With the inaugural address of the next president about to be delivered, I can’t help but reflect upon political oratory in general and the old fashioned kind in particular. I don’t mean the sort of folksy speeches Ronald Reagan used to give or even the reassuring talks Franklin D. Roosevelt soothed Depression-era America with. I mean the hard-core stuff: pre-radio, pre-World War One, pre-living memory.

The 19th century was the golden era for orotund oratory. The speech-making of those days is truly a lost art because we can only read what was said. Many speeches qualify as great American documents, but because we cannot hear them, we only can appreciate a part of their greatness. It is very hard to recapture what effect that the likes of Henry Clay or Daniel Webster had upon a crowd. It isn’t even enough to have an actor reproduce the rich voices and the dramatic gestures of these larger-than-life figures. The ears of Americans have evolved (or perhaps degenerated)-–we can no longer experience the impact that Clay or Webster had upon an audience. Few living listeners have a taste for the heavily stylized, often baroque style of language employed by a 19th century orator. Even Abraham Lincoln, who often used more direct and colloquial language than his peers, would sound a bit stilted and rarified today.

In this time of fractured attention spans, it is difficult to even appreciate the extremes that American orators of one hundred-plus years ago could reach. Some of you might recall that Lincoln shared the stage with Edward Everett when dedicating the soldiers’ cemetery at Gettysburg on November 19, 1863. Everett, a Boston patrician who was the very model of antebellum respectability, gave a two-hour address filled with classical allusions and references to English history. Needless to say, this speech would be mind-numbing for most Americans to hear today. But Everett’s words were deeply meaningful in form as well as content to Americans of his time. They liked that the words were heavy and ponderous, the equivalent of a massive marble temple. By contrast, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address was seen as insubstantial to many at the time.

Earlier this year, I edited several speeches by Clay for inclusion in Schlager Group’s forthcoming Milestone Documents of American Leaders. It was a hard job, not because the individual thoughts within Clay’s speech weren’t clear, but because of the sprawling, leisurely pace of the orations. The Kentucky senator’s attack upon President Andrew Jackson for removing deposits from the Bank of the United States particularly resisted easy cutting. This speech-–delivered to the Senate over a span of several days-–is filled with rich invective, sustained outrage and emotionally manipulative language. Clay was a charismatic figure and knew how to move an audience (even fellow politicians) to tears. But it takes real imagination to get a sense of the speech’s impact from reading these thick paragraphs of words today.

I’ve believed for a long time that art is a collaborative process. (It’s an idea I borrowed from the artist Marcel Duchamp back in my college days.) The audience as well as the artist creates the work of art. In a real sense, a state paper or an important political speech is a work of art-–and it only lives if those who read or hear it are prepared to receive it, to take it into their hearts. The speeches of Henry Clay and his peers are now inert, though their echoes can be felt in laws that still affect our lives. But we can no longer give them life, only appreciate them as noble fossils. They have become exotic, just as Henry Clay would be exotic today if he somehow slipped through a hole in time and walked among us.

We are participants and cowriters in the documents we read. Somehow, the thoughts and the words used to convey them must be relevant to the present generation, not just to the people living when they were composed. This is implied in the idea of a living Constitution, as opposed to a strictly constructed one. A law cannot exist frozen in amber like a prehistoric fly. Sad to say, the rhetorical flourishes of the Henry Clays are semipreserved creatures with long-decomposed DNA. We cannot revive them.

These are, admittedly, esoteric thought to keep in mind as Barack Obama swears upon Lincoln’s Bible to uphold the Constitution. But it might be useful to consider that no matter how gifted or eloquent our new president might be, only the rest of America can give his words life. And this is true for the Constitution he has sworn to protect as well.

Barry Alfonso is a writer and independent historian living in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His home page is at www.barryalfonso.com/.