CHATHAM AS AN ORATOR.* LINE the actor and the opera
singer, the orator can look forward only to the most shadowy of posthumous fames. However • exactly his words may be taken down by the shorthand writer, the essence of his oratory must perish with him until some more marvellous cinematograph and gramophone can be taught to record his gestures, the inflexions of his voice, and the thousands of subtle marks that convey his personality to the spectator. The printed words are scarcely more than the trap- pings and accessories of rhetoric. Chatham, however, was more unlucky than most orators in this respect, for even the printed skeleton of his speeches is lost. Verbatim reports. were unknown in the eighteenth century, and all of his most
celebrated speeches were extemporized. The reputation of Chatham as an orator depends, therefore, like that of Paganini and La Camargo, upon hearsay, and like theirs it must suffer accordingly. For who can honestly believe that an eighteenth-century violinist or ballet-dancer was really better than his own favOurites whom he knows at first-hand? There exist, it is true, indifferent reports of a dozen or so of Chatham's speeches, and it is around these and upon the innumerable eulogies of his contem- poraries that the Master of Trinity has woven this year's Romans Lecture. It cannot be said that Dr. Butler has completely succeeded in giving us a reconstruction of Chatham's oratory. The material, indeed, is so great in quantity and so inconsistent in quality that to produce any convincing image out of it would be difficult. How is Lecky, for instance, to be reconciled even with himself when he says on one occasion that the speeches "usually took the tone of a singularly elevated, rapid, and easy conversation," and speaks on another of "the force, fire, and majesty of a. declamation which thrilled and awed the most fastidious audience " P This combination of ease of expression with force of passion and invective is described with characteristics neatness by Lord Chesterfield when he says that " Mr. Pitt carried with him unpremeditated the strength of thunder and the splendour of lightning." Perhaps the 'nest striking feature of those passages of Chatham's speeches
which remain is that they are so largely free from the terrible pomposity which marred the oratory of the latter part of the eighteenth century. Here is a passage from one of his
American speeches
" We shall be forced ultimately to retract. Let us retract while we can' not when we must. I say we must necessarily undo these violent, oppressive Acts. They must be repealed. You will repeal them. I pledge myself for it that you will in the end repeal them. I stake my reputation on it. I will consent to be taken for an idiot if they are not finally repealed. Avoid, then, this humiliating necessity."
The simple words, the short sentences, give one some idea of the concentrated power of the speaker. But they also make no feel inclined to echo Lord Rosebery's words upon another of the speeches : " These are all the shreds that remain of this - glorious rhapsody. It would perhaps be better that nothing had survived. Each student must try and reconstruct for himself, like some rhetorical Owen, out of these poor bones the majestic structure of Pitt's famous speech."
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