Mr. C. "Ought they not to cultivate elocution?"
Dr. N. "It seems to me that at those institutions where they pay the most attention to elocution they speak the worst. I have no faith in artificial eloquence. Teach men to think and feel, and, when they have anything to the purpose to say, they can say it. I should about as soon think of teaching a man to weep, or to laugh, or to swallow, as to speak when he has anything to say."
Mr. C. "How, then, do you account for the astonishing power of some tragedians?"
Dr. N. "Ah! the speaking in the theatre is all overacted. There is no nature in it. Those actors, placed in a public assembly, and called upon to address men on some real and momentous occasion, would utterly fail to touch men's hearts, while some plain country-man, who had never learned a rule of art, would find his way at once to the fountains of feeling and action within them. The secret of the influence which is felt in the acting of the teatre is not that it is natural. Let a real tragedy be acted, and let men believe that a real scene is before them, and the theatre would be deserted. No audience in this country could bear the presentation of a natural and real tragedy. Men go to the theatre to be amused. The scenery, the music, the attitudes, the gesticulations, all unite to fix attention and amuse; but the eloquence, so called, of the theatre, is all factitious, and is no more adapted to the real occasions of life than would be the recitative in singing, and it pleases on the same principle that this does."
Mr. C. "But, Doctor, why was it that, when Cooke or Kean appeared on the stage, he engrossed all eyes and ears, and nothing was heard or seen or thought of but himself? The acting of Kean was just as irresistible as the whirlwind. He would take up an audience of three thousand in his fist, as it were, and carry them just where he pleased, through every extreme of passion."
Dr. N. "because these actors were great men. Cooke, as far as I have been able to learn, (I never saw him,—I had once an engagement to meet him in Philadelphia, but he was drunk at the time, and disappointed me,) was perfectly natural. So I suppose Kean to have been. So Garrick was, and Talma. And the secret of the influence of these men was, that they burst the bonds of art and histrionic trick, and stood before their audience in their untrammelled natural strength. Garrick, at his first appearance, could not command an audience. It was first necessary for him entirely to revolutionize the English stage.
"Ministers have, very often, a sanctimonious tone, which by many is deemed a symbol of goodness. I would not say it is a symbol of hypocrisy, as many very pious men have it. One man acquires a tone, and those who study with him learn to associate it with his piety, and come to esteem it an essential part of ministerial qualification. But, instead of its being to me evidence of feeling, it evinces, in every degree of it, want of feeling; and whenever a man rises in his religious feelings sufficiently high, he will break away from the shackles of his perverse habit, and speak in the tone of nature.
"The most eloquent preacher I have ever heard was Dr. L——. General Hamilton at the bar was unrivalled. I heard his great effort in the case of People versus Croswell, for a libel upon Jefferson. There was a curious changing of sides in the position of the advocates. Spencer, the Attorney-General, who had long been climbing the ladder of democracy, managed the cause for the people; and Hamilton, esteemed an old-school Federalist, appeared as the champion of a free press. Of course, it afforded the better opportunity of witnessing the professional skill and rhetorical power of the respective advocates.
"Spencer, in the course of his plea, had occasion to refer to certain decisions of Lord Mansfield, and embraced the opportunity of introducing a splendid ad captandum eulogium on his Lordship,—'A name born for immortality; whose sun of fame would never set, but still hold its course in the heavens, when the humble names of his antagonist and himself should have sunk beneath the waves of oblivion.'
"Hamilton was evidently nettled at this invidious and unnecessary comparison, and cast about in his mind how he might retort upon Spencer. I do not know that my conjecture is right; but it has always seemed to me that his reason for introducing his repartee to Spencer in the odd place where he did, just after a most eloquent and pathetic peroration, was something as follows—'I have now constructed and arranged my argument, and the thread of it must not be broken by the intervention of any such extraneous matter. Neither will it do to separate my peroration from the main body of my argument. I must, then, give up the opportunity of retorting at all, or tack it on after the whole, and take the risk of destroying the effect of my argument.'