The Value of a Thick Skin
Sir Orlando Drought must have felt bitterly the quiescence with which
he sank into obscurity on the second bench on the opposite side of
the House. One great occasion he had on which it was his privilege
to explain to four or five hundred gentlemen the insuperable reasons
which caused him to break away from those right honourable friends to
act with whom had been his comfort and his duty, his great joy and
his unalloyed satisfaction. Then he occupied the best part of an hour
in abusing those friends and all their measures. This no doubt had
been a pleasure, as practice had made the manipulation of words easy
to him,--and he was able to revel in that absence of responsibility
which must be as a fresh perfumed bath to a minister just freed from
the trammels of office. But the pleasure was surely followed by much
suffering when Mr. Monk,--Mr. Monk who was to assume his place as
Leader of the House,--only took five minutes to answer him, saying
that he and his colleagues regretted much the loss of the Right
Honourable Baronet's services, but that it would hardly be necessary
for him to defend the Ministry on all those points on which it had
been attacked, as, were he to do so, he would have to repeat the
arguments by which every measure brought forward by the present
Ministry had been supported. Then Mr. Monk sat down, and the business
of the House went on just as if Sir Orlando Drought had not moved his
seat at all.
"What makes everybody and everything so dead?" said Sir Orlando to
his old friend Mr. Boffin as they walked home together from the
House that night. They had in former days been staunch friends,
sitting night after night close together, united in opposition, and
sometimes, for a few halcyon months, in the happier bonds of office.
But when Sir Orlando had joined the Coalition, and when the sterner
spirit of Mr. Boffin had preferred principles to place,--to use the
language in which he was wont to speak to himself and to his wife
and family of his own abnegation,--there had come a coolness
between them. Mr. Boffin, who was not a rich man, nor by any means
indifferent to the comforts of office, had felt keenly the injury
done to him when he was left hopelessly in the cold by the desertion
of his old friends. It had come to pass that there had been no
salt left in the opposition. Mr. Boffin in all his parliamentary
experience had known nothing like it. Mr. Boffin had been sure that
British honour was going to the dogs and that British greatness was
at an end. But the secession of Sir Orlando gave a little fillip to
his life. At any rate he could walk home with his old friend and talk
of the horrors of the present day.
"Well, Drought, if you ask me, you know, I can only speak as I feel.
Everything must be dead when men holding different opinions on every
subject under the sun come together in order that they may carry on a
government as they would a trade business. The work may be done, but
it must be done without spirit."
"But it may be all important that the work should be done," said the
Baronet, apologising for his past misconduct.
"No doubt;--and I am very far from judging those who make the
attempt. It has been made more than once before, and has, I think,
always failed. I don't believe in it myself, and I think that
the death-like torpor of which you speak is one of its worst
consequences." After that Mr. Boffin admitted Sir Orlando back into
his heart of hearts.
Then the end of the Session came, very quietly and very early. By
the end of July there was nothing left to be done, and the world of
London was allowed to go down into the country almost a fortnight
before its usual time.
With many men, both in and out of Parliament, it became a question
whether all this was for good or evil. The Boffinites had of course
much to say for themselves. Everything was torpid. There was no
interest in the newspapers,--except when Mr. Slide took the tomahawk
into his hands. A member of Parliament this Session had not been by
half so much bigger than another man as in times of hot political
warfare. One of the most moving sources of our national excitement
seemed to have vanished from life. We all know what happens to
stagnant waters. So said the Boffinites, and so also now said Sir
Orlando. But the Government was carried on and the country was
prosperous. A few useful measures had been passed by unambitious men,
and the Duke of St. Bungay declared that he had never known a Session
of Parliament more thoroughly satisfactory to the ministers.
But the old Duke in so saying had spoken as it were his public
opinion,--giving, truly enough, to a few of his colleagues, such as
Lord Drummond, Sir Gregory Grogram and others, the results of his
general experience; but in his own bosom and with a private friend he
was compelled to confess that there was a cloud in the heavens. The
Prime Minister had become so moody, so irritable, and so unhappy,
that the old Duke was forced to doubt whether things could go on
much longer as they were. He was wont to talk of these things to his
friend Lord Cantrip, who was not a member of the Government, but
who had been a colleague of both the Dukes, and whom the old Duke
regarded with peculiar confidence. "I cannot explain it to you," he
said to Lord Cantrip. "There is nothing that ought to give him a
moment's uneasiness. Since he took office there hasn't once been
a majority against him in either House on any question that the
Government has made its own. I don't remember such a state of
things,--so easy for the Prime Minister,--since the days of Lord
Liverpool. He had one thorn in his side, our friend who was at the
Admiralty, and that thorn like other thorns has worked itself out.
Yet at this moment it is impossible to get him to consent to the
nomination of a successor to Sir Orlando." This was said a week
before the Session had closed.
"I suppose it is his health," said Lord Cantrip.
"He's well enough as far as I can see;--though he will be ill unless
he can relieve himself from the strain on his nerves."
"Do you mean by resigning?"
"Not necessarily. The fault is that he takes things too seriously. If
he could be got to believe that he might eat, and sleep, and go to
bed, and amuse himself like other men, he might be a very good Prime
Minister. He is over troubled by his conscience. I have seen a good
many Prime Ministers, Cantrip, and I've taught myself to think that
they are not very different from other men. One wants in a Prime
Minister a good many things, but not very great things. He should be
clever but need not be a genius; he should be conscientious but by no
means strait-laced; he should be cautious but never timid, bold but
never venturesome; he should have a good digestion, genial manners,
and, above all, a thick skin. These are the gifts we want, but we
can't always get them, and have to do without them. For my own part,
I find that though Smith be a very good Minister, the best perhaps to
be had at the time, when he breaks down Jones does nearly as well."
"There will be a Jones, then, if your Smith does break down?"
"No doubt. England wouldn't come to an end because the Duke of Omnium
shut himself up at Matching. But I love the man, and, with some few
exceptions, am contented with the party. We can't do better, and it
cuts me to the heart when I see him suffering, knowing how much I did
myself to make him undertake the work."
"Is he going to Gatherum Castle?"
"No;--to Matching. There is some discomfort about that."
"I suppose," said Lord Cantrip,--speaking almost in a whisper,
although they were closeted together,--"I suppose the Duchess is a
little troublesome."
"She's the dearest woman in the world," said the Duke of St. Bungay.
"I love her almost as I do my own daughter. And she is most zealous
to serve him."
"I fancy she overdoes it."
"No doubt."
"And that he suffers from perceiving it," said Lord Cantrip.
"But a man hasn't a right to suppose that he shall have no
annoyances. The best horse in the world has some fault. He pulls, or
he shies, or is slow at his fences, or doesn't like heavy ground.
He has no right to expect that his wife shall know everything and
do everything without a mistake. And then he has such faults of
his own! His skin is so thin. Do you remember dear old Brock? By
heavens;--there was a covering, a hide impervious to fire or steel!
He wouldn't have gone into tantrums because his wife asked too many
people to the house. Nevertheless, I won't give up all hope."
"A man's skin may be thickened, I suppose."
"No doubt;--as a blacksmith's arm."
But the Duke of St. Bungay, though he declared that he wouldn't give
up hope, was very uneasy on the matter. "Why won't you let me go?"
the other Duke had said to him.
"What;--because such a man as Sir Orlando Drought throws up his
office?"
But in truth the Duke of Omnium had not been instigated to ask the
question by the resignation of Sir Orlando. At that very moment
the "People's Banner" had been put out of sight at the bottom of a
heap of other newspapers behind the Prime Minister's chair, and his
present misery had been produced by Mr. Quintus Slide. To have a
festering wound and to be able to show the wound to no surgeon, is
wretchedness indeed! "It's not Sir Orlando, but a sense of general
failure," said the Prime Minister. Then his old friend had made use
of that argument of the ever-recurring majorities to prove that there
had been no failure. "There seems to have come a lethargy upon the
country," said the poor victim. Then the Duke of St. Bungay knew that
his friend had read that pernicious article in the "People's Banner,"
for the Duke had also read it and remembered that phrase of a
"lethargy on the country," and understood at once how the poison had
rankled.
It was a week before he would consent to ask any man to fill the
vacancy made by Sir Orlando. He would not allow suggestions to be
made to him and yet would name no one himself. The old Duke, indeed,
did make a suggestion, and anything coming from him was of course
borne with patience. Barrington Erle, he thought, would do for the
Admiralty. But the Prime Minister shook his head. "In the first place
he would refuse, and that would be a great blow to me."
"I could sound him," said the old Duke. But the Prime Minister again
shook his head and turned the subject. With all his timidity he was
becoming autocratic and peevishly imperious. Then he went to Lord
Cantrip, and when Lord Cantrip, with all the kindness which he could
throw into his words, stated the reasons which induced him at present
to decline office, he was again in despair. At last he asked Phineas
Finn to move to the Admiralty, and, when our old friend somewhat
reluctantly obeyed, of course he had the same difficulty in filling
the office Finn had held. Other changes and other complications
became necessary, and Mr. Quintus Slide, who hated Phineas Finn
even worse than the poor Duke, found ample scope for his patriotic
indignation.
This all took place in the closing week of the Session, filling our
poor Prime Minister with trouble and dismay, just when other people
were complaining that there was nothing to think of and nothing to
do. Men do not really like leaving London before the grouse calls
them,--the grouse, or rather the fashion of the grouse. And some
ladies were very angry at being separated so soon from their swains
in the city. The tradesmen too were displeased,--so that there were
voices to re-echo the abuse of the "People's Banner." The Duchess had
done her best to prolong the Session by another week, telling her
husband of the evil consequences above suggested, but he had thrown
wide his arms and asked her with affected dismay whether he was to
keep Parliament sitting in order that more ribbons might be sold!
"There is nothing to be done," said the Duke almost angrily.
"Then you should make something to be done," said the Duchess,
mimicking him.