It is the lack of this background that accounts in good part for the lack of conversation in America in the European sense, even among the professional and university classes. Too often in America as long as one keeps to a man’s “subject” one may get a good deal that is interesting, even if it is imparted too much like a lecture, but once get off that and one is lost. It is like getting off a road in the dark. In contrast, I well recall an evening spent with a Frenchman, whose “subject” happens to be American history. As we had both written books known to the other on the topic,[Pg 232] we started on that, and I very soon found that he was better founded in it than many American professors. There was not a source to which I referred with which he was not well acquainted and which he did not quickly and accurately appraise. Soon the talk wandered to other matters. In a very amateurish way I had been interested in the Minoan civilization of Crete and had been to the Ashmolean Museum to hunt up some pottery. In a casual way he took up the question and discussed the various stages of the civilization and the changes in pottery design; and as we drifted from that to Greece and philosophy and literature, the talk flowed on and on, without effort or pedantry until we found it was one in the morning. He was, of course, a far abler and better educated man than myself, but outside of American history, perhaps, we were both amateurs in all we discussed. What I enjoyed was the breadth of the discussion, the wealth of background he had, the ability to illustrate some point by another in a wholly different field. It is just this that is lacking for the most part in American talk, which is apt to be narrow, professional, and all too often pedantic. The European mind at its best is both fuller and more flexible than ours, though in many practical ways the American is perhaps the more flexible. It is not simply the number of facts absorbed but the play of mind and the fields covered. We have had our own examples of the scholar in politics, for example—the man of fairly wide interests, such as Wilson, Lodge, Roosevelt, to name three very different types; but they have been, so to speak, practical minds, working in history, law or natural science. We note the intrinsic difference when we run over the English list, Morley, Balfour, Haldane, Smuts and others. In all of them, Morley least,[Pg 233] philosophy has been a major interest, and it is in the philosophical outlook that we find another essential factor in good conversation. It cannot be sustained long on mere facts. The philosophy need not—indeed, should not—be technical, but there must be a philosophical attitude, an ability and willingness to see all round a subject and to trace its implications.