James Whitcomb Riley
has this quality in his voice when reciting. Edwin Booth had it. All
great actors have it. Every true orator has it. It touches you
strangely, thrills you, affects you much as music does.
It is a remarkable thing that there _is neither wit nor humor in any
of the immortal speeches_ that have fallen from the lips of man. To
find a joke in Webster would be an offense. The only things which
Ingersoll wrote that will live are his oration at his brother's grave
and his famous "The Past Rises before Me like a Dream." But in neither
of these productions of this genius of jesters is there a single trace
of wit.
There is not a funny sally in all Burke's speeches. Lincoln's
Gettysburg address, his first and second inaugurals, his speech
beginning the Douglas campaign, and his Cooper Union address in New
York, are perhaps the only utterances of his that will endure.
Yet this greatest of story-tellers since AEsop did not deface one of
these great deliverances with story or any form of humor.
The reason for this is found in the whole tendency of human thought
and feeling--in the whole melancholy history of the race--where tears
and grief, the hard seriousness of life and the terrible and speedy
certainty of our common fate of suffering and of death, make somber
the master-cord of existence.
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