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If we talk like that, we cannot easily be tactless and offensive, and it is hard to see how we could be really dull or boresome. Surely we cannot then fail to "make friends and influence people," and, what is most important, influence them the way their better nature wants to be influenced. As a teacher of literature, I cannot resist the urge to end this book on conversation with a sonnet an English poet, Robert Herrick, a clergyman, put at the head of his book of lyrics. If one changes the verbs sing and write, to talk, it can most appropriately be quoted to describe the range of good conversation from what creeps, crawls, and marries, to what paints, speculates, and moralizes, from nature to the supernatural, from ourselves to our fellows — and never quite loses sight of the heavenly goal post. |
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