Thinking is a form of exercise, and growth comes only through exercise—that is to say, expression.
We learn things only to throw them away: no man ever wrote well until he had forgotten every rule of rhetoric, and no orator ever spake straight to the hearts of men until he had tumbled his elocution into the Irish Sea.
To hold on to things is to lose them. To clutch is to act the part of the late Mullah Bah, the Turkish wrestler, who came to America and secured through his prowess a pot of gold. Going back to his native country, the steamer upon which he had taken passage collided in mid-ocean with a sunken derelict. Mullah Bah, hearing the alarm, jumped from his berth and strapped to his person a belt containing five thousand dollars in gold. He rushed to the side of the sinking ship, leaped over the rail, and went to Davy Jones' Locker like a plummet, while all about frail women and weak men in life-preservers bobbed on the surface and were soon picked up by the boats. The fate of Mullah Bah is only another proof that athletes die young, and that it is harder to withstand prosperity than its opposite.
But knowledge did not turn the head of Marat. His restless spirit was reaching out for expression, and we find him drifting to London for a wider field.
England was then, as now, the refuge of the exile. There is today just as much liberty, and a little more free speech, in England than in America. We have hanged witches and burned men at the stake since England has, and she emancipated her slaves long before we did ours. Over against the home-thrust that respectable women drink at public bars from John O'Groat's to Land's End, can be placed the damning count that in the United States more men are lynched every year than Great Britain legally executes in double the time.
A too-ready expression of the Rousseau philosophy had made things a bit unpleasant for Marat in Edinburgh, but in London he found ready listeners, and the coffeehouses echoed back his radical sentiments.
These underground debating-clubs of London started more than one man off on the oratorical transverse. Swift, Johnson, Reynolds, Goldsmith, Garrick, Burke—all sharpened their wits at the coffeehouses. I see the same idea is now being revived in New York and Chicago: little clubs of a dozen or so will rent a room in some restaurant, and fitting it up for themselves, will dine daily and discuss great themes, or small, according to the mental caliber of the members.
During the latter part of the Eighteenth Century, these clubs were very popular in London. Men who could talk or speak were made welcome, and if the new member generated caloric, so much the better—excitement was at a premium.
Marat was now able to speak English with precision, and his slight French accent only added a charm to his words. He was fiery, direct, impetuous. He was a fighter by disposition, and care was taken never to cross him beyond a point where the sparks began to fly. The man was immensely diverting, and his size was to his advantage—orators should be very big or very little—anything but commonplace. The Duke of Mantua would have gloried in Jean Paul, and later might have cut off his head as a precautionary measure.
Among the visitors at one of the coffeehouse clubs was one B. Franklin, big, patient, kind. He weighed twice as much as Marat: and his years were sixty, while Marat's were thirty.