great peers, high prelates, thronged the lobbies. The fame of the orator, the boldness of his exploit, curiosity as to the plan, poignant anxiety as to the party result, wonder whether a wizard had at last actually arisen with a spell for casting out the baleful spirits that had for so many ages made Ireland our torment and our dishonour-all these things brought together such an assemblage as no minister before had ever addressed within those worldrenowned walls. "The Parliament was new. Many of its members had fought a hard battle for their seats, and trusted they were safe in the haven for half a dozen good years to come. Those who were moved by professional ambition, those whose object was social advancement, those who thought only of upright public service, the keen party men, the men who aspire to office, the men with a past and the men who looked for a future, all alike found themselves adrift on dark and troubled waters. The secrets of the Bill had been well kept. To-day the disquieted host were first to learn what was the great project to which they would have to say that Aye or No on which for them and for the State so much would hang. "Of the chief comrades or rivals of the minister's own generation, the strong administrators, the eager and accomplished debaters, the sagacious leaders, the only survivor now comparable to him, in eloquence or in influence, was Mr Bright. That illustrious man seldom came into the house in those distracted days; and on this memorable occasion his stern and noble head was to be seen in dim obscurity. 66 Various as were the emotions in other regions of the House, in one quarter rejoicing was unmixed. There, at least, was no doubt and no misgiving. There, pallid and tranquil, sat the Irish leader, whose hard insight, whose patience, energy, and spirit of command had achieved this astounding result, and done that which he had vowed to his countrymen that he would assuredly be able to do. On the benches round him genial excitement rose almost to tumult. Well it might. For the first time since the Union the Irish cause was at last to be pressed in all its force and strength, in every aspect of policy and of conscience, by the most powerful Englishman then alive. "More striking than the audience was the man; more striking than the multitude of eager onlookers from the shore was the rescuer, with deliberate valour facing the floods ready to wash him down; the veteran Ulysses, who, after more than half a century of combat, service, toil, thought it not too late to try a further work of noble note.' In the hands of such a master of the instrument the theme might easily have lent itself to one of those displays of exalted passion which the House had marvelled at in more than one of Mr Gladstone's speeches on the Turkish question, or heard with reverence in his speech on the Affirmation Bill in 1883. "What the occasion now required was that passion should burn low, and reasoned persuasion hold up the guiding lamp. An elaborate scheme was to be unfolded, an unfamiliar policy to be explained and vindicated. Of that best kind of eloquence which dispenses with declamation this was a fine and sustained example. There was a deep, rapid, steady, onflowing volume of arguments, exposition, exhortation. Every hard or bitter stroke was avoided. Now and again a fervid note thrilled the ear and lifted all hearts. But political oratory is action, not words-action, character, will, conviction, purpose, personality. As this eager muster of men underwent the enchantment of periods exquisite in their balance and modulation, the compulsion of his flashing glance and animated gesture, what stirred and commanded them was the recollection of national service, the thought of the speaker's mastering purpose, his unflagging resolution and strenuous will, his strength of thew and sinew well tried in long years of resounding war, his unquenched conviction that the just cause can never fail. Few are the heroic moments in our parliamentary politics, but this was one." Had England then been vouchsafed a vision of the future it could hardly have allowed this crowning effort of its war-worn veteran to have failed. CHAPTER LIV WILLIAM WATSON IT is inevitable that a poet who is master of metre and moves habitually to the measures of prosody should without effort descend at will and with power to "the other harmony of prose." Sir William Watson among the poets of the present day may, I believe, claim the distinction of electing throughout his career to remain a poet, and has made no excursions into journalism or other less august avenues of expression. Once only, as far as I am aware, has he descended from the slopes of Parnassus to enter the lists, in his Pencraft, as a champion for law and order in Letters, and in that single act of condescension to prose he has shown himself indisputably great. In this book of his he has upheld the true principles of pencraft in a disordered world, and has thereby rendered a priceless service to Letters: "Let none imagine, because this little book reveals scant sympathy with what is barrenly violent and erratic, that the author is a mere apostle of conformity, his gospel one of mechanical obedience to supposed statute law. Literature lives by defiance as well as by acquiescence. Its story has few episodes more romantic than those revolts, whether against some deadening, stifling régime or against beneficently wielded authority, those adventurous risings, which sometimes prosper and are justified, and sometimes collapse in discredit, or with the glamour of picturesque misfortune. In such mutinies the primal forces are not seldom unprisoned, the effete things are burned as chaff, and splendid rebel figures are thrown up against the flare. To apply to these insurrections a policy of soulless repression would often be to stamp on the very seeds of life and growth and harvest. There may even be no honest course for us, in given circumstances, but to join the insurgents. What, then, is the rock of principle on which we should take our stand? It is this: the recognition of an intellectual duty and obligation on our part to see to it that our very revolutions, in their nature and purpose, are essentially movements toward order, not toward anarchy; toward that happiest freedom which rather welcomes control as a support than resents it as an interference. It is because I discern in much recent literature an opposite drift, away from that true enfranchisement, that I have attempted here the perhaps hopeless and almost certainly thankless task of doing something, however little, in the direction of counteracting such a tendency. "No doubt a lorn adventure, for a solitary swordsman to throw himself, in light armour, across the path of the prancing cohorts! Likely enough he will be trodden underfoot, and none ride up to avenge him; yet it may well happen that the need for some other and better champion of a drooping cause will hereafter be found even more urgent than now. While these words are being written the air is still full of the clash and thunder of no mere warfare of the pen. The untimely night, the nox intempesta of rage and slaughter, is heavy upon us; and when it shall have passed, though no man can foresee what thoughts and moods will then sway the world, at least they can hardly fail to have in them much that will be new and imperiously possessing. It is the habit of the human mind, in times of the surge and flooding-in of novel ideas, so to magnify their momentousness, and even their novelty, as to hold cheap, if it does not passionately condemn, all solicitude for the manner of their vesture. Form becomes vanity, art is held a bauble, style an indulgencestrenuousness is all: and that way disaster lies. For another generation, coming with no very vivid concern upon a world of once red-hot but by that time sadly cooled ideas and emotions, tenets, and theories, is revolted by their graceless presentment and turns from them with distaste and languor. They seem the dust of vanished Farther I will not at present presume to venture My object is now fulfilled in collecting in this book Among the thousands of books that now pour from The desire to write something that shall live is a "Pulvis et umbra et nihil." FINIS. [INDEX. |