Very few of the great orators have had loud voices, or, if they did have them, they did not employ them. I am told that Wendell Phillips always spoke in a conversational tone, and yet he was able to make an audience of many thousands hear distinctly; and Phillips was one of the greatest speakers America has produced.
It is probable that no man ever lived who had a more sensuous effect upon his hearers than Ingersoll. In a literal and a physical sense he charmed them. I never heard him talk in a loud voice. There was no "bell-like" quality. It was not an "organ-like" voice.
The greatest feat of modern speech, in its immediate effect, was Henry Ward Beecher's speech to the Liverpool mob. A gentleman who heard that speech told me that, notwithstanding the pandemonium that reigned around him, Beecher did not shout, nor speak at the top of his voice, a single time during that terrible four hours.
It is true that Æschines spoke of Demosthenes' delivery of his "Oration on the Crown" as having the ferocity of a wild beast. I do not see how that can be, however, because Demosthenes selected Isæus as his teacher for the reason that Isæus was "business-like" in method.
This, however, is common to the voices of nearly all great speakers; they have a peculiar power of penetration that carries them much farther than the shout and halloo of the loudest-voiced person. They have, too, a singularly touching and tender quality, which, in a sensuous way, captivates and holds the hearers. James Whitcomb Riley has this quality in his voice when reciting. Edwin Booth had it. All great actors have it. Every true orator has it. It touches you strangely, thrills you, affects you much as music does.
It is a remarkable thing that there is neither wit nor humor in any of the immortal speeches that have fallen from the lips of man. To find a joke in Webster would be an offense. The only things which Ingersoll wrote that will live are his oration at his brother's grave and his famous "The Past Rises before Me like a Dream." But in neither of these productions of this genius of jesters is there a single trace of wit.
There is not a funny sally in all Burke's speeches. Lincoln's Gettysburg address, his first and second inaugurals, his speech beginning the Douglas campaign, and his Cooper Union address in New York, are perhaps the only utterances of his that will endure.
Yet this greatest of story-tellers since Æsop did not deface one of these great deliverances with story or any form of humor.
The reason for this is found in the whole tendency of human thought and feeling—in the whole melancholy history of the race—where tears and grief, the hard seriousness of life and the terrible and speedy certainty of our common fate of suffering and of death, make somber the master-cord of existence. And the great orator must reflect the deeper soul of his hearers.
So all the immortal things are serious, even sad.