Part 15 (1/2)

The greatest feat of modern speech, in its immediate effect, was Henry Ward Beecher's speech to the Liverpool mob. A gentleman who heard that speech told me that, notwithstanding the pandemonium that reigned around him, Beecher did not shout, nor speak at the top of his voice, a single time during that terrible four hours.

It is true that aeschines spoke of Demosthenes' delivery of his ”Oration on the Crown” as having the ferocity of a wild beast. I do not see how that can be, however, because Demosthenes selected Isaeus as his teacher for the reason that Isaeus was ”business-like” in method.

This, however, is common to the voices of nearly all great speakers; they have a peculiar power of penetration that carries them much farther than the shout and halloo of the loudest-voiced person. They have, too, a singularly touching and tender quality, which, in a sensuous way, captivates and holds the hearers. James Whitcomb Riley has this quality in his voice when reciting. Edwin Booth had it. All great actors have it. Every true orator has it. It touches you strangely, thrills you, affects you much as music does.

It is a remarkable thing that there _is neither wit nor humor in any of the immortal speeches_ that have fallen from the lips of man. To find a joke in Webster would be an offense. The only things which Ingersoll wrote that will live are his oration at his brother's grave and his famous ”The Past Rises before Me like a Dream.” But in neither of these productions of this genius of jesters is there a single trace of wit.

There is not a funny sally in all Burke's speeches. Lincoln's Gettysburg address, his first and second inaugurals, his speech beginning the Douglas campaign, and his Cooper Union address in New York, are perhaps the only utterances of his that will endure.

Yet this greatest of story-tellers since aesop did not deface one of these great deliverances with story or any form of humor.

The reason for this is found in the whole tendency of human thought and feeling--in the whole melancholy history of the race--where tears and grief, the hard seriousness of life and the terrible and speedy certainty of our common fate of suffering and of death, make somber the master-cord of existence. And the great orator must reflect the deeper soul of his hearers.

So all the immortal things are serious, even sad.

It is so with speech--I mean the speech that affects the convictions and understanding of men. I am excluding now that form of speech which belongs to the same cla.s.s, though not of so high an order, as the theatrical exhibition.

Excepting only Lincoln, the Middle West has produced no greater man than Oliver P. Morton; and few men in our history have had greater power upon an audience both in the immediate and permanent effect of his speeches than did Indiana's great Senator. It is related of him that while a very young man he made a speech so rich in humor and scintillant of wit that it attracted the attention of the whole commonwealth.

Morton, however, was not pleased or flattered. He was alarmed. He feared that what he knew to be his weighty abilities would be held lightly by his fellow citizens. From that time on this Cromwell of the forum never ”told a story” or attempted to amuse his hearers in any way.

Of course, if your mental armory is naturally heavily stocked with the various forms of fun, you are not to be blamed for employing the weapons with which Nature has equipped you and which Nature has peculiarly fitted you to use--although Morton deliberately let them rust. But, generally speaking, it is a distinct descent from the high plane of your address to excite the laughter of your audience. When you do so, you confess that you are not able to hold the attention of your hearers by the sustained and unbroken strength of your argument.

You admit that you are either so dull in your thought or indifferent in your convictions that you know you are wearying your auditors and must rest them by some mental diversion.

Where there is an earnestness of thought (and earnestness is only another name for seriousness) there will always be the same quality in manner--an impressiveness in bearing and delivery. This is inconsistent with merriment of delivery, which robs speech of a certain weight and intrinsic worth. It is also inconsistent with the voice of storm and the hurricane manner.

And men in deadly earnest do not talk loudly. It has been my fortune to see men angry and aroused to the point of killing; they were intense, but quiet. I have also seen that bravado and drunken boisterousness which thought it imitated, and meant to imitate, genuine rage; it was always strident and violent, never dangerous, never sincere. The same thing is true in speech.

There have only been two or three roarers in effective oratory--Mirabeau, by all accounts (though anything can be forgiven a man who can make such speeches as the great Frenchman made), and Demosthenes, if aeschines is to be believed, which I think he is not to be in this particular. He was only excusing his own defeat, and he had to attribute it to delivery. (I think any unprejudiced mind will agree that aeschines made the better argument.) All the other great speakers have, even in their most intense pa.s.sages, and in situations where life and death were involved, been comparatively quiet so far as mere volume of sound is concerned.

I remember, as if it were yesterday, the first great speaker I ever heard. It was Robert G. Ingersoll, delivering a lecture in Des Moines, Iowa, in 1884. He had an audience which would have inspired eloquence in almost any breast. He came on the stage alone, and was very carefully, even elegantly attired, to the smallest item of his grooming.

His address was in ma.n.u.script, and imperfectly committed to memory. He laid it down on a little table at the back of the stage (returning to it occasionally to refresh his memory), and then, in a very natural and matter-of-fact way, walked to the footlights, and, looking the audience frankly in the eyes, began without an instant's hesitation, and in a voice precisely as if he were talking to a friend.

But he was as dramatic at his climaxes as Edwin Booth ever was in Hamlet. His face paled, or seemed to pale; his hands clinched with a desperate energy, and the whole att.i.tude of the man was that of one in awful wrath. Yet his voice was not raised above the common current of the evening's address--if anything, it was lower. While the mature mind cannot endure Ingersoll's rhetoric, it must be acknowledged that his manner of delivery (except when his levity made him coa.r.s.e) was nearly equal to that of Wendell Phillips. Still, in his intense pa.s.sages Ingersoll was almost fiercely earnest. And Plutarch tells us that Cicero's friends feared he would kill himself by bursting a blood-vessel, with such intense energy did he speak.

Both of these men had that instinctive taste of the great speaker which Shakespeare has described better than any one else in literature, when he makes Hamlet tell the players not to ”mouth it, as many of your players do, I had as lief the town-crier spoke my lines.

Nor do not saw the air too much--your hand thus: but use all gently: for in the very torrent, tempest, and (as I may say) the whirlwind of pa.s.sion, you must acquire and beget a temperance, that may give it smoothness. O, it offends me to the soul to hear a robustious, periwig pated fellow tear a pa.s.sion to tatters, to very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings; who, for the most part, are capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb shows and noise: I could have such a fellow whipped for o'erdoing Termagant; it out-herods Herod: pray you, avoid it.”

When I was a very young boy I saw a fist-fight which impressed me as powerfully as any lesson I ever learned at school. An overtall and powerful man, about forty years old, had become angry at a medium-sized but very compact man of about the same age. As his pa.s.sion increased his violence grew, until finally he was shouting his denunciations. The little man stood quietly alert.

Finally, with a great volume of sound, the big man rushed upon the little one with arms swinging in the air, and I looked with interest and curiosity to see the smaller man either run or be demolished. He did neither. His fists were raised quickly but intensely before him, and when the big man was almost upon him, it seemed to me that his right hand did not shoot out farther than ten or twelve inches; but it did shoot out, and the result was as if the big man had been shot, sure enough.

He fell like a slaughtered ox, but rose and came on again, only again to be knocked down. This continued for three or four times, for the giant was ”game”; but finally he was ”thrashed to a standstill,” as the expression has it.

It was a great lesson in life and a great lesson in speaking, which is only a phase of life. The victor came to the point. He did not dissipate his energies. It is so in the manner of speaking. The greatest contrast to the perfect method of Ingersoll which I ever beheld in a man of equal eminence was in the delivery of a lecture by Joseph Cook.

He came on the stage with ostentatious impressiveness. He sat some time before he was introduced, seeming vast and overpowering--a very Matterhorn of consequence. After introduction he stood with one hand thrust in the breast of his tightly b.u.t.toned frock coat, and looked tremendously all over the audience for perhaps an entire minute.

Everybody was awed; he looked so great. We all said to ourselves, ”What a mighty man this is!”