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  • Betting on Conversation
  • John McCormick (bio)
Conversation: A History of a Declining Art by Stephen Miller (Yale University Press, 2006. 336 pages. $27.50)

Mr. Miller's history extends from the Old Testament to the Mesopotamians and the Greeks to the iPod. In the absence of any broad agreement about an innocent but elusive term, he devotes considerable space to the definition of what conversation is not, before he demonstrates what conversation is, and why as an art it is declining, if not now moribund. Conversation is not a prophecy, not Job's exchanges with God; it is not holding forth; it is neither argument nor parade of learning; emphatically it is not "instrumental," not a salesman's pitch. Among many definitions of conversation, such as those of Samuel Johnson or Henry Fielding, that of Michael Oakeshott stands out: "conversation is purposeless. It has no determined course, we do not ask what it is 'for.'" Conversation "is an unrehearsed intellectual adventure . . . as with gambling, its significance lies neither with winning nor in losing, but in wagering."

All definitions either cite or imply a social dimension, for conversation can take place only among equals, and that equality extends to women. Hume wrote that "mixt companies, without the fair sex, are the most insipid entertainment in the world, and destitute of gaiety and politeness, as much as of sense and reason. Nothing can keep them from excessive dullness but hard drinking; a remedy worse than the disease." Samuel Johnson [End Page viii] coined the term clubbable further to define equality. (German offers an even better term—salonfähig.)

Many of Miller's definitions are derived from England and Scotland in the eighteenth century. He occasionally glances abroad to Montaigne, to Rousseau, or further back to Castiglione (The Courtier) and Giovanni della Casa (Galateo) for their influence from the seventeenth century onward—encouraging politeness and denigrating the self-infatuation that makes conversation impossible. Politeness, or what Johnson called "good breeding," ensures the avoidance of enthusiasm, excessive zeal, which shatters the atmosphere essential to conversation. Addison and Johnson agreed that politeness must be learned, for we are selfish and egotistical by nature and must learn in society to defer to others, no matter how tedious they may seem to us. Fielding urged the necessity of conversation, writing in Tom Jones, A Foundling: "There is another sort of knowledge beyond the power of learning to bestow, and this is to be had by conversation. So necessary is this to understanding the characters of man, that none are more ignorant of them than those learned pedants, whose lives have been entirely consumed in colleges, and among books."

Eighteenth-century commentators made much of the term raillery as indicating equality and requiring politeness, since raillery could move from gentle comment on a companion's foibles to sarcasm and vicious attack. In our time raillery may sound quaint and literary. In England today raillery has become in near-polite slang, "taking the mickey," while in bloke country, raillery is "taking the piss" out of someone. So much for politeness. Swift praised women for raising the level of discourse among men, who are given to "those odious topicks of immodesty and indecencies, into which the Rudeness of our Northern Genius is . . . apt to fall."

Miller emphasizes the place of coffeehouses in fostering conversation in England from the last quarter of the seventeenth century to their decline in the mid-eighteenth century. Charles II wanted to suppress the coffeehouse as a malign influence leading to possible treason. As newspapers proliferated in London between 1702 and the 1770s, London coffeehouses were noted by continental travelers as centers of free conversation and broad political discussion, centers therefore of political influence. Clubs and salons were obvious places of polite discourse; although as romantic individualism began to supplant Enlightenment rationality, partly influenced by Rousseau, salons became suspect as centers of luxury and artificial attitudes; politeness could lead to the deceptions of courtiers. This contrasts with the view that politeness in conversation impeded the political quarrelling that might result in civil disruption; hence politeness protected English liberty.

By 1790 a radical change in manners supplanted conversation with reticence in the coffeehouse. By the time of...

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