Oratory ever since the days of Socrates, and perhaps long before, has been suspected as one of the black arts; and both at the time and afterwards Mr. Gladstone's speeches in his first Midlothian campaign were disparaged, as I have just said, as sentiment rather than politics, as sophistry not sound reason, as illusory enchantment not solid and subsisting truth. We are challenged to show passages destined to immortality. With all admiration for the effulgent catalogue of British orators, and not forgetting Pitt on the slave trade, or Fox on the Westminster scrutiny, or Sheridan on the begums of Oude, or Plunket on the catholic question, or Grattan, or Canning, or Brougham, we may perhaps ask whether all the passages that have arrived at this degree of fame and grandeur, with the exception of Burke, may not be comprised in an extremely slender volume. The statesman who makes or dominates a crisis, who has to rouse and mould the mind of senate or nation, has something else to think about than the production of literary masterpieces. The great political speech, which for that matter is a sort of drama, is not made by passages for elegant extract or anthologies, but by personality, movement, climax, spectacle, [pg 590] and the action of the time. All these elements Midlothian witnessed to perfection.
It was my fortune to be present at one whole day of these performances. “An overpowering day,” Mr. Gladstone calls it in his diary (December 5, 1879). “After a breakfast-party,” he says, “I put my notes in order for the afternoon. At twelve delivered the inaugural address as lord rector of the university” [Glasgow]. This discourse lasted an hour and a half, and themes, familiar but never outworn nor extinct, were handled with vigour, energy, and onward flow that made them sound as good as novel, and even where they did not instruct or did not edify, the noble music pleased. The great salient feature of the age was described as on its material side the constant discovery of the secrets of nature, and the progressive subjugation of her forces to the purposes and will of man. On the moral side, if these conquests had done much for industry, they had done more for capital; if much for labour, more for luxury; they had variously and vastly multiplied the stimulants to gain, the avenues of excitement, the solicitations to pleasure. The universities were in some sort to check all this; the habits of mind formed by universities are founded in sobriety and tranquillity; they help to settle the spirit of a man firmly upon the centre of gravity; they tend to self-command, self-government, and that genuine self-respect which has in it nothing of mere self-worship, for it is the reverence which each man ought to feel for the nature that God has given him, and for the laws of that nature. Then came an appeal, into which the speaker's whole heart was thrown, for the intellectual dignity of the Christian ministry. If argument failed to the great Christian tradition, he would set small value on the multitude of uninstructed numerical adhesions, or upon the integrity of institutions and the unbroken continuity of rite. “Thought,” he exclaimed,—“thought is the citadel.” There is a steeplechase philosophy in vogue—sometimes specialism making short cuts to the honours of universal knowledge; sometimes by the strangest of solecisms, the knowledge of external nature being thought to convey a supreme capacity for judging within the sphere of moral [pg 591] action and of moral needs. The thing to do is to put scepticism on its trial, and rigorously to cross-examine it: allow none of its assumptions; compel it to expound its formulæ; do not let it move a step except with proof in its hand; bring it front to front with history; even demand that it shall show the positive elements with which it proposes to replace the mainstays it seems bent on withdrawing from the fabric of modern society. The present assault, far from being destined to final triumph, is a sign of a mental movement, unsteady, though of extreme rapidity, but destined, perhaps, to elevate and strengthen the religion that it sought to overthrow. “In the meantime,” he said, in closing this branch of his address, “I would recommend to you as guides in this controversy, truth, charity, diligence, and reverence, which indeed may be called the four cardinal virtues of all controversies, be they what they may.” This was followed by an ever-salutary reminder that man is the crown of the visible creation, and that studies upon man—studies in the largest sense of humanity, studies conversant with his nature, his works, his duties and his destinies—these are the highest of all studies. As the human form is the groundwork of the highest training in art, so those mental pursuits are the highest which have man, considered at large, for their object. Some excellent admonitions upon history and a simple, moving benediction, brought the oration to an end.
Blue caps as well as red cheered fervently at the close, and some even of those who had no direct interest in the main topics, and were not much or not at all refreshed by his treatment of them, yet confessed themselves sorry when the stream of fascinating melody ceased to flow. Then followed luncheon in the university hall, where the principal, in proposing the lord rector's health, expressed the hope that he had not grudged the time given to the serene, if dull, seclusion of academic things. “I only quarrel with your word dull,” said Mr. Gladstone in reply. “Let me assure you, gentlemen, nothing is so dull as political agitation.” By this time it was four o'clock. Before six he was at St. Andrew's Hall, confronting an audience of some six thousand [pg 592] persons, as eager to hear as he was eager to speak; and not many minutes had elapsed before they were as much aflame as he, with the enormities of the Anglo-Turkish convention, the spurious harbour in Cyprus, the wrongful laws about the press in India, the heavy and unjust charges thrown upon the peoples of India, the baseless quarrel picked with Shere Ali in Afghanistan, the record of ten thousand Zulus slain for no other offence than their attempt to defend against our artillery with their naked bodies their hearths and homes.
Once mentioning a well-known member of parliament who always showed fine mettle on the platform, Mr. Gladstone said of him in a homely image, that he never saw a man who could so quickly make the kettle boil. This was certainly his own art here. For an hour and a half thus he held them, with the irresistible spell of what is in truth the groundwork of every political orator's strongest appeal—from Athenians down to Girondins, from Pericles to Webster, from Cicero to Gambetta—appeal to public law and civil right and the conscience of a free and high-minded people. This high-wrought achievement over, he was carried off to dine, and that same night he wound up what a man of seventy hard-spent years might well call “an overpowering day,” by one more address to an immense audience assembled by the Glasgow corporation in the city hall, to whom he expressed his satisfaction at the proof given by his reception in Glasgow that day, that her citizens had seen no reason to repent the kindness which had conferred the freedom of their city upon him fourteen years before.
Character Of The Campaign
The audience in St. Andrew's Hall at Glasgow was, we may presume, like his audiences elsewhere, and the sources of his overwhelming power were not hard to analyse, if one were in analytic humour. For one thing, the speeches were rallying battle-cries, not sermons, and everybody knew the great invisible antagonist with whom the orator before them was with all his might contending. It was a gleaming array of the political facts of a political indictment, not an aerial fabric of moral abstractions. Nor, again, had the fashion in which Mr. Gladstone seized opinion and feeling and personal allegiance in Scotland, anything in common with [pg 593] the violent if splendid improvisations that made O'Connell the idol and the master of passionate Ireland. One of the most telling speeches of them all was the exposure of the government finance in the Edinburgh corn-exchange, where for an hour and a half or more, he held to his figures of surplus and deficit, of the yield of bushels to the acre in good seasons and bad, of the burden of the income-tax, of the comparative burden per head of new financial systems and old, with all the rigour of an expert accountant. He enveloped the whole with a playful irony, such as a good-humoured master uses to the work of clumsy apprentices, but of the paraphernalia of rhetoric there is not a period nor a sentence nor a phrase. Fire is suppressed. So far from being saturated with colour, the hue is almost drab. Yet his audience were interested and delighted, and not for a moment did he lose hold,—not even, as one observer puts it, “in the midst of his most formidable statistics, nor at any point in the labyrinthine evolution of his longest sentences.”
Let the conclusion be good or let it be bad, all was in groundwork and in essence strictly on the plane and in the tongue of statesmanship, and conformable to Don Pedro's rule, “What need the bridge much broader than the flood?”[359] It was Demosthenes, not Isocrates. It was the orator of concrete detail, of inductive instances, of energetic and immediate object; the orator confidently and by sure touch startling into watchfulness the whole spirit of civil duty in a man; elastic and supple, pressing fact and figure with a fervid insistence that was known from his career and character to be neither forced nor feigned, but to be himself. In a word, it was a man—a man impressing himself upon the kindled throngs by the breadth of his survey of great affairs of life and nations, by the depth of his vision, by the power of his stroke. Physical resources had much to do with the effect; his overflowing vivacity, the fine voice and flashing eye and a whole frame in free, ceaseless, natural and spontaneous motion. So he bore his hearers through long chains of strenuous periods, calling up by the marvellous transformations of his mien a strange succession of images—as [pg 594] as if he were now a keen hunter, now some eager bird of prey, now a charioteer of fiery steeds kept well in hand, and now and again we seemed to hear the pity or dark wrath of a prophet, with the mighty rushing wind and the fire running along the ground.
All this was Mr. Gladstone in Midlothian. To think of the campaign without the scene, is as who should read a play by candle-light among the ghosts of an empty theatre. When the climax came, it was found that Mr. Gladstone's tremendous projectiles had pounded the ministerial citadel to the ground, and that he had a nation at his back. What had been vague misgiving about Lord Beaconsfield grew into sharp certainty; shadows of doubt upon policy at Constantinople or Cabul or the Cape, became substantive condemnation; uneasiness as to the national finances turned to active resentment; and above all, the people of this realm, who are a people with rather more than their share of conscience at bottom, were led to consider whether when all is said, there is not still a difference between right and wrong even in the relations of states and the problems of empire. It was this last trait that made the atmosphere in which both speaker and his hearers drew their inspiration. It may be true, if we will, that, as a great critic sardonically hints, “eloquence, without being precisely a defect, is one of the worst dangers that can beset a man.”[360] Yet after all, to disparage eloquence is to depreciate mankind; and when men say that Mr. Gladstone and Midlothian were no better than a resplendent mistake, they forget how many objects of our reverence stand condemned by implication in their verdict; they have not thought out how many of the faiths and principles that have been the brightest lamps in the track of human advance they are extinguishing by the same unkind and freezing breath. One should take care lest in quenching the spirit of Midlothian, we leave sovereign mastery of the world to Machiavelli.
I need not here go through the long list of topics. As an attack upon ministers Mr. Gladstone made out the upshot to be finance in confusion, legislation in arrear, honour compromised [pg 595] by breach of public law, Russia aggrandized and yet estranged, Turkey befriended, as they say, but sinking every year, Europe restless and disturbed; in Africa the memory of enormous bloodshed in Zululand, and the invasion of a free people in the Transvaal; Afghanistan broken; India thrown back. He disclaimed all fellowship with those who believe that the present state of society permits us to make any vow of universal peace, and of renouncing in all cases the policy of war. He enumerated the six principles that he thought to be the right principles for us: to foster the strength of the empire by just laws and by economy; to seek to preserve the world's peace; to strive to the uttermost to cultivate and maintain the principle of concert in Europe; to avoid needless and entangling engagements; to see that our foreign policy shall be inspired by such love of freedom as had marked Canning, Palmerston, Russell; to acknowledge the equal right of all nations. He denounced “the policy of denying to others the rights that we claim ourselves” as untrue, arrogant, and dangerous. The revival of the analogy of imperial Rome for the guidance of British policy he held up as fundamentally unsound and practically ruinous. For have not modern times established a sisterhood of nations, equal, independent, each of them built up under the legitimate defence which public law affords to every nation living within its own borders, and seeking to perform its own affairs? He insisted that we should ever “remember the rights of the savage, as we call him.” “Remember,” he exclaimed, “that the sanctity of life in the hill villages of Afghanistan, among the winter snows, is as inviolable in the eye of Almighty God as can be your own. Remember that He who has united you as human beings in the same flesh and blood, has bound you by the law of mutual love; that that mutual love is not limited by the shores of this island, is not limited by the boundaries of Christian civilisation; that it passes over the whole surface of the earth, and embraces the meanest along with the greatest in its unmeasured scope.”
It was this free movement and pure air that gave to the campaign its marking character. The campaign had a soul [pg 596] in it. Men were recalled to moral forces that they had forgotten. In his last speech at Edinburgh, Mr. Gladstone's closing words were these:—