His Speeches as Literature.
As a rule—a rule to which there are some magnificent exceptions—orators have only to cease from speaking to become uninteresting. What has been heard with enthusiasm is read with indifference or even with astonishment. You miss the noble voice, the persuasive gesture, the irresistible personality; and with the emotional faculty at rest and the reason at work you are surprised—and it may be a little indignant—that you should have been impressed so deeply as you were by such cold, bald verbosity as seen in black and white the masterpiece of yesterday appears to be. To some extent this is the case with these speeches of Disraeli’s. At the height of debate, amid the clash of personal and party animosities, with
the cheers of the orator’s supporters to give them wings, they sounded greater than they were. But for all that they are vigorous and profitable yet. Their author’s unfailing capacity for saying things worth heeding and remembering is proved in every one of them. It is not easy to open either of Mr. Kebbel’s volumes without lighting upon something—a string of epigrams, a polished gibe, a burst of rhetoric, an effective collocation of words—that proclaims the artist. In this connection the perorations are especially instructive, even if you consider them simply as arrangements of sonorous and suggestive words: as oratorical impressions carefully prepared, as effects of what may be called vocalised orchestration touched off as skilfully and with as fine a sense of sound and of the sentiment to correspond as so many passages of instrumentation signed ‘Berlioz’ might be.