Mr. Gladstone had the defects ascribed to him. His impulsiveness sometimes betrayed him into declarations which a cooler reflection would have dissuaded. The second reading of the Irish Home Rule Bill of 1886 might possibly have been carried had he not been goaded by his opponents into words which were construed as recalling or modifying the concessions he had announced at a meeting of the Liberal party held just before. More than once precious time was wasted because antagonists, knowing his excitable temper, brought on discussions with the sole object of annoying 422 him and drawing from him some hasty deliverance. Nor was he an adept, like Disraeli and Disraeli’s famous Canadian imitator, Sir John A. Macdonald, in the management of individuals. His aversion for the meaner side of human nature made him refuse to play upon it. Many of the pursuits, and most of the pleasures, which attract ordinary men had no interest for him, so that much of the common ground on which men meet was closed to him. He was, moreover, too constantly engrossed by the subjects he loved, and by enterprises which specially appealed to him, to have leisure for the lighter but often vitally important devices of political strategy. I remember hearing, soon after 1870, how Mr. Delane, then editor of the Times, had been invited to meet the Prime Minister at a moment when the support of that newspaper would have been specially valuable to the Liberal Government. Instead of using the opportunity in the way that had been intended, Mr. Gladstone dilated during the whole time of dinner upon the approaching exhaustion of the English coal-beds, to the surprise of the company and the unconcealed annoyance of the powerful guest. It was the subject then uppermost in his mind, and he either forgot, or disdained, to conciliate Mr. Delane. Good nature as well as good sense made him avoid giving offence by personal reflections in debate, and he usually suffered fools 423 if not, like St. Paul’s converts, gladly, yet patiently.[64] In the House of Commons he was entirely free from airs, and, indeed, from any assumption of superiority. The youngest member might accost him in the lobby and be listened to with perfect courtesy. But he had a bad memory for faces, seldom addressed any one outside the circle of his personal friends, and more than once made enemies by omitting to notice and show attention to recruits who, having been eminent in their own towns, expected to be made much of when they entered Parliament. Having himself plenty of pride and comparatively little vanity, he never realised the extent to which, and the cheapness with which, men can be captured and used through their vanity. Adherents were sometimes turned into dangerous foes because his preoccupation with graver matters dimmed his sense of what may be done to win support by the minor arts, such as an invitation to dinner or even a seasonable compliment. And his mind, flexible as it was in seizing new points of view and devising expedients to meet new circumstances, did not easily enter into the characters of other men. 424 Ideas and causes interested him more than did personal traits; his sympathy was keener and stronger for the sufferings of nations or masses of men than with the fortunes of an individual man. With all his accessibility and kindliness, he was at bottom chary of real friendship, while the circle of his intimates became constantly smaller with advancing years. So it befell that though his popularity among the general body of his adherents went on increasing, and the admiration of his parliamentary followers remained undiminished, he had in the House of Commons few personal friends who linked him to the party at large, and rendered to him those confidential services which count for much in keeping all sections in hearty accord and enabling the commander to gauge the sentiment of his troops.
Of parliamentary strategy in that larger sense, which covers familiarity with parliamentary forms and usages, care and judgment in arranging the business of the House, the power of seizing a parliamentary situation and knowing how to deal with it, the art of guiding a debate and choosing the right moment for reserve and for openness, for a dignified retreat, for a watchful defence, for a sudden rattling charge upon the enemy—of all this no one had a fuller mastery. His recollection of precedents was unrivalled, for it began in 1833 with the first reformed Parliament, and it seemed as fresh for those remote 425 days as for last month. He enjoyed combat for its own sake, not so much from inborn pugnacity, for he was not disputatious in ordinary conversation, as because it called out his fighting force and stimulated his whole nature. “I am never nervous in reply,” he once said, “though I am sometimes nervous in opening a debate.” No one could be more tactful or adroit when a crisis arrived whose gravity he had foreseen. In the summer of 1881 the House of Lords made some amendments to the Irish Land Bill which were deemed ruinous to the working of the measure, and therewith to the prospects of the pacification of Ireland. A conflict was expected which might have strained the fabric of the constitution. The excitement which quickly arose in Parliament spread to the nation. Mr. Gladstone alone remained calm and confident. He devised a series of compromises, which he advocated in conciliatory speeches. He so played his game that by a few minor concessions he secured nearly all the points he cared for, and, while sparing the dignity of the Lords, steered his bill triumphantly out of the breakers which had threatened to engulf it. Very different was his ordinary demeanour in debate when he was off his guard. His face and gestures while he sat in the House of Commons listening to an opponent would express all the emotions that crossed his mind. He would follow every sentence as a hawk follows 426 the movements of a small bird, would sometimes contradict half aloud, sometimes turn to his next neighbour to vent his displeasure at the groundless allegations or fallacious arguments he was listening to, till at last, like a hunting leopard loosed from the leash, he would spring to his feet and deliver a passionate reply. His warmth would often be in excess of what the occasion required, and quite disproportioned to the importance of his antagonist. It was in fact the unimportance of the occasion that made him thus yield to his feeling. As soon as he saw that bad weather was coming, and careful seamanship wanted, his coolness returned, his language became measured, while passion, though it might increase the force of his oratory, never made him deviate a hand’s breadth from the course he had chosen. The Celtic heat subsided, and the shrewd self-control of the Lowland Scot regained command.
It was by oratory that Mr. Gladstone rose to fame and power, as, indeed, by it most English statesmen have risen, save those to whom wealth and rank and family connections used to give a sort of presumptive claim to high office, like the Cavendishes and the Russells, the Bentincks and the Cecils. And for many years, during which Mr. Gladstone was suspected as a statesman because, while he had ceased to be a Tory, he had not fully become a Liberal, his eloquence was the main, one 427 might almost say the sole, source of his influence. Oratory was a power in English politics even a century and a half ago, as the career of the elder Pitt shows. During the last seventy years, years which have seen the power of rank and family connections decline, it has, although less cultivated as a fine art, continued to be almost essential to the highest success, and it still brings a man quickly to the front, though it will not keep him there should he prove to want the other branches of statesmanlike capacity.
The permanent reputation of an orator depends upon two things, the witness of contemporaries to the impression produced upon them, and the written or printed record of his speeches. Few are the famous speakers who would be famous if they were tried by this latter test alone, and Mr. Gladstone was not one of them. It is only by a rare combination of gifts that one who speaks with so much force and brilliance as to charm his listeners is also able to deliver thoughts so valuable in words so choice that posterity will read them as literature. Some of the ancient orators did this; but we seldom know how far those of their speeches which have been preserved are the speeches which they actually delivered. Among moderns, a few French preachers, Edmund Burke, Macaulay, and Daniel Webster are perhaps the only speakers whose discourses have passed into classics and 428 find new generations of readers.[65] Twenty years hence Mr. Gladstone’s will not be read, except, of course, by historians. Indeed, they ceased to be read even in his lifetime. They are too long, too diffuse, too minute in their handling of details, too elaborately qualified in their enunciation of general principles. They contain few epigrams and few of those weighty thoughts put into telling phrases which the Greeks called γνῶμαι. The style, in short, is not sufficiently rich or polished to give an enduring interest to matter whose practical importance has vanished. The same oblivion has overtaken all but a few of the best speeches (or parts of speeches) of Grattan, Sheridan, Pitt, Fox, Erskine, Canning, Plunket, Brougham, Peel, Bright. It may, indeed, be said—and the examples of Burke and Macaulay show that this is no paradox—that the speakers whom posterity most enjoys are rarely those who most affected the audiences that listened to them.[66]
If, on the other hand, Mr. Gladstone be judged by the impression he made on his own time, his place will be high in the front rank. His speeches were neither so concisely telling as Mr. Bright’s nor so finished in diction; but no other man 429 among his contemporaries—neither Lord Derby nor Mr. Lowe, nor Lord Beaconsfield nor Lord Cairns, nor Bishop Wilberforce nor Bishop Magee—taken all round, could be ranked beside him. And he rose superior to Mr. Bright himself in readiness, in variety of knowledge, in persuasive ingenuity. Mr. Bright spoke seldom and required time for preparation. Admirable in the breadth and force with which he set forth his own position, or denounced that of his adversaries, he was not equally qualified for instructing nor equally apt at persuading. Mr. Gladstone could both instruct and persuade, could stimulate his friends and demolish his opponents, and could do all these things at an hour’s notice, so vast and well ordered was the arsenal of his mind. Pitt was superb in an expository or argumentative speech, but his stately periods lacked variety. Fox, incomparable in reply, was hesitating and confused when he had to state his case in cold blood. Mr. Gladstone showed as much fire in winding up a debate as skill in opening it.
His oratory had, indeed, two faults. It wanted concentration, and it wanted definition. There were too many words, and the conclusion was sometimes left vague because the arguments had been too nicely balanced. I once heard Mr. Cobden say: “I always listen to Mr. Gladstone with pleasure and admiration, but I sometimes have to ask myself, when he has sat down, ‘What 430 after all was it that he meant, and what practical course does he recommend?’” These faults were balanced by conspicuous merits. There was a lively imagination, which enabled him to relieve even dull matter by pleasing figures, together with a large command of quotations and illustrations. There were powers of sarcasm, powers, however, which he rarely used, preferring the summer lightning of banter to the thunderbolts of invective. There was admirable lucidity and accuracy in exposition. There was art in the disposition and marshalling of his arguments, and finally—a gift now almost lost in England—there was a delightful variety and grace of appropriate gesture. But above and beyond everything else which enthralled the listener, there stood out four qualities. Two of them were merits of substance—inventiveness and elevation; two were merits of delivery—force in the manner, expressive modulation in the voice.
No one showed such swift resourcefulness in debate. His readiness, not only at catching a point, but at making the most of it on a moment’s notice, was amazing. Some one would lean over the back of the bench he sat on and show a paper or whisper a sentence to him. Apprehending the bearings at a glance, he would take the bare fact and so shape and develop it, like a potter moulding a bowl on the wheel out of a lump of clay, that it grew into a cogent 431 argument or a happy illustration under the eye of the audience, and seemed all the more telling because it had not been originally a part of his case. Even in the last three years of his parliamentary life, when his sight had so failed that he read nothing, printed or written, except what it was absolutely necessary to read, and when his deafness had so increased that he did not hear half of what was said in debate, it was sufficient for a colleague to say into the better ear a few words explaining how the matter at issue stood, and he would rise to his feet and extemporise a long and ingenious argument, or retreat with dexterous grace from a position which the course of the discussion or the private warning of the Whips had shown to be untenable. Never was he seen at a loss either to meet a new point raised by an adversary or to make the best of an unexpected incident. Sometimes he would amuse himself by drawing a cheer or a contradiction from his opponents, and would then suddenly turn round and use this hasty expression of their opinion as the basis for a fresh argument of his own. Loving conflict, he loved debate, and, so far from being confused or worried by the strain conflict put upon him, his physical health was strengthened and his faculties were roused to higher efficiency by having to prepare and deliver a great speech. He had the rare faculty of thinking ahead while he was speaking, and 432 could, while pouring forth a stream of glittering sentences, be at the same time (as one saw by watching his eye) composing an argument to be delivered five or ten minutes later. Once, at a very critical moment, when he was defending a great measure against the amendment—moved by a nominal supporter of his own—which proved fatal to it, a friend suddenly reminded him of an incident in the career of the mover which might be effectively used against him. When Mr. Gladstone sat down after delivering an impassioned speech, in the course of which he had several times approached and then sheered off from the incident, he turned round to the friend and said, “I was thinking all the time I was speaking whether I could properly use against —— what you told me, but concluded, on the whole, that it would be too hard on him.”
The weakness of his eloquence sprang from its supersubtlety and superabundance. He was prone to fine distinctions. He multiplied arguments when it would have been better to rely upon two or three of the strongest. And he was sometimes so intent on refuting the particular adversaries opposed to him, and persuading the particular audience before him, that he forgot to address his reasonings to the public beyond the House, and make them equally applicable and equally convincing to the readers of next morning.
As dignity is one of the rarest qualities in 433 literature, so elevation is one of the rarest in oratory. It is a quality easier to feel than to analyse. One may call it a power of ennobling ordinary things by showing their relation to great things, by pouring high emotions round them, by bringing the worthier motives of human conduct to bear upon them, by touching them with the light of poetry. Ambitious writers and speakers strain after effects of this kind; but they are effects which study and straining cannot ensure. Vainly do most men flap their wings in the effort to soar; if they succeed in rising from the ground it is because some unusually strong burst of feeling makes them for the moment better than themselves. In Mr. Gladstone the capacity for feeling was at all times so strong, and the susceptibility of the imagination so keen, that he soared without effort. His vision seemed to take in the whole landscape. The points actually in question might be small, but the principles involved were to him far-reaching. The contests of to-day were ennobled by the effect they might have in a still distant future. There are rhetoricians skilful in playing by words and manner on every chord of human nature, rhetoricians who move you, and may even carry you away for the moment, but whose sincerity is doubted, because the sense of spontaneity is lacking. Mr. Gladstone was not of these. He never seemed to be 434 forcing an effect or assuming a sentiment. To listen to him was to feel convinced of his own conviction and to be warmed by the warmth with which he expressed it. Nor was this due to the perfection of his rhetorical art. He really did feel what he expressed. Sometimes, of course, like all statesmen, he had to maintain a cause whose weakness he perceived, as, for instance, when it became necessary to defend the blunder of a colleague, or a decision reached by some Cabinet compromise which his own judgment disapproved. But even in such cases he did not simulate feeling, but reserved his earnestness for those parts of the case on which it could be honestly expended. As this was generally true of the imaginative and emotional side of his eloquence, so was it especially true of his unequalled power of lifting a subject from the level on which other speakers had treated it into the purer air of permanent principle, perhaps even of moral sublimity.
The dignity and spontaneity which marked the substance of his speeches was no less conspicuous in their delivery. Nothing could be more easy and graceful than his manner on ordinary occasions, nothing more grave and stately than it became when he was making a ceremonial reference to some public event or bestowing a meed of praise on the departed. His expository discourses, such as those with which he introduced 435 a complicated bill or unfolded a financial statement, were models of their kind, not only for lucidity, but for the pleasant smoothness, never lapsing into monotony, with which the stream of speech flowed from his lips. The task was performed so well that people thought it an easy task till they saw how inferior were the performances of two subsequent chancellors of the exchequer so able in their respective ways as Sir Stafford Northcote and Mr. Lowe. But when an occasion arrived which quickened men’s pulses in the House of Commons, a place where feeling rises as suddenly as do the waves of a Highland loch when a squall comes rushing down the glen, the vehemence of his feeling found expression in the fire of his eye and the resistless strength of his words. His utterance did not grow swifter, nor did the key of his voice rise, as passion raises and sharpens the voice in most men. But the measured force with which every sentence was launched, like a shell hurtling through the air, the concentrated intensity of his look, as he defied antagonists in front and swept his glance over the ranks of his supporters around and behind him, had a startling and thrilling power which no other Englishman could exert, and which no Englishman had exerted since the days of Pitt and Fox. The whole proud, bold, ardent nature of the man seemed to flash out, and one almost forgot what 436 the lips said in admiration of the towering personality.