THERE is no doubt--it is not feigned by tired fancy--that the present
House of Commons is a less entertaining assembly than it was wont to be.
This is partly due to the lack of heaven-born comedians and largely to
the curtailment of opportunity. The alteration of the rules of time
under which the House sits for work was fatal to redundancy of humour.
The House of Commons is, after all, human, and it is an indisputable
fact that mankind is more disposed to mirth after dinner than before. If
the record be searched it will be found that ninety per cent. of the
famous scenes that have established its reputation as a place of public
entertainment have happened after dinner.
Under the new rules, which practically close debate at midnight, there
is no "after dinner." Mechanically, apparently involuntarily, the old
arrangement of debate has shifted. Time was, within the memory of many
sitting in the present House, when the climax of debate was found in its
closing hours. The Leader of the House rose at eleven or half-past, and
before a crowded and excited assembly cheered on his followers to an
impending division. When he sat down, amid thundering cheers from his
supporters, the Leader of the Opposition sprang to his feet, was hailed
with a wild cheer from his friends, struck ringing blows across the
table, and then, at one o'clock, or two o'clock, or whatever hour of the
morning it might chance to be, members poured forth in tumultuous tide,
parting at the division lobby.
This was the period of the evening when chartered libertines of debate
appeared on the scene and the fun grew fast and furious. It was Mr.
O'Donnell's pleasing habit to rise when the duel between the Leaders was
concluded, and the crowded House roared for the division like caged
lions whose feeding-time is overstepped. Pausing to recapture his errant
eyeglass, Mr. O'Donnell was accustomed to gaze round the seething mass
of senators with admirably-feigned surprise at their impatience. When
the uproar lulled he began his speech; when it rose again he stopped;
but the speech was inevitable, and members presently recognising the
position, sat in sullen silence till he had said his say.
[Illustration: "ADMIRABLY-FEIGNED SURPRISE."]
This was comedy, not highly conceived it is true, but worked out with
great skill, the enraged House chiefly contributing to its success. It
was varied by the tragedy of the desperate English or Scotch member who,
striving vainly night after night to catch the Speaker's eye, made a mad
plunge at his last chance, and was literally howled down. It was a
favourite hour for the late Mr. Biggar's manifestations, and the
lamented and immortal Major O'Gorman never failed to put in an
appearance at eleven o'clock, ready for any fun that might be going or
might be made.
Now, when members slowly fill the House after dinner, dropping in
between ten and eleven o'clock, they know there is no time for anything
but business. If a division is imminent the debate must necessarily stop
before midnight for the question to be put. If it is to be continued, it
must be adjourned sharp on the stroke of midnight. As the House rarely
refills much before eleven o'clock, there is not opportunity after
dinner for more than one set speech from a favourite orator. The
consequence is that the plums of debate are in these days all pulled out
before dinner; and though at this period, the withers of the House being
unwrung it is ready for a brisk fight, it is not in the mellow mood that
invites and encourages the humorous.
Whilst the opportunities of the Parliamentary Yorick are thus
peremptorily curtailed, he is at a further disadvantage in view of the
personality of the Leadership. It is impossible that a House led by Mr.
W. H. Smith can be as prone to merriment as was one which found its head
in Mr. Disraeli. When, in the Parliament of 1868, Mr. Gladstone was
Premier and Mr. Disraeli Leader of the Opposition, or in the succeeding
Parliament, when these positions were reversed, the House of Commons
enjoyed a unique incentive to conditions of humour. Mr. Gladstone, with
his gravity of mien, his sonorous sustained eloquence, and his
seriousness about trifles, was a superb foil for the gay, but always
mordant humour of Mr. Disraeli.
[Illustration: "ELOQUENCE."]
From the outset of his career that great Parliamentarian enjoyed
extraordinary advantage by reason of the accident of the personality
against which, first and last, he was pitted. Having had Sir Robert Peel
to gird against through the space of a dozen years, it was too much to
hope that for fully a quarter of a century he should have enjoyed the
crowning mercy of being opposed to and contrasted with Mr. Gladstone.
Yet such was his good fortune. How little he did with Lord Hartington in
the interregnum of 1874-7, and how little mark he made against Lord
Granville when he met him in the Lords, brings into strong light the
advantage fortune had secured for him through the longer period of his
life.
Whilst the tone and habit of the House of Commons in matters of humour
are to a considerable extent conformable with the idiosyncrasy of its
leaders, it will sometimes, in despair of prevailing dulness, assume a
joke if it has it not. There is nothing more delightful in the happiest
efforts of Mr. Disraeli than the peculiar relations which subsist
between the present House of Commons and Mr. W. H. Smith. On one side we
have a good, amiable, somewhat pedagogic gentleman, unexpectedly thrust
into the seat haunted by the shades of Palmerston and Disraeli. On the
other side is the House of Commons, a little doubtful of the result, but
personally liking the new Leader, and constitutionally prone to
recognise authority.
[Illustration: "HAUNTED."]
At first Mr. Smith was voted unbearably dull. His hesitating manner, his
painful self-consciousness, his moral reflections, and his all-pervading
sense of "duty to his Queen and country" bored the House. In the first
few months of his succession to Lord Randolph Churchill, there was seen
the unwonted spectacle of members getting up and leaving the House when
the Leader presented himself at the table. But Mr. Smith plodded on,
patiently, pathetically, trolling out his moral reflections, and
tremulously preserving what with full consciousness of the contradiction
of words may be described as an air of submissive authority. Members
began to perceive, or perhaps to invent, the fun of the thing. Mr. Smith
realised their boyhood's idea of Mr. Barlow conversing with his pupils;
only he was always benevolent, and though he frequently shook his ferule
with threatening gesture, Sandford and Merton felt that the palms of
their hands were safe.
Mr. Smith is, however, peculiarly a House of Commons' possession. No one
out of the House can quite understand how precious he is, how
inimitable, how indescribable. To the outsider he makes poor amends for
the Irish Members of the Parliament of 1874, or the Fourth Party that
played so prominent a _rôle_ in the House that met in 1880. The Fourth
Party, like the Major, Mr. Biggar, Mr. Delahunty, Mr. McCarthy Downing,
and the famous Lord Mayor of Dublin--who warned Mr. Forster what would
happen in the event of an (absolutely uncontemplated) attempt on the
part of the Chief Secretary to drag his lordship's spouse out of her bed
in the dead of the night--are with us no more. Gone too, faded into
dreamland, are the characters who made up the Fourth Party. Happily
three of them remain with us, though in strangely altered circumstances.
Two sit on the Treasury Bench, and one watches it from behind with
friendly concern that adds a new terror to Ministerial office.
[Illustration: "THREE-FOURTHS OF A PARTY."]
Each in his way brilliantly sustains the reputation of the famous school
in which he was trained. There is in the House only one possibly
superior combination of debaters to Lord Randolph Churchill, Mr. Arthur
Balfour, and Sir John Gorst. In the quality of humour especially under
consideration, this combination carries away the palm from the other. I
think it is untrue to say, as is commonly accepted, that Mr. Gladstone
is devoid of the sense of humour, though it must be admitted that it
does not predominate in his House of Commons speeches. Mr. Chamberlain
is even more conspicuously lacking in this commanding quality. On the
other hand, Mr. Balfour in his House of Commons addresses does not shine
as a humorist. He is in his public character (in strange contrast, by
the way, with his personal habitude) not sufficiently genial. But he has
a pretty wit of the sarcastic, poisoned-dagger style, which, differing
from the effects of humour, makes everybody laugh, save the object of
the attack. _He_ writhes.
[Illustration: "HE WRITHES."]
Mr. Balfour's Parliamentary style, doubtless unconsciously, perhaps for
reasons connected with heredity, is shaped upon his distinguished
uncle's. He lacks the grave ponderosity which gives the finishing touch
to Lord Salisbury's occasional trifling with public questions. But he is
still young, and his style inchoate.
The Minister who answers for India in the House of Commons cannot fairly
be expected to contribute to the hilarity of its proceedings. Yet
occasionally Sir John Gorst, more particularly at question-time,
standing at the table with almost funereal aspect, drops a parenthetical
remark that convulses the House with laughter. Lord Randolph Churchill,
since he has taken to racing, has assumed a gravity of manner which
militates against repetition of his old successes in setting the table
in a roar.
But the gloom under which he has enveloped himself is, like that which
just now obscures the sunlight of laughter over the House generally,
only a temporary condition. The present House has accidentally run into
a groove of gloom, which will probably outlast its existence. But there
is no reason to believe that the decay of humour noted will be
permanent. There is no assembly in the world so pathetically eager to be
amused as is the House of Commons. It sits and listens entranced to
bursts of sustained argument. It follows with keen intellectual delight
the course of subtle argument. It burns with fierce indignation at a
story of wrong-doing. It flashes with generous impulse at an invitation
to do right. But it likes, above all things, to be made to laugh. In its
despair of worthier efforts, almost anything will do. An agitated orator
rounding off his peroration by sitting down on his hat; a glass of water
upset; or, primest joke of all, an impassioned oratorical fist brought
down with resonant thud on the hat of a listener sitting attentive on
the bench below--these are trivial, familiar accidents that never fail
to bring down the House.
[Illustration: "AN IMPASSIONED ORATORICAL FIST."]
So persistently eager is the House to be amused that, failing the gift
of beneficent nature, it will, as in the case of Mr. W. H. Smith, invent
a humorous aspect of a man, and laugh at its own creation. There are
many cases where a man has commenced his Parliamentary career amidst
evidences not only of personal disfavour, but of almost malignant
animosity, and has finished by finding his interposition in debate
hailed by hilarious cheering. Such a case was that of the late Mr.
Biggar, who for fully ten years of his Parliamentary career was an
object of unbridled execration. He lived to find himself almost a prime
favourite in the House, a man who, when he had not got further in his
speech than to ejaculate "Mr. Speaker, sir," found himself the focus of
a circle of beaming faces, keenly anticipatory of fun. Mr. Biggar in the
sessions of 1886-9 was the same member for Cavan who, in the Parliament
of 1874, was a constant mark of contumely, and even of personal hatred.
The House had grown used to him, and had gradually built up round his
name and personality an ideal of eccentric humour. But the creative
power was with the audience--a priceless quality that remains with it
even in these dull times, and though temporarily subdued, will presently
have its day again.
[Illustration: "A PRIME FAVOURITE."]
_The Snowstorm._