A SHAKSPEARE'S ADVICE TO PREACHERS. A SERMON FROM SHAKSPEARE. "In this business Action is eloquence, and the eyes of the ignorant More learned than the ears.", LTHOUGH we have taken as the text for this sermon the words quoted above, no doubt Shakspeare's best advice to preachers is Hamlet's to the players; and the intention of that good advice throughout seems to be, to teach very much the lesson of the text, that "action is eloquence." We may be sure that Shakspeare was far too wise a man, and too accomplished in the arts which constitute the orator, to teach that "action is eloquence" merely because it is action. Action, indeed, without a word, we know, may be overwhelming and most convincingly impressive; but then it must be action through which soul is revealed. Shakspeare refers to the other order of speech when he says: “Oh, it offends me to the soul to hear a robustious periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings; who, for the most part, are capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb shows, and noise. I would have such a fellow whipped for o'erdoing Termagant; it out-herods Herod: pray you, avoid it." Surely this condemnation, characterized as it is by good sense and truth, is just as true for preachers as for players. Action, as the multitudes understand it, is not always passion; deep feeling does not usually exhibit itself in an uproar. Shakspeare teaches the necessity and the power of self-possession in words which are the context of those quoted above:— "Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue; but if you mouth it, as many of our players do, I had as lief the town-crier spoke my lines. Nor do not saw the air too much with your hand, thus; but use all gently: for in the very torrent, tempest, and (as I may say) whirlwind of your passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness." Is it too much to say, that where there is real feeling there will always be fine action, but what action? Not the sawing of the air with the arm, not the stamping of the foot, not the moving to and fro of the body; something like these there may be possibly, but not essentially, for there THE TROLLHATTEN STYLE OF ELOQUENCE. 469 may be intense action when the body and all its members are entirely still to outward appearance. You may mark the action in the bright and kindling movements of the eye; you may mark it in the animation of the face, in the nervous movement of the fingers, in the whole body, apparently quiet to the shallow observer, and yet full of life. No doubt there are moments when roused passion flames and pours forth feeling in torrents. Eloquence, when at its true pitch and movement, is sometimes like the broad and heavy fall of the Niagara, a mighty mass of waters bearing along, and overwhelming by their breadth, the calm passion, if we may so speak; but another order of eloquence is like that of the Trollhatten Falls, in Sweden. When we were there we heard a gentleman by our side contrasting its effects with Niagara. It is a torrent that leaps from a height, thunders along from crag to crag, forces its way through separate ravines, seeming to leave pausing places behind it as it hurries tempestuously along. There is an eloquence in which thought marshals and commands feeling; there is another order in which feeling marshals and commands. thought, and both may be equally great and real, and in both the doctrine of Shakspeare is true, "Action is eloquence." Dr. Chalmers must have been a noble example of the Trollhatten style of eloquence. Subseciva Brown gives a fine illustration of his listening to the great Scotch orator, when he was a youth in the High School of Edinburgh, in a moorland district on a summer evening : "As we entered the kirk we saw a notorious character, a drover, who had much of the brutal look of what he worked in, with the knowing eye of a man of the city, a sort of big Peter Bell. "He had a hardness in his cheek; He had a hardness in his eye.' He was our terror; and we not only wondered, but were afraid when we saw him going in. The minister came in, homely in his dress and gait, but having a great look about him, like a mountain among hills. The tide set in, everything added to its power; 'deep called to deep.' How astonished and impressed we all were. He was at the full thunder of his power; the whole man was in an agony of earnestness; the drover was weeping like a child, the tears running down his ruddy, coarse cheeks, his face opened out and smoothed like an infant's, his whole body stirred with emotion. And when the wonderful speaker sat down, how beautiful to our eyes did the thunderer look; exhausted, but sweet and pure. We went home quieter than we came; we thought of other things, that voice, that face, those great, simple, living thoughts, those floods of resistless eloquence, that piercing, shattering voice." Here, manifestly, action was eloquence; of such eloquence now we seem to have no examples, no illustrations, perhaps because faith in unseen things is at a very low ebb in the average congregation, and the hearer's feelings do not assist even the great preacher. As a pendant to this in the "Hora Subsecive," we remember to have 470 ROBERT HALL: THE NIAGARA ORDER OF ELOQUENCE. heard a dear departed friend tell how, when a boy, he was taken by his father, one still summer evening across the Northamptonshire fields to hear Robert Hall, in one of those old village chapels with the square galleries. As in the other instance, the place was crowded from the neighbourhood round with plain farmer-folk, a sprinkling of intelligent ministers, and the gentry of the neighbourhood. The minister came in, a simple, heavy, but still impressive-looking man; in due course he announced his text, "The end of all things is at hand." His voice was not shattering, but thin, weak. There was no action at all, only of the twitching of the fingers, more especially as the hand moved and rested upon the lower part of the back, where the speaker was suffering almost incessant pain. As he went on beneath the deepening evening shades, falling through the windows of the old chapel, his voice and his words first chained, then charmed and fascinated his hearers: One after another, the whole place and all in it seemed as if beneath a great spell. As he talked about the coming end, the spell upon the people seemed to begin to work itself out into an awful, fearful restlessness, one and another rose from their seats and stood stretching forward with a kind of fright and wonder. Still there was no action, only the flow of that wondrous voice, with a marvellous witchery of apt and melodious words; but through them the "end of all things" sounded like some warning bell. More people rose, stretching forward; many of those who rose first, as if they felt some strange power upon them, they knew not what, got up and stood upon their seats, until, when the "great master of assemblies " closed his passionate, pathetic accents, the whole audience were upon their feet, intensely alive with interest, as if they had heard in the distance the presages and preludes of the coming end, and felt that it was time to prepare. Our readers will well believe that our old friend spoke of this as a never-forgotten moment, one of the most memorable of his life. In both of these instances action was eloquence; but in the last, the action was especially inward, the soul within the speaker making the words move over other men's souls as with the power of a necromancer. Such eloquence as we have in our own day seems never to be of this order, although much of it perhaps is worthy of that characterization by one of our poets, though we could never see its justice as applied to the statesman to whom the lines were addressed : "An eloquence, not like those rills from a height, Which sparkle, and foam, and in vapour are o'er; But those "filtering recesses of thought and of lore" are the impediments of that eloquence' which speaks in action, and those movements in the atmosphere of the mind which create tempests of feeling in the minds of the hearers. Tameness must on the whole, we think, be said to be THE ELOQUENCE OF THE HUMAN HAND. 471 the vice of even many who may yet be regarded as eminent speakers; and to them Shakspeare's words, which seem to invoke to action, might be especially applicable : "Be not too tame neither, but let your own discretion be your tutor: suit the action to the word, the word to the action; with this special observance, that you o'er-step not the modesty of nature; for anything so overdone is from the purpose of playing [preaching], whose end, both at the first, and now, was, and is, to hold, as 'twere, the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time, his form and pressure. Now this, overdone, or come tardy off, though it make the unskilful laugh, cannot but make the judicious grieve; the censure of which one must, in your allowance, o'er-weigh a whole theatre [or church full] of others. Oh, there be players [preachers], that I have seen play,--and heard others praise, and that highly,—not to speak it profanely, that, neither having the accent of Christians, nor the gait of Christian, Pagan, nor man, have so strutted and bellowed, that I have thought some of nature's journeymen had made men, and not made them well, they imitated humanity so abominably." Such, in a word, are the differences which Shakspeare indicates between animation and dulness. Thus, the idea of action is to be very variously construed; it is true, the hand is an organ of expression, and the orator speaks through his fingers. An ancient master of oratory, Quintilian, says: "The hand speaks for itself; by it we ask, we promise, we invoke, we dismiss, we threaten, we deprecate, we express fear, joy, grief, our doubts, our assents, our penitence, we show moderation, profusion, we mark number and time." But for all this there must be a soul in the fingers. The orator who inflamed a multitude to march against Philip by his harangue, in reply to the question, What is the first law of rhetoric? said, "Action!" and the second?" Action!" and the third? "Still, Action!" But manifestly he did not mean the activity of a marionette, but of the mind. "What is eloquence?" said Cicero, "but a continuous motion of the soul?" the growing vitality of the mind. This is illustrated in what De Quincey says of Burke :— "Under Burke's treatment every truth grows in the act of unfolding it. This peculiarity is, no doubt, in some degree, due to the habit of extempore speaking, but not to that only. Burke himself traced it very much to his study of the Bible: 'I have,' said he, 'read the Bible morning, noon, and night, and have ever since been the happier and better man for such reading."" We spoke above of Shakspeare's knowledge of the arts which constitute the orator; his works furnish several illustrations, especially in the Roman pieces; study, for instance, the character of Menenius Agrippa, in Coriolanus; in him we find how action was eloquence; he was a sort 472 ELOQUENCE AGAINST ELOQUENCE. of John Bright with a Roman multitude,-at home with them, familiar with them, equally able in a public colloquy, which turns by-and-by into an oration, to give one a cheerful clap on the shoulders, and presently, to another, a smart and sufficiently satisfactory box on the ears; here is action regarded as eloquence moving along a low level, talking in common sense common-place things in which all the citizens are interested,— in pithy proverb, and amusing parable. But how different a study when, in the Forum, we are before the dead body of Cæsar, and Brutus and Marc Antony utter their orations; there action rises to a higher pitch; eloquence no longer moves along the uninspiring level of ordinary life; a tremendous action has been performed, Cæsar has been slain, and Brutus steps forth passionately, vehemently to vindicate the deed; the nervous action of the man carrying the multitude along with him till their shouts ring round him in acclamations, and demand that he shall be borne in triumph to his house, and a statue reared to his memory. And then comes in the cunning Marc Antony. Let the student in oratory mark how the insinuating soul winds its way through the words in which ambition affects feeling for its own ends, until, by quite a different order of action, and quite another tone of eloquence, the multitude is wrought upon and the same people propose to march away, to burn the house of Brutus and his body too! Action against action, eloquence against eloquence, the entire scene is surely an instructive commentary upon the words we have taken for a text. "Action is eloquence, and the eyes of the ignorant More learned than the ears." Another illustration is in the quite different, the altogether inflamed and passionate speech of Henry V. before Harfleur. Here, of course, standing in the presence of a great battle, and speaking for the purpose of rousing an army, the words themselves are like "Greyhounds on the slips straining upon the start." The ruder the audience, the more exciting the occasion, the more necessary does it seem that words should be clothed in vehemency; and this remark holds of sacred as well as of other orders of eloquence. It must be strange if the most sacred themes shall only produce a tame, dull, monotonous mode of delivery. Surely Hamlet's reflections are very pertinent: "Is it not monstrous, that this player here, Tears in his eyes, distraction in's aspèct, A broken voice, and his whole function suiting What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba, That he should weep for her? What would he do, |