Lord Macaulay has made all the world familiar with the bray of Exeter
Hall. Exeter Hall, when it does bray, does so to some purpose. It is in
vain fighting Exeter Hall. It is the parliament of the middle classes.
It has an influence for good or bad no legislator can overlook--to which
often the assembly in St. Stephen's is compelled to bow. I have seen a
Prince Consort presiding at a public meeting in Exeter Hall; on its
platform I have heard our greatest orators and statesmen declaim. In
England who can over estimate the influence of woman? and in Exeter Hall,
in the season, nine benches out of ten are filled with women. The
oratory of Exeter Hall is not parliamentary. A man may shine before a
legal tribunal--may shine on the floor of the House of Commons--may be
great among the Lords--and yet utterly fail in Exeter Hall. He may even
be a popular preacher, and yet not move the masses that crowd the Strand,
when a public meeting, chiefly religious, occasionally philanthropic,
never political, is being held.
On your right-hand side, as you pass along the Strand, you see a lofty
door, evidently leading to some immense building within. It is called
Exeter Hall, for it stands where in old times stood Exeter Change, and
still has its live lions, which are very numerous, especially in the
months of May and June. You enter the door and ascend a long and ample
staircase, which conducts you to one of the finest public rooms in the
metropolis. What popular passions have I not seen here! What
contradictory utterances have I not heard here! High Church--Low
Church--Methodism--Dissent--have all appealed from that platform to those
benches crowded with living souls. From that platform, accompanying that
organ, seven hundred voices join often in Handel's majestic strains.
Underneath me are the offices of the various societies whose aims are
among the noblest that can be proposed to man. Westminster Hall is a
fine hall, but this in which I am is eight feet wider than that--131 feet
long, 76 feet wide, and 45 feet high, and will contain with comfort more
than 3,000 persons. On the night of which I now write it was well filled
by an audience, such as a few years back could not have been collected
for love or money, but which now can be got together with the greatest
ease, not merely in London, but in Manchester, in Birmingham, in
Liverpool, in all our great seats of industry, of intelligence, and life.
I mean an audience of men and women who have come to see intemperance to
be the great curse of this our age and land, and who have resolved to
abstain themselves from all intoxicating drink, and to encourage others
to do so as well. Evidently something great was expected. The western
gallery was covered with tastefully-decorated cloth, on which was
inscribed, in emblazoned silver letters, thirty inches deep, "The London
Temperance League," with an elaborate painted border, composed of
garlands of flowers. The royal gallery, and the smaller one opposite,
was covered with scarlet cloth, on which were arranged rose-coloured
panels, with the words, "London Temperance League," in silver letters.
The front of the platform and the reporters' box was also decorated in a
similar manner. At the end of the royal gallery was fixed a large royal
standard, the folds of which hung gracefully over the heads of the
audience. Under the royal standard was placed the union-jack. At the
end of the opposite gallery proudly waved the banner of the great
Republic of the West. The platform was decorated with flags, bearing
inscriptions of various kinds. Like the stars in the heavens, or the
sands on the sea shore, they were innumerable. In front of the organ
were arranged the choir of the Temperance Societies, and on the floor of
the platform were placed the Shapcott family, with their Sax-horns.
Why was all this preparation made? For what purpose that living
multitude of warm hearts? The answer is soon given. Some twenty-four
years back a poor lad, without money and learning--almost without
friends--was shipped off to America, to try his fortune in the New World.
Arrived there, the lad became a man, lived by the sweat of his brow,
learned to drink, to be a boon companion, and fell as most fall; for
there is that in the flowing bowl and the wine when it is red, which few
can withstand. Friends left him; he became an outcast and a wanderer; he
sank lower and lower; he walked in rags; he loathed life; his frame
became emaciated with disease; there was none to pity or to save. It
seemed for that man there was nothing left but to lie down and die.
However, whilst there is life there is hope. That man, in his
degradation and despair, was reached; he signed the Temperance pledge; he
became an advocate of the Temperance cause. His words were words of
power; they touched men's hearts, they fired men's souls. He led the
life of an apostle; wherever he went the drunkard was reclaimed; zeal was
excited, the spell of the sparkling cup was gone, humanity was saved, and
now he had returned for awhile to his native land to advocate the cause
which had been a salvation to his own soul and life, and these men and
women--these hopeful youths--these tender-hearted maidens--have come to
give him welcome. Already every eye in that vast assembly is turned to
the quarter whence it is expected the hero of the night will appear. At
length the appointed hour arrives, a band of Temperance reformers move
towards the platform, with the flags of Britain and America waving, as we
trust they may long do, harmoniously together. Familiar faces are
seen--Cruikshank--Buckingham--Cassell; but there is one form, apparently
a stranger; it is John B. Gough. A few words from Mr. Buckingham, who
presides, and the stranger comes forward; but he is no stranger, for the
British greeting, that almost deafens his ears, while it opens his heart,
makes him feel himself at once at home.
Well, popular enthusiasm has toned down--the audience has reseated
itself--a song of welcome has been sung, and there stands up a man of
middle size and middle age. Lord Bacon deemed himself ancient when he
was thirty-one--we moderns, in our excessive self-love, delude each other
into the belief that we are middle-aged when we are anywhere between
forty and sixty. In reality, a middle-aged man should be somewhere about
thirty-five, and such we take to be Mr. Gough's age. He is dressed in
sober black--his hair is dark, and so is his face; but there is a
muscular vigour in his frame for which we were not prepared. We should
judge Gough has a large share of the true _elixir vitae_--animal spirits.
His voice is one of great power and pathos, and he speaks without an
effort. The first sentence, as it falls gently and easily from his lips,
tells us that Gough has that true oratorical power which neither money,
nor industry, nor persevering study, can ever win. Like the poet, the
orator must be born. You may take a man six feet high; he shall be
good-looking, have a good voice, and speak English with a correct
pronunciation--you shall write for that man a splendid speech--you shall
have him taught elocution by Mr. Webster, and yet you shall no more make
that man an orator than, to use a homely phrase, you can make a silk
purse out of a sow's ear. Gough is an orator born. Pope tells us he
"lisped in numbers," and in his boyhood Gough must have had the true
tones of the orator on his tongue. There was no effort--no fluster--all
was easy and natural. He was speaking for the first time to a public
meeting in his native land--speaking to thousands who had come with the
highest expectations--who expected much and required much--speaking, by
means of the press, to the whole British public. Under such
circumstances, occasional nervousness would have been pardonable; but,
from the first, Gough was perfectly self-possessed. There are some men
who have prodigious advantages on account of appearance alone. We think
it was Fox who said it was impossible for any one to be as wise as
Thurlow looked. The great Lord Chatham was particularly favoured by
nature in this respect. In our own time--in the case of Lord Denman--we
have seen how much can be done by means of a portly presence and a
stately air. Gough has nothing of this. He is just as plain a personage
as George Dawson of Birmingham would be if he were to cut his hair and
shave off his moustache; but, though we have named George Dawson, Gough
does not speak like him, or any other living man. Gough is no servile
copy, but a real original. We have no one in England we can compare him
to. Our popular lecturers, such as George Dawson, Henry Vincent, George
Thompson, are very different men. They have all a studied quaintness or
a studied rhetoric. There is something artificial about them all. In
Gough there is nothing of this. He seems to speak by inspiration. As
the apostles spoke who were commanded not to think beforehand what they
should say--the spoken word seems to come naturally, as air bubbles up
from the bottom of the well. In what he said there was nothing
new--there could be nothing new--the tale he told was old as the hills;
yet, as he spoke, an immense audience grew hushed and still, and hearts
were melted, and tears glistened in female eyes, and that great human
mass became knit together by a common spell. Disraeli says, Sir Robert
Peel played upon the House of Commons as an old fiddle; Gough did the
same at Exeter Hall. At his bidding, stern, strong men, as well as
sensitive women, wept or laughed--they swelled with indignation or
desire. Of the various chords of human passions he was master. At times
he became roused, and we thought how
"In his ire Olympian Pericles
Thundered and lightened, and all Hellas shook."
At other times, in his delineation of American manners, he proved himself
almost an equal to Selsbee. Off the stage we have nowhere seen a better
mimic than Gough, and this must give him great power, especially in
circles where the stage is as much a _terra incognita_ as Utopia, or the
Island of Laputa itself. We have always thought that a fine figure of
Byron, where he tells us that he laid his hand upon the ocean's mane.
Something of the same kind might be said to be applicable to Mr. Gough.
He seemed to ride upon the audience--to have mastered it completely to
his will. He seemed to bestride it as we could imagine Alexander
bestriding his Bucephalus. Since then Mr. Gough has spoken in Exeter
Hall nearly seventy times--has endured cruel misrepresentations--yet his
attractions are as great, and his audiences as overflowing as over. The
truth is, in his strength and weakness Gough is the very personification
of an Exeter Hall orator. You may object to his exaggerations--you may
find fault with his digressions--you may pooh-pooh his arguments--you may
question the good taste of some of his allusions--you may wonder how
people can applaud, and laugh at, or weep over, what they have applauded,
or laughed at, or wept over a dozen times before: but they do; that no
one can deny.
Gough spoke for nearly two hours. Evidently the audience could have
listened, had he gone on, till midnight. We often hear that the age of
oratory has gone by--that the press supersedes the tongue--that the
appeal must henceforth be made to the reader in his study, not to the
hearer in the crowded hall. There is much truth in that. Nevertheless,
the true orator will always please his audience, and true oratory will
never die. The world will always respond to it. The human heart will
always leap up to it. The finest efforts of the orator have been amongst
civilised audiences. It was a cultivated audience before whom
Demosthenes pleaded; to whom, standing on Mars-hill, Paul preached of an
unknown God. The true orator, like the true poet, speaks to all. He
gathers around him earth's proudest as well as poorest intellects.
Notwithstanding, then, the march of mind, oratory may win her triumphs
still. So long as the heart is true to its old instinct--so long as it
can pity, or love, or hate, or fear, it will be moved by the orator, if
he can but pity or love, or hate or fear himself. This is the true
secret. This is it that made Gough the giant that he is. Without that
he might be polished, learned, master of all human lore; but he would be
feeble and impotent as the
"Lorn lyre that ne'er hath spoken
Since the sad day its master chord was broken."