THE REV. W. MORLEY PITNSHON, M.A.
TM" student of English politics can seldom see a more striking
or instructive sight than Exeter Hall crowded to excess by a sea of eager faces, fixed in one concentrated gaze on Mr. Spurgeon or Mr. W. Morley Punshon as orator, with Lord Shaftesbury or the Honourable Arthur Kinnaird in the chair. Those well-packed human atoms, the movements and attitudes of whose thought are all swayed by the slightest inflexion of the representative mind which addresses them, stand for the great inert mass of a most important section of English opinion ; the 'orator himself embodies the projectile force that impresses on the mass a steady uniform direction of motion, while in the pale shimmer of faint aristocratic piety in the chair we see the centre of Conservative influence which constantly curves that strong, not to say coarse, motive power, of average middle-class hearts and opinions into an orbit of fixed political habit and routine. It is one, at least, of the great secrets of political stability in England that every form of extra-political social force is represented in the highest as well as the lower strata of English society. You can find no creed so narrow and vehement but some nobleman will be found to back it, and therefore to divert it from any revolutionary tendencies into a normal power that is not only content with, but proud. of, the existing forms of English society. But for this shelv- ing away of the social grades within the same stratum of narrow religious belief, it would be difficult to see men like Mr. Morley l'unshon riding the thoughts and wishes of the middle classes with as much ease and mastery as Mr. Gladstone ever displayed. in the House of Commons, or Messrs. Cobden and Bright in a free- trade meeting, without some anxiety for the future of intel- lectual freedom. There is such a menacing combination of earnestness, bitter intolerance, and narrow self-satisfaction, about the thoughts which awaken the enthusiastic echoes of these listening crowds, that were it not for that pale splendour in the chair by which we know their tidal movements to be regulated, and which we know to be in its turn subject to imperious social influences of a wider and more liberal nature than those which reach it from below, we should look with dread at the rapidly- growing ascendancy of orators like Mr. Spurgeon andMr.Punshon, who wield the powers of a very effective rhetoric without in any
degree commanding the field of thought through which they aim at leading their audience.
It has been the custom to regard rhetoric as an art wielded from above by a student of human nature, who is anxious to avail him- self most skilfully of its tendencies for persuasive purposes. Thus De Quincey tells us that " by Eloquence we understand the overflow of powerful feelings upon occasions fitted to excite them ; but Rhetoric is the art of aggrandizing and bringing out into strong relief, by means of various and striking thoughts, some aspect of truth [or, we suppose, falsehood], which is itself supported by no spontaneous feelings, and, therefore, rests" upon artificial aids." When De Quince), wrote this he wag thinking of a rhetoric that is cultivated in a sphere of thought high above the masses whom it is intended to sway—of the great Greek and Latin rhetoricians, and of such English rhetori- cians as Jeremy Taylor and Sir Thomas Browne. Yet we are certainly beginning to see the rise of a class of orators who are at least as oratorical as they are eloquent, who set forth, that is, " aspects of truth or falsehood supported by no spontaneous feelings and resting on artificial aids," quite as much as they express emotions, and yet whose thought is scarcely raised at all above the level of their audience. Athens had such orators probably in men like Cleon, and England has had them at intervals for the last century; but, as a rule, even the least respect- able favourites of the crowd have till lately been orators artistically playing on the feeling of the masses with a clear perception of their- own skill and their own ends in so doing, like O'Connell; while the great line of orators have really exercised, to a certain degree, the " redemptive power " of all true oratory, and used their art to snatch up the masses for a time into a world of thought and. sentiment much higher than their own. Such orators, for instance, were certainly John Wesley and his brother preachers, on whom Mr. Morley Punshon discoursed so cleverly at Exeter Hall last Tuesday. But such, we can scarcely say, notwithstanding a real appreciation of their excellent intentions and substantial wortk, are not Mr. Spurgeon and Mr. Morley Punshon.
Mr. Morley Punshon is, no doubt, the greater rhetorician,. if the less eloquent, of the two. He js better educated than Mr. Spurgeon, never a buffoon, never vulgar, much less
more ornate, holds the reins tighter, sees his own way clearer,. and calculates his points with a distincter knowledge of the perspective of his subject. But in sympathies and intellectual range he is scarcely at all more the superior of his audience- than Mr. Spurgeon ; and, though in a homely and vulgar fashion, Mr. Spurgeon seems to have more reality of conscience. than Mr. Punshon. There is the artificial burnish of a divinity academy still visible on Mr. Punshon's mind, though it must be long since he left it ; he handles religious truths with a gloved hand,. while, as an able writer says, Mr. Spurgeon handles religious truths- as a grazier handles an ox,—i.e., we suppose coarsely, almost grossly as regards the motive, but with a direct sense of hard and soft, bone and outline, which divinity lecturers generally succeed in spoiling.. Mr. Punshon's strength is clearly greatest where he is not touching religious truth or formula at all. He has a large catholic sense of humour,—a suppressed irony of manner which, at his best, half- reminds us of Mr. Bright;—as when he said of Romaine, that be was " actually guilty of the coarse crime of overcrowding St.. George's, Hanover square, and persuading patricians that they had souls r or when he remarked that " Wesley was abruptly warner off from Newgate, lest he should make men wicked, and from Bedlam, lest he should drive men mad." Mr Punshon's face and whole manner express this kind of restrained humour. With a face that is caricatured, in the common prints pre- sented to you at the door of Exeter Hall, into a kind of compound between Sykes and Chadband,—greasy sensuousness, dominated by unscrupulous ferocity,—there is really a basis of much fundamental human breadth under artificial and apparently sacerdotal control,—the eyes far back in the head, and not wide open, giving an expression of narrow concentrated purpose and animosity of will,—the deep lines round the heavy mouth and chin carrying a half-quizzical effect, that sometimes takes the form of bitterness, and always gives an impression of driving ft•reef—. and a fixed set manner about the whole telling of a man who
might mould his views according to his perception of their power as instruments of action. There is a striking expression even
in his massive back, when it is turned to the audience,—a big,.
sober, broad-shouldered, inflexible back,---not vibrating, but slowly and ponderously turning on the central axis. And yet with alk this he is in some sense a natural orator :—not an orator of thought,. nor of Kling, for he is wilfully, intentionally ornate,-almoat• absurdlyornate, when you come to think aft4rwards of Whitt the man
really was, and yet of the flowery language he chose to use,—and yeteffective, from the sort of vehement purpose with which in the
• best parts of his lecture he brushed through the flowers of his own rhetoric. When he spoke of Whitefield abandoning himself to preaching, "glad as a gazelle upon the hills;" or when he said, " that you could no more confine him to a sect than you could chain the libertine breezes," there was a flaunting, tawdriness of rhetoric that could not but strike any cultivated ear,—and yet the rapid restrained voice in which he rushed through these and much other foolish.and tasteless masses of ornament, almost made you feel the driving force of the man more than if the inappropriate spangles had not been there. He did not emphasize his ornaments as if he were proud of them, but for the most part pushed through as if they were unfortunately in his way.
Yet there was one characteristic outburst of intolerant bigotry, and almost hate, which made one turn with a sense of safety to that complacent aristocratic smile whose owner occupied the chair, —a smile which seemed to regard the existence of God and spiri- tual Truth. as implying a compliment to the religious aristocracy in general, if not to the chairman in particular. With this
benignant regulating power over the meeting, one felt that even the hate whick denounced poor Bishop Colons) as a " spiritual garotter " was socially harmless. Passionately as Mr. Punshon denounced the heretic Bishop, it was curiously characteristic that he did.so on the ground that if a man's mind is always to be open to truth, and is never to cease to listen to historical evidence, no preotical organizations such as Wesley's could ever be achieved at all, since the stroke of paralyzing doubt might fall at any moment 011 the heart of the founder. The fierce tone in which Mr. Morley Punshon repudiated this suggestion of the devil's, and demanded the literal infallibility of the Bible as the only practical foundation, for successful religious institutions struck us almost with horror, while we looked only at his ascendancy over that sea of faces. The working postulate of all sectarian Protes- tant organizations, the orator evidently said to himself, should be true, must be true ; nay, he gave the impression that, whether true or not, for him and all good religious teachers it should be, and remain unquestioned,—for, as he amusingly and probably half unconsciously said in his peroration., Christians have the fulcrum which Archimedes wanted to move the world,—" the fulcrum is God's everlasting truth [Bible infallibility] and the power is in ourselves." That was no doubt a slip—but still a slip very charac- teristic both of the Wesleyan body, and of Mr. Morley Pun- Bison. He at least is evidently very much inclined indeed to make the Bible the mere supporting fulcrum for that "power in himself " which is to move the world. God, a very efficient instru- ment of man,'—that formula is not a little symptomatic of the sort of power wielded with an iron hand by the " Connection " which Mr. Punslion evidently thought Wesley's greatest, and we his most fatal, legacy to mankind.
And it expressed, too, Mr. Pnnshon's characteristic power and characteristic weakness as an orator. He makes an un- commonly effective use of religious influences when he allows his own strong will to be seen dominating and managing them. But he utterly fails in the celestial effects. When that strong and heavy face was cast up to the roof of Exeter Hall in a would-be seraphic extacy,—an extacy of set purpose,—the undimmed glasses through which we watched him presented to us a spectacle anything but moving, The gaslight lay upon as opaque a face as ever strove in vain for the irradiation of a Stephen ; neither in vision nor in reality was that solid roof opened above him ; it was as if Mr. Frederick Peel should become heavily extatic over a Treasury minute. Mr. Punshon can express much ; but let us warn him, as a Mend who has watched him closely, not to try again the angelic- transparency line. When he denounced in Wesley's words the iniquity of all slavery,—of American slavery most,—his audience felt instinctively that he had caught something of Wesley's spirit,—but as the heavy seraph he did not shine at all. And again in that elabo- rate peroration of his, when he hung with Mr. Glaisher in a bal- loon (half-physical; half-spiritual), between earth and heaven, and bade us see the clouds below, the heavenly light above, and adjured us to listen to the bells ringing for the marriage of the heavenly bride; the only thought suggested to a cultivated mind was how /ow it might perchance be possible for the mercury to fall in any balloon-car weighted by that massive and earthly form. Mr. Spurgeon has, we think, a more truly vivid and direct sense of elementary religious truth than Mr. Punshon, though the latter seems the abler and weightier-minded man. We should fear him ts an ecclesiastical persecutor much more than Mr. Spurgeon, notwithstanding all the Baptist orator's imagery of hell, There is a substantial relief in reflecting that the gentlemanly diluted piety of a great many ponourable3 Arthur Kinuairda- piety sincere enough, but which cannot but deeply respect average aristocratic opinion,—stands between Mr. Punshon and the ecclesiastical ends to which he might otherwise pervert his power over the middle class.
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