textfiles/politics/INGERSOLL/biog-18.txt

                16 page printout, page 232 to 247
             INGERSOLL, A BIOGRAPHICAL APPRECIATION

                           CHAPTER 18.

                  HIS FACULTIES OF ARTISTIC AND
                     INTELLECTUAL EXPRESSION

     He who would rise to the full scope of Ingersoll's art, in its
varied manifestations -- oratory, poetry, prose -- must be familiar
with the elements of things. He must be of no school or cult --
must possess that elemental depth, that aversion to the provincial,
that view of the universal, which invariably marks the mind of
genius. In unison with the great eternal pulse of the universe must
be the rhythm of his heart and brain.

     But how are we to look upon the artistic side of Ingersoll?
Shall he be viewed as an orator, as a poet, or as a rhetorician? I
answer: As none of these, in particular; for he was far more than
any or all of them: he was an idealist, -- one of the purest and
sublimest that has lived. Back of every expression, -- poetic,
oratorical, or philosophical, -- was the ideal. This he worshiped.
In the realm of art, he saw with faultless eye. So absolute was his
devotion to the ideal; so keen, and yet so profound, his sense of
symmetry, proportion, harmony, that he clothed his thoughts in the
noblest garb, shrinking from the inapposite, the inelegant, as
surely as the magnet repels a scrap of lead. This made his art
supreme.

     It is often remarked: "That man was a great sculptor," "That
man was a great painter," when it should be said: "A great idealist
chiseled that statue," "A great idealist painted that picture." Who
can not chisel or paint? But how many who chisel or paint or write
or speak do so at the command of the ideal?

     Every writer and every speaker unconsciously produces a
perfect likeness of his physical and mental being -- of himself. It
is called his style. Critics sometimes assert that the style of so-
and-so is "artificial." In the ultimate sense, this is erroneous.
Should a writer employ a borrowed style, it would not be his style,
any more than an apple artificially attached to a twig of an
orange-tree would be an orange. And no matter how successful he
might be in deceiving others as to the genuineness of his style, he
could never succeed in deceiving himself.

     We are here led to a most fitting comparison of two natural
phenomena: the tree and its fruit -- the author and his style. The
analogy is unmistakable. Neither literally nor figuratively do men
gather grapes from thorns, nor figs from thistles. No one would
have expected Daniel Webster -- the leonine head with brow
overhanging cliff like the cavernous eyes and rugged lines below --
to produce a Queen Mob. It required the slight figure, the girlish,
sympathetic face, the intense blue eyes, the keen sensibilities.
the rare ethereal vision, of Shelley.

     Ingersoll, too, put his personality into his lines. His style,
therefore, is not susceptible to comparison -- it is utterly
unique! Should one of his marvelous pages be found on the sands of
the Sahara, its author would be instantly recognizable.



                         Bank of Wisdom
                  Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
                               232

             INGERSOLL, A BIOGRAPHICAL APPRECIATION

     A vast majority of our race are substantially alike. They look
alike, dress alike, act alike, think alike. Since they must 
inevitably, if unconsciously, infuse into their literary expression
a part of their very selves, how can they but write alike? Indeed,
not only is the latter what we are led, by reason and analogy, to
expect: it is precisely what we establish by observation. Take the
output in any branch of literature -- contemporary periodical
verse, for example. As far as individuality is concerned, the
greater part of the periodical verse of the last decade, or of the
preceding, could have been written by a single person. Between the
styles (if "styles" there be) of almost any two of the scores of
authors actually represented, there is less difference than between
the styles of the garments of any two of those authors, despite the
proverbial pecuniary vicissitudes of literary fortune. Ingersoll
himself described, all too faithfully, this class of artists when
he said: --

     " * * * Most writers suppress individually. They wish to
please the public. They flatter the stupid and pander to the
prejudice of their readers. They write for the market, making books
as other mechanics make shoes. They have no message, they bear no
torch, they are simply the slaves of customers.

     "The books they manufacture are handles by 'the trade'; they
are regarded as harmless. The pulpit does not object; the young
person can read the monotonous pages without a blush -- or a
thought.

     "On the title pages of these books you will find the imprint
of the great publishers; on the rest of the pages, nothing. These
books might be prescribed for insomnia."

     In striking contrast with the many writers just described
stand the few who are the glory of literature not only, but of the
human race, -- the men and the women of genius. And, strange to
say, or rather, natural to say, the former have always made, and
are still making, with perhaps equal frequency, in reference to the
latter, two contradictory assertions. About half of the
mediocrities assert, that individuals of genius are the same as
others; and this is perfectly natural, because mediocrity can
scarcely be expected fully to comprehend its own limitations. A
prisoner can see only the inner side of the confining wall -- never
the outer side nor the top. The other half of the mediocrities
assert, that individuals of genius are absolutely different from
others; and this, too, is perfect natural, for the same reason. The
truth is, that the genius is the same as others in everything
except that in which he is a genius; or, reversely, he differs from
others in that only in which he is not a mediocrity.

     Without speculating as to the ultimate cause of the difference
distinguishing him (the futility of so speculating, in the present
state of scientific knowledge, having been pointed in Chapter I),
we may yet briefly concern ourselves with the difference itself.
The genius, then, has implicit confidence in himself; the
mediocrity, confidence in others. The genius has learned little,
and has little to learn: the mediocrity may have learned a great
deal, but has a great deal to learn. The genius does not "suppress
individuality": he expresses it. He does not "wish to please the 

                         Bank of Wisdom
                  Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
                               233

             INGERSOLL, A BIOGRAPHICAL APPRECIATION

public," but himself, -- his ideal. He does not "flatter the
stupid": he tries to arouse and enlighten them. He does not "pander
to the prejudice" of his readers: he tries to destroy it. He does
not "write for the market," but for posterity. He has a "message";
he bears a "torch"; he is not a "slave," but free. His books,
though they may be "handled by 'the trade,'" are not always
"regarded as harmless": they are often regarded as dangerous. To
them, "the pulpit" does "object"; because, while "the young person"
can read them "without a blush," neither the young nor the old can
read them without "a thought."

     So it was with Ingersoll and his works. And no one else in
American literature, where the microcephalous deny him a place, has
crowded more into a line. Many have occupied pages in expressing
what he would have expressed in a paragraph.

     He wrote as a river runs. In the work of no other writer is to
be found less evidence of effort. There is nothing to suggest the
literary student, -- the "verbal varnisher and veneerer."
Preeminently the word-wizard of his century, the whole of rhetoric
was rejuvenated by his genius.

     But there is a particular quality of his style, which,
although not yet recognized by the general reader, demands
conspicuous attention, -- and, indeed, perhaps the most conspicuous
attention, -- in a just estimate of him as a literary artist. I
refer to rhythm. For it is undoubtedly true, as an observing and
distinguished critic has said, that Ingersoll, like Socrates, was
the first to perfect the prose rhythms of the language in which he
sought expression. He possessed not only the imagination, but the
ear, of the born poet. Believing that the poets themselves have
demonstrated rhyme to be a hindrance, rather than a help, in
expressing the sublimest thought and feeling; caring nothing for
the greater part of that which passes as poetry; and often putting
upon it the stamp of ridicule, he carried unconsciously into his
lines the enchanting splendor, -- the resistless charm, -- of
metered rhyme. It is this, more than any other single factor, which
will one day compel impartial and unprejudiced critics to place him
among the first, if not at the head, of the great masters of
English prose.

     So naturally did his thoughts find harmonious expression, that
scarcely a page of his finer productions fails to afford, here and
there, material for exquisite blank verse.

     Thus "The Warp and Woof," only part of which (for spacial
reasons) will be quoted, may be arranged so that the prevailing
measure will be iambic pentameter: --

       "The rise and set of sun,
             The birth and death of day,
        The dawns of silver and the dusks of gold,
             The wonders of rain and snow,
        The shroud of winter and the many-colored robes of spring,
             The lonely moon with nightly loss or gain,
        The serpent lightning and thunder's voice,
             The tempest's fury and the breath of morn,
        The threat of storm and promise of the bow;
             Cathedral clouds with dome and spire," etc.

                  Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
                               234

             INGERSOLL, A BIOGRAPHICAL APPRECIATION

     And elsewhere, in iambic rhythm rendered more conspicuous by
prosodical division and capitalization, this charming picture of
autumn: --

  "The withered banners of the corn are still,
        And gathered fields are growing strangely wan,
   White death, poetic death,
        With hands that color what they touch,
   Weaves in the autumn wood
        Its tapestries and gold."

     Speaking of the part that myths have played in the evolution
of religious thought, he says, in perfect iambic rhythm: --

     "They thrilled the vines of Spring with tremulous desire; Made
tawny Summer's billowed breast the throne and home of love; Filled
Autumn's arms with sun-kissed grapes and gathered sheaves; And
pictured Winter as a weak old king Who felt, like Lear upon his
withered face, Cordelia's tears."

     The following rhapsodical tribute to Shelley is so strikingly
like what Poe defined as "The Rhythmical Creation of Beauty," that,
had it been written with ten syllables to the line, no more and no
less, as it could have been, regardless alike of sense and rhythm,
it would doubtless be called poetry: --

     "The light of morn beyond the purple hills -- - A palm that
lifts its coronet of leaves above the desert's sands -- An isle of
green in some far sea -- A spring that waits for lips of thirst --
A strain of music heard within some palace wrought of dreams -- A
cloud of gold above a setting sun -- A fragrance wafted from some
unseen shore."

     Concerning Shakespeare's understanding of human nature, he
expresses himself with a rhythm as wondrously beautiful as the
molten undulations left by the sinking sun: --

     "He knew the thrills and ecstasies of love, The savage joys of
hatred and revenge. He heard the hiss of envy's snakes And watched
the eagles of ambition soar. There was no hope that did not put its
star above his head -- No fear he had not felt -- No joy that had
not shed its sunshine on his face."

Again of Shakespeare: --

  "He walked the ways of mighty Rome,
   And saw great Caesar with his legions in the field.
   He stood with vast and motley throngs
   And watched the triumphs given to victorious men,
   Followed by uncrowned kings, the captured hosts, and all
            the spoils of ruthless war.
   He heard the shouts that shook the Coliseum's roofless walls,
   When from the reeling gladiator's hand the short sword fell,
   While from his bosom gushed the stream of wasted life."

     It will be observed, that, excepting a single line in the
last, both of these Shakespearean quotations, like the one on 


                         Bank of Wisdom
                  Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
                               235

             INGERSOLL, A BIOGRAPHICAL APPRECIATION

Shelley, could be arranged in perfectly regular blank verse, with
five iambic feet (ten syllables) to the line. It will also he
observed, that, should they be so arranged, their sense would be
marred, and they would lose insouciance and rhythmic beauty. What
would be left? And yet, had they been originally written thus, by
some professional poet schooled to sacrifice substance to mere
traditional literary form, they would have been classed as poetry.
Indeed, that this is precisely what would have occurred, even had
they possessed less of poetic quality than they do, there is ample
evidence. As introductory of a fragment of it, I quote: --

     "The red man came -- the roaming hunter tribes, warlike and
fierce, and the mound-builders vanished from the earth. The
solitude of centuries untold has settled where they dwelt. The
prairie wolf hunts in their meadows, and his fresh-dug den yawns by
my path. The gopher mines the ground where stood their swarming
cities."

     Surely the average reader, chancing upon this passage, would
not suspect that he was being enriched beyond the potencies of good
prose: and yet, no less a judge of literature than William Cullen
Bryant evidently regarded it as poetry; for he wrote and published
it as such, in blank verse of just ten syllables, under the title
The Prairies, as follows: --

                 "The red man came --
       The roaming hunter tribes, warlike and fierce,
       And the mound-builders vanished from the earth.
       The solitude of centuries untold
       Has settled where they dwelt. The prairie wolf
       Hunts in their meadows, and his fresh-dug den
       Yawns by my path. The gopher mines the ground
       Where stood their swarming cities."

     But let it be understood, that this passage is not quoted with
the object of asserting that it is not poetry, nor with the
purposive implication that the scores of productions in like form
which might be quoted from other sources are not poetry. Rather is
it quoted with the object of rendering the reader receptive to a
question which I have had in mind for many years, and which I now
ask, in simple justice: If that which, when transformed into prose,
is indistinguishable from it may be retransformed into verse and
legitimately called poetry, what term shall be applied to that
which, although originally written as prose, contains imaginative,
emotional, rhythmic, and tonal qualities unmistakably placing it
above and beyond good prose? That is to ask, if the quotation from
Bryant is poetry, what are the quotations from Ingersoll? If Bryant
and others of his school were poets, what was Ingersoll? Let us be
candid; let us be fair; let us be sensible.

     Form is one thing; substance, or quality, quite another. Form
is not an alembic transmuting the baser mental metals into gold. It
does not create -- it is created. It cannot change prose to poetry,
nor poetry to prose. volumes of prose have been written as poetry;
volumes of poetry, as prose.




                         Bank of Wisdom
                  Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
                               236

             INGERSOLL, A BIOGRAPHICAL APPRECIATION

     The truth is, that, of all the elements of recognized poetic
form, only one is absolutely indispensable to poetry-rhythm. There
may be very great poetry without rhyme, and without perfect meter;
but poetry without rhythm is not poetry: it is mere verse. It is a
heart that does not beat -- a stream without cataracts -- a willow
that does not wave -- a bird without wings -- a star that does not
shine.

     This indispensable element of poetry, -- this indefinable
something that haunts with enchanting spell the golden temple of
enraptured song, -- is apparent in all of Ingersoll's finer work.
Of course, it is rendered more so by the formal treatment which I
have applied to particular selections; but, unlike that of a
considerable portion of the professional poet's blank verse, it
cannot be obscured by the prose form, in which Ingersoll usually
cast his printed thoughts. Of this, there is no stronger nor more
pleasing evidence than the following fragment of one of his
controversial Papers: --

     "Life is a shadowy, strange, and winding road on which we
travel for a little way -- a few short steps -- just from the
cradle, with its lullaby of love, to the low and quiet wayside inn,
where all at last must sleep, and where the only salutation is --
Good night."

     In exercising the art of expression, Ingersoll kept to himself
all that was back of the scene. He made no explanation -- offered
no excuse. His presence was his prelude; his pen was his preface.
He knew that a glance behind the canvas mars the effect of the
greatest painting. Very few writers, and still fewer orators,
appear to recognize this vital aesthetic truth. Hence most of them,
by way of introduction, usually exhibit all of the defects that an
imperfect mastery can reveal -- the crude ideas and rejected
fragments -- the very interior of their mental workshops. It is
like a glimpse of the kitchen from the banquet board.

     What would the tender and enthralling lines to "Chloris" be
worth were they prefaced by Burns to imply, that, before writing
them, he had carefully and conscientiously compared her with the
other girls? Think of it!

     Most writers are affected with a sort of verbose diathesis.
Having almost no imagination, they credit the reader with a like
amount. They anticipate the very motions of his brain -- tell
everything. Their lines are prison-bars between which fettered
fancy catches only now and then a glimpse of field and sky. With
such a style, Ingersoll had no patience. He despised detail, the
mathematical, the provincial. In short, he was an idealist; and his
style, like the rainbow, arched in iridescent wonder the
intellectual sky. He knew that one mind can get from another no
more than it is "capable of receiving," and that, between the
words, there should always be room for the reader or hearer to use
the brush and chisel. He knew that every mind, in spite of others,
-- in spite of itself, -- takes its own peculiar view. He realized
that the greatest work of art is, at most, only a sort of mental
arbor where cling and run the vines of fancy, springing from the
brain of whomsoever reads or sees. Most of these vines would be 


                         Bank of Wisdom
                  Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
                               237

             INGERSOLL, A BIOGRAPHICAL APPRECIATION

dwarfed and flowerless, and not last half the season through; some
might live, but would not thrive; others still, with exuberance
interwoven, would tender to mating songsters the hospitality of
countless leafy bowers, fling to summer dawns blossoms fit for
Juliet's breast, while beneath the mellowing skies would hang, in
clustered spheres and purple, the smiles and tears of April days,
the amorous kisses of unnumbered suns.

     There is a particular circumstance which those who would form
a just estimate of Ingersoll's expressional faculties should keep
constantly in mind: he was, first of all, an orator. By dint of the
orator's power and prestige did he lay claim upon contemporaries;
and under the orator's almost fateful disadvantages must he lay
claim upon posterity. The present has memories; the future will
have type and tradition. The critic, the student, even the admirer,
in the years to be will know and feel only so much of the
expressional power of this great personality as can be conveyed by
the illusive and inadequate medium of the insensate page. Gone, --
fading in the mist of memory, -- the noble form; silent, -- echoing
only in the hearts of a lessening few, -- the voice that soothed
and silvered common speech, and glorified the un-remembering air;
vanished the enthralling presence -- a presence that held in magic
spell the spirit of the springtime dawn, -- the calm of fulfilled
noon, -- the peacefulness of eventide, -- the tranquillity of
midnight upon the starlit plain.

     So in Ingersoll the orator were blended, in matchless harmony,
nature's rarest and noblest gifts. The circumstances under which
the latter first became manifest, -- under which he discovered 
himself, -- are as interesting as they were anomalous.

     Robert Ingersoll was in his late teens when a presumably
orthodox gentleman who had been selected to speak at a Sunday-
school picnic, on the Fourth of July, near a small town in
Illinois, was prevented by illness, at the veritable "eleventh
hour," from keeping his engagement. Thereupon the good people who
were charged with seeing that the programme was carried out in its
original completeness, and who had heard something of young
Ingersoll's oratorical inclinations, invited him to take the place
of the delinquent one.

     The youthful substitute chose as his theme the patriots and
heroes of the Revolution. Familiar, of course, with the great and
noble services which Thomas Paine had rendered, not only to
America, but to the whole world, before, during, and after that
struggle, and resenting, with deepest indignation, the base
ingratitude which had been his lot simply and solely because of his
subsequent deistical and anti-christian writings, Ingersoll had
previously made a resolution never to deliver a speech without
mentioning the name of the "Author-Hero." The probability that
those whom he was about to address were somewhat deficient in
reliable data concerning the author of Common Sense, The Crisis,
The Right of Man, etc. doubtless served to confirm, in Ingersoll's
judgment, the wisdom of the resolution just mentioned. Anyway, the
memory of Thomas Paine received at that Sunday-school picnic its
rightful meed. This, of course, was met with resentment --
resentment which the youthful speaker read unmistakably in the 


                         Bank of Wisdom
                  Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
                               238

             INGERSOLL, A BIOGRAPHICAL APPRECIATION

faces and voices of his orthodox elders. But in the same faces and
voices, he read something else -- evidence of kindled emotion; for,
many times during his speech, -- made without preparation, -- his
hearers were moved alternately to laughter and tears. In that
laughter and those tears, -- in that April of his genius, -- Robert
Ingersoll saw the many-colored bow of promise. For the first time,
he realized that he held the magic key which, even through the
cankerous rust of prejudice, could reach and unlock the secrets of
the soul.

     Of the "rarest and noblest gifts," visible and invisible,
which 'nature blended with matchless harmony in Ingersoll the
orator,' I would here mention eyes, features, and physique; for
these were by no means the least of the many factors which combined
to constitute in him "that wonderful thing called presence."

     His eyes, then, were light-blue, changing, with varying moods,
to gray, -- changing markedly; and his face was "the face that
mirrored thoughts." Among the orators of the world, from Pericles
to the present, there is no face like the face of Ingersoll. As you
gaze upon it, you feel that nature has reached the summit -- that
she can rise no higher, can do no more -- that she, at last, has
done what she set out to do. This face is human! -- you feel that
a great brain is in partnership with a great heart, and that the
heart is senior partner. The lines of the former seem everywhere
just subdued by the lines of the latter -- the lines of intellect
to blend easily, gladly, with the lines of art. The forehead, the
eyes, the nose, of the thinker are also those of the artist and
philanthropist; the mouth and chin of the intellectual gladiator
are also the mouth and chin of the poet, -- almost of the mother.
As you gaze upon this face, you feel that mercy, at last, has found
expression -- every unfortunate, a friend; that the moans of every
martyr, -- the longings of every exile, -- the agonies of every
victim of dungeon, rack, and chain, -- the burdens of every slave,
-- the despair and wretchedness of every outcast, -- the cries of
every unmothered babe, -- the sobs and yearnings of every abused or
hungry child, -- were heard and felt by the unknown sculptor who
traced the lines; -- that those lines express the rapturous
realization of an eon-wished, but hitherto unpictured and
unembodied, ideal. And you feel that, after all, man's melancholy
martyrdom was not in vain; that the race has possibilities; that
its future is radiant with hope. This face has the contour, the
symmetry, the poise and balance, the confidence, the integrity, the
frankness, the open honesty -- the naturalness -- of nature. In it
are the joy of June and the serenity of September. And yet there is
earnestness, determination, unmistakable. In fact, you look upon
this face, and you feel that, were it just a trifle less serious,
you should smile. You look a moment longer, and -- you smile! and
are satisfied.

     ln height Ingersoll was six feet, minus half an inch; and, in
his prime, he weighed from two hundred to two hundred and twenty
pounds. This brief statement, in conjunction with the preceding
text and illustrations, might, perhaps, suffice as a description of
his physical appearance, were it not for the remarkable fact
(repeatedly noted by intimate friends), that, when he stepped upon
the platform before an audience, he seemed suddenly to become a 


                         Bank of Wisdom
                  Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
                               239

             INGERSOLL, A BIOGRAPHICAL APPRECIATION

giant in stature, -- far ampler and taller than he actually was --
seemed to rise on the spirit of the occasion, to the supreme
command of everything in sight! The greater the occasion and the
audience, the greater he seemed to become, and the higher he seemed
to rise. He was peculiarly, preeminently, "the born orator" -- born
anew with every inspiration. Of incomparable physique, -- the broad
and massive shoulders supporting a perfectly molded head -- with
the formidableness of an antique warrior, and yet the gentle mien
of a child -- his was a presence to command the attention of the
Olympian gods. The admirer of the majestic, the heroic, the classic
in poise and bearing, -- of the Grecian ideal in breathing flesh,
-- who never sat with an audience as Robert G. Ingersoll strode
upon the stage and stood "foursquare to all the winds that blew,"
has missed such an unforgettable impression as will not again be
the proud and happy fortune of mankind.

     Oratory is the noblest stream that flows from the hidden
spring of the ideal to the illimitable ocean of expression.
Ingersoll was acquainted by nature with the course of that stream
-- knew its every inch, from where it, dallying, sparkles like a
silver thread among the rocks and hills of thought, to where its
mighty current forces back the tides of error in the broad estuary
of persuasion.

     Of course, as already mentioned, oratory cannot be put upon
paper It cannot even be separated from the times and the scenes
that produce it, nor from the effects that it in turn produces. As
dead protoplasm is no longer protoplasm, so a printed oration is
not an oration. The unprecedented occasion -- the opportunity
previously sought in vain, but now within the orator's grasp; the
vast assemblage waiting only for the magic voice that shall set
vibrating in unison with each other, and with those of the orator,
the secret chords of sympathy and emotion; the flashing eye, the
poise, the gesture, and the thrilling pause -- language too
eloquent for utterance -- these are as much a part of the oration
as are its words.

     But while the latter alone are comparatively valueless in
judging the orator as such, they do enable us to judge him as
verbal artist and philosopher.

     To attempt a final selection from the gems that, for forty
years, fell from the golden lips of Ingersoll, seems well nigh
hopeless. To choose from most other geniuses, would be an easy
task. Their average product contains enough of the commonplace to
distinguish passages that are really grand. But Ingersoll left
nothing commonplace. Great lines, -- thoughts that touch the
universal, -- poems of subdue shade, -- are found on almost every
page. Many sentences are music, as sweet as the Orphean lyre, and
will hold their power to charm as long as genius knows its kith and
kin. There was no thought, fancy, sentiment, emotion, or passion in
the expression of which he was not supreme. He was the Phidias of
verbal sculpture -- the Michelangelo of words. From the gallery of
his mind, he selected symbols, figures, pictures, as easily, -- as
naturally, -- as the sea tosses upon the sand a nameless gem.




                         Bank of Wisdom
                  Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
                               240

             INGERSOLL, A BIOGRAPHICAL APPRECIATION

     So the question as to which is Ingersoll's oratorical
masterpiece is preeminently, -- almost distinctively, -- one that
does not permit of a confident answer. Yet, ask the average person
to name that masterpiece, and he will mention the "Plumed Knight
Speech" or A Tribute to Ebon C. Ingersoll or possibly, A Vision of
War. Why I do not know. Probably it is because he has read one of
them. For, though perfect of their kind, none of them, I judge, is
better entitled to distinction than are several other productions
of our orator.

     Take the "Soliloquy" at the grave of Napoleon -- only a few
sentences, to be sure -- a few touches of the brush; and yet it is
a complete and perfect picture of that marvelous life, from the
insatiable ambition which would grasp and hold the world, to the
Stygian midnight of despair and gloom which settled at St. Helena.
There, "gazing out upon the sad and solemn sea" -- "the only woman
that ever loved him pushed from his heart by the cold hand of
ambition" -- stands the great Napoleon. And beside the "poor
peasant," in "wooden shoes," but surrounded by loving wife and
happy children, how small and wretched!

     Then there is "The Cemetery" -- "that vast cemetery called the
past," wherein are "most of the religions of men," and "nearly all
their gods," from India's mystic shrines to the divine fires of our
Aztecs -- a view of comparative mythology and religion which is
universal in its scope, and which is expressed with the charm of
consummate art.

     And the Shakespearean lecture -- a vine of words that twines
with subtle delicacy and grace around the mighty oak of
Shakespeare's brain. I have often thought that there are two
productions which should be in the hands of every student of
English, -- Spencer's Philosophy of Style and Ingersoll's lecture
on Shakespeare: the first, to show why certain words and
expressions are used in preference to others; the last, how they
are used. This lecture contains, in my judgment, the noblest
metaphor in our language: --

"Shakespeare was an intellectual ocean, whose waves touched all the
shores of thought; within which were all the fate, ambition and
revenge; upon which fell the gloom and darkness of despair and
death and all the sunlight of content and love, and within which
was the inverted sky lit with eternal stars -- an intellectual
ocean -- towards which all rivers ran, and from which now the isles
and continents of thought receive their dew and rain."

     Many other selections, taken here and there, are hardly less
notable. How many have read the following? and yet what
physiologist, psychologist, poet, or philosopher has left a truer
description of the human brain? --

     "The dark continent of motive and desire has never been
explored. In the brain, that wondrous world with one inhabitant,
there are recesses dim and dark, treacherous sands and dangerous
shores, where seeming sirens tempt and fade; streams that rise in
unknown lands from hidden springs, strange seas with ebb and flow
of tides, restless billows urged by storms of flame, profound and 


                         Bank of Wisdom
                  Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
                               241

             INGERSOLL, A BIOGRAPHICAL APPRECIATION

awful depths hidden by mist of dreams, obscure and phantom realms
where vague and fearful things are half revealed, jungles where
passion's tigers crouch, and skies of cloud and blue where fancies
fly with painted wings that dazzle and mislead; and the poor of
this pictured world is led by old desires and ancient hates, and
stained by crimes of many vanished years, and pushed by hands that
long ago were dust, until he feels like some bewildered slave that
Mockery has throned and crowned."

Could the student of human nature -- could any one who has climbed
unhelped, or in spite of opposition, the ladder of success --
possibly fail to catch the golden thread that runs through this
iambic epigram? --

     "Obstruction is but virtue's foil. From thwarted light leaps
color's flame. The stream impedded has a song."

     Think of the spirit of liberty that breathes through this
sentence: --

     "Let us go the broad way where science goes -- through the
open fields, past the daisied slopes, where sunlight, lingering,
seems to sleep and dream."

     His ability to find in the words of his very adversaries the
weapons of attack, -- to capture the enemy's ordnance and use it
against its owner, -- is well shown in describing "The Infidel": --

     "He knew that all the pomp and glitter had been purchased with
liberty -- that priceless jewel of the soul. In looking at the
cathedral he remembered the dungeon. The music of the organ was not
loud enough to drown the clank of fitters. He could not forget that
the taper had lighted the fagot. He knew that the cross adorned the
hilt of the sword, and so where others worshiped, he wept."

     What other orator, standing at the grave of a friend, has
uttered such praise as the following? -- hyperbole so perfect that
it actually does not seem an exaggeration! --

     "Her heart was open as the gates of day. She shed kindness as
the sun sheds light. If all her deeds were flowers, the air would
be faint with perfume. If all her charities could change to
melodies, a symphony would fill the sky."

     And could human speech be more tenderly pathetic than in the
lines in behalf of the aged actors whom death has claimed? --

     "And then the silence falls on darkness.

     "Some loving hands should close their eyes; some loving lips
should leave upon their pallid brows a kiss; some friends should
lay the breathless forms away, and on the graves drop blossoms
jeweled with the tears of love."

     It required three of the Rhodian artists to chisel the Laocoon
group; but, in the Decoration Day Oration of 1882, Ingersoll alone
chiseled an allegorical group, which, in perfection at least, is 
its companion-piece: --

                         Bank of Wisdom
                  Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
                               242

             INGERSOLL, A BIOGRAPHICAL APPRECIATION

     "Pity pointed to the scarred and bleeding backs of slaves;
Mercy heard the sobs of mothers reft of babes, and justice held
aloft the scales, in which one drop of blood shed by a master's
lash, outweighed a nation's gold."

     Having included the preceding, it would be very hard to omit
the closing sentences of A Vision of War: --

     "Those heroes are dead. They died for liberty -- they died for
us. They are at rest. They sleep in the land they made free, under
the flag they rendered stainless, under the solemn pines, the sad
hemlocks, the tearful willows, and the embracing vines. They sleep
beneath the shadows od clouds, careless alike of sunshine or of
storm, each in the windowless palace of Rest. Earth may run red
with other wars -- they are at peace. In the midst of battle, in
the roar of conflict, they found the serenity of death. I have one
sentiment for soldiers living and dead: Cheers for the living; 
tears for the dead."

     What majesty! What harmony! What soulful perfection! -- "under
the solemn pines, the sad hemlocks, the tearful willows, and the
embracing vines"; and "in the windowless palace of Rest." One must
indeed be faintly impressible to beauty, who should hope to do
justice to the author of such words as these.

     Were he not necessarily aware of the sad depth to which the
noxious roots of religious prejudice penetrate the mental soil of
mediocrity, the justly appreciative reader of the selections here
quoted or mentioned would, despairing, wonder at the comparatively
meager praise elsewhere bestowed upon their author. And with a
reviewer who should utterly ignore the source of so many matchless
thoughts, such reader could have but little patience. Suppose that
the spirit of an absolutely unprejudiced literary critic, visiting
this earth from another sphere, should find in some "Library of the
World's Best Literature" liberal selections from America's
recognized literati, with no mention of Life, A Vision of War,
Shakespeare, or any of the "tributes." What, in the reader's
judgment, would be that angel's opinion of literary editors? Yet
this is precisely what would be found. There are in our libraries
to-day compilations containing no reference to Ingersoll, but
including productions of scores of writers who are all but
commonplace, and whose combined efforts could never have resulted
in even one of his masterpieces.

     He shared with poets and philosophers the ability to express,
with appositeness, lucidity, and beauty, the utmost in a line. He
was gifted to an extraordinary degree with the phrasal and the
epigrammatic faculties. Definitions, descriptions, comparisons,
illustrations, generalizations, fell from his lips as fall the
ripened fruits from autumn's laden boughs. Thus he referred to the
bygone centuries as --

     "The withered leaves of time that strew the desert of the
past."

     In the aurora borealis, he beheld --



                         Bank of Wisdom
                  Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
                               243

             INGERSOLL, A BIOGRAPHICAL APPRECIATION

     "The morning of the North when the glittering lances pierce
the shield of night."

     He was --

     "Touched and saddened by autumn, the grace and poetry of
death."

     Where others saw merely the snowflakes blown singly or in
flurries, he could see --

     "the infantry of the snows and the cavalry of the wild blast."

     Than this it would be difficult to find in English a more
strikingly suggestive figure.

     With a delicacy rivaling Shelley's reference to the lids of
the sleeping Ianthe, he described the breast of woman as --

     "Life's drifted font, blue-veined and fair, where perfect
peace finds perfect form."

     Condemning alike the practices of the "insane ascetic" and the
"fool of pleasure," he defined temperance as --

     "The golden path along the strip of virtue that lies between
the deserts of extremes."

     The secret of his countless tributes to manhood, heroism, and
genius is revealed in this line: --

     "Gratitude is the fairest flower that sheds its perfume in the
heart."

     There was in Ingersoll the marvelous extravagance of Hugo --
of Shakespeare. Referring to the hopefulness of a beautiful but
helpless girl -- a paralytic -- whom he had visited, he said that

     "her brave and cheerful spirit over wreck and ruin of her body
like morning on the desert."

     While the selections thus far quoted, -- particularly in the
present chapter, -- are extraordinarily rich in epigrammatic
quality, they are nevertheless inadequate in doing full justice to
Ingersoll's genius in the latter regard.

     Our philosopher was not one of those individuals who sit down
deliberately to write epigrams. Had he been such, he doubtless
would not now be creditable with a greater number of really
noteworthy sayings than any other American. Like Burns's poem's,
Ingersoll's epigrams wrote themselves.

     In the one that follows, we are reminded, by the way, of the
"ploughman poet's" partiality for common sense and real genius, in
contradistinction to mere book-learning and acquired talent: --

     "For the most part, colleges are places where pebbles are
polished and diamonds are dimmed."

                         Bank of Wisdom
                  Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
                               244

             INGERSOLL, A BIOGRAPHICAL APPRECIATION

     In our next selection, we find cause to wonder at Ingersoll's
intimate knowledge of things in which he never indulged: --

     "A brazen falsehood and a timid truth are the parents of
compromise."

And --

     "Apology is the prelude to retreat."

     In illustration of the truth that great cares and sorrows are
rare with most of us, -- that trivialities make up the bulk of 
life's burdens, -- he said: --

     "The traveler is bothered more with dust than mountains."

     He observed that --

     "The road is short to anything we fear,"

     That --

     "Joy lives in the house beyond the one we reach,"

     And that --

     "Hope is the only bee that makes honey without flowers."

     Ingersoll uttered in the fewer, shortest words the profoundest
philosophic truths, -- the wisest ethical precepts.

     Than the following sixteen syllables what pompous array of
sentences and paragraphs could more truly express the conclusion of
every candid man who has really thought? --

     "The golden bridge of life from gloom emerges and on shadow
rests."

     He was the philosopher, not only of moral, but of mental
honesty, -- of perfect intellectual veracity; and he observed that

     "Cunning plates fraud with the gold of honesty, and veneers
vice with virtue."

But that, nevertheless --

     "There is nothing shrewder in this world than intelligent
honesty. Perfect candor is sword and shield."

And he declared that --

     "Nobility is a question of character, not of birth.

     "Honor cannot be received as alms -- it must be earned.

     "It is the brow that makes the wreath of glory green."

     He was the philosopher of right: --

                         Bank of Wisdom
                  Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
                               245

             INGERSOLL, A BIOGRAPHICAL APPRECIATION

     "Every man in the right is my brother."

     Although painfully aware that "innocence is not a perfect
shield" against the aggressiveness of evil, he still asserted that

     "The gem of the brain is the innocence of the soul."

     He was the philosopher of human love -- a believer in its
protecting and redeeming powers: --

     "Vice lives either before Love is born, or after Love is
dead."

     In the following line, conscience comes to solace the victim
of unmerited neglect: --

     "It is better to deserve without receiving than to receive
without deserving."

     He was the philosopher of freedom: --

     "In the realm of Freedom, waste is husbandry. He who puts
chains upon the body of another shackles his own soul."

     He was the philosopher of sympathy. He believed that no
character could be so lofty that it would not be elevated by
pitying even the very lowest: --

     "We rise by raising others -- and he who stoops above the
fallen, stands erect."

     To those who would seek life's goal solely in the heights of
fame, he said: --

     "Happiness dwells in the valleys with the shadows."

     He condenses the conclusions of modern physical science into
these nine words: --

     "A grain of sand can defy all the gods."

     In the following line our language is enriched with a new
definition: --

     "Wisdom is the science of happiness."

     To the morally short-sighted, he utters this warning: --

     "He loads the dice against himself, who scores a point against
the right."

     Is there in progressive literature a more substantial line
than the following? --

     "Fear is the dungeon of the mind."

     He declares that --


                         Bank of Wisdom
                  Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
                               246

             INGERSOLL, A BIOGRAPHICAL APPRECIATION

     "Intellectual freedom is only the right to be honest."

     This is one of the subtlest and profoundest truths. A person
who has not the right to express his honest thoughts has not the
right to be honest.

     But in none of the preceding epigrams, perhaps, is there
stronger proof of profound and subtle intellect than in the
following fragment of an argument for the doctrine of necessity: --

     "To the extent that we have wants, we are not free. To the
extent that we do not have wants, we do not act."

     And yet it has been said that the author of these lines was
not a thinker!

     It is barely necessary to state, that, making due allowance,
in many cases, for unavoidable incompleteness, the selections which
have been included in this chapter, and in this work as a whole,
are, in my judgment, fairly representative of the artistic and
intellectual Ingersoll. Should they not seem fully to justify my
estimate of him, I could only wish that they might at least awaken
sufficient interest to prompt their unbiased comparison with an
equal number of selections, of kindred nature, from some reformer,
lawyer, patriot, philosopher, orator, and poet whose title to 
enduring fame is universally recognized.







                          ****     ****

    Reproducible Electronic Publishing can defeat censorship.

   The Bank of Wisdom Inc. is a collection of the most thoughtful,
scholarly and factual books. These computer books are reprints of
suppressed books and will cover American and world history; the
Biographies and writings of famous persons, and especially of our
nations Founding Fathers. They will include philosophy and
religion. all these subjects, and more, will be made available to
the public in electronic form, easily copied and distributed, so
that America can again become what its Founders intended --

                 The Free Market-Place of Ideas.

   The Bank of Wisdom is always looking for more of these old,
hidden, suppressed and forgotten books that contain needed facts
and information for today. If you have such books please contact
us, we need to give them back to America.

                          ****     ****





                         Bank of Wisdom
                  Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
                               247