Democratic Sentinel, Volume 5, Number 14, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 13 May 1881 — The Fine Talker. [ARTICLE]

The Fine Talker.

The fine talker in a city runs but a brief career. He is as short-lived as the race-horse, or the man who swings by one leg on the trapeze or hois ts cannonballs, or in any other way wins applause by forcible spurts of display. In a year or two the jokes begin to look thin and the capital stories give signs of having been turned and patched much too often. The talker then usually throws them into a lecture or two, and is apt to earn, not State dinners, but daily bread and beef with them while he delights provincial lyceums.* Outside of ihe large cities your fine talker is seldom a wit. The bucolic mind distrusts the funny man. The people of small towns elect as the oracle the ready but weighty speaker, the man of general research into encyclopaedias and magazines, who can give you an opinion off-hand on beet sugar, or Russian politics, or predestination, or the chances’ as to the Presidency in 1884, with fluency and authority. He keeps his wits on tap, so to speak, ready for-all comers. To be sure, even in the slow eddies and currents of thought in provincial life, the opinions of this leader of intelligence and conversation sometimes appear stale and second hand, and his audience wonder whether they have elected their ruler wisely. But they generally wonder in silence, and he talks on his way triumphantly. The female of this species is marked by the same characteristics. She is usually more effusive, however. She takes her audience more into her confidence. A gushing sympathy and personal interest are her capital, instead of the good stores and the quick humor of which most women are destitute. Having claimed you as her friend, she proceeds to show you .what an acquisition you have made. She is ready to exhaust and settle forever all questions uppermost in the community; whether it be the Indian problem, embroidered tidies, or universal salvation. • The salient point to be noted in the men or women who are popularly known as fine talkers in this counfry, that their material is, as a rule, stale and secondhand. They have a verbal expertness in handling thoughts; they give them out as liberally as the plowman throws down the chopped fodder to his herd. But the thoughts are chopped fine and dried; they bear the same relation to the simple utterances of a genuine thinker that the dry cut stubble does to the green, live, growing corn in the field. The men and women noted as conversers in English society of the last century were those gifted with dramatic powers or dashing wit. They were the raconteurs or wits whose stories and repartees have come down to us. But now we Americans want facts and opinions from the men whose talk would satisfy us, and we are not particular as to whether the facts are the fruit of real knowledge, or the chance scrapings of review-reading. We have not yet grown up to the old French idea of a great causcur— the man or woman who says little and listens much, who never makes a display; but all of whose knowledge, magnetism, and tact are used to bring out his companion and place him at his best.— New York Tribune.