The writer of these chapters has always felt some inward affinity to the character of Lord St. Jerome in Lothair, of whom it is recorded that he loved conversation, though he never conversed. "There must be an audience," he would say, "and I am the audience." In my capacity of audience I assign a high place to the agreeableness of Lord Rosebery's conversation. To begin with, he has a delightful voice. It is low, but perfectly distinct, rich and sympathetic in quality, and singularly refined in accent. It is exactly the sort of voice which bespeaks the goodwill of the hearer and recommends what it utters. In a former chapter we agreed that the chief requisite of good conversation is to have something to say which is worth saying, and here Lord Rosebery is excellently equipped. Last week the newspapers announced with a flourish of rhetorical trumpets that he had just celebrated his fiftieth birthday.^[21] Some of the trumpeters, with a laudable intention to be civil, cried, "Is it possible that he can be so old?" Others, with subtler art, professed themselves unable to believe that he was so young. Each compliment contained its element of truth. In appearance, air, and tastes Lord Rosebery is still young. In experience, knowledge, and conduct he is already old. He has had a vivid and a varied experience. He is equally at home on Epsom Downs and in the House of Lords. His life has been full of action, incident, and interest. He has not only collected books, but has read them; and has found time, even amid the engrossing demands of the London County Council, the Turf, and the Foreign Office, not only for study, but—what is much more remarkable—for thought.

So far, then, as substance goes, his conversation is (to use Mr. Gladstone's quaint phrase) "as full of infinitely varied matter as an egg is full of meat;" and in its accidents and ornaments it complies exactly with the conditions laid down in a former chapter—a manner which knows how to be easy and free without being free-and-easy; habitual deference to the tastes and prejudices of other people; a courteous desire to be, or at least to seem, interested in their concerns; and a recollection that even the most patient hearers (among whom the present writer reckons himself) may sometimes wish to be speakers. To these gifts he adds a keen sense of humour, a habit of close observation, and a sub-acid vein of sarcasm which resembles the dash of Tarragon in a successful salad. In a word, Lord Rosebery is one of the most agreeable talkers of the day; and even if it is true that il s'Écoute quand il parle, his friends may reply that it would be strange indeed if one could help listening to what is always so agreeable and often so brilliant.

A genial journalist recently said that Mr. Goschen was now chiefly remembered by the fact that he had once had Sir Alfred Milner for his Private Secretary. But whatever may be thought of the First Lord of the Admiralty as a politician and an administrator, I claim for him a high place among agreeable talkers. There are some men who habitually use the same style of speech in public and in private life. Happily for his friends, this is not the case with Mr. Goschen. Nothing can be less agreeable than his public style, whether on the platform or in the House of Commons. Its tawdry staginess, its "Sadler's Wells sarcasm," its constant striving after strong effects, are distressing to good taste. But in private life he is another and a much more agreeable man. He is courteous, genial, perfectly free from affectation, and enters into the discussion of social banalities as eagerly and as brightly as if he had never converted the Three per Cents, or established the ratio between dead millionaires and new ironclads. His easiness in conversation is perhaps a little marred by a Teutonic tendency to excessive analysis which will not suffer him to rest until he has resolved every subject and almost every phrase into its primary elements. But this philosophic temperament has its counterbalancing advantages in a genuine openness of mind, willingness to weigh and measure opposing views, and inaccessibility to intellectual passion. It is true that on the platform the exigencies of his position compel him to indulge in mock-heroics and cut rhetorical capers for which Nature never designed him; but these are for public consumption only, and when he is not playing to the gallery he can discuss his political opponents and their sayings and doings as dispassionately as a microscopist examines a black-beetle. Himself a good talker, Mr. Goschen encourages good talk in other people; and in old days, when the Art of Conversation was still seriously cultivated, he used to gather round his table in Portland Place a group of intimate friends who drank '34 port and conversed accordingly. Among these were Lord Sherbrooke, whose aptness in quotation and dexterity in repartee have never, in my experience, been surpassed; and Lord Chief Justice Cockburn, whose "sunny face and voice of music, which lent melody to scorn and sometimes reached the depth of pathos," were gracefully commemorated by Lord Beaconsfield in his sketch of Hortensius. But this belongs to ancient history, and my business is with the conversation of to-day.

Very distinctly of to-day is the conversation of Mr. Labouchere. Even our country cousins are aware that the Member for Northampton is less an ornament of general society than the oracle of an initiated circle. The smoking-room of the House of Commons is his shrine, and there, poised in an American rocking-chair and delicately toying with a cigarette, he unlocks the varied treasures of his well-stored memory, and throws over the changing scenes of life the mild light of his genial philosophy. It is a chequered experience that has made him what he is. He has known men and cities; has probed in turn the mysteries of the caucus, the green-room, and the Stock Exchange; has been a diplomatist, a financier, a journalist, and a politician. Under these circumstances, it is perhaps not surprising that his faith—no doubt originally robust—in the purity of human nature and the uprightness of human motive should have undergone some process of degeneration. Still it may be questioned whether, after all that he has seen and done, he is the absolute and all-round cynic that he would seem to be. The palpable endeavour to make out the worst of every one—including himself—gives a certain flavour of unreality to his conversation; but, in spite of this peculiarity, he is an engaging talker. His language is racy and incisive, and he talks as neatly as he writes. His voice is pleasant, and his utterance deliberate and effective. He has a keen eye for absurdities and incongruities, a shrewd insight into affectation and bombast, and an admirable impatience of all the moral and intellectual qualities which constitute the Bore. He is by no means inclined to bow his knee too slavishly to an exalted reputation, and analyzes with agreeable frankness the personal and political qualities of great and good men, even if they sit on the front Opposition bench. As a contributor to enjoyment, as a promoter of fun, as an unmasker of political and social humbug, he is unsurpassed. His performances in debate are no concern of mine, for I am speaking of conversation only; but most Members of Parliament will agree that he is the best companion that can be found for the last weary half-hour before the division-bell rings, when some eminent nonentity is declaiming his foregone conclusions to an audience whose whole mind is fixed on the chance of finding a disengaged cab in Palace Yard.

Like Mr. Labouchere, Lord Acton has touched life at many points—but not the same. He is a theologian, a professor, a man of letters, a member of society; and his conversation derives a distinct tinge from each of these environments. When, at intervals all too long, he quits his retirement at Cannes or Cambridge, and flits mysteriously across the social scene, his appearance is hailed with devout rejoicing by every one who appreciates manifold learning, a courtly manner, and a delicately sarcastic vein of humour. The distinguishing feature of Lord Acton's conversation is an air of sphinx-like mystery, which suggests that he knows a great deal more than he is willing to impart. Partly by what he says, and even more by what he leaves unsaid, his hearers are made to feel that, if he has not acted conspicuous parts, he has been behind the scenes of many and very different theatres.

He has had relations, neither few nor unimportant, with the Pope and the Old Catholics, with Oxford and Lambeth, with the cultivated Whiggery of the great English families, with the philosophic radicalism of Germany, and with those Nationalist complications which, in these later days, have drawn official Liberalism into their folds. He has long lived on terms of the closest intimacy with Mr. Gladstone, and may perhaps be bracketed with Canon MacColl and Sir Algernon West as the most absolute and profound Gladstonian outside the family circle of Hawarden. But he is thoroughly eclectic in his friendships, and when he is in London he flits from Lady Hayter's tea-table to Mr. Goschen's bureau, analyzes at the Athenaeum the gossip which he has acquired at Brooks's, and by dinner-time is able, if only he is willing, to tell you what Spain intends and what America; the present relations between the Curia and the Secret Societies; how long Lord Salisbury will combine the Premiership with the Foreign Office; and the latest theory about the side of Whitehall on which Charles I. was beheaded.

The ranks of our good talkers—none too numerous a body at the best, and sadly thinned by the losses which I described in a former chapter—have been opportunely reinforced by the discovery of Mr. Augustine Birrell. For forty-eight years he has walked this earth, but it is only during the last nine—in short, since he entered Parliament—that the admirable qualities of his conversation have been generally recognized. Before that time his delightful Obiter Dicta had secured for him a wide circle of friends who had never seen his face, and by these admirers his first appearance on the social scene was awaited with lively interest. What would he be like? Should we be disillusioned? Would he talk as pleasantly as he wrote? Well, in due course he appeared, and the questions were soon answered in a sense as laudatory as his friends or even himself could have desired. It was unanimously voted that his conversation was as agreeable as his writing; but, oddly enough, its agreeableness was of an entirely different kind. His literary knack of chatty criticism had required a new word to convey its precise effect. To "birrell" is now a verb as firmly established as to "boycott," and it signifies a style light, easy, playful, pretty, rather discursive, perhaps a little superficial. Its characteristic note is grace. But when the eponymous hero of the new verb entered the conversational lists it was seen that his predominant quality was strength.

An enthusiastic admirer who sketched him in a novel nicknamed him "The Harmonious Blacksmith," and the collocation of words happily hits off the special quality of his conversation. There is burly strength in his positive opinions, his cogent statement, his remorseless logic, his thorough knowledge of the persons and things that he discusses. In his sledge-hammer blows against humbug and wickedness, intellectual affectation, and moral baseness, he is the Blacksmith all over. In his geniality, his sociability, his genuine love of fun, his frank readiness to amuse or be amused, the epithet "harmonious" is abundantly justified. He cultivates to some extent the airs and tone of the eighteenth century, in which his studies have chiefly lain. He says what he means, and calls a spade a spade, and glories in an old-fashioned prejudice. He is the jolliest of companions and the steadiest of friends, and perhaps the most genuine book-lover in London, where, as a rule, people are too "cultured" to read books, though willing enough to chatter about them.

NOTES:[21]