Chapter III: The Writer and the Orator

The author of _Nile Notes of a Howadji_ loved alliteration. In his early books he amused himself with pleasant arrangements of words such as ‘camels with calm, contemptuous eyes,’ or ‘lustrous leaves languidly moving,’ or ‘slim minarets spiring silverly and strangely from the undefined mass of mud houses.’ Note this description of the date-palm: ‘Plumed as a prince and graceful as a gentleman, stands the date; and whoever travels among palms travels in good society;’ or this of the sakias: ‘Like huge summer insects they doze upon the bank, droning a melancholy, monotonous song. The slow, sad sound pervades the land--one calls to another, and he sighs to his neighbor, and the Nile is shored with sound no less than sand.’

Alliteration is a mark of youth. Employed to excess it has a cloying effect, like that of diminished sevenths in music. Of minor rhetorical arts it is the poorest, the most seductive, the most readily abused. But we should miss it sadly from the ‘Howadji’ books. Removed from the context these phrases quoted have an artificial sound, in their place they blend perfectly.

Curtis’s style grew less florid and sensuous after the early writings. At all times it is singularly easy. One gets the impression that he was a spontaneous writer. Great productivity is not possible when there must be a constant retouching of phrases and paragraphs. The unlabored nature of his writing may explain the light estimate Curtis put on it. He is said to have been quite unwilling to reprint a volume of essays from the ‘Easy Chair.’ That anything which came with so little effort could be worth re-reading seemed not to occur to him.

He was the orator almost as soon as he was the man of letters. A rhetorician by taste and training, he knew the dangers of rhetoric and in his oratory avoided them. Clarity and grace are the most obvious characteristics of every sentence. Curtis could no more have been awkward and heavy than he could have been obscure.

He can hardly be praised enough for the ease and naturalness of his allusions. We auditors grow restless when a speaker begins to cite classical names. We fear our old friends Cicero and Catiline, Cæsar and Brutus. We cannot away with Hannibal and Hamilcar. The ear has been dulled by constant repetition. Curtis knew how to make the oldest of these tiresome references seem new. All his allusions have an air of freshness and spontaneity. One would suppose the declaimers had long since exhausted the virtues of Spartacus. Curtis dared to make the old gladiator accessory to his argument in a passage like this:--

‘Spartacus was a barbarian, a pagan, and a slave. Escaping he summoned other men whose liberty was denied. His call rang clear through Italy like an autumn storm through the forest, and men answered him like clustering leaves.... He had no rights that Romans were bound to respect, but he wrote out in blood upon the plains of Lombardy his equal humanity with Cato and Cæsar. The tale is terrible. History shudders with it still. But you and I, Plato and Shakespeare, the mightiest and the meanest men, were honored in Spartacus, for his wild revenge showed the brave scorn of oppression that beats immortal in the proud heart of man.’

Nature had bestowed on Curtis gifts which, if not indispensable to a speaker, are like free-will offerings as against tribute, and make the pathway smooth. His commanding presence, his winning smile and manner, his glorious voice, the air of high breeding, a self-possession which when accompanied by unaffected good nature is one of the most attractive traits--all combined to place him among the first of American orators. He was properly said (in a phrase which through vain repetition has almost lost its meaning) to ‘grace’ the platform.