EMERSON AND ORAL DISCOURSE

THEODORE T. STENBERG

"Speech is power: speech is to persuade, to convert, to compel. It is to bring another out of his bad sense into your good sense." 1

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MERICA'S greatest thinker was also a lifelong and assiduous

student and practitioner of the art of oral discourse. Moreover, he entertained some hope of becoming a teacher of the art. At the age of fifty-eight, he wrote these significant words: "Why has never the poorest country college offered me a professorship of rhetoric? I think I could have taught an orator, though I am none." The first sentence quoted is manifestly an expression of disappointment.

No one who reads Emerson's Journals can fail to note that a good deal of space is devoted to comment on eloquence and on orators. The present writer, in taking notes on the Journals preparatory to the writing of this account, has jotted down the word eloquence in a hundred and three different contexts. As regards orators, these notes contain a hundred and forty-two references to Webster, sixty-one to Everett, fifty-two to Channing, forty-six to Burke, nineteen to Choate, sixteen to Phillips, fifteen to Demosthenes, six to Chatham. In addition, the names of many other speakers appear one or more times. This interest in public speaking, as the Journals make sufficiently evident, was continuous throughout Emerson's long career. It is also of significance, in this connection, that the first lecture on Eloquence was written twenty years before the second, the date of the first being 1847 and that of the second 1867.3

'The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. E. W. Emerson, Boston and New York, 1903-4 (Centenary Edition), VIII, 92.

Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, with Annotations, ed. E. W. Emerson and W. E. Forbes, Boston and New York, 1909-14, IX, 413.

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Works, VII, 364, 366.

Emerson descended from an almost unbroken line of clergymen. That this circumstance had an important bearing on his preoccupation with oratory can hardly be doubted. At the age of twenty, he expressed his own view of the matter in these words: "I inherit from my sire a formality of manner and speech, but I derive from him, or from his patriotic parent, a passionate love for the strains of eloquence. I burn after the aliquid immensum infinitumque which Cicero desired." 1

As a boy, Emerson naturally manifested this "passionate love for the strains of eloquence" mainly in declamation. His son, Dr. Edward Waldo Emerson, relates the following: "A gentleman, who in his youth was clerk in Deacon White's store, tells us that he used to love to hear the small Ralph declaim, and would capture him when he came on an errand and set him, nothing loath, on a sugar barrel whence he would entertain his earliest Concord audience, the chance frequenters of the grocery, with recitations of poetry, very likely Campbell's 'Glenara' or the Kosciuski passage, or statelier verses from Milton."2 Emerson himself also has something to offer on this point: "I was a little chubby boy trundling a hoop in Chauncy Place, and spouting poetry from Scott and Campbell at the Latin School." 3

Nor did this interest in declamation die out as he grew older. Dr. Emerson says: "He took the greatest interest in our recitation of poetry, and pleased himself that no one of us could sing, for he said he thought that he had observed that the two gifts of singing and oratory did not go together. Good declamation he highly prized, and used to imitate for us the recitation of certain demigods of the college in those days when all the undergraduates went with interest to hear the Seniors declaim.

"On our return from school after 'Speaking Afternoon' he always asked, 'Did you do well?' 'I don't know.' 'Did the boys study or play, or did they sit still and look at you?' 'Several of them didn't attend.' 'But you must oblige them to. If the orator doesn't command his audience they will command him.'" +

Emerson was not, however, blind to the dangers of declamation in the opprobrious sense, and of empty rhetoric. Referring to the

college declamations and rhetorical exhibitions of his young manhood, he exclaims: "What fools a few sounding sentences and verses made of me and my mates!" 1 In another context he says: "There is nevertheless a foolish belief among teachers that the multitude are not wise enough to discern between good manner and good matter, and that voice and rhetoric will stand, instead of truth. They can tell well enough whether they have been convinced or no. The multitude suppose often that great talents are necessary to produce the elaborate harangues which they hear without emotion of consequence, and so they say, What a fine speaker, What a good discourse; but they will not leave any agreeable employment to go again, and never will do a single thing in consequence of having heard the discourse. But let them hear one of these God-taught teachers and they will surrender to him. They leave their work to come again; they go home and think and talk and act as he said. Men know truth as quick as they see it." 2

While a student at Harvard, Emerson one year took the Boylston prize for declamation. The mere externals of public speaking still seem to have attracted him rather more than the substance. The editors of the Journals say: "The florid oratory then in vogue, especially of the young Southerners, had, for a time, a great attraction for the New England boy." While a sophomore, he helped to organize a literary society, the rules and regulations of which were drawn up by him and two other members. These rules contain two sentences which throw some light on his views at this stage: "The great design of public education is to qualify men for usefulness in active life, and the principal arts by which we can be useful are those of writing and speaking. . . . We are told by those from whose decision there is no appeal that by constant, unwearied practice only can facility and excellence in these arts be attained." 5

But his greatest Harvard experience was his coming under the spell of Everett. The Journals furnish abundant evidence of the importance of this influence. Two years after his graduation, when the spell had to some extent been broken, he writes these words concerning one of Everett's lectures: "Though the lecture contained nothing original, and no very remarkable views, yet it was an account 1Works, III, 295.

'Journals, II, 296-7. Works, VII, 365.

Journals, I, 120-1.

Journals, I, 35.

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of antiquities bearing everywhere that 'fine Roman hand,' and presented in the inimitable style of our Cicero." That this influence had lasting results is made plain in a statement written eighteen years after graduation: "Everett has put more stories, sentences, verses, names in amber for me than any other person." Four years later he records a detailed estimate, only a part of which follows: "There was an influence on the young people from Everett's genius which was almost comparable to that of Pericles in Athens. That man had an inspiration that did not go beyond his head, but which made him the genius of elegance. He had a radiant beauty of person, of a classic style, a heavy, large eye, marble lids, which gave the impression of mass which the slightness of his form needed, sculptured lips, a voice of such rich tones, such precise and perfect utterance that, although slightly nasal, it was the most mellow and beautiful and correct of all the instruments of the time. The word that he spoke, in the manner in which he spoke it, became current and classical in New England." 3 But Everett's limitations are very clear to him: "Meantime all this was a pure triumph of Rhetoric. This man had neither intellectual nor moral principles to teach. He had no thoughts. It was early asked . . . what truths he had thrown into circulation, and how he had enriched the general mind, and agreed that only in graces of manner, only in a new perception of Grecian beauty, had he opened our eyes."

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Shortly after his graduation, Emerson heard one of Channing's sermons, and expresses his admiration in these words: "The language was a transparent medium, conveying with the utmost distinctness the pictures in his mind to the mind of the hearers." And when Webster was chosen representative to Congress in 1822, Emerson writes the following semiprophetic sentence: "A victory is achieved today for one whose name perchance is written highest in the volume of futurity." Webster was soon to become his ideal in the realm of American oratory. Says John Burroughs: "Emerson's description and praise and criticism of Webster form some of the most notable pages in his Journal."

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The Last Harvest, Boston, 1922, p. 61.

As a young clergyman and lecturer he glories in his opportunity: "The high prize of eloquence may be mine, the joy of uttering what no other can utter, and what all must receive." 1 Little by little he drifted away from the pulpit; and during the latter half of his life the lecture was his sole medium for public address. At the age of thirty-six, he says: "I look upon the Lecture-room as the true church of today and as the home of a richer eloquence than Faneuil Hall or the Capitol ever knew." " Again: "A lecture is a new literature, which leaves aside all tradition, time, place, circumstance, and addresses an assembly as mere human beings, no more. It has never yet been done well. It is an organ of sublime power, a panharmonicon for variety of note." " Professor Bliss Perry's judgment is correct: "The oral impulse was strong in this descendant of eloquent sires, the admiring auditor of Everett and Webster, the unwearied searcher and practitioner of the mysteries of the spoken word."

Perhaps it is not amiss to end this account of the development of Emerson's interest in oral discourse with two glowing tributes to the art. At the age of nineteen, two years after graduation from college, he writes what purports to be the glorious history of eloquence: "The new capacities and desires which burned in the human breast, demanded a correspondent perfection in speech,-to body them forth. Then a voice was heard in the assemblies of men, which sounded like the language of the gods; it rolled like music on the ear, and filled the mind with indefinable longings; it was peremptory as the word of kings; or mournful as a widow wailing; or enkindling as the martial clarion. That voice men called Eloquence, and he that had it unlocked their hearts, or turned their actions whithersoever he would. Like sea-waves to the shore, like mountain sheep to their shepherd, so men crowded around this commander of their hearts to drink in his accents, and to mould their passions to his will. The contagion of new desires and improvements went abroad,—and tribe after tribe of barbarians uplifted the banner of Refinement. This spirit-stirring art was propagated also, and although its light sunk often in the socket, it was never put out. Time rolled, and successive ages rapidly developed the mixed and mighty drama of human society, and among the instruments em

Journals, III, 345.

'Journals, V, 298.

Journals, V, 234.

The Praise of Folly and Other Papers, Boston, 1923, p. 117.