Modern parliamentary eloquence; the Rede lecture, delivered before the University of Cambridge, November 6, 1913

.1

THE REDE LECTURE

DELIVERED BEFORE THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE
NOVEMBER 6, 1913

BY
EARL CURZON OF KEDLESTON

Chancellor of the University of Oxford

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1914

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First Edition, 1913.
Reprinted, 1914.

ONLY a small portion of this Lecture was delivered at
Cambridge, owing to limitations of time. The whole is
now published, as a more comprehensive study of the
question than could be inferred from the condensed
reports that appeared in the Press.

MODERN PARLIAMENTARY
ELOQUENCE

A YEAR and a half ago the Master of the most famous
College in this illustrious University, your own Dr. Butler,
himself a speaker of unsurpassed grace and felicity, came
over to my University of Oxford to deliver the Romanes
Lecture on Lord Chatham as an Orator. He confessed in
his opening remarks that it had at first been his intention
to deal with the history and influence of British Oratory
during the century and a half from Chatham to Gladstone,
but that second thoughts had induced him to curtail the
range of his ambition and to confine himself to a single
exemplar, though perhaps the noblest of all. There were
many who regretted the self-restraint of the lecturer, and
who felt that a unique opportunity had been lost of hearing
judgment passed on one of the foremost of arts by one of
its most gifted exponents.

In accepting the invitation of your Vice-Chancellor to

come to Cambridge and deliver to you the Rede Lecture

this afternoon, I do not presume to handle

Scope of the bow from which even Dr. Butler shrunk.

address.

But I take up the ' subject at the other or

modern end, and I shall endeavour to present to you some
analysis, however imperfect, of contemporary British
eloquence as it has appeared to one whose public life,
though by no means long, has yet enabled him to hear
all the greatest speakers from Gladstone, Disraeli, Bright,
to the present day, and to whom the comparison between
the public speaking of the past and present has always
appealed as a subject of more than ephemeral interest.
By Modern Parliamentary Eloquence I mean the eloquence
of the past fifty years — the speaking which men still
living can remember to have heard. It will be my en-
deavour to examine the conditions under which this phase

£

2 Modern Parliamentary Eloquence

of the art — if art I may still presume to call it — has been
produced ; to consider its titles to honour, and to contrast
it with the Parliamentary eloquence of earlier times.

In the title of my address I have designedly used the
word Eloquence in preference to Oratory, for two reasons.

First, because the phrase Oratory seems to
Meaning connote a very high and superlative degree

of excellence, to which speakers under modern
conditions only rarely attain — so that, if my theme were
confined to modern Orators, I should very soon be at the
end of my rope ; secondly, because, while Eloquence,
irrespective of age or clime, is a part of the continuous
though rare endowment of man, Oratory in the classical
sense of the term, as an art taught, studied, and pursued,
has practically ceased to exist, and has almost become the
traditional subject of a gibe or a sneer.

Far, indeed, have we gone from the days, when — as the
classical studies, in which this University still retains, and I

hope may long preserve, its old pre-eminence,

Classical have taught us — Oratory, or Rhetoric as it

conception . ° , , .

of Rhetoric. was called by the ancients, was regarded

as the first of the arts, equal, if not superior,
to poetry and painting, to sculpture and the drama ; an
art that in the Commonwealths of Greece and Rome
was the supreme accomplishment of the educated man.
As Disraeli put it, in " The Young Duke," " oratory was
their most efficient mode of communicating thought ; it
was their substitute for printing."1

It would be wide of my present purpose to pursue
the development of this art as it was expounded in
the master-treatise of Aristotle ; as it was practised by
the great Athenian orators ; and as it passed from the
Academies of Greece to those of Rome. Happily your
own great scholar, Richard Jebb, a speaker himself of
exquisite refinement and unusual command of form, has
relieved us of the task in the introductory chapter
of his famous work on the Attic Orators. In passing,
however, let me take note of the fact, to which I

1 Part v. cap vi.

Modern Parliamentary Eloquence 3

shall again revert, in the contrast that it indicates with
more modern conceptions, that the oratory of the Greeks
and Romans was essentially the oratory of art, and
therefore of preparation. Though it is on record that
Demosthenes was an effective extemporaneous speaker,
yet neither he nor any other of the ancient masters of the
art improvised if they could possibly avoid it. It was
inconsistent with the conception of their art, an infringe-
ment of its canons, a blot upon its perfection, to do so.
Had they been told that the best speaker in later times
would be regarded as the man who could extemporise
most readily, or most adroitly conceal the degree of his
preparation, they would have been shocked at so grave an
affront to Rhetoric. They wrote their speeches with as
solemn a deliberation as Milton, in imitation of them,
wrote his famous discourse on freedom of speech ; they
sometimes wrote speeches which were never delivered at
all, but which were published by their authors, without a
vestige of self-consciousness, as artistic masterpieces to be
studied and admired ; they wrote speeches to be delivered
by other people; and, indeed, when the actual texts of
their orations were not forthcoming, other people re-wrote
their speeches for them.1 It cannot, I imagine, be doubted
that the celebrated Funeral Oration of Pericles was the
work far more of Thucydides, re-composing the speech
from the ideas of Pericles and from such data as survived,
than it was of Pericles himself.

The Greek and Roman conception of Oratory as an art
to be studied reappeared in the Universities of the Middle

Ages, both in England and on the Continent,
Modern where rhetorical exercises and disputations
practice. were a part of the prescribed curriculum. They

have long since vanished from an academic
world which offers annual prizes to its students for futile
declamations in Latin and erudite compositions in
Greek, but which never dreams of teaching them how to

1 A variation on this method was that of the French orator
Mirabeau, who used to deliver speeches composed for him by friends.
They saved him the trouble by composing the text, and he turned
the dull metal into gold by his own genius and individuality.

B 2

4 Modern Parliamentary Eloquence

make a speech in their native tongue. Upon such an iron
time has the art fallen. Truly would the Attic or Roman
orator think that we live in a mad world if his spirit,
reincarnated for a brief hour, could flit from the banks of
the Ilissus or the Tiber to those of the Isis or the Cam.

But bidding good-bye to this conception of an oratory

that has passed away, and reverting to our own more

modest claims, the question may still be

Meaning asked : " What, for the purposes of this address,

Eloquence. *s the scope and meaning to be attached to
the title that I have taken ? " When I use the
word " Eloquence," let me say, then, that I do not allude to
the talent of mere facility or glibness of speech, or even
of rhetoric in its later application — the talent to which a
speaker refers when he says, " After the eloquent remarks to
which we have just listened, there is nothing for me to add."
No, by Eloquence I here mean the highest manifestation
of the power of speech, of which — in an age where oratory
is no longer recognised or practised as an art — public
speakers are still capable. For it will be a part of my
argument — paradoxical as it may appear — that while
oratory, strictly so-called, has passed under a cloud, and
the orator, if haply he does emerge, is almost regarded as
suspect — yet never was eloquence, i.e. the power of moving
men by speech, more potent than now ; though it has never
been less studied as an art, yet never was it more useful,
or I may add, more admired as an accomplishment.

While, therefore, I have no new definition of oratory or
eloquence to offer — for the secret of the finest speaking is
in itself undefinable — I shall yet be describing that which
all men understand when I say that such and such a man
was a real orator, or that such and such a speech was an
example of true eloquence. We refer when we use such
phrases to no ordinary or commonplace gift. We mean
that upon the head of such a man tongues as of fire
have descended from heaven ; that the silver of ordinary
speech is turned into gold on his lips ; that he strikes a
chord in our heart which thrills as though it had been
touched by celestial fingers. And in forming this opinion

Modern Parliamentary Eloquence 5

I shall judge — we can only judge — by the impression pro-
duced upon those who hear him. Oratory, for our purposes,
is the vehicle of persuasion, not of prophecy or instruction
or even of truth.1

Scott, in Marmion, sings of the happy time :

" 'Twixt boy and youth
When thought is speech, and speech is truth."

Parliamentary eloquence lives and breathes in no such
age of innocence. It ought always to spring

The Art of from thought, but it has no necessary con-
persuaston. . .<.«.«

nection with truth. As early as the fifth

century B.C. Isocrates defined rhetoric as the Science (a
very curious word, typical of the Greek attitude) of
persuasion. Aristotle only so far varied this definition as
to lay down that the function of rhetoric was not to
persuade, but to discover the available means of persuasion.
Neither of them contended that it was an instrument for
the propagation of truth.

In the same light and as a vehicle of persuasion must

we still regard it. Of the three audiences whom the

speaker has to face — the hearers of the

Effect on the moment, the readers of the morrow, and a

is the test, remote posterity — the first are those in whose
hands his fame as an orator really lies. It
may be that the highest form of eloquence is the eloquence
that can be read with as much pleasure as it was originally
heard, and that the greatest masterpieces are those which live
again as prose. Burke, indeed, who is commonly regarded
as the foremost of our literary orators, was actually heard
with much less enjoyment than that with which he was
afterwards read. But while the orator who is to enjoy an
enduring fame must subscribe to the double test, as did
Pitt and Daniel Webster and Macaulay and Bright, he is
not necessarily less an orator because he fails, for whatever
reason, to satisfy the second requirement We have not

1 Machiavelli said of the speaking of Savonarola : " The secret of
oratory lies, not in saying new things, but in saying things with a
certain power that moves the hearers."

6 Modern Parliamentary Eloquence

a single authentic sentence of Bolingbroke : we have only
scattered fragments of Chatham, the majority of whose re-
corded speeches were later compilations. But the title of
these two men to be considered as almost, if not quite,
the supreme orators of the British race none will dispute.
Perhaps their speeches would have read well : I cannot
but believe it. But, if they did not, that would not have
detracted at all from their fame as orators. Fox, indeed,
who cared a great deal about immediate effect and very
little for literature, went so far as to say that if a speech

read well it must have been a d d bad speech. That

of course is a paradox. Mr. Gladstone, however, would
have given great satisfaction to Fox. It is doubtful if
posterity will preserve with reverence or read with enjoy-
ment any but a few passages in a few of his almost
countless harangues. And yet who that heard him would
deny to him the gift of oratory in the highest degree?
As Mr. Balfour well said in his eulogium of that statesman
delivered in the House of Commons after the latter's death
(May 20, 1898):

" Mr. Gladstone's speeches are of a kind that make it impossible for
those who read them in any sense to judge of their excellence. Posterity
must take it from us, who heard with our own ears the extraordinary
gifts of pathos, humour, invective, detailed exposition, of holding the
audience and interesting them in the most intricate and dry matters
of administrative and financial detail — that they had all these qualities.
If you go and take down a volume of his speeches and read them, you
will not believe what I tell you ; but I am telling you the truth. It is
not the speeches which read best which are the greatest speeches.
Posterity cannot possibly judge of their merit by a mere study of the
words used. They must see the man, feel the magnetism of his pre-
sence, see his gestures, the flash of his eyes. . . . The test of a
speaker is the audience he addresses. There is no other judge ; from
that Court there is no appeal."

Ben Jonson said of Bacon that " the fear of every man
that heard him was that he should make an end." If so
Bacon also was among the first of orators : it is only Mr.
Balfour's proposition stated in another form. Lord Morley
is reported once to have said : " Three things matter in a
speech — who says it, how he says it, and what he says, and
of the three the last matters the least." The gay cynicism
of this remark may be forgiven for its underlying truth.

Modern Parliamentary Eloquence 7

Let me take another and renowned illustration. Sheridan's
famous speech on the Begums of Oude on the motion for
the impeachment of Warren Hastings in the House of
Commons in February, 1787, was described by Byron as
" the very best oration ever conceived or heard in this
country." This might be set down as the pardonable
exaggeration of a poet — an exaggeration not unfamiliar to
ourselves, for how often have we not heard men say, even
in these degenerate days, that such and such a speech was
the finest that they had ever heard — were it not that
Byron's verdict was re-echoed by Burke and Pitt, by
Wilberforce and Fox, who all heard the speech. Upon
their judgment it is impossible to deny to Sheridan the
distinction of having made a speech of superlative merit
(and he made two others nearly as good), or to exclude
him from the inner circle of the foremost orators. But the
speech itself we cannot judge either as literature or as art,
for Sheridan, with an admirable discretion, refused, even
for an offer of £1000, to publish it, and the reporting in
those days was so bad that the text was to all intents and
purposes lost.

In dealing with the Parliamentary speakers of our time
I shall, accordingly, confine myself to those whom I have
myself heard, or for whom I can quote the testimony of
others who heard them ; and I shall not regard them as
prose writers or literary men, still less as purveyors of
instruction to their own or to • future generations, but as
men who produced, by the exercise of certain talents of
speech, a definite impression upon contemporary audiences,
and whose reputation for eloquence must be judged by
that test, and that test alone.

But perhaps, before I come to individuals, I may en-
deavour to summarise the main conditions under which
modern Parliamentary eloquence is produced,
Conditions an(j to s^ow ^ow materially they differ
of modern . ,

eloquence. from those which prevailed in what is

generally regarded as the golden age of
British oratory, viz., the second half of the eighteenth
century. In this difference lies a complete and sufficient

8 Modern Parliamentary Eloquence

explanation of the apparent decline of British eloquence.
The reason is not that a particular fountain of human
genius has been dried at its source, never again to be
revived, but that it flows into new channels, and irrigates
a fresh soil. Or, if the metaphor may be varied, men's
souls are still capable of being set on fire by the spoken
word ; but the spark is otherwise kindled, and it lights a
less radiant and consuming flame.

If we study the oratory of the great speakers of the

Georgian epoch, from Chatham down to Canning — for

with the latter the tradition may be said to

Oratory of the have expired — we shall at once see that it

century was *^e ar* °f an aristocratic society, practised
under aristocratic conditions, in an aristo-
cratic age. The great speakers were drawn from a few
families, frequently connected by ties of intermarriage.
They had received the same public school and University
education, deliberately framed to qualify them, not merely
for participation in public life, but for proficiency in public
speech. The elder Pitt insisted on the younger making a
special study of Thucydides when he went up to Cambridge.
The son gladly responded to the father's admonitions, and
read and translated the celebrated orators of the ancient
world. Virgil, Horace, Cicero, Juvenal, even the later
Roman poets,1 were more familiar to them than are
Tennyson and Browning to us. They quoted their favourite
authors, they capped each other's efforts and, above all,
they understood (i.e., the few who counted, understood)
each other's quotations. When they went down to the
House of Parliament a similar dignity characterised their
dress and deportment, regularised their hours of leisurely
labour, and pervaded the debates. The House met early
in the afternoon, and usually finished its proceedings on
the same day. They did not mind sitting up late at night
— that was a part of the social habit of the time — and we
read of many of the finest orations having been delivered
in the early hours of the morning, even long after the

1 Burke, in his famous speech on Fox's East India Bill, quoted
Silius Italicus. Another orator quoted Claudian.

Modern Parliamentary Eloquence 9

dawn. The speakers wore breeches and silk stockings ;
their heads were powdered or wigged ; the blue riband of
the Garter crossed their breasts. A sitting of the House
partook almost of the nature of a Court ceremonial.1 No
reverberations from the democracy (which did not exist)
penetrated the comparatively small and secluded chamber,
no importunities from constituents, no calls to public
platforms, no engagements in Committee rooms or on the
Terrace, no sharp reminders from caucuses or agents, dis-
turbed the stately equanimity of their proceedings. They
spoke as they dressed, and moved, and I may add, drank,
with a fine profusion, and in the grand style. In fact,
apart from political differences, which, in days of universal
place-hunting and corruption, were probably more acri-
monious than at the present time, the governing class
in both Houses of Parliament constituted a social caste,
banded together by ties of common interest and mutual
admiration. They dissected, criticised, and applauded
each other's speeches. The leisure hours of those who
possessed literary qualifications were often devoted to
writing about each other's attainments. The dramatic dis-
plays of the great protagonists were always assured of a rapt
audience and a befitting arena, for the simple reason that
the number of those who could speak was limited, and that
the remainder were content to furnish an inarticulate
claque in the background. Lord John Russell used to say
that there were a dozen men in the days of Fox and Pitt
who could make a better speech than anyone living in his
time, but that there was not another man in the House
who could even understand what they were talking about.

1 There is an interesting passage in " Endymion," cap. 76, in which
Sir Fraunceys Scoope — believed to have been drawn from Sir Francis
Burdett — describes to the young M.P. (circ. 1842) the conditions of
the House of Commons as they were in the days of Pitt and Fox.
There was rarely a regular debate, and never a party division up till
Easter, and very few people came up. After Easter there was always
one great party fight, which was talked of for weeks in advance.
After this, for the rest of the Session, the House was a mere club, to
which members came down in evening dress. So late as the time of
Canning they appeared in silk stockings and knee breeches or
pantaloons.

io Modern Parliamentary Eloquence

This cynical reflection somewhat exaggerates the gap
between the players and the pit, but it presents a not
unfaithful picture of a number of highly-gifted actors
performing serenely to a compact and deferential crowd.
Add to the influence of these surroundings the fact that
great events — wars on the Continent, the rebellion of the
American Colonies, the Government of India, the revolu-
tion in France — occupied the attention and inspired the
eloquence of the leading statesmen — creating an atmo-
sphere favourable to great emotions and to rhetorical
display. It is not surprising in these circumstances that
Parliamentary eloquence should have blossomed into an
exuberant growth, that the models of the ancient world
should have been diligently emulated, and almost repro-
duced or that oratory for more than half a century
reappeared in England in the garb of an exclusive and
fashionable art.

Contrast with this mise-en-scene the picture] of Parlia-
mentary life, as it has been gradually evolved in the
interval between the passing of the Great

Modern Reform Bill and the present day, i.e. in the
conditions. . .

time during which the constitution in its

practical working has been converted from an aristocratic
oligarchy into a democracy ever gaining in strength until it
is now supreme. We may trace the change as it has affected
the speaker as an individual, Parliament as an institution,
the audiences to whom speeches are delivered, and the
temper of the time.

The member of Parliament in the present day is no
longer exclusively drawn from what used to be called the

upper classes. The bulk of the House are
The modern probably contributed by what would a century

ago have been termed the upper middle
classes. No obstacles exist to the entry of the labouring
classes, who are certain, as time passes, to increase their
representation. Thus it has come about that while the
types and standards of education that are represented in
the House are many and various, the one type which
is in the minority is that which was once supreme, viz.,

Modern Parliamentary Eloquence 1 1

that which is based on the continuous study and knowledge
of the Greek and Roman classics. How many men are
there in the House of Commons who have ever read an
oration of Demosthenes, or could translate a speech of
Cicero ? Thus one class of model has altogether vanished.
And if it be said that there is no need to go back to the
ancients, and that it is open to anyone to study the
oratorical masterpieces of our own country, may it not
again be asked, " Where and by whom are they now
taught ? Is there a single candidate for Parliament who
has ever, except of his own initiative, read a speech of Pitt
or analysed the methods of Grattan or Canning?" Thus
the link of a common education in accepted models has
vanished, and the power of speech that a man takes to the
House when he enters it is that which has been developed
in the college debating society, or on the platform, but
not in the study of the past. He need not for that reason
be an ineffective speaker — very often quite the reverse ;
but in so far as knowledge and education can make a man
an orator, he is without that resource.

We see this decline of oratorical furniture in the rapid

diminution of quotation and literary allusion in the speeches

of the day. More than a century ago Fox

Decline of js saj,j J-Q have advised as to quotations " No
classical ~ . . T . ... .

quotations. Greek — as much Latin as you like, and never

French under any circumstances ; no English
poet unless he has completed his century." In my own
time I can only recall two Greek quotations in the House
of Commons : one was from a scholar of Balliol, the
present Prime Minister, the other from another Balliol
man, the late Lord Percy, who once repeated a line from
Euripides.1 Mr. Gladstone not infrequently quoted

1 Disraeli, in an address to the students of Glasgow University in
1872, quoted a passage from Sophocles and then added : "In the per-
plexities of life I have sometimes found these lines a solace and a
satisfaction ; and I now deliver them to you to guide your consciences
and to guard your lives." The students cheered sympathetically, but
I have been told by one who knew the facts that Mr. Disraeli only
acquired the quotation from an academic friend a little while before
the meeting, and that a somewhat limited knowledge of Greek
probably left him quite in the dark as to its meaning. The story

12 Modern Parliamentary Eloquence

Latin,1 but since his day it may be almost said, except in
the case of popular tags, to have passed into the limbo
of the unknown.2 Our own poets, even Shakespeare, cut
no great figure. There is too much reason to fear that
quotation, except from an opponent's speeches, is a mori-
bund accomplishment. And yet it is one of the most
hallowed and effective implements of oratory.

The same argument applies to imagery, metaphor,
antithesis, alliteration, trope — all the once popular

adjuncts of the rhetorical art. When heard
Adornment ^ey are regar<^ed with a mixture of suspicion

and amused surprise. I sometimes wonder
what sort of a reception would be given by the present
House of Commons to the famous image of the junction
of the Rhone and Saone (a far from rhetorical passage)
employed by the elder Pitt to describe the coalition of Fox
and Newcastle in 1754:

"At Lyons I was taken to the place where the two rivers meet ; the
one gentle, feeble, languid, and though languid, of no great depth ;
the other a boisterous and impetuous torrent. But different as they
are, they meet at last."

So simple is the language, so natural is the beauty of
this simile, that I am inclined to think it would pass
muster even now. But I am not so sure of the more
daring image applied by the younger Pitt to the later
coalition between Fox and North in 1783, when he
denounced the inauspicious union, and in the name of his

recalls to me another which was told me by Sir William Harcourt.
That statesman, who had a great admiration for Lord Beaconsfield,
visited him in his declining years at Hughenden. His host showed
him round the library, and pointing with pride to one set of shelves
said that they contained the two branches of literature from which he
had derived throughout life the greatest consolation, namely,
Theology and the Classics !

1 The most famous case in his later years was the quotation from
Lucretius (ii. 646) which appeared in the noble speech on the
Affirmation Bill (the Bradlaugh case) on April 26th, 1883. It is
reproduced in Morley"s Life.

* Bright's one attempt at a Latin phrase was a notorious fiasco.
In a debate in July, 1869, he spoke of Disraeli as entering the House
crinis (vice crinibus) disjectis. Mr. Gladstone almost bounded from
his seat with horror.

Modern Parliamentary Eloquence 13

country forbade the banns. That is rhetoric — though of
a high order — and would, I fear, only provoke a smile.

But the change in Parliament is far greater and far more
prejudicial to the cultivation of oratory than any change
in the individual member. In the first place
Partianumt ^e House of Commons is much more con-
cerned with legislation and much less with
administration than a century ago. In those days there
were but few bills, and the main business of the House
was to keep an eye on Ministers, to question their policy —
particularly their foreign policy — to check their expen-
diture, and, for the party in opposition, to expose with as
much vituperation as possible their alleged misdeeds. All
these undertakings afforded natural material for oratory,
and still more for invective. Now Parliament is immersed
in the harassing details of legislation ; it has become a
gigantic workshop, in which the hum of the machinery is
always ringing, and the dust from the spindles is flying
thickly, in the air. A good deal of time is spent on
interrogating Ministers ; four-fifths of the remainder in the
Committee Stage of Bills or the conversational discussion
of the Estimates. The residuum that is left for full-dress
debate is very small.

Secondly, the House no longer has the first claim on its
members ; for the greater part of the sitting, its benches
are relatively empty and are occupied in the main by
those who want to catch the Speaker's eye and who retreat
as soon as they have accomplished their object ; the
multiplicity of business takes them to the libraries, the
writing-rooms, the lobbies — anywhere but the chamber
itself. A man may have the gift of the winged word, but
he cannot be eloquent to empty benches.

Thirdly, the power of the Whips and the tyranny of the
party machine have grown so immensely that there is little
opening left for independence — the natural seed-ground
of oratory — and but rare opportunities of turning votes by
eloquence. Speeches therefore tend to become standard-
ised, and conform to a conventional and commonplace
type.

14 Modern Parliamentary Eloquence

But by far the greatest change that has been wrought

in Parliamentary conditions, as they affect speaking, has

been the result of verbatim reporting in the

Effect of presSt At the time when Chatham thundered
reporting.

and Pitt lightened, reporting was treated as

a gross breach of privilege by the House of Commons — a
law which was constantly reasserted, and only evaded by
surreptitious note-takers skulking in the galleries and
reconstructing the speeches afterwards from such aids as
their imperfect notes or memory might afford. In these
circumstances the speaker, unconscious of Hansard and
undeterred by the fear of the morrow's Times, could give
the free rein to his imagination ; could amplify, repeat,
embellish, and adorn with impunity. But now that every
word is taken down and that the speaker, particularly the
prominent or Front Bench speaker, knows that he is
addressing, not a private club, but a gathering that may
embrace the whole nation, and in the case of Foreign
Office debates a much wider audience still, he must walk
delicately and measure his paces ; he cannot frisk and
frolic in the flowery meads of rhetoric ; he dare not " let
himself go " as Chatham or Fox could afford to do. As
Lord Rosebery has epigrammatically remarked, "eloquence
and stenography are not of congenial growth," and " as
reporting improves eloquence declines."1

These changes in the House have been the reflex of
corresponding and even greater movements outside. The
prodigious expansion of the Press and the
Effect of the unjversai empire of the telegraph have ren-
dered the populace indifferent to Parlia-
mentary debates. When they can get their politics served
up hot and steaming along with the morning teacup in
the leader of their favourite organ, why bother about
Parliament? Why read the finest speech even of an
orator or of a leader when the descriptive paragraph

1 There is perhaps something to be said on the other side. James
Grant, who was a Parliamentary reporter, and wrote a book entitled
The Newspaper Press, said that the temporary absence of reporters
from the House of Commons in 1833, when they were excluded by
the action of O'Connell, had a most deplorable effect on the eloquence
of members, whose speeches became short, spiritless, and dull.
Possibly, however, this was a Press Gallery point of view.

Modern Parliamentary Eloquence 15

condenses it all into a few high-flavoured sentences, with
the personal element and the mise-en-scene thrown in as
well ? x

Still more has the growth of platform speaking detracted

from the vogue of Parliamentary eloquence. While it is

the latter that still unlocks the door to Minis-

Effectofthe terjaj office ft js the platform which makes or
platform.

unmakes leaders, and decides the fortunes of

parties. No Parliamentary reputation, however great, will
avail in the future to secure for a statesman the confidence
of his party or the support of the nation unless it is con-
firmed by the verdict of the platform. It is there that the
shrillest war-cries are uttered ; there that the gauge of
oratorical combat is thrown down. Lord Randolph
Churchill would never have become leader of the House
of Commons but for his platform triumphs. Mr. Lloyd
George reserves the master-pieces of his peculiar style for
Limehouse, Newcastle, and Swindon.

It may be retorted that while these conditions operate

to the depreciation of Parliamentary eloquence, they at the

same time create a new standard and type of

Nature of oratory, viz., that of the public meeting. This

platform . 11,11.1. j ,1. • r

oratory. 1S undoubtedly the case, and the waning of

one form of the art is accompanied, if it is
not counterbalanced, by the growth of another. But that
it is a different type, obeying different laws, and appealing
to different emotions, is abunda'ntly clear, if only because
some of the most accomplished exponents of one style fail
miserably in the other. Consider the main points of
difference. On the platform the orator is addressing, as a
rule and in the main, the members of his own political
party : they have come to hear him perform, he is the star
figure of the scene ; he is free from interruption save such
as springs from the often useful interjections of scattered
opponents, or the undiscriminating enthusiasm of friends.

1 This is an entirely modern creation. The sentiments of our fore-
fathers towards the sketch-writer may be inferred from the speech of
the courtly Windham in December, 1798. " What," he asked, " was to
become of the dignity of the House, if the manners and gestures and
tone and action of each member were to be subject to the licence,
the abuse, the ribaldry of newspapers ? "

1 6 Modern Parliamentary Eloquence

No one can refute him or say him nay. The speech is
delivered in the electric atmosphere of great and crowded
halls, where the contagion of a multitude, expectant and
sympathetic, acts like wine both upon speaker and audience.
The latter is commonly neither profound in its knowledge
nor fastidious in its taste. A broad humour, a little chaff,
some claptrap, a spice of invective, and a resounding perora-
tion are passports to the heart of the crowd. So it has been
with the mobs and the mob orators of all countries and all
times.

How different is the atmosphere of a Chamber where
rules of debate and a measure of decorum have to be
observed, where the audience, so far from clamouring for
the speaker, is often surfeited with speeches and requires to
be coaxed back to the meal, where an appeal has to be
made to the understanding rather than to the emotions,
where an emptying House may chill the courage of the
boldest orator, and where the entire effect of his eloquence
may be wiped out by a brilliant reply. Obviously we are
speaking of two entirely different modes of expression,
which call for separate gifts. The one represents a more
cultured and exacting, the other an easier and broader, style.
It is not denied that sometimes the gifts of the platform
and the Parliamentary orator are combined in the same

person in an extraordinary degree, and, in a

Speakers who few rare caseS) that the performer so gifted has

both styles, been able to maintain as high a standard at

the mass meeting as in the House. Daniel
O'Connell appears to me to have been the greatest mob
orator that we have ever had in this country, and he also
excelled in Parliament. Mirabeau, in France, possessed
very similar gifts. Lamartine, at the Hotel de Ville, in
Paris, in 1848, produced an instantaneous effect that few
orators have surpassed. Mr. Gladstone was scarcely, if at
all, inferior to O'Connell ; Mr. Bright was a third. But in
the two latter cases what appealed to the crowd would
seem to have been not so much the rolling sentences,
or the majestic mien of the orator, as the spectacle of
righteous fervour, invoking the moral sense of the com-

Modern Parliamentary Eloquence 17

munity to storm some citadel of ancestral privilege or to
redress an unexpiated wrong.

Another difference between the modern fashion and that

of our forefathers, and still more that of the ancient world,

is the estimation in which extempore, as

Extempore distinct from prepared, oratory is now held.
speaking. . .- . .

I doubt if in reality the modern speaker

prepares less, in fact the conditions of modern oratory, with
the sleuth-hounds of the Press hanging upon the track of
the speaker, and the electric telegraph waiting to convey his
smallest lapse from sense or discretion to the world, almost
compel him, if he is a leader, to prepare more ; at least
they compel him to be more careful about the ipsissima
verba of his utterances. But the difference lies in this,
that whereas the classic orator gloried in his preparation,
and would have thought it a slur upon his art in any way
to abate it, the modern speaker, with a false sense of
shame, adopts every manner of artifice for hiding his
studies, and seeks to convey the illusion of extempor-
aneous effort even where his subterfuge is belied by the
obvious evidence of facts. We are familiar with the
speaker who compresses his MS. or his notes into a small
space in the palm of his hand, or as Mr. Bright was said
to have done, even conceals them in his hat. We have all of
us witnessed the ignominious breakdown of the speaker
who has learned off his effort by heart, but whose memory
fails him at the pinch. I have even heard a speaker
commence a quotation which he said had occurred to him
while on his feet, and only complete it with the aid of a
slip of paper confusedly extracted from his pocket. In so
far as these are the devices of unskilled practitioners they
hardly call for attention here. But they are of importance
in so far as they represent a mental attitude towards
speaking which undoubtedly differs from that of former
times. Mr. Balfour, for instance, represents the modern
standpoint when he once said in an address :

" No impromptu speech can have the finish, polish, or conscious
arrangement which is the result of study. But the man who writes
his speech, and then learns it, and then declaims it — so that every man
knows he has written it — that man will never succeed as a speaker."

C

1 8 Modern Parliamentary Eloquence

A good deal, of course, turns upon the exact application
of the proviso which I have underlined. But even allowing
for that, Mr. Balfour's dictum is conspicuously at variance
with both the rules and the practice of the ancient world.
All the greatest speeches of antiquity were prepared and
learned off by heart, and the audience were perfectly con-
scious of the fact. The same is true of many at any rate
of the masterpieces of post-classical oratory. Does anyone
imagine that Abraham Lincoln improvised his Gettysburg
oration — I happen to know that it was written out on a
slip of paper in advance — or his second Inaugural Address ?
Many of the greatest efforts of the British eighteenth
century orators were similarly committed to memory.
Brougham wrote :

" The highest reaches of the art can only be attained by him who
well considers and maturely prepares and oftentimes sedulously
corrects and refines his oration."

The fact is that both methods are entirely legitimate,
and each is capable of being the highest art. The choice lies
in the occasion and the theme. The Parliamentary orator
who has to deliver a panegyric upon a departed statesman
would be foolish if he did not diligently and scrupulously
prepare it. But the party leader who has to follow a rival
leader in debate would be still more foolish, he would be
grossly incompetent, if he relied upon preparation or trusted
to memory.

If we look back at the golden age of English eloquence
we shall see the two streams flowing side by side, the one
impetuous and uncontrolled, the other smooth
eolden a°-e anc* snmmg- Chatham at his best in extem-
poraneous outpouring — his panegyric on
Wolfe universally condemned as a failure ; Fox the same,
weak in opening, ineffective in eulogy (for instance, his speech
on the Duke of Bedford) but incomparable in reply ; Pitt
with an even and majestic flow that depended little upon
notes ; Burke capable of speaking grandly, though not to the
enjoyment of his audience, without preparation, but devot-
ing to his highest flights the most laborious toil ; Windham

Modern Parliamentary Eloquence 19

exquisite when unpremeditated, but leaving when he died the
manuscript of an undelivered speech written out entirely in
his own hand ; Grattan, marvellous in both styles. Sheridan,
on the other hand, preparing and learning everything, even
his jokes ; * Macaulay, writing out his great speeches, and
repeating them — such was his almost miraculous memory
— without the omission of a word ; Brougham, redolent
of the lamp ; Canning always suggesting the actor and the
rhetorician. Later on we shall see which method has been
favoured by the great speakers of our time. But enough
has been said to show that no distinction in merit can be
laid down, while if it were, it would be at once discounted
by the fact that the same speakers practise and excel in
both.

That extemporaneous speaking, however, is now thought
to be a higher form of the art appears to be certain from
the plaudits that are lavished' upon the
vc ° H™ successful rejoinder as compared with the
most polished introduction, and from the
attempts that are made to simulate it even by expert per-
formers. Why this should be so, it is not altogether easy
to say. Professor Jebb, in a bold generalisation, attributed
it to the Hebraic basis of education in modern Christendom,
which identifies the supreme afflatus with inspiration from
above. I am inclined to think that the explanation is both
more simple and less flattering. The number of those
who can extemporise with power and brilliancy is always
greatly inferior to the number of those who can compose
and prepare ; and men rate more highly the rarer attain-
ment. Secondly, for the purpose of modern politics, the
one is a much more serviceable asset than the other. The
occasions of speech in our public life have so enormously
multiplied, parliamentary business lies so much more in
debate than in exposition, there is so little leisure on the
part, either of speaker or of audience, for sustained display,
that the speaker who can improvise has a great advantage

1 When he died his note-books were found with the carefully
prepared jokes in them which he intended to fire off (and in many
cases had fired off) when the moment and the victim came.

C 2

2O Modern Parliamentary Eloquence

over the speaker who requires notice. Perhaps also the
one gift appears to connote sincerity, while the other
suggests artifice. Nevertheless, behind all this lurks the
solid and incontrovertible fact that on great occasions
men still prepare and write out at length, and trust largely
either to memory or to notes.

I have now summarised the principal characteristics
that seem to me to differentiate the modern practice of
public speech in this country from that of an earlier date.
I have shown that the condition of the House of Commons,
the education and life of members, the exigencies of the
party system, the requirements of the constituencies, all tend
insensibly to a lowering of the old standards and to the
disparagement of speaking as an art. Perhaps there is in
this state of affairs no more than an inevitable reflex of
what is sometimes called the spirit of the age. It is a
temper quick, impatient, practical, business-like, distrustful
of periphrasis, scornful of superfluous embellishment, eager
to arrive at the goal. Speed and directness have ousted
leisure and circumambulation. Just as the steamer has
superseded the sailing ship, the railway the stage-coach,
the taxicab the hansom, and the motor the cart, so must
the speaker get more quickly to his destination ; he may
not halt to drink at Pierian fountains or to wreathe his head
with Delphian bay.

I am not sure that a similar decline is not observable

in the two other great fields of British eloquence, the

pulpit and the bar. It would take me far

Forensic and ^fe\& were I to attempt to investigate these
ecclesiastical ,. . r

eloquence, phenomena this evening. But I suspect that

the same causes, mutatis mutandis, are pro-
ducing similar effects, and that the eloquence of a Mans-
field or an Erskine, an Atterbury or a Wilberforce will be
less and less likely to be evolved from the conditions of
the future.

And yet, while admitting this decline in the highest

General level level and anticipating its continuance, there

of speaking, are two opposing considerations which it

is fair to name. The first is this, that while the highest

Modern Parliamentary Eloquence 21

standard is lower than it was, the ordinary standard
is higher. It cannot, I think, be doubted that though
fewer speakers speak with the voice of angels than
of yore, more speakers speak like intelligent men. In the
House of Commons the general level of speech is certainly
higher than it was fifty years ago — the direct consequence
of the practice acquired on the platform and in the hard
mill of contested elections. It is scarcely to be conceived
that so wretched a speaker as Castlereagh could ever again
lead the House of Commons — that he should have been
preferred to the brilliant Canning is to this hour one of
the puzzles of history. I doubt even whether the Duke
of Wellington, who had no pretensions to be an orator,
could be called either by the favour of the Sovereign
or the confidence of the country to the presidency of an
administration. The gift of speech in political leaders
has become a greater necessity — it is really a condition of
existence.

The second consideration is this, that though oratory
may be shorn of much of its ancient reverence, the power

of speech is in no wise dethroned. It still
Influence of sjts aioft ancj holds the keys of fortune in its
eloquence. laP- ^ may be that " fragments of the mighty

voice" less often "come rolling on the wind";
but, with a humbler and less sonorous utterance, eloquence
still sways the hearts of men. and opens the doors to
influence and power. The man who aspires to a seat on
the Front Bench of the House of Commons will find his
best passport in speech. A Cabinet Minister must be
able to expound his policy and defend his department.
The man who would lead the people and control the State
may not perhaps succeed without character ; but he will
undoubtedly fail if he has not the gift of tongues. On the
lower rungs of the political ladder it is in the debating
society, at the street corner, in clubs, and on platforms
that the ambitious artisan acquires the training which takes
him from the secretaryship of his Union to the Town
Council, from the latter to the House of Commons, and
from the back benches to the front. Never was there a

22 Modern Parliamentary Eloquence

time when power of speech was more sure of its reward.
It might indeed be argued that it is a disproportionate
reward, when we see the back places crowded by the often
superior but unserviceable talents of the dumb.

I should also like to dispel the popular illusion that elo-
quence, even in the decline of the art, no longer affects
votes in Parliament. It is certainly the case
that' in the tightening of party bonds, it
becomes increasingly difficult for a man to
vote against his side, still more to be persuaded by the
speech of a political opponent to do so ; and the classical
instances of a division turned by the speech of a Wilberforce
(on the Melville case in 1806), a Plunket (on Catholic Eman-
cipation in 1807) or a Macaulay (on the Copyright Bill in
1842, and again on the proposal to make the Master of
the Rolls incapable of sitting in the House of Commons in
1853), are perhaps unlikely to be repeated. But in the
House of Commons I have constantly seen votes affected by
speeches, in this sense, that a policy which was regarded with
grave doubt or suspicion has been acclaimed, either with or
without a division, owing to the adroit or powerful defence
of a Minister ; that a successful attack on a policy or a
plan has led to its abandonment, sooner than face the risks
of the division lobby ; or even, as in the case of the well-
known speech of the late Lord Wolverhampton, then
Mr. Fowler, in 1895, tnat anticipated defeat has been
converted into overwhelming victory. Perhaps the most
remarkable instance of such an oratorical triumph in
modern times was the speech of Mr. Gladstone, when
moving a vote of credit in the Russo-Afghan crisis of 1885.
I trust, therefore, that no aspirant to a Parliamentary
career, and no mourner over the bier of old-world elo-
quence, will be disheartened by the idea that we live in
times when speech is merely a casual accomplishment, like
the hitting of a golf ball, or a stroke at cricket, worthy,
perhaps, of admiration, but destitute either of real merit
or of authority. Such would be an absurd and misleading
fallacy.

Rather do 1 look forward to a revival in the country of

Modern Parliamentary Eloquence 23

eloquence in other and more popular shapes adjusted to
the requirements of the times. Just as the
Possible oratory of the Georgian era was attuned to an
eloquence in aristocratic age, and that of the mid-Victorian
a democracy, epoch to middle-class ascendancy, so does it
seem to me likely that the democracy will
produce an eloquence, perhaps even an oratory, of its own.
Should a man arise from the ranks of the people, as did
Abraham Lincoln from the backwoods of America, a man
gifted with real oratorical power and with commanding
genius, I can see no reason why he should not renew in
England the glories of a Chatham or a Grattan. His tri-
umphs might be less in the Senate than in the arena : his
style might not be that of the classics of the past. But he
might by reason of his gifts climb to the topmost place
where he would sway the destinies of the State and affect
the fortunes of an Empire. Symptoms of such a power
and style are sometimes visible in the declamations of
Mr. Lloyd George, who, to a student of
Mr. Lloyd history, is a curious compound of the brothers
Tiberius and Caius Gracchus, with a strong
flavour of the Athenian demagogue thrown in, and
when emotionally aroused, either by the misdeeds of his
opponents or the sufferings of the poor, has a great com-
mand of dramatic or melodramatic effect. But this style
of speech requires to be purified of much dross before it
can be certified as fine gold. In the House of Commons
some of the Labour Members are eloquent speakers,
notably Mr. Philip Snowden and Mr. Ramsay Macdonald.
From these general considerations I will pass on to con-
sider the individual speakers of renown who
Individual have been produced under the conditions
speakers, which I have described, and of whose oratorical
abilities I will attempt to give some estimate.
By far the greatest orator whom I personally heard in
the House of Commons — indeed almost the

only orator — was Mr. Gladstone. I sat in
Gladstone. J .,,./.

Parliament with him for eight years. I had

the honour of preceding him, and the still greater honour

24 Modern Parliamentary Eloquence

of being followed by him, in debate. Before I obtained a
seat in the House I had frequently listened to him from the
Gallery. Although he had nearly reached the age of
seventy years at the time of which I speak, and was almost
the sole survivor of a generation of giants that had passed
away, his strength was not abated nor his eloquence
dimmed. I heard him introduce the first Home Rule Bill
in a speech three-and-a-half hours in length, I heard all his
great speeches on both Home Rule Bills, and every con-
siderable speech during the last decade of his Parliamentary
life. I even heard him propose a toast at a wedding
breakfast.

While this great and famous figure was in the House of
Commons the House had eyes for no other person. His
movements on the bench, restless and eager, his demeanour
when on his legs, whether engaged in answering a simple
question, expounding an intricate Bill, or thundering in
vehement declamation, his dramatic gestures, his deep and
rolling voice with its wide compass and marked northern
accent, his flashing eye, his almost incredible command of
ideas and words, made a combination of irresistible
fascination and power. We who sat opposite him in his
later years saw in him the likeness, now of an old eagle,
fearless in his gaze and still exultant in his strength, now
of some winged creature of prey, swooping down upon a
defenceless victim, now of a tiger, suddenly aroused from
his lair and stalking abroad in his anger. Mr. Gladstone
seemed to me to be master of every art of eloquence and
rhetoric. He could be passionate or calm, solemn or
volatile, lucid or involved, grave or humorous (with a heavy
sort of banter), persuasive or denunciatory, pathetic or
scornful, at will. It is true that his copiousness was
sometimes overpowering and his subtlety at moments
almost Satanic.1

1 Mr. Gladstone's extreme subtlety was the source of a popular joke
at his expense during the visit of Garibaldi to London in 1864. The
marked attentions of a noble widow to Garibaldi having suggested
that she had matrimonial intentions, it was objected that the Italian
patriot was already married, whereupon the ready answer was made,
"Oh, he must get Gladstone to explain her away."

Modern Parliamentary Eloquence 25

It was then that one understood Disraeli's bitter phrase
about the "sophistical rhetorician inebriated with the
exuberance of his own verbosity," or Mr. Forster's sardonic
remark, " The right hon. gentleman can persuade other
people of almost anything, he can persuade himself of
absolutely anything." I recall a phrase of that incorrig-
ible cynic Labouchere, alluding to Mr. Gladstone's frequent
appeals to a higher power, that he did not object to the
old man always having a card up his sleeve, but he did
object to his insinuating that the Almighty had placed it
there. I remember, too, how sensitive he was to attack, how
easily drawn, how lacking in proportion in his treatment of
smaller men and things. These were the foibles of a great
intellect, the antithesis to transcendant powers. But they
did not obscure the general impression of a noble person-
ality, aglow with ardour, and magnificent in courage.

Among the earlier speeches of Mr. Gladstone, long

before my day, I have always thought one of the finest

was that delivered on the second reading of

His greatest the abortive Reform Bill of 1866, when he

s4)€€Crl6S.

quoted from the ALneid, as to his reception
by the Liberal Party, and concluded with the words :

" The banner which we now carry in this fight, though perhaps at
some moment it may droop over our sinking heads, soon again will
float in the eye of heaven, and will be borne by the firm hands of the
united people of the three kingdoms, perhaps not to an easy, but to a
certain and a not far distant victory."

But according to Mr. Balfour and other authorities cited
by Lord Morley, the peroration of the speech about
Montenegro and Bulgaria in May, 1877, must have been
a not inferior deliverance. In the latter part of Mr
Gladstone's life the speech to which all who heard it gave
the palm was the speech on April 26th, 1880, on the
Affirmation Bill, introduced to deal with the case of Mr.
Bradlaugh. In this speech occurred the famous quotation
from Lucretius to which I have before referred ; but the
passage in which it was enshrined was one that no other
living Parliamentarian could have spoken, and that touched
the highest point of exalted sentiment and intellectual
reasoning. Few of those who heard it could follow the

26 Moaern Parliamentary Eloquence

argument ; fewer still understood the Latin. But there
was a silence as in a church, and a feeling as though the
air was fanned by invisible wings. In the Home Rule
Debate of 1886, I recall especially the speech in which Mr.
Gladstone concluded the debate on introducing the Bill,
and which contained the celebrated phrase about " a double
dose of original sin," and the speech which immediately
preceded the defeat of the Government on the second
reading, culminating in a marvellous peroration.

That Mr. Gladstone was a supreme orator there can, I
think, be no doubt. There was no resource of oratory
intellectual, emotional or external, that was not at his
command. But that he was an orator to be heard, rather
than to be read, is a commonplace. If we take up now
the two volumes of the Midlothian Speeches in 1879 and
1880, we feel, in Tom Moore's words —

"like one

Who treads alone
Some banquet hall deserted,

Whose lights are fled,

Whose garlands dead,
And all but he departed."

So difficult is it to believe that these interminable and
involved harangues were the spell that stirred the heart
of an entire nation, upset a powerful minister, and carried
the speaker to the pinnacle of power.

And yet that Mr. Gladstone was no less great as a plat-
form orator than he was in the House of Commons is
evident from this as from innumerable other experiences.
But his triumph on the platform, which appears to have
become greater as he advanced in years, was the triumph
of a moral force quite as much as of an eloquent tongue.

It seems to be supposed, from Mr. Gladstone's incom-
parable fertility of utterance and readiness in reply, that
he never prepared his speeches in advance.
methods. This is a mistake. Like all great orators, he
made careful preparation when this was due
to the occasion.1 He wrote down and he even learned off

1 The notes of many scores of his speeches are preserved at
Hawarden.

Modern Parliamentary Eloquence 27

his perorations ; and from my place in the Gallery of the
House, in April, 1886, I could distinctly see the MS., in
his own handwriting, of the entire concluding sentences
of his speech in introducing the first Home Rule Bill.

1 recall some other personal characteristics of this great
orator. In earlier days he was described as standing while

speaking, with his hands clasped behind his
gestures back. I never saw him in this position. His

gestures in speech were astonishing in their
variety and freedom. He would lean on the table with his
right elbow, and point his finger in scorn at the object of
his invective or attack. He would smite his right hand on
the open palm of his left hand with resounding blows. He
would bang the table and the box on it with his clenched
fist. On one occasion I saw his hand descend heavily
upon the gilded mace. He had a habit of swinging right
round and appealing to his supporters, while all that we
who were opposite could see was his bald cranium and
streaming white hair. Another extraordinary and probably
unconscious trick, while he was unfolding an argument,
was that of scratching the top of his scalp with the
extended thumb of his right hand. On the other hand, the
enormous collars with which Punch insisted on investing
him were nothing more than the conventional dress of
the mid-Victorian epoch. On great occasions he always
appeared with a flower in his button-hole ; and if a long
speech were in prospect we all of us knew the little
pomatum-bottle with its mixture of beaten egg and sherry,
which was half hidden behind the brass-bound box.1 Such
are a few fugitive recollections of the greatest man who
sat in the House of Commons in my time, and of the
foremost orator of the last half-century.

His great rival Disraeli I saw in both Houses of

Parliament. Though he was a master of
B. Disraeli, picturesque and incisive phraseology, though

many passages in his long-sustained vendetta
with Peel in the years 1845-6, which can be read in the

1 He explained its virtues to Lord Morley in these terms : " It
stimulates, it lubricates."

28 Modern Parliamentary Eloqwnce

second volume of Monypenny's Life, are almost unequalled
in the annals of Parliamentary invective, and though a few,
like the comparison of the Liberal Government at Man-
chester in April, 1872, to a range of exhausted volcanoes
on the South American coast, belong to English literature,
I always heard from those who remembered Disraeli even
in his prime that he was not an orator either by nature or
art. Many of his speeches, particularly in earlier times,
were bombastic and dreary ; and he did not, except in
later years, when wrapped in the prestige of his triumphant
career, easily place himself in touch with his audience.
But there was an air of expectancy whenever he spoke :
men were on the look-out for the jewelled phrase, the
exquisite epigram, the stinging sneer. He was like the
conjurer on a platform, whose audience with open mouths
awaited the next trick. Now and then he soared to
genuine eloquence, as when, in April, 1865, in an atmosphere
of breathless silence, he passed a eulogium of unusual
simplicity on Mr. Cobden, and described him as one of
those members of Parliament " who, though not present in
the body, are still members of this House, independent of
dissolutions, of the caprice of constituencies, even of the
course of time."

In both Chambers Mr. Disraeli's characteristic pose was
that of a statuesque and Sphinx-like immobility on the
bench. I have seen him sitting hour after hour while
Mr. Gladstone or some other opponent was thundering at
him, motionless, with his arms crossed, his eyes apparently
closed, and not a flicker of emotion on his pallid
countenance. Sometimes he would murmur a word to
Lord John Manners or an old friend. An illustration of
his sardonic and disconcerting method was told me by
my uncle, Sir Wilfrid Lawson ; it was the occasion when,
Mr. Gladstone having more than once repeated the phrase
" The Right Hon. Gentleman and his satellites," and
having then paused or momentarily lost the thread of his
argument, Disraeli rose and amid a hushed House re-
marked in dulcet tones, " the last word was satellites ! "

I heard his speech in the House of Lords on the Afghan

Modern Parliamentary Eloquence 29

War in December, 1878, and I recall the peroration in
which, raising his hollow voice and waving his hand, he
called upon his hearers to brand the Peace at any Price
doctrines — " these dogmas, these deleterious dogmas, with
the reprobation of the Peers of England." When he
left the House for the division the Peers waited while he
walked out alone at the head of his party. He also came
back alone at the head of the procession and took his
solitary place on the bench ; and, when a young and
frisky Peer who had dined somewhat too well went up in
a genial mood to have a word with his leader, and almost
sat down on the top of him, from the steps of the throne
I could hear the startled statesman emit, with what he
himself once styled a superb groan, the sepulchral ejaculation
" My dear Lord ! "

It is evident that Disraeli's phrases were carefully
prepared and committed to memory, whether delivered

from the platform or in the House. He was
His phrases. . *.«.!. • • ^ ^

m truth a rhetorician rather than an orator, an

actor in the guise of a politician. It was as a phrasemonger
that his greatest rhetorical triumphs were won : organised
hypocrisy ; plundering and blundering ; England does not
love coalitions ; tea-kettle precedents ; sanitas sanitatum ;
juvenile and curly ; mass in masquerade ; on the side
of the angels ; Batavian grace ; peace with honour ;
imperium et libertas ; the key of India is London. All
of these are taken from his speeches ; his novels contain a
thousand other illustrations.

In earlier days Disraeli wore the fanciful dress of the
dandy of the period, and his gestures were in harmony
with his costume. He would pull down his
waistcoat> Put his hands in his pockets and
hook his fingers in his armholes, while
speaking. I once as a boy saw him in the House of
Commons dressed in a black velvet coat and check
trousers, an almost incredible garb for a modern Prime
Minister. It was in a black velvet shooting coat and a
wide-awake hat that he strolled into the Sheldonian
Theatre at Oxford in 1874 and informed the astonished

3O Modern Parliamentary Eloquence

parsons of the Oxford Diocese that he was " on the side of
the angels." But in the House of Lords he always wore a
frock coat buttoned'across his chest, and a black tie. He
indulged in little gesticulation, but at critical moments,
when leading up to a phrase or a peroration, he would
extract a handkerchief from his coat-tails and wave it with
a slight flourish in the air. In those later days his once
ambrosial locks had lost their curl : a single twist alone
adorned his brow ; his thinning hair was protected by the
art of the dyer from the final ravages of time. As an
Oxford undergraduate I attended his funeral at Hughenden.
I recall the profound and unfavourable impression created
by the absence of Mr. Gladstone, but this omission was
more than rectified by the magnanimous tribute paid to
his memory a few days later by his great survivor in the
House of Commons.

I was a member of the Lower House for a short time
with Mr. Bright, but I only once heard him speak, and
that in a commonplace manner. That he was
jl-flt a great orator in the class of those who care-
fully prepare their choicest sentences and
regard a speech as a work of art, is certain. In fact he was
the most conspicuous violation of Mr. Balfour's canon
which I have before quoted ; for every one knew that
his beautiful passages were learned in advance, and he
made no secret of it himself; and yet, whether at a
popular gathering or in the House, he was unquestion-
ably one of the few of whom it might be said, in
Mr. Gladstone's splendid phrase, that what he received
from his audiences in vapour he poured back upon them
in flood.

One of the secrets of Mr. Bright's eloquence was his
unique command of happy and almost colloquial simile,
the apposite stories that he told, and his ready wit. Nature
had assisted him with a good presence, action simple and
unaffected (his biographer says that he had no gesture
beyond the raising of his hand), and a melodious voice.

But the real clue to his power lay in the personality and
moral attributes of the man, and in the nature of the causes

Modern Parliamentary Eloquence 31

for which he pleaded. Though it is no part of the business
of an orator to mount a pulpit, John Bright preached to
his countrymen with the fervour of a Savonarola and the
simplicity of a Wesley. Many of his illustrations (e.g. the
Shunammite woman and the cave of Adullam) were drawn
from the Bible, which he was said to know better than any
other book. In general literature he was not deeply versed,
nor did he give any evidence of a wide knowledge or pro-
found reasoning. There can never have been any speaker
who more successfully practised the maxim Ars est celare
artem. Though he was known to shut himself up for days
before he delivered a great speech, when he was inaccessible
even to his family, though his purple passages, as they would
now be called, were committed to memory 1 and his per-
orations written down, neither his manner nor his diction
suggested artifice, while his high character and patent
sincerity opened the door of every heart. I will not repeat
here the well-known passages from his most famous ora-
tions, but I will give one extract only from the speech that
he made at a public breakfast given to William Lloyd
Garrison, the American abolitionist, in June, 1867 — a
speech that was thought by many of his friends to have
been the highest achievement of his art.

"Then came the outbreak which had been so often foretold, so
often menaced : and the ground reeled under the nation during four
years of agony, until at last, after the smoke of the battlefield had
cleared away, the horrid shape which had cast its shadow over a
whole Continent had vanished, and was gone for ever. An ancient
and renowned poet has said

' Unholy is the voice

Of loud thanksgiving over slaughtered men.'

It becomes us not to rejoice, but to be humbled, that a chastisement
so terrible should have fallen upon any of our race ; but we may be
thankful for this — that this chastisement at least was not sent in vain.
The great triumph in the field was not all ; there came after it another
great triumph, a triumph over passion ; and there came up before
the world the spectacle, not of armies or military commanders, but
of the magnanimity and mercy of a powerful and victorious nation."

1 He told Mr. George Russell that his method of constructing a
speech was to divide his subject into compartments, to each of which
he supplied what he called an island, i.e. a carefully prepared key
sentence. Then he would swim from island to island, until he landed
on the best island of all, which was, of course, the peroration.

32 Modern Parliamentary Eloquence

By the side of this may be placed the passage, tremendous
in its dramatic simplicity, in one of John Bright's Crimean
War speeches, in December, 1854, in which — referring to a
fellow M.P., an officer, whom he had met at Hyde Park
Corner and who had remarked that it was no light matter
for a man with a wife and five little children to be ordered
off to the war — he suddenly added : " The stormy Euxine
is his grave, his wife is a widow, his children fatherless."

I recall another contemporary and colleague of Mr.

Gladstone who also deserved the name of orator. This

was the Duke of Argyll, father of the present

D"ke °f holder of the title. Mr. Gladstone once told
Argyll.

me that the finest speaker he had ever heard

in the House of Lords was Lord Ellenborough, that ill-
balanced and tempestuous person, who was both Governor-
General of India and President of the Board of Control.
But at other times he appears to have said the same thing
of the Duke of Argyll. Lord Ellenborough was before my
day, but I frequently heard the Duke. He spoke with
perfect ease, with grace of gesture, with felicity of diction,
and with intellectual power. Though short of stature, he
had an almost leonine appearance : and his hair stood up
from his lofty forehead like the plume in a Highlander's
bonnet. A somewhat haughty manner, combined with
this appearance, and a rather didactic tone, caused Bishop
Wilberforce to christen him Cocculus Indicus.1 But
though his oratorical talents were obscured by an omni-
science that is the greatest disability from which a public
man can suffer, and were for the most part confined for
their exercise to the Upper Chamber, there can be no
doubt that the Duke possessed many of the attributes of
the real orator. His methods, as his son has informed me,
were these : he always carefully put down the heads of
his speech in due order in columns on a sheet of note-
paper — but nothing more. He never wrote out passages,
nor did he quote or declaim them after delivery. His
voice was one of singular beauty. There is a general con-
sensus that the finest speech, or at least the finest passage
1 He was Secretary of State for India.

Modern Parliamentary Eloquence 33

in a speech, made by him was in the debate on the second
reading of the Home Rule Bill of 1893, when he had
finally severed himself from his former chief. Answering
Mr. Gladstone's argument that the Bill was inevitable, he
thus addressed the Lords (September 6th, 1893):

" Inevitable ! Why I have been spending the last few weeks in a
part of Scotland where we look down on 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. Was there ever such folly ? "

Sir William Harcourt, as a speaker, was in some respects
the survival of an earlier day. It may be suspected that

he also took Disraeli, for whom he had a
Sir William , . ,. , , f ,,

Harcourt. great admiration, as a model : for there was

the same elaborate preparation and polished
sarcasm in the efforts of both. Harcourt had many
advantages as a speaker : a commanding presence, a
classical style, a caustic humour, considerable erudition,
and a wide knowledge of affairs. I heard him make
many powerful speeches, but he was not naturally
eloquent. I doubt if he ever moved an audience either to
deep feeling or to tears — which might serve as a defin-
ition of oratory;1 and he failed to convince his hearers of
sincerity or conviction — an impression which was en-
couraged by some of the circumstances of his political
career. In satire, raillery, and 'scorn, not always highly
refined, he was proficient. I remember calling upon him
once in his rooms at Cambridge, where he was Professor
of International Law, in 1879. He handed me a copy of
a speech in this vein which he had just delivered at
Southport in Lancashire — a place I was later to represent
in Parliament — with the remark : " That speech will make
me Home Secretary in the next Administration " — and so
it did. Though he was very effective in improvised retort,
— more so I think than when prepared — he became in

1 It may be recalled that Alcibiades said of Socrates that Pericles
and the other great Attic orators were not to be compared with him,
because "the voice of Socrates made his heart leap within him as that of
a Corybantian reveller, and his eyes rain tears." — PLATO, Sympos. 215.

D

34 Modern Parliamentary Eloquence

later years so much a slave to his MS., that he lost all
appearance of spontaneity. His speech would lie on the
box in front of him, page piled on page, and when he
visited the country for platform orations, a special desk
was sent down in advance to accommodate his voluminous
MS. His literary knowledge gave a fine flavour to his
speeches, and he made by far the best adaptation of a
quotation that I heard in the House of Commons.
This was on an occasion when a splendid and courtly
country gentleman of the old school — Sir R. Knightley —
had been making a speech, in which he touched on his
own long and distinguished ancestry. In replying, Har-
court parodied the well-known verse of Addison about the
moon : —

" And (K)nightly to the listening earth
Repeats the story of his birth."

On the other hand he was exceedingly angry on another
occasion when some rival wit applied to him Pope's
famous line about the Monument of London, which

" Like a tall bully rears its head — and lies."

The speaker halted when he came to the last word of the
quotation, which was drowned amid the uproarious cheers
of the House.

I pass from these historic figures of bygone Liberalism

to consider some of the foremost men on the opposite side.

Lord Salisbury was at all times in his

Marquis of remarkable career a speaker of outstanding

Salisbury. . ,. ,°

importance ; outstanding because of his

powerful and penetrating intellect, his mordant humour,
and his literary skill. That a man could possess and
exercise so unusual a literary gift without incurring the
faintest suspicion of being a rhetorician is a proof of his
supreme indifference to the orator's arts. For these he had
neither the equipment nor the inclination. He cared
nothing for the platform ; he made no conscious effort to
attract or to conciliate his hearers ; he was invariably think-
ing of his subject rather than of them. In most of the
attributes that we have hitherto associated with the orator

Modern Parliamentary Eloquence 35

he was wholly wanting. And yet he was one of the most
fascinating, and in his later days one of the most
impressive, speakers to whom it was possible to listen.
Whether in the House of Lords, or at a Lord Mayor's
banquet, or at a public meeting, he appeared to suggest
embodied wisdom ; he was the philosopher meditating
aloud. It seemed a mere accident that the reflection was
conducted audibly and in public rather than in the recesses
of the library at Hatfield. His massive head, bowed
upon his chest, his precise and measured tones, his total
absence of gesture, his grave but subtle irony, sustained
the illusion. It was only when the epigrams flashed forth,
and the extraordinary felicity of diction overcame the
barriers of reserve, that the cheers rattled along the
absorbed and silent benches.

No powerful speaker was ever less dependent on aids to
memory or indeed on preparation. Before a great harangue
he would arrange his thoughts in the solitude of his study
or during a walk in the open air. But he neither made nor
required notes. I was with him as one of his Private
Secretaries on the occasion of his visit to Newport in
November, 1885, to deliver the battle cry in the impending
electoral campaign. He spoke for one-and-three-quarter
hours in a vast hall without a single note but an extract
from a speech by Mr. Chamberlain, written on a card in his
pocket.

The evolution of the statesman is as interesting a study

as that of the great painter. We can usually trace Period I,

Period II, and Period III, according to the

Evolution of influences under which he has passed or the
hts character.

natural development of his own powers of

character and mind. Thus we pass in the case of Mr.
Gladstone from the hope of the stern and unbending Tories
through intervening phases to the darling of democratic
Liberalism ; in the case of Disraeli from the dandified
political adventurer to the awe-inspiring voice of an Empire.
No such change or evolution of political opinion marked
the career of Lord Salisbury. But the change of temper
and tone was not less remarkable, converting the " master

D 2

36 Modern Parliamentary Eloquence

of gibes and flouts and sneers," the bitter speaker, whose
" invective lacked finish," into the mellowed and majestic
statesman, cautious in his policy, philosophic in his
mental outlook, imposing in his reserve. In the course of
this transition, the faculty of epigram, which was too
deeply rooted in him to be seriously modified, and which
made his private conversation a perpetual delight, expended
itself in the " blazing indiscretions " for which he attained a
notoriety that amused no one more than himself. These
were entirely unpremeditated ; and I remember being with
him for a Birmingham demonstration, before which he
declared that on this occasion at least he would not offend,
only to perpetrate a few hours later one of his most
characteristic indiscretions.

A speaker who was equally deficient in the arts of

oratory, and even more indifferent to applause, but who

attained a position of scarcely inferior in-

Duke of fluence in the State was the late Duke of
Devonshire.

Devonshire. When he was first made an

Under Secretary in 1863, the appointment was looked
upon as a Whig job, and almost an affront to the House
of Commons. That a speaker so ungainly in manner, so
unready of speech, and so casual in temperament, should
also be the eldest son of a Duke, was thought to aggravate
the crime. And yet this leisure-loving man, who always
preferred Newmarket to the House of Commons, who
hated making a speech, and regarded politics as a disagree-
able necessity of his order, rose by his robust and stead-
fast common sense, his incorruptible honesty, and the
splendid tenacity with which he defended and expounded his
convictions, to be one of the most powerful and persuasive
speakers in either House of Parliament. In the Debate
upon the Introduction of the first Home Rule Bill in
1886, to which I have before referred, by far the best
speech, greatly transcending that of the trained orator Mr.
Gladstone, was delivered by Lord Hartington. No hesi-
tation or drowsiness marred the utterance of the man who
felt his most sacred convictions outraged and betrayed.
Sincerity and a s&va indignatio endowed him with a

Modern Parliamentary Eloquence 37

noble eloquence, and when he resumed his seat, I recall that
members stood up and waved their hats in the air. In a
subsequent career of singular unselfishness and inflexible
courage he was called upon to make similar pronouncements
on many occasions. He thus became the recognised
mouthpiece of the sober sense of the community,
and his speeches were more widely read than those
of any other public man ; for they both formed and
expressed public opinion. The British Parliament has
probably never contained a statesman who with fewer
of the orator's gifts was more successful in producing
the effect which even the orator sometimes fails to
attain.

One of the remarkable features of the speaking of this
upright man was his extreme nervousness. I have seen
his sheet of notes shaking in his hands as he spoke, and I
recall that when I was sworn in to the Privy Council at
Windsor, and the Duke, as President of the Council, had
to read out the names to Queen Victoria from a big sheet
of paper or parchment, his hands trembled so violently
that he all but dropped the list.

And now I pass to two very opposite figures, who both

attained to high fame by their proficiency in the combined

arts of Parliamentary and democratic elo-

Ckurchill °iuence- I speak of Lord Randolph Churchill
and Mr. Chamberlain. Churchill's meteoric
career and tragic ending call for no mention here. It is
as a speaker alone that I propose to consider him. I can
speak from personal recollection of his performances both
in Parliament and in the country. I heard many of the
personal attacks upon Mr. Gladstone and the Liberal
Government, and, perhaps, scarcely less upon the respectable
persons who then led the Conservative party, by means of
which he hewed his way to fame. The tomahawk was
always in his hand. It is impossible to describe the glee-
ful ferocity with which he swept off the scalps of friend
and foe. Some of these speeches contained the grossest
errors of taste, and nearly all were marked by a vein of
almost burlesque exaggeration. In later times, however,

38 Modern Parliamentary Eloqitence

he led the House of Commons for a few weeks with
unquestionable brilliance, and some of his speeches showed
a rapidly-growing sense of responsibility and great con-
structive power. His manner, like his speeches, revelled in
contrast, alternating from extreme insolence to sweet
reasonableness and an engaging courtesy. Like Disraeli,
on whom he clearly modelled himself, he oscillated
between the adventurer and the statesman. He spoke
with a voice resonant, but not musical, from copious notes,
and often committed large portions of his speech to
memory. He gesticulated much with his hands ; the fierce
twirling of his moustache and his protruding eye were
favourite themes with the political caricaturist. Seated
behind him in the House when he delivered the speech in
which he explained his fatal resignation, in the winter of
1886, I could observe the extreme nervousness betrayed
by his restless movements and twitching fingers.

It was as a mob-orator that Randolph Churchill excelled ;

no speaker of our day was for a few years such a popular

hero. The effrontery with which he assailed

As a mob- accepted idols, his mastery of a rather coarse
orator. . J

but pungent humour, his racy sallies, his use

of large-sounding phrases in the Disraelian manner, and
the belief that he was the prophet of a new political creed,
which was permanently to attach the democracy to the
Tory Party, combined to make him the darling of the
crowd. I remember asking one of his Birmingham
supporters the reason of his amazing popularity. " We
like our liquors neat," was the reply, "and Randolph

gives 'em us d d neat." The speech at Blackpool in

January, 1884, which contained the picture of Mr. Gladstone
as the feller of trees, culminating in the immortal sentence
" The forest laments that Mr. Gladstone may perspire,"
and followed by the not too happy political apologue about
Chips, is perhaps the best specimen of his platform manner.
It is interesting to know that the majority of these
speeches were written out in advance, quickly learned
(for Randolph Churchill included among his gifts a
marvellous memory), and even sent before delivery to the

Modern Parliamentary Eloquence 39

Morning Post, which to the end remained faithful to his
fortunes.

What would have become of Churchill's power of
speech is as difficult to conjecture as what would have
happened to his career. The fluidity of his principles and
his love for bold experiments and dramatic conceptions
might have landed him ultimately in any camp, or in none.
But that his oratorical gifts — though he was not in any
sense an orator — might have grown into a weapon of
enormous efficacy and power in the State, is no extrava-
gant hypothesis.

Mr. Chamberlain is another illustration of great talents,

equally effective in the Senate and on the platform. In the

House of Commons he never aimed at oratory,

Joseph ke macje no soaring flights of imagination or
Chamberlain. . .... .

rhetoric ; he neither received nor transmitted

the divine spark. But for mastery of all the arts of debate,
clearness, conciseness, humour, invective, ridicule, cogent
and relentless reasoning, he was unsurpassed. And on the
platform his strokes went straight to the mark, whether in
the hearts of his audience or on the weak spot of the
enemy. It is hard to say whether he was more effective
as a demagogue, waging fierce war against privilege and
monopoly, or as the patriot preaching with burning
enthusiasm the gospel of Empire. The gift which im-
pressed me most in his speaking was his imperturbable
self-possession. An incident occurred in the introduc-
tory debate on the first Home Rule Bill in 1886, when
Mr. Chamberlain, in the midst of a powerful declamation,
was suddenly interrupted by Mr. Gladstone and forbidden
to disclose a Cabinet secret. Where the composure and
the argument of any ordinary man would have been fatally
shattered by the suddenness of the blow, Mr. Chamberlain
recovered himself in a moment, shifted the ground of his
argument, and proceeded with the unerring precision of a
machine. His best speeches gave evidence of careful
preparation, and were assisted by neatly arranged notes.
He only indulged sparingly in gesture, but his crisp and

40 Modern Parliamentary Eloquence

penetrating intonation was an equally admirable vehicle
for close reasoning or for withering scorn.

John Morley, the present Lord Morley of Blackburn,

should be mentioned here, not as an orator, for he would

make no such claim, but as the last or almost

John tne jast expOnent; of (-ne classical literary

style. Just as his great Biography of Mr.
Gladstone teems with splendid phrases, original without
being extravagant, imaginative without being ornate, so
in some of his platform speeches, delivered in the days
when he addressed great popular audiences, the prin-
ciples of his political creed were expounded in a garb that
reminds one of the school of literary orators that ended
with Canning and Macaulay. It was not rhetoric, because
the sense was never sacrificed to the form, but it was an
inspired form of spoken prose. Sometimes — but less often —
in the House of Commons he performed a similar feat.
I quote one passage only, as a model of fine phrasing, from
a speech delivered on the South African War in May,
1901. A striking passage in the earlier part of this speech
about " a hateful war, a war insensate and infatuated, a
war of uncompensated mischief and irreparable wrong,"
was followed by this peroration :

" The master-key of the prosperity and strength of the realm is
peace. Peace means low taxes, reduced rent, advancement in the
comfort and well-being of the people of these islands, and, what I do
not, will not, disregard — it means the goodwill of the world. If our
aim is the extension of our territorial dominion, the transformation of
our ancient realm, which has aided civilisation for generation after
generation, into a boastful military Empire, to be supported, I
suppose, by conscription and a Customs Union thrown in, which will
lose us our best markets for the sake of the worst, then, I say, financial
ruin undoubtedly awaits us. I quote a sentence from a great divine
which I have used before : ' Things are what they are, and their
consequences will be what they will be. Why, then, shall we seek to
deceive ourselves ?J Wear out your coal, pile up your debts, multiply
and magnify your responsibilities in every part of the globe, starve
social reforms among your people at home ; and then, indeed, you will
have a Little England, a dilapidated heritage to hand on to your
children and your children's children."

I pass to the three living statesmen who have been
Prime Ministers, We may be sure, from what has been

Modern Parliamentary Eloquence 41

said, that none of them could have attained to or have
held that office without exceptional powers of speech,
although it would be impossible to name a trio of
men who represented greater varieties of equipment and
style.

Lord Rosebery is frequently and not inaptly described

as our only Orator, and as the Orator of Empire, the latter

a tribute to the rich imagination and stately

Earl of diction with which, on great occasions, he
Rosebery. .

speaks for the nation, or expounds an

imperial theme. There is hardly a gift predicable of
the orator with which nature or study has not endowed
Lord Rosebery ; a voice flexible and resonant rather than
melodious, gestures, bold and dramatic, perhaps even at
times histrionic, a diction both chaste and resplendent, an
exhaustive knowledge of all that is pertinent in literature
or history, an exuberant fancy, great natural wit, a gift
of persiflage, sometimes almost too generously indulged.
I speak with less confidence as to passion and pathos,
since it is an oratory that produces every sensation of
admiration, amusement, and delight, without as a rule
appealing either to profound emotion or to tears. A ten-
dency may be traced in some speeches to exaggeration of
effect.

If the range of Lord Rosebery's eloquence during the
last forty years be examined, it will be found, I think,
that he has exceeded any public man during
^at Per^oc^ m tne number of speeches that he
has delivered, which may claim to be both
oratory from the effect produced on their audiences at
the time, and literature, to judge by the enjoyment with
which they may be read afterwards. His eloquence
has poured over the ordinary boundaries of the political
arena, has filled innumerable channels of historical, bio-
graphical, social, or literary interest, and has fertilised
many and diverse fields. Whatever subject he touches is
raised at once out of the commonplace : it is gilded with
happy phrases, it sparkles with effervescence and laughter,
and it becomes a part of the intellectual capital of the

42 Modern Parliamentary Eloqiience

whole community. It was with a cry of universal dismay
that the nation heard the other day the surely unpardon-
able threat that it is perhaps to be deprived in the future
of this gratuitous and unalloyed enjoyment.

There are at least a score of Lord Rosebery's speeches

from which I might find quotations worthy to take

their place in any company. The most

Passages widely popular and admired which he has
quoted. . J

delivered in recent years was his welcome to

the members of the Imperial Press Conference in London,
in June, 1909, in which occurred that exquisite passage
about English scenery : " the little villages clustered, as
they have clustered for centuries, about the heaven-directed
spires."

But I prefer to select passages from two speeches, both
delivered in St. Andrew's Hall at Glasgow, a place and a
city for which Lord Rosebery has reserved some of his
choicest gifts.

The first is his peroration, in July, 1896, on the frailties
of Robert Burns :

" Man, after all, is not ripened by virtue alone. Were it so, this
world were a paradise of angels. No. Like the growth of the earth,
he is the fruit of all seasons, the accident of a thousand accidents, a
living mystery moving through the seen to the unseen ; he is sown in
dishonour ; he is matured under all the varieties of heat and cold ; in
mists and water, in snow and vapours, in the melancholy of autumn,
in the torpor of winter, as well as in the rapture and fragrance of sum-
mer, or the balmy affluence of spring, its breath, its sunshine ; at the
end he is reaped, the produce not of one climate, but of all, not of good
alone, but of sorrow, perhaps mellowed and ripened, perhaps stricken
and withered and sour. How then shall we judge anyone— how, at
any rate, shall we judge a giant, great in gifts and great in tempta-
tions, great in strength and great in weakness ? Let us glory in his
strength and be comforted in his weakness, and when we thank
Heaven for the inestimable gift of Burns, we do not need to remem-
ber wherein he was imperfect, we cannot bring ourselves to regret
that he was made of the same clay as ourselves."

The second passage is the peroration of his Rectorial
Address at Glasgow University in 1900, on the British
Empire : —

" How marvellous it all is ! Built not by saints and angels, but the
work of men's hands ; cemented with men's honest blood and with a
world of tears ; welded by the best brains of centuries past ; not without

Modern Parliamentary Eloquence 43

the taint and reproach incidental to all human work, but constructed
on the whole with pure and splendid purpose. Human, and not wholly
human, for the most heedless and the most cynical must see the finger
of the Divine. Growing as trees grow, while others slept ; fed by the
faults of others as well as by the character of our fathers ; reaching
with the ripple of a resistless tide over tracts and islands and continents,
until our little Britain woke up to find herself the foster-mother of
nations and the source of united empires. Do we not hail in this less
the energy and fortune of a race than the supreme direction of the
Almighty ? Shall we not, while we adore the blessing, acknowledge
the responsibility ? And while we see, far away in the rich horizons,
growing generations fulfilling the promise, do we not own with reso-
lution mingled with awe the honourable duty incumbent on ourselves ?
Shall we then falter or fail ? The answer is not doubtful. We will
rather pray that strength may be given us, adequate and abundant, to
shrink from no sacrifice in the fulfilment of our mission ; that we may
be true to the high tradition of our forefathers ; and that we may
transmit their bequest to our children, aye, and please God, to their
remote descendants, enriched and undefiled, this blessed and splendid
dominion."

Both these passages were doubtless written ; for all I
know they may have been read ; but whether they were
written, or read, or declaimed, they seem to me worthy to
be ranked with the greatest masterpieces of British
eloquence.

Mr. Balfour would be greatly shocked if any such claim
were put forward on his behalf as I have made for some of
the statesmen whom I have been discussing.
A. /. Balfour. Indeed, I expect that he would disagree with
much of what I have written about oratory
and eloquence ; for there has probably never been a states-
man of the first rank in England who was so indifferent
to either, or so distrustful of their influence in public life.
Not that Mr. Balfour would be slow to recognise the
supreme gifts either of Mr. Gladstone or Lord Rosebery —
he has testified to the one, and I think to both — but his
own idea of the best speech-making, I expect, would
be that the thought is all important, and that the form,
which is accidental, temperamental, and secondary, may be
left to look after itself. I am confident that he has
never consciously cultivated a single rhetorical art, and it
can only have been by mistake if he has ever strayed into
a peroration.

Mr. Balfour can perhaps afford to take this line, for

44 Modern Parliamentary Eloquence

intellect has supplied him with that which a natural
aptitude or conscious training has given to

. ; ,s..a. others. His is probably the acutest mind
dialectician. \. .. . ,

that has been dedicated to politics during the

past century. As a parliamentary dialectician he has
never had a superior ; and his facility is such that in any
field where his rare elevation of thought finds natural
scope, he runs the risk of becoming eloquent in spite of
himself. I recall his first speeches as Irish Secretary twenty-
six years ago. They were both ineffective and hesita-
ting. Even now he sometimes finds difficulty in getting
under way, and his indifference to precision or detail is
apt to be a source of embarrassment. But if any issue
arises which requires to be resolved into broad principles,
and to be handled by the thinker rather than the politician,
the statesman rather than the party man, the House of
Commons may look to him with confidence to express its
highest ideals. No parliamentary speaker has ever had
greater charm of manner or courtesy of address, and the
way in which, in 1906-7, he won back the confidence of a
new House of Commons, overpoweringly hostile to his
political opinions, and distrustful of his dialectical methods,
was a triumph without a parallel.

Mr. Balfour is probably more independent of prepara-
tion than any man who has ever led the House of Commons,

When he spoke of placing his views on the
His methods. u ir u r

Fiscal Question on half a sheet of note paper,

he described that which is his normal practice. The notes
for all the speeches that he has made in a political career
of forty years would, in all likelihood, not equal the MS.
of a single Budget speech of Mr. Gladstone. But from
these few pencilled words he will evolve either the subtlest
metaphysical analysis or the loftiest and broadest general-
isations. He is too indifferent to the arts of oratory to
have enjoyed a platform success at all comparable to his
Parliamentary position. But even at mass meetings his
logic, his play of humour, his immense resourcefulness, and
his felicitous diction, have often won a conspicuous triumph.
I could not pay a higher tribute to Mr. Balfour's versa-

Modern Parliamentary Eloquence 45

tility than by selecting for quotation a passage from the
class of speech from which a priori he would most naturally
shrink, but in which his intellectual ascendency and width
of outlook have more than once enabled him to excel.
This is what he said in January, 1910, upon the death of
Queen Victoria :

" Perhaps less known was the life of continuous labour which her
position as Queen threw upon her. Short as was the interval between
the last trembling signature affixed to a public document and the final
and perfect rest, it was yet long enough to clog and hamper the
wheels of administration ; and when I saw the accumulating mass of
untouched documents which awaited the attention of the Sovereign, I
marvelled at the unostentatious patience which for sixty-three years,
through sorrow, through suffering, in moments of weariness, in moments
of despondency, had enabled her to carry on without break or pause her
share in the government of this great Empire. For her there was no
holiday, to her there was no intermission of toil. Domestic sorrow,
domestic sickness, made no difference in her labours ; and they were
continued from the hour at which she became our Sovereign to within
a few days— I had almost said a few hours — of her death. It is easy
to chronicle the growth of empire, the course of discovery, the progress
of trade, the triumphs of war, all the events that make history interest-
ing or exciting. But who is there that will dare to weigh in the
balance the effect which such an example, continued over sixty-three
years, has produced on the higher life of her people ? "

The present Prime Minister, Mr. Asquith, represents a
type of public speaking carried to higher perfection than

by anyone else in modern times. Possessed
H. H. Asquith. of a copious vocabulary, an extraordinary

and effortless command of the right word, a
remarkable gift of lucidity and compression, and a resonant
voice, he produces an overpowering effect of Parliamentary
and forensic strength. Whether in exposition or declama-
tion, in opening or in reply, on a great subject or a small,
he never falls below a certain stately level, even though
he never soars above it into passion or kindles an audience
into flame. Whenever I have heard him on a first-rate
occasion, there rises in my mind the image of some great
military parade. The words, the arguments, the points,
follow each other with the steady tramp of regiments
across the field ; each unit is in its place, the whole march-
ing in rhythmical order ; the sunlight glints on the bayonets,
and ever and anon is heard the roll of the drums.

46 Modern Parliamentary Eloquence

The same characteristics are visible when he speaks
from a platform. Where another speaker would stretch
himself out over an hour and a quarter, Mr. Asquith has
said all that is to be said in fifty minutes. It is a miracle
of succinctness, the apotheosis of business-like efficiency.
There is no gesticulation, no self-abandonment, no flash or
glow, but the case is stated, illustrated, argued, and proven
with a force that is almost stunning. Further, the Prime
Minister is the master of one incomparable art — the result,
I imagine, of early practice at the Bar. He can represent
the weakest of cases as though it were of overwhelming
strength, the most startling of innovations as though it were
an everyday procedure, the most disputable of propositions
as though it were an axiom of universal acceptance. This
combination of gifts, intellectual, personal, rhetorical, renders
Mr. Asquith a Parliamentary workman of the highest order.
Never are these talents of concise and flawless expres-
sion better shown than on the occasion of his tributes to
the illustrious dead. Of these I think that I

His memorial should have selected for mention his eulogium
tributes.

upon King Edward, were it not that it has

since been surpassed by his tribute to Alfred Lyttelton, an
echo of the Virgilian cry that has rung down the ages :
" Sunt lacrymae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt." He
spoke as follows :

" Perhaps of all men of this generation Alfred Lyttelton came
nearest to the mould and ideal of manhood which every English
father would like to see his son aspire to and, if possible, attain.
The bounty of nature, enriched and developed not only by early
training, but by constant self-discipline through life, blended in him
gifts and graces which taken alone are rare, and in such attractive
union are rarer still. Body, mind, and character — the schoolroom,
the cricket field, the Bar, the House of Commons — each made its
separate contribution to the faculty and the experience of a many-
sided and harmonious whole. But what he was he gave — gave with
such ease and exuberance that I think it maybe said without exaggera-
tion that wherever he moved he seemed to radiate vitality and charm.
He was, as we here know, a strenuous fighter. He has left behind
him no resentments and no enmity : nothing but a gracious memory
for a manly and winning personality — the memory of one who served
with an unstinted measure of devotion his generation and his country.
He has been snatched away in what we thought was the full tide of
buoyant life still full of promise and of hope. What more can we
say ? We can only bow once again before the decrees of the Supreme

Modern Parliamentary Eloquence 47

Wisdom. Those who loved him — and they are many, in all schools of
opinion, in all ranks and walks of life — when they think of him, will
say to themselves :

'This is the happy warrior, this is he
Whom every man in arms should wish to be.' "

Many good speakers there are or have been in the
House of Commons in my time with whom it is impossible
to deal here at any length. The present
leader of the Unionist Party in that House,
Mr. Bonar Law, would not have been chosen
to succeed Mr. Balfour but for his powers of speech, which
had given him a high reputation, though not as yet Cabinet
office. The exercise of these powers in a field of authority,
added to fearless courage, transparent sincerity, and an
uncommon faculty for going straight to the heart of
things, has justified that choice. What Mr. Bonar Law's
future as a statesman may be, the gods hold in their lap.
As a Parliamentary and public speaker, he possesses a
gift unseen since the late Lord Salisbury — that of delivering
a sustained and closely reasoned argument or attack for
an hour without a single note. In part the result of an
astonishing memory, in part of great intellectual quickness,
this faculty as it is developed by practice, cannot fail to
place him in the front rank of British Parliamentary
successes.

One of the few prominent speakers in the House of

Commons who still cultivates, I will not say the classical,

but the literary style, and at times practises

Churchm. it: with Sreat abilit7> is Mr- Winston Churchill.
Like most talented speakers he is able to
adapt himself to the need of the moment, but it may be
conjectured that the form of speech which he prefers, and
in which also he excels, is that in which structure, diction,
and form — not perhaps unflavoured by invective — have
been pressed into the service of an artistic whole. On the
platform he adopts a double style. The exigencies of
modern democracy seem indeed to require from its
favourites a twofold gift — at one time the utterance of the
statesman whose dignified periods allay apprehension and
will one day take their place in an anthology of British

48 Modern Parliamentary Eloqiience

Eloquence, at another the " patter " of the music-hall artist
who must tickle the taste of the " gods " in a transpontine
" gallery."

In the Unionist party at the present time are two men,

the one, alas ! silent, the other in the prime of his activity

and powers, to whom true eloquence cannot

Z>. Plunket. be denied. These are Lord Rathmore, better

known when in the Lower House as Mr.

David Plunket, and Lord Hugh Cecil, the youngest son

of the late Lord Salisbury.

Mr. Plunket started with an inherited talent for oratory,
for he was the grandson of one of Ireland's most famous
orators, Lord Plunket. A fine presence, an easy manner,
a musical voice (from which, as soon as he had cast loose,
a stammer that somewhat impedes his utterance in or-
dinary conversation, entirely disappeared), and a command
of picturesque and stately language, made him for over
twenty years one of the favourites of the House of Commons.
His best speeches were probably those on the Extension
of the Household Franchise in Ireland in 1885, and on the
Welsh Church Bill in 1895. But Mr. Plunket had not
only the gifts but also the sensitive temperament of the
orator. It was always an effort and anguish to him to
speak, and, withdrawn into the sepulchral shades of the
Upper Chamber in 1895, ne relapsed into a silence which
has never since been broken.

Fortunately Lord Hugh Cecil suffers from no such

self-imposed repression. His earnest swaying figure, his

eager, high-pitched voice, are seen and heard

Lord H"gh in every important debate, and on many
provincial platforms. His speaking is al-
ways intellectual, much of it is hard hitting and fierce.
But from time to time the fire of eloquence is ignited on
his lips, and the House is hushed to silence as it listens to
words that combine the charm of music with the rapture
of the seer. I will quote three such passages. The first
was in a debate on the Resolutions preliminary to the
Parliament Bill on March soth, 1910:

" I look upon our Constitution with something much more than the

Modern Parliamentary Eloquence 49

reverence with which a man of good taste would look upon an ancient
and beautiful building. I look upon it as a temple of the twin deities
of Liberty and Order which Englishmen have so long worshipped to
the glory of their country. Let us then go into the temple, con over
its stones, and saturate ourselves with its atmosphere, and then,
continuing its traditions, let us adorn and embellish it. So we too
shall partake of something of its renown, our figures will, perhaps,
be found in it, and our names be graven on its stones. In this way
we shall attain to a measure of its immortality, and high on the
eminence of its glory our fame will stand secure, safe from the waters
of oblivion, safe from the tide of time."

The second passage was in a debate on the Education
Bill, on May i6th, 1902, when the speaker alluded to the
school of thought " who may be described as adopting the
position of Christianity in everything except its theology }
who possess the morality of Christianity, its sense of right
and wrong, its delicate sensitiveness of conscience, though
they are unable to accept its theological basis," and
went on :

" These men, it may be said, erect in the mansions of their hearts a
splendid throne-room, in which they place objects revered and beauti-
ful. There are laid the sceptre of righteousness and the swords of
justice and mercy. There is the purple robe that speaks of the unity
of love and power, and there is the throne that teaches the supreme
moral governance of the world. And that room is decorated by all
that is most beautiful in art or literature. It is gemmed by all the
jewels of imagination and knowledge. Yet that noble chamber, with
all its beauty, its glorious regalia, its solitary throne, is still an empty
room."

Lastly, speaking on the Welsh Church Bill, on January
, 1913, he said :

" Though it is a fine thing to give education, there is something that
comes closer, sooner or later, to the human heart. It is a comforting
thing that the poor man should receive relief, adequate care and help
in sickness. But there are two great crises — one that comes to every
man, and one that comes to many — when these things appear com-
paratively small. In the presence of some great moral upheaval,
some great spiritual crisis, in that agony of mind which alone such a
crisis brings, it is not in education, medicine, or alms, that relief is to
be found. There comes to every one that last great day when
medicine has done its best, when all relief possible has been given,
when the soul stands naked and trembling, face to face with all the
horrors and wonders of Eternity. Then there is one light alone to
lighten the darkness, then it is only in the Gospel, in which all the
denominations alike believe, that hope and happiness and comfort
are to be found."

E

50 Modern Parliamentary Eloquence

These passages are prepared and studied eloquence ; but
they are eloquence of a high order, and they suggest that
combination of spiritual fervour with a glowing imagination
that was characteristic of some of the greatest orators of
the past.

It would be surprising if Ireland, the land of Curran,
Grattan, O'Connell, and Plunket, had not

Irish made a contribution to the eloquence of the
Eloquence. -»..._....

British Parliament during the past half

century that should be worthy of its ancient renown.

I sat opposite the Nationalist Party in the House of
Commons during the twelve years in which they were

forcing the Home Rule question from the
C. S. Parnell. obscurity of a local fad to the rank of the first

political issue of the day — the years of political
and agrarian crimes in Ireland, and tumult in Parliament —
the years in which Parnell flared into a sudden and sombre
prominence and as suddenly disappeared. Parnell was not
eloquent, much less an orator. Possessed of singularly
handsome features, he was slovenly in dress and untidy in
appearance. He used to speak with one of his hands buried
deeply in a front pocket of his trousers. He had no great
command of language. But as he hissed out his sentences
of concentrated passion and scorn, scattering his notes as
he proceeded upon the seat behind him, he gave an im-
pression of almost daemonic self-control and illimitable
strength. When he spoke for his party, in the tremendous
moments of the crisis, Mr. Gladstone would move to the
end of the front bench, and with his hand held behind his
ear, listen to the freezing but impressive display with rapt
attention. Either in the House or outside of it, Parnell
appeared an isolated figure ; " remote, unfriended, melan-
choly, slow," he came in and out without exchanging
a word with anyone : the utmost concession that he
appeared to make to companionship was when he would
be met tramping the lobbies in earnest conversation
with one of the few associates whom he deigned to
consult.

One of Parnell's principal lieutenants, Mr. Sexton, had

Modern Parliamentary Eloquence 51

very considerable oratorical gifts, and I remember Mr.

Balfour publicly thanking him for the valuable
T. Sexton, assistance that he had rendered in debate in

the shaping of one of the Irish Land Bills
of that time. But the nickname with which Punch
christened him, " Windbag Sexton," gave an unfair im-
pression of his abilities, which were great, although the air
of self-satisfaction with which his inexhaustible periods
flowed from his lips was sometimes a source of irritation
to his opponents.

At that time Mr. Redmond had not developed the powers
either of speech or command which have since maintained

him for over twenty years in the troubled
/. Redmond, but uncontested leadership of his party, and,

as some allege, the dictatorship of British
politics. One of the main sources of his success has been
a power of speech, consistently verging upon eloquence,
and sometimes tinged with genuine emotion. I have
heard him described as the " Master of Parliamentary
plausibility."

The most talented member of the Irish party, with an
unsurpassed gift of corrosive humour and almost diabolical

irony was, and is, Mr. Timothy Healy. His
Timothy Healy. witty sallies were a great delight to a jaded

House. Some of the best were perpetuated
at the expense of the late Sir Richard Temple, whom
Providence had not blessed with great natural beauty.
" The Burmese idol nods " — was one interjection as
Temple's head fell forward with a series of somnolent
jerks upon his chest. On another occasion Temple had
interjected a " No, no ! " while Healy was speaking,
only to be met by the irrepressible humorist with the
rejoinder, " The hon. member is very great with his Noes
(nose)." Though he now intervenes less frequently in debate,
Mr. Healy always struck me for sheer cleverness as one of the
best speakers I ever heard in the House of Commons, and
on rare occasions — I recall one passage about the Catholic
Church — he was lifted above himself and became inspired.
The contemplation of speakers still with us has almost

E 2

52 Modern Parliamentary Eloquence

tempted me to forget a number of figures who have now
passed away, but who graced the boards and won the
plaudits of their time. These seem to me to fall into three
categories, according to the nature of their powers and
influence — the statesmen, the rhetoricians, and the
humorists. I will devote a few words to each class.

The great Lord Derby, three times Prime Minister, was
before my day. But he just came within the half century
which I have attempted to cover, having died
Fourteenth in 1869. He was
Earl of Derby. «« The brilliant chief> irregularly great,

Frank, haughty, rash — the Rupert of debate "

depicted by Lord Lytton in the New Timon. That he
excelled in every talent of the orator, in debate no less
than in declamation, is established by the universal con-
sensus of his contemporaries. But he may be said to
belong to an earlier period, the records of which can be
better traced elsewhere.

I recall very clearly his son, the fifteenth Earl of Derby
Foreign Ministerin Disraeli's second administration. Hewas
a frigid and monotonous but powerful speaker
Fifteenth wno seemed the embodiment of intellectual
Earl of Derby, common-sense. His speeches were com-
mitted to memory, but the speaker somewhat
marred their effect by a rather pompous and " mouthing "
delivery.

Mr. Cobden also belonged to an earlier generation.
But in a review of Parliamentary Eloquence, it is im-
possible altogether to omit the man whose
Cobden Powers of luminous exposition acted as a foil
to the fervid oratory of John Bright on a
hundred platforms, and of whom so great a judge as Sir
Robert Peel could say that his " eloquence was the more
to be admired because it was unaffected and unadorned."
A figure, unknown to the present generation, but very
prominent in his day, was Mr. Gathorne
GHa°rd"e Hardy> afterwards the first Earl of Cran-
brook. He was one of Disraeli's most capable
and trusted lieutenants, and certainly one of the ablest

Modern Parliamentary Eloquence 53

speakers on the Front Bench in the House of Commons.
He had a fine presence, great ease in delivery, excellent
debating powers, and a refreshing vigour. At one time
he was thought likely to reach the highest place in the
ranks of his party.

I heard some of Mr. Forster's most effective speeches at
the time when he was denouncing Parnellism in the House
of Commons. Rugged, shaggy, volcanic,
P' j forceful, totally destitute of grace or imagina-
tion, he was seriously considered at one time,
as we know, for the leadership of his party, and was a
notable and potent figure in debate.

There was no finer debater than Mr. (afterwards Lord)
Goschen. His short sight, compelling him to hold his
papers almost under his eyes, his harsh and
G.J. Goschen, rasping voice and his lack of grace in pose
and action, were serious handicaps to any
speaker. But he had intellect, courage, conviction, and
fire. No man could state a case more finely for his party,
or deliver a more comprehensive and crushing reply ; and
on one occasion, at the famous meeting at His Majesty's
Theatre in April, 1886, to inaugurate the anti-Home Rule
Campaign, in rebutting the argument that assassination
might have to be faced, he uttered the immortal phrase
" we will make our wills and do our duty."

I cannot refrain from mentioning here one man who,

though prevented by the circumstances of his office from

attaining a high position as a speaker or a

Arthur W. Parliamentarian, was nevertheless one of the

*€Cl

most imposing figures whom I remember in
public life. This was Arthur Peel, afterwards Lord Peel,
and for eleven years Speaker of the House of Commons. A
more majestic presence in the Chair it was impossible to
conceive. His pointed beard and heavy official wig caused
him closely to resemble the picture of a Pharaoh on his
throne ; and his demeanour, when censuring an unruly
member, rebuking an offender at the Bar, or composing a
tumult in the House, was the quintessence of dignified
grandeur. At such a moment — I forget to whom the

54 Modern Parliamentary Eloquence

description was originally applied — " thunder clothed his
brow," and the House listened in hushed awe. When he
did make a speech on being elected or re-elected to the
Chair, it was evident that he might have greatly excelled
in the classical style of an earlier generation.

His elder brother, the second Sir Robert Peel, though
he made no mark in public life, had also inherited no
mean rhetorical and dramatic attainments.
Standing up to speak, as I saw him, on the
benches below the gangway on the Con-
servative side, his almost foreign appearance, rich voice,
animated gestures, and humour that seldom erred on the
side of refinement, suggested great gifts which, if con-
trolled and directed, might have led to influence and
fame.

In the 'seventies the Conservative party produced and

were led for five years in the Upper House by a great

lawyer who was also a statesman, a fine

Earl Cairns, speaker, almost at moments an orator. This

was the first Lord Cairns. An intellectual

countenance, a distinguished and weighty manner, and a

cultured diction, enabled him to overcome the drawbacks

from which lawyers in Parliament are generally, though

perhaps unfairly, believed to suffer. I heard his powerful

speech on the evacuation of the Transvaal in the House of

Lords in 1880, which he concluded with the apposite

quotation from Abraham Cowley : —

" We grieved, we sighed, we wept — we never blushed before."
At this point he rose to genuine eloquence. More com-
monly he was self-restrained, passionless, and cold.

Perhaps I should not omit to mention a Parliamentary
figure of a very different type. This was Charles Brad-
laugh, with whom I sat in the House of
Charles Commons for some years. Known as the
' " boy orator " of secular and atheistic circles
in his youth, trained in the rough school of public
disputation, a professional agitator of the most accom-
plished type, he created an extraordinary effect by the
speech which he made when called to the bar of the House
in June, 1880 — a speech described by Mr. Gladstone in his

Modern Parliamentary Eloquence 55

letter to the Queen as " the address of a consummate
speaker." Later, when he obtained an uncontested entrance
into the House, he impressed it greatly with his courage,
sincerity, and oratorical power. Traces of his early career
flashed out in his complete disregard of the aspirate when
excited, and he had a peculiar trick of standing with his
right leg raised upon the bench and his elbow resting upon
it as he addressed the House. His towering bulk and
resounding voice (which almost equalled the thunder of
Mr. John Burns) added to the impression of weight and
power, and I can well believe that had he pursued less
violent lines of agitation or been identified with more
popular causes, he might have obtained an influence with
the democracy second only to that of Daniel O'Connell.

I pass from the class of politicians who were speakers,
to another class, the speakers who were politicians. I
speak of a number of persons celebrated in

The their day, but now well-nigh forgotten, and
rhetoricians. , , . , f ,

of a class of speech which is not oratory but

rhetoric, though the exaggeration of contemporaries some-
times mistakes it for the authentic article. These men
were of very different order of merit, all had great abilities,
and some attained to high office ; but the glitter and sparkle
of their ornate art has left no permanent mark upon the
history of their time. I seem to trace a lineal descent in
these exponents of a style in which Canning, and to a less
extent Macaulay, were acknowledged masters, but which in
inferior hands could only achieve an ephemeral reputation.
They are Richard Lalor Sheil, George Smythe (afterwards
Lord Strangford), Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Robert
Lowe, Patrick Smyth, and Joseph Cowen. Since the last
named died the stock has become extinct and seems
unlikely to be renewed.

Of these Sheil carried his art to the highest pitch of
artificial elaboration. He was an essentially histrionic
speaker, both in action and voice. " Did not
Sheil scream?" some one asked of Mr.
Gladstone. " He was all scream " is said to have been
the reply. Professor Jebb seems to have thought that
Sheil's famous apostrophe about the aliens in the House

56 Modern Parliamentary Eloquence

of Commons in February, 1837, was an unmeditated effort
produced by the sight of Lord Lyndhurst, who had
applied the expression to Irishmen, seated under the
gallery as he was making his speech. I cannot believe
that this was the case. It is difficult to credit the un-
studied and spontaneous origin of the references to the
"steeps and moats of Badajos," or the catalogue of
victories — Vimiera, Salamanca, Albuera, Toulouse, Water-
loo,— or the peroration :

" When the chill morning dawned, their dead lay cold and stark
together, in the same deep pit their bodies were deposited, the green
corn of spring is now breaking from their commingled dust, the dew
falls from heaven upon their union in the grave."

And if I wanted a confirmation for this view I should find
it in the even more amazing example of the same style by
the same speaker in his denunciation of the dying Duke
of York in 1827, when he followed, so to speak, the corpse
of the still living object of his invective from the death
chamber to the funeral vault in St. George's — a gruesome
and incredible example of perverted art.

I have only dwelt upon Sheil, who died in 1851,

because he was the most accomplished professor of this

academy. Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton, the

Sir E. Bulwer noveiist who was Secretary for the Colonies
Lytton. * .

in 1857, for a short time excited a wonderful

sensation by similar displays. Men crowded to the House
of Commons to hear the latest performance of " the orator
of the century." Epigrams, antithesis, alliteration — all the
conscious tricks of the trade — were packed into his ornate
harangues, which no one now remembers.

A little later there appeared a far more accomplished
exponent of the same art. This was Mr. Robert Lowe,

afterwards Lord Sherbrooke, who, in the
Robert Lowe, Session of 1 866, rose to real fame by the

burnished and scathing brilliance of his
attacks upon the Reform Bill of that year. Scholarship,
irony, paradox, wit, studied elaboration of form, all were
weapons in the hands of the man who had the supreme
advantage of attacking his party with the sympathy of the
greater portion of the House behind him.

Modern Parliamentary Eloquence 57

Disraeli's friend, George Smythe, the hero of Coningsby,

and the orator of the Young England Party, was one of

the pathetic failures of English politics. But

George j j-jave a speech by him delivered at Man-
Smythe. 3

Chester in the company of Disraeli in 1844,

which, I was told by one who remembered it, had caused a
greater sensation than any oration of that time.

Patrick Smyth, the bearer of a similar name, was an

Irishman who, after an adventurous career, entered

Parliament as a Nationalist member, and

Patrick delivered there a series of elaborate speeches
Smyth.

which earned for him a passing renown.

The last of the school was Joseph Cowen, Radical mem-
ber for Newcastle, who, siding with Disraeli in his foreign
policy, came out as a rhetorical exponent of
Joseph Cowen. Imperialism, in a series of speeches delivered
partly in the House of Commons, partly on
the platform, which caused an immense sensation, and
were even thought by some to be masterpieces of the
orator's art They seem to be very full of grandiloquent
platitudes and 'missfire epigrams now. Every word was
committed by the speaker to memory, and recited in a
strong Northumbrian accent that was almost unintelligible
outside of Newcastle. John Bright cruelly said of Cowen,
" he was a fine speaker if you did not listen to what he
said." With Cowen this school of rhetoric came to an
end, and in an age the temper and spirit of which I
described in the opening pages of this address, it seems im-
possible that it should be revived.

Perhaps I ought to devote a word in passing to the

humourists of the House during the period of which I have

been speaking. Not that any of them were

Parliamentary orators, although humour is a useful adjunct

humourists : of oratory. But they did what oratory often
Sir W. Lawson, r ... . , . . '

C0l fails to do : they pleased their hearers and

Saunderson, relieved the dulness of Parliamentary life

iiiSSSS* Sir Wilfrid Lawson was a j°ker of the SP°«-

A. Birrell. taneous and rollicking type, who combined

a power of telling good stories and depicting

grotesque situations with great charm of personality and an

58 Modern Parliamentary Eloquence

ardent Radicalism. Col. Saunderson, an Irish Unionist
member, gifted with a terrific brogue, which he had im-
proved by practice, gave so genial and good-natured a
display of Irish humour that he was loved by the Parnellite
party whom he derided and exposed. Dr. Robert Wallace,
an Edinburgh minister, professor, and journalist, clothed a
biting wit in a literary garb so artistic that he kept the
House, in which, by the way, he had a seizure and died,
alternately hushed with expectancy and convulsed with
laughter. Labouchere was the incurable cynic who mocked,
at everybody, including himself. Mr. Birrell, the present
Irish Secretary, has an instinctive gift of humour which
does not desert him even on serious occasions, and is aided
by irreproachable literary form. Bernal Osborne belongs
to a rather earlier day ; but in his prepared epigrams
almost always lurked a poisoned dart, intended to pierce
the bosom impartially of friend and foe.

Another class of speakers in the House of Commons

that has added to its intellectual distinction, and not

infrequently to its eloquence, has been that

The Professors of the professOrs. I heard, I think, all of
tn Parliament. .

them in recent years, with the exception of

John Stuart Mill, whose great literary reputation was
perhaps not sustained by his rhetorical performances. As
he delivered his maiden speech, Disraeli, fixing him with
his eye-glass, is said to have murmured, " Oh, the finishing
governess " ; and this impression, encouraged by a weak
voice and nervous manner, was never quite removed by
the intellectual quality of the highly finished essays which
this learned philosopher recited to the House. The blind
Professor Fawcett was a sincere and powerful speaker ;
and so, in different ways, were the present Lord Courtney,
Professor Jebb, who had a delicate gift of speech, Professor
S. H. Butcher, a very able Parliamentarian, as well as
a most accomplished man, and Professor Lecky. The
figure of the latter, swaying to and fro, with not too grace-
ful undulations, as he delivered the most admirable
argument in a high and rather querulous treble voice, is
a picture not easily forgotten. In some of these cases and

Modern Parliamentary Eloquence 59

in others that I could mention, it was difficult not to think
of the lecturer at his desk, addressing an audience of
inferior mental calibre to the speaker ; and when even the
most famous of physicians advanced to the table, one
almost expected to see him open the brass-bound box and
extract a chemical retort from its recesses for purposes of
demonstration.

The bench of Bishops has in its time contributed much
to the eloquence, as well as to the appearance and dignity
of the Upper House. During the last half
The Episcopal centurv its most noted orator was Samuel
Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford and Win-
chester, whose eloquence was of a very high order and,
like his character, suggested the great ecclesiastical states-
man rather than the divine. He leaped into fame by a
speech on the Corn Laws in June, 1846, of which his
biographer says that it ought to have been heard rather
than read. I never had the good fortune to listen to
Dr. Wilberforce. But I recall the terse and powerful
speaking of Bishop Magee, who combined reasoning with
sarcasm, and scholarship with humour, and whose best
speech was delivered on the second reading of the Bill for
the Disestablishment of the Irish Church in 1869. Bishop
Creighton of London — a most ingenious and witty speaker
at a dinner-table — might, had he lived, have become a
power in debate. The present Archbishop of York
(Dr. Lang) is the master of a scholarly and impressive
style. But the ecclesiastic who, of all others, seemed to
me in his speeches and person to embody most effectively
the grave persuasiveness, the august authority, and the spiri-
tual elevation of the Episcopal Bench, was Archbishop Tait.

In studying the records of the speakers of the time, I

find a phrase in constant use which excites a legitimate

curiosity. It is said of So-and-so that he had

,.The the Parliamentary manner. This is an
Parliamentary

manner. attribute that would appear to be quite

independent of oratory or even of considerable
powers of speech, because it is frequently applied to men
who had neither ; although on the other hand it may

60 Modern Parliamentary Eloquence

coexist with both. The two most conspicuous illustrations
of this gift, which is sometimes otherwise expressed as
the being a great House of Commons man, appear to have
been Walpole in the eighteenth century and Sir Robert
Peel in the nineteenth century. Disraeli said at different
times of Peel that he was "the greatest member of
Parliament that ever lived," and that he " played on the
House like an old fiddle." Someone else said of him that
he was " the greatest member of Parliament since Walpole."
Mr. Gladstone seems to have meant much the same thing
when he declared that " Peel was the best man of business
who was ever Prime Minister." The compliment clearly
cannot relate to charm of manner any more than to gift
of speech, because Peel was notoriously stiff, cold,
and even repellent in manner. Both men were
accomplished and versatile speakers, but neither was an
orator. It can only relate, as it seems, to a power of
managing the House of Commons, correctly understanding
its temper, humouring its idiosyncrasies and piloting its
wayward inclinations. In other words it is a form of tact,
which in the case of a leader is perhaps the first condition
of successful leadership. It is the particular tact that
enables a man to make the House feel that he is of like
temper with itself, playing the same game and observing
its rules ; not trying selfishly to coruscate or excel, but
putting his own contribution of talent or eloquence into
'the common stock. Disraeli may have had this in mind
when he wrote that "to make others feel we must feel
ourselves, and to feel ourselves we must be natural." We
may recall that Mr. Gladstone, who was a good judge, said
that in the present generation Sir Edward Grey, who is
a most impressive speaker, was the man with the real
Parliamentary manner.

It is a remarkable thing, possessing no necessary con-
nection, either with the Parliamentary manner or with

efficiency as a speaker, that so few of the
Naders great Parliamentary leaders would appear to

have been popular with their followers at the
time. In reading the memoirs or diaries of the past we

Modern Parliamentary Eloquence 61

come across a stream of disparaging and frequently
denunciatory criticism. Pitt was reserved and stand-off
in manner. He never invited approach or encouraged
acquaintance. Lord Rosebery wittily remarked that he
turned up his nose at all mankind. Lord John Russell
was shy and distant. He sought popularity neither with
friend nor foe, and was accused — it is a strong word — of an
offensive hauteur. Disraeli, though he paid more than one
magnanimous tribute to Peel, and uttered the panegyric
upon his Parliamentary abilities which I have quoted, de-
scribed his manner as alternately haughtily stiff and exuber-
antly bland, adding that he made no attempt to conciliate the
rank and file, and was supposed to regard them with con-
tempt. Disraeli himself was profoundly distrusted, not
merely by his opponents, but by his own party, throughout
the greater part of his career, and remained a solitary and
shrouded figure to the end. His final popularity was
quite independent of any intimacy of relations between his
followers and himself. Mr. Gladstone, in his mid-career,
was regarded as an arrogant and domineering person, and
even in my time I often heard him accused of marching
through the lobbies without a sign of recognition of his
expectant and obsequious friends. On the other hand, to
those who addressed him, or whom he addressed, he
appeared a model of old-world courtesy. Randolph
Churchill was a mixture of rather elaborate civility and
an outspoken rudeness that was at times brutal. He
could be charming and he could be outrageous. I have heard
him consign an able and worthy follower to the nether
regions at the top of his voice while walking through the
Division lobby. Lord Salisbury was wrapped in a cloak
of aloofness, and seemed to move in another world, though
I recall his unconcealed pleasure when on one occasion a
working man pointed to him as he was walking down Pall
Mall and whispered audibly to his mate, " There goes the
Old Buffer ! " I have heard analogous stories told of the
brusqueness or indifference of leaders in more recent times.
Almost the only Parliamentary leader against whom such
charges were never brought were Melbourne and Palmerston.

62 Modern Parliamentary Eloquence

Both were light-hearted and rather cynical men of the
world, and Palmerston's long ascendency was due quite as
much to his good humour and jokes and banter as it was
to more intellectual qualities.

The above reflections might seem to justify the theory
that personal charm is no part of the equipment of a
political leader, and that if he plays his part well it does
not matter much with what grace or acceptability he plays
it. May we not rather seek an explanation in the foibles,
not so much of the leader as of the led ? May he not be
preoccupied or shy where he is thought to be proud or in-
different ? May they not be sensitive and over-exacting ?
After all, the popularity of a leader is usually in the same
ratio as his success. Disraeli, who was once the suspect,
became the idol of his party. Mr. Gladstone, from being
taunted with arrogance, blossomed into the eventide splen-
dour of the Grand Old Man. Popularity, in fact, comes to
the leaders who wait long enough and do their work
sufficiently well.

Our retrospect will, I think, have shown us that while

there is no reason to deplore or to apprehend a cessation

in the vogue of fine speaking in this country,

Modern its practice has in the passage of time taken

audiences, on different and less ambitious forms in con-
sonance with the more practical spirit of the
age. Perhaps our best criterion will be to imagine the
effect of certain of the acknowledged masterpieces of the
past if delivered before a modern audience. Could Burke, if
he were now living, deliver either in the House of Commons
or before a judicial tribunal his wonderful passage about the
descent of Hyder AH on the Carnatic ? Could a modern
orator, if he were receiving the freedom of the borough of
Plymouth, point to the men-of-war lying in the harbour
and say, as Canning did, in language of almost sublime
grandeur :

"You well know, gentlemen, how soon one of these stupendous
masses, now reposing on those shadows in perfect stillness — how soon
upon any call of patriotism or necessity, it would assume the likeness
of an animated thing, instinct with life and motion ; how soon it
would ruffle, as it were, its swelling plumage, how quickly would it put

Modern Parliamentary Eloquence 63

forth all its beauty and its bravery, collect its scattered elements of
strength and awaken its dormant thunder."

If it be said that a Burke or a Canning could do it, the
answer must be that we have neither a Burke nor a
Canning, and that one shudders to think of any inferior
professor attempting the task. In America it would be
undertaken with confidence, even if it were not achieved
with ease. But there the rhetoric assumes a more glowing
guise ; and though we are told that Mr. Bryan obtained the
Democratic nomination for the Presidency of the U.S. in
1896 by the sentence, in relation to the free coinage of
silver :

" You shall not press down on the brow of labour this crown of
thorns ; you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold " —

to us the triumph is inexplicable, and we feel somehow
that the arrow has glanced off the mark.

In one respect modern speaking has undoubtedly gained
as compared with that of an earlier time. Complaints are

frequently made that speeches are too long
of ancj t^at ^g worst offenders are the occupants

of the Front Benches. They seldom speak
for less than one hour and often longer. The conventional
speech of the star orator on a public platform is never less
than an hour in length. I will not presume to say whether
the same result could be better attained in forty-five or in
fifty minutes ; that is as it may be. What I do wish to
make clear is that the present length is modesty itself
compared with the performances of our ancestors. Chatham
is usually said to have started the fashion of two to three
hours' speeches. The practice was continued by his son and
by the great champions of that day. Perhaps an excuse for
it may be found in the fact that the great speakers were so
few, the majority of the House of Commons being inarticu-
late, and consequently there were not enough speeches
to go round. Fox and Pitt were very much in the position
of two expert billiard players engaged in an exhibition
match of so much " up." If one player made a break of
five hundred, the other was expected to retaliate with at

64 Modern Parliamentary Eloquence

least an equivalent score ; and the audience were there to
applaud and to bet on the result.

Anyhow the tradition grew up that length and eloquence
were inseparable, and we find that the majority of the great
speeches of the late Georgian and even the early Victorian
epochs were from three to four hours in duration. Sheridan's
speech on the Begums of Oude was five hours and forty
minutes in length ; Burke frequently spoke for between
three and four hours. Brougham's speech on Law Reform
in the House of Commons in February, 1828, lasted for
six hours ; and it was of the well-known occasion when he
sank on his knees in the House of Lords and implored the
Peers to pass the Reform Bill of 1831 that Lord Campbell
sarcastically remarked :

"The peroration was partly inspired by draughts of mulled port,
imbibed by him very copiously towards the conclusion of the four
hours during which he was on his legs or on his knees."

Mr. Gladstone, in introducing the Budget of 1853, spoke
for five hours. Lord Palmerston's celebrated Don Pacifico
speech in June, 1850, spoken, as Mr. Gladstone somewhat
hyperbolically remarked, " from the dusk of one day to the
dawn of the next," and delivered without the aid of a note
— assuredly one of the most astonishing feats in the
history of the British Parliament — occupied four hours and
forty minutes. Some of Mr. Lowe's Reform Bill speeches
were from two to three hours in duration.

Have we not, therefore, amid many symptoms of
decline, one ground for honest congratulation in our
increasing self-restraint ? Cobden and Bright once sup-
ported a resolution that no one should speak for more
than an hour. Latter-day reformers have attempted to
fix the limit at twenty minutes. The two Front Benches
are fellow conspirators in resisting any such reform. But
the movement towards greater conciseness that has already
set in spontaneously may be expected to make progress
even if the House of Commons declines to accelerate it by
arbitrary restrictions.

Many of the orators whom we have discussed had

Modern Parliamentary Eloquence 65

seats successively in the two Houses of Parliament ; and it
Influence of seems to be widely thought that the House
House of Lords of Lords has had a chilling and deteriorating
on oratory. jnfluence UpOn eloquence that glowed and
flourished in the more stimulating atmosphere of the
Lower Chamber. Chatham, it has been said, lost his
power by going to the House of Lords ; Walpole spoke
there infrequently and with reluctance ; Brougham de-
clined in influence after he attained the Woolsack ;
Macaulay never spoke at all after becoming a Peer.
The inference, which is probably in any case fallacious,
does not seem to be borne out by the experience of
our time. Lord Derby, the Prime Minister, lost nothing
by going to the House of Lords. Indeed he was called up
to it with his own consent seven years before he succeeded
to the*^arldom. The late Lord Salisbury's peculiar gifts
of speech, which might have been thought especially suited
to the Commons, were equally effective in the Lords. The
Duke of Argyll deliberately preferred that House to any
other audience. Certain well-known speakers in our own
day, I may instance Lords St. Aldwyn, Loreburn, and
Haldane, have spoken even better in the Upper Chamber
than they did in the House of Commons. It is impossible
to say what Lord Rosebery's eloquence might have
achieved in the Lower House, where it was never heard.
But no one can say that in the Upper House it has been
deprived either of a worthy stage, or an admiring audience.
The House of Commons could hardly have made a better
or more finished debater of the present Lord Lansdowne.
It is true that to a man accustomed to the electric atmos-
phere of the Lower Chamber, with its cheering and
counter-cheering and all the excitement of a popular
assembly, the still and motionless firrflament of the Upper
House, with its austere silences and its rare murmurs
of Olympian applause, is like exchanging the temperature
of a stokehole for that of a refrigerating chamber. But
the freedom from interruption, the perfect fairness of the
audience, and the hushed serenity of the scene, are com-
pensations by no means to be despised. On the whole,

F

66 Modern Parliamentary Eloquence

while granting that in a democratic age a seat in one
chamber may mean power and in the other comparative
extinction, there seems to be no reason for believing that
eloquence itself need be affected by the translation.
Though the range of influence may be restricted, the
quality of the art need not decline.

Disraeli in an enigmatic passage in the " Young Duke,"
said that there were two distinct styles of speaking

required by the two Chambers. " I intend,"
The two styles, he added, " in the course of my career, if I

have time, to give a specimen of both. In
the Lower House ' Don Juan ' may perhaps be our model,
in the Upper House ' Paradise Lost.' " His own House
of Commons speeches had certainly much of the licence
of the former parallel. But greatly as I respect the House
of Peers, I have never heard anything in it, even from Lord
Beaconsfield, that remotely resembled " Paradise Lost."

It would be interesting to pursue the study of the rival
methods of eloquence in Parliament and at the Bar, and to

inquire how far forensic triumph has been

Parliamentary the prelude to Parliamentary success. With
career of , . , .

lawyers. every election more and more lawyers enter

the House of Commons ; as someone said,
they are usually birds of passage there, on their way to
some more permanent resting-place ; but they are very
much to the fore in debate; important and lucrative offices
are open exclusively to them, and, as the careers of
Mr. Asquith and Sir E. Carson have shown, the prizes of
political leadership are within their grasp. There seems
to be a general impression that lawyers are not generally
successful or popular in the House of Commons, and that
the abilities which may have won fame in cross-examining
witnesses or winning verdicts from juries are not those
suited to Parliamentary debate. This is a generalisation
which instances might be found to support. Erskine, who
was incomparable in the Law Courts, was a compara-
tive failure in the House of Commons. In our own
days Sir Charles Russell never achieved in the House
anything approaching the triumphs which rarely failed

Modern Parliamentary Eloquence 67

him at the Bar. The same might be said of Sir Francis
Lockvvood, of Sir Horace (afterwards Lord) Davey, of
Mr. Henry Matthews (afterwards Lord Llandaff), and
of other cases even more recent. If there be such a law
or even tendency, the explanation may perhaps lie partly
in the fact that lawyers only come down to the House
when their day's work is over and they are relatively
tired. But it also lies in the different nature of the
problems they approach, and the audiences they address.
The House of Commons dislikes that which is didactic, and
recoils from that which is dull. It never quite forgave hair-
splitting, even when it was Mr. Gladstone's foible. It will
not accept it as the armoury of smaller men. Possibly also
the House is a little suspicious of professions other than its
own. These, however, may be fanciful suggestions, and
recent experiences seem to point to an extension of the
influence achieved by lawyers in the House of Commons.
Moreover, I recall that one of the most remarkable speeches
made in the House of Commons in my time was that
in which Sir E. Clarke, following immediately after Mr.
Gladstone's speech in introducing the Home Rule Bill
of 1893, dissected and answered it point by point with
astonishing brilliancy and force. Sir E. Clarke was said to
have been equally prepared for any one of two or three
other alternative schemes that Mr. Gladstone might have
produced. But in any case it was a wonderful performance.
The Upper House is that in which forensic abilities have
as a rule found a more congenial field, and the Woolsack
has been occupied by many great lawyers who were also
great speakers. Among these during the past century may
be mentioned the names of Eldon, Brougham, Lyndhurst,
and Cairns.

A number of questions have been suggested by our

inquiry to which I may endeavour to give an answer.

Are great speakers generally nervous, and if

Nervousness so does their nervousness detract from their
of speakers.

speaking ? I nave mentioned one or two

cases in the course of this narrative. Mr. Gladstone, in
answer to the same query, once said that he was frequently

F 2

68 Modern Parliamentary Eloquence

nervous in opening, but never in reply. John Bright was
intensely nervous at starting. Bishop Wilberforce confessed
to being nervous even in the pulpit. I doubt if any good
speaker can plead immunity from nerves, or has any clear
idea, before he begins, whether he is going to make a good
speech, a bad speech, or an indifferent speech. This
applies, of course, much more to Parliament than to the
platform, where the conditions are more stable, and can be
more safely predicted. In Parliament so much turns on
the accident of the moment, the temper of the House,
the number present, the speeches that have preceded. The
nervousness of the inexperienced speaker who is waiting
to begin is visible in his manner and movements, but even
the " old hand " is often some time before he warms to his
task. A speaker who has no nerves will probably never
attain to the first rank of Parliamentary orators — which
perhaps may explain why the hero of the platform is so often
a failure in the House. On the other hand, I doubt if any
considerable speaker is nervous when he has once gained
the ear of his audience, while the expert debater, so far
from feeling apprehensive, looks forward with eager ex-
pectancy to his reply.

Another question may be put : Is an orator greatly
assisted by grace of manner, voice, and action, and is he
correspondingly handicapped by an uncomely
Appearance Qr jgnODie appearance, harsh accents, inelegant
gestures, or unconscious tricks ? A priori there
can be but one answer to these questions ; and, in the art of
great orators like Chatham, Gladstone, Daniel O'Connell,
or Bright, it is clear that a large part was played by the
splendour or harmony of their physical endowment. On
the other hand genius is beyond and above the law ;
and far more common than the spectacle of eloquence
reinforced by grace of manner or dignity of person, is
that of the orator triumphing over physical obstacles or
mannerisms that might be thought fatal to success. Burke
was angular and awkward in his gestures ; Mirabeau was
ugly almost beyond words. Pitt used to saw the air with
his arms like a windmill ; Abraham Lincoln was gaunt

Modern Parliamentary Eloquence 69

and dishevelled, and, until excited, spoke with a shrill and
piping voice ; Grattan indulged in very violent gestures
and swayed his body to and fro, till " at last his genius
carried all before it, and, as in the oracles of old, the con-
tortions vanished as the inspiration became manifest."
Peel, though gifted with a very handsome presence, had
a trick of putting his hands under his coat tails while
speaking which somewhat detracted from his dignity.
Lord Macaulay went off at the speed of an express train,
his action was ungainly, and his voice loud and without
modulation. Sheil not only screamed, but did it in almost
unintelligible accents. Lord John Russell was notoriously
insignificant.

Two things are clear. With the decline of oratory, all
attempts to make a study of action, manner, or even
delivery, have been abandoned. Secondly, as speaking
becomes less dramatic and more business-like, even un-
studied action falls every day into greater disuse. The
foreigner who is accustomed to see a French or Italian orator
declaiming in the tribune, rushing up and down, waving his
arms, beating the desk, and throwing his body into violent
postures, is astonished at the spectacle of the English
Parliamentarian standing almost motionless at the table,
his hands clinging to the lapels of his coat, or perhaps
toying with a pince-nez, his most violent action being in
all probability a mild castigation of the brass-bound box
in front of him. As to what would happen if a British
orator indulged in the supplosio pedis, or stamping of the
feet, which was one of the most restrained of the gestures
prescribed in the Greek school of rhetoric, I shudder to
think.

The answer then appears to be that orators make their
own gestures ; that gesture of any sort is dying out ; and
that while a great orator is doubtless aided by a handsome
exterior and graceful action, it does not matter very much
even if he happens to be ugly and awkward. Anyone who
saw or heard the late Bishop Magee would realise how
little dependent upon physical accessories it is possible for
successful orators to be.

70 Modern Parliamentary Eloquence

It almost goes without saying from what has passed that
the peroration, in the sense of the rhetorical summing-up
of a speech, with peculiar attention to thought,
Perorations, diction, and form, is dying also. Or rather
— for speakers must end somehow, and it is
well to round off a speech with a sentence that has some
regard both to euphony and grammar — the short staccato
peroration is taking the place of the long and rolling
periods of our ancestors which followed each other to the
finale, like Atlantic breakers breaking in foam and thunder
on the beach. In those days the audience looked eagerly
for the premonitory signs of the peroration, because there
the orator would crystallise his argument, allow his fancy
to take final wing, and appeal to the spiritual part of his
hearers. Now it is to be feared that they are, as a rule,
awaited as a timely signal of the approaching end. I do
not know a single living speaker, with the possible excep-
tion of Lord Hugh Cecil, who perorates in Parliament as
did Gladstone and Bright. The platform peroration of a sort
still lingers in the mouths of those who conclude by adjuring
their hearers to hand down undiminished to posterity this
great Empire, etc., etc. But with this exception, which is
purely conventional, the peroration is almost obsolete, and
as it is, or was, the last part of a speech to be delivered, so
does it appear to be the last feature of the art of rhetoric
that is likely to be revived. Dr. Hornby, Headmaster of
Eton in my day, who was one of the most finished after-
dinner speakers that I ever heard, and who always left his
audience in doubt as to how far his art was impromptu or
prepared, said to a friend of mine, " Above all things, take
special pains about your peroration — you never know how
soon you may require it." But I suspect that in this witty
remark he was providing a prescription for sitting down
with dignity rather than for finishing with eloquence.

In common with perorations, and other literary graces,

I cannot help thinking that phrase-making

Phrase-making. — the art in which Disraeli excelled — and

the faculty of repartee, have also declined.

The former, which is rarely spontaneous, is no doubt dis-

Modern Parliamentary Eloquence 71

appearing along with other symptoms of prepared effort.
Randolph Churchill pursued this branch of the art in rather
a vulgar style. " Vineries and pineries," and " an old man in
a hurry," were characteristic specimens. Lord Salisbury
dropped naturally into literary epigram or alliteration, as
when he spoke of the " dreary drip of dilatory declama-
tion." But this was not high art. Mr. Gladstone's phrases —
"dim and distant future," "a strategical movement to the
rear," " Political Economy banished to Saturn," " the re-
sources of civilisation not exhausted," etc., were destitute of
literary merit, and were, as a rule, political weapons forged
by himself but turned against him by his opponents. John
Morley's " mending or ending " was a useful jingle, but
hardly a phrase. We have fallen, in later times, to the
level of " terminological inexactitude " and " rare and
refreshing fruit," which are not literary nuggets but political
tags. The Parliamentary or platform speaking of the last
twenty-five years has, I believe, not thrown up a single
phrase that is destined to survive. I was myself the author
of one — when I described the function of the Foreign Press
correspondent as " the intelligent anticipation of events
before they occur." But, though I see it frequently quoted,
I can detect no merit in the saying.

I have searched my memory to think if in the same
period there have been any notable illustrations of that which

is the most useful subsidiary adjunct of Par-
Repartee. liamentary eloquence, viz., retort and repartee-

Mr. Gladstone once said that the finest
repartee that he had ever heard in the House of Commons
was the reply of Lord John Russell to Sir Francis Burdett,
who, after turning Tory and joining the Carlton Club, had
sneered at the cant of patriotism. " I quite agree," replied
Lord John, " that the cant of patriotism is a bad thing.
But I can tell him a worse, namely, the recant of patriotism."
To my mind one of the readiest and at the same time
most finished examples of Parliamentary repartee that
were ever heard in the House of Commons, was the retort
of Sir Robert Peel in 1848 to Feargus O'Connor, who,
charged with being a Republican, had denied it, and said

72 Modern Parliamentary Eloquence

that he did not care whether the Queen or the Devil was
on the throne. Peel replied :

"When the Hon. Member sees the Sovereign of his choice on the
throne of these realms, I hope he will enjoy, as I am sure he will
deserve, the confidence of the Crown."

No such gem as this can be discovered in the Parlia-
mentary diggings of the past quarter of a century, and I
am driven to wonder whether the art has perished or
whether we are merely degenerate men.

Irr Parliamentary memoirs frequent reference is made to
the maiden speeches of orators who afterwards became

famous, and the diarist is apt to read into his
speeches. own recollection an anticipation of the fame

that was to be. I have heard a great many
maiden speeches, and I once made one. Nothing can
exceed the generosity of the two Houses on such an
occasion. Men hurry in to cheer the performance of the
youthful novice, or even of the man who has entered the
House in middle life. Any symptoms of promise are
eagerly welcomed and generously exaggerated, and the
speaker, if successful, finds a warm welcome on his next
appearance. But the conditions under which the maiden
speech is delivered are such as to deprive it of any real
value as a test of ability or merit, and most of the stories,
whether of success or failure (and this applies even to the
famous case of Disraeli), should be subject to a very con-
siderable discount. Occasionally, a maiden speech turns
out to be an epitome of qualities or talents that designate
the speaker to impending fame. In recent years, the most
conspicuous case of this was the maiden speech of Mr.
F. E. Smith, the prelude to many subsequent triumphs
both in the House and on the platform.

In this long review of the Parliamentary achievements of
the past, the question may be asked whether any speech or

speeches appear to stand out as the best and
mastertitces most Per^ect examples of the art whose many

phases I have examined. It is as impossible
to say with confidence of any speech that it was the best
ever made, or made in a particular period or country, as to

Modern Parliamentary Eloquence 73

say that any one day was the finest day in the year, or

any piece of scenery the finest in this or that continent.

Three speeches, however, in the English language have

always appeared to me to emerge with a superiority which,

if not indisputable, will perhaps not be seriously disputed —

much in the same way as the Funeral Oration of Pericles

was generally allowed to be the masterpiece of the ancient

world. Two of them just fall within the period that we

have passed in review, but were not made in England or

by an Englishman. The third was made — or is said to

have been made (because there is some doubt as to the

actual words) — by an Englishman half a century earlier.

Ten weeks before Pitt died, his health was drunk at the

Lord Mayor's Dinner, after the victory of

William xrafaigar) as the Saviour of Europe. The

dying man responded in these memorable

and immortal terms :

" I return you many thanks for the honour you have done me. But
Europe is not to be saved by any single man. England has saved
herself by her exertions, and will, as I trust, save Europe by her
example."

Abraham Lincoln was the author of both the other

speeches. Everyone knows them, they are part of the

intellectual patrimony of the English-speaking

Abraham race -gut ^Qy may Qnce agajn acjmit of

repetition here, as a model and an inspiration.
At the Gettysburg Cemetery on November iQth, 1863, he
thus spoke :

" Fellow countrymen — Four score and seven years ago, our fathers
brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty,
and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

" Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that
nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.
We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to
dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting place for those who
here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fit
and proper that we should do this.

" But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate,
we cannot hallow, this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who
struggled here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add
or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember, what we
say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us, the
living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they
who fought here have thus so far nobly advanced. It is rather for us

74 Modern Parliamentary Eloquence

to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us ; that from
these honoured dead we take increased devotion to that cause for
which they gave the last full measure of devotion ; that we here highly
resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain ; that this nation,
under God, shall have a new birth of freedom ; and that government
of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the
earth."1

Pitt's speech occupied only a few seconds in delivery,
Lincoln's less than three minutes : and yet where are the
world-famed pages, the crowded hours of rhetoric, com-
pared with these? At Gettysburg, Edward Everett, the
orator, had been set down to make the great oration, and
he made it ; Lincoln was merely introduced for " a few
remarks " at the close of the proceedings. But the oration
is forgotten and the remarks will live for ever.

The Second Inaugural Address of the same speaker,
delivered at Washington on March 4th, 1865, a month
before his assassination, contained this famous passage
about the causes and issue of the Civil War : —

" If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offences
which in the Providence of God must needs come, but which, having
continued through his appointed time, he now wills to remove, and
that he gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe
due to those by whom the offence came, shall we discern there any
departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living
God always ascribe to him ? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we
pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet if
God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's
250 years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of
blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn by the
sword, then, as was said 3,000 years ago, so still it must be said that
the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether." 2

1 The story has often been told that these words were hastily
scribbled by Lincoln on a sheet of paper as he went in a tramcar to
the cemetery. I was assured by his son that the story is without
foundation. The speech was composed at the White House before
Lincoln started from Washington, and committed to memory. The
published version was written out after he returned.

2 Lincoln was equally good at improvised invective and retort.
Replying at a mass meeting to a speaker who had changed his
politics and been rewarded with a post, for the discharge of the duties
of which he had acquired a fine house and set up a lightning con-
ductor on the roof, Lincoln, whom the turncoat had taunted with his
youth, said, " I am not so young in years as I am in the tricks and
trade of the politician. But whether I live long or die young, I would
rather die now than change my politics for an office worth $3,000 a
year, and have to erect a lightning rod over my house to protect my
conscience from an offended God."

Modern Parliamentary Eloquence 75

Neither of these passages was extemporaneous. Both
were written in advance ; one was recited and the other
read. They violate the canons, therefore, of those who
apply the test of improvisation to oratory. I quote them
here because they seem to me to represent better
than any explanation or definition could do that which is
not rhetoric nor declamation, nor even sermonising, but the
purest gold of human eloquence, nay, of eloquence almost
divine. Either could be delivered, if a man capable of
composing and delivering them were to exist, in any
assemblage, before any audience, at any time of the
modern world's history, without a suggestion of artifice or
incongruity, with an effect inexorably sure and eternally
true. They were uttered by a man who had been a
country farmer and a district lawyer before he became a
statesman. But they are among the glories and the
treasures of mankind. I escape the task of deciding which
is the masterpiece of modern English eloquence by award-
ing the prize to an American.

INDEX

ADDISON quoted, 34

Alcibiades, 33

Aldwyn, Viscount, 65

Argyll, Duke of, 32-33, 65

Aristotle, 2, 5

Asquith, H. H., n, 45-47, 66

Atterbury, Bishop, 20

BACON, Francis, 6

Balfour, A. J., 6, 17, 25, 30, 43-45,

5i

Birrell, A., 58
Bolingbroke, Viscount, 6
Bradlaugh, Charles, 25, 54-55
Bright, John, 5, 12, 16, 17, 18, 30-

32, 52, 57, 64, 68, 70
Brougham, Lord, 18, 19, 64, 65, 67
Bryan, R. J., 63
Burdett, Sir F., 9, 71
Burke, Edmund, 5, 7, 8, 62, 64, 68
Burns, John, 55
Butcher, S. H., 58
Butler, Dr. H. M., I
Byron, Lord, quoted, 7

CAIRNS, Earl, 54, 67
Campbell, Lord, quoted, 64
Canning, George, 8, 9, n, 19, 21,

40, 62, 63
Carson, Sir E., 66
Castlereagh, Viscount, 21
Cecil, Lord Hugh, 48-50, 70
Chamberlain, Joseph, 35, 37, 39-40
Chatham, Earl of (W. Pitt), 6, 8, 12,

14, 18, 23, 63, 65, 68
Churchill, Lord Randolph, 15, 37-38,

61, 71

Churchill, Winston, 47-48
Cicero, 8, I r
Clarke, Sir E., 67
Classics, study of, 8, 1 1
Cobden, Richard, 28, 52, 64
Courtney, Lord, 58
Cowen, Joseph, 57
Cowley, Abraham, quoted, 54

Creighton, Bishop, 59
Curran, T. B., 50

DAVKY, Sir H. (Lord Davey), 67
Democracy, Eloquence in a, 23
Demosthenes, II
Derby, I4th Earl of, 52, 65
Derby, I5th Earl of, 52
Devonshire, Duke of, 36-37
Disraeli, B. (Earl of Beaconsfield),
11, 12, 27-30, 33, 35, 38, 56, 60,
70, 72 ; quoted, 2, 9, 25, 58, 60,
61, 62, 66

EIGHTEENTH Century oratory, 8-14
Eldon, Earl of, 67
Ellenborough, Lord, 32
Eloquence, conditions of modern, 8,

10-23

Eloquence, meaning of, 2-4
Empire, British, Lord Rosebery on,

42.

Erskine, Lord, 20, 66
Everett, Edward, 74
Extempore speaking, 17-20, 44

FAWCETT, Professor, 58

Forensic eloquence, 20

Forster, W. E., 25, 53

Fowler, H. E. (Viscount Wolver-

hampton), 22
Fox, Charles James, 6, 7, 9, II, 12,

14, 18, 63

GARIBALDI, 24
Garrison, W. Lloyd, 31
George, D. Lloyd, 15, 23
Gesture in speaking, 68-69
Gladstone, W. E., 6, II, 12, 16,
22, 23-27, 28, 30, 32, 33, 35, 36,

37, 38, 39, 40, 43, 5°, 54, 55, 60,
61, 62, 64, 67, 70, 71
Goschen, G. J. (Viscount Goschen),

53
Grattan, Henry, n, 19, 23, 50, 69

Index

Greek oratory, 2, 3, 69
Grey, Sir Edward, 60

HALDANE, Viscount, 65
Harcourt, Sir W., 12, 33-34
Hardy, Gathorne (Earl of Cranbrook),

52-53

Hastings, Warren, 7
Healy, Timothy, 51
Horace, 8

Hornby, Dr. H., 70
House of Commons, character of, 9,

II, 13, 16
House of Lords, eloquence in, 65

IRISH eloquence, 49-51
Isocrates, 5

JEBB, Professor R. C., 2, 19, 55,

58

Jonson, Ben, 6
Juvenal, 8

KNIGHTLKY, Sir R., 34

LABOUCHERE, Henry, 25, 58

Lamartine, 16

Lansdowne, Marquis of, 65

Lang, Archbishop, 59

Law, A. Bonar, 47

Lawson, Sir Wilfrid, 28, 57

Lecky, W. H., 58

Lincoln, Abraham, 18, 23, 68, 73-

74

Lock wood, Sir F., 67

Loreburn, Earl, 65

Lowe, Robert (Viscount Sherbrooke),

56, 64

Lyndhurst, Lord, 56, 67
Lyttelton, Alfred, 46
Lytton, Sir E. Bulwer, 51, 56

MACAU LAY, T. B (Lord Macaulay),

5, 19, 22, 40, 65, 69
Macdonald, Ramsay, 23
Machiavelli quoted, 5
Magee, Bishop, 59, 69
Maiden speeches, 72
Manners, Lord John, 28
Manners, Parliamentary, 60-6 1
Mansfield, Lord, 20
Matthews, H enry( Viscount Llandaff),

67

Melbourne, Viscount, 61
Mill, John Stuart, 58
Milton, John, 3
Mirabeau, 3, 16, 68
Moore, T. , quoted, 26

Morley, John (Viscount), 6, 25, 40,
71

NERVOUSNESS in speaking, 67-68
North, Lord, 12

O'CoNNELL, Daniel, 14, 16, 50, 55,

68

O'Connor, Feargus, 71
Oratory, meaning of, 2, 4, 5
Osborne, Bernal, 58

PALMERSTON, Viscount, 61, 64
Parliamentary manner, the, 59
Parnell, C. S., 50
Peel, Arthur W. (Viscount Peel), 53-

54

Peel, Sir Robert, 27, 53, 60, 71, 72
Peel, Sir Robert (junior), 54, 72
Percy, Earl, II
Pericles, 3, 33, 73
Perorations, 70
Phrases in oratory, 29, 70
Pitt, William, 5, 7, 8, 9, II, 12, 14,

18, 61, 63, 68, 73, 74
Platform oratory, 15-16, 23, 38, 54
Plunket, David (Lord Rathmore),

48

Plunket, Lord, 22, 50
Pope quoted, 34
Press, influence of, 14
Professors in Parliament, 58-59

QUOTATIONS, Classical, 8, n, 12,
25

REDMOND, John, 51

Repartee, 71-72

Reporting, effect of, 14

Rhetoric, 2

Rhetoricians, the, 55~57

Rosebery, Earl of, 41-43, 65 ; quoted,

14, 61
Russell, Sir Charles (Lord Russell),

66, 71

Russell, G. W., 31
Russell, Lord John (Earl), 9, 61, 69,

ST. ALDWYN, Viscount, 6c
Salisbury, Marquis of, 34-36, 47 6l,

65, 7i

Saunderson, Col., 58
Savonarola, 5, 30
Scott, Sir W., quoted, 5
Sexton, Thomas, 50-51
Shakespeare, 12
Shell, R. L., 55-56, 69

Index

79

Sheridan, R. B., 7, 19, 64

Smith, F. E., 72

Smyth, P. J., 57

Smythe, George (Viscount Strang-

ford), 57
Snowden, P., 23
Socrates, 33
Sophocles, ii

TAIT, Archbishop, 59
Temple, Sir R., 51

Thucydides, 3, 8
VIRGIL, 8

WALLACE, Dr. R., 58
Walpole, Sir Robert, 60, 65
Webster, Daniel, 5
Wellington, Duke of, 21
Wilberforce, Bishop S., 59, 68
Wilberforce, W., 7, 20, 22
Windham, W., 15, 18

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