Sketches in the House Part 19

[Sidenote: The two chambers--a contrast.]

Whatever the cause I always a.s.sociate the House of Lords in my mind with emptiness and silence, and the gloomy scenes of desertion. And, therefore, when I see it crowded as it was on this historic Monday evening, the effect it produces is heightened by the recollection and the sense of the contrast it presents to its ordinary appearance. The House of Commons has a certain impressiveness and splendour of air when it is very full; I always have a certain sense of exaltation by the mere looking at its crowded benches on these nights when the excitement of the hour brings everybody to his place. But then the House of Commons is frequently full, and there is no such sense of unusualness when you see it thus that you have when you look on the House of Lords with benches teeming with mult.i.tudinous life which you have seen so often empty, lifeless, and ghostly. Thus splendid was the scene, and yet it gave you a prevailing and unconquerable impression of gloom and lifelessness. In the House of Commons, the member addressing the a.s.sembly is like the wind which pa.s.ses through an aeolian harp. You cannot utter a word which does not produce its full and immediate response. You say a thing which has the remotest approach to an absurdity in it, and the whole House laughs consumedly and immediately. You utter a phrase which excites party feeling, and at once--quick as lightning falls--comes back the retort of anger or approval; your way is studded and punctuated with some response or other, that signifies the readiness and the depth and amplitude of emotion in one of the most emotional, and noisy, and responsive a.s.semblies in the world. It is a curious change from all this to look on all these crowded benches sitting in a silence that is unbroken more than once in the course of half an hour.

[Sidenote: Spencer's serene courage.]

I have often had to admire Lord Spencer--to admire him when he was a political foe as well as when he has been a political friend; but I don't think I ever admired him so much as when he stood up on September 4th to address this strange a.s.sembly. Hours he has pa.s.sed through of all-pervading and all-surrounding gloom, danger, and a.s.sa.s.sination; but I do not suppose his nerve was ever put to a test more trying than when he confronted those large battalions of uncompromising and irresponsive foes. There were foes on all sides of him. They filled the many benches opposite to him; they filled, with equal fervour and mult.i.tudinousness, the benches on his own side. It was remarkable to see the thoroughness with which the Tories had mustered their forces; but the spectacle of the Liberal Unionists' Benches was even still more remarkable, for there was not a seat vacant; they had all come--those renegade and venomous deserters from the Liberal ranks--to do their utmost against the Liberal party and their mighty Liberal leader. And what support had Lord Spencer against all these foes--before him, around him--on all sides of him? On the benches immediately behind him there was a small band of men--not forty all told--looking strangely deserted, skeleton-like, even abashed in all their loneliness and isolation. These were the friends--few but faithful--amid all the hundreds, who alone had a word of cheer for Lord Spencer in a long and trying speech he had to address to his irreconcilable foes. But if there was any tremor in him as he stood up in surroundings so trying, I was unable to detect it. Indeed, at the moment he rose, there was something very fine and very impressive in his figure. He is, as most people know, a man of unusual height; hard exercise and the ride across country have kept him from having any of that tendency to _embonpoint_ which destroys in middle age so many a fine figure. On the contrary, there is not a superfluous ounce of flesh on that tall, alert figure; it is the figure of a trained athlete rather than the figure one would a.s.sociate with a n.o.bleman in the end of a self-indulgent and ever-eating and over-drinking century. The features, strong yet gentle, though far from regular, have considerable distinction, and the flowing red beard makes the face stand out in any a.s.sembly. Carefully but plainly dressed, erect, perfectly composed, and courteous in every word and look and gesture, Lord Spencer made his plea for justice to the nation where once his name was the symbol for hatred and wrong.

[Sidenote: A man of deeds, not words.]

Lord Spencer is not an orator. Simple, unadorned, straightforward, he speaks just as he feels; and this lent a singular fascination to a speech which from other lips might have sounded thin and ineffectual, for the speech was nothing less than a revelation into the depths of a nature singularly rich in courage and experience. One cannot help thinking of all that lay behind those plain and unadorned words in which Lord Spencer told the story of his conversion from the policy of coercion to that of self-government. Here was the man who had looked out one summer evening on the spot where his close friend--his chief subordinate--was hacked to death; this was the man who had brought to conviction and then to the narrow square of the execution yard the members of one of the most powerful and sanguinary of conspiracies; here was the man who for years had pa.s.sed through the streets of Dublin and the towns of Ireland amid the rattle of cavalcade, as necessary for his protection against popular hate as the troops that protect the person of the Czar in the streets of Poland. Here was, indeed, a man not of words but of deeds; one who spoke not mere phrases coined from the imaginings of the brain, but one who had seen and heard and throbbed; had looked unappalled into the depths and the abysses of human life, and the dreadest political experiences; one who had visited the Purgatorio and conversed with the lost or the tortured souls, and come back from the pilgrimage with words of hope, faith, and charity. Altogether it was a fine speech--worthy of the man, worthy of his career, worthy of the great and historic occasion.

[Sidenote: Funereal Devonshire.]

I wish I could say as much of the speech of the Duke of Devonshire. It may be that his miserable failure was due to the fact that he is as yet unaccustomed to the House of Lords, and that the modesty which is undoubtedly one of his disadvantages as a public speaker has not yet been overcome; but his speech was a return to the very worst manner of his earlier days in the House of Commons. I have heard the Duke of Devonshire in his early manner and in his late; and his early manner was about as detestable as a man's manner could have been. He had a habit of sinking his voice as he approached the end of a sentence, so that a sentence beginning on a high note gradually sank to a moan, and a murmur, and a gulp. The whole effect was mournful in the extreme, and gave you a sense of the weariness and the worthlessness of all human life such as the most eloquent ascetic could never succeed in imparting.

In the House of Lords, the Duke of Devonshire suddenly returned to his early and bad manner, and delivered a speech which was more like a funeral oration than a call to arms.

[Sidenote: Lord Ribblesdale.]

Of the remaining speeches I need say little. Lord Bra.s.sey, in a few manly and straightforward words, expressed his entire sympathy with the principle of the Bill; Lord Cowper gave another very melancholy and inaudible performance. And then came one of the most remarkable speeches the House of Lords has heard for some time. From the Treasury Bench there stood a tall, slight, and rather delicate figure. The face, long, large-featured, hatchet-shaped, was surmounted with a ma.s.s of curling-hair; altogether, there was a suggestion of what Disraeli looks like in that picture of him as a youth which contrasts so strangely and sadly with the figure and the face we all knew in his later days. This was Lord Ribblesdale. Lord Ribblesdale holds an office in the Royal Household in the present Administration. Up to a short time ago, he was unknown in even the teeming ranks of n.o.ble litterateurs; but an article he wrote on a conversation with the late Mr. Parnell gave indications of a bright and apt pen, a great power of observation, and a shrewd, impartial mind. On Sept. 4th, he surprised the House by showing also the possession of very rare and very valuable oratorical powers, His speech was excellent in diction, was closely and calmly reasoned, and produced an extraordinary effect, even on the Tory side, which, beginning by a stony silence, and a certain measure of curiosity--ended by giving an impression of being moved, and even awed a little by this speech.

Altogether a very remarkable performance; we have not heard the last now that we have heard the first of Lord Ribblesdale in the fields of party oratory.

[Sidenote: A striking personality.]

The Duke of Argyll has changed a good deal in physical appearance during the last twenty years. There was a time when he was was robust and squat, a rather stout little man, with a slightly strutting manner, head thrown back, and very fine and s.p.a.cious forehead; a head of hair as luxurious and drooping as that of Mary Magdalene. The form has considerably shrunk with advanced years, but not with any disadvantage, for the face, pinched and lined though it appears, has a finer and more intellectual look than that of earlier days. Wrong-headed--perhaps very self-conceited--at all events, entirely left behind by the advancing democratic tide, the Duke of Argyll is yet always to me a sympathetic and striking figure. If he thinks badly, at least he thinks originally.

His thoughts are his own, and n.o.body else's; and though he is a bitter controversialist, at least he feels the weight and gravity of the vast questions on which he p.r.o.nounces. Above all things, he has a touch of the divine in his oratory. He is, indeed, almost the last inspired speaker left in the House of Lords. There is another speaker, of whom more presently, with extraordinary gifts, with also true oratorical powers, capable of producing mighty effects; but with Lord Rosebery the light is very clear and very dry; there is none of the softness and brilliancy, and poetic and imaginative insight which are to be found in the speeches of the Duke of Argyll. On September 6th the Duke used very vehement and some very whirling language about Mr. Gladstone; his reading of history was all wrong; his policy for Ireland was--to put it plainly--brutal. But what cannot be forgiven to a man who has still such a beautiful voice--who still gesticulates so beautifully--and, above all, who is capable of rising to the height of some of the pa.s.sages in the speech on this particular Wednesday? For instance, what could have been more beautiful than that pa.s.sage in which he put the argument that Ireland was too near to be treated in the same way as a distant colony--the pa.s.sage in which he spoke of seeing from the Scotch Highlands the sun shining on the cornfields and cottage windows of Antrim?

[Sidenote: Rosebery's great triumph.]

On September 7th a very great event happened in the House of Lords. The mental mastership of that a.s.sembly was transferred from one man to another, from the master of many legions to the captain of a few thin and almost despised battalions. I heard the whole of Lord Rosebery's speech, and I heard three quarters of the speech of the Marquis of Salisbury, and no impartial man could deny the contrast between these two speeches on this occasion, the one being no less fine and complete, the other no less monotonous than I have set forth. It was not merely that Lord Salisbury proved himself vastly inferior to Lord Rosebery in mere oratory, but the speech of the Foreign Secretary was that of a finer speaker, and of a more serious, intellectual, and sagacious politician.

[Sidenote: A disadvantage conquered.]

Lord Rosebery had the disadvantage of following upon a speaker who had reduced the House to a state of somnolent despair. Lord Selborne has an episcopal appearance, the manner of an author of hymns, and the unctuous delivery of a High Church speaker. But like most of the orators of the House of Lords, he considered two hours was the minimum which he was ent.i.tled to occupy, and though he spoke with wonderful briskness, for an octogenarian, at the beginning of his observations, his voice soon became so exhausted as to be a mere senile and inaudible whisper. Deeper and deeper it descended, and the House was in the blackest depths when the Foreign Secretary rose to speak. Everybody knows how embarra.s.sing and distressing it is to an orator to have to begin by rousing an a.s.sembly that has been thus depressed; and the difficulty was increased in the case of Lord Rosebery by the fact that he had to address an audience in which four hundred men were against him and about forty in his favour; and there is no orator whose nerve is so steady, and whose self-confidence is so complete, as not to be depressed and weakened by such a combination of circ.u.mstances. This is partly the reason of the lighter tone of the earlier observations which offended some too sensitive critics. Indeed, it might have seemed for some time as if Lord Rosebery got up with the idea of treating the whole business as the merest unreality of comedy; and had resolved to signify this by refusing to treat either the House or the Bill or himself seriously. In face of the tragedies of the Irish sphinx--with all its centuries of brooding sorrow behind it, this was not a tone which commended itself to the judicious. But, then, this was a too hasty criticism. The light and almost chaffing introduction was necessary in the highest interests of art; for, as I have said, the House was depressed, and it was in no mood to listen to an orator whose creed appeared to it the merest rank treason. It was necessary to get the House into something like receptiveness of mood before coming to serious business; when that was done, it was time enough to seek to impress it.

[Sidenote: An oratorical tour de force.]

And this is just what happened. Everybody was in really good spirits by the time Lord Rosebery ten minutes on his legs; Lord Selborne's unctuous dronings had disappeared into the irrevocable and vast distances; in short, the moribund Chamber was alive, vivacious, and receptive. And when he had got them to this point Lord Rosebery took the serious part of his work seriously in hand. Not that he attempted lofty appeal. On the contrary, rarely throughout the speech did he raise his voice above that clear, penetrating, but eminently self-restrained tone which is the tone of a man of good society, discussing the loftiest and most complex problem with the easy and disillusioned composure of the experienced and slightly cynical man of the world. Nay, Lord Rosebery offended some of his critics by openly avowing the creed of the man of the world in dealing with the whole problem. He was careful to disown enthusiasm, or fanaticism, or even willingness in the service of Home Rule. It was with him simply a frigid matter of policy, a policy to which he had been driven by the resistless evidence of facts, the resistless logic of reason.

[Sidenote: A deep-laid purpose.]

This frankly was an att.i.tude which grated slightly on the sensitive nerves of the many to whom Ireland's emanc.i.p.ation--with all the sobbing centuries which lie behind it--is a fanaticism, a faith, a great creed; but the point to be really considered is whether this was the tone to adopt for the purpose of carrying out the desired end. And I am inclined to think--and some of the hottest Irishmen I know agree with me--that this was the very way Lord Rosebery should have spoken. And after all it was wonderfully impressive--even to me with all I feel about the Irish question. For the image it presented--set forth by the physical aspect of the orator--was such as I can imagine to be wonderfully impressive to that dull, unimaginative, and unsentimental personage--the man of the shifting ballast, whose almost impenetrable brain has to finally decide this question. And the image presented to that very creature of clay was this: "Here is a man who is my Foreign Secretary; as such, he has every day of his life to deal with questions which affect my interests in the most direct way; to fight for my purse, my future, my Empire; and he has to do so with his brain matched against the brains of the astutest men in the world--the diplomatic representatives of other Powers. And all this he has to do with the sense that behind the smooth language of diplomacy, the unbroken and even voices of diplomatic representatives, there stand ironclads and mighty armies--bloodshed, wholesale, and hideous death--the tiger spirit and powers of war. And I see that the man who has all these complex problems to solve--these trained gamblers to watch--these sinister Powers to confront and think of--is a man of cold temper, of frigid understanding, of a power of calm calculation in face of all the perils and all the emotions and all the sentiment of the perplexing Irish problems; and to him Home Rule has come as a set, sober choice of possible policies for the interest of our Empire." Such an att.i.tude--exalted by the even, though powerful, the cold, though penetrating voice--the face impa.s.sive and inscrutable--the eye, steady, unmoving, and unreadable--all this, I say, was just the kind of thing to produce an immense impression on those who are ready only to accept Home Rule as the policy that pays best.

[Sidenote: Even the Peers impressed.]

And certainly the House of Lords was wonderfully impressed by this att.i.tude. There was no applause, except now and then from those skeleton ranks that lay behind Lord Rosebery, but then there was in the whole air that curious and almost audible silence--to use a conscious paradox--which conveys to the trained ear clearer sounds of absorption and attention than the loudest cheers. And then you began to forget the badinage of the earlier sentences--you forgave the frigidity and self-repression--you became strongly fascinated by the mobile face, inscrutable eyes, and the voice penetrated to your innermost ear; he gave you an immense sense of a clear, masterful, and resolute mind and character. And, finally, towards the end, when, to a certain extent, Lord Rosebery let himself go, there was a ring not of ordinary emotion, but of the pa.s.sion of a great Minister who was fully conscious of the Imperial and supreme responsibility of a Foreign Minister, who was able to look great and even complex facts straight in the face, who had the courage to face the disagreeable solution of a troublesome and perilous problem. And, in spite of its lethargy, its hatred of his opinions, the House of Lords felt this also, and there was something of awe in the silence with which it listened to the ringing words of warning with which the speech concluded. And its att.i.tude showed more. It was, so to speak, a soul's awakening; it was the discovery of having found at last a man who could sway, impress, and strike its imagination.

[Sidenote: Salisbury's signal failure.]

On Friday night, September 8th, Lord Salisbury had his opportunity of undoing this great effect--of rea.s.serting that intellectual as well as mere voting dictatorship which he holds in the House of Lords; and he signally failed to rise to the occasion. I do not like the policy of Lord Salisbury, but there is a lucidity, a point, and sometimes a vigour in his speeches which make them usually charming reading. It was, therefore, with the full expectation of being interested that I listened to him, but he drove me out of the House by the impossibility of my keeping awake under the influence of his dull, shallow, and disappointing speech. He began with a little touch of nature that certainly was prepossessing. He had brought in with him a dark-brown bottle, like the bottle one a.s.sociates with seltzer water. The fluid was perfectly clear; it was evidently not like the strong wine which Prince Bismarck used to require in the days when he used to make great speeches. And Lord Salisbury, as he poured out a draught--it looked very like Johannis water--lifted up the bottle to the Ministers opposite with a pleasant smile, as though to prove to them that he was not offending against even the sternest teetotal code.

It was the first and the last bit of real human naturalness in the whole speech, for Lord Salisbury's manner and delivery are wooden, stiff, awkward and lumbering. He stands upright--except, of course, for that heavy stoop of the shoulders which is one of his characteristics--and rarely moves himself one-hundredth part of an inch. The voice--even, clear, and strong, and yet not penetrating, and still less inspiring--rarely has a change of note; it is delivered with the strange, curious air of a man who is thinking aloud, and has forgotten the presence of any listeners. The eyes--hidden almost amid the s.h.a.ggy and black-grey hair which covers nearly the whole face--are never directed to any person around. They seem to gaze into vacancy; altogether there is something curious, weird, almost uncanny, in this great, big whale of a man, intoning his monologue with that curious detachment of eye and manner in the midst of a crowded, brilliant, and intensely nervous and restless a.s.sembly of men and women.

[Sidenote: The pessimism of a recluse.]

And it was not to be wondered at that a speech so delivered--a mere soliloquy--should fail to be impressive. It was too far and away unreal--had too little actuality to reach the poor humble b.r.e.a.s.t.s that were panting for excitement and exhortation. But once throughout it all was there a touch of that somewhat sardonic humour that sometimes delights even Lord Salisbury's political foes. Replying to the very clever speech of Lord Ribblesdale, Lord Salisbury described the speech as a confession, and all confessions, he added, were interesting, from St. Augustine to Rousseau, from Rousseau to Lord Ribblesdale. That, I say, was the solitary gleam. For the rest, it was an historical essay--with very bad history and worse conclusions; and the whole spirit was as bad as it could be. The Irish were still the enemy such as they appear in the b.l.o.o.d.y pages of Edmund Spenser, or in the war proclamations and despatches of Oliver Cromwell; and yet I cannot feel that Lord Salisbury's language could be resented as, say, the same language would be from Mr. Chamberlain. It all sounded so like the dreamings of a student and recluse--discussing the problem without much pa.s.sion--without even malignity--but with that strange frankness of the unheard and unechoed musings of the closet.

[Sidenote: A muttered soliloquy.]

Finally, the speech also had the narrowness, shallowness, and unreality of the hermit's soliloquy. In the main, there was no insight. A logic-chopper, a dialectician--even in some respects a musing philosopher--such Lord Salisbury is; but breadth, depth, clear vision--of that there was not a trace in the whole speech. And then you went back in memory to the other speech--so clear, so broad-directed, yet uttered by a man who looked straight before him and all around him--who felt the presence in his every nerve of that a.s.sembly there which he was addressing; who lived and saw instead of dreaming--and you could come to no other conclusion than that of the two leaders of the House of Lords, the young man was the statesman and the man of action as well as the orator, and that it was worth the spending even all the weary hours of this past week in the House of Lords to learn so much of these great protagonists in our Parliamentary struggles.

[Sidenote: Anti-climax.]

Of other speakers I say but little. I came in during the dinner hour to see a very little man with what we call in Ireland a "c.o.c.ked" nose, a conceited mouth, and a curious mixture of the unctuousness and benedictory manner of the pulpit and the limp twitterings of the curate at a ladies' tea-fight. This was the head of the Bishop of Ripon. I cannot stare for even a second at this tiny tomt.i.t and artificial figure, with all those lawn sleeves and black gowns, and all the other fripperies and draperies of the parson-peer, who is to every rational man so grotesque and contemptible an intruder in a legislative chamber.

In the grim and crowded gallery of the personages of an Irish Epic, such an intruder is like the thin piping note of a tiny bird mid the carnage and shouts and roars of a battle-field.

Everybody knows the result of the division: for the Bill, 41; against, 419; majority, 378. It was a conclusion that was foregone, but the Lords themselves recognized the comic futility of it. The attempted cheers ended in one loud, mocking, universal laugh. And thus the curtain fell on the historic drama of the great Home Rule Session.

T.P.

THE END.