In a life-enhancing essay that confirms, if nothing else, that he would have been the all-time ideal dinner party guest, Robert Louis Stevenson writes that to talk with others about the affairs of the day is to “bear our part in that great international congress, always sitting, where public wrongs are first declared, public errors first corrected, and the course of public opinion shaped, day by day, a little nearer to the right”.
The written word, to which Stevenson himself brought such a gifted hand, will always fall short of the richness of the talk that precedes it, he argues. Literature itself “is no other than the shadow of good talk” in which “the imitation falls far short of the original in life, freedom and effect”. Indeed, no legislative measure ever comes before parliament, Stevenson suggests, unless “it has been long ago prepared by the grand jury of the talkers”.
