I should not ascribe the title of orator to Mr. Chamberlain. He has nothing of the inspiration, the poetry, the "vision splendid," the "faculty divine," which make the genuine orator. But as a speaker of the second, and perhaps most useful, class, he has never been surpassed. His speaking was the perfection of clearness. Each argument seemed irresistible, each illustration told. His invective was powerful, his passion seemed genuine, his satire cut like steel and froze like ice. His perception of his hearers' likes and dislikes was intuitive, and was heightened by constant observation. His friends and his enemies were those whom he esteemed the friends and the enemies of England; and he never committed the heroic but perilous error of setting himself against the passing mood of national feeling. He combined in rare harmony the debating instinct which conquers the House of Commons, with the power of appeal to popular passion which is the glory of the Demagogue.
The word with which my last sentence closed recalls inevitably the tragic figure of Lord Randolph Churchill. The adroitness, the courage, and the persistency with which between 1880 and 1885 he sapped Gladstone's authority, deposed Northcote, and made himself the most conspicuous man in the Tory Party, have been described in his Biography, and need not be recapitulated here. Mr. Chamberlain, who was exactly qualified to resist and abate him, had not yet acquired a commanding position in the House of Commons; and on the platform Churchill could not be beaten. In these two men each party possessed a Demagogue of the highest gifts, and it would have puzzled an expert to say which was the better exponent of his peculiar art. In January, 1884, Churchill made a speech at Blackpool, and thus attacked his eminent rival—"Mr. Chamberlain a short time ago attempted to hold Lord Salisbury up to the execration of the people as one who enjoyed great riches for which he had neither toiled nor spun, and he savagely denounced Lord Salisbury and his class. As a matter of fact, Lord Salisbury from his earliest days has toiled and spun in the service of the State, and for the advancement of his countrymen in learning, in wealth, and in prosperity; but no Radical ever yet allowed himself to be embarrassed by a question of fact. Just look, however, at what Mr. Chamberlain himself does; he goes to Newcastle, and is entertained at a banquet there, and procures for the president of the feast a live Earl—no less a person than the Earl of Durham. Now, Lord Durham is a young person who has just come of age, who is in the possession of immense hereditary estates, who is well known on Newmarket Heath, and prominent among the gilded youth who throng the doors of the Gaiety Theatre; but he has studied politics about as much as Barnum's new white elephant, and the idea of rendering service to the State has not yet commenced to dawn on his ingenuous mind. If by any means it could be legitimate, and I hold it is illegitimate, to stigmatize any individual as enjoying great riches for which he has neither toiled nor spun, such a case would be the case of the Earl of Durham; and yet it is under the patronage of the Earl of Durham, and basking in the smiles of the Earl of Durham, and bandying vulgar compliments with the Earl of Durham, that this stern patriot, this rigid moralist, this unbending censor, the Right Honourable Joseph Chamberlain, flaunts his Radical and levelling doctrines before the astonished democrats of Newcastle. 'Vanity of Vanities,' saith the preacher, 'all is vanity.' 'Humbug of Humbugs,' says the Radical, 'all is humbug.'"
And with that most characteristic specimen of popular eloquence, we may leave the two great demagogues of the Victorian Age.
At the period of which I am speaking the House of Commons contained two or three orators surviving from a class which had almost died away. These were men who, having no gift for extempore speaking, used to study the earlier stages of a debate, prepare a tremendous oration, and then deliver it by heart. Such, in days gone by, had been the practice of Bulwer-Lytton, and, as far as one can see, of Macaulay. In my day it was followed by Patrick Smyth, Member for Tipperary, and by Joseph Cowen, Member for Newcastle. Both were real rhetoricians. Both could compose long discourses, couched in the most flowery English, interlarded with anecdotes and decorated with quotations; and both could declaim these compositions with grace and vigour. But the effect was very droll. They would work, say, all Tuesday and Wednesday at a point which had been exhausted by discussion on Monday, and then on Thursday they would burst into the debate just whenever they could catch the Speaker's eye, and would discharge these cascades of prepared eloquence without the slightest reference to time, fitness, or occasion.
My uncle, Lord Russell, who entered Parliament in 1813, always said that the first Lord Plunket was, on the whole, the finest speaker he had ever heard, because he combined a most cogent logic with a most moving eloquence; and these gifts descended to Plunket's grandson, now Lord Rathmore, and, in the days of which I am speaking, Mr. David Plunket, Member for the University of Dublin. Voice, manner, diction, delivery, were all alike delightful; and, though such finished oratory could scarcely be unprepared, Mr. Plunket had a great deal too much of his nation's tact to produce it except when he knew that the House was anxious to receive it. In view of all that has happened since, it is curious to remember that Mr. Arthur Balfour was, in those days, a remarkably bad speaker. No one, I should think, was ever born with less of the orator's faculty, or was under heavier obligations to the Reporters' Gallery. He shambled and stumbled, and clung to the lapels of his coat, and made immense pauses while he searched for the right word, and eventually got hold of the wrong one. In conflict with Gladstone, he seemed to exude the very essence of acrimonious partisanship, and yet he never exactly scored. As Lord Beaconsfield said of Lord Salisbury, "his invective lacked finish."
A precisely opposite description might befit Sir Robert Peel, the strangely-contrasted son of the great Free Trader. Peel was naturally an orator. He could make the most slashing onslaughts without the appearance of ill-temper, and could convulse the House with laughter while he himself remained to all appearance unconscious of the fun. His voice, pronounced by Gladstone the most beautiful he ever heard in Parliament, was low, rich, melodious, and flexible. His appearance was striking and rather un-English, his gestures were various and animated, and he enforced his points with beautifully shaped hands. If voice and manner could make a public speaker great, Sir Robert Peel might have led the Tory Party; but Demosthenes was right after all. The graces of oratory, though delightful for the moment, have no permanent effect. The perfection of Parliamentary style is to utter cruel platitudes with a grave and informing air; and, if a little pomposity be superadded, the House will instinctively recognize the speaker as a Statesman. I have heard Sir William Harcourt say, "After March, comes April," in a tone which carried conviction to every heart.
A word must be said about speakers who read their speeches. I do not think I shall be contradicted if I say that in those distant days Sir William Harcourt, Sir George Trevelyan, and Mr. Gibson, now Lord Ashbourne, wrote every word, and delivered their speeches from the manuscript. In late years, when Harcourt had to pilot his famous Budget through Committee, he acquired a perfect facility in extempore speech; but at the beginning it was not so. The Irish are an eloquent nation, and we are apt to send them rather prosy rulers. "The Honourable Member for Bletherum was at that time perambulating the district with very great activity, and, I need not say, with very great ability." Such a sentence as that, laboriously inscribed in the manuscript of a Chief Secretary's speech, seems indeed to dissipate all thoughts of oratory. Mr. Henry Richard, a "Stickit Minister" who represented Merthyr, was the worst offender against the Standing Order which forbids a Member to read his speech, though it allows him to "refresh his memory with notes"; and once, being called to order for his offence, he palliated it by saying that he was ready to hand his manuscript to his censor, and challenged him to read a word of it.
The least oratorical of mankind was the fifteenth Lord Derby, whose formal adhesion to the Liberal Party in 1882 supplied Punch with an admirable cartoon of a female Gladstone singing in impassioned strain—
"Always the same, Derby my own!