which interests Mr. Gladstone opens the floodgates
and submerges a province. But the torrent does
not wait for the invitation. If not invited it
comes of its own accord; headlong, overwhelming, sweeping
all before it, and gathering fresh force from every
obstacle which it encounters on its course. Such
is Mr. Gladstone’s table-talk. For conversation,
strictly so called, he has no turn. He asks questions
when he wants information, and answers them copiously
when asked by others. But of give-and-take, of
meeting you half-way, of paying you back in your own
conversational coin, he has little notion. He
discourses, he lectures, he harangues. But if
a subject is started which does not interest him it
falls flat. He makes no attempt to return the
ball. Although, when he is amused, his amusement
is intense and long sustained, his sense of humour
is highly capricious. It is impossible for even
his most intimate friends to guess beforehand what
will amuse him and what will not; and he has a most
disconcerting habit of taking a comic story in grim
earnest, and arguing some farcical fantasy as if it
was a serious proposition of law or logic. Nothing
funnier can be imagined than the discomfiture of a
story-teller who has fondly thought to tickle the great
man’s fancy by an anecdote which depends for
its point upon some trait of baseness, cynicism, or
sharp practice. He finds his tale received in
dead silence, looks up wonderingly for an explanation,
and finds that what was intended to amuse has only
disgusted. Mr. Browning once told Mr. Gladstone
a highly characteristic story of Disraelitish duplicity,
and for all reply heard a voice choked with indignation:—“Do
you call that amusing, Browning?
I call it devilish."[18]
FOOTNOTES:
[17] This was written before the 19th of May, 1898,
on which day “the world lost its greatest citizen;”
but it has not been thought necessary, here or elsewhere,
to change the present into the past tense.
[18] I give this story as I received it from Mr. Browning.
XV.
CONVERSATION—continued.
More than thirty years have passed since the festive
evening described by Sir George Trevelyan in The
Ladies in Parliament:—
“When, over the port
of the innermost bin,
The circle of diners
was laughing with Phinn;
When Brookfield had
hit on his happiest vein.
And Harcourt was capping
the jokes of Delane.”
The sole survivor of that brilliant group now[19]
leads the Opposition; but at the time when the lines
were written he had not yet entered the House of Commons.
As a youth of twenty-five he had astonished the political
world by his anonymous letters on The Morality of
Public Men, in which he denounced, in the style
of Junius, the Protectionist revival of 1852.
He had fought a plucky but unsuccessful fight at Kirkcaldy;
was making his five thousand a year at the Parliamentary
Bar; had taught the world international law over the
signature of “Historicus,” and was already,
what he is still, one of the most conspicuous and
interesting figures in the society of London.
Of Sir William Harcourt’s political alliances
this is not the place nor am I the person to treat: