1 MIRABEAU. After a Portrait - Design by H. B. Hall. T IS well known to Mirabeau's admirers that he was one of the ugliest men in France. The portrait designed by Hall is a standard likeness, but it may be suspected of flattering him. THE VISCOUNT DE CORMENIN (LOUIS MARIE DE LA HAYE, VICOMTE DE CORMENIN) (1788-1868) ORMENIN'S "Book of Orators" (Livre des Orateurs), is better known to and was soon afterwards translated into English. The American edition of 1854 had prefixed to it J. T. Headley's essay on the "Oratory of the French Revolution." Cormenin, who was a distinguished French jurist and publicist, was born at Paris, January 6th, 1788, and educated for the bar. In 1810 Napoleon appointed him auditor of the Council of State, and he held office also under the Bourbons, after the Restoration. In 1828 he was elected to the Chamber of Deputies, where he attacked the abuses During the various changes which folof government under Charles X. lowed up to the coup d'état of Louis Napoleon he was active in politics, It is and he was a member of the Council of State under the second empire. In 1868 he became commander of the French Legion of Honor. said that he established more charitable institutions than any layman of his time in France." He died at Paris, May 6th, 1868. Ο MIRABEAU'S STYLE AND METHODS Elaborate NE is surprised and recoils affrighted before the gigantic works accomplished by Mirabeau during the two years of his parliamentary life. discourses, apostrophes, replies, motions, addresses, letters to constituents, newspaper controversy, reports, morning sessions, evening sessions, committee He bears upon business,- he participates in all, superintends all. Nothing for him was too great, nothing too little; nothing too complex and nothing too simple. his shoulders a world of labors, and seems, in that herculean career, to expeHe unraveled with perfect ease the most comrience neither fatigue or distaste. plicated difficulties, and his restless activity exhausted the whole circle of subHe conversed, jects without being able to satisfy itself. He kept occupied all at the same time his numerous friends, his constituents, his agents, his secretaries. debated, listened, dictated, read, compiled, wrote, declaimed, maintained a correspondence with all France. He digested the labors of others, assimilating them He used to receive notes as he ascended the so as that they became his own. tribune, in the tribune even, and pass them, without pausing, into the texture of his discourse. He retouched the harangues and reports of which he had given He chastened them with his practiced judgment, the frame, the plan, the idea. colored them with his vivid expressions, strengthened them with his vigorous thought. This sublime plagiarist, this grand master, employed his aids and his pupils to extract the marble from the quarry and chip off the grosser parts, like the statuary who, when the block is rough-hewn, approaches, takes his chisel, gives it respiration and life and makes it a hero or a god. Mirabeau had a perfect understanding of the mechanism and the rights of a deliberative body. He knew how far it may go and where it should stop. His disciplinary formulas have passed into our rules, his maxims into our laws, his counsels into our policy. His words were law. He presided as he spoke, with a grave dignity, and used to reply to the several deputations with such fertility of eloquence and felicity of language that it may be truly said the Constituent Assembly has never been better represented than by Mirabeau, whether in the chair of the president or in the tribune of the orator. What a grand conception he formed of the national representation when saying: "Every deputation from the people astounds my courage." It was with these holy emotions he approached the tribune. Mirabeau used to premeditate most of his discourses; his comparison of the Gracchi, his allusion to the Tarpeian rock, his apostrophe to Sieyès, his famous speeches on the constitution, on the right of war and peace, the royal veto, the property of the clergy, the lottery, the mines, bankruptcy, the assignats, slavery, national education, the law of successions, where he displays such treasures of science and profound elaboration of thought, all these are written pieces. - His manner as an orator is that of the great masters of antiquity, with an admirable energy of gesture and a vehemence of diction which perhaps they had never reached. He is strong, because he does not diffuse himself; he is natural, because he uses no ornaments; he is eloquent, because he is simple; he does not imitate others because he needs but to be himself; he does not surcharge his discourse with a baggage of epithets, because they would retard it; he does not run into digressions, for fear of wandering from the question. His exordiums are sometimes abrupt, sometimes majestic, as it comports with the subject. His narration of facts is clear. His statement of the question is precise and positive. His ample and sonorous phraseology much resembles the spoken phraseology of Cicero. He unrolls, with a solemn slowness, the folds of his discourse. He does not accumulate his enumerations as ornaments, but as proofs. He seeks not the harmony of words, but the concatenation of ideas. He does not exhaust a subject to the dregs, he takes but the flower. Would he dazzle, the most brilliant images spring up beneath his steps; would he touch, he abounds in raptures of emotion, in tender persuasions, in oratorical transports which do not conflict with, but sustain, which are never confounded with, but follow, each other, which seem to produce one another successively and flow with a happy disorder from that fine and prolific nature. But when he comes to the point in debate, when he enters the heart of the question, he is substantial, nervous, logical as Demosthenes. He advances in a serried and impenetrable order. He reviews his proofs, disposes the plan of attack, and arrays them in order of battle. Mailed in the armor of dialectics, he sounds the charge, rushes upon the adversaries, seizes and prostrates them; nor does he loose his hold till he compels them, knee on neck, to avow themselves vanquished. If they retreat, he pursues, attacks them front and rear, presses upon them, drives them, and brings them inevitably within the imperial circle which he had designated for their destruction,—like those who, upon the deck of a narrow vessel, captured by boarding her, place a hopeless enemy between their sword and the ocean. How his language must have surprised by its novelty and thrilled the popular heart, when he drew this picture of a legal constitution: "Too often are bayonets the only remedy applied to the convulsions of oppression and want. But bayonets never re-establish but the peace of terror, the silence of despotism. Ah! the people are not a furious herd which must be kept in chains! |