An artist who draws with a free hand, will be able to develop his talent to its full extent, but one who draws in a cramped or false manner will always suffer more or less from the effects of it; but this was not the worst of the matter. Self-control does much for the artist, but unprejudiced criticism is also necessary. This Phillips never could obtain. There were persons who judged him impartially, but he was not in the way of obtaining their opinions. He was surrounded by a small band of adherents who praised him without discrimination, and who fiercely repelled the attacks of those who found fault with him. The newspapers all took sides against him, for both political parties dreaded the agitation of the slavery question, and Phillips could rarely look into one of them without meeting with a savage attack on himself by some subaltern who knew of no better use for his quill than the manufacture of these venomous darts. Neither could he walk through the streets of Boston without hearing himself cursed and execrated. Meanwhile Mrs. Chapman and Mrs. L. Maria Child extolled him to the skies. Faithful and undistorted picture of himself he could meet with nowhere.
We read of saintly characters who have endured persecution with Christian humility and resignation, who have blessed those who cursed them, and loved those who hated them; but how many such have we been personally acquainted with? If we except Desdemona there are none in the great dramatists. It is an excellent principle, this of returning good for evil; but is it not also true that nature has planted hatred in us as a protection against future imposition? There may be such personages, but Wendell Phillips was not one of them.
He endured the stings of the pro-slavery hornets, as they were called, with stoical dignity and forbearance, but in spite of all good resolutions, they had an effect upon the inner man. Like the good Maritornes when Sancho Panza mistook her for an evil spirit, he endured the drubbing as long as flesh-and-blood would stand it, and then retaliated in good earnest. It was discovered at length, that Wendell Phillips had a sharp tongue, as well as a silver one, and could use it also with some temper. Of course he was blamed for this, and very few considered what provocation he had, or gave him credit for his previous forbearance. The habit increased rather than abated in him with age, and finally acquired the nature of a familiar demon that would appear unexpectedly in the midst of a brilliant discourse and sadly mar the effect of it.
His tendency to exaggeration, disregard of fact, and recklessness of statement, may all be attributed to his irregular, improvised manner of working. There are few public speakers, indeed, who escape these faults. What preparation he made for his speeches will probably never be known. He was always as mysterious on this point as a professional juggler. To a lady who once asked him about it, he replied, that he never made any preparation. For those of his speeches that have been published, we are obliged to a skilful short-hand writer named Yerrinton, who was Wendell Phillips' devoted admirer, and never missed an opportunity of hearing him on a fresh subject in Boston or New York.
To judge from internal evidence, it would seem likely that having divided his subject, as a lawyer does his argument, into a number of points, and having filled his mind somewhat full of them, he wrote out a careful and well-studied opening to his address, and then committed it to memory. This would enable him to make terms, as it were, with his audience in those first critical moments of his speech, and afterwards he could rely on his native wit and genius to carry him through. When his subject was a criticism of public events, this was not so difficult, and it gave him the advantage of a certain vivacious energy which appealed strongly to his hearers; but it was a dangerous practice. An orator who has a certain length of time to fill, and a reputation to sustain, is obliged to go on at all hazards. He cannot afford to be dull, nor to stop for a moment's reflection. If his memory fails him for an instant, imagination must supply its place. In this manner he often made misstatements which were quite unintentional, and must have been deeply regretted afterwards. Some allowance too should be made for a man who feels himself in a desperate position. His historical lectures on "The Lost Arts," "Daniel O'Connel," and "Toussaint," must sooner or later have been committed to memory, and were repeated again and again in a nearly identical form.
To amend for these deficiencies, his delivery was perfect, and even more than that. One of our best critics has called him matchless in this respect, and no other orator of the century, except possibly Canning, may be compared to him. Webster was more effective, but rather ponderous. Choate's style was peculiar, and Everett's cold and studied. Gladstone resembles him more, perhaps, than any other, but Gladstone has a decided solemnity of manner which is a help to him among his countrymen, but a defect as judged by classic standards. With Wendell Phillips, it was not only that every phase of thought and feeling was portrayed at once in his face, attitude, and gestures, but this was done with such grace and purity as only belongs to the very highest art. It was as if a figure in Raphael's "School at Athens" had suddenly stepped out from the picture and explained the thought of the master to us in words.
There is nothing I can compare with the unconscious grace and purity of Phillips in his best moments except a picture by Raphael, or one of Milton's shorter poems. It was no lurid brilliancy or artificial light that shone from him, but rather the cheerful radiance of spring sunshine. No matter how gloomy the political outlook might be, or in what sombre colors he depicted it, this light from the man himself illuminated his subject and gave encouragement to his hearers. The most prolonged applause could not disturb a muscle in his countenance, and a storm of hisses appeared to have as little effect on him. From the first word to the last, he was master of the platform, and no one dreamed of contesting his right to it. His gestures were his own, and could not be imitated, for they were the creation of the moment. There was something magical in this art of his, and if his wisdom and judgment had only equalled it, he might have counted among the greatest of men.
Emerson sent one of Webster's orations to Carlyle, and the latter complained that it was monotonous and lacked the poetic quality of Demosthenes. This is quite true, but at the same time it may be said that Webster's speeches, judged simply as literature, have not been surpassed by five other American writers. The grand roll of his sentences does not become wearisome to a lover of sound reasoning, and in the presentation of his subject he has rarely been equalled. An oration of his is not like a picture hanging on the wall, but rather a public building which one can walk around and look at from the four cardinal points. Even his speech on the fugitive-slave bill, for which he has been so much blamed, contains the best analysis of the slavery question up to that time which had yet been made. He considered slavery a great evil, and his mistake evidently consisted in supposing that a great evil could exist in one part of the nation without vitiating the whole of it.
[Illustration: WENDELL PHILLIPS. AS HE APPEARED BEFORE THE PHI BETA KAPPA.]
Phillips looked upon slavery as a crime, and attacked it in an uncompromising manner. His speeches are not much like Webster's, but they are excellent reading; full of keen, vivid thought, bright sayings, and genial humor. He had the imagination of Demosthenes, but without the logical faculty. Many of them possess historical value, and but for too much voix blanc, like the brightness of new silver, might be compared with Emerson's essays. Certain passages and individual sentences are of rare beauty. Speaking of Lovejoy thirty years after his death, he said, "How cautiously men sink into nameless graves, while now and then one forgets himself into immortality." At the time of the Dred Scott decision, he exclaimed: "Is Liberty dead? Is the valley of the Mississippi her grave? Are the Rocky Mountains her monument; and shall the Falls of Niagara chant forever her requiem?" In his Brooklyn address of November 1st, 1859, the finest of his orations, and one which he must have prepared with exceptional care, after telling the story of Tsar Nicholas, who insisted on building a straight railroad from Moscow to St. Petersburg in spite of the opposition of the engineers, he continued: "An intelligent democracy says of slavery, or a law, or a creed, 'This is justice, or it is not'; the track of God's thunderbolt is a straight line from justice to iniquity, and the church or state that cannot stand it must get out of the way." Or take this illustration of his subject from Athenian life—which is itself Athenian, and very much in the vein of Demosthenes:—