He wears a flaming and fantastic flower, like a decadent minor poet.
As for his bluffness and toughness and appeals to common sense,
all that is, of course, simply the first trick of rhetoric.
He fronts his audiences with the venerable affectation of Mark Antony--

"I am no orator, as Brutus is;
But as you know me all, a plain blunt man."

It is the whole difference between the aim of the orator and
the aim of any other artist, such as the poet or the sculptor.
The aim of the sculptor is to convince us that he is a sculptor;
the aim of the orator, is to convince us that he is not an orator.
Once let Mr. Chamberlain be mistaken for a practical man, and his
game is won. He has only to compose a theme on empire, and people
will say that these plain men say great things on great occasions.
He has only to drift in the large loose notions common to all
artists of the second rank, and people will say that business
men have the biggest ideals after all. All his schemes have
ended in smoke; he has touched nothing that he did not confuse.
About his figure there is a Celtic pathos; like the Gaels in Matthew
Arnold's quotation, "he went forth to battle, but he always fell."
He is a mountain of proposals, a mountain of failures; but still
a mountain. And a mountain is always romantic.

There is another man in the modern world who might be called
the antithesis of Mr. Chamberlain in every point, who is also
a standing monument of the advantage of being misunderstood.
Mr. Bernard Shaw is always represented by those who disagree
with him, and, I fear, also (if such exist) by those who agree with him,
as a capering humorist, a dazzling acrobat, a quick-change artist.