ON THE PRESENT STATE OF PARLIAMENTARY ELOQUENCE
| The London Magazine.] | [October 1820. |
It was a fine impertinence of the younger Pliny, to try to persuade Tacitus, in one of his epistles, that the diffuse style was better than the concise. ‘Such a one,’ says he, ‘aims at the throat of his adversary: now I like to strike him wherever I can.’ I may be thought guilty of a like piece of officiousness in the remarks here offered on several of the most prominent of our parliamentary speakers. In general, to suggest advice, or hazard criticism, is to recommend it to others to do something, which we know they either will not or cannot do: or it is to desire them either to please us, or do nothing. The present article may be considered as a marginal note or explanatory addition to a former one, on nearly the same subject—like one of Lord Castlereagh’s long parentheses: but I hope there will be more in it. It is a subject of which I wish to make clear work as I go; for it is one to which, if I can once get rid of it, I am not likely to recur.
The haughty tone of invective which I have already ascribed to Lord Chatham, was very different from that didactic style of parliamentary oratory which has since been imported from northern colleges and lecture-rooms. Of this school Sir James Mackintosh and Mr. Brougham may be reckoned at the head.
This method consists, not so much in taking a side, as in stating a question. The speaker takes upon him to be the judge rather than the advocate; and if he had the authority of a judge, or could direct the decision, as well as sum up the evidence, it would be all very well. An orator of this stamp does not seat himself on the Opposition side of the House to urge or to reply to particular points, but in a Professor’s chair of Humanity, to read a lecture to the tyros of the Treasury-Bench, on the elementary principles and all the possible bearings, the objections and answers, the difficulties and the solutions of every question in philosophy, jurisprudence, politics, and political economy,—on war, peace, ‘domestic treason, foreign levy,’ colonial produce, copy-right of authors, prison discipline, the hulks, the corn-bill, the penitentiary, prostitutes, and pick-pockets. Nothing comes amiss to him that can puzzle himself or pose his hearers; and he lets out all his knowledge indiscriminately, whether it makes for or against him, with deliberate impartiality and scrupulous exactness. Such persons might be called Orators of the Human Mind. They are a little out of their place, it must be owned, in the House of Commons. The object there is—not to put the majority in possession of the common grounds of judging, as in a class of students—(these are taken for granted as already known)—but to carry a point, to gain a verdict for yourself or for truth, by throwing the weight of eloquence and argument into the scale against interest, prejudice, or sophistry. There are retainers enough on the other side to manage for the crown, who are ready to take all advantages without your volunteering to place yourself in their power, or to put excuses in their mouths, to help them out at a dead-lift. If they were candid, if they were disinterested, if they were not hostilely disposed, it might be a feasible scheme to consider a debate as an amicable communication of doubts and lights, as a comparison of strength or a confession of weakness: but why hint a doubt, or start a difficulty needlessly in your own path, which will be eagerly caught at, and made use of in the most insulting manner to defeat a host of real proofs, and overturn the most legitimate conclusions? Why tamper with your own cause? Why play at fast and loose with your object? Why restore the weapons into your enemies’ hands, which you have just wrested from them? Why ‘make a wanton’ of the First Minister of State? It is either vanity, weakness, or indifference to do so. You might as well in confidence tell an adversary where you meant to strike him, point out to him your own weak sides, or wait in courtesy for the blow. Gamesters do not show one another their hands: neither should politicians, who understand what they are about—that is, knaves will not, and honest men ought not. Others will find out the rotten parts of a question: do you stick to the sound—knowledge is said to be power: but knowledge, applied as we have seen it, neutralises itself. Mere knowledge, to be effectual, must act in vacuo: but the House of Commons is by no means a vacuum, and empty receiver for abstract truth and airy speculation. There is the resistance, the refrangibility of dense prejudice and crooked policy: you must concentrate, you must enforce, you must urge to glowing sympathy: and enthusiasm, zeal, perfect conviction on your part, is the only principle that can be brought into play against the cool calculations or gross incentives of selfishness and servility on the opposite side. A middle line of conduct does not excite respect, but contempt. They do not think you sincere, but lukewarm. They give you credit for affectation or timidity, but none for heartiness in a cause, or fidelity to a party. They have more hopes of you than fears. By everlasting subtle distinctions, and hesitating, qualified, retracting dissent from measures you would be thought most to reprobate, you do more harm than good. In theory there are infinite shades of difference, but in practice the question must be decided one way or other: either the Ayes or the Noes must have it. In all such cases, those who are not for us are against us. In political controversy, as in a battle, there are but two sides to chuse between; and those who create a diversion in favour of established abuses by setting up a third, fanciful, impracticable standard of perfection of their own, in the most critical circumstances, betray the cause they pretend to espouse with such overweening delicacy. For my own part, I hate a fellow who picks a hole in his own coat, who finds a flaw in his own argument, who treats his enemies as if they might become friends, or his friends as if they might become enemies. I hate your shuffling, shilly-shally proceedings, and diagonal sidelong movements between right and wrong. Fling yourself into the gap at once—either into the arms, or at the heads of Ministers!
I remember hearing, with some pain and uneasiness, Sir James Mackintosh’s maiden speech on the Genoa business. It was a great, but ineffectual effort. The mass of information, of ingenuity, and reasoning, was very prodigious; but the whole was misdirected, no impression whatever was made. It was like an inaugural dissertation on the general principles of ethics, on the laws of nature and nations, on ancient and modern history—a laboured treatise de omnibus rebus et quibusdam aliis. There were all the rules of moral arithmetic, all the items in a profligate political account; but the bill was not properly cast up, the case was not distinctly made out, the counsel got no damages for his client. Nothing was gained by this motion, nor could there be. When he had brought his heaviest artillery to bear with probable success upon a certain point, he stopped short like a scientific demonstrator (not like a skilful engineer) to show how it might be turned against himself. When he had wound up the charge of treachery or oppression to a climax, he gratuitously suggested a possible plea of necessity, accident, or some other topic, to break the force of his inference; or he anticipated the answers that might be made to it, as if he was afraid he should not be thought to know all that could be said on both sides of the question. This enlarged knowledge of good and evil may be very necessary to a philosopher, but it is very prejudicial to an orator. No man can play the whole game in this manner, blow hot and cold in a breath, or take an entire debate into his own hands, and wield it in which way he pleases. He will find his own load enough for his own shoulders to bear. The exceptions if you chuse to go into them, multiply faster than the rules: the various complications of the subject distract, instead of convincing: you do your adversary’s work for him; the battle is lost without a blow being struck; and a speech of this sceptical kind requires and receives no answer. It falls by its own weight, and buries any body but the Minister under its ruins—or it is left, not a triumphal arch, but a splendid mausoleum of the learning, genius, and eloquence of the speaker.—The Cock-pit of St. Stephen’s does not relish this scholastic refinement, this method of holding an argument with a man’s self: a little bear-garden, cut-and-thrust work would be much better understood. Sir James has of late improved his tact and knowledge of the House. He has taken up Sir Samuel Romilly’s department of questions relating to the amelioration of the penal code and general humanity, and I have no doubt Government will leave him in quiet possession of it. They concede these sort of questions as an amiable diversion, or friendly bonus, to the indefatigable spirit of Opposition.
Mr. Brougham is, I conceive, another instance of this analytical style of debating, which ‘plays round the head, but does not reach the heart.’ There is a want of warmth, of momentum, of impulse in his speeches. He loses himself in an infinity of details, as his learned and honourable friend does in a wide sea of speculation. He goes picking up a number of curious pebbles on the shore, and at the outlets of a question—but he does not ‘roll all his strength and all his sharpness up into one ball,’ to throw at and crush his enemies beneath his feet. He enters into statistics, he calls for documents, he examines accounts. This method is slow, perplexing, circuitous, and not sure. While the evidence is collecting, the question is lost. While one thing is substantiating, another goes out of your mind. These little detached multifarious particulars, which require such industry and sagacity in the speaker to bring them forward, have no clue in the minds of the hearers to connect them together. There is no substratum of prejudice, no cement of interest. They do not grow out of the soil of common feeling and experience, but are set in it; nor do they bear the fruits of conviction. Mr. Brougham can follow the ramifications of an intricate subject, but he is not so well acquainted with the springs of the human mind. He finds himself at the end of his speech,—in the last sentence of it,—just where he was at the beginning, or in any other given part of it. He has not acquired any additional impetus, is not projected forward with any new degree of warmth or vigour. He was cold, correct, smart, pointed at first, and he continues so still. A repetition of blows, however, is of no use, unless they are struck in the same place: a change of position is not progression. As Sir James Mackintosh’s speeches are a decomposition of the moral principles of society, so Mr. Brougham’s are an ingenious taking in pieces of its physical mechanism. While they are at work with their experiments, their antagonists are putting in motion the passions, the fears, and antipathies of mankind, and blowing their schemes of reform above the moon.
Talent alone, then, is not sufficient to support a successful Opposition. There is talent on the other side too, of some sort or other; and, in addition, there is another weight, that of influence, which requires a counterpoise. This can be nothing else but fixed principle, but naked honesty, but undisguised enthusiasm. That is the expansive force that must shatter the strongholds of corruption if ever they are shattered, that must make them totter, if ever they are made to totter, about the heads of their possessors. Desire to expose a ministry, and you will do it—if it be, like ours, vulnerable all over. Desire to make a display of yourself, and you will do it, if you have a decent stock of acquirements. Mr. Brougham has a great quantity of combustible materials constantly passing through his hands, but he has not the warmth in his own heart to ‘kindle them into a flame of sacred vehemence.’ He is not a good hater. He is not an impassioned lover of the popular cause. He is not a Radical orator: he is not a Back-bone debater. He wants nerve, he wants impetuosity. He may divide on a question, but he will never carry it. His circumspection, which he thinks his strength, is in reality his weakness. He makes paltry excuses, unmanly concessions. His political warfare is not a bellum internecinum. He commits no mortal offences. He has not yet cut off his retreat. In a word, he trims too much between all parties. A person who does this too long, loses the confidence, loses the cordiality of all parties; loses his character; and when he has once lost that, there is nothing to stand in his way to office and the first honours of the State!
He who is not indifferent himself will find out, from his own feelings, what it is that interests others in a cause. An honest man is an orator by nature. The late Mr. Whitbread was an honest man, and a true parliamentary speaker. He had no artifices, no tricks, no reserve about him. He spoke point-blank what he thought, and his heart was in his broad, honest, English face. He had as much activity of mind as Mr. Brougham, and paid the same attention to business as that gentleman does; but it was with him a matter of feeling, and had nothing of a professional look. His objects were open and direct; and he had a sufficient stock of natural good sense and practical information, not to be made the dupe of sophistry and chicane. He was always in his place, and ready to do his duty. If a falsehood was stated, he contradicted it instantly in a few plain words: if an act of injustice was palliated, it excited his contempt; if it was justified, it roused his indignation: he retorted a mean insinuation with manly spirit, and never shrunk from a frank avowal of his sentiments. He presented a petition or complaint against some particular grievance better than any one else I ever saw. His manner seemed neither to implicate him in the truth of the charge, nor to signify a wish to disclaim it beforehand. He was merely the organ through which any alleged abuse of power might meet the public ear, and he either answered or redressed, according to the merits of the case upon inquiry. In short, he was the representative of the spontaneous, unsophisticated sense of the English people on public men and public measures. Any plain, well-meaning man, on hearing him speak, would say, ‘That is just what I think’; or from observing his manner, would say, ‘That is just what I feel.’ He was not otherwise a powerful debater or an accomplished speaker. He could not master a general view of any subject, or get up a set speech with effect. One or two that I heard him make (particularly one on the Princess of Wales and the situation of her affairs in 1813, in which he grew pathetic) were complete failures. He could pull down better than he could build up. The irritation of constant contradiction was necessary to his full possession of himself:—give him ‘ample scope and verge enough,’ and he lost his way. He stuck close to the skirts of Ministry, but he was not qualified to originate or bring to a triumphant conclusion any great political movement. His enthusiasm ran away with his judgment, and was not backed by equal powers of reasoning or imagination. He was a sanguine, high-spirited man, but not a man of genius, or a deep thinker; and his fortitude failed him, when the last fatal blow was given to himself and his party. He could not have drawn up so able a political statement as Mr. Brougham; but he would have more personal adherents in the House of Commons, for he was himself the adherent of a cause.
Mr. Tierney is certainly a better speaker and a cleverer man. But he can never make a leader for want of earnestness. He has no Quixotic enthusiasm in himself; much less any to spare for his followers. He cares nothing (or seems to care nothing) about a question; but he is impatient of absurdity, and has a thorough contempt for the understandings of his opponents. Sharpened by his spleen, nothing escapes his acuteness. He makes fine sport for the spectators. He takes up Lord Castlereagh’s blunders, and Mr. Vansittart’s no-meanings; and retorts them on their heads in the finest style of execution imaginable. It is like being present on a Shrove-Tuesday, and seeing a set of mischievous unfeeling boys throwing at a brace of cocks, and breaking their shins. Mr. Tierney always brings down his man: but beyond this you feel no confidence in him; you take no interest in his movements but as he is instrumental in annoying other people. He (to all appearance) has no great point to carry himself, and no wish to be thought to have any important principle at stake. He is by much too sincere for a hypocrite, but is not enough in earnest for a parliamentary leader. For others to sympathise with you, you must first sympathise with them. When Mr. Whitbread got up to speak, you felt an interest in what he was going to say, in the success of his arguments: when you hear that Mr. Tierney is on his legs, you feel that you shall be amused with an admirable display of dexterity and talent, but are nearly indifferent as to the result. You look on as at an exhibition of extraordinary skill in fencing or prize-fighting.
Of all those who have for some years past aspired by turns to be leaders of the Opposition, Mr. Ponsonby was the person who had the fewest pretensions. He was a literal arguer. He affected great sagacity and judgment, and referred every thing, in a summary way, to the principles of common sense, and the reason of the case. He abounded in truisms, which seldom go far in deciding disputable points. He generally reduced the whole range of the debate into the narrow compass of a self-evident proposition:—to make sure of his object, he began by taking the question for granted, and necessarily failed when he came to the particular application. He was not aware of the maxim, that he who proves too much, proves nothing. His turn of observation was legal, not acute: his manner was dry, but his blows were not hard: his features were flat on his face, and his arguments did not stand out from the question. He might have been a tolerable special-pleader, but he was a bad orator, and, I think, a worse politician. Any one who argues on strict logical grounds must be prepared to go all lengths, or he will be sure to be defeated at every step he takes: but the gentleman’s principles were of a very cautious and temporising cast. I have seen him, more than once, give himself great airs over those who took more general views of the subject; and he was very fastidious in the choice of associates, with whom he would condescend to act.
Mr. Ponsonby’s style of speaking was neither instructive nor entertaining. In this respect, it was the reverse of Mr. Grattan’s, which was both. To see the latter make one of his promised motions on Catholic Emancipation, was one of the most extraordinary exhibitions, both bodily and mental, which could possibly be witnessed. You saw a little oddly-compacted figure of a man, with a large head and features,—such as they give to pasteboard masks, or stick upon the shoulders of Punch in the puppet-show,—rolling about like a Mandarin—sawing the air with his whole body from head to foot, sweeping the floor with a roll of parchment, which he held in one hand, and throwing his legs and arms about like the branches of trees tossed by the wind:—every now and then striking the table with impatient vehemence, and, in a sharp, slow, nasal, gutteral tone, drawling out, with due emphasis and discretion, a set of little smart antithetical sentences,—all ready-cut and dry, polished and pointed;—that seemed as if they ‘would lengthen out in succession to the crack of doom.’ Alliterations were tacked to alliterations,—inference was dove-tailed into inference,—and the whole derived new brilliance and piquancy from the contrast it presented to the uncouthness of the speaker, and the monotony of his delivery. His were compositions that would have done equally well to be said or sung. The rhyme was placed at the beginning instead of the end of each line; he sharpened the sense on the sound, and clenched an argument by corresponding letters of the alphabet. It must be confessed, that there was something meretricious, as well as alluring, in this style. After the first surprise and startling effect is over, and the devoted champion of his country’s cause goes on ringing the changes on ‘the Irish People and the Irish Parliament’—on ‘the Guinea and the Gallows,’ as the ultimate resources of the English government,—on ‘ministerial mismanagement, and privileged profligacy,’—we begin to feel that there is nothing in these quaint and affected verbal coincidences more nearly allied to truth than falsehood:—there is a want of directness and simplicity in this warped and garbled style; and our attention is drawn off from the importance of the subject by a shower of epigrammatic conceits, and fanciful phraseology, in which the orator chuses to veil it. It is hardly enough to say, in defence of this jingle of words, (as well as of the overstrained hyperbolical tone of declamation which accompanies it) that ‘it is a custom of Ireland.’[[55]] The same objection may be made to it in point of taste that has been made to the old-fashioned, obsolete practice of cutting trees into the shape of arm-chairs and peacocks, or to that style of landscape-gardening, where
‘Grove nods to grove, each alley has a brother,
And half the platform just reflects the other—’
and I am afraid that this objection cannot be got over, at least, on this side the water.[[56]]
The best Irish speaker I ever heard (indeed the best speaker without any exception whatever) is Mr. Plunkett; who followed Mr. Grattan in one of the debates on the Catholic question above alluded to. The contrast was not a little striking; and it was certainly in favour of Mr. Plunkett. His style of workmanship was more manly and more masterly. There were no little Gothic ornaments or fantastic excrescences to catch and break the attention: no quaintness, witticism, or conceit. Roubilliac, after being abroad, said, that ‘what he had seen there made his own work in Westminster Abbey look like tobacco-pipes.’ You had something of the same sort of feeling with respect to Mr. Grattan’s artificial and frittered style, after hearing Mr. Plunkett’s defence of the same side of the question. He went strait forward to his end with a force equal to his rapidity. He removed all obstacles, as he advanced. He overturned Mr. Banks with his right hand, and Mr. Charles Yorke with his left—the one on a chronological question of the Concordat, and the other as to the origin of the Corporation and Test Acts. One wonders how they ever got up again, or trusted themselves on a ground of matter-of-fact ever after. Mr. Secretary Peele did not offer to put himself in his way. No part of the subject could come amiss to him—history, law, constitutional principle, common feeling, local prejudices, general theory,—all was alike within his reach and his controul. Having settled one point, he passed on to another, carrying his hearers with him:—it was as if he knew all that could be said on the question, and was anxious to impart his knowledge without any desire of shining. There was no affectation, no effort, but equal ease and earnestness. Every thing was brought to bear that could answer his purpose, and there was nothing superfluous. His eloquence swept along like a river,
‘Without o’erflowing, full.’
Every step told: every sentence went to account. I cannot say that there was any thing very profound or original in argument, imposing in imagination, or impassioned in sentiment, in any part of this address—but it was throughout impregnated with as much thought, imagination and passion as the House would be likely to understand or sympathise with. It acted like a loadstone to the feelings of the House; and the speaker raised their enthusiasm, and carried their convictions as far as he wished, or as it was practicable. The effect was extraordinary: the impression grew stronger from first to last. No one stirred the whole time, and, at the end, the lobbies were crowded with members going up stairs and saying, ‘Well, this is a speech worth going without one’s dinner to hear,’ (Oh, unequivocal testimony of applause!) ‘there has been nothing like this since the time of Fox,’ etc. For myself, I never heard any other speech that I would have given three farthings to have made. It did not make the same figure in the newspapers the next day; for it was but indifferently reported, owing to the extreme fluency with which it was delivered. There was no boggling, no straggling, irrelevant matter;—you could not wait for him at the end of a long parenthesis, and go on with your report as if nothing had happened in the interval, as is sometimes the case,[[57]]—and besides, for the reason above given, it was a speech better calculated to strike in the hearing than the perusal; for though it was fully up to the tone of the House, the public mind can bear stronger meats. Another such speech would have decided the question, and made the difference of four votes by which it was lost. While the impression was fresh in the mind, it was not easy for any one, pretending to honesty, to look his neighbour in the face and vote against the motion. But Mr. Plunkett, in the mean time, sailed for Ireland. Any one who can speak as he can, and is a friend to his own, or any other country, ought not to let the present men retain their seats six months longer. Nothing but the will is wanting.—The ability, I will venture to say, is there.
And what shall I say of Lord Castlereagh—that spouter without beginning, middle, or end—who has not an idea in his head, nor a word to say for himself—who carries the House of Commons by his manner alone—who bows and smiles assent and dissent—who makes a dangling proposition of his person, and is himself a drooping figure of speech—what shall I say of this inanimate automaton? Nothing! For what can be said of him?
‘Come then, expressive silence, muse his praise.’[[58]]
Neither have I any thing to say of the style of eloquence of Mr. Alderman Wood, or Mr. Waithman, or Sir. W. Curtis—except that the latter always appears to me a very fit and lively representative of the good living, drinking, and eating of the city. This is but reasonable. The bodies of the city, not their minds, should be represented. A large turtle in the House (with a proxy to the minister) would answer the purpose just as well.
Mr. Wilberforce is a speaker whom it is difficult to class either with ministers or opposition. His character and his pretensions are altogether equivocal. He is a man of some ability, and, at one time, had considerable influence. He is what might be called ‘a sweet speaker’: his silver voice floats and glides up and down in the air, as if it was avoiding every occasion of offence, and dodging the question through its various avenues of reason and interest.
——‘In many a winding bout
Of melting softness long drawn out.’
There is a finical flexibility of purpose, and a cautious curiosity of research, that would put you in pain for him, if the want of proper self-respect did not take away all common fellow-feeling. His stratagems are so over-wrought that you wish them to fail: his evasions are so slippery and yet so palpable that you laugh in his face. Mr. Wilberforce is a man that has always two strings to his bow: as an orator, he is a kind of lay-preacher in parliament. He is at continual hawk and buzzard between character and conscience, between popularity and court favour, between his loyalty and his religion, between this world and the next. Is not this something like trying to serve God and Mammon? He is anxious to stand fair with the reflecting part of the community, without giving umbrage to power. He is shocked at vice in low stations:
‘But ’tis the fall degrades her to a whore;
Let greatness own her, and she’s mean no more.’
He would go with the popular cause as long as it was popular, and gave him more weight than he lost by it; but would desert it the instant it became obnoxious, and that an obstinate adherence to it was likely to deprive him of future opportunities of doing good. He had rather be on the right side than the wrong, if he loses nothing by it. His reputation costs him nothing; though he always takes care to save appearances. His virtues compound for his vices in a very amicable manner. His humanity is at the horizon, three thousand miles off,—his servility stays at home, at the beck of the minister. He unbinds the chains of Africa, and helps (we trust without meaning it) to rivet those of his own country, and of Europe. As a general truth,—(not meaning any undue application in the present instance,) it may be affirmed, that there is not a more insignificant as well as a dangerous character crawling between heaven and earth, than that of the pretended patriot, and philanthropist, who has not courage to take the plain reward of vice or virtue—who crouches to authority, and yet dreads the censure of the world, who gives a sneaking casting vote on the side of conscience only when he can do it with impunity,—or else throws the weight of his reputation into the scale of his interest and the profligacy of others—who makes an affectation of principle a stalking-horse to his pitiful desire of distinction, and betrays a cause, sooner than commit himself.
‘Out upon such half-faced fellowship.’ We have another example of trumpery ambition in the person of Mr. C. Wynne; who, officious, indefatigable in his petty warfare with the abuses of power, is chiefly anxious to stand well with those who sanction them. He interprets the text literally, not to do evil that good may come. He is so fearful of the imputation of the least wrong, that he will never do or let any one else do the greatest right. Summum jus summa injuria, has never entered his head. He is the dog in the political manger: a technical marplot. He takes a systematic delight in giving a lift to his enemies, and in hampering his friends. He is a regular whipper-in on the side of opposition, to all those who go but a hairs-breadth beyond his pragmatical notions of discretion and propriety. He sets up for a balance-master of the constitution and, by insisting on its never deviating from its erect, perpendicular position, is sure to have it overturned. He professes to be greatly scandalized at the abuses and corruptions in our ancient institutions, which are ‘as notorious as the sun at noon-day,’ and would have them removed—but he is much more scandalized at those indiscreet persons who bring to light any of these notorious abuses, in order to have them remedied. He is more angry at those with whom he differs in the smallest iota than at those who differ from him toto cælo: and is at mortal enmity with every antiministerial measure that is not so clogged with imbecility and objections as to be impracticable or absolutely unavailing. He is therefore a bad partisan, and does little mischief, only because he is little attended to. Indeed, his voice is against him.
I did not much like Sir Samuel Romilly’s significant, oracular way of laying down the law in the House:—his self-important assumption of second-hand truths, and his impatience of contradiction, as if he gave his time there to humanity for nothing. He was too solemn a speaker: as Garrow was too flippant and fluent. The latter appeared to have nothing to do but to talk nonsense by the yard, for the pleasure of exposing himself or being exposed by others. He might be said to hold in his hand a general retainer for absurdity, and to hold his head up in the pillory of his own folly with a very unabashed and unblushing gaiety of demeanour. Lawyers, as a general rule, are the very worst speakers in the House: if there are a few nominal exceptions, it is because they are not lawyers.
I do not recollect any other speaker of importance but Mr. Canning; and he requires a chapter by himself. Thus then I would try to estimate him.—The orator and the writer do not always belong to the same class of intellectual character; nor is it, I think, in general, fair to judge of the merit of popular harangues by reducing them to the standard of literary compositions. Something,—a great deal,—is to be given to the suddenness of the emergency, the want of preparation, the instantaneous and effectual, but passing appeal to individual characters, feelings, and events. The speaker has less time allowed him to enforce his purpose, and to procure the impression he aims at than the writer; and he is therefore entitled to produce it by less scrupulous, by more obvious and fugitive means. He must strike the iron while it is hot. The blow must be prompt and decisive. He must mould the convictions and purposes of his hearers while they are under the influence of passion and circumstances,—as the glass-blower moulds the vitreous fluid with his breath. If he can take the popular mind by surprise, and stamp on it, while warm, the impression desired, it is not to be demanded whether the same means would have been equally successful on cool reflection or after the most mature deliberation. That is not the question at issue. At a moment’s notice the expert debater is able to start some topic, some view of a subject, which answers the purpose of the moment. He can suggest a dextrous evasion of his adversaries’ objections, he knows when to seize and take advantage of the impulse of popular feeling, he is master of the dazzling fence of argument, ‘the punto, the stoccado, the reverso,’ the shifts, and quirks, and palpable topics of debate; he can wield these at pleasure, and employ them to advantage on the spur of the occasion—this is all that can be required of him; for it is all that is necessary, and all that he undertakes to do. That another could bring forward more weighty reasons, offer more wholesome advice, convey more sound and extensive information in an indefinite period, is nothing to the purpose; for all this wisdom and knowledge would be of no avail in the supposed circumstances; the critical opportunity for action would be lost, before any use could be made of it. The one thing needful in public speaking is not to say what is best, but the best that can be said in a given time, place, and circumstance. The great qualification therefore of a leader in debate (as of a leader in fight) is presence of mind: he who has not this, wants every thing, and he who has it, may be forgiven almost all other deficiencies. The current coin of his discourses may be light and worthless in itself; but if it is always kept bright and ready for immediate use, it will pass unquestioned; and the public voice will affix to his name the praise of a sharp-witted, able, fluent, and eloquent speaker. We ‘no further seek his merits to disclose, or scan his frailties in their brief abode,’—the popular ear and echo of popular applause. What he says may be trite, pert, shallow, contradictory, false, unfounded, and sophistical; but it was what was wanted for the occasion, and it told with those who heard it. Let it stop there, and all is well. The rest is forgotten; nor is it worth remembering.
But Mr. Canning has an ill habit of printing his speeches: and I doubt where the same oratorical privileges can be extended to printed speeches; or to this gentleman’s speeches in general, even though they should not be printed. Whether afterwards committed to the press or not, they have evidently, I think, been first committed, with great care, to paper or to memory. They have all the marks, and are chargeable with all the malice prepense of written compositions. They are not occasional effusions, but set harangues. They are elaborate impromptus; deeply concerted and highly polished pieces of extempore ingenuity. The repartee has been conceived many months before the luckless observation which gives ostensible birth to it; and an argument woven into a debate is sure to be the counterpart or fag-end of some worn-out sophism of several years’ standing. Mr. Canning is not so properly an orator as an author reciting his own compositions. He foresees (without much of the spirit of prophecy) what will, may, or can be said on some well-conned subject, and gets up, by anticipation, a tissue of excellent good conceits, indifferent bad arguments, classical quotations, and showy similes, which he contrives, by a sort of rhetorical join-hand, to tack on to some straggling observation dropped by some Honourable Member,—and so goes on, with folded arms and sonorous voice, neither quickened nor retarded, neither elevated nor depressed by the hear him’s that now rise on the one side, or are now echoed from the other;—never diverted into laughing gaiety, never hurried into incontrolable passion—till he is regularly delivered in the course of the same number of hours of the labour of weeks and months. To those who are in the secret of the arts of debating, who are versed in the complicated tactics of parliamentary common-place, there is nothing very mysterious in the process, though it startles the uninitiated. The fluency, the monotony, the unimpressible, imposing style of his elocution,—‘swinging slow with sullen roar,’ like the alternate oscillation of a pendulum—afraid of being thrown off his balance—never trusting himself with the smallest inflection of tone or manner from the impulse of the moment,—all shew that the speaker relies on the tenaciousness of his memory, not on the quickness and fertility of his invention. Mr. Canning, I apprehend, never answered a speech: he answers, or affects to answer some observation in a speech, and then manufactures a long tirade out of his own ‘mother-wit and arts well-known before.’ He caps an oration, as school-boys cap verses; and gets up his oracular responses, as Sidrophel and Whackum did theirs, by having met with his customers of old. From that time he has the debate entirely in his own hands, and exercises over it ‘sole sovereign sway and masterdom.’ One of these spontaneous mechanical sallies of his resembles a voluntary played on a barrel-organ: it is a kind of Pan-harmonic display of wit and wisdom—such as Mr. Canning possesses! The amplest stores of his mind are unfolded to their inmost source—the classic lore, the historic page, the philosophic doubt, the sage reply, the sprightly allusion, the delicate irony, the happy turning of a period or insinuation of a paragraph with senatorial dignity and Ovidian grace—are all here concocted, studied, revised, varnished over, till the sense aches at their glossy beauty and sickens at hopeless perfection. Our modern orator’s thoughts have been declared by some to have all the elegance of the antique; I should say, they have only the fragility and smoothness of plaster-cast copies!
If I were compelled to characterize Mr. Canning’s style by a single trait, I should say that he is a mere parodist in verse or prose, in reasoning or in wit. He transposes arguments as he does images, and makes sophistry of the one, and burlesque of the other. ‘What’s serious, he turns to farce.’ This is perhaps, not art in him, so much as nature. The specific levity of his mind causes it to subsist best in the rarified atmosphere of indifference and scorn: it attaches most interest and importance to the slight and worthless. There is a striking want of solidity and keeping in this person’s character. The frivolous, the equivocal, is his delight—the element in which he speaks, and writes, and has his being, as an orator and poet. By applying to low and contemptible objects the language or ideas which have been appropriated to high and swelling contemplations, he reduces the latter to the same paltry level, or renders the former doubly ridiculous. On the same principle, or from not feeling the due force and weight of different things, as they affect either the imagination or the understanding, he brings the slenderest and most evanescent analogies to bear out the most important conclusions; establishes some fact in history by giving it the form of an idle interrogation, like a school-boy declaiming on he knows not what; and thinks to overturn the fixed sentiment of a whole people by an interjection of surprise at what he knows to be unavoidable and unanswerable. There is none of the gravity of the statesman, of the enthusiasm of the patriot, the impatient zeal of the partizan, in Mr. Canning. We distinguish through the disguise of pompous declamation, or the affectation of personal consequence, only the elegant trifler, the thoughtless epigrammatist, spreading ‘a windy fan of painted plumes,’ to catch the breath of popular applause, or to flutter in the tainted breeze of court-favour. ‘As those same plumes, so seems he vain and light,’—never applying his hand to useful action, or his mind to sober truth. A thing’s being evident, is to him a reason for attempting to falsify it: its being right is a reason for straining every nerve to evade or defeat it at all events. It might appear, that with him inversion is the order of nature. ‘Trifles light as air, are’ to his understanding, ‘confirmations strong as proofs of holy writ:’ and he winks and shuts his apprehension up to the most solemn and momentous truths as gross and vulgar errors. His political creed is of an entirely fanciful and fictitious texture—a kind of moral, religious, political, and sentimental filligre-work: or it is made up of monstrous pretexts, and idle shadows, and spurious theories, and mock-alarms. Hence his gravest reasonings have very much an air of concealed irony; and it might sometimes almost be suspected that, by his partial, loose, and unguarded sophisms, he meant to abandon the very cause he professes to magnify and extol.[[59]] It is indeed, his boast, his pride, his pleasure, ‘to make the worse appear the better reason,’ which he does with the pertness of a school-boy and the effrontery of a prostitute: he assumes indecent postures in the debate, confounds the sense of right and wrong by his licentious disregard of both, puts honesty out of countenance by the familiarity of his proposals, makes a jest of principle,—‘takes the rose from the fair forehead of a virtuous cause, and plants a blister there.’
The House of Lords does not at present display much of the aristocracy of talent. The scene is by no means so amusing or dramatic here as in the House of Commons. Every speaker seems to claim his privilege of peerage in the awful attention of his auditors, which is granted while there is any reasonable hope of a return: but it is not easy to hear Lord Grenville repeat the same thing regularly four times over, in different words—to listen to the Marquis of Wellesley who never lowers his voice for four hours from the time he begins, nor utters the commonest syllable in a tone below that in which Pierre curses the Senate—Lord Holland might have other pretensions to alacrity of mind than an impediment of speech, and Lord Liverpool might introduce less of the vis inertiæ of office into his official harangues, than he does. Lord Ellenborough was great ‘in the extremity of an oath.’ Lord Eldon, ‘his face ’twixt tears and smiles contending,’ never loses his place or his temper. It is a pity to see Lord Erskine sit silent, who was once a popular and powerful speaker; and when he does get up to speak, you wish he had said nothing. This nobleman, the other day, on his return to Scotland after an absence of fifty years, made a striking speech on the instinctive and indissoluble attachment of all persons to the country where they are born,—which he considered as an innate and unerring principle of the human mind; and, in expatiating on the advantages of patriotism, argued by way of illustration, that if it were not for this original dispensation of Providence, attaching, and, as it were, rooting every one to the spot where he was bred and born,—civil society should never have existed, nor mankind have been reclaimed from the barbarous and wandering way of life, to which they were in the first instance addicted! How these persons should become attached by habit to places where it appears, from their vagabond dispositions, they never stayed at all, is an oversight of the speaker which remains unexplained. On the same occasion, the learned Lord, in order to produce an effect, observed that when, advancing farther north, he should come to the old playground near his father’s mansion, where he used to play at ball when a child, his sensations would be of a most affecting description. This is possible; but his Lordship returned homewards the next day, thinking, no doubt, he had anticipated all the sentiment of the situation. This puts one in mind of the story one has heard of Tom Sheridan, who told his father he had been down to the bottom of a coal-pit. ‘Then, you are a fool, Tom,’ said the father. ‘Why so, Sir?’ ‘Because,’ said the other, ‘it would have answered all the same purpose to have said you had been down!’