112 ELOQUENCE.
or in the Senate rises in his thought, he descends in his language, — that is, when he rises to any height of thought or of passion he comes down to a lan guage level with the ear of all his audience. It is the merit of John Brown and of Abraham Lincoln — one at Charlestown, one at Gettysburg — in the two best specimens of eloquence we have had in this country. And observe that all poetry is written in the oldest and simplest English words. Dr. John son said, " There is in every nation a style which never becomes obsolete, a certain mode of phraseol ogy so consonant to the analogy and principles of its respective language as to remain settled and unaltered. This style is to be sought in the com mon intercourse of life among those who speak only to be understood, without ambition of elegance. The polite are always catching modish innovations, and the learned forsake the vulgar, when the vulgar is right; but there is a conversation above grossness and below refinement, where propriety resides."
But all these are the gymnastics, the education of eloquence, and not itself. They cannot be too much considered and practised as preparation, but the powers are those I first named. If I should malye 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 con trol of their faculties! You can find in many, and indeed in all, a certain fundamental equality. Fun- ELOQUENCE. 113 damentally 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 en able 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, col lapse, and cannot rally. If they are to put a thing in proper shape, fit for the occasion and the audi ence, 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 114 ELOQUENCE.
manliness. The doctor, no doubt, shut up in his closet and his theology, had lost some natural re lation 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 hav ing known from all eternity." This unmanliness is so common a result of our half-education, — teach ing 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 guar dians 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 ELOQUENCE. 115 of English education, and of high importance to the matter in hand.
Lord Ashley, in 1606, while the bill for regu lating trials in cases of high treason was pending, attempting to utter a premeditated speech in Par liament 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 pro ceed; but, having recovered his spirits and the command of his faculties, he drew such an argu ment 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 per sonal 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, win ning 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 116 ELOQUENCE.
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 Dunder head'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 Bobespierre'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 char acter who bring an overpowering personality into court, and the cause they maintain borrows impor tance from an illustrious advocate. Absoluteness is required, and he must have it or simulate it. If the cause be unfashionable, he will make it fashion able. 'T is 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.
ELOQUENCE. 117 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 meta physical zymosis culminating in Kant, Schelling, Schleiermacher, Schopenhauer, Hegel, and so end ing. To this we might add the great eras not only of painters -but of orators. The historian Pa- terculus says of Cicero, that only in Cicero's lifetime was any great eloquence in Eome; so it was said that no member of either house of the British Par liament 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 sud denly expand at some moment the mind of mankind indicate themselves by orators.
118 ELOQUENCE.
118 ELOQUENCE.
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 conven tions; 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 sci ence, 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 constitu ency?
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 Caesar, the boat of Colum bus, 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 bet ter 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.
6 122 KESOURCES.
These examples wake an infinite hope, and call every man to emulation. A low, hopeless spirit puts out the eves; scepticism is slow suicide. A philosophy which sees only the worst; believes neither in virtue nor in genius; which says 't is 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, Avith logic and learning and wit, teaching pessimism, — teach ing 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."
RESOURCES. 123 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 prepara tions of somewhat to follow; or, in humanity, mil lions 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 fur niture 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 124 RESOURCES.
Nature not owe to her duration of amassing infin itesimals 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 Phoenicians 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 tran sition 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 in voluntarily 'dropped of its existence; and di vine 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 lie mak ing 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 pos- RESOURCES. 125 session 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, be come 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 wraste beyond, the land was suddenly in parts found covered with gold and silver, floored with coal. It was thought a fable, what Guthrie, a travel ler 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 Alad din 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 Gar den of Eden; here the Genesis and the Exodus. We have seen slavery disappear like, a painted 126 RESOURCES.
scene in a theatre; we have seen the most health ful revolution in the politics of the nation, — the Constitution not only amended, but construed in a new spirit. We have seen China opened to Euro pean 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 per forate and mould the old ball, as a carpenter does with wood. All is ductile and plastic. "We are working the new Atlantic telegraph. American en ergy is overriding every venerable maxim of polit ical 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 educa tion 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 produc tion 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 RESOURCES. 127 people to use them, and a uew 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 con sumer of his wares.
The whole history of our civil war is rich in a thou sand 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 obsta cles 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 128 RESOURCES.
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 Xature keeps the lakes warm by tucking them up under a blanket of ice, and the ground un der 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 fish erman looks about him, puts a round stick of wood underneath, and it rolls as on wheels at once. Xa- poleon 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. Mains, known for his dis coveries in the polarization of light, was captain of a corps of engineers in Bonaparte's Egyptian campaign, which was heinously unprovided and ex posed. " 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 under stand their language, and, coming among a wild party RESOURCES. 129 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 ex plained 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 pro voke 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 130 RESOURCES.
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 pre serve 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 ene my think you have ten before your eyes, as drunk ards who see a thousand candles at once."