[3]Oliver Wendell Holmes in “Autocrat of the Breakfast Table.”
[4]Robert Louis Stevenson.
[5]Hamlet, Act III, Scene II.
CHAPTER VII
THE GRECIAN ORATORS
what constituted their art
When you shall say, “As others do, so will I: I renounce, I am sorry for it, my early visions; I must eat the good of the land and let learning and romantic expectation go, until a more convenient season”; then dies the man in you; then once more perish the buds of art, and poetry, and science, as they have died already in a thousand thousand men. The hour of that choice is the crisis of your history, and see that you hold yourself fast by the intellect.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson: Dartmouth Address
If a man would become a truly great orator, he must put aside all mere selfish desires and heed only the call of the best that is in him. He must have visions, and realize them; he must act according to his own understanding, and not become the pliant tool of another, be that other a political boss, a political machine, or an unholy ambition; he must be himself, and refuse to echo the thoughts of others; and, as a foundation upon which all these virtues are to be built, must be the one great virtue of industry.
Through all climes and in all ages men have achieved eminence as orators by persevering efforts only, and while, at times, an orator, full-fledged and ready for the fray, has burst into the list and played his part upon the stage of action, such occurrences have been so rare as to make them but examples of the exception that proves the rule. Therefore, let him who would become proficient in the art of speech make up his mind to labor in order to attain that proficiency.