[Sidenote:  Salisbury’s signal failure.]

On Friday night, September 8th, Lord Salisbury had his opportunity of undoing this great effect—­of reasserting that intellectual as well as mere voting dictatorship which he holds in the House of Lords; and he signally failed to rise to the occasion.  I do not like the policy of Lord Salisbury, but there is a lucidity, a point, and sometimes a vigour in his speeches which make them usually charming reading.  It was, therefore, with the full expectation of being interested that I listened to him, but he drove me out of the House by the impossibility of my keeping awake under the influence of his dull, shallow, and disappointing speech.  He began with a little touch of nature that certainly was prepossessing.  He had brought in with him a dark-brown bottle, like the bottle one associates with seltzer water.  The fluid was perfectly clear; it was evidently not like the strong wine which Prince Bismarck used to require in the days when he used to make great speeches.  And Lord Salisbury, as he poured out a draught—­it looked very like Johannis water—­lifted up the bottle to the Ministers opposite with a pleasant smile, as though to prove to them that he was not offending against even the sternest teetotal code.

It was the first and the last bit of real human naturalness in the whole speech, for Lord Salisbury’s manner and delivery are wooden, stiff, awkward and lumbering.  He stands upright—­except, of course, for that heavy stoop of the shoulders which is one of his characteristics—­and rarely moves himself one-hundredth part of an inch.  The voice—­even, clear, and strong, and yet not penetrating, and still less inspiring—­rarely has a change of note; it is delivered with the strange, curious air of a man who is thinking aloud, and has forgotten the presence of any listeners.  The eyes—­hidden almost amid the shaggy and black-grey hair which covers nearly the whole face—­are never directed to any person around.  They seem to gaze into vacancy; altogether there is something curious, weird, almost uncanny, in this great, big whale of a man, intoning his monologue with that curious detachment of eye and manner in the midst of a crowded, brilliant, and intensely nervous and restless assembly of men and women.

[Sidenote:  The pessimism of a recluse.]

And it was not to be wondered at that a speech so delivered—­a mere soliloquy—­should fail to be impressive.  It was too far and away unreal—­had too little actuality to reach the poor humble breasts that were panting for excitement and exhortation.  But once throughout it all was there a touch of that somewhat sardonic humour that sometimes delights even Lord Salisbury’s political foes.  Replying to the very clever speech of Lord Ribblesdale, Lord Salisbury described the speech as a confession, and all confessions, he added, were interesting, from St. Augustine to Rousseau, from Rousseau to Lord Ribblesdale.  That, I say, was the solitary gleam.