Society and solitude: Twelve chapters
to rule something, and the lawyers saved their rogue under the fog
of a definition. The parts were so well cast and discriminated, that
it was an interesting game to watch. The government was well enough
represented. It was stupid, but it had a strong will and possession,
and stood on that to the last. The judge had a task beyond his
preparation, yet his position remained real: he was there to represent
a great reality,--the justice of states, which we could well enough see
beetling over his head, and which his trifling talk nowise affected,
and did not impede, since he was entirely well-meaning.
The statement of the fact, however, sinks before the statement of
the law, which requires immeasurably higher powers, and is a rarest
gift, being in all great masters one and the same thing,--in
lawyers, nothing technical, but always some piece of common sense,
alike interesting to laymen as to clerks. Lord Mansfield’s merit
is the merit of common sense. It is the same quality we admire in
Aristotle, Montaigne, Cervantes, or in Samuel Johnson, or Franklin. Its
application to law seems quite accidental. Each of Mansfield’s famous
decisions contains a level sentence or two, which hit the mark. His
sentences are not always finished to the eye, but are finished to the
mind. The sentences are involved, but a solid proposition is set forth,
a true distinction is drawn. They come from and they go to the sound
human understanding; and I read without surprise that the black-letter
lawyers of the day sneered at his “equitable decisions,” as if they
were not also learned. This, indeed, is what speech is for,--to make
the statement; and all that is called eloquence seems to me of little
use, for the most part, to those who have if, but inestimable to such
as have something to say.
Next to the knowledge of the fact and its law is method, which
constitutes the genius and efficiency of all remarkable men. A crowd
of men go up to Faneuil Hall; they are all pretty well acquainted with
the object of the meeting; they have all read the facts in the same
newspapers. The orator possesses no information which his hearers have
not; yet he teaches them to see the thing with his eyes. By the new
placing, the circumstances acquire new solidity and worth. Every fact
gains consequence by his naming it, and trifles become important. His
expressions fix themselves in men’s memories, and fly from mouth to
mouth. His mind has some new principle of order. Where he looks, all
things fly into their places. What will he say next? Let this man
speak, and this man only. By applying the habits of a higher style of
thought to the common affairs of this world, he introduces beauty and
magnificence wherever he goes. Such a power was Burke’s, and of this
genius we have had some brilliant examples in our own political and
legal men.
Imagery. The orator must be, to a certain extent, a poet. We are
such imaginative creatures, that nothing so works on the human mind,
barbarous or civil, as a trope. Condense some daily experience into a
glowing symbol, and an audience is electrified. They feel as if they
already possessed some new right and power over a fact, which they can
detach, and so completely master in thought. It is a wonderful aid to
the memory, which carries away the image, and never loses it. A popular
assembly, like the House of Commons, or the French Chamber, or the
American Congress, is commanded by these two powers,--first by a fact,
then by skill of statement. Put the argument into a concrete shape,
into an image,--some hard phrase, round and solid as a ball, which they
can see and handle and carry home with them,--and the cause is half
won.
Statement, method, imagery, selection, tenacity of memory, power of
dealing with facts, of illuminating them, of sinking them by ridicule
or by diversion of the mind, rapid generalization, humor, pathos,
are keys which the orator holds; and yet these fine gifts are not
eloquence, and do often hinder a man’s attainment of it. And if we
come to the heart of the mystery, perhaps we should say that the truly
eloquent man is a sane man with power to communicate his sanity. If
you arm the man with the extraordinary weapons of this art, give him
a grasp of facts, learning, quick fancy, sarcasm, splendid allusion,
interminable illustration,--all these talents, so potent and charming,
have an equal power to insnare and mislead the audience and the orator.
His talents are too much for him, his horses run away with him; and
people always perceive whether you drive, or whether the horses take
the bits in their teeth and run. But these talents are quite something
else when they are subordinated and serve him; and we go to Washington,
or to Westminster Hall, or might well go round the world, to see a
man who drives, and is not run away with,--a man who, in prosecuting
great designs, has an absolute command of the means of representing his
ideas, and uses them only to express these; placing facts, placing men;
amid the inconceivable levity of human beings, never for an instant
warped from his erectness. There is for every man a statement possible
of that truth which he is most unwilling to receive,--a statement
possible, so broad and so pungent that he cannot get away from it, but
must either bend to it or die of it. Else there would be no such word
as eloquence, which means this. The listener cannot hide from himself
that something has been shown him and the whole world, which he did
not wish to see; and, as he cannot dispose of it, it disposes of him.
The history of public men and affairs in America will readily furnish
tragic examples of this fatal force.
For the triumphs of the art somewhat more must still be required,
namely, a reinforcing of man from events, so as to give the double
force of reason and destiny. In transcendent eloquence, there was
ever some crisis in affairs, such as could deeply engage the man to
the cause he pleads, and draw all this wide power to a point. For
the explosions and eruptions, there must be accumulations of heat
somewhere, beds of ignited anthracite at the centre. And in cases where
profound conviction has been wrought, the eloquent man is he who is no
beautiful speaker, but who is inwardly drunk with a certain belief. It
agitates and tears him, and perhaps almost bereaves him of the power
of articulation. Then it rushes from him as in short, abrupt screams,
in torrents of meaning. The possession the subject has of his mind is
so entire, that it insures an order of expression which is the order
of Nature itself, and so the order of greatest force, and inimitable
by any art. And the main distinction between him and other well-graced
actors is the conviction, communicated by every word, that his mind is
contemplating a whole, and inflamed by the contemplation of the whole,
and that the words and sentences uttered by him, however admirable,
fall from him as unregarded parts of that terrible whole which he
sees, and which he means that you shall see. Add to this concentration
a certain regnant calmness, which, in all the tumult, never utters a
premature syllable, but keeps the secret of its means and method; and
the orator stands before the people as a demoniacal power to whose
miracles they have no key. This terrible earnestness makes good the
ancient superstition of the hunter, that the bullet will hit its mark,
which is first dipped in the marksman’s blood.
Eloquence must be grounded on the plainest narrative. Afterwards, it
may warm itself until it exhales symbols of every kind and color,
speaks only through the most poetic forms; but, first and last, it
must still be at bottom a biblical statement of fact. The orator is
thereby an orator, that he keeps his feet ever on a fact. Thus only
is he invincible. No gifts, no graces, no power of wit or learning or
illustration, will make any amends for want of this. All audiences
are just to this point. Fame of voice or of rhetoric will carry people
a few times to hear a speaker; but they soon begin to ask, “What
is he driving at?” and if this man does not stand for anything, he
will be deserted. A good upholder of anything which they believe, a
fact-speaker of any kind, they will long follow; but a pause in the
speaker’s own character is very properly a loss of attraction. The
preacher enumerates his classes of men, and I do not find my place
therein; I suspect, then, that no man does. Everything is my cousin;
and whilst he speaks things, I feel that he is touching some of my
relations, and I am uneasy; but whilst he deals in words, we are
released from attention. If you would lift me, you must be on higher
ground. If you would liberate me, you must be free. If you would
correct my false view of facts,--hold up to me the same facts in the
true order of thought, and I cannot go back from the new conviction.
The power of Chatham, of Pericles, of Luther, rested on this strength
of character, which, because it did not and could not fear anybody,
made nothing of their antagonists, and became sometimes exquisitely
provoking and sometimes terrific to these.
We are slenderly furnished with anecdotes of these men, nor can we help
ourselves by those heavy books in which their discourses are reported.
Some of them were writers, like Burke; but most of them were not,
and no record at all adequate to their fame remains. Besides, what
is best is lost,--the fiery life of the moment. But the conditions
for eloquence always exist. It is always dying out of famous places,
and appearing in corners. Wherever the polarities meet, wherever the
fresh moral sentiment, the instinct of freedom and duty, come in
direct opposition to fossil conservatism and the thirst of gain, the
spark will pass. The resistance to slavery in this country has been a
fruitful nursery of orators. The natural connection by which it drew
to itself a train of moral reforms, and the slight yet sufficient
party organization it offered, reinforced the city with new blood from
the woods and mountains. Wild men, John Baptists, Hermit Peters, John
Knoxes, utter the savage sentiment of Nature in the heart of commercial
capitals. They send us every year some piece of aboriginal strength,
some tough oak-stick of a man who is not to be silenced or insulted
or intimidated by a mob, because he is more mob than they,--one who
mobs the mob,--some sturdy countryman, on whom neither money, nor
politeness, nor hard words, nor eggs, nor blows, nor brickbats, make
any impression. He is fit to meet the bar-room wits and bullies; he is
a wit and a bully himself, and something more: he is a graduate of the
plough, and the stub-hoe, and the bushwhacker; knows all the secrets
of swamp and snow-bank, and has nothing to learn of labor or poverty
or the rough of farming. His hard head went through, in childhood, the
drill of Calvinism, with text and mortification, so that he stands
in the New England assembly a purer bit of New England than any, and
flings his sarcasms right and left. He has not only the documents in
his pocket to answer all cavils, and to prove all his positions, but
he has the eternal reason in his head. This man scornfully renounces
your civil organizations,--county, or city, or governor, or army,--is
his own navy and artillery, judge and jury, legislature and executive.
He has learned his lessons in a bitter school. Yet, if the pupil be of
a texture to bear it, the best university that can be recommended to a
man of ideas is the gauntlet of the mobs.
He who will train himself to mastery in this science of persuasion must
lay the emphasis of education, not on popular arts, but on character
and insight. Let him see that his speech is not differenced from
action; that, when he has spoken, he has not done nothing, nor done