Sketches in the House Part 6

[Sidenote: T.W. Russell.]

At last, this was got over, and the time came for T.W. Russell. There are few men in the House of Commons who excite such violent dislike on Liberal and Irish Benches as this pre-eminently disagreeable personality. The dislike is well founded. It is not because Mr. Russell is rancorous, or has strong opinions; it is because n.o.body has any faith in his sincerity. For many years of his life he was a paid teetotal lecturer. Teetotalism is a counsel of perfection, and teetotallers are estimable men, but the paid platform advocate of teetotalism is never a very attractive personality. This tendency to shout, and thump the table, and work up the agony--this eternal pitching of the voice to the scream that will terrify the groundlings, appal the sinner, and bring down the house--all these things produce a style of oratory which is about as disagreeable as anything in the shape of oratory can be. Above all things, it is difficult to take the itinerant lecturer seriously, with his smoking meal at home as a reward for his philanthropic efforts.

The whole thing produces on the mind the impression of a clap-trap performance, with no heart or soul underneath all its ravings, bellowings, and dervish-like contortions.

Mr. Russell has ceased to be a teetotal lecturer, and has become a stump orator for the Unionist party, but the scent of the teetotal platform hangs round him still. He yells, bellows, and twists himself about, puts all his statements with ridiculous exaggeration--altogether, so overdoes the part that it is only the wildest and emptiest Tory who is taken in by him. What spoils the whole thing to my mind is that it is all so evidently artificial--so palpably pumped up. Clapping his hand on his breast, lifting his shaky fingers to Heaven, Mr. Russell is always in a frenzied protestation of honesty, of rugged and una.s.sailable virtue, of bitter vaticination against the wickedness of the rest of mankind. No man could be as honest as he professes to be, and live. The whole thing would be exquisite acting if, underneath all this conscious exaggeration, you did not see the mere political bravo. You turn sometimes, and sicken as though you were at the country fair, and saw the poor raucous-throated charlatan eating fire or swallowing swords to the hideous accompaniments of the big drum and the deafening cymbal.

[Sidenote: Mr. Carson.]

No--Mr. T.W. Russell is the mere play-actor. If you want one of the real actualities in the more sinister side of Irish life, look at and study Mr. Carson. It is he who winds up the debate on the commission of Mr.

Justice Mathew--a debate made memorable by the ablest debating speech Mr. Morley has made in the whole course of his Parliamentary career. I see men talking to Mr. Carson that belong to an opposite side of politics. I confess that I never see him pa.s.s without an internal shudder. Just as the sight of an abbe gave M. Homais, in "Madame Bovary," an unpleasant whiff of the winding-sheet, there is something in the whole appearance of Mr. Carson that conveys to me the dank smell of the prison, and the suffocating sense of the scaffold. Do you remember that strange, terrible day in the "Derniere Incarnation de Vautrin," in which Balzac describes Vautrin's pa.s.sage through the ranks of the gaol-birds and gaol officials among whom he had pa.s.sed so much of his life? Above all, do you recall that final, and supreme, and awful touch in which, addressing consciously the handler of the guillotine, he professes to take him for the chaplain, and, bringing the poor executioner for once to confusion, is addressed with blushing face and trembling lips with the observation, "Non, Monsieur, j'ai d'autres fonctions"?

[Sidenote: Green Street Court-House.]

Mr. Carson, doubtless, has "autres fonctions" than that of Jack Ketch--who has always been so efficient and constant an instrument of Government in Ireland--but I am never able to regard one part of the official machinery by which wronged nations are held down as very different from the other. Above all, I am unable to make much distinction between the final agent in the gaol and those other actors who play with loaded dice the b.l.o.o.d.y game in the criminal court with the partisan judge and the packed jury. Doubtless, happy reader, you have never been in a place called Green Street Court-House, in Dublin. If you ever go to the Irish capital, pay that spot a visit. It will compensate you--especially if you can get some _cicerone_ who will tell you some of the a.s.sociations that cling around the spot. It is in a back street--narrow, squalid, filthy--surrounded by all those signs of crumbling decay which speak more loudly to the visitor to Dublin of the decay and destruction of a nation than fieriest orator or solidest history. And in no part of Dublin have Death's effacing fingers worked with such destructiveness as in all the streets that surround the Green Street Court-House. Palatial mansions are windowless, grimy, hideous--with all the ghastly surroundings of tenement homes of the very poor.

It is in Green Street Court-House that the political offenders in Ireland are tried. Within its narrow and grimy walls I saw many a gallant Irishman, when I was a young reporter, pa.s.s through a foregone and prearranged trial to torture, agony, madness, premature death. I can only think of it as of a shambles, or, perhaps, to put it more strongly, but more accurately, as I think of that wooden framework in which I saw the murderer, Henry Wainwright, hanged by the neck one foggy morning years ago, a gallows. The jury was packed, and the judges on the bench were as much a part of the machinery of prosecution as the Counsel for the Crown. The whole thing was a ghastly farce--as ghastly as the private enquiries that intervene between the Russian rebel and the hunger, and solitude, and death of the fortress of St. Peter and St.

Paul, or the march to Siberia.

[Sidenote: The lawyer and the hangman.]

In all such squalid tragedies, men of the Carson type are a necessary portion of the machinery, as necessary as the informer that betrays--as the warder who locks the door--as the hangman who coils the rope. Mark you, all the forms--all the precautions--all the outward seeming of English law and liberty--are in these Irish courts. The outside is just the same as in any court that meets in the Old Bailey; but it is all the mask and the drapery, behind which the real figures are the foregone verdict, the partisan judge--the prepared cell or constructed gallows.

In the regime of coercion which has just expired, the whole machinery was in motion. The last sentence of the law was not resorted to in political offence, for the days of rebellion in the open field had pa.s.sed. But there were the Resident Magistrates ready to do their master Balfour's bidding, and to send men to imprisonment, in some cases followed by bread-and-water discipline--by stripping of clothes and other atrocities, which made the court of the Resident Magistrate the antechamber to the cell, and the cell the antechamber to the tomb. In all these ghastly and tragic dramas, enacted all over Ireland, Mr.

Carson was the chief figure--self-confident, braggart, deliberate--winding the rope around his victim's neck with all the a.s.sured certainty of the British Empire, Mr. Balfour and the Resident Magistrates behind him.

[Sidenote: Mr. Carson's exterior.]

Nature has stamped on Mr. Carson's exterior the full proclamation of his character and career. There is something about his appearance and manner that somehow or other seems to belong rather to the last than the present century. He is a very up-to-date gentleman in every sense of the word--clothes included. But the long, lantern, black-coloured jaws, the protruding mouth, the cavernous eyes, the high forehead with the hair combed straight back--all seem to suggest that he ought to be wearing the wig, the queue, and the sword of the eighteenth century. He looks as though he had come from consultation, not with Mr. Balfour, but Lord Castlereagh, and as if the work he were engaged in was the sending of the Brothers Sheares to Tyburn, not William O'Brien to Tullamore, and as though he had stopped up o' nights to go over again the list of the Irishmen that could be bought or bullied, or cajoled into the betrayal of Ireland's Parliament.

Look at him as he stands at the box. You can see that he has been bred into almost impudent self-confidence, by those coercion tribunals, in which the best men of Ireland lay at the mercy of a creature like Mr.

Balfour and the meaner creatures who were ready to do Mr. Balfour's work. Mr. Carson, not a year in the House, places his hands on the box, then on his hips, with all the airs of a man who had been in Parliament for a lifetime--attacks Mr. Gladstone, Mr. Morley, Mr. Justice Mathew--three of the highest-minded and ablest men of their time--as though he were at Petty Sessions, with Mr. Cecil Roche dispensing justice. It is an odious sight. It makes even Englishmen shudder. But it has its uses. It throws on to the floor of the House of Commons with all the illumination of those great times, the abysses and pa.s.sions and sinister figures in Ireland's moving tragedy.

CHAPTER VII.

A FORTNIGHT OF QUIET WORK.

[Sidenote: Dulness.]

The House did very good work during the last fortnight in March. This has a corollary more satisfactory to the public than to the journalist; for, whenever business is progressing, it invariably means that the proceedings have been extremely dull. It is a well-known phenomenon of the House of Commons, that the moment there is a chance of anything like a personal scene--though the encounter be of the smallest possible moment and affect nothing beyond two personalities of no particular importance--it is well known that whenever such scene is promised, the benches of the House of Commons prove too small for the huge crowds that rush to them from all parts. Mr. Fowler introduced one of the most revolutionary measures ever brought into the House of Commons--revolutionary I mean, of course, in the good sense--and yet he delivered his new gospel of emanc.i.p.ation to a House that at no period was in the least crowded, and that was never excited. Happy is the country that has no annals, fruitful is the Parliament that has no scenes.

[Sidenote: Uganda again.]

But there were signs of something like storm at certain portions of the sitting on March 20th, for there stood on the paper the Estimate which raised the difficult question of Uganda, and on that question, as everybody knows, there is a yawning gulf between the opinions of Mr.

Labouchere and a number of Radicals below the gangway, and the occupants of the Treasury Bench. Of Mr. Labouchere the saying may be used, which is often employed with regard to weak men--Mr. Labouchere is far from a weak man--he is his own worst enemy. His delight in persiflage, his keen wit--his love of the pose of the bloodless and cynical Boulevardier--have served to conceal from Parliament, and sometimes, perhaps, even from himself, the sincerity of his convictions, and the masculine strength and firmness of his will. Somehow or other, he is least effective when he is most serious. His speech on Uganda, for instance, was admirably put together, and chock full of facts, sound in argument, and in its seriousness quite equal to the magnitude of the issues which it raised. But no man is allowed to play "out of his part"--as the German phrase goes. Labby has accustomed the House to expect amus.e.m.e.nt from him, and it will not be satisfied unless he gives it. When, therefore, he does make a serious speech, the House insists on considering it dull, and rarely lends to him its attentive and serious ear.

[Sidenote: Which is the buffoon?]

Great and yet fatal is the power of oratory. In the course of this same night's debate, Mr. Chamberlain also made a speech. During portions of it he delighted the House, and it was extremely effective as a party speech. In the course of his observations, Mr. Chamberlain, alluding to some jokelet of Labby, declared that a great question like Uganda should not be treated in a spirit of "buffoonery." That observation was rude, and scarcely Parliamentary. But that is not the point--n.o.body expects gentlemanly feeling or speech from Mr. Chamberlain. The point is that the observation could have been applied with much more truth to the speech of Mr. Chamberlain than to that of Labby; for Mr. Chamberlain's speech consisted, for the most part, of nothing better than the merest party hits--the kind of thing that almost anybody could say--that hundreds of journalists nightly write in their party effusions, and for very modest salaries. But the heart and soul of the question of Uganda were not even touched by Mr. Chamberlain. Labby may have been right or wrong; but Labby's was a serious speech with a serious purpose. Mr.

Chamberlain's speech was just a smart bit of party debating. The buffoonery--in the sense of shallowness and emptiness--was really in the speech that everybody took to be grave. The seriousness was in the speech which, amid the delighted applause of the Tories, Mr. Chamberlain denounced as buffoonery.

[Sidenote: The grip of Labby.]

In some respects Mr. Labouchere reminds me of the late Mr. Biggar.

Underneath all his exterior of carelessness, callousness, and flippancy, there lies a very strong, a very tenacious, and a very clear-sighted man. There are times--especially when the small hours of the morning are breaking, and Labby is in his most genial mood--when he is ready to declare that, after all, he is only a Conservative in disguise, and that his Radicalism is merely put on for the purpose of amusing and catching the groundlings. As a matter of fact, Labby is by instinct one of the most thorough Radicals that ever breathed. His Radicalism, it is true, is of the antique pattern. He is an individualist without compromise or concession. Life to him is to the strongest; he has no faith save in the gospel of the survival of the fittest. Equable and even cheery, he does not take a particularly joyous view of human existence. I have heard him speak of the emptiness and futilities of human existence in tones, not of gloom, for he is too much of a philosopher to indulge in regrets, but with a hearty sincerity that would do credit to the Trappist monk who found everything vanity of vanities in a sinful world. Despising honours and dignities, he positively loathes outward show; he is a Radical by instinct and nature. Though one of the wealthiest men in the House of Commons, n.o.body has over known him guilty of one act of ostentation.

Probably he loves power. I have not the smallest doubt that he would enjoy very well being a Cabinet Minister. But for social distinction, for the frippery and display of life, he has a positive dislike. He is like Mr. Biggar also in tenacity.

[Sidenote: And the grit.]

It must have been a disappointment to him--it was certainly a disappointment to his many friends--that he was not a member of the Ministry which he did so much to bring into existence. But the very day the House met after the formation of the Government, Labby was in his old place on the front bench below the gangway as if nothing had occurred--just as ready as ever to take his share in the proceedings of the House of Commons. And every succeeding evening saw him in his place--listening with commendable piety to the exhortations of Holy Writ--given forth in the fine resonant voice of Archdeacon Farrar--ready to seize a point--to take advantage of a situation, eagerly interested in everything that is going on. Some people may regard this as a very common gift. It is nothing of the kind. I know no place in the world which is a severer test of a man's tenacity of purpose, than the House of Commons. I suppose it is because we see the men more publicly there than elsewhere; but I know no place where there are so many ups and downs of human destiny as in the House of Commons--no place, at all events, where one is so struck with the changes, and transformations of human destinies. The man who, in one or two Sessions, is on his legs every moment--who takes a prominent part in every debate--who has become one of the notabilities of the House--in a year or two's time has sunk to a silent dweller apart from all the eagerness and fever of debate, sinks into melancholy and listlessness, and is almost dead before he has given up his Parliamentary life. Staying power is the rarest of all Parliamentary powers; Labby has plenty of staying power.

[Sidenote: Sir Charles Dilke.]

Another figure which the new House of Commons is gradually beginning to understand is Sir Charles Dilke. He is one of the men who seem to have no interest in life outside politics. When one thinks that he has wealth, an immense number of subjects in which he can find instruction and occupation, that he is familiar with the languages, literature, and life of several countries, it is hard to understand how he could have had the endurance to go through the hurricane of abuse and persecution which he has had to encounter in the last seven years. There are traces in his face of the intense mental suffering through which he has pa.s.sed; there are more lines about the eyes than should be in the case of a man who is just fifty. But, otherwise, he positively looks younger than he did when he was a Cabinet Minister. There is colour where there used to be nothing but deadly pallor--freshness where the long and terrible drudgery of official life had left a permanent look of f.a.g and weariness. Sir Charles Dilke has taken up the broken thread of his life just as if nothing had occurred in that long period of exile and suffering. He is never out of his place: attends every sitting as conscientiously as if he were in office and responsible for everything that is going on; and has his eye on subjects as wide apart as the parish councils and Newfoundland, army reform and the occupation of Uganda. It is curious to see, too, how he is regaining that ascendancy over the House of Commons which he exercised formerly. It is an ascendancy not due in the least to oratorical power. Sir Charles Dilke never made a fine sentence or a sonorous peroration in his whole life.

It is that power of acquiring all the facts of the case--of being thoroughly up in all its merits--in short, of knowing his business--which impresses the House of Commons, which, after all, though it may cheer the gibes of a smart and pert debater like Mr. Chamberlain, is most happy when it hears a man talking of something which he understands thoroughly.

[Sidenote: Joe as a Jingo.]

Mr. Chamberlain spoke, as I have said, in the debate. It was a very characteristic speech. I know people think I am prejudiced about this gentleman. Not in the least. I recognize that he has many splendid qualities for political life. They are not qualities which I think highest either in the oratorical or the intellectual sense. He also has staying power, and has gone through seven terrible years. There is the trace of all the bitterness of that struggle in his face--which has lost in these years the almost boyish freshness of expression and outline, which bears in every deep line a mark of the ferocity of the pa.s.sions by which his breast has been torn. He is one of the many men in the House of Commons that give one the impression of being hunted by the worst and most pitiless of all furies--violent personal pa.s.sion--especially for power, for triumph, for revenge. But still, there he is--ready as ever to take part in the struggle--still holding the position he held seven years ago--with no sign of weakening or repentance, though there be plenty of the hunger of baulked revenge.

[Sidenote: The tragedy of politics.]

What a pity it is we can't see some of those great political figures in the nudity of their souls. They must have many a bitter moment--many an hour of dark and hopeless depression--probably far more than other men; for them emphatically life is a conflict and a struggle. And the conflict and the struggle often kill them long before their time. Was there ever anything much more tragic than the cry of M. Ferry for "le grand Repos," as he lay stifling from the weakening heart which the bullet of a political enemy and the slings and arrows of years of calumny and persecution had at last broken? To any man with ordinary sensitiveness of nerves, a political career is a crucifixion--many times repeated. But Mr. Chamberlain, probably, has not the ordinary sensitiveness of nerves. Combative, masterful, with narrow and concentrated purpose, he pursues the game of politics--not without affliction, but with persistent tenacity and a courage that have rarely shown any signs of faltering or failing.

All these things must be granted to Mr. Chamberlain; but when I come to speak of him intellectually, I cannot see anything in him but a very perky, smart, glib-tongued "drummer," who is able to pick up the crumbs of knowledge with extraordinary rapidity, and give them forth again with considerable dexterity. He speech on Uganda, so far as its thought and its phraseology were concerned, was on the level of the profound utterances with which Sir Ashmead Bartlett tickles and infuriates the groundlings of provincial audiences. But it took the House--at least, it took the Tories; and, after all, what party orators who have not the responsibilities of office have to do, is to get cheers and embarra.s.s the Government.

[Sidenote: Another hymn to the G.O.M.]

The reader must not be either exasperated or bored if he finds continuous mention of the G.O.M. in these pages, for he is, to a great extent, the House of Commons. I remember hearing Mrs. Gladstone once use of her distinguished husband a phrase which gave tersely and simply a complete idea of a side of his character. It was just before his historic visit to Birmingham, and there was anxiety as to the vast size of the great Bingley Hall in which it had been decided he was to speak.

"He has such heart," said Mrs. Gladstone of her husband--meaning that whatever was the size of the hall, he would do his best, at whatever cost, to fill it with his voice. It is this mighty heart of his which carries him through everything, and which largely accounts for the hold he has over the imaginations and hearts of the ma.s.ses. Well, one can see proof of this in his conduct whenever he is leader of a Government.

Other Prime Ministers and leaders of the House are only too willing to leave as much of the work as possible to their subordinates. Disraeli used to lie in Oriental calm during the greater part of every sitting, leaving all his lieutenants to do the drudgery while he dosed and posed.

Not so Gladstone. He is almost literally always on his legs. The biggest bore--the rudest neophyte--the most gulping obstructive is certain of an answer from him--courteous, considerate, and ample. No debate, however small, is too petty for his notice and intervention; in short, he tries to do not only his own work, but everybody else's.

[Sidenote: His justification.]

I have once or twice gently suggested that I thought the G.O.M. might leave a little more to his subordinates, and spare that frame and mind which bears the Atlantean burden of the Home Rule struggle. But Mr.

Gladstone is able to unexpectedly justify himself when his friends are crying out in remonstrance; and it is, too, one of the peculiarities of this extraordinary portent of a man--extraordinary physically as much as mentally--that the more he works, the fresher and happier he seems to be. If you see him peculiarly light-hearted; if he be gesticulating with broad and generous sweep on the Treasury Bench; if he be whispering to Sir William Harcourt, and then talking almost aloud to Mr. John Morley--above all, if he be ready to meet all comers, you may be quite sure that he has just delivered a couple of rattling and lengthy speeches, in which, with his deadly skill and perfect temper, he has devastated the whole army of false arguments with which his opponents have invaded him. So, for instance, it was on March 28th. It was noticed that he was not in the House for some hours during the discussion of the Vote on Account. But, as evening approached, there he was in his place--fresh, smiling, happy, every limb moving with all the alertness of auroral youth. In the interval between his first appearance in the House and then later, he had delivered two lengthy speeches to two deputations of deadly foes; but he came down after this exertion just as if he had been playing a game of cricket, and had taken enough physical exercise to bring blitheness to his spirits and alacrity to his limbs.

[Sidenote: His unending progress.]

And then the best of it all is that Mr. Gladstone justifies his speech-making by improving every hour. It would scarcely seem credible that a man with more than half-a-century of speech-making and triumphs behind him would have been capable of making any change, and especially of making a change for the better. But the peculiarity of Mr. Gladstone is that even as a speaker he grows and improves every day. I have been watching him closely now for some sixteen years in the House of Commons, and I thought that it was impossible for him to ever reach again the triumphs of some of his utterances. I have heard people say, too, that they felt it pathetic to hear him deliver his speech on the introduction of the Home Rule Bill, and to remember the vigour with which his utterances on that occasion stood in such a contrast. This was superficial and false criticism. It is quite true that the old resonance of the voice is not there, and it is true that now and then he shows signs of physical fatigue, and that recently after his cold there were some days when his voice was little better than a very distinct, but also a very pathetic, whisper. But there is another side. Age has mellowed his style, so that now he can speak on even the most contentious subject with a gentleness and a freedom from anything like venom--with an elevation of tone--that make it almost impossible for even his bitterest opponent to listen to him without delight and, for the moment at least, with a certain degree of a.s.sent. If anybody really wishes to find out what const.i.tutes the highest and most effective form of House of Commons' eloquence, he should spend his days in listening to Mr. Gladstone in the most recent style he has adopted in the House of Commons. And the lessons to be derived are that House of Commons'

eloquence should be easy, genial in temper, reserved in force--in short, that it should put things with the agreeable candour, and pa.s.sionlessness want of exaggeration which characterise well-bred conversation.

[Sidenote: To the slaughter.]

A foredoomed sheep could not have been brought more unwillingly to the slaughter than was Mr. Balfour to the debate on the Vote of Censure. He had nothing new to say, and unfortunately he felt that as keenly as anybody else. Every single topic with which he had to deal had been discussed already, until people were positively sick of them--in short, poor Mr. Balfour was in the position of having to serve up to the House a dish that had been boiled and grilled and stewed, and yet stewed again, until the gorge rose at it in revolt and disgust. The late Chief Secretary has the susceptibility of all nervous temperaments. The men are indeed few who have equal power with all kinds of audiences--with an audience that is friendly and that is hostile. Still more rare is it to find a man who can face an audience even worse than a downright hostile one, and that is an audience which is indifferent, There are very few men I have known in my Parliamentary experience who could do it.