Modern Parliamentary Eloquence

MQDERN PARLIAMENTARY ELOQUENCE THE REDE LECTURE DELIVERED BEFORE THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE NOVEMBER 6, 1913 BY EARL CURZON OF K Chancellor of the University ofQxfo MACMILLAN AND CO, LIMITED ST. MARTINS STREET, LONDON 1913 Copyright MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED LONDON . BOMBAY . CALCUTTA MELBOURNE THE MACMILLAN COMPANY NEW YORK . BOSTON . CHICAGO DALLAS . SAN FRANCISCO THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD. TORONTO ONLY a small portion of this Lecture was delivered at Cambridge, owing to limitations of time. The whole is now published, as a more comprehensive study of the question than could be inferred from the condensed reports that appeared In the Press. MODERN PARLIAMENTARY ELOQUENCE A YEAR and a half ago the Master of the most famous College in this illustrious University, your own Dr. Butler, himself a speaker of unsurpassed grace and felicity, came over to my University of Oxford to deliver the Romanes Lecture on Lord Chatham as an Orator. He confessed in his opening remarks thai it had at first been his intention to deal with the history and influence of British Oratory during the century and a half from Chatham to Gladstone, but that second thoughts had induced him to curtail the range of his ambition and to confine himself to a single exemplar, though perhaps the noblest of all There were many who regretted the self-restraint of the lecturer, and who felt that a unique opportunity had been lost of hearing judgment passed on one of the foremost of arts by one of its most gifted exponents In accepting the invitation of your Vice-Chancellor to come to Cambridge and deliver to you the Rede Lecture this afternoon, 1 clo not presume to handle bMc of 0 bow from which even Dr, Butlershrunk. address. But I take up the subject at the other or modern end, and I shall endeavour to present to you some analysis, however imperfect, of contemporary British eloquence as it has appeared to one whose public life, though by no means long, has yet enabled him to hear all the greatest speakers from Gladstone, Disraeli, Bright, to the present day, and to whom the comparison between the public speaking of the past and present has always appealed as a subject of more than ephemeral interest. By Modem Parliamentary Eloquence I mean the eloquence of the past fifty years the speaking which men still living can remember to have heard. It will be my en deavour to examine the conditions under which this phase B 2 Modern Parliamentary Eloquence of the art if art I may still presume to call it hasjleen produced to consider its titles to honour, and to contrast it with the Parliamentary eloquence of earlier times. In the title of my address I have designed used the word Eloquence in preference to Oratory, for two reasons. First, because the phrase Oratory seems to Meaning connote a very high and superlative degree of excellence, to which speakers under modern conditions only rarely attain so that, if my theme were confined to modern Orators, I should very soon be at the end of my rope secondly, because, while Eloquence, irrespective of age or clime, is a part of the continuous though rare endowment of man, Oratory in the classical sense of the term, as an art taught, studied, and pursued, has practically ceased to exist, and has almost become the traditional subject of a gibe or a sneer. Far, indeed, have we gone from the days, when as the classical studies, in which this University stillretains, and I hope may long preserve, its old pre-eminence, Classical Mt taught us Oratory, or Rhetoric as it conception 1111,1 of Rhetoric. was called by the ancients, was regarded as the first of the arts, equal, if not superior, to poetry and painting, to sculpture and the drama an art that in the Commonwealths of Greece and Rome was the supreme accomplishment of the educated man. As Disraeli put it, in The Young Duke, oratory wa s their most efficient mode of communicating thought it was their substitute for printing...