n of Gladstone's speaking if one
suggested that it was always equally effective. Masterly in his appeal
to a popular audience, supernaturally dexterous in explaining a
complicated subject to the House of Commons, supremely solemn and
pathetic in a Memorial Oration, he was heard to least advantage on a
social or festive occasion. He would use a Club-dinner or a
wedding-breakfast, a flower-show or an Exhibition, for the utterance of
grave thoughts which had perhaps been long fermenting in his mind; and
then his intensity, his absorption in his theme, and his terrible
gravity, disconcerted hearers who had expected a lighter touch. An
illustration of this piquant maladroitness recurs to my memory as I
write. In 1882 I was concerned with a few Radical friends in founding
the National Liberal Club.[44] We certainly never foresaw the palatial
pile of terra-cotta and glazed tiles which now bears that name.[45] Our
modest object was to provide a central meeting-place for Metropolitan
and provincial Liberals, where all the comforts of life should be
attainable at what are called "popular prices." Two years later,
Gladstone laid the foundation-stone of the present Club-house, and, in
one of his most austere orations, drew a sharp contrast between our poor
handiwork and those "Temples of Luxury and Ease" which gaze in haughty
grandeur on Pall Mall. We had hoped to provide what might seem like
"luxury" to the unsophisticated citizen of Little Pedlington; and, at
the least, we meant our Club to be a place of "ease" to the Radical
toiler. But Gladstone insisted that it was to be a workshop dedicated to
strenuous labour; and all the fair promises of our Prospectus were
trodden under foot.[46]

I have often heard Gladstone say that, in the nature of things, a speech
cannot be adequately reported. You may get the words with literal
precision, but the loss of gesture, voice, and intonation, will
inevitably obscure the meaning and impede the effect. Of no one's
speaking is this more true than of his own. Here and there, in the
enormous mass of his reported eloquence, you will come upon a fine
peroration, a poetic image, a verse aptly cited, or a phrase which can
be remembered. But they are few and far between--_oases_ in a wilderness
of what reads like verbiage. Quite certainly, his speeches, in the mass,
are not literature, as those found to their cost who endeavoured to
publish them in ten volumes.

For speeches which are literature we