CHAPTER XI
In April, 1886, Mr. Gladstone brought in his Home Rule Bill. The House was so thronged that members sat about on the steps leading up from the floor, and even on the arms of the benches and on each other's knees, while I had to give up my usual seat in the small compartment on the floor of the chamber and be content with a place in the first row of the Distinguished Strangers'
Gallery. Herbert Bismarck sat on my left and the Marquis of Breteuil on my right, yet the visitors that night were so world famous that these men were not even mentioned in next day's papers. Not a seat was vacant in any of the galleries; even that of peers was crammed; every diplomat in London seemed to be present; and cheek by jowl with the black uniform of bishops, Indian princes by the dozen blazing with diamonds, lent a rich Oriental color to the scene.
I had heard Mr. Gladstone often before, and especially on the war in the Sudan a few years earlier, when he had risen, I thought, to great heights, but this performance of the Old Man was none the less remarkable. His head was like that of an old eagle-luminous eyes, rapacious beak and bony jaws; his high white collar seemed to cut off his head of a bird of prey from the thin, small figure in conventional, black evening dress. His voice was a high, clear tenor; his gestures rare, but well chosen; his utterance as fluid as water; but now and then he became strangely impressive through some dramatic pause and slower enunciation, which emphasized, so to say, the choice and music of the rhythmic words.
Though I did not believe in him at all and was, indeed, repelled by the conventional Christian sentimentality he poured out on us when deeply moved, I could not but admit that the old man was singularly eloquent and the best specimen of the Greek rhetor of modern times. Everyone knew that his proposals were a mere resultant of a dozen opposing forces, yet he seemed so passionately sincere and earnest that time and again you might have thought that he was expounding God's law, conveyed to him on Sinai.
He was a great actor, and as Mr. Foster once said, could persuade himself of anything and the House of Commons of tragic absurdities.
Herbert Bismarck, a giant of thirty perhaps, with a long Viking-fair moustache and blue eyes, declared at the end that he had never heard so great a speech. And the effect was prodigious; for five minutes the whole House cheered and the people in the galleries sat spell-bound.
A few nights later, Parnell spoke; the House was nothing like full; the galleries more than half empty; the Indian dignitaries conspicuous by their absence; not a bishop nor archbishop to be seen; yet to me the scene was more impressive. There he stood, a tall, thin, erect figure; no reporter had ever said that he was handsome; yet, to my astonishment, he was by far the handsomest man I ever saw in the House of Commons-magnificently good- looking. Just forty years of age, his beard was beginning to grey, but what drew one was the noble profile, the great height, and the strange, blazing eyes in the thin, white face. I could not account for the effect of heat and light in his eyes, till later I noticed that the dark hazel of them was dotted, so to speak, with golden pin heads that in excitement seemed to blaze; the finest eyes that I have ever seen in a human head, except the eyes of Richard Burton.
He began amid Irish cheers, but very quietly in his ordinary voice. I soon noticed that the hands holding his coat were so tense that the knuckles went white; he hadn't a single oratorical trick; he spoke quite naturally, but slowly, as if seeking his words, and soon I began to feel that words to this man stood for deeds. When he spoke of the crimes and coercion of the previous five years, his words seemed to me those of some recording angel; the absence of inflection or passion gave the impression of immutable truth. I remember his very words: they were prophetic; they could be used for the events of thirty years later:
You have had during these five years-I don't say this to inflame passion- you have had during these five years the suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act; you have had a thousand of your Irish fellow-subjects held in prison without specific charge, many of them for long periods of time, some of them for twenty months, without trial and without any intention of placing them upon trial (I think of all these thousand persons arrested under the Coercion Act of the late Mr. Foster scarcely a dozen were put on their trial); you have had the Arms Act; you have had the suspension of trial by jury-all during the last five years.
You have authorized your police to enter the domicile of any citizen of your fellow subject in Ireland, at any hour of the day or night, and search any part of his domicile, even the beds of the women, without warrant. You have fined the innocent for offenses committed by the guilty; you have taken power to expel aliens from the country; you have revived the curfew law and the blood money of your Norman conquerors; you have manufactured new crimes and offenses, and applied fresh penalties unknown to your law for these crimes and offenses. All this you have done for five years, and all this and much more you will have to do again.
The chill atmosphere of hatred in which he had begun his speech had changed: a good many English members were listening now with all their ears. I felt very much as I had felt when drinking in Bismarck's great speech in the Reichstag five years before, that a great man was talking and the words were prophetic and the place sacred.
Then he spoke of Trevelyan and himself and I thrilled.
Mr. Trevelyan has said that there is no half-way house between separation and the maintenance of law and order in Ireland by Imperial authority. I say, with just as much sincerity of belief and just as much experience as the right honorable gentleman, that in my judgment there is no half-way house between the concession of legislative autonomy to Ireland and the disenfranchisement of the country and her government as a Crown colony.
That was the whole problem in a couple of phrases, and I was in no doubts as to who was in the right.
Yet when he sat down the cheering was purely Irish, and the Chief didn't even notice the enthusiasm of his followers.
One day, shortly before I got the editorship of the Fortnightly Review, I received a letter, from a man in Dublin, full of curious statements that greatly excited me. I answered him, and in the course of our correspondence I came to see that he was a mine of information about the Irish Party and their doings in Ireland. He stated quite boldly that the Irish Party was responsible for the murder of Lord Frederick Cavendish in Phoenix Park and for most of the subsequent deeds of violence in Ireland. He did not hesitate to implicate Parnell in this knowledge; and so I wrote to him, asking him to come over to London and spend a week with me. He had already told me that he was poor, so I sent him money and asked him to be my guest; and in due time Richard Pigott came and stayed with me in my house in Kensington Gore.
The very first evening he told me how the knives which had been used in the Phoenix Park murder had been taken from the offices of the Irish Parliamentary Party in Westminster and brought across and distributed to the murderers in Dublin. I was quite willing to believe it all, and my manifest interest seemed to excite him, for he went on expanding the story in every direction. After two or three days I began to doubt him; and at the end of a week I knew that he was drawing on his imagination for his facts and was wholly untrustworthy. At the end I said that I would take the matter into consideration and would let him know. I did let him know in a day or two that I would have nothing to do with publishing his stories.
A little later The Times began publishing its exposure of Parnell, and at length printed a letter purporting to be from Parnell, which plainly implicated him in the Phoenix Park murder. I got a facsimile made of it and reproduced the letter in the Evening News. Next day I was out riding to Richmond with Arthur Walter, the son of the owner of The Times. He told me, without circumlocution, how glad he was that I had published the letter.
'Why?' I asked. 'I published it merely as a piece of news.' 'Surely you wouldn't have published it,' he said, 'if you hadn't believed it.'
'I don't believe a word of it,' I cried. 'I published it as news, on the authority of The Times.'
'But it is plainly Parnell's handwriting,' said Walter. 'In these days,' I replied, 'handwriting can be photographed and reproduced precisely; it is absurd to trust to similarity in handwriting to prove the authenticity of a letter.'
I can't remember whether I told him then or a little later how I had come to know Pigott, but about this time he admitted to me that Pigott was the chief source of The Times information, and I warned him against the man.
