The Albatross Book of Living Oratory [antikvár]

introduction in a sense the life goes out of a speech once it has been delivered. The tone and modulation of the voice, the dramatic emphasis and pause, the speaker's presence and the gestures of his hands are lost and cannot be recovered. In print, only the words, the bare bones, are preserved, so that the most powerful imagination can hardly conceive the form in which they were once, as it were, made flesh. Nor indeed is it possible, even with the means we now possess for reproducing sound mechanically, to record the magic of the occasion; and many people, who have listened to what at the time they supposed were great speeches, must have afterwards realized that it was neither the speech nor the speaker that was great, but simply the occasion. Thus, when Hazlitt regretfully observed that the reputation of men who were once celebrated for their speeches 'lives only in the shadow of a name', he was merely describing the common fate of all whose fame has rested on the spoken and not the written word. Verba volent, sciipta manent, runs the Latin tag, and if HazHtt's observation was true a century and a quarter ago, when oratory was cultivated as an art and there was time for eloquence, and leisure for those who wished to listen, it is all the more apt to-day when public speaking is no longer an art but a matter of expediency, and speeches are brief and to the point, because the world is too busy to listen for very long and is quickly bored by elaborate perorations. If, then, a collection such as this, of speeches delivered on occasions, many of them now forgotten, by men, some of whom are little more than names to all but the historian, has any value or interest for its readers, it is because there is more in the words of a famous speaker than meets the ear—something over and above the sound of his voice that outlasts the occasion and is not lost on a printed page. What this is, the reader, I hope, will discover for himself; but it may be useful to suggest what kind of pleasure and, perhaps, profit he may expect to find in the following pages. There is, of course, the ordinary satisfaction of finding out what celebrated men have said in their guarded moments, what, for ex^ ample, Mr. Gladstone did actually say in 1879, or what President Wilson said on the eve of America's entry into the last war—and trying to imagine the circumstances in which they spoke. There is, II