THE SOLEMNITY OF .1:111, HOUSE OF COMMONS.
THE inquiry at Waterford has resulted not only in unseat- ing the sitting Member, but in declaring the candidate- who failed, Mr. Bernal Osborne, disqualified to contest the seat. That is rather sad, because Mr. Osborne is really so- much wanted in the House of Commons, that if he can't get in by accident as it were, Mr. Gladstone's Government would find it almost imperative to introduce a special Reform Bill of one clause, empowering the House whenever it considers itself in imminent danger of puritanical solemnity to elect by co-optation a lively member for the relief of the debates,. —such member to vacate his seat ipso facto whenever the House agrees to a resolution that he has not for the space of one year added any cheerfulness to its debates. We are all fully aware who would be at once elected by the House of Commons if it were to receive such a power. No one has ever acted the part of Jester to that assembly,—Jester in the old sense in which the word denotes that his every witticism and drollery had a sting of shrewdness at the bottom of it,—so well as Mr. Bernal Osborne. No doubt there have been times when even we ourselves were unjust to him, but then it was .in the old days of a flippant House of Commons led by a flippant leader, when jokes were as plenty as blackberries, -and the first Minister of the Crown regarded the first question of the day chiefly as a joke. But now we have got an earnest,— may we not almost say a grim I—House of Commons, which votes with taciturn punctuality what the constituencies wish,. speaks, if at all, in brief, business-like, weighty speeches, and,. like Elizabeth after the execution of Essex, has never been_ known to smile. The First Minister, full of grave responsi- bilities, with the sins of Ireland almost weighing physically on his sensitive conscience, and striving hard to shape out more clearly to himself the hopes of Ireland as they loom through the mists of the future, has no surplus force left for playfulness or levity after the power of eloquent and ex- haustive exposition and disquisition has gone out of him. Mr. Bright, who stands next to him in the Ministry, has never excelled in any kind of oratory that was not essentially massive and grave. He can ridicule,—as in his celebrated citation in his speech on Mr. Disraeli's policy for Ireland of the mountebank who had a pill that was "very good against the earthquake," —but he never laughs and seldom makes laugh. His elo- quence is heavy metal,—massive, measured, glowing. Nor can the third of the great triad, Mr. Lowe, be said in any sense to contribute to the gaiety or hilarity of the House of Commons. His sarcasm is often rasping, and men smile inwardly to see their friends or foes hit so hard and so exactly in the vulnerable point, but certainly they are not the gayer for the Chancellor of the Exchequer's homethrusts,—which only contribute to make the House feel the seriousness of life as especially illustrated in the vulnera- bility of the average member. And if "those who seem to be pillars" of the Ministry, keep the nerves of the House tightly stretched, and seldom relax the tension, the dii minores of the Cabinet and Administration certainly do not counteract the tendency. Mr. Cardwell is official, as it were, by profession,—and the expression of official responsibility, though never positively mournful, has always a lugubrious tinge, — the air of assisting at the obsequies of departed hopes. Mr. Childers is a keen and sensible man of business, of more than ordinary cheeriness ; but still cheery sense, though it may raise the spirits of the House, can hardly be said to entertain or afford it relaxation. Mr. Ayrton's victorious way is carefully chosen over the corns of Members of the House of Commons, and even if some of them do giggle at the woes of others, that is a transient and fearful and almost painful joy. Mr. Stansfeld is urbanity itself, but Secretaries to the Treasury cannot jest. Mr. Forster is sagacity personified, but sagacity, especially when engaged in providing for the teaching of the nation and the slaughter of its diseased cattle, is a characteristic that may need occasional alleviation. Mr. Austin Bruce is gently and lucidly earnest, and Mr. Monsell is somewhat solemn, and Mr. Otway impressive, Mr. Shaw Lefevre instructive, and Mr. Grant Duff enlightened ; yet, the whole Administration affects the House of Commons very much more as a "being breathing thoughtful breath" than as "a phantom of delight,"—types so different, that it took a grave Cumbrian mountaineer like Wordsworth to be capable of identifying them as co-existing in one and the same nature.
Nor does the composition of the first Opposition Bench tend to relieve the gravity of the situation. Mr. Disraeli has it always in his power to be amusing, especially if he is either hard-pressed or successful ; but just now he is neither ; he is irresponsible and unsuccessful; in short, he is "in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes," and he has in this Parliament, hitherto at least, been wonderfully reticent and dull, almost disposed to leave the leadership to Mr. Gathorne Hardy, who is zealous, but wooden and elephantine whenever he attempts to be playful. The other sitters on that bench it "solemnizes" one, to use the sanctimonious Presbyterian word, even to glance at in thought. Lord John Manners, and Mr. Mowbray, and Sir John Pakington, and Mr. Adderley, and Mr. Hunt, and Lord Robert Montagu,—can dismaler political shadows be con- ceived? Surely the infant House is in no slight danger of a premature and weird old age, born as it has been into the midst of the sternest, or most repulsive kind of influences ? All work and no play makes Jack not only a dull, but sometimes a rebel- lions boy. What with unrelieved earnestness on the one side, and all but unrelieved dullness on the other, is there not some danger that a. young House of Commons,—provided with no better sport than the heavy animosities between Mr. Whalley and Mr. Newdegate in the respective characters of the clown and riding-master of the political pantomime,—may
• strike for more cakes and ale ? As the spoiled child of the new constituencies, it may turn captions if it does not get a
certain amount of fan, as well as work, out of politics. Life may be even too full of seriousness for the House of Commons, —especially if seriousness comes to mean, as it is apt to do,
what it meant in the ease of the celebrated Rab ;—of whom his master, the Scotch shepherd, said that "life had been full of sariotumess to Rah" since he had made up his mind that it was his duty to fight every dog he met.
And one way or the other, if not both, life is likely tobe very full of seriousness to Members of Parliament this session, with
an Irish Land Tenure Bill for the principal joy of the session. As there is nothing like a heavy ploughed field to take the life out of a hunt or a steeple-chase, so there is nothing like solid quotations from Sir John Davies, and
Mr. Justice Saxey, and Mr. McCombie, and Mr. Campbell, and Mr. Caird, and the other myriad land - tenure pamphleteers, or difficult discussions as to what Stein did and what he did not do in Prussia, what effect the Belgian small-farm system has really had on the people, with digressions into the law of settlement and entail and the art of drainage, to take the life out of an English Parliament. No doubt these solid subjects may serve in some measure as earthworks to receive and deaden the impetus of mere angry artillery. But in proportion as the debate grows heavy and im- personal, the House will grow weary and cross, and will yearn even more ardently after that privilege of possessing a jester which, as it was not denied to Kings in the old days when weary with affairs of State, ought surely to be conceded to Parliaments now. How good it was to have Mr. Bernal Osborne fresh from dinner, in those dreary days when Parliament had the Com- pound Householder on the brain, to relieve the intervals of nightmare by his happy thought that "there was more joy over one Chancellor of the Exchequer who repented than over ninety-and-nine steady-going reformers who never went astray ;" or by his solemn warning against the legal advisers of the Crown as the "two black graces who were sure to throw the question into Chancery;" or by his picture of Mr. Disraeli as the conductor of an omnibus full of heavy stupid old country gentlemen whom he had to lug up to the top of the hill as best he could ; or, beat of all perhaps, by that retort of his on Mr. Graves, the Member for Liverpool, who had risen to east oil on the troubled waters," that the oil so cast had been, as be- fitted so great a commercial authority, oil of petroleum. We don't say such hits were very brilliant, but they furnished a safety-valve for dangerously mortified and pent-up spirits. They gave heart to a fagged and desperate House ; they re- called the memory of happier days when the Compound House- holder was not yet, and the possibility of others when he might have ceased to be ; they sustained the moral courage of the heavy-laden, and opened a horizon beyond the slough in which Parliament was wearily floundering along. And who can doubt that whenever Parliament gets fairly bogged in the unreelaimed land of Ireland, it will need a Bernal Osborne to restore the flagging strength of the staggering representatives ?
Besides, even the tone and spirit of debate is the higher for a jester of any wit. As even Lear's rage is all the grander for his shrewd fool's pertinent comments,— ' Whoop jug! I know when the horse follows the cart,'—so the infatuation of the Irish Orangemen would but come out with all the more picturesque grandeur, had Mr. Osborne but been returned for Waterford to play the jesting critic on their madness. These dreadfully earnest constituencies of our new Parliament, with their appetite for real reforms and well- disciplined battalions, forget the weariness and greatness of the way, and fail to provide those little refreshments for the journey, of which men like Mr. Bernal Osborne arc perennial fountains. Industry and humour are both of them of the essence of a good British Parliament. Of industry, of upright, strenuous, incessant toil, we shall have plenty in the coming session. But humour that consoles and alleviates the plodding hours has almost been forgotten. Yet this is not one of those unique occasions when Parliament should debate and legislate as it were on its knees. Momentous as regards Ireland and England too,—if we pass our education measure,— the Session no doubt will be. But a little banter, and hope of banter, and dread of banter, would be by no means out of place. It would give opportunity as well as significance to the earnest- ness of which we may otherwise have a surfeit. Tony Lumbkin
remarked that his mother always snubbed him if ho were in spirits, but if he had never been in spirits she clearly would
not have had either the wish or the opportunity. An earnest Parliament rather needs a flippant and impertinent member like Mr. Bernal Osborne, both to bring out its own strenuous- ness of purpose, and to relieve the dyspepsia which that strenuousness is apt to cause. And though we can hardly
hope that the House will take our suggestion, and pass a Reform Bill for adding an ex oficio Jester to its ranks,—by
the way, if the House of Lords were jealous, it could create a life-peer for its own purposes, and so confess its need of wit, if not of wisdom, which would involve at least a good jest, if not a good jester,—yet we do venture to appeal to some good-
natured constituency to have compassion on a too earnest House of Commons, ere it be too late. If it goes on much
longer as it is, it will become like Charles Lamb's Scotchman, who could never get a joke into his head without a difficult surgical operation.
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