|At a dinner table the other night, the talk turned upon a certain
politician whose cynical traffic in principles and loyalties has
eclipsed even the record of Wedderbum or John Churchhil. There was one
defender, an amiable and rather portentous gentleman who did not so much
talk as lecture, and whose habit of looking up abstractedly and fixedly
at some invisible altitude gave him the impression of communing with the
Almighty. He was profuse in his admissions and apologies, but he wound
up triumphantly with the remark:
“But, after all, you must admit that he is a person of genius.”
“So was Madame de Pompadour,” said a voice from the other side of the
table.
It was a devastating retort, swift, unexpected, final. Like all good
replies it had many facets. It lit up the character of the politician
with a comparison of rare wit and truth. He was the courtesan of
democracy who, like the courtesan of the King, trafficked sacred things
for ambition and power, and brought ruin in his train. It ran through
the dull, solemn man on the other side of the table like a rapier. There
was no reply. There was nothing to reply to. You cannot reply to a flash
of lightning. It revealed the speaker himself. Here was a swift,
searching intelligence, equipped with a weapon of tempered steel that
went with deadly certainty to the heart of truth. Above all, it flashed
on the whole landscape of discussion a fresh and clarify ing light that
gave it larger significance and range.
It is the character of all great replies to have this various glamour
and finality. They are not of the stuff of argument. They have the
absoluteness of revelation. They illuminate both subject and
personality. There are men we know intimately simply by some lightning
phrase that has leapt from their lips at the challenge of fundamental
things. I do not know much about the military genius or the deeds of
Augureau, but I know the man by that terrible reply he made to Napoleon
about the celebration at Notre Dame which revealed the imperial
ambitions of the First Consul. Bonaparte asked Augureau what he thought
of the ceremony. “Oh, it was very fine,” replied the general; “there was
nothing wanting, _except the million of men who have perished in pulling
down what you are setting up_.”
And in the same way Luther lives immortally in that shattering reply to
the Cardinal legate at Augsburg. The Cardinal had been sent from Rome to
make him recant by hook or by crook. Remonstrances, threats, entreaties,
bribes were tried. Hopes of high distinction and reward were held out to
him if he would only be reasonable. To the amazement of the proud
Italian, a poor peasant's son--a miserable friar of a country town--was
prepared to defy the power and resist the prayers of the Sovereign of
Christendom.
“What!” said the Cardinal at last to him, “do you think the Pope cares
for the opinion of a German boor? The Pope's little finger is stronger
than all Germany. Do you expect your princes to take up arms to defend
_you--you_, a wretched worm like you? I tell you, no! And where will you
be then--where will you be then?”
“Then, as now,” replied Luther. “Then, as now, in the hands of Almighty
God.”
<b>Not less magnificent was the reply of Thomas Paine to the bishop. The
venom and malice of the ignorant and intolerant have, for more than a
century, poisoned the name and reputation of that great man--one of the
profoundest political thinkers and one of the most saintly men this
country has produced, the friend and secretary of Washington, the
brilliant author of the papers on “The Crisis,” that kept the flame of
the rebellion high in the darkest hour, the first Foreign Secretary of
the United States, the man to whom Lafayette handed the key of the
Bastille for presentation to Washington. The true character of this
great Englishman flashes out in his immortal reply. The bishop had
discoursed “On the goodness of God in making both rich and poor.” And
Paine answered, “God did not make rich and poor. God made male and
female and gave the earth for their inheritance.”</b>
It is not often that a great reply is enveloped with humour. Lincoln had
this rare gift, perhaps, beyond all other men. One does not know whether
to admire most the fun or the searching truth of the reply recorded by
Lord Lyons, who had called on the President and found him blacking his
boots. He expressed a not unnatural surprise at the occupation, and
remarked that people in England did not black their own boots. “Indeed,”
said the President. “Then whose boots do they black?” There was the same
mingling of humour and wisdom in his reply to the lady who anxiously
inquired whether he thought the Lord was on their side. “I do not know,
madam,” he said, “but I hope that we are on the Lord's side.”
And with what homely humour he clothed that magnanimous reply to Raymond
when the famous editor, like so many other supporters, urged him to
dismiss Chase, his Secretary of the Treasury, who had been consistently
disloyal to him and was now his open rival for the Presidency, and was
using his department to further his ambitions. “Raymond,” he said, “you
were brought up on a farm, weren't you? Then you know what a 'chin fly'
is. My brother and I were once ploughing on a Kentucky farm, I driving
the horse and he holding the plough. The horse was lazy; but once he
rushed across the field so that I, with my long legs, could scarcely
keep pace with him. On reaching the end of the furrow, I found an
enormous chin fly fastened upon him and I knocked him off. My brother
asked me what I did that for. I told him I didn't want the old horse
bitten in that way. 'Why,' said my brother, 'that's all that made him
go!' Now, if Mr Chase has got a presidential 'chin-fly' biting him, I'm
not going to knock it off, if it will only make his department _go!_” If
one were asked to name the most famous answer in history, one might, not
unreasonably, give the palm to a woman--a poor woman, too, who has been
dust for three thousand years, whose very name is unknown; but who spoke
six words that gave her immortality. They have been recalled on
thousands of occasions and in all lands, but never more memorably than
by John Bright when he was speaking of the hesitation with which he
accepted cabinet office: “I should have preferred much,” he said, “to
have remained in the common rank of citizenship in which heretofore I
have lived. There is a passage in the Old Testament that has often
struck me as being one of great beauty. Many of you will recollect that
the prophet, in journeying to and fro, was very hospitably entertained
by a Shunamite woman. In return, he wished to make her some amends, and
he called her to him and asked her what there was he should do for her.
'Shall I speak for thee to the King?' he said, 'or to the captain of the
host.' Now, it has always appeared to me that the Shunamite woman
returned a great answer. She replied, in declining the prophet's offer,
'I dwell among mine own people.'”
It is the quality of a great reply that it does not so much answer the
point as obliterate it. It is the thunder of Sinai breaking in on the
babble of vulgar minds. The current of thought is changed, as if
by magic, from mean things to sublime things, from the gross to the
spiritual, from the trivial to the enduring. Clever replies, witty
replies, are another matter. Anybody can make them with a sharp
tongue and a quick mind. But great replies are not dependent on wit or
cleverness. If they were Cicero would have made many, whereas he never
made one. His repartees are perfect of their kind, but they belong to
the debating club and the law court. They raise a laugh and score a
point, but they are summer lightnings. The great reply does not come
from witty minds, but from rare and profound souls. The brilliant
adventurer, Napoleon, could no more have made that reply of Augereau
than a rabbit could play Bach. He could not have made it because with
all his genius he was as soulless a man as ever played a great part on
the world's stage.
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[Illustration: 0102]