The Memoir has a note respecting one of these meetings with the Irish leader at which Parnell was accompanied by Major Nolan, then member for County Galway:
'Nolan showed opportunist Nationalism; Parnell irreconcilable Nationalism. The latter let out, in spite of his great caution, that if we chose to go to Ireland on Mill's land programme, we could destroy his position and the Home Rule movement. Nolan said that a party which would give security of tenure to the small tenants could afford to leave the large ones out. (To touch the large tenancies in that sense would be virtually to charge the possession of property in Ireland with partial compensation.)'
At this moment, the beginning of 1879, the purely Nationalist agitation for self-government had not yet been joined to the demand for an improved and freer status for the Irish tenant. This was mainly the work of Davitt, and Davitt had scarcely yet been heard of by the wider public.
CHAPTER XIX
SOCIAL AND POLITICAL INTERESTS
Hospitable and popular, Sir Charles had the best of what those days could offer in talk and talkers. He compared his own country very unfavourably with the possible standard of social intercourse:
'In England and in France people seem wholly unaware that they cannot either in politics or in literature deal with or even understand questions involving philosophical and historical considerations without any training in either philosophy or history, and one sees writings and speeches by persons who think themselves members of an educated class which are unintelligible to any who have the slightest discipline of either habit of thought or form of expression.'
'In the best English political and literary society there is no conversation. Mr. Gladstone will talk with much charm about matters that he does not understand, or books that he is not really competent to criticize; but his conversation has no merit to those who are acquainted with the subjects on which he speaks. Men like Lord Rosslyn, [Footnote: Lord Rosslyn died in 1890.] Lord Houghton, Lord Granville (before his deafness), had a pleasant wit and some cultivation, as had Bromley Davenport, Beresford Hope, and others, as well as Arthur Balfour, but none of these men were or are at a high level; and where you get the high level in England, you fall into priggism. On the whole, Hastings, Duke of Bedford, was the best specimen that I ever knew of an English gentleman as regards learning and conversation; but then he was horrible as a man, in spite of his pretty manners, because ferocious in his ideas upon property. Now, at Rome is to be found that which is unknown in London, in Paris, in St. Petersburg, and unknown, I fancy, at Vienna and Berlin, although of these I know far less—namely, conversation not priggish or academic, and yet consistently maintained at a high level.
'I often heard Mr. Gladstone talk well at little Charles Forster's. "Mr. G." also seemed to me to talk especially well at the table of Sir Walter James, [Footnote: The first Lord Northbourne.] an old gentleman who had left Parliament soon after I was born. In those two houses he was supreme; but if Coleridge or the Viper (Abraham Hayward) or Browning were present, who talked better than he did, and would not give way to him, he was less good. Villiers, who was another good talker, "Mr. G." could not abide, and his presence also was a damper.'
In the next year we have 'a dinner at the French Embassy, where Gladstone was very agreeable, talking French well in an old-fashioned style.'