A Cynic Looks at Life

A book entitled Forensic Eloquence, by Mr. John Goss, appears to have for purpose to teach the young idea how to spout, and that purpose, I dare say, it will accomplish if something is not done to prevent.  I know nothing of the matter myself, a strong distaste for forensic eloquence, or eloquence of any kind implying a man mounted on his legs and doing all the talking, having averted me from its study.  The training of the youth of this country to utterance of themselves after that fashion I should regard as a disaster of magnitude.  So far as I know it, forensic eloquence is the art of saying things in such a way as to make them pass for more than they are worth.  Employed in matters of importance (and for other employment it were hardly worth acquiring) it is mischievous because dishonest and misleading.  In the public service Truth toils best when not clad in cloth-of-gold and bedaubed with fine lace.  If eloquence does not beget action it is valueless; but action which results from the passions, sentiments and emotions is less likely to be wise than that which comes of a persuaded judgment.  For that reason I cannot help thinking that the influence of Bismarck in German politics was more wholesome than is that of Mr. John Temple Graves.

For eloquence per se—­considered merely as an art of pleasing—­I entertain something of the respect evoked by success; for it always pleases at least the speaker.  It is to speech what an ornate style is to writing—­good and pleasant enough in its time and place and, like pie-crust and the evening girl, destitute of any basis in common sense.  Forensic eloquence, on the contrary, has an all too sufficient foundation in reason and the order of things:  it promotes the ambition of tricksters and advances the fortunes of rogues.  For I take it that the Ciceros, the Mirabeaus, the Burkes, the O’Connells, the Patrick Henrys and the rest of them—­pets of the text-bookers and scourges of youth—­belong in either the one category or the other, or in both.  Anyhow I find it impossible to think of them as highminded men and right-forth statesmen—­with their actors’ tricks, their devices of the countenance, inventions of gesture and other cunning expedients having nothing to do with the matter in hand.  Extinction of the orator I hold to be the most beneficent possibility of evolution.  If Mr. Goss has done anything to retard that blessed time when the Bourke Cockrans shall cease from troubling and the weary be at rest he is an enemy of his race.

“What!” exclaims the thoughtless reader—­I have but one—­“are not the great forensic speeches by the world’s famous orators good reading?  Considering them merely as literature do you not derive a high and refining pleasure from them?” I do not:  I find them turgid and tumid no end.  They are bad reading, though they may have been good hearing.  In order to enjoy them one must have in memory what, indeed, one is seldom permitted to forget:  that they were addressed to the ear; and in imagination one must hold some shadowy simulacrum of the orator himself, uttering his work.  These conditions being fulfilled there remains for application to the matter of the discourse too little attention to get much good of it, and the total effect is confusion.  Literature by which the reader is compelled to bear in mind the producer and the circumstances under which it was produced can be spared.