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 peroration