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CHAPTER XXIV.

ORIGINALITY IN ORATORY

ORIGINALITY is founded on nature — an inexhaustible field in which to find it.  Genius is a glimpse of nature denied to others.  Realism is truth and newness.  There would be more originality than there is if, instead of following custom without thought, men went to nature, the source of all surprises.  Edmund Kean, who had originality in him, augmented it by art.  One day he saw Jack Painter, the prize-fighter, raise his arm to strike when he could no longer rise from the ground.  When next Kean played Richard III. he did that, and 'brought down the house.'  When asked how he came to think of expressing in that way undying valour, he said Jack Painter gave him the idea by what he did when beaten.  Men wondered how Massillon, living in a cloister, could know the human heart as he did.  When asked how he came by such knowledge, which exceeded that of other men, he answered: 'I learned it by studying myself.'  Locke tells us, says Lord Byron, that 'all his knowledge of the human understanding was derived from studying his own mind.'  Emerson, who excelled in the quality, advised him who would be original, thus: —

'Insist on yourself — never imitate.  Your gift you can present every moment, with the cumulative force of a whole life's cultivation; but of the adopted talent of another you have only an extemporaneous half possession.  The way to speak and write what shall not go out of fashion, is to speak and write sincerely.  Take Sidney's maxim: "Look in thy heart and write."  He that writes to himself writes to an eternal public'

    Originality is reality, instead of stereotype conventionalism.  A dialogue between Bacon and Shakespeare ran as follows: —

Bacon: He that can make the multitude laugh and weep as you do, Mr Shakespeare, need not fear scholars.  A head naturally fertile and forgetive is worth many libraries, inasmuch as a tree is more valuable than a basket of fruit, or a good hawk better than a bag full of game, or the little purse which a fairy gave to Fortunatus more inexhaustible than all the coffers in the treasury.  More scholarship might have sharpened your judgment, but the particulars whereof a character is composed are better assembled by force of imagination than of judgment.  Although judgment perceives coherences, it cannot summon up materials, nor melt them into a compound with the felicity which belongs to imagination alone.

Shakespeare: My Lord, thus far I know, that the first glimpse and conception of a character in my mind is always engendered by chance and accident.  We shall suppose, for instance, that I am sitting in a taproom, or standing in a tennis court.  The behaviour of someone fixes my attention.  I note his dress, the sound of his voice, the turn of his countenance, the drinks he calls for, his questions and retorts, the fashion of his person, and, in brief, the whole outgoings and incomings of the man.  These grounds of speculation being cherished and revolved in my fancy, it becomes straightway possessed with a swarm of conclusions and beliefs concerning the individual.  In walking home I picture out to myself what would be fitting for him to say or do upon any given occasion, and these fantasies, being recalled at some after period, when I am writing a play, shape themselves into divers manikins, who are not long of being nursed into life.  Thus comes forth Shallow and Slender and Mercutio and Sir Andrew Aguecheek.

    An early commentator of Shakespeare's plays says it was watching a meat dealer sharpening skewers that gave the great dramatist the fine conception: 'There is a Providence doth shape our ends, rough hew them as we will.'  Thus doth imagination find in the meanest things emblems of the loftiest.

    In observation and experiment original information has its source.  But the conventionalisms of society repress its manifestation.  Lord Jeffrey has depicted its influence on young men in a passage of great instruction: —

'In a refined and literary community,' says he, 'so many critics are to be satisfied, so many rivals to be encountered, and so much division to be hazarded, that a young man is apt to be deterred from so perilous an enterprise, and led to seek distinction in some safer line of exertion.  His originality is repressed till he sinks into a paltry copyist, or aims at distinction by extravagance and affectation.  In such a state of society he feels that mediocrity has no chance of distinction; and what beginner can expect to rise at once into excellence?  He imagines that mere good sense will attract no attention, and that the manner is of much more importance than the matter in a candidate for public admiration.  In his attention to the manner, the matter is apt to be neglected; and in his solicitude to please those who require elegance of diction, brilliancy of wit, or harmony of periods, he is in some danger of forgetting that strength of reason and accuracy of observation by which he first proposed to recommend himself.  His attention, when extended to so many collateral objects, is no longer vigorous or collected; the stream, divided into so many channels, ceases to flow either deep or strong; he becomes an unsuccessful pretender of fine writing, and is satisfied with the frivolous praise of elegance or vivacity.'

    Young preachers, poetical from ardour, and enthusiastic from passion, will often rush from libraries crammed with lore, with which nobody else is familiar, and pour out before a congregation what the speaker believes to be both sublime and impressive, but which his hearers cannot understand.  They grow listless and restless, and he retires overwhelmed with a sense of failure.

    On one occasion a young preacher of considerable promise, for whom I had a great friendship, failed in this way.  I sought to console him by urging that failure with one of his quality should be but a stepping-stone to success.  Persons of eminence have mostly failed many times before they succeeded.  'But why have I not succeeded?' he asked.  'I can never hope to say better things of my own than I have said to-night of others.'  'The cause of your non-success is explicable.  A young preacher who had ascended the pulpit with great confidence, but who broke down in the middle of his sermon, was met by Rowland Hill as he was rushing from the pulpit.  "Young man," said Rowland, "had you ascended the pulpit in the spirit in which you descended, you would have descended in the spirit in which you ascended."  Something of this kind will explain your case.  At first, then, you should address your hearers as though they were children, state your arguments as though they were learners, and then assume them to be well-informed men.  On the threshold of a new subject men are as children — during its unfoldment they are learners; only when the subject is mastered are they men with manhood's understanding.  To forget this is to be open to the sarcasm of Swift, who, when Burnet said, speaking of the Scotch preachers in the time of the civil war, 'The crowds were far beyond the capacity of their churches, or the reach of their voices,' Swift added, 'And the preaching beyond the capacity of the crowd.  I believe the church had as much capacity as the minister.'

    Mr Justin M'Carthy, in his History of Our Own Times, says that 'Cardinal Newman, like Mill, has the rare art that dissolves all the difficulties of the most abstruse or perplexed subject, and shows it bare and clear even to the least subtle of readers.  His words dispel mists.  There are many passages of his works in which he rises to the height of a genuine and noble eloquence.  In all the arts that make a great preacher or orator, Newman was strikingly deficient.  His manner was constrained, ungraceful and even awkward, his voice was thin and weak.  His bearing was not at first impressive in any way.  A gaunt, emaciated figure, a sharp and eagle face, a cold, meditative eye, rather repelled than attracted those who saw him for the first time.  Singularly devoid of affectation, Newman did not always conceal his intellectual scorn of men who made loud pretence with inferior gifts, and the men must have been few indeed whose gifts were not inferior to his.  Newman had no scorn for intellectual inferiority in itself; he despised it only when it gave itself airs.  Mr Gladstone said of him: —

'Dr Newman's manner in the pulpit was one which, if you considered it in its separate parts, would lead you to arrive at very unsatisfactory conclusions.  There was not very much change in the inflection of his voice; action there was none; his sermons were read, and his eyes were always on his book; and all that, you will say, is against efficiency in preaching.  Yes; but you take the man as a whole, and there was a stamp and a seal upon him, there was a solemn music and sweetness in his tone, there was a completeness in the figure, taken together with the tone and with the manner, which made even his delivery such as I described it, and though exclusively with written sermons, singularly attractive.'

    The Cardinal's originality lay in his ideas.  Like Massillon he had a surprising knowledge of the human heart.  Like his famous brother, Professor Francis William Newman, he had a musical voice, which, though not powerful, was expressive.  A university is mainly a school of learning.  It matters little to students how a professor speaks, it is what he says to which the greedy ear of the learner is lent.  It is not the manner but the matter which is important to them.  It is knowledge, not voice or gesture, which wins the degree.  John Henry Newman had been lost or unregarded had he not had the good fortune to have for hearers men to whom ideas were everything.  Originality there gave him his great fame.

    Dr Channing had newness and boldness of thought where other preachers were conventional.  He was a lean man, quite fragile.  Americans, who always give the weight of their public men, and partly estimate them by their avoirdupois qualities, found that Dr Channing weighed only 100 lbs!  But he was aided by a marvellous voice.  Men wondered how such tones as his could proceed from so slender a throat.  He cultivated this power, which grew by practice.  When he read the line of the hymn, ―

'Angels roll that stone away,'

Dr Robert Collyer told me the congregation thought they heard the movement of the stone in the air.

    Of the Lowell's Offering, published by Charles Knight in his day, the Times said: —

'It is the production of factory girls in Lowell — the American Manchester — and we much doubt if all the duchesses in England could write as much and so seldom offend against good taste.  The secret of these girls' success in writing arises from their writing only about what they know — common life and their own affairs!'

    A frequent cause of failure with young lecturers is neglecting to find a point of common understanding between themselves and their auditors.  They do not comprehend the use of a brief explanatory exordium.  We know that the geometer would in vain reason with others unless axioms were previously agreed upon for reference.

    So with an audience.  If they do not agree with the speaker as to the premises from which he reasons, the audience have no standard by which they can test his conclusions.  Hence, though he may confound them, yet he will never convince them.

    It is in this sense only that those who would improve the public must 'write down' to the public.  They may, and they ought to, elevate the public by their sentiments, but they must found their reasoning on what the populace understand and admit, or they reason in vain.  The people must be taken at what they are, and elevated to what they should be.

    Thus the student may see that originality may be shown in various ways.  Lucidity in itself is one source of it.  Be plain, but not coarse.  What is called plain speaking is generally insolent speaking.  Keep clear of charnel-house terms, which appal the hearer, and turn him away.  Be clear in a salubrious sense.  Hint as little as possible.  An innuendo is like scouring the doorstep with butter — it makes it slippery, not clean.  Spare a general audience oyster ideas that lie in the deep beds of a subject, and require a professional knife to open them.

    It is always pleasant to speak to a Scotch audience.  They always understand you.  If you have a point they see it, and if you have not a point they see that.  They will forgive you being dull if you mean something.  Depend on ideas, and be sure you have them.  Ideas are the soul of speech.

    A man sees best with his eyes well open.  There are somnambulist auditors who seem to walk into an assembly asleep.  The first thing which produces wakefulness on their part is the discovery that something pertinent is being said, in which they are concerned.  A man who has expectations from his aunt looks at the old lady in a much more wakeful way than he would had she nothing to give.  If the speaker is unknown, the mind of the audience is a mere cold, hard surface, upon which an impression can hardly be made.  Then there is no help for the speaker but a fiery statement, some flashing tone, some light of illustration which has warmth in it — which melts indifference into interest.  Then attention becomes as wax, upon which the deepest or most delicate impression can be made — and time, instead of effacing it, hardens it into durability.  It was said by Panchard that Mirabeau was 'the first man in the world to speak upon a question he knew nothing about.'  That was because he had much general knowledge and knew more than he was known to know.  Besides, he had confidence, self-possession and quickness of mind, which enabled him to see what might, or ought to be said on a new subject as soon as he heard it proposed.  It might have been in reference to Mirabeau that Lord Brougham said 'Know everything about something and something about everything,' for Mirabeau's knowledge was far wider and out of the way than Panchard knew.  In nine years' experience in the office of a public tutor in one of the Universities, Paley found, in discoursing to young persons upon topics of morality, that unless the subject was so drawn up to a point as to exhibit the full force of an objection, or the exact place of a doubt, before any explanation was entered upon, it was labour lost.  In other words, unless some curiosity was excited before it was attempted to be satisfied, the labour of the teacher was wasted.  When information was not desired it was seldom, he found, retained.  Create in the mind of the audience a sense of want of the knowledge you have to give, and they will attend to it because they desire it.  Paley had much original common sense acquired by observation.

    Absolute repugnance to a pursuit is no proof of incapacity for excelling in it; the career of hundreds show they had the greatest aversion to the profession circumstances compelled them to follow.  When a boy at a dame school, she boxed my ears for three days because I would not try to make pothooks, of which I believed myself entirely incapable.  All the while I had form in my blood, could make any letter, and had latent facility and delight in inventing new forms, and I knew it not.

    We know not what we can do till we have made the experiment, and in mistrusting our powers we increase the difficulty we have to surmount.  Charles Reece Pemberton whose delineations of Shakespeare's tragic heroes was second only to Macready's, avowed that when he first saw a play performed he felt conscious that he should never be equal to the duties even of a scene-shifter.  Julius Cæsar, naturally of a weak and tender constitution, was determined, by exercise, inuring himself to exposure and other such means, to improve it; even he, afterwards so renowned, shed tears on reflecting that at his own age Alexander had done so much, whilst he himself had done nothing.  Genius is perceived in its sagacity in attempting an untried course, and its singleness of purpose in pursuing it; for general excellence is an impossibility, and it is folly and dissipation of time to attempt it.  Wellington possessed scarcely any quality which the world recognises as genius, save in purpose which he followed out.  De Witt said, ' Do one thing at a time.'  We must not only have a purpose, but keep to that purpose only, if we wish to succeed, for it is of no use having a purpose, with aptitude and opportunity for carrying it out, if we are deficient in the power of continuity.  Excellence comes by continuity.  The strength of genius is measured by the amount of perseverance used.  Genius is a thing of degree; its elements are common to all, and if all do all they can, though not eminent, each will rise higher in the scale of power.  Demosthenes, Cicero, Cæsar, Napoleon, all worked hard.  It is this working hard which has made the man of mediocrity pass by those to whom nature has been most prodigal of other gifts.

    It is told of Frederic the Great, that being informed of the death of one of his chaplains, a man of considerable learning and piety, he desired that his successor should not be behind him in these qualifications, and informed a candidate about to preach a trial sermon at the royal chapel, that he would himself furnish him with a text from which he was to make an extempore sermon.  The king arrived at the end of the prayers, and on the candidate ascending the pulpit, one of his majesty's aides-de-camp presented him with a sealed paper.  The preacher opened it and found nothing written therein.  He did not, however, lose his presence of mind, but turning the paper on both sides, he said, 'My brethren, here is nothing and there is nothing; out of nothing God created all things,' and he proceeded to deliver an admirable discourse upon the wonders of the creation.

    'Hic Rhodus; hic salta' (Here is Rhodes — leap here).  Do not wait for a change of outward circumstances, but take your circumstances as they are, and make the best of them.  This saying, which was meant to shame a braggart, will admit of a very different application.  Goethe has changed the postulate of Archimedes, 'Give me a standing-place and I will move the world,' into the precept, 'Make good thy standing-place if thou wouldst move the world.'  This is what he did throughout his life.

    There are few problems of events which do not also bring their solutions with them, were we cool enough to read them; but men do not believe what they see, or will not see what is before them.  We make pre-conceived opinion, pre-determined judgment, overrule new facts.  We too often act the part of the man who is so much in love with his boat that he never ventures to sail in it.  An orator should go to the rostrum mainly to announce conclusions, not to form them.  Let him take advantage of the tide of feeling, temper and exclamations of the meeting; but unless he is firm in a previous purpose, these things will take advantage of him, and carry him away from his subject, instead of his carrying away the audience.  The main word or phrase should strike like a blow, or pierce through the flesh — and no words should precede or accompany the term intended to strike, save those which like feathers give wings to the arrow.  All superfluous words are as friction in the air, and impede the shaft, or act as buffers mitigating its force, or protecting him against whom it is levelled.  Every aimless phrase or word which points elsewhere than the target divert attention, so that no one sees when it is hit.  Skill in rhetorical, that is intellectual marksmanship (if there be such a word), will win for a man the repute of originality without his knowing how he came by it — the quality not being common.

    One day, when Frederick Douglas first appeared on the platform, he was speaking against the northern 'dough-faces,' and quoted against them the text, 'And the Lord God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all 'the days of thy life.'  Immediately arose the familiar hiss, and, drawing himself up to his full height, Douglas, pointing to the sibilant creature, exclaimed, 'I told you so.  Upon thy belly shalt thou go, dust shalt thou eat, and hiss, all the days of thy life.'  This was not in the text, but it told all the same upon the serpents in the meeting.

    There was a famous negress in America known as 'Sojourner Truth' — a name she gave herself, as she went from place to place preaching, even when she was 100 years of age.  Hearing, during slavery days, Douglas lecture in despairing tone upon the termination of slavery, Sojourner raised her tall form, rendered more striking by her flowing grey hair, and exclaimed, with her deep, loud voice, 'Frederick, is God dead?'  Her short oration evoked the hopes and enthusiasm of the assembly, who were astonished at the splendid question.  She had probably nursed the orator, who was born in slavery, and called him Frederick, as in earlier days.  In a striking speech in the House of Commons, Mr Stansfield said: 'The whole principle of the Home Rule Bill was to find a modus vivendi between the two nations.  The geographical position of Ireland determined its political relations.  There must be a union — but not too rigid and absolute a union, as though the British and the Irish were monotonously one.'  Thus a phrase which has light in it makes the fortune of a speech.

    Originality is like fortune — a man may inherit it at birth, or it may come to him after, with this difference: no one need wait for originality being given; he may find it by looking for it.  When Turner wished to paint a storm he had himself lashed to the mast of a ship and went out into the tempest to see what it was like.  When Massillon said he had studied his own heart, he knew that strange knowledge was to be found there.  Fielding quotes the instructive saying, 'Man differs from man more than man differs from the beast.'  Thus sources of originality lie thick wherever a man moves, if he gives his mind to observe them.

    One thing has to be borne in mind.  When Shakespeare says 'To thine own self be true,' a man who acts on the injunction should ask himself what his own self really is.  Is it a base self, or a noble self? his ignorant self, or his cultivated self?  Let not the appeal be to a base but to a best self.

    Proportion of time, as well as proportion of parts, is essential, both for the sake of the speaker's strength as well as the hearer's patience.  Whitfield is reported to have said that a man with the eloquence of an angel ought not to exceed forty minutes in the length of a sermon, and it is well known that Wesley seldom exceeded thirty.  'I have almost always found,' says another eminent preacher, 'that the last fifteen minutes of a sermon an hour in length was worse than lost, both upon the speaker and congregation!'  There is practical wisdom in these remarks.  A man who determines to speak but a short time is more likely to command the highest energy for his effort, and to speak with sustained power.  Half an hour is time enough for immortality.  Mirabeau achieved it by efforts of less duration.  It is not without reason that we keep the proverb, 'Brevity is wit.'  There is originality in that brevity which fully informs, but never tires.  The orator may wisely remember the lines of Mr E. E. Bowen, sung at Speech Day at Harrow, when John Lyon approaches Queen Elizabeth at Tilbury Fort, to plead for the School Charter —

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CHAPTER XXV.

THE OUTSIDE MIND OF THE ORATOR

MANY people have no outside mind (nor inside mind either), which deprives them of the greatest gift of the gods — that of 'seeing themselves as others see them.'  Few attain to that power; but what is more important, rhetorically, is that the orator sees his subject as it may strike others, and provides that it shall strike them rightly.  It has been told how Dr Burchard never thought how his fatal alliteration of 'Rum, Romanism and Rebellion' would strike his Presidential audiences.  Sir William Follet, the nature of whose forensic strength has been described, had no thought as to the outside impression he might make against the justice and impartiality of the law he was bound, as Attorney-General, to uphold and exalt.  At the trial of Thomas Cooper he was so vindictive to the Chartist shoemaker at the bar that, despite Cooper's reconversion to Christianity, and the divine forgiveness which he preached, he never forgave Sir William Follet, who filled the hearts of thousands of Chartists with hatred of Whig Government.  All the while, fair speech would have vindicated the law, and increased respect for the party he represented.  Half the disaffection of the people in every nation is created by well-meaning vindicators of order who have no outside mind, and who betray the interests committed to them.

    Very often a man betrays himself by not considering how others may regard him, in consequence of what he says.  Professor H. Morley, in his introduction to 'Julius Cæsar,' [9] shows that to continue to the death of Brutus was necessary to the design Shakespeare had.

    Here he might have said reasonably and effectively, 'The reader who is of this opinion will think that the critics who have said that the play ought to have concluded with the assassination scene did not understand the theory on which the great tragedy was evidently written.'  Instead of words to this effect, Professor Morley exclaims: —

'Shall we ask now where the wit lay under the wigs of critics who wondered why Shakespeare did not end the play of "Julius Cæsar" with the scene of the assassination?'

    This is to say, now Professor Morley has spoken, there can be no doubt under whose wig the wit lies.  This was quite apparent from his clear and instructive argument, without his saying so and repelling the reader by his conceit.

    A man may be the first to conceive an idea of mark, or to discover a new method of public service — an idea which nobody thinks much of at the time — a method which nobody acts upon.  Years after, somebody comes forward with the same thought, or the same device, who obtains both credit and attention.  He may have originated the idea independently, and at a time when the public were better inclined than before to entertain the conception, or it may have been derived from the first promulgator, to whom no reference is made.  If, however, he who was first in the field comes forward with clamorous or imputative claims for credit, he rarely gets it, however much it may be his due.  But if he contents himself with expressing his pleasure at seeing views now accepted coincident with those which long ago, at a certain time, and in a certain way, were advanced by himself, but were then unnoticed or unregarded — the modesty of his reference will beget public interest in the question.  Many would be disposed to admit his originality who would refuse assent to it if it were put forward in a spirit of jealous and egotistical pretension.  It is important to an advocate and an orator not to forget that every public question has an outside.

    When I was a young man I was one of several lecturers engaged in debating and explaining the principles of the Communistic movement then advocated.  It was our duty to report from time to time to the New Moral World, the journal of the movement (of which we were accredited missionaries), the proceedings in which we took part.  The most eminent of my colleagues, Mr Lloyd Jones, never did this.  When asked why no reports came from him, he answered, 'How could he praise himself?'  Of course he could not usefully do so.  Nobody wanted him to do it.  But what he might have done was to describe the quality and number of the audiences whom he addressed, what adversaries appeared, the point of what they said, and briefly, the purport of his replies.  This would be instructive to his colleagues elsewhere, and to the readers of the journal in question.  He was not required to tell them how clever he was — how successfully he silenced his opponents — or how brilliantly he acquitted himself.  All this would better appear in his arguments than in any eulogy he could write of himself.  Could he have looked outside himself in that respect, as he did in many other things, he had been further useful and entertaining.

    It was through the influence of Madame Maintenon that Massillon was appointed to preach before Louis XIV. at the Advent, 1699.  Louis XIV. was then at the height of his power and glory; the military reverses which embittered his later years had not begun; he was 'The Grand Monarch' of Europe, intoxicated with flattery.  It was customary for the court preachers to begin with a compliment to him.  The courtiers were keenly expectant, as they watched the preacher's calm, rapt face as to how he would turn his opening sentences.  'Blessed are they that mourn,' was the unexpected text.  And again he paused. 'Sire,' he said, 'if the world were here speaking to your Majesty, and not Jesus Christ, it would not address you thus.  It would say to you, "Blessed is the prince who has never fought but he has conquered; who has imposed peace on the nations at his will; who has filled the universe with his name; who through a long and flourishing reign has enjoyed at his ease the fruits of his glory, the love of his people, the admiration of his enemies, the wisdom of his laws, the noble hope of a numerous posterity."  But, sire, Jesus Christ speaks not as the world speaks.  "Happy," He saith to you, "not he who wins the admiration of the present world, but who is chiefly occupied with the world to come; who lives in forgetfulness of all that passeth away because his conversation is in Heaven.  Happy not he whose reign will be immortalised in history, but he whose penitential tears shall have blotted out the history of his sins from the memory of God.  "Yea, it is he who is happy."  Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted."'

    A monk, who before this had been commanded to preach before the king, began his sermon thus: 'Sire, I mean not to pay any compliment to your Majesty — I have found none in the Gospel.'  This monk was more intent on displaying his own cloistered asceticism than on displaying the truth, and he never more had opportunity of touching the conscience of the king.  By obtruding 'faithfulness' out of season he lost his chance of being useful in season.  Massillon was wiser.  He knew that truth does better to knock at doors than break them open.  You may indeed thrust truth through the splintered panels, but the occupant of the house will kick it out again as soon as you are gone.  Violence begets contempt, except among cowards.

    Once I had a house in which I designed to reside to the end of my days, and in order that those days should not be unnecessarily shortened, I spent £150 in making it entirely healthy.  To be sure of this, I called in a sanitary engineer.  Only one thing was wanting in the end — a manhole of eleven feet in depth to the main drain for access to a trap to be placed there.  This I wished made outside the house, and application was sent to the town authorities for leave to do it.  The answer was that they had refused 11,000 applications, involving an operation on the footpath where the shaft in question would be made.  The builder who was making my alterations — himself an alderman — said 'nothing could be done; the shaft must be in the house, and he took up the floor of my front room, and dug nine feet down, before I was aware of it.  I desired him to fill up the hole and replace the floor.  I consulted the mayor — who happened to call upon me — who said he was afraid the permission I wanted could not be had.  Seeing there was an outside to this question, I wrote to the works committee the following letter, with a view to show them how their refusal would appear to the public if made known to them: —

'Gentlemen, — Word has come to me that you decline to permit me to put a shaft outside my house.  The town recently spent £1,000 in vindicating its salubriousness as a place where visitors may come, or gentlemen reside, without having to make a preliminary engagement with their undertakers.  Believing this, I became a resident, when I am informed that, if I desire to sink a shaft upon my premises for sanitary purposes, it must be within my house.  Do you mean that I must ask my friends whether they will dine in the "Front sewer-room" or in the "Back sewer-room"?  It would cost me less to have three burials from my house than the alterations for salubrity I am making.  But as I may be one of the three to be buried, I object to this risk.  True, I may let the house to a tenant, but, if I know that the germs of death can percolate into it, I should feel, if a death ensued, that I was a murderer.  Landlord law would permit me to do so, but I should not be less a scoundrel if, for the sake of rent, I did it.  What say you, gentlemen?'

    The Town Surveyor, a clear-headed officer, sent me the permission I sought.  Afterwards, the mayor asked me for a copy of my letter which obtained for me this unexpected leave.  I gained this point from my habit of looking to see whether a question has an outside.  I cite this instance because a precept is never sufficiently recommended until you show how it comes out in practice.  As far as my experience goes, the dialectic injunction is true — 'Know more than you use.  Read and think outside and all around.'  Goldsmith, who greatly admired Burke's skill in statement, in argument, and in quietly mastering and crushing error, as a boa constrictor might, said 'Burke wound into a subject like a serpent.'  He must therefore have looked outside to discover the most convenient aperture by which he could enter.

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CHAPTER XXVI.

PULPIT ORATORY

CONSIDERING the many thousands of preachers of all denominations who address every week more or less intelligent congregations, it would be conducive to the public taste as well as pleasure if each preacher spoke well.  Mr Bright was of opinion that no one should be appointed to preach who had not a tolerable voice, and some knowledge of the art of expression.  Soldiers of the cross, like other soldiers, should be selected with reference to their capabilities for discharging the duties of the service.

    Oratory, the art of public persuasion, might exist in the Church to a greater extent than we find it, but for its dread of imitating the theatre.  Art is mostly suppressed among the Dissenters by the influence of evangelism; did this not exist, their precarious pay would deter them from the pursuit of eloquence.  The bar is too full of business and too anxious for fees to reach much distinction.  The politician is generally indolent if not dependent; and if necessitous, he has to struggle for himself when he should be struggling for excellence.  General Ludlow, whose maxim the reader has seen, said a man 'should say what he means, and mean what he says.'  This is rhetoric, because it means sincerity, and sincerity is persuasion to all who know no more than the speaker.  Sincerity is not errorless; the most honest man may be mistaken, but the logician should never be mistaken.  Logic is the art of avoiding error, and should be one of the attainments of every preacher.  Cardinal Newman was of this opinion.  In a remarkable passage, he says: —

'One main portion of intellectual education, of the labours of both school and university, is to remove the original dimness of the mind's eye, to strengthen and perfect its vision; to enable it to look out into the world right forward, steadily and truly; to give the mind clearness, accuracy, precision; to enable it to use words aright, to understand what it says, to conceive justly what it thinks about, to abstract, compare, analyse, divide, refine and reason correctly.  There is a particular science which takes these matters in hand, and it is called logic; but it is not by logic — certainly not by logic alone that the faculty I speak of is required.  The infant does not learn to spell and read the hues upon his retina by any scientific rule; nor does the student learn accuracy of thought by any manual or treatise.  The instruction given him, of whatever kind, if it be really instruction, is mainly, or at least pre-eminently, this — a discipline in accuracy of mind.'

    Mr Spurgeon, who made pleasantry popular in the pulpit, used to tell young preachers how he went with a friend to the Crystal Palace one day, and going to the rifle range his friend took a shot and made a 'centre,' and he seemed proud of it.  But there were two targets, one on the right, and the other on the left, and the man in charge said, 'Which target did the gent aim at?'  His friend answered, 'The right-hand one.'  'I thought so,' said the man, 'for you hit the left one.'  That was not a creditable thing to a marksman, though he succeeded in hitting something.  Mr Spurgeon said it was no credit to a minister to win a soul by inadvertence.  He should aim, and learn the art of hitting what he aimed at.

    The principles of oratory, which conduce to secular efficiency, are necessary to excellence in the spiritual sphere.  As the law of causation which reigns in matter extends to mind, so the laws of rhetoric reign in divinity as well as in the drama.

    A lecture, a speech, a sermon, or a conversation, is like a city in which you seek a destination.  Unless the pathway of the meaning is clearly marked by relevant words, the listener will never find his way to it.  If you leave any nameless openings, his thoughts will turn down there, and you will be at the end of your argument before the mind of the hearer gets back to it.

    Sometimes preachers so treat their hearers that they know not what they are to get back to.  Some years ago, I went to hear the Rev. J. Guinness Rogers and the Rev. Dr R. W. Dale, when those eminent ministers went through the land in exposition and vindication of Nonconformity of the Congregationalist type.  But neither of them ever said what Congregationalism was.  Its aim, we understand, was to increase the life of the Church, and so many of the great audience whom they attracted, who were of that persuasion, doubtless knew all about it.  These brilliant propagandists appeared to assume that all the audience did.  Three-fourths of the assembly, to my knowledge, had not the remotest idea of Congregationalism as a distinctive religious democracy.  The first thing a preacher should think of is that three-fourths of a miscellaneous congregation have little knowledge of what he is talking about.

    Though we must admit, that illiterate passion affects us more than learning without it, we must keep in view that this passion is the passion of conviction.  All the rest is, to Englishmen, rant.  The passion of conviction is modest, manly and earnest.  If the conviction is manifestly founded on knowledge and reason, and is seen to be based on what Grote happily called 'reasoned truth,' it is omnipotent.

    Massillon, like Demosthenes, won renown by virtue of compression, coherency, energy of statement, and vigour of insight.  He had the penetration to see what others overlooked, and when he showed to his auditors what all might but did not see, they were astounded.  How many profess to relinquish the things of this world — but how few do it.

    'Where are they,' Massillon exclaims, 'who renounce, in good faith, the pleasures, customs, maxims and hopes of the world?  All have made the promise — who have kept it?  We see many people who complain of the world; who accuse it of injustice, ingratitude, caprice; who inveigh bitterly against it; who speak loudly of its abuses and errors; but in denouncing it they love it, follow it, and cannot do without it; in complaining of its injustices they are angry, but not disabused; they feel its evil treatments, but do not recognise its dangers; they censure it, but where are those who hate it?  And by that may be very well judged the people who make pretence to salvation.  In fine, you have uttered the anathema against Satan and his works; and what are his works?  Those which compose, well-nigh, the thread and entire course of your life; the pomps, the plays, the pleasures, the spectacles, the illusions of which he is the father, the pride of which he is the model, the jealousies and the contentions of which he is the artificer.'

    Massillon understood that overdoing was undoing, and stopped at the point of effect.  It was Voltaire who, more than any other writer, made the fame of Massillon.  At passages like these, and the one previously quoted, Voltaire said in the Encyclopædia, the audience were 'stirred by a sort of involuntary motion, the whole assembly started up from their seats, and such murmurs of surprise and acclamation arose as disconcerted the speaker, though they increased the effect of his discourse.'

    The business of a preacher is to represent his Master — not himself.  His art is but the light by which the great picture is seen.  The purity and quality of that light is important.  It reveals everything, but never draws attention to itself.  Edward Irving was very desirous that Robert Hall should hear him preach.  This came to pass, and when Hall was asked what he thought of Irving's impassioned eloquence, he answered, 'He presented a magnificent picture, but stood too much in front of it himself.'

    A story is told of Massillon which many have heard and supposed to be of more recent origin.  It is said that one day, when he was preaching upon the Passion before Louis XIV. and all the court, he so affected his hearers that everybody was in tears except a citizen, who appeared as indifferent to what he heard as to what he saw.  One of his neighbours, surprised at such insensibility, said to him, 'How can you refrain from weeping, while we are all bathed in tears?'  'That is not astonishing,' answered the citizen, 'I am not of this parish.'  The eloquence which I have endeavoured to describe would have included this man also in the general weeping; just as the preaching of Whitfield emptied the pockets of Franklin, the greatest utilitarian economist who ever listened to him.  Was it not Whitfield of whom it was written —

The common impression is that Whitfield had revivalist rudeness and passion.  On the contrary, he had extreme grace of manner.  He had art as well as fervency, and the union made him irresistible to his hearers, to whatever parish they belonged.

    Having regard to the dreadful message the majority of preachers have to deliver, which no art can render humane, which must freeze the manner of the deliverer, the sincere preacher must find his art more difficult than other speakers.  The Duchess of Buckingham, who had heard Whitfield's message, wrote to the Countess of Huntingdon, who favoured his communion, saying, —

'It is monstrous to be told that you have a heart as sinful as the common wretch who crawls the earth.  This is highly offensive and insulting, and I cannot but wonder that your ladyship should relish any sentiments so much at variance with high rank and good-breeding.'

    No doctrine that is true ought to be deemed repulsive.  The object of the pulpit orator is to persuade the minds of men to the acceptance of sacred truth.  But to do this effectually, he must not only choose times and seasons, but his audience.  In the earlier days of co-operation it suffered from neglect of this precaution.  Some earnest speakers delighted to make statements which had the effect of an electric shock upon hearers.  They exceeded Prudhon, who said in his sharp, naked way, that property was robbery, which represented all mankind as engaged in thieving.  If any one desirous of arresting the attention of certain passengers in a crowded street should roll a skittle ball among them, all who had India-rubber ankles might find, the percussion tolerable; but those with tender shins would be so wounded and wroth that they would, when they recovered, be disposed to kick the indiscriminate gentleman who had attacked them so sharply.  If a man could pass an electric shock through a crowd, he might do good to some by the excitement he would create, but a good part of the feebler sort he would knock down.  So it is when the shocks of logic are sent indiscriminately through the human understanding; some minds are knocked quite over by it, and never recover.  This is too little thought of in preaching.  It is a serious thing to shock the wrong persons.  It may shatter them.  The mind may be splintered as well as a bureau, and never be good for anything after.  If we regard the process of treating conviction as a science, then we must be reasonable in the use of reason.  Sterne cites it as a sign of Providence, that God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb.  Most persons who give attention to the art of diffusing new opinions will quite agree that it is wise sometimes to temper the fierce wind of logic to the nervous intelligence shorn of robust strength.  If the experienced eye is discerning enough, it may see lying all around the fierce logician, prostrate and shattered minds, in the last agonies of new ideas, which have struck them mercilessly and fatally.  Beyond all doubt there are many persons whose notions are so heavy, dull and matted together, that thought cannot move within them, and a vigorous disintegrating shock is the best thing for them.  Their minds are loosened thereby, and they become able to think.  But this class of persons should be got together when addressed, and what is said to them should not be reported, or that will happen which Bishop Colenso relates.  When he had explained to a Zulu chief the minatory character of salvation, he did not contradict the bishop, but answered like a gentleman, 'It may be true, but I would rather not believe it.'  It is a maxim in modern hydropathy that what shocks, or pains, or creates revulsion, is wrong, and may create new diseases.  Pressnitz killed his own discovery by severity in treatment.  Smedley reanimated it by making hydropathic healing agreeable.  When Fox was canvassing Westminster he asked a butcher in St James' market for his vote, who answered, 'Sir, I admire your head, but damn your heart.'  To which Fox replied, 'Sir, I admire your candour, but damn your manners.'  There should be faithfulness and candour in the pulpit, but it will be more effective if considerately expressed.

    Though the clerical orator should not repel by austerity, neither should he seek to advance his views by jocoseness.  The nature of religion demands a cheerful reverence — but reverence in language there must be.  Mr Spurgeon sometimes stepped over the boundary which separates pleasantry from buffoonery.  When Bishop Disney sent over to England some negro evangelists from Canada, one sang 'The Old Sexton.'  The lines —

were sung with a pathos that moved every heart.  Then came a song beginning, —

    There was no palpitating hope here, as to who would 'gather them in' at the last day.  The tone of the song was that of singers, who would gather themselves in.  All this took place at the Mansion House in London.  Merchants who had taken out their cheques to give to the mission put them up again as these jocose, irreverent songs proceeded.  The Egyptian Hall contained many of the first Christian families of London.  How could they be expected to subscribe for promoting theological teaching of this description?  There may be poor negroes to whom this revivalist chatter has charms for their humble minds, but these Canadian coloured men and women, who were singers, were capable of nobler things, and gave proof how well they could sing songs of tenderness and moving sentiment.  Why were they not advised to sing only such songs?  Christianity should never be comic.  Yet many ministers who would not commit this fault themselves will countenance it in others as good enough for the multitude — betraying their cause thereby.

    But consistency is more difficult than decorum in piety.  Criticism, like competition, is sharper in these days, when intelligence is more general, than heretofore; and the pulpit orator should understand that his hearers find it hard to believe in the sincerity of any man who tells you the words of the Lord are true, and who knows he has said, 'My people shall not sow and another reap, they shall not plant and another gather,' yet see this done every day, and they aid and abet it, and act it themselves.  The pulpit orator who is the advocate of well-discerned Christian consistency in social life would convince and conciliate adversaries as no mere rhetoric can.

    A good voice has an advantage in the pulpit as well as on the platform, and he who is a master of sense as well as sound he will command a high place in public opinion.  But, as popular education goes, voice will do more for a preacher than matter, since a man who can be heard has a chance of attention, while he who is not audible has none.  Besides, people naturally like sounds which come to them of their own accord, and need no effort to hear.  Moreover a hundred persons may be entertained and even satisfied by cadence and vocalisation for ten who will be capable of intellectual appreciation of what is said and whose enjoyment depends upon its purport.

    When a deputation of elders were sent from New York to Chicago to invite Dr Robert Collyer to be their minister, they had but one misgiving — 'Would his voice fill the place?'  'If that is all,' said the doctor, 'I shall do, for my voice is cramped in Chicago.'  His voice would reach across a prairie.  If John the Baptist spoke with his pleasant power I do not wonder that the desert was crowded with hearers.  Strong sense borne on a strong voice is influential speaking.  When weighty sense sets out on a weak voice it falls to the ground before it reaches distant hearers.

    Preachers have always had trouble with drowsy hearers of the word.  Even Puritan ministers had to have recourse to 'woodchuck' contrivances to keep their congregations awake.  In 1646, the Rev. Dr Samuel Whiting was minister of Lynn, Massachusetts.  One Obadiah Turner kept a journal at that time.  The following is an extract: —

'1646, June ye 3d.  Allen Brydges hath bin chose to wake ye sleepers in meeting, and, being much proud of his place, must needs have a fox taile fixed to ye end of a long staff wherewith he may brush the faces of them yt will have naps in time of discourse; likewise a sharp thorn wherewith he may prick such as be most sounde.  On ye last Lord his day, as he strutted about ye meeting house, he did spy Mr Tomkins sleeping with much comforte, his head kept steadie by being in ye corner, and his hand grasping ye rail.  And soe spying, Allen did quickly thrust his staff behind Dame Ballard, to give him a grievous prick on ye hand.  Whereupon Mr Tomkins did spring up much above ye floor, and with terrible force strike his hand against ye wall, and also, to ye great wonder of all, profainlie exclaim in a loud voice, "Curs the woochuch!" he dreaming, as it seemed, yt a woochuch had seized and bit his hand.  But on comeing to know where he was, and ye great scandall he had committed, he seemed much abashed, but did not speak.  And I think he will not soone again go to sleepe in meeting.  Ye women may sometimes sleep and none know it, by reason of their enormous bonnets.  Mr Whiting does pleasantli say yt from the pulpit he doth seem to be preaching to stacks of straw with men jotted here and there among them.'

    Were there only natural art in reading Scriptures and collects in the churches there would be no need of an Allen Brydges the Waker to walk the aisles.

    When in Washington, one of my delights was to wander into negro churches.  There was another church of coloured people, well to do, and therefore more conventional in their worship.  The humbler church, to which I preferred to go, I found more genuine, and therefore more entertaining and instructive.

    The preacher who conducted the services was beyond the middle age, and of sedate, honest aspect.  His reading of the Scripture was the only religious reading I heard on my visits to America.  It was slow, distinct, impressive, earnest, now hushed, now loud, now a cadence of alarm.  His tone changed with the sense, with natural dramatic passion, as though the reader comprehended the words of Heaven, and was reading them aloud for the first time.  It was not like the reading I had heard in the morning in the President's church, where the lessons were read with what seemed to me a cold propriety, in which all the tragic pathos of the sacred story was frozen in the preacher's throat; it was earnestness in a refrigerator.

    The negro sermon was in keeping with the reading.  The coloured gospel was not bad — peculiar, but seldom extravagant.  Its discernment and candour would surprise any English hearer.  'My brethren,' said the preacher, 'Christ bid us love our enemies.  David was a man after God's own heart, but David did not do this.'  The preacher said this, and left it as a thing to be noted, and not to be explained away.  'We should have clean hands,' he remarked.  'Clean hands do not mean hands merely clean according to nature, it means clean souls.'  The conclusion of his sermon was an exhortation, after the manner of preachers, but in the vein of his race.  'My brethren, pray!  You can telegraph to God.  You can telegram right away.  The man is always at the other end.  You can telegram at midnight, the man at the wheel is always awake.  Always awake, my brothers and sisters.  Pray! brothers, pray!  The office is always open, the man is always at the wheel.  Brothers and sisters, telegram right away.'  The preacher had got his figures of speech a little mixed.  He was thinking of the ship when he spoke of the 'man at the wheel.'  Still, he managed his simile pretty effectively, and the comparison between the speed of a telegram and a prayer was creditable to his powers of illustration.  He was quite understood.  Some laughed, some smiled, some made audible assent, especially two rows of dark sisters dressed in resplendent blue dresses — members of the 'Society of Moses.'

    In days when only written books existed, those able to read them must have been impressed by them in a degree unknown to us.  Then men knew less than now, but what they knew they knew better.  When the Bible was chained to the altar of the church, men must have hung upon the lips of the reader as they heard for the first time what they took to be the actual words of God.  What curiosity, impatience and astonishment were to be read in the faces of their auditors!  What awe, what reverence, what pathos, what passion there would be in the tones of the reader!  If preachers had the genuine belief of the coloured reader of Washington, and were to read as he read, churches would have more frequenters than they have now.  It is recognised now that there is all the difference in the world between a man feeling not that he must say something, but that he has something to say.  This is as true in the pulpit as Parliament.

    The Rev. Dr Joseph Parker — who, when a young preacher, had merely a good presence, a good voice, facility and fervour of speech — owes all his distinction to himself, by the cultivation of strong natural powers.  He has given it as his opinion that, 'until there is better hearing there will not be better preaching.'  This may be true in one sense.  No preacher would think of delivering the same quality of sermon before auditors of known intelligence which he would preach to a congregation not known to have any.  Dr Parker can hardly intend to say that the hearers are to raise the preacher, whose duty it is to raise his hearers.  Dr Parker did not wait for this.  He has made his hearers.  It is true that neither orator nor preacher can go much further than his auditors can see; for then he is out of sight and his influence ceases.  A preacher is a leader, but he cannot lead unless he is ahead of his hearers.  When his subject is beyond their range of knowledge he must be informing and explanatory.  He need not lower the truth, but raise the understanding of those to whom it is addressed.  If that be the preacher's endeavour he will do much to elevate his hearers.  Once I was the guest of a rector for whom I had personal affection.  For two Sundays I sat in his family pew.  His sermons had no relation to anything in the heavens above or the earth beneath.  Such sermons, however well intended, could not elevate the parochial hearers in a century.  Dr Parker is the only divine who has advised — what I thought I was alone in advising years ago, namely — that preachers who have to preach twice on a Sunday should preach a sermon of the great orators of the Church once in the day, and reserve their unwearied minds for their own discourse.  The sermons of the Fathers of the Church and orators of the pulpit, from early times to the present, afford a mighty field of selection.  Wealth of illustration, felicity of expression, splendour of ideas, and passion, lie there mostly unknown to preachers and almost entirely so to modern, busy, narrow-minded, uninformed congregations — narrow-minded because ignorant of the brilliant sermons with which the pulpit orators of every denomination have enriched and delighted the minds of the generation in which they lived.  A preacher who knows how to read, has good discernment of relevant passages, judgment not to make them too long, and preface them by an account of who the preacher was, would command grateful hearers, whom he would reform, gratify, and refine.  A great play delights as often as it is well acted; why should not a great sermon, when well spoken?  Acquaintedness with great discourses would often improve the preacher as well as his flock.  As Butler said long ago: —

 
    Professor Francis William Newman, a man of wider information than his brother, the cardinal, told me he deemed it beyond his power to preach a sermon every week — he who never spoke, or wrote any mean or incomplete thing, measured a sermon by a standard of his own.  One minister I have known, who, though always preaching, was always fresh, was Henry Ward Beecher.  His ideas were inexhaustible.  The Rev. Hugh Price Hughes's definition of the essential requisites of modern preaching are 'simplicity, flexibility, spontaneity and earnestness' — qualities of his own preaching, aided by a voice which travels like a bird over the audience and along the galleries.  Ward Beecher had the four qualities above named, with the addition of imagination; always bright and often poetical, when every sentence was tinted with a hue of its own, as is the case with sermons by the Rev. Stopford A. Brooke, which a connoisseur in pulpit orations would know when he saw them quoted, though no preacher's name was appended to them.

    When a young man, I heard a sermon by the Rev. William Knibb, a Baptist minister, whose life was wasted in Jamaica, begin with these words, which I still remember, 'In the days when infantine Christianity went forth to battle with the full-grown powers of superstition and darkness.'  His picturesque sentences continued to the end, his unfaltering swiftness and distinctness, I have never heard exceeded.

    It was said of Morley Punshon, whom I sometimes heard — a preacher of renown in his day — 'He did not create; he did not inform; he did not reason; he did not criticise — he set forth things vividly.'  That was a great merit; he held the field but did not extend it.

    'Parsons of York,' as he was called (as men spoke of Jay of Bath, or Hall of Leicester — preachers who are remembered as no one else of those towns is) in later years, whatever may have been the case earlier, broke up his sentences with a dry hacking cough for the first fifteen minutes.  Still the sentences went on their coherent way.  Afterwards he suffered no interruption when the stately argument of his oration rose high before the hearer, who remembered it long after as though he had seen a great sight.  It was in Whitfield Chapel, London, where I heard Parsons.  Though unlike his famous predecessor in that place, those who heard Parsons left him, as men are said to have left Whitfield, with the impression that they had heard a master of the pulpit.

    Sydney Smith complained in his day of the cold decorum of the pulpit.  He said: —

'The great object of modern sermons is to hazard nothing; their characteristic is decent debility, which alike guards their authors from ludicrous errors, and precludes them from striking beauties.  Every man of sense, in taking up an English sermon, expects to find it a tedious essay, full of common-place morality; and if the fulfilment of such expectations be meritorious, the clergy have certainly the merit of not disappointing their readers.'

    Since his day, preachers of note have arisen in the church.  Neither Kingsley, nor Maurice, nor Bishop Magee were conventional in their preaching.  Still, too many Church preachers are dull.  Many of them are happily sent abroad.  I have heard a colonial bishop so insipid and unimpressive of speech, that he could not convert on his own coast, where hearers had the advantage of knowing his tongue, much less those to whom he would speak in a language foreign to them.

    Preaching can never be what it might be, could the other side be heard after the discourse.  The clergyman who told a great lawyer that his was a fascinating profession — was answered, 'Preaching is a better one, as the opposite party has no right of reply.'  Ten lawyers have more alertness, many-sidedness, and circumspection than a hundred preachers.  They know their learned brother lies in wait to question every unprovable statement they make.  The Catholic clergy knew they lost weight by being all on one side, and invented the Devil's Advocate that the other side might be heard.  But this advocate seldom puts in an appearance.  Were he to attend, every Sundays preaching would rapidly improve in truth, fairness and force.  Then a hearer would seldom have to say of a preacher, as an observing woman did: In the first place he read his sermon; in the second he did not read it well; and in the third it was not worth reading.

    As to the manner of preaching, Dr Leifchild's rules for preaching would ruin any preacher —

    A preacher would be ridiculous in a month who did this.  Shakespeare's advice to players is far wiser.  Warmth will vary with conviction, and energy with earnestness and the nature of the subject.  The close of a discourse should be better spoken than the explanatory parts.  It may end in resounding sentences, or, like a farewell song of love, its last cadence may die in the air, leaving an impression which will never die in the mind of the hearer.

    If a preacher wants to know what he is going to say — or, better, wants to know what he ought to say — let him write out his sermon, not for the purpose necessarily of reading it to his congregation, but for the purpose of reading it to himself.  He will never discover what links of argument he has omitted in an intended extempore speech — he will never become aware of the redundancies, contradictions, undesigned repetitions and incoherences of arrangement — without order or sequence — until he writes right off what is in his mind.  When he has revised, pruned, amplified where necessary, and given logical connection, let him make marginal notes of the purport of each essential passage, and preach from these notes.  Such was the advice of Professor Hall to an American divinity class of which he had charge.  There is no better rule to follow.  It fixes a comprehensive outline of the intended sermon in the mind.  Written passages and illustrations will recur to the memory.  There will be confidence, flexibility and coherence — audibility and earnestness will do the rest.

――――♦――――

 
CHAPTER XXVII.

PLATFORM READING

NO one would prefer a sermon or speech, poor in quality and incoherent in texture, extemporarily delivered — to a discourse or oration, compact in expression and strong in sense — read well.  It is bad reading which brings reading into comparative contempt or dislike.  Reading, like any other form of oratory, has its conditions, which are seldom thought of.

    Sometimes a speech or an address will be read from a quarto book, written in a small hand, over which the reader stumbles.  The hearer counts the turning over of the monotonously-spoken pages to calculate when the end of his misery will come, when, to his utter dismay, he perceives that the pages are written at the back, and when the end was thought to be in sight, the dreadful lecturer, or speaker, begins to turn the leaves over and read the backs, when the period of the hearer's release is indefinitely postponed.

    I have seen a preacher read a sermon in small, badly-written, interlined pages, which no one who once took his eyes off it could, without delay, find the place again at which he was.  I have seen a prize paper read from a small printed pamphlet which did not permit the reader once to look at his audience without missing a sentence or two, and so rapidly and insipidly was it spoken, that an audience from a penitentiary, would not listen to it to the end.  I have seen a Dean read an address in minute handwriting.  He, being near-sighted, had to hold the pages close to his face.  All the auditors could see was a bundle of white leaves and a bald head behind it, and the voice issuing from the rear of the pages was so indistinct and cadenceless that the words were all swallowed by the persons three rows before him, for they reached no further, and the audience at the back had to seek from those in front a second-hand report of what was supposed to have been said, of which no one was sure.

    At the British Association I have seen a president read his inaugural address from long proof slips, just as the printer sent them.  The president had to ask the secretary for his address, of which the secretary had only one copy — and that he could not find when wanted.  Nothing could be more humiliating to president or audience than to read to, or to be read to, from printers' slips, which takes all dignity out of the occasion, even if the reading was fairly spoken.  But the president, being a professor, despised emphasis, inflection, or passion, as unphilosophical.  The audience had a bad time of it, and applauded only when the address ended, and because it had ended.  Philosophers might be expected to do things better.

    University reading is, as a rule, more insipid than clerical.  The professor's object is to say in a paper (when he reads one) exactly what ought to be known.  Students bent upon knowledge, with their minds already occupied with the subject submitted to them, and seeking information important to them — bend a willing ear, and are grateful for the ideas they want, and heed not, and care not, how colourless and tame-toned are the words spoken.  Many professors, as I have seen, when they come before the public as preachers or scientists, will deliver their message in the most spiritless manner to an audience ignorant alike of its matter and moment, whom they inspire not only with dislike but with resentment against speaker and subject.

    The pulpit or platform orator who cares only for the judgment of the few, whose attainments give weight to their opinions, may read anyhow, provided he has ideas which the few covet. But if he calls together a miscellaneous audience, or connives at their being assembled, and does not intend to entertain or instruct them, he ought to be liable to indictment for obtaining attention under false pretences.  Some preachers affect not to read their sermons; but they do it, and their congregations know it.  If a man cannot speak — in pulpit or on platform — from notes of the kind described in the last chapter, he had better read openly; and if done properly it will be effective.

    The method is this.  After writing out the speech or discourse, twice or thrice if necessary, read it aloud to someone whom you wish to interest in it.  A reader gets thereby quite a new idea of what he has written. If any part is not understood by the listener, that part must be made clear.  If any part or phrase strikes the listener as not being in good taste, reconsider it.  One object in reading the discourse aloud is to note the time it takes to read it with audibility.  If it occupies an hour it should be abridged until it can be easily read in three-quarters of an hour.  That allows one quarter for the expansion of public reading, which will be slower, fuller in tone, and allow for pauses between new paragraphs.  No discourse, as a rule, should exceed one hour.

    When the whole statement intended to be made is satisfactory as to terms and length, it should be copied out on large note-sized paper, in a handwriting sufficiently bold to be easily read at a distance from the eye.  The initial capital letters should be print capitals, so as to mark clearly the beginning of a new sentence.  Up strokes and down strokes should be short, so that one line does not hang down into another, nor project above, causing confusion or entanglement of words.  The paper used should be somewhat stiff, so that one page can be easily raised by itself.  The writing should be on one side only.  The speaker or preacher should write out the copy himself.  He will know better the words he himself has formed, and become so familiar with the text as to know it almost by heart.  Finally, he should underline with a coloured pencil such words or sentences on which the emphasis is to fall, just as the acting copy of a play is under-scored.  Then the speech is ready to be read.  When the time comes to deliver it, the pages should be held in one hand, and by a careless movement let the auditors perceive that nothing is written at the back, and as each page is read it should be laid on a table at hand, so that the hearers may know that as the pages decrease the end of their detention draweth nigh.  Now, a speech so prepared can be held at a distance from the reader.  He will know at a glance the contents of the page, and the part marked for emphasis will tell him the important words.  On reading the beginning of a sentence he will often know the rest, and feel himself free to look the audience in the face and use such gestures as the sentiment suggests.  Additions or explanations — amplifications of phrases he may feel to need, and illustrations will come into his mind — for which he has left himself time.  By holding his thumb at the sentence where he commenced to interpolate, he can come back instantly to the place, and thus acquire a freedom and spontaneity of delivery more effective than ordinary extempore speeches, which lack vigour, relevance and brightness.

    The Rev. Mr Bellew, though a sonorous and eloquent preacher, delighted his congregation more by reading sermons than by preaching them.  Mr J. S. Laurie, in his Training of Teachers, says, 'Reading aloud, in any sense other than the mere naming of vocables, is an act of intelligence, and an act requiring an even higher intelligence as the subject-matter of what is read grows in subtlety and complexity.  Even with the help of more disciplined and better-informed minds, very few of the middle and upper classes can read in a style that satisfies at once the understanding and the ear of a cultivated listener.  Probably no accomplishment is more conclusive evidence that a boy has been educated than the power of reading well.'  Good reading requires good judgment and good preparation, as oratory does.  This means trouble, and trouble is not taken save by those whose aim is excellence.  I remember a writer saying, 'I once spent the night with a clergyman, an old friend, who had the habit of reading his sermons.  I asked him why he did so.  He went on to give me the reasons, and became animated.  "Well," said I, "I am tired to-night, but I have been very much interested in what you said.  Nevertheless, if you had read your remarks I should have gone to sleep.'"  That was because the rector was a mere conventional reader.  Had he read his sermons as he would read a letter to his family giving them information of a legacy, each bequest to each person would be read with congratulatory emphasis, and none would go to sleep.

    French and American audiences will accept written speeches.  The French read like an oration.  The speeches which stirred all the world in the French Convention were written and read.  Some Americans abuse the privilege of reading in the Legislative Chamber, making their speeches too long for any human purpose, and so reading them that nobody listens or ought to listen to them.  The French read papers and addresses often too long for lasting impression, but then they do read them with an almost super-human animation.

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CHAPTER XXVIII.

FIGURES OF SPEECH

IT is by similes that ideas are made vivid, argument enlivened, and obscurity made clear.  The term above — 'Figures of Speech' — is used in the sense of comparisons, similitudes, symbols, likenesses, and generally such descriptions of things in which the imagination discovers an instructive resemblance to the subject to be explained.  A figure of speech is a change in the subject without any change of meaning.  A simile is the comparison of another thing to the one in question, the likening of two things which, though differing in other respects, have strong points of resemblance.  An instance has already been given showing with what judgment these resemblances should be selected.  The one rule being, if the object is to exalt a subject, to make a noble comparison.  If the purpose is to degrade a subject, the comparison made should serve to lower it in the reader's estimation.  Errors and oversights in these respects are of daily occurrence.  A preacher to whom I often listened with pleasure in days when I was an habitual hearer of the word, one day reproached Christians with not using their minds for making sure of the grounds of their convictions, adding, that they put out their thinking as people did their washing, and got it done badly.  This offended many of his congregation, for some of them could think.  The preacher's simile implied that his congregation had dirty ideas — for that, and that alone, is why garments are sent to the laundry.  The laundress does not make garments, but merely cleans them; whereas, what the preacher — to his credit — wanted, was that his hearers should form ideas of their own, without which a man is mentally naked or bedizened in second-hand clothes, and he should have sought a simile which suggested this.  The one he chose did not touch the case.  The congregation did not suffer from dirty ideas, else he had badly instructed them.  What they suffered from was scantiness of ideas, which could only be worthily increased by their own efforts.

    Some time ago a noble lord, who, like his father before him, had high regard for Mr Gladstone, told a public meeting of Liberals that it might be said of Mr Gladstone in the words of Shakespeare: —

Now, the bestriding man referred to was a dangerous tyrant.  It was a bad compliment to compare Mr Gladstone to him.  Then it follows also that the lesser Liberals are 'petty men, who creep about to find themselves dishonourable graves.'  So the speaker smote Mr Gladstone and all his adherents hip and thigh by one simile, of whose range and application he could have given no thought.  Had the speaker compared Mr Gladstone to the King of Brobdignag, and his followers to men of good but lesser build; or by other simile which suggested that Mr Gladstone was the Saul of his party — head and shoulders above any of them — he had exalted him whom he intended to exalt, and not called up adverse reflections.  It may serve to show with what circumspection similes should be employed if I point out that the last one I have given is open to objection on a political platform — for Saul was mad sometimes, a fact which a quick adversary would turn to good account.

    Not long ago Lady Henry Somerset, in a much-applauded address, said that a bear leader whom she saw in Switzerland told her that when he wanted the bear to dance he kept pulling the string.  That was what 'the people of England must do with their leaders in respect of temperance, and she was sure they would dance.'  This should have been said when the reporters had left, as being better suited for private than for public consumption.  To tell public men you consider them street bears, who will dance only when you pull the string round their necks, is to do all you can to prevent leaders doing anything you wish.  It sets their self-respect against you.  It is smart speaking if you do not think of the result.  Lady Somerset is an engaging lady, and if she, or others like her, pulled the string, no doubt there would be dancing if the dancers could forget that she thinks them 'ears.'

    There is an Australian weapon called a boomerang, which, when thrown, comes back and hits the thrower.  Beware of boomerang arguments, or boomerang similes.  For instance, if misled by pessimist texts you should say all men are corrupt, your opponent might say: 'As all men are so, so you must be.  Thank you for the admission of your conscious rottenness, of which it did not occur to me to accuse you.'  That was the reply I made to a Dr Rowbotham who asked me to assist his advocacy, after declaring on a London platform that all men had putrid principles.  I thought such principles did not require aid in development.

    Robert Owen's principles have often been described but never made so clear as by citing a simile of Victor Hugo.  'Men are like nettles.  Cultivation will turn them from noxious to useful plants.  There are no bad herbs or bad men; there are only bad cultivators.'  This is Robert Owen's philosophy in a nutshell.

    If kings were not better than they are supposed to be, they would be worse than they are, breathing, as they do, the air of fulsomeness.  Royalty has always been a patient, and at times a greedy, recipient of egregious adulation.  It is Macaulay, I think, who says the oratory devoted to James I., on his progress through Scotland, was of no common cast.  Officials who addressed him at the various towns at which he arrived, 'put together Augustus, Alexander, Trajan and Constantine.  It was supposed that even the antipodes heard of his courtesy and liberality; the very hills and groves were said to be refreshed with the dew of his aspect; in his absence the citizens were languishing gyrades, in his presence delighted lizards, for he was the sunshine of their beauty.  At Glasgow, Master Hay, the commissary, when attempting to speak before him, became like one touched with a torpedo, or seen of a wolf; and the Principal of the University, comparing his majesty with the sun, observed, to the luminary's disadvantage, that King James had been received with incredible joy and applause; whereas a descent of the sun into Glasgow would in all likelihood be extremely ill taken.  Hyperbole was not sufficient — the aid of the prodigies was called — a boy of nine years old harangued the king in Hebrew, and the schoolmaster of Linlithgow spoke verses in the form of a lion.'  That was better than a good deal of adulation of royalty, which is often presented in the form of an ass.  When literature first became common, rhetoric grew tawdry, and degenerated into what Dr Parker calls the 'Berlin wool and fancy work' style of statement.  A strong simplicity is always force.

    To preserve peace, and to do good, is an old maxim of morality.  Feltham thus enlivens it by this illustration: —

'When two goats on a narrow bridge met over a deep stream, was not he the wiser that lay down for the other to pass over him, rather than he that would hazard both their lives by contending?  He preserved himself from danger, and made the other become debtor to him for his safety.  I will never think myself disparaged either by preserving peace or doing good.'

    Paine, whom I have heard Ebenezer Elliot describe as the greatest master of metaphor he had known, said of a certain body in America, who professed that principle was higher than interest, were nevertheless 'hunting after their own advantage with a step as steady as time, and an appetite as keen as death.'  Their insatiableness is rendered more evident by these similes.  Describing the illuminated popularity of a political quack — one Silas Deene — Paine said, 'He went up like a rocket and came down like the stick.'  Mirabeau, when asked to counsel an obstinate friend, answered, 'You might as well make an issue in a wooden leg as give him advice.'  Emerson, at the soirée of the Manchester Athenæum, expressing the latent strength of Old England, said she 'had still a pulse like a cannon.'  Speaking elsewhere of the freshness of the style of Montaigne, Emerson said his sentences were 'vascular and alive — if you cut them they would bleed.'  The Cork Magazine says, that the preface of Thomas Davis to the speeches of Curran is in some parts as majestic as the orations which it prefaces; in others, displaying a wild pathos, which 'strikes upon the ear like the cry of a woman.'

    Comparisons are implied by phrases.  An instance occurs in Cardinal Newman's works, where he says, 'Heresy did but precipitate the truths before held in solution.'  The allusion is chemical and a happy one.  Contempt for the men-millinery of literature was forcibly expressed by Mirabeau — 'My style readily assumes force, and I have a command of strong expressions, but if I want to be mild, unctuous and measured, I become insipid, and my flabby style makes me sick.'  Dumont, a friend of Mirabeau's, recounting his own editorial experience in preserving brevity and a wise directness in his journal, says, 'The most diffuse complained of our reducing their dropsical and turgescent expressions.'  Grattan, comparing the Irish Parliament to a human career, exclaimed, 'I have sat by its cradle and I followed its hearse.'

    In the Auditor, Lord Viscount Barrington was described as 'a little squirrel of State, who had been busy all his life in the cage, without turning it round to any human purpose.'  The clearness attained by this simile needs no explanation.  Edward Vansittart Neale, when he wished to show how much the profits of productive labour exceed those of commerce, likened the store to the squirrel —

while the workshop has unlimited possibilities before it.  It is of value to intercept the difference between wholesale and retail prices.  But the store moves between those two barriers.  Mr Neale's simile made clear the advantages of labour acting without limitation.

    When Mr Mould, the undertaker in Martin Chuzzlewit, speaks of Shakespeare, it is as the theatrical poet who was 'buried' at Stratford.  But it matters not whence the similes are drawn, provided they are appropriate and elevating, which was not the case in the sermon preached at Newgate after the escape of Jack Sheppard.  The clergyman discoursed to this effect: —

'How dexterously did he pick the padlock of his chain with a crooked nail, burst his fetters asunder, climb up his chimney, wrench out an iron bar — break his way through a stone wall, make the strong door of a dark entry fly before him, reach the leads of the prison, fix a blanket to the wall with a spike stolen from the chapel, descend to the top of the turner's house, cautiously pass downstairs, and make his escape at the street door.

'I shall spiritualise these things.  Let me exhort ye, then, to open the locks of your hearts with the nail of repentance; burst asunder the fetters of your beloved lusts; mount the chimney of hope; take thence the bar of good resolution; break through the stone wall of despair, and. force the stronghold in the dark entry of the valley of the shadow of death; raise yourself to the leads of divine meditation; fix the blanket of faith with the spike of the Church; let yourselves down to the turner's house of resignation; descend the stairs of humility.  So shall you come to the door of deliverance from the prison of iniquity, and escape from the clutches of that old executioner the devil.'

    This style, once popular, might divert a gaol audience, but would not be thought edifying now.  Down to this chaplain's days this was thought to be clever composition.  The chaplain ought to have been imprisoned for his effort.  Its only excuse could be that it amused his gloomy congregation.  It could not edify them, and was more likely to produce ridicule than reverence.

    Prodigality of metaphors, like multitudes of superlatives, confound meaning.  'It is an idle fancy of some,' says Felton, 'to run out perpetually upon similitudes, confounding their subject by the multitude of likenesses, and making it like so many things, that it is like nothing at all!'

    The child, when he first learns to speak, will say anything, thinking he accomplishes much in continuing to talk.  So with the public speaker when he first commences, and so with the early efforts of the young writer.  When he first rises above the level of plain prose, he never knows when to descend to the earth; and instead of finding an elevation whence he can show his readers a wider landscape and new objects, he thinks he does enough by showing himself.

    Goodrich relates that a boy being rebuked by a clergyman for neglecting to go to church, replied that he would go if he could be permitted to change his seat.  'But why do you wish to change your seat?' said the minister.  'You see,' said the boy, 'I sit over the opposite side of the meeting-house, and between me and you there's Judy Vicars and Mary Staples, and half a dozen other women, with their mouths wide open, and they get all the best of the sermon, and when it comes to me it's pretty poor stuff.'

    It is doubtful whether any boy ever made this reflection.  The story must be pointed at those preachers whose voices are confined to the listeners nearest to them.  Nevertheless, likening the sermon to something to be eaten, made vivid the disadvantage of not being able to hear what is said.

    A resemblance of one thing to another is often cited in argument.  It is then called an analogy.  But it must be remembered that an analogy is not an argument, only an illustration.  No two different things can be alike all through, and it is only the points of the analogy cited, which should be taken notice of in reply.

    There is sometimes an argument of no mean force in a simile.  A soldier, sentenced for an attempt to leave his regiment on Indian service, said in his defence, 'We are not all bad at bottom, but we have at times fever and ague, and then the heart grows faint for England, and we have Europe on the chest.'  That soldier, had he been educated, had been a great rhetorician who would have convinced in a few words.

    A negro woman, though possessing a scantier vocabulary, can be more vivid of speech than her mistress: — A Washington lady, much surprised upon receiving notice from her dusky cook that she was about to leave her service, in order to be married.  'Why,' said the lady, 'I did not even know you had an admirer.'  'Oh, yes'm, for some time.'  'Who is it, Mary?'  'Don't you 'member,  Miss Lissie, that I 'tended a fune'l 'bout two weeks ago?  It's the corpse's husband!'

    In using figures of speech care must be taken not to change the simile in an incongruous way.  There is the well-known American example of the orator who, discovering the artfulness of an opponent, exclaimed, 'I smell a rat — I see it floating in the air — I nip it in the bud.'  In two sentences he converted the rat into a bird and a flower.  The Irish have a gift for absurd similes, which are excusable in them because of the humour in which they excel.  As when Sir Boyle Roche in affirming his loyalty said, 'I stand prostrate before the Throne.'  It was an Hibernian prophet who announced —

    But it was an English cleric of confused memory who told his congregation that 'sorrow may endure for a joy but night cometh in the morning.'  'My brethren,' said an aspiring young preacher, 'such a man as I have described is like the captain of a crewless vessel on a shoreless sea.  Happy would such a man be to bring his men to land.'  There was a glamour of imagination in these words, and it was only afterwards that the hearers reflected that a crewless vessel had no men, and that on a shoreless sea there was no land to put them on.  These oratorical aberrations are confined to no country, though more frequent in some than others.  It was only the other day that Herr Rickhert taunted the German Ministry, saying, 'We hear nothing upon the Ministerial benches, nothing, but profound silence.'  This could not be better said in Dublin.

    A practical design of these chapters, which are now nearing their close — which the reader will be glad to hear — is to call into life the latent power for excellence that every man has, and to guard him against the easy errors into which one inexperienced or uninformed may fall.  Errors are forgiven on their first, or even second committal, but the third time they cause distrust.  At Muzart Pass, over the Tian Shan Range, a marble monument bears this inscription: —

'He who comes this way once may be pardoned, as not knowing what he is doing.  He who comes twice is a fool.  He who comes a third time is hopeless as a Kaffir.'

    The reader, familiar with the maxims of the preceding pages, will be naturally and rightly desirous of illustrating his meaning, when necessary, by some apt figure of speech.  He will do well to do so, provided he does it with taste, relevance and circumspection, or he will, as Uncle Eben observes, 'after toiling up the stairway of fame, slide down the bannister into obscurity.'

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CHAPTER XXIX.

POETRY IN RELATION TO RHETORIC

ALL the public speaker necessarily has to do with poetry is to read it, or speak it well.  And he will be more likely to do this effectively if he knows that what he cites is poetry, or at least so felicitous in expression as to make vivid the idea he wishes to enforce.  For instance, to move men to speech it is necessary that the speaker should know their nature.  For human nature differs in different places as climate does.  Did not Dr Angus Smith show that there are more than nineteen distinct climates in London.  There are more than nineteen distinct orders of men.  How else could there be so many distinct sects?  One man believes in that which to another is absolutely incredible.  In every town and village the nature of men is of a different texture.  Doubtless there are general features in which humanity agrees.  But if the object is to show that those who would master human nature had better study it — he may show its strange moods by quoting Mr Lecky's lines on one whose career was inscrutable to his friends, —

Let us hope this is not true; but true or not they are striking lines, and vividly call attention to the unexpected characteristics of human nature.

    Of great poets there are too few, and of minor poets too many — some say.  But this is not a good judgment — being unfair to the minor rhymers, as though they were permanently inferior; whereas, the great poet was a minor one once, and some of them were very unpromising minors.  In his 'Hours of Idleness' Byron gave no foretaste of the qualities of energy and fire which afterwards astonished the world.  No poem ever opened with more enchanting lines than 'Endymion,' whose first words were —

The critics of Keats's day saw nothing in this as a presage of power, but the power was there.  It was the youthful muse of Tennyson which produced the lines: —

It was only W. J. Fox who saw the poet in them.

    The reader might not take for poetry the following lines, but he would not make much of a mistake if he did: —

    If the Student looks for newness of thought and force of expression, he will meet with passages which may be successfully quoted.

    Some say if, when you have written verses, you find you can better express the chief idea in prose your verses are not poetry.  That does not follow, because there is good poetry in prose.  Carlyle, for instance, was a poet who wrote in prose what he was entirely unable to express in verse.  If, however, a man who has made verses finds he can better express himself in prose, he should put his ideas into prose.

    It is not easy to give a definition of poetry which shall enable everyone to detect poetry when he meets it.  But an ordinary person who reads two stanzas of Rossetti's 'Blessed Damozel' would be arrested by its beauty of expression and splendour of imagination: —

There are astronomical objections to this vision, but Burke would have given it a place in his unfinished book on the Sublime and Beautiful.

    A passage of no mean beauty occurs in Shelley's 'Prometheus': —

The melody of the language alone would inform the reader that he was in the hands of a master.

    Sometimes a poet does not know his own beauty of expression, and changes a term of beauty for one without it, as when Tennyson, having written of Prince Albert dead —

Thou silent father of our kings to be,

altered it into —

Thou noble father of our kings to be.

'Silent' father has the dignity which no one challenges.  'Noble' father is controversial.

    It is good practice to write verse.  He who attempts it may not become a poet, but he will learn more of the terms, variety and infinite meanings of his own tongue, or of any other tongue he uses, than by any other means.  Wordsworth, who was a master in song, wrote once to Sir William Hamilton: —

'Again and again I must repeat that the composition of verse is infinitely more of an art than men are prepared to believe, and absolute success in it depends upon innumerable minutiæ, which it grieves me you should stoop to acquire a knowledge of.  Milton talks of pouring "easy his unpremeditated verse."  It would be harsh, untrue and odious to say there is anything like cant in this, but it is not true to the letter and tends to mislead.  I could point out 500 passages in Milton upon which labour has been bestowed, and twice 500 more on which labour would have been serviceable.'

    Matthew Arnold, when he is not contemptuous, is instructive.  If his sweetness was intermittent, he did not lack light.  'Homer's movement, he says,

'is a flowing, a rapid movement.  Milton's is a laboured, a self-retarding movement.  Milton charges himself so full with thought, imagination, knowledge, that his style will hardly contain them.  He is too full-stored to show us in much detail one conception, one piece of knowledge; he shows it to us in a pregnant, allusive way, and then presses on to another.  Homer is quite different; he says a thing and says it to the end, and then begins another, while Milton is trying to press a thousand things into one.  So that in reading Milton you never lose the sense of laborious and condensed fulness; in reading Homer you never lose the sense of flowing and abounding ease.'

    Homer was a poet of life, Tennyson was mainly a poet of mind.  Homer sang of actions, Tennyson of ideas.  Sir Walter Scott has more of the Homeric quality than any other romance writer of renown.  Poets and writers of that mould are better to quote in an oration than a metaphysical poet.  Byron is better for the platform than Shelley.  There are exceptions, of course, among the kaleidoscopic children of song.  All are human at times.  Even Browning, who requires a Society to explain him, has splendid flashes of nature, as witness these lines: —

    Of prose which has all the qualities of poetry except the metrical form, the reader may find in a passage of Professor Heeren: —

'Persepolis rises above the deluge of years.  Time sadly overcometh all things, and is now dominant, and sits upon a sphinx and looketh unto Memphis and Old Thebes; while his sister Oblivion reclineth semi-sensuous on a pyramid, making puzzles of Titanian erections, turning old glories into dreams.  History sinketh beneath her cloud.  The traveller, as he passeth amazedly through these deserts, asketh of her who builded them?  She mumbleth something, but what it is he knoweth not.'

    The poet hath not often excelled Heeren.  Instance Bryant on the same subject: —

    Mere rhyme often assists the memory, and, if nervous, it may better strike the understanding than prose.  Of this quality are some old lines on Feasting and Fasting, beginning thus:—

There is a mental repletion also enervating to intellectual health.

    Dr Johnson, who had prose in his blood, sometimes put it into verse, and though not poetry it was near to it by its vigour and sense.  In the prologue he wrote for Garrick on the opening of the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, describing the reign of pedantry and degeneracy of the stage, he exclaims: —

    Pope, the greatest of our argumentative poets, has no passage more striking than one logical stanza in Lord Byron's 'Childe Harold.'  It has vividness, felicity of phrase and condensation.  It would be impossible to say the same things in prose in such few words.

    Another example, though devoid of the range of insight manifest in Byron's lines, is the fine sonnet of Blanco White.  As a poetic imaginative argument for a future life it is unsurpassed.  Literature has no argument so brilliant that I can recall: —

    For passages of point and fire the orator must go, to the poets.  One of them exclaims:

An agitator may say that without much risk.  That means numbers must agree to act all together, and numbers are not given to agree; and if numbers do agree they must keep one counsel if they are to succeed, and numbers can seldom be depended upon to keep one counsel.  Shakespeare supplies much more dangerous lines: —

 
Let any man beware how he says these, to whom, and where.

    The Talmud says, 'Life is but a shadow, not of a house, or of a tree, but of a bird passing overhead; another moment both bird and shadow are gone.'  The simile is well conceived.  For variety and felicity of figure upon this subject nothing known to me excels the following poem, ascribed to Dr Donovan, who made it, or took it from an old Irish manuscript.  The reader will see that the Irish poet is a logician — a rare thing in poets — and sums up each stanza at its conclusion, and each simile is as it were proven.

The Student in search of similes may take up a basket from this unrivalled poem.

    Nobody could mistake the hand of the poet, in strength of conception and unchangeableness of terms, in Landor's lines: —

But of this the present writer as well as the student may take warning.

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CHAPTER XXX.

STYLE EXPLAINED

STYLE is the manner in which ideas are expressed.  Style is not in the mind — it is the mind.  As Dr Johnson said of the wits of Charles the Second's reign: —

Themselves they studied — as they felt they writ.

A bitter fountain cannot give forth sweet water.  According to the quality of the information in the treasure house of the understanding will be the style — scant or plentiful in words, clear or confused in expression, vivacious or dull, yielding ideas leaden or golden, gems of paste or diamonds rich and rare.  When a man can, like Cobbett, talk with his pen, his style is disclosed.  It is said of John Morley that the chief features of his style are 'perfect sanity and reasonableness.'  Its special charm, 'simplicity and courtesy.'  His hold upon his reader is his 'scholarship and sincerity.'  He has 'urbanity and wit,' still rare in literature.

    Style is a quality peculiar to the writer, and where it has excellence not time itself can efface its charm.  Facts may be forgotten, learning grow commonplace, truths dwindle into mere truisms, but a magnificent style can never lose its freshness.  Someone has said, 'For style, even more than for his wonderful erudition, is Gibbon admired; and the same quality, and that alone, renders Hume a popular historian of England, in spite of his imperfect learning, the untrustworthiness of his statements in matters of fact, and the anti-popular caste of his opinions.'  Method, perspicuity, brevity, variety, harmony, are indeed separable from sense, but no combination of such qualities will give life to a book without sense.  They are but the auxiliaries of meaning, not the substitutes for it.

    If any one would know what style is not and how it is not acquired, let him read an article on Dickens in a quarter where there should be guidance, the Dublin University Magazine, in or about 1865.  It said: —

'Dickens has achieved a great thing — he has created a style.  The singular circumstance in this case is that, by careful study of previous styles, by imitation of them, this author has produced out of the heterogeneous elements a compound essentially differing from all its component parts, and claiming — claiming justly — the high merit of being original.  That such a result should follow such a course ought to encourage writers who aim at true celebrity to adopt this humble and painstaking initiatory system.'

    Dickens would smile at this attempt to make a literary alchemist of him, as one fusing all sorts of styles in his crucible of composition, and bringing out quite a new metal.  Present society furnished him with materials; observation, freedom of thought and confidence did the rest — humour combined them and made the style.  Tindal said of Pitt's first speech that 'it was more ornamental than the speeches of Demosthenes and less diffuse than those of Cicero.'

    'That it should have been so often quoted,' says Macaulay, ' is proof how slovenly most people are content to think. It would be no very flattering compliment to a man's figure to say that he is taller than the Polish dwarf, shorter than Giant O'Brien, fatter than a skeleton, and more slender than
Daniel Lambert. No speaking can be less ornamental than that of Demosthenes, or more diffuse than that of Cicero.'

    Heldenmaier lays it down as a maxim of education, that freedom is the all-essential condition of growth and power.  There can be no fervour while, in the language of Sam Slick, 'Talk has a pair of stays, and is laced up tight and stiff.'  It is freedom which is the active element of all fresh and vigorous style.  Dr Gilchrist observes that — 'What one of the ancient philosophers said of laws may be truly said of rhetorical rules: they are like cobwebs which entangle the weak but which the strong break through.  The first rule of good composition is, that the composer be free and bold.  Before a man can be a good thinker or a good writer he must be free and bold . . . . Can servile composers in the harness of rules, dreading the lash of criticism, limping upon quotations, with their eye upon precedents and authorities, create a style at once new and striking, yet just and proper?  All real greatness is the offspring of freedom: there may be absurdity, folly, cant, hypocrisy, squeamish delicacy, finical politeness, sickly sentimentality, mawkish affectation in every possible fantastic form of fashion and variety; but there cannot be original, substantial excellence without intellectual independence, manly thinking and feeling.'

    As soon as a man understands a subject, he is in a condition, so far as ideas go, to write or speak about it.  If he has also courage to write himself in his words, he may be original.  But if he forget that fullness and freedom are both blind, and that without the revealing lights of taste, perspicuity and brevity, he may offend, bewilder and tire.

    An old woman who showed a house and pictures at Towcester expressed herself in these words: — 'This is Sir Richard Farmer; he lived in the country, took care of his estate, built this house and paid for it, managed well, saved money, and died rich.  That is his son; he was made a lord, took a place at Court, spent his estate, and died a beggar!'

    A concise but striking account.  The old exhibitor had no doubt learned brevity by weariness of repetition and the desire of giving satisfactory information in a few words — difficult to acquire; but they can be acquired, and a style marked by sentences concise and short is no mean one.  Butler, who knew so many things, tells us: —

    Douglas Jerrold wrote of the Bishop of Exeter: — 'What a lawyer was spoiled in that bishop!  What a brain he has for cobwebs!  How he drags you along through sentence after sentence — every one a dark passage — until your head swims!'  Jerrold, whose style was as bright as his mind, knew the darkness which prevails where perspicuity is absent.

    Brevity and precision are more manifest among our French neighbours than among ourselves.  The speeches made to mobs — the most hurried placards, abound in the felicities of condensation.  Europe has been agitated with communism before our time.  Few could tell you what was meant by it.  Yet a century ago, Morelly thus expressed it: — 'It is the solution of this excellent problem to find a situation in which it shall be nearly impossible for man to be depraved or poor.'  We have never on this side the Channel exceeded the felicity of this description.

    'The style of Bunyan,' says Macaulay, 'is delightful to every reader, and invaluable as a study to every person who wishes to obtain a wide command over the English language.  The vocabulary is the vocabulary of the common people.  There is not an expression, if we except a few terms of theology, which would puzzle the rudest peasant.  We have observed several pages which do not contain a single word of more than two syllables.  Yet, no writer has said more exactly what he wanted to say.  For magnificence, for, pathos, for vehement exhortation, for subtle disquisition, for every purpose of the poet, the orator, and the divine, this homely dialect, this dialect of plain working men, was sufficient.'

    In the first edition of Practical Grammar (by the present writer), there was direction open to the charge of vagueness.  If remarks had to be made at the end of a statement, it was directed that they should be neither 'too strong nor top tedious.'  But when he subsequently asked his class at the City Mechanics' Institution at what point of effectiveness a man might be said to be 'too strong,' it was agreed that there was error somewhere.  And the injunction not to be 'too tedious' was found to imply that we might be tedious in some degree — which hardly seemed desirable.  Then it was asked, What is strength?  Some answered power.  What was power?  Some said effectiveness.  But it was soon felt that these definitions left us like Swift's definition of style, 'the use of proper words in proper places.'  What were proper words and proper places still remained open questions.  So, if power was strength, and strength effectiveness, what was effectiveness was still unknown.  It was finally agreed that to be strong was to be just, and the remedy of tediousness was brevity.  We therefore agreed that, 'remarks just and brief was the proper expression to have used.  For what was just could never be 'too' strong, and what was brief could never be 'too' tedious.  From which we also learned that strength of comment lay in just sentiments, and that tedium was the tiresomeness of prolixity.

    When Professor Huxley speaks or writes, his style seems the product of an original mind dwelling in an atmosphere of realities.  His sentences are as fresh as bunches of grapes gathered the same morning, the bloom is upon them.

    The Rev. J. R. Green was one of the few writers of recent years whose style is the envy and admiration of critics as well as his readers.  Mr Green had his own preferences as to who should write about him.  Whether Mr W. J. Loftie, 'the Historian of London,' is one does not appear, but in the New Princetown Review, he describes Green's ideas of style: — 'A German in research, a Frenchman in writing — that was his formula; and a thorough familiarity with French historians, and novelists too, had more to do with the nervous, manly, graphic English of his works than is generally supposed.  I have heard him say that English history should be written so as to be as entertaining as a French novel.  I remember one of his maxims about composition: — 'Take the public, as it were, into your confidence; write to them as if they knew as much as you do yourself; but in your own mind assume that they know nothing.'  This is an intelligible, and therefore an instructive passage.

    The loaded style never lasts in literature.  Excellence lies in the thought expressed, and not in ornate phrases.  The one thing the hearer or reader has to look to is the quality of the idea sought to be conveyed to his understanding.  If it comes to him in terms which commend it or exalt it so much the better.  The idea should be presented bright and clear, all phrases which merely glitter about it do but dazzle those who have to see it.  When the orator describes the

Wide, grey, lampless depth of time,

his simple language best depicts the impressive vision.

    A column has been erected at Monte Pincio, in Rome, to the memory of Galileo's imprisonment in the neighbouring palace of the Medicis.  It bears the following epigraph: — 'The neighbouring palace once the property of the Medicis, was the prison of Galileo-Galilei, guilty of having seen the earth revolve round the sun.'  He who wrote this epitaph had a style worthy of Rome.

    Joseph Barker was a man of slovenly power, and yet a moving influence in his day.  He found his way to the popular understanding by a force of style all his own.  Ebenezer Elliot and other good judges of rhetoric in Sheffield, told me Barker excelled all other platform speakers they had known in the vigorous use of Saxon English.  He was always understood by the multitude; like Dr Johnson (whom I do not think Barker ever read), he knew the literary force of repeating nouns; unless a pronoun could be used near to the noun.  While the noun was in the memory of the crowd or congregation before him — he repeated the noun.  The hearer, therefore, had never to go back upon what he had heard.  The main noun being brought again before him, he always knew what the matter in hand was.  This practice gives amazing force and clearness to popular speech.  It is a mere mechanical element of style which everyone might employ with great advantage of hearer or reader.

    He who wants to know whether he has written what he wishes to say, and as he ought to say it, let him read it aloud to himself.  Even his own voice will seem apart from him as that of an auditor.  Or let him do as the shrewd Moliere did, read his composition to his cook, if no one else is at hand — read it to any one who will listen — and the reader will at once become sensible of redundancies, omissions, irrelevancies, and incongruities, of which his own wit will never make him sensible.  Even stupidity as an auditor will improve style.

    The text of a great writer resembles a piece of Gobelin tapestry or some golden embroidery.  Every page is from the same loom.  You know every sentence by the texture, the colour, and the design.  Some books are like calico prints, you read them by the yard; the gay or gaudy pattern diverts or serves for common use.  In some books, insipid, glaring pieces of flimsy meaning, without harmony or purpose — stare at the reader in every chapter.  But in George Elliot's writing, for instance, every portion is part of one well-woven fabric, strong, dainty, and durable, and is as a wealthy garment of the mind.

    All that is in the power of a student of style and who wishes to make one for himself, are clearness, brevity, and the use of relevant and vivid similes.  'Be clear' was the best thing Napoleon said to his secretaries.  Clearness of statement can be acquired by anyone who has clear ideas.  Brevity is almost a mechanical attainment, since a man has only to stop when he has written as much as his adversary would read if written to him — or would listen to if spoken to him.  Meaning may be made clearer and even enlivened by comparison.  Alma-Tadema says, 'As the sun colours the flowers, so does art colour life.'  Comparisons and similes are the sun of style and impart colour to it.

    A painter or sculptor will acquire taste and finish by studying the great masters of the twin arts; he may thus improve his own style, but the turn and quality of his mind will remain his own.  In like manner, a rhetorician will profit by the study of great writers.  For vigorous transparency and classical grace, Grote counted Mill's essay on Liberty to be the most striking production of modern time.  Let the student keep as clear as he can of mean conversation or mean books.  Buddha says: —

'Let no one think lightly of evil, saying, in his heart, "It will not come near me."  Even by the falling of water drops a water-pot is filled; and the fool becomes full of evil, even if he gathers it little by little.  Then let the good come near, and little by little the heart will become full of excellence.'

    A dinner cooked anyhow, a coat cut anyhow, without study of the figure or kind of person to be clothed, would neither delight the taste nor the sight.  Style of speech means prevision and adaptability to the occasion and to the end sought.  In every case, transparency and brevity are the permanent virtues.

    Dean Swift, who saw further before him than any man in the great day in which he lived, said he who makes two ears of corn grow where only one grew before deserves well of mankind.  The contrary is true in literature.  He who makes one sentence to express a meaning, while another would employ two to do it, confers a sensible benefit on all whom he addresses, and deserves the gratitude of every reader.

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CHAPTER XXXI.

WHAT HAS BEEN SAID

'WHAT am I going to say?' is a question a speaker may usefully put to himself before commencing his address. If he does not know, it will, in most cases, be bad for the audience. It is the principal thing, or two or three of the main things, which should be clear, distinct and uppermost in the orator's mind. Whether he keeps to notes he may have made for illustration will matter little if his distinctive objects are made evident to the hearers. But as a speech nears its end the need for a not less important interrogatory arises.

    'What has been said? is the next question many a speaker might put to himself before the conclusion of his speech. By that time he ought to know what he has been talking about — but may not — and it may be the audience are not quite sure themselves, so that a brief incidental as it were, an unpretentious, but nevertheless a salient recapitulation of the essential points of the address will be useful. In cases where a statement made is clear, strong, vigorous and coherent, a few impressive sentences at the close are sufficient.  If the speaker should has reason to think his audience have not a clear conception of his subject he may restate it clearly in a few words at the close.  In no case slavishly recapitulate all points made.  Do no more than recall the animating principles, which should be fixed in the hearer's or reader's mind, as is sought to be done in this chapter.  Let the speaker not forget that many persons never think, though they think they do.

    The effectiveness of a speech is governed by its purpose.  That implies that a purpose must animate the orator.  And for effectiveness, unsurpassed clearness, if the speaker can attain to it, is the main condition.  How can a man be moved or guided by what he does not see?  It is like the large stone visible at low water in a river in Cavan, on which is carved the notice — 'When this stone is out of sight it is not safe to ford the stream.'  But what traveller can read the warning when it is 'out of sight?'

    The late Archbishop of York (Dr Magee) was so sensible of the value of purpose in speech, or essay, or sermon, that he advised young preachers when they had written a sermon and could not give a name to it, to throw it away, decide upon a name, and write to that, otherwise, 'a man who starts without a definite purpose is at the mercy of his words.'  Words, and not a fixed intent, have the command of him.  During the Mexican war one of the generals said to Captain Bragg, 'The crisis has arrived— fire.'  The Captain said to his lieutenant, 'You hear what the General said — "The crisis has come— fire."'  The lieutenant replied,— 'But I see nothing to fire at.'  'Then,' said Captain Bragg, 'fire at the crisis.'  No report states whether they hit it.  But the moral of the incident is relevant.  The orator, like the soldier, must aim at something, and have something to aim at.  In rhetoric, as well as in morals, the saying of the Mogul Sultan Achar is true, — 'I never knew a man lost on a straight road.'

    'There are,' said the shrewd Archbishop Magee, 'three kinds of preachers: — First, the preachers you can't listen to.  Second, the preachers you can listen to.  Third, the preachers you can't help listening to.'

    The last kind of preacher is one who acts on the wise maxim of Vinet, and 'looks after himself as though he were somebody else' — as everyone must do who would become a successful public speaker.  He who would practise Vinet's rule must court debate and engage in it, when he will learn that there are two sides, and sometimes more, to every question.  Not knowing this, causes many persons to be blown about by every wind of doctrine, which confuses them when they encounter it, because they have not known it, and, of course, have not regarded it in forming their own judgment.  Unfamiliar with opposite views, they are afraid of them, and are unhinged by them.  William Black, the novelist, relates that it was by the merest accident in reading the proofs of his novel of Wolfenberg, that he discovered that the printer had made his heroine die by an 'overdose of opinion.'  More people die in this way than are imagined.  A well-informed man is never in danger from an overdose of opinion.  A prudent man seeks every kind of relevant opinion before he forms his own.  Dr Johnson, who was always for discussion, derided the fear of rival views, saying, 'If contrariety of opinion would poison a man, a politician would die in a day.'  Contrariety of reasoned opinion — none others are entitled to attention — are the elements out of which a sound judgment is formed.  He whose mind is set on sureness as to facts will never go far wrong, nor will he mislead others.  'If people,' says the Rev. Dr Edward Everett Hale, 'would only stop talking where they stop knowing, half the evils of life would come to an end.'  He who takes the trouble of personal investigation will avoid many errors.  It is when anyone relies, without suspicion or care, upon what he learns from others, that the necessity for circumspection comes in.  Rumour seldom touches the fringe of truth.  Reports are to be distrusted and hearsay more so.  Miss Edna Lyall's Autobiography of a Slander is the most instructive little book of the day, on careless, unintended, tragic mendacity of modern days.  Before anyone believes what he is told, he ought to ask himself what is the teller's capacity for attentive hearing and accuracy of memory?  What opportunity had he of knowing the truth of what he relates?  What motives has he for telling it?  Is the tale-bearer a person of vigilant observation and habitual veracity of mind?  Has he prejudice, animus, or interest, which may bias his impressions?  If he merely tells what he has been told, what is the character, qualifications and attainments as to trustworthiness of that informant?  Under what circumstance was the thing said which he reports?  Circumstances under which a thing is said are like the context of a passage.  The context is a part of the story.  Without due sifting of evidence on which a man reasons, he may be deceived himself and, what is worse, he may deceive all who trust to his judgment.  For he who retails as facts what he has taken no precautions to verify, and has not warned hearer or reader to that effect, becomes himself responsible for what error or mischievousness may be in them.

    Of course, a man speaks in vain when the auditors cease to attend to him.  He must obtain and retain the ear of the assembly, or he will fail to influence them.  To this end he must not lead attention down lanes of digressions, or it will lose sight of the main line on which the train of argument moves.  Nor must the minds of the hearers be allowed to stumble at words above their comprehension.  Every speaker of sense will follow, as far as the question under consideration will let him, that golden rule of Caesar's — 'To avoid an unusual word as one would a rock.'  In character, in manners, in logic, in style, the supreme excellence is simplicity.

    George Sand tells us there is a good Goddess of Poverty.  If you have choice in Pagan deities, choose the good Goddess of Lucidity, if there be one.

Lord Dalling, when Sir Henry Bulwer Lytton, showed a high order of caution and precaution as a diplomatist.  When trouble with America arose on the question of 'indirect damages,' at the close of the planter's war in defence of slavery, American statesmen drew up a Treaty which was to close the affair, but opened it wider.  Lord Dalling found in it the terms 'growing out of,' which he said 'could hardly occur to anyone but a market gardener.'  When he had to prepare a counter treaty, he took the trouble of going over all American Treaties, and in all important passages he only used such words as they had used before, in the sense in which American diplomatists had used them.  To employ the language of Paley, this 'could not be gotten over.'  Common ground was found and an international agreement came to pass.

    On terms of imputation, Mr Serjeant Robinson, in his Bench and Bar, gives curious legal opinions.  He relates that an action was brought before Mr Justice Maule by an attorney against a defendant for calling him a thief, a rogue, and a fiend; and as the plaintiff had no proof of any pecuniary special damage, he had to rely on the injury that must necessarily be inflicted on him in his professional capacity by the imputations of being a 'friend.'

    In summing up, Maule said: — 'As to the word thief, it is a very ambiguous one, and does not necessarily impute what the law considers an indictable offence.  For instance, to steal a man's wife, to steal away the affections of another, to steal a march upon anyone, would be no crime in law.  Wives, human affections, and such things as marches are not at present the subjects of larceny.  Rogue is different; it might certainly affect the plaintiff professionally, because a rogue ought not to be allowed to practise as an attorney.  But the same principle does not apply to the term fiend.  It may not be a complimentary expression, but I do not think to be a fiend disqualifies a man from being an, attorney.  If the learned counsel will point out to me any case where the Court has refused an application to place a fiend upon the rolls, I shall be happy to consider it.'

    Contumelious epithets have the unpleasant tendency of suggesting the character and associations of the user.  A cattle dealer of Berne being indicted for calling another in the same way of business a 'swindler, a dirty dog and a convict,' the Court held that such language was but the current expressions of the cattle market, and below the dignity of notice.

    John Addington Symonds, as remarkable for self-introspection as for his great attainments, said 'he found a pleasure in expression for its own sake, but he had not the inevitable touch of the true poet, nor the unconquerable patience of the conscious artist.'  There is the genius of a great writer in this sentence, which explains with penetration and fitness of phrase the unregarded conditions of supreme excellence.

    Paderewski is a famous master of his art, but his skill is won and sustained by application, which is instructive to those of indolent ambition who believe in off-hand excellence.  On the eve of Paderewski's first appearance in New York, he left his hotel at nine at night, went direct to Steinway Hall, induced the watchman to let him in, had the gas lighted, opened the biggest piano he could find, and sat before it from ten at night till four the next morning, with only the watchman for an audience.  Then he went home, and after ten hours' sleep astonished a large audience by what most of them took to be spontaneous skill.  The 'unconquerable patience' commended by Symonds has its place in literature and speech as well as music.

    One who lately died — Robert Louis Stevenson, whose praise for mastery in writing every critic sang — said: 'I can always tell when an author does not write over and over again.  His clauses may be unmusical, his words colourless and inexpressive, yet, if the order is perfect throughout, he will be a great writer.'  Absolute rightness of order gives new force and significance to terms and expressions, which would be lifeless without it.  Stevenson's clauses had melody, colour and expressiveness, but the rightness of order, which imparted to them splendour, he acquired himself with 'infinite labour.' [10]

    Yet the labour necessary to excellence is less than is commonly imagined, if the aspirant confines himself to things essential.  Relevant knowledge is all that is required, and relevance is limited.  Excessive acquisition of many things is as useless as excessive eating, and equally inconvenient for action.  There are learned persons who read themselves stupid.  Hume, in his wise way, said, 'A man's time, when well husbanded, is like a cultivated field, of which a few acres produce more of what is useful to life than extensive provinces, even of the richest soil, when overrun with weeds.'

    Mr Arthur W. Hutton, being for seven years a priest in the Oratory at Birmingham, knew Cardinal Newman well.  Mr Hutton tells us that 'Dr Newman's two volumes of Catholic sermons were written out and carefully corrected.  But his spoken sermons were, by comparison, deplorable — apparently unprepared and without plan or point; throughout he was rambling and dreary.  He told me himself, says Mr Hutton, 'that he never saw the congregation he was addressing — a fact which, I suppose, by itself shows that he had no oratorical gift.  But when he read with slow and musical enunciation the exquisite sentences he had penned in the privacy of his room, there was something almost magical in the effect.'

    The noblest oration on oratory delivered in this century, so far as is known to me, is that by Lord Lytton, then Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton, on the occasion of his installation as Lord Rector of the University of Glasgow.  In one passage he said, 'Without earnestness a man might be admired as a firework, but he would never guide as a star.'  Further, 'Though delivery no doubt is the appropriate excellence of the mere orator, the three-fold gift of the Parliamentary speaker is earnestness.  Have but fair sense and a competent knowledge of your subject, and then be thoroughly in earnest to impress your own honest conviction upon others, and no matter what your delivery, though your gestures shocked every rule in Quinctilian, you would command the ear and influence the debates of the most accomplished, the most fastidious, and, take it altogether, the noblest assembly of freemen in the world.'  A man cannot be earnest at will.  It is interest and conviction which makes anyone earnest.  But though earnestness on any subject is not a quality at command, every man is in earnest about something, and if his desire is to speak well let him confine himself to questions in which he is sincerely concerned.  A speaker may be entertaining without sincerity, but cannot be impressive without it.

    Oratory is what Mr Goldwin Smith called it, 'the fusion of argument and passion.'  Reason animated by human interest — new truth endowed with new life.

    The manifest sincerity with which Lord Lytton commended maxims of oratory to the students of the University, served him well.  The 'outburst of long-continued cheering' which followed its close, showed that.  The brilliant sense of what he said implied conviction as well as premeditation.  An engaging presence and physical power — two important conditions of oratory — he had, but his manner was greatly against him.  It showed an entire lack of oratorical art.  One who heard him said — 'There were no winning tones; his action was ungainly; he moved his arms from his elbows; his voice was monotonous, and in the grander passages of his address he had no better mode of indicating their importance than by throwing himself into an extra erect attitude, and pronouncing his words louder and with a greater drawl than usual.'  I have heard him speak in the House of Commons in the same way, when he charmed all who listened to what he said, and were unregarding how he said it.  It was his audibility and sense which saved him.  Ever true is the saying of Buddha, who held that 'pleasant speech and the word that is well spoken are great blessings.'

    For all students one rule holds good — not having all the talent you desire, nor all the genius you covet, cultivate what you have.  None know what that is till they give their powers fair play, full play and reiterated play.  Jenny Lind said, 'If I had nothing in the world but music it would be enough.  I become a different thing when I sing — different body — different soul.'  But she did not know this till long after she began to sing.

    When Professor Arminius Vambéry was asked by the Empress Eugénie how he travelled through Asia with a defective foot, he answered, 'Oh, your Majesty, one does not walk on his feet, but on his tongue.'  Oratory is the education of the tongue, with that befitting accompaniment of gesture and manner which lend life to language.  All the while the merit of eloquence lies in its use.  The valid use of the art of public speaking and debate is the protection of unfriended truth, and the vindication of imperilled right.  Poets tell us that

    Beware how you believe that.  The right never comes 'uppermost ' unless some one helps it up.  'Justice is seldom or never done,' unless strong argument compels men to do it.  Adolphe Fischer tells us you 'cannot kill a principle,' but the people can be killed who assert it, and that is sufficient.  The principle is suppressed for generations.  Truth is said to be 'immortal.'  Let us hope it is, but I have seen its voice silenced through the intimidation of those who vindicated it.  What is the good of dumb truth?  This is why bigotry, intolerance and persecution are so hateful.  They can and do suppress truth and right.  To resist these seemingly eternal agents of evil, all the arts of eloquence and reason are required.  Speech and pen are brilliant weapons, by which the victory over error and injustice can be won.

    The object of instruction in any art is to enable the student, in his hour of practice of it, to be master of all his powers.  Could the minds of men be made palpable in bodily form, few would be found complete.  The arras and limbs would be shrunken in some from want of due exercise — in many, the head would be entirely missing.  As a man is himself the measure by which he judges other men, he will form a defective estimate of others who is defective himself.

    Thus, to aim at excellence is to increase the power of understanding others.  The quality of that self-knowledge, on which all efficiency is built, the Arabian proverb teaches us in the saying, 'Men are Four,' which is now put into English verse. [11]

    The succeeding chapter is as it were a summary of the maxims and suggestions of preceding pages as illustrated in the characteristics of legislative orators.

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CHAPTER XXXII.

PARLIAMENTARY ORATORY

IT does not as I have said require an orator to write of oratory — else I should not take this subject.  To live in the atmosphere of eloquence is not to acquire it.  A man may be a good musical critic and be quite unable to play like Paganini, or sing like Malibran.  An art-critic may appraise Leonardo da Vinci who could never paint the 'Last Supper.'  Many have criticised 'Hamlet,' but none of them have written a better play.  He who witnesses a boat-race can see which oarsman will come in first, though were he in the boat himself he would come in last.  For myself, I have known a sufficient number of orators to become a connoisseur of oratory.  But though I have lived near the rose, I have not myself acquired the scent.

    Two things are mistaken for oratory — eloquence and splendid speaking — whereas stimulant eloquence alone is oratory, and is known by readiness, fitness, fire and velocity of speech.  Splendid speaking is description touched with colour, as may be seen in Huxley, Goldwin Smith, and Green, the historian.  George Dawson was a speaker of repute in his day — the greatest platform talker known in this century.  He not only rewarded your attention, he engaged it.  The difference between the speaker and the orator may be seen in this: —

    A good speaker is one who explains things with distinctness, terseness, and lucidity.

    An orator displays energy, compression, and passion.

    The object of the speaker is to give information — the object of the orator is to incite to action.  The speaker illumines the understanding — the orator impels and directs the passions.  The speaker is a guide, the orator is a master.  A speech is light — an oration is force.  Europe heard it in Gambetta's voice of storm, thunder, and fire.  The second Sir Robert Peel's voice stands next in my mind for volcanic force, summoning attention and holding it.  He who considers what the qualities of the public speaker are, will better understand what the qualities of the orator are.  Pitt in the last century, and Chamberlain in this, are notable examples of commanding speakers.  Romilly, in his Dialogue with Percival, says 'Pitt, who could speak fluently three hours together, came about us like the tide along the Lancashire sands, always shallow, but always just high enough to drown us.'  Chamberlain who singularly resembles Pitt in personal features, is not 'shallow' save intermittently, but he has Pitt's overcomingness in his clearness and directness, lacking Pitt's commanding voice and dignity of gesture.  I was present a few years ago in an assembly at which Mr Chamberlain spoke, as did also several other distinguished persons.  A stranger who knew none of them would say that Mr Chamberlain was the most gentlemanly speaker of them all, save Mr Gladstone, in readiness, undemonstrativeness, in resolution of tone and directness of expression; displaying not the force of passion, but the force of will, which are characteristics of the gentlemanly speaking, I go no further.  Other qualities of the gentlemanly manner are considerate courtesy, which is modest before genius, and which never wounds the susceptibility of the humblest by contemptuousness or disparagement — attainments which do not always accompany gifts of speech.

    The good speaker is the Light-giver.  I once asked the late John Stuart Mill as to the qualities of the late Lord Derby, then Lord Stanley; he said, 'Lord Stanley is the only young nobleman I know who thinks it necessary to give reasons for the opinions he holds.'  Logic is the light of speech.  John Arthur Roebuck was the most mathematical speaker in Parliament in his time.  He knew that the shortest distance between one point and another was a straight line, and he took it.  Sitting at his table one day, he told me what he was going to say at Salisbury, where, at the Bishop's request, he was to deliver prizes to students.  A fortnight later, I read a report of his speech in the Times, which, so far as I remembered, was word for word what he had said to me.  The reason was that the words of a perfect statement are not changeable.  If any term can be changed for the better it means that a wrong word has been used.  Thus, to a trained mind, understanding is in place of memory.  The chosen words recur to the speaker because they are inevitable; none others will express the sense intended.

    John Stuart Mill was a speaker of similar quality.  He had principles, which guide the politician (as the Pole star does the mariner) through the tumultuous sea of party questions, which to other minds are trackless.  A principle is a magnet which draws particles of sense, like steel, from all quarters to itself.  He had also promptness in repartee, which always commands admiration in Parliament.  When Lord Cranbrook, then Mr Gathorne Hardy, whom Mr Justin M'Carthy describes as 'fluent as the sand in an hour-glass, and stirring as the roll of a drum — but often as dry as the sand and empty as the drum' — when he (Mr Hardy) taunted Mr Mill with saying that the Tories were the 'stupid party,' Mr Mill at once rejoined: 'The honourable member misunderstands me.  I never said that every Tory was stupid — what I said was, that if a man was stupid he was sure to be a Tory.'

    Lord Cranbrook was a type of the explosive speaker.  His father was an ironmaster, and Lord Cranbrook always spoke like a blast furnace.  He produced common-places red hot, and spoke them with a red face, as I have often seen him.  He would have been leader of the House when his party was in power but for his explosive tendencies.

    Lord Sherbrooke, when Mr Lowe, displayed a classical clearness and brightness of speech.  When he was contemptuous his sentences had teeth in them, which left their mark upon the mind.  In the grey of a morning in 1868, when the Liberals had deserted Mr Gladstone, and left him with only a majority of five on a question of State, Mr Gladstone, with his usual high spirit, at once resigned.  The alarmed deserters thought they might reassure him by a vote of confidence in him, and as Mr Lowe emerged into the lobby they asked his opinion of the idea.  His answer was, 'I think, gentlemen, that you cannot unpull a man's nose,' which ended that project.

    Lord Derby was not a fluent speaker, but he excelled in vigorous lucidity.  The hearer came to see exactly what Lord Derby saw, and what otherwise he would not see — the common-sense of a contested question, which only few persons ever do perceive.

    In ease, in grace, in silvery tones, in the confidence he created that he could say, and continue to say, whatever he willed to say, no speaker, save one, in his parliamentary days exceeded Lord Coleridge.

    Lord Westbury had in him the making of a Lord Chancellor, of the quality of Lord Bacon.  All the details of the most complicated subject lay open before his mind, in clear order.  Never from a form so lusty and bucolic in appearance did words proceed so low, so continuous, so pellucid, so keen, and so unerring.  His sentences were as clear cut as though turned out of one of Sharp and Roberts' lathes.  I once heard him plead a case, when the court adjourned for lunch as he arrived at the word sesquipedalian.  He had got only 'sesqui' pronounced.  When the court returned he went on with 'pedalian' as though no interruption had occurred.  He never lost the continuity of his argument.  In reply in the House of Lords to the Bishop of Oxford, then unfairly known as 'Soapy Sam,' Lord Westbury remarked, 'I will now answer the saponaceous oratory of the right reverend prelate.'

    Of all the great speakers of our time none have been more instructive or more self-possessed than Cobden.  He was the greatest master of statement in Parliament or on the platform.  Demands of agitation left him too little time to predetermine what he would say, but he determined it while he was saying it.  Like Bunyan — who saw principles like men walking in the streets — so Cobden saw sentences as palpable things.  He saw his words in the air before him as they left his lips.  If he had put a proposition in terms redundant he restated it with retrenchment — that it might be more clearly seen.  If the terms used were too brief he supplied those lacking — lest his argument might be incomplete.  If a phrase went too far he qualified it, so that when he left it ignorance could not misunderstand his meaning, nor malignity pervert it.  When it was proposed in the House of Commons to go to war with America to procure cotton, so that our Lancashire weavers might not starve, Mr Cobden answered to the effect that war is not proposed by any honourable members from hatred to the American people — no one professes that; nor from love of war — no one had the inhumanity to avow that.  The contention is that war would save us expense in supporting our unemployed weaver population by bringing cotton from the South.  'Since economy is the reason,' said Cobden, 'it might be well to observe that it would be far cheaper to feed all our unemployed people on turtle soup and champagne than go to war for cotton.'  It would be better for the weavers, and neither make bad blood between kindred nor shed good blood in fratricidal battle.

    Such is good public speaking — whose qualities are that it gives light, information, and direction without wasting time by prolixity or perplexing the public understanding by ambiguity, or depraving the public ear by verbiage.

    The orator is of a different order.  He is a speaker inspired by purpose and passion.  He has a torrid fervour — energy, action — the power of seeing the essential parts of his subject, velocity and fitness of expression, presenting an impelling argument with a directness that cannot be mistaken, and a force that cannot be evaded.  Sometimes a single burst of scorn is a speech, as when Henry Clay, in his abolition days, made the famous retort to the slave-owners who tried to drown his voice by hisses, by exclaiming, 'That is the sound you hear when the waters of truth drop upon the fires of hell.'

    There are six names in the memory of most persons which illustrate the characteristics of parliamentary oratory — Shiel, O'Connell, Beaconsfield, Cowen, Bright and Gladstone.

    Shiel was a small man with a small voice, two disadvantages which only genius can cancel.  He had a voice which squealed, but his sentences had a flame in them which scorched the adversary they touched.  At other times, as Hawthorne said, 'He spoke with a strange wild sound like a language half blown away by the wind.'  Shiel had Irish fervour of speech and French vivacity of action.  There may be those who remember seeing Stella Colas as Juliet, in the garden scene with Romeo, throw herself forward as though she would fall out of the window; so Shiel threw his body across the table of the House of Commons in uttering his famous reply to the Duke of Wellington, who had said the Irish were aliens in race, blood and religion.  His accents were in his hair, his eyes, in his arms, in every limb.  He was alive all over, and from this confluence of action proceeded a piercing stream of sentences of scorn and fire.

    O'Connell had the three greatest qualities of an orator, (i) a commanding figure — his words came from above you; (2) a voice which could be heard by everyone, without which the entire audience cannot be moved; (3) the sagacity to say things which most interested those who heard them.  O'Connell, besides a majestic stature, had a three-fold voice: one of persuasiveness in the law court, one of dignity in Parliament, another of resounding raciness on the platform.  He told us at a meeting in London how the birth-rate in Dublin had decreased 5000 a year for four years, adding, 'I charge the British Government with the murder of those 20,000 infants who never were born.'  He saw nothing absurd in it, nor under his magical voice did his hearers, until the next day.  An Irish schoolmaster, of Birmingham, who was present, was more self-possessed.  Mr Sam Timmins told me that the discerning schoolman prodded a friend near him and said, 'That is worthy of my countrymen.'

    Addressing the Newhall Hill meeting in Birmingham, at which 200,000 persons were computed to be present, O'Connell observed a compact mass of 400 women from Rowley Regis, who had marched to Birmingham in the early morning.  Grim and stalwart, with lusty arms, they maintained their position against the pressure of the vast throng.  O'Connell's quick eye rested upon them for a moment and began his oration, exclaiming, 'Surrounded as I am by the fair, the gentle, and the good.'  They might be 'good' — the Black Country industries did not make women 'fair,' and had they been 'gentle' they had never been in that turbulent throng, but the intrepid compliment told.  The women cheered, and cheered afterward everything he said.  The men cheered because the women did, and the crowd behind cheered because those before them cheered, and so the fortune of the great oration was made.  Anyone can read how it was done in the first Lord Lytton's New Timon, where he says: —

No member of Parliament in my time won in so short a time the reputation of an orator as Joseph Cowan.  This came to pass by his speech in the House of Commons on the Bill for giving the title of Empress to the Queen.  The house, impatient for the vote, was filled with cries of 'Divide, divide,' when he rose for the first time to address it.  All that could be seen was his dark, luminous eye, for his stature is short; all that could be heard was a new voice of manifestly honest tone.  His argument was historical, compact, brief, in which three things were said never before or since heard in that House.  He spoke of the Prince Napoleon as 'the son of a usurper;' he said 'the divine right of kings was killed on the scaffold with Charles I.;' and declared that 'the superstition of royalty had never taken deep hold on the people of this country.'  All this was unusual and bold.  Of all the sentences none were weak, and their impetuous rush never ceased until the end — and Mr Cowen acquired the fame of an orator in a single night.

    If regard be had to the triumphs of public speaking, Lord Beaconsfield might be described as the greatest orator of our time.  Race, religion, fortune, and character were against him — but he had the instinct and art of expression, and was the only man in Europe who had climbed on phrases to power.  He did not study principles — he studied men, whom he labelled with disabling phrases as a professor would a plant, a shell, or a bird.  His voice was an organ of policy, not of feeling.  He might have been sincere in a way of his own — but he never gave the impression, even by accident, that he believed what he said.  He was no more English in his mind than Napoleon the Corsican was French, whom Madame de Stael said was 'a man of unknown nature.'  Disraeli was as distinct in his ideas as though he belonged to another world.  But he understood this world; he influenced men like a master.  He advanced himself as only the unfriended can — by being of service to his employers or his party.  He had audacity and his courage never forsook him.  His ambition was to dazzle men.  He bewildered others, but never lost himself.  Once when he was overcome, not by what he felt but from what he had taken, he could not stand at the Treasury table without clutching it, when he exclaimed that 'he was thankful there was a table between him and Mr Gladstone, or that right honourable and impetuous gentleman might spring up and attack him personally.'  All he meant was that he might, but for the table, fall into the- arms of his adversary.  Thus he gave the public to believe that he needed protection, when all he needed was support.  His merit was that he introduced pleasantry into politics.  His wit stood him in the place of principle.  He touched public affairs with a light hand; and being without prejudices or preferences, he often stated with admirable force the case to which he was opposed, when it did not interfere with the purpose in hand.  As Cobden once said of Palmerston, he was entirely impartial, he had no bias — not even towards the truth.

    Disraeli's oratory was based on a Jewish craving for effect, an instinct of speech, and early knowledge of himself.  In Vivian Grey he described himself as he always remained — gracious to those who aided his ambition, vindictive to any who opposed him.  Mr Stansfeld, who had no mean power of his own, early expressed in Parliament that contempt for Disraelian principles, which Lord Salisbury when Viscount Cranbourne — published a Review to expose.  After Stansfeld's speech, Disraeli said to a friend, 'I will do for that educated mechanic;' a well-chosen phrase of hatred and malice.  Soon after, he commenced nightly attacks on Stansfeld, as a friend of Mazzini, saying there was an underground passage between Thurloe Square, where Mazzini visited Stansfeld, and the Treasury bench on which Stansfeld then sat.  This continued until ended by Bernal Osborne, with his Jewish wit, often as effective as Disraeli's, but with a generous vein in it.  Sir Richard Strachey, whose elongated visage was blue, rendered so by some gunpowder explosion, abetted the attack.  After this had gone on for a month, Osborne broke in, 'Mr Speaker, I think this farce has gone on long enough.  Here, every night towards twelve o'clock, in stalks the honourable member for Norwich, like a tragedy king, with his dagger and his poisoned bowl; and he not only acts the character, he looks it.'  This hit at Sir Richard's blue visage extinguished him in ridicule and laughter.  He probably disposed of his dagger and bowl in Wardour Street, for it no more appeared in the House.  Thus wit succeeded where reason had failed.  Whoever stood in Disraeli's way he stabbed with words as a bravo would with a dagger.  Lord Beaconsfield was the most polished gladiator Parliament has known since the days of Canning, and he would have been the first of orators had he cared for anything save the effect of it on his own fortunes.

    We now turn to him whom Mr Beresford Hope described as the 'White Lion of Birmingham' — Mr Bright, who had the voice of an organ, at once strong and harmonious, which swelled but never screeched.  A resolute face, and a resolute tone, gave him a commanding manner; this, united to a stately way of thinking, gave him ascendency in oratory.  Disregarding details, he puts the relevance of a question so strongly that it was difficult to express in other words the same idea with equal force.  As I have said elsewhere, take this passage in one of Bright's orations, in which you see his passion for justice and his method of speech. He exclaims: —

'I believe there is no permanent greatness in a nation, except it be based on morality.  I do not care for military greatness or military renown; I care for the condition of the people among whom I live.  There is no man in England less likely to speak irreverently of the crown and monarchy of England than I am; but crowns, coronets, mitres, military displays, pomp of war, wide colonies and a huge empire, are, in my view, all trifles light as air, and not worth considering unless with them you can have a fair share of comfort, contentment, and happiness among the great body of the people.  Palaces, baronial castles, great halls and stately mansions do not make a nation.  The nation in every country dwells in the cottage.'

    Here is the Homeric trend of simplicity and power, not among metaphysical abstractions (which flit before the mind like shadows) but among men and things, palpable to every one, and touching living interests.  But let anyone turn to the record of Mr Bright's speeches in the Anti-Corn Laws days, and compare the recurrence of famous figures of speech thirty years later, and he will see that the crude form of the earlier day and the finished expression of later years, is as different as the flint-headed spear of the Mongol from the rapier of Toledo.  A famous statue is not cut out of the first block the sculptor lays his hands upon, nor is an oration perfected except by many efforts.

    In the clearness and melody of a far-reaching voice, in spontaneity of expression, in fertility of thought, begotten by the subject while speaking upon it — in action animated by the sense of mastery and conviction, Mr Gladstone excels all living orators.  He poises himself on words as an eagle poises himself in the air.  When the Opposition speakers in Parliament have unexpectedly collapsed, Mr Gladstone (when leader of the House) is suddenly called upon by the Speaker to close the debate.  To reply at once on what has not been said, as well as upon what has, requires consideration.  I have heard Mr Gladstone on such occasions speak for several minutes without saying anything.  What you hear is a well-woven texture of articulation — an unbroken continuity of argumentative mist — an almost infinite and coherent extension of glittering vapour.  The circumambient air is thick with words, all connected — with nothing.  An Italian poet has described exactly what takes place: —

 
    All at once the cloud is cleared away with a sudden gesture and you hear the words 'Mr Speaker.'  The orator then has made up his mind as to the scope of his reply, and then follows a stream of sentences direct, compact, and pungent — crisp as the curling wave, definite as the bullet.  Mr Gladstone is the greatest orator of our time, who can be serious and humorous, earnest without being heavy, vehement without imputation — a very rare attainment.  In all the hurricane of personalities, at one time blown upon him from every quarter, only one charge of imputation was brought against Mr Gladstone, and that was that he had described an opponent as a 'certain' person.  It is not giving a political but a rhetorical opinion to say that there is no example on record of any speaker of Mr Gladstone's eminence who has displayed his abstinence from personal imputation — the easiest and most popular of all the arts of oratory.  Invective relieves the speaker of the trouble of proof, and delights the auditor who ceases to think of the question at issue, and does not know that it is withdrawn from his mind.  Outraged partisans then appear upon the scene and principles disappear.

    Of the two great orators of whom I have spoken Mr Gladstone has the subtler reason — Mr Bright had the stronger fire.  Mr Gladstone is moved by a sense of duty, which seeks for reasons and waits for occasions.  Mr Bright was incited by a sense of justice, which is impetuous and acts from indignation.  Mr Bright's eloquence was more volcanic and imposing; Mr Gladstone's more resembles lightning — greater in vividness, and revealing under its flashes a greater extent of hidden country.  Mr Bright seemed to take just the quantity of words upon the platform which he required, and, like parts of a well-fitting structure, each word fell into its place as the mighty oration proceeded.  With Mr Gladstone it is as though he took upon the platform with him vast piles of the English language, from which he takes, with a swift hand, whatever he requires for the purpose of the moment; words of strength, or beauty, or brightness — of light, or shade, or force, until each passage is perfect.  When a sentence is begun, you cannot always foresee how Mr Gladstone will end it.  But the great artist never fails.  His eye sees all the while the fitting word lying by his side, and he dashes it in with the spontaneity of a master, and light is diffused all over the argument, as in a picture which has just received the final touch of genius.  That is Parliamentary oratory.  The audience is the most cultivated and critical in the world.  The finish which is applauded in the Senate would seem tameness on the platform.

    In that arena where distinction won reaches to posterity, there are discerning plaudits for those felicities of speech which Tennyson describes in Virgil: —

The qualities of the noblest style are all comprised in this splendid praise.  But the House of Commons, though fastidious, is not foolish — neither is it impatient to do right; as a rule, it is not impatient to do anything, but it likes to know what it is doing.  It thinks with Mark Antony —

    And the working-class member who, like Mr Burt, is diffident without being afraid and intelligent without being presumptuous, may gain the ear of the House.  It may be charmed by a picturesque phrase, as it was by the Irish member who praised the whisky of his country above all other 'because it went down the throat like a torchlight procession.'  The House gives ear to an honest voice.  There are some members of Parliament in whose voice there is an accent of petty larceny.  But he who, speaking with sincerity of manner, gives information upon subjects which he knows and is known to know, he is listened to, however unpretending or vernacular may be the language in which he tells his story.

    I omit many high names and many illustrations of the distinction other speakers and orators have attained which would interest the readers as much as those I have cited.  I omit them lest by too great variety I distract attention from the nature of oratory, which it is my duty to make clear and keep clear in the reader's mind.  Most of us hope that the English Parliament may maintain its ascendency as the first political assembly in the world.  Most of us hope that its members will always so comport themselves in dignity and excellence as to challenge the imitation of public men.  Whatever time may be given to increase public interest in the high character of Parliament, or inspire any who may go there with the desire to sustain it, is of the nature of patriotism.

    One merit always remains to Parliament.  What a man says is more regarded than how he says it.  Landor warned one, inattentive to this, who had brilliance without purpose: —

 
    The speaker and the orator alike must mean something, and something distinctive.  All men cannot be orators, but every man will speak better and write better by knowing the qualities which go to make the orator.  Lord Brougham defined oratory in the sense in which he himself excelled in it, as the power of seeing, when you begin a sentence, all through it, and of knowing at the opening what the end is to be.

    Protracted and parenthetical as Brougham's sentences often were, there was never confusion in them; they always terminated intelligibly.  The parenthesis, when limited and direct, is a sign of mastery, showing that the speaker never looses sight of his subject.  Concentration and directness make the force of speech.  Too many objects presented to the mind prevent the points essential being seen.  Too much said means something relevant hidden by a crowd of words, which essential something should stand distinct, clear, open, alone, and endowed with the glory of space.  Economy in words, stopping at sufficiency, implies mastery of statement.  Captain Cuttle said 'his power to put his hands on a few words whenever he wanted them came from his not wasting them as some do.'  Walter Savage Landor, who himself equalled Plutarch in the vigour which comes of terseness, said: —

'Phocion conquered with few soldiers, and he convinced with few words.  I know not what better description I could give you either of a great captain or a great orator.'

THE END.

FOOTNOTES

1.

See 'Reply to Letter of Ion,' in the [Melodeon, Boston— the only reply Mr Phillips told me he ever made to a European  critic.

2.

Aspiration is pronouncing the h with  full breath

3.

System of Logic, p. 12. Second Edition.

4.

Young Duke, by Disraeli.

5.

Local Self- Government, pp. 395 to 409.

6.

'If neither is good,' says Hamilton, 'wound your opponent,' which may be Parliamentary, but is discreditable in the speaker and a waste of public time.

7.

William Hale White.

8.

Primitive Methodist Quarterly Review, January 1894.

9.

Cassell's 'National Library.'

10.

Westminster Gazette, at the time of Stevenson's death.

11.

By C. E. J. in The Spectator.