One is struck, in reading the “thrilling” addresses on various occasions, which are said to have “chained as with hooks of steel the attention of thousands,” and which confer on their authors “immortal reputations” that die within a year, to see what tasteless word-piling passes with many for eloquence. The advice given in Racine’s “Plaideurs,” by an ear-tortured judge to a long-winded lawyer, “to skip to the deluge,” might wisely be repeated to our thousand Ciceros and Chathams. The Baconian art of condensation seems nearly obsolete. Many of our orators are forever breaking butterflies on a wheel,—raising an ocean to drown a fly,—loading cannon to shoot at humming-birds. Thought and expression are supplanted by lungs and the dictionary. Instead of great thoughts couched in a few close, home, significant sentences,—the value of a thousand pounds sterling of sense concentrated into a cut and polished diamond,—we have a mass of verbiage, delivered with a pompous elocution. Instead of ideas brought before us, as South expresses it, like water in a well, where you have fulness in a little compass, we have the same “carried out into many petty, creeping rivulets, with length and shallowness together.”
It is in our legislative bodies that this evil has reached the highest climax. A member may have a thought or a fact which may settle a question; but if it may be couched in a sentence or two, he thinks it not worth delivering. Unless he can wire-draw it into a two-hours speech, or at least accompany it with some needless verbiage to plump it out in the report, he will sit stock still, and leave the floor to men who have fewer ideas and more words at command. The public mind, too, revolts sometimes against nourishment in highly concentrated forms; it requires bulk as well as nutriment, just as hay, as well as corn, is given to horses, to distend the stomach, and enable it to act with its full powers. Then, again,—and this, perhaps, is one of the main causes of long-winded speeches,—there is a sort of reverence entertained for a man who can “spout” two or three hours on the stretch; and the wonder is heightened, if he does it without making a fool of himself. Nothing, however, can be more absurd than to regard mere volubility as a proof of intellectual power. So far is this from being the case that it may be doubted whether any large-thoughted man, who was accustomed to grapple with the great problems of life and society, ever found it easy upon the rostrum to deliver his thoughts with fluency and grace.
Bruce, the traveller, long ago remarked of the Abyssinians, that “they are all orators, as,” he adds, “are most barbarians.” It is often said of such tonguey men that they have “a great command of language,” when the simple fact is that language has a great command of them. As Whately says, they have the same command of language that a man has of a horse that runs away with him. A true command of language consists in the power of discrimination, selection, and rejection, rather than in that of multiplication. The greatest orators of ancient and modern times have been remarkable for their economy of words. Demosthenes, when he
“Shook the arsenal, and fulmined over Greece
To Macedon and Artaxerxes’ throne,”
rarely spoke over thirty minutes, and Cicero took even less time to blast Catiline with his lightnings. There are some of the Greek orator’s speeches which were spoken, as they may now be read with sufficient slowness and distinctness, in less than half an hour; yet they are the effusions of that rapid and mighty genius the effect of whose words the ancients exhausted their language in describing; which they could adequately describe only by comparing it to the workings of the most subtle and powerful agents of nature,—the ungovernable torrent, the resistless thunder. Chatham was often briefer still, and Mirabeau, the master-spirit of the French tribune, condensed his thunders into twenty minutes.
It is said that not one of the three leading members of the convention that formed the Constitution of the United States spoke, in the debates upon it, over twenty minutes. Alexander Hamilton was reckoned one of the most diffuse speakers of his day; yet he did not occupy more than two hours and a half in his longest arguments at the bar, nor did his rival, Aaron Burr, occupy over half that time. A judge who was intimately acquainted with Burr and his practice declares that he repeatedly and successfully disposed of cases involving a large amount of property in half an hour. “Indeed,” says he, “on one occasion he talked to the jury seven minutes in such a manner that it took me, on the bench, half an hour to straighten them out.” He adds. “I once asked him, ‘Colonel Burr, why cannot lawyers always save the time, and spare the patience of the court and jury, by dwelling only on the important points in their cases?’ to which Burr replied, ‘Sir, you demand the greatest faculty of the human mind, selection.’” To these examples we may add that of a great English advocate. “I asked Sir James Scarlett,” says Buxton, “what was the secret of his preëminent success as an advocate. He replied that he took care to press home the one principal point of the case, without paying much regard to the others. He also said that he knew the secret of being short. ‘I find,’ said he, ‘that when I exceed half an hour, I am always doing mischief to my client. If I drive into the heads of the jury unimportant matter, I drive out matter more important that I had previously lodged there.’”
Joubert, a French author, cultivated verbal economy to such an extreme that he tried almost to do without words. “If there is a man on earth,” said he, “tormented by the cursed desire to get a whole book into a page, a whole page into a phrase, and this phrase into one word,—that man is myself.” The ambition of many American speakers, and not a few writers, is apparently the reverse of this. We do not seem to know that in many cases, as Hesiod says, a half is more than the whole; and that a speech or a treatise hammered out painfully in every part is often of less value than a few bright links, suggestive of the entire chain of thought. Who wants to swallow a whole ox, in order to get at the tenderloin?
Prolixity, it has been well said, is more offensive now than it once was, because men think more rapidly. They are not more thoughtful than their ancestors, but they are more vivid, direct, and animated in their thinking. They are more impatient, therefore, of long-windedness, of a loose arrangement, and of a heavy, dragging movement in the presentation of truth. “A century ago men would listen to speeches and sermons,—to divisions and subdivisions,—that now would be regarded as utterly intolerable. As the human body is whisked through space at the rate of a mile a minute, so the human mind travels with an equally accelerated pace. Mental operations are on straight lines, and are far more rapid than they once were. The public audience now craves a short method, a distinct, sharp statement, and a rapid and accelerating movement, upon the part of its teachers.”[18] It is, in short, an age of steam and electricity that we live in, not of slow coaches; an age of locomotives, electric telegraphs, and phonography; and hence it is the cream of a speaker’s thoughts that men want,—the wheat, and not the chaff,—the kernel, and not the shell,—the strong, pungent essence, and not the thin, diluted mixture. The model discourse to-day is that which gives, not all that can be said, even well said, on a subject, but the very apices rerum, the tops and sums of things reduced to their simplest expression,—the drop of oil extracted from thousands of roses, and condensing all their odors,—the healing power of a hundred weight of bark in a few grains of quinine.
“Certainly the greatest and wisest conceptions that ever issued from the mind of man,” says South, “have been couched under, and delivered in, a few close, home, and significant words.... Was not the work of all the six days [of creation] transacted in so many words?... Heaven, and earth, and all the host of both, as it were, dropped from God’s mouth, and nature itself was but the product of a word.... The seven wise men of Greece, so famous for their wisdom all the world over, acquired all that fame, each of them by a single sentence consisting of two or three words. And γνῶθι σεαυτὸν still lives and flourishes in the mouths of all, while many vast volumes are extinct, and sunk into dust and utter oblivion.”