EARL SPENCER.
Even those most bitterly opposed to the policy, and most disdainful of men who had turned when Mr. Gladstone said “turn,” had to pause when they reached, on the list of noble Home Rulers, the name of Earl Spencer. For he was, in truth, the last man to be influenced either by vague sentiment, or by those calculations of personal profit and loss which so often determine the course of a politician. His mind was solid and rather prosaic, and his parts were not quick, but he had in a rather special degree the sort of “horse sense” for which the Duke of Devonshire was distinguished—the sense which acts as a brake rather than as a motive power. It was a thoroughly English mind, with all its limitations and much of its strength, and it was none the less strong because it found a considerable difficulty in expression. Lord Spencer was a very bad speaker; if he had had even an ordinary degree of command over words he would almost certainly have succeeded Mr. Gladstone as Prime Minister. But he never got beyond the fluency necessary to any man who has to take a part in public business; the coining of a phrase was beyond him, and though he could make a point well enough in debate, he was quite destitute of power over a popular audience. The fact, however, increased rather than diminished his influence over a certain minority, and he was undoubtedly the most powerful counter-poise on the Home Rule side to the weight of the Duke of Devonshire. His character and position, of course, helped. He was not, like the head of the House of Cavendish, indifferent to politics; he had ambitions, and would have been glad to satisfy them. But he was wholly free from one set of weaknesses, and far above one set of temptations. He had a constitutional disdain for the kind of tricks to which some great nobles descend in their avarice of power, while his high rank and great possessions secured him against the temptations of mere avarice of place.
In Earl Spencer, indeed, the Whig noble was seen at not far from his best, and it was not difficult for those who knew him to understand why the Whiggish oligarchy so long held its own in this country. It was not in the smallest degree “democratic.” No men ever more hated democracy, no men ever fought more successfully against democracy, than the Whigs. Burke, for example, regarded the “swinish multitude” very much as an old Greek might have regarded the slave population of his time. But there was also the same sort of equality between the Whigs as that which existed between the free citizens of the ancient world. They played their part on a high stage, and indulged an unmitigated contempt for those who were on the ground. But once a man was admitted to this jealous society he was given the full freedom of it. He was admitted as an equal, and not as a lackey. It was thus that Whiggism was able to command the services of great intellects. It was thus that almost all great history was for many years written in most unfair glorification of Whigs. It was this liberality that long permitted Whiggism to be as illiberal as it liked in other matters. Toryism was less wise. It tended to treat intellect as a common thing meant for common use. The priggish and mediocre Addison was made a Whig Secretary of State. The great Swift got an Irish Deanery. Macaulay died a Peer, and lives as a classic. The men who (less efficiently, it is true) did for Toryism the work Macaulay did for Whiggism were unmarked in their lives and forgotten in their deaths. The Tory philosopher was treated as a valet, and consequently few men above the mentality of the valet became Tory philosophers. The tradition on both sides weakened as the years went on. The Whig Peer of the Nineties would have sniffed at much of the company at Holland House. The Tory Peer of the Nineties would have considered Mr. Lecky an extremely respectable man, worthy of some sort of place at his dinner-table, even on an important night. But we have only to think of the long, sincere, and equal friendship between Earl Spencer and John Morley to be reminded of the great difference between the parties. There were writers on the Tory side not inferior in intellect and scholarship to the son of the Blackburn doctor. Some of them, possibly, were more fitted for active political life. But none of them was ever considered in competition with those “claims which cannot be ignored.” It was not until Mr. Chamberlain joined a Conservative Cabinet that a young man like Sir Alfred Milner, with nothing but his brains to recommend him, caught the eye of a colleague of the Cecils.
It was not only that the Whig magnate was ready to admit any sufficiently able man to the freedom of his circle. He habitually showed also the rare magnanimity—or rare sagacity—of submitting to the domination of men whom he had made, and men who could never, without his acquiescence, have entered into serious competition with himself. Disraeli was almost the solitary instance of the middle-class man rising to supreme position in Toryism, and that triumph was achieved by a patient contempt of slight and sneer, of haughty superiority and mean ingratitude, which could be only possible to a very exceptional nature. On the other side, one man after another of no great wealth or birth swayed Cabinets consisting largely of great lords. Earl Spencer’s loyalty to Mr. Gladstone is highly typical of the tradition. He formed and maintained sturdily his own views on matters he felt himself competent to judge, and indeed it was his stubbornness in the matter of the Navy Estimates that led to his old chief finally relinquishing office. But if the positions had been more than reversed, if he had possessed Mr. Gladstone’s splendid powers and his own ample patrimony and patrician prestige, he could not have looked for more devoted or more disinterested service than he gave, or for a more complete absence of personal self-seeking or disloyal intrigue.
Earl Spencer, indeed, carried almost to excess the disposition to subordinate his personal feelings to considerations of party welfare. He was assailed, during his Irish period, by the foulest slanders and the most furious invective. All unmoved, he proceeded, within the law, but also with the full vigour of the law, to suppress the murder gang which in the early Eighties almost threatened the dissolution of Irish society. His dealing with the Invincibles was a model for the imitation of all statesmen responsible for the restoration of law and order in a distracted country. He aimed at nothing but what it was clearly his duty to compass, and what he aimed at he struck dead, with the slow but inexorable certainty of a fate. In the performance of this duty nothing moved him. But when it was all over, and he had followed his party in their conversion from the policy of coercion to the policy of concession, he appeared on the same platforms with the men who had formerly assailed him with groundless slander and measureless abuse. This magnanimity, which his critics called rather a carelessness of personal dignity, was characteristic of the man, and we might almost say of the Whig in the man. He could not have felt pleasure in the “union of hearts.” But he was ruled by the almost instinctive Whiggish subordination of private feeling to public (or at lowest to party) interest.
The Whig could be, and often was, extraordinarily covetous. He could be, and often was, more solicitous concerning his party than his country, or, rather, he was too much accustomed to think of the prosperity of his party as identical with that of his country. But he was, generally speaking, loyal to his ideas and to the institutions which stood for his ideas, and he understood, better than his opponents, what it meant to play for a side. Whigs quarrelled fiercely among themselves after the enemy was beaten; before a still formidable foe they possessed a rare instinct of discipline. So long as the nineteenth-century Liberal Party was mainly Whiggish it was mainly victorious; and it was no merely reactionary inspiration which made Whiggism regard Radicalism as on the whole a deadlier enemy than Toryism; the Radical was not so much a rebel against the social scheme as against the Party Whip. Whiggism would probably have conquered Radicalism and continued to give its own impress to the Party but for the Home Rule split. But that convulsion left so few great Whig families on the Liberal side that the influence of those who remained was chiefly personal. So long as men like Earl Spencer lived they were able to preserve to some extent the character of the Party. But they left no successors. Nothing is more remarkable than the dying out of political talent among the landed classes during the last twenty years; and it is perhaps not altogether fanciful to connect it with the decline of the Whigs, who, in their palmy days, not only maintained themselves in full efficiency, but acted as a sort of pace-maker for their opponents. The Whig nobility was never numerically in a majority, but it commanded the greater part of aristocratic talent, and it created a certain spirit of emulation among young Tories. But when the Whigs went over to the Tory Party this stimulus was wanting. There was really no need for any strenuous contest of wits in the Upper House; still less was there any necessity for Party discipline. No doubt henceforward existed as to the result of a party division, and though it might be desirable to justify by argument the course decided by numbers, no case is likely to be either attacked or defended with full vigour and acuteness when the speaker knows that no single vote will be affected by his eloquence or his logic.
The House of Lords, it is true, is still by no means destitute of ability and experience in public affairs: in many respects it has degenerated less than the elective chamber. But the qualities which make men pre-eminent in counsel and debate are now almost a monopoly of Peers who have served in the House of Commons or in high places under the Crown. Further, the cadets of the noble houses show an increasing disinclination to enter politics, and a decreasing ability to satisfy such ambitions even when they are present. Glance at the personnel of the present Government, compare it with any Government of the nineteenth century, and the first thing to strike one is the political decline of the historic families. If the Liberal Party alone were affected, the fact might be attributed to the mere advance of opinion in that Party. But on the whole the Liberals retain more distinguished men of old family than the Conservatives. The House of Lords was never more of one complexion. There never was a Tory majority in the Commons so large and so compact. Yet those very critics on the Tory side who are for ever urging that the real Tories should show their strength are forced ruefully to admit that from both Houses it would be difficult to pick a Government of indubitable orthodoxy which should also be a Government of reasonable efficiency. Territorial Toryism has almost suffered the fate of those ancient monsters which, in a world of which they were unchallenged masters, developed such bulk and inertia as actually to die of over-weight and under-intelligence. In this case the intelligence has not exactly died: it has been diverted to other things. In the old days the ordinary course of a young man was first to take up politics as a game, and then to adopt it as a vocation. The game lost interest when the sides became grotesquely unequal, and the vocation is no longer felt.
A man like Earl Spencer is, therefore, not merely rare in present-day politics; he is almost unknown. The Peers who still take an interest in the affairs of the nation are not territorial, but rather urban and even suburban Peers. That, as in the case of Lord Curzon, they may occasionally be able to boast great descent is not to the point; their tastes are those of the town and not of the shire. They are not likely, like Walpole, to open their huntsman’s or gamekeeper’s letters before attending to official correspondence. It is true that the sort of man Earl Spencer was—and he was once the ordinary type of great lord in politics—is still to be found, but you shall hardly find him in affairs. And he has, perhaps, a little coarsened; he has grown too horsey, and lost his old taste for things of the mind. Earl Spencer was Master of the Pytchley, and astonished John Morley by the zest with which he set out on a fourteen-mile drive to the meet on a pouring wet morning, after being up half the night talking politics. But he was also the owner of a great library which he was perfectly able to appreciate—a library with which he parted, not in order to make money, but simply because he felt that such priceless books should be at the public disposal.
The great Whig nobles of a former generation were, even the greatest of them, by no means beyond criticism. They often took a selfish view of public questions. They often lacked imagination and sympathy. They were many of them most complacent pagans. Most were quite horribly calm over things like the Irish famine and the industrial shames of Great Britain. But it is not easy to point to any age or country which afforded better examples than the best of them of the cultivated mind in the sound body, of powers mental and physical carried to their highest pitch of development, of refined virility and calm strength. And of the type Earl Spencer was not the least worthy representative.
Sir Henry Morton Stanley made a double appeal to the imagination of the early Nineties. He represented both the old romance of adventurous travel and the new romance of mechanical efficiency. It was his luck to do considerable things exactly at the time when exploration had become scientific, but had not ceased to be picturesque. A generation before there was glamour, but little good business, in the conquest of the wild; on the whole the betting was decidedly on the wild. A generation later the glamour had largely departed, though the business was very good business indeed. But in the high and palmy days of Stanley the explorer had the best of both worlds. He was admired as a disinterested knight errant, and rewarded handsomely for not being one.
To-day the public is a little cynical on the whole subject. It is not so much that the world has grown smaller; the world is still a very large place. It is not so much that danger has been eliminated; it has in some ways been notably increased. But the very completeness of a modern exploration boom defeats part of its purpose. So far as it sets out to make the restless hero an efficient money-maker for himself and others it generally succeeds mightily. So far as it sets out to make the restless hero a demigod it invariably fails; it makes him, instead, something very like a bore. The public reads all about book rights, serial rights, cinema rights, oxy-hydrogen lecture rights. It reads all about the restless hero’s wife, the restless hero’s child, the restless hero’s mother, the restless hero’s schoolmaster, until it begins to be thoroughly tired with the restless hero even before he has started for the North Pole or the South, for some unpleasant range of mountains or some still more unpleasant expanse of swamps. This fatigue, of course, does not prevent much enthusiasm when the restless hero returns, particularly if he fails interestingly to do what he said he was going to do; the public is apt to be calmer if he succeeds to the foot of the letter. This enthusiasm means nothing in particular. The public will always consent to be worked up into a due state of frenzy over a returning hero; merely the chance of a “rag” is for great numbers of mysteriously constituted people too precious to miss. But the restless hero will deceive himself if he takes this worship too seriously; the public will equally worship any American cinema actor. Neither the hero nor the cinema actor, however, will be allowed to become, as of old, the “lion of the season.” The modern public may be silly in choosing its idols. It shows common sense in throwing them aside the very moment they cease to amuse.
In the Nineties there was already visible a good deal of this modern tendency to get crazes very badly and tire of them very quickly. But the “lion of the season” still existed, and Stanley, on his return from the Emin Pasha relief expedition, was a lion indeed. It is curious, at this time of day, to recall the origin of this, the last of Stanley’s great marches through the African wild. One Edouard Schnitzer, known as Emin Pasha, had been stranded in Equatorial Africa after the capture of Khartoum by the Mahdi. Why any large body of Englishmen should have been interested in this man it is not easy to say. But towards the end of 1886 there was a considerable agitation for an expedition to discover the fate of Emin, and (if he proved to be alive) to rescue him. Who better for this task than Stanley, “the man who found Livingstone”? There was no better-known story than that of Stanley and Livingstone. Every child was familiar with the woodcut of two men—one in a sun-helmet, the other in a cap—each with his adoring bevy of blacks, shaking hands with each other; underneath was printed Stanley’s “Dr. Livingstone, I presume.” Every magazine reader of more mature years knew the whole story—how James Gordon Bennett, of the New York Herald, “a tall, fierce-eyed, and imperious-looking young man,” saw Stanley in Paris, and told him to “find Livingstone.” Expenses? “Never mind about expenses. When you have spent your first ten thousand, draw on me for another ten thousand. When that is gone, draw on me for another; when that is gone, draw on me for another; draw what you like, but find Livingstone.” That was the story in its perfect dramatic form; the real story was a little different. Bennett told Stanley to go, but no terms were actually settled, and the explorer, who had already “made good” as a newspaper correspondent for Bennett in Abyssinia, found no money for him at Zanzibar, and had actually to contract a loan from the United States Consul there. But naturally the ideal account of the transaction obtained full currency. The nineteenth century had a pathetic faith in its Press, and even in the American Press; and it revelled in the vision of one strong, silent man, by the power of a mighty banking account, hurling a second strong, silent man across a dark continent to the succour of a third strong, silent man. These things no longer thrill; there are so many men now still stronger and more silent, so many banking accounts still more mighty. But to Victorian civilisation the romance of millionaire whims was yet enchanting; and James Gordon Bennett, though he persisted in living to be an oddity, never quite lost the splendour of his “find Livingstone” heroism.
As for Stanley himself, the expedition covered him with enduring glory. Every British boy born in the late Sixties and Seventies was familiar with his haggard but resolute features, and knew by heart the singular story of his life. It was the kind of story that impresses itself indelibly on the imagination of youth. Stanley’s name, of course, came to him only in mature life. He was born John Rowlands, the son of a farmer near Denbigh. His father he never knew; during his childhood he only saw his mother once, in the workhouse of St. Asaph, whither she had come with two other of her children; she would not recognise him, and when, after his first return from America, he paid her a visit, it was only to meet with a cold repulse. John Rowlands had been left as an infant in charge of his grandfather, Moses Parry, then living within the precincts of Denbigh Castle. On the death of this old man he was transferred to the care of an ancient couple, two of his uncles guaranteeing a maintenance allowance of five shillings a week. This at last failed, and the child was taken to the St. Asaph Union Workhouse; he was then in his sixth year. Young Rowlands in these dismal surroundings suffered all the pangs possible to a boy of keen sensibilities and strong natural affections who finds himself the victim, not only of privation and humiliation, but of actual tyranny. His schoolmaster was a one-handed monster named Francis, who seems to have been as bad as anybody in Dickens. “No Greek helot or dark slave,” says Stanley in his Autobiography, “ever underwent discipline as the boys of St. Asaph under the heavy, masterful hand of James Francis. The ready back-slap in the face, the stunning clout over the ear, the strong blow with the open palm on alternate cheeks, which knocked our senses into confusion, were so frequent that it was a marvel that we ever recovered them again. Whatever might be the nature of the offence, or merely because his irritable mood required vent, our poor heads were cuffed and slapped and pounded until we were speechless and streaming with blood. But, though a tremendously rough and reckless striker with his fist or hand, such blows were preferable to deliberate punishment with the birch, ruler, or cane, which with cool malice he inflicted.... If a series of errors were discovered in our lessons, then a vindictive scourging of the offender followed until he was exhausted or our lacerated bodies could bear no more.”
It is a testimony to the toughness of child nature, though none to the management of this brutal institution, that of Stanley’s thirty school-fellows one lived to be a wealthy merchant, another to be a clergyman, a third to be a colonial lawyer, and a fourth to become a man of large fortune overseas. But the iron entered deeply into young Rowlands’ soul, and the most constant motive in his life was to obliterate the stigma of pauperism. His connection with the workhouse abruptly terminated when he was about fifteen. He turned on the brutal master, gave him a severe thrashing, ran away, got first a place as a pupil teacher, then worked as a farm-boy, a haberdasher’s boy, and a butcher’s boy, until at last, at Liverpool, he obtained a job on an American sailing-ship. At New Orleans, tired of the brutality he had experienced in a voyage of eighty-three days, he ran away from the ship, and the same day chanced across the man who was to become his adopted father, a Mr. Stanley, who, once some sort of minister, was now a commercial traveller. No more striking tribute has ever been paid to the influence of American institutions than that of the ex-workhouse lad from England. “The people I passed,” he says, “appeared to me nobler than any I had seen. They had a swing of the body wholly un-English, and their facial expressions differed from those I had been accustomed to. I strove to give a name to what was so unusual. Now, of course, I know that it was the sense of equality and independence that made each face so different from what I had seen in Liverpool. These people knew no master, and had no more awe of their employers than they had of their fellow-employees.” At the same time he could not help feeling “a little contempt” for the extreme touchiness which was the defect of these high qualities. In a few weeks he had himself acquired a good deal of the American spirit; the servile taint was eradicated; and the temper and aptitudes which had been so long suppressed expanded in the “felicities of freedom.”
Mr. Stanley soon after lost his wife—whom young Rowlands describes as having taught him “the immense distance between a lady and a mere woman.” This bereavement induced him to adopt the young Englishman, and he performed the ceremony in due form, filling a basin with water and baptizing the erstwhile John Rowlands as Henry Morton Stanley. “The golden period of my life,” says Stanley, “began from that supreme moment.” For the first time in his life he had a proper outfit of clothes, and was introduced to the amenities of civilised life. But his adopted father did not long survive, and in the meantime the Civil War, in which Stanley saw service on both sides, had broken out. When peace was declared, Stanley, who had suffered extraordinary vicissitudes of fortune, took advantage of a chance introduction to the New York Press to embark on the career of free-lance journalism. His great chance as a war correspondent came with the Abyssinian War. Gordon Bennett thought American interest in Abyssinia too slight to justify the expense of a special correspondent, but agreed to pay for any matter accepted if Stanley cared to defray his own charges. Stanley agreed to this discouraging proposal, and by good luck and management gave the New York Herald the first news of the capture of Magdala and the fall of King Theodore. The Livingstone adventure followed, and he was a made man. Livingstone, when found, was content to remain where he was, and there were some wicked people who suggested that so far from Stanley discovering Livingstone, it was Livingstone who discovered Stanley. But, though the wound of such injurious suggestion rankled for many years, Stanley fully established himself both with the geographers and the general public. His expedition across Africa in 1870—he had just before accompanied Sir Garnet Wolseley on the Ashanti campaign—raised, however, some controversy as to his methods; he was charged with harshness to his men, with keeping aloof from his officers, and with employing slaves. Such criticisms, which had more or less followed all Stanley’s feats, were specially loud after the first enthusiasm over the success of the Emin Pasha expedition had died down. It was successful in much the same sense as the finding of Livingstone. Emin Pasha was found, but he did not at first want to be rescued; and when, a little later, he had trouble with his Egyptian officers and elected to return with Stanley to the coast, he promptly went over to the Germans, whose service he entered. This fact, the other fact that Stanley failed to see any fault in Emin’s conduct, and the further fact of the massacre of Stanley’s rearguard, which he had virtually abandoned in order to push on to Emin, rapidly cooled the great explorer’s popularity. There soon began a bitter controversy over the fate of the rearguard. Stanley, in attacking his critics, assailed the memory of Major Barttelot, who had been left in charge of the ill-fated party. His critics retorted with a charge of carelessness and mismanagement, and the effect of this wrangle was to throw a good deal of light on Stanley’s methods.
The natives of the Lower Congo gave him a name which signified “Breaker of Rocks,” and in doing so proved themselves no mean judges of character. Stanley was not a cruel man nor an unprincipled, and Sir Garnet Wolseley has spoken of his high courage and unruffled calm in positions of danger. But he was not in the position of a soldier in charge of a military expedition; he acted only occasionally in a quasi-military capacity; more often he travelled as a civilian, and sometimes as in every sense a private person. This circumstance he seems to have overlooked. “My methods,” he said, in expressing the hope that it would be his to follow Livingstone in opening up Africa to the “shining light of Christianity,” “will not be Livingstone’s. Each man has his own way. His, I think, had its defects, though the old man personally had been almost Christ-like for goodness, patience, and self-sacrifice. The selfish and wooden-headed world requires mastering as well as loving charity; for man is a composite of the spiritual and earthly.” We have here the sharp contrast between the earlier and later nineteenth-century schools of exploration, the school of the gospel and the school of the gatling gun. Stanley had his own conception of religion; in his way he was a decidedly pious man; his workhouse wretchedness had inclined him to seek the Father of the fatherless; he had resumed in later life the prayerful habits of his boyhood, and he devoted some considerable time in his first trans-African tour to converting a ruling chief to Christianity. But there was more of Calvin than of Christ in his faith, and more of the Old Testament than the New.
With the completion of the Emin Pasha expedition he retired on his laurels, married, and went into politics. But, though after a first unsuccessful attempt he got himself returned for North Lambeth, he quickly found how hard is the political path of an elderly man who has achieved distinction in other walks. He could not get into Parliamentary ways, and even when he spoke on subjects he perfectly understood he had the usual vice of the “man on the spot.” He could not help lecturing, and lecturing is one of the things the House of Commons will not tolerate. If the House did not think too well of him, he certainly thought exceedingly ill of the House. He describes it as “a gigantic apparatus for frittering away energy and time.” No politician claimed his undiluted admiration; curiously enough, Mr. (now Lord) Haldane came nearest to his notion of a capable and earnest man. It was the old quarrel of the man of action with the place of talk—a matter on which, as on most, there are things to be said on both sides.
One curious thing may be recalled concerning him. He was often to be seen at public dinners. But nobody ever saw him eat anything; every dish went away untasted.
I first met Justin McCarthy in the schoolroom of a little Gloucestershire village. It was during the short-lived “union of hearts” between the General Election of 1886 and the general upset which followed the Parnell divorce case. Justin McCarthy was appearing on the platform of a popular county member of that time, one Arthur Brend Winterbotham, a fine specimen of the more hearty type of middle-class Liberal. Winterbotham had the reputation of a shrewd man of business; he was a Stroud Valley weaver in a highly comfortable way. But on the platform one would imagine that he had no thought but for the People—“the People, Lord, the People, not Crowns, not Kings, but Men”; to use one of his favourite quotations. In politics he was a perfect Lawrence Boythorne of a man, irresistible in his frank good-humour; his silence was one expansive smile, and his speaking one melodious roar. His strong and splendid voice had a wonderful trick of falling when he spoke of the tears Liberalism intended to dry if it could only get hold of an official pocket-handkerchief; it vibrated with splendid scorn when he exposed the democratic pretences of the Tories. He was never more effective than when reading a newspaper extract; he seemed to be able to impart the dignity of Isaiah to something in the Daily News. To hear him quote an enemy’s speech, and add, “‘Loud cheers,’ gentlemen! The newspaper says ‘loud cheers’—but were they the cheers of agricultural labourers?” was a liberal education in platform style. And each of his chins—he had a number—was worth hundreds of votes.
JUSTIN McCARTHY.
On this occasion he gave a real rousing speech on Ireland. He remarked several times that his blood boiled. His voice trembled when he spoke of evictions. It rose to bugle tones when he denounced Mr. Balfour’s “bayonets and battering rams.” He spoke of Home Rule as the one great Liberal policy. And then the Chairman called on Mr. Justin McCarthy with a certain embarrassment, as if he had an idea that he was a celebrity of some kind, but did not quite know his claim to fame (which was probably the fact), as “one who had fought and suffered for the cause of tortured Erin.” And Mr. Justin McCarthy, a gentle-mannered little man, with timid, spectacled eyes, a scholar’s diffidence, and one of those beards which give the impression that their purpose is less to advertise virility than to conceal a feminine softness which might be too apparent with a clean-shaved face, delivered, without a gesture or an exaggeration, the most moderate speech I have ever heard on the Irish question. It had no perceptible effect, except that the blacksmith in the back benches, who had fiercely interrupted Mr. Winterbotham—he was a Tory, as became a shoer of the horses of the nobility and gentry—began to snore heavily about half-way through. But, whenever I have since heard people talk about the emotional and unreasonable Irishman, and the strong, passionless, unsentimental Englishman, I have always seen in my mind’s eye the strenuous Gloucestershire cloth-weaver and the mild Irish scholar side by side. And I have never been able to acquit the English Liberal of those days of a great responsibility. It was not, perhaps, wholly his fault. Assuredly he meant no harm. But he did nevertheless a mighty evil. His well-intended sentimentalities were taken in earnest by an intensely earnest people. Then awkward things happened, and it appeared exactly how much clear thought and sincere conviction lay beneath all the loose talk about “living to see the day, when the clouds should pass away, and the sun of freedom shine again on Erin’s land.” It was seen that Parnell was in essence right—that the Liberals would do exactly what they were forced to do, that when the Irish question was “up,” Home Rule would be “practical politics,” but that when Ireland was out of the picture, Home Rule would be out of the Liberal programme. On the other hand, the Conservatives, when they promised coercion, invariably fulfilled their promises most conscientiously. So the fatal legend grew up that the English could only be trusted to “deliver the goods” when they took the form of handcuffs.
Englishmen often think of the Southern Irishman as a clever child. I will not discuss that view. But those who held it would have been wise to consider how logical children are in their own way, what an awful sense they have of the nature of a bargain, how hard it is to restore their faith when once shattered. You and I may quite easily forget that we have promised wide-eyed innocence, aged five, an elephant for Christmas. But wide-eyed innocence will not forget the fact, or accept our lame explanations that we really could not get the elephant, because some still wider-eyed innocence had thrown itself on the floor and screamed till it was black at the mere suggestion of such a present. Half the Irish trouble is this exaggerated logicality on the part of the Irishman, child or no child, and this happy-go-lucky, hand-to-mouth spirit of compromise and procrastination on the part of the undeniably mature and businesslike Englishman. We, as a practical people, seldom set our hands to a business document without intending to carry it out. But we have a nasty habit of signing intellectual promissory notes without the smallest idea of meeting them. When it is a question of money, our undertaking to pay “this first of exchange” in ninety days is the best security of the kind in the world. But an English Minister will cheerfully say, “We are all Socialists now,” or tell Labour to be “audacious,” or speak in favour of nationalisation of the coal mines, or give his “personal pledge” that food shall not cost more, without the smallest sense of responsibility. Now, the Irish are not the best people in the world with whom to do money business; but they do take ideas seriously. And if they have been promised an elephant, they expect an elephant. It is no use arguing with them that the elephant would be a white elephant, that an elephant in Ireland would not be nearly so well suited to the bogs as a stork, that so dangerous a brute is no fit plaything for children of the flighty Celtic temperament. They keep repeating (with some passion) that an elephant they have been promised, that an elephant they will have, and that they won’t be happy (or let anyone else be) until they get it. And they become noisier than ever when told that they “only do it to annoy,” and that everybody knows the last thing they really want is the elephant.
I have chosen Justin McCarthy, from a knot of Irishmen who occupied a considerable place in the politics of the Nineties, because he seems to me a figure worth the study of those Englishmen who are inclined in their haste to dismiss Irish agitation as an insincere and artificial thing. There could hardly have lived a man less inclined by nature for the rough-and-tumble of politics. His every instinct was literary. A good library satisfied almost every craving except that for an occasional quiet little dinner with people capable of talking interestingly about Shakespeare and the musical glasses. His love of humane learning was proclaimed at an age when the ordinary boy of his position—he was born in “genteel poverty” which grew in poverty and lost in gentility as his easy-going dilettante father, who had occupied the post of clerk to the Cork City magistrates, came down in the world—was chiefly engaged with marbles and whip-top. “We were nearly all poor,” he says of his school set, “but we all belonged to families in which education counted for much, and where scholarly studies found encouragement.... We could read our Latin and make something of our Greek, most of us could read French, some few Italian, and many of us were taking to the study of German.”
It was natural that a lad whose own degree in such a circle is indicated by Lord Moulton’s statement that “McCarthy was the best all-round scholar he knew” should drift into the literary career. Long before he was twenty McCarthy, on whom the support of the family now depended, was working as a reporter on the staff of the Cork Examiner at a salary of £1 a week. But Irish journalism was then—possibly still is—too hungry a business to detain long an ambitious and capable man, and it was not many years before McCarthy left it behind. Establishing himself first in Liverpool and afterwards in London, he soon attained a certain position in the republic of letters. In 1868 he went to America, had considerable success, and was told, by one who had power behind him, that he might have the post of United States Minister to London if he would remain and be naturalised. By this time, however, he had decided that his main business in life was to work for Irish Nationalism, and he decided that this could be better done as a British subject.
In 1879 he was returned for Longford, and shortly after was elected Vice-Chairman of the Nationalist Party. He entered the House of Commons with a “profound respect” for its constitution and history. Unlike those Irishmen who saw in the House only an alien instrument of oppression, he had always regarded it as a “powerful agency in the development of constitutional and religious equality,” and his “main desire” in public life was “to see the establishment of such an institution in Ireland for the government of the Irish people by the Irish people.” The vision of Irish independence never floated before his mind’s eye; he was content with “a compromise which should give to Ireland the entire management and control of her own legislation while she yet remained a member of the British Imperial system.” That there was perfect sincerity in these professions may be inferred, not only from the character of Justin McCarthy’s public career, but from the tone of his History of Our Own Time. An English Unionist might possibly be as fair in writing a history of Ireland; probably he would not. But it would be miraculous if such a man could dwell on the deeds of Sarsfield with enthusiasm equal to that which inspires Justin McCarthy in paying tribute to the splendours of the British Army. But this same man, with his gentle and peace-loving nature, took his part in the drudgery of obstruction under Parnell, and had his turn in being “suspended.” “It was not very pleasant work,” he admits, “for one who had been for more than a quarter of a century a resident of England, and had formed many very close friendships and some relationship there, and had been doing his best to win for himself a position in English literature and journalism.” But, however unpleasant it might be, every Irish member had to take his fair share in the work of obstruction; and he did it knowing that it was only a means to an end. Under the leadership of Isaac Butt an Irish night had been simply a Scottish night with a brogue. Obstruction forced the Irish question on the attention of the English people.
Just before the Parnell divorce suit came to shatter so many things, McCarthy had come to believe that the main trouble was over, and that, in his own words, “an Irish Nationalist member was henceforward to be a welcome associate in the great progressive work of English politics.” But the Liberal conversion, like all wholesale conversions, was not much more than skin-deep. At the best it was a conversion of sentiment; at the worst a conversion of expediency. There was a good-natured acquiescence on the part of the rank-and-file, an acquiescence not always good-natured on the part of the subordinate leaders. Mr. Gladstone was in earnest; one or two of his lieutenants were in earnest; the party generally was like the Roman masses under Constantius and Julian, ready to deride the gods or stone the saints as the people in authority wished. The foundations of the policy were laid in sand, and it could not stand the stress of the storm caused by the O’Shea divorce suit.
It was a curious example of the irony of circumstance that brought the cold and silent Parnell into conflict with the genial and chatty man of letters who had been hitherto his devoted factotum. But when the issue was joined McCarthy showed that he also could be inflexible. Parnell bitterly described him, on his election as chief of the Nationalist Party, as “just the man for a tea-party,” and assuredly he was the last person to enjoy an atmosphere of vendetta. But, while it was a “cruel stroke of fate” that compelled him to stand forth as the opponent of Parnell and John Redmond, his resolution was firm from the moment that Parnell issued the manifesto which he believed would be fatal, unless counteracted, to the Home Rule cause. And if it was ironical that McCarthy should be pitted against Parnell, it was still more ironical that Parnell should be defeated by McCarthy; that he was defeated was made evident some time before his stormy career ended.
But the struggle was scarcely less disastrous to the victor. Writing was McCarthy’s only means of living, and the demands on his time made writing difficult. His work for Ireland, moreover, involved him in serious financial loss, and when he resigned the chairmanship he was virtually ruined both in health and estate. His last years were spent in invalidism in Westgate, with the pressure of want driving his tired brain and enfeebled physique to a too copious output of novels, historical studies, and newspaper articles. An act of political generosity on Mr. Balfour’s part at length lightened the burden, and from 1903 to his death in 1912 he enjoyed a Civil List pension of £250 a year. McCarthy was greatly touched by this tribute from one whom he had consistently attacked. But the attacks, however trenchant, had never been marked by a tone of personal bitterness. That was not in McCarthy’s nature. But for the cursed spite of politics he could never have indulged a more serious quarrel than those which arise between amiable scholars over a disputed reading or a historical doubt. And even in politics he could combine perfect firmness of principle with a certain large charity. Nothing further from the stage Irishman of English fancy could be imagined than the modest and agreeable man of letters, courtly after the older manner, soft in step and gentle in voice, with only a slight and agreeable trace of brogue, who was so often to be met with at all sorts of neutral dinner-tables during the Nineties. But he was in his way as indomitable an Irish Nationalist as any of those unhappy fellow-countrymen whose death on the scaffold it was his mournful duty as a historian to chronicle. His sacrifices would have been little felt had the cause triumphed to which he devoted the best years of life; things being as they were, he could not but think that talents which might have given him a much higher rank in literature had been frittered away in a great futility.
It is only necessary to compare the Irish Nationalist represented—at the best, it is true—by Justin McCarthy with the Irish Nationalist represented to-day by “President” de Valera in order to realise the mischief wrought rather by levity than ill intent. The impotence of the Nationalist Party in the Nineties made it a negligible ally and a negligible enemy, and both English Parties hastened to forget that there was an Irish question. Thus the opportunity of a settlement in the absence of agitation passed, and when, with restored Irish unity, a new demand arose, the atmosphere was in the nature of things unfavourable to statesmanlike handling. The “Union of Hearts,” had it been a real thing, might well have worked a cure for Irish ills. Being in the main an unreal thing, it but added to Irish embitterment. And to-day we know the greatness of our gain.
The Nineties were rich in painters of all kinds. People bought pictures then, and all sorts of pictures; in those days of still happy and careless barbarism there was no veto on any school, and one could hang things of almost any school in almost any surroundings. The influence of the Prince Consort was not altogether dead, and people unashamedly admired the picture with a story, as well as the portrait with a likeness. So the older-school painters were still for the most part extremely comfortable. Herkomer and the other standard portrait painters covered acres of canvas annually; Alma-Tadema brought yearly an extra polish to his marbles; the silver birch of MacWhirter put forth fresh leaves every spring; “Derby Day” Frith survived, and even did some little work, to remind the world of the brave days of victorious sentimentalism; at Christie’s, Goodall, Maclise, and Landseer still won the dealers’ respect; J. C. Horsley, protesting against the nude, was only mildly laughed at as “Clothes-Horsley.” Millais, cured of his pre-Raphaelite enthusiasms, was now more of the old gang than the new. But Mr. Sargent, the Sandow of the brush, proved that the public was by no means illiberal; it was just as much pleased to be artistically hit between the eyes as to be tickled. Whistler, still unaccountably reckoned by many a mere fop—so strong was the influence of a Ruskin yet in the flesh—was busy making cloudy masterpieces and clear-cut enmities, and a whole school of morbidity danced in grisly sort round the early tomb of Beardsley.