And men in deadly earnest do not talk loudly.  It has been my fortune to see men angry and aroused to the point of killing; they were intense, but quiet.  I have also seen that bravado and drunken boisterousness which thought it imitated, and meant to imitate, genuine rage; it was always strident and violent, never dangerous, never sincere.  The same thing is true in speech.

There have only been two or three roarers in effective oratory—­Mirabeau, by all accounts (though anything can be forgiven a man who can make such speeches as the great Frenchman made), and Demosthenes, if AEschines is to be believed, which I think he is not to be in this particular.  He was only excusing his own defeat, and he had to attribute it to delivery. (I think any unprejudiced mind will agree that AEschines made the better argument.) All the other great speakers have, even in their most intense passages, and in situations where life and death were involved, been comparatively quiet so far as mere volume of sound is concerned.

I remember, as if it were yesterday, the first great speaker I ever heard.  It was Robert G. Ingersoll, delivering a lecture in Des Moines, Iowa, in 1884.  He had an audience which would have inspired eloquence in almost any breast.  He came on the stage alone, and was very carefully, even elegantly attired, to the smallest item of his grooming.

His address was in manuscript, and imperfectly committed to memory.  He laid it down on a little table at the back of the stage (returning to it occasionally to refresh his memory), and then, in a very natural and matter-of-fact way, walked to the footlights, and, looking the audience frankly in the eyes, began without an instant’s hesitation, and in a voice precisely as if he were talking to a friend.

But he was as dramatic at his climaxes as Edwin Booth ever was in Hamlet.  His face paled, or seemed to pale; his hands clinched with a desperate energy, and the whole attitude of the man was that of one in awful wrath.  Yet his voice was not raised above the common current of the evening’s address—­if anything, it was lower.  While the mature mind cannot endure Ingersoll’s rhetoric, it must be acknowledged that his manner of delivery (except when his levity made him coarse) was nearly equal to that of Wendell Phillips.  Still, in his intense passages Ingersoll was almost fiercely earnest.  And Plutarch tells us that Cicero’s friends feared he would kill himself by bursting a blood-vessel, with such intense energy did he speak.

Both of these men had that instinctive taste of the great speaker which Shakespeare has described better than any one else in literature, when he makes Hamlet tell the players not to “mouth it, as many of your players do, I had as lief the town-crier spoke my lines.  Nor do not saw the air too much—­your hand thus:  but use all gently:  for in the very torrent, tempest, and (as I may say) the whirlwind of passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance, that may give it smoothness.  O, 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 could have such a fellow whipped for o’erdoing Termagant; it out-herods Herod:  pray you, avoid it.”