Sappho plucked her passion
from the lyre--we have to take things as they are. Except Burns, Heine,
Beranger (with Moore, if you will), and you will find it hard to compile
in all the lyrical poetry of the last 150 years a list of half a dozen
first-class or even second-class bards who wrote primarily to be sung. It
may help you to estimate how far lyrical verse has travelled from its
origins if you will but remind yourselves that a _sonnet_ and a _sonata_
were once the same thing, and that a _ballad_ meant a song accompanied by
dancing--the word _ballata_ having been specialised down, on the one line
to the _ballet_, in which Mademoiselle Genee or the Russian performers
will dance for our delight, using no words at all; on the other to "Sir
Patrick Spens" or "Clerk Saunders," 'ballads' to which no one in his
senses would dream of pointing a toe.

Thus with Verse the written (or printed) word has pretty thoroughly
ousted the speaking voice and its auxiliaries--the pipe, the lute, the
tabor, the chorus with its dance movements and swaying of the body; and
in a quieter way much the same thing is happening to prose. In the Drama,
to be sure, we still write (or we should) for the actors, reckon upon
their intonations, their gestures, lay account with the tears in the
heroine's eyes and her visible beauty: though even in the Drama to-day
you may detect a tendency to substitute dialectic for action and
paragraphs for the [Greek: Stichomuthia], the sharp outcries of passion
in its give-and-take. Again we still--some of us--deliver sermons from
pulpits and orations in Parliament or upon public platforms. Yet I am
told that the vogue of the sermon is passing; and (by journalists) that
the leading article has largely superseded it. On that point I can offer
you no personal evidence; but of civil oratory I am very sure that the
whole pitch has been sensibly lowered since the day of Chatham, Burke,
Sheridan; since the day of Brougham and Canning; nay, ever since the day
of Bright, Gladstone, Disraeli. Burke, as everyone knows, once brought
down a Brummagem dagger and cast it on the floor of the House. Lord
Chancellor Brougham in a peroration once knelt to the assembled peers,
'_Here the noble lord inclined his knee to the Woolsack_' is, if I
remember, the stage direction in Hansard. Gentlemen, though in the course
of destiny one or another of you may be called upon to speak daggers to
the Treasury Bench, I feel sure you will use none