Society and solitude: Twelve chapters
for example, and the ceremonies of a coronation, are a dignified
repetition of the occurrences that might befall a dragoon and his
footboy. The College of Cardinals were originally the parish priests
of Rome. The leaning towers originated from the civil discords which
induced every lord to build a tower. Then it became a point of family
pride,--and for more pride the novelty of a leaning tower was built.
This strict dependence of Art upon material and ideal Nature, this
adamantine necessity which underlies it, has made all its past, and
may foreshow its future history. It never was in the power of any man,
or any community, to call the arts into being. They come to serve his
actual wants, never to please his fancy. These arts have their origin
always in some enthusiasm, as love, patriotism, or religion. Who carved
marble? The believing man, who wished to symbolize their gods to the
waiting Greeks.
The Gothic cathedrals were built when the builder and the priest and
the people were overpowered by their faith. Love and fear laid every
stone. The Madonnas of Raphael and Titian were made to be worshipped.
Tragedy was instituted for the like purpose, and the miracles of
music: all sprang out of some genuine enthusiasm, and never out of
dilettanteism and holidays. Now they languish, because their purpose
is merely exhibition. Who cares, who knows what works of art our
government have ordered to be made for the Capitol? They are a mere
flourish to please the eye of persons who have associations with
books and galleries. But in Greece, the Demos of Athens divided into
political factions upon the merits of Phidias.
In this country, at this time, other interests than religion and
patriotism are predominant, and the arts, the daughters of enthusiasm,
do not flourish. The genuine offspring of our ruling passions we
behold. Popular institutions, the school, the reading-room, the
telegraph, the post-office, the exchange, the insurance-company, and
the immense harvest of economical inventions, are the fruit of the
equality and the boundless liberty of lucrative callings. These are
superficial wants; and their fruits are these superficial institutions.
But as far as they accelerate the end of political freedom and
national education, they are preparing the soil of man for fairer
flowers and fruits in another age. For beauty, truth, and goodness
are not obsolete; they spring eternal in the breast of man; they are
as indigenous in Massachusetts as in Tuscany or the Isles of Greece.
And that Eternal Spirit, whose triple face they are, moulds from them
forever, for his mortal child, images to remind him of the Infinite and
Fair.
ELOQUENCE.
ELOQUENCE.
It is the doctrine of the popular music-masters, that whoever can
speak can sing. So, probably, every man is eloquent once in his life.
Our temperaments differ in capacity of heat, or, we boil at different
degrees. One man is brought to the boiling-point by the excitement of
conversation in the parlor. The waters, of course, are not very deep.
He has a two-inch enthusiasm, a patty-pan ebullition. Another requires
the additional caloric of a multitude, and a public debate; a third
needs an antagonist, or a hot indignation; a fourth needs a revolution;
and a fifth, nothing less than the grandeur of absolute ideas, the
splendors and shades of Heaven and Hell.
But because every man is an orator, how long soever he may have been
a mute, an assembly of men is so much more susceptible. The eloquence
of one stimulates all the rest, some up to the speaking-point, and
all others to a degree that makes them good receivers and conductors,
and they avenge themselves for their enforced silence by increased
loquacity on their return to the fireside.
The plight of these phlegmatic brains is better than that of those
who prematurely boil, and who impatiently break silence before their
time. Our county conventions often exhibit a small-pot-soon-hot style
of eloquence. We are too much reminded of a medical experiment where a
series of patients are taking nitrous-oxide gas. Each patient, in turn,
exhibits similar symptoms,--redness in the face, volubility, violent
gesticulation, delirious attitudes, occasional stamping, an alarming
loss of perception of the passage of time, a selfish enjoyment of his
sensations, and loss of perception of the sufferings of the audience.
Plato says, that the punishment which the wise suffer, who refuse to
take part in the government, is, to live under the government of worse
men; and the like regret is suggested to all the auditors, as the
penalty of abstaining to speak,--that they shall hear worse orators
than themselves.
But this lust to speak marks the universal feeling of the energy of
the engine, and the curiosity men feel to touch the springs. Of all
the musical instruments on which men play, a popular assembly is
that which has the largest compass and variety, and out of which,
by genius and study, the most wonderful effects can be drawn. An
audience is not a simple addition of the individuals that compose it.
Their sympathy gives them a certain social organism, which fills each
member, in his own degree, and most of all the orator, as a jar in a
battery is charged with the whole electricity of the battery. No one
can survey the face of an excited assembly, without being apprised
of new opportunity for painting in fire human thought, and being
agitated to agitate. How many orators sit mute there below! They come
to get justice done to that ear and intuition which no Chatham and no
Demosthenes has begun to satisfy.
The Welsh Triads say, “Many are the friends of the golden tongue.”
Who can wonder at the attractiveness of Parliament, or of Congress,
or the bar, for our ambitious young men, when the highest bribes of
society are at the feet of the successful orator? He has his audience
at his devotion. All other fames must hush before his. He is the
true potentate; for they are not kings who sit on thrones, but they
who know how to govern. The definitions of eloquence describe its
attraction for young men. Antiphon the Rhamnusian, one of Plutarch’s
ten orators, advertised in Athens, “that he would cure distempers of
the mind with words.” No man has a prosperity so high or firm but two
or three words can dishearten it. There is no calamity which right
words will not begin to redress. Isocrates described his art as “the
power of magnifying what was small and diminishing what was great,”--an
acute but partial definition. Among the Spartans, the art assumed a
Spartan shape, namely, of the sharpest weapon. Socrates says: “If
any one wishes to converse with the meanest of the Lacedæmonians, he
will at first find him despicable in conversation; but, when a proper
opportunity offers, this same person, like a skilful jaculator, will
hurl a sentence worthy of attention, short and contorted, so that he
who converses with him will appear to be in no respect superior to a
boy.” Plato’s definition of rhetoric is, “the art of ruling the minds
of men.” The Koran says, “A mountain may change its place, but a man
will not change his disposition” yet the end of eloquence is,--is it
not?--to alter in a pair of hours, perhaps in a half-hour’s discourse,
the convictions and habits of years. Young men, too, are eager to enjoy
this sense of added power and enlarged sympathetic existence. The
orator sees himself the organ of a multitude, and concentrating their
valors and powers:
“But now the blood of twenty thousand men
Blushed in my face.”
That which he wishes, that which eloquence ought to reach, is, not a
particular skill in telling a story, or neatly summing up evidence,
or arguing logically, or dexterously addressing the prejudice of the
company,--no, but a taking sovereign possession of the audience. Him
we call an artist, who shall play on an assembly of men as a master on
the keys of the piano,--who, seeing the people furious, shall soften
and compose them, shall draw them, when he will, to laughter and to
tears. Bring him to his audience, and, be they who they may,--coarse or
refined, pleased or displeased, sulky or savage, with their opinions
in the keeping of a confessor, or with their opinions in their
bank-safes,--he will have them pleased and humored as he chooses; and
they shall carry and execute that which he bids them.
This is that despotism which poets have celebrated in the “Pied Piper
of Hamelin,” whose music drew like the power of gravitation,--drew
soldiers and priests, traders and feasters, women and boys, rats and
mice; or that of the minstrel of Meudon, who made the pall-bearers
dance around the bier. This is a power of many degrees, and requiring
in the orator a great range of faculty and experience, requiring a
large composite man, such as Nature rarely organizes; so that, in our
experience, we are forced to gather up the figure in fragments, here
one talent, and there another.
The audience is a constant metre of the orator. There are many
audiences in every public assembly, each one of which rules in turn.
If anything comic and coarse is spoken, you shall see the emergence
of the boys and rowdies, so loud and vivacious that you might think
the house was filled with them. If new topics are started, graver and
higher, these roisters recede; a more chaste and wise attention takes
place. You would think the boys slept, and that the men have any degree
of profoundness. If the speaker utter a noble sentiment, the attention
deepens, a new and highest audience now listens, and the audiences
of the fun and of facts and of the understanding are all silenced
and awed. There is also something excellent in every audience,--the
capacity of virtue. They are ready to be beatified. They know so much
more than the orator,--and are so just! There is a tablet there for
every line he can inscribe, though he should mount to the highest
levels. Humble persons are conscious of new illumination; narrow brows
expand with enlarged affections;--delicate spirits, long unknown to
themselves, masked and muffled in coarsest fortunes, who now hear their
own native language for the first time, and leap to hear it. But all
these several audiences, each above each, which successively appear to
greet the variety of style and topic, are really composed out of the
same persons; nay, sometimes the same individual will take active part
in them all, in turn.
This range of many powers in the consummate speaker, and of many
audiences in one assembly, leads us to consider the successive stages
of oratory.
Perhaps it is the lowest of the qualities of an orator, but it is, on
so many occasions, of chief importance,--a certain robust and radiant
physical health; or,--shall I say?--great volumes of animal heat. When
each auditor feels himself to make too large a part of the assembly,
and shudders with cold at the thinness of the morning audience, and
with fear lest all will heavily fail through one bad speech, mere
energy and mellowness are then inestimable. Wisdom and learning would
be harsh and unwelcome, compared with a substantial cordial man, made
of milk, as we say, who is a house-warmer, with his obvious honesty
and good meaning, and a hue-and-cry style of harangue, which inundates
the assembly with a flood of animal spirits, and makes all safe and
secure, so that any and every sort of good speaking becomes at once
practicable. I do not rate this animal eloquence very highly; and yet,
as we must be fed and warmed before we can do any work well,--even the
best,--so is this semi-animal exuberance, like a good stove, of the
first necessity in a cold house.
Climate has much to do with it,--climate and race. Set a New-Englander
to describe any accident which happened in his presence. What