He and Mr Burt had together backed a Bill which was intended to do something to ameliorate the condition of the coal-miners of this country, and at the annual slaughter of the innocents, Mr Disraeli announced that it was the intention of the Government to carry on the measure. The statement had already fallen from his lips and he had just entered on another sentence when the intolerable patronising voice broke in, “Hear, hear, hear,” “Hear, hear hear,” as if a very great personage with too great a consciousness of his own greatness were expressing his approval of the conduct of a little boy. Disraeli stopped dead short in his speech and one of the finest bits of comedy I can remember to have seen ensued. He closed his eyes and began very deliberately to fumble about the breast of his frock-coat within and without in search of something which he was evidently not over anxious to find. Alighting at last on the object of this perfunctory search he produced an eyeglass and, still with closed eyes, he lifted the skirt of his coat and polished the glass upon its silken lining. It began to occur to Mr Disraeli's patron that all this slow pantomime was in some way directed to his address. The House waited, with here and there a rather nervous expectant laugh. The Labour member, who was originally thrown abroad in his usual pompous fashion, began to shrivel. His widely-extended arms, which had been stretched along the top of the bench on which he sat, crept closer and closer to his sides. He shrank, he dwindled, he wilted like a leaf on a hot stove, and when Disraeli finally screwed his glass into his eye and, after surveying him for two or three dreadful seconds, allowed the glass to fall and resumed his speech at the very word at which he had broken off, the patron of the House was an altogether abject figure. The assembly literally rocked with laughter and Mr Burt's colleague never, never, never ventured to pat Mr Disraeli on the back again.
It does not fall to the lot of every self-sufficient ass who finds himself returned to Parliament and who imagines that he can at once make a figure in that assembly to learn his place in so abrupt a fashion, but there is no gathering in the world in which a man so inevitably finds his proper level. Poor Dr Kenealy had gifts enough to have carried him to a high place almost anywhere, but unfortunately for himself he came into the House in a mood of passionate defiance against the world. He chose to defy the rules of the Assembly at its very threshold. It has been the custom from time immemorial for a new member to be introduced by two gentlemen who are already officially known to Mr Speaker. I happened to be in the box apportioned to the Daily News when the Doctor attempted to evade this rule and to present himself before the Speaker without the customary credentials. He was of course forbidden to enter and after some unseemly altercation outside the bar, two members were found to volunteer to introduce him. He marched up the House with his umbrella in one hand and the certificate of the Returning Officer in the other, his eyes flashing a quite unnecessary defiance, poor gentleman, behind his gold-rimmed glasses, and his whole figure placed as if for instant combat. It was probably by an inadvertence that he hung his umbrella upon the Speaker's mace, but it was certainly counted as an act of intentional discourtesy against him. He was sent to Coventry from the first, and he was so sore and angry that he was almost fore-doomed to bring himself into trouble.
Kenealy succeeded in placing on the paper a motion in favour of triennial Parliaments very shortly after his first unfavourable introduction into the House. It was long after midnight when he rose to speak. He began at the beginning and favoured us with an analysis of the characteristics of the first gathering of a representative assembly under Alfred the Great. Sir Wilfred Lawson almost immediately rose to inquire whether the hour were not somewhat too advanced for a disquisition on parliamentary history, the facts of which were available to everybody, and Kenealy passionately retorted that he was in possession of the ear of the House, that he would stand upon his rights, would adopt his own methods and would speak at what length he chose. In answer to this defiance, the House rose en masse and its members solemnly filed away, leaving Kenealy to address the Speaker, the clerks at the table and a handful of reporters in the gallery. He struggled on for awhile, but by and by a member returned and drew the attention of the Speaker to the very obvious fact that there were not forty members present. The Speaker rose under his canopy and waved his cocked hat solemnly towards Kenealy and then towards the other occupant of the House.
“There are not forty members present,” he said solemnly, “the House is now adjourned.” That was the result of Dr Kenealy's first essay and in his second he came to final and irremediable grief. In a crowded House, he arose to impeach his enemies and traducers. He was ploughing along and I was fighting after him in my own gouty, inefficient shorthand, when one of the strangest premonitions of my life occurred to me. He said “If any of these unjust aspersions are cast anew upon me”—and I seemed to know as absolutely what he was going to say as if the whole thing were a play which I had seen rehearsed a score of times. I thought, “I hope to heaven he won't say that,” and he went on in the very words my mind forebode. “If these unjust aspersions are cast upon me, I shall shake them from me as the lion shakes the dew-drops from his mane.” There was a second's silence as he paused, and then there was a crash of laughter with peal on peal to follow. Three times I have known the House of Commons surrendered to illimitable mirth and on each occasion the victim of its derision is somewhat pitiable. But poor Kenealy! he stood there lost, astounded, vacant, a quite tragic figure, and when the crowded House had ceased to laugh out of pure exhaustion, he spoke again in a tone completely changed; all the forensic manner gone out of him. That he could find a voice at all after such a scathing was an evidence of his courage, but with that unfortunate sentence he had shot his bolt. He never attempted to address the House again. I do not remember even to have seen him within its precincts after that catastrophe.
It is not impossible there may have been a little touch of gratified malice in that Homeric laugh which killed Kenealy's parliamentary career, but there was certainly not a trace of it in that heroic peal of mirth which dismissed Mr Newdigate from the scene of his parliamentary activities. Mr Newdigate was undoubtedly a dull man, he was undoubtedly an eccentric, but he was just as certainly a gentleman and he enjoyed everybody's esteem. He was a long-backed Tory squire who for many years represented the Northern Division of the County of Warwick. His chief virtues were that he rode straight to hounds, that he dispensed an open-handed old-fashioned hospitality to his hunt and that he voted regularly and faithfully with his party. There was no man who could more quickly empty a full House than he. The very sight of him on his feet created a stampede, and throughout his parliamentary life it had been his lot to empty benches. But at last his chance came. Our present King, then Prince of Wales, was about to visit India, and the Government proposed a vote of 60,000L. to enable him to do the thing in proper fashion. Mr Peter Taylor, a distinguished Radical of that time, rose to move the previous question, and then Mr Newdigate, in recognition, as one supposes, of the faithful party service of many years, was allowed to support the Government resolution. Just for once in his life the House did not empty at his rising; his chance was here, the coveted opportunity of a lifetime, and in his own way he proceeded to take advantage of it. In sepulchral tones he assured Mr Speaker that if this vote were refused the loyal feelings of this country would receive a blow, and the popular confidence in that House would receive a blow, and the loyal sentiment of the Empire would receive a blow; and as he piled up the agony of his speech, he stooped lower and lower, driving his right hand down at the end of each period with a sledge-hammer force until the blow landed, not on the public conscience or the loyalty of the Empire, but on the white hat of one, Mr Charley, who sat directly below him and who in a second was bonneted to the very shoulders. Now Mr Charley wore a very tall white hat and it was his habit to wear his hair rather long, and as he struggled to release himself from the obscurity into which he had been plunged, the lining of the tall white hat turned inside out and his long hair rose with it until he appeared to be expanding himself like some elastic snake. One gentleman on the front bench below the gangway actually fell from his seat and rolled upon the floor, and the House laughed itself almost into hysteria, whilst the hapless orator stood waving in apologetic dumb show. Now here was a tragedy indeed: to have the dream of a whole lifetime at last actually realised and concrete and then to see it go to ruin in that way. So swift a transition from the very height of triumph to the very gulf! When our laugh was over I am sure there was not one of us who did not profoundly sympathise with the sufferer, and Mr Newdigate never attempted to speak again at least in my time. He and Mr Whalley were the two members of the House who were the stern and unfaltering enemies of the Jesuits. They saw the emissaries of Jesuitry everywhere and were unceasing in denouncing all their wicked wiles, but it was notorious that each cast an eye askance upon the other and each was rather inclined to be persuaded to believe that his pretended fellow-crusader was a Jesuit in disguise.
On the night on which Disraeli's government fell he gave the House of Commons a last proof of his unconquerable “cheek and pluck.” The Marquis of Hartington had delivered a speech which everybody knew to have sealed the fate of the party in power, but the great Jew statesman rose up imperturbable and audacious to the last “There is, sir,” he said in that veiled voice of his which sounded as if it were struggling through dense fog and could indeed only have been made audible throughout the chamber by a trained master in elocution—“there is in war a manoeuvre which is well known. First the cavalry advance creating dust and waving sabres, then a rattle of musketry is heard along the line, and next the big guns are brought into play, and when the dust and smoke have cleared away the force which has created it is found to have removed to a considerable distance. This manouvre, sir, is known as the covering of a retreat and this manoeuvre has been executed with an admirable adroitness by Her Majesty's Opposition this evening.” He knew, of course, that he was beaten, he knew that in an hour's time the reins of Government would have passed from his own hands to those of his rival, but he took defeat with his own sardonic gaiety and made a claim for victory with his expiring breath.
I had a curious little instance of this indomitable vein in him one summer morning when the House had risen after sunrise and I overtook him on his way to his official residence. The street was empty and he was crawling along leaning heavily on his walking stick and clasping his left hand on the small of his back with a gesture which bespoke him as being in severe pain. He heard my footstep behind him and turned; his careless and apparently unseeing glance had crossed my face a score of times and he could not fail to have known at least that he was known to me. At the second at which he became aware of me, he drew himself to his full height and stepped out with the assured gait of a man in full possession of health and strength. He twirled his walking stick quite gaily and he maintained that attitude until I had passed him by. I had not the heart to look back afterwards. I saw him once again and once only. One afternoon whilst I was sitting writing in my lodgings I received a telegram from Mr Robinson, afterwards Sir John—then the inspiring genius of the Daily News, instructing me to repair to the office. On arriving there, I received instructions to repair at once to the House of Lords and there, no other journalist being present, I witnessed the formal installation of Lord Beaconsfield. There were four peers present in their robes of scarlet and ermine and their beaver bonnets and the Lord Chancellor was seated on the woolsack. An attendant brought a scarlet cloak, and a very shabby and faded garment it was indeed, and adjusted it about the shoulders of the neophyte. The second attendant handed to him a black beaver which he assumed, then he was led in a sort of solemn dance to the four quarters of the House, at each of which he made an obeisance. Finally he was conducted to the Lord Chancellor and the ceremony came to an end. Everybody supposed that Disraeli's career had come to an end also, and I myself was one of the mistaken prophets. I was writing at the time a weekly set of verses for Mayfair, a sixpenny Society journal long since defunct, and in the next issue of that journal I took Mr Disraeli's formal installation for my theme. I remember two verses which may perhaps be allowed to serve as an expression of the almost universal opinion of the time, an opinion which everybody now knows to have been contradicted in the most extraordinary fashion by the happenings of the next four years. I wrote:—
“Sitting last Thursday in the House of Peers,
A little ere the hour of five I saw
The Muse of History weeping stony tears
Above the picture I'm about to draw.
The saddest spectacle the place has known
Since Barry planned its first foundation stone.
“Tired with the weight of triumphs worn too long,
A man of genius sought a grave for fame;
And far apart from Life's impetuous throng
To this dim place of sepulture he came.
And in the presence of a grieving few
He read his own brief burial service through.”
The House of Lords had proved a grave for so many brilliant reputations which had been built up in the Lower Chamber that the general prophecy, mistaken as it was, was not at all a thing to be surprised at; Mr Punch's cartoon of Lord John Russell's entry into the House of Peers is not forgotten. The meagre little figure in robes and coronet is shown slinking by Lord Brougham similarly attired, and the latter addresses the arrival, saying, “You'll find it very cold up here, Johnnie.”
I was in the House also when Mr Biggar introduced the great parliamentary art of “stone-walling.” Mr Biggar would take the first half-dozen blue books he came across, and would begin to read aloud whenever any new measure of which he disapproved was about to be introduced. At half-past two he would begin to read, and continue, oblivious of the passing of the hours, until the time after which no new measure could be introduced. Sir Wilfrid Lawson, in his characteristic way, “wanted to know if the hon. member were in order in reading to himself for sixty minutes at a stretch?” Mr Speaker, who at that time was Mr Brand, rolled out the instruction that “the honourable member must make himself audible to the chair.” Mr Biggar forthwith put three blue books under each arm, and taking up his glass of water said, “I will come a little nearer, Mr Speaker,” and came. Mr Speaker told him on one of these occasions, “So far as I can understand the line you are taking, I do not see how these matters are related.” “I will establish the connection by and by, sir,” replied Mr Biggar. This art of “stonewalling” was practised in the House for a number of years until at last the rules were so altered as to make it impossible. It was remarkable how quickly a member found his level in the House. If he started with the idea that he would “boss” the House he would quickly find that the House “bossed” him.