Sketches in the House Part 5

[Sidenote: Carlton Club echoes.]

There were signs of the meeting at the Carlton when the House met on Thursday evening, March 9th. The Tory benches were crowded; the young bloods were fuller than ever of that self-consciousness to which I have adverted, and there were signs of movement, excitement, and the spirit of mischief and evil in all their faces and in their general demeanour.

There were nearly one hundred questions on the paper--and questions had become a most effective weapon of Obstruction. But there was a certain peculiarity about the questioning on this Thursday evening. A stranger to the House would have remarked that all the questions addressed to Mr.

Gladstone were asked last. This was not an accidental arrangement. It was done in the case of every leader of the House, so as to leave him more time before coming down to the House of Commons. It was done in the case of Mr. Balfour when he was leader of the House, with the result that that very limp and leisurely gentleman never came down to his place until the House had been one or two hours at work. There was, of course, much stronger reason for that little bit of consideration in the case of Mr. Gladstone, than in that of a young man like Mr. Balfour.

[Sidenote: The epoch of brutality.]

But the Tories, in the new and brutal mood to which they have worked themselves up, have taken means for depriving Mr. Gladstone of what small benefit he got from this postponement of the questions to him till the end of question time. The puniest whipster of the Tory or the Unionist party now is satisfied with nothing less, if you please, than to have his questions addressed to and answered by Mr. Gladstone himself. One of this impudent tribe is a Scotch Unionist named Cochrane.

The Scotch Unionist is one of the most bitter of the venomous tribe to which he belongs. Mr. Gladstone is a man of peace and unfailing courtesy, but the old lion has potentialities of Olympian wrath, and when he is stirred up a little too much his patience gives way, and he has a manner of shaking his mane and sweeping round with his tail which is dangerous to his enemies and a delight and fascination to his friends. He took up the witless and unhappy Cochrane, shook him, and dropped him sprawling and mutilated, in about as limp a condition as the late Lord Wolmer--I call him late in the sense of a person politically dead--when that distinguished n.o.bleman was called to account for his odious calumny on the Irish members.

[Sidenote: Baiting the lion.]

At last, however, the Cochranes and the rest of the gang that had thought it fine fun to bait an old man were silenced; but even yet the ordeal of Mr. Gladstone was only beginning. I have seen many disgusting sights in my time in the House of Commons; but I never saw anything so bad as this scene. Mr. Gladstone looked--as I thought--wan and rather tired. He had been down to Brighton; and I have a profound disbelief in these short hurried trips to the seaside. But Mr. Gladstone seems to like them, and haply they do him good. He looked as if the last trip had rather tired him out. Or was it that he had had to sit for several hours the day before at a Cabinet Council? These Cabinet Councils must often be a great trial to a leader's nerves; for all Councils in every body in the world mean division of opinion, personal frictions, ugly outbursts of temper, from which even the celestial minds of political leaders are not entirely free. Anyhow Mr. Gladstone looked pale, f.a.gged, and even a little dejected. You--simple man--who are only acquainted with human nature in its brighter and better manifestations, would rush to the conclusion that the sight of the greatest man of his time in his eighty-fourth year, thus wan, wearied, pathetic, would appeal to the imaginations or the hearts of even political opponents. Simple man, you know nothing of the ruthless cruelty which dwells in political b.r.e.a.s.t.s, of the savagery which lies in the depths of the horse-jockey squire or the overdressed youth--anxious to distinguish himself, if it be only by throwing mud at a stately column--you have no idea of these things.

[Sidenote: The lion lashes out.]

Time after time--again and again--in this form and in that--the Tories, young and old, experienced and senseless, rose to try and corner Mr.

Gladstone. Mr. Frank Lockwood, examining a hostile witness in the divorce court, could not have been more persistent than the Lowthers, and the Cranbornes, and even Mr. Balfour. But he was equal to them all--met them man after man, question after question, and, though he had to be on his feet a score of times in the course of a few minutes, was always ready, firm, alert. How we enjoyed the whole splendid display--a brilliant intellect playing with all the ease of its brightest and best powers; but, after all, what a flood of holy rage the whole thing was calculated to rouse in any but rancorous b.r.e.a.s.t.s. However, we had our revenge. The resurgence of Jimmy Lowther seems to be a phenomenon, as disturbing to his friends as to his foes. The ugly necessity for sharing responsibility for his vulgar and senseless excesses has come home to Mr. Balfour. There was something very like a scene this night between him and the Newmarket steward. Mr. Balfour was ready to accept the a.s.surances which had been given to him by Mr. Gladstone--a.s.surances which, if anything, erred on the side of conciliation--but Jimmy has entered on the frenzied campaign of obstruction to all and everything which his dull, narrow, and obstinate mind has mistaken for high policy.

This led to a strange and striking scene. Mr. Balfour, speaking on some question, was interrupted by Mr. Lowther--and then, in front of the whole House--in words which everybody could hear, with gesture of his whole arm--sweeping, indignant, irritated--the gesture with which a master dismisses an importunate servant--the Tory leader rebuked the interruptions of Mr. Lowther.

[Sidenote: Jimmy flouts Mr. Balfour.]

But Mr. Lowther, in these days, is not to be put down, and doubtless he feels in his inner breast that wrong which has been done for years to his talents and his services; doubtless he remembers the silence and obscurity to which he has been condemned, while Mr. Balfour has been figuring largely before the general public, in the very situation which Jimmy held himself in days when Mr. Balfour stumbled and trembled from his place below the gangway. At all events, Jimmy has determined to revive; and in these sad days, when nothing but the sheer brutality of obstruction is required, he is not a man to be trifled with. And so he defied Mr. Balfour and insisted on a division. Mr. Balfour ostentatiously left the House, but the majority of the Tory party followed Jimmy.

[Sidenote: The pity of it.]

All this resuscitation of obstruction necessitated, on Mr. Gladstone's part, an extreme step. Before this time Mr. Gladstone was very rarely in the House after eight o'clock. About that hour, he silently stole away and left the conduct of the business of the House to Sir William Harcourt. He was thus able to get to bed at a reasonable hour, and to attend during the day to the business of the nation. But when the emergency arises, Mr. Gladstone is never able to listen to the dictates of prudence, or selfishness, or peril. He was determined to show the Tories that if they were going to play the game of obstruction, they would have to count with him more seriously than they imagine. To his friends--who doubtless were aghast at the proposition--he announced that he was going to break through those rules which had been imposed upon him by a watchful physician and by his age. At eleven o'clock he announced he would be in the House again, and accordingly, at eleven o'clock--quietly, unostentatiously, without the welcome of a cheer--he almost stole to his place on the Treasury Bench. Something about the figure of Mr. Gladstone compels the concentration of attention upon him at all times. He seems the soul, the inspiration, the genius of the House of Commons. He was not, as is usually the case with him in the evening, in the swallow-tail and large shirt-front of evening dress; he had the long, black, frock coat, which he usually wears on the great occasions when he has a mighty speech to deliver. Of course, Mr.

Gladstone was immediately the observed of every eye; but, as I have said, there was no demonstration--the House of Commons is often silent at its most sublime moments.

[Sidenote: He pounces.]

But if there were silence, it was simply pent-up rage, fierce resolve.

When, having brought the discussion down to past midnight, the Tories calmly proposed that the debate should be adjourned, the Old Man got up.

He was very quiet, spoke almost in whispered lowliness; but he was unmistakable. The vote would have to be taken. An hour later--when the clock pointed to one--there was a second attempt. There was the same response in the same tone--its quietness, however, fiercely accentuated by Liberal cheers. And then, when the Tories still seemed determined to obstruct, came a division, then the closure, and at one o'clock in the morning Mr. Gladstone was able to leave the House. Thus was he compelled to waste time and strength, that Mr. Chamberlain might nightly hiss his hate, and Mr. Jimmy Lowther might gulp and obstruct, obstruct and gulp.

CHAPTER VI.

GLADSTONE THE SURVIVAL.

[Sidenote: From the past.]

What I like most about Mr. Gladstone is his antique spirituality. The modern politician is smart, alive, pert, up-to-date; knows everything about registration; hires a good agent; can run a caucus, and receive a deputation. With us, as yet, the modern politician has not wholly abandoned religious faith--as he has done among our neighbours on the Continent--and has not come to regard this solid earth of ours as the one standing-place in a universe alone worthy the consideration of intelligent men. But the English politician is so far suffused with the spirit of modernity as to prefer the newspaper to the book, to regard more closely registration records than the cla.s.sics, and generally is wide awake rather than steeped in subtler and profounder forms of sagacity and knowledge. The Prime Minister is a Survival. With all his extraordinary adaptiveness, he stands in many respects in sharpest contrast to his environment. I can never forget, as I look at him, all those years he spent in that vanished epoch which knew nothing of evolution or of science at all, and was content to regard a knowledge of the cla.s.sics as the beginning and the end of a gentleman's education.

After reading the life of Lord Aberdeen, I was brought back in spirit to all those years during which Mr. Gladstone was a member of the Tory party, and lived in an atmosphere of proud, scholarly exclusiveness--of distrust of the mult.i.tude--of ecclesiasticism in the home, in the forum, and as the foundation of all political controversy. When, therefore, Mr.

Gladstone is going through a crisis, it is intensely interesting to me to watch him and to see how he carries himself amid it all; and then it is that this thought occurs to me of how differently and clearly he stands out from all his colleagues and surroundings.

[Sidenote: A reminiscence.]

Different things suggest early a.s.sociations to different people. Mrs.

Solness, in the "Master Builder," could think only of her dolls when she was telling the story of the fire that left her childless for ever. I have heard of a great lady who cannot see a sh.e.l.l without recalling the scenes of her dead youth before her. Next to the railway bridge which spans the river in my native town, there is nothing which brings back the past to me so palpably and so vividly--I might sometimes say, so poignantly--as the echoes of books. One of my clearest recollections is of a little room, looking out on a sunny and, as it appeared to me then, a beautifully-kept garden, with a small but glistening river in the distance, and the air filled, not only with the songs of birds, but all the intoxicating and inaudible music of youth's dreams and visions. All this phantasmagoria of memory is accompanied by the echo of a melodious, rich voice, rising and falling, in the to me unfamiliar but delightful accent of an educated Englishman: and the story of Ancient Greece--sometimes her poetry with the loves of her G.o.ds, the fights, the shouts of battle, the exhortations and the groans of her heroes--rises once more before me. Or, again, I hear the tale told anew of that great last immortal day in the life of Socrates, as the great Philosopher sank to rest in a glory of self-sacrificing submission, serenity, and courage--a story which moves the world to tears and admiration, and will continue so to do as long as it endures. The voice of the teacher and the friend still survives, which had this extraordinary power of giving in the very different tongue of England all the glories of the poetry and the prose of Greece; and other youths, doubtless like me, look out under the spell of its music to that same green garden in far-off Galway, by the side of Corrib's stream.

[Sidenote: Gladstone dreams.]

Of all this I sate musing during some idle moments in the middle of March; for, as I looked at Mr. Gladstone, the whole scene was, by a curious trick of memory and a.s.sociation, brought back to me. Everyone who knew the great old Philosopher of Athens, will remember that he had his familiar _daemon_, and that he believed himself to have constant communication with him. If I remember rightly, there is a good deal about that _daemon_ in his "Phaedo"--that wonderful story to which I have just alluded, and which lives so vividly in my memory. Sometimes I think that Mr. Gladstone has the same superst.i.tion. He has moments--especially if there be the stress of the sheer brutality of obstructive and knavish hostility--when he seems to retire into himself--to transfer himself on the wings of imagination to regions infinitely beyond the reach, as well as the ken, of the land in which the Lowthers, the Chamberlains, and the Bartleys dwell. At such moments he gives one the impression of communing with some spirit within his own breast--a familiar _daemon_, whose voice, though still and silent to all outside, shouts louder than the roar of faction or the shouts of brutish hate. Then it is that I remember what depths of religious fervour there are in this leader of a fierce democracy, and can imagine that ofttimes his communings may, perchance, be silent prayer.

[Sidenote: In contrast with Lowther.]

As I have said, there have been many such moments in those days in Parliament. Mr. Gladstone can be severe--wrathful--even cruel. It is not often that he is so, but sometimes he has, in sheer self-defence, to notice the dogs that yelp at his heels, and to lash out and maul them so as to keep off the rest. n.o.body will forget how, in a few words, Mr.

Gladstone mercilessly and for ever crushed that impudent young gentleman, who is t.i.tled and considered to-day largely because Mr.

Gladstone was the patron of his sanctimonious father. Mr. Jesse Collings hides under a painfully extorted smile the agonies he endures on the few occasions when Mr. Gladstone deems it worth his while to scornfully refer to his apostasy. But, speaking generally, Mr. Gladstone uses his giant powers with extraordinary benignity and mercifulness, and is almost tender with even his bitterest opponents. When, therefore, Mr.

Gladstone was being baited by beef-headed Lowther, he for the most part looked simply pained; and took refuge in that far-off self-absorption which enabled him to forget the odious reality in front of him. And a.s.suredly, if you looked at the face of Gladstone, and then at the face of Lowther, and thought of the different purposes of the two men, you could not be surprised that Mr. Gladstone should desire to forget the existence of Mr. Lowther. Mr. Lowther's face, with its high cheek-bones, its heavy underhung lip, like the national bulldog in size, and in its impression of brutal, dull, heavy tenacity--its grotesque good-humour--its unrelieved coa.r.s.eness--brings out into higher contrast and bolder relief the waxen pallor, the beautifully chiselled features, the dominant benignity and refinement of the face of Mr. Gladstone. And, then, think that the one man is fighting to maintain, and the other to put an end, and for ever, to the hateful, b.l.o.o.d.y, and, it might almost be said, b.e.s.t.i.a.l struggle of centuries; and you can understand the feeling of overwhelming loathing which sometimes rises in the b.r.e.a.s.t.s of those who see the two men pitted against each other.

[Sidenote: For Jimmy was leader.]

For this was what it had come to in the House of Commons. It was Jimmy Lowther against Mr. Gladstone. Mr. Balfour occasionally dropped in a perfunctory word; now and then even tried to raise the standard of revolt against Mr. Lowther; and, of course, had finally to accept the consequences of Mr. Lowther's acts. Joe was there too; much more active in sympathy with Jimmy than Mr. Balfour. With all his faults, there is a certain saving refinement in Mr. Balfour--it is not a refinement that has restrained him from being cruel with the hysteric violence of the effeminate, but it is a refinement that preserves him from the mere Newmarket horseplay of Jimmy Lowther, and the thin rancour of a Brummagem drummer. Joe, I say, was there, ready to back up Jimmy in his worst exploits, but, after all, Jimmy was the leader. In this mighty struggle--not merely for the reconciliation of England and Ireland, but for the existence of Parliamentary inst.i.tutions--the stakes are no smaller--the gentlemen of England were represented by Mr. Lowther, and the rude democracy by Mr. Gladstone. Democrats need not feel much ashamed of the contrast.

[Sidenote: The apotheosis of Jimmy.]

But there Jimmy Lowther was, gulping and obstructing, obstructing and gulping. The deadly and almost animal dulness of the performance I must insist on again and again. Mr. Lowther does not speak--he is as inarticulate as one of the prize bulls which, I doubt not, he delights to view at Islington what time the Agricultural Hall opens its portals to fat men and fat beasts. He cannot stand on his legs for five minutes together without saying half-a-dozen times, "I repeat what I have already said;" he has no ideas, no language, nothing except sheer bull-headed power of standing on his legs, and occupying a certain amount of time. Everybody knows that Lowtherism reached its climax on Sat.u.r.day, March 11th. On that day, men, who had held high office, were not ashamed to resort to so mean and palpable an obstructive expedient as to put on paper twenty-two questions to their successors in office.

The previous Friday had been bad enough. That was the day which tried Mr. Gladstone more, perhaps, than any day for many a year; and, indeed, it tried others as much as he, though not everybody bore it with the same iron and inflexible courage. There were large absences--some of the Irish away at conventions in Ireland, others without that legitimate excuse; there were Liberal absentees as well. Obstruction, meantime, stalked triumphantly; and when the divisions came, our strength sank down to almost invisible figures. Ah! it was saddening to look at Mr.

Gladstone's face throughout that long morning sitting of Friday, March 10th. There are some days that live in one's memory, not so much as days as nights--with the ghastly spectres of darkness--nightmares--hauntings of a hideous past--antic.i.p.ations of a joyless future. Such that Friday remains in my memory--with Mr. Gladstone's face standing out from the surrounding figures--pale, remote, pained.

[Sidenote: The G.O.M. as a lecturer.]

The announcement of the following Monday came only as a surprise to those who had not been fully behind the scenes. There were few, who knew the impression that the Friday had made, who did not feel sure that the game of pushing the Home Rule Bill on before Easy Easter was up, and that Mr. Gladstone had been beaten by the sheer brutality of Obstruction. But still hope springs eternal in the Irish breast, and there was still the lingering feeling that Mr. Gladstone would make a further and more desperate effort to break down one of the most shameless crusades of Obstruction on which a great party had ever entered. Indeed, Mr. Gladstone himself was responsible for a rise in the temperature of his own party on the very evening of that fateful and fatal Friday morning, when obstruction and the abandonment of their own friends had so nearly driven the Government out of office. I could scarcely believe my eyes when at nine o'clock on that day I came down to the almost empty House--in these evening sittings the House always looks about as cheerful as a theatre at mid-day--and saw Mr. Gladstone on the Treasury Bench, almost radiant, and evidently full of speech, go, and spirit. There wasn't really the smallest necessity for his presence.

Nothing stood on the paper save one of those harmless, futile motions which are discussed with about as much interest by the House generally, as "abstract love"--to use a bold figure of Labby in a recent debate.

It was a motion which complained that private members did not get sufficient time. Considering that private members had used their privileges for some two weeks previously to destroy the very foundation of all representative Government--namely, that the majority shall prevail--the complaint seemed a little audacious. Anyhow, a debate upon it could lead nowhere. But the moment the resolution was proposed, up stood the Grand Old Man, and delivered a bright, sparkling little academical address, for all the world like the lecture of a very _spirituel_ French professor to a parcel of boys from the Quartier Latin. For the moment you could actually imagine that the Old Man had forgotten that there were such things in the world as Home Rule, Obstruction, Newmarket Lowther, and Brummagem Joe. And all the time here were we, who could be his sons, grinding our hearts in despair--in futile anger--in melancholy retrospect.

[Sidenote: An hour of gloom.]

With the Monday, however, came a biting frost. The news that Mr.

Gladstone had been struck down from the fray, was sufficient to prepare anybody for the final announcement. With him leading the Liberal hosts, one could feel that obstruction could finally be beaten, however obstinate might be its resistance--for he has the faith that moves mountains. Then came the announcement that the second reading of the Home Rule Bill had been postponed till after Easter. The Tories and the Unionists were apparently taken by surprise; so much so that they did not seem to have the power of yelling forth their delight at the triumph of their policy with that full chorus which one would have expected.

Altogether, the announcement came upon the House, and pa.s.sed the House, with a quickness and a greater quietness than one might have expected.

The consequences were too serious to be grasped immediately; and men were almost anxious to get to the lobbies for the purpose of discussing it in all its bearings.

The rest of the week was but a poor falling-off after the heroic and tragic fever of its opening, and of the week which preceded it. One could see that in the Liberal ranks there had succeeded to the fierce fighting spirit of the previous days a certain la.s.situde and disappointment. What their faces told in the House their lips more freely uttered in the lobbies. For a time, indeed, there was a feeling of almost unreasoning despair, and that full, frank, unsparing criticism to which every Government is subject from its friends when the winds blow and the waves are high. It was said that the Government had committed the mistake of making too many targets at once; that they had first infuriated the Church by the Welsh Suspensory Bill; that they had followed this up by infuriating the publicans and the brewers by the Veto Bill; that, meantime, there was very little chance of their being able to obtain the compensatory advantage of getting these Bills pa.s.sed into law. There were grumblings about the Registration Bill; in short, nothing and n.o.body were spared in this hour of gloom and disaster.

[Sidenote: "Herr Schloss."]

But the House of Commons--as I have often remarked--is like a barometer in the prompt.i.tude of its reflection of every momentary phase, and all these things are duly discounted by old Parliamentary hands accustomed to panics when a check comes to what has been a most successful campaign on the whole. And in the meantime, if there had been any tendency to disintegration, it was soon restored by the conduct of the Tories. For, the old game of obstruction and vituperation went on just as strongly as if no concession had been made, and no victory gained. The Monday night had been reserved for a debate on the Evicted Tenants' Commission. And Mr. T.W. Russell, brimful of notes and venom, sate in his place, as impatient to rise as the captive and exuberant balloon which only strong ropes and the knotted arms of men hold tight to mother earth. Jimmy, however, has a pa.s.sion for his ign.o.ble calling; he sings at his work like the gravedigger in "Hamlet." And before the inflated Russell was able to explode, Jimmy had an hour or so to himself in the discussion of Mr. Mundella's efforts to deal with labour. It was on this occasion that Jimmy spread something like dismay in the bench on which he sate.

Mr. Schloss, who had been appointed as a correspondent by Mr. Mundella, has a name which shows a German origin. Jimmy insisted on speaking of him accordingly as "Herr Schloss." And there, not a yard from Jimmy, sate the Baron de Worms, one of the most portentous and pretentious of English patriots, who bears not only a German name, but a German t.i.tle.

I don't know whether "Herr" Goschen was in the House at the same time; if so, his feelings must have been very poignant. Mr. Mundella doesn't know how to treat these Obstructives. The main thing is not to take them seriously. Jimmy, to tell the truth, makes no pretence of taking himself seriously, and grins through a horse-collar most of the time he is speaking. But the poor President of the Board of Trade is conscious of doing everything man can do to help to the solution of the vexed questions of the time. He cannot avoid allowing himself to be worked up into a frenzy by imputations which he ought to know are simply intended for the purpose of getting him out of temper, and so prolonging debate.

[Sidenote: Sir John Gorst.]

Sir John Gorst is one of the men who have again been brought much into evidence by the turn events have taken. I remember the time when he first made a Parliamentary figure. It was in the days when Lord Randolph Churchill started out on his great and meteoric career, at the beginning of the Parliament of '80. Sir John Gorst was, in many respects, the cleverest of the brilliant little group--at least, at the work which they were then doing. He is cold-blooded, quick, and dexterous, and, above all things, he has supreme pessimism and cynicism. To him, all political warfare is a somewhat squalid struggle, in which everybody is dishonest, and everybody playing for his own hand. It is an advantage in some respects to take that view; it saves a man from anything like unduly pa.s.sionate convictions--enables him to keep cool even in trying circ.u.mstances. I have seen Sir John as cold as ice in the very height and ecstasy of the most pa.s.sionate moments in the fierce Parliament of 1880 to 1885, and a man who remains so cool is sure to be able to strike his blows deliberately and home. My poor friend, Mr. Mundella, sometimes forgets this. When Sir John Gorst accused him of slighting somebody--I don't know who; and, really, it doesn't matter, for Sir John Gorst knew very well that the charge was entirely unfounded--when, I say, Sir John did this, up jumped honest Mr. Mundella to indignantly deny that he had ever done anything of the kind. Of course, he hadn't, and Sir John Gorst knew that as well as Mr. Mundella. But then, ten minutes were wasted in the encounter; and even ten minutes are not despised by Jimmy and his compeers.