Studies in Contemporary Biography

by Viscount James Bryce Bryce

Those who observed that he was almost always occupied in examining and attacking the measures or the conduct of those who governed Ireland were apt to think his talent a purely critical one. They were mistaken. Critical, 232 indeed, it was, in a remarkable degree; keen, penetrating, stringently dissective of the arguments of an opponent, ingenious in taking advantage of a false step in administration or of an admission imprudently made in debate. But it had also a positive and constructive quality. From time to time he would drop his negative attitude and sketch out plans of legislation which were always consistent and weighty, though not made attractive by any touch of imagination. They were the schemes not so much of a statesman as of an able man of business, who saw the facts, especially the financial facts, in a sharp, cold light, and they seldom went beyond what the facts could be made to prove. And his ideas struck one as being not only forcible but independent, the fruit of his own musings. Although he freely used the help of others in collecting facts or opinions, he did not seem to be borrowing the ideas, but rather to have looked at things for himself, and seen them as they actually were, in their true perspective, not (like many Irishmen) through the mists of sentiment or party feeling. The impression made by one of his more elaborate speeches might be compared to that which one receives from a grey sunless day with an east wind, a day in which everything shows clear, but also hard and cold.

To call his mind a narrow one, as people sometimes did, was to wrong it. If the range of his 233 interests was limited, his intelligence was not. Equal to any task it undertook, it judged soundly, appreciating the whole phenomena of the case, men and things that had no sort of attraction for it. There was less pleasure in watching its activities than the observation of a superior mind generally affords, for it was always directed to immediate aims, and it wanted the originality which is fertile in ideas and analogies. It was not discursive, not versatile, not apt to generalise. It did not rejoice in the exercise of thought for thought’s sake, but felt itself to be merely a useful instrument for performing the definite practical work which the will required of it.

If, however, the intellect of the man could not be called interesting, his character had at least this interest, that it gave one many problems to solve, and could not easily be covered by any formulæ. An observer who followed the old method of explaining every man by ascribing to him a single ruling passion, would have said that his ruling passion was pride. The pride was so strong that it almost extinguished vanity. Parnell did not appear to seek occasions for display, frequently neglecting those which other men would have chosen, seldom seeming to be elated by the applause of crowds, and treating the House of Commons with equal coolness whether it cheered 234 him or howled at him. He cared nothing for any social compliments or attentions, rarely accepted an invitation to dinner, dressed with little care and often in clothes whose style and colour seemed unworthy of his position. He was believed to be haughty and distant to his followers; and although he could occasionally be kindly and even genial, scarcely any were admitted to intimacy, and few of the ordinary signs of familiarity could be observed between him and them. Towards other persons he was sufficiently polite but warily reserved, showing no desire for the cultivation of friendship, or, indeed, for any relations but those of business. Of some ordinary social duties, such as opening and answering letters, he was, especially in later years, more neglectful than good breeding permits; and men doubted whether to ascribe this fault to indolence or to a superb disregard of everybody but himself. Such disregard he often showed in greater matters, taking no notice of attacks made upon him which he might have refuted, and intimating to the English his indifference to their praise or blame. On one remarkable occasion, at the beginning of the session of 1883, he was denounced by Mr. W. E. Forster in a long and bitter speech, which told powerfully upon the House. Many instances were given in which Irish members had palliated 235 or failed to condemn criminal acts, and Parnell was arraigned as the head and front of this line of conduct, and thus virtually responsible for the outrages that had occurred. The Irish leader, who had listened in impassive silence, broken only by one interjected contradiction, to this fierce invective, did not rise to reply, and was with difficulty induced by his followers to deliver his defence on the following day. To the astonishment of every one, that defence consisted in a declaration, delivered in a cold, careless, almost scornful way, that for all he said or did in Ireland he held himself responsible to his countrymen only, and did not in the least regard what Englishmen thought of him. It was an answer not of defence but of defiance.

Even to his countrymen he could on occasion be disdainful, expecting them to defer to his own judgment of his own course. He would sometimes remain away from Parliament for weeks together, although important business might be under consideration, perhaps would vanish altogether from public ken. Yet this lordly attitude and the air of mystery which surrounded him did not seem to be studied with a view to effect. They were due to his habit of thinking first and chiefly of himself. If he desired to indulge his inclinations, he indulged them. Some extremely strong motive of passion or interest might 236 interpose to restrain this desire and stimulate him to an unwelcome exertion; but no respect for the opinion of others, nor fear of censure from his allies or friends, would be allowed to do so.

This boundless self-confidence and independence greatly contributed to his success as a leader. His faith in his star inspired a conviction that obstacles whose reality his judgment recognised would ultimately yield to his will, and gave him in moments of crisis an undismayed fortitude which only once forsook him—in the panic which was suddenly created by the Phœnix Park murders of May 1882. The confidence which he felt, or appeared to feel, reacted upon his party, and became a chief ground of their obedience to him and their belief in his superior wisdom. His calmness, his tenacity, his patience, his habit of listening quietly to every one, but deciding for himself, were all evidences of that resolute will which imposed itself upon the Irish masses no less than upon his Parliamentary following, and secured for him a loyalty in which there was little or nothing of personal affection.

In these several respects his overweening pride was a source of strength. In another direction, however, it proved a source of weakness. There are men in whom the want of moral principle, of noble emotions, or of a scrupulous conscience and nice sense of honour, is partly replaced by 237 deference to the opinion of their class or of the world. Such men may hold through life a tolerably upright course, neither from the love of virtue nor because they are ambitious and anxious to stand well with those whom they aspire to influence or rule, but because, having a sense of personal dignity, combined with a perception of what pleases or offends mankind, they are resolved to do nothing whereby their good name can be tarnished or an opening given to malicious tongues. But when pride towers to such a height as to become a law to itself, disregarding the judgment of others, it may not only lead its possessor into an attitude of defiance which the world resents, but may make him stoop to acts of turpitude which discredit his character. Mr. Parnell was certainly not a scrupulous man. Without dwelling upon the circumstances attending the divorce case already referred to, or upon his betrayal of Mr. Gladstone’s confidences, and his reckless appeals during the last year of his life to the most inflammable elements in Ireland, there are facts enough in his earlier career to show that he had little regard for truth and little horror for crime. A revolution may extenuate some sins, but even in a revolution there are men (and sometimes the strongest men) whose moral excellence shines through the smoke of conflict and the mists of detraction. In Mr. Parnell’s nature the moral 238 element was imperfectly developed. He seemed cynical and callous; and it was probably his haughty self-reliance which prevented him from sufficiently deferring to the ordinary moralities of mankind. His pride, which ought to have kept him free from the suspicion of dishonour, made him feel himself dispensed from the usual restraints. Whatever he did was right in his own eyes, and no other eyes need be regarded. Phenomena somewhat similar were observable in Napoleon. But Napoleon, though he came of a good family, was obviously not a gentleman in the common sense of the term. Mr. Parnell was a gentleman in that sense. He had the bearing, the manners, the natural easy dignity of a man of birth who has always moved in good society. He rarely permitted any one to take liberties with him, even the innocent liberties of familiar intercourse. This made his departures from what may be called the inner and higher standard of gentlemanly conduct all the more remarkable.

He has been accused of a want of physical courage. He did no doubt after the Phœnix Park murders ask the authorities in England for police protection, being, not unnaturally, in fear for his life; and he habitually carried firearms. He was at times in danger, and there was every reason why he should be prepared to defend himself. An anecdote was told of another member 239 of the House of Commons whose initials were the same as his own, and who, taking what he supposed to be his own overcoat from the peg on which it hung in the cloakroom of the House, was startled when he put his hand into the pocket to feel in it the cold iron of a pistol. Moral courage he showed in a high degree during his whole public career, facing his antagonists with an unshaken front, even when they were most numerous and bitter. Though he intensely disliked imprisonment, the terms on which he came out of Kilmainham Gaol left no discredit upon him. He behaved with perfect dignity under the attacks of the press in 1887, and in the face of the use made of letters attributed to him which turned out to have been forged by Richard Pigott—letters which the bulk of the English upper classes had greedily swallowed. With this courage and dignity there was, however, little trace of magnanimity. He seldom said a generous word, or showed himself responsive to such a word spoken by another. Accustomed to conceal his feelings, except in his most excited moments, he rarely revealed, but he certainly cherished, vindictive sentiments. He never forgave either Mr. W. E. Forster or Mr. Gladstone for having imprisoned him in 1881;[36] and though 240 he stood in some awe of the latter, whom he considered the only really formidable antagonist he had ever had to confront, he bore a grudge which smouldered under the reconciliation of 1886 and leapt into flame in the manifesto of November 1890.

The union in Mr. Parnell of intense passion with strenuous self-control struck all who watched him closely, though it was seldom that passion so far escaped as to make the contrast visibly dramatic. Usually he was cold, grave, deliberate, repelling advances with a sort of icy courtesy. He hardly ever lost his temper in the House of Commons, even in his last session under the sarcasms of his former friends, though the low, almost hissing tones of his voice sometimes betrayed an internal struggle. But during the electoral campaign in Kilkenny, in December 1890, when he was fighting for his life, he was more than once so swept away by anger that those beside him had to hold him back from jumping off the platform into the crowd to strike down some one who had interrupted him. Suspended for a moment, his mastery of himself quickly returned. Men were astonished to observe how, after some of the stormy passages at the meetings of Irish members held in one of the House of Commons committee-rooms in December 1890, he would address quietly, perhaps lay his hand upon the shoulder of, some one 241 of the colleagues who had just been denouncing him, and on whom he had poured all the vitriol of his fierce tongue. As this could not have been good-nature, it must have been either calculated policy or a pride that would not accept an injury from those whom he had been wont to deem his subjects. Spontaneous kindliness was never ascribed to him; nor had he, so far as could be known, a single intimate friend.

Oratory is the usual avenue to leadership in a democratic movement, and Mr. Parnell is one of the very few who have arrived at power neither by that road nor by military success. So far from having by nature any of the gifts or graces of a popular speaker, he was at first conspicuously deficient in them, and became at last effective only by constant practice, and by an intellectual force which asserted itself through commonplaceness of language and a monotonous delivery. Fluency was wanting, and even moderate ease was acquired only after four or five years’ practice. His voice was neither powerful nor delicate in its modulations, but it was clear, and the enunciation deliberate and distinct, quiet when the matter was ordinary, slow and emphatic when an important point arrived. With very little action of the body, there was often an interesting and obviously unstudied display of facial expression. So far from glittering with the florid rhetoric supposed to 242 characterise Irish eloquence, his speeches were singularly plain, bare, and dry. Neither had they any humour. If they ever raised a smile, which seldom happened, it was by some touch of sarcasm or adroit thrust at a point left unguarded by an adversary. Their merit lay in their lucidity, in their aptness to the matter in hand, in the strong practical sense which ran through them, coupled with the feeling that they came from one who led a nation, and whose forecasts had often fulfilled themselves. They were carefully prepared, and usually made from pretty full notes; but the preparation had been given rather to the matter and the arrangement than to the diction, which had rarely any ornament or literary finish. Of late years he spoke infrequently, whether from indolence or from weak health, or because he thought little was to be done in the face of a hostile majority, now that the tactics of obstruction had been abandoned. When he interposed without preparation in a debate which had arisen unexpectedly, he was short, pithy, and direct; indeed, nothing was more characteristic of Parnell than his talent for hitting the nail on the head, a talent which always commands attention in deliberative assemblies. No one saw more clearly or conveyed in terser language the course which the circumstances of the moment required; and as his mastery of parliamentary procedure and practice came next 243 to that of Mr. Gladstone, any advice that he gave to the House on a point of order carried weight. It would indeed be no exaggeration to say that during the sessions of 1889 and 1890 he was distinctly the second man in the House of Commons, surpassed in debating power by five or six others, but inferior to Mr. Gladstone alone in the interest which his speeches excited and in the impression they produced. Along with this access of influence his attitude and the spirit of his policy appeared to rise and widen. There was less of that hard attorneyism which had marked his criticisms of the Tory Government and their measures up to March 1880, and of the Liberal Government and their measures during the five following years. He seemed to grow more and more to the full stature of a statesman, with constructive views and a willingness to make the best of the facts as he found them. Yet even in this later and better time one note of greatness was absent from his speeches. There was nothing genial or generous or elevated about them. They never soared into an atmosphere of lofty feeling, worthy of the man who was by this time deemed to be leading his nation to victory, and who had begun to be admired and honoured by one of the two great historic English parties.

Parnell was not only versed in the rules of parliamentary procedure, but also a consummate 244 master of parliamentary tactics. Soon after he entered the House of Commons he detected its weak point, and perfected a system of obstruction which so destroyed the efficiency of its time-honoured modes of doing business that new sets of rules, each more stringent than the preceding, had to be devised between 1878 and 1888. The skill with which he handled his small but well-disciplined battalion was admirable. He was strict with individuals, requiring absolute obedience to the party rules, but ready to gratify any prevailing current of feeling when he saw that this could be done without harm to the cause. More than once, when English members who happened to be acting with him on some particular question pressed him to keep his men quiet and let a division be taken at once, he answered that they were doubtless right in thinking that the moment for securing a good division had arrived, but that he must not muzzle his followers when they wanted to have their fling. The best proof of the tact with which he ruled a section comprising many men of brilliant talents lies in the fact that there was no serious revolt, or movement towards revolt, against him until the breach of 1890 between himself and the Liberal party had led to the belief that his continued leadership would mean defeat at the polls in Great Britain, and the postponement, perhaps for many years, of Home Rule for Ireland.