Off fly the vizards and discover all: How plain I see through the deceit!
How shallow and how gross the cheat!
On what poor engines move The thoughts of monarchs and designs of states!
What petty motives rule their fates!
I to such blockheads set my wit!
I d.a.m.n such fools! go, go, you"re bit!
Mr. Forster"s own style (simpler now than when he was under the immediate influence of d.i.c.kens, if more slipshod than when repressed by Landor) is not in essentials better or worse than usual. It is not always clear nor always idiomatic. On page 120 he tells us that "Scott did not care to enquire if it was likely that stories of the kind referred to should have contributed to form a character, or if it were not likelier still that they had grown and settled round a character already famous as well as formed." Not to speak of the confusion of moods and tenses, the phrase "to form a character" has been so long appropriated to another meaning than that which it has here, that the sense of the pa.s.sage vacillates unpleasantly. He tells us that Swift was "under engagement to Will Frankland to christen _the baby his wife is near bringing to bed_." Parthenogenesis is a simple matter to this. And why _Will_ Frankland, _Joe_ Beaumont, and the like? We cannot claim so much intimacy with them as Swift, and the eighteenth century might be allowed to stand a little on its dignity. If Mr. Forster had been quoting the journal to Stella, there would be nothing to say except that Swift took liberties with his friends in writing to her which he would not have ventured on before strangers. In the same odd jargon, which the English journals are fond of calling American, Mr. Forster says that "Tom [Leigh] was not _popular_ with Swift." Mr. Forster is not only no model for contemporary English, but (what is more serious) sometimes mistakes the meaning of words in Swift"s day, as when he explains that "strongly engaged" meant "interceded with or pressed." It meant much more than that, as could easily be shown from the writings of Swift himself.
All the earlier biographers of Swift Mr. Forster brushes contemptuously aside, though we do not find much that is important in his own biography which industry may not hit upon somewhere or other in the confused narrative of Sheridan, for whom and for his sources of information he shows a somewhat unjust contempt. He goes so far as sometimes to discredit anecdotes so thoroughly characteristic of Swift that he cannot resist copying them himself. He labors at needless length the question of Swift"s standing in college, and seems to prove that it was not contemptible, though there can be no doubt that the contrary opinion was founded on Swift"s own a.s.sertion, often repeated. We say he seems to prove it, for we are by no means satisfied which of the two Swifts on the college list, of which a facsimile is given, is the future Dean. Mr.
Forster a.s.sumes that the names are ranked in the order of seniority, but they are more likely to have been arranged alphabetically, in which case Jonathan would have preceded Thomas, and at best there is little to choose between three _mediocriters_ and one _male_, one _bene_, and one _negligenter_. The doc.u.ment, whatever we may think of its importance, has been brought to light by Mr. Forster. Of his other materials. .h.i.therto unpublished, the most important is a letter proving that Swift"s Whig friends did their best to make him a bishop in 1707. This shows that his own later account of the reasons of his change from Whig to Tory, if not absolutely untrue, is at least unjust to his former a.s.sociates, and had been shaped to meet the charge of inconsistency if not of desertion to the enemy. Whatever the motives of his change, it would have been impossible to convince a sincere Whig of their honesty, and in spite of Mr. Forster"s a.s.sertion that Addison continued to love and trust him to the last, we do not believe that there was any cordiality in their intercourse after 1710. No one familiar with Swift"s manner of thinking will deem his political course of much import in judging of his moral character. At the bottom of his heart he had an impartial contempt for both parties, and a firm persuasion that the aims of both were more or less consciously selfish. Even if sincere, the matters at issue between them were as despicable to a sound judgment as that which divided the Big and Little-endians in Lilliput. With him the question was simply one between men who galled his pride and men who flattered it. Sunderland and Somers treated him as a serviceable inferior; Harley and Bolingbroke had the wit to receive him on a footing of friendship. To him they were all, more or less indifferently, rounds in the ladder by which he hoped to climb. He always claimed to have been a consistent Old Whig--that is, as he understood it, a High-Churchman who accepted the Revolution of 1688. This, to be sure, was not quite true, but it could not have been hard for a man who prided himself on a Cavalier grandfather, and whose first known verses were addressed to the non-juring primate Sancroft after his deprivation, to become first a Tory and then a conniver at the restoration of the Stuarts as the best device for preventing a foreign succession and an endless chance of civil war. A man of Swift"s way of thinking would hardly have balked at the scruple of creed, for he would not have deemed it possible that the Pretender should have valued a kingdom at any lower rate than his great-grandfather had done before him.
The more important part of Mr. Forster"s fresh material is to come in future volumes, if now, alas! we are ever to have them. For some of what he gives us in this we can hardly thank him. One of the ma.n.u.scripts he has unearthed is the original version of "Baucis and Philemon" as it was before it had pa.s.sed under the criticism of Addison. He seems to think it in some respects better than the revised copy though in our judgment it entirely justifies the wisdom of the critic who counselled its curtailment and correction. The piece as we have hitherto had it comes as near poetry as anything Swift ever wrote except "Cadenus and Vanessa," though neither of them aspires above the region of cleverness and fancy. Indeed, it is misleading to talk of the poetry of one whose fatal gift was an eye that disidealized. But we are not concerned here with the discussion of Swift"s claim to the t.i.tle of poet. What we are concerned about is to protest in the interests of good literature against the practice, now too common, of hunting out and printing what the author would doubtless have burned. It is unfair to the dead writer and the living reader by disturbing that unitary impression which every good piece of work aims at making, and is sure to make, only in proportion to the author"s self-denial and his skill in
The last and greatest art, the art to blot.
We do not wish, nor have we any right to know, those pa.s.sages through which the castigating pen has been drawn.
Mr. Forster may almost claim to have rediscovered Swift"s journals to Esther Johnson, to such good purpose has he used them in giving life and light to his narrative. He is certainly wrong, however, in saying to the disparagement of former editors that the name Stella was not invented "till long after all the letters were written." This statement, improbable in itself as respects a man who forthwith refined Betty, Waring, and Vanhomrigh into Eliza, Varina, and Vanessa, is refuted by a pa.s.sage in the journal of 14th October, 1710, printed by Mr. Forster himself. At least, we know not what "Stellakins" means unless it be "little Stella." The value of these journals for their elucidation of Swift"s character cannot be overestimated, and Mr. Forster is quite right in insisting upon the importance of the "little language," though we are by no means sure that he is always so in his interpretation of the cipher. It is quite impossible, for instance, that ME can stand for Madam Elderly, and so for Dingley. It is certainly addressed, like the other endearing epithets, to Esther Johnson, and may mean My Esther or even Marry Esther, for anything we know to the contrary.
Mr. Forster brings down his biography no farther than the early part of 1710, so that we have no means of judging what his opinion would be of the conduct of Swift during the three years that preceded the death of Queen Anne. But he has told us what he thinks of his relations with Esther Johnson; and it is in them, as it seems to us, that we are to seek the key to the greater part of what looks most enigmatical in his conduct. At first sight, it seems altogether unworthy of a man of Swift"s genius to waste so much of it and so many of the best years of his life in a sordid struggle after preferment in the church--a career in which such selfish ambitions look most out of place. How much better to have stayed quietly at Laracor and written immortal works! Very good: only that was not Swift"s way of looking at the matter, who had little appet.i.te for literary fame, and all of whose immortal progeny were begotten of the moment"s overmastering impulse, were thrown nameless upon the world by their father, and survived only in virtue of the vigor they had drawn from his stalwart loins. But how if Swift"s worldly aspirations, and the intrigues they involved him in, were not altogether selfish? How if he was seeking advancement, in part at least, for another, and that other a woman who had sacrificed for him not only her chances of domestic happiness, but her good name? to whom he was bound by grat.i.tude? and the hope of repairing whose good fame by making her his own was so pa.s.sionate in that intense nature as to justify any and every expedient, and make the patronage of those whom he felt to be his inferiors endurable by the proudest of men? We believe that this was the truth, and that the woman was Stella. No doubt there were other motives.
Coming to manhood with a haughtiness of temper that was almost savage, he had forced himself to endure the hourly humiliation of what could not have been, however Mr. Forster may argue to the contrary, much above domestic servitude. This experience deepened in him the prevailing pa.s.sions of his life, first for independence and next for consideration, the only ones which could, and in the end perhaps did, obscure the memory and hope of Stella. That he should have longed for London with a persistency that submitted to many a rebuff and overlived continual disappointment will seem childish only to those who do not consider that it was a longing for life. It was there only that his mind could be quickened by the society and spur of equals. In Dublin he felt it dying daily of the inanition of inferior company. His was not a nature, if there be any such, that could endure the solitude of supremacy without impair, and he foreboded with reason a Tiberian old age.
This certainly is not the ordinary temper of a youth on whom the world is just opening. In a letter to Pope, written in 1725, he says, "I desire that you and all my friends will take a special care that my disaffection to the world may not be imputed to my age; for I have credible witnesses ready to depose that it hath never varied from the twenty-first to the fifty-eighth year of my age." His contempt for mankind would not be lessened by his knowledge of the lying subterfuges by which the greatest poet of his age sought at once to gratify and conceal his own vanity, nor by listening to the professions of its cleverest statesman that he liked planting cabbages better than being prime minister. How he must have laughed at the unconscious parody when his old printer Barber wrote to him in the same strain of philosophic relief from the burthensome glories of lord-mayoralty!
Nay, he made another false start, and an irreparable one, in prose also with the "Tale of a Tub." Its levity, if it was not something worse, twice balked him of the mitre when it seemed just within his reach.
Justly or not, he had the reputation of scepticism. Mr. Forster would have us believe him devout, but the evidence goes no further than to prove him ceremonially decorous. Certain it is that his most intimate friends, except Arbuthnot, were free-thinkers, and wrote to him sometimes in a tone that was at least odd in addressing a clergyman.
Probably the feeling that he had made a mistake in choosing a profession which was incompatible with success in politics, and with perfect independence of mind, soured him even more than his disappointed hopes.
He saw Addison a secretary of state and Prior an amba.s.sador, while he was bubbled (as he would have put it) with a shabby deanery among savages. Perhaps it was not altogether his clerical character that stood in his way. A man"s little faults are more often the cause of his greatest miscarriages than he is able to conceive, and in whatever respects his two friends might have been his inferiors, they certainly had the advantage of him in that _savoir vivre_ which makes so large an element of worldly success. In judging him, however, we must take into account that his first literary hit was made when he was already thirty-seven, with a confirmed bias towards moody suspicion of others and distrust of himself.
The reaction in Swift"s temper and ambition told with the happiest effect on his prose. For its own purposes, as good working English, his style (if that may be called so whose chief success was that it had no style at all), has never been matched. It has been more praised than studied, or its manifest shortcomings, its occasional clumsiness, its want of harmony and of feeling for the finer genialities of language, would be more often present in the consciousness of those who discourse about it from a superficial acquaintance. With him language was a means and not an end. If he was plain and even coa.r.s.e, it was from choice rather than because he lacked delicacy of perception; for in badinage, the most ticklish use to which words can be put, he was a master.
PLUTARCH"S MORALS[1]
[Footnote 1: A review of the English translation edited by William W.
Goodwin with an Introduction by Ralph Waldo Emerson.]
Plutarch is perhaps the most eminent example of how strong a hold simple good humor and good sense lay upon the affections of mankind. Not a man of genius or heroism himself, his many points of sympathy with both make him an admirable conductor of them in that less condensed form which is more wholesome and acceptable to the average mind. Of no man can it be more truly said that, if not a rose himself, he had lived all his days in the rose"s neighborhood. Such is the delightful equableness of his temperament and his singular talent for reminiscence, so far is he always from undue heat while still susceptible of so much enthusiasm as shall not disturb digestion, that he might seem to have been born middle-aged. Few men have so amicably combined the love of a good dinner and of the higher morality. He seems to have comfortably solved the problem of having your cake and eating it, at which the ascetic interpreters of Christianity teach us to despair. He serves us up his worldly wisdom in a sauce of Plato, and gives a kind of sensuous relish to the disembodied satisfactions of immortality. He is a better Christian than many an orthodox divine. If he do not, like Sir Thomas Browne, love to lose himself in an _O, alt.i.tudo!_ yet the sky-piercing peaks and snowy solitudes of ethical speculation loom always on the horizon about the sheltered dwelling of his mind, and he continually gets up from his books to rest and refresh his eyes upon them. He seldom invites us to alpine-climbing, and when he does, it is to some warm nook like the Jardin on Mont Blanc, a parenthesis of homely summer nestled amid the sublime nakedness of snow. If he glance upward at becoming intervals to the "primal duties," he turns back with a settled predilection to the "sympathies that are nestled at the feet like flowers." But it is within his villa that we love to be admitted to him and to enjoy that garrulity which we forgive more readily in the mother of the muses than in any of her daughters, unless it be Clio, who is most like her. If we are in the library, he is reminded of this or that pa.s.sage in a favorite author, and, going to the shelves, takes down the volume to read it aloud with decorous emphasis. If we are in the _atrium_ (where we like him best) he has an anecdote to tell of all the great Greeks and Romans whose busts or statues are ranged about us, and who for the first time soften from their marble alienation and become human. It is this that makes him so amiable a moralist and brings his lessons home to us. He does not preach up any remote and inaccessible virtue, but makes all his lessons of magnanimity, self-devotion, patriotism seem neighborly and practicable to us by an example which a.s.sociates them with our common humanity. His higher teaching is theosophy with no taint of theology. He is a pagan Tillotson disenc.u.mbered of the archiepiscopal robes, a practical Christian unbewildered with doctrinal punctilios. This is evidently what commended him as a philosopher to Montaigne, as may be inferred from some hints which follow immediately upon the comparison between Seneca and Plutarch in the essay on "Physiognomy." After speaking of some "escripts encores plus reverez," he asks, in his idiomatic way, "a, quoy faire nous allons nous gendarmant par ces efforts de la science?" More than this, however, Montaigne liked him because he was _good talk_, as it is called, a better companion than writer. Yet he is not without pa.s.sages which are n.o.ble in point of mere style. Landor remarks this in the conversation between Johnson and Tooke, where he makes Tooke say: "Although his style is not valued by the critics, I could inform them that there are in Plutarch many pa.s.sages of exquisite beauty, in regard to style, derived perhaps from authors much more ancient." But if they are borrowed, they have none of the discordant effect of the _purpureus pannus_, for the warm sympathy of his nature a.s.similates them thoroughly and makes them his own. Oddly enough, it is through his memory that Plutarch is truly original. Who ever remembered so much and yet so well? It is this selectness (without being overfastidious) that gauges the natural elevation of his mind. He is a gossip, but he has supped with Plato or sat with Alexander in his tent to bring away only memorable things. We are speaking of him, of course, at his best. Many of his essays are trivial, but there is hardly one whose sands do not glitter here and there with the proof that the stream of his thought and experience has flowed down through auriferous soil. "We sail on his memory into the ports of every nation," says Mr. Emerson admirably in his Introduction to Goodwin"s Plutarch"s "Morals." No doubt we are becalmed pretty often, and yet our old skipper almost reconciles us with our dreary isolation, so well can he beguile the time, when he chooses, with anecdote and quotation.
It would hardly be extravagant to say that this delightful old proser, in whom his native Boeotia is only too apparent at times, and whose mind, in some respects, was strictly provincial, had been more operative (if we take the "Lives" and the "Morals" together) in the thought and action of men than any other single author, ancient or modern. And on the whole it must be allowed that his influence has been altogether good, has insensibly enlarged and humanized his readers, winning them over to benevolence, moderation, and magnanimity. And so wide was his own curiosity that they must be few who shall not find somewhat to their purpose in his discursive pages. For he was equally at home among men and ideas, open-eared to the one and open-minded to the other. His influence, too, it must be remembered, begins earlier than that of any other ancient author except Aesop. To boys he has always been the Robinson Crusoe of cla.s.sic antiquity, making what had hitherto seemed a remote island sequestered from them by a trackless flood of years, living and real. Those obscure solitudes which their imagination had peopled with spectral equestrian statues, are rescued by the sound of his cheery voice as part of the familiar and daylight world. We suspect that Agesilaus on his hobby-horse first humanized antiquity for most of us. Here was the human footprint which persuaded us that the past was inhabited by creatures like ourselves.
A PLEA FOR FREEDOM FROM SPEECH AND FIGURES OF SPEECH-MAKERS
A PLEA FOR FREEDOM FROM SPEECH AND FIGURES OF SPEECH-MAKERS
I must beg allowance to use the first person singular. I cannot, like old Weller, spell myself with a We. Ours is, I believe, the only language that has shown so much sense of the worth of the individual (to himself) as to erect the first personal p.r.o.noun into a kind of votive column to the dignity of human nature. Other tongues have, or pretend, a greater modesty.
I
What a n.o.ble letter it is! In it every reader sees himself as in a gla.s.s. As for me, without my I"s, I should be as poorly off as the great mole of Hadrian, which, being the biggest, must be also, by parity of reason, the blindest in the world. When I was in college, I confess I always liked those pa.s.sages best in the choruses of the Greek drama which were well sprinkled with _ai ai_, they were so grandly simple. The force of great men is generally to be found in their intense individuality,--in other words, it is all in their I. The merit of this essay will be similar.
What I was going to say is this.
My mind has been much exercised of late on the subject of two epidemics, which, showing themselves formerly in a few sporadic cases, have begun to set in with the violence of the cattle-disease: I mean Eloquence and Statuary. They threaten to render the country unfit for human habitation, except by the Deaf and Blind. We had hitherto got on very well in Chesumpscot, having caught a trick of silence, perhaps from the fish which we cured, _more medicorum_, by laying them out. But this summer some misguided young men among us got up a lecture-a.s.sociation.
Of course it led to a general quarrel; for every pastor in the town wished to have the censorship of the list of lecturers. A certain number of the original projectors, however, took the matter wholly into their own hands, raised a subscription to pay expenses, and resolved to call their lectures "The Universal Brotherhood Course,"--for no other reason, that I can divine, but that they had set the whole village by the ears.
They invited that distinguished young apostle of Reform, Mr. Philip Vandal, to deliver the opening lecture. He has just done so, and, from what I have heard about his discourse, it would have been fitter as the introductory to a nunnery of Kilkenny cats than to anything like universal brotherhood. He opened our lyceum as if it had been an oyster, without any regard for the feelings of those inside. He pitched into the world in general, and all his neighbors past and present in particular.
Even the babe unborn did not escape some unsavory epithets in the way of vaticination. I sat down, meaning to write you an essay on "The Right of Private Judgment as distinguished from the Right of Public Vituperation"; but I forbear. It may be that I do not understand the nature of philanthropy.
Why, here is Philip Vandal, for example. He loves his kind so much that he has not a word softer than a brickbat for a single mother"s son of them. He goes about to save them by proving that not one of them is worth d.a.m.ning. And he does it all from the point of view of an early (a _knurly_) Christian. Let me ill.u.s.trate. I was sauntering along Broadway once, and was attracted by a bird-fancier"s shop. I like dealers in out-of-the-way things,--traders in bigotry and virtue are too common,--and so I went in. The gem of the collection was a terrier,--a perfect beauty, uglier than philanthropy itself, and hairier, as a c.o.c.kney would say, than the "ole British hairystocracy. "A"n"t he a stunner?" said my disrespectable friend, the master of the shop. "Ah, you should see him worry a rat! He does it like a puffic Christian!"
Since then, the world has been divided for me into Christians and _perfect_ Christians; and I find so many of the latter species in proportion to the former, that I begin to pity the rats. They (the rats) have at least one virtue,--they are not eloquent.
It is, I think, a universally recognized truth of natural history, that a young lady is sure to fall in love with a young man for whom she feels at first an unconquerable aversion; and it must be on the same principle that the first symptoms of love for our neighbor almost always manifest themselves in a violent disgust at the world in general, on the part of the apostles of that gospel. They give every token of hating their neighbors consumedly; _argal_, they are going to be madly enamored of them. Or, perhaps, this is the manner in which Universal Brotherhood shows itself in people who wilfully subject themselves to infection as a prophylactic. In the natural way we might find the disease inconvenient and even expensive; but thus vaccinated with virus from the udders (whatever they may be) that yield the (b.u.t.ter-)milk of human kindness, the inconvenience is slight, and we are able still to go about our ordinary business of detesting our brethren as usual. It only shows that the milder type of the disease has penetrated the system, which will thus be enabled to out-Jenneral its more dangerous congener. Before long we shall have physicians of our ailing social system writing to the "Weekly Brandreth"s Pill" somewhat on this wise:--"I have a very marked and hopeful case in Pequawgus Four Corners. Miss Hepzibah Tarbell, daughter of that archenemy of his kind, Deacon Joash T., attended only one of my lectures. In a day or two the symptoms of eruption were most encouraging. She has already quarrelled with all her family,--accusing her father of bigamy, her uncle Benoni of polytheism, her brother Zeno C. of aneurism, and her sister Eudoxy Trithemia of the variation of the magnetic needle. If ever hopes of seeing a perfect case of Primitive Christian were well-founded, I think we may entertain them now."
What I chiefly object to in the general-denunciation sort of reformers is that they make no allowance for character and temperament. They wish to repeal universal laws, and to patch our natural skins for us, as if they always wanted mending. That while they talk so much of the G.o.dlike nature of man, they should so forget the human natures of men! The Flathead Indian squeezes the child"s skull between two boards till it shapes itself into a kind of gambrel roof against the rain,--the readiest way, perhaps, of uniforming a tribe that wear no clothes. But does he alter the inside of the head? Not a hair"s-breadth. You remember the striking old gnomic poem that tells how Aaron, in a moment of fanatical zeal against that member by which mankind are so readily led into mischief, proposes a rhinotomic sacrifice to Moses? What is the answer of the experienced law-giver?
Says Moses to Aaron, ""T is the fashion to wear "em!""
Shall we advise the Tadpole to get his tail cut off, as a badge of the reptile nature in him, and to achieve the higher sphere of the Croakers at a single hop? Why, it is all he steers by; without it, he would be as helpless as a compa.s.s under the flare of Northern Lights; and he no doubt regards it as a mark of blood, the proof of his kinship with the preadamite family of the Saurians. Shall we send missionaries to the Bear to warn him against raw chestnuts, because they are sometimes so discomforting to our human intestines, which are so like his own? One sermon from the colic were worth the whole American Board.
Moreover, as an author, I protest in the name of universal Grub Street against a unanimity in goodness. Not to mention that a Quaker world, all faded out to an autumnal drab, would be a little tedious,--what should we do for the villain of our tragedy or novel? No rascals, no literature. You have your choice. Were we weak enough to consent to a sudden h.o.m.ogeneousness in virtue, many industrious persons would be thrown out of employment. The wife and mother, for example, with as indeterminate a number of children as the Martyr Rogers, who visits me monthly,--what claim would she have upon me, were not her husband forever taking to drink, or the penitentiary, or Spiritualism? The pusillanimous lapse of her lord into morality would not only take the very ground of her invention from under her feet, but would rob her and him of an income that sustains them both in blissful independence of the curse of Adam. But do not let us be disheartened. Nature is strong; she is persistent; she completes her syllogism after we have long been feeding the roots of her gra.s.ses, and has her own way in spite of us.
Some ancestral Cromwellian trooper leaps to life again in Nathaniel Greene, and makes a general of him, to confute five generations of Broadbrims. The Puritans were good in their way, and we enjoy them highly as a preterite phenomenon; but they were _not_ good at cakes and ale, and that is one reason why they are a preterite phenomenon.
I suppose we are all willing to let a public censor like P.V. run amuck whenever he likes,--so it be not down our street. I confess to a good deal of tolerance in this respect, and, when I live in No. 21, have plenty of stoicism to spare for the griefs of the dwellers in No. 23.
Indeed, I agreed with our young Cato heartily in what he said about Statues. We must have an Act for the Suppression, either of Great Men, or else of Sculptors. I have not quite made up my mind which are the greater nuisances; but I am sure of this, that there are too many of both. They used to be _rare_ (to use a Yankeeism omitted by Bartlett), but nowadays they are overdone. I am half inclined to think that the sculptors club together to write folks up during their lives in the newspapers, quieting their consciences with the hope of some day making them look so mean in bronze or marble as to make all square again. Or do we really have so many? Can"t they help growing twelve feet high in this new soil, any more than our maize? I suspect that Posterity will not thank us for the hereditary disease of Carrara we are entailing on him, and will try some heroic remedy, perhaps lithotripsy.
Nor was I troubled by what Mr. Vandal said about the late Benjamin Webster. I am not a Boston man, and have, therefore, the privilege of thinking for myself. Nor do I object to his claiming for women the right to make books and pictures and (shall I say it?) statues,--only this last becomes a grave matter, if we are to have statues of all the great women, too! To be sure, there will not be the trousers-difficulty,--at least, not at present; what we may come to is none of my affair. I even go beyond him in my opinions on what is called the Woman Question. In the gift of speech, they have always had the advantage of us; and though the jealousy of the other s.e.x have deprived us of the orations of Xantippe, yet even Demosthenes does not seem to have produced greater effects, if we may take the word of Socrates for it,--as I, for one, very gladly do.
No,--what I complain of is not the lecturer"s opinions, but the eloquence with which he expressed them. He does not like statues better than I do; but is it possible that he fails to see that the one nuisance leads directly to the other, and that we set up three images of Talkers for one to any kind of man who was useful in his generation? Let him beware, or he will himself be petrified after death. Boston seems to be specially unfortunate. She has more statues and more speakers than any other city on this continent. I have with my own eyes seen a book called "The Hundred Boston Orators." This would seem to give her a fairer t.i.tle to be called the _tire_ than the _hub_ of creation. What with the speeches of her great men while they are alive, and those of her surviving great men about those aforesaid after they are dead, and those we look forward to from her _ditto ditto_ yet to be upon her _ditto ditto_ now in being, and those of her paulopost _ditto ditto_ upon her _ditto ditto_ yet to be, and those--But I am getting into the house that Jack built.
And yet I remember once visiting the Ma.s.sachusetts State House and being struck with the Pythagorean fish hung on high in the Representatives"
Chamber, the emblem of a silence too sacred, as would seem, to be observed except on Sundays. Eloquent Philip Vandal, I appeal to you as a man and a brother, let us two form (not an Antediluvian, for there are plenty, but) an Antidiluvian Society against the flood of milk-and-water that threatens the land. Let us adopt as our creed these two propositions:--
I. _Tongues were given us to be held._
II. _Dumbness sets the brute below the man: Silence elevates the man above the brute._
Every one of those hundred orators is to me a more fearful thought than that of a hundred men gathering samphire. And when we take into account how large a portion of them (if the present mania hold) are likely to be commemorated in stone or some even more durable material, the conception is positively stunning.