strain after effects of this kind; but they are effects which study
and straining do not enable a man to attain. Vainly do most of us
flap our wings in the effort to soar; if we rise from the ground it
is because some unusually strong or deep burst of feeling makes us
for the moment better than ourselves. In Mr. Gladstone the capacity
for feeling was at all times so strong, the susceptibility of the
imagination so keen, that he soared without effort. His vision
seemed to take in the whole landscape. The points actually in
question might be small, but the principles involved were to him
far-reaching. The contests of to-day seemed to interest him because
their effect would be felt in a still distant future. There are
rhetoricians skilful in playing by words and manner on every chord
of human nature, rhetoricians who move you indeed, and may even
carry you away for the moment, but whose sincerity you nevertheless
doubt, because the sense of spontaneity is lacking. Mr. Gladstone
was not of these. He never seemed to be forcing an effect or
assuming a sentiment. To listen to him was to feel convinced of his
own conviction and of the reality of the warmth with which he
expressed it. Nor was this due to the perfection of his rhetorical
art. He really did feel what he expressed. Sometimes, of course,
like all statesmen, he had to maintain a cause whose weakness he
knew, as, for instance, when it became necessary to defend the
blunder of a colleague. But even in such cases he did not simulate
feeling, but reserved his earnestness for those parts of the case on
which it could be honestly expended. As this was true of the
imaginative and emotional side of his eloquence altogether, so was
it especially true of his unequaled power of lifting a subject from
the level on which other speakers had treated it into the purer air
of permanent principle, perhaps even of moral sublimity.