‘Talking upon Paper’

In 1738 Father John Constable published anonymously a lively treatise entitled The Conversation of Gentlernen, in which he observed that ‘Writing is a sort of Conversing. There is consequently a pro-portionable Accuracy to be observed in both.’ ¹ This declaration carries weight; Constable was also the author of a study of contemporary prose, Reflections upon Accuracy of Style (2732), and therefore an expert witness of the liaison between writing and conversing in the early eighteenth century. His emphasis on ‘Accuracy’, and his deliberate use of the word ‘consequently’, draw attention to the fact that the relationship mutually affected both parties. In the first place, men were encouraged to talk like books. ‘Never enter upon any Discourse, unless the form and image of what you are to speak to, be well imprinted in your mind; that so your Discourse may prove a full and perfect Birth, and not an abortive Embryo’; or again: ‘methodize what you have to say handsomely, not mingling things of different tribes together.’ ² These instructions are from one of the numerous guides to good breeding that were offered to an eager public after the Restoration. How far such books, which were often translated or adapted from Continental originals, reflect actual practice amongst the most refined of society, or how far their precepts were followed by the young and socially ambitious, must remain conjectural. Though the demand for these manuals seems to have been high, information about their readers (apart from the plagiarizing compilers of other 15courtesy-books) is very scanty. Dudley Ryder, a law-student in the Middle Temple, records that he ‘met with’ a second-hand copy of Pierre d’Ortigue’s L’art de plaire dans la conversation, and thought it well written, ‘with a good many very just and polite reflections’. ¹ But Ryder, who came of a non-conformist linen-draper’s family, was painfully conscious of his need for ‘polish’, and he and his cousin, another young man of social aspirations, had already discovered many of Ortigue’s precepts for themselves: ‘We talked about storytelling and the necessity of it for conversation and the difficulty of doing it well. He [the cousin] has to this end thought over stories and wrote down hints of them.’ ² To the same end Ortigue considers at length how we can prepare ourselves for good society; he concludes that we should analyse conversations that we have taken part in, and recall at night the best things we have heard, or uttered, during the day. The keeping of a commonplace-book was as necessary for the good speaker as for the good writer. Such advice and such efforts might well tend to produce rather studied and bookish ways of speaking. So that as literature absorbed contemporary speech-habits and grew more relaxed and easy, conversation, at least among certain sections of society, came to meet it.