Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography
"Predominant Partner." Bright succeeded when he pleaded for the Repeal
of the Corn Laws and the extension of the Suffrage: he failed when he
opposed the Crimean War, and lost his seat when he protested against our
aggression on China. It must often fall to the lot of the patriotic
orator thus to set himself against the drift of national sentiment, and
to pay the penalty. No such perils beset the Demagogue.
I should not ascribe the title of orator to Mr. Chamberlain. He has
nothing of the inspiration, the poetry, the "vision splendid," the
"faculty divine," which make the genuine orator. But as a speaker of the
second, and perhaps most useful, class, he has never been surpassed.
His speaking was the perfection of clearness. Each argument seemed
irresistible, each illustration told. His invective was powerful, his
passion seemed genuine, his satire cut like steel and froze like ice.
His perception of his hearers' likes and dislikes was intuitive, and was
heightened by constant observation. His friends and his enemies were
those whom he esteemed the friends and the enemies of England; and he
never committed the heroic but perilous error of setting himself against
the passing mood of national feeling. He combined in rare harmony the
debating instinct which conquers the House of Commons, with the power of
appeal to popular passion which is the glory of the Demagogue.
The word with which my last sentence closed recalls inevitably the
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