A FORTNIGHT OF QUIET WORK.
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 emancipation 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.
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 amusement 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.
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—nobody 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.
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, nobody 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.
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.
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 passed; 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 fag 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.
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 passions 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 passion—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.
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 embarrass the Government.
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 masses. 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.
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.
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 assent. If anybody really wishes to find out what constitutes 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 passionlessness want of exaggeration which characterise well-bred conversation.
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.
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 associate, was also able to speak in any circumstances 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.
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.
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 assembly. 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 assembly 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 massive 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.
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 circumstances 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 assembly 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 passion, 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.
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 glass 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 glass 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 glass 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 glass that stood before him, and handed it across the table. With a bow, and a delighted and delightful smile, the Old Man took the glass, 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.
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 passed. 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.
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.