II. _Dumbness sets the brute below the man: Silence elevates the man
above the brute._
Every one of those hundred orators is to me a more fearful thought than
that of a hundred men gathering samphire. And when we take into account
how large a portion of them (if the present mania hold) are likely to be
commemorated in stone or some even more durable material, the conception
is positively stunning.
Let us settle all scores by subscribing to a colossal statue of the late
Town Crier in bell-metal, with the inscription, "VOX ET PRAETEREA
NIHIL," as a comprehensive tribute to oratorical powers in general.
_He_, at least, never betrayed his clients. As it is, there is no end to
it. We are to set up Horatius Vir in effigy for inventing the Normal
Schoolmaster, and by and by we shall be called on to do the same
ill-turn for Elihu Mulciber for getting uselessly learned (as if any man
had ideas enough for twenty languages!) without any schoolmaster at all.
We are the victims of a droll antithesis. Daniel would not give in to
Nebuchadnezzar's taste in statuary, and we are called on to fall down
and worship an image of Daniel which the Assyrian monarch would have
gone to grass again sooner than have it in his back-parlor. I do not
think lions are agreeable, especially the shaved-poodle variety one is
so apt to encounter;--I met one once at an evening party. But I would be
thrown into a den of them rather than sleep in the same room with that
statue. Posterity will think we cut pretty figures indeed in the
monumental line! Perhaps there is a gleam of hope and a symptom of
convalescence in the fact that the Prince of Wales, during his late
visit, got off without a single speech. The cheerful hospitalities of
Mount Auburn were offered to him, as to all distinguished strangers, but
nothing more melancholy. In his case I doubt the expediency of the
omission. Had we set a score or two of orators on him and his suite, it
would have given them a more intimidating notion of the offensive powers
of the country than West Point and all the Navy Yards put together.
In the name of our common humanity, consider, too, what shifts our
friends in the sculpin line (as we should call them in Chesumpscot) are
put to for originality of design, and what the country has to pay for
it. The Clark Mills (that turns out equestrian statues as the Stark
Mills do calico-patterns) has pocketed fifty thousand dollars for making
a very dead bronze horse stand on his hind legs. For twenty-five cents I
have seen a man at the circus do something more wonderful,--make a very
living bay horse dance a redowa round the amphitheatre on his (it occurs
to me that _hind legs_ is indelicate) posterior extremities to the
wayward music of an out-of-town (_Scoticè_, out-o'-toon) band. Now, I
will make a handsome offer to the public. I propose for twenty-five
thousand dollars to suppress my design for an equestrian statue of a
distinguished general officer as he _would have_ appeared at the Battle
of Buena Vista. This monument is intended as a weathercock to crown the
new dome of the Capitol at Washington. By this happy contrivance, the
horse will be freed from the degrading necessity of touching the earth
at all,--thus distancing Mr. Mills by two feet in the race for
originality. The pivot is to be placed so far behind the middle of the
horse, that the statue, like its original, will always indicate which
way the wind blows by going along with it. The inferior animal I have
resolved to model from a spirited saw-horse in my own collection. In
this way I shall combine two striking advantages. The advocates of the
Ideal in Art cannot fail to be pleased with a charger which embodies, as
it were, merely the abstract notion or quality, Horse, and the attention
of the spectator will not be distracted from the principal figure. The
material to be pure brass. I have also in progress an allegorical group
commemorative of Governor Wise. This, like-Wise, represents only a
potentiality. I have chosen, as worthy of commemoration, the moment when
and the method by which the Governor meant to seize the Treasury at
Washington. His Excellency is modelled in the act of making one of his
speeches. Before him a despairing reporter kills himself by falling on
his own steel pen; a broken telegraph wire hints at the weight of the
thoughts to which it has found itself inadequate; while the Army and
Navy of the United States are conjointly typified in a horse-marine who
flies headlong with his hands pressed convulsively over his ears. I
think I shall be able to have this ready for exhibition by the time Mr.
Wise is nominated for the Presidency,--certainly before he is elected.
The material to be plaster, made of the shells of those oysters with
which Virginia shall have paid her public debt. It may be objected, that
plaster is not durable enough for verisimilitude, since bronze itself
could hardly be expected to outlast one of the Governor's speeches. But
it must be remembered that his mere effigy cannot, like its prototype,
have the pleasure of hearing itself talk; so that to the mind of the
spectator the oratorical despotism is tempered with some reasonable hope
of silence. This design, also, is intended only _in terrorem_, and will
be suppressed for an adequate consideration.
I find one comfort, however, in the very hideousness of our statues. The
fear of what the sculptors will do for them after they are gone may
deter those who are careful of their memories from talking themselves
into greatness. It is plain that Mr. Caleb Cushing has begun to feel a
wholesome dread of this posthumous retribution. I cannot in any other
way account for that nightmare of the solitary horseman on the edge of
the horizon, in his Hartford Speech. His imagination is infected with
the terrible consciousness, that Mr. Mills, as the younger man, will, in
the course of Nature, survive him, and will be left loose to seek new
victims of his nefarious designs. Formerly the punishment of the wooden
horse was a degradation inflicted on private soldiers only; but Mr.
Mills (whose genius could make even Pegasus look wooden, in whatever
material) flies at higher game, and will be content with nothing short
of a general.
Mr. Cushing advises extreme measures. He counsels us to sell our real
estate and stocks, and to leave a country where no man's reputation with
posterity is safe, being merely as clay in the hands of the sculptor. To
a mind undisturbed by the terror natural in one whose military
reputation insures his cutting and running (I mean, of course, in marble
and bronze), the question becomes an interesting one,--To whom, in case
of a general exodus, shall we sell? The statues will have the land all
to themselves,--until the Aztecs, perhaps, repeopling their ancient
heritage, shall pay divine honors to these images, whose ugliness will
revive the traditions of the classic period of Mexican Art. For my own
part, I never look at one of them now without thinking of at least one
human sacrifice.
I doubt the feasibility of Mr. Cushing's proposal, and yet something
ought to be done. We must put up with what we have already, I suppose,
and let Mr. Webster stand threatening to blow us all up with his pistol
pointed at the elongated keg of gunpowder on which his left hand
rests,--no bad type of the great man's state of mind after the
nomination of General Taylor, or of what a country member would call a
penal statue. But do we reflect that Vermont is half marble, and that
Lake Superior can send us bronze enough for regiments of statues? I go
back to my first plan of a prohibitory enactment. I had even gone so far
as to make a rough draught of an Act for the Better Observance of the
Second Commandment; but it occurred to me that convictions under it
would be doubtful, from the difficulty of satisfying a jury that our
graven images did really present a likeness to any of the objects
enumerated in the divine ordinance. Perhaps a double-barrelled statute
might be contrived that would meet both the oratorical and the
monumental difficulty. Let a law be passed that all speeches delivered
more for the benefit of the orator than that of the audience, and all
eulogistic ones of whatever description, be pronounced in the chapel of
the Deaf and Dumb asylum, and all statues be set up within the grounds
of the Institution for the Blind. Let the penalty for infringement in
the one case be to read the last President's Message, and in the other
to look at the Webster statue one hour a day, for a term not so long as
to violate the spirit of the law forbidding cruel and unusual
punishments.
Perhaps it is too much to expect of our legislators that they should
pass so self-denying an ordinance. They might, perhaps, make all oratory
but their own penal, and then (who knows?) the reports of their debates
might be read by the few unhappy persons who were demoniacally possessed
by a passion for that kind of thing, as girls are sometimes said to be
by an appetite for slate pencils. _Vita brevis, lingua longa._ I protest
that among lawgivers I respect Numa, who declared, that, of all the
Camenae, Tacita was most worthy of reverence. The ancient Greeks also
(though they left too much oratory behind them) had some good notions,
especially if we consider that they had not, like modern Europe, the
advantage of communication with America. Now the Greeks had a Muse of
Beginning, and the wonder is, considering how easy it is to talk and how
hard to say anything, that they did not hit upon that other and more
excellent Muse of Leaving-off. The Spartans, I suspect, found her out
and kept her selfishly to themselves. She were indeed a goddess to be
worshipped, a true Sister of Charity among that loquacious sisterhood!
Endlessness is the order of the day. I ask you to compare Plutarch's
lives of demigods and heroes with our modern biographies of deminoughts
and zeroes. Those will appear but tailors and ninth-parts of men in
comparison with these, every one of whom would seem to have had nine
lives, like a cat, to justify such prolixity. Yet the evils of print are
as dust in the balance to those of speech.
We were doing very well in Chesumpscot, but the Lyceum has ruined all.
There are now two debating clubs, seminaries of multiloquence. A few of
us old-fashioned fellows have got up an opposition club and called it
"The Jolly Oysters." No member is allowed to open his mouth except at
high-tide by the calendar. We have biennial festivals on the evening of
election day, when the constituency avenges itself in some small measure
on its Representative elect by sending a baker's dozen of orators to
congratulate him.
But I am falling into the very vice I condemn,--like Carlyle, who has
talked a quarter of a century in praise of holding your tongue. And yet
something should be done about it. Even when we get one orator safely
underground, there are ten to pronounce his eulogy, and twenty to do it
over again when the meeting is held about the inevitable statue. I go to
listen: we all go: we are under a spell. 'T is true, I find a casual
refuge in sleep; for Drummond of Hawthornden was wrong when he called
Sleep the child of Silence. Speech begets her as often. But there is no
sure refuge save in Death; and when my life is closed untimely, let
there be written on my head-stone, with impartial application to these
Black Brunswickers mounted on the high horse of oratory and to our
equestrian statues,--
_Os sublime_ did it!