A book entitled _Forensic Eloquence_, by Mr. John Goss, appears to have
for purpose to teach the young idea how to spout, and that purpose,
I dare say, it will accomplish if something is not done to prevent.
I know nothing of the matter myself, a strong distaste for forensic
eloquence, or eloquence of any kind implying a man mounted on his
legs and doing all the talking, having averted me from its study. The
training of the youth of this country to utterance of themselves after
that fashion I should regard as a disaster of magnitude. So far as I
know it, forensic eloquence is the art of saying things in such a way
as to make them pass for more than they are worth. Employed in matters
of importance (and for other employment it were hardly worth acquiring)
it is mischievous because dishonest and misleading. In the public
service Truth toils best when not clad in cloth-of-gold and bedaubed
with fine lace. If eloquence does not beget action it is valueless; but
action which results from the passions, sentiments and emotions is
less likely to be wise than that which comes of a persuaded judgment.
For that reason I cannot help thinking that the influence of Bismarck
in German politics was more wholesome than is that of Mr. John Temple
Graves.
For eloquence _per se_—considered merely as an art of pleasing—I
entertain something of the respect evoked by success; for it always
pleases at least the speaker. It is to speech what an ornate style
is to writing—good and pleasant enough in its time and place and,
like pie-crust and the evening girl, destitute of any basis in common
sense. Forensic eloquence, on the contrary, has an all too sufficient
foundation in reason and the order of things: it promotes the ambition
of tricksters and advances the fortunes of rogues. For I take it that
the Ciceros, the Mirabeaus, the Burkes, the O’Connells, the Patrick
Henrys and the rest of them—pets of the text-bookers and scourges of
youth—belong in either the one category or the other, or in both.
Anyhow I find it impossible to think of them as high-minded men and
rightforth statesmen—with their actors’ tricks, their devices of the
countenance, inventions of gesture and other cunning expedients having
nothing to do with the matter in hand. Extinction of the orator I hold
to be the most beneficent possibility of evolution. If Mr. Goss has
done anything to retard that blessed time when the Bourke Cockrans
shall cease from troubling and the weary be at rest he is an enemy of
his race.
“What!” exclaims the thoughtless reader—I have but one—“are not the
great forensic speeches by the world’s famous orators good reading?
Considering them merely as literature do you not derive a high and
refining pleasure from them?” I do not: I find them turgid and tumid
no end. They are bad reading, though they may have been good hearing.
In order to enjoy them one must have in memory what, indeed, one is
seldom permitted to forget: that they were addressed to the ear; and
in imagination one must hold some shadowy simulacrum of the orator
himself, uttering his work. These conditions being fulfilled there
remains for application to the matter of the discourse too little
attention to get much good of it, and the total effect is confusion.
Literature by which the reader is compelled to bear in mind the
producer and the circumstances under which it was produced can be
spared.