There is one comprehensive quality which may be said to lave been wanting in his nature, which clouded his many excellences, led him continually into false positions, and even in his delightful letters excites in the reader, from time to time, an impatient feeling of contempt. He wanted manliness. It was a quality which was fast dying out, in his day, among even the best of the luxurious and corrupt aristocracy of Rome. It was perhaps but little missed in his character by those of his contemporaries who knew and loved him best. But without that quality, to an English mind, it is hard to recognise in any man, however brilliant and amiable, the true philosopher or hero.
The views which this great Roman politician held upon the vexed question of the ballot did not differ materially from those of his worthy grandfather before-mentioned.[1] The ballot was popular at Rome,—for many reasons, some of them not the most creditable to the characters of the voters; and because it was popular, Cicero speaks of it occasionally, in his forensic speeches, with a cautious praise; but of his real estimate of it there can be no kind of doubt. "I am of the same opinion now", he writes to his brother, "that ever I was; there is nothing like the open suffrage of the lips". So in one of his speeches, he uses even stronger language: "The ballot", he says, "enables men to open their faces, and to cover up their thoughts; it gives them licence to promise whatever they are asked, and at the same time to do whatever they please". Mr. Grote once quoted a phrase of Cicero's, applied to the voting-papers of his day, as a testimony in favour of this mode of secret suffrage—grand words, and wholly untranslatable into anything like corresponding English—"Tabella vindex tacitae libertatis"—"the tablet which secures the liberty of silence". But knowing so well as Cicero did what was the ordinary character of Roman jurors and Roman voters, and how often this "liberty of silence" was a liberty to take a bribe and to vote the other way, one can almost fancy that we see upon his lips, as he utters the sounding phrase, that playful curve of irony which is said to have been their characteristic expression.[2] Mr. Grote forgot, too, as was well pointed out by a writer in the 'Quarterly Review',[3] that in the very next sentence the orator is proud to boast that he himself was not so elected to office, but "by the living voices" of his fellow-citizens.
[Footnote 1: See p. 3.]
[Footnote 2: No bust, coin, or gem is known which bears any genuine likeness of Cicero. There are several existing which purport to be such, but all are more or less apocryphal.]
[Footnote 3: Quart. Rev., lxi. 522.]
The character of his eloquence may be understood in some degree by the few extracts which have been given from his public speeches; always remembering how many of its charms are necessarily lost by losing the actual language in which his thoughts were clothed. We have lost perhaps nearly as much in another way, in that we can only read the great orator instead of listening to him. Yet it is possible, after all, that this loss to us is not so great as it might seem. Some of his best speeches, as we know—those, for instance, against Verres and in defence of Milo—were written in the closet, and never spoken at all; and most of the others were reshaped and polished for publication. Nor is it certain that his declamation, which some of his Roman rivals found fault with as savouring too much of the florid Oriental type, would have been agreeable to our colder English taste. He looked upon gesture and action as essential elements of the orator's power, and had studied them carefully from the artists of the theatre. There can be no doubt that we have his own views on this point in the words which he has put into the mouth of his "Brutus", in the treatise on oratory which bears that name. He protests against the "Attic coldness" of style which, he says, would soon empty the benches of their occupants. He would have the action and bearing of the speaker to be such that even the distant spectator, too far off to hear, should "know that there was a Roscius on the stage". He would have found a French audience in this respect more sympathetic than an English one.[1] His own highly nervous temperament would certainly tend to excited action. The speaker, who, as we are told, "shuddered visibly over his whole body when he first began to speak", was almost sure, as he warmed to his work, to throw himself into it with a passionate energy.
[Footnote 1: Our speakers certainly fall into the other extreme. The British orator's style of gesticulation may still be recognised, mutatis mutandis, in Addison's humorous sketch of a century ago: "You may see many a smart rhetorician turning his hat in his hands, moulding it into several different cocks, examining sometimes the lining and sometimes the button, during the whole course of his harangue. A deaf man would think that he was cheapening a beaver, when he is talking perhaps of the fate of the British nation".]
He has put on record his own ideas of the qualifications and the duties of the public speaker, whether in the Senate or at the bar, in three continuous treatises on the subject, entitled respectively, 'On Oratory', 'Brutus', and 'The Orator', as well as in some other works of which we have only fragments remaining. With the first of these works, which he inscribed to his brother, he was himself exceedingly well satisfied, and it perhaps remains still the ablest, as it was the first, attempt to reduce eloquence to a science. The second is a critical sketch of the great orators of Rome: and in the third we have Cicero's view of what the perfect orator should be. His ideal is a high one, and a true one; that he should not be the mere rhetorician, any more than the mere technical lawyer or keen partisan, but the man of perfect education and perfect taste, who can speak on all subjects, out of the fulness of his mind, "with variety and copiousness".
Although, as has been already said, he appears to have attached but little value to a knowledge of the technicalities of law, in other respects his preparation for his work was of the most careful kind; if we may assume, as we probably may, that it is his own experience which, in his treatise on Oratory, he puts into the mouth of Marcus Antonius, one of his greatest predecessors at the Roman bar.
"It is my habit to have every client explain to me personally his own case; to allow no one else to be present, that so he may speak more freely. Then I take the opponent's side, while I make him plead his own cause, and bring forward whatever arguments he can think of. Then, when he is gone, I take upon myself, with as much impartiality as I can, three different characters—my own, my opponent's, and that of the jury. Whatever point seems likely to help the case rather than injure it, this I decide must be brought forward; when I see that anything is likely to do more harm than good, I reject and throw it aside altogether. So I gain this,—that I think over first what I mean to say, and speak afterwards; while a good many pleaders, relying on their abilities, try to do both at once".[1]