Views and Reviews | Page 9

locks,' in
'smiling parterres' and 'stately terraces.' He seldom sat down in print to
anything less than a 'banquet', he was capable of invoking 'the iris
pencil of Hope'; he could not think nor speak of the beauties of woman
except as 'charms.' Which seems to show that to be 'born in a library,'
and have Voltaire--that impeccable master of the phrase--for your chief
of early heroes and exemplars is not everything.

His Oratory.
It is admitted, I believe, that he had many of the qualities of a great
public speaker: that he had an admirable voice and an excellent method;
that his sequences were logical and natural, his arguments vigorous and
persuasive; that he was an artist in style, and in the course of a single
speech could be eloquent and vivacious, ornate and familiar, passionate
and cynical, deliberately rhetorical and magnificently fantastic in turn;
that he was a master of all oratorical modes--of irony and argument, of
stately declamation and brilliant and unexpected antithesis, of
caricature and statement and rejoinder alike; that he could explain,
denounce, retort, retract, advance, defy, dispute, with equal readiness
and equal skill; that he was unrivalled in attack and unsurpassed in
defence; and that in heated debate and on occasions when he felt
himself justified in putting forth all his powers and in striking in with
the full weight of his imperious and unique personality he was the most
dangerous antagonist of his time. And yet, in spite of his mysterious
and commanding influence over his followers--in spite, too, of the fact
that he died assuredly the most romantic and perhaps the most popular
figure of his time--it is admitted withal that he was lacking in a certain
quality of temperament, that attribute great orators possess in common
with great actors: the power, that is, of imposing oneself upon an
audience not by argument nor by eloquence, not by the perfect
utterance of beautiful and commanding speech nor by the enunciation
of eternal principles or sympathetic and stirring appeals, but by an
effect of personal magnetism, by the expression through voice and
gesture and presence of an individuality, a temperament, call it what
you will, that may be and is often utterly commonplace but is always
inevitably irresistible. He could slaughter an opponent, or butcher a
measure, or crumple up a theory with unrivalled adroitness and
despatch; but he could not dominate a crowd to the extent of
persuading it to feel with his heart, think with his brain, and accept his
utterances as the expression not only of their common reason but of
their collective sentiment as well. He was as incapable of such a feat as
Mr. Gladstone's Midlothian campaign as Mr. Gladstone is of producing
the gaming scene in The Young Duke or the 'exhausted volcanoes'

paragraph in the Manchester speech.

His Speeches as Literature.
As a rule--a rule to which there are some magnificent
exceptions--orators have only to cease from speaking to become
uninteresting. What has been heard with enthusiasm is read with
indifference or even with astonishment. You miss the noble voice, the
persuasive gesture, the irresistible personality; and with the emotional
faculty at rest and the reason at work you are surprised--and it may be a
little indignant--that you should have been impressed so deeply as you
were by such cold, bald verbosity as seen in black and white the
masterpiece of yesterday appears to be. To some extent this is the case
with these speeches of Disraeli's. At the height of debate, amid the
clash of personal and party animosities, with the cheers of the orator's
supporters to give them wings, they sounded greater than they were.
But for all that they are vigorous and profitable yet. Their author's
unfailing capacity for saying things worth heeding and remembering is
proved in every one of them. It is not easy to open either of Mr.
Kebbel's volumes without lighting upon something--a string of
epigrams, a polished gibe, a burst of rhetoric, an effective collocation
of words--that proclaims the artist. In this connection the perorations
are especially instructive, even if you consider them simply as
arrangements of sonorous and suggestive words: as oratorical
impressions carefully prepared, as effects of what may be called
vocalised orchestration touched off as skilfully and with as fine a sense
of sound and of the sentiment to correspond as so many passages of
instrumentation signed 'Berlioz' might be.

The Great Earl.
Fruits fail, and love dies, and time ranges; and only the whippersnapper
(that fool of Time) endureth for ever. Moliere knew him well, and he
said that Moliere was a liar and a thief. And Disraeli knew him too, and
he said that in these respects Disraeli and Moliere were brothers. That

he said so matters as little now as ever it did;