for that encouraging cheer.

Addressing the House of Commons is like no other public speaking in
the world. Its semi-colloquial methods give it an air of being
easy, but its shifting audience, the comings and goings and
hesitations of members behind the chair--not mere audience units,
but men who matter--the desolating emptiness that spreads itself
round the man who fails to interest, the little compact, disciplined
crowd in the strangers' gallery, the light, elusive, flickering
movements high up behind the grill, the wigged, attentive, weary
Speaker, the table and the mace and the chapel-like Gothic
background with its sombre shadows, conspire together, produce a
confused, uncertain feeling in me, as though I was walking upon a
pavement full of trap-doors and patches of uncovered morass. A
misplaced, well-meant "Hear, Hear!" is apt to be extraordinarily
disconcerting, and under no other circumstances have I had to speak
with quite the same sideways twist that the arrangement of the House
imposes. One does not recognise one's own voice threading out into
the stirring brown. Unless I was excited or speaking to the mind of
some particular person in the house, I was apt to lose my feeling of
an auditor. I had no sense of whither my sentences were going, such
as one has with a public meeting well under one's eye. And to lose
one's sense of an auditor is for a man of my temperament to lose
one's sense of the immediate, and to become prolix and vague with
qualifications.



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