SPEECH AND SONG 261 



greatest, the speaker was less Anglo-Saxon than 

 Celtic or Iberian. 



The passion inherent in all is revealed more or 

 less in the tone according to the racial temperament. 

 In French oratory there is a tendency to music. Thus, 

 listening to an impassioned speech by one of their 

 greatest speakers, the lamented Jaures, it struck me 

 that it was three parts cadenced speech and a fourth 

 part recitative and song, and that it was the frantic 

 oration of a savage chief improved in shape and 

 colour, refined and beautified, with the long musical 

 note to end the sentence. The savage does not end 

 his sentences with this musical note in oratory or 

 ordinary speaking; but in some tribes the woman 

 does, the last word or syllable always being sung, 

 sometimes sweetly. Here we have a transference, or 

 an interchange of tones in two distinct forms of 

 expression — speech and song — speech taking back 

 from song something originally from itself and 

 improved. And again, we have the reverse process 

 when music falls back on recitative and even cadenced 

 speech, as for example in Wagner's operas. As in the 

 difference between the great French orator and the 

 savage chief, so between the recitative in the opera 

 and the changing and impassioned speech of the 

 savage; in the opera the savage is still declaiming, 

 but with an improved, a more musical voice and a 

 higher sense of musical form. 



In all that goes before it will be seen that I am 

 in the main in complete agreement with Herbert 



