The old order.
The ordinary tendency of the Parliamentary man is towards the sombre black, and the solemnity of the long-tailed frock-coat. There have been times when if a member of Parliament did venture to enter the House of Commons in a coat prematurely ending in the short tails of the morning coat, or in the tail-less sack-coat, he would have been called up to the Speaker's chair and as severely reprimanded as though he had committed the most atrocious offence—in those far-off days—of wearing a pot-hat. But in these democratic times one can do anything; and low-crowned hats, sack-coats, homespun Irish tweeds, affright and shock the old aristocratic Parliamentary eye. When summer approaches, the whole aspect of the House changes. The sombre black is almost entirely doffed; and you look on an assembly as different in its outward appearance from its antecedent state as the yellow-winged butterfly is from the grim grub. Indeed, members of Parliament seem to take a delight in anticipating the change of dress which the change of season imposes. There are members of the House of Commons who can claim to wear the very first white hat of the season. Sir Wilfrid Lawson has a sombre creed and a Bacchanalian spirit; and, accordingly, the very first time a mere stray gleam of sunshine streaks the wintry gloom Sir Wilfrid wears an audaciously white hat.
Mr. Gladstone's rejuvenescence.
Mr. Gladstone is a curious mixture of splendour and carelessness. He nearly always wears a small, narrow black tie, which brings into greater relief the Alpine heights and the measureless width of his big shirt-collars, and the broad expanse of his shirt-front. But this tie—though it marks a pleasant and becoming individuality of dress—loses half its effect by nearly always getting out of its place; when night is advanced, the knot is always about half across Mr. Gladstone's neck. On the other hand, he is nearly always very carefully dressed; his black frock-coat—a little ancient in make, and always of the smooth black, which has given way with younger men to the diagonals—is a well-known feature of every great debate, and adds grace to his appearance and delivery. When summer comes, however, he bursts into an almost dazzling glory of white waistcoats, grey cashmere coats, and hats of creamy-yellow whiteness, ethereal and almost aggressively summery. The younger men are not slow to follow so excellent an example—though generally there is the tendency to the dark grey, which is a compromise between the black of winter and the fiery white tweed which the man in the street is wont to wear. Sir Charles Russell—who, returning from Paris on the same day as Mr. Sexton, received a very warm welcome—is also a child of his age in his clothes. Time was when a great legal luminary—especially if he were on the bench—was supposed to be violating every canon of good taste if he did not wear garments which might be described as a cross between the garb of a bishop, an undertaker, and a hangman. The judge on the bench, in fact, was always supposed to be putting on the black cap figuratively, and, therefore, was obliged to bear with him the outward sign of his damnable trade. The late Lord Cairns was the first to break through this tradition, and affect the style of the prosperous stockbroker. Sir Charles Russell is different, for he dresses in thorough taste; but when one saw him in the House of Commons in a grey suit and a deep-cut waistcoat, one might have taken him for a gentleman squire with a taste for study, varied by an occasional visit to Newmarket.
Mr. Morley's tweed suit.
All these observations have been suggested by the portentous fact that on June 15th Mr. John Morley startled the world of Parliament by appearing in a very neat, a very well cut, and a very light tweed suit. If Mr. Morley figures in many Tory imaginations as a modern St. Just, longing for the music of the guillotine and the daily splash of Tory and orthodox blood, it is much more due to his clothes than to his writings; for ordinarily he is dressed after the fashion which one can well suppose reigned in the days when the men of the Terror were inaugurating a reign of universal love, brotherhood, and peace through the narrow opening between the upper and the lower knife of the guillotine. His coat is blue: so is his waistcoat; and his nether garments are of a severe drab brown. It is impossible to imagine that any man who assumes such garments could be otherwise than a severe and sanguinary doctrinaire, anxious for his neighbours' blood. The genial smile with which the House of Commons has become familiar has invalidated the Tory estimate of Mr. Morley, but it was that memorable Thursday that completed the transformation of judgment. No man could be a lover of the guillotine who could wear so airy, so gay, and, above all, so juvenile and well-cut a suit of clothes. Mr. Morley himself was overwhelmed with the amount of attention which his new suit attracted. He, poor man, did not see the portentous political significance of the transaction, and almost sank under the multitude and variety of congratulations which he received from watchful friends. He has done many great and successful things in the course of his brilliant career—but he never achieved a triumph so complete and so prompt as he did when he put on his light tweed suit, and steered under its illuminating rays the Home Rule Bill through the rocks and shoals, the eddies and the cross-currents of the House of Commons.
A brilliant pas de deux.
On the following afternoon there was another scene in which clothes had their share. At about three o'clock there entered the House together two slight, alert figures—in both cases a little above the middle height, and both clothed in a suit of clothes the exact counterpart of each other in make, shape, and colour. There was a dominant and almost monotonous grey in their appearance; but there was little of grey in their looks. When at once there burst from the Tory and Unionists Benches a loud, wild, prolonged huzzah, it was seen that this theatrical little entrance at one and the same time of Joe and Mr. Balfour, was their method of accentuating the Tory triumph in Linlithgow. The two gentlemen seen entering together separated as they walked up the floor—the Tory going to his place on the front Opposition Bench, the Unionist to his corner seat on the Liberal side. It was a very skilfully arranged bit of business, though there were critics who thought its histrionic element a little out of place in the sombre and solemn realities of public life, and a great national controversy. In the midst of it all I looked at Mr. Gladstone. It is in such moments that you are able to get a glimpse into all the great depths of this extraordinary nature. And I have written more than once in these columns that the greatest of all his characteristics is composure. This mighty, restless, fiery fighter against wrong—this stalwart and unconquerable wrestler for right, this Titan—I might even say this Don Quixote—who has gone out with spear and sword to assault the most strongly-entrenched citadels of human wrongs—who has faced a world in arms—this man has, after all, at the centre of his existence, and in the depths of his nature, a gospel which sustains him in the hours of defeat and gloom, and makes him one of the most restless of combatants, and the most tranquil.
The grand old philosopher.
Devotional, almost pietistic, introspective, accustomed, I have no doubt, from that early training of domestic piety and sacerdotal surroundings, to see all this gay, vast phantasmagoria of life the antechamber to a greater, more enduring, and better world beyond those voices, Mr. Gladstone—at least that is my reading of his character—looks at everything in human existence with the power of self-detachment from its garish moments and its transient interests. Behind this constant warfare, underneath all this public passion and sweeping resolves, there is a nether and unseen world of thought, emotion, hope, and in that world there is ever calm. It is a tabernacle in his soul where only holy thoughts may enter. Outside its impenetrable and echoless walls are left behind the shouts of faction, the noise of battle, the rise and fall of the good and ever-enduring fight between wrong and right. Within that tabernacle Mr. Gladstone has the power of withdrawing himself at will, just as in the Agora of Athens, and on the last great day when he discoursed on immortality, and drank the mortal hemlock, Socrates could withdraw himself, and listen to the inner whisper of his dæmon. All this, I say, you could see in the abstracted, resigned and composed look of Mr. Gladstone at the moment when his triumphant enemies, in their summer garb, with their smiling faces, and strutting walk, entered the House of Commons. If you wanted to see at once the contrast, not only of the temper of the hour, but the still greater and more momentous contrast of temperaments, you had only to look from the face of Mr. Gladstone to that of Mr. Chamberlain. The contrast of their years—the deeper contrast of their natures—above all, the profounder contrast of their worlds of thought, training and environment—all were brought out. In that perky, retroussé-nosed, self-complacent, confidently smiling man you saw all the flippancy—so-called realism—the petty commercialism of the end of the middle of the nineteenth century. The mysticism, the poetry, the rich devotion, the lofty and large ideals of the beginning of the century—of the time that remembered Byron and produced Newman—all these things were to be seen in the rapt look of that noble, beautiful and refined face on the Treasury Bench. And yet there was something more. The brilliant light of the early days of our century has become dim and cold in those hearts and minds which have not had the power to grow and expand with their ages. But with that splendid sanity of body as well as mind which belongs to him, Mr. Gladstone is the creature of the ending of the nineteenth as of the beginning of the twentieth century. Like the man of Arctic climes, he stands almost at the same moment in the sunset of one great century and the heralding light of the sunrise of another.