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Page 4
A book entitled _Forensic Eloquence_, by Mr. John Goss, appears to have
for purpose to teach the young idea how to spout, and that purpose, I
dare say, it will accomplish if something is not done to prevent. I know
nothing of the matter myself, a strong distaste for forensic eloquence,
or eloquence of any kind implying a man mounted on his legs and doing
all the talking, having averted me from its study. The training of the
youth of this country to utterance of themselves after that fashion I
should regard as a disaster of magnitude. So far as I know it, forensic
eloquence is the art of saying things in such a way as to make them pass
for more than they are worth. Employed in matters of importance (and for
other employment it were hardly worth acquiring) it is mischievous
because dishonest and misleading. In the public service Truth toils best
when not clad in cloth-of-gold and bedaubed with fine lace. If eloquence
does not beget action it is valueless; but action which results from the
passions, sentiments and emotions is less likely to be wise than that
which comes of a persuaded judgment. For that reason I cannot help
thinking that the influence of Bismarck in German politics was more
wholesome than is that of Mr. John Temple Graves.
For eloquence _per se_--considered merely as an art of pleasing--I
entertain something of the respect evoked by success; for it always
pleases at least the speaker. It is to speech what an ornate style is to
writing--good and pleasant enough in its time and place and, like
pie-crust and the evening girl, destitute of any basis in common sense.
Forensic eloquence, on the contrary, has an all too sufficient
foundation in reason and the order of things: it promotes the ambition
of tricksters and advances the fortunes of rogues. For I take it that
the Ciceros, the Mirabeaus, the Burkes, the O'Connells, the Patrick
Henrys and the rest of them--pets of the text-bookers and scourges of
youth--belong in either the one category or the other, or in both.
Anyhow I find it impossible to think of them as highminded men and
right-forth statesmen--with their actors' tricks, their devices of the
countenance, inventions of gesture and other cunning expedients having
nothing to do with the matter in hand. Extinction of the orator I hold
to be the most beneficent possibility of evolution. If Mr. Goss has done
anything to retard that blessed time when the Bourke Cockrans shall
cease from troubling and the weary be at rest he is an enemy of his race.
"What!" exclaims the thoughtless reader--I have but one--"are not the
great forensic speeches by the world's famous orators good reading?
Considering them merely as literature do you not derive a high and
refining pleasure from them?" I do not: I find them turgid and tumid no
end. They are bad reading, though they may have been good hearing. In
order to enjoy them one must have in memory what, indeed, one is seldom
permitted to forget: that they were addressed to the ear; and in
imagination one must hold some shadowy simulacrum of the orator himself,
uttering his work. These conditions being fulfilled there remains for
application to the matter of the discourse too little attention to get
much good of it, and the total effect is confusion. Literature by which
the reader is compelled to bear in mind the producer and the
circumstances under which it was produced can be spared.
NATURA BENIGNA
It is not always on remote islands peopled with pagans that great
disasters occur, as memory witnesseth. Nor are the forces of nature
inadequate to production of a fiercer throe than any that we have known.
The situation is this: we are tied by the feet to a fragile shell
imperfectly confining a force powerful enough under favoring conditions,
to burst it asunder and set the fragments wallowing and grinding
together in liquid flame, in the blind fury of a readjustment. Nay, it
needs no such stupendous cataclysm to depeople this uneasy orb. Let but
a square mile be blown out of the bottom of the sea, or a great rift
open there. Is it to be supposed that we would be unaffected in the
altered conditions generated by a contest between the ocean and the
earth's molten core? These fatalities are not only possible but in the
highest degree probable. It is probable, indeed, that they have occurred
over and over again, effacing all the more highly organized forms of
life, and compelling the slow march of evolution to begin anew. Slow? On
the stage of Eternity the passing of races--the entrances and exits of
Life--are incidents in a brisk and lively drama, following one another
with confusing rapidity.
Mankind has not found it practicable to abandon and avoid those places
where the forces of nature have been most malign. The track, of the
Western tornado is speedily repeopled. San Francisco is still populous,
despite its earthquake, Galveston despite its storm, and even the courts
of Lisbon are not kept by the lion and the lizard. In the Peruvian
village straight downward into whose streets the crew of a United States
warship once looked from the crest of a wave that stranded her a half
mile inland are heard the tinkle of the guitar and the voices of
children at play. There are people living at Herculaneum and Pompeii. On
the slopes about Catania the goatherd endures with what courage he may
the trembling of the ground beneath his feet as old Enceladus again
turns over on his other side. As the Hoang-Ho goes back inside its banks
after fertilizing its contiguity with hydrate of China-man the living
agriculturist follows the receding wave, sets up his habitation beneath
the broken embankment, and again the Valley of the Gone Away blossoms
as the rose, its people diving with Death.
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