passage from Edmund Burke. It is from one of his written orations; but it perfectly represents also his spoken ones. The topic is the national character of the English as compared with that of the French.

"Thanks to our sullen resistance to innovation, thanks to the cold sluggishness of our national character, we still bear the stamp of our forefathers. We have not, as I conceive, lost the generosity and dignity of thinking of the fourteenth century; nor, as yet, have we subtilized ourselves into savages. We are not the converts of Rousseau, we are not the disciples of Voltaire; Helvetius has made no progress among us. Atheists are not our preachers; madmen are not our lawgivers. We know that we have made no discoveries, and we think that no discoveries are to be made, in morality; nor many in the great principles of government; nor in the ideas of liberty, which were understood long before we were born altogether as well as they will be after the grave has heaped its mould upon our presumption, and the silent tomb shall have imposed its law on our pert loquacity. In England we have not yet been completely embowelled of our natural entrails; we still feel within us, and we cherish and cultivate, those inbred sentiments which are the faithful guardians, the active monitors of our duty, the true supporters of all liberal and manly morals. We have not been drawn and trussed in order that we may be filled, like stuffed birds in a museum, with chaff and rags, and paltry blurred shreds of paper about the rights of man. We preserve the whole of our feelings still native and entire, unsophisticated by pedantry and infidelity. We have real hearts of flesh and blood beating in our bosoms. We fear God; we look up with awe to kings, with affection to parliaments, with duty to magistrates, with reverence to priests, and with respect to nobility. Why? Because, when such ideas are brought before our minds, it is natural to be so affected; because all other feelings are false and spurious, and tend to corrupt our minds, to vitiate our primary morals, to render us unfit for rational liberty, and, by teaching us a servile, licentious, and abandoned insolence, to be our low sport for a few holidays, to make us perfectly fit for and justly deserving of slavery through the whole course of our lives. You see, sir, that, in this enlightened age, I am bold enough to confess that we are generally men of untaught feelings-that, instead of casting away all our old prejudices, we cherish them to a very considerable degree, and (to take more shame to ourselves) we cherish them because they are prejudices. We are afraid to put men to live and trade, each on his own private stock of reason, because we suspect that the stock in each man is small, and that individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations and of ages. Many of our men of speculation, instead of exploding general prejudices, employ their sagacity to discover the latent wisdom which prevails in them. If they find what they seek (and they seldom fail), they think it more wise to continue the prejudice, with the reason involved, than to cast away the coat of prejudice and to leave nothing but the naked

Passage from Burke.

467 reason, because prejudice, with its reason, has a motive to give action to that reason, and an affection which will give it permanence. Prejudice is of ready application in the emergency; it previously engages the mind in a steady course of wisdom and virtue, and does not leave the man hesitating in the moment of decision, sceptical, puzzled, and unresolved. Prejudice renders a man's virtue his habit, and not a series of unconnected acts. Through just prejudice his duty becomes a part of his nature.'

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Of the doctrine of this passage, we say nothing; we speaking only of the style-the intellectual manner. We observe in it the characteristics of Burke-a certain richness in the subsidiary thought, a tendency to speculation and generalization, and a great copiousness in words and illustrative imagery. As every one knows, Burke's are almost the only political speeches of that age that any one now cares to read or finds it worth while to read-and this because they are the only speeches of the time the thought of which is of permanent value. It is the literal truth, as any one may verify for himself, that, great and important men as Pitt and Fox were, and superior as the latter of them, at least, was to Burke as an orator of the day, their speeches now are interesting almost exclusively as historical records, and scarcely at all as portions of our literature. That Burke, however, should have produced speeches which, while accomplishing their immediate purpose, should have survived in virtue of their rich intellectual substance, is a proof that oratorical effect may consist with intellectual exuberance, and that a genius naturally speculative may exist submerged in the seeming orator. This was very much the case also with Dr. Chalmers, who, tremendous as his oratory was, positively could not speak except to illustrate and enforce some definition, some broad proposition or antithesis of ideas, some one massive generalization which he had previously excogitated. Occasionally, there is something of this in Kossuth; but, on the whole, his style as a speaker reminds a literary critic less of the speculative richness of Burke, than of the fine hardgrained reasoning of Demosthenes. We speak of his English orations; in his Magyar oratory, there may have been a wilder element.

If the peculiarity of the orator, then, does not consist essentially in his physical conformation, nor in the nature of the themes which he principally affects, nor in the style of his language, in what does it consist? An examination of a number of passages, all allowed to be oratorical, 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. All genuine

specimens of oratory, it will be found, in whatever else they may differ, are characterized by a certain energy, or impressiveness, or force, or warmth, the exact cause of which it may be diffiult to detect; and so, also, all genuine orators will be found to exhibit a certain energy, or fervour, or vehemence of characterlet 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 come 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

Physiological Action of Orators.

469

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, overmaster 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. Perhaps, 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-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