doubt. So at least shall you get an adequate deliverance. . . . But assume a consent and it shall be granted, since really and underneath their external diversities, all men are of one heart and mind.”1 "Speak the affirmative; emphasize your choice by utter ignoring of all that you reject; seeing that opinions are temporary, but convictions uniform and eternal,-seeing that a sentiment never loses pathos or persuasion, but is youthful after a thousand years." 2

Aim to create in your hearer independence of mind rather than dependence. "I have been writing and speaking what were once called novelties, for twenty-five or thirty years, and have not now one disciple. Why? Not that what I said was not true; not that it has not found intelligent receivers; but because it did not go from any wish in me to bring men to me, but to themselves. I delight in driving them from me. What could I do if they came to me?-they would interrupt and encumber me. This is my boast that I have no school follower. I should account it a measure of the impurity of insight, if it did not create independence." "

Take the occasion into account. "In eloquence, the great triumphs of the art are when the orator is lifted above himself; when consciously he makes himself the mere tongue of the occasion and the hour, and says what cannot but be said. Hence the term abandonment, to describe the self-surrender of the orator. Not his will, but the principle on which he is horsed, the great connection and crisis of events, thunder in the ear of the crowd." "I remember his appearance at Bunker's Hill. There was the Monument, and here was Webster. He knew that a little more or less of rhetoric signified nothing: he was only to say plain things and equal things,— grand things if he had them, and, if he had them not, only to abstain from saying unfit things,—and the whole occasion was answered by his presence. It was a place for behavior more than for speech, and Mr. Webster walked through his part with entire success." 5

Practice what you preach. "The argument which has not power to reach my own practice, I may well fear has not power to reach yours." "The only speech will at last be action." "

'J. E. Cabot, A Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson, II, 392.

Remember that the career of orator requires long preparation. "The orator is nowise equal to the evoking on a new substance of this brilliant chain of sentiments, facts, illustrations, whereby he now fires himself and you. Every link in this living chain he found separate; one, ten years ago; one, last week; some of them he found in his father's house, or at school when a boy; some of them by his losses; some of them by his sickness; some by his sins. The Webster with whom you talk admires the oration almost as much as you do, and knows himself to be nowise equal, unarmed, that is, without the tool of Synthesis, to the splendid effect which he is yet well pleased you should impute to him."1 "I pitied-for his ill speaking, until I found him not at all disheartened, not at all curious concerning the effect of his speech, but eager to speak again, and speak better on a new matter. Then I see him destined to move society." 2

3

Do not expect to be always understood or appreciated. “It is a luxury to be understood." "Those who live to the future must always appear selfish to those who live to the present." "Man was made for conflict, not for rest." "The true and finished man is ever alone." "Magnanimity consists in scorning circumstance." "God is not in a hurry." 8

6

As Emerson found most of his ideals of public speaking embodied in Webster, this account may fittingly end with the following tribute: "His excellent organization, the perfection of his elocution and all that thereto belongs,-voice, accent, intonation, attitude, manner, we shall not soon find again. Then he was so thoroughly simple and wise in his rhetoric; he saw through his matter, hugged his fact so close, went to the principle or essential, and never indulged in a weak flourish, though he knew perfectly well how to make such exordiums, episodes and perorations as might give perspective to his harangues without in the least embarrassing his march or confounding his transitions. In his statements things lay in daylight; we saw them in order as they were. Though he knew very well how to present his own personal claims, yet in his argument he

was intellectual,-stated his fact pure of all personality, so that his splendid wrath, when his eyes became lamps, was the wrath of the fact and the cause he stood for." 1

'Works, XI, 221-2.

S

THE LITERARY CRITICISM OF ORATORY

HERBERT A. WICHELNS

I

AMUEL JOHNSON once projected a history of criticism "as

it relates to judging of authors." Had the great eighteenthcentury critic ever carried out his intention, he would have included some interesting comments on the orators and their judges. Histories of criticism, in whole or in part, we now have, and histories of orators. But that section of the history of criticism which deals with judging of orators is still unwritten. Yet the problem is an interesting one, and one which involves some important conceptions. Oratory-the waning influence of which is often discussed in current periodicals—has definitely lost the established place in literature that it once had. Demosthenes and Cicero, Bossuet and Burke, all hold their places in literary histories. But Webster inspires more than one modern critic to ponder the question whether oratory is literature; and if we may judge by the emphasis of literary historians generally, both in England and in America, oratory is either an outcast or a poor relation. What are the reasons for this change? It is a question not easily answered. Involved in it is some shift in the conception of oratory or of literature, or of both; nor can these conceptions have changed except in response to the life of which oratory, as well as literature, is part.

This essay, it should be said, is merely an attempt to spy out the land, to see what some critics have said of some orators, to discover what their mode of criticism has been. The discussion is limited in the main to Burke and a few nineteenth-century figures-Webster, Lincoln, Gladstone, Bright, Cobden-and to the verdicts on these found in the surveys of literary history, in critical essays, in histories of oratory, and in biographies.

Of course, we are not here concerned with the disparagement of oratory. With that, John Morley once dealt in a phrase: "Yet,

after all, to disparage eloquence is to depreciate mankind." Nor is the praise of eloquence of moment here. What interests us is the method of the critic: his standards, his categories of judgment, what he regards as important. These will show, not so much what he thinks of a great and ancient literary type, as how he thinks in dealing with that type. The chief aim is to know how critics have spoken of orators.

We have not much serious criticism of oratory. The reasons are patent. Oratory is intimately associated with statecraft; it is bound up with the things of the moment; its occasion, its terms, its background, can often be understood only by the careful student of history. Again, the publication of orations as pamphlets leaves us free to regard any speech merely as an essay, as a literary effort deposited at the shrine of the muses in hope of being blessed with immortality. This view is encouraged by the difficulty of reconstructing the conditions under which the speech was delivered; by the doubt, often, whether the printed text of the speech represents what was actually said, or what the orator elaborated afterwards. Burke's corrections are said to have been the despair of his printers. Some of Chatham's speeches, by a paradox of fate, have been reported to us by Samuel Johnson, whose style is as remote as possible from that of the Great Commoner, and who wrote without even having heard the speeches pronounced. Only in comparatively recent times has parliamentary reporting pretended to give full records of what was actually said; and even now speeches are published for literary or political purposes which justify the corrector's pencil in changes both great and small. Under such conditions the historical study of speech making is far from easy.

Yet the conditions of democracy necessitate both the making of speeches and the study of the art. It is true that other ways of influencing opinion have long been practised, that oratory is no longer the chief means of communicating ideas to the masses. And the change is emphasized by the fact that the newer methods are now beginning to be investigated, sometimes from the point of view of· the political student, sometimes from that of the "publicity expert.'" But, human nature being what it is, there is no likelihood that face

1

1Life of William Ewart Gladstone, New York, 1903, II, 593.

2

Select Works, ed. E. J. Payne, Oxford, 1892, I, xxxviii.

3

Basil Williams, Life of William Pitt, New York, 1913, II, 335-337.