He seems, in this later manner which has been so much discussed, to have lost his contact with the old familiar symbols of feeling and sense and to have resolved the world into a place of sublimated abstractions, which he describes sometimes with a stammering and inadequate tongue and again in bursts of rugged eloquence and with amazing penetration. The smoothness of the ordered thought, the pretty balances, the march and swing of the old cadences of our speech are either beyond him or beneath him, and in a man of so acute and full a mind and with a sophistication so complete in all that makes for beauty, we can not do less than subscribe to the theory that he knows what he is about and that his style, in the curious phase to which he has brought it, is a true expression of the oddly oblique lines and strangely concentric circles of his matured mind.
Eloquence is, I have sometimes thought, the rarest quality that may be embraced in the essentials of style. We need not quibble over definitions. “Eloquence,” said Dean Farrar, “is the noble, the harmonious, the passionate expression of truths profoundly realized, or of emotions intensely felt”; and it is sufficient for our purposes. The term is applied commonly and uncritically in oratory. I have not myself found the reading of the speeches of great orators profitable, charmed they never so marvelously in their own day. The old school readers served us well in this particular by their admirable selections.
Judgments of the ear and of the eye vary widely. The sentences that read well will as likely as not fall flat when spoken, even when uttered with force. The oration delivered on the field of Gettysburg by Edward Everett is commonly spoken of in contemptuous contrast with Lincoln’s utterance on the same occasion, but there can be no fair comparison between the two performances. Everett was indisputably one of the greatest forensic orators of his time,—scholarly, elegant, impressive. What Lincoln wrote and read at Gettysburg was not an oration but—to use Carl Schurz’s happy characterization of it—a sonorous and beautiful psalm. The familiar story that Lincoln began and finished that address on the train between Washington and Gettysburg was denied by Mr. John G. Nicolay, who has somewhere written a most interesting account of its preparation.
It is difficult to imagine a severer test of the mind’s gift of expression than the extemporaneous speech, evoked by some emergency and spoken without premeditation. Such instances are indeed rare, for your orator is, I find, something of a liar. He likes to give the impression of readiness of tongue and wit; whereas the speech he has flung off at some crisis of a debate, seemingly produced on his feet, may have been carried in his mind for weeks.
We Americans have long been accustomed to florid style of public address. I remember hearing it said often in my youth that the newspaper was driving out the orator, but I do not believe that this is true, or that it will ever be true. The glow and passion of the spoken word must always hold a fascination for men that is not possible in the printed appeal. The general rise of popular intelligence raises the standard somewhat; mere bombast and spread-eagleism—the nimble ascent to pyramidal climaxes,—is less effective as the years go by; but the spell-binder has not yet been superseded. He may not always convince, but he dare not be dull, and he now and then rises to the level of a Benjamin Harrison, who combined the cogent reasoning of the deeply philosophical lawyer with a rare art in marshaling his facts, and addressed himself to the conscience and the reason of his audiences.
Terror and horror are rarely evoked by our later orators. Even the slaughter of the innocents in the Philippines in the amiable Christian effort to extend our beneficent empire to Asia has brought forth no really striking protest worthy of the cause. In the same senate chamber where the hired counsel of the railways and other trust-protecting and subsidy-hunting felons subsequently thwarted the will of the American people, Thomas Corwin, a senator in congress from Ohio, on the 11th of February, 1847, thus delivered himself on the continuation of the war with Mexico. I quote this paragraph from Senator Corwin’s speech in reply to Senator Cass of Michigan merely to illustrate the possibilities of passionate oratory skillfully employed:
“Sir, look at this picture of want of room! With twenty millions of people, you have about one thousand millions of acres of land, inviting settlement by every conceivable argument, bringing them down to a quarter of a dollar an acre and allowing every man to squat where he pleases. But the Senator from Michigan says we will be two hundred millions in a few years and we want room. If I were a Mexican I would tell you, ‘Have you not room in your own country to bury your dead men? If you come into mine we will greet you with bloody hands and welcome you to hospitable graves.’”
And while we are touching upon the literary style of statesmen you will pardon me for quoting further, in illustration of the reluctance, caution and restraint that may check the exuberance of personal feeling, from a statement made by Colonel Theodore Roosevelt in January, 1904: He said:
“In John Hay I have a great Secretary of State. In Philander Knox I have a great Attorney-General. In other Cabinet posts I have great men. Elihu Root could take any of these places and fill it as well as the man who is now there. And, in addition, he is what probably none of these gentlemen could be, a great Secretary of War. Elihu Root is the ablest man I have known in our Government service. I will go further. He is the greatest man that has appeared in the public life of any country, in any position, on either side of the ocean, in my time.”
Criticism offers no adequately descriptive word for this type of reserved, unventurous statement. Let us consider whether it may not properly be styled the imperial theodoric.