MR. WHALLEY.
MR. WHALLEY is one of the greatest of the ' enigmas ' of life, though not one, we believe, on which Mr. Greg has thrown, or attempted to throw, any light. For sixteen years now of steady attendance in Parliament, he has given an un- divided and most industrious attention to mares'-nests of a particular kind, which neither chaff, nor evil report, nor con- sistent failure to attract attention, nor the rebukes and penalties of Judges, nor the cheerful acquiescence of the House of Com- mons in those rebukes and penalties, nor the taunts of Ministers, nor the raillery of the Press, have ever had the smallest effect in diminishing or diverting from its objects. If there were necessarily anything great in immutability without a mind to change, Mr. Whalley might well be set up as a sort of fetish by those who respect unchangeableness. He is as unchange- able as a limpet sticking to a rock. There are certain forms of life which are tenacious apparently because their organisation is of so low an order. We have been told that there is a par- ticular kind of slug which feeds upon another slug, and that this inferior slug goes on with its meal &I certain vegetable tissues, quite without any appearance of discomposure at the process which his own tissues are simultaneously undergoing under the operations of his destroyer. That is a condition of things which reminds one of Mr. Whalley going on feeding almost voraciously on his various Jesuit mares'-nests, with perfect com- posure, while the wits of the political world are simultaneously feeding on Mr. Whalley. Such a phenomenon_ implies a low order of political and intellectual vitality. But there is some- thing impressive and even instructive in the spectacle. It suggests more than anything we know the very close analogies between the intellectual and the physical worlds. It cannot be denied that Mr. Wballey's hatred and fear of Jesuits are in some sense intellectual phenomena. We could hardly expect even the most sagacious dog to understand what a Jesuit means, and why he is terrible. It clearly takes a mind, in the human sense, to be preyed upon by this sort of fear. And yet them is something of the air of the lower animal and vegetable world, rather than of human passion and emotion, in the way in which Mr. Whalley gnaws away at his one topic in all its varieties, without so much as raising himself for a steady look at the external world. Mr. Disraeli once talked of the Liberals mumbling the dry bones of political economy,' but the metaphor must have been suggested to him by the way in which Mr. Whalley mumbles the long since stripped and even attenuated bones of the Jesuit conspiracy. He never seems to care or even to want to know what impression his remarks make on his fellow-creatures. It is not his fellow-creatures he is think- ing of, it is the dull fascination of the subject for himself. Mr. Whalley lives in the abstract. You see it in his face. There is a depression of vitality in it, a dim and grey ex- pression, as of a man who lives in a tedious dream, and has not even strength enough of life in him to wish to drive it away. Mr. Disraeli suggested mischievously on Monday night, though he discountenanced the suggestion in the same breath, that Mr. Whalley might possibly be the emissary of the Jesuits, a Society who love, as he has been assured by a recent writer, to send forth one of their lay brethren to speak ill of the Order, but to speak ill of it so clumsily and so ostentatiously as only to add to its fame. That might be a very adequate account of some pretended fanatics, 13ut Mr. Whalley, with all his fixedness of idea, is not of that type. Both the real and the assumed fanatic must give signs of life ; the real, because there is fire in him,—the assumed, because it takes a good deal of vitality of some sort to assume permanently a part in life at all, and a sort of vitality which must show itself now and then. Mr. Whalley never shows a sign of the kind. He has the tenacity of a fungoid growth, but not a trace of the vividness of any actor, however infelicitous. He is always sombre, and gives the impression of dwelling among the shadows and cobwebs of the world. " Dod " tells us that he was among the first gene- ration of students at University College, London, and that he "gained the first prize in rhetoric and metaphysics." If so, he must have been a favourite pupil of the late Dr. Hoppus, and perhaps first got the subdued tinge which marks his manner while dwelling among the dim shadows of that worthy Presbyterian's not very bright metaphysical lucubrations. The prize in 'rhetoric,' however, can certainly not have been gained for any display of rhetorical power. Mr. Whalley, in the confusion of his brain as to Jesuit intrigues, has frequently shown a remarkable incapa- city even for the ordinary distinctions of grammar. A few years ago we remember him asking the Marquis of Hartington, then Secretary for Ireland, on the subject of a Mrs. Neill, who had been murdered, it was supposed, by an evicted tenant. He couched the question in these remarkable words Whether the statement in the public journals that Mrs. Neill addressed a letter to the Lord-Lieutenant, specifying the priest by whom, and other circumstances connected with, the altar denunciation on the Sunday preceding her murder, was true," and Lord Hartington was not unnaturally a little puzzled with the Gampish interrogation. We suspect the late Professor Hoppus gave Mr. Whalley the prize for metaphy- sics, and not for rhetoric, or if for rhetoric at all, only for the skill which logicians are apt to display in confusing rhetoric by stirring the mud of the various metaphysical problems on which it rests. Mr. Whalley has certainly shown himself innocent of the most elementary ideas of practical rhetoric. He is as inarticulate in his appeals to the House, as he is persevering and consistent. He feeds himself on but one political diet, but unfortunately for him, that diet does not seem to nourish the faculty of lucid exposition. One would wonder how he managed to keep up his spirits under the consistent con- tempt of the House of Commons, if one felt sure that a politician of this unique type has any spirits to keep up, and does not rather simply focus in himself all the dumb, rankling, inorganic sort of fears inherited from other times of the things represented by the words 4 Papacy ' and Jesuit.' Mr. Whalley is indeed unwise in attempting to make speech his medium at all. He should keep to the devices of those earlier ages which expressed their fears and hopes by symbols, instead of by intellectual efrorts. At one time he appears to have had some faint instinct of this kind, and he built himself on his Welsh estate a sort of Tower of refuge for Orangemen, which used to go by the name of Whalley's folly.' That is the kind of mute appeal to vague, inchoate fears which best suits poli- ticians like Mr. Whalley and the large number of panic- stricken people whose sympathy, no doubt, sustains him in his position of parliamentary loneliness and political humili- ation. It is the attempt to go beyond these vivid signals of distress and fear, and to put something into the distincter shape of words and laws, which ruins Mr. Whalley. If he restricted himself to mere political gestures, as it were, of dread and aversion,—to putting up beacons warning men against Popery, and erecting hospices for the protection of the victims of the Jesuits,—he might make a kind of impres- sion on the weaker portion of the public mind, and at least would not lay himself open to confutation. But when he attempts to persuade the House of Commons of any proposi- tion whatever, or to convince the public that a ci-decant butcher is kept out of his rights because the Jesuits control absolutely both the Queen's Bench and the Treasury Bench, he goes sadly astray ; for he should never attempt to convince anybody of anything, except of the existence of his own contagious apprehensions. He has not the art of expressing or exciting even the feelings of others by what he says, though he may possibly do so by what he does. Living in a world of dim and tremulous political shadows, which hardly possess even his own heart, though they confuse his mind, he is not likely to effect anything by the agency of language. When he writes a letter or opens his lips, it is only to convey to others how blurred and indistinct is the intelligence which wabbles about in that thick atmos- phere of fantastic theories which he evidently breathes ; and it cannot serve his cause to elicit, as even his unformed and shapeless notions occasionally do elicit, lucid speeches and letters, like Mr. Bright's recent speech and letter about the pretender to the Tichbome estates—which come out all the keener and sharper for the muddy, cuttle-fish kind of fluid in the thick discharges of which Mr. Whalley's inarticulate anxieties are confusedly imaged forth to the world.
We should, then, be disposed to account for Mr. Whalley as one of the grotesques in which Nature is apt to repeat, some- what incoherently, an exhausted type, after the significance and virtue of the type have passed away. He is what Carlyle might perhaps call a 4 spectral appearance, gibbering out fragments of obsolete formula' to an age which has little need even of the complete thoughts which those formula once embodied. A descendant of a relative of Cromwell's and Hampden's, Mr. Whalley represents a sort of survival of Puritan alarms docked of their historical significance. Nothing but the very low political vitality of the man could have enabled him to persevere as he has done without a glimmer of reward or gratitude from anybody worth mentioning. There is no depth of feeling and not a ray of thought in Mr. Whalley's political life. But he is, we suspect, a good-natured being of a low calibre- of political structure,—he wrote at one time, before the great craze came upon him, on tithe- commutation and such like dusty subjects,—on whom these hybrid fears and notions have fastened much as a dry-rot fastens on beams and rafters not sufficiently exposed to the air, till the fungus encompasses the whole structure in its embrace. At least, if that or something like that be not the true account of Mr. Whalley, we suspect that he is an enigma which will never be solved. A more typical Carlylian 'phantom,' a more unique specimen of the kind of public hypochondriac into which politicians who subordinate their own minds to their superstitions may degenerate, can hardly be imagined than the dim, leaden-coloured, political apparition of the now for sixteen-years habitually-returned Member for Peter- borough.
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