The men
are indeed few who have equal power with all kinds of audiences--with an
audience that is friendly and that is hostile. Still more rare is it to
find a man who can face an audience even worse than a downright hostile
one, and that is an audience which is indifferent, There are very few
men I have known in my Parliamentary experience who could do it.
[Sidenote: A memory of Parnell.]
Mr. Parnell was one. I have seen him speak quite comfortably to an
audience which consisted of himself, Mr. Biggar, the Minister in
attendance, and the Speaker of the House--in all, four, including
himself. Indeed, he often said to me that he rather liked to have such
an audience. Speaking was not easy or agreeable to him, and his sole
purpose for many years in speaking at all was to consume so much time.
Parnell was a man who always found it rather hard to concentrate his
mind on any subject unless he was alone and in silence. This was perhaps
one of the many reasons why he kept out of the House of Commons as much
as he could. Anything like noise or disturbance around him seemed to
destroy his power of thinking. For instance, when he was being
cross-examined by Sir Richard Webster in the course of the Forgeries
Commission, his friends trembled one day because, looking at his face,
with its puzzled, far-away look, they knew that he was in one of those
moods of abstraction, during which he was scarcely accountable for what
he said.
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