Atlantic Monthly | Page 2

the sharpest weapon. Socrates says, "If any one
wishes to converse with the meanest of the Lacedaemonians, he will at
first find him despicable in conversation; but, when a proper
opportunity offers, this same person, like a skilful jaculator, will hurl a
sentence worthy of attention, short and contorted, so that he who
converses with him will appear to be in no respect superior to a boy."
Plato's definition of rhetoric is, "the art of ruling the minds of men."
The Koran says, "A mountain may change its place, but a man will not
change his disposition";--yet the end of eloquence is,--is it not?--to alter
in a pair of hours, perhaps in a half-hour's discourse, the convictions
and habits of years. Young men, too, are eager to enjoy this sense of
added power and enlarged sympathetic existence. The orator sees
himself the organ of a multitude, and concentrating their valors and
powers:
"But now the blood of twenty thousand men Blushed in my face."
That which he wishes, that which eloquence ought to reach, is, not a
particular skill in telling a story, or neatly summing up evidence, or
arguing logically, or dexterously addressing the prejudice of the
company; no, but a taking sovereign possession of the audience. Him
we call an artist, who shall play on an assembly of men as a master on
the keys of the piano,--who, seeing the people furious, shall soften and

compose them, shall draw them, when he will, to laughter and to tears.
Bring him to his audience, and, be they who they may, coarse or
refined, pleased or displeased, sulky or savage, with their opinions in
the keeping of a confessor, or with their opinions in their
bank-safes,--he will have them pleased and humored as he chooses; and
they shall carry and execute that which he bids them.
This is that despotism which poets have celebrated in the "Pied Piper of
Hamelin," whose music drew like the power of gravitation,--drew
soldiers and priests, traders and feasters, women and boys, rats and
mice; or that of the minstrel of Meudon, who made the pallbearers
dance around the bier. This is a power of many degrees, and requiring
in the orator a great range of faculty and experience, requiring a large
composite man, such as Nature rarely organizes, so that, in our
experience, we are forced to gather up the figure in fragments, here one
talent, and there another.
The audience is a constant metre of the orator. There are many
audiences in every public assembly, each one of which rules in turn. If
anything comic and coarse is spoken, you shall see the emergence of
the boys and rowdies, so loud and vivacious, that you might think the
house was filled with them. If new topics are started, graver and higher,
these roisters recede; a more chaste, and wise attention takes place. You
would think the boys slept, and that the men have any degree of
profoundness. If the speaker utter a noble sentiment, the attention
deepens, a new and highest audience now listens, and the audiences of
the fun and of facts and of the understanding are all silenced and awed.
There is also something excellent in every audience,--the capacity of
virtue. They are ready to be beatified. They know so much more than
the orator,--and are so just! There is a tablet there for every line he can
inscribe, though he should mount to the highest levels. Humble persons
are conscious of new illumination; narrow brows expand with enlarged
affections: delicate spirits, long unknown to themselves, masked and
muffled in coarsest fortunes, who now hear their own native language
for the first time, and leap to hear it. But all these several audiences,
each above each, which successively appear to greet the variety of style
and topic, are really composed out of the same persons; nay, sometimes
the same individual will take active part in them all, in turn.
This range of many powers in the consummate speaker and of many

audiences in one assembly leads us to consider the successive stages of
oratory.
Perhaps it is the lowest of the qualities of an orator, but it is, on so
many occasions, of chief importance,--a certain robust and radiant
physical health,--or, shall I say? great volumes of animal heat. When
each auditor feels himself to make too large a part of the assembly, and
shudders with cold at the thinness of the morning audience, and with
fear lest all will heavily fail through one bad speech, mere energy and
mellowness are then inestimable. Wisdom and learning would be harsh
and unwelcome, compared with a substantial cordial man, made of
milk, as we say, who is a house-warmer, with his obvious honesty and
good meaning, and a hue-and-cry style of harangue, which inundates
the