THE RELATION OF CHARACTER TO ELOQUENCE.

THE Quarterly Review of this month contains a very entertain- ing paper on British Parliamentary eloquence, which is full of racy and characteristic illustrations of the different qualities of a long line of British orators. Nothing is more remarkable in this series of illustrations than the great variety of elements of which what is called eloquence, in the larger sense,—i.e., persuasive- ness,—is in different cases made up. Especially there seem to be two tolerably distinct classes of orators, orators who succeed chiefly by detecting the life that is in their subject, or, so to say, tapping it with skill,—and orators who succeed chiefly by lending to their subject the life that is peculiar and personal to themselves. Of the last class Lord Chatham is perhaps the greatest of all British examples. Grattan, who has given a wonderful description of his oratory, to which the reviewer refers, describes him, no doubt most accurately, as a great actor who could so completely electrify Parliament, that he struck with startling success coups de the'iltre, which would have made any other man ridiculous or over- whelmed him with disgrace. The reviewer quotes from Grattan one instance in which Chatham (then Mr. Pitt) began a speech with "Sugar, Mr. Speaker," an exordium which excited a laugh, whereupon Chatham "looked fiercely round, and in a loud voice, rising in its notes and swelling into vehement anger, pronounced Sugar three times, and having thus quelled the House and extinguished every appearance of levity or laughter, turned round and disdainfully asked, Who will laugh at sugar now ?' " Of a similar kind is the story of his once expressing some hypo- thetical wish that if in no other way the king or kingdom could be aroused to the dangers threatening it, some misfortune might befall the country to open the eyes of the King, whereupon being interrupted by a call to order, he, instead of retracting, said in his most majestic manner, "What I have spoken I have spoken conditionally, but I now retract the condition. I speak it abso- lutely, and I hope that some signal calamity will befall the country." Such imposing and fiery eruptions of a lofty and even theatrical self-respect as these, were clearly successful merely because they expressed the extraordinary ardour and vividness of the orator's own personal consciousness of power. He domineered over the wills of his audience. He magnetized them by the wave of his hand. He made men feel that they could not stand up against him. In neither of these instances was there even an effort to avail himself of the intellectual materials of his subject. He blankly asserted his own predominance of character, and it was confessed on the spot. In our own day, another illustration of the same type of oratory, though from a very different point of view indeed, is Mr. Bright. No doubt Mr. Bright often does make much, perhaps the most, of his subject ; but he makes vastly more of himself. Not that he indulges, like Lord Chatham, any overweening sense of his own superior force of character. Yet the real greatness and persuasiveness of his speeches lie not in their argument, but in the passion and massiveness of the convictions which underlie that argument. Mr. Bright's magic lies in his art of giving his audience a glimpse of the spectacle of himself ;—he himself, as revealed in his speeches, is the true plea for his opinions ; he displays a really great character,—a character of large passion and wonderful dignity, though seldom, indeed, of true impartiality,—holding with all the force of true religious fervour to the principles for which he speaks. 01 course, these principles gain, and ought to gain enormously by the exhibition ; for no one after one of these speeches can despise the principles he has professed, or feel anything but admiration for the source from which they spring. The argument may be good or bad, but the type of mind to which these principles are most congenial is sur- roun ded with a new splendour of moral and imaginative asso-

ciations. Take the following passage, not by any means the highest flight of his eloquence, but for that very reason the more illustra- tive of our position,—his scornful comment at Rochdale in 1863 on the present Sir Robert Peel's expression of sympathy with the Confederate Government

The other day, not a week since, a member of the present Govern- ment,—he is not a statesman, he is the son of a great statesman, and occupies the position of Secretary for Ireland,—dared to say to an English audience that he wished the Republic to be divided, and that the South should become an independent State. If that island which,— I suppose in punishment for some of its offences,—has been committed to his care, if that island were to attempt to secede, not to set up a slava kingdom, but a kingdom more free than it has ever yet been, the Government of which he is a member would sack its cities and drench its soil with blood before they would allow such a kingdom to be established."

The superficial logic of that passage was its forcible argunzentunt ad hominem, its sarcasm on the gross moral inconsistency of the sympathisers with Confederates. But the true secret of its impressiveness is the picture it reveals of the real interior dis- dain of a high and noble character for the selfish subterfuges of politicians less pure and less sincere. It was of the same species of eloquence, though a far higher and more impressive specimen of it, as that which the Quarterly reviewer adduces from amongst the happiest of Lord John Russell's retorts, his retort on Burdett, who had just ratted to the Tories :—" I quite agree with the honourable baronet that the cant of patriotism is a bad thing. But I can tell him a worse,—the re-cant of patriotism,—which I

will gladly go along with him in reprobating whenever he shows me an example of it." It is remarkable enough that Mr. Bright's highest efforts of eloquence all suggest more analogies with the type of eloquence properly aristocratic than with that of our middle statesmen,—Canning, Peel, Gladstone. Not, of course, that the great aristocratic orators often betray that deep religious feeling and imagination which is so specially characteristic of Mr.

Bright,—but that they do know the art of presenting their own

lofty self-respect and self-confidence, and their disdain of any- thing beneath it, as a sort of spectacle to their audience, after a manner which has only been rivalled among the orators of the people,—but in him exceeded,—by Mr. Bright. Lord John Russell's disdain of Burdett, though a fine ex-

pression of aristocratic scorn of disloyalty to political faith, had nothing in it of the almost royal grandeur of

Mr. Bright's disdain for the present Sir Robert Peel. It is worth notice that the only one of our rising statesmen who has anything of the same art,—and it is his only great force as a

speaker, for he neither presumes nor pretends to any of the skill of a rhetorician,—is Mr. Forster. He manages at times,—his speech of Tuesday night on Mr. Candlish's motion was a very good, though not the best example,—to carry very great weight and persuasiveness, not so much by the arguments he uses, as by the dignity of the character and the depth of the convictions, into which he gives his audience a glimpse. So far as Mr. Disraeli belongs to this class of orators at all, it is chiefly by disclosing his extraordinary " detachment " of intellect, the perfect coolness with which he can survey the struggle in the very passion and clamour of which he is, and calculate the advisability of magnani- mous generosity of tone or, it may be, of an assumed and exaggerated heat. There is something impressive in this ex-

hibition of a cool intelligence, directing the choice of weapons,— now (though very rarely) selecting of its own free-will

the manner of impassioned resentment,—a manner in which, however, Mr. Disraeli rarely quite imposes on his audi- ence,—but mostly selecting with patient discrimination the venomed arrow of personal sarcasm or the high argument of

imperial duty. The Quarterly reviewer thinks Mr. Disraeli lost his temper in the Budget debate of 1853, when he told Sir Charles Wood that petulance was not sarcasm, nor insolence invective, and observed of Sir James Graham that he viewed him with regard, but not with respect. We exceedingly doubt that view. The distinction as to Sir James Graham was not at all the kind of distinction which a man in a genuine passion would have drawn ; it betrayed the wakeful mind overlooking carefully the choice of words. When Mr. Dis- raeli is too bitter for effect, it is not his passion, but his judgment which is in fault. He has a belief that on great occasions an English party leader should show passion, that he acquires alma-

dancy by doing so, but his passion never strikes us as real. We are far more impressed by the coolness with which he passes from the passion to the logic, and the logic to the passion, than by the genuineness of the passion itself. Mr. Disraeli's ascendancy as an orator is chiefly due to the glimpses he gives us of a calm, though by no means faultless, intelligence pulling at pleasure the various strings of political motive.

Of course there are plenty of good English orators of the other class,—orators who produce their impression by immersing them- selves in their subject, not by sedulously keeping themselves out- side it, and, so to say, overhanging it. Sheil and Canning, two of the greatest of Parliamentary orators, produced almost all their great effects by the effective use they made of their subjects rather than of themselves. Mr. Gladstone is usually an orator of the same type, though whenever he has produced his greatest effects, he has passed beyond that type into the other. The Quarterly Review quotes one of the few passages of Mr. Gladstone's speeches which drew tears from the eyes of phlegmatic Manchester men. It was in 1866, in answering Mr. Disraeli's taunt that he had changed his party and policy in relation to Reform. Mr. Glad- stone replied :— " ' I came amongst you an outcast from those with whom I associated, driven from their ranks, 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 forced pauperis. I had nothing to offer you but faithful and honourable service ; you received me as Dido received the shipwrecked 2ffneas

• Except ejectum Ettore, egentem.'

And I only trust you may not hereafter, at any time, have to complete the sentence in regard to me :

'Et regal, demens: in paste locavi:

You received me with kindness, indulgence, generosity, and I may even say with some measure of your confidence. And the relation between us has assumed such a form that you can never be my debtors, but that I must be for ever in your debt."

Now, there, the orator felt the necessity of giving his followers some picture of the interior life, as it were, of their leader, and the effect was magical, far above that of mere argument. And though no doubt great effects may be produced by appeal to the feelings which are naturally raised by a subject, without any intrusion whatever of the personality of the speaker,—though many of Burke's greatest effects were so produced, and probably almost all Shell's and Canning's,—though it may be said to be more properly the pure oratorical gift to move men without any relation to the personality of the speaker,—still certainly that is not the kind of eloquence which produces the greatest impression on Englishmen. They are more open to the eloquence of character than to the elo- quence of argument. The latter is a comparatively transient influence ; the former remains long after the occasion of its display is past; it exercises the magic of a permanent and living spell.