Autobiography of Seventy Years Part 68

Gladstone was the last of a school of oratory, and the last of our time--I hope not for all time--of a school of statesmen.

When he entered upon a discussion in Parliament, or on the hustings, he elevated it to the highest possible plane. The discussion became alike one of the highest moral principles and the profoundest political philosophy. He seemed to be speaking as our statesmen of the Revolutionary time, and the time of framing our Const.i.tution. He used to speak to all generations alike. What he had to say would have been true and apt and fit to be uttered in the earlier days of Athens and Rome, and true and apt and fit to be uttered for thousands of years to come. He had, in a large measure, a failing which all Englishmen have, and always had; the notion that what is good for England is good for humanity at large. Still it was a lofty morality and a lofty ideal statesmans.h.i.+p. It was sincere. What he said, that he believed. It came straight from his heart, and he kindled in the bosoms of his listeners the ardor of his own heart. He was not afraid of his ideals.

I heard Dr. Guthrie in Edinburgh in 1860. It was a hot day.

My companion was just getting well from a dangerous attack of bleeding at the lungs. We made our way with difficulty into the crowded church. The people were, almost all of them, standing. We were obliged, by my friend's condition, to get out again before the sermon. I remember, however, the old man's att.i.tude, and his prayer in the racy, broad Scotch, the most tender, pathetic and expressive language on earth for the deeper emotions as well as for humor. I wonder if my readers have ever seen the version of the Psalms--

"Frae Hebrew Intil Scottis," by P. Hately Waddell, LL.D., Minister, Edinburgh, 1891.

If not, and they will get it, a new delight is in store for them, and they will know something of the diction of Dr.

Guthrie.

He once began a prayer, "O Lord, it is a braw thing to loe ye. But it is a better (bitter) thing to hate ye."

The beauty of this dialect is that while it is capable alike of such tenderness, and such lofty eloquence, and such exquisite and delicate humor, it is, like our Saxon, incapable of falsetto, or of little pomposities.

I heard Lyman Beecher, then a very old man, before a meeting of the members of the Ma.s.sachusetts Legislature in 1852, when the measure known as the Maine Liquor Law was pending. He bore unmistakable marks of advanced age. But there were one or two pa.s.sages that showed the power of the orator, one especially in which he described the beauty and delight of our homes, and intemperance threatening them with its waves like a great sea of fire.

I saw Henry Ward Beecher several times in private, and had pleasant talks with him. But I am sorry to say I never heard him speak, so far as I can now remember, on any occasion when he put forth his power. But if half that is told of his speeches, during the Civil War, some of them to hostile and angry audiences, be true, he was a consummate master. One story is told of him which I suppose is true, and, if it be true, ranks him as one of the greatest masters of his art that ever lived.

It is said that he was speaking to a great crowd in Birmingham, or perhaps Liverpool, which constantly goaded him with hostile interruptions, so that he had great difficulty in getting on. At last one fellow provoked the cheers and applause of the audience by crying out--"Why didn't you put down the Rebellion in sixty days as you said you would?" Beecher paused a moment until they became still, in their eagerness to hear his reply, and then hurled back--"We should if they had been Englishmen."

The fierce, untamed animal hesitated a moment between anger and admiration, and then the English love of fair play and pluck prevailed, and the crowd cheered him and let him go on.

But any man who reads Beecher's delightful "Letters from the White Mountains," or some of his sermons, and imagines his great frame, and far-sounding voice, will get a conception of his power to play on the feelings or men, of his humor, and pathos, and intense conviction, and rapidity in pa.s.sing from one emotion to another, and will understand him.

I heard Rufus Choate a great many times. I heard nearly all the speeches given in Brown's Life; and I heard him a great many times at the Bar, both before juries and the full Court. He is the only advocate I ever heard who had the imperial power which would subdue an unwilling and hostile jury. His power over them seemed like the fascination of a bird by a snake. Of course, he couldn't do this with able Judges, although all Judges who listened to him would, I think, agree that he was as persuasive a reasoner as ever lived.

But with inferior magistrates and juries, however intelligent, however determined they were in a made-up opinion, however on their guard against the charmer, he was almost irresistible.

There are very few important cases recorded that Choate lost.

Non supplex, sed magister aut dominus videretur esse judic.u.m.

Choate's method was pure persuasion. He never appealed to base motives, nor tried to awake coa.r.s.e prejudices or stormy pa.s.sions. He indulged in no invective. His wit and sarcasm and ridicule amused the victim almost as much as it amused the bystander. He had the suaviloquentia which Cicero attributes to Cornelius. There was never a harsh note in his speech.

Latrantur enim jam quidam oratores, non loquuntur.

When he was confronted with some general rule, or some plain fact, he had a marvellous art of subtle distinction. He showed that his client, or witness, or proposition, belonged to a cla.s.s of itself. He invested it with a distinct and intense personality. He held up his fact or his principle before the mind of the Court and the jury. He described and pictured it. He brought out in clear relief what distinguished it from any other fact or proposition whatever. If necessary, he would almost have made a jury, before he was through, think the Siamese twins did not look alike, and possibly that they never could have been born of the same parents.

He had a voice without any gruff or any shrill tones. It was like a sweet, yet powerful flute. He never strained it or seemed to exert it to its fullest capacity. I do not know any other public speaker whose style resembled his in the least. Perhaps Jeremy Taylor was his model, if he had any model. The phraseology with which he clothed some commonplace or mean thought or fact, when he was compelled to use commonplace arguments, or to tell some common story, kept his auditors ever alert and expectant. An Irishman, who had killed his wife, threw away the axe with which Choate claimed the deed was done, when he heard somebody coming. This, in Choate's language, was "the sudden and frantic e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n of the axe."

Indeed his speech was a perpetual surprise. Whether you liked him or disliked him, you gave him your ears, erect and intent.

He used ma.n.u.script a great deal, even in speaking to juries.

When a trial was on, lasting days or weeks, he kept pen, ink, and paper at hand in his bedroom, and would often get up in the middle of the night to write down thoughts that came to him as he lay in bed. He was always careful to keep warm.

It was said he prepared for a great jury argument by taking off eight great coats and drinking eight cups of green tea.

When I was a young lawyer in Worcester I had something to do before the Court sitting in the fourth story of the old stone court house in Boston. I finished my business and had just time to catch the train for home. As I came down the stairs I pa.s.sed the door of the court-room where the United States Court was sitting. The thick wooden door was open, and the opening was closed by a door of thin leather stretched on a wooden frame. I pulled it open enough to look in, and there, within three feet of me, was Choate, addressing a jury in a case of marine insurance, where the defence was the unseaworthiness of the vessel. I had just time to hear this sentence, and shut the door and hurry to my train: "She went down the harbor, painted and perfidious--a coffin, but no s.h.i.+p."

I hear now, as if still in the eager throng, his speech in Faneuil Hall during the Mexican War. He demanded that we should bring back our soldiers to the line we claimed as our rightful boundary, and let Mexico go. He said we had done enough for glory, and that we had humiliated her enough.

"The Mexican maiden, as she sits with her lover among the orange-groves, will sing to her guitar the story of these times--'Ah, woe is me, Alhama,' for a thousand years to come."

Choate, like other good orators, and like some great poets, notably Wordsworth, created the taste which he satisfied.

His dramatic action, his marvellous and strange vocabulary, his oriental imagination, his dressing the common and mean things of life with a poetic charm and romance, did not at once strike favorably the taste of his Yankee audiences.

Webster and Everett seem to have appreciated him from the first. But he was, till he vindicated his t.i.tle to be a great lawyer, rather a thorn in the flesh of Chief Justice Shaw, of whose consternation and amazement, caused by the strange figure that appeared in his court-room, many queer stories used to be told. But the young men and the people liked him.

"Non probantur haec senibus--saepe videbam c.u.m invidentem tum etiam irascentem stomachantem Philippum--sed mirantur adulescentes mult.i.tudo movetur."

It was a curious sight to see on a jury twelve hard-headed and intelligent countrymen--farmers, town officers, trustees, men chosen by their neighbors to transact their important affairs--after an argument by some clear-headed lawyer for the defence, about some apparently not very doubtful transaction, who had brought them all to his way of thinking, and had warned them against the wiles of the charmer, when Choate rose to reply for the plaintiff--to see their look of confidence and disdain--"You needn't try your wiles upon me." The shoulder turned a little against the speaker--the averted eye--and then the change; first, the changed posture of the body; the slight opening of the mouth; then the look, first, of curiosity, and then of doubt, then of respect; the surrender of the eye to the eye of the great advocate; then the spell, the charm, the great enchantment--till at last, jury and audience were all swept away, and followed the conqueror captive in his triumphal march.

He gesticulated with his whole body. Wendell Phillips most irreverently as well as most unjustly compared him to a monkey in convulsions. His bowings down and straightening himself again were spoken of by another critic, not unfriendly, as opening and shutting like a jack-knife. His curly black hairs seemed each to have a separate life of its own. His eyes shone like coals of fire. There is a pa.s.sage of Everett's which well describes Choate, and is also one of the very best examples of Everett, who, with all his fertility of original genius, borrowed so much, and so enriched and improved everything that he borrowed. Cicero said of Antonius:

"Omnia veniebant Antonio in mentem; eaque suo quaeque loco, ubi pluimum proficere et valere possent, ut ab imperatore equites pedites levis armatura, sic ab illo in maxume opportunis orationis partibus conlocabantur."

Now see what Everett does with this thought in his eulogy, spoken in Faneuil Hall, the week after Choate's death:

"He is sometimes satisfied, in concise epigrammatic clauses, to skirmish with his light troops, and drive in the enemy's outposts. It is only on fitting occasions, when great principles are to be vindicated, and solemn truths told, when some moral or political Waterloo or Solferino is to be fought, that he puts on the entire panoply of his gorgeous rhetoric. It is then that his majestic sentences swell to the dimensions of his majestic thought; then it is that we hear afar off the awful roar of his rifled ordnance; and when he has stormed the heights, and broken the centre, and trampled the squares, and turned the staggering wings of the adversary, that he sounds his imperial clarion along the whole line of battle, and moves forward with all his hosts, in one overwhelming charge."

One of the most remarkable advocates of my day was Sidney Bartlett. He seldom addressed juries, and almost never public a.s.semblies. He was a partner of Chief Justice Shaw before 1830. He argued cases before the Supreme Court of the United States and before the Supreme Court of Ma.s.sachusetts after he was ninety. He cared for no other audience. He had a marvellous compactness of speech, and a marvellous sagacity in seeing the turning-point of a great question. He found the place where the roads diverged, got the Court's face set in the right direction, and then stopped. He would argue in ten or fifteen minutes a point where some powerful antagonist like Curtis or Choate would take hours to reply. I once told him that his method of argument was to that of ordinary lawyers like logarithms to ordinary mathematics. He seemed pleased with the compliment, and said, "Yes, I know I argue over their heads. The Chief Justice told me he wished I would talk a little longer." I do not know that Bartlett ought to be reckoned among orators. But he had a great power of convincing, and giving his intellectual delight to minds capable of appreciating his profound and inexorable logic.

Edward Everett seems to me, on the whole, our best example of the orator, pure and simple. Webster was a great statesman, a great lawyer, a great advocate, a great public teacher.

To all these his matchless oratory was but an instrument and incident.

Choate was a great winner of cases, and as relaxation he gave, in the brief vacations of an overworked professional life (he once defined a lawyer's vacation as the time after he has put a question to a witness while he is waiting for an answer), a few wonderful literary and historical addresses.

He gave a brief period of brilliant but most unwilling service in each House of Congress. He made some powerful political speeches to popular audiences. But his heart was always in the court-house. No gambler ever hankered for the feverish delight of the gaming table as Choate did for that absorbing game, half chance, half skill, where twelve human dice must all turn up together one way, or there be no victory.

But Everett is always the orator. He was a clergyman a little while. He was a Greek professor a little while. He was a College President a little while. He was a Minister to England a little while. He was Representative in Congress and Senator.

He was Governor of the Commonwealth. In these places he did good service enough to make a high reputation for any other man. Little of these things is remembered now. He was above all things--I am tempted to say, above all men--the foremost American orator in one cla.s.s.

There is one function of the orator peculiar to our country, and almost unknown elsewhere. That is the giving utterance to the emotion of the people, whether of joy or sorrow, on the occasions when its soul is deeply stirred--when some great man dies, or there is a great victory or defeat, or some notable anniversary is celebrated. This office was filled by other men, on some few occasions by Daniel Webster himself, but by no man better than by Everett. A Town, or City, or State is very human. In sorrow it must utter its cry of pain; in victory, its note of triumph. As events pa.s.s, it must p.r.o.nounce its judgement. Its constant purpose must be fixed and made more steadfast by expression. It must give voice to its love and its approbation and its condemnation. It must register the high and low water mark of its tide, its rising and its sinking in heat and cold. This office Edward Everett, for nearly fifty years, performed for Ma.s.sachusetts and for the whole country. In his orations is preserved and recorded everything of the emotion of the great hours of our people's history. The camera of his delicate photography has preserved for future generations what pa.s.sed in the soul of his own in the times that tried the souls of men.

I do not know where he got his exquisite elocution. He went abroad in his youth, and there were good trainers abroad, then. He must have studied thoroughly the speeches of Cicero and the Greek orators. Many casual phrases in his works, besides many quotations, show his familiarity with Cicero's writing on oratory.

If you would get some faint, far-off conception of him, first look at the best bust or picture of Everett you can find.

Imagine the figure with its every movement gentle and graceful.

The head and face are suggestive of Greek sculpture. This person sits on the platform with every expression discharged from the face, looking like a plaster image when the artist has just begun his model, before any character or intelligence has been put into it. You think him the only person in the audience who takes no interest whatever in what is going on, and certainly that he expects to have nothing to do with it himself. He is introduced. He comes forward quietly and gracefully. There is a slight smile of recognition of the welcoming applause. The opening sentences are spoken in a soft--I had almost said, a caressing voice, though still a little cold. I suppose it would be called a tenor voice.

There was nothing in the least unmanly about Edward Everett.

Yet if some woman had spoken in the same tones, you would have not thought them unwomanly.

Illa tamquam cycnea fuit divini hominis vox et oratio.

He has found somewhere in the vast storehouse of his knowledge a transaction exactly like the present, or exactly in contrast with it, or some sentiment of poet or orator which just fits the present occasion. If it be new to his audience, he adds to it a newer delight still by his matchless skill as a narrator-- a skill almost the rarest of all talents among public speakers.

If it be commonplace and hackneyed he makes it fresh and pleasant by giving in detail the circ.u.mstances when it was first uttered, or describes some occasion when some orator has applied it before; or calls attention to its very triteness as giving it added authority. If he wish to express his agreement with the last speaker and "say ditto to Mr. Burke," he tells you when that was said, what was the occasion, and gives you the name of Mr. Kruger, who stood for the representation of Bristol with Burke.

Mr. Everett's stores were inexhaustible. If any speaker have to get ready in a hurry for a great occasion, let him look through the index of the four volumes of Everett's speeches, and he will find matter enough, not only to stimulate his own thought and set its currents running, but to ill.u.s.trate and adorn what he will say.

But pretty soon the orator rises into a higher plane. Some lofty sentiment, some stirring incident, some patriotic emotion, some play of fancy or wit comes from the brain or heart of the speaker. The audience is hushed to silence. Perhaps a little mist begins to gather in their eyes. There is now an accent of emotion in the voice, though still soft and gentle. The Greek statue begins to move. There is life in the limbs. There has been a lamp kindled somewhere behind the clear and transparent blue eyes. The flexible muscles of the face have come to life now. Still there is no jar or disorder. The touch upon the nerves of the audience is like that of a gentle nurse. The atmosphere is that of a May morning. There is no perfume but that of roses and lilies.

But still, gently at first, the warmer feelings are kindled in the hearts of the speaker and hearers. The frame of the speaker is transfigured. The trembling hands are lifted high in the air. The rich, sweet voice fills the vast audience chamber with its resonant tones. At last, the bugle, the trumpet, the imperial clarion rings out full and clear, and the vast audience is transported as to another world--I had almost said to a seventh heaven. Read the welcome to Lafayette or the close of the matchless eulogy on that ill.u.s.trious object of the people's love. Read the close of the oration on Was.h.i.+ngton.

Read the contrast of Was.h.i.+ngton and Marlborough. Read the beautiful pa.s.sage where, just before the ocean cable was laid, the rich fancy of the speaker describes--

"The thoughts that we think up here on the earth's surface in the cheerful light of day--clothing ourselves with elemental sparks, and shooting with fiery speed in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, from hemisphere to hemisphere, far down among the uncouth monsters that wallow in the nether seas, along the wreck-paved floor, thorough the oozy dungeons of the rayless deep; the last intelligence of the crops, whose dancing ta.s.sels will in a few months be coquetting with the west wind on those boundless prairies, flas.h.i.+ng along the slimy decks of old sunken galleons, which have been rotting for ages; messages of friends.h.i.+p and love, from warm, living bosoms, burn over the cold green bones of men and women, whose hearts, once as fond as ours, burst as the eternal gulfs closed and roared over them, centuries ago."

Read the pa.s.sage in the eulogy on Choate where he describes him arming himself in the entire panoply of his gorgeous rhetoric--and you will get some far-away conception of the power of this magician.

One thing especially distinguishes our modern orator from the writer in the closet, where he writes solely for his readers, or where he has prepared his speeches beforehand--that is, the influence of the audience upon him. There is nothing like it as a stimulant to every faculty, not only imagination, and fancy, and reason, but especially, as every experienced speaker knows, memory also. Everything needed seems to come out from the secret storehouses of the mind, even the things that have lain there forgotten, rusting and unused. Mr. Everett describes this in a masterly pa.s.sage in his Life of Webster.

Gladstone states it in a few fine sentences: