THE ART OF LISTENING.

AGREAT deal has been written on the art of speak

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ing; but a treatise on the art of listening would be more valuable. There are plenty of good talkers in society, but good hearers are rare. Carlyle's discourses; preached in so many volumes, with sad earnestness, on the text Silence is golden," have borne thus far but little fruit. A Frenchman once said of a gentleman in company, in whom he could detect no other quality worthy of a compliment, that he had "a great talent for silence." This apparent equivoque was a real compliment, for of all gifts one of the very rarest is that self-control which enables one to hold his tongue. Few persons have reflected how difficult it is to command that attention and concentration of mind which constitute a good listener. It requires not only high moral but also rare intellectual qualities. It is not, as one is apt to suppose, a merely passive state. It implies positive labor of mind, close, consecutive thinking, and sometimes a powerful and even painful effort of the will, to arrest one's own train of ideas or dreamy reveries, and fix the mind upon the thought or reasoning of another.

Besides this power of attention, there must be also great power of sympathy, indeed, the latter is almost essential to the former. There is an ear of the soul as well as of the body, which must be wide open if one would listen well. It has been well said that the most apprecia

tive listening is done with the eyes. Man cannot, like the lower animals, prick up his ears or bend them forward when he wants to hear; hence the look of the eyes is the surest test of attention. All the other marks of interest

may be counterfeited. The manner may be apparently full of respect, every word and gesture of impatience may be repressed, and yet the wits of the seeming listener may be wool-gathering. But the eye refuses to dissemble. By its dull, vacant stare, its introspective look, or its restless wandering from place to place, it will betray the hypocritical hearer in spite of every attempt at deception. Hence, no unspoken affront, short of absolute rudeness, rouses resentment so readily as wandering attention manifested by wandering glances. A man's thoughts are wont to follow his eyes, and be engrossed by what they see rather than by what he hears.

To sit in dumb silence, and be forever a recipient,- a bucket eternally pumped into, without power of reaction, as Carlyle somewhere expresses it, is doubtless good for no man; yet most men, it can hardly be doubted, would be benefited by oftener listening in place of talking. It is well, at times, to interchange thought, and there are moments when, as Sydney Smith said of his jokes, we must let out our ideas or burst; yet it is evidently the listener who gets the richest harvest from conversation. It has been well said that he who speaks, sows, he who listens, reaps, in colloquy. We may be neither wise nor witty; but, listening to the acute and learned, we may make their shrewdness and knowledge in a measure our own. In conversation better than in books may we read human nature; and a sentiment dropped burning from the lips settles more deeply in the mind than the finest writing. It

was Scott, we believe, who made it a rule to pump every man upon the subjects with which he was best acquainted; and thus from every ride in a stage-coach brought home some fact, hint, or trait of character, which added to the charm of his writings. All men have their hobbies, which they dearly love to mount, their strong points, the subjects nearest to their hearts, and upon which they are at home in conversation,- and happy is he who turns this peculiarity in others to his own advantage. Dr. Johnson once faced a fellow-traveler in a stage-coach, from whom he found that every attempt to draw out a scintilla of information was like trying to extract sunbeams from cucumbers. "Try me on leather," said the poor fellow in despair. The Doctor tried him on leather, and found that, regarding that topic, he had both soul and understanding. "The study of books," says Montaigne, "is a languishing and feeble motion that heats not; but if I converse with a man of mind, and no flincher, who presses hard upon me, and digs at me right and left, his imagination raises up mine, it stimulates me to something above myself."

Of all bores, the loquacious are the most disagreeable; the society enjoyed by such is generally a series of first invitations. Burns has well portrayed them in his description of the "venerable corps" of excessively good and rigidly righteous people,-whose life he compares to a well-going mill, supplied with store of water, and whose machinery goes on in one unvarying clack, their hopper constantly ebbing, but never exhausted. It is amusing to see how one of these persons, who has been gabbling for an hour or less, drops his countenance as if he had been shot, or seized with lockjaw, the moment any one of his hearers interposes a single remark. On the contrary,

the good listener is always welcome in society,—even the wisest preferring his character to that of superior men, because he hearkens with respect, and studiously gathers every word that falls. Some years ago, in England, an old man left a large legacy to a person who was not a relation, because he had had the complaisance patiently to listen to him. Napoleon, on a certain occasion, was so pleased with the attention of Madame De Rémusat when he talked, that he proclaimed her a woman of intellect, though at that time she had not addressed two consecutive sentences to him. Fontenelle, in his old age, said that he willingly left the world, since there was no one in it who knew how to listen to him. Is it not strange that there should be so much egotism in society,- such an eagerness to teach rather than to learn; to instruct others, rather than to grow wise one's self? Yet there are many persons who, apparently, never have the slightest suspicion, while gabbling, that possibly another may wish to edge in a word. They would as soon suppose that a beggar wished to bestow alms upon them, as that anybody else could wish to speak while they are ready to save him the trouble. A dull book is endurable. We can lay it down without offense. But to a dull talker we are compelled to listen with "sad civility," though his babble be, like Gratiano's, a few grains of wheat to a bushel of chaff. It is said that Kant, the German philosopher, who had a habit of sometimes uttering his thoughts audibly, but unconsciously, when alone, was once dining at a friend's, where he was bored by the dullness of the conversation, when, with honest simplicity, he unconsciously, but audibly, soliloquized, "My God, what an intolerably tedious

company this is!" A few such soliloquists in society might rid it of its babblers.

It is said that the elder Mathews talked so much and so fast that he contracted a disease of the tongue; but if this statement were true, we should see hundreds of others to-day suffering from the same disease. It is not usually among scholars that one finds such monopolists, but among those who mingle largely in society, and boast of their "knowledge of the world." Hazlitt has justly said that

there are few things more contemptible than the conversation of these persons,- the mere men of the town. It is made up of the technicalities and cant of all professions, without the spirit or knowledge of any. "It is flashy and vapid, or like the rinsings of different liquors at a night cellar, instead of a bottle of fine old port."

The "Autocrat" finely says, in one of his early papers, that the whole force of conversation depends on how much you can take for granted. "Vulgar chess-players have to play their game out; nothing short of the brutality of an actual checkmate satisfies their dull apprehensions. But look at two masters of that noble game! White stands well enough, so far as you can see; but Red says, mate in six moves. White looks-nods; the game is over. Just so in talking with first-rate men; especially when they are good-natured and expansive, as they are apt to be at table."

It has been remarked by De Quincey that, as a rule, the French, in spite of their reputation for loquacity, have the keenest sense of all that is odious or ludicrous in prosing, and universally have a horror of les longueurs. Yet he notes one "shocking anomaly shocking anomaly" or exception in their code of good taste as applied to conversation, viz., the case