Part 27

'One of our eminent speakers,' he continued, 'Lord Grey, is perhaps best when he has not had time to prepare himself. He is so full of knowledge and of inferences, that he has always enough ready to make an excellent speech. When he prepares himself, there is too much; he gives the House more facts and more deductions than it can digest.'

'Do you agree with me,' I asked, 'in thinking that Lord Melbourne was best when he improvised?'

'I agree with you,' answered Lord Granville, 'that his set speeches were cold and affected. He was natural only when he was quite careless, or when he was much excited, and then he was admirable.'

'Did not Thiers improvise?' I asked.

'Never,' answered Tocqueville. 'He prepared himself most carefully. So did Guizot. We see from the "Revue rétrospective" that he even prepared his replies. His long experience enabled him to foresee what he should have to answer. Pasquier used to bring his speech ready written. It lay on the desk before him, but he never looked at it.'

'That seems to me,' I said, 'very difficult. It is like swimming with corks. One would be always tempted to look down on the paper.'

'It is almost equally difficult,' said Tocqueville, 'to make a speech of which the words are prepared. There is a struggle between the invention and the memory. You trust thoroughly to neither, and therefore are not served thoroughly by either.'

'Yet that,' said Marcet, 'is what our Swiss pastors are required to do. They are forbidden to read, and forbidden to extemporise, and by practice they speak from memory--some well, all tolerably.'

'Brougham,' said Lord Granville, 'used to introduce his most elaborately prepared passages by a slight hesitation. When he seemed to pause in search of thoughts, or of words, we knew that he had a sentence ready cut and dried.'

'Who,' I asked Sumner, 'are your best speakers in America?'

'The best,' he said, 'is Seward; after him perhaps comes Winthrop.'

'I should have thought it difficult,' I said, 'to speak well in the Senate, to only fifty or at most sixty members.'

'You do not speak,' answered Sumner, 'to the Senators. You do not think of them. You know that their minds are made up. Except as to mere executive questions, such as the approval of a public functionary, or the acceptance or modification of a treaty, every senator comes in pledged to a given, or to an assumed, set of opinions and measures. You speak to the public. You speak in order that 500,000 copies of what you say, as was the case with my last speech, may be scattered over the whole Union.'

'That,' I said, 'must much affect the character of your oratory. A speech meant to be read must be a different thing from one meant to be heard. Your speeches must in fact be pamphlets, and that I suppose accounts for their length.'

'That is true,' replied Sumner. 'But when you hear that we speak for a day, or for two days, or, as I have sometimes done, for three days, you must remember that our days are days of only three hours each.'

'How long,' I asked, 'was your last speech?'

'About five hours,' he answered. 'Three hours the first day and two hours the second.'

'That,' I said, 'is not beyond our remotest limit. Brougham indeed, on the amendment of the law, spoke for six hours, during the greater part of the time to an audience of three. The House was filled with fog, and there is an H.B. which represents him gesticulating in the obscurity and the solitude.'

'He,' said Lord Granville, 'put his speech on the Reform Bill at the top.'

'The speech,' I said, 'at the end of which he knelt to implore the Peers to pass the bill, and found it difficult to rise.'

Tuesday, April 14.--Z., Sumner, Lord Granville, Tocqueville, M. Circourt, St.-Hilaire, and Corcelle breakfasted with us.

The conversation took the same turn as yesterday.

'May I venture,' said Lord Granville to Z., 'to ask whom of your opponents you feared the most?'

'Beyond all comparison,' answered Z., 'Thiers.'

'Was not D.' I asked, 'very formidable?'

'Certainly,' said Z. 'But he had not the wit, or the entraînement of Thiers. His sentences were like his action. He had only one gesture, raising and sinking his right arm, and every time that right arm fell, it accompanied a sentence adding a link to a chain of argument, massive and well tempered, without a particle of dross, which coiled round his adversary like a boa constrictor.'

'And yet,' said M., 'he was always languid and embarrassed at starting; it took him ten minutes to get en train.'

'That defect,' said Lord Granville, 'belonged to many of our good speakers--to Charles Fox--to Lord Holland. Indeed Fox required the excitement of serious business to become fluent. He never made a tolerable after-dinner speech.'