Autobiography of Seventy Years Part 67

Canning's attention, while at Eton, was strongly turned to extemporaneous speaking. They had a debating society, in which the Marquis of Wellesley and Charles Earl Grey had been trained before him, in which they had all the forms of the House of Commons--Speaker, Treasury benches, and an Opposition.

Canning also was disciplined by the habit of translation.

Curran practised declamation daily before a gla.s.s, reciting pa.s.sages from Shakespeare and the best English orators. He frequented the debating societies which then abounded in London.

He failed at first, and was ridiculed as "Orator Mum." But at last he surmounted every difficulty. It was said of him by a contemporary: "He turned his shrill and stumbling brogue into a flexible, sustained, and finely modulated voice; his action become free and forcible; he acquired perfect readiness in thinking on his legs; he put down every opponent by the mingled force of his argument and wit; and was at last crowned with the universal applause of the society and invited by the president to an entertainment in their behalf." I am not sure that I have seen, on any good authority, that he was in the habit of writing translations from Latin or Greek, but he studied them with great ardor and undoubtedly adopted, among the methods of perfecting his English style, the custom of students of his day of translation from these languages.

Jeffrey joined the Speculative Society, in Edinburgh, in his youth. His biographer says that it did more for him than any other event in the whole course of his education.

Chatham, the greatest of English orators, if we may judge by the reports of his contemporaries, trained himself for public speaking by constant translations from Latin and Greek.

The education of his son, the younger Pitt, is well known.

His father compelled him to read Thucydides into English at sight, and to go over it again and again, until he had got the best possible rendering of the Greek into English.

Macaulay belonged to the Cambridge Union, where, as in the society of the same name at Oxford, the great topics of the day were discussed by men, many of whom afterward became famous statesmen and debaters in the Commons.

Young Murray, afterward Lord Mansfield, translated Sall.u.s.t and Horace with ease; learned great part of them by heart; could converse fluently in Latin; wrote Latin prose correctly and idiomatically, and was specially distinguished at Westminster for his declamations. He translated every oration of Cicero into English and back again into Latin.

Fox can hardly have been supposed to have practised much in debating societies, as he entered the House of Commons when he was nineteen years old. But it is quite probably that he was drilled by translations from Latin and Greek into English; and in the House of Commons he had in early youth the advantage of the best debating society in the world. It is said that he read Latin and Greek as easily as he read English. He himself said that he gained his skill at the expense of the House, for he had sometimes tasked himself during the entire session to speak on every question that came up, whether he was interested in it or not, as a means of exercising and training his faculties. This is what made him, according to Burke, "rise by slow degrees to be the most brilliant and accomplished debater the world ever saw."

Sir Henry Bulwer's "Life of Palmerston" does not tell us whether he was trained by the habit of writing translations or in debating societies. But he was a very eager reader of the cla.s.sics. There is little doubt, however, considering the habit of his contemporaries at Cambridge, and that he was ambitious for public life, and represented the University of Cambridge in Parliament just after he became twenty-one, that he belonged to a debating society and that he was drilled in English composition by translation from the cla.s.sics.

Gladstone was a famous debater in the Oxford Union, as is well known, and was undoubtedly in the habit of writing translations from Greek and Latin, of which he was always so pa.s.sionately fond. He says in his paper on Arthur Hallam that the Eton debating club known as the Society supplied the British Empire with four Prime Ministers in fourscore years.

The value of the practice of translation from Latin or Greek into English, in getting command of good English style, in my judgment, can hardly be stated too strongly. The explanation is not hard to find. You have in these two languages and especially in Latin, the best instrument for the most precise and most perfect expression of thought. The Latin prose of Tacitus and Cicero, the verse of Virgil and Horace, are like a Greek statue, or an Italian cameo--you have not only exquisite beauty, but also exquisite precision. You get the thought into your mind with the accuracy and precision of the words that express numbers in the multiplication table. Ten times one are ten--not ten and one one-millionth. Having got the idea into your mind with the precision, accuracy, and beauty of the Latin expression, you are to get its equivalent in English. Suppose you have knowledge of no language but your own. The thought comes to you in the mysterious way in which thoughts are born, and struggles for expression in apt words.

If the phrase that occurs to you does not exactly fit the thought, you are almost certain, especially in speaking or rapid composition, to modify the thought to fit the phrase.

Your sentence commands you, not you the sentence. The extemporary speaker never gets, or easily loses, the power of precise and accurate thinking or statement, and rarely attains a literary excellence which gives him immortality. But the conscientious translator has no such refuge. He is confronted by the inexorable original. He cannot evade or shirk. He must try and try and try again until he has got the exact thought expressed in its English equivalent. This is not enough. He must get an English expression if the resources of the language will furnish it, which will equal as near as may be the dignity and beauty of the original. He must not give you pewter for silver, or pinchbeck for gold, or mica for diamond. This practice will soon give him ready command of the great riches of his own n.o.ble English tongue. It will give a habitual n.o.bility and beauty to his own style. The best word and phrase will come to him spontaneously when he speaks and thinks.

The processes of thought itself will grow easier. The orator will get the affluence and abundance which characterize the great Italian artists of the Middle Ages, who astonish us as much by the amount and variety of their work as by its excellence.

The value of translation is very different from that of original written composition. Cicero says:

"Stilus optimus et praestantissimus dicendi effector ac magister."

Of this I am by no means sure. If you write rapidly you get the habit of careless composition. If you write slowly you get the habit of slow composition. Each of these is an injury to the style of the speaker. He cannot stop to correct or scratch out. Cicero himself in a later pa.s.sage states his preference for translation. He says that at first he used to take a Latin author, Ennius or Gracchus, and get the meaning into his head, and then write it again. But he soon found that in that way if he used again the very words of his author he got no advantage, and if he used other language of his own, the author had already occupied the ground with the best expression, and he was left with the second best. So he gave up the practice and adopted instead that of translating from the Greek.

But to go back to what makes an orator. As I have said, his object is to excite the emotions which, being excited, will be most likely to impel his audience to think or act as he desires. He must never disgust them, he must never excite their contempt. He can use to great advantage the most varied learning, the profoundest philosophy, the most compelling logic. He must master the subject with which he has to deal, and he must have knowledge adequate to ill.u.s.trate and adorn it. When every other faculty of the orator is acquired, it sometimes almost seems as if the voice were nine-tenths, and everything else but one-tenth, of the consummate orator. It is impossible to overrate the importance to his purpose of that matchless instrument, the human voice.

The most fastidious critic is by no means the best judge, seldom even a fairly good judge, of the public speaker. He is likely to be a stranger to the emotion which the orator inspires and excites. He is likely to fall into mistakes like that which Goldwin Smith makes about Patrick Henry. Mr.

Smith ridicules Henry's speech and action and voice. The emotion which the great Virginian stirred in the b.r.e.a.s.t.s of his backwoodsmen seems very absurd to this cultured Englishman.

The bowing and changes of countenance and gesticulating of the orator seem to him like the cheapest acting. Yet to us who understand it, it does not seem that Patrick Henry in the old church at Richmond need yield the palm to Chatham in St. Stephen's Chapel, either for the grandeur of his theme or of his stage, or the sublimity of his eloquence.

Matthew Arnold had the best pair of intellectual eyes of our time. But he sometimes made a like mistake as a critic of poetry. He speaks slightingly of Emerson's Fourth of July Ode--

Oh tenderly the haughty day Fills his blue urn with fire; One morn is in the mighty heaven, And one in our desire.

What did the Englishman know of the Fourth of July emotion which stirred all Americans in the days when the country had just escaped destruction, and was entering upon its new career of freedom and of glory? What could he understand of that feeling, full of the morning and of the springtime, which heard the cannon boom and the bells ring, with stirring and quickened pulse, in those exultant days? Surely there never was a loftier stroke than that with which the New England poet interpreted to his countrymen the feeling of that joyous time--the feeling which is to waken again when the Fourth of July comes round on many anniversaries:

Oh tenderly the haughty day Fills his blue urn with fire; One morn is in the mighty heaven, And one in our desire.

It is often said that if a speech read well it is not a good speech. There may be some truth in it. The reader cannot, of course, get the impression which the speaker conveys by look and tone and gesture. He lacks that marvellous influence by which in a great a.s.sembly the emotion of every individual soul is multiplied by the emotion of every other. The reader can pause and dwell upon the thought. If there be a fallacy, he is not hurried away to something else before he can detect it. So, also, more careful and deliberate criticism will discover offences of style and taste which pa.s.s unheeded in a speech when uttered. But still the great oratoric triumphs of literature and history stand the test of reading in the closet, as well as of hearing in the a.s.sembly. Would not Mark Anthony's speech over the dead body of Caesar, had it been uttered, have moved the Roman populace as it moves the spectator when the play is acted, or the solitary reader in his closet? Does not Lord Chatham's "I rejoice that America has resisted" read well? Do not Sheridan's great perorations, and Burke's, in the Impeachment of Warren Hastings, read well?

Does not "Liberty and Union, Now and Forever!" read well?

Does not "Give me Liberty or Give me Death!" read well? Does not Fisher Ames's speech for the treaty read well? Do not Everett's finest pa.s.sages read well?

There are examples of men of great original genius who have risen to lofty oratory on some great occasion who had not the advantage of familiarity with any great author. But they are not only few in number, but the occasions are few when they have risen to a great height. In general the orator, whether at the Bar, or in the pulpit, or in public life, who is to meet adequately the many demands upon his resources, must get familiarity with the images and ill.u.s.trations he wants, and the resources of a fitting diction, by soaking his mind in some great authors which will alike satisfy and stimulate his imagination, and supply him with a lofty expression.

Of these I suppose the best are, by common consent, the Bible, Shakespeare, and Milton. It is a maxim that the pupil who wishes to acquire a pure and simple style should give his days and nights to Addison. But there is a lack of strength and vigor in Addison, which perhaps prevents his being the best model for the advocate in the court-house or the champion in a political debate. I should rather, for myself, recommend Robert South to the student. If the speaker, whose thought have weight and vigor in it, can say it as South would have said it, he may be quite sure that his weighty meaning will be expressed alike to the mind of the people and the apprehension of his antagonist.

There is one great difference between the condition of the American orator and that of the orator of antiquity. The speaker, in the old time, addressed an audience about to act instantly upon the emotions or convictions he had himself caused. Or he spoke to a Judge who was to give no reason for his opinion. The sense of public responsibility scarcely existed in either. The speech itself perished with the occasion, unless, as in some few instances, the orator preserved it in ma.n.u.script for a curious posterity. Even then the best of them had discovered that not eloquence, but wisdom, is the power by which states grow and flourish.

"Omnia plena consiliorum, inania verborum.

"Quid est tam furiosum quam verborum vel optimorum atque ornatissimorum sonitus inanis nulla subjecta sententia nec scientia?"

Cicero's oratory is to excite his hearers, whether Judge or popular a.s.sembly, for the occasion. Not so in general with our orator. The auditor is ashamed of excitement. He takes the argument home with him: He sleeps on it. He reads it again in the newspaper report. He hears and reads the other side. He discusses with friends and antagonists. He feels the responsibility of his vote. He expects to have to justify it himself. Even the juryman hears the sober statement of the Judge, and talks the case over with his a.s.sociates of the panel in the quiet seclusion of the jury-room.

The Judge himself must state the reasons for his opinions, which are to be read by a learned and critical profession and by posterity. The speaker's argument must be sounded, and rung, and tested, and tried again and again, before the auditor acts upon it. Our people hear some great orators as they witness a play. The delight of taste, even intellectual gratification, caused by what is well said, is one thing.

Conviction is quite another. The printing-press and the reporter, the consultation in the jury-room, the reflection in the Judge's chamber, the delay of the election to a day long after the speech, are protections against the mischief of mere oratory, which the ancients did not enjoy.

I heard a debate in the House of Commons in 1860, on the paper duties, in which Lord John Russell, Palmerston, Gladstone, and John Bright took part. Gladstone's part was not very prominent. I now remember little that he said. His image, as it then appeared, is effaced by his later appearance on a much greater occasion. Bright spoke admirably, both in manner and matter. He was an Independent, through giving general support to the measures of the Government, in which Palmerston and Lord Russell were the leaders. He complained bitterly of their acquiescence in what he thought the unconst.i.tutional att.i.tude of the House of Lords, in refusing to consent to the abolition of the paper duties, for which the House of Commons had voted. But the Government, though they had tried to abolish the duty, were very glad to hold on to the revenue.

Bright had none of the English hesitation, and frequent punctuation of sentences with--"er"--"er"--which has led some one, speaking of English orators, to say that "to err" is human. He reminded me in general, in look, voice, and manner, of the late Richard H. Dana, although he sometimes threw more pa.s.sion and zeal into his speech than Dana ever indulged. Periods followed each other in easy and rapid flow. He had a fine voice and delivery, easily filling the hall from his place below the gangway.

Palmerston, in his jaunty and off-hand way, rebuked Bright for desiring to make the House of Commons adopt a resolution which would only show its own helplessness. On the whole, he seemed to me to get the better of the debate. Bright could not persuade the House, or the people of England, to make a great const.i.tutional question out of the paper duties, especially after the powerful speech of Lord Lyndhurst, who, then more than ninety years old, argued for the side of the Lords with a power that no other speaker on the subject rivalled.

I heard Gladstone again in 1871, when there was a great struggle between him and Disraeli over the Parliamentary and Munic.i.p.al Elections Bill. I visited the House with Thomas Hughes, to whom I was indebted for much courtesy while in London, and had a seat on the floor just below the gallery, where a few strangers are, or were then, admitted by special card from the Speaker.

Bernal Osborne, Sir Michael Hicks-Beach, Sir Stafford Northcote, Gladstone, and Disraeli took part in the debate. The bill was introduced by Mr. Gladstone's Government. The question that night was on a motion to strike out the provision for the secret ballot; so the opponents of the Government had to close in support of the motion. The report of Hansard purports to be in the first person. But I can testify from memory that it is by no means verbally accurate. I have no doubt the speeches were taken down in short-hand. The phonetic system was then used. But the report seems to be about like those which our good short-hand reporters used to make before that invention. The speeches are well worth studying by a person who wishes to get an idea of the intellectual and literary quality of these champions. There is no great pa.s.sage in any one of them. But the capacity and quality of power appear distinctly. Osborne was full of a shrewd and delightful wit, without the vitriolic flavor which often appears in the sarcasm of Disraeli. Gladstone showed his power of elevating the discussion to a lofty plane, which his opponent never reached, although Disraeli launched at him many a keen shaft from below. Mr. Hughes sat by me most of the night, and occasionally brought and introduced to me some eminent person whom he thought I would like to know.

The members of our National House of Representatives, however turbulent or disorderly, never would submit to the fashion of treating a speaker whom they do not want to hear which prevails in the House of Commons. When Mr. Gladstone got through, the night was far spent, and the House evidently wanted to hear Disraeli, then vote and go home. Mr. Plunket, a member for the University of Dublin, who seemed an intelligent and sensible man, rose, wishing to correct a statement of Mr. Gladstone's, which he thought had done him an injustice.

Disraeli rose about the same time, but bowed and gave way.

The House did not like it. Poor Plunket's voice was drowned in the storm of shouts--"Sit down. Sit down. Dizzy, Dizzy,"

in which my friend, Mr. Hughes, although of Gladstone's party, joined at the top of his lungs. I think the Bedlam lasted five minutes. But Plunket stood his ground and made his correction.

Although Bernal Osborne was a man of great wit and sense, and Sir Stafford Northcote and Sir Michael Hicks-Beach were then, as the latter is now, very eminent characters, yet the only speakers who belonged to the rank of the great orators were Gladstone and Disraeli. I will not undertake to add another description of Gladstone to the many with which every reader of mine is thoroughly familiar. The late Dr. Bellows resembled him very nearly, both in his way of reasoning and his manner of speech. Persons who have heard Dr. Bellows at his best will not deem this comparison unworthy.

Gladstone was terribly in earnest. He began his speech by a compliment to Northcote, his opponent, for whom he had shown his esteem by sending him to the United States as one of the Joint High Commission to make the Alabama Treaty. But when Mr. Gladstone was well under way, Sir Stafford interposed a dissent from something he said by calling out "No, no"-- a very frequent practice in the House. Gladstone turned upon him savagely, with a tone of anger which I might almost call furious: "Can the gentleman tolerate no opinion but his own, that he interjects his audible contradiction into the middle of my sentence?" The House evidently did not like it. Hughes, who agreed with Gladstone, said to me: "What a pity it is that he cannot control his temper; that is his great fault."

There are no pa.s.sages in this speech of Gladstone that can be cited as among the best examples of the great style of the orator. But there are several that give a good idea of his manner, and show something of the argument in two or three sentences: "I am not at all ashamed of having said, and I will say it again, that this is a choice of evils. I do not say that the proposal for a secret ballot is open to no objections whatever. I admit that open voting has its evils as well as its merits. One of these merits is that it enables a man to discharge a n.o.ble duty in the n.o.blest possible manner.

But what are its demerits? That by marking his vote you expose the voter to be tempted through his cupidity and through his fears. We propose, by secret voting, to greatly diminish the first of these, and we hope to take away the second. We do not believe that the disposition to bribe can operate with anything like its present force when the means of tracing the action of the man bribed are taken away, because men will not pay for that they do not know they will ever receive."

"I think it is too late for the honorable gentleman to say, 'We are pa.s.sing through an experiment; wait for more experiment.'"

"We have already been debating this subject for forty years; we have plenty of time on our hands; it is a G.o.dsend to have anything to fill up our vacant hours; and therefore let us postpone the subject in order that it may be dealt with in future years."

The great quality of Gladstone, as of Sumner, is his profound seriousness. He makes the impression on his hearers, an impression made, but not so strongly, upon his readers, that the matter he is discussing is that upon which the foundations of heaven and earth rest.

It would be a great mistake to hold Disraeli cheap. He turned the tables upon Osborne, who had gone into several, what Disraeli called, archaeological details, with respect to the antiquity of the ballot, and had cited a proclamation of Charles I.

prohibiting the ballot in all corporations, either in the city of London or elsewhere, which Disraeli said "was done with the admirable view of identifying the opinions of those who sit on this side of the House with the political sentiments of that monarch. But there was another a.s.sertion of the principle that the ballot should be open that the gentleman has not cited. That occurred in the most memorable Parliament that ever sat in England--the Long Parliament . . . . They wished it therefore to be exercised, not to satisfy the self-complacency of the individual, but with due respect for common-sense and the public opinion of the country, and influenced by all those doctrines and all that discipline of party which they believed to be one of the best securities for public liberty."

Gladstone showed in his speech the profounder reflection on the general subject, the more philosophy, and the intenser earnestness; Disraeli showed quickness of wit, a ready command of his resources, ability for subtle distinctions, and glimpses of his almost Satanic capacity for mocking and jeering. He describes Mr. Gladstone most felicitously as "inspired by a mixture of genius and vexation." He speaks of his majority as a "mechanical majority, a majority the result of heedlessness of thought on the part of members who were so full of other questions that they gave pledges in favor of the ballot without due consideration."

He said: "There is a celebrated river, which has been the subject of political interest of late, and with which we are all acquainted. It rolls its magnificent volume, clear and pellucid, in its course; but it never reaches the ocean; it sinks into mud and mora.s.s. And such will be the fate of this mechanical majority. The conscience of the country is against it. It is an old-fashioned political expedient; it is not adapted to the circ.u.mstances which we have to encounter in the present, and because it has no real foundation of truth or policy, it will meet with defeat and discomfiture."

Gladstone had, what is quite rare, and what no famous American orator that I now think of, except Choate and Evarts, have had--a tendency to diffuse and somewhat involved speech, and at the same time a gift of compact epigrammatic utterance on occasions. When Mr. Evarts, who was my near relative, and a man with whom I could take a liberty, came into the Senate, I said to him that we should have to amend the rules so that a motion to adjourn would be in order in the middle of a sentence; to which he replied that he knew of n.o.body in this country, who objected to long sentences, except the criminal cla.s.ses.