Talk, in fact, should never be exclusively technical, any more than it should deal solely in facts. Talk is to facts much like wine to grapes. They should be there as a foundation, but the aroma and full flavor of a rich Burgundy are far from the individual grapes that were crushed in order that the wine might flow and slowly mature. There is one factor that has played a large part in the de-specializing of talk in Europe, and that is responsible for good talk everywhere, which has been curiously lacking in America—woman. Talk is possibly best between socialized, civilized men, but the process of socializing, civilizing and de-specializing them has been largely the task of woman, a task in which she has signally failed in America. This topic is complex enough to call for a paper wholly devoted to it, but I think it cannot be denied that woman in America has failed in her age-long duty of civilizing her man. She has merely appropriated leisure and culture to herself. Woman has never made anything of culture without man. As a result of the complete social dichotomy in America, the women have developed an anæmic, uncreative cultural atmosphere, and the social life of both sexes has become uncivilized in a very real sense. A broadly humane culture has suffered in the hands of the women until it has come to be regarded as effeminate dilettantism, and the man,[Pg 234] engrossed in his office, shop, study or laboratory, leading his social life by talking shop, whether business, art or profession, to his fellow male workers, has narrowed also into specialism and one-track interests. Yet, on the whole, I think today, in spite of all the Women’s Clubs with their papers, the Browning Societies and the rest of the feminine cultural flub-dub, there is more chance for the growth of a genuine cultivated life among the men than among the women of America. Woman having failed to socialize and humanize her man, it may yet be his job to civilize her. I am very far from meaning that good talk must deal with Shakespeare and the musical glasses. What I mean is that good conversation is something quite different from obtaining verbal instruction. We may get an amazing amount of interesting information from a specialist discoursing on his subject, but so can we from the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Good talk affords, perhaps, the best instruction in the world, but it is not the instruction of a text book. A scientist who knew all there was to know about the common house-fly might give us an extremely interesting evening, but if it were solely limited to the objective aspects of this one subject it obviously would not be good conversation in any civilized sense. For that, as we have said, a wide background of knowledge and experience, and a completely de-specialized attitude of mind are required.