Life of Sir George Grey: Governor, High commissioner, and Premier. An Historical Biography.
His Imagination
His Imagination.
His breadth of view and his large schemes were directly connected with an imperial imagination. He had the vivid visual realisation of one who saw things in the concrete. A defeated Premier had appointed himself Speaker of the Legislative Council and created a number of his friends members of the Council. To Grey it was "like a king entering the Chamber surrounded by his retainers." A condemned House of Representatives, which awaited dissolution and yet legislated for its successor, reminded him of "the living governed by the dead." All appeared to him in picture. John Bright had a vision of America, from the frozen North to the glowing South, as "the home of freedom and a refuge for the oppressed of every nation and of every clime." Grey's vision may not have been nobler than that, but it was wider, deeper, and richer. He had a vision of a grand Pan-Anglican federation, where the two great races of the world would blend harmoniously into a living unity and exhibit a new social type. All these things he saw with his bodily eyes, and he spoke and wrote of them with the passion of belief proper to a seer. He made others see with him, when his perceptions were true. It was thus he convinced them.
Perhaps it was a corollary of the predominance of imagination in his mind that, though he had perceptions which nothing escaped, and an extraordinary memory which let slip nothing it ever held, he had no grasp of details; and when a measure was under discussion, he was frivolous in the cabinet, useless on a committee, and silent in the legislature. His projects of taxation would have made Turgot or Gladstone smile, so childishly futile were they. His reasonings for or against a tax were also puerile.
The same high faculty of imagination gave elevation to his oratory. Did a great cause move him? Breathing thoughts came at will, and burning words seemed to come of themselves. Passion kindled them. Indignation heated them white. Others cite poetry when they should be eloquent; his eloquence was poetry.