Sketches in the House: The Story of a Memorable Session (1893)

by T. P. O'Connor

Lord Spencer is not an orator. Simple, unadorned, straightforward, he speaks just as he feels; and this lent a singular fascination to a speech which from other lips might have sounded thin and ineffectual, for the speech was nothing less than a revelation into the depths of a nature singularly rich in courage and experience. One cannot help thinking of all that lay behind those plain and unadorned words in which Lord Spencer told the story of his conversion from the policy of coercion to that of self-government. Here was the man who had looked out one summer evening on the spot where his close friend—his chief subordinate—was hacked to death; this was the man who had brought to conviction and then to the narrow square of the execution yard the members of one of the most powerful and sanguinary of conspiracies; here was the man who for years had passed through the streets of Dublin and the towns of Ireland amid the rattle of cavalcade, as necessary for his protection against popular hate as the troops that protect the person of the Czar in the streets of Poland. Here was, indeed, a man not of words but of deeds; one who spoke not mere phrases coined from the imaginings of the brain, but one who had seen and heard and throbbed; had looked unappalled into the depths and the abysses of human life, and the dreadest political experiences; one who had visited the Purgatorio and conversed with the lost or the tortured souls, and come back from the pilgrimage with words of hope, faith, and charity. Altogether it was a fine speech—worthy of the man, worthy of his career, worthy of the great and historic occasion.

Funereal Devonshire.

I wish I could say as much of the speech of the Duke of Devonshire. It may be that his miserable failure was due to the fact that he is as yet unaccustomed to the House of Lords, and that the modesty which is undoubtedly one of his disadvantages as a public speaker has not yet been overcome; but his speech was a return to the very worst manner of his earlier days in the House of Commons. I have heard the Duke of Devonshire in his early manner and in his late; and his early manner was about as detestable as a man's manner could have been. He had a habit of sinking his voice as he approached the end of a sentence, so that a sentence beginning on a high note gradually sank to a moan, and a murmur, and a gulp. The whole effect was mournful in the extreme, and gave you a sense of the weariness and the worthlessness of all human life such as the most eloquent ascetic could never succeed in imparting. In the House of Lords, the Duke of Devonshire suddenly returned to his early and bad manner, and delivered a speech which was more like a funeral oration than a call to arms.

Lord Ribblesdale.

Of the remaining speeches I need say little. Lord Brassey, in a few manly and straightforward words, expressed his entire sympathy with the principle of the Bill; Lord Cowper gave another very melancholy and inaudible performance. And then came one of the most remarkable speeches the House of Lords has heard for some time. From the Treasury Bench there stood a tall, slight, and rather delicate figure. The face, long, large-featured, hatchet-shaped, was surmounted with a mass of curling-hair; altogether, there was a suggestion of what Disraeli looks like in that picture of him as a youth which contrasts so strangely and sadly with the figure and the face we all knew in his later days. This was Lord Ribblesdale. Lord Ribblesdale holds an office in the Royal Household in the present Administration. Up to a short time ago, he was unknown in even the teeming ranks of noble littérateurs; but an article he wrote on a conversation with the late Mr. Parnell gave indications of a bright and apt pen, a great power of observation, and a shrewd, impartial mind. On Sept. 4th, he surprised the House by showing also the possession of very rare and very valuable oratorical powers, His speech was excellent in diction, was closely and calmly reasoned, and produced an extraordinary effect, even on the Tory side, which, beginning by a stony silence, and a certain measure of curiosity—ended by giving an impression of being moved, and even awed a little by this speech. Altogether a very remarkable performance; we have not heard the last now that we have heard the first of Lord Ribblesdale in the fields of party oratory.

A striking personality.

The Duke of Argyll has changed a good deal in physical appearance during the last twenty years. There was a time when he was was robust and squat, a rather stout little man, with a slightly strutting manner, head thrown back, and very fine and spacious forehead; a head of hair as luxurious and drooping as that of Mary Magdalene. The form has considerably shrunk with advanced years, but not with any disadvantage, for the face, pinched and lined though it appears, has a finer and more intellectual look than that of earlier days. Wrong-headed—perhaps very self-conceited—at all events, entirely left behind by the advancing democratic tide, the Duke of Argyll is yet always to me a sympathetic and striking figure. If he thinks badly, at least he thinks originally. His thoughts are his own, and nobody else's; and though he is a bitter controversialist, at least he feels the weight and gravity of the vast questions on which he pronounces. Above all things, he has a touch of the divine in his oratory. He is, indeed, almost the last inspired speaker left in the House of Lords. There is another speaker, of whom more presently, with extraordinary gifts, with also true oratorical powers, capable of producing mighty effects; but with Lord Rosebery the light is very clear and very dry; there is none of the softness and brilliancy, and poetic and imaginative insight which are to be found in the speeches of the Duke of Argyll. On September 6th the Duke used very vehement and some very whirling language about Mr. Gladstone; his reading of history was all wrong; his policy for Ireland was—to put it plainly—brutal. But what cannot be forgiven to a man who has still such a beautiful voice—who still gesticulates so beautifully—and, above all, who is capable of rising to the height of some of the passages in the speech on this particular Wednesday? For instance, what could have been more beautiful than that passage in which he put the argument that Ireland was too near to be treated in the same way as a distant colony—the passage in which he spoke of seeing from the Scotch Highlands the sun shining on the cornfields and cottage windows of Antrim?

Rosebery's great triumph.

On September 7th a very great event happened in the House of Lords. The mental mastership of that assembly was transferred from one man to another, from the master of many legions to the captain of a few thin and almost despised battalions. I heard the whole of Lord Rosebery's speech, and I heard three quarters of the speech of the Marquis of Salisbury, and no impartial man could deny the contrast between these two speeches on this occasion, the one being no less fine and complete, the other no less monotonous than I have set forth. It was not merely that Lord Salisbury proved himself vastly inferior to Lord Rosebery in mere oratory, but the speech of the Foreign Secretary was that of a finer speaker, and of a more serious, intellectual, and sagacious politician.

A disadvantage conquered.