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. All the world knows how Parnell brought his action against The Times and how Pigott broke down in the witness box and shortly afterwards shot himself in Madrid. But the hatred of Parnell was so pronounced in England that in due time his enemies induced O'Shea to begin his action for divorce and make Parnell the co-respondent. Parnell believed, and said openly, that the result of the case would be to show that he was not guilty of the grave accusation of having brought disunion between husband and wife: it was perfectly well known that the O'Sheas were practically separated before Parnell came upon the scene, but any weapon is good enough to beat a dog with, and so the dispute was given an exaggerated importance by the English press.
Gladstone threw up his hands in holy horror and pretended to be shocked at Parnell's sin; I called Gladstone an "old hypocrite" and stated that on more than one occasion he had sent to Mrs. O'Shea for intimate information about Parnell and his views. In her book on Parnell and their mutual love, Mrs.
O'Shea tells the plain truth.
For ten years Gladstone had known of the relations between Parnell and myself, and had taken full advantage of the facility this intimacy offered him in keeping in touch with the Irish leader. For ten years! But this was private knowledge. Now it was public knowledge, and an English statesman must always appear on the side of the angels.
So Mr. Gladstone found his religion could at last be useful to his country.
Parnell felt no resentment towards Gladstone. He merely said to me, with his grave smile: "That old Spider has nearly all my flies in his web," and, to my indignation against Gladstone, he replied: "You don't make allowances for statecraft. He has the Nonconformist conscience to consider, and you know as well as I do he always loathed me. But these fools who throw me over at his bidding, make me a little sad."
On the next page she tells of the traitorism of certain members of the Irish Party, when those who owed most to the great Chief turned most currishly against him. Mrs. O'Shea adds, "How long the Irish Party had known of the relations between Parnell and myself need not be here discussed. Some years before certain members of the party opened one of my letters to Parnell."
As I wrote at the time, this traitorism signed the death warrant of Irish Home Rule for a generation at least.
In December, 1890, a vacancy occurred in Kilkenny, and Parnell went over to support his nominee. Miss Katherine Tynan gives a great picture of the scene before his speech in the rotunda at Dublin.
It was nearly eight-thirty when we heard the bands coming. Then the windows were lit up by the lurid glare of thousands of torches in the street outside. There was a distant roaring like the ocean. The great gathering within waited silently with expectation. Then the cheering began, and we craned our necks and looked on eagerly, and there was the tall, slender, distinguished figure of the Irish leader making its way across the platform. I don't think any words could do justice to his reception. The house rose at him; everywhere around there was a sea of passionate faces, loving, admiring, almost worshipping that silent, pale man. The cheering broke out again and again; there was no quelling it. Mr. Parnell bowed from side to side, sweeping the assemblage with his eagle glance. The people were fairly mad with excitement. I don't think anyone outside Ireland can understand what a charm Mr. Parnell has for the Irish heart; that wonderful personality of his, his proud bearing, his handsome strong face, the distinction of look which marks him more than anyone I have ever seen. All these are irresistible to the artistic Irish…
I said to Dr. Kenny, who was standing by me, "He is the only quiet man here."
"Outwardly," said the keen medical man, emphatically. Looking again, one saw the dilated nostrils, the flashing eyes, the passionate face.
When Mr. Parnell came to speak, the passion within him found vent. It was a wonderful speech; not one word of it for oratorical effect, but every word charged with a pregnant message to the people who were listening to him, and the millions who should read him. It was a long speech, lasting nearly an hour, but listened to with intense interest, punctuated by fierce cries against men whom this crisis has made odious, now and then marked in a pause by a deep-drawn moan of delight. It was a great speech-simple, direct, suave- with no device and no artificiality. Mr. Parnell said long ago, in a furious moment in the House of Commons, that he cared nothing for the opinion of the English people. One remembered it now, noting his passionate assurances to his own people, who loved him too well to ask him questions.
I went across to Ireland for the Kilkenny election. Parnell was stopping in the hotel. In public he wore a bandage over his right eye, saying that some one had thrown quicklime in it and injured it. But when he received Harold Frederic and myself in the inn he had laid aside the bandage and his eye seemed altogether uninjured.
One incident took place then which I shall never forget. Frederic, the American journalist, was a great friend and loyal supporter of Parnell, and the chief therefore talked with us naturally and without pose. But I was shocked by the deep shadows under Parnell's eyes and a look of strain- I had almost said, of wild fear in his eyes. He had been through deep waters!
Suddenly, while we were chatting, there came some noise from outside, and before we could interfere Parnell had whipped outside the window and was standing on the balcony. A funeral was passing down the street in solemn silence. Everyone knows how seriously death is regarded in Ireland.
Suddenly Parnell cried at the top of his voice: "There goes the corpse of Pope Hennessy," his opponent in the electoral struggle. In a minute some friends came and helped Frederic to drag him into the room, reminding him that he had forgotten his bandage, which he wore even a week later. The loss of selfcontrol, so marked in so proud and masterful a man, made a deep impression on me. I told Frederic that night that Parnell had serious nerve trouble and would go mad soon if be didn't take care.
Fate was more merciful to him. He returned to his adoring wife at Brighton, but in spite of all her care and devotion, died in her arms in October, 1891, aged just 45. They had been lovers eleven years.
Parnell was a great character, if not a great intellect. But it was natural that England, which couldn't use the far greater man, Burton, couldn't use Charles Parnell. And the whole misery and disunion in Ireland today conies from this fact. Parnell ought to have been an English hero. His love for Mrs. O'Shea was the love of his whole life, and he gave himself to her with the same singlehearted devotion he had vowed in political life to the cause of Ireland.
Almost everyone took for granted that Gladstone was the greatest Englishman of his century, but in my heart I have always regarded him as negligible. His political achievements were merely parochial.
The insane misjudgment of Gladstone reminds me of a dinner I was asked to in London where Mr. Chauncey Depew was to appear for the first time. Every one was agog to hear the man who came to London with the reputation of being the best after-dinner speaker in America.
After dinner Mr. Depew got up, heralded with fantastic praise and applause, and began a long series of platitudes punctuated with age-worn anecdotes, chestnuts familiar to me in boyhood. He went on interminably while the applause grew fainter and fainter. At length, I said to my vis-d-vis, a wellknown judge, "Haven't you had enough of this?" He replied, "Enough for a life tune," and we both got up and left the room.
Years later I told this to a young friend from New York, one Allan Bowling. "I once heard Depew," he said, "in New York, say the most stupid thing conceivable. 'The greatest American I ever met,' he said, 'was undoubtedly Abraham Lincoln; the greatest man was William Gladstone!'" For monumental stupidity, the remark would be hard to beat.
When I told Lord Wolverton, a great friend of mine, how Chamberlain had cast me off, and the Fortnightly Review, because of my views against Free Trade, he immediately proposed that I should see Gladstone and put him in Chamberlain's place. "Then," the banker said, "you can have whatever money you want, and I think you will have a much greater success with Gladstone behind you than you have had with Chamberlain." That I admitted at once. So it was arranged that I should go out to Combe and meet Gladstone and have a talk.
I went out in due course, but I was not impressed much with Gladstone's talk at the dinner. He held forth on every subject that came up, and talked well, but his eagle face and luminous eyes were finer than anything he said. He had read widely, I saw, but it seemed to me that he had thought very little for himself.
At the end of the dinner he went off with an Eton boy and played "Beggar My Neighbor." About ten o'clock the Eton boy went up to bed, and Gladstone came over to half a dozen of us standing in front of the fireplace.
"Did you get much out of the game?" asked his host, Lord Wolverton.
"A great deal," said Gladstone. "The boy taught me that four knaves can beat the whole pack."
I could not resist the temptation. "Good God," I interjected, "I should have thought that your experience, Sir, would have shown that one knave was able to do that." He glowered at me and said nothing; he evidently took my jesting remark personally, though I had not so meant it.
Lord Wolverton told me, afterwards, that I had spoiled my chances with Gladstone. I said I thought I should survive, though I did not excuse myself for my foolish repartee.
A little while ago (I am writing in 1926), a Captain Peter Wright got into great trouble for stating that Gladstone was always running after women in the loosest way. The story of course was contradicted by his son, Herbert Gladstone, who is now Lord Gladstone; but Herbert Gladstone's denial should not be taken seriously.
It was common talk in the House of Commons that Gladstone was perpetually after women. It was said, too, that girls used to write him love letters, and that all such letters were brought to Mrs. Gladstone who, after reading them, tore them up, taking care that they shouldn't reach the Grand Old Man.
I distinctly remember Sir Charles Dilke telling me that Gladstone couldn't oppose him because he was known to be still looser himself. But my belief in Gladstone's libertinism was better founded.
But why should I prove it now? An English jury has declared its belief in Mr.
Gladstone's goodness: what more is wanted? An Irish M. P., too, Mr. T. P. O'Connor, has asserted that in his judgment Mr. Gladstone knew nothing about Parnell's intrigue with Mrs. O'Shea till the libel suit revealed it, though Mrs. O'Shea, in her book, has stated positively that Gladstone knew all about it years before the scandal. For good reasons I agree with Mrs. O'Shea, and can only regret that Mr. T. P. O'Connor's memory was so strangely subservient to English prejudice.
But, after all, what do the O'Connors matter when the Avorys sit as judges?
The height of the joke was reached when Mr. Justice Avory asserted, from his knowledge of English and Italian, that Lord Milner's allusion to "Gladstone, as governed by his Seraglio," was quite innocent and conveyed "no hint that such a man was a gross sensualist." Pity that Mr. Justice Avory didn't strengthen his knowledge by a glance at Dr. Johnson's dictionary! Thanks to this judicial freak, Gladstone has received, in correct English fashion, plenary absolution, and thus hypocrisy is justified of its professors, and the sepulchre of English life has enjoyed a new coat of cheap whitewash.
I don't pretend that my opinion has any objective validity; yet, I give it in corroboration of Captain Wright's boldness. But I should never have quarreled with Gladstone without mentioning his judgments, which reveal the essential mediocrity of the man. His heroes were Washington and Burke; the most interesting modern statesmen to him were Lord Randolph Churchill and Parnell. His favorite country after Britain was naturally the United States. Even in his chosen field of words and literary art, all his judgings were mediocre. The modern author he placed highest was Sir Walter Scott; the greatest modern masters of English prose in his opinion were Ruskin and Cardinal Newman; the best biography was Lockhart's Life of Scott, He thought Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and Goethe the four greatest writers, but he omitted Cervantes altogether, and never seems to have heard of Turgenev. Fancy putting Newman as a writer of prose above Swift or Pater, and fancy a Prime Minister who could write a review article on the genius of Marie Bashkirtseff.
My quarrel with Gladstone was not so bad as another blunder which I must now relate. In due time I found that my knowledge of Pigott had had a great effect upon Arthur Walter. His father and Mr. MacDonald, the manager of The Times had been utterly misled by Pigott, whereas I had got to know him and had soon judged him rightly. The first consequence of The Times fiasco was that John Walter practically withdrew from the management of the paper and asked his son Arthur to take his place. Arthur, it seems, after my talk, had told his father that he thought Pigott absolutely untrustworthy. As soon as Arthur Walter got power on The Times he sent for me. He had gone down, I remember, to stay with Mrs. Walter at the Hotel Metropole in Brighton. I went down, took a room, put my belongings straight and then went up to him. I found him washing his hands before lunch.
"I sent for you," he said, "because I think now I can offer you the editorship of The Times. I believe you would do it greatly, but I wanted to know first of all what you think of Buckle, the present editor, and what you would do with him!"
"I would keep him on as political editor," I replied; "he seems to suit the conservative opinion that is the backbone of The Times, and I have so many new things to do that I don't want to make any break with the past that isn't absolutely necessary."
"That's fine of you!" said Arthur Walter, "I suppose you know that Buckle wouldn't give you any place?"
"No one, Walter," I replied, "can see above his own head, and so we must forgive Buckle, but I see little Mr. Buckle perfectly plainly, though he is about six feet high. My idea is to make a general headquarters staff to run The Times; to get picked editors on every great subject, a dozen at least, and then fifty contributing editors, the ablest men from every country in Europe."
"Good God," said Walter. "You frighten me; what would it cost?"
"I should give the foreign contributing editors," I said, "about two hundred pounds a year each on their promise immediately to answer by return any questions addressed to them; of course, we would pay for their contributions as well, and I would give the dozen editors in England one thousand pounds a year, plus the honor."
"Even that," he said, "would be an added expense of twenty or thirty thousand pounds a year: how would you cover the loss?"
"I would undertake for that single editorial page," I said, laughing, "to get three columns of advertisements in America and South Africa which would pay the twenty-five thousand pounds a year of new expenses three times over. I would make the leader page in The Times the greatest page that has ever been seen in journalism. Every line in it should be on the topmost level of thought! And I would add a financial column which would bring in more cash."
We went in to lunch and I told him more of my ideas, and he was greatly impressed, till I came to the declaration that I would make it a penny paper so as to get over a million circulation. "My father and MacDonald have gone into that," he said, "and they both declare it is absolutely impossible."
"That word shouldn't be in the vocabulary of The Times," I said.
But he went on seriously, "You have no idea how carefully they have gone into the whole matter, and it would turn all my father's grey hairs white if he thought that anybody was going to do such a thing."
"You can't afford," I said, "to leave the Daily Telegraph with a tenfold greater circulation than that of The Times. I assure you the penny paper is necessary, but I won't press it till the success of the other innovations has shown you that I am justified."
He shook his head and begged me to put the idea out of my head. Strange to say, I found that Mrs. Walter was with me in opinion. "If Mr. Harris could get a million circulation for The Times," she said, "surely all the advertisements would be immensely more valuable; and by making your own paper, as he says, you might get, if not such good paper as you have now, yet nearly as good at a cheaper rate."
Then for the first time I learned that the paper supply of The Times was in the hands of another branch of the family, and they wouldn't consent easily to any great change.
But I committed my great mistake when Walter began to talk of Oscar Wilde. "I hope," he said, "that you wouldn't employ him in any way on The Times." I replied that I didn't think he needed any journalistic employment: everything he did was eagerly bought up by the reviews and large publishers.
"I wonder that you go about with him," said Walter. "You are getting a bad name through it."
"Really," I said, "I never heard that his disease was catching. Genius is not infectious."
"In the last six months," Walter went on, "I have received hundreds of letters, signed and anonymous, talking about your connection with him and your perpetual defense of him."
This struck me as extraordinary. I had, then, no idea of the number of anonymous correspondents in London; I learned the vile effects of envy very slowly, for I never felt envious of any one in my life.
"I defend every able man I meet," I said carelessly; "they all have a hard time of it in life and it is a sort of duty to stick up for them."
"As long as you don't employ him," said Walter, "I don't mind, but I thought I ought to tell you that you could do nothing more unpopular than to defend him."
"I always defend my friends," I said.
Walter seemed a little shocked, a little pettish, too, I thought, not to say petty.
About a fortnight later, Walter told me that he had asked Moberly Bell, their correspondent in Egypt, to come to London to help him. "I couldn't face your innovations, Harris, especially in regard to the price of the paper."
I suppose I was too cocksure, and so frightened him.
I record my failures here as openly as my successes. If I had been a little more of a diplomatist I could have won Arthur Walter easily, for he had good brains and a good heart and only wanted the best. I have always blamed myself for my failure.