(VIEWED BY HENRY W. LUCY.)
[Sidenote: THE EMPTY SEAT.]
The new Session is already fairly advanced, and in some sense it is sad
to reflect that business goes forward very much as if Mr. Gladstone
were still in his place by the brass-bound box. It seemed when the
first announcement of his retirement was made that the House of Commons
could scarcely survive the withdrawal. There is not a man in the House
to-day who remembers the place when Mr. Gladstone was not a prominent
figure in it. It is true Mr. Villiers, having continuously sat since he
was first elected for Wolverhampton in 1835, is known as "The Father of
the House." But in a Parliamentary sense Mr. Gladstone was born before
his father, seeing that he took his seat for Newark in the year 1832.
Moreover, whilst Mr. Villiers, literally bent under the weight of his
more than ninety years, has long withdrawn from regular attendance
on Parliamentary duties, Mr. Gladstone was, up to the end of last
Session, daily in his place, actively directing affairs and ready at a
moment's notice to deliver a speech which, standing alone, would make a
Parliamentary reputation.
[Illustration: "LISTENING."]
[Sidenote: LISTENING.]
Up to the last his passion for Parliamentary life was overmastering.
He was, probably, never so happy as when seated in the House following
a debate. Some speeches, to others unbearably blank of interest, were
to him irresistibly attractive. During the last Parliament he, in
deference to an undertaking extorted by Sir Andrew Clark, promised to
limit his regular attendance on debate up to a point marked by the
dinner-hour, not returning save upon exceptional occasions. He made up
for restraint of opportunity by exacting use of the measure provided.
Often between seven and eight o'clock, when the House was almost empty
and some unimportant, unattractive member found his chance, he had
among his scanty audience the Prime Minister, sitting with hand to
ear, apparently entranced. During the interminable Home Rule debates,
Mr. Gladstone formed a habit, at which less excitable members used to
smile, of moving to the gangway-end of the Treasury Bench, sitting
there by the hour eagerly listening to a member whose measure of
attraction for ordinary men was indicated by the emptiness of the
benches. When in Opposition he carried this habit a step further,
occasionally seating himself below the gangway the better to hear an
Irish member.
[Sidenote: THE UNDERTAKER.]
Although immersed in affairs of State, Mr. Gladstone had that intimate
personal knowledge of the House of Commons which seems more natural
among the gossips in the smoke-room. He knew every man above the
level of the absolutely silent members, and had formed a keen and
well-defined judgment of their qualities. He was always on the look-out
for promising young men among his own party, and sometimes found
them, as in the cases of Mr. Asquith, Mr. Acland, Mr. Robertson, Sir
Edward Grey, and Mr. Sydney Buxton. One evening during the Midlothian
campaign, the conversation turned upon new members on the Conservative
side who had made some mark in the last Parliament. I ventured to name
one Irish member, seated above the gangway, who had taken frequent part
in debate on Irish affairs, and had shown intimate knowledge of the
Irish question.
"Yes," said Mr. Gladstone, "but his manner is so funereal. In my humble
way," he added, his face wrinkling into the smile that illumined it
when he was much amused, "I call him the Undertaker."
There was something charming in this way of putting it, as if he were
only a beginner in the way of affixing nicknames to Parliamentary
personages, and must not be understood in his "humble way" to be
competing with practitioners.
[Sidenote: BAITED.]
One feeling that weighed with everyone when Mr. Gladstone withdrew
from the forefront of Parliamentary life was that he, the greatest,
is also the last of a type not cast for modern Parliaments. There was
about him in the heat of battle a certain chivalry of manner, and
in the minutest relationships a courtesy, which is too truly known
as "old-fashioned." With his departure the House of Commons loses a
standard of daily conduct which, though unattainable for the average
man, was ever a wholesome incentive. To gentlemen below the gangway
this courtly bearing under, sometimes, almost brutal provocation, was
an incomprehensible and undesirable thing. They wanted to see him hit
back, give stroke for stroke, and could not understand his patient,
dignified bearing. No man, under my observation in the House of
Commons--and I have lived in it for more than twenty years--was ever
assailed with such bitterness as Mr. Gladstone; and none have shown
so little resentment. During his Ministry of 1880-5, he was nightly
the object of vituperation on the part of the Irish members, who came
nearer to the language of Billingsgate than of Westminster. It seems
now, as it seemed then, that no man could ever forget, or forgive,
the savagery of that prolonged onslaught. I do not know whether Mr.
Gladstone has forgotten it. Certainly, through the last seven years he
sat on one or other of the Front Benches he comported himself as if it
had never been: as if the men whom he alluded to as "my hon. friends"
had ever, as then, cooed him as gently as a sucking dove.
[Illustration: "DIGNITY AND COURTESY."]
In private I have heard him speak of only two members of the House of
Commons with abhorrence, and then the tone of voice and visage were
terrible to hear and see. When he has appeared at the table following
some bitter personal attack, and the House has hushed every sound in
expectation of an avalanche of scathing wrath, he has but lightly
touched on the personal matter, and returned to the course of argument
it had spitefully broken in upon. Once or twice last Session he turned
upon Mr. Chamberlain, and delighted the House by the courtly grace and
delightful skill of his reprisal. But it was never savage, or with any
under-current of nastiness--which possibly, after all, made it the more
effective.
The late Mr. Cavendish Bentinck was much treasured by the House of
Commons by reason of the temptation, invariably irresistible, he laid
in the way of Mr. Gladstone to indulge in lofty banter. Oddly enough,
in these later years, the man who stirred the blackest water of his
ire was Mr. Jesse Collings, whose almost venerable inoffensiveness of
appearance, as Mr. Gladstone turned upon him, completed the enjoyment
of the episode. Mr. Finlay was another member who seemed quite
inadequately to stir his wrath. At one time a promising recruit to the
Liberal party, Mr. Finlay in 1886 seceded with Lord Hartington and Mr.
Chamberlain. Like the other Dissentient Liberals he retained his old
seat, which happened to be immediately behind the Front Opposition
Bench. His contiguity seemed to affect Mr. Gladstone with physical
repulsion. In the heat of debate he would turn round to face Mr.
Finlay, at the moment innocent of wrong-doing, fix him with flaming
eye, and pour over him a torrent of scorching denunciation.
[Sidenote: MONUMENTAL PATIENCE.]
Mr. Gladstone's marvellous patience has been shown most conspicuously
in his bearing towards temporary recalcitrant followers. For at least
a quarter of a century his worst enemies have been those of his own
household. As soon as he has completed the structure of a Ministry,
so soon have "caves" been dug around it by hands that assumed to be
friendly. His progress has ever been clogged by Tea Room cabals, the
incessant unrest culminating in the great disruption of 1886.
I do not remember seeing Mr. Gladstone more angry than he was one
Wednesday afternoon in the Session of 1870. Here again his wrath was
excited by an ordinarily inoffensive person. The Irish Education Bill
was before the House, and there was, naturally, a Tea Room Party formed
by good Liberals for the destruction of their Leader and the bringing
in of the other side. Mr. Fawcett was foremost in the cabal, laying
the foundation, after a manner not unfamiliar in politics, of the
Ministerial position he later attained under the statesman whom he had
attacked from the flank. Mr. Miall, in genial Nonconformist fashion,
accused Mr. Gladstone of profiting by the support of the Opposition,
thus earning the suspicion, distrust, and antagonism of his most
earnest supporters.
By an odd coincidence, Mr. Miall sat that afternoon in the very seat
where last year Mr. Gladstone was accustomed to find Mr. Chamberlain.
When he sat down the Premier leaped to his feet and, turning upon him
with angry gesture, as if he would sweep him bodily out of the House,
said: "I hope my hon. friend will not continue his support of the
Government one moment longer than he deems it consistent with his sense
of duty and right. For God's sake, sir, let him withdraw it the moment
he thinks it better for the cause he has at heart that he should do so."
Twenty-four years have sped since that Wednesday afternoon. But I can
see, as if it were yesterday, the figure with outstretched hand, and
hear the thunderous voice in which this never since repeated invocation
to the Deity rang through the House. The outbreak was memorable because
rare. Since then the provocation has been as persistent as that which
on this same Irish Education Bill prepared for the foundering of the
Liberal party in the earliest months of 1874, and led to all that came
to pass in the next six years of the Disraeli Parliament. Occasionally
Mr. Gladstone has been moved to outburst of resentment. But it has been
slight compared with the incentive.
We have heard and read in recent months much about the courage,
eloquence, and statesmanship of this great career. To me it seems
that the most strongly marked feature in it has been its quiet long
suffering, its sublime patience. The fight is finished now, well done
up to the very last, and to-day--
For thee, good knight and grey, whose gleaming crest
Leads us no longer, every generous breast
Breathes benediction on thy well-won rest.
[Sidenote: YOUTH AND AGE.]
Mr. Gladstone is so accustomed to make passing references to his
extreme age, and those in close intercourse with him have grown so
habituated to the phenomenon, that the marvel of it comes to be
considerably lessened. There are two personal recollections which
serve to place the fact in full light. One was revived by Sir William
Harcourt at one of the Saturday-to-Monday parties with which the
Prince of Wales occasionally brightens Sandringham. A reference to
the Premier's then approaching eighty-fourth birthday being made, Sir
William Harcourt said he had a perfect recollection of an occasion
when he was nursed on the knee of Mr. Gladstone. Sir William is no
chicken, either in years or girth, and recollection of this affecting
scene carried him back nearly sixty years. It was too much for Mr.
Frank Lockwood, who happened to be amongst the guests forming this
particular house party. Through eyes softened with the gleam of tears,
the Recorder of Sheffield sketched on the back of the menu a picture of
the infantile Harcourt fondled on the knee of his right hon. friend,
both unconscious of all the coming years held in store for them. The
sketch is, I believe, now among the prized possessions of the Princess
of Wales.
[Illustration: OLD WILLIAM AND YOUNG WILLIAM.]
The other reminiscence also belongs to the records of a country house,
and it is Mr. Gladstone who recalls it. Mr. Henry Chaplin was a fellow
guest. Mr. Gladstone one evening asked him whether his grandmother had
not lived in a certain street in Mayfair. Mr. Chaplin assented. "Ah,"
said Mr. Gladstone, "I remember it very well. I lived next door to her
for awhile when I was a child. She used to give evening parties. When
the carriages were assembled to take up, my brother and I used to creep
out of bed--it was in the summer time--softly open the window, get out
our squirts, and discreetly fire away at the coachmen on the boxes. I
remember the intense delight with which we used to see them look up to
the sky and call out to ask each other whether it wasn't beginning to
rain."
[Illustration: SIR ISAAC HOLDEN.]
[Sidenote: SIR ISAAC HOLDEN.]
Mr. Gladstone is not, after all, the oldest man in the present House
of Commons. Sir Isaac Holden is his senior by two years. Of the twain,
I fancy Sir Isaac is the younger-looking. During the winter Session,
lacking the impulse of the constant fight round the Home Rule standard,
disappointed by the success of Obstructionist tactics, Mr. Gladstone,
from time to time, showed a distinct falling-off from the splendid form
he had presented through the long summer Session. Sometimes he sat
on the Treasury Bench, with chin sunk on his chest, a grey paleness
stealing over his face, and the light of battle faded from his eyes. He
never failed to pull himself together on returning to the House after
a division. But the effort was made, not, as heretofore, in advance of
his entrance, but after he had walked a few paces, with bent shoulders
and weary gait.
Sir Isaac Holden, who has now entered on his eighty-seventh year,
is as straight as a dart, and walks with springy step that shows no
effort. He shares with Mr. Gladstone the characteristic, rare in a man
of fourscore, that his eyes are still bright and clear. On occasions
when the Standing Orders are suspended and the House sits late in
anticipation of an important division, Sir Isaac waits till whatever
hour is necessary in order to record his vote. When the House is up, he
walks home.
Unlike Mr. Gladstone, Sir Isaac has leisure, means, and disposition
to order his daily life upon carefully-considered rules. His day is
automatically parcelled out: work, exercise, food, and recreation each
having its appointed place and period. He is neither a vegetarian
nor a teetotaler, though the main stock of his daily meals is fruit
and vegetables. For wine he drinks a little claret. He has lived a
busy, useful life, and owes a large fortune to his own industry and
enterprise. Of singularly modest disposition, the only thing he thinks
worthy of being mentioned to his credit is the fact that he invented
the lucifer match.
[Sidenote: THE EFFACEMENT OF THE IRISH MEMBER.]
The still new Parliament possesses no more marked characteristic than
the self-effacement of the Irish member. If any member of the 1874 or
the 1880 Parliament were to revisit Westminster without knowledge of
what had taken place since 1886, he would not recognise the scene. In
those not distant days the Irish member pervaded the Chamber. Whatever
the subject-matter of debate might be, he was sure to march in and make
the question his own. If in any direct or indirect manner Ireland was
concerned, this was natural enough. But any subject, found in China or
Peru, would serve to occupy a night's sitting, and retard the progress
of Government business. In the Parliament of 1880 two of the most
prolonged and fiercest debates, inaugurated and carried on by the Irish
members, related to flogging in the army and the state of affairs in
South Africa.
This procedure was, up to 1886, part of a deliberate policy, of which
Mr. Biggar and Mr. Parnell were the earliest exponents. They wanted
their own Parliament on College Green. If the Saxon, regardless of
entreaties and demands, insisted on keeping them at Westminster, they
would make themselves as obnoxious as possible. The habit of constantly
taking part in debate being thus formed, and fitting easily gentlemen
to whom public speaking comes by nature, it was observed, though with
less persistence, during the last Parliament, when the Irish party was
no longer a political Ishmael, but was the acknowledged ally of one of
the great English armies.
[Sidenote: MR. SEXTON.]
With the opening of the present Session a marvellous, almost
miraculous, change has been wrought. Its most remarkable development,
the fullest measure of rare personal sacrifice, is found in the case
of Mr. Sexton. A man of rare gifts as a debater, no one takes so keen
a pleasure in the delivery of Mr. Sexton's speeches as does the hon.
member himself. This very excess of appreciation was at one time wont
to mar his Parliamentary position. For the ordinary speaker, provision
of one peroration per speech suffices. So illimitable are Mr. Sexton's
natural resources, that he can toss off half-a-dozen perorations in
the course of a single speech. In practice this habit grows a trifle
tantalizing. Even the most indolent listener draws himself together
and concentrates attention when a member, who has been talking for
twenty minutes or half an hour, shows signs of coming to a conclusion.
When, after declaiming a ringing peroration, the orator, recurring to
leveller tones and less ornate style, quietly begins again, the feeling
of disappointment is aggravated by a sense of having been betrayed.
[Illustration: MR. SEXTON.]
In some of his set speeches, extending from one and a half to two
hours, Mr. Sexton, doubtless unconsciously, has been known thus to
impose on the confidence of the House three distinct times. This
long-irresistible tendency to verbosity was regrettable as spoiling
a position won by natural ability, hampered rather than assisted by
adventitious circumstances.
Since the first Session of the new Parliament opened the Irish
members, including Mr. Sexton, have conducted themselves in a manner
that testifies to the potency of patriotism. The one object they have
in view is to get a Home Rule Bill added to the Statute Book. It is
avowedly, as Lord Randolph Churchill long ago, with brusque frankness,
admitted, a race against time. Every week's delay in the accomplishment
of the end imperils the success of the movement. In these circumstances
any Irish member who lengthens the proceeding by speech-making is a
traitor to the cause. The Irish members have, therefore, with one
accord taken and kept a vow of silence.
[Sidenote: RADICAL MARTYRS.]
This is no new thing in Parliamentary tactics. A dozen years ago a
similar effacement of another active party was brought about in the
House of Commons. This was the active and useful private member, of
whom the late Mr. Peter Rylands was a type, accustomed to sit through
Committee of Supply worrying the Minister in charge of the Votes with
innumerable questions and pin-pricking criticisms. The Irish were
then the Obstructionists, and, taking full advantage of opportunity
presented in Committee of Supply, they talked at large through the
night in order to prevent Votes being taken. It came to pass that any
honest, well-meaning member who desired to obtain information touching
a particular Vote came to be regarded as a criminal. He was undoubtedly
by his interposition playing the game of the Obstructionists. It was
not only the time appropriated by his remarks that had to be taken
into account. The quick-witted Irishmen, making the most of every
opportunity, went off on the new trail opened, and followed it for the
greater part of a sitting. The well-meaning economist was shunned by
his friends, frowned on by his leaders, and took care not to repeat
the indiscretion. Between 1880 and 1885 the old-fashioned custom
of narrowly examining the Civil Service Estimates, not the least
interesting function of a member of the House of Commons, received a
blow from which it has not yet recovered.
The consequent self-repression was bad enough for sober Saxons like
Mr. Peter Rylands and his mates in Committee. For the Celtic nature
the strain must be much more severe. What Mr. Sexton suffers, as night
after night he sits below the Gangway, hearing other members talk and
recognising how much better he could put the points, who shall say? As
for Mr. Tim Healy, he providentially finds partial relief in a running
commentary that occasionally draws upon him reproof from the Speaker
or Chairman. Mr. Balfour, with the instincts of a leader partially
responsible for good order in the House, once welcomed these little
ebullitions. They were, he said, equivalent to the blowing-off of
steam. Shut off the means of partial relief, and fatal explosion might
follow.
[Sidenote: THE EXTINCT IRISH MEMBER.]
It is curious but not inexplicable how the type of Irish member
familiar eighteen or even thirteen years ago has disappeared. Of the
band Isaac Butt reappeared on the political stage to lead, but few
are left. Even of their successors, the body Mr. Biggar inspired and
Mr. Parnell organized, those still in the House may be counted on the
fingers of one hand. And what a rare group of individuals they formed!
There were many characters that might have stepped out of the pages
of Lever or Lover. Butt himself was an interesting figure, a relic of
Parliamentary time and manner that to-day seem prehistoric. It is a
pity that such a man, with his great gifts and his wide experience,
should have been allowed to drop behind the horizon without the tribute
of that biography rendered to many far less interesting and important
people. There was something pathetic about the renunciation of his
leadership by the party he had created. When Parnell was a youth at
college, Butt was fighting for Home Rule for Ireland. He was the Moses
of this Irish pilgrimage. Some failings and shortcomings may have
justified the edict which forbade him to enter the Promised Land. But
it was a little hard that he should have been ousted from the command
whilst still on the march he had planned.
[Illustration: MR. TIM HEALY.
_From an Irish MS. of the 19th Century._]
I remember the night when, entering the House whilst the usual flood of
questions was pouring from the Irish camp, he walked on, crossed the
Gangway, and took his seat behind the Front Opposition Bench. He did
not long survive this severance from the majority of his party. He was
not old as years are counted. But he had lived his days, had heard the
chimes at midnight, was bowed in body, harassed in mind, and this last
blow shattered him.
There were few to migrate with him above the Gangway. Almost alone,
McCarthy Downing followed the old leader, a lachrymose comforter,
sitting near him, as Butt, with his back turned to the Irish quarter,
sat with his head leaning on his hands listening to the shrill gibes of
Joseph Gillis, or the more polished but not therefore less acrid taunts
of Parnell.
Mr. Mitchell Henry was one of the few who stood by the old chief, the
rift thus developed widening as the influence of Parnell and Biggar
prevailed, and open war was declared against law and order and the
House of Commons. When the Liberals came in in 1880, and the Irish
members, breaking through a new tradition, decided to remain stationary
on the left of the Speaker, Mitchell Henry crossed the floor, sat with
the Ministerialists, and became a favourite target of the Parnellites.
[Sidenote: SIR PATRICK O'BRIEN.]
With him went Sir Patrick O'Brien, the most delightful embodiment of
genuine Irish humour of the unconscious, inconsequential order known
to the present generation. Sir Pat, with his left hand in his trousers
pocket, his right hand shaking defiance at his countrymen opposite,
was a precious possession, for ever lost to an increasingly prosaic
Parliament. He could not away with the new kind of Irish member
represented by Mr. Kenny, "the young sea-sarpent from County Clare," as
in a flight of lofty but vague eloquence he called him. "Order! order!"
cried the Speaker, sternly. "Then, Mr. Speaker," said Sir Pat, with a
courtly bow, "I will withdraw the sea-sarpent and substitute the hon.
member for County Clare."
_Stories From the Diary of a Doctor._
_By the Authors of_ "THE MEDICINE LADY."