Изображения страниц
PDF
EPUB

opinions with the same freedom, and for the same purpose, that I would expose my wounds to a surgeon. To you, it is peculiarly proper that I should make my appeal on this subject; for when eloquence is the theme, your name is not far off.

Tell me, then, you, who are capable of doing it, what is this divine eloquence? What the charm by which the orator binds the senses of his audience; by which he attunes and touches and sweeps the human lyre, with the resistless sway and master hand of a Timotheus? Is not the whole mystery comprehended in one word-SYMPATHY? I mean not merely that tender passion which quavers the lip and fills the eye of the babe when he looks on the sorrows and tears of another; but that still more delicate and subtile quality by which we passively catch the very colours, momentum and strength of the mind, to whose operations we are attending; which

converts every speaker, to whom we listen, into a Procrustes, and enables him, for the mo

ment, to stretch or lop our faculties to fit the standard of his own mind.

I am

This is a very curious subject. sometimes half inclined to adopt the notion stated by our great Bacon in his original and masterly treatise on the advancement of learning. "Fascination," says he, "is the power " and act of imagination intensive upon other "bodies than the body of the imaginant; "wherein the school of Paracelsus and the "disciples of pretended natural magick have "been so intemperate, as that they have ex"alted the power of the imagination to be "much one with the power of miracle-work"ing faith: others that draw nearer to pro"bability, calling to their view the secret 66 passages of things and especially of the "contagion that passeth from body to body, "do conceive it should likewise be agreeable

"to nature, that there should be some trans"missions and operations from spirit to "spirit, without the mediation of the senses ; "whence the conceits have grown, now al"most made civil, of the mastering spirit, "and the force of confidence, and the like." This notion is farther explained in his Sylva Sylvarum, wherein he tells a story of an Egyptian soothsayer, who made Mark Anthony believe that his genius, which was otherwise brave and confident, was, in the presence of Octavianus Cæsar, poor and cowardly therefore he advised him to absent himself as much as he could and remove far from him. It turned out, however, that this soothsayer was suborned by Cleopatra, who wished Anthony's company in Egypt.

and

Yet, if there be not something of this secret intercourse from spirit to spirit, how does it happen that one speaker shall gradually invade and benumb all the faculties of my soul

as if I were handling a torpedo; while another shall awaken and arouse me, like the clangour of the martial trumpet? How does it happen that the first shall infuse his poor spirit into my system, lethargize my native intellects, and bring down my powers exactly to the level of his own? or that the last shall descend upon me like an angel of light, breathe new energies into my frame, dilate my soul with his own intelligence, exalt me into a new and nobler region of thought, snatch me from the earth at pleasure, and rap me to the seventh heaven? And, what is still more wonderful, how does it happen that these different effects endure so long after the agency of the speaker has ceased? Insomuch, that if I sit down to any intellectual exercise, after listening to the first speaker, my performance shall be unworthy even of me, and the num-fish visible and tangible in every sentence; whereas, if I enter on the same amusement, after ha

ving attended to the last mentioned orator, I shall be astonished at the elevation and vigour of my own thoughts; and if I meet, accidentally, with the same production, a month or two afterwards, when my mind has lost the inspiration, shall scarcely recognise it for my own work.

Whence is all this? To me it would seem that it must proceed either from the subtile commerce between the spirits of men, which lord Verulam notices, and which enables the speaker, thereby, to identify his hearer with himself; or else that the mind of man possesses, independently of any volition on the part of its proprietor, a species of pupillary faculty of dilating and contracting itself, in proportion to the pencil of the rays of light which the speaker throws upon it; which dilatation or contraction, as in the case of the eye, cannot be immediately and abruptly altered.

« ПредыдущаяПродолжить »