ring my own voice
and my subconscious wonder as to what I could possibly be talking
about, the realisation that I was getting on fairly well, the immense
satisfaction afterwards of having on the whole brought it off, and the
absurd gratitude I felt 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.

5

My discontents with the Liberal party and my mental exploration of
the quality of party generally is curiously mixed up with certain
impressions of things and people in the National Liberal Club. The
National Liberal Club is Liberalism made visible in the flesh--and
Doultonware. It is an extraordinary big club done in a bold, wholesale,
shiny, marbled style, richly furnished with numerous paintings, steel
engravings, busts, and full-length statues of the late Mr. Gladstone;
and its spacious dining-rooms, its long, hazy, crowded smoking-room with
innumerable little tables and groups of men in armchairs, its
magazine room and library upstairs, have just that undistinguished and
unconcentrated diversity w