler.

It is impossible to say what the consequences might have been if my relative and Mr. Endless had ever come together. Mr. Spoke Wheeler is one of those men — a large class, as it appears to me — who will talk, and who have nothing whatever in the way of a subject of their own to talk about. His constant practice is to lie silently in ambush for subjects started by other people; to take them forthwith from their rightful owners; turn them coolly to his own uses, and then cunningly wait again for the next topic, belonging to somebody else, that passes within his reach. It is useless to give up, and leave him to take the lead — he invariably gives up, too, and declines the honour. It is useless to start once more, seeing him apparently silenced — he becomes talkative again the moment you offer him the chance of seizing on your new subject — disposes of it without the slightest fancy, taste, or novelty of handling, in a moment — then relapses into utter speecklessness as soon as he has silenced the rest of the company by taking their topic away from them. Wherever he goes, he commits this social atrocity with the most perfect innocence and the most provoking good-humor, for he firmly believes in himself as one of the most entertaining men who ever crossed a drawing-room or caroused at a dinner-table.

Imagine Mr. Spoke Wheeler getting an invitation to one of those brilliant suppers which assisted in making the evenings of the sparkling Endless so attractive to his friends and admirers. See him sitting modestly at the table with every appearance in his face and manner of being the most persistent and reliable of listeners. Endless takes the measure of his man, as he too confidently believes, in one bright glance — thinks to himself, Here is a new worshiper to astonish; here is the conveniently dense and taciturn human pedestal on which I can stand to let off my fireworks — plunges his knife and fork, gayly hospitable, into the dish before him (let us say a turkey and truffles, for Endless is a gastronome as well as a wit), and starts off with one of those “fertile allusions” for which he was so famous.

“I never carve turkey without thinking of what Madame de Pompadour said to Louis the Fifteenth,” Endless begins, in his most off-hand manner. “I refer to the time when the superb Frenchwoman first came to court, and the star of the fair Chateauroux waned before her. Who remembers what the Pompadour said when the king insisted on carving the turkey?”

Before the company can beg Endless, as usual, to remember for them, Mr. Spoke Wheeler starts into life and seizes the subject.

“What a vicious state of society it was in the time of Madame De Pompadour!” he says, with moral severity. “Who can wonder that it led to the French Revolution?”

Endless feels that his first effort for the evening is nipped in the bud, and that the new guest is not to be depended on as a listener. He, however, waits politely, and every one else waits politely to hear something more about the French Revolution. Mr. Spoke Wheeler has not another word to say. He has snatched his subject — has exhausted it — and is now waiting, with an expectant smile on his face, to lay hands on another. Disastrous silence reigns, until Mr. Endless, as host and wit, launches a new topic in despair.