itself. They cannot be too much considered and practised as preparation,
but the powers are those I first named. If I should make the shortest
list of the qualifications of the orator, I should begin with
_manliness_; and perhaps it means here presence of mind. Men differ so
much in control of their faculties! You can find in many, and indeed in
all, a certain fundamental equality. Fundamentally all feel alike and
think alike, and at a great heat they can all express themselves with an
almost equal force. But it costs a great heat to enable a heavy man to
come up with those who have a quick sensibility. Thus we have all of us
known men who lose their talents, their wit, their fancy, at any sudden
call. Some men, on such pressure, collapse, and cannot rally. If they
are to put a thing in proper shape, fit for the occasion and the
audience, their mind is a blank. Something which any boy would tell with
color and vivacity they can only stammer out with hard literalness,--say
it in the very words they heard, and no other. This fault is very
incident to men of study,--as if the more they had read the less they
knew. Dr. Charles Chauncy was, a hundred years ago, a man of marked
ability among the clergy of New England. But when once going to preach
the Thursday lecture in Boston (which in those days people walked from
Salem to hear), on going up the pulpit stairs he was informed that a
little boy had fallen into Frog Pond on the Common, and was drowned, and
the doctor was requested to improve the sad occasion. The doctor was
much distressed, and in his prayer he hesitated,--he tried to make soft
approaches,--he prayed for Harvard College, he prayed for the schools,
he implored the Divine Being "to-to-to bless to them all the boy that
was this morning drowned in Frog Pond." Now this is not want of talent
or learning, but of manliness. The doctor, no doubt, shut up in his
closet and his theology, had lost some natural relation to men, and
quick application of his thought to the course of events. I should add
what is told of him,--that he so disliked the "sensation" preaching of
his time that he had once prayed that "he might never be eloquent"; and,
it appears, his prayer was granted. On the other hand, it would be easy
to point to many masters whose readiness is sure; as the French say of
Guizot, that "what Guizot learned this morning he has the air of having
known from all eternity." This unmanliness is so common a result of our
half-education,--teaching a youth Latin and metaphysics and history, and
neglecting to give him the rough training of a boy,--allowing him to
skulk from the games of ball and skates and coasting down the hills on
his sled, and whatever else would lead him and keep him on even terms
with boys, so that he can meet them as an equal, and lead in his
turn,--that I wish his guardians to consider that they are thus
preparing him to play a contemptible part when he is full-grown. In
England they send the most delicate and protected child from his
luxurious home to learn to rough it with boys in the public schools. A
few bruises and scratches will do him no harm if he has thereby learned
not to be afraid. It is this wise mixture of good drill in Latin grammar
with good drill in cricket, boating, and wrestling, that is the boast of
English education, and of high importance to the matter in hand.
Lord Ashley, in 1606, while the bill for regulating trials in cases of
high treason was pending, attempting to utter a premeditated speech in
Parliament in favor of that clause of the bill which allowed the
prisoner the benefit of counsel, fell into such a disorder that he was
not able to proceed; but, having recovered his spirits and the command
of his faculties, he drew such an argument from his own confusion as
more advantaged his cause than all the powers of eloquence could have
done. "For," said he, "if I, who had no personal concern in the
question, was so overpowered with my own apprehensions that I could not
find words to express myself, what must be the case of one whose life
depended on his own abilities to defend it?" This happy turn did great
service in promoting that excellent bill.
These are ascending stairs,--a good voice, winning manners, plain
speech, chastened, however, by the schools into correctness; but we must
come to the main matter, of power of statement,--know your fact; hug
your fact. For the essential thing is heat, and heat comes of sincerity.
Speak what you do know and believe, and are personally in it, and are
answerable for every word. Eloquence is _the power to translate a truth
into language perfectly intelligible to the person to whom you speak_.
He who would convince the worthy Mr. Dunderhead of any truth which
Dunderhead does not see, must be a master of his art. Declamation is
common; but such possession of thought as is here required, such
practical chemistry as the conversion of a truth written in God's
language into a truth in Dunderhead's language, is one of the most
beautiful and cogent weapons that is forged in the shop of the Divine
Artificer.
It was said of Robespierre's audience, that though they understood not
the words, they understood a fury in the words, and caught the
contagion.
This leads us to the high class, the men of character who bring an
overpowering personality into court, and the cause they maintain borrows
importance from an illustrious advocate. Absoluteness is required, and
he must have it or simulate it. If the cause be unfashionable, he will
make it fashionable. 'Tis the best man in the best training. If he does
not know your fact, he will show that it is not worth the knowing.
Indeed, as great generals do not fight many battles, but conquer by
tactics, so all eloquence is a war of posts. What is said is the least
part of the oration. It is the attitude taken, the unmistakable sign,
never so casually given, in tone of voice, or manner, or word, that a
greater spirit speaks from you than is spoken to in him.
But I say, _provided your cause is really honest_. There is always the
previous question: How came you on that side? Your argument is
ingenious, your language copious, your illustrations brilliant, but your
major proposition palpably absurd. Will you establish a lie? You are a
very elegant writer, but you can't write up what gravitates down.
An ingenious metaphysical writer, Dr. Stirling of Edinburgh, has noted
that intellectual works in any department breed each other by what he
calls _zymosis_, i.e. fermentation; thus in the Elizabethan Age there
was a dramatic _zymosis_, when all the genius ran in that direction,
until it culminated in Shakspeare; so in Germany we have seen a
metaphysical _zymosis_ culminating in Kant, Schelling, Schleiermacher,
Schopenhauer, Hegel, and so ending. To this we might add the great eras
not only of painters but of orators. The historian Paterculus says of
Cicero, that only in Cicero's lifetime was any great eloquence in Rome;
so it was said that no member of either house of the British Parliament
will be ranked among the orators whom Lord North did not see, or who did
not see Lord North. But I should rather say that when a great sentiment,
as religion or liberty, makes itself deeply felt in any age or country,
then great orators appear. As the Andes and Alleghanies indicate the
line of the fissure in the crust of the earth along which they were
lifted, so the great ideas that suddenly expand at some moment the mind
of mankind indicate themselves by orators.
If there ever was a country where eloquence was a power, it is in the
United States. Here is room for every degree of it, on every one of its
ascending stages,--that of useful speech, in our commercial,
manufacturing, railroad, and educational conventions; that of political
advice and persuasion on the grandest theatre, reaching, as all good men
trust, into a vast future, and so compelling the best thought and
noblest administrative ability that the citizen can offer. And here are
the service of science, the demands of art, and the lessons of religion
to be brought home to the instant practice of thirty millions of people.
Is it not worth the ambition of every generous youth to train and arm
his mind with all the resources of knowledge, of method, of grace, and
of character, to serve such a constituency?
RESOURCES.
RESOURCES.
MEN are made up of potences. We are magnets in an iron globe. We have
keys to all doors. We are all inventors, each sailing out on a voyage of
discovery, guided each by a private chart, of which there is no
duplicate. The world is all gates, all opportunities, strings of tension
waiting to be struck; the earth sensitive as iodine to light; the most
plastic and impressionable medium, alive to every touch, and, whether
searched by the plough of Adam, the sword of Cæsar, the boat of
Columbus, the telescope of Galileo, or the surveyor's chain of Picard,
or the submarine telegraph, to every one of these experiments it makes a
gracious response. I am benefited by every observation of a victory of
man over nature,--by seeing that wisdom is better than strength; by
seeing that every healthy and resolute man is an organizer, a method
coming into a confusion and drawing order out of it. We are touched and
cheered by every such example. We like to see the inexhaustible riches
of Nature, and the access of every soul to her magazines. These examples
wake an infinite hope, and call every man to emulation. A low, hopeless
spirit puts out the eyes; scepticism is slow suicide. A philosophy which
sees only the worst; believes neither in virtue nor in genius; which
says 'tis all of no use, life is eating us up, 'tis only question who
shall be last devoured,--dispirits us; the sky shuts down before us. A
Schopenhauer, with logic and learning and wit, teaching
pessimism,--teaching that this is the worst of all possible worlds, and
inferring that sleep is better than waking, and death than sleep,--all
the talent in the world cannot save him from being odious. But if,
instead of these negatives, you give me affirmatives,--if you tell me
that there is always life for the living; that what man has done man can
do; that this world belongs to the energetic; that there is always a way
to everything desirable; that every man is provided, in the new bias of
his faculty, with a key to nature, and that man only rightly knows
himself as far as he has experimented on things,--I am invigorated, put
into genial and working temper; the horizon opens, and we are full of
good-will and gratitude to the Cause of Causes. I like the sentiment of
the poor woman who, coming from a wretched garret in an inland
manufacturing town for the first time to the sea-shore, gazing at the
ocean, said "she was glad for once in her life to see something which
there was enough of."
Our Copernican globe is a great factory or shop of power, with its
rotating constellations, times, and tides. The machine is of colossal
size; the diameter of the water-wheel, the arms of the levers, and the
volley of the battery, out of all mechanic measure; and it takes long to
understand its parts and its workings. This pump never sucks; these
screws are never loose; this machine is never out of gear. The vat, the
piston, the wheels and tires, never wear out, but are self-repairing. Is
there any load which water cannot lift? If there be, try steam; or if
not that, try electricity. Is there any exhausting of these means?
Measure by barrels the spending of the brook that runs through your
field. Nothing is great but the inexhaustible wealth of Nature. She
shows us only surfaces, but she is million fathoms deep. What spaces!
what durations! dealing with races as merely preparations of somewhat to
follow; or, in humanity, millions of lives of men to collect the first
observations on which our astronomy is built; millions of lives to add
only sentiments and guesses, which at last, gathered in by an ear of
sensibility, make the furniture of the poet. See how children build up a
language; how every traveller, every laborer, every impatient boss, who
sharply shortens the phrase or the word to give his order quicker,
reducing it to the lowest possible terms,--and there it must
stay,--improves the national tongue. What power does Nature not owe to
her duration of amassing infinitesimals into cosmical forces!
The marked events in history, as the emigration of a colony to a new and
more delightful coast; the building of a large ship; the discovery of
the mariner's compass, which perhaps the Phœnicians made; the arrival
among an old stationary nation of a more instructed race, with new arts:
each of these events electrifies the tribe to which it befalls; supples
the tough barbarous sinew, and brings it into that state of sensibility
which makes the transition to civilization possible and sure. By his
machines man can dive and remain under water like a shark; can fly like
a hawk in the air; can see atoms like a gnat; can see the system of the
universe like Uriel, the angel of the sun; can carry whatever loads a
ton of coal can lift; can knock down cities with his fist of gunpowder;
can recover the history of his race by the medals which the deluge, and
every creature, civil or savage or brute, has involuntarily dropped of
its existence; and divine the future possibility of the planet and its
inhabitants by his perception of laws of nature. Ah! what a plastic
little creature he is! so shifty, so adaptive! his body a chest of
tools, and he making himself comfortable in every climate, in every
condition.
Here in America are all the wealth of soil, of timber, of mines, and of
the sea, put into the possession of a people who wield all these
wonderful machines, have the secret of steam, of electricity, and have
the power and habit of invention in their brain. We Americans have got
suppled into the state of melioration. Life is always rapid here, but
what acceleration to its pulse in ten years,--what in the four years of
the war! We have seen the railroad and telegraph subdue our enormous
geography; we have seen the snowy deserts on the northwest, seats of
Esquimaux, become lands of promise. When our population, swarming west,
had reached the boundary of arable land, as if to stimulate our energy,
on the face of the sterile waste beyond, the land was suddenly in parts
found covered with gold and silver, floored with coal. It was thought a
fable, what Guthrie, a traveller in Persia, told us, that "in Taurida,
in any piece of ground where springs of naphtha (or petroleum) obtain,
by merely sticking an iron tube in the earth, and applying a light to
the upper end, the mineral oil will burn till the tube is decomposed, or
for a vast number of years." But we have found the Taurida in
Pennsylvania and Ohio. If they have not the lamp of Aladdin, they have
the Aladdin oil. Resources of America! why, one thinks of St. Simon's
saying, "The Golden Age is not behind, but before you." Here is man in
the Garden of Eden; here the Genesis and the Exodus. We have seen
slavery disappear like a painted scene in a theatre; we have seen the
most healthful revolution in the politics of the nation,--the
Constitution not only amended, but construed in a new spirit. We have
seen China opened to European and American ambassadors and commerce; the
like in Japan: our arts and productions begin to penetrate both. As the
walls of a modern house are perforated with water-pipes, sound-pipes,
gas-pipes, heat-pipes, so geography and geology are yielding to man's
convenience, and we begin to perforate and mould the old ball, as a
carpenter does with wood. All is ductile and plastic. We are working the
new Atlantic telegraph. American energy is overriding every venerable
maxim of political science. America is such a garden of plenty, such a
magazine of power, that at her shores all the common rules of political
economy utterly fail. Here is bread, and wealth, and power, and
education for every man who has the heart to use his opportunity. The
creation of power had never any parallel. It was thought that the
immense production of gold would make gold cheap as pewter. But the
immense expansion of trade has wanted every ounce of gold, and it has
not lost its value.
See how nations of customers are formed. The disgust of California has
not been able to drive nor kick the Chinaman back to his home; and now
it turns out that he has sent home to China American food and tools and
luxuries, until he has taught his people to use them, and a new market
has grown up for our commerce. The emancipation has brought a whole
nation of negroes as customers to buy all the articles which once their
few masters bought, and every manufacturer and producer in the North has
an interest in protecting the negro as the consumer of his wares.
The whole history of our civil war is rich in a thousand anecdotes
attesting the fertility of resource, the presence of mind, the skilled
labor of our people. At Annapolis a regiment, hastening to join the
army, found the locomotives broken, the railroad destroyed, and no
rails. The commander called for men in the ranks who could rebuild the
road. Many men stepped forward, searched in the water, found the hidden
rails, laid the track, put the disabled engine together, and continued
their journey. The world belongs to the energetic man. His will gives
him new eyes. He sees expedients and means where we saw none. The
invalid sits shivering in lamb's-wool and furs; the woodsman knows how
to make warm garments out of cold and wet themselves. The Indian, the
sailor, the hunter, only these know the power of the hands, feet, teeth,
eyes, and ears. It is out of the obstacles to be encountered that they
make the means of destroying them. The sailor by his boat and sail makes
a ford out of deepest waters. The hunter, the soldier, rolls himself in
his blanket, and the falling snow, which he did not have to bring in his
knapsack, is his eider-down, in which he sleeps warm till the morning.
Nature herself gives the hint and the example, if we have wit to take
it. See how Nature keeps the lakes warm by tucking them up under a
blanket of ice, and the ground under a cloak of snow. The old forester
is never far from shelter; no matter how remote from camp or city, he
carries Bangor with him. A sudden shower cannot wet him, if he cares to
be dry; he draws his boat ashore, turns it over in a twinkling against
a clump of alders, with cat-briers, which keep up the lee-side, crawls
under it, with his comrade, and lies there till the shower is over,
happy in his stout roof. The boat is full of water, and resists all your
strength to drag it ashore and empty it. The fisherman looks about him,
puts a round stick of wood underneath, and it rolls as on wheels at
once. Napoleon says, the Corsicans at the battle of Golo, not having had
time to cut down the bridge, which was of stone, made use of the bodies
of their dead to form an intrenchment. Malus, known for his discoveries
in the polarization of light, was captain of a corps of engineers in
Bonaparte's Egyptian campaign, which was heinously unprovided and
exposed. "Wanting a picket to which to attach my horse," he says, "I
tied him to my leg. I slept, and dreamed peaceably of the pleasures of
Europe." M. Tissenet had learned among the Indians to understand their
language, and, coming among a wild party of Illinois, he overheard them
say that they would scalp him. He said to them, "Will you scalp me? Here
is my scalp," and confounded them by lifting a little periwig he wore.
He then explained to them that he was a great medicine-man, and that
they did great wrong in wishing to harm him, who carried them all in his
heart. So he opened his shirt a little and showed to each of the savages
in turn the reflection of his own eyeball in a small pocket-mirror which
he had hung next to his skin. He assured them that if they should
provoke him he would burn up their rivers and their forests; and, taking
from his portmanteau a small phial of white brandy, he poured it into a
cup, and, lighting a straw at the fire in the wigwam, he kindled the
brandy (which they believed to be water), and burned it up before their
eyes. Then taking up a chip of dry pine, he drew a burning-glass from
his pocket and set the chip on fire.
What a new face courage puts on everything! A determined man, by his
very attitude and the tone of his voice, puts a stop to defeat, and
begins to conquer. "For they can conquer who believe they can." Every
one hears gladly that cheerful voice. He reveals to us the enormous
power of one man over masses of men; that one man whose eye commands the
end in view, and the means by which it can be attained, is not only
better than ten men or a hundred men, but victor over all mankind who do
not see the issue and the means. "When a man is once possessed with
fear," said the old French Marshal Montluc, "and loses his judgment, as
all men in a fright do, he knows not what he does. And it is the
principal thing you are to beg at the hands of Almighty God, to preserve
your understanding entire; for what danger soever there may be, there is
still one way or other to get off, and perhaps to your honor. But when
fear has once possessed you, God ye good even! You think you are flying
towards the poop when you are running towards the prow, and for one
enemy think you have ten before your eyes, as drunkards who see a
thousand candles at once."
Against the terrors of the mob, which, intoxicated with passion, and
once suffered to gain the ascendant, is diabolic and chaos come again,
good sense has many arts of prevention and of relief. Disorganization it
confronts with organization, with police, with military force. But in
earlier stages of the disorder it applies milder and nobler remedies.
The natural offset of terror is ridicule. And we have noted examples
among our orators, who have on conspicuous occasions handled and
controlled, and, best of all, converted a malignant mob, by superior
manhood, and by a wit which disconcerted, and at last delighted the
ringleaders. What can a poor truckman who is hired to groan and to hiss
do, when the orator shakes him into convulsions of laughter so that he
cannot throw his egg? If a good story will not answer, still milder
remedies sometimes serve to disperse a mob. Try sending round the
contribution-box. Mr. Marshall, the eminent manufacturer at Leeds, was
to preside at a Free-Trade festival in that city; it was threatened that
the operatives, who were in bad humor, would break up the meeting by a
mob. Mr. Marshall was a man of peace; he had the pipes laid from the
waterworks of his mill, with a stopcock by his chair from which he could
discharge a stream that would knock down an ox, and sat down very
peacefully to his dinner, which was not disturbed.
See the dexterity of the good aunt in keeping the young people all the
weary holiday busy and diverted without knowing it: the story, the
pictures, the ballad, the game, the cuckoo-clock, the stereoscope, the
rabbits, the mino bird, the pop-corn, and Christmas hemlock spurting in
the fire. The children never suspect how much design goes to it, and
that this unfailing fertility has been rehearsed a hundred times, when
the necessity came of finding for the little Asmodeus a rope of sand to
twist. She relies on the same principle that makes the strength of
Newton,--alternation of employment. See how he refreshed himself,
resting from the profound researches of the calculus by astronomy; from
astronomy by optics; from optics by chronology. 'Tis a law of chemistry
that every gas is a vacuum to every other gas; and when the mind has
exhausted its energies for one employment, it is still fresh and capable
of a different task. We have not a toy or trinket for idle amusement,
but somewhere it is the one thing needful for solid instruction or to
save the ship or army. In the Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, the torches
which each traveller carries make a dismal funeral procession, and serve
no purpose but to see the ground. When now and then the vaulted roof
rises high overhead, and hides all its possibilities in lofty depths,
'tis but gloom on gloom. But the guide kindled a Roman candle, and held
it here and there shooting its fireballs successively into each crypt of
the groined roof, disclosing its starry splendor, and showing for the
first time what that plaything was good for.
Whether larger or less, these strokes and all exploits rest at last on
the wonderful structure of the mind. And we learn that our doctrine of
resources must be carried into higher application, namely, to the
intellectual sphere. But every power in energy speedily arrives at its
limits, and requires to be husbanded; the law of light, which Newton
said proceeded by "fits of easy reflection and transmission"; the
come-and-go of the pendulum is the law of mind; alternation of labors is
its rest. I should like to have the statistics of bold experimenting on
the husbandry of mental power.
In England men of letters drink wine; in Scotland, whiskey; in France,
light wines; in Germany, beer. In England everybody rides in the saddle;
in France the theatre and the ball occupy the night. In this country we
have not learned how to repair the exhaustions of our climate. Is not
the seaside necessary in summer? Games, fishing, bowling, hunting,
gymnastics, dancing,--are not these needful to you? The chapter of
pastimes is very long. There are better games than billiards and whist.
'Twas a pleasing trait in Goethe's romance, that Makaria retires from
society "to astronomy and her correspondence."