I only heard Bright make one speech in the House. It was an impromptu one, and the orator was not at his best But Bright in a passion was a. person to be listened to. I heard him at Birmingham just after his appointment to the Presidency of the Board of Trade. A Conservative banker opposed his re-election, and Bright was very much annoyed, in fact he was profoundly indignant at being opposed. When he came on the Town Hall platform, that horse-shoe in the forehead, of which Sir Walter Scott speaks as becoming visible in moments of excitement, was flashing out scarlet. He plunged into his speech at once. He did not say “Ladies and gentlemen,” or “Electorate of Birmingham,” or anything of the kind. “I call it a piece of impertinence,” he began, “and unsurpassed in my knowledge of political history that here in this home of freedom, and now at this hour when the fetters you have worn for a lifetime are but newly smitten from you, while your limbs are yet sore with their chafing, and the sound of their clanking is yet in your ears, that a Tory should come forward and ask your permission—to do what?—to rivet those fetters anew upon you. Will you give him that leave?” And in one voice eight thousand people answered “No,” which sealed the doom of the banker.
Robert Lowe afforded one of the most noteworthy instances of a man who, having made a fine reputation in the House of Commons, failed to sustain it in the House of Lords. I did not myself witness the scene of his discomfiture, but I had the story of it at first hand within ten minutes of its happening. The unfortunate gentleman was so short-sighted that he could read only when his eyes were within one or two inches of the page. He had prepared himself with a sheaf of notes for his first address to the Upper House; he had contrived in the nervousness natural to the occasion to mix his memoranda, and finding himself unable to rearrange them, he sat down discomfited, and he appears to have accepted that one disaster as final.
In the Commons he had been a brilliant figure. I have good personal reason to remember his most striking effort. His speech had relation to an Army Reform Bill, and it was a mosaic of the aptest and most wittily applied literary quotations. It was of so fine a literary quality that I very much doubt if there were a score of people among his hearers who were able fully to appreciate its excellence.
Those who could follow his allusions were delighted beyond measure, and the House took its cue from them and laughed and cheered uproariously at many things it did not understand. Mr Gladstone acted as a sort of fugleman, and his rejoicing chuckle at some happy ironic application of a Virgilian or Homeric phrase was a cue which was instantly seized upon. Lowe was always a terror to the reporters, for he spoke at a pace which no stenographer's or phonographer's pen could follow, but it was not merely the speed of his utterance which made him so impossible. He would boggle at the beginning of a sentence, and would stammer over it until the reporter was half wild with expectancy, and then he would be away at racing pace, gabbling at the rate of three or four hundred words a minute. I was in the reporter's box when Mr Lowe caught the Speaker's eye on this particular evening, and the chief of the staff, who sat next to me, gave me an urgent whisper, “We want the fullest possible note of this.” I suffered a twenty minutes' agony. I believe that for many years after I had left the national talking-shop, I was credited with having been one of the lamest shorthand writers who ever sat there, and in my anxiety and with the certainty of failure before my eyes, I fell into such a state of agitation that my hand perspired so that my pencil would not mark a line upon the paper. I threw it down in despair and stared upward at the painted ceiling, listening for all I was worth, and determined to rely upon what was then a really phenomenal memory.
“What are you doing?” my chief whispered to me. “For God's sake leave me alone!” I answered. He gave a moan and went to work feverishly at a supplementary note. The orator sat down amidst a great burst of cheers, just as my relief tapped me on the shoulder, and I walked away to committee room No. 18, which was then used by the gallery reporters as a transcribing room, feeling assured as I walked along the corridor that my career as a parliamentary reporter had reached an ignominious close. Near the door of the committee room I encountered old Jack O'Hanlon, one of the veterans of the gallery and reputed the best classic in all Westminster. His note-book was tucked in his armpit and he was rubbing his hands delightedly. “That's parliamentary eloquence, if you like,” he said as I came up with him; “there's nothing loike that been heard in the House of Commons these thirty years. There's hardly a scholar in the classics left in the House.” We sat down side by side, and when we had been at work in silence for a minute or two, the old scholar turned to me and asked, “Did you happen to catch that phrase of Sam Weller's?” I gave it to him without difficulty and then an inspiration occurred to me. The stammering tongue had plundered Father Prout and the prophet Malachi, Dickens and Ingoldsby, Pope and Smollett and Defoe, and as it chanced he had made no literary allusion in English which did not recall some long familiar text to my mind, I offered a bargain. If O'Hanlon would give me the classical stuff in respect to which I was in Pagan darkness, I would give him the English with which he was less well-acquainted. We exchanged notes and between us we turned out an excellent if a somewhat compressed and truncated report. I felt that I was saved, and on the following morning, I made an anxious survey of the work of my rivals. O'Hanlon represented The Advertiser, and I found that the report of a big meeting of the Licensed Victuallers' Association which had been held somewhere in the provinces had swamped him. He was cut down to a mere paragraph and as for the other journals—The Times, The Telegraph and The Standard—they were all hopelessly at sea. There was but one report of that amazing discourse which was even distantly worthy of it, and that was in The Daily News. I received a special letter of congratulation from Mr J. R. Robinson who, to the day of his death, persisted in regarding me as a classical scholar of exceptional acquirements. I never had an opportunity of undeceiving him or I would certainly have taken it, but I have since been content to regard this as an example of the haphazard way in which reputations are sometimes made. I learned, many years after, that I was still remembered in the gallery as the man who took a note of the most difficult speech of its year by staring at the painted ceiling.
It was surprising to notice to what heights party feeling ran amongst the reporters in the gallery. When Mr Gladstone came into power, hundreds of malicious and impossible stories were current about him amongst the supporters of the Opposition, and in the little Tabagie at the foot of the gallery stairs in which most of our spare hours were spent, there were heated discussions in which his eloquence, his financial capacity and his scholarship were all decried. I remember one occasion when the veteran of The Daily Telegraph staff walked into the room with the announcement that “that eternal old woman was on her legs again,” and a general groan went round. I was, and have never ceased to be, an ardent admirer of Mr Gladstone's character and genius, and I used constantly to chafe at his belittling by little men, but I never found a real opportunity for the expression of my own opinion until one day when I was sent down to report the annual outing of the Commissioners of Epping Forest. We had a jolly day, winding up with a very substantial dinner and a drive back to London in a string of open brakes. There was a basket of champagne aboard the brake in which I found a seat, and it turned out that nobody in the whole assembly was in possession of anything which could be utilised as a champagne opener. One gentleman, however, was very skilful in knocking off the necks of the bottles, and before we were half-way home we were all in a state of great contentment and joviality. There was a rather noisy discussion about politics and, with one exception, my companions were all fierce opponents of Gladstone. I fired at last—I daresay the champagne had something to do with it—and I ventured to tell those gentlemen that they seemed to me to be crawling about beneath the instep of a great man's boot, under the impression that they were taking an architectural survey of the man. “You will have,” I said, “to travel to a telescopic distance before you will be able to realise his proportions,” and there I burst into quotation:
“Every age,
Through being beheld too close, is ill-discerned
By those who have not lived past it; we'll suppose
Mount Athos carved, as Persian Xerxes schemed,
To some colossal statue of a man:
The peasants, gathering brushwood in his ear,
Had guessed as little of any human form
Up there, as would a flock of browsing goats.
They'd have, in fact, to travel ten miles off
Or ere the giant broke on them,
Full human profile, nose and chin distinct,
Mouth, muttering rhythms of silence up the sky,
And fed at evening with the blood of suns;
Grand torso,—hand, that flung perpetually
The largesse of a silver river down
To all the country pastures. 'Tis even thus
With times we live in,—evermore too great
To be apprehended near.”
I supposed that even if the quotation were not recognised, everybody would at least know that it was a quotation, and that it could not conceivably have been an impromptu, but one man turned on another and said: “By Jove! that's eloquence,” and a gentleman at the rear of the brake asked me out of the darkness why I didn't make a try for Parliament, and assured me that I had a future there before me.