POLITICAL GRUDGE. T HE scene in the House of Commons on
Thursday week, with its consequences in the Daily News of last Monday, certainly looks as if political grudges were obtaining a very great influence amongst us. We have sometimes thought that the old Greek practice of a sort of precautionary removal from the State, of individuals who had excited, or seemed likely to excite, too much jealousy or even merely fret, by the qualities which had given them distinction, was not altogether an unwise safety-valve for some of the most active, though some of the least honourable, elements of social and public life. Aristotle tells us that " democratical States used to ostracise and remove from the city for a definite time those who appeared to be pre-eminent above their fellow-citizens, by reason of their wealth, the number of their friends, or any other means of influence." It was not thought to be altogether ,a disgrace, —rather perhaps a distinction,—to be thus ostracised ; and Plutarch says it was " a good-natured mode of allaying envy," by throwing a cloud over the dignity which had excited a grudge. It was a mode, in fact, rather of removing popular irritation than of punishing unpopularity, though the means taken to remove popular irritation could not but be in a degree painful to the victims. It was, in short, a precaution taken " for the hardness of the people's hearts " more than for its direct utility ; indeed, when tried at Syracuse, it was found to be so much dreaded by the influential classes that, for fear of it, they would not take any share in public life at all, lest they should be ostracised. And for that reason the use of this safety-valve for political grudge had to be abolished. Aristotle speaks of it emphatic- ally as a practice in use in democracies ; but in Athens, certainly, it was not only democratic feeling which thus ex- pressed itself, for six thousand votes were enough, if not more than enough, to ostracise; and if Aristides were ostracised simply for his aristocratic bias, and because the people were weary of hearing him called " the Just," the jealousy of a class, —and not a very large class, was quite sufficient to procure an ostracism, and often did procure it. At the present moment in England, we do not doubt that there is a vast intensity in the political grudge felt against two or three of our foremost poli- ticians,—for example, Mr. Gladstone, Lord Salisbury, and Mr. Chamberlain. And by political grudge we mean some- thing quite different from political antagonism. A political grudge involves political antagonism in combination with a deep irritability of the nerves in many of the persons who feel that antagonism,—an irritability which renders them inclined to swear when they hear the name they dislike. It is a moral sensation resembling the physical sensation produced by the scratching of a slate-pencil on a slate ; it makes the blood run cold for the moment, and renders the man who feels it quite incapable of any political impartiality. No doubt that was the sort of irritation produced amongst the Athenians by constantly hearing Aristides spoken of as " the Just," and that is, we imagine, the feeling not unfrequently produced amongst some of his English antagonists by hearing Mr. Gladstone spoken of as the " Grand Old Man," the model of English magnanimity, sympathy, and courage. Again, no doubt Lord Salisbury's reputation for satirical wit produces the same sense of grudge amongst Irish Members who can remember nothing but his supposed comparison of the Irish Celts to the Hottentots of South Africa, and to the Hittites, Ammonites, Perizzites, and Jebusites of Palestine. And Mr. Chamberlain's political smartness and complacency pro- duce just the same irritability of the nerves amongst most of those who remain Gladstonians. They maintain, with some plausibility, that Mr. Chamberlain first set them the example of descanting on Irish wrongs, and on the duty of finding some adequate satisfaction for the national aspirations of the sister- , island, and then left them in the lurch. In all such oases it is, we believe, more the dominance of a certain personal accent in the politician against whom the grudge is felt,—an accent which excites restlessness in particular temperaments, almost as a red rag excites restlessness in a bull,—than their political principles, which produces the excessive irritation which he inspires. And the reason why that personal accent is so irritating is quite as much due to some special sensitive- ness in those who feel the irritability, and consequently the grudge, as to anything specially vexatious in him who causes it. There is a story, we think, in the life of Moore of some gambler who, after having lost heavily, found a man on the stairs as he was descending, modestly engaged in tying his shoe. The gambler kicked the poor man downstairs, saying as he did so : " Damn you, you're always tying your shoe." That is the precise feeling, we suspect, though not, of course, usually manifested in the same highly exaggerated form, which makes so many Englishmen or Irishmen feel inclined to gnash their teeth when they hear any charac- teristic expression of Mr. Gladstone's or Mr. Chamberlain's, or any satiric touch of Lord Salisbury's. It is not the individual expression which so irritates their opponents half as much as the sense of grievance with which an attitude of mind that is entirely out of sympathy with their own jars on them. If the unhappy man who was caught tying his shoe had only been in a hurry or, still better, a frenzy of excitement, and not engaged in so humble and trivial a task, he would not have irritated the ruined gambler into kicking him downstairs. And so it is, no doubt, with those who seem to feel in our day such a vivid political grudge. There is something in Mr. Gladstone's grand courtesy, and sometimes excessive humility, which specially jars upon the temperament of the Englishman who sees, or thinks he sees, the United Kingdom going to pieces under his statesmanship, and who cannot endure the profound sense of moral and spiritual obligation which vibrates in every sentence which Mr. Gladstone utters on the subject. So, too, Mr. Chamberlain's verve, and his extreme self-confidence, and the perfect lucidity of his aggres- sive sentences, jar most painfully on the comrades who are con- scious of having once been his allies, and who are now his vic- tims; they could perhaps forgive him if he only hesitated, if he only looked back wistfully at the views with which he him- self had inoculated them ; but as it is, the mere clear ring of his voice, the mere penetrating glance of his shrewd eye, fills them with an overwhelming sense of personal grudge. They would ostracise him if they could, not as the Athenians did for his wealth and many friends, but for his calm self- confidence, his innumerable lucidities of statement, his unanswerable appeals to average common-sense. And so, too, the Celt who loathes Lord Salisbury, loathes him far less for anything he says, than for the accent of amused satire with which he says it. Such a Celt feels like the mob under the sting of Coriolanus's scorn, and he writhes less at any explicit taunt, than in consequence of his profound conviction that scorn is implied not only in what Lord Salisbury says, but in what he leaves unsaid, especially when be excuses himself on the ground of the over-sensitiveness of the Celt, for declining to say more.
How far grudges go nowadays, we have sufficient proof this week, not only in Professor Tyndall's avowed conviction that politically Mr. Gladstone deserves the block, but in the Daily News' very poor and totally unjustifiable account of Thurs- day week's proceedings in its impression of Monday, which was so much in the form of a report, that it had no right at all to be falsified, and had so little of the aspect of a burlesque to any one who had not heard the proceedings of which it professed to give an account, that it was actually taken in many quarters as intended for the literal truth. Nothing but a passionate and even spiteful political grudge could have influenced the writer of that statement, especially when we consider the remarks of the leading article by which it was accompanied, and which would have been almost unmeaning without the spurious report which gave the leading article ita interpretation. There is no joke in attributing malice to persons who have not shown any malice; and yet this was pre- cisely what the spurious report effected. There was nothing to laugh at, as there must be in any true burlesque, nothing even to indicate to an ordinary reader of the paper that exaggeration was being purposely used to draw attention to features of the debate which, if unexaggerated, might have escaped atten- tion. There is no joke in making a politician say what he did not say, and what would have been simply discredit- able to him if he had said it; and where there is no suffi- cient breadth of caricature to hint the true character of the scene to those who were not present at it, to ninety-nine people in every hundred it becomes simple misstatement. In- deed, had there been any such breadth of caricature, Mr. T. P.
O'Connor could not have maintained, as in the depth of his rancour he actually did maintain, that the report was a perfectly just and accurate one of what actually occurred, though every other speaker, including Mr. Gladstone and even Mr. Hunter, who is as hostile to Mr. Chamberlain as any other Home- ruler, ridiculed it as the most monstrous of all suggestions that it was intended to be an accurate account of what occurred. (Indeed, the Daily News itself delivers its witness against Mr. T. P. O'Connor on that head.) We can only explain the insertion of so very poor and spitef al a " joke " in a paper, which never even professes to be comic, unless perhaps to be comically dull, by the intensity of the grudge which Mr. Chamberlain. inspires in one class of politicians, just as Mr. Gladstone inspires an almost equal intensity of grudge in another.
No doubt political ostracism is too expensive a price to pay for the purpose of allaying such grudges as these. Even if a forced retirement from the political scene dispersed the bitterness of feeling, it would disperse it at the cost of all political efficiency. Politics cannot, unfortunately, go on without some rancour; but whatever form the rancour takes, it certainly should not take the form of deliberate misrepre- sentation of your enemy's words and acts. We do not con- demn even Professor Tyndall for saying that though he would give his life to save Mr. Gladstone's, he would send him to the block, if he had the power, for his political sins, half as much as we condemn. the Daily News for expressing the extrava- gance of its grudge in a manner that would mislead many thousands of its readers into chinking that Mr. Chamberlain had said and done what he had never said and done. That is using a sort of political dynamite which no honourable poli- tician, however vehement his bias, would justify. The next political duty to that of clearing your mind of cant, is clearing it of grudge. Indeed, grudge is a sort of cant, the cant of animosity. It seems to us almost as bad a sign of the times when grudge of this violent kind makes its appearance in the political world, as it is when political opposition is used, or rather abused, to wreak revenge on a private enemy by way of retaliation for private wrongs.
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