Oratory and orators

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Chapter I. The Power And Influence Of The Oeatok

rr^O estimate the degree in which the orator has influ- -'- eneed the world's history, would be a difficult task. It would be hardly too much to say that, since the dawn of civilization, the triumphs of the tongue have rivalled, if not surpassed, those of the sword. There is hardly any man, illiterate or educated, so destitute of sensibility that he is not charmed by the music of eloquent speech, even though it affect his senses rather than his mind and heart, and rouse his blood only as it is roused by the drums and truiiapets of military bands. But when eloquence is something more than a trick of art, or a juggle with words; when it has a higher aim than to tickle the ear, or to charm the imagination as the sparkling eye and dazzling scales of the serpent enchant the hovering bird; when it has a higher inspiration than that which produces the " sounding brass and tinkling cymbal " of merely fascinating speech; when it is armed with the thunderbolt of powerful thought, and winged with lofty feeling; when the electric current of sympathy is established, and the orator sends upon it thrill after thrill of sentiment and emotion, vibrating and pulsating to the sensibilities of his hearers, as if their very heart-strings were held in the grasp of his trembling fingers; when it strips those to whom it is addressed of their independence, invests them with its own life, and makes them obedient to a strange nature, as the mighty ocean tides follow the path of the moon; when it divests men of their peculiar qualities and affections, and turns a vast multitude into one man, giving to them but one heart, one pulse, and one voice, and that an echo of the speaker's, — then, indeed, it becomes not only a delight, but a power, and a power greater than kings or military chieftains can command.

The French philosopher, D'Alembert, goes so far as to say of eloquence, that " the prodigies which it often works, in the hands of a single man, upon an entire nation, are perhaps the most shining testimony of the superiority of one man over another " ; and Emerson expresses a similar opinion when he says that eloquence is " the appropriate organ of the highest personal energy." As there is no effort of the human mind which demands a rarer combination of faculties than does oratory in its loftiest flights, so there is no human effort which is rewarded with more immediate or more dazzling triumphs. The philosopher in his closet, the statesman in his cabinet, the general in the tented field, may produce more lasting effects upon human affairs, but their influence is both more slowly felt, and less intoxicating from the ascendancy it confers. The orator is not compelled to wait through long and weary years to reap the reward of his labors. His triumphs are instantaneous; they follow his efforts as the thunder-peal follows the lightning's flash. While he is in the very act of forming his sentences, his triumph is reflected from the countenances of his hearers, tOWEE AND INFLUENCE Ot 1"HE OEATOK. 11

and is sounded from their lips. To stand up before a vast assembly composed of men of the most various callings, views, passions, and prejudices, and mould them at will; to play upon their hearts and minds as a master upon the keys of a piano; to convince their understandings by the logic, and to thrill their feelings by the art, of the orator; to see every eye watching his face, and every ear intent on the words that drop from his lips; to see indiiference changed to breathless interest, and aversion to rapturous enthusiasm; to hear thunders of applause at the close of every period; to see the whole assembly animated by the feelings which in him are burning and struggling for utterance; and to think that all this is the creation of the moment, and has sprung instantaneously from his iiery brain and the inspiration imparted to it by the circumstances of the hour; — this, perhaps, is the greatest triumph of which the human mind is capable, and that in which its divinity is most signally revealed.

■' The history of every country and of every age teems with the miracles wrought by this necromantic power. Eloquence, as every school-boy knows, was the master-spirit of both the great nations of antiquity, — Greece and Rome. It was not the fleets of Attica, though mighty, nor the valor of her troops, though unconquerable, that directed her destinies, but the words and gestures of the men who had the genius and the skill to move, to concentrate, and to direct the energies and passions of a whole people, as though they were but one person. When the Commons of Eome were bowed down to the dust beneath the load of debts which they owed their patrician creditors, it was the agonizing appeals of an old man in rags, pale

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and famishing, with haggard beard and hair, who told the citizens that he had fought in eight and twenty battles, and yet had been imprisoned for a debt with usurious interest which he was compelled to contract, but could not pay, that caused a change of the laws, and a restoration to liberty of those who had been enslaved by their creditors. It was not, as it has been well said, the fate of Lucretia, but the gesture of Brutus waving abroad her bloody knife, and his long hidden soul bursting forth in terrible denunciation, that drove out the Tarquin from Eome, overthrew the throne, and established the Republics "It was a father's cries and prayers for vengeance, as he rushed from the dead body of Virginia,? appealing to his countrymen, that roused the legions of the Tusculan camp to seize upon the Sacred Mount, and achieve another freedom. And when the Roman Empire was the world, and trophies from every people hung in her capitol, the orator, whether in the senate or in the comitia, shook oracles of the fate/ of nations from the folds of his mantle." Plutarch tells us that Thucydides, when Archidamus, King of Sparta, asked him which was the best wrestler, Pericles or he, — replied: "When I throw him, he says he was never down, and persuades the very spectators to believe him." The Athenian populace, roused by the burning words of Demosthenes, started up with one accord and one cry to march upon Philip; and the Macedonian monarch said of the orator who had baffled him, — on hearing a report of one of his orations, — "Had I been there, he would have persuaded me to take up arms against myself" We are told that such was the force of Cicero's oratory, that it not only confounded the audacious Cataline, and silenced the eloquent Hortensius, — not only deprived Curio of all

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power of recollection, when he rose to oppose that great master of enchanting rhetoric, — but made even Caesar tremble, and, changing his determined purpose, acquit the man he had resolved to condemn. It was not till the two champions of ancient liberty, Demosthenes and Cicero, were silenced, that the triumph of Despotism in Greece and Rome was complete. The fatal blow to Athenian greatness was the defeat by Antipater which drove Demosthenes to exile and to death; the deadly stroke at Roman freedom was that which smote off the head of Tully at Caieta.

In the Dark Ages the earnest tones of a simple private man, who has left to posterity only his baptismal name, with the modest surname of Hermit, roused the nations to engage in the Crusades, drove back the victorious crescent, overthrew feudalism, emancipated the serfs, delivered the towns from the oppression of the barons, and changed the moral face of Europe. Two centuries later the voice of a solitary monk shook the Vatican, and emancipated half of Europe from the dominion of Papal Rome. In later ages the achievements of oratory have been hardly less potent. What reader of English history is not familiar with the story of that "lord of the silver bow," the accomplished Bolingbroke, whom the Ministry, when they permitted him to return from exile, dared not permit to reenter Parliament, lest they should be pierced by his deadly shafts? Who can say what the cause of European, or even the world's history would have been, had the British Senate never shaken with the thunders of Fox's, Camden's, or Grattan's eloquence, or had Mirabeau, Vergniaud, Louvet, Barbaroux, and Danton never hurled their fiery bolts from the French tribune? "Who can doubt," says Daniel Webster, "that in our own struggle for inde-

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pendenee, the majestic eloquence of Chatham, the profound reasoning of Burke, the burning satire and irony of Barr^, had influence on our fortunes in America? They tended to diminish the confidence of the British ministry in their hopes to subject us. There was not a reading man who did not struggle more boldly for his rights when those exhilarating sounds, uttered in the two houses of Parliament, reached him across the seas." To the effects wrought by "the fulminating eloquence " of the first of these great orators, history has borne abundant testimony. The arbiter of the destinies of his own country, he was also the . foremost man in all the world. " His august mind overawed majesty. . . . Without dividing, he destroyed party; without corrupting, he made a venal age unanimous; Prance sunk beneath him; with one hand he smote the House of Bourbon, and wielded in the other the democracy of England."

We are told that when Mirabeau arose in the National Assembly, and delivered one of those fiery speeches which, in their union of reason and passion, so remind us of Demosthenes, he trod the tribune with the supreme authority of a master, and the imperial air of a king. As he proceeded with his harangue, his frame dilated; his face was wrinkled and contorted; he roared, he stamped; his hair whitened with foam ; his whole system was seized with an electric irritability, and writhed as under an almost preternatural agitation. The effect of his eloquence, which was of the grandest and most impressive kind, abounding in bold images, striking metaphors, and sudden natural bursts, the creation of the moment, was greatly increased by his " hideously magnificent aspect," — the massive frame, the features full of pock-holes and

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blotches, the eagle eye that dismayed with a look, the voice of thunder that dared a reply, the hair that waved like a lion's mane. The ruling spirit of the French Revolution, he did, while he lived, more than any other man, " to guide the whirlwind and direct the storm " of that political and social crisis. When the clergy and the nobles obeyed the royal mandate that the National Assembly should disperse, and the commons remained hesitating, uncertain, almost in consternation, it was his voice that hurled defiance at the King, and inspired the Tiers- Etat with courage. When he cried out to the astonished emissary of Lewis: "Slave, go tell your master that we are here by the will of the people, and that we will depart only at the point of the bayonet ! " the words sounded like a thunder-clap to all Europe, and from that moment the bondage of the nation was broken, and the fate of despotism sealed.* Startling the critics of the Academy by his bold, straight- forward style of oratory, so opposed to the stiff, conventional manner of the day, he showed them that there was " a power of life " in his rude and startling language, — that the most commonplace ideas could be endowed with electric power; and, had he not died prematurely, he might, perhaps, have dissuaded France from plunging into the gulf of anarchy, and shown a genius for reconstruction only inferior to that which he had displayed as a destroyer.

Among the most memorable displays of oratory, few are more familiar to the ordinary reader than those which took place during the trial of Warren Hastings in Westminster Hall. It is said that when Burke, with an im-

* It is pretty certain that the language actually used by Miraheau was less (ierse and audacious than this: we give the current version.

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agination almost as oriental as the scenes he depicted, described, in words that will live as long as the English language, the cruelties inflicted upon the natives of India by Debi Sing, one of Hastings's agents, a convulsive shudder ran through the whole assembly. Indignation and rage filled the breasts of his hearers; some of the ladies " swooned away " ; and Hastings himself, though he had protested his innocence, was utterly overwhelmed. " For half an hour," he said afterward in describing the scene, " I looked up at the orator in a revery of wonder, and actually felt myself to be the most culpable man on earth." — When Canning, in 1826, closed his famous speech on the King's Message respecting Portugal with the memorable passage: "I looked to Spain in the Indies; I called a New World into existence to redress the balance of the Old," the effect, we are told, was terrific. The whole House was moved as if an electric shock had passed through them: they all rose for a moment to look at him!

A memorable example of the power of eloquence is furnished by the speech of Lord Stanley (afterward the Earl of Derby) on the Irish Coercion Bill, brought into the House of Commons in 1833. O'Connell had made a powerful speech in opposition, and seemed, says Lord Russell (to whom we are indebted for an account of the scene), about to achieve a triumph in favor of sedition and anarchy. Lord Derby, in his reply, recalled to the recollection of the House of Commons that, at a recent public meeting, O'Connell had spoken of the House of Commons as 658 scoundrels. " In a tempest of scorn and indignation," says Lord Russell, "he excited the anger of the men thus designated against the author of

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the calumny. The House which for two hours before seemed about to yield to the great agitator, was now almost ready to tear him to pieces. In the midst of the storm which his eloquence had raised, he (Lord Stanley) sat down, having achieved one of the greatest triumphs of eloquence ever won in a popular assembly by the powers of oratory."

In our own country the triumphs of eloquence have been hardly less marked than those of the Old World. In the night of tyranny the eloquence of the country first blazed up, like the lighted signal-fires of a distracted border, to startle and enlighten the community. Everywhere, as the news of some fresh invasion of liberty and right was borne on the wings of the wind, men ran together and called upon some earnest citizen to address them. The eloquence of that period was not the mere ebullition of feeling; it was the enthusiasm of reason; it was judgment raised into transport, and breathing the irresistible ardors of sympathy.

When in 1761 James Otis, in a Boston popular assembly, denounced the British Writs of Assistance, his hearers were hurried away resistlessly on the torrent of his impetuous speech. When he had concluded, every man, we are told, of the vast audience went away resolved to take up arms against the illegality. When Patrick Henry pleaded the tobacco case "against the parsons" in 1758, it is said that the people might have been seen in every part of the house, on the benches, in the aisles, and in the windows, hushed in death-like stillness, and bending eagerly forward to catch the magic tones of the speaker. The jury were so bewildered as to lose sight of the legislative enactments on which the plaintiffs relied; the court lost the

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equipoise of its judgment, and refused a new trial; and the people, who could scarcely keep their hands off their champion after he had closed his harangue, no sooner saw that he was victorious, than they seized him at the bar, and, in spite of his own efforts, and the continued cry of "Order!" from the sheriff and the court, bore him out of the court-house, and, raising him on their shoulders, carried him about the yard in a kind of electioneering triumph. When the same great orator concluded his well-known speech in March, 1775, in behalf of American independence, " no murmur of applause followed," says his biographer; "the effect was too deep. After the trance of a moment, several members of the Assembly started from their seats. The cry, To arms! seemed to quiver on every lip and glance from every eye." — Mr. Jefferson, who drew up the Declaration of Independence, declares that John Adams, its ablest advocate on the floor of Congress, poured forth his passionate appeals in language " which moved his hearers from their seats."

There are few school-boys who are not familiar with the famous passage in the great speech of Fisher Ames on the British Treaty, in which he depicts the horrors of the border war with the Indians, which would result from its rejection. Even when we read these glowing periods to-day in cold blood, without the tremulous and thrilling accents of the dying statesman, that made them so impressive, we feel the " fine frenzy " of the speaker in every line. An old man, a judge in Maine, who heard the burning words of Ames, declared that as he closed with the climax, " The darkness of midnight will glitter with the blaze of your dwellings. You are a father, — the blood of your sons shall fatten your corn-field : you are a mother, —

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the war-whoop shall wake the sleep of the cradle," — the prophecy seemed for a moment a reality. " I shuddered and looked a little behind me; for I fancied a big Indian with an uplifted tomahawk over me."

William Wirt, himself an orator, tells us that when the "Blind Preacher of Virginia" drew a picture of the trial, crucifixion, and death of our Savior, there was such force and pathos in the description that the original scene appeared to be, at that moment, acting before the hearers' eyes. "We saw the very faces of the Jews: the staring, frightful distortions of malice and rage. We saw the buflfet; my soul kindled with a flame of indignation; and my hands were involuntarily and convulsively clinched." But when, with faltering voice, he came to touch on the patience, the forgiving meekness of the Savior, his prayer for pardon of his enemies, "the efi'ect was inconceivable. The whole house resounded with the mingled groans, and sobs, and shrieks of the congregation."

The accounts given of the effects wrought by some of Daniel Webster's speeches, seem almost incredible to those who never have listened to his clarion-like voice and weighty words. Yet even now, as we read some of the stirring passages in his early discourses, we can hardly realize that we are not standing by as he strangles the reluctantes dracones of an adversary, or actually looking upon the scenes in American history which he so vividly describes. Prof. Ticknor, speaking in one of his letters of the intense excitement with which he listened to Webster's Plymouth Address, says: "Three or four times I thought my temples would burst with the gush of blood; for, after all, you must know that I am aware it is no connected and compacted whole, but a collection of wonderful fragments of burning eloquence, to which his manner gave tenfold force. When I came out, / was almost afraid to come near to him. It seemed to me that he was like the mount that might not be touched, and that burned with fire."

As it was the eloquence of Hamilton, spoken and written, which, in no small degree, established our political system, so it was the eloquence of Webster that mainly defended and saved it: —

When the Federal Constitution, the product of so much sacrifice and toil, was menaced by the Nulliflers of South Carolina, it was the great orator of Massachusetts that sprang to its rescue. As the champion of New England closed the memorable peroration of his reply to Hayne, the silence of death rested upon the crowded Senate Chamber. Hands remained clasped, faces fixed and rigid, and eyes tearful, while the sharp rap of the President's hammer could hardly awaken the audience from the trance into which the orator had thrown them. When, again, over thirty years later. Nullification once more raised its front, and stood forth armed for a long and desperate conflict, it was the ignited logic of the same Defender of the Constitution, — the burning and enthusiastic appeals for "Liberty and Union, now and /orever, one and inseparable," — which, still echoing in the memories of the people, roused them as by a bugle-blast to resistance. It was because Webster, when livino- had indoctrinated the whole North with his views of the structure of our government, that, when his bones lay mouldering at Marshfield, the whole North was ready to

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fight as one man against the heresy of Secession. The idol of the American youth, at the stage of their culture when eloquence exerts its most powerful fascination, he had infused into their hearts such a sentiment of nationality, that they sprang to arms with a determination to shed the last drop of their blood, rather than see a single star effaced from the ample folds of the national flag. Who has forgotten the potent enchantment worked by the same voice in Paneuil Hall, after the odious Compromise Act of 1850? The orator who had been adored as " godlike," and whose appearance had been a signal for a universal outburst of enthusiasm, — the orator upon whom New England had been proud to lavish its honors, was now received with frowning looks and sullen indignation; yet "never," says the poet Lowell, "did we encounter a harder task than to escape the fascination of that magnetic presence of the man, which worked so potently to charm the mind from a judicial serenity to an admiring enthusiasm. There he stood, the lion at bay; and that one man, with his ponderous forehead, his sharp, cliff-edged brows, his brooding, thunderous eyes, his Mirabeau mane of hair, and all the other nameless attributes of his lion-Jike port, seemed enough to overbalance and outweigh that great multitude of men, who came as accusers, but remained, so to speak, as captives, swayed to and fro by his aroused energy as the facile grain is turned hither and thither in mimic surges by the strong wind that runs before the thundergust."

With the triumphs of sacred oratory it would be easy to fill a volume. Not to go back to the days of John the Baptist, or to those of Paul and Peter, whose words are the very flame-breath of the Almighty, — nor even to

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the days of Clirysostom, the golden-mouthed, who, when, like another Elijah, or John the Baptist risen from the dead, he reappeared among his townsmen of Antioch, after the austerities in the desert to which his disgust at their licentiousness had driven him, denounced their bacchanalian orgies in words that made their cheeks tingle, and sent them panic-stricken to their homes, — who is not familiar with the miracles which christian eloquence has wrought in modern times? Who has forgotten the story of " the priest, patriot, martyr," Savonarola, crying evermore to the people of Florence, " Heu ! fuge crudelas terras, fuge littus avarum ! " Who is ignorant of the mighty changes, ecclesiastic and political, produced by the blunt words of Latimer, the fiery appeals of Wyeliffe, the stern denunciations of Knox? Or what ruler of men ever subjugated them more effectually by his sceptre than Chalmers, who gave law from his pulpit for thirty years ; who hushed the frivolity of the modern Babylon, and melted the, souls of the French philosophers in a half-known tongue; who drew tears from dukes and duchesses, and made princes of the blood and bishops start to their feet, and break out into rounds of the wildest applause?

What cultivated man needs to be told of the sweet persuasion that dwelt upon the tongue of the swan of Cambray, the alternating religious joy and terror inspired by the silvery cadence and polished phrase of Massillon, or the resistless conviction that followed the argumentative strategy of Bourdaloue,— a mode of attack upon error and sin which was so illustrative of the iniperatoria virtus of Quintilian, that the great Cond^ cried out once, as the Jesuit mounted the pulpit, " Silence, Messieurs void Vennemi!" What schoolboy is not familiar with the

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religious terror with which, in his oraisons funebres, the " Demosthenes of the pulpit," Bossuet, thrilled the breasts of seigneurs and princesses, and even the breast of that King before whom other kings trembled and knelt, when, taking for his text the words, " Be wise, therefore, ye kings! be instructed, ye judges of the earth!" he unveiled to his auditors the awful reality of God the Lord of all empires, the chastiser of princes, reigning above the heavens, making and unmaking kingdoms, principalities and powers; or, again, with the fire of a lyric poet and the zeal of a prophet, called on nations, princes, nobles, and warriors, to come to the foot of the catafalque which strove to raise to heaven a magnificent testimony of the nothingness of man? At the beginning of his discourses, the action of " the eagle of Meaux," we are told, was dignified and reserved; he confined himself to the notes before him. Gradually " he warmed with his theme, the contagion of his enthusiasm seized his hearers; he watched their rising emotion; the rooted glances of a thousand eyes filled him with a sort of divine frenzy; his notes became a burden and a hindrance; with impetuous ardor he abandoned himself to. the inspiration of the moment; with the eyes of the soul he watched the swelling hearts of his hearers; their concentrated emotions became his own; he felt within himself the collected might of the orators and martyrs whose collected essence, by long and repeated communion, he had absorbed into himself; from flight to flight he ascended, until, with unflagging energy, he towered straight upwards, and dragged the rapt contemplation of his audience along with him in its ethereal flight." At such times, says the Abb6 Le Dieu, it seemed as though the heavens were open, and celestial

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joys were about to descend upon these trembling souls, like tongues of fire on the day of Pentecost. At other times, heads bowed down with humiliation, or pale upturned faces and streaming eyes, lips parted with broken ejaculations of despair, silently testified that the spirit of repentance had breathed on many a hardened heart.

There is a story told of a French Abb6, that he preached a sermon, on a certain Sunday, of such power that his appalled people went home, put up the shutters of their shops, and for three days gave themselves up to utter despair. Jonathan Edwards, the Calvinistic divine, preached sermons of such force that, under the lash of his fiery denunciation, men cried out in agony, and women rose up in their seats. There have been other preachers who, in moments of general misery, have had equal power of turning the wailing of their people into bursts of thankfulness and joy. "I have heard it reported," says Emerson, "of an eloquent preacher whose voice is not forgotten in this city (Boston), that, on occasions of death or tragic disaster which overspread the congregation with gloom, he ascended the pulpit with more than his usual alacrity, and, turning to his favorite lessons of devout and jubilant thankfulness, — ' Let us praise the Lord,' — carried audience, mourners, and mourning along with him, and swept away all the impertinence of private sorrow with his hosannas and songs of praise."

In our own day the triumphs of eloquence, though of a different kind from those of yore, are hardly less signal than in the ages past. We doubt, on the whole, if the orator was ever tempted by brighter laurels, or had a grander field for the exercise of his art. We live in an age of popular agitation, when, in every free country, the

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people are becoming more and more the source of all power, and when it is by organized and systematic effort, — by " monster meetings," and appeals made to the constituencies of the country, rather than to the legislature, — that great political changes are worked out. The germs of great events, the first motive-springs of change, have their origin, no doubt, in the closet, in the brains of men of deep thought and wide observation, who are not engaged in the strife and turmoil of the arena. But the people are the great agency by which all revolutions and changes are accomplished, and the two great engines for convincing and moving the people are oratory and the press. Nevei before were the masses of the people appealed to so earnestly and systematically as now. The title, "Agitator,* once a term of contempt, has now become one of honor, Look at England! What mighty changes have been wrought in her political system within the last fifty years by the indomitable energy of the Vincents, the Poxes, the Cobdens, and scores of other speakers, who have traversed the kingdom, advocating Parliamentary Eeform, the Eepeal of the Corn-Laws, and other measures which were once deemed utopian and hopeless! Scotland, too, has hardly yet recovered from a convulsion which shook society to its foundations, produced by the eloquence of a few earnest men, who declared that " conscience should be free." Who can doubt that, in our own country, it was the vehement and impassioned oratory of the so-called "anti-slavery fanatics," — the "hare-brained" champions of "the higher law," — that precipitated the "irrepressible conflict" which broke the fetters of the slave, and thus removed the most formidable obstacle to the complete union of North and South, as well as the foulest stain on our escutcheon? 2