Of Quick or Slow Speech

It is reported of many great orators that those who had the arts of speaking well had not always the faculty of speaking promptly, and that those who had the faculty of speaking promptly did not always speak well. The faculties are not the same, and not always found together. Caesar and Cicero both had the gift, but they exercised it differently — one spoke as though dictating to an army, the other as though pleading before the gods. Both were magnificent. Neither method is inherently superior.

Those who are slow of tongue often have more substance in what they finally produce. The thought that has been held back and turned over gains a kind of density that quick speech rarely achieves. I have sat with men who spoke rarely and haltingly, and what they said, when they arrived at it, had been considered from every angle before it was offered. The man who speaks immediately may be performing his thought rather than having it.

“One of the finest minds I ever knew — a man of letters of our time — said that he had labored all his life to make his style ready and familiar, but that the more he polished it, the more he feared he was polishing away the thing he meant to say.”

For my own part, I write as I think, and I think as I write — which means slowly, with many turnings-back. I cannot produce the kind of rounded, finished discourse that some admire. What I offer is something more halting, more personal, more evidently the product of a single unsteady mind. Whether that is a deficiency or a kind of honesty, I have not entirely decided. I suspect it may be both at once.

The danger of eloquence is that it persuades us too well — including the speaker. A man who can clothe any thought in fine words will be tempted to clothe thoughts that do not deserve clothing. The plain speaker has at least this advantage: he cannot make a poor argument beautiful, and so he is forced to make it better or abandon it.