"Let wealth and commerce, laws and learning die, But leave us still our old nobility!"
the author justly retorted that he would far sooner be the foolish young man who wrote those lines than the malignant old man who quoted them.
That speeches should be as effective when read as when delivered is the highest quality of oratory. For this reason, perhaps, some speakers write out their speeches and commit them to memory. Disraeli did so with his more important orations, a fact which greatly enhances the pleasure of their perusal. Macaulay followed the same practice, and, indeed, it is said that the excessive elaboration of his oratory sometimes weakened its effect. Lord Randolph Churchill's earlier speeches were all memorised in this fashion. But it is not every man whose memory is sufficiently retentive to enable him to accomplish this feat, and a breakdown in the very middle of a humorous anecdote thoughtfully interspersed in a speech is a catastrophe which casts ridicule upon the speaker.[363]
Though matter may be a most important element in parliamentary speaking, manner undoubtedly counts for a good deal. Demosthenes practised declaiming with sharp weapons suspended above him so as to learn to keep still, and, as we have already seen, had some obscure reason for filling his mouth with pebbles. Neither of these practices is to be commended to modern orators, many of whom already speak as though their mouths were filled with hot potatoes, while their habitual gesticulations, if made in the neighbourhood of dependent cutlery, would result in reducing their bodies to one huge wound. Sir Watkin Wynne and his brother were long known in the House of Commons as "Bubble and Squeak," the former's voice being a smothered mumble suggestive of suppressed thunder, the latter's a childish treble. Mannerisms of gesture, as well as of speech, are easily contracted. Lord Mahon, "out-roaring torrents in their course," reinforced his stentorian lungs by violent gestures which were at times a source of bodily danger to his friends. Once, when speaking on a Bill he had brought in for the suppression of smuggling, he declared that this crime must be knocked on the head with one blow. To emphasize his meaning, he dealt the unfortunate Pitt, who was sitting just in front of him, a violent buffet on the head, much to the amusement of the House.[364] The gesticulations of Sir Charles Wetherell, the well-known member, were less dangerous, if quainter. He used to unbutton his braces in a nervous fashion while addressing the House, leaving between his upper and lower garments an interregnum to which Speaker Manners Sutton once alluded as the honourable gentleman's only lucid interval. The late Lord Goschen would grasp himself firmly by the lapel of his coat, as though (to quote a well-known parliamentary writer) "otherwise he might run away and leave matters to explain themselves."[365]
Parliamentary eloquence to-day makes up in quantity for what it lacks in quality. The number of members who follow the advice of the Psalmist and earn a reputation for wisdom by a continual policy of eloquent silence[366] has dwindled to vanishing point, since to speak in Parliament has come to be regarded as part of a member's duty to his constituents. In Gladstone's first session, in 1833, less than 6000 speeches were made in the House of Commons; fifty years later the number had increased to 21,000; to-day the steadily growing bulk of each volume of the "Parliamentary Debates" testifies to the swelling flood of oratory which is annually let loose within the precincts of Parliament. And if La Rochefoucauld's maxim be true, that we readily pardon those who bore us, but never those whom we bore, the House of Commons has need of a most forgiving spirit to listen patiently to so much of what can only be described as vox et praeterea nihil.
The level of eloquence is, no doubt, higher in the House of Lords than elsewhere. Peers include a greater number of orators among their numbers; opportunities for a display of their talents are more rare; their powers are not dissipated in prolonged debates, as in the Commons, but are reserved for full-dress occasions.
In neither House nowadays is there any exhibition of that old-fashioned rhetoric, florid and flamboyant, which was once so popular. What Mackintosh calls "an elevated kind of after-dinner conversation," such as Lord Salisbury affected so successfully, is the form taken by modern parliamentary eloquence. There are no appeals to sentiment, no quotations from the classics, no bombastic declamations.[367] The House of Commons is still "a mob of gentlemen, the greater part of whom are neither without talent nor information,"[368] and with such an audience learned generalities are out of place. Passion has to a large extent given way to business, and in Parliament to-day are rarely heard those "splendid common-places of the first-rate rhetorician," which Lord Morley considers necessary to sway assemblies.
We live in a material age. The flowers of rhetoric bloom no longer in the cold business-like atmosphere of the parliamentary garden; only the more practical but unromantic vegetables remain. The rich embroideries of trope and metaphor have been roughly torn from modern speech, leaving the bare skeleton of reason exposed to the public gaze. The grandiose orator of the past, with his ornate phraseology, his graceful periods, his quotations from the poets, has been ousted by the passionless debater, flinging, like the improvident O'Connell, his brood of robust thoughts into the world, without a rag to cover them. No one to-day would dream of expending fifty shillings—let alone fifty guineas—for the privilege of hearing a modern Sheridan address a twentieth-century Parliament; no modern Grattan (as Sheil might say) shatters the pinnacles of this establishment with the lightning of his eloquence.
The successful parliamentary speaker is no longer one who is able, in the words of Macaulay, to produce with rapidity a series of stirring but transitory impressions, to excite the minds of five hundred gentlemen at midnight, without saying anything that any of them will remember in the morning.[369] Rather is he the cold judicious politician who chooses his words less for their beauty than for their immunity from subsequent perversion, who can crystallise in a few brief sentences, within the compass of a few minutes, the opinions that it would have taken his ancestors as many hours to express in the turgid rhetoric of a bygone age. The orator—as the name was once understood—is now a rara avis, but seldom raising his tuneful voice above the raucous cawing of his fellows. And whoever feels with Gibbon that the great speakers fill him with despair, and the bad ones with terror, will leave the precincts of Parliament to-day more often terrorstricken than desperate. That this should be so is no reason for giving way to gloom or sorrow. Parliamentary eloquence is not necessarily the sign of a country's greatness. The English Parliament, which began by acclaiming Burke as the prince of orators, soon became indifferent to his powers, and ended by labelling him the "Dinner Bell." Fox has left no memorial of any good wrought by his oratory. "Neither the Habeas Corpus Act, nor the Bill of Rights, nor Magna Charta originated in eloquence," and if it be true that "a senate of orators is a symptom of material decay,"[370] we may look forward to the future of England with calm and perfect confidence.