A Cynic Looks at Life | Page 5

bomb amongst powerless and helpless women and children; you
imbecile politicians with a plague of remedial legislation for the
irremediable; you writers and thinkers unread in history, with as many
"solutions to the labor problem" as there are among you those who can
not coherently define it--do you really think yourselves wiser than
Jesus of Nazareth? Do you seriously suppose yourselves competent to
amend his plan for dealing with evils besetting nations and souls? Have
you the effrontery to believe that those who spurn his Golden Rule you
can bind to obedience of an act entitled an act to amend an act? Bah!
you fatigue the spirit. Go get ye to your scoundrel lockouts, your villain
strikes, your blacklisting, your boycotting, your speeching, marching
and maundering; but if ye do not to others as ye would that they do to
you it shall occur, and that right soon, that ye be drowned in your own
blood and your pick-pocket civilization quenched as a star that falls
into the sea.

THE GIFT O' GAB
A book entitled Forensic Eloquence, by Mr. John Goss, appears to
have for purpose to teach the young idea how to spout, and that purpose,
I dare say, it will accomplish if something is not done to prevent. I
know nothing of the matter myself, a strong distaste for forensic
eloquence, or eloquence of any kind implying a man mounted on his
legs and doing all the talking, having averted me from its study. The
training of the youth of this country to utterance of themselves after
that fashion I should regard as a disaster of magnitude. So far as I know
it, forensic eloquence is the art of saying things in such a way as to
make them pass for more than they are worth. Employed in matters of
importance (and for other employment it were hardly worth acquiring)
it is mischievous because dishonest and misleading. In the public
service Truth toils best when not clad in cloth-of-gold and bedaubed
with fine lace. If eloquence does not beget action it is valueless; but
action which results from the passions, sentiments and emotions is less
likely to be wise than that which comes of a persuaded judgment. For

that reason I cannot help thinking that the influence of Bismarck in
German politics was more wholesome than is that of Mr. John Temple
Graves.
For eloquence _per se_--considered merely as an art of pleasing--I
entertain something of the respect evoked by success; for it always
pleases at least the speaker. It is to speech what an ornate style is to
writing--good and pleasant enough in its time and place and, like
pie-crust and the evening girl, destitute of any basis in common sense.
Forensic eloquence, on the contrary, has an all too sufficient foundation
in reason and the order of things: it promotes the ambition of tricksters
and advances the fortunes of rogues. For I take it that the Ciceros, the
Mirabeaus, the Burkes, the O'Connells, the Patrick Henrys and the rest
of them--pets of the text-bookers and scourges of youth--belong in
either the one category or the other, or in both. Anyhow I find it
impossible to think of them as highminded men and right-forth
statesmen--with their actors' tricks, their devices of the countenance,
inventions of gesture and other cunning expedients having nothing to
do with the matter in hand. Extinction of the orator I hold to be the
most beneficent possibility of evolution. If Mr. Goss has done anything
to retard that blessed time when the Bourke Cockrans shall cease from
troubling and the weary be at rest he is an enemy of his race.
"What!" exclaims the thoughtless reader--I have but one--"are not the
great forensic speeches by the world's famous orators good reading?
Considering them merely as literature do you not derive a high and
refining pleasure from them?" I do not: I find them turgid and tumid no
end. They are bad reading, though they may have been good hearing. In
order to enjoy them one must have in memory what, indeed, one is
seldom permitted to forget: that they were addressed to the ear; and in
imagination one must hold some shadowy simulacrum of the orator
himself, uttering his work. These conditions being fulfilled there
remains for application to the matter of the discourse too little attention
to get much good of it, and the total effect is confusion. Literature by
which the reader is compelled to bear in mind the producer and the
circumstances under which it was produced can be spared.

NATURA BENIGNA
It is not always on remote islands peopled with pagans that great
disasters occur, as memory witnesseth. Nor are the forces of nature
inadequate to production of a fiercer throe than any that we have
known. The situation