The House of Commons should make the most of Mr. Lloyd George while it has got him, and everything in his appearance, the rosy complexion and the still bustling step, suggests that it will have him for a good deal longer than 50 years, astonishing span though that is. He is genius unconfined. You can describe the accidents of his genius, his energy, his almost mediumistic insight, his fundamental gaiety of soul, the quality that springs those happy similitudes such as "kittens in the cream jug," to describe Sir Herbert Samuel and Sir Archibald Sinclair enjoying office in the first National Government; you can do all that, but you still have not got him complete. Far from He has always been utterly true to himself, which is, perhaps, only another definition of genius. But this may illustrate what one means. He arrived on the front bench a stranger to the class and the tradition that has given us all but two of our Prime Ministers. Neither public school nor university had had any hand in his making, and some of his colleagues, larger in learning and more contracted in soul, have referred both his success and his weaknesses, which were each shabby in their eyes, to the fact that he had not had their intellectual and social discipline.
"He has read nothing and understands everything." Clemenceau said of him. What a tribute to intuitive genius! And still another tribute; this to his witchery. "He can talk a bird out of a tree." So Mr. Churchill, who also discovered to his everlasting admiration the "unquailing eye" that faced the Cabinet in the darkest hours of the German submarine campaign in 1917. His dauntless courage then must always be remembered.
He has been one of the greatest artists in speech the House of Commons has had. Not a great orator; great oratory must be touched with moral passion. This Mr. Lloyd George has not been able to command. Not the awful outstretched arm of Gladstone, but the descriptive gestures that lie somewhere between, the actor and the revivalist may suggest the lighter oratorical armament one has in mind. A great power of satire served by a most uncommon faculty of thinking in pictures that stamp his criticisms on. the visual eye—that has been one of the great sources of'his strength in speech and debate. "The penguins of the city." How it all fuses to suggest what he wanted to convey—black and white fatuity waddling before the nation on the road to the economic collapse of 1931. The satire has been cruel, it has also been playful, probably more playful than cruel. But it has never had any Swift-like savagery it it.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.