Chapter 26

And here the practice of Ministers varies exceedingly. Lord Salisbury writes almost everything with his own hand. Mr. Balfour dictates to a shorthand clerk. Most Ministers write a great deal by their Private Secretaries. Letters of any importance are usually transcribed into a copying-book. A Minister whom I knew used to burn the fragment of blotting-paper with which he had blotted his letter, and laid it down as an axiom that, if a constituent wrote and asked a Member to vote for a particular measure, the Member should on no account give a more precise reply than, "I shall have great pleasure in voting in the sense you desire." For, as this expert observed with great truth, "unless the constituent has kept a copy of his letter--and the chances are twenty to one against that--there will be nothing to prove what the sense he desired was, and you will be perfectly safe in voting as you like." The letters received by a Minister are many, various, and surprising. Of course, a great proportion of them relate to public business, and a considerable number to the affairs of his constituency. But, in addition to all this, lunatics, cranks, and impostors mark a Minister for their own, and their applications for loans, gifts, and offices of profit would exhaust the total patronage of the Crown and break the Bank of England.

When the day's official papers have been dealt with, answers to questions settled, correspondence read, and the replies written or dictated, it is very likely time to go to a conference on some Bill with which the office is concerned. This conference will consist of the Minister in charge of the Bill, two or three of his colleagues who have special knowledge of the subject, the Permanent Officials, the Parliamentary draftsman, and perhaps one of the Law Officers. At the conference the amendments on the paper are carefully discussed, together with the objects for which they were presumably put down, their probable effect, their merits or demerits, and the best mode of meeting them. An hour soon passes in this kind of anticipatory debate, and the Minister is called away to receive a deputation.

The scene is exactly like that which Matthew Arnold described at the Social Science Congress--the large bare room, dusty air, and jaded light, serried ranks of men with bald heads and women in spectacles; the local M.P., like Mr. Gregsbury in _Nicholas Nickleby_, full of affability and importance, introducing the selected spokesmen--"Our worthy mayor; our leading employer of labour; Miss Twoshoes, a philanthropic worker in all good causes"--the Minister, profoundly ignorant of the whole subject, smiling blandly or gazing earnestly from his padded chair; the Permanent Official at his elbow murmuring what the "practice of the department" has been, what his predecessor said on a similar occasion ten years ago, and why the object of the deputation is equally mischievous and impossible; and the Minister finally expressing sympathy and promising earnest consideration. Mr. Bright, though the laziest of mankind at official work, was the ideal hand at receiving deputations. Some Ministers scold or snub or harangue, but he let the spokesmen talk their full, listened patiently, smiled pleasantly, said very little, treated the subject with gravity or banter as its nature required, paid the introducing member a compliment on his assiduity and public spirit, and sent them all away on excellent terms with themselves and highly gratified by their intelligent and courteous reception.

So far we have described our Minister's purely departmental duties. But perhaps the Cabinet meets at twelve, and at the Cabinet he must, to use Mr. Gladstone's phrase, "throw his mind into the common stock" with his fellow-Ministers, and take part in the discussions and decisions which govern the Empire. By two o'clock or thereabouts the Cabinet is over. The labours of the morning are now beginning to tell, and exhausted Nature rings her luncheon-bell. Here again men's habits widely differ. If our Minister has breakfasted late, he will go on till four or five, and then have tea and toast, and perhaps a poached egg; but if he is an early man, he craves for nutriment more substantial. He must not go out to luncheon to a friend's house, for he will be tempted to eat and drink too much, and absence from official territory in the middle of the day has a bad look of idleness and self-indulgence. The _dura ilia_ of the present[37] Duke of Devonshire could always cope with a slice of the office-joint, a hunch of the office-bread, a glass of the office-sherry. But, as a rule, if a man cannot manage to get back to the family meal in South Kensington or Cavendish Square, he turns into a club, has a cutlet and a glass of claret, and gets back to his office for another hour's work before going to the House.

At 3.30 questions begin, and every Minister is in his place, unless, indeed, there is a Levee or a Drawing-room, when a certain number of Ministers, besides the great Officers of State, are expected to be present. The Minister lets himself into the House by a private door--of which Ministers alone have the key--at the back of the Chair. For an hour and a half, or perhaps longer, the storm of questions rages, and then the Minister, if he is in charge of the Bill under discussion, settles himself on the Treasury Bench to spend the remainder of the day in a hand-to-hand encounter with the banded forces of the Opposition, which will tax to their utmost his brain, nerve, and physical endurance. If, however, he is not directly concerned with the business, he goes out perhaps for a breath of air and a cup of tea on the Terrace, and then buries himself in his private room--generally a miserable little dog-hole in the basement of the House--where he finds a pile of office-boxes, containing papers which must be read, minuted, and returned to the office with all convenient dispatch. From these labours he is suddenly summoned by the shrill ting-ting of the division-bell and the raucous bellow of the policeman to take part in a division. He rushes upstairs two steps at a time, and squeezes himself into the House through the almost closed doors. "What are we?" he shouts to the Whip. "Ayes" or "Noes" is the hurried answer; and he stalks through the lobby to discharge this intelligent function, dives down to his room again, only, if the House is in Committee, to be dragged up again ten minutes afterwards for another repetition of the same farce, and so on indefinitely.

It may be asked why a Minister should undergo all this worry of running up and down and in and out, laying down his work and taking it up again, dropping threads, and losing touch, and wasting time, all to give a purely party vote, settled for him by his colleague in charge of the Bill, on a subject with which he is personally unfamiliar. If the Government is in peril, of course every vote is wanted; but, with a normal majority, Ministers' votes might surely be "taken as read," and assumed to be given to the side to which they belong. But the traditions of Government require Ministers to vote. It is a point of honour for each man to be in as many divisions as possible. A record is kept of all the divisions of the session and of the week, and a list is sent round every Monday morning showing in how many each Minister has voted.

The Whips, who must live and move and have their being in the House, naturally head the list, and their colleagues follow in a rather uncertain order. A Minister's place in this list is mainly governed by the question whether he dines at the House or not. If he dines away and "pairs," of course he does not in the least jeopardize his party or embarrass his colleagues; but "pairs" are not indicated in the list of divisions, and, as divisions have an awkward knack of happening between nine and ten, the habitual diner-out naturally sinks in the list. If he is a married man, the claims of the home are to a certain extent recognized by his Whips, but woe to the bachelor who, with no domestic excuse, steals away for two hours' relaxation. The good Minister therefore stays at the House and dines there. Perhaps he is entertaining ladies in the crypt-like dining-rooms which look on the Terrace, and in that case the charms of society may neutralize the material discomforts. But, if he dine upstairs at the Ministerial table, few indeed are the alleviations of his lot. In the first place he must dine with the colleagues with whom his whole waking life is passed--excellent fellows and capital company--but nature demands an occasional enlargement of the mental horizon. Then if by chance he has one special bugbear--a bore or an egotist, a man with dirty hands or a churlish temper--that man will inevitably come and sit down beside him and insist on being affectionate and fraternal.

The room is very hot; dinners have been going on in it for the last two hours; the [Greek: knisê]--the odour of roast meat, which the gods loved, but which most men dislike--pervades the atmosphere; your next-door neighbour is eating a rather high grouse while you are at your apple-tart, or the perfumes of a deliquescent Camembert mingle with your coffee. As to beverages, you may, if you choose, follow the example of Lord Cross, who, when he was Sir Richard, drank beer in its native pewter, or of Mr. Radcliffe Cooke, who tries to popularize cider; or you may venture on that thickest, blackest, and most potent of vintages which a few years back still went by the name of "Mr. Disraeli's port." But as a rule these heroic draughts are eschewed by the modern Minister. Perhaps, if he is in good spirits after making a successful speech or fighting his Estimates through Committee, he will indulge himself with an imperial pint of champagne; but more often a whiskey-and-soda or a half-bottle of Zeltinger quenches his modest thirst.

On Wednesday and Saturday our Minister, if he is not out of London, probably dines at a large dinner-party. Once a session he must dine in full dress with the Speaker; once he must dine at, or give, a full-dress dinner "to celebrate her Majesty's Birthday." On the eve of the meeting of Parliament he must dine again in full dress with the Leader of the House, to hear the rehearsal of the "gracious Speech from the Throne." But, as a rule, his fate on Wednesday and Saturday is a ceremonious banquet at a colleague's house, and a party strictly political--perhaps the Prime Minister as the main attraction, reinforced by Lord and Lady Decimus Tite-Barnacle, Mr. and Mrs. Stiltstalking, Sir John Taper, and young Mr. Tadpole. A political dinner of thirty colleagues, male and female, in the dog-days is only a shade less intolerable than the greasy rations and mephitic vapours of the House of Commons' dining-room.

At the political dinner "shop" is the order of the day. Conversation turns on Brown's successful speech, Jones's palpable falling-off, Robinson's chance of office, the explanation of a recent by-election, or the prospects of an impending division. And, to fill the cup of boredom to the brim, the political dinner is usually followed by a political evening-party. On Saturday the Minister probably does two hours' work at his office and has some boxes sent to his house, but the afternoon he spends in cycling, or golfing, or riding, or boating, or he leaves London till Monday morning. On Wednesday he is at the House till six, and then escapes for a breath of air before dinner. But on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday, as a rule, he is at the House from its meeting at three till it adjourns at any hour after midnight. After dinner he smokes and reads and tries to work in his room, and goes to sleep and wakes again, and towards midnight is unnaturally lively. Outsiders believe in the "twelve o'clock rule," but insiders know that, as a matter of fact, it is suspended as often as an Irish member in the '80 Parliament. Whoever else slopes homewards, the Government must stay. Before now a Minister has been fetched out of his bed, to which he had surreptitiously retired, by a messenger in a hansom, and taken back to the House to defend his Estimates at three in the morning.

"There they sit with ranks unbroken, cheering on the fierce debate, Till the sunrise lights them homeward as they tramp through Storey's Gate, Racked with headache, pale and haggard, worn by nights of endless talk, While the early sparrows twitter all along the Birdcage Walk."

Some ardent souls there are who, if report speaks true, are not content with even this amount of exertion and excitement, but finish the night, or begin the day, with a rubber at the club or even a turn at baccarat. However, we are describing, not choice spirits or chartered _viveurs_, but the blameless Minister, whose whole life during the Parliamentary session is the undeviating and conscientious discharge of official duty; and he, when he lays his head upon his respectable pillow any time after 1 a.m., may surely go to sleep in the comfortable consciousness that he has done a fair day's work for a not exorbitant remuneration.

FOOTNOTES:

[35] 1897.

[36] The word "conservative" here applies only to official routine. The Civil Service has no politics, but many of its members are staunch Liberals.

[37] Spencer Compton, 8th Duke.

XXXIV.

AN OLD PHOTOGRAPH-BOOK.

The diary from which these Recollections have been mainly gathered dates from my thirteenth year, and it has lately received some unexpected illustrations. In turning out the contents of a neglected cupboard, I stumbled on a photograph-book which I filled while I was a boy at a Public School. The school has lately been described under the name of Lyonness,[38] and that name will serve as well as another. The book had been mislaid years ago, and when it accidentally came to light a strange aroma of old times seemed still to hang about it. Inside and out, it was reminiscent of a life in which for five happy years I bore my part. Externally the book showed manifest traces of a schoolboy's ownership, in broken corners; plentiful ink-stains, from exercises and punishments; droppings of illicit candle grease, consumed long after curfew-time; round marks like fairy rings on a greensward, which indicated the standpoint of extinct jam pots--where are those jam pots now? But, while the outside of the book spoke thus, as it were, by innuendo and suggestion, the inside seemed to shout with joyous laughter or chuckle with irreverent mirth; or murmured, in tones lower perhaps, but certainly not less distinct, of things which were neither joyous nor mirthful.

The book had been carefully arranged. As I turned over the leaves, there came back the memory of holiday-evenings and the interested questionings of sisters over each new face or scene; and the kind fingers which did the pasting-in; and the care with which we made portrait and landscape fit into and illustrate one another. And what memories, what impressions, strong and clear as yesterday's, clung to each succeeding view! The Spire--that "pinnacle perched on a precipice"--with its embosoming trees, as one had so often seen it from the North-Western Railway, while the finger of fate, protruding from the carriage window, pointed it out with--"That's where you will go to school." And, years later, came the day when one travelled for the first time by a train which did not rush through Lyonness Station (then how small), but stopped there, and disgorged its crowd of boys and their confusion of luggage, and oneself among the rest, and one's father just as excited and anxious and eager as his son.

A scurry for a seat on the omnibus or a tramp uphill, and we find ourselves abruptly in the village street. Then did each page as I turned it over bring some fresh recollection of one's unspeakable sense of newness and desolation; the haunting fear of doing something ludicrous; the morbid dread of chaff and of being "greened," which even in my time had, happily, supplanted the old terrors of being tossed in a blanket or roasted at a fire. Even less, I venture to think, was one thrilled by the heroic ambitions, the magnificent visions of struggle and success, which stir the heroes of schoolboy novels on the day of their arrival.

Here was a view of the School Library, with its patch of greensward separating it from the dust and traffic of the road. There was the Old School with its Fourth Form Room, of which one had heard so much that the actual sight of it made one half inclined to laugh and half to cry with surprise and disappointment. There was the twisting High Street, with its precipitous causeway; there was the faithful presentment of the fashionable "tuck-shop," with two boys standing in the road, and the leg of a third caught by the camera as he hurried past; and, wandering through all these scenes in the album as one had wandered through them in real life, I reached at last my boarding-house, once a place of mystery and wonderful expectations and untried experiences; now full of memories, some bright, some sad, but all gathering enchantment from their retrospective distance; and in every brick and beam and cupboard and corner as familiar as home itself.

The next picture, a view of the School Bathing-place, carried me a stage onward in memory to my first summer quarter. Two terms of school life had inured one to a new existence, and one began to know the pleasures, as well as the pains, of a Public School. It was a time of cloudless skies, and abundant "strawberry mashes," and _dolce far niente_ in that sweetly-shaded pool, when the sky was at its bluest, and the air at its hottest, and the water at its most inviting temperature.

And then the Old Speech-Room, so ugly, so incommodious, where we stood penned together like sheep for the slaughter, under the gallery, to hear our fate on the first morning of our school life, and where, when he had made his way up the school, the budding scholar received his prize or declaimed his verses on Speech Day. That was the crowning day of the young orator's ambition, when there was an arch of evergreens reared over the school gate, and Lyonness was all alive with carriages, and relations, and grandees,

"And, as Lear, he poured forth the deep imprecation, By his daughters of Kingdom and reason deprived; Till, fired by loud plaudits and self-adulation, He regarded himself as a Garrick revived."

Opposite the Old Speech-Room was the interior of the Chapel, with its roof still echoing the thunder of the Parting Hymn; and the pulpit with its unforgotten pleadings for truthfulness and purity; and the organ, still vocal with those glorious psalms. And, high over all, the Churchyard Hill, with its heaven-pointing spire, and the Poet's Tomb; and, below, the incomparable expanse of pasture and woodland stretching right away to the "proud keep with its double belt of kindred and coeval towers."

"Still does yon bank its living hues unfold, With bloomy wealth of amethyst and gold; How oft at eve we watched, while there we lay, The flaming sun lead down the dying day, Soothed by the breeze that wandered to and fro Through the glad foliage musically low. Still stands that tree, and rears its stately form In rugged strength, and mocks the winter storm; There, while of slender shade and sapling growth, We carved our schoolboy names, a mutual troth. All, all, revives a bliss too bright to last, And every leaflet whispers of the past."

And while the views of places were thus eloquent of the old days, assuredly not less so were the portraits. There was the Head Master in his silken robes, looking exactly as he did when, enthroned in the Sixth Form Room, he used to deliver those well-remembered admonitions--"Never say what you know to be wrong," and "Let us leave _commence_ and _partake_ to the newspapers."

And there was the Mathematical Master--the Rev. Rhadamanthus Rhomboid--compared with whom his classical namesake was a lenient judge. An admirable example was old Mr. Rhomboid of a pedagogic type which, I am told, is passing away--precise, accurate, stern, solid; knowing very little, but that little thoroughly; never overlooking a slip, but seldom guilty of an injustice; sternest and most unbending of prehistoric Tories, both in matters political and educational; yet carrying concealed somewhere under the square-cut waistcoat a heart which knew how to sympathize with boy-flesh and the many ills which it is heir to. Good old Mr. Rhomboid! I wonder if he is still alive.

Facing him in the album, and most appropriately contrasted, was the portrait of a young master--the embodiment of all that Mr. Rhomboid most heartily loathed. We will call him Vivian Grey. Vivian Grey was an Oxford Double First of unusual brilliancy, and therefore found a special charm and a satisfying sense of being suitably employed in his duty at Lyonness, which was to instil [Greek: tuptô] and Phaedrus into the five-and-thirty little wiseacres who constituted the lowest form. Over the heads of these sages his political and metaphysical utterances rolled like harmless thunder, for he was at once a transcendentalist in philosophy and a utilitarian Radical of the purest dye. All of which mattered singularly little to his five-and-thirty disciples, but caused infinite commotion and annoyance to the Rhomboids and Rhadamanthuses. Vivian Grey at Oxford had belonged to that school which has been described as professing

"One Kant with a K, And many a cant with a c."

At Lyonness he was supposed to have helped to break the railings of Hyde Park in the riot of 1866, and to be a Head Centre of the Fenian Brotherhood. As to personal appearance, Mr. Grey was bearded like the pard--and in those days the scholastic order shaved--while his taste in dress made it likely that he was the "Man in the Red Tie" whom we remember at the Oxford Commemoration some thirty years ago. In short, he was the very embodiment of all that was most abhorrent to the old traditions of the schoolmaster's profession; and proportionately great was the appositeness of a practical joke which was played me on my second or third morning at Lyonness. I was told to go for my mathematical lesson to Mr. Rhomboid, who tenanted a room in the Old School. Next door to his room was Mr. Grey's, and I need not say that the first boy whom I asked for guidance playfully directed me to the wrong door. I enter, and the Third Form suspend their Phaedrus, "Please, sir, are you Mr. Rhomboid?" I ask, amid unsmotherable laughter. Never shall I forget the indignant ferocity with which the professor of the new lights drove me from the room, nor the tranquil austerity with which Mr. Rhomboid, when I reached him, set me "fifty lines" before he asked me my name.

On the same page I find the portrait of two men who have before now figured in the world of school-fiction under the names of Rose and Gordon.[39] Of Mr. Rose I will say no more than that he was an excellent schoolmaster and a most true saint, and that to his influence and warnings many a man can, in the long retrospect, trace his escape from moral ruin. Mr. Gordon is now a decorous Dean; at Lyonness he was the most brilliant, the most irregular, and the most fascinating of teachers. He spoilt me for a whole quarter. I loved him for it then, and I thank him even now.