Lord Palmerston, then Foreign Secretary, introduced an innovation
whereby, instead of being solemnly summoned by a verbal message, the
clerks were expected to answer his bell. Some haughty spirits rebelled
against being treated like footmen, and tried to organize resistance;
but Odo Russell, as he then was, refused to join the rebellious
movement, saying that whatever method apprized him most quickly of Lord
Palmerston's wishes was the method which he preferred. The aggrieved
clerks regarded him as a traitor to his order--but he died an
ambassador. Trollope described the wounded feelings of a young clerk
whose chief sent him to fetch his slippers; and in our own day a Private
Secretary, who had patiently taken tickets for the play for his chief's
daughters, drew the line when he was told to take the chief's razors to
be ground. But such assertions of independence are extremely rare, and
as a rule the Private Secretary is the most cheerful and the most alert
of ministering spirits.
But it is time to return from this personal digression to the routine of
the day's work. Among the most important of the morning's duties is the
preparation of answers to be given in the House of Commons, and it is
often necessary to have answers ready by three o'clock to questions
which have only appeared that morning on the notice-paper. The range of
questions is infinite, and all the resources of the office are taxed in
order to prepare answers at once accurate in fact and wise in policy, to
pass them under the Minister's review, and to get them fairly copied out
before the House meets. As a rule, the Minister, knowing something of
the temper of Parliament, wishes to give a full, explicit, and
intelligible answer, or even to go a little beyond the strict terms of
the question if he sees what his interrogator is driving at. But this
policy is abhorrent to the Permanent Official. The traditions of the
Circumlocution Office are by no means dead, and the crime of "wanting to
know, you know," is one of the most heinous that the M.P. can commit.
The answers, therefore, as prepared for the Minister are generally
jejune, often barely civil, sometimes actually misleading. But the
Minister, if he be a wise man, edits them into a more informing shape,
and after a long and careful deliberation as to the probable effect of
his words and the reception which they will have from his questioner, he
sends the bundle of written answers away to be fair-copied and turns to
his correspondence.
And here the practice of Ministers varies exceedingly. Lord Salisbury
writes almost everything with his own hand. Mr. Balfour dictates to a
shorthand clerk. Most Ministers write a great deal by their Private
Secretaries. Letters of any importance are usually transcribed into a
copying-book. A Minister whom I knew used to burn the fragment of
blotting-paper with which he had blotted his letter, and laid it down as
an axiom that, if a constituent wrote and asked a Member to vote for a
particular measure, the Member should on no account give a more precise
reply than, "I shall have great pleasure in voting in the sense you
desire." For, as this expert observed with great truth, "unless the
constituent has kept a copy of his letter--and the chances are twenty to
one against that--there will be nothing to prove what the sense he
desired was, and you will be perfectly safe in voting as you like." The
letters received by a Minister are many, various, and surprising. Of
course, a great proportion of them relate to public business, and a
considerable number to the affairs of his constituency. But, in addition
to all this, lunatics, cranks, and impostors mark a Minister for their
own, and their applications for loans, gifts, and offices of profit
would exhaust the total patronage of the Crown and break the Bank of
England.
When the day's official papers have been dealt with, answers to
questions settled, correspondence read, and the replies written or
dictated, it is very likely time to go to a conference on some Bill with
which the office is concerned. This conference will consist of the
Minister in charge of the Bill, two or three of his colleagues who have
special knowledge of the subject, the Permanent Officials, the
Parliamentary draftsman, and perhaps one of the Law Officers. At the
conference the amendments on the paper are carefully discussed, together
with the objects for which they were presumably put down, their probable
effect, their merits or demerits, and the best mode of meeting them. An
hour soon passes in this kind of anticipatory debate, and the Minister
is called away to receive a deputation.
The scene is exactly like that which Matthew Arnold described at the
Social Science Congress--the large bare room, dusty air, and jaded
light, serried ranks of men with bald heads and women in spectacles; the
local M.P., like Mr. Gregsbury in _Nicholas Nickleby_, full of
affability and importance, introducing the selected spokesmen--"Our
worthy mayor; our leading employer of labour; Miss Twoshoes, a
philanthropic worker in all good causes"--the Minister, profoundly
ignorant of the whole subject, smiling blandly or gazing earnestly from
his padded chair; the Permanent Official at his elbow murmuring what the
"practice of the department" has been, what his predecessor said on a
similar occasion ten years ago, and why the object of the deputation is
equally mischievous and impossible; and the Minister finally expressing
sympathy and promising earnest consideration. Mr. Bright, though the
laziest of mankind at official work, was the ideal hand at receiving
deputations. Some Ministers scold or snub or harangue, but he let the
spokesmen talk their full, listened patiently, smiled pleasantly, said
very little, treated the subject with gravity or banter as its nature
required, paid the introducing member a compliment on his assiduity and
public spirit, and sent them all away on excellent terms with themselves
and highly gratified by their intelligent and courteous reception.
So far we have described our Minister's purely departmental duties. But
perhaps the Cabinet meets at twelve, and at the Cabinet he must, to use
Mr. Gladstone's phrase, "throw his mind into the common stock" with his
fellow-Ministers, and take part in the discussions and decisions which
govern the Empire. By two o'clock or thereabouts the Cabinet is over.
The labours of the morning are now beginning to tell, and exhausted
Nature rings her luncheon-bell. Here again men's habits widely differ.
If our Minister has breakfasted late, he will go on till four or five,
and then have tea and toast, and perhaps a poached egg; but if he is an
early man, he craves for nutriment more substantial. He must not go out
to luncheon to a friend's house, for he will be tempted to eat and drink
too much, and absence from official territory in the middle of the day
has a bad look of idleness and self-indulgence. The _dura ilia_ of the
present[37] Duke of Devonshire could always cope with a slice of the
office-joint, a hunch of the office-bread, a glass of the office-sherry.
But, as a rule, if a man cannot manage to get back to the family meal in
South Kensington or Cavendish Square, he turns into a club, has a cutlet
and a glass of claret, and gets back to his office for another hour's
work before going to the House.
At 3.30 questions begin, and every Minister is in his place, unless,
indeed, there is a Levee or a Drawing-room, when a certain number of
Ministers, besides the great Officers of State, are expected to be
present. The Minister lets himself into the House by a private door--of
which Ministers alone have the key--at the back of the Chair. For an
hour and a half, or perhaps longer, the storm of questions rages, and
then the Minister, if he is in charge of the Bill under discussion,
settles himself on the Treasury Bench to spend the remainder of the day
in a hand-to-hand encounter with the banded forces of the Opposition,
which will tax to their utmost his brain, nerve, and physical endurance.
If, however, he is not directly concerned with the business, he goes out
perhaps for a breath of air and a cup of tea on the Terrace, and then
buries himself in his private room--generally a miserable little
dog-hole in the basement of the House--where he finds a pile of
office-boxes, containing papers which must be read, minuted, and
returned to the office with all convenient dispatch. From these labours
he is suddenly summoned by the shrill ting-ting of the division-bell and
the raucous bellow of the policeman to take part in a division. He
rushes upstairs two steps at a time, and squeezes himself into the
House through the almost closed doors. "What are we?" he shouts to the
Whip. "Ayes" or "Noes" is the hurried answer; and he stalks through the
lobby to discharge this intelligent function, dives down to his room
again, only, if the House is in Committee, to be dragged up again ten
minutes afterwards for another repetition of the same farce, and so on
indefinitely.
It may be asked why a Minister should undergo all this worry of running
up and down and in and out, laying down his work and taking it up again,
dropping threads, and losing touch, and wasting time, all to give a
purely party vote, settled for him by his colleague in charge of the
Bill, on a subject with which he is personally unfamiliar. If the
Government is in peril, of course every vote is wanted; but, with a
normal majority, Ministers' votes might surely be "taken as read," and
assumed to be given to the side to which they belong. But the traditions
of Government require Ministers to vote. It is a point of honour for
each man to be in as many divisions as possible. A record is kept of all
the divisions of the session and of the week, and a list is sent round
every Monday morning showing in how many each Minister has voted.
The Whips, who must live and move and have their being in the House,
naturally head the list, and their colleagues follow in a rather
uncertain order. A Minister's place in this list is mainly governed by
the question whether he dines at the House or not. If he dines away and
"pairs," of course he does not in the least jeopardize his party or
embarrass his colleagues; but "pairs" are not indicated in the list of
divisions, and, as divisions have an awkward knack of happening between
nine and ten, the habitual diner-out naturally sinks in the list. If he
is a married man, the claims of the home are to a certain extent
recognized by his Whips, but woe to the bachelor who, with no domestic
excuse, steals away for two hours' relaxation. The good Minister
therefore stays at the House and dines there. Perhaps he is entertaining
ladies in the crypt-like dining-rooms which look on the Terrace, and in
that case the charms of society may neutralize the material discomforts.
But, if he dine upstairs at the Ministerial table, few indeed are the
alleviations of his lot. In the first place he must dine with the
colleagues with whom his whole waking life is passed--excellent fellows
and capital company--but nature demands an occasional enlargement of the
mental horizon. Then if by chance he has one special bugbear--a bore or
an egotist, a man with dirty hands or a churlish temper--that man will
inevitably come and sit down beside him and insist on being affectionate
and fraternal.
The room is very hot; dinners have been going on in it for the last two
hours; the [Greek: knisê]--the odour of roast meat, which the gods
loved, but which most men dislike--pervades the atmosphere; your
next-door neighbour is eating a rather high grouse while you are at your
apple-tart, or the perfumes of a deliquescent Camembert mingle with your
coffee. As to beverages, you may, if you choose, follow the example of
Lord Cross, who, when he was Sir Richard, drank beer in its native
pewter, or of Mr. Radcliffe Cooke, who tries to popularize cider; or you
may venture on that thickest, blackest, and most potent of vintages
which a few years back still went by the name of "Mr. Disraeli's port."
But as a rule these heroic draughts are eschewed by the modern Minister.
Perhaps, if he is in good spirits after making a successful speech or
fighting his Estimates through Committee, he will indulge himself with
an imperial pint of champagne; but more often a whiskey-and-soda or a
half-bottle of Zeltinger quenches his modest thirst.
On Wednesday and Saturday our Minister, if he is not out of London,
probably dines at a large dinner-party. Once a session he must dine in
full dress with the Speaker; once he must dine at, or give, a full-dress
dinner "to celebrate her Majesty's Birthday." On the eve of the meeting
of Parliament he must dine again in full dress with the Leader of the
House, to hear the rehearsal of the "gracious Speech from the Throne."
But, as a rule, his fate on Wednesday and Saturday is a ceremonious
banquet at a colleague's house, and a party strictly political--perhaps
the Prime Minister as the main attraction, reinforced by Lord and Lady
Decimus Tite-Barnacle, Mr. and Mrs. Stiltstalking, Sir John Taper, and
young Mr. Tadpole. A political dinner of thirty colleagues, male and
female, in the dog-days is only a shade less intolerable than the greasy
rations and mephitic vapours of the House of Commons' dining-room.
At the political dinner "shop" is the order of the day. Conversation
turns on Brown's successful speech, Jones's palpable falling-off,
Robinson's chance of office, the explanation of a recent by-election, or
the prospects of an impending division. And, to fill the cup of boredom
to the brim, the political dinner is usually followed by a political
evening-party. On Saturday the Minister probably does two hours' work at
his office and has some boxes sent to his house, but the afternoon he
spends in cycling, or golfing, or riding, or boating, or he leaves
London till Monday morning. On Wednesday he is at the House till six,
and then escapes for a breath of air before dinner. But on Monday,
Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday, as a rule, he is at the House from its
meeting at three till it adjourns at any hour after midnight. After
dinner he smokes and reads and tries to work in his room, and goes to
sleep and wakes again, and towards midnight is unnaturally lively.
Outsiders believe in the "twelve o'clock rule," but insiders know that,
as a matter of fact, it is suspended as often as an Irish member in the
'80 Parliament. Whoever else slopes homewards, the Government must stay.
Before now a Minister has been fetched out of his bed, to which he had
surreptitiously retired, by a messenger in a hansom, and taken back to
the House to defend his Estimates at three in the morning.
"There they sit with ranks unbroken, cheering on the fierce debate,
Till the sunrise lights them homeward as they tramp through
Storey's Gate,
Racked with headache, pale and haggard, worn by nights of endless
talk,
While the early sparrows twitter all along the Birdcage Walk."
Some ardent souls there are who, if report speaks true, are not content
with even this amount of exertion and excitement, but finish the night,
or begin the day, with a rubber at the club or even a turn at baccarat.
However, we are describing, not choice spirits or chartered _viveurs_,
but the blameless Minister, whose whole life during the Parliamentary
session is the undeviating and conscientious discharge of official duty;
and he, when he lays his head upon his respectable pillow any time after
1 a.m., may surely go to sleep in the comfortable consciousness that he
has done a fair day's work for a not exorbitant remuneration.
FOOTNOTES:
[35] 1897.
[36] The word "conservative" here applies only to official routine. The
Civil Service has no politics, but many of its members are staunch
Liberals.
[37] Spencer Compton, 8th Duke.
XXXIV.
AN OLD PHOTOGRAPH-BOOK.
The diary from which these Recollections have been mainly gathered dates
from my thirteenth year, and it has lately received some unexpected
illustrations. In turning out the contents of a neglected cupboard, I
stumbled on a photograph-book which I filled while I was a boy at a
Public School. The school has lately been described under the name of
Lyonness,[38] and that name will serve as well as another. The book had
been mislaid years ago, and when it accidentally came to light a strange
aroma of old times seemed still to hang about it. Inside and out, it was
reminiscent of a life in which for five happy years I bore my part.
Externally the book showed manifest traces of a schoolboy's ownership,
in broken corners; plentiful ink-stains, from exercises and punishments;
droppings of illicit candle grease, consumed long after curfew-time;
round marks like fairy rings on a greensward, which indicated the
standpoint of extinct jam pots--where are those jam pots now? But, while
the outside of the book spoke thus, as it were, by innuendo and
suggestion, the inside seemed to shout with joyous laughter or chuckle
with irreverent mirth; or murmured, in tones lower perhaps, but
certainly not less distinct, of things which were neither joyous nor
mirthful.
The book had been carefully arranged. As I turned over the leaves,
there came back the memory of holiday-evenings and the interested
questionings of sisters over each new face or scene; and the kind
fingers which did the pasting-in; and the care with which we made
portrait and landscape fit into and illustrate one another. And what
memories, what impressions, strong and clear as yesterday's, clung to
each succeeding view! The Spire--that "pinnacle perched on a
precipice"--with its embosoming trees, as one had so often seen it from
the North-Western Railway, while the finger of fate, protruding from the
carriage window, pointed it out with--"That's where you will go to
school." And, years later, came the day when one travelled for the first
time by a train which did not rush through Lyonness Station (then how
small), but stopped there, and disgorged its crowd of boys and their
confusion of luggage, and oneself among the rest, and one's father just
as excited and anxious and eager as his son.
A scurry for a seat on the omnibus or a tramp uphill, and we find
ourselves abruptly in the village street. Then did each page as I turned
it over bring some fresh recollection of one's unspeakable sense of
newness and desolation; the haunting fear of doing something ludicrous;
the morbid dread of chaff and of being "greened," which even in my time
had, happily, supplanted the old terrors of being tossed in a blanket or
roasted at a fire. Even less, I venture to think, was one thrilled by
the heroic ambitions, the magnificent visions of struggle and success,
which stir the heroes of schoolboy novels on the day of their arrival.
Here was a view of the School Library, with its patch of greensward
separating it from the dust and traffic of the road. There was the Old
School with its Fourth Form Room, of which one had heard so much that
the actual sight of it made one half inclined to laugh and half to cry
with surprise and disappointment. There was the twisting High Street,
with its precipitous causeway; there was the faithful presentment of the
fashionable "tuck-shop," with two boys standing in the road, and the leg
of a third caught by the camera as he hurried past; and, wandering
through all these scenes in the album as one had wandered through them
in real life, I reached at last my boarding-house, once a place of
mystery and wonderful expectations and untried experiences; now full of
memories, some bright, some sad, but all gathering enchantment from
their retrospective distance; and in every brick and beam and cupboard
and corner as familiar as home itself.
The next picture, a view of the School Bathing-place, carried me a stage
onward in memory to my first summer quarter. Two terms of school life
had inured one to a new existence, and one began to know the pleasures,
as well as the pains, of a Public School. It was a time of cloudless
skies, and abundant "strawberry mashes," and _dolce far niente_ in that
sweetly-shaded pool, when the sky was at its bluest, and the air at its
hottest, and the water at its most inviting temperature.
And then the Old Speech-Room, so ugly, so incommodious, where we stood
penned together like sheep for the slaughter, under the gallery, to hear
our fate on the first morning of our school life, and where, when he had
made his way up the school, the budding scholar received his prize or
declaimed his verses on Speech Day. That was the crowning day of the
young orator's ambition, when there was an arch of evergreens reared
over the school gate, and Lyonness was all alive with carriages, and
relations, and grandees,
"And, as Lear, he poured forth the deep imprecation,
By his daughters of Kingdom and reason deprived;
Till, fired by loud plaudits and self-adulation,
He regarded himself as a Garrick revived."
Opposite the Old Speech-Room was the interior of the Chapel, with its
roof still echoing the thunder of the Parting Hymn; and the pulpit with
its unforgotten pleadings for truthfulness and purity; and the organ,
still vocal with those glorious psalms. And, high over all, the
Churchyard Hill, with its heaven-pointing spire, and the Poet's Tomb;
and, below, the incomparable expanse of pasture and woodland stretching
right away to the "proud keep with its double belt of kindred and coeval
towers."
"Still does yon bank its living hues unfold,
With bloomy wealth of amethyst and gold;
How oft at eve we watched, while there we lay,
The flaming sun lead down the dying day,
Soothed by the breeze that wandered to and fro
Through the glad foliage musically low.
Still stands that tree, and rears its stately form
In rugged strength, and mocks the winter storm;
There, while of slender shade and sapling growth,
We carved our schoolboy names, a mutual troth.
All, all, revives a bliss too bright to last,
And every leaflet whispers of the past."
And while the views of places were thus eloquent of the old days,
assuredly not less so were the portraits. There was the Head Master in
his silken robes, looking exactly as he did when, enthroned in the Sixth
Form Room, he used to deliver those well-remembered admonitions--"Never
say what you know to be wrong," and "Let us leave _commence_ and
_partake_ to the newspapers."
And there was the Mathematical Master--the Rev. Rhadamanthus
Rhomboid--compared with whom his classical namesake was a lenient judge.
An admirable example was old Mr. Rhomboid of a pedagogic type which, I
am told, is passing away--precise, accurate, stern, solid; knowing very
little, but that little thoroughly; never overlooking a slip, but seldom
guilty of an injustice; sternest and most unbending of prehistoric
Tories, both in matters political and educational; yet carrying
concealed somewhere under the square-cut waistcoat a heart which knew
how to sympathize with boy-flesh and the many ills which it is heir to.
Good old Mr. Rhomboid! I wonder if he is still alive.
Facing him in the album, and most appropriately contrasted, was the
portrait of a young master--the embodiment of all that Mr. Rhomboid most
heartily loathed. We will call him Vivian Grey. Vivian Grey was an
Oxford Double First of unusual brilliancy, and therefore found a special
charm and a satisfying sense of being suitably employed in his duty at
Lyonness, which was to instil [Greek: tuptô] and Phaedrus into the
five-and-thirty little wiseacres who constituted the lowest form. Over
the heads of these sages his political and metaphysical utterances
rolled like harmless thunder, for he was at once a transcendentalist in
philosophy and a utilitarian Radical of the purest dye. All of which
mattered singularly little to his five-and-thirty disciples, but caused
infinite commotion and annoyance to the Rhomboids and Rhadamanthuses.
Vivian Grey at Oxford had belonged to that school which has been
described as professing
"One Kant with a K,
And many a cant with a c."