Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2

by George Frisbie Hoar

If you would get some faint, far-off conception of him, first look at the best bust or picture of Everett you can find. Imagine the figure with its every movement gentle and graceful. The head and face are suggestive of Greek sculpture. This person sits on the platform with every expression discharged from the face, looking like a plaster image when the artist has just begun his model, before any character or intelligence has been put into it. You think him the only person in the audience who takes no interest whatever in what is going on, and certainly that he expects to have nothing to do with it himself. He is introduced. He comes forward quietly and gracefully. There is a slight smile of recognition of the welcoming applause. The opening sentences are spoken in a soft—I had almost said, a caressing voice, though still a little cold. I suppose it would be called a tenor voice. There was nothing in the least unmanly about Edward Everett. Yet if some woman had spoken in the same tones, you would have not thought them unwomanly.

Illa tamquam cycnea fuit divini hominis vox et oratio.

He has found somewhere in the vast storehouse of his knowledge a transaction exactly like the present, or exactly in contrast with it, or some sentiment of poet or orator which just fits the present occasion. If it be new to his audience, he adds to it a newer delight still by his matchless skill as a narrator— a skill almost the rarest of all talents among public speakers. If it be commonplace and hackneyed he makes it fresh and pleasant by giving in detail the circumstances when it was first uttered, or describes some occasion when some orator has applied it before; or calls attention to its very triteness as giving it added authority. If he wish to express his agreement with the last speaker and "say ditto to Mr. Burke," he tells you when that was said, what was the occasion, and gives you the name of Mr. Kruger, who stood for the representation of Bristol with Burke.

Mr. Everett's stores were inexhaustible. If any speaker have to get ready in a hurry for a great occasion, let him look through the index of the four volumes of Everett's speeches, and he will find matter enough, not only to stimulate his own thought and set its currents running, but to illustrate and adorn what he will say.

But pretty soon the orator rises into a higher plane. Some lofty sentiment, some stirring incident, some patriotic emotion, some play of fancy or wit comes from the brain or heart of the speaker. The audience is hushed to silence. Perhaps a little mist begins to gather in their eyes. There is now an accent of emotion in the voice, though still soft and gentle. The Greek statue begins to move. There is life in the limbs. There has been a lamp kindled somewhere behind the clear and transparent blue eyes. The flexible muscles of the face have come to life now. Still there is no jar or disorder. The touch upon the nerves of the audience is like that of a gentle nurse. The atmosphere is that of a May morning. There is no perfume but that of roses and lilies. But still, gently at first, the warmer feelings are kindled in the hearts of the speaker and hearers. The frame of the speaker is transfigured. The trembling hands are lifted high in the air. The rich, sweet voice fills the vast audience chamber with its resonant tones. At last, the bugle, the trumpet, the imperial clarion rings out full and clear, and the vast audience is transported as to another world—I had almost said to a seventh heaven. Read the welcome to Lafayette or the close of the matchless eulogy on that illustrious object of the people's love. Read the close of the oration on Washington. Read the contrast of Washington and Marlborough. Read the beautiful passage where, just before the ocean cable was laid, the rich fancy of the speaker describes—

"The thoughts that we think up here on the earth's surface in the cheerful light of day—clothing ourselves with elemental sparks, and shooting with fiery speed in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, from hemisphere to hemisphere, far down among the uncouth monsters that wallow in the nether seas, along the wreck-paved floor, thorough the oozy dungeons of the rayless deep; the last intelligence of the crops, whose dancing tassels will in a few months be coquetting with the west wind on those boundless prairies, flashing along the slimy decks of old sunken galleons, which have been rotting for ages; messages of friendship and love, from warm, living bosoms, burn over the cold green bones of men and women, whose hearts, once as fond as ours, burst as the eternal gulfs closed and roared over them, centuries ago."

Read the passage in the eulogy on Choate where he describes him arming himself in the entire panoply of his gorgeous rhetoric—and you will get some far-away conception of the power of this magician.

One thing especially distinguishes our modern orator from the writer in the closet, where he writes solely for his readers, or where he has prepared his speeches beforehand—that is, the influence of the audience upon him. There is nothing like it as a stimulant to every faculty, not only imagination, and fancy, and reason, but especially, as every experienced speaker knows, memory also. Everything needed seems to come out from the secret storehouses of the mind, even the things that have lain there forgotten, rusting and unused. Mr. Everett describes this in a masterly passage in his Life of Webster. Gladstone states it in a few fine sentences:

"The work of the orator, from its very inception," he says, "is inextricably mixed up with practice. It is cast in the mould offered to him by the mind of his hearers. It is an influence principally received from his audience (so to speak) in vapor, which he pours back upon them in a flood. The sympathy and concurrence of his time is, with his own mind, joint parent of his work. He cannot follow nor frame ideals; his choice is to be what his age would have him, what it requires in order to be moved by him, or else not to be at all."

I heard six of Kossuth's very best speeches. He was a marvellous orator. He seemed to have mastered the whole vocabulary of English speech, and to have a rare gift of choosing words that accurately expressed his meaning, and he used so to fashion his sentences that they were melodious and delightful to the ear. That is one great gift or oratory, as it is of poetry, or indeed of a good prose style. Why it is that two words or phrases which mean precisely the same thing to the intellect, have so different an effect on the emotions, no man can tell. To understand it, is to know the secret not only of reaching the heart, but frequently of convincing the understanding of man.