In September 1890, I saw Gladstone. He was eighty years old, full of confidence and vitality, for his partnership with Parnell, which had lost the election in 1886, was now the means of triumph, and it was a certainty that he would soon be in a position to make the dream of Home Rule a reality. But in November, in less than two months, the divorce suit brought by Captain O’Shea, in which Parnell was correspondent, and the terrible scenes in December in Committee Room No. 15 where Parnell tried in vain to maintain his rule over his party, changed the whole face of things.

After Gladstone brought in his Home Rule Bill in 1886, politics became violent. The Grand Old Man was hissed in London drawing-rooms. I remember talking in 1880 with that most extreme of Tories, Professor Mahaffy of the University of Dublin. I thought it strange that differences in political opinion should ruin personal friendship. “Why,” said Mahaffy excitedly, “Gladstone and I have been intimate friends for many years. If I met him on the street now, I would cut him dead.”

Then I asked him about Parnell, and he said contemptuously that Parnell’s relations with women were scandalous. But I think he was repeating the mere gossip of hatred; I do not think he knew anything about Mrs. O’Shea, and that he was as much surprised as anyone else when the truth came out the very next year.

Parnell was a great man. As the years pass, he will become more and more a legendary figure, and there will probably be dozens of biographies written about him. Already St. John Ervine, a man of Belfast who used to hate Parnell, has written a glowing, adulatory Life. I think we probably come nearest to the real Parnell in T. P. O’Connor’s Memoirs.

Those were the great days in Parliament. Listen to “T. P.” on Gladstone.

“The most remarkable thing in the appearance of Gladstone was his extraordinary eyes; they were large, black, and flashing; sometimes there came into them a look that was almost wild.... The blackness and the brightness of his eyes were brought into greater relief by the almost deadly pallor of his complexion.... As he walked up the floor of the House he seemed to be enveloped by a great solitude, so unmistakably did he stand out from all the figures around him.

I must add to this description of his extreme physical gifts the wonderful quality of his voice. It was a powerful voice, but sweet and melodious, and it was managed as exquisitely and as faithfully as the song of a great prima donna. If the speech were ringing, it came to your ears almost soft by that constant change of tone which the voice displayed; it could whisper, it could thunder.... I have seen many great figures, but, with all respect to the greatest among them, the House of Commons without Gladstone seems to me as great a contrast as a chamber illumined by a farthing dip when the electric light has failed.”

XIV
A ROOM WITHOUT A VIEW

What is the worst poem ever written by a man of genius? It is certain that if an anthology should be made of the most terrible verses of the English bards the results would be both surprising and appalling. I cannot at this moment think of any worse pair of lines in English literature than those offered in all seriousness by the seventeenth-century poet, Richard Crashaw. They occur in a poem containing many lovely passages. In comparing the tearful eyes of Mary Magdalene to many different things he perpetrated a couplet more remarkable for ingenuity than for beauty. Her eyes are

Two walking baths, two weeping motions,