During his public career Mr. Reed has manifested in a score or more of verbal hand-to-hand conflicts his ability to meet an emergency to the best advantage of his side. Always upon his feet when he scents danger, he is as quick to scent it as any politician who ever occupied a seat upon that floor. He is at all times as truly the master of all his resources as ever Mr. Blaine was in that same tempestuous arena of the House.
From the first he has shown himself 384 that rara avis, a born debater—aggressive and cautious, able to strike the nail right on the head at critical moments, to condense a whole argument with epigrammatic brevity. He has shown, to my judgment, better than any parliamentarian living, how the turbulent battlings of great legislative bodies, so chaotic in appearance, are not chaos at all to one who has the capacity to think with clearness and precision upon his feet. Such a man assimilates the substance of every speech and judges its relative bearing upon the question. At the beginning it is hard to tell where a discussion will hinge, but gradually, as the debate goes on, the two or three points which are the key of the situation become clear to the true debater. As I understand the art of the debater, it is as if logs were heaped in confusion before him, and the thing to do was to single out the one log which, when removed, starts all the others flying down stream—an easier thing to conceive than to accomplish, and which demands an alliance of widely diverse qualities. I remember telling Mr. Reed once that it seemed to me as if there must be in the temperament of the debater something of the artist’s nature—a little of the same instinct to inspire and guide him. And I added: “Don’t you, like the artist, draw for material everywhere, from friend and foe alike, from things bearing directly upon your subject as well as from things that are apparently more removed from it? Don’t you have something akin to inspiration?”
“Well, perhaps so,” Mr. Reed answered, “and an anecdote occurs to my mind which you may think fits your theory. An obscure chap got up once and went for me in what was evidently a six months’ laboriously prepared invective. I hardly realized what he was about, except that I had an impression of the man using words in the same frantic fashion a windmill uses its arms in a blow. All the same, when he had finished pitching into me, I could not but get up and return the compliment. I had no more idea of what I was going to say than he had, when, by a hazard, my eye caught in the sea of heads before me the face of another representative from his State—a man who was one of the leaders of his party—and instantly the answer flashed in my mind. I had begun with something like ‘This is only another echo of the minority of the Fifty-first Congress, whose echoes are dying, not musically, but dying. Gentlemen,’ I continued, ‘it is too much glory for a State to furnish us with two such eminent representatives, the one to lead the House, the other to bring up the rear.’
“But I want to tell you, while we are on this subject of the artist and the orator,” Mr. Reed continued, “that I believe there is as much of a rhythm in prose as there is in poetry, and if a man has not the intuitive feeling of that subtile thing, rhythm, he can never amount to anything as an orator. Certain books of George William Curtis—‘Prue and I,’ especially—have helped me as much as anything to realize how delightful a quality rhythm is.”
There is a side to Mr. Reed which few people suspect. He is a lover of good novels, especially such novels as those of Balzac and Thackeray, which present human nature in a rugged, truthful manner. I should think that Mr. Reed would have about as much respect for a namby-pamby novel as he has for a wishy-washy politician.
Of the English novelists he likes Thackeray by far the best. “Pendennis,” “The Adventures of Philip,” and “The Virginians” he esteems as his most interesting works, though Thackeray reached high-water mark, in Mr. Reed’s opinion, in “Vanity Fair.” Charles Reade, too, has found in him an assiduous reader. He thinks “The Cloister and the Hearth” the finest and truest picture that has been made of life in the fifteenth century, and that Charles Reade is the best story-teller that ever wrote English.
In poetry his preference is for Tennyson, but he is a constant reader of Browning, Holmes, Longfellow, and Whittier also. “Would you mind,” said Mr. Reed, while talking of poets, “if I descend from the great names and say that I have a great liking for the rhymes of a Kansas lawyer, Eugene F. Ware, who writes over the nom-de-plume of ‘Ironquill’? They are so 385 direct; they present a moral in so few and so strikingly well chosen words; and then they have just enough of that quality of language which is always attractive because it is language in the making. How do you like this example of Mr. Ware’s sturdy popular muse?
“‘Once a Kansas zephyr strayed
Where a brass-eyed bull-pup played;
And that foolish canine bayed