cipal prophets and kings, and out of the whole variously combined to have constructed the myths their writings contain. Now we may remark that this is strained and artificial; but even if accepted as an adequate explanation, constructions of this kind would require an intellectual acuteness and critical discrimination such as Strauss is not prepared to allow to the period in which he supposes the gospels to have originated; for he considers it to have been destitute of the critical faculty altogether. There There is no attempt to show how these positions may be reconciled, and yet it seems that this mythical hypothesis requires the absence of the critical faculty on the one hand, and on the other its existence in a state of tolerably advanced culture.

The mythical hypothesis is so full of contradiction, so opposed to the spirit and principles of genuine criticism, that the man who adopts it has little reason to complain of the credulity of Christians. It is now more obvious than ever that there is no resting place between the acceptance and rejection of the gospels, and there appears to be a growing conviction that to accept them is less credulous than to reject them, and the only reasonable course a man can take. "There was a time when Teller's Lexicon was admired and esteemed by many contemporaries, as much as Teller's annuals are now. There was a time when the way in which Paulus endeavoured to bring the consciousness of the age into harmony with the writings of the New Testament was lauded as unparalleled in its acuteness. There was a time when Strauss's mythical hypothesis appeared to shake the foundations of the world. But now Teller is laughed at; at the name of Paulus, men shrug their shoulders; Strauss's mythical hypothesis has been quietly laid aside as useless by the most kindred spirit,* to make room for the hypothesis of a pious fraud. The time will come when men will not merely laugh but shudder at such an hypothesis as this." †

A. J.

* Baur.

"Ebrard's Gospel History."

86

IN

ART. VII. THE ORATOR.

All

N what does oratory consist? An examination of a number of passages, all allowed to be historical, so as to see what quality they have in common, in spite of their differences, or, better still, a study of any living specimens of the orator that may be within reach will suggest a certain rough approach to an answer. genuine specimens of oratory, it will be found, in whatever else they may differ, are characterised by a certain energy, or impressiveness, or force, or warmth, the exact cause of which it may be difficult to detect; and so, also, all genuine orators will be found to exhibit a certain energy, or fervour, or vehemence of character— let us even call it perturbability, or capacity of being roused and agitated. It is precisely the presence or the absence of this element that creates the feeling of difference between a mere fluent speaker and the man whom we recognise as an orator. Vehemence, power of being personally agitated in the act of agitating others this, whatever smoothness and grace and dignity may be superinduced upon it by art, will be found to constitute the peculiarity of orators.

There is no doubt that, if our physiology were sufficiently advanced, this peculiarity would be found to be connected with certain arrangements of the physical constitution. While in the artist the passive sensibilities may predominate, or the passive sensibilities in association with select intellectual processes; while the pure thinker, again, is constituted for calm persevering reflection within himself; in the orator, whether the original stimulus came from within or without, the habitual rush of the being will be along the nerves of action and motion in the direction of the outer world-with perhaps (in order to distinguish him from the practical man, who is the same so far), a special determination of the energy towards the organs of speech. Somehow or other, at all events, the body of the orator is concerned in what he does. Standing before his audience, the orator is not merely a voice uttering words and ideas; he is a mass of intensely excited nerve acting, like a charged battery, on the aggregate vitality of his audience while they are individually receiving his words and ideas. The very law of human nature on which oratory depends is, that ideas dropped into the mind when it is in a state of excitement, take a firmer hold of that mind, and are more instantaneously and permanently diffused through it, for better or worse, as the case may be, than when it is in its natural and ordinary mood. Now, though there are various ways in which the mind may be excited, so as thus

to increase its tenderness and permeability to ideas, one of the most effective is simple collocation with other minds in an assembly or audience. It is all nonsense to speak of an audience as being simply a collection of individuals; meaning by that, that the audience can have nothing more in it than pre-existed in the individuals separately. Let a thousand individuals meet in the same hall, and, more particularly, let them meet genially and for the purpose of seeing some spectacle, or listening to some harangue, and, after a little while, electric circuits are established amongst them, and they are formed into a collective organism having a certain common consciousness, and exhibiting phenomena not belonging to the individual. Of course, in the case of the presence of individuals hostile to the spirit of the assembly and contemptuous of its proceedings, and also in the case of the division of a meeting into opposed factions, there are corresponding variations in the phenomena presented; but still, essentially, the fact of congregation brings with it a set of conditions alien to the experience of the individuals when isolated. Hence part of that force which attends on exhibitions of oratory is actually supplied, not by the speaker, but by the audience itself; and, the larger the audience, and the more exciting the circumstances in which they have met, the more there is of this already accumulated fund of power waiting for the orator's use, and, though independent of him in its origin, yet, in the effect, to go to his credit. But for the power to become apparent, nay also partly for its generation, the orator must be there; and it is the very definition of the man who professes to be an orator that he shall be in his own nature a man meeting the enthusiasm of the waiting crowd with a like enthusiasm of his own which shall receive it, evoke it, mingle with it, madden it, reverberate it, master it. Such men there are; and it is a grand sight to see them as they command a crowd. It is clear that, corporeally as well as mentally, or mentally because corporeally, they are in pre-established harmony with the conditions presented by an assemblage of their fellow-beings. Gradually, as they speak, they glow, they wax fervid; the audience acts upon them, and they react upon the audience; and they stand at last a visibly agitated mass of nervous force swaying the sea of heads beneath them, not by their voice and words alone, but by a positive physiological effluence or attraction. Among recent British orators, Chalmers was an extraordinary example of this power of sheerly physiological action which distinguishes the born orator from the merely cultivated speaker. He was a man of large and heavy build, whose demeanour, when he was not himself speaking, was so far from being fidgetty or excitable, that he sat like a mass of stone, perfectly placid and unperturbed, either not moving his head at all, or moving it slowly round as if it turned on a weighty pivot. All the

more impressive was it to see this heavy frame under the influence of the oratorical agitation. How the whole man was moved while he moved others! It was not speech; it was phrenzy. Even on lesser occasions, when he still kept within bounds, it was plain that in hearing him the audience was subjected not merely to the influence of his meaning, but to the influence also of the sheer physical excitement which accompanied his own sense of that meaning. And on greater occasions the sight was absolutely terrible. His heavy frame was convulsed; his face flushed and grew Pythic; the veins in his forehead and neck stood out like cordage; his voice pealed or reached to a shriek; foam flew from, his mouth in flakes; he hung over his audience almost menacing them with his shaking fist; or he stood erect, maniacal and stamping. More than once after such an exhibition, there were fears of apoplexy; and once he lay for three hours on a sofa, having his head laved with vinegar, before sufficiently recovering himself. And often, when one remembered and carried away the exact words spoken by him in one of these phrenzies, they would seem plain enough, and such as any one else might have delivered without any approach to the same state of fury. Once, for example, when his agitation was at the uttermost, the sentiment which he was expressing was simply this that if the landed aristocracy of the country did not pay heed to certain social tendencies, the importance of which he had been expounding, "their estates were not worth ten years' purchase." Here was a notion, here were words, which could have been spoken by any hardheaded man, or any quiet thinker who had anyhow got them into his head, and which certainly, if spoken by such a person, might have been spoken calmly; so that clearly the oratorical fury with which they came from the lips of Chalmers depended on a constitutional peculiarity—that peculiarity being an unusual amount of emotional and nervous perturbability in association with his thoughts and feelings, whatever they were. haps, indeed, the intensity with which a notion or sentiment is felt, is measured always and in all persons by the degree in which it affects the nervous or bodily system, so that universally the oratorical perturbability might be supposed to be founded on personal earnestness of character. It was so, at least, in Dr. Chalmers

Per

a man earnest to the core, and who felt in social matters as powerfully and painfully as most men do in matters of mere private and domestic concern. But no such general rule could be laid down without limitations and exceptions. On the one hand, there are examples of oratorical perturbability (though not the highest) where deep personal earnestness is deficient-cases in which oratorical power seems to depend on a sort of factitious or simulated earnestness coming in the act of speech and vanishing when it is over; and in which, therefore, all that can be asserted is

the man's perturbability to his own passing conceptions. On the other hand, we have personal earnestness, and even susceptibility to impressions and feelings to the degree of physical agitation and suffering, where there is an absence of the oratorical faculty. For the present, therefore, all that we need say is that a certain kind of perturbability, a certain visible co-operation of body and manner with mind and purpose, does characterize the orator.

Vague as this is, it serves to explain a good deal. It serves to explain, for example, the well-known fact that many great orations —that is, orations, the effect of which we know to have been prodigious-seem poor enough when they are read in print. Whitfield's reported sermons are often cited as an instance; and we have already stated it as our belief, that even the great political speeches of the parliamentary era of Fox and Pitt cannot now be read with any pleasure equivalent to their reputation. It was Fox's own maxim, indeed, that if a speech read well, it must have been a bad speech. The maxim, with all deference to so great an authority, is not true. Fine propositions are imperishable: those speeches, therefore, will survive, and will bear reading, in which there has been good and noble intellectual matter, not to speak of poetry; and that intellectual excellence in the matter of a speech, and that, too, of rare kinds, may consist with the highest oratorical effect in its delivery, is sufficiently proved by such examples as Demosthenes, Burke, Chalmers, and Kossuth. But the remark of Fox is certainly valid to this extent-that very generally, when speeches are read in print after their delivery, the virtue seems to have gone out of them. Nay, more, often when speeches do seem to preserve their virtue, so that they affect and delight the reader, it is not specially the oratorical virtue that they preserve, but some other. In reading, for instance, the severe, terse sense of Demosthenes, one may be astonished and delighted, and yet (unless one is a bit of an orator oneself) be puzzled to find out where the extraordinary eloquence lies. The reason is plain. The reader is not under the magnetic battery of the orator's excited presence. The meaning comes to him without the accompanying physiological action which sent it trembling through the very veins of the original auditors. Some speeches, in fact, consist of intellectual rubbish, or, what is little better, sent home by intense physiological action, just as sand and gravel might be discharged from a cannon consequently, when the physiological action is wanting, what remains is only the intellectual rubbish. In the speeches of Demosthenes, on the other hand, what remains is splendid Athenian sense-propositions linked together logically, like pellets of polished steel. These we may and do admire; but, to understand the Demosthenic oratory, we must fancy the unparalleled intensity of physiological action with which these were delivered into the hearts and brains of the