In public speaking, Lord Salisbury seemed to be thinking aloud, and to be quite unconscious of his audience. Though he was saturated with his subject there was apparently no verbal preparation. Yet his diction was peculiarly apt and pointed. He never looked at a note; used no gesture; scarcely raised or lowered his voice. But in a clear and penetrating monotone he uttered the workings of a profound and reflective mind, and the treasures of a vast experience. Though massive, his style was never ponderous: and it was constantly lightened by the sallies of a pungent humour. In the debate on the Second Reading of the Home Rule Bill of 1893, Lord Ribblesdale, then recently converted from Unionism to Gladstonianism, and Master of the Buckhounds in the Liberal government, had given the history of his mental change. In replying, Lord Salisbury said, "The next speech, my lords, was a confession. Confessions are always an interesting form of literature—from St. Augustine to Rousseau, from Rousseau to Lord Ribblesdale." The House laughed, and the Master of the Buckhounds laughed with it.
One of the most vigorous orators whom I have ever heard, in the House of Lords or out of it, was Dr. Magee, Bishop of Peterborough, and afterwards Archbishop of York. He had made his fame by his speech on the Second Reading of the Irish Church Bill, and was always at his best when defending the temporal interests of ecclesiastical institutions. No clergyman ever smacked so little of the pulpit. His mind was essentially legal—clear, practical, logical, cogent. No one on earth could make a better case for a bad cause; no one could argue more closely, or declaim more vigorously. When his blood was up, he must either speak or burst; but his indignation, though it found vent in flashing sarcasms, never betrayed him into irrelevancies or inexactitudes.
A fine speaker of a different type—and one better fitted for a Churchman—was Archbishop Tait, whose dignity of speech and bearing, clear judgment, and forcible utterance, made him the worthiest representative of the Church in Parliament whom these latter days have seen. To contrast Tait's stately calm with Benson's fluttering obsequiousness[48] or Temple's hammering force, was to perceive the manner that is, and the manners that are not, adapted to what Gladstone called "the mixed sphere of Religion and the Sæculum."
By far the greatest orator whom the House of Lords has possessed in my recollection was the late Duke of Argyll. I have heard that Lord Beaconsfield, newly arrived in the House of Lords and hearing the Duke for the first time, exclaimed, "And has this been going on all these years, and I have never found it out?" It is true that the Duke's reputation as an administrator, a writer, a naturalist, and an amateur theologian, distracted public attention from his power as an orator; and I have been told that he himself did not realize it. Yet orator indeed he was, in the highest implication of the term. He spoke always under the influence of fiery conviction, and the live coal from the altar seemed to touch his lips. He was absolute master of every mood of oratory—pathos, satire, contemptuous humour, ethical passion, noble wrath; and his unstudied eloquence flowed like a river through the successive moods, taking a colour from each, and gaining force as it rolled towards its close.
On the 6th of September, 1893, I heard the Duke speaking on the Second Reading of the Home Rule Bill. He was then an old man, and in broken health; the speech attempted little in the way of argument, and was desultory beyond belief. But suddenly there came a passage which lifted the whole debate into a nobler air. The orator described himself standing on the Western shores of Scotland, and gazing across towards the hills of Antrim: "We can see the colour of their fields, and in the sunset we can see the glancing of the light upon the windows of the cabins of the people. This is the country, I thought the other day when I looked on the scene—this is the country which the greatest English statesman tells us must be governed as we govern the Antipodes." And he emphasized the last word with a downward sweep of his right hand, which in a commonplace speaker would have been frankly comic, but in this great master of oratory was a master-stroke of dramatic art.
Before I close this chapter, I should like to recall a word of Gladstone's which at the time when he said it struck me as memorable. In August, 1895, I was staying at Hawarden. Gladstone's Parliamentary life was done, and he talked about political people and events with a freedom which I had never before known in him. As perhaps was natural, we fell to discussing the men who had been his colleagues in the late Liberal Ministry. We reviewed in turn Lord Spencer, Sir William Harcourt, Lord Rosebery, Mr. John Morley, Sir George Trevelyan, and Mr. Asquith. It is perhaps a little curious, in view of what happened later on, that Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman was not mentioned; but, with regard to the foregoing names, I perfectly recollect, though there is no need to repeat, the terse and trenchant judgment passed on each. When we had come to the end of my list, the ex-Premier turned on me with one of those compelling glances which we knew so well, and said with emphasis, "But you haven't mentioned the most important man of all." "Who is that?" "Edward Grey—there is the man with the real Parliamentary gift." I am happy to make the Foreign Secretary a present of this handsome compliment.
FOOTNOTES:
[42] Mucius Scævola per multos annos "Princeps Senatûs."
[43] Bulwer-Lytton, St. Stephen's.
[44] Mr. A. J. Willams, Mr. A. G. Symond, Mr. Walter Wren, Mr. W. L. Bright, and Mr. J. J. Tylor were some of them; and we used to meet in Mr. Bright's rooms at Storey's Gate.