tragic figure of Lord Randolph Churchill. The adroitness, the courage,
and the persistency with which between 1880 and 1885 he sapped
Gladstone's authority, deposed Northcote, and made himself the most
conspicuous man in the Tory Party, have been described in his Biography,
and need not be recapitulated here. Mr. Chamberlain, who was exactly
qualified to resist and abate him, had not yet acquired a commanding
position in the House of Commons; and on the platform Churchill could
not be beaten. In these two men each party possessed a Demagogue of the
highest gifts, and it would have puzzled an expert to say which was the
better exponent of his peculiar art. In January, 1884, Churchill made a
speech at Blackpool, and thus attacked his eminent rival--"Mr.
Chamberlain a short time ago attempted to hold Lord Salisbury up to the
execration of the people as one who enjoyed great riches for which he
had neither toiled nor spun, and he savagely denounced Lord Salisbury
and his class. As a matter of fact, Lord Salisbury from his earliest
days has toiled and spun in the service of the State, and for the
advancement of his countrymen in learning, in wealth, and in prosperity;
but no Radical ever yet allowed himself to be embarrassed by a question
of fact. Just look, however, at what Mr. Chamberlain himself does; he
goes to Newcastle, and is entertained at a banquet there, and procures
for the president of the feast a live Earl--no less a person than the
Earl of Durham. Now, Lord Durham is a young person who has just come of
age, who is in the possession of immense hereditary estates, who is well
known on Newmarket Heath, and prominent among the gilded youth who
throng the doors of the Gaiety Theatre; but he has studied politics
about as much as Barnum's new white elephant, and the idea of rendering
service to the State has not yet commenced to dawn on his ingenuous
mind. If by any means it could be legitimate, and I hold it is
illegitimate, to stigmatize any individual as enjoying great riches for
which he has neither toiled nor spun, such a case would be the case of
the Earl of Durham; and yet it is under the patronage of the Earl of
Durham, and basking in the smiles of the Earl of Durham, and bandying
vulgar compliments with the Earl of Durham, that this stern patriot,
this rigid moralist, this unbending censor, the Right Honourable Joseph
Chamberlain, flaunts his Radical and levelling doctrines before the
astonished democrats of Newcastle. 'Vanity of Vanities,' saith the
preacher, 'all is vanity.' 'Humbug of Humbugs,' says the Radical, 'all
is humbug.'"
And with that most characteristic specimen of popular eloquence, we may
leave the two great demagogues of the Victorian Age.
At the period of which I am speaking the House of Commons contained two
or three orators surviving from a class which had almost died away.
These were men who, having no gift for extempore speaking, used to study
the earlier stages of a debate, prepare a tremendous oration, and then
deliver it by heart. Such, in days gone by, had been the practice of
Bulwer-Lytton, and, as far as one can see, of Macaulay. In my day it was
followed by Patrick Smyth, Member for Tipperary, and by Joseph Cowen,
Member for Newcastle. Both were real rhetoricians. Both could compose
long discourses, couched in the most flowery English, interlarded with
anecdotes and decorated with quotations; and both could declaim these
compositions with grace and vigour. But the effect was very droll. They
would work, say, all Tuesday and Wednesday at a point which had been
exhausted by discussion on Monday, and then on Thursday they would burst
into the debate just whenever they could catch the Speaker's eye, and
would discharge these cascades of prepared eloquence without the
slightest reference to time, fitness, or occasion.
My uncle, Lord Russell, who entered Parliament in 1813, always said that
the first Lord Plunket was, on the whole, the finest speaker he had ever
heard, because he combined a most cogent logic with a most moving
eloquence; and these gifts descended to Plunket's grandson, now Lord
Rathmore, and, in the days of which I am speaking, Mr. David Plunket,
Member for the University of Dublin. Voice, manner, diction, delivery,
were all alike delightful; and, though such finished oratory could
scarcely be unprepared, Mr. Plunket had a great deal too much of his
nation's tact to produce it except when he knew that the House was
anxious to receive it. In view of all that has happened since, it is
curious to remember that Mr. Arthur Balfour was, in those days, a
remarkably bad speaker. No one, I should think, was ever born with less
of the orator's faculty, or was under heavier obligations to the
Reporters' Gallery. He shambled and stumbled, and clung to the lapels of
his coat, and made immense pauses while he searched for the right word,
and eventually got hold of the wrong one. In conflict with Gladstone, he
seemed to exude the very essence of acrimonious partisanship, and yet he
never exactly scored. As Lord Beaconsfield said of Lord Salisbury, "his
invective lacked finish."
A precisely opposite description might befit Sir Robert Peel, the
strangely-contrasted son of the great Free Trader. Peel was naturally an
orator. He could make the most slashing onslaughts without the
appearance of ill-temper, and could convulse the House with laughter
while he himself remained to all appearance unconscious of the fun. His
voice, pronounced by Gladstone the most beautiful he ever heard in
Parliament, was low, rich, melodious, and flexible. His appearance was
striking and rather un-English, his gestures were various and animated,
and he enforced his points with beautifully shaped hands. If voice and
manner could make a public speaker great, Sir Robert Peel might have led
the Tory Party; but Demosthenes was right after all. The graces of
oratory, though delightful for the moment, have no permanent effect. The
perfection of Parliamentary style is to utter cruel platitudes with a
grave and informing air; and, if a little pomposity be superadded, the
House will instinctively recognize the speaker as a Statesman. I have
heard Sir William Harcourt say, "After March, comes April," in a tone
which carried conviction to every heart.
A word must be said about speakers who read their speeches. I do not
think I shall be contradicted if I say that in those distant days Sir
William Harcourt, Sir George Trevelyan, and Mr. Gibson, now Lord
Ashbourne, wrote every word, and delivered their speeches from the
manuscript. In late years, when Harcourt had to pilot his famous Budget
through Committee, he acquired a perfect facility in extempore speech;
but at the beginning it was not so. The Irish are an eloquent nation,
and we are apt to send them rather prosy rulers. "The Honourable Member
for Bletherum was at that time perambulating the district with very
great activity, and, I need not say, with very great ability." Such a
sentence as that, laboriously inscribed in the manuscript of a Chief
Secretary's speech, seems indeed to dissipate all thoughts of oratory.
Mr. Henry Richard, a "Stickit Minister" who represented Merthyr, was the
worst offender against the Standing Order which forbids a Member to read
his speech, though it allows him to "refresh his memory with notes"; and
once, being called to order for his offence, he palliated it by saying
that he was ready to hand his manuscript to his censor, and challenged
him to read a word of it.
The least oratorical of mankind was the fifteenth Lord Derby, whose
formal adhesion to the Liberal Party in 1882 supplied _Punch_ with an
admirable cartoon of a female Gladstone singing in impassioned strain--
"Always the same, Derby my own!
Always the same to your old Glad-stone."
Lord Derby wrote every word of his speeches, and sent them in advance to
the press. It was said that once he dropped his manuscript in the
street, and that, being picked up, it was found to contain such entries
as "Cheers," "Laughter," and "Loud applause," culminating in "'But I am
detaining you too long.' (Cries of 'No, no,' and 'Go on.')"
The mention of Lord Derby reminds me of the much-criticized body to
which he belonged. When I entered Parliament, the Chief Clerk of the
House of Commons was Sir Thomas Erskine May, afterwards Lord
Farnborough--an hereditary friend. He gave me many useful hints, and
this among the rest--"Always go across to the House of Lords when they
are sitting, even if you only stop five minutes. You may often happen on
something worth hearing; and on no account ever miss one of their
full-dress debates." I acted on the advice, and soon became familiar
with the oratory of "the Gilded Chamber," as Pennialinus calls it. I
have spoken in a former chapter of the effect produced on me as a boy by
the predominance of Disraeli during the debates on the Reform Bill of
1867. He had left the House of Commons before I entered it, but that
same mysterious attribute of predominance followed him to the House of
Lords, and indeed increased with his increasing years. His strange
appearance--un-English features, corpse-like pallor, blackened locks,
and piercing eyes--marked him out as someone quite aloof from the common
population of the House of Lords. When he sat, silent and immovable, on
his crimson bench, everyone kept watching him as though they were
fascinated. When he rose to speak, there was strained and awe-stricken
attention. His voice was deep, his utterance slow, his pronunciation
rather affected. He had said in early life that there were two models of
style for the two Houses of Parliament--for the Commons, _Don Juan_: for
the Lords, _Paradise Lost_. As the youthful Disraeli, he had out-Juaned
Juan; when, as the aged Beaconsfield, he talked of "stamping a
deleterious doctrine with the reprobation of the Peers of England," he
approached the dignity of the Miltonic Satan. It was more obviously true
of him than of most speakers that he "listened to himself while he
spoke"; and his complete mastery of all the tricks of speech
countervailed the decay of his physical powers. He had always known the
value of an artificial pause, an effective hesitation, in heralding the
apt word or the memorable phrase; and just at the close of his life he
used the method with a striking though unrehearsed effect. On the 4th of
March, 1881, he was speaking in support of Lord Lytton's motion
condemning the evacuation of Kandahar. "My Lords," he said, "the Key of
India is not Merv, or Herat, or,"--here came a long pause, and rather
painful anxiety in the audience; and then the quiet resumption of the
thread--"It is not the place of which I cannot recall the name--the Key
of India is London."
At a dinner at Lord Airlie's in the previous month Lord Beaconsfield,
talking to Matthew Arnold, had described the great (that is, the
fourteenth) Lord Derby as having been "a man full of nerve, dash, fire,
and resource, who carried the House irresistibly along with him." Bishop
Samuel Wilberforce was reckoned by Mr. Gladstone as one of the three men
who, of all his acquaintance, had the greatest natural gift of public
speaking.[47] Both the Bishop and the Statesman found, each in the
other, a foeman worthy of his steel; but both had passed beyond these
voices before I entered Parliament, leaving only tantalizing
traditions--"Ah! but you should have heard Derby on the Irish Church,"
or "It was a treat to hear 'Sam' trouncing Westbury." Failing those
impossible enjoyments, I found great pleasure in listening to Lord
Salisbury. I should reckon him as about the most interesting speaker I
ever heard. His appearance was pre-eminently dignified: he looked,
whether he was in or out of office, the ideal Minister of a great
Empire--
"With that vast bulk of chest and limb assigned
So oft to men who subjugate their kind;
So sturdy Cromwell pushed broad-shouldered on;
So burly Luther breasted Babylon;
So brawny Cleon bawled his agora down;
And large-limb'd Mahomed clutched a Prophet's crown."
In public speaking, Lord Salisbury seemed to be thinking aloud, and to
be quite unconscious of his audience. Though he was saturated with his
subject there was apparently no verbal preparation. Yet his diction was
peculiarly apt and pointed. He never looked at a note; used no gesture;
scarcely raised or lowered his voice. But in a clear and penetrating
monotone he uttered the workings of a profound and reflective mind, and
the treasures of a vast experience. Though massive, his style was never
ponderous: and it was constantly lightened by the sallies of a pungent
humour. In the debate on the Second Reading of the Home Rule Bill of
1893, Lord Ribblesdale, then recently converted from Unionism to
Gladstonianism, and Master of the Buckhounds in the Liberal government,
had given the history of his mental change. In replying, Lord Salisbury
said, "The next speech, my lords, was a confession. Confessions are
always an interesting form of literature--from St. Augustine to
Rousseau, from Rousseau to Lord Ribblesdale." The House laughed, and the
Master of the Buckhounds laughed with it.
One of the most vigorous orators whom I have ever heard, in the House of
Lords or out of it, was Dr. Magee, Bishop of Peterborough, and
afterwards Archbishop of York. He had made his fame by his speech on the
Second Reading of the Irish Church Bill, and was always at his best when
defending the temporal interests of ecclesiastical institutions. No
clergyman ever smacked so little of the pulpit. His mind was essentially
legal--clear, practical, logical, cogent. No one on earth could make a
better case for a bad cause; no one could argue more closely, or
declaim more vigorously. When his blood was up, he must either speak or
burst; but his indignation, though it found vent in flashing sarcasms,
never betrayed him into irrelevancies or inexactitudes.
A fine speaker of a different type--and one better fitted for a
Churchman--was Archbishop Tait, whose dignity of speech and bearing,
clear judgment, and forcible utterance, made him the worthiest
representative of the Church in Parliament whom these latter days have
seen. To contrast Tait's stately calm with Benson's fluttering
obsequiousness[48] or Temple's hammering force, was to perceive the
manner that is, and the manners that are not, adapted to what Gladstone
called "the mixed sphere of Religion and the _Sæculum_."
By far the greatest orator whom the House of Lords has possessed in my
recollection was the late Duke of Argyll. I have heard that Lord
Beaconsfield, newly arrived in the House of Lords and hearing the Duke
for the first time, exclaimed, "And has this been going on all these
years, and I have never found it out?" It is true that the Duke's
reputation as an administrator, a writer, a naturalist, and an amateur
theologian, distracted public attention from his power as an orator; and
I have been told that he himself did not realize it. Yet orator indeed
he was, in the highest implication of the term. He spoke always under
the influence of fiery conviction, and the live coal from the altar
seemed to touch his lips. He was absolute master of every mood of
oratory--pathos, satire, contemptuous humour, ethical passion, noble
wrath; and his unstudied eloquence flowed like a river through the
successive moods, taking a colour from each, and gaining force as it
rolled towards its close.
On the 6th of September, 1893, I heard the Duke speaking on the Second
Reading of the Home Rule Bill. He was then an old man, and in broken
health; the speech attempted little in the way of argument, and was
desultory beyond belief. But suddenly there came a passage which lifted
the whole debate into a nobler air. The orator described himself
standing on the Western shores of Scotland, and gazing across towards
the hills of Antrim: "We can see the colour of their fields, and in the
sunset we can see the glancing of the light upon the windows of the
cabins of the people. This is the country, I thought the other day when
I looked on the scene--this is the country which the greatest English
statesman tells us must be governed as we govern the Antipodes." And he
emphasized the last word with a downward sweep of his right hand, which
in a commonplace speaker would have been frankly comic, but in this
great master of oratory was a master-stroke of dramatic art.
Before I close this chapter, I should like to recall a word of
Gladstone's which at the time when he said it struck me as memorable. In
August, 1895, I was staying at Hawarden. Gladstone's Parliamentary life
was done, and he talked about political people and events with a freedom
which I had never before known in him. As perhaps was natural, we fell
to discussing the men who had been his colleagues in the late Liberal
Ministry. We reviewed in turn Lord Spencer, Sir William Harcourt, Lord
Rosebery, Mr. John Morley, Sir George Trevelyan, and Mr. Asquith. It is
perhaps a little curious, in view of what happened later on, that Sir
Henry Campbell-Bannerman was not mentioned; but, with regard to the
foregoing names, I perfectly recollect, though there is no need to
repeat, the terse and trenchant judgment passed on each. When we had
come to the end of my list, the ex-Premier turned on me with one of
those compelling glances which we knew so well, and said with emphasis,
"But you haven't mentioned the most important man of all." "Who is
that?" "Edward Grey--there is the man with the real Parliamentary gift."
I am happy to make the Foreign Secretary a present of this handsome
compliment.
FOOTNOTES:
[42] Mucius Scævola per multos annos "Princeps Senatûs."
[43] Bulwer-Lytton, _St. Stephen's_.
[44] Mr. A. J. Willams, Mr. A. G. Symond, Mr. Walter Wren, Mr. W. L.
Bright, and Mr. J. J. Tylor were some of them; and we used to meet in
Mr. Bright's rooms at Storey's Gate.
[45] "It is an extraordinary big club done in a bold, wholesale, shiny,
marbled style, richly furnished with numerous paintings, steel
engravings, busts, and full-length statues of the late Mr.
Gladstone."--H. G. Wells, _The New Machiavelli_.
[46] "Speaking generally, I should say there could not be a less
interesting occasion than the laying of the foundation-stone of a Club
in London. For, after all, what are the Clubs of London? I am afraid
little else than temples of luxury and ease. This, however, is a club of
a very different character."
[47] The others were the late Duke of Argyll and the eighth Lord Elgin.
[48] "I had to speak in the House of Lords last night. It is a really
terrible place for the unaccustomed. Frigid impatience and absolute
goodwill, combined with a thorough conviction of the infallibility of
laymen (if not too religious) on all sacred subjects, are the tone,
_morale_, and reason, of the House as a living being. My whole
self-possession departs, and ejection from the House seems the best
thing which could happen to one."--Archbishop Benson to the Rev. B. F.
Westcott, March 22, 1884.
XIII
LITERATURE
There was Captain Sumph, an ex-beau, still about town, and related
in some indistinct manner to Literature and the Peerage. He was
said to have written a book once, to have been a friend of Lord
Byron, to be related to Lord Sumphington.... This gentleman was
listened to with great attention by Mrs. Bungay; his anecdotes of
the Aristocracy, of which he was a middle-aged member, delighted
the publisher's lady.
W. M. THACKERAY, _Pendennis_.
When I am writing Reminiscences, I always feel dreadfully like Captain
Sumph; but, in order to make the resemblance quite exact, I must devote
a chapter to Literature.
I seem, from my earliest conscious years, to have lived in a world of
books; and yet my home was by no means "bookish." I was trained by
people who had not read much, but had read thoroughly; who regarded good
literature with unfeigned admiration; and who, though they would never
have dreamt of forcing or cramming, yet were pleased when they saw a boy
inclined to read, and did their best to guide his reading aright. As I
survey my early life and compare it with the present day, one of the
social changes which impresses me most is the general decay of
intellectual cultivation. This may sound paradoxical in an age which
habitually talks so much about Education and Culture; but I am persuaded
that it is true. Dilettantism is universal, and a smattering of
erudition, infinitely more offensive than honest and manly ignorance,
has usurped the place which was formerly occupied by genuine and liberal
learning. A vast deal of specialism, "mugged up," as boys say, at the
British Museum or the London Library, may coexist with a profound
ignorance of all that is really worth knowing. It sounds very
intellectual to chatter about the authorship of the Fourth Gospel, or to
scoff at St. John's "senile iterations and contorted metaphysics"; but,
when a clergyman read St. Paul's eulogy on Charity, instead of an
address, at the end of a fashionable wedding, one of his hearers said,
"How very appropriate that was! Where did you get it from?" Everyone can
patter nonsense about the traces of Bacon's influence in _The Merry
Wives of Windsor_, and can ransack their family histories for the
original of "Mr. W. H." But, when _Cymbeline_ was put on the stage,
Society was startled to find that the principal part was not a woman's.
When some excellent scenes from Jane Austen were given in a Belgravian
drawing-room, a lady of the highest notoriety, enthusiastically praising
the performance, enquired who was the author of the dialogue between Mr.
and Mrs. John Dashwood, and whether he had written anything else. I have
known a Lord Chief Justice who had never seen the view from Richmond
Hill; a publicist who had never heard of Lord Althorp; and an authoress
who did not know the name of Izaak Walton.
Perhaps these curious "ignorances," as the Prayer Book calls them,
impressed me the more forcibly because I was born a Whig, and brought up
in a Whiggish society; for the Whigs were rather specially the allies of
learning; and made it a point of honour to know, though never to parade,
the best that has been thought and written. Very likely they had no
monopoly of culture: the Tories may have been just as well-informed. But
a man "belongs to his belongings"; one can only describe what one has
seen; and here the contrast between Past and Present is palpable
enough. I am not thinking of professed scholars and students, such as
Lord Stanhope the Historian, and Sir Edward Bunbury the Senior Classic;
or of professed blue-stockings, such as Barbarina, Lady Dacre, and
Georgiana, Lady Chatterton; but of ordinary men and women of good family
and good position, who had received the usual education of their class,
and had profited by it.
Mr. Gladstone used to say that, in his schooldays at Eton, a boy might
learn much, or learn nothing; but he could not learn superficially. A
similar remark would have applied to the attainments of people who were
old when I was young. They might know much, or they might know nothing;
but they did not know superficially. What they professed to know, that
you could be sure they knew. The affectation of culture was despised;
and ignorance, where it existed, was avowed. For example, everyone knew
Italian, but no one pretended to know German. I remember men who had
never been at a University, but had passed straight from a Public School
to a Cavalry Regiment or the House of Commons, and who yet could quote
Horace as easily as the present generation quotes Kipling. These people
inherited the traditions of Mrs. Montagu, who "vindicated the genius of
Shakespeare against the calumnies of Voltaire," and they knew the
greatest poet of all time with an absolute ease and familiarity. They
did not trouble themselves about various readings, and corrupt texts,
and difficult passages. They had nothing in common with that true father
of all Shakespearean criticism, Mr. Curdle, in _Nicholas Nickleby_, who
had written a treatise on the question whether Juliet's nurse's husband
was really "a merry man," or whether it was only his widow's
affectionate partiality that induced her so to report him. But they knew
the whole mass of the Plays with a natural and unforced intimacy; their
speech was saturated with the immortal diction, and Hamlet's
speculations were their nearest approach to metaphysics. Pope was quoted
whenever the occasion suggested him, and Johnson was esteemed the Prince
of Critics. Broadly speaking, all educated people knew the English poets
down to the end of the eighteenth century. Byron and Moore were enjoyed
with a sort of furtive and fearful pleasure; Wordsworth was tolerated,
and Tennyson was "coming in." Everyone knew Scott's novels by heart, and
had his or her favourite heroine and hero.