Atlantic Monthly | Page 9

commanded by these two powers,--first
by a fact, then by skill of statement. Put the argument into a concrete
shape, into an image, some hard phrase, round and solid as a ball,
which they can see and handle and carry home with them, and the
cause is half won.
Statement, method, imagery, selection, tenacity of memory, power of
dealing with facts, of illuminating them, of sinking them by ridicule or
by diversion of the mind, rapid generalization, humor, pathos, are keys
which the orator holds; and yet these fine gifts are not eloquence, and
do often hinder a man's attainment of it. And if we come to the heart of
the mystery, perhaps we should say that the truly eloquent man is a
sane man with power to communicate his sanity. If you arm the man
with the extraordinary weapons of this art, give him a grasp of facts,
learning, quick fancy, sarcasm, splendid allusion, interminable
illustration,--all these talents, so potent and charming, have an equal
power to insnare and mislead the audience and the orator. His talents
are too much for him, his horses run away with him; and people always
perceive whether you drive, or whether the horses take the bits in their
teeth and run. But these talents are quite something else when they are
subordinated and serve him; and we go to Washington, or to
Westminster Hall, or might well go round the world, to see a man who
drives, and is not run away with,--a man who, in prosecuting great
designs, has an absolute command of the means of representing his
ideas, and uses them only to express these; placing facts, placing men;

amid the inconceivable levity of human beings, never for an instant
warped from his erectness. There is for every man a statement possible
of that truth which he is most unwilling to receive,--a statement
possible, so broad and so pungent, that he cannot get away from it, but
must either bend to it or die of it. Else there would be no such word as
eloquence, which means this. The listener cannot hide from himself
that something has been shown him and the whole world, which he did
not wish to see; and, as he cannot dispose of it, it disposes of him. The
history of public men and affairs in America will readily furnish tragic
examples of this fatal force.
For the triumphs of the art somewhat more must still be required,
namely, a reinforcing of man from events, so as to give the double
force of reason and destiny. In transcendent eloquence, there was ever
some crisis in affairs, such as could deeply engage the man to the cause
he pleads, and draw all this wide power to a point. For the explosions
and eruptions, there must be accumulations of heat somewhere, beds of
ignited anthracite at the centre. And in cases where profound conviction
has been wrought, the eloquent man is he who is no beautiful speaker,
but who is inwardly drunk with a certain belief. It agitates and tears
him, and perhaps almost bereaves him of the power of articulation.
Then it rushes from him as in short, abrupt screams, in torrents of
meaning. The possession the subject has of his mind is so entire, that it
insures an order of expression which is the order of Nature itself, and
so the order of greatest force, and inimitable by any art. And the main
distinction between him and other well-graced actors is the conviction,
communicated by every word, that his mind is contemplating a whole
and inflamed by the contemplation of the whole, and that the words and
sentences uttered by him, however admirable, fall from him as
unregarded parts of that terrible whole which he sees, and which he
means that you shall see. Add to this concentration a certain regnant
calmness, which, in all the tumult, never utters a premature syllable,
but keeps the secret of its means and method; and the orator stands
before the people as a demoniacal power to whose miracles they have
no key. This terrible earnestness makes good the ancient superstition of
the hunter, that the bullet will hit its mark, which is first dipped in the
marksman's blood.
Eloquence must be grounded on the plainest narrative. Afterwards, it

may warm itself until it exhales symbols of every kind and color,
speaks only through the most poetic forms; but, first and last, it must
still be at bottom a biblical statement of fact. The orator is thereby an
orator, that he keeps his feet ever on a fact. Thus only is he invincible.
No gifts, no graces, no power of wit or learning or illustration will
make any amends for want of this. All audiences are just to this point.
Fame of voice