Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB

The third? Action. Which, I said, had been generally understood to mean the action of an orator with his hands, etc., in speaking; but that I thought another kind of action of more importance to an orator who would persuade people to follow his advice, viz., such a course of action in the conduct of life as would impress them with an opinion of his integrity as well as of his understanding; that, this opinion once established, all the difficulties, delays, and oppositions, usually caused by doubts and suspicions, were prevented; and such a man, though an imperfect speaker, would almost carry his points against the most flourishing orator who has not the character of sincerity.'

Nowhere is energy-the energy of earnestness - SO indispensable as in oratory. To move mightily, there must be a capacity for being mightily moved. A speech may be full of merit, yet fail, if tamely delivered; or full of faults, yet succeed, if spirited. Burke, who spoke in the drowsy manner of an essayist, produced no effects in any way correspondent with the productions of his genius. These seem to have been spoken for posterity rather than for his contemporaries, who called him the 'dinner bell.' We are told that a man once went to Demosthenes, and in a manner wholly unsuited to a strong accusation, asked him to be his advocate against a person from whom, he said, he had suffered an assault. 'Not you, indeed,' said the orator, in a cold, indifferent tone, 'you have suffered no such thing.' 'What!' cried the man passionately, raising his voice, 'have I not received those blows?' 'Ay, now,' replied Demosthenes, 'you speak like a person that has really been injured.' Above all, the writer should write, the speaker should speak, with an honest enthusiasm. No mere violence of language, no mere theatrical exhibition of passion, not simulated fervor, can work the magical effects of reality.

Wouldst thou unseal the fountain of my tears,
Thyself the signs of grief must show,

says Horace.

'In cases where profound conviction has been wrought,' says Emerson, 'the eloquent man is he who is no beautiful speaker, but who is inwardly drunk with a certain belief. And the main distinction be

you

tween him and other well-graced actors is the conviction, communicated by every word, that his mind is contemplating a whole, and inflamed by the contemplation of the whole, and that the words and sentences uttered by him, however admirable, fall from him as unregarded parts of that terrible whole which he sees, and which he means that shall see.' We have before insisted that, as we should not begin abruptly, neither should we end in this. manner. The peroration is the result of the discourse, and its beauty resides in the suitableness of its relation thereto. It should be neither too brief nor too extended; presenting distinct ideas, not vague effusions; expanding, enlarging, applying (if need be) the central thought, aiming to call into vigorous, harmonious activity the intellect, the imagination, and the feelings. The type will be intellectual or emotional, according as the main object is to inform and convince or to persuade. It has been remarked that the perorations of the great pulpit masters are generally moderate and gentle; as rivers, arriving at the sea, become slower yet more impressive.

Foregoing remarks render it unnecessary to enlarge on the cultivation of moral qualities—probity, candor, humanity, sympathy, reverence, modesty, courage. Nor need we repeat, but for emphasis, that manly virtues, tender sensibilities, must be joined to a fund of knowledge, both special and general. But we may be allowed to recommend and urge a habit of application and industry. Read, memorize, translate, practice. Study the masterpieces. Exercise yourselves in composing and speaking,

of

having chewed and digested your subject beforehand. Remember that the pen is the corrector of vagueness thought and expression. 'Always prepare, investigate, compose a speech,' said Rufus Choate to a student, ‘pen in hand. Webster always wrote when he could get a chance.' In his journal, May, 1843, he wrote:

...

I am not to forget that I am, and must be, if I would live, a student of forensic rhetoric. A wide and anxious survey of that art and that science teaches me that careful, constant writing is the parent of ripe speech. It has no other. But that writing must always be rhetorical writing, that is, such as might in some parts of some speech be uttered to a listening audience. It is to be composed as in and for the presence of an audience. So it is to be intelligible, perspicuous, pointed, terse; with image, epithet, turn; advancing and impulsive; full of generalizations, maxims, illustrating the sayings of the wise.

'My dear fellow,' said Curran to Philips, 'the day of inspiration has gone by. Everything I ever said, which was worth remembering - my de bene esses, my white horses, as I call them were all carefully prepared.' Demosthenes was so diligent in his preparation, that his enemies said his orations smelt of the lamp. Brougham declares the perfection of public speaking to consist in introducing a prepared passage with effect. On this point, all that can be wisely said perhaps is summed up in the subjoined passage:

While speeches should not, except in rare cases, be written out and memorized entire, yet important passages, we think, should be; and, in every case where one is to speak on an important occasion, he should make himself so completely master of his theme by patient thought and frequent use of the pen, that the substance and the method, the matter and the order, of his ideas shall be perfectly familiar to him. Nor is it enough that he possess himself of sharply defined thoughts, and the precise order of their delivery; he must brood over them hour by hour till the fire burns,' and the mind glows with them-till not only the arguments and illustrations have been supplied to the memory, but the most felicitous terms, the most

vivid, pregnant, and salient phrases, have been suggested, which he will recall to an extent that will surprise him, by the matter in which they are imbedded, and with which they are connected by the laws of association. Proceeding in this way, he will unite, in a great measure, the advantage of the written and the spoken styles. Avoiding the miserable bondage of the speaker who servilely adheres to manuscript a procedure which produces, where the effort of memory has not been perfect, a feeling of constraint and frigidity in the delivery, and where it has been perfect, an appearance of artificiality in the composition — he will weave into his discourse the passages which he has polished to the last degree of art, and he will introduce also anything that occurs during the inspiration of delivery.1

Yet again, do not fear to be seen in your own proper figure, and remember always that the body is more than raiment. Be concerned, first and supremely, to be intelligible; then to be interesting, attractive. Few that have listened to the eloquence of the late Bishop Simpson would have dreamed that the master-speaker who stood before them was, in his early youth, marked out from his fellows by his lack of power to speak attractively. Yet so it was. And the Bishop's words, in telling of that period and of the way in which he acquired the power which in his subsequent life was so markedly his, are so suggestive that they are worth repeating here. 'At school,' he says, 'the one thing I could not do was to speak. It cost me unspeakable effort to bring myself to attempt it, and I was invariably mortified by my failures. At length, having felt called to the ministry, I sought to forget myself as far as possible, and, banishing all thoughts of oratory, to give myself absolutely to the task of saying things so that people could readily understand them. And that is the fundamental secret of all true eloquence.

1 Dr. Mathews.

[merged small][merged small][merged small][ocr errors]

Law, order, knowledge, art, from high,

And ev'ry heav'nly favour lent,

The world's hard lot to qualify.

They knew not how they should behave,

For all from Heav'n stark-naked came;

But Poetry their garments gave,

And then not one had cause for shame.--GOETHE.

The sense of beauty enters into the highest philosophy, as in Plato. The highest poet must be a philosopher, accomplished like Dante, or intuitive like Shakespeare.--GLADSTONE.

HE world lives backward in memory as well as

THE forward in hope. In the past are the heart's dead

kindred. There are the great who rule our spirits from their urns; there our joys reappear as purer and more brilliant than they were experienced. There sorrow loses its bitterness, and is changed into a sort of pleasing recollection. 'I love everything that's old,' says Goldsmith; and Sir William Temple, alluding to the charm of antiquity, quotes the king of Aragon as saying: 'Among so many things as are by men possessed or pursued in the whole course of their lives, all the rest are baubles beside old wood to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to converse with, and old books to read.'

That distance thus quickens the play of the imagination is the chief reason why you may observe in the poets, as already exemplified, a certain infusion of the antique element, which in ordinary modern prose is either unknown or quite exceptional-'thou,' 'thy,' 'a-weary,'

« AnteriorContinuar »