The Crime of Talking Shop

THE CONTRIBUTORS’ CLUB

No greater intellectual service has been rendered in this generation than the development of the interview and special article to their present unique position. A successful manufacturer, in a few unstudied sentences, gives us the explanation of Christian Science; an eminent politician allows a glimpse of unsuspected literary lore; a prosperous novelist solves social and economic problems off-hand; while the hero of a great criminal trial adds to the sum of human knowledge by his utterances on the future of the airship.

Our stupid fathers talked learnedly about ‘the argument from authority’; they were blankly ignorant of the omniscience of fame. Just how the attainment of notoriety enriches the mind with stores of facts, is among the mysteries of psychology; but that, in some occult way, the arrival at prominence is synchronous with the possession of expert knowledge, is the experience of every well-read person. Being an editor is thus less occupation than recreation; and serious reading, losing its forbidding aspect, becomes at once education and entertainment. By this advanced method, the greatest thoughts of the greatest minds — which is literature — are conveyed without delay to the mass of their contemporaries.

The old, slow process of permeation and percolation had been superseded by the more rapidly fruitful one of inundation. There is a royal road to knowledge, — fame. And while the famous one may shed his light upon the path of his own ascent, it is far more interesting and more striking to hear him discourse upon topics foreign to his native attention or actual research. Prodigies arouse more curiosity than professors, and the gift of tongues is more convincing manifestation than linguistic training. We have a wholesome fear of the man who talks shop.

The justification of this fear ought to be, and perhaps is, unnecessary. It rests, of course, upon the great democratic principle of equality. There is a dangerous tendency nowadays to apply the higher criticism to the statements of the Declaration of Independence. It is passing strange that the peril in such a procedure should escape the notice of even the most closely immured closet philosophizer. Once let the idea arise that the historic document is not infallible, — is, on the contrary, open to discussion and criticism, not simply of what it means, but of whether what it says is true or not, and where will uncertainty end? In what quarter shall American political wisdom be found? We say nothing regarding the patriotism of such a course. Taking, therefore, the words of the Declaration at their obvious and unstrained signification, we know that any man is the born equal of every other man, if not, as has been wisely observed, his superior. The man who talks shop, consequently, undemocratically, if quietly, assumes and asserts a pretended and unfounded superiority which is as irritating as it is un-American. From what did our forefathers flee to the untamed wilderness if not from a baseless assumption of political wisdom? Parliament had to be taught by drastic measures that the science of government is not esoteric.

The person who talks shop, however, does something worse than outrage our democracy: he commits a serious social crime. The one thing that saves conversation from being utterly a lost art is the highly-developed ‘small-talk’ of modern society. Did not no less a personage than the great Duke of Wellington speak of it as a grave defect that ‘I have no small-talk’? Now what would become of this same small-talk if it became the impossible fashion to talk shop? And what would be the inevitable state of affairs intellectual and social if the present custom of saying pretty nothings were superseded by the barbarism of saying profitable somethings? We should shudder if we were not reassured by the prompt reflection that the fearful catastrophe is n’t likely to occur in our discreet day.

But the greatest is behind. Think how completely uninteresting it would be to have to listen to Demosthenes tell how he won the crown, or Socrates how he felt as the hemlock went down, or Leonidas the story of the defeat that made him famous (he was so laconic a talker anyway), or Joan of Arc of those days before Orleans and in Rheims, or — No, no. That is n’t what we want. Leave these matters to the professionals in history. Let us hear from Cæsar on woman suffrage, Chaucer on the future of radium, and Horatius on bridge. If possible, let us round up Xenophon, the Bacons, Dante, and Buddha, and, between sips of our best tea, engage them in harmless chat anent Lucy Lissome’s scandalous elopement with her fiancé, Dr. Gerlock’s (reported) attentions to the widow Stimley, the probable outcome of the wonderful serial running in The Upper Ten Thousand, and the marvels of the newest moving-picture show. By tactful management we ought to be able to endow these antique thinkers with some smack of contemporary culture.