AS CHAPLAIN TO MR SPEAKER
Some Reminiscences of Parliament.
By F. W. Farrar, D.D., Dean of Canterbury.
I knew something about the Houses of Legislature, and had been present at not a few debates, long before I had the high honour of being a Chaplain to the Speaker. Many years ago, when I was a master at Harrow, I had the privilege of knowing the late Lord Charles Russell, whose son, Mr. G. W. E. Russell, was once in my form, and who always treated me with conspicuous kindness. Lord Charles was for a long time the highly popular Serjeant-at-Arms of the House of Commons. There are only two persons who enjoy the privilege of having "private galleries" at their disposal at the end of the House—the Speaker and the Serjeant-at-Arms. Whenever there was likely to be a very important debate, which excited keen public interest, Lord Charles used to offer us two seats in his gallery. I availed myself of this exceptional privilege as often as I could, and in that way I have been present at some of those deeply interesting political and oratorical displays which may almost be said to have become things of the past. The speaking of the most distinguished leaders in the House of Commons is still manly, forcible, and lucid: but I do not think that I am only speaking as a laudator temporis acti, Me puero, when I say that never—or, at any rate, only on the rarest occasions—do we now hear those flashing interchanges of wit, or those utterances of sustained, impassioned, and lofty eloquence which were by no means unfrequent thirty years ago. It may be that the pressure of affairs is greater, owing to the immense and ever-extending interests of the British Empire; or that there is not, at the present moment, the intense political excitement which once prevailed; or that the prevalent taste in such matters is different:—but, whatever be the reason, it would, I think, be generally admitted that, in nine cases out of ten, debates in these days are more unexciting and more severely practical than once they were, so that speeches full of "thoughts that breathe and words that burn" are now rarely delivered before our assembled senators. For that reason the debates are far less interesting and memorable than they were in former times.
There are still many speakers in the House to whom all must listen with pleasure and admiration. Sir W. Harcourt, Sir Henry Fowler, Mr. Morley, Mr. Goschen, Mr. Balfour, always set forth their arguments with force and dignity; and it would, I think, be generally conceded that few speakers could surpass Mr. Chamberlain in the skill and fearless forthrightness with which he enunciates his views. There are still a few debaters who might bear comparison with Sir Robert Peel in the dignified enunciation of views full of sober wisdom; or with Mr. Cobden in his "unadorned eloquence"; or with Lord Palmerston in his unstudied and lively geniality:—but since first Mr. Bright, and then Mr. Gladstone, stepped out of the political arena, anyone who could be called "a great orator" has become very uncommon in Parliamentary debates. No orator in the House has acquired, or perhaps even aims at, the fame for eloquence obtained in the political arena by men like O'Connell, Sheil, Lord Macaulay, Sir Edward Bulwer, Mr. Disraeli, John Bright, Lord Sherbrooke when he was at his best, or William Ewart Gladstone. We do not now have speeches which, like that of Lord Brougham in the House of Lords on the Reform Bill, occupied six hours in the delivery; or, like the famous "Civis Romanus sum" speech of Lord Palmerston in the Don Pacifico debate, are prolonged "from the dusk of a summer evening to the dawn of a summer day."
(Photo: Mendelssohn, Pembridge Cres.)
MR. H. D. ERSKINE.
(The Present Serjeant-at-Arms.)
(From an Engraving by Joseph Brown.)
LORD CHARLES RUSSELL.
(Late Serjeant-at-Arms.)
PRAYERS IN THE HOUSE OF COMMONS.
(Conducted by Canon Wilberforce, the Present Chaplain.)
This may partly be due to the fact that we have not, for many years, passed through political crises in which the hearts of men have been so powerfully stirred as they were in the times of the first Reform Bill; or in the early struggles of the Irish party; or in the debates on the abolition of the corn laws; or during the thrilling incidents of the Crimean War. In these days speeches are shorter, less formal, less ornate, less impassioned. But if the passions of men should again be stirred as they were by those anxious issues, doubtless the same stormy eloquence might once more be evoked. In those days the hearts of millions beat like the heart of one man. One or two historic incidents may serve to illustrate the intensity of national feeling.
While the great issues at stake in the first Reform Bill were filling the thoughts of all, only one Bishop, Dr. Philpotts of Exeter, voted (I believe) in favour of the Bill. The consequence was that the whole bench of Bishops was for a time overwhelmed with national hatred. The late genial and kind-hearted Duke of Buccleuch told me that he had been severely hurt in an attempt to protect the Bishops from popular insult as they came out of the House of Lords. The Bishops had to sign a common protest that they were no longer able to carry out their legislative duties because they could not attend the House of Lords with safety. Even in Canterbury, when the kindly Archbishop Howley visited his metro-political city, he was assaulted by the mob in the streets, pelted with mud and dead cats, prevented from dining at the Guildhall, and was only saved by two or three courageous gentlemen from being dragged out of his carriage and brutally ill-treated. Lord Macaulay's celebrated description of the scene which took place in the House of Commons when the Bill was passed by a very small majority proves how much less inflammable is the present state of the political atmosphere.
ARCHBISHOP HOWLEY ASSAULTED BY THE MOB.
He tells us that not only did the members who attached supreme importance to the passing of the Bill clasp each other by the hand with tears, but that, with unprecedented disregard of the decorous traditions of Parliament, they leapt upon the benches, and stood there waving their hats, and cheering themselves hoarse.
Take again the scene which the House witnessed during a memorably eloquent speech of Mr. Bright. He was addressing a House which in those days all but unanimously rejected his opinions, though time has since then shown how well deserving they were of consideration; and yet he moved many to tears who were little accustomed to give open signs of their emotion. He always spoke in a style of nervous Saxon English, and his words on that occasion were a singular mixture of unconventional homeliness and profound pathos.
JOHN BRIGHT SPEAKING IN THE HOUSE OF COMMONS.
He mentioned that he had met Colonel Boyle, a well-known member of the House—"at Mr. Westerton's, the bookseller's I think it was, at the corner of Hyde Park"—and had asked him whether he was going out to the Crimea. He answered that he was afraid he was. "It was not fear for himself; he knew not that. 'But,' he said, 'to go out to the war is a serious thing for a man who has a wife and five children.' The stormy Euxine is his grave; his wife is a widow; his children are fatherless." And then, after alluding to other well-known members who had perished in the Crimean War, he added, "The Angel of Death has been among us; we may almost hear the beating of his wings."
BRIGHT RECITING HIS SPEECH TO HIS FRIENDS.
As he spoke many of the assembled gentlemen of England were seen indignantly dashing away, or furtively wiping from their eyes, the tears of which no one need have been for one moment ashamed. When Lord Palmerston arose to answer the oration, and to repeat to the House its own predominant convictions, the bursts of cheering with which his entirely unoratorical speech was welcomed were heard even in the House of Lords. But what the members cheered was not Lord Palmerston's eloquence, for to eloquence he had scarcely the smallest pretence, but the British pluck which would not succumb to the intense feeling which the great orator had aroused by appeals that had held his audience "hushed as an infant at the mother's breast."
A CHARACTERISTIC ATTITUDE OF THE LATE MR. GLADSTONE.
On the evening before this speech Mr. Bright and Mr. Cobden had been the guests of a former kind friend of mine, Mr. W. S. Lindsay, M.P., in his beautiful house on the banks of the Thames. Mr. Lindsay had been the warm ally of both these great leaders in the Free Trade agitation, and he told me this curious anecdote. Mr. Bright, as is well known, carefully studied his speeches and committed them to memory word for word, delivering them in such measured, yet often thrilling, tones as gave to each word its utmost force. Mr. Lindsay said that the evening before—knowing the extreme importance of the speech, and the fact that he would be trying to persuade a multitude of hearers against their will—Mr. Bright had recited to these two friends in the drawing-room the arguments which he intended to enunciate. But he had not then brought in the allusion to the Angel of Death. The three members were sitting side by side during the debate; and it was perhaps as a relief to his own over-burdened feelings that Mr. Cobden, when the tumult of applause which followed the speech had subsided, said to Mr. Bright, "Where did you get hold of that passage about the angel, John? You did not say it to us last night." "No," answered the orator; "I only thought of it while I was dressing this morning." "Now, if you had said 'the flapping of his wings,' instead of 'the beating of his wings,'" said Cobden, "everyone would have laughed." I have no doubt that in this apparently trivial criticism Cobden was only seeking to lighten the oppression of his own misgivings about the national policy of that time; but, curiously enough, I several times heard Dean Stanley allude to the great speech, both in conversation and in sermons, and he always quoted the passage, "We may almost hear the flapping of his wings."
(Photo: Elliott and Fry, Baker Street, W.)
RICHARD COBDEN.
Several of Mr. Bright's best points seem to have occurred to him suddenly. In the days when there was the secession from the Liberal party to which he gave the popular nickname of "the Cave of Adullam," speaking of the fact that the members of the party seemed to be all on an equality, and to have no acknowledged leader, he convulsed the House with laughter by comparing them to one of those shaggy lapdogs of which it was difficult to distinguish which was the head and which was the tail. One leading member of this party was the late Mr. Horsman—a very forcible debater, who used sometimes to be spoken of as "the wild Horsman." I once heard a little passage of arms between him and the late Lord Houghton. "Ah!" said Mr. Horsman, "you can't boast of a Cave of Adullam in the House of Lords!" "No," replied Lord Houghton, with the readiness of a rapier thrust, "in the House of Lords we have nothing so hollow!"
It is extraordinary how much our judgment of oratory is affected by our opinion as to the point at issue. I once heard Mr. Bright deliver a speech of great force and beauty on the second Reform Bill; and his speeches were always eloquent and admirable so that he never seemed to sink below himself. Indeed, one secret of his splendid success was the care and study which he devoted to master every detail of what he intended to say; so that—to the astonishment of Mr. Gladstone, who had the happy art of falling to sleep as soon as he laid his head on the pillow—Mr. Bright's speeches often caused him sleepless nights. The oration to which I refer was delivered, if I remember rightly, in 1857. I was listening with admiration in the Speaker's gallery, when suddenly an ardent Conservative, who was sitting next to me, showed himself so entirely impervious to the charm and power of the orator that he flung himself back in his seat with the contemptuous remark, "I thought the fellow could speak!"
This reminds me of one or two incidents in the great debate on the Disestablishment of the Irish Church in the House of Lords. The Earl of Tankerville, whose son was a boy in my house at Harrow, had very kindly given me a seat in the gallery, and I heard a great part of that very famous discussion. The learned and lovable Archbishop Trench had to plead the cause of his Church; but he was old and deeply depressed, and his speech was naturally ineffective. At the very beginning he made an unfortunate slip, which, trivial as it was—and it is by no means unfrequently the case that a "trifle light as air" makes an impression, favourable or unfavourable, far beyond what might seem to be its proper importance—at once marred the effect of what he was about to urge. For, at the beginning of his speech, he unluckily addressed the assembled peers as "My brethren!"—or, as he pronounced it, "My brathren"—instead of "My Lords"; and, hastily as he corrected himself, the scarcely suppressed titter which ran through the House was alike disconcerting to the speaker and injurious to the effect of his words. A stranger was seated next to me, who was burning with enthusiasm for the Irish Church, and expected a powerful defence of its position from its eminent Archbishop. But the prelate's somewhat lachrymose appeal seemed to him quite below the importance of the occasion; and, with a sigh of deep disappointment, he leaned back with the murmur, "Oh dear! he's as heavy as lead and as dull as ditch-water!"
(Photo: S. A. Walker, 230, Regent Street, W.)
LORD DERBY (14th EARL).
(The "Rupert of Debate.")
The greatest speech on that occasion was that of the late Archbishop Magee, who had then been recently appointed Bishop of Peterborough. I had, shortly before, heard his powerful sermon in St. Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin, at the Church Congress, while the fate of the Irish Church was still trembling in the balance. He had chosen the text, "And they beckoned to their partners, who were in the other ship, to come over and help them." The text was so singularly appropriate that Archdeacon Denison is said to have started up from his seat and almost to have clapped his hands aloud! Great things were expected of the speech, and the recently appointed Bishop fully rose to the occasion. As we went out of the House, one of the peers told me that the late Lord Ellenborough (the famous Viceroy of India) had pronounced Dr. Magee's speech to be the most eloquent he had ever heard, except one (I think) of Lord Erskine's. Yet I could not help fancying at the time that political circumstances had tended to the undue extolment of this speech—eloquent and powerful as it undoubtedly was above its intrinsic merits. I perfectly remember the scene and all the circumstances, and even the manner and accent with which it was delivered; but neither then nor afterwards was I at all impressed by the arguments, nor can I now recall them. This is far from being the case with another speech delivered in the same debate by Dr. Connop Thirlwall, the very able and learned Bishop of St. Davids. He was dealing with the charge of "sacrilege," which was freely brought against the Bill, and he endeavoured to show that there were acts which some might characterise by such a stigma which might, on the contrary, be deeds actuated by the highest justice and mercy.
"MY BRATHREN."
(Archbishop Trench addressing the House of Lords.)
I witnessed a humorous little incident in the House of Lords during the debate on the Public Schools Bill. The late Earl of Clarendon was in charge of it, and the Earl of Derby, "the Rupert of debate," was opposed to it. A number of head-masters, whose methods and interests would be affected by the Bill, had been permitted to stand by the throne in the part of the House where members of the House of Commons are allowed to take their place when they want to hear a debate. Lord Clarendon in his speech was gently complaining that Lord Derby, in characterising the Bill, had said of it (as Lord Clarendon misquoted it)—"Sunt bona; sunt quædam mediocria; sunt plŭrŭ māla." This quotation, as the amused head-masters instantly noticed with a smile, involved two very glaring false quantities on the part of the statesman who was introducing the Bill for the improvement of the education of the country. Instantly Lord Derby started up with the words, "Will the noble Lord repeat what he has just attributed to me?" Innocent of the little trap which had been thus laid for him, Lord Clarendon repeated his "Sunt plŭrŭ māla." "I never said anything of the kind!" said Lord Derby with humorous indignation. "I am sure," said Lord Clarendon, "that I shall be in the recollection of all when I repeat that the noble Lord, though he must have forgotten the fact, quoted the line which I have just repeated to the House." "Nothing of the kind!" said Lord Derby, with great emphasis; "what I said was very different. It was" (and the quotation was emphasised by pointed finger and slow enunciation), "'Sunt bona; sunt quædam mediocria; sunt mŭlŭ plūra.'" Lord Clarendon laughed good-humouredly, and apologised for the slip; but he was evidently a little discomfited.
(From the Bust by C. Moore.)
RICHARD LALOR SHEIL.
To return for a few moments to the House of Commons, a friend of mine once asked Mr. Gladstone who was the most eloquent speaker whom he had ever heard in the House of Commons. He answered, as he has replied to others, "that he thought he had never heard anyone more eloquent than Richard Lalor Sheil." Anyone who will read Mr. Sheil's published volume of speeches will not be surprised at this remark. The one celebrated outburst which is best remembered, thrilled all who heard it, and sounded like the sudden sweep of a tornado. Lord Lyndhurst, in a recent speech, had unwisely and unfairly spoken of the Irish as "aliens." Alluding to this, Mr. Sheil burst out with the fine passage from which I will only quote a part: "Aliens!" he exclaimed. "Was Arthur Duke of Wellington in the House of Lords, and did he not start up and exclaim, 'Hold! I have seen the aliens do their duty!'... On the field of Waterloo the blood of Englishmen and Scotchmen and Irishmen flowed in the same stream, and drenched the same field. When the chill morning dawned their dead lay cold and stark together; in the same deep pit their bodies were deposited; the green corn of spring is now breaking from their commingled dust; the dew falls from heaven upon their union in the grave. Partakers in every peril, in the glory shall they not be permitted to participate? And shall we be told as a requital that we are 'aliens' from the noble country for whose salvation our lifeblood was poured out?"
The effect of such a passage delivered as Richard Lalor Sheil delivered it, can better be imagined than described. He was a man of short figure and somewhat insignificant appearance; and his voice was high and shrill, and never well-modulated like the voices of such orators as Lord Chatham or Mr. Bright. But he spoke with genuine feeling and enthusiasm. The impression produced by such earnestness can never be resisted. The tones of passion are very penetrating, and they vibrate in the memory. "But did not Mr. Sheil scream a good deal in his speeches, Mr. Gladstone?" asked his friend. "Sir," was the answer, "he was all scream!" And yet few Parliamentary debaters have ever produced a deeper impression!