Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography
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 _Saeculum_."
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 Scaevola per multos annos "Princeps Senatus."
[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,