Chapter XXXV: Oratory and Some Orators I Have Heard (2)

It was a curious sight to see on a jury twelve hard-headed and intelligent countrymen--farmers, town officers, trustees, men chosen by their neighbors to transact their important affairs--after an argument by some clear-headed lawyer for the defence, about some apparently not very doubtful transaction, who had brought them all to his way of thinking, and had warned them against the wiles of the charmer, when Choate rose to reply for the plaintiff--to see their look of confidence and disdain--"You needn't try your wiles upon me." The shoulder turned a little against the speaker--the averted eye--and then the change; first, the changed posture of the body; the slight opening of the mouth; then the look, first, of curiosity, and then of doubt, then of respect; the surrender of the eye to the eye of the great advocate; then the spell, the charm, the great enchantment--till at last, jury and audience were all swept away, and followed the conqueror captive in his triumphal march.

He gesticulated with his whole body. Wendell Phillips most irreverently as well as most unjustly compared him to a monkey in convulsions. His bowings down and straightening himself again were spoken of by another critic, not unfriendly, as opening and shutting like a jack-knife. His curly black hairs seemed each to have a separate life of its own. His eyes shone like coals of fire. There is a passage of Everett's which well describes Choate, and is also one of the very best examples of Everett, who, with all his fertility of original genius, borrowed so much, and so enriched and improved everything that he borrowed. Cicero said of Antonius:

"Omnia veniebant Antonio in mentem; eaque suo quaeque loco, ubi pluimum proficere et valere possent, ut ab imperatore equites pedites levis armatura, sic ab illo in maxume opportunis orationis partibus conlocabantur."

Now see what Everett does with this thought in his eulogy, spoken in Faneuil Hall, the week after Choate's death:

"He is sometimes satisfied, in concise epigrammatic clauses, to skirmish with his light troops, and drive in the enemy's outposts. It is only on fitting occasions, when great principles are to be vindicated, and solemn truths told, when some moral or political Waterloo or Solferino is to be fought, that he puts on the entire panoply of his gorgeous rhetoric. It is then that his majestic sentences swell to the dimensions of his majestic thought; then it is that we hear afar off the awful roar of his rifled ordnance; and when he has stormed the heights, and broken the centre, and trampled the squares, and turned the staggering wings of the adversary, that he sounds his imperial clarion along the whole line of battle, and moves forward with all his hosts, in one overwhelming charge."

One of the most remarkable advocates of my day was Sidney Bartlett. He seldom addressed juries, and almost never public assemblies. He was a partner of Chief Justice Shaw before 1830. He argued cases before the Supreme Court of the United States and before the Supreme Court of Massachusetts after he was ninety. He cared for no other audience. He had a marvellous compactness of speech, and a marvellous sagacity in seeing the turning-point of a great question. He found the place where the roads diverged, got the Court's face set in the right direction, and then stopped. He would argue in ten or fifteen minutes a point where some powerful antagonist like Curtis or Choate would take hours to reply. I once told him that his method of argument was to that of ordinary lawyers like logarithms to ordinary mathematics. He seemed pleased with the compliment, and said, "Yes, I know I argue over their heads. The Chief Justice told me he wished I would talk a little longer." I do not know that Bartlett ought to be reckoned among orators. But he had a great power of convincing, and giving his intellectual delight to minds capable of appreciating his profound and inexorable logic.

Edward Everett seems to me, on the whole, our best example of the orator, pure and simple. Webster was a great statesman, a great lawyer, a great advocate, a great public teacher. To all these his matchless oratory was but an instrument and incident.

Choate was a great winner of cases, and as relaxation he gave, in the brief vacations of an overworked professional life (he once defined a lawyer's vacation as the time after he has put a question to a witness while he is waiting for an answer), a few wonderful literary and historical addresses. He gave a brief period of brilliant but most unwilling service in each House of Congress. He made some powerful political speeches to popular audiences. But his heart was always in the court-house. No gambler ever hankered for the feverish delight of the gaming table as Choate did for that absorbing game, half chance, half skill, where twelve human dice must all turn up together one way, or there be no victory.

But Everett is always the orator. He was a clergyman a little while. He was a Greek professor a little while. He was a College President a little while. He was a Minister to England a little while. He was Representative in Congress and Senator. He was Governor of the Commonwealth. In these places he did good service enough to make a high reputation for any other man. Little of these things is remembered now. He was above all things--I am tempted to say, above all men--the foremost American orator in one class.

There is one function of the orator peculiar to our country, and almost unknown elsewhere. That is the giving utterance to the emotion of the people, whether of joy or sorrow, on the occasions when its soul is deeply stirred--when some great man dies, or there is a great victory or defeat, or some notable anniversary is celebrated. This office was filled by other men, on some few occasions by Daniel Webster himself, but by no man better than by Everett. A Town, or City, or State is very human. In sorrow it must utter its cry of pain; in victory, its note of triumph. As events pass, it must pronounce its judgement. Its constant purpose must be fixed and made more steadfast by expression. It must give voice to its love and its approbation and its condemnation. It must register the high and low water mark of its tide, its rising and its sinking in heat and cold. This office Edward Everett, for nearly fifty years, performed for Massachusetts and for the whole country. In his orations is preserved and recorded everything of the emotion of the great hours of our people's history. The camera of his delicate photography has preserved for future generations what passed in the soul of his own in the times that tried the souls of men.

I do not know where he got his exquisite elocution. He went abroad in his youth, and there were good trainers abroad, then. He must have studied thoroughly the speeches of Cicero and the Greek orators. Many casual phrases in his works, besides many quotations, show his familiarity with Cicero's writing on oratory.

If you would get some faint, far-off conception of him, first look at the best bust or picture of Everett you can find. Imagine the figure with its every movement gentle and graceful. The head and face are suggestive of Greek sculpture. This person sits on the platform with every expression discharged from the face, looking like a plaster image when the artist has just begun his model, before any character or intelligence has been put into it. You think him the only person in the audience who takes no interest whatever in what is going on, and certainly that he expects to have nothing to do with it himself. He is introduced. He comes forward quietly and gracefully. There is a slight smile of recognition of the welcoming applause. The opening sentences are spoken in a soft--I had almost said, a caressing voice, though still a little cold. I suppose it would be called a tenor voice. There was nothing in the least unmanly about Edward Everett. Yet if some woman had spoken in the same tones, you would have not thought them unwomanly.

Illa tamquam cycnea fuit divini hominis vox et oratio.

He has found somewhere in the vast storehouse of his knowledge a transaction exactly like the present, or exactly in contrast with it, or some sentiment of poet or orator which just fits the present occasion. If it be new to his audience, he adds to it a newer delight still by his matchless skill as a narrator-- a skill almost the rarest of all talents among public speakers. If it be commonplace and hackneyed he makes it fresh and pleasant by giving in detail the circumstances when it was first uttered, or describes some occasion when some orator has applied it before; or calls attention to its very triteness as giving it added authority. If he wish to express his agreement with the last speaker and "say ditto to Mr. Burke," he tells you when that was said, what was the occasion, and gives you the name of Mr. Kruger, who stood for the representation of Bristol with Burke.

Mr. Everett's stores were inexhaustible. If any speaker have to get ready in a hurry for a great occasion, let him look through the index of the four volumes of Everett's speeches, and he will find matter enough, not only to stimulate his own thought and set its currents running, but to illustrate and adorn what he will say.

But pretty soon the orator rises into a higher plane. Some lofty sentiment, some stirring incident, some patriotic emotion, some play of fancy or wit comes from the brain or heart of the speaker. The audience is hushed to silence. Perhaps a little mist begins to gather in their eyes. There is now an accent of emotion in the voice, though still soft and gentle. The Greek statue begins to move. There is life in the limbs. There has been a lamp kindled somewhere behind the clear and transparent blue eyes. The flexible muscles of the face have come to life now. Still there is no jar or disorder. The touch upon the nerves of the audience is like that of a gentle nurse. The atmosphere is that of a May morning. There is no perfume but that of roses and lilies. But still, gently at first, the warmer feelings are kindled in the hearts of the speaker and hearers. The frame of the speaker is transfigured. The trembling hands are lifted high in the air. The rich, sweet voice fills the vast audience chamber with its resonant tones. At last, the bugle, the trumpet, the imperial clarion rings out full and clear, and the vast audience is transported as to another world--I had almost said to a seventh heaven. Read the welcome to Lafayette or the close of the matchless eulogy on that illustrious object of the people's love. Read the close of the oration on Washington. Read the contrast of Washington and Marlborough. Read the beautiful passage where, just before the ocean cable was laid, the rich fancy of the speaker describes--

"The thoughts that we think up here on the earth's surface in the cheerful light of day--clothing ourselves with elemental sparks, and shooting with fiery speed in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, from hemisphere to hemisphere, far down among the uncouth monsters that wallow in the nether seas, along the wreck-paved floor, thorough the oozy dungeons of the rayless deep; the last intelligence of the crops, whose dancing tassels will in a few months be coquetting with the west wind on those boundless prairies, flashing along the slimy decks of old sunken galleons, which have been rotting for ages; messages of friendship and love, from warm, living bosoms, burn over the cold green bones of men and women, whose hearts, once as fond as ours, burst as the eternal gulfs closed and roared over them, centuries ago."

Read the passage in the eulogy on Choate where he describes him arming himself in the entire panoply of his gorgeous rhetoric--and you will get some far-away conception of the power of this magician.

One thing especially distinguishes our modern orator from the writer in the closet, where he writes solely for his readers, or where he has prepared his speeches beforehand--that is, the influence of the audience upon him. There is nothing like it as a stimulant to every faculty, not only imagination, and fancy, and reason, but especially, as every experienced speaker knows, memory also. Everything needed seems to come out from the secret storehouses of the mind, even the things that have lain there forgotten, rusting and unused. Mr. Everett describes this in a masterly passage in his Life of Webster. Gladstone states it in a few fine sentences:

"The work of the orator, from its very inception," he says, "is inextricably mixed up with practice. It is cast in the mould offered to him by the mind of his hearers. It is an influence principally received from his audience (so to speak) in vapor, which he pours back upon them in a flood. The sympathy and concurrence of his time is, with his own mind, joint parent of his work. He cannot follow nor frame ideals; his choice is to be what his age would have him, what it requires in order to be moved by him, or else not to be at all."

I heard six of Kossuth's very best speeches. He was a marvellous orator. He seemed to have mastered the whole vocabulary of English speech, and to have a rare gift of choosing words that accurately expressed his meaning, and he used so to fashion his sentences that they were melodious and delightful to the ear. That is one great gift or oratory, as it is of poetry, or indeed of a good prose style. Why it is that two words or phrases which mean precisely the same thing to the intellect, have so different an effect on the emotions, no man can tell. To understand it, is to know the secret not only of reaching the heart, but frequently of convincing the understanding of man.

Kossuth made a great many speeches, sometimes five or six in a day. He could have had no preparation but the few minutes which he could snatch while waiting for dinner at some house where he was a guest, or late at night, after a hard day's work. But his speeches were gems. They were beautiful in substance and in manner. He was ready for every occasion. When the speaker who welcomed him at Roxbury told him that Roxbury contained no historic spot that would interest a stranger, Kossuth at once answered, "You forget that it is the birthplace of Warren." When old Josiah Quincy, then past eighty, said at a Legislative banquet that he had come to the time--"when the keepers of the house shall tremble, and the strong men shall bow themselves, and the grinders cease because they are few, and those that look out of the windows be darkened, and they shall be afraid of that which is high, and fears shall be in the way," Kossuth interrupted him, "Ah! but that was of ordinary men."

I was a member of the Legislature when Kossuth visited Boston. I heard his address to the House and to the Senate, his reply to the Governor's welcome. I heard him again at the Legislative banquet in Faneuil Hall, and twice in Worcester--on the Common in the afternoon, and at the City Hall in the evening. I shook hands with him and perhaps exchanged a word or two, but of that I have no memory. Afterward I visited him with my wife at Turin in 1892, when he was a few months past ninety. He received me with great cordiality. I spent two hours with him and his sister, Madam Ruttkay. They both expressed great pleasure with the visit, and Madam Ruttkay kissed Mrs. Hoar affectionately when we took leave. Kossuth's beautiful English periods were as beautiful as they were forty years before, at the time of his famous pilgrimage through the United States. His whole conversation related to the destiny of his beloved Hungary. He spoke with great dignity of his own share in the public events which affected his country. There was nothing of arrogance or vanity in his claim for himself, yet in speaking of Francis Joseph, he assumed unconsciously the tone of a superior. He maintained that constitutional liberty could never be permanent where two countries with separate legislatures were under one sovereign. He said the sovereign would always be able to use the military and civil power of one to accomplish his designs against the liberty of the other. The opinion of Kossuth on such a question is entitled to the greatest deference. But I incline to the belief that, while undoubtedly there may be great truth in the opinion, the spirit of liberty will overcome that danger. Hungary and Hungary's chief city seem rapidly to be asserting control in their own affairs and an influence in the Austro-Hungary Empire which no monarch will be able to withstand, and which it is quite likely the royal family will not desire to withstand. In these days monarchs are learning the love of liberty, and I believe in most cases to-day the reigning sovereigns of Europe are eager to promote constitutional government, and prefer the title of Liberator to that of Despot.

I have heard Wendell Phillips speak a great many times. I do not include him in this notice, because, if I did, I ought to defend my estimate of him at considerable length, and to justify it by ample quotation. I think him entitled to the very highest rank as an orator. I do not estimate his moral character highly. I think he exerted very little influence on his generation, and that the influence he did exert was in the main pernicious. I have had copied everything he said, from the time he made his first speech, so far as it is found in the newspapers, and have the volumes in which his speeches are collected. I never had occasion to complain of him on my own account. So far as I know and believe, he had the kindliest feeling for me until his death, and esteemed my public service much more highly than it deserved. But he bitterly and unjustly attacked men whom I loved and honored under circumstances which make it impossible for me to believe that his conduct was consistent with common honesty. He seemed never to care for the soundness of his opinion before he uttered it, or for the truth of the fact before he said it, if only he could produce a rhetorical effect. He seemed to like to defame men whom the people loved and honored. Toward the latter part of his life, he seemed to get desperate. If he failed to make an impression by argument, he took to invective. If vinegar would not answer he resorted to cayenne pepper. If that failed, he tried to throw vitriol in the eyes of the men whom he hated. His remedy for slavery was to destroy the country, and to leave the slave to the unchecked will of the South. During Lincoln's great trial, he attacked and vilified him. At the time when nearly every household in the North was mourning for its dead, he tried to persuade the people that Lincoln did not mean to put down the Rebellion. He never gave the people wise counsel, and rarely told them the honest truth. He rarely gave his homage to anybody. When he did, it was to bad men, and not to good men.

There can be no worse influence upon the youth of the Republic than that which shall induce them to approve sentiments, not because they are true, but only because they are eloquently said.