第39章 COLLEGE PAPERS(5)

One other word,however,before we have done.What shall we be when we grow really old?Of yore,a man was thought to lay on restrictions and acquire new deadweight of mournful experience with every year,till he looked back on his youth as the very summer of impulse and freedom.We please ourselves with thinking that it cannot be so with us.We would fain hope that,as we have begun in one way,we may end in another;and that when we are in fact the octogenarians that we SEEM at present,there shall be no merrier men on earth.It is pleasant to picture us,sunning ourselves in Princes Street of a morning,or chirping over our evening cups,with all the merriment that we wanted in youth.

III -DEBATING SOCIETIES

A DEBATING society is at first somewhat of a disappointment.

You do not often find the youthful Demosthenes chewing his pebbles in the same room with you;or,even if you do,you will probably think the performance little to be admired.As a general rule,the members speak shamefully ill.The subjects of debate are heavy;and so are the fines.The Ballot Question -oldest of dialectic nightmares -is often found astride of a somnolent sederunt.The Greeks and Romans,too,are reserved as sort of GENERAL-UTILITY men,to do all the dirty work of illustration;and they fill as many functions as the famous waterfall scene at the 'Princess's,'which I found doing duty on one evening as a gorge in Peru,a haunt of German robbers,and a peaceful vale in the Scottish borders.There is a sad absence of striking argument or real lively discussion.Indeed,you feel a growing contempt for your fellow-members;and it is not until you rise yourself to hawk and hesitate and sit shamefully down again,amid eleemosynary applause,that you begin to find your level and value others rightly.Even then,even when failure has damped your critical ardour,you will see many things to be laughed at in the deportment of your rivals.

Most laughable,perhaps,are your indefatigable strivers after eloquence.They are of those who 'pursue with eagerness the phantoms of hope,'and who,since they expect that 'the deficiencies of last sentence will be supplied by the next,'have been recommended by Dr.Samuel Johnson to 'attend to the History of Rasselas,Prince of Abyssinia.'

They are characterised by a hectic hopefulness.Nothing damps them.They rise from the ruins of one abortive sentence,to launch forth into another with unabated vigour.

They have all the manner of an orator.From the tone of their voice,you would expect a splendid period -and lo!a string of broken-backed,disjointed clauses,eked out with stammerings and throat-clearings.They possess the art (learned from the pulpit)of rounding an uneuphonious sentence by dwelling on a single syllable -of striking a balance in a top-heavy period by lengthening out a word into a melancholy quaver.Withal,they never cease to hope.Even at last,even when they have exhausted all their ideas,even after the would-be peroration has finally refused to perorate,they remain upon their feet with their mouths open,waiting for some further inspiration,like Chaucer's widow's son in the dung-hole,after 'His throat was kit unto the nekke bone,'in vain expectation of that seed that was to be laid upon his tongue,and give him renewed and clearer utterance.

These men may have something to say,if they could only say it -indeed they generally have;but the next class are people who,having nothing to say,are cursed with a facility and an unhappy command of words,that makes them the prime nuisances of the society they affect.They try to cover their absence of matter by an unwholesome vitality of delivery.They look triumphantly round the room,as if courting applause,after a torrent of diluted truism.They talk in a circle,harping on the same dull round of argument,and returning again and again to the same remark with the same sprightliness,the same irritating appearance of novelty.

After this set,any one is tolerable;so we shall merely hint at a few other varieties.There is your man who is pre-eminently conscientious,whose face beams with sincerity as he opens on the negative,and who votes on the affirmative at the end,looking round the room with an air of chastened pride.There is also the irrelevant speaker,who rises,emits a joke or two,and then sits down again,without ever attempting to tackle the subject of debate.Again,we have men who ride pick-a-back on their family reputation,or,if their family have none,identify themselves with some well-known statesman,use his opinions,and lend him their patronage on all occasions.This is a dangerous plan,and serves oftener,I am afraid,to point a difference than to adorn a speech.

But alas!a striking failure may be reached without tempting Providence by any of these ambitious tricks.Our own stature will be found high enough for shame.The success of three simple sentences lures us into a fatal parenthesis in the fourth,from whose shut brackets we may never disentangle the thread of our discourse.A momentary flush tempts us into a quotation;and we may be left helpless in the middle of one of Pope's couplets,a white film gathering before our eyes,and our kind friends charitably trying to cover our disgrace by a feeble round of applause.AMIS LECTEURS,this is a painful topic.It is possible that we too,we,the 'potent,grave,and reverend'editor,may have suffered these things,and drunk as deep as any of the cup of shameful failure.Let us dwell no longer on so delicate a subject.