FullReads

Before this, Tilton started out to star the country as a lecturer. He evidently thought he could climb to popularity over the wreck of Henry Ward Beecher. Even had he wrecked Beecher completely, it is very likely he would have gone down in the swirl, and become literary flotsam and jetsam just the same.

Tilton had failed to down his man, and men who are failures do not draw on the lecture platform. The auditor has failure enough at home, God knows! and what he wants when he lays down good money for a lecture-ticket is to annex himself to a success.

Tilton’s lecture was called, “The Problem of Life”–a title which had the advantage of allowing the speaker to say anything he wished to say on any subject and still not violate the unities. I heard Tilton give this lecture twice, and it was given from start to finish in exactly the same way. It contained much learning–had flights of eloquence, bursts of bathos, puffs of pathos, but not a smile in the whole hour and a half. It was faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null, dead perfection–no more. It was so perfect that some people thought it great. The man was an actor and had what is called platform presence. He would walk on the stage, carrying his big, blue cloak over his arm, his slouch-hat in his hand–for he clung to these Beecher properties to the last, even claiming that Beecher was encroaching on his preserve in wearing them.

He would bow as stiffly and solemnly as a new-made judge. Then he would toss the cloak on a convenient sofa, place the big hat on top of it, and come down to the footlights, deliberately removing his yellow kid gloves. There was no introduction–he was the whole show and brooked no competition. He would begin talking as he removed the gloves; he would get one glove off and hold it in the other hand, seemingly lost in his speech. From time to time he would emphasize his remarks by beating the palm of his gloved hand with the loose glove. By the time the lecture was half over, both gloves would be lying on the table; unlike the performance of Sir Edwin Arnold, who, during his readings, always wore one white kid glove and carried its mate in the gloved hand from beginning to end.

Theodore Tilton’s lectures were consummate art, done by a handsome, graceful and cultured man in a red necktie, but they did not carry enough caloric to make them go. They seemed to lack vibrations. Art without a message is for the people who love art for art’s sake, and God does not care much for these, otherwise he would not have made so few of them.

* * * * *

Lyman Abbott sums up his estimate of the worth of his lifelong friend and literary associate, Henry Ward Beecher, in the following words:

“It was in the pulpit that Beecher was seen at his best. His mastery of the English tongue, his dramatic power, his instinctive art of impersonation, which had become a second nature, his vivid imagination, his breadth of intellectual view, the catholicity of his sympathies, his passionate enthusiasm, which made for the moment his immediate theme seem to him the one theme of transcendent importance, his quaint humor alternating with genuine pathos, and above all his simple and singularly unaffected devotional nature, made him as a preacher without a peer in his own time and country. His favorite theme was love: love to man was to him the fulfilment of all law; love of God was the essence of all Christianity. Retaining to the day of his death the forms and phrases of the New England theology in which he had been reared, he poured into them a new meaning and gave to them a new significance.