MEMORIES OF A HUNDRED YEARS

CHAPTER I

THE ORATORS

MODERN AMERICAN ORATORY

HE cant phrase of conventional conversation

THE

says that the age of oratory is over. I do not believe this. The conditions are changed. The methods are changed. But it is as true as it ever was that if a man wants to lead men, he had better be able to tell men what he wants. And it will be well for him and them if he can. tell them this, so that they shall believe him and remember afterward what he has said to them.

William McElroy, who is himself no mean judge, told me that George William Curtis once said to him that the most remarkable passage in modern oratory, the passage, that is, that is best worth remembering, is the passage well known and often cited in Waldo Emerson's oration at Dartmouth in 1838. Carlyle speaks of that address as lying on a counter in an Oxford book

3

shop and arresting Gladstone's attention before Gladstone was thirty years old.

"You will hear every day the maxims of a low prudence. You will hear that the first duty is to get land and money, place and name. 'What is this Truth you seek, what is this Beauty?' men will ask, with derision. If nevertheless God have called any of you to explore truth and beauty, be bold, be firm, be true. When you shall say, 'As others do, so will I: I renounce, I am sorry for it, my early visions; I must eat the good of the land and let learning and romantic expectations go, until a more convenient season;'- then dies the man in you; then once more perish the buds of art and poetry and science, as they have died already in a thousand thousand men. The hour of that choice is the crisis of your history, and see that you hold yourself fast by the intellect."

Mr. McElroy quoted Curtis's remark to Roscoe Conkling, who differed from him. He said that the finest passage he remembered from any man of his time is Charles Sprague's reference to the American Indian in a Fourth of July oration. One would be glad to have a dozen such opinions from a dozen such leaders. The passage which Mr. Conkling referred to is this:

"Roll back the tide of time. How painfully to us applies the promise, 'I will give to thee, the heathen for an inheritance.' Not many

generations ago, where you now sit, circled with all that exalts and embellishes civilized life, the rank thistle nodded in the wind and the wild fox dug his hole unscared. Here lived and loved another race of beings. Beneath the same sun that rolls over your heads the Indian hunter pursued the panting deer; gazing on the same moon that smiles for you, the Indian lover wooed his dusky mate. Here the wigwam blaze beamed on the tender and the helpless, the council-fire glared on the wise and the daring. Now they dipped their noble limbs in your sedgy lakes, and now they paddled the light canoe along your rocky shores. Here they warred; the echoing whoop, the bloody grapple, the defying death-song, all were here; and when the tiger strife was over, here curled the smoke of peace. Here, too, they worshipped; and from many a dark bosom went up a pure prayer to the Great Spirit. He had not written his laws for them on tables of stone, but he had traced them on the tables of their hearts. poor child of nature knew not the God of revela

The

tion, but the God of the universe he acknowl

edged in everything around. He beheld Him in the star that sank in beauty behind his lowly dwelling, in the sacred orb that flamed on him from his midday throne, in the flower that snapped in the morning breeze, in the lofty pine that had defied a thousand whirlwinds, in the timid warbler that never left its native grove, in the fearless eagle whose untired pinion was wet in clouds, in the worm that crawled at his foot, and in his own matchless form, glowing with a spark of light to whose mysterious source he bent in humble though blind adoration."

EXAMPLE OF EDMUND BURKE

Emerson himself had an enthusiastic admiration for Webster, until he thought he had betrayed the North. To the day of his death he had an admiration for Edward Everett, whom he had known first when he was a professor of Greek literature at Harvard College. I shall speak of Emerson in another place, but this is perhaps the best place to say that he had an opinion quite indefensible as to the knack of absolutely extempore speech, -a knack which, according to me, any one can master. But Emerson did not think so.