PARLIAMENTARY CANDIDATES.
The best time to study at leisure the habits and manners of the candidate for Parliament is shortly before an anticipated dissolution. Even as once in a series of years the astronomer furbishes up his telescope and observes the transit of a planet across the surface of the sun, so, as a General Election approaches, and when, consequently, candidates are numerous, the curious observer of human nature in all its wayward manifestations hastens to some place where experience has taught him candidates will be found gathered together.
No spot is so favourable for an investigation of this kind as the scene of a contested by-election which takes place when a General Election is at no great distance. The investigation cannot with safety be postponed until a General Election. Then all is hurry and confusion. There is a fight in every constituency. No man can help his neighbour. Everybody is on his own war-path. There is, therefore, no concentration of candidates. They are scattered up and down the land and so flurried that it is almost impossible to observe their humours. To appreciate a candidate properly takes time—a great deal of time. But at a by-election shortly before a General Election candidates are to be found in shoals—genuine candidates who have all gone through the proud process of selection, who enjoy a status peculiarly their own, who have a part to play, and play it with spirit. They hurry to the contest from afar. With what readiness do they proffer their services! Like sea-birds, they come screaming and flapping their wings, and settle down at the same hotel, which for days resounds with their cheerful cries. This is quite the best place to observe them. In the smoking-room at night, after their oratorical labours are over, they are very great, very proud, very happy. Their talk is of their constituencies, as they are pleased to designate the districts which have chosen them. They retail the anecdotes with which they are wont to convulse their audiences. The stories are familiar, but not as they tell them.
What a contrast do these bright, hopeful creatures present to their taciturn, cynical companions!—sombre figures, who sit sucking at their pipes, the actual members of Parliament, who, far from flying joyfully to the field of battle, as the candidate has just done, have been driven there, grunting and grumbling, by the angry crack of the party Whips.
As you listen to the frank, exuberant speech of the candidate, recounting the points he has made during the day, the conviction he has brought home to the waverer, the dilemmas he has thrust upon his opponents, the poor show made by somebody who thought to embarrass him by an interruption, and compare it with the gloomy asides of the member, who, however brave a figure he may have made upon the platform an hour or two before, seems now painfully alive to the inherent weakness of his cause, doubtful of victory anywhere, certain of defeat where he is, it is almost impossible to believe that once upon a time the member was himself a candidate.
Confidence is the badge of the tribe of candidates. How it is born, where it is bred, on what it feeds save vanity, we cannot tell. Figures cannot shake it. It is too majestical to be affected by ridicule. From scorn and brutal jest it turns contemptuously away. When a collision occurs between the boundless confidence of the candidate and the bottomless world-wearied scepticism of the member, it is interesting to note how wholly ineffectual is the latter to disturb, even for a moment, the beautifully poised equilibrium of the former.
‘I always forget the name of the place you are trying for,’ I lately overheard a member, during an election contest, observe at breakfast-time to a candidate.
‘The Slowcombe Division of Mudfordshire,’ replied the candidate.
‘Oh!’ said the member, with a groan, as he savagely chipped at his egg; ‘I thought they had given you something better than that.’
‘I wish for nothing better,’ said the candidate; ‘I’m safe enough.’
And so saying, he rose from the table, and, taking his hat, went off on to the Parade, where he was soon joined by another candidate, and the pair whiled away a couple of hours in delightful converse.
The politics of candidates are fierce things. In this respect the British commodity differs materially from the American. Mr. Lowell introduces the American candidate as saying:
‘Ez to my princerples, I glory
In hevin’ nothin’ o’ the sort.
I ain’t a Whig, I ain’t a Tory—
I’m just a Canderdate, in short.’
Our candidates—good, excellent fellows that they are—are not a bit like Mr. Lowell’s. They have as many principles as a fish has bones; their vision is clear. The following expressions are constantly on their lips:
‘I can see no difficulty about it—I have explained it all to my people over and over again, and no more can they. I and my constituency are entirely at one in the matter. I must say our leaders are very disappointing My people are getting a little dissatisfied, though, of course, I tell them they must not expect everything at once, and I think they see that’—and so on for an hour or two.
There is nothing a candidate hates more than a practical difficulty; he feels discomfited by it. It destroys the harmony of his periods, the sweep of his generalizations. All such things he dismisses as detail, ‘which need not now detain us, gentlemen.’
Herein, perhaps, consists the true happiness of the candidate. He is the embodied Hope of his party. He will grapple with facts—when he becomes one. In the meantime he floats about, cheered wherever he goes. It is an intoxicating life.
Sometimes when candidates and members meet together—not to aid their common cause at a by-election, but for the purpose of discussing the prospects of their party—the situation gets a little accentuated. Candidates have a habit of glaring around them, which is distinctly unpleasant; whilst some members sniff the air, as if that were a recognised method of indicating the presence of candidates. Altogether, the less candidates and members see of one another, the better. They are antipathetic; they harm one another.
The self-satisfaction and hopefulness of the candidate, his noisy torrent of talk ere he is dashed below, his untiring enunciation of platitudes and fallacies, his abuse of opponents, the weight of whose arm he has never felt—all these things, harmless as they are, far from displeasing in themselves, deepen the gloom of the sitting member, into whose soul the iron of St. Stephen’s has entered, relax the tension of his mind, unnerve his vigour, corrode his faith; whilst, on the other hand, his demeanour and utterances, his brutal recognition of failure on his own side, and of merit in his opponent’s, are puzzling to the candidate.
The leaders of parties will do well if they keep members and candidates apart. The latter should always herd together.
To do candidates justice, they are far more amusing, and much better worth studying, than members.