The Express.
London, England, 1853-08-04 00:00:00

LITERATURE.

.[:etches, Par!casnentary and .viutuaisiow. B tt... Eight
lion. THUMAS BAItINOTUN Slacarmar. mull,.
This edition of Mr. Macaulay's sp....ehee has not
the advantage of his revision nor fat'e unction of his
authority; and when anothe.‘
Which does pOasess
these recommendations apyrAg evti)hedi. will give
it the -r;`'vrenet''' MeAnwl'...ile, here are !gaeamay's
rations, in " the `.ersicra of Hansard''—and pretty
much as they were delivered. Before remarking on
his charactersties as a speaker, let us first note the
public advantage -which the present perfection of re-
porting produces. In this edition—unauthorised as
it is—we Gen form an excellent Wee of tilt speaket'e
merits; while of the great orators of the last age,
we can have no adequate idea, except now and then
when they have corrected and authorised versions
of their speeches themselves. We must beer this
in mind in all our efforts to judge of our
famous orators. Of Burke we can judge, because
Burke took care of the publication of his speeches,
as he did of everything which he took in hand ; but
of Fox, for instance. and of Sheridan, we cannot
judge at all : for Fox never, we believe, corrected
more than one speech, while not even splendid offers
could induce Sheridan to take the trouble with his.
Indeed, our British orators have fared worse than
any class of our intellectual men ; we have no
speeches of Bolingbroke, and poor versions of those
of almost ever) body else.
More than a hundred years ago, David Home
published among his essays an essay on " Elo-
quence," in which he treats of the British preten-
sions in that art, and compares them with those of
antiquity. lie remarks on our deficiency in the art,
as something extraordinary, and speculates on the
subject with his usual luminous penetration. After
defining the British aryl,. as not rising above " good
sense conveyed in proper expressions," he
proses is to anticipate something higher, sod
=pewees his belief that something higher
may be expected. Before his century was
sat, we had achieved high and impassioned oratory
worthy to rank with that of any time. For, in fact,
lie ordinary remark that the days of eloquence are
ow, is one which appears in every age only to be
false. Eloquence comes and goes like poetry,
wed
dote not die out altogether. It would be absurd
=imaginative and impassioned speeches ea
when only reasoning is needful. In this, as
be everything. Nature has her due laws—given
grave, and passionate, and terrible periods, she sup-
plies eloquence to Bait them. The sea grows high
when the gale comes. The ordinary business of
party demands good sense and logic : an oppressed
empire, a convulsed country, develop other qualities.
Artificial, assumed "eloquence" is indeed a grave
nuisance in ordinary life; but when life itself becomes
excited and impassioned. language takes its tone
from the condition of the heart. The mistake of the
would-be " orators" who inflict inflated twaddle upon
public assemblies is, that they try to ape "Cicero
and Burke" on occasions when those great men
would have been as homely as a page of Cocker.
The failure of " literary men" in oratory has been
often a subject of remark. But let nobody run away
with false ideas upon this point. Many of the best
speakers tries been amongst the best writers—as
Cicero, Tacitus, Lord Bacon, Bossnet, Bolingbroke,
Burke, and Sheridan. Mr. Macaulay's speeches are
quite as remarkable as his essays : Diaraeles as good
as his riovels ; and if Fox failed in writing, and
Jeffrey in parliament, it was at least as much for this
simple reason as for any other—that each of them
tried the pursuits in which they shone least, at too
late a period of life.
Macaulay ranks among the orators on precisely
the same scale as ho ranks among the writers of the
world. Speech and essay differ only as one apple
from another apple on the same tree ; or perhaps
we may say the essay is superior to the speech,
as the more sunny to the less sunny side of a
peach. We think that his mind finds the
readiest and most genial expression in writing; but
still all the qualities of his mind find play in oratory
to full advantage. His oratory Ins the same saga-
city and shrewdness, equal clearness and pungency
—the same moral tone, that his " articles" have.
The difference is only that inevitable one, which
the difference of the circumstances makes ; and
which must make language addressed to the ear of a
body of men different from that addressed to the eye
ora reader, or to a small circle at a dinner table. We
are by no means sure that the tone and manner of
the matter uttered is not improved by the fact that it
is uttered in this diverse sphere. It is softer, more
human and social to our mind, as if the contact of
living men exercised a genial influence on the
speaker's intellectual disposition—one that is not re-
markable for sentiment, and figures in print as mere
" knowing" than sympathetic. Macaulay's intellec-
tual character is prominently " knowing," in fact—
not in the vulgar sense, but in the sense in which
Pope uses that adjective.