Sketches in the House Part 7

[Sidenote: A memory of Parnell.]

Mr. Parnell was one. I have seen him speak quite comfortably to an audience which consisted of himself, Mr. Biggar, the Minister in attendance, and the Speaker of the House--in all, four, including himself. Indeed, he often said to me that he rather liked to have such an audience. Speaking was not easy or agreeable to him, and his sole purpose for many years in speaking at all was to consume so much time.

Parnell was a man who always found it rather hard to concentrate his mind on any subject unless he was alone and in silence. This was perhaps one of the many reasons why he kept out of the House of Commons as much as he could. Anything like noise or disturbance around him seemed to destroy his power of thinking. For instance, when he was being cross-examined by Sir Richard Webster in the course of the Forgeries Commission, his friends trembled one day because, looking at his face, with its puzzled, far-away look, they knew that he was in one of those moods of abstraction, during which he was scarcely accountable for what he said. And sure enough he made on that day the appalling statement that he had used certain language for the purpose of deceiving the House of Commons. He said to me that he liked to speak in an empty House because then he had time to collect his thoughts. Joe Biggar, his a.s.sociate, was also able to speak in any circ.u.mstances with exactly the same ease of spirit. To him, speaking was but a means to an end, and whether people listened to him or not--stopped to hang on his words or fled before his grating voice and Ulster accent--it was all one to him.

Two other men have the power of speaking always with the same interest and self-possession. These are Sir Charles Dilke and Mr. O'Connor Power.

[Sidenote: The Sensitiveness of Mr. Balfour.]

But Mr. Balfour is like none of these men. He requires the glow of a good audience--of a cheering party--of the certainty of success in the division lobby--to bring out his best powers. The splendid, rattling, self-confident debater of the coercion period now no longer exists, and Mr. Balfour has positively gone back to the clumsiness, stammering, and ineffectiveness of the pre-historic period of his life before he had taken up the Chief Secretaryship. That was bad enough; but what is worse is that the House is beginning to feel it. If you lose confidence in yourself, the world is certain to pretty soon follow your example. And so it is now with Mr. Balfour, for when he stood up to speak on March 27th there was the sight--which must have made his soul sink to even profounder depths of depression--of members leaving the House in troops and rushing to the lobby, the library, or the smoke-room, rather than listen to a debater whose rise a few months ago would have meant a general and excited incursion of everybody that could hear. Starting thus, Mr. Balfour made the worst of a bad case, his speech was a failure, and as the American would put it, a fizzle; in short, a ghastly business.

[Sidenote: The G.O.M.'s outburst.]

It was in the midst of this debate that Mr. Gladstone made his magnificent and unexpected outburst. He had been paying attention to the debate--but very quietly, and not at all in a way that suggested an idea of intervening in it. It was, too, about nine o'clock when Mr. Gladstone stood up, and anybody acquainted with the House of Commons knows that nine o'clock is in the very crisis of that dinner hour which nightly makes the House of Commons a waste and a wilderness. Nor, indeed, was there much in the opening sentences that seemed to indicate the fact--the great fact--that the House of Commons was about to listen to one of the most extraordinary manifestations of eloquence it has ever heard during its centuries of existence. For the Old Man was in his most benignant mood. He spoke of his opponents and their case in sorrow rather than in anger. Evidently, the House was about to listen to one of those delightful little addresses--half paternal, half pedagogic--to which it has become accustomed in recent years, since Mr. Gladstone threw off the fierce, warring spirit of earlier days, and became the honey-tongued Nestor of the a.s.sembly. But, as time went on, the House began to perceive that the Old Man was in splendid fighting trim, and seized with one of those moments of positive inspiration, in which he carries away an a.s.sembly as though it were floated into Dreamland on the waves of a mighty magician's magic power. Smash after smash came upon the Tory case--as though you could see the whole edifice crumbling before your eyes, as though it were an earthquake slitting the rocks and shaking the solid earth. And, all the time, no loss whatever of the ma.s.sive calm, the imperturbable good-humour, the deadly politeness which the commercial gentlemen from Ulster have also found can kill more effectively than the shout of rhetoric, or the jargon of faction, or the raucous throat of bigotry.

[Sidenote: In the Empyrean.]

At last the Old Man had come to a contrast between the action of the Tory Government of 1885 and the Liberal with regard to the treatment of prisoners in Ireland. The history of that period is one upon which Mr.

Gladstone is now able to speak without feeling; but he dragged out from that period and its hidden recesses the whole story of the negotiations between Parnell and Lord Carnarvon, and all the other circ.u.mstances that make that one of the most remarkable epochs in the history of English parties. He was now sweeping all before him. This Lord Randolph felt, and it was almost timorously he rose to make an interruption. The Old Man courteously gave way; but it was only to jump up again and pour on his young opponent a tide of ridicule and answer which overwhelmed him.

Higher and higher he soared with every succeeding moment, and stranger and more impressive became the aspect of the House. There is nothing which becomes that a.s.sembly so much as those moments of exaltation during which it is under the absolute spell of some great master of its emotions. Then a death-like stillness falls upon it--you can almost hear the same heavy-drawn sighs as those that in a Paris opera-house tell of all the pa.s.sion, the flood of memory and regret, and the dreams which are evoked by the voice of a Marguerite before her final expiation--of a Juliet before her final immolation. Laughter and cheers there were in abundance during this portion of Mr. Gladstone's speech; but the general demeanour was one of deadly stillness and rapt emotion--the stillness one can imagine on that Easter morning when De Quincey went forth and washed the fever from his forehead with the dew of early day.

[Sidenote: An episode.]

And in the midst of it all there came one of the most pathetic little episodes I have seen in the House of Commons of recent years. Mr.

Gladstone has somewhat changed his habits in one respect. There was a time when he rarely came to the House to deliver a great speech without a little bottle--such as one sees containing pomade on the dressing-table of the thin-haired bachelor. Of late, the pomade-bottle has disappeared. The G.O.M. is now content to take the ordinary gla.s.s of water. It is very seldom that he requires even that amount of sustenance during his great speeches. However, he had been doing a good deal that day--he had already made a long speech to his supporters in the Foreign Office--and he required a gla.s.s of water. He called out for it, and, at once, there was a rush from the Treasury Bench to the lobby outside.

But, before this could be done, the very pleasant little episode to which I have alluded took place. There stood opposite Mr. Jackson, the late Chief Secretary, an untouched gla.s.s of water. When he heard the cry of the Old Man, Mr. Jackson--who has plenty of Yorkshire kindliness, as well as Yorkshire bluffness--at once took up the gla.s.s that stood before him, and handed it across the table. With a bow, and a delighted and delightful smile, the Old Man took the gla.s.s, and drank almost greedily. And then, turning to his opponents, he said, "I wish the right hon. gentleman who uses me so kindly, were as willing to take from my fountainhead as I am from his." The grace, the courtesy, the readiness with which it was said, took the House by storm, and it was hard to say whether the delighted laughter and cheers came in greater volume from the Tory or the Liberal side of the House.

[Sidenote: The peroration.]

And Mr, Gladstone's power increased with his power over the House. It looked as if you were watching some mighty monarch of the air that rises and rises higher, higher into the empyrean on slow-poised, even almost motionless, wing. Leaving behind the narrow issues of the particular motion before the House, Mr. Gladstone entered on a rapid survey of the mournful and touching relations between English officialism and Irish National sentiment. From the dead past, he called up the touching, beautiful, and sympathetic figure of Thomas Drummond, and all his efforts to reconcile the administration of the law with the rights and sentiments of the Irish people. The time for cheering had pa.s.sed. All anybody could do was to listen in spellbound silence, as sonorous sentence rolled after sonorous sentence. And then cams the end, in a softer and lower key. It was a direct personal allusion to Mr. Morley.

It was the whole weight of the Government and of its head thrown to the side of the Chief Secretary in the new policy in Ireland. "We claim,"

said Mr. Gladstone, "to be partakers of his responsibility, we appeal to the judgment of the House of Commons, and we have no other desire except to share his fate." And then a hurricane of applause.

[Sidenote: A first experience.]

It was impossible not to feel sympathy for Lord Randolph Churchill in the difficult task of following such a speech. The first thing he had to do was to bear testimony to the extraordinary effect the speech had made upon the House of Commons. It was, he said, a speech "impressive and entrancing"--two most happily-chosen epithets to describe it. And then Lord Randolph told a little bit of personal history which was interesting. In all his Parliamentary career, this was the first time he had been called upon to immediately follow a speech of Mr. Gladstone. He would willingly have abandoned the opportunity, for it was a speech which no man in the House of Commons was capable of confronting. After it, everything else was bound to fall flat, dull, and unimpressive. Lord Randolph had the misfortune of having prepared a speech of considerable length--going into the dead past, forgotten things, and found himself--almost for the first time in his life--incapable of holding the attention of the House of Commons. Then the division followed, with 47 of a majority--and loud ringing cheers came from the friends of the Government--and especially from the Irish benches--represented in the division by every single member of the party, with the exception of one, absent on sick leave.

CHAPTER VIII.

THE CALM BEFORE THE STORM.

[Sidenote: Still holiday-making.]

The Easter holidays were slow in coming to an end. People who were fortunate enough to obtain pairs, lingered by the seaside or in the country house. Others were busy with the work which the recess now imposes as much as in the most feverish Parliamentary times on leading political men. Mr. Balfour was away in Ireland, among the Orangemen of Ulster and the Loyalists of Dublin; Lord Randolph Churchill was at Liverpool making silly and violent speeches; Mr. Chamberlain was _colloguing_--to use an excellent Irish phrase--with the publicans of the Midlands. The Irish were especially conspicuous by the smallness of their attendance. They had been months away from business, wives, children, and naturally they were anxious to take advantage of the brief breathing s.p.a.ce which was left to them before that time came when they could not leave Westminster for a moment in the weeks during which the Home Rule Bill was in Committee!

[Sidenote: Return of the G.O.M.]

Mr. Gladstone, of course, was in his place. Down in Brighton, in a pot-hat, antediluvian in age and shape, he had been courting the breeze of the sea under the hospitable wing of Mr. Armitstead; escaping from the crowds of hero-worshippers, and attending divine service sometimes twice in the same day. He had not been idle in his temporary retreat.

When the day comes to record his doings before the accurate scales of Omnipotent and Omniscient Justice, he will stand out from all other men in the absolute use of every available second of his days of life. It was clear that during his retreat, as during his hours of official work, his mind had been busy on the same absorbing and engrossing subject. He was armed with a considerable ma.n.u.script, and had evidently thought out his sentences, his arguments, his statements of facts with intense devotion and thought.

This is one of the things which distinguishes him from other public men of his time. There are men I wot of--and not very big men either--who are nothing without their audience. They deem their dignity abused if there be not the crowded bench, the cheering friends, the prominent and ostentatious place. Not so Mr. Gladstone. Perhaps it is the splendid robustness of his nerves, perhaps the absorption in his subject to the forgetfulness of himself; whatever it is, he faces this small, _distrait_, perhaps even depressed, audience with the same zest as though he were once again before that splendid gathering which met his eyes on the memorable night when he brought in his Home Rule Bill. Who but he could fail to have noticed the contrast, and noticing, who but he could remain so loftily un.o.bservant and unimpressed?

[Sidenote: In splendid form.]

But then Mr. Gladstone has too much of that splendid oratorical instinct not to fashion and shape his speech to the change in the surroundings.

He has an impressionability--not to panic, not to depression, not to wounded vanity, but to the appropriateness and the demands of an environment, which is something miraculous. I have already remarked, that the infinite variety of his oratory is Shakespearian in its completeness and abundance. The speech on April 6th was an additional proof of this. Comparisons were naturally made between this speech and the speech by which he introduced the Bill, and everybody who was competent thought that the second speech was the finer and better of the two. Stories have trickled through to the public of the anxieties and worries with which Mr. Gladstone was confronted--not from the Irish side--on the very night before he had to bring forth this prodigious piece of legislative work. It is these small worries that to many Statesmen are the grimmest realities and the most momentous and effective events of their inner lives. It is reported that one of the few sleepless nights which have ever disturbed the splendidly even and sane and healthy tenor of this tempestuous and incessantly active life, was the night before the introduction of the Home Rule Bill. There are points to be finally settled--clauses to be ultimately fixed--phrases to be polished or pared at the eleventh hour in all human affairs. Measures finally settled and fixed for weeks before the last hour exist--like all perfection--only in the brains and pages of dramatists and novelists.

[Sidenote: Sunburnt, vigorous, self-possessed.]

It was not unnatural under these circ.u.mstances that when Mr. Gladstone made his speech introducing the Home Rule Bill there should have been on his cheek a pallor deadlier even than that which usually sits upon his brow. That pallor, by the way, I heard recently, has been characteristic of him from his earliest years. A schoolfellow from that far-off and almost pre-historic time when our Grand Old Man was a thin, slim, introspective and prematurely serious boy at Eton, tells to-day that the recollection he has of the young Gladstone is of a slight figure, never running, but always walking with a fast step, with earnest black eyes, and with a pallid face--the ivory pallor, be it observed, not of delicacy, but of robustness. Still there was on that Home Rule night, a pallor that had the deadlier hue of sleeplessness, worry, over-anxiety--the hideous burden of a great, weighty, and complex speech to deliver.

On April 6th all this was gone. The fresh, youthful, cheerful man who stood up in his place had drunk deep of the breezes that sweep The Front at Brighton; his cheeks were burned by the blaze of a splendid spring sun; in the budding, blossoming vital air around him he had taken some of that eternal hopefulness with which the new birth of nature in the spring inspires every human being with any freshness of sensation left. Perchance from his windows in the Lion Mansion he had looked in the evening over the broad expanse of frontierless waters, and risen to the exaltation of the chainless unrest, the tireless and eternal youth, the illimitable breadth of the sea. At all events, he stood before the House visibly younger, brighter, serener than for many a day.

The voice bore traces of the transformation of body and soul which this short visit to the sea has produced. It was soft, mellow, strong. There were none of the descents to pathetic and inaudible whispers which occasionally in the hours of f.a.g and fatigue have painfully impressed the sympathetic hearer. As Mr. Gladstone subdued himself to the temper of the House, the House accommodated itself to the tone of Mr.

Gladstone. I have heard his speech on the second reading described as a pleasant, delightful, historical lecture. Certainly, no stranger coming to the House would have imagined that these sentences, flowing in a beautiful, even stream, dealt with one of the conflicts of our time which excite the fiercest pa.s.sion and bitterest blood. It is this calmness that is now part of Mr. Gladstone's strength. It soothes and kills at the same time.

[Sidenote: The Nestor-patriot.]

The evening was soft and sunny, the air of the House subdued, and the absence of anything like large numbers prevented outbursts of party pa.s.sion. And yet all this seemed to heighten the effectiveness of the scene and the speech. Once again one had to think of Mr. Gladstone--as posterity will think of him at this splendid epoch of his career--not as the party politician, giving and receiving hard blows--riding a whirlwind of pa.s.sion--facing a hurricane of hate--but as the Nestor-patriot of his country, telling all parties alike the gospel that will lead to peace, prosperity, and contentment. The Tories, doubtless, see none of this; but even they cannot help falling into the mood of the hour, and under the fascination of the speaker. Now and then they interrupt, but, as a rule, they sit in respectful and awed silence.

Whenever they do venture on interruption, the old lion shows that he is still in possession of all that power for a sudden and deadly spring, which lies concealed under the easy and tranquil strength of the hour.

He happens to mention the case of Norway and Sweden as one of the cases which confirm his contention that autonomy produces friendly relations.

He has to confess, that in this case some difficulties have arisen; there is a faint Tory cheer. At once--but with gentle good humour--with an indulgent smile--Mr. Gladstone remarks that he doesn't wonder that the Tories clutch at the smallest straw that helps them to eke out a case against autonomy, and then he proceeds to show that even the case of Norway and Sweden doesn't help them a bit.

[Sidenote: A vivid gesture.]

There is another little touch which will bring out the perfection and beauty of the speech. One of the things which tell the experienced observer that Mr. Gladstone is in his best form, is the exuberance and freedom of his gesture. Whenever he feels a thorough grip of himself and of the House, he lets himself go in a way upon which he does not venture in quieter moods. He was dealing with the question of our colonies and of the difference which had been made in them by the concession of Home Rule. It was while thus engaged that he made one of those eloquent little asides, which bring home to the mind the vastness and extent of this great career. Nearly sixty years ago--just think of it, nearly sixty years ago--he had been a.s.sociated with the Government of the Colonies--referring to the time when Lord Aberdeen was his chief, and he held office for the first time as an Under-Secretary. And then he made from Lord Aberdeen a quotation in which the Colonial Secretary calls delighted attention to the fact that Heligoland is tranquil--the single one of all the dependencies of the Crown of which that could be said at that moment.

But it was not at this point that the significant gesture came in, to which I have alluded. Mr. Gladstone had another doc.u.ment to read. By the way--even over the distance which divides the Treasury Bench from the Opposition Benches below the gangway, where we Irishry sit--I could see that the doc.u.ment was written in that enormous hand-writing, which is necessary nowadays when the sight of the Prime Minister is not equal to the undimmed l.u.s.tre of the eagle eye. This letter, said Mr. Gladstone, was not addressed to him. It was not addressed to a Home Ruler. By this time, curiosity was keenly excited. But Mr. Gladstone--smiling, holding the House in firm attention and rapt admiration--was determined to play with the subject a little longer. The letter was not directed even to the Commoner. It was directed to a "Peer;" and as he uttered this sacred word, with a delicious affectation of reverence, he raised the index finger of his hand to high heaven, as though only a reference to a region so exalted could sufficiently manifest the elevation of the personage who had been the recipient of the letter. The House saw the point, and laughed in great delight. It is on occasions like these that one sees the immense artistic power which lies under all the seriousness and gravity of Mr. Gladstone--the thorough exuberance of vitality which marks the splendid sanity of his healthy nature.

[Sidenote: Mr. Birrell.]

I always tremble when I see a literary man, and especially a literary man with a high reputation, rise to address the House of Commons. The sh.o.r.es of that cruel a.s.sembly are strewn with the wrecks of literary reputations. It was, therefore, not without trepidation that I saw Mr.

Augustin Birrell--one of the very finest writers of our time--succeed in catching the Speaker's eye. My misgivings were entirely unnecessary.

With perfect ease and self-possession--at the same time with the modesty of real genuine ability--Mr. Birrell made one of the happiest and best speeches of the debate. Now and then, the epigram was perhaps a little too polished--the wit perhaps a trifle too subtle for the House of Commons. But careful preparation always involves this; and every man must prepare until he is able to think more clearly on his legs than sitting down. It was just the kind of speech which was wanted at a moment when the general air is rent with the rhodomontade and tomfoolery of Ulster. Applying to these wild harangues the destructively quiet wit of _obiter dicta_, Mr. Birrell made the Orangemen look very foolish and utterly ridiculous. Mr, Gladstone was one of Mr. Birrell's most attentive and cordial hearers. Mr. Birrell is going to do great things in the House of Commons.

[Sidenote: In penal servitude.]

The keen, playful, and penetrating wit of Mr. Birrell did not do anything for Mr. Dunbar Barton. Mr. Barton is--as he properly boasted--the descendant of some of that good Protestant stock that, in the days of the fight over the destruction of the Irish Parliament, stood by the liberties of Ireland. He is a nephew of Mr. Plunket--he inherits the talent which is traditional in the Plunket family, and is said not to be without some of the national spirit that still hides itself in odd nooks and corners of estranged Irish minds. But he has none of the saving grace of his country or family. A solemn voice that seems to come from the depths of some divine despair, and from the recesses of his innermost organs, together with a certain funereal aspect in the close-shaven face, gives him an air that suggests the cypress and the cemetery. But with deadly want of humour, he spoke of the possibility of his spending the remainder of a blameless life in penal servitude, and was deeply wounded when the uproarious and irreverent House refused to take the possibility seriously.

[Sidenote: Mr. Stansfeld.]

The following Friday was made memorable by a fine speech from Mr.

Stansfeld. Full of activity, with undimmed eye, with every mental faculty keen and alert, with every lofty and generous aspiration as fresh as in the days of hot and perilous youth, Mr. Stansfeld yet appears something of a survival in the House of Commons. His appearance, his style of speech, even the framework of his thought, seem to belong to another--in some respects a finer and more pa.s.sionate period than our own. The long hair combed straight back--the strong aquiline nose--the heavy-lined and sensitive mouth--the subdued tenderness and wrath of the eyes--even the somewhat antique cut of the clothes--suggest the days when the storm and stress of the youthful century were still in men's souls, and were driving them to conspiracy, to prison, to scaffold, to barricades, to b.l.o.o.d.y fields. There is also a deliberation in the delivery--a sonorousness in the phraseology--that has something of a bygone day. But all this adds to the impressiveness of the address. The fervour is all there, the unalterable conviction, the lofty purpose.

There is reason for the warm note of welcome which comes from the Irish benches; for this man--perhaps disappointed--perchance not too well used--stands up to defend his principles with the same utter forgetfulness of self which belongs only to the finest and the truest natures.

[Sidenote: Commercial culture.]