The De Oratore is by far the longest of his works on rhetoric, and, as I think, the pleasantest to read. It was followed, after ten years, by the Brutus, or De Claris Oratoribus, and then by the Orator. But in all of them he charms us rather by his example than instructs us by his precepts. He will never make us believe, for instance, that a man who talks well will on that account be better than a man who thinks well; but he does make us believe that a man who talks as Cicero knew how to do must have been well worth hearing, and also that to read his words, when listening to them is no longer possible, is a great delight. Having done that, he has no doubt carried his object. He was too much a man of the world to have an impracticable theory on which to expend himself. Oratory had come uppermost with him, and had indeed made itself, with the Romans, the only pursuit to be held in rivalry with that of fighting. Literature had not as yet assumed its place. It needed Cicero himself to do that for her. It required the writing of such an essay as this to show, by the fact of its existence, that Cicero the writer stood quite as high as Cicero the orator. And then the written words remain when the sounds have died away. We believe that Cicero spoke divinely. We can form for ourselves some idea of the rhythm of his periods. Of the words in which Cicero spoke of himself as a speaker we have the entire charm.
Boccaccio, when he takes his queen into a grassy meadow and seats her in the midst of her ladies, and makes her and them and their admirers tell their stories, seems to have given rise to the ideas which Cicero has used when introducing his Roman orators lying under a plane-tree in the garden of Tusculum, and there discussing rhetoric; so much nearer to us appear the times of Cicero, with all the light that has been thrown upon them by their own importance, than does the middle of the fourteenth century in the same country. But the practice in this as in all matters of social life was borrowed from the Greeks, or perhaps rather the pretence of the practice. We can hardly believe that Romans of an advanced age would so have arranged themselves for the sake of conversation. It was a manner of bringing men together which had its attraction for the mind's eye; and Cicero, whose keen imagination represented to him the pleasantness of the picture, has used the form of narrative with great effect. He causes Crassus and Antony to meet in the garden of Crassus at Tusculum, and thither he brings, on the first day, old Mucius Scævola the augur, and Sulpicius and Cotta, two rising orators of the period. On the second day Scævola is supposed to be too fatigued to renew the intellectual contest, and he retires; but one Cæsar comes in with Quintus Lutatius Catulus, and the conversation is renewed. Crassus and Antony carry it on in chief, but Crassus has the leading voice. Cæsar, who must have been the wag among barristers of his day, undertakes to give examples of that Attic salt by which the profundity of the law courts is supposed to have been relieved. The third conversation takes place on the afternoon of the second day, when they had refreshed themselves with sleep; though Crassus, we are specially told, had given himself up to the charms of no mid-day siesta. His mind had been full of the greatness of the task before him, but he will show neither fatigue nor anxiety. The art, the apparent ease with which it is all done, the grace without languor, the energy without exertion, are admirable. It is as though, they were sitting by running water, or listening to the music of some grand organ. They remove themselves to a wood a little farther from the house, and there they listen to the eloquence of Crassus. Cotta and Sulpicius only hear and assent, or imply a modified dissent in doubting words.
It is Crassus who insists that the orator shall be omniscient, and Antony who is supposed to contest the point with him. But they differ in the sweetest language; and each, though he holds his own, does it with a deference that is more convincing than any assertion. It may be as well, perhaps, to let it be understood that Crassus and Cæsar are only related by distant family ties—or perhaps only by ties of adoption—to the two of the First Triumvirate whose names they bear; whereas Antony was the grandfather of that Cleopatra's lover against whom the Philippics were hurled.
No one, as I have said before, will read these conversations for the sake of the argument they contain; but they are, and will be, studied as containing, in the most appropriate language, a thousand sayings respecting the art of speech. "No power of speaking well can belong to any but to him who knows the subjects on which he has to speak;"[244] a fact which seems so clear that no one need be troubled with stating it, were it not that men sin against it every day. "How great the undertaking to put yourself forward among a crowd of men as being the fittest of all there to be heard on some great subject!"[245] "Though all men shall gnash their teeth, I will declare that the little book of the twelve tables surpasses in authority and usefulness all the treatises of all the philosophers."[246] Here speaks the Cicero of the Forum, and not that Cicero who amused himself among the philosophers. "Let him keep his books of philosophy for some Tusculum idleness such as is this of ours, lest, when he shall have to speak of justice, he must go to Plato and borrow from him, who, when he had to express him in these things, created in his books some new Utopia."[247] For in truth, though Cicero deals much, as we shall see by-and-by, with the philosophers, and has written whole treatises for the sake of bringing Greek modes of thought among the Romans, he loved the affairs of the world too well to trust them to philosophy. There has been some talk of old age, and Antony, before the evening has come, declares his view. "So far do I differ from you," he says, "that not only do I not think that any relief in age is to be found in the crowd of them who may come to me for advice, but I look to its solitude as a harbor. You indeed may fear it, but to me it will be most welcome."[248]
Then Cicero begins the second book with a renewal of the assertion as to oratory generally, not putting the words into the mouth of any of his party, but declaring it as his own belief: "This is the purpose of this present treatise, and of the present time, to declare that no one has been able to excel in eloquence, not merely without capacity for speaking, but also without acquired knowledge of all kinds."[249] But Antony professes himself of another opinion: "How can that be when Crassus and I often plead opposite causes, and when one of us can only say the truth? Or how can it be possible, when each of us must take the cause as it comes to him?"[250] Then, again, he bursts into praise of the historian, as though in opposition to Crassus: "How worthy of an orator's eulogy is the writing of history, whether greatest in the flood of its narrative or in its variety! I do not know that we have ever treated it separately, but it is there always before our eyes. For who does not know that the first law of the historian is that he must not dare to say what is false: the next, that he must not dare to suppress what is true."[251] We wonder, when Cicero was writing this, whether he remembered his request to Lucceius, made now two years ago. He gives a piece of advice to young advocates, apologizing, indeed, for thinking it necessary; but he has found it to be necessary, and he gives it: "Let me teach this to them all; when they intend to plead, let them first study their causes."[252] It is not only here that we find that the advice which is useful now was wanted then. "Read your cases!" The admonition was wanted in Rome as it has been since in London.
But the great mistake of the whole doctrine creeps out at every page as we go on, and disproves the idea on which the De Oratore is founded. All Cicero's treatises on the subject, and Quintilian's, and those of the pseudo-Tacitus, and of the first Greek from which they have come, fall to the ground as soon as we are told that it must be the purport of the orator to turn the mind of those who hear him either to the right or to the left, in accordance with the drift of the cause.[253] The mind rejects the idea that it can be the part of a perfect man to make another believe that which he believes to be false. If it be necessary that an orator should do so, then must the orator be imperfect. We have the same lesson taught throughout. It is the great gift of the orator, says Antony, to turn the judge's mind so that he shall hate or love, shall fear or hope, shall rejoice or grieve, or desire to pity or desire to punish.[254] No doubt it is a great power. All that is said as to eloquence is true. It may be necessary that to obtain the use of it you shall educate yourself with more precision than for any other purpose. But there will be the danger that they who have fitted the dagger to the hand will use it. It cannot be right to make another man believe that which you think to be false.
In the use of raillery in eloquence the Roman seems to have been very backward; so much so that it is only by the examples given of it by themselves as examples that we learn that it existed. They can appall us by the cruelty which they denounce. They can melt us by their appeals to our pity. They can terrify; they can horrify; they can fill us with fear or hope, with anger, with despair, or with rage; but they cannot cause us to laugh. Their attempts at a joke amuse us because we recognize the attempt. Here Cæsar is put forward to give us the benefit of his wit. We are lost in surprise when we find how miserable are his jokes, and take a pride in finding that in one line we are the masters of the Romans. I will give an instance, and I pick it out as the best among those selected by Cicero. Nasica goes to call upon Ennius, and is informed by the maid-servant that her master is not at home. Ennius returns the visit, and Nasica halloos out from the window that he is not within. "Not within!" says Ennius; "don't I know your voice?" Upon which Nasica replies, "You are an impudent fellow! I had the grace to believe your maid, and now you will not believe me myself."[255] How this got into a law-case we do not know; it is told, however, just as I have told it. But there are enough of them here to make a small Joe Miller; and yet, in the midst of language that is almost divine in its expressions, they are given as having been worthy of all attention.
The third book is commenced by the finest passage in the whole treatise. Cicero remembers that Crassus is dead, and then tells the story of his death. And Antony is dead, and the Cæsars. The last three had fallen in the Marian massacres. There is but little now in the circumstances of their death to excite our tears. Who knows aught of that Crassus, or of that Antony, or of those Cæsars? But Cicero so tells it in his pretended narrative as almost to make us weep. The day was coming when a greater than either of them was to die the same death as Antony, by the order of another Antony—to have his tongue pierced, and his bloody head thrust aloft upon the rostra. But no Roman has dared to tell us of it as Cicero has told the story of those others. Augustus had done his work too well, and it was much during his reign that Romans who could make themselves heard should dare to hold their tongues.
It would be useless in me here to attempt to give any notion of the laws as to speech which Cicero lays down. For myself I do not take them as laws, feeling that the interval of time has been too great to permit laws to remain as such. No orator could, I feel sure, form himself on Cicero's ideas. But the sweetness of the language is so great as to convince us that he, at any rate, knew how to use language as no one has done since: "But there is a building up of words, and a turning of them round, and a nice rendering. There is the opposing and the loosening. There is the avoiding, the holding back, the sudden exclamation, and the dropping of the voice; and the taking an argument from the case at large and bringing it to bear on a single point; and the proof and the propositions together. And there is the leave given; and then a doubting, and an expression of surprise. There is the counting up, the setting right; the utter destruction, the continuation, the breaking off, the pretence, the answer made to one's self, the change of names, the disjoining and rejoining of things—the relation, the retreat, and the curtailing."[256] Who can translate all these things when Quintilian himself has been fain to acknowledge that he has attempted and has failed to handle them in fitting language?
And then at last there comes that most lovely end to these most charming discourses: "His autem de rebus sol me ille admonuit, ut brevior essem, qui ipse jam præcipitans, me quoque hac præcipitem pæne evolvere coegit."[257] These words are so charming in their rhythm that I will not rob them of their beauty by a translation. The setting sun requires me also to go to rest: that is their simple meaning. At the end of the book he introduces a compliment to Hortensius, who during his life had been his great rival, and who was still living when the De Oratore was written.