Such were the excellent effects of the Crimes Act of 1882, and annalists treating of this period have commonly said that the Act was due to the murders in the Phoenix Park. Some years ago Lord James of Hereford, who, as Attorney-General, had been closely associated with these events, placed in my hands a written statement of the circumstances in which the Act originated, and begged that, if possible, the truth of the matter might be made known. This may be a convenient opportunity for giving his testimony.

"The Bill of 1882 was designed, and on the stocks, during the month of April. I saw F. Cavendish as to some of its details almost immediately before his starting for Ireland. As Chief Secretary, he discussed with me the provisions the Bill should contain. On Sunday, May 7, 1882, when the news of F. Cavendish's murder became known, I went to see Harcourt. He begged me to see that the drawing of the Bill was hastened on. About 2 o'clock I went to the Irish Office, and found the Irish Attorney-General hard at work on the Bill. The first draft of it was then in print. No doubt F. Cavendish's death tended to affect the subsequent framing of the Bill. Harcourt came upon the scenes. T—— and J—— were called to the assistance of the Irish draftsmen, and no doubt the Bill was rendered stronger in consequence of the events of May 6.

"I also well remember the change of front about the power of Search. The Irish Members in the most determined manner fought against the creation of this power.... Harcourt, who had charge of the Bill, would listen to none of these arguments, but Mr. Gladstone was much moved by them. There was almost a crisis produced in consequence of this disagreement; but Harcourt gave way, and the concession was announced."

It is not my purpose in these chapters to speak about my own performances in Parliament, but the foregoing allusion to the concession on the Right of Search tempts me to a personal confession. In the Bill, as brought in, there was a most salutary provision giving the police the right to search houses in which murders were believed to be plotted. After making us vote for this clause three times—on the First Reading, on the Second Reading, and in Committee—the Government, as we have just seen, yielded to clamour, and proposed on Report to alter the clause by limiting the Right of Search to day-time. I opposed this alteration, as providing a "close time for murder," and had the satisfaction of helping to defeat the Government. The Big-Wigs of the Party were extremely angry, and Mr. R. H. Hutton, in The Spectator, rebuked us in his most grandmotherly style. In reply, I quoted some words of his own. "There is nothing which injures true Liberalism more than the sympathy of its left wing with the loose ruffianism of unsettled States." "Such a State," I said, "is Ireland; and if, under the pressure of extraordinary difficulties, Ministers vacillate or waver in their dealings with it, the truest Liberalism, I believe, is that which holds them firmly to their duty."

In that sad Session of 1882 the troubles of the Government "came not single spies, but in battalions," and the most enduring of those troubles arose in Egypt. For the benefit of a younger generation, let me recall the circumstances.

Ismail Pasha, the ruler of Egypt, had accumulated a national debt of about L100,000,000, and the pressure on the wretched peasants who had to pay was crushing. Presently they broke out in revolt, partly with the hope of shaking off this burden, and partly with a view to establishing some sort of self-government. But the financiers who had lent money to Egypt took fright, and urged the Government to interfere and suppress the insurrection. A meeting of Tories was held in London on June 29th and the Tory Leaders made the most inflammatory speeches. Unhappily, the Government yielded to this show of violence. It was said by a close observer of Parliamentary institutions that "When the Government of the day and the Opposition of the day take the same side, one may be almost sure that some great wrong is at hand," and so it was now. On July 10th our fleet bombarded Alexandria, smashing its rotten forts with the utmost ease, and killing plenty of Egyptians. I remember to this day the sense of shame with which I read our Admiral's telegraphic despatch: "Enemy's fire weak and ineffectual."

The protest delivered on the following day, by Sir Wilfrid Lawson, the most consistent and the most disinterested politician whom I ever knew, deserves to be remembered.

"I say deliberately, and in doing so I challenge either Tory or Liberal to contradict me, that no Tory Government could have done what the Liberal Government did yesterday in bombarding those forts. If such a thing had been proposed, what would have happened? We should have had Sir William Harcourt stumping the country, and denouncing Government by Ultimatum. We should have had Lord Hartington coming down, and moving a Resolution condemning these proceedings being taken behind the back of Parliament. We should have had Mr. Chamberlain summoning the Caucuses. We should have had Mr. Bright declaiming in the Town Hall of Birmingham against the wicked Tory Government; and as for Mr. Gladstone, we all know that there would not have been a railway-train, passing a roadside station, that he would not have pulled up at, to proclaim non-intervention as the duty of the Government."

On the 12th of July John Bright retired from the Government, as a protest against the bombardment, and made a short speech full of solemn dignity. "I asked my calm judgment and my conscience what was the path I ought to take. They pointed it out to me, as I think, with an unerring finger, and I am humbly endeavouring to follow it."

But it was too late. The mischief was done, and has not been undone to this day. I remember Mr. Chamberlain saying to me: "Well, I confess I was tired of having England kicked about all over the world. I never condemned the Tory Government for going to war; only for going to war on the wrong side." It was a characteristic saying; but this amazing lapse into naked jingoism spread wonder and indignation through the Liberal Party, and shook the faith of many who, down to that time, had regarded Gladstone as a sworn servant of Peace. The Egyptian policy of 1882 must, I fear, always remain the blot on Gladstone's scutcheon; and three years later he gave away the whole case for intervention, and threw the blame on his predecessors in office. In his Address to the Electors of Midlothian before the General Election of 1885 he used the following words: "We have, according to my conviction from the very first (when the question was not within the sphere of Party contentions), committed by our intervention in Egypt a grave political error, and the consequence which the Providential order commonly allots to such error is not compensation, but retribution."

But, though Providence eventually allotted "retribution" to our crimes and follies in Egypt, and though they were always unpopular with the Liberal Party out of doors, it was curious to observe that the position of the Government in the House of Commons was stronger at the end of 1882 than it was at the beginning. That this was so was due, I think, in part to the fact that for the moment we were victorious in Egypt,[37] and in part to admiration for the vigour with which Lord Spencer was fighting the murderous conspiracy in Ireland. The Government enjoyed the dangerous praise of the Opposition; obstruction collapsed; and some new Rules of Procedure were carried by overwhelming majorities. Here let me interpolate an anecdote. Mr. M—— L—— was a barrister, an obsequious supporter of the Government, and, as was generally surmised, on the lookout for preferment. Mr. Philip Callan, M.P. for County Louth, was speaking on an amendment to one of the new Rules, and Mr. M—— L—— thrice tried to call him to order on the ground of irrelevancy. Each time, the Chairman of Committee ruled that, though the Honourable Member for Louth was certainly taking a wide sweep, he was not out of order. Rising the third time from the seat Callan said: "I may as well take the opportunity of giving notice that I propose to move the insertion of a new Standing Order, which will read as follows: 'Any Hon. Member who three times unsuccessfully calls another Hon. Member to order, shall be ineligible for a County Court Judgeship.'" Mr. M—— L—— looked coy, and everyone else shouted with glee.

The Session of 1883 opened very quietly. The speech from the Throne extolled the success of the Ministerial policy in Ireland and Egypt, and promised a series of useful but not exciting measures. Meanwhile the more active Members of the Liberal Party, among whom I presumed to reckon myself, began to agitate for more substantial reforms. We had entered on the fourth Session of the Parliament. A noble majority was beginning to decline, and we felt that there was no time to lose if we were to secure the ends which we desired. Knowing that I felt keenly on these subjects, Mr. T. H. S. Escott, then Editor of the Fortnightly, asked me to write an article for his Review, and in that article I spoke my mind about the Agricultural Labourers' Suffrage, the Game Laws, the reform of the City of London, and an English Land Bill. "The action of the Peers," I said, "under Lord Salisbury's guidance will probably force on the question of a Second Chamber, and those who flatter themselves that the Liberal Party will shrink from discussing it will be grievously disillusioned. Disestablishment, begun in Ireland, will inevitably work round, by Scotland, to England. And who is to preside over these changes?"

I returned to the charge in the June number of the Nineteenth Century, and urged my points more strongly. I pleaded for social reform, and for "a Free Church in a Free State." I crossed swords with a noble Lord who had pronounced dogmatically that "A Second Chamber is absolutely necessary." I gave my reasons for thinking that now-a-days there is very little danger of hasty and ill-considered legislation, and I pointed out that, when this danger disappears, the reason for a Second Chamber disappears with it. "But," I said, "granting, for the sake of argument, that something of this danger still survives, would it not be fully met by limiting the power of the Lords to a Veto for a year on a measure passed by the Commons?"

These articles, coupled with my speeches in the House and in my constituency, gave dire offence to the Whigs; and I was chastened with rebukes which, if not weighty, were at any rate ponderous. "Not this way," wrote the St. James's Gazette, in a humorous apostrophe, "not this way, O Junior Member for Aylesbury, lies the road to the Treasury Bench," and so, indeed, it seemed. But, on returning from an evening party at Sir Matthew Ridley's, on the 5th of June, 1883, I found a letter from Mr. Gladstone, offering me the post of Parliamentary Secretary to the Local Government Board. One sentence of that letter I may be allowed to quote:

"Your name, and the recollections it suggests, add much to the satisfaction which, independently of relationship, I should have felt in submitting to you this request." It was like Gladstone's courtesy to call his offer a "request."

Thus I became harnessed to the machine of Government, and my friends, inside the House and out of it, were extremely kind about the appointment. Nearly everyone who wrote to congratulate me used the same image: "You have now set your foot on the bottom rung of the ladder." But my staunch friend George Trevelyan handled the matter more poetically, in the following stanza:

"As long as a plank can float, or a bolt can hold together, When the sea is smooth as glass, or the waves run mountains high, In the brightest of summer skies, or the blackest of dirty weather, Wherever the ship swims, there swim I."

The part of "the ship" to which I was now fastened was certainly not the most exalted or exciting of the public offices. The estimation in which it was held in official circles is aptly illustrated by a pleasantry of that eminent Civil Servant, Sir Algernon West. When the Revised Version of the New Testament appeared, Gladstone asked Sir Algernon (who had begun life in the Treasury), if he thought it as good as the Authorized Version. "Certainly not," was the reply. "It is so painfully lacking in dignity." Gladstone, always delighted to hear an innovation censured (unless he himself had made it), asked for an illustration. "Well," said West, "look at the Second Chapter of St. Luke. There went out a decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed. Now that always struck me as a sublime conception—a tax levied on the whole world by a stroke of the pen—an act worthy of an Imperial Treasury. But I turn to the Revised Version, and what do I read? That all the world should be enrolled—a census—the sort of thing the Local Government Board could do. That instance, to my mind, settles the question between Old and New."

But in the office thus contemned by the Paladins of the Treasury, there was plenty of interesting though little-observed work. In the autumn of 1883 I undertook, in conjunction with the President of the Board, a mission of enquiry into the worst slums in London. There is no need to recapitulate here all the horrors we encountered, for they can be read in the evidence given before the Royal Commission on the Housing of the Poor which was appointed in the following year; but one incident made a peculiar impression on my mind. The Sanitary Officer reported some underground dwellings in Spitalfields as being perhaps the worst specimens of human habitation which we should find, and he offered to be my guide. I entered a cellar-like room in a basement, which, till one's eyes got used to the dimness, seemed pitch-dark. I felt, rather than saw, the presence of a woman, and, when we began to talk, I discerned by her voice that she was not a Londoner. "No, sir," she replied, "I come from Wantage, in Berkshire." Having always heard of Wantage as a kind of Earthly Paradise, where the Church, the Sisterhood, and the "Great House" combined to produce the millennium, I said, involuntarily, "How you must wish to be back there!" "Back at Wantage!" exclaimed the Lady of the Cellar. "No, indeed, sir. This is a poor place, but it's better than Wantage." It was instructive to find this love of freedom, and resentment of interference, in the bowels of the earth of Spitalfields.

An incident which helps to illustrate Gladstone's personal ascendancy belongs to this period. Those were the days of agitation for and against a Channel Tunnel, eagerly promoted by speculative tunnel-makers, and resolutely opposed by Mr. Chamberlain, then President of the Board of Trade. Gladstone, when asked if he was for or against the Tunnel, said very characteristically, "I am not so much in favour of the Tunnel, as opposed to the opponents of it"; and this of course meant that he was really in favour of it. About this time I met him at dinner, and after the ladies had gone, I think we were eight men round the table. Gladstone began praising the Tunnel; one of the hearers echoed him, and the rest of us were silent. Looking round triumphantly, Gladstone said, "Ah, this is capital! Here we are—eight sensible men—and all in favour of the Tunnel." Knowing that several of us were against the Tunnel, I challenged a division and collected the votes. Excepting Gladstone and his echo, we all were anti-tunnelites, and yet none of us would have had the hardihood to say so.

In this year—1883—Gladstone's Government had regained some portion of the popularity and success which they had lost; but when the year ran out, their success was palpably on the wane, and their popularity of course waned with it. The endless contradictions and perplexities, crimes and follies, of our Egyptian policy became too obvious to be concealed or palliated, and at the beginning of 1884 the Government resolved on their crowning and fatal blunder. On the 18th of January, Lord Hartington (Secretary of State for War), Lord Granville, Lord Northbrook, and Sir Charles Dilke had an interview with General Gordon, and determined that he should be sent to evacuate the Soudan. Gladstone assented, and Gordon started that evening on his ill-starred errand. In view of subsequent events, it is worth recording that there were some Liberals who, from the moment they heard of it, condemned the undertaking. The dithyrambics of the Pall Mall Gazette drew from William Cory[38] the following protest:

"January 21, 1884.

"It's really ludicrous—the P. M. G. professing a clearly suprarational faith in an elderly Engineer, saying that he will cook the goose if no one interferes with him ... as if he could go to Suakim, 'summon' a barbarous potentate, make him supply his escort to Khartoum, and, when at Khartoum, issue edicts right and left; as if he could act without subaltern officers, money, stores, gold, etc.; as if he were an homme drapeau, and had an old army out there ready to troop round him, as the French veterans round Bonaparte at Frejus."

In Parliament, the principal work of 1884 was to extend the Parliamentary Franchise to the Agricultural Labourer. A Tory Member said in debate that the labourers were no more fit to have the franchise than the beasts they tended; and Lord Goschen, who had remained outside the Cabinet of 1880 sooner than be party to giving them the vote, used to say to the end of his life that, if the Union were ever destroyed, it would be by the agricultural labourers. I, however, who had lived among them all my life and knew that they were at least as fit for political responsibility as the artisans, threw myself with ardour into the advocacy of their cause. (By the way, my speech of the Second Reading of the Franchise Bill was answered by the present Speaker[39] in his maiden speech.) All through the summer the battle raged. The Lords did not refuse to pass the Bill, but said that, before they passed it, they must see the accompanying scheme of Redistribution. It was not a very unreasonable demand, but Gladstone denounced it as an unheard-of usurpation. We all took our cue from him, and vowed that we would smash the House of Lords into atoms before we consented to this insolent claim. Throughout the Parliamentary recess, the voices of protest resounded from every Liberal platform, and even so lethargic a politician as Lord Hartington harangued a huge gathering in the Park at Chatsworth. Everything wore the appearance of a constitutional crisis. Queen Victoria, as we now know, was seriously perturbed, and did her utmost to avert a rupture between Lords and Commons. But still we persisted in our outcry. The Lords must pass the Franchise Bill without conditions, and when it was law, we would discuss Redistribution. A new Session began on 23rd of October. The Franchise Bill was brought in again, passed, and sent up to the Lords. At first the Lords seemed resolved to insist on their terms; then they wavered; and then again they hardened their hearts. Lord Salisbury reported that they would not let the Franchise Bill through till they got the Redistribution Bill from the Commons. Meanwhile, all sorts of mysterious negotiations were going on between the "moderate" men on both sides; and it was known that Gladstone dared not dissolve on the old franchise, as he was sure to be beaten in the Boroughs. His only hope was in the agricultural labourers. Then, acting under pressure which is not known but can be easily guessed, he suddenly announced, on the 17th of November, that he was prepared to introduce the Redistribution Bill before the Lords went into Committee on the Franchise Bill. It was the point for which the Tories had been contending all along, and by conceding it, Gladstone made an absolute surrender. All the sound and fury of the last six months had been expended in protesting that we could never do what now we meekly did. It was the beginning of troubles which have lasted to this day. The House of Lords learned the welcome lesson that, when the Liberal Party railed, they only had to sit still; and the lesson learnt in 1884 was applied in each succeeding crisis down to August 1911. It has always been to me an amazing instance of Gladstone's powers of self-deception that to the end of his life he spoke of this pernicious surrender as a signal victory.

Early in 1885, it became my duty to receive at the Local Government Board a deputation of the Unemployed, who then were beginning to agitate the habitual calm of the well-fed and the easy-going. It was a curious experience. The deputation consisted of respectable-looking and apparently earnest men, some of whom spoke the language of Alton Locke, while others talked in a more modern strain of dynamite, Secret Societies, and "a life for a life." The most conspicuous figure in the deputation was an engineer called John Burns,[40] and those who are interested in political development may find something to their mind in the report of the deputation in The Times of February 17th, 1885. There they will read that, after leaving Whitehall, the crowd adjourned to the Embankment, where the following resolution was carried, and despatched to the President of the Local Government Board:

"That this meeting of the unemployed, having heard the answer given by the Local Government Board to their deputation, considers the refusal to start public works to be a sentence of death on thousands of those out of work, and the recommendation to bring pressure to bear on the local bodies to be a direct incitement to violence; further, it will hold Mr. G. W. E. Russell and the members of the Government, individually and collectively, guilty of the murder of those who may die in the next few weeks, and whose lives would have been saved had the suggestion of the deputation been acted on.

(Signed) JOHN BURNS, Engineer. JOHN E. WILLIAMS, Labourer. WILLIAM HENRY, Foreman. JAMES MACDONALD, Tailor."

The threats with which the leaders of the Unemployed regaled us derived a pleasing actuality from the fact that on the 24th of January simultaneous explosions had occurred at the Tower and in the House of Commons. I did not see the destruction at the Tower, but I went straight across from my office to the House of Commons, and saw a curious object-lesson in scientific Fenianism. In Westminster Hall there was a hole in the pavement six feet wide, and another in the roof. I had scarcely done examining these phenomena when another crash shook the whole building, and we found that an infernal machine had been exploded in the House of Commons, tearing the doors off their hinges, wrecking the galleries, and smashing the Treasury Bench into matchwood. The French Ambassador, M. Waddington, entered the House with me, and for a while stood silent and amazed. At length he said, "There's no other country in the world where this could happen." Certainly it must be admitted that at that moment our detective organization was not at its best.

However, neither mock-heroics nor actual outrage could obscure the fact that during the spring of 1885 there Was an immense amount of unemployment, and consequent suffering, among the unskilled labourers. I suggested that we should issue from the Local Government Board a Circular Letter to all the Local Authorities in London, asking them, not to invent work, but to push forward works which, owing to the rapid extension of London into the suburbs, were becoming absolutely necessary. But the President of the Board, a bond slave of Political Economy, would not sanction even this very mild departure from the precepts of the Dismal Science. The distress was peculiarly acute at the Docks, where work is precarious and uncertain in the highest degree. Some well-meaning people at the West End instituted a plan of "Free Breakfasts" to be served at the Dock-Gates to men who had failed to obtain employment for the day. On one of these occasions—and very pathetic they were—I was the host, and the Saturday Review treated me to some not unkindly ridicule.

Child of the Whigs whose name you flout, Slip of the tree you fain would fell; Your colleagues own, I cannot doubt, Your plan, George Russell, likes them well, "What will regain," you heard them cry, "That popular praise we once enjoyed?" And instant was your smart reply, "Free Breakfasts to the Unemployed."

And then, after six more verses of rhythmical chaff, this prophetic stanza:

And howsoe'er profusely flow The tea and coffee round the board, The hospitality you show Shall nowise lack its due reward. For soon, I trust, our turn 'twill be, With joy by no regret alloyed, To give the present Ministry A Breakfast for the Unemployed.

The Parliamentary work of 1885 was Redistribution. The principles had been settled in secret conclave by the leaders on both sides; but the details were exhaustively discussed in the House of Commons. By this time we had become inured to Tory votes of censure on our Egyptian policy, and had always contrived to escape by the skin of our teeth; but we were in a disturbed and uneasy condition. We knew—for there was an incessant leakage of official secrets—that the Cabinet was rent by acute dissensions. The Whiggish section was in favour of renewing the Irish Crimes Act. The Radicals wished to let it expire, and proposed to conciliate Ireland by a scheme of National Councils. Between the middle of April and the middle of May, nine members of the Cabinet, for one cause or another, contemplated resignation. After one of these disputes Gladstone said to a friend: "A very fair Cabinet to-day—only three resignations." Six months later, after his Government had fallen, he wrote: "A Cabinet does not exist out of office, and no one in his senses could covenant to call the late Cabinet together." The solution of these difficulties came unexpectedly. The Budget introduced by Hugh Childers on the 30th of April proposed to meet a deficit by additional duties on beer and spirits; and was therefore extremely unpopular. Silently and skilfully, the Tories, the Irish, and the disaffected Liberals laid their plans. On Sunday, June 7th, Lord Henry Lennox—a leading Tory—told me at luncheon that we were to be turned out on the following day, and so, sure enough, we were, on an amendment to the Budget moved by Sir Michael Hicks-Beach.[41] It was thought at the time that the Liberal wirepullers welcomed this defeat, as a way out of difficulties. Certainly no strenuous efforts were made to avert it. The scene in the House when the fatal figures were announced has been often described, and in my mind's eye I see clearly the image of Lord Randolph Churchill, dancing a kind of triumphant hornpipe on the bench which for five momentous years had been the seat of the Fourth Party. On the 24th of June Lord Salisbury became Prime Minister for the first time.

The break-up of the Government revealed to all the world the fact that the Liberal Party was cleft in twain. The Whig section was led by Lord Hartington, and the Radical section by Mr. Chamberlain. Gladstone did his best to mediate between the two, and so to present an unbroken front to the common foe. But the parting of the ways soon became painfully apparent. The fall of the Government involved, of course, the return of Lord Spencer from Ireland, and some of his friends resolved, after the manner of admiring Englishmen, to give him a public dinner. The current phrase was that we were to "Dine Spencer for coercing the Irish." As he had done that thoroughly for the space of three years, and, at the risk of his own life, had destroyed a treasonable and murderous conspiracy, he was well entitled to all the honours which we could give him. So it was arranged that the dinner was to take place at the Westminster Palace Hotel on the 24th of July. Shortly before the day arrived, Mr. Chamberlain said to me: "I think you had better not attend that dinner to Spencer. I am not going, nor is D——. Certainly Spencer has done his duty, and shown capital pluck; but I hope we should all have done the same, and there's no reason to mark it by a dinner. And, after all, coercion is not a nice business for Liberals, though we may be forced into it." However, as I had greatly admired Lord Spencer's administration, and as his family and mine had been politically associated for a century, I made a point of attending, and a capital evening we had. There was an enthusiastic and representative company of two hundred Liberals. Lord Hartington presided, and extolled Lord Spencer to the skies; and Lord Spencer justified the Crimes Act by saying that, when it was passed, there was an organization of thirty thousand Fenians, aided by branches in Scotland and England, and by funds from America, defying the law of the land in Ireland. Not a word in all this about Home Rule, or the Union of Hearts, but we cheered it to the echo, little dreaming what the next six months had in store for us.

Though I was thoroughly in favour of resolute dealing with murder and outrage, I was also—and this was a combination which sorely puzzled The Spectator—an enthusiastic Radical, and specially keen on the side of social reform. My views on domestic politics were substantially the same as those set forth with extraordinary vigour and effect in a long series of speeches by Mr. Chamberlain, who was now unmuzzled, and was making the fullest use of his freedom. He was then at the very zenith of his powers, and the scheme of political and social reform which he expounded is still, in my opinion, the best compendium of Radical politics; but it tended in the direction of what old-fashioned people called Socialism, and this was to Gladstone an abomination. One day, to my consternation, he asked me if it was true that Socialism had made some way among the younger Liberals, of whom I was then one. Endeavouring to parry a question which must have revealed my own guilt, I feebly asked if by Socialism my venerable Leader meant the practice of taking private property for public uses, or the performance by the State of what ought to be left to the individual; whereupon he replied, with startling emphasis: "I mean both, but I reserve my worst Billingsgate for the attack on private property."

On the 18th of September Gladstone issued his Address to the Electors of Midlothian—an exceedingly long-winded document, which seemed to commit the Liberal Party to nothing in particular. Verbosa et grandis epistola, said Mr. John Morley. "An old man's manifesto," wrote the Pall Mall. By contrast with this colourless but authoritative document, Mr. Chamberlain's scheme became known as "The Unauthorized Programme," and of that programme I was a zealous promoter.

As soon as the Franchise Bill and the Redistribution Bill had passed into law, it was arranged that the dissolution should take place in November. The whole autumn was given up to electioneering. The newly-enfranchised labourers seemed friendly to the Liberal cause, but our bewildered candidates saw that their leaders were divided into two sections—one might almost say, two camps. This was a condition of things which boded disaster to the Liberal Party; but Gladstone never realized that Chamberlain was a power which it was madness to alienate.

On the 2nd of October I went on a visit to Hawarden, and the next day Gladstone opened a conversation on the state of the Party and the prospects of the Election. He said: "I believe you are in Chamberlain's confidence. Can you tell me what he means?" I replied that I was not the least in Chamberlain's confidence, though he had always been very friendly to me, and I admired his Programme. "But," I said, "I think that what he means is quite clear. He has no thought of trying to oust you from the Leadership of the Liberal Party; but he is determined that, when you resign it, he, and not Hartington, shall succeed you." This seemed to give the Chief some food for reflection, and then I ventured to follow up my advantage. "After all," I said, "Chamberlain has been your colleague for five years. Surely your best plan would be to invite him here, and ascertain his intentions from himself." If I had suggested that my host should invite the Sultan or the Czar, he could not have looked more surprised. "I have always made a point," he said, "of keeping this place clear of political transactions. We never invite anyone except private friends." "Well," I said, "but we are within six weeks of the Election, and it will never do for us to go to the country with you and Chamberlain professing two rival policies."

Backed by Mrs. Gladstone, I carried my point, and with my own hand wrote the telegram inviting Mr. Chamberlain. Unfortunately I had to leave Hawarden on the 6th of October, so I was not present at the meeting which I had brought about; but a few days later I had a letter from Mr. Chamberlain saying that, though his visit had been socially pleasant, it had been politically useless. He had not succeeded in making Gladstone see the importance of the Unauthorized Programme, and "if I were to drop it now," he said, "the stones would immediately cry out."

What then ensued is matter of history. Parliament was dissolved on the 18th of November. When the elections were finished, the Liberal Party was just short of the numerical strength which was requisite to defeat a combination of Tories and Parnellites. Lord Salisbury, therefore, retained office, but the life of his administration hung by a thread.

On the 24th of November, 1884, the great Lord Shaftesbury, moved by the spirit of prophecy, had written: "In a year or so we shall have Home Rule disposed of (at all hazards) to save us from daily and hourly bores." On the 17th of December, 1885, the world was astonished by an anonymous announcement in two newspapers—and the rest followed suit next day—that, if Gladstone were returned to power, he would be prepared to deal, in a liberal spirit, with the demand for Home Rule. This announcement was an act of folly not easy to explain or condone. We now know whose act it was, and we know that it was committed without Gladstone's privity. As Lord Morley says: "Never was there a moment when every consideration of political prudence more imperatively counselled silence." But now every political tongue in the United Kingdom was set wagging, and Gladstone could neither confirm nor deny. Our bewilderment and confusion were absolute. No one knew what was coming next; who was on what side; or whither his party—or, indeed, himself—was tending. One point only was clear: if Gladstone meant what he seemed to mean, the Parnellites would support him, and the Tories would be turned out. The new Parliament met on the 21st of January, 1886. On the—, the Government were defeated on an amendment to the Address, in favour of Municipal Allotments, and Lord Salisbury resigned. It was a moment of intense excitement, and everyone tasted for a day or two "the joy of eventful living."

On the 29th of January, I dined with Mr. and Mrs. Gladstone. The host was in a grim mood of suppressed excitement, anger, and apprehension. All day long he had been expecting a summons from the Queen, and it had not arrived. "It begins to look," he said, "as if the Government meant after all to ignore the vote of the House of Commons, and go on. All I can say is that, if they do, the Crown will be placed in a worse position than it has ever occupied in my lifetime." But after the party had broken up, Sir Henry Ponsonby arrived with the desired message from the Queen; and on the 1st of February Gladstone kissed hands, as Prime Minister for the third time.

"When Gladstone runs down a steep place, his immense majority, like the pigs in Scripture but hoping for a better issue, will go with him, roaring in grunts of exultation." This was Lord Shaftesbury's prediction in the previous year; but it was based on an assumption which proved erroneous. It took for granted the unalterable docility of the Liberal Party. I knew little at first hand of the transactions and tumults which filled the spring and early summer of 1886. At the beginning of February I was laid low by serious illness, resulting from the fatigue and exposure of the Election; and when, after a long imprisonment, I was out of bed, I went off to the seaside for convalescence. But even in the sick-room I heard rumours of the obstinate perversity with which the Liberal Government was rushing on its fate, and the admirably effective resistance to Home Rule engineered by Lord Hartington and Mr. Chamberlain. The Liberal leaders ran down the steep place, but an important minority of the pigs refused to follow them. The Home Rule Bill was thrown out on the 8th of June. Parliament was immediately dissolved. The General Election gave a majority of more than a hundred against Home Rule; the Government retired and Lord Salisbury again became Prime Minister.

In those distant days, there was a happy arrangement by which once a year, when my father was staying with me, Mr. and Mrs. Gladstone dined with me to meet him. My father and Gladstone had both entered public life at the General Election of 1832, and my father loved to describe him as he appeared riding in Hyde Park on a grey Arabian mare, "with his hat, narrow-brimmed, high up on the centre of his head, sustained by a crop of thick, curly hair," while a passer-by said: "That's Gladstone. He is to make his maiden speech to-night. It will be worth hearing." The annual rencounter took place on the 21st of July, 1886. After dinner, Gladstone drew me into a window and said: "Well, this Election has been a great disappointment." I replied that we could certainly have wished it better, but that the result was not unexpected. To my amazement, Gladstone replied that it was completely unexpected. "The experts assured me that we should sweep the country." (I always wish that I could have had an opportunity of speaking my mind to those "experts.") Pursuing the subject, Gladstone said that the Queen had demurred to a second election in six months, and that some of his colleagues had recommended more moderate courses. "But I said that, if we didn't dissolve, we should be showing the white feather."

It is no part of my purpose to trace the dismal history of the Liberal Party between 1886 and 1892. But one incident in that time deserves to be recorded. I was dining with Lord and Lady Rosebery on the 4th of March, 1889; Gladstone was of the company, and was indulging in passionate diatribes against Pitt. One phrase has always stuck in my memory. "There is no crime recorded in history—I do not except the Massacre of St. Bartholomew—which will compare for a moment with the means by which the Union was brought about." When the party was breaking up, one of the diners said: "I hope Mr. Gladstone won't draw that parallel, between the Union and the Massacre of St. Bartholomew, on a public platform, or we shall stand even less well with the thinking public than we do now."

Parliament was dissolved in June, 1892, and, when the elections were over, it was found that the Liberal Party, including the Irish, had only a majority of 40. When Gladstone knew the final figures, he saw the impossibility of forcing Home Rule through the Lords, and exclaimed: "My life's work is done." However, as we all remember, he took the Premiership for a fourth time, and during the Session of 1893 passed a Home Rule Bill through the House of Commons. The Lords threw it out by 419 to 41, the minority being mainly wage-receivers. Other troubles there were, both inside the Government and outside it; Mr. Gladstone told his friends that the Naval Estimates demanded by the Admiralty were "mad and drunk"; and people began to suspect that the great change was at hand.

On the 1st of March, 1894, Gladstone made his last speech in the House of Commons. In that speech he bequeathed to his party the legacy of a nobly-worded protest against the irresponsible power of the "Nominated Chamber"; and then, having accomplished sixty-one years of Parliamentary service, he simply disappeared, without ceremony or farewell. In my mind's eye I see him now, upright as ever, and walking fast, with his despatch-box dangling from his right hand, as he passed the Speaker's Chair, and quitted the scene of his life's work for ever.

In spite of warnings and anticipations, the end had, after all, come suddenly; and, with a sharp pang of regretful surprise, we woke to the fact that "our master was taken away from our head to-day." Strong men were shaken with emotion and hard men were moved to unaccustomed tears, as we passed out of the emptied House in the dusk of that gloomy afternoon.

On the 6th of March, 1894, Gladstone wrote to me as follows, in reply to my letter of farewell:

"My speculative view into the future shows me a very mixed spectacle, and a doubtful atmosphere. I am thankful to have borne a part in the emancipating labours of the last sixty years; but entirely uncertain how, had I now to begin my life, I could face the very different problems of the next sixty years. Of one thing I am, and always have been, convinced—it is not by the State that man can be regenerated, and the terrible woes of this darkened world effectually dealt with. In some, and some very important, respects, I yearn for the impossible revival of the men and the ideas of my first twenty years, which immediately followed the first Reform Act. But I am stepping out upon a boundless plain.

"May God give you strength of all kinds to perform your appointed work in the world."

FOOTNOTES:

[37] The British troops entered Cairo on the 14th of September, 1882.

[38] Better known as "Billy Johnson," the famous Eton Tutor.

[39] The Right Hon. J. W. Lowther.

[40] Afterwards the Right Hon. John Burns, M.P., President of the Local Government Board.

[41] Afterwards Lord St. Aldwyn.



XII

ORATORY

[Greek: esti d' ouch ho logos tou rhetoros, Aischine, timion, oud' ho tonos tes phones, alla to tauta proaireisthai tois pollois, kai to tous autous misein kai philein, housper an he patris.] DEMOSTHENES. De Corona.

The important thing in public speaking is neither the diction nor the voice. What is important is that the speaker should have the same predilections as the majority, and that his country's friends and foes should be also his own.

I hope that I shall not be reproached with either Pedantry or Vanity (though I deserve both) if, having begun so classically, I here introduce some verses which, when I was a boy at Harrow, my kind Head Master addressed to my Father. The occasion of these verses was that the recipient of them, who was then Sergeant-at-Arms in the House of Commons and was much exhausted by the long Session which passed the first Irish Land Act, had said in his haste that he wished all mankind were dumb. This petulant ejaculation drew from Dr. Butler the following remonstrance:

Semper ego auditor? Requies data nulla loquelae Quae miseras aures his et ubique premit? Tot mala non tulit ipse Jobas, cui constat amicos Septenos saltem conticuisse dies. "Si mihi non dabitur talem sperare quietem, Sit, precor, humanum sit sine voce genus!" Mucius[42] haec secum, sortem indignatus iniquam, (Tum primum proavis creditus esse minor) Seque malis negat esse parem: cui Musa querenti, "Tu genus humanum voce carere cupis? Tene adeo fatis diffidere! Non tibi Natus Quem jam signavit Diva Loquela suum? En! ego quae vindex 'mutis quoque piscibus' adsum, Donatura cycni, si ferat hora, sonos, Ipsa loquor vates: Patriae decus addere linguae Hic sciet, ut titulis laus eat aucta tuis. Hunc sua fata vocant; hunc, nostro numine fretum, Apta jubent aptis ponere verba locis. Hunc olim domus ipsa canet, silvaeque paternae, Curiaque, et felix vatibus Herga parens. Nec lingua caruisse voles, quo vindice vestrae Gentis in aeternum fama superstes erit." H. M. B., Aug., 1870.

The prophecy has scarcely been fulfilled; but it is true that from my earliest days I have had an inborn love of oratory. The witchery of words, powerful enough on the printed page, is to me ten times more powerful when it is reinforced by voice and glance and gesture. Fine rhetoric and lofty declamation have always stirred my blood; and yet I suppose that Demosthenes was right, and that, though rhetoric and declamation are good, still the most valuable asset for a public speaker is a complete identification with the majority of his countrymen, in their prejudices, their likings, and their hatreds.

If Oratory signifies the power of speaking without premeditation, Gladstone stands in a class by himself, far above all the public speakers whom I have ever heard. The records of his speaking at Eton and Oxford, and the reports of his earliest performances in Parliament, alike give proof that he had, as Coleridge said of Pitt, "a premature and unnatural dexterity in the combination of words"; and this developed into "a power of pouring forth, with endless facility, perfectly modulated sentences of perfectly chosen language, which as far surpassed the reach of a normal intellect as the feats of an acrobat exceed the capacities of a normal body."

His voice was flexible and melodious (in singing it was a baritone); though his utterance was perceptibly marked by a Lancastrian "burr"; his gestures were free and graceful, though never violent; every muscle of his face seemed to play its part in his nervous declamation; and the flash of his deep-set eyes revealed the fiery spirit that was at work within. It may be remarked in passing that he considered a moustache incompatible with effective speaking—"Why should a man hide one of the most expressive features of his face?" With regard to the still more expressive eyes, Lecky ruefully remarked that Gladstone's glance was that of a bird of prey swooping on its victim.

Lord Chief Justice Coleridge told me that he had once asked Gladstone if he ever felt nervous in public speaking. "In opening a subject," said Gladstone, "often; in reply never," and certainly his most triumphant speeches were those in which, when winding up a debate, he recapitulated and demolished the hostile arguments that had gone before. One writes glibly of his "most triumphant" speeches; and yet, when he was among us, he always delivered each Session at least one speech, of which we all used to say, with breathless enthusiasm, "That's the finest speech he ever made." On the platform he was incomparable. His fame as an orator was made within the walls of Parliament; but, when he ceased to represent the University of Oxford, and was forced by the conditions of modern electioneering to face huge masses of electors in halls and theatres and in the open air, he adapted himself with the utmost ease to his new environment, and captivated the constituencies as he had captivated the House. His activities increased as his life advanced. He diffused himself over England and Wales and Scotland. In every considerable centre, men had the opportunity of seeing and hearing this supreme actor of the political stage; but Midlothian was the scene of his most astonishing efforts. When, on the 2nd of September, 1884, he spoke on the Franchise Bill in the Waverley Market at Edinburgh, it was estimated that he addressed thirty thousand people.

"Beneath his feet the human ocean lay, And wave on wave flowed into space away, Methought no clarion could have sent its sound Even to the centre of the hosts around; And, as I thought, rose the sonorous swell, As from some church-tower swings the silvery bell. Aloft and clear, from airy tide to tide, It glided, easy as a bird may glide; To the last verge of that vast audience sent, It played with each wild passion as it went; Now stirred the uproar, now the murmur stilled: And sobs or laughter answered as it willed:"[43]

It is painful to descend too abruptly from such a height as that: but one would be giving a false notion of Gladstone's speaking if one suggested that it was always equally effective. Masterly in his appeal to a popular audience, supernaturally dexterous in explaining a complicated subject to the House of Commons, supremely solemn and pathetic in a Memorial Oration, he was heard to least advantage on a social or festive occasion. He would use a Club-dinner or a wedding-breakfast, a flower-show or an Exhibition, for the utterance of grave thoughts which had perhaps been long fermenting in his mind; and then his intensity, his absorption in his theme, and his terrible gravity, disconcerted hearers who had expected a lighter touch. An illustration of this piquant maladroitness recurs to my memory as I write. In 1882 I was concerned with a few Radical friends in founding the National Liberal Club.[44] We certainly never foresaw the palatial pile of terra-cotta and glazed tiles which now bears that name.[45] Our modest object was to provide a central meeting-place for Metropolitan and provincial Liberals, where all the comforts of life should be attainable at what are called "popular prices." Two years later, Gladstone laid the foundation-stone of the present Club-house, and, in one of his most austere orations, drew a sharp contrast between our poor handiwork and those "Temples of Luxury and Ease" which gaze in haughty grandeur on Pall Mall. We had hoped to provide what might seem like "luxury" to the unsophisticated citizen of Little Pedlington; and, at the least, we meant our Club to be a place of "ease" to the Radical toiler. But Gladstone insisted that it was to be a workshop dedicated to strenuous labour; and all the fair promises of our Prospectus were trodden under foot.[46]

I have often heard Gladstone say that, in the nature of things, a speech cannot be adequately reported. You may get the words with literal precision, but the loss of gesture, voice, and intonation, will inevitably obscure the meaning and impede the effect. Of no one's speaking is this more true than of his own. Here and there, in the enormous mass of his reported eloquence, you will come upon a fine peroration, a poetic image, a verse aptly cited, or a phrase which can be remembered. But they are few and far between—oases in a wilderness of what reads like verbiage. Quite certainly, his speeches, in the mass, are not literature, as those found to their cost who endeavoured to publish them in ten volumes.

For speeches which are literature we must go to John Bright; but then Bright's speaking was not spontaneous, and therefore, according to the definition suggested above, could not be reckoned as Oratory. Yet, when delivered in that penetrating voice, with its varied emphasis of scorn and sympathy and passion; enforced by the dignity of that noble head, and punctuated by the aptest gesture, they sounded uncommonly like oratory. The fact is that Bright's consummate art concealed the elaborate preparation which went to make the performance. When he was going to make a speech, he was encompassed by safeguards against disturbance and distraction, which suggested the rites of Lucina. He was invisible and inaccessible. No bell might ring, no door might bang, no foot tread too heavily. There was a crisis, and everyone in the house knew it; and when at length the speech had been safely uttered, there was the joy of a great reaction.

My Father, unlike most of the Whigs, had a warm admiration for Bright; and Bright showed his appreciation of this feeling by being extremely kind to me. Early in my Parliamentary career, he gave me some hints on the art of speech-making, which are interesting because they describe his own practice. "You cannot," he said, "over-prepare the substance of a speech. The more completely you have mastered it, the better your speech will be. But it is very easy to over-prepare your words. Arrange your subject, according to its natural divisions, under three or four heads—not more. Supply each division with an 'island'; by which I mean a carefully-prepared sentence to clinch and enforce it. You must trust yourself to swim from one 'island' to another, without artificial aids. Keep your best 'island'—your most effective passage—for your peroration; and, when once you have uttered it, sit down at once. Let no power induce you to go on."

Anyone who studies Bright's speeches will see that he exactly followed his own rule. The order and symmetry are perfect. The English is simple and unadorned. Each department of the speech has its notable phrase; and the peroration is a masterpiece of solemn rhetoric. And yet after all what Demosthenes said is true of these two great men—the Twin Stars of Victorian Oratory. Each had all the graces of voice and language, and yet each failed conspicuously in practical effect whenever he ran counter to the predilections and passions of his countrymen. Gladstone succeeded when he attacked the Irish Church, and denounced the abominations of Turkish misrule: he failed when he tried to palliate his blunders in Egypt, and to force Home Rule down the throat of the "Predominant Partner." Bright succeeded when he pleaded for the Repeal of the Corn Laws and the extension of the Suffrage: he failed when he opposed the Crimean War, and lost his seat when he protested against our aggression on China. It must often fall to the lot of the patriotic orator thus to set himself against the drift of national sentiment, and to pay the penalty. No such perils beset the Demagogue.

I should not ascribe the title of orator to Mr. Chamberlain. He has nothing of the inspiration, the poetry, the "vision splendid," the "faculty divine," which make the genuine orator. But as a speaker of the second, and perhaps most useful, class, he has never been surpassed. His speaking was the perfection of clearness. Each argument seemed irresistible, each illustration told. His invective was powerful, his passion seemed genuine, his satire cut like steel and froze like ice. His perception of his hearers' likes and dislikes was intuitive, and was heightened by constant observation. His friends and his enemies were those whom he esteemed the friends and the enemies of England; and he never committed the heroic but perilous error of setting himself against the passing mood of national feeling. He combined in rare harmony the debating instinct which conquers the House of Commons, with the power of appeal to popular passion which is the glory of the Demagogue.

The word with which my last sentence closed recalls inevitably the tragic figure of Lord Randolph Churchill. The adroitness, the courage, and the persistency with which between 1880 and 1885 he sapped Gladstone's authority, deposed Northcote, and made himself the most conspicuous man in the Tory Party, have been described in his Biography, and need not be recapitulated here. Mr. Chamberlain, who was exactly qualified to resist and abate him, had not yet acquired a commanding position in the House of Commons; and on the platform Churchill could not be beaten. In these two men each party possessed a Demagogue of the highest gifts, and it would have puzzled an expert to say which was the better exponent of his peculiar art. In January, 1884, Churchill made a speech at Blackpool, and thus attacked his eminent rival—"Mr. Chamberlain a short time ago attempted to hold Lord Salisbury up to the execration of the people as one who enjoyed great riches for which he had neither toiled nor spun, and he savagely denounced Lord Salisbury and his class. As a matter of fact, Lord Salisbury from his earliest days has toiled and spun in the service of the State, and for the advancement of his countrymen in learning, in wealth, and in prosperity; but no Radical ever yet allowed himself to be embarrassed by a question of fact. Just look, however, at what Mr. Chamberlain himself does; he goes to Newcastle, and is entertained at a banquet there, and procures for the president of the feast a live Earl—no less a person than the Earl of Durham. Now, Lord Durham is a young person who has just come of age, who is in the possession of immense hereditary estates, who is well known on Newmarket Heath, and prominent among the gilded youth who throng the doors of the Gaiety Theatre; but he has studied politics about as much as Barnum's new white elephant, and the idea of rendering service to the State has not yet commenced to dawn on his ingenuous mind. If by any means it could be legitimate, and I hold it is illegitimate, to stigmatize any individual as enjoying great riches for which he has neither toiled nor spun, such a case would be the case of the Earl of Durham; and yet it is under the patronage of the Earl of Durham, and basking in the smiles of the Earl of Durham, and bandying vulgar compliments with the Earl of Durham, that this stern patriot, this rigid moralist, this unbending censor, the Right Honourable Joseph Chamberlain, flaunts his Radical and levelling doctrines before the astonished democrats of Newcastle. 'Vanity of Vanities,' saith the preacher, 'all is vanity.' 'Humbug of Humbugs,' says the Radical, 'all is humbug.'"

And with that most characteristic specimen of popular eloquence, we may leave the two great demagogues of the Victorian Age.

At the period of which I am speaking the House of Commons contained two or three orators surviving from a class which had almost died away. These were men who, having no gift for extempore speaking, used to study the earlier stages of a debate, prepare a tremendous oration, and then deliver it by heart. Such, in days gone by, had been the practice of Bulwer-Lytton, and, as far as one can see, of Macaulay. In my day it was followed by Patrick Smyth, Member for Tipperary, and by Joseph Cowen, Member for Newcastle. Both were real rhetoricians. Both could compose long discourses, couched in the most flowery English, interlarded with anecdotes and decorated with quotations; and both could declaim these compositions with grace and vigour. But the effect was very droll. They would work, say, all Tuesday and Wednesday at a point which had been exhausted by discussion on Monday, and then on Thursday they would burst into the debate just whenever they could catch the Speaker's eye, and would discharge these cascades of prepared eloquence without the slightest reference to time, fitness, or occasion.

My uncle, Lord Russell, who entered Parliament in 1813, always said that the first Lord Plunket was, on the whole, the finest speaker he had ever heard, because he combined a most cogent logic with a most moving eloquence; and these gifts descended to Plunket's grandson, now Lord Rathmore, and, in the days of which I am speaking, Mr. David Plunket, Member for the University of Dublin. Voice, manner, diction, delivery, were all alike delightful; and, though such finished oratory could scarcely be unprepared, Mr. Plunket had a great deal too much of his nation's tact to produce it except when he knew that the House was anxious to receive it. In view of all that has happened since, it is curious to remember that Mr. Arthur Balfour was, in those days, a remarkably bad speaker. No one, I should think, was ever born with less of the orator's faculty, or was under heavier obligations to the Reporters' Gallery. He shambled and stumbled, and clung to the lapels of his coat, and made immense pauses while he searched for the right word, and eventually got hold of the wrong one. In conflict with Gladstone, he seemed to exude the very essence of acrimonious partisanship, and yet he never exactly scored. As Lord Beaconsfield said of Lord Salisbury, "his invective lacked finish."

A precisely opposite description might befit Sir Robert Peel, the strangely-contrasted son of the great Free Trader. Peel was naturally an orator. He could make the most slashing onslaughts without the appearance of ill-temper, and could convulse the House with laughter while he himself remained to all appearance unconscious of the fun. His voice, pronounced by Gladstone the most beautiful he ever heard in Parliament, was low, rich, melodious, and flexible. His appearance was striking and rather un-English, his gestures were various and animated, and he enforced his points with beautifully shaped hands. If voice and manner could make a public speaker great, Sir Robert Peel might have led the Tory Party; but Demosthenes was right after all. The graces of oratory, though delightful for the moment, have no permanent effect. The perfection of Parliamentary style is to utter cruel platitudes with a grave and informing air; and, if a little pomposity be superadded, the House will instinctively recognize the speaker as a Statesman. I have heard Sir William Harcourt say, "After March, comes April," in a tone which carried conviction to every heart.

A word must be said about speakers who read their speeches. I do not think I shall be contradicted if I say that in those distant days Sir William Harcourt, Sir George Trevelyan, and Mr. Gibson, now Lord Ashbourne, wrote every word, and delivered their speeches from the manuscript. In late years, when Harcourt had to pilot his famous Budget through Committee, he acquired a perfect facility in extempore speech; but at the beginning it was not so. The Irish are an eloquent nation, and we are apt to send them rather prosy rulers. "The Honourable Member for Bletherum was at that time perambulating the district with very great activity, and, I need not say, with very great ability." Such a sentence as that, laboriously inscribed in the manuscript of a Chief Secretary's speech, seems indeed to dissipate all thoughts of oratory. Mr. Henry Richard, a "Stickit Minister" who represented Merthyr, was the worst offender against the Standing Order which forbids a Member to read his speech, though it allows him to "refresh his memory with notes"; and once, being called to order for his offence, he palliated it by saying that he was ready to hand his manuscript to his censor, and challenged him to read a word of it.

The least oratorical of mankind was the fifteenth Lord Derby, whose formal adhesion to the Liberal Party in 1882 supplied Punch with an admirable cartoon of a female Gladstone singing in impassioned strain—

"Always the same, Derby my own! Always the same to your old Glad-stone."

Lord Derby wrote every word of his speeches, and sent them in advance to the press. It was said that once he dropped his manuscript in the street, and that, being picked up, it was found to contain such entries as "Cheers," "Laughter," and "Loud applause," culminating in "'But I am detaining you too long.' (Cries of 'No, no,' and 'Go on.')"

The mention of Lord Derby reminds me of the much-criticized body to which he belonged. When I entered Parliament, the Chief Clerk of the House of Commons was Sir Thomas Erskine May, afterwards Lord Farnborough—an hereditary friend. He gave me many useful hints, and this among the rest—"Always go across to the House of Lords when they are sitting, even if you only stop five minutes. You may often happen on something worth hearing; and on no account ever miss one of their full-dress debates." I acted on the advice, and soon became familiar with the oratory of "the Gilded Chamber," as Pennialinus calls it. I have spoken in a former chapter of the effect produced on me as a boy by the predominance of Disraeli during the debates on the Reform Bill of 1867. He had left the House of Commons before I entered it, but that same mysterious attribute of predominance followed him to the House of Lords, and indeed increased with his increasing years. His strange appearance—un-English features, corpse-like pallor, blackened locks, and piercing eyes—marked him out as someone quite aloof from the common population of the House of Lords. When he sat, silent and immovable, on his crimson bench, everyone kept watching him as though they were fascinated. When he rose to speak, there was strained and awe-stricken attention. His voice was deep, his utterance slow, his pronunciation rather affected. He had said in early life that there were two models of style for the two Houses of Parliament—for the Commons, Don Juan: for the Lords, Paradise Lost. As the youthful Disraeli, he had out-Juaned Juan; when, as the aged Beaconsfield, he talked of "stamping a deleterious doctrine with the reprobation of the Peers of England," he approached the dignity of the Miltonic Satan. It was more obviously true of him than of most speakers that he "listened to himself while he spoke"; and his complete mastery of all the tricks of speech countervailed the decay of his physical powers. He had always known the value of an artificial pause, an effective hesitation, in heralding the apt word or the memorable phrase; and just at the close of his life he used the method with a striking though unrehearsed effect. On the 4th of March, 1881, he was speaking in support of Lord Lytton's motion condemning the evacuation of Kandahar. "My Lords," he said, "the Key of India is not Merv, or Herat, or,"—here came a long pause, and rather painful anxiety in the audience; and then the quiet resumption of the thread—"It is not the place of which I cannot recall the name—the Key of India is London."

At a dinner at Lord Airlie's in the previous month Lord Beaconsfield, talking to Matthew Arnold, had described the great (that is, the fourteenth) Lord Derby as having been "a man full of nerve, dash, fire, and resource, who carried the House irresistibly along with him." Bishop Samuel Wilberforce was reckoned by Mr. Gladstone as one of the three men who, of all his acquaintance, had the greatest natural gift of public speaking.[47] Both the Bishop and the Statesman found, each in the other, a foeman worthy of his steel; but both had passed beyond these voices before I entered Parliament, leaving only tantalizing traditions—"Ah! but you should have heard Derby on the Irish Church," or "It was a treat to hear 'Sam' trouncing Westbury." Failing those impossible enjoyments, I found great pleasure in listening to Lord Salisbury. I should reckon him as about the most interesting speaker I ever heard. His appearance was pre-eminently dignified: he looked, whether he was in or out of office, the ideal Minister of a great Empire—

"With that vast bulk of chest and limb assigned So oft to men who subjugate their kind; So sturdy Cromwell pushed broad-shouldered on; So burly Luther breasted Babylon; So brawny Cleon bawled his agora down; And large-limb'd Mahomed clutched a Prophet's crown."

In public speaking, Lord Salisbury seemed to be thinking aloud, and to be quite unconscious of his audience. Though he was saturated with his subject there was apparently no verbal preparation. Yet his diction was peculiarly apt and pointed. He never looked at a note; used no gesture; scarcely raised or lowered his voice. But in a clear and penetrating monotone he uttered the workings of a profound and reflective mind, and the treasures of a vast experience. Though massive, his style was never ponderous: and it was constantly lightened by the sallies of a pungent humour. In the debate on the Second Reading of the Home Rule Bill of 1893, Lord Ribblesdale, then recently converted from Unionism to Gladstonianism, and Master of the Buckhounds in the Liberal government, had given the history of his mental change. In replying, Lord Salisbury said, "The next speech, my lords, was a confession. Confessions are always an interesting form of literature—from St. Augustine to Rousseau, from Rousseau to Lord Ribblesdale." The House laughed, and the Master of the Buckhounds laughed with it.

One of the most vigorous orators whom I have ever heard, in the House of Lords or out of it, was Dr. Magee, Bishop of Peterborough, and afterwards Archbishop of York. He had made his fame by his speech on the Second Reading of the Irish Church Bill, and was always at his best when defending the temporal interests of ecclesiastical institutions. No clergyman ever smacked so little of the pulpit. His mind was essentially legal—clear, practical, logical, cogent. No one on earth could make a better case for a bad cause; no one could argue more closely, or declaim more vigorously. When his blood was up, he must either speak or burst; but his indignation, though it found vent in flashing sarcasms, never betrayed him into irrelevancies or inexactitudes.

A fine speaker of a different type—and one better fitted for a Churchman—was Archbishop Tait, whose dignity of speech and bearing, clear judgment, and forcible utterance, made him the worthiest representative of the Church in Parliament whom these latter days have seen. To contrast Tait's stately calm with Benson's fluttering obsequiousness[48] or Temple's hammering force, was to perceive the manner that is, and the manners that are not, adapted to what Gladstone called "the mixed sphere of Religion and the Saeculum."

By far the greatest orator whom the House of Lords has possessed in my recollection was the late Duke of Argyll. I have heard that Lord Beaconsfield, newly arrived in the House of Lords and hearing the Duke for the first time, exclaimed, "And has this been going on all these years, and I have never found it out?" It is true that the Duke's reputation as an administrator, a writer, a naturalist, and an amateur theologian, distracted public attention from his power as an orator; and I have been told that he himself did not realize it. Yet orator indeed he was, in the highest implication of the term. He spoke always under the influence of fiery conviction, and the live coal from the altar seemed to touch his lips. He was absolute master of every mood of oratory—pathos, satire, contemptuous humour, ethical passion, noble wrath; and his unstudied eloquence flowed like a river through the successive moods, taking a colour from each, and gaining force as it rolled towards its close.

On the 6th of September, 1893, I heard the Duke speaking on the Second Reading of the Home Rule Bill. He was then an old man, and in broken health; the speech attempted little in the way of argument, and was desultory beyond belief. But suddenly there came a passage which lifted the whole debate into a nobler air. The orator described himself standing on the Western shores of Scotland, and gazing across towards the hills of Antrim: "We can see the colour of their fields, and in the sunset we can see the glancing of the light upon the windows of the cabins of the people. This is the country, I thought the other day when I looked on the scene—this is the country which the greatest English statesman tells us must be governed as we govern the Antipodes." And he emphasized the last word with a downward sweep of his right hand, which in a commonplace speaker would have been frankly comic, but in this great master of oratory was a master-stroke of dramatic art.

Before I close this chapter, I should like to recall a word of Gladstone's which at the time when he said it struck me as memorable. In August, 1895, I was staying at Hawarden. Gladstone's Parliamentary life was done, and he talked about political people and events with a freedom which I had never before known in him. As perhaps was natural, we fell to discussing the men who had been his colleagues in the late Liberal Ministry. We reviewed in turn Lord Spencer, Sir William Harcourt, Lord Rosebery, Mr. John Morley, Sir George Trevelyan, and Mr. Asquith. It is perhaps a little curious, in view of what happened later on, that Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman was not mentioned; but, with regard to the foregoing names, I perfectly recollect, though there is no need to repeat, the terse and trenchant judgment passed on each. When we had come to the end of my list, the ex-Premier turned on me with one of those compelling glances which we knew so well, and said with emphasis, "But you haven't mentioned the most important man of all." "Who is that?" "Edward Grey—there is the man with the real Parliamentary gift." I am happy to make the Foreign Secretary a present of this handsome compliment.

FOOTNOTES:

[42] Mucius Scaevola per multos annos "Princeps Senatus."

[43] Bulwer-Lytton, St. Stephen's.

[44] Mr. A. J. Willams, Mr. A. G. Symond, Mr. Walter Wren, Mr. W. L. Bright, and Mr. J. J. Tylor were some of them; and we used to meet in Mr. Bright's rooms at Storey's Gate.

[45] "It is an extraordinary big club done in a bold, wholesale, shiny, marbled style, richly furnished with numerous paintings, steel engravings, busts, and full-length statues of the late Mr. Gladstone."—H. G. Wells, The New Machiavelli.

[46] "Speaking generally, I should say there could not be a less interesting occasion than the laying of the foundation-stone of a Club in London. For, after all, what are the Clubs of London? I am afraid little else than temples of luxury and ease. This, however, is a club of a very different character."

[47] The others were the late Duke of Argyll and the eighth Lord Elgin.

[48] "I had to speak in the House of Lords last night. It is a really terrible place for the unaccustomed. Frigid impatience and absolute goodwill, combined with a thorough conviction of the infallibility of laymen (if not too religious) on all sacred subjects, are the tone, morale, and reason, of the House as a living being. My whole self-possession departs, and ejection from the House seems the best thing which could happen to one."—Archbishop Benson to the Rev. B. F. Westcott, March 22, 1884.



XIII

LITERATURE

There was Captain Sumph, an ex-beau, still about town, and related in some indistinct manner to Literature and the Peerage. He was said to have written a book once, to have been a friend of Lord Byron, to be related to Lord Sumphington.... This gentleman was listened to with great attention by Mrs. Bungay; his anecdotes of the Aristocracy, of which he was a middle-aged member, delighted the publisher's lady. W. M. THACKERAY, Pendennis.

When I am writing Reminiscences, I always feel dreadfully like Captain Sumph; but, in order to make the resemblance quite exact, I must devote a chapter to Literature.

I seem, from my earliest conscious years, to have lived in a world of books; and yet my home was by no means "bookish." I was trained by people who had not read much, but had read thoroughly; who regarded good literature with unfeigned admiration; and who, though they would never have dreamt of forcing or cramming, yet were pleased when they saw a boy inclined to read, and did their best to guide his reading aright. As I survey my early life and compare it with the present day, one of the social changes which impresses me most is the general decay of intellectual cultivation. This may sound paradoxical in an age which habitually talks so much about Education and Culture; but I am persuaded that it is true. Dilettantism is universal, and a smattering of erudition, infinitely more offensive than honest and manly ignorance, has usurped the place which was formerly occupied by genuine and liberal learning. A vast deal of specialism, "mugged up," as boys say, at the British Museum or the London Library, may coexist with a profound ignorance of all that is really worth knowing. It sounds very intellectual to chatter about the authorship of the Fourth Gospel, or to scoff at St. John's "senile iterations and contorted metaphysics"; but, when a clergyman read St. Paul's eulogy on Charity, instead of an address, at the end of a fashionable wedding, one of his hearers said, "How very appropriate that was! Where did you get it from?" Everyone can patter nonsense about the traces of Bacon's influence in The Merry Wives of Windsor, and can ransack their family histories for the original of "Mr. W. H." But, when Cymbeline was put on the stage, Society was startled to find that the principal part was not a woman's. When some excellent scenes from Jane Austen were given in a Belgravian drawing-room, a lady of the highest notoriety, enthusiastically praising the performance, enquired who was the author of the dialogue between Mr. and Mrs. John Dashwood, and whether he had written anything else. I have known a Lord Chief Justice who had never seen the view from Richmond Hill; a publicist who had never heard of Lord Althorp; and an authoress who did not know the name of Izaak Walton.

Perhaps these curious "ignorances," as the Prayer Book calls them, impressed me the more forcibly because I was born a Whig, and brought up in a Whiggish society; for the Whigs were rather specially the allies of learning; and made it a point of honour to know, though never to parade, the best that has been thought and written. Very likely they had no monopoly of culture: the Tories may have been just as well-informed. But a man "belongs to his belongings"; one can only describe what one has seen; and here the contrast between Past and Present is palpable enough. I am not thinking of professed scholars and students, such as Lord Stanhope the Historian, and Sir Edward Bunbury the Senior Classic; or of professed blue-stockings, such as Barbarina, Lady Dacre, and Georgiana, Lady Chatterton; but of ordinary men and women of good family and good position, who had received the usual education of their class, and had profited by it.

Mr. Gladstone used to say that, in his schooldays at Eton, a boy might learn much, or learn nothing; but he could not learn superficially. A similar remark would have applied to the attainments of people who were old when I was young. They might know much, or they might know nothing; but they did not know superficially. What they professed to know, that you could be sure they knew. The affectation of culture was despised; and ignorance, where it existed, was avowed. For example, everyone knew Italian, but no one pretended to know German. I remember men who had never been at a University, but had passed straight from a Public School to a Cavalry Regiment or the House of Commons, and who yet could quote Horace as easily as the present generation quotes Kipling. These people inherited the traditions of Mrs. Montagu, who "vindicated the genius of Shakespeare against the calumnies of Voltaire," and they knew the greatest poet of all time with an absolute ease and familiarity. They did not trouble themselves about various readings, and corrupt texts, and difficult passages. They had nothing in common with that true father of all Shakespearean criticism, Mr. Curdle, in Nicholas Nickleby, who had written a treatise on the question whether Juliet's nurse's husband was really "a merry man," or whether it was only his widow's affectionate partiality that induced her so to report him. But they knew the whole mass of the Plays with a natural and unforced intimacy; their speech was saturated with the immortal diction, and Hamlet's speculations were their nearest approach to metaphysics. Pope was quoted whenever the occasion suggested him, and Johnson was esteemed the Prince of Critics. Broadly speaking, all educated people knew the English poets down to the end of the eighteenth century. Byron and Moore were enjoyed with a sort of furtive and fearful pleasure; Wordsworth was tolerated, and Tennyson was "coming in." Everyone knew Scott's novels by heart, and had his or her favourite heroine and hero.

I said in a former chapter that I had from my earliest days free access to an excellent library; and, even before I could read comfortably by myself, my interest in books was stimulated by listening to my elders as they read aloud. The magic of words and cadence—the purely sensuous pleasure of melodious sound—stirred me from the time when I was quite a child. Poetry, of course, came first; but prose was not much later. I had by nature a good memory, and it retained, by no effort on my part, my favourite bits of Macaulay and Scott. The Battle of Lake Regillus and The Lay of the Last Minstrel, the impeachment of Warren Hastings and the death of Reginald Front-de-Boeuf, are samples of the literature with which my mind was stored. Every boy, I suppose, attempts to imitate what he admires, and I was eternally scribbling. When I was eleven, I began a novel, of which the heroine was a modern Die Vernon. At twelve, I took to versification, for which the swinging couplets of English Bards and Scotch Reviewers supplied the model. Fragments of prose and verse came thick and fast. When I was thirteen, I made my first appearance in print; with a set of verses on a Volunteer Encampment, which really were not at all bad; and at fourteen I published (anonymously) a religious tract, which had some success in Evangelical circles.

The effect of Harrow was both to stimulate and to discipline my taste for literature. It was my good fortune to be taught my Sophocles and Euripides, Tacitus and Virgil, by scholars who had the literary sense, and could enrich school-lessons with all the resources of a generous culture. My sixteenth and seventeenth years brought me a real and conscious growth in the things of the mind, and with that period of my life I must always gratefully associate the names of Frederic Farrar, Edward Bowen, and Arthur Watson.[49]

Meanwhile I was not only learning, but also practising. My teachers with one accord incited me to write. Essay-writing formed a regular part of our work in school and pupil-room, and I composed a great deal for my own amusement. I wrote both prose and verse, and verse in a great many metres; but it was soon borne in upon me—conclusively after I had been beaten for the Prize Poem[50]—that the Muse of Poetry was not mine. In prose, I was more successful. My work for The Harrovian gave me constant practice, and I twice won the School-Prize for an English Essay. In writing, I indulged to the full my taste for resonant and rolling sound; and my style was ludicrously rhetorical. The subject for the Prize Essay in 1872 was "Parliamentary Oratory: its History and Influence," and the discourse which I composed on that attractive theme has served me from that day to this as the basis of a popular lecture. The "Young Lion" of the Daily Telegraph thus "roared" over my performance—

"The English Essay now takes a higher place on Speech Day than it did in the old season; and the essay which was crowned yesterday was notable alike for the theme, the opinions, and the literary promise of the writer. The young author bore the historical name of Russell, and he was really reviewing the forerunners and the fellow-workers of his own ancestors, in describing the rhetorical powers of the elder and the younger Pitt, Fox, Burke, Sheridan, Canning and Grey.... The well-known Constitutional note of Lord Russell was heard in every page, and the sonorous English was such as the Earl himself might have written fifty years ago, if the undergraduates of that day had been able to copy a Macaulay. The essayist has read the prose of that dangerous model until he has imitated the well-known and now hackneyed devices of the great rhetorician with a closeness which perilously brought to mind the show passages of the 'Essays' and the 'History.' Mr. Russell has caught the trick of cutting up his paragraphs into rolling periods, and short, sharp, and disjointed sentences; but he will go to more subtle and more simple masters of style than Macaulay, when he shall have passed the rhetorical stage of youth."