Although the dominant quality of Mr. Bright’s oratory lay in the almost biblical simplicity and gravity of the spirit which inspired it, there were times when he could show a quick command of a lighter mood.
I happened to be present in the House of Commons when he attacked with admirable raillery Mr. Horsman and Mr. Lowe, who had retired into what Mr. Bright described as their political Cave of Adullam. He kept the House in a mood of continual amusement, which culminated at last in his well-known reference to the Scotch terrier.
Seizing upon the fact that Mr. Horsman’s party seemed at present to consist of only two members, he added: “When a party is formed of two men so amiable, so discreet, as the two right honourable gentlemen, we may hope to see for the first time in Parliament a party perfectly harmonious and distinguished by mutual and unbroken trust. But there is one difficulty which it is impossible to remove. This party of two reminds me of the Scotch terrier which was so covered with hair that you could not tell which was the head and which was the tail of it.”
Millais’s portrait of John Bright does less than justice to the dignity of his face. It may be that the artist was confronted by his task at too late a period in Bright’s life; certain it is that as I recall him in the years 1866 and 1867 there were elements of beauty in the face, both as regards colouring and expression, that are not to be found in the later portrait.
In this respect it compares unfavourably, I think, with the great painter’s superb representation of Mr. Gladstone’s features. I heard Mr. Gladstone many times in the House of Commons, but I must frankly own that even in its highest moments his oratory never to my thinking came to within even measurable distance with that of John Bright.
In readiness of debate I suppose he had no superior on either side of the House, but the complexity of his mind, with its ever-watchful care to temper each direct and simple statement with what the speaker conceived to be its necessary qualifications, was mirrored in the often overburdened structure of his lengthened periods; and yet even in this defect the unflagging energy and sustained intellectual agility of the speaker were constantly exhibited.
I fancy no orator of his own or any other time could so safely conduct himself through the sinuous ways of a prolonged sentence with a sense of such security to the hearers that there would be no lapse or failure in the ordered arrangement of its many modifying clauses. On constant provocation he often spoke with a fire that enabled him to liberate himself from the entangled meshes of parenthesis which haunted him in his more considered utterances, and I remember being present in the House during the dramatic little scene between him and Disraeli which showed these two parliamentary gladiators at their best.
Somewhat rashly, perhaps, Disraeli had indulged in a sarcastic reference to Mr. Gladstone’s earlier adherence to Tory principles, and at the conclusion of his speech Mr. Gladstone, springing to his feet, retorted upon his opponent with telling effect by reminding the Conservative statesman that he himself had once sought to win the Liberal vote.
The right honourable gentleman, secure I suppose in the knowledge of his own consistency, has taunted me with the political errors of my boyhood. The right honourable gentleman, when he addressed the honourable member for Westminster [J. Stuart Mill], took occasion to show his magnanimity, for he declared that he would not take the philosopher to task for what he wrote twenty-five years ago. But when he caught one who thirty-five years ago, just emerged from boyhood and still an undergraduate at Oxford, had expressed an opinion adverse to the Reform Bill of 1832, of which he had so long and bitterly repented, then the right honourable gentleman could not resist the temptation that offered itself to his appetite for effect. He, a parliamentary champion of twenty years’ standing, and the leader, as he informs us to-night, of the Tory party, is so ignorant of the House of Commons, or so simple in the structure of his mind, that he positively thought he would obtain a parliamentary advantage by exhibiting me to the public view for reprobation as an opponent of the Reform Bill of 1832. Sir, as the right honourable gentleman has done me the honour thus to exhibit me, let me for a moment trespass on the patience of the House to exhibit myself. What he has stated is true. I deeply regret it. But I was bred under the shadow of the great name of Canning; every influence connected with that name governed the first political impressions of my childhood and my youth; with Mr. Canning I rejoiced in the removal of religious disabilities from the Roman Catholic body, and in the free and truly British tone which he gave to our policy abroad; with Mr. Canning I rejoiced in the opening he made towards the establishment of free commercial interchanges between nations; with Mr. Canning, and under the shadow of that great name, and under the shadow of the yet more venerable name of Burke, I grant my youthful mind and imagination were impressed with the same idle and futile fears which still bewilder and distract the mature mind of the right honourable gentleman. I had conceived that very same fear, that ungovernable alarm, at the first Reform Bill in the days of my undergraduate career at Oxford which the right honourable gentleman now feels; and the only difference between us is this—I thank him for bringing it into view by his quotation—that, having those views, I, as it would appear, moved the Oxford Union Debating Society to express them clearly, plainly, forcibly, in downright English, while the right honourable gentleman does not dare to tell the nation what it is that he really thinks, and is content to skulk under the meaningless amendment which is proposed by the noble Lord. And now, sir, I quit the right honourable gentleman; I leave him to his reflections, and I envy him not one particle of the polemical advantage which he has gained by his discreet reference to the proceedings of the Oxford Union Debating Society in the year of grace 1831....
I came among you [the Liberal party] an outcast from those with whom I associated, driven from them, I admit, by no arbitrary act, but by the slow and resistless forces of conviction. I came among you, to make use of the legal phraseology, in pauperis forma. I had nothing to offer you but faithful and honourable service. You received me as Dido received the shipwrecked Aeneas—