E-text prepared by Joshua Hutchinson, Keith M. Eckrich, and Project
Gutenberg Distributed Proofreaders
It is the doctrine of the popular music-masters, that whoever canspeak can sing. So, probably, every man is eloquent once in his life.Our temperaments differ in capacity of heat, or we boil at differentdegrees. One man is brought to the boiling point by the excitement ofconversation in the parlor. The waters, of course, are not very deep.He has a two-inch enthusiasm, a pattypan ebullition. Another requiresthe additional caloric of a multitude, and a public debate; a thirdneeds an antagonist, or a hot indignation; a fourth needs arevolution; and a fifth, nothing less than the grandeur of absoluteideas, the splendors and shades of Heaven and Hell.
But because every man is an orator, how long soever he may have been amute, an assembly of men is so much more susceptible. The eloquence ofone stimulates all the rest, some up to the speaking point, and allothers to a degree that makes them good receivers and conductors, andthey avenge themselves for their enforced silence by increasedloquacity on their return to the fireside.
The plight of these phlegmatic brains is better than that of those whoprematurely boil, and who impatiently break the silence before theirtime. Our county conventions often exhibit a small-pot-soon-hot styleof eloquence. We are too much reminded of a medical experiment, wherea series of patients are taking nitrous-oxide gas. Each patient, inturn, exhibits similar symptoms,—redness in the face, volubility,violent gesticulation, delirious attitudes, occasional stamping, analarming loss of perception of the passage of time, a selfishenjoyment of his sensations, and loss of perception of the sufferingsof the audience.
Plato says, that the punishment which the wise suffer, who refuse totake part in the government, is, to live under the government of worsemen; and the like regret is suggested to all the auditors, as thepenalty of abstaining to speak, that they shall hear worse oratorsthan themselves.
But this lust to speak marks the universal feeling of the energy ofthe engine, and the curiosity men feel to touch the springs. Of allthe musical instruments on which men play, a popular assembly is thatwhich has the largest compass and variety, and out of which, by geniusand study, the most wonderful effects can be drawn. An audience is nota simple addition of the individuals that compose it. Their sympathygives them a certain social organism, which fills each member, in hisown degree, and most of all the orator, as a jar in a battery ischarged with the whole electricity of the battery. No one can surveythe face of an excited assembly, without being apprised of newopportunity for painting in fire human thought, and being agitated toagitate. How many orators sit mute there below! They come to getjustice done to that ear and intuition which no Chatham and noDemosthenes has begun to satisfy.
The Welsh Triads say, "Many are the friends of the golden tongue." Whocan wonder at the attractiveness of Parliament, or of Congress, or thebar, for our ambitious young men, when the highest bribes of societyare at the feet of the successful orator? He has his audience at hisdevotion. All other fames must hush before his. He is the truepotentate; for they are not kings who sit on thrones, but they whoknow how to govern. The definitions of eloquence describe itsattraction for young men. Antip