Of that oratory, something must now be said. By it he
rose to fame and power, as, indeed, by it most English statesmen have risen,
save those to whom wealth and rank and family connections have given a sort
of presumptive claim to high office, like the Cavendishes and the Russells,
the Cecils and the Bentincks. And for many years, during which Mr. Gladstone
was distrusted 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 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. But within the last fifty years, years which have seen the power of
rank and family connections decline, it has continued to be essential to the
highest success although much less cultivated as a fine art, and 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--we may, perhaps, be soon able to say the phonographed--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
readiness, force, and brilliance as to charm his listeners is also able to
deliver such valuable thoughts in such choice words that posterity will read
them as literature. Some few 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, some French
preachers, Edmund Burke, Macaulay, and Daniel Webster are perhaps the only
speakers whose discourses have passed into classics and find new generations
of readers. Twenty years hence Mr. Gladstone's will not be read, except, of
course, by historians. 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 [Greek text].
The style, in short, is not sufficiently rich or finished to give a
perpetual interest to matters whose practical importance has vanished. The
same oblivion has overtaken all but a very few of the best things of
Grattan, Pitt, 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.
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 among
his contemporaries--neither Lord Derby nor Mr. Lowe nor Mr. Disraeli nor
Bishop Wilberforce nor Bishop Magee--deserved comparison with him. And he
rose superior to Mr. Bright himself in readiness, in variety of knowledge,
in persuasive ingenuity. Mr. Bright required time for preparation, and was
always more successful in alarming his adversaries and stimulating his
friends than in either instructing or convincing anybody. Mr. Gladstone
could do all these four things, and could do them at an hour's notice, so
vast and well ordered was the arsenal of his mind.
His oratory had many
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 remarkable powers of
sarcasm--powers, however, which he rarely used, preferring the summer
lightning of banter to the thunderbolt of invective. There was admirable
lucidity and accuracy in exposition. There was great skill in the
disposition and marshaling of his arguments, and finally--a gift now almost
lost in England--there was a wonderful variety and grace of appropriate
gesture. But above and beyond everything else which enthralled the listener,
there were four qualities, two specially conspicuous in the substance of his
eloquence--inventiveness and elevation; two not less remarkable in his
manner--force in the delivery, expressive modulation in the voice.
Of the swift resourcefulness of his mind, something has been said
already. In debate it shone out with the strongest ray. 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 its bearings at a
glance, he would take the bare fact and so shape and develop it, like a
potter molding a bowl on the wheel out of a lump of clay, that it grew into
a cogent 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 two 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 whisper a few words to him, explaining how the matter at issue
stood, and he would rise to his feet and extemporize a long and ingenious
argument, or perhaps 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. No one ever saw him at a loss either to meet a new point
raised by an adversary or to make the most 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. In
this particular kind of debating power, for the display of which the House
of Commons--an assembly of moderate size, which knows all its leading
figures familiarly--is an apt theater, he has been seldom rivaled and never
surpassed. Its only weakness sprang from its superabundance. 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 literature, so elevation is one of
the rarest in oratory. It is a quality easier to feel than to describe or
analyze. We may call it a power of ennobling ordinary things by showing
their relation to great things, of pouring high emotions round them, of
bringing the worthier motives of human conduct to bear upon them, of
touching them with the light of poetry. Ambitious writers and speakers
incessantly strain after effects of this kind; but they are effects which
study and straining do not enable a man to attain. Vainly do most of us flap
our wings in the effort to soar; if we rise from the ground it is because
some unusually strong or deep burst of feeling makes us for the moment
better than ourselves. In Mr. Gladstone the capacity for feeling was at all
times so strong, 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 seemed to interest him because
their effect would be felt 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 indeed, and may even carry you away for the
moment, but whose sincerity you nevertheless doubt, because the sense of
spontaneity is lacking. Mr. Gladstone was not of these. He never seemed to
be forcing an effect or assuming a sentiment. To listen to him was to feel
convinced of his own conviction and of the reality of 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 knew, as, for
instance, when it became necessary to defend the blunder of a colleague. 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 true of the imaginative and emotional side of his eloquence altogether,
so was it especially true of his unequaled 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 note of
genuineness 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. His expository discourses,
such as those with which he introduced a complicated bill or unfolded a
financial statement, were models of their kind, not only for lucidity, but
for the pleasant smoothness, equally free from monotony and from abruptness,
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 immeasurably
inferior were the performances of two subsequent chancellors of the
exchequer so able in their respective ways as Mr. Lowe and Mr. Goschen. But
when an occasion arrived which quickened men's pulses, and particularly when
some sudden storm burst on the House of Commons, a place where the waves
rise as fast as in a mountain lake under a squall rushing down a 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 it 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 the lips said in admiration
of the towering personality.
People who read next day the report in the
newspapers of a speech delivered on such an occasion could not comprehend
the impression it had made on the listeners. "What was there in it so to
stir you?" they asked. They had not seen the glance and the gestures; they
had not heard the vibrating voice rise to an organ peal of triumph or sink
to a whisper of entreaty. Mr. Gladstone's voice was naturally one of great
richness and resonance. It was a fine singing voice, and a pleasant voice to
listen to in conversation, not the less pleasant for having a slight trace
of Liverpool accent clinging to it. But what struck one in listening to his
speeches was not so much the quality of the vocal chords as the skill with
which they were managed. He had the same gift of sympathetic expression, of
throwing his feeling into his voice, and using its modulations to accompany
and convey every shade of meaning, that a great composer has when he puts
music to a poem, or a great executant when he renders at once the composer's
and the poet's thought. And just as great singers or violinists enjoy the
practice of their art, so it was a delight to him to put forth this faculty
of expression-- perhaps an unconscious, yet an intense delight; as appeared
from this also, that whenever his voice failed him (which sometimes befell
in later years) his words came less easily, and even the chariot of his
argument seemed to drive heavily. That the voice should so seldom have
failed him was wonderful. When he had passed his seventy-fifth year, it
became sensibly inferior in volume and depth of tone. But its strength,
variety, and delicacy remained. In April, 1886, he being then seventy-seven,
it held out during a speech of nearly four hours in length. In February,
1890, it enabled him to deliver with extraordinary effect an eminently
solemn and pathetic appeal. In March, 1895, those who listened to it the
last time it was heard in Parliament--they were comparatively few, for the
secret of his impending resignation had been well kept-- recognized in it
all the old charm. But perhaps the most curious instance of the power it
could exert is to be found in a speech made in 1883, during one of the
tiresome debates occasioned by the refusal of the Tory party and of some
timorous Liberals to allow Mr. Bradlaugh to be sworn as a member of the
House of Commons. This speech produced a profound impression on those who
heard it, an impression which its perusal to-day fails to explain. That
impression was chiefly due to the grave and reverent tone in which he
delivered some sentences stating the view that it is not our belief in the
bare existence of a Deity, but the realizing of him as being also a
Providence ruling the world, that is of moral value and significance, and
was due in particular to the lofty dignity with which he declaimed six lines
of Lucretius, setting forth the Epicurean view of the gods as unconcerned
with mankind. There were probably not ten men in the House of Commons who
could follow the sense of the lines so as to appreciate their bearing on his
argument. But these stately and sonorous hexameters--hexameters that seemed
to have lived on through nineteen centuries to find their application from
the lips of an orator to-day; the sense of remoteness in the strange
language and the far-off heathen origin; the deep and moving note in the
speaker's voice, thrilled the imagination of the audience and held it
spellbound, lifting for a moment the whole subject of debate into a region
far above party conflicts. Spoken by any one else, the passage culminating
in these Lucretian lines might have produced little effect. It was the voice
and manner, above all the voice, with its marvelous modulations, that made
the speech majestic. Yet one must not forget to add that with him, as with
some other famous statesmen, the impression made by a speech was in a
measure due to the admiring curiosity and wonder which his personality
inspired. He was so much the most interesting human being in the House of
Commons that, when he withdrew, many members said that the place had lost
half its attraction for them, and that the chamber seemed empty because he
was not in it. Plenty of able men remained. But even the ablest seemed
ordinary, perhaps even commonplace, when compared with the figure that had
vanished, a figure in whom were combined, as in no other man of his time, an
unrivaled experience, an extraordinary activity and versatility of
intellect, a fervid imagination, and an indomitable will. |