Atlantic Monthly

Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 2, Issue 11,
September, 1858

The Project Gutenberg eBook, Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11,
September, 1858, by Various
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net

Title: Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858
Author: Various
Release Date: December 14, 2003 [eBook #10456]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ATLANTIC
MONTHLY, VOLUME 2, ISSUE 11, SEPTEMBER, 1858***
E-text prepared by Joshua Hutchinson, Keith M. Eckrich, and Project
Gutenberg Distributed Proofreaders

THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY.
A MAGAZINE OF LITERATURE, ART, AND POLITICS.
VOL. II.--SEPTEMBER, 1858.--NO. XI.

ELOQUENCE.
It is the doctrine of the popular music-masters, that whoever can speak
can sing. So, probably, every man is eloquent once in his life. Our
temperaments differ in capacity of heat, or we boil at different degrees.
One man is brought to the boiling point by the excitement of
conversation in the parlor. The waters, of course, are not very deep. He

has a two-inch enthusiasm, a pattypan ebullition. Another requires the
additional caloric of a multitude, and a public debate; a third needs an
antagonist, or a hot indignation; a fourth needs a revolution; and a fifth,
nothing less than the grandeur of absolute ideas, the splendors and
shades of Heaven and Hell.
But because every man is an orator, how long soever he may have been
a mute, an assembly of men is so much more susceptible. The
eloquence of one stimulates all the rest, some up to the speaking point,
and all others to a degree that makes them good receivers and
conductors, and they avenge themselves for their enforced silence by
increased loquacity on their return to the fireside.
The plight of these phlegmatic brains is better than that of those who
prematurely boil, and who impatiently break the silence before their
time. Our county conventions often exhibit a small-pot-soon-hot style
of eloquence. We are too much reminded of a medical experiment,
where a series of patients are taking nitrous-oxide gas. Each patient, in
turn, exhibits similar symptoms,--redness in the face, volubility, violent
gesticulation, delirious attitudes, occasional stamping, an alarming loss
of perception of the passage of time, a selfish enjoyment of his
sensations, and loss of perception of the sufferings of the audience.
Plato says, that the punishment which the wise suffer, who refuse to
take part in the government, is, to live under the government of worse
men; and the like regret is suggested to all the auditors, as the penalty
of abstaining to speak, that they shall hear worse orators than
themselves.
But this lust to speak marks the universal feeling of the energy of the
engine, and the curiosity men feel to touch the springs. Of all the
musical instruments on which men play, a popular assembly is that
which has the largest compass and variety, and out of which, by genius
and study, the most wonderful effects can be drawn. An audience is not
a simple addition of the individuals that compose it. Their sympathy
gives them a certain social organism, which fills each member, in his
own degree, and most of all the orator, as a jar in a battery is charged
with the whole electricity of the battery. No one can survey the face of
an excited assembly, without being apprised of new opportunity for
painting in fire human thought, and being agitated to agitate. How
many orators sit mute there below! They come to get justice done to

that ear and intuition which no Chatham and no Demosthenes has
begun to satisfy.
The Welsh Triads say, "Many are the friends of the golden tongue."
Who can wonder at the attractiveness of Parliament, or of Congress, or
the bar, for our ambitious young men, when the highest bribes of
society are at the feet of the successful orator? He has his audience at
his devotion. All other fames must hush before his. He is the true
potentate; for they are not kings who sit on thrones, but they who know
how to govern. The definitions of eloquence describe its attraction for
young men. Antiphon the Rhamnusian, one of Plutarch's ten orators,
advertised in Athens, "that he would cure distempers of the mind with
words." No man has a prosperity so high or firm, but two or three
words can dishearten it. There is no calamity which right words will
not begin to redress. Isocrates described his art, as "the power of
magnifying what was small and diminishing what was great";--an acute,
but partial definition. Among the Spartans, the art assumed a Spartan
shape, namely, of