TOPICS OF THE DAY.
SIR WILFRID LAWSON.
COUNTRY gentlemen make just the sort of humourists which the House of Commons likes best. Their Squire- archical simplicity, their downright plain-spoken ways, their privileged inability—whether real or assumed, matters not— to follow the finer distinctions which soften down the super- ficial paradoxes of life —the solidity of their self-respect, the bonhomie of their frank, out-of-doors manner, the thoroughly national character of their sagacity, and the complete under- standing between them and the House as to the prepossessions which they really feel and the prepossessions which they have a prescriptive right to assume, form a sound, firm basis for mutual understanding and good feeling on which it is very easy indeed to build up a more cordial rela- tion. Mr. Henley, the sagacious and hard-headed Member for Oxfordshire, has this kind of understanding with the House, and he hardly ever speaks without eliciting some cordial recognition of the shrewdness and force of his homely, vernacular English. The late Mr. Henry Drummond, who also was a Tory, and who, on the discussion of the Bill to legalise marriage with a deceased wife's sister, begged its honourable proposer to marry his grandmother like a man, and have done with it, was an admirable specimen of the type of the kind of humour, of a Tory type, appropriate to the county gentleman, though he had a distinct touch in him of the disciplined man of business as well. And Sir Wilfrid Lawson is an equally good specimen of the Radical variety of the squire type,—the variety, that is, which makes the most of the inconsistencies and ab- surdities of life as it is, and ignores the inconsistencies and absurdities of the proposed innovations or reforms. The pre-. decessor of Sir Wilfrid in the favour of the House Mr. Bernal Osborne, the Member for Waterford before the dissolution of 1874, did not belong to the class of squires at all, but rather to that of the habitués of Clubs, and though he was a witty man of the world, there was a sort of hackneyed, dinner-table tone about his jokes which took off all their freshness. There is nothing of this with Sir Wilfrid, and though he must beware of such poor and conventional puns as he made at the public meeting on Monday as to being supported at once by a Cardinal and a Pope —(he meant Cardinal Manning and Mr. Pope),—he will keep his place easily enough in the favour of the House of Commons, and without losing the power of speaking seriously and with weight, when he chooses, if he will only take care not to indulge the House with conventional banter, and so in- juriously dilute, the unique personality which gives the charm to his speeches. For Sir Wilfrid's position, though it is the position of an oddity, depends in a very great degree indeed on the apparently off-hand and unpremeditated character of his criticisms,—the criticisms of an impatient Radical squire who, as he himself once boldly declared of every statesman left to us except Lord Russell, "does not care two straws" whether the British Constitution be adhered to or not. If Sir Wilfrid were ever to give to his humour the effect of care and preparation, he might no doubt continue to be popular ; for any one who can make a good joke is welcomed in our dull House of Com- mons; but he would lose the sort of reputation he has for blurting out caustic Radical remarks on the absurdities and paradoxes of things as they are, just as Mr. Drummond used to blurt out caustic Tory remarks on the silly panaceas proposed for mending them. We were glad, therefore, to notice on Wednesday, that in speaking for the Permissive Bill, Sir Wilfrid was not at all oppressively funny, though he was evidently disposed to give his antagonists as good as they gave. And we hope he will carefully avoid the mistake made by Mr. Bernal Osborne, who so accustomed the House to his jokes, that even when he intended to speak seriously he was greeted with shouts of laughter, to his own
great chagrin. Nothing but artificiality and exhaustion can come of so false a relation to the House of Commons as that.
Sir Wilfrid Lawson, however, is, we believe, too shrewd a man, and has too much real sense both of humour and of dignity, to fall into such an error. A niaternal grandson of the late Sir James Graham and a Cumbrian both in independence of character and that leaning to eccentricity which comes of solitude, he can never become the mere jester of the House of Commons. For he has inherited from his grandfather none of that pliancy and tendency to adapt himself to the times which marked Sir James Graham ; nor certainly does his considerable fund of humour derive from that source.. There is nothing of the canny Scotchman, though there is so much of the quaint dash of Cumbrian wilfulness, in his. composition. He evinces very strongly both that tenacious literalness of mind which makes the contrasts of life appear greater than they really are, and also that flexibility of mood which heightens the colours of their contrast, and brings. them into the sharpest relief. He is one of those,—and they are many,—who can hardly see even the child change into the man without feeling disposed to set before it the inconsistency and radical departure from first principles implied in the change. Thus his frequent and very amusing remarks on the paradoxes of modern Christianity, often imply that if Christians had been what they ought to have been, their mode of living now would be very much what it was when they numbered only a few Galilean peasants; and in the same way, his criticisms on our policy and institutions, generally seem to reproach the British Empire for growing as it does, and to aim at reducing it to something which can be more easily governed on the abstract principles of Radicalism. Sir Wilfrid Lawson is, we fancy, one of the few true English adherents of the Ballot, of the re- duction of the Army, of the non-intervention policy, of the doctrine that our colonial territory ought to be reduced, and of strong decentralisation schemes of the Home-rule and Per- missive-Bill character, still left us. And yet there is nothing- really of the didactic Radical doctrinaire about him. He has too much humour for that. He said on Wednesday, evidently very sincerely, that nothing annoys him like being called the "Apostle of Temperance," and that he had no more right to the title than Mr. Bass himself. Indeed, probably he has not belief enough even in the Radical nostrums to be the apostle of anything. He is sceptical at bottom of all political measures: So far as he believes in his own political school, it is because all he recommends is extremely humble and destructive of the pride of statesmen. He likes modest attempts. Only on Wednesday he disclaimed and abandoned to the Government what he termed in derision their "large and comprehensive measures." For himself, he refrains his soul and keeps it low to matters like the passing of a Permissive Bill intended to enlarge, as he puts it, the self-governing power of a local population in relation to an important detail of the social system, or like the removal of Bishops from the House of Lords, or like an attempt to persuade the House that it is hardly decent to adjourn for two hours on what it regards as the sacred feast of the Ascension, while it adjourns over the whole Derby-day as if that were a feast of infinitely higher claims on a Christian people ; or like the admirably simple measure which, with the . boldness of true genius, he proposed. to substitute for the Public Worship Regulation Act,. —namely, that any clergyman found breaking the law should be fined five shillings and costs at Petty Sessions. And of course, as Sir Wilfrid Lawson believes that if any legislation or policy is good at all, it can only be of the least ambitions, not to say the most humiliating kind, he is always most amusing when he takes in hand either the statesmen or the policies with any ambitious flavour about them. His fancy is never more tickled than by the spectacle of men of the world professing great zeal in the
interests of popular religion. His happy description of' Mr. Disraeli's and Sir William Harcourt's attitude in relation to the Public Worship Regulation Bill, when he called them "these two holy men, these two pillars of Ortho- doxy, the modern Luther and the modem Melanchthon, who in moving terms have been imploring the House of -Commons— that great Assembly of Jews, Turks, Heretics, and Infidels —to maintain Religion and put down Ritualism," was evidently inspired by his natural distrust of the very ambitious Protestantism of those distinguished pillars of the Church. And as to great strokes of pohly, he has seldom been more gravely entertaining than he was in deprecating the annexation of Fiji. Of course the annexation of the Cannibal Islands was a theme on which even an ordinary Member of Parliament, with any wish to defeat the policy, would have been sure to attempt a joke ; but Sir Wilfrid drew a really ludicrous picture of the fear entertained lest the 20,000 re- maining cannibals should come down from the mountains into. the plains and eat the 107,000 Methodist converts, and of the only feasible mode of preventing this calamity by despatching a few companies of the British Army,—that great branch, maim called it, of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel,—to kill them and burn their villages, and by sending in their wake teachers to declare to them the truths of the Gospel of peace. Whether it be that Sir Wilfrid is so much a sceptic at heart that all idealism, even British nationalism and Imperialism, sounds to him like buncombe, or whether he really believes that civilisation has done more harm than good in the world, cer- tain it is that his mixed literalism and scepticism never show to more advantage as elements of humour than when he is trying to make a grand British policy or a magniloquent British orator ridiculous.
Again, the literalism of the interpretation which he imme- diately applies to what his opponents say, helps him to very effective hits at the shortcomings of their logic. He is very skilful in pushing their assumptions to their legitimate con- sequences. Thus he gravely argued that if it were right at all to make a public and official holiday of the Derby-day, the Speaker ought to go to the Derby "in his State coach, drawn by brewers' horses, as he did at the thanksgiving for the Prince of Wales's recovery,—in which case a great number of the Commons would willingly attend him, and protect him from the people he would meet there ;" and on Wednesday, in refuting the arguments against the Permissive Bill, he entreated the Government to apply their principles in practice, by restraining those few but barbarous landlords who, out of their own heads, had deprived the popu- lation in their parishes of licensed drink-shops, and bringing in a Bill to provide, in all such cases of hardship, for "places where people might get drunk again." And no doubt the wide - discretion given to the Magistrates even to prohibit public- houses in any district by refusing all licences within it, is not different in principle from the discretion which Sir Wilfrid proposes to concede to two-thirds of the ratepayers to prohibit them also.
Sir Wilfrid Lawson's humour is not of the most searching kind. It does not sweep the whole earth,—and the heavens too for that matter,—as the Yankee humour does, in search of grotesque analogies for the most trivial details of life. What gives it its pleasant flavour is that it is the genuine product of the character of a shrewd and benevolent country gentleman, whose intellect having begun to stir beneath the well-defined traditions and prejudices of the class of English Squires, and to perceive the insecurity of the ordinary political assumptions of that least active-minded of castes, has taken rather kindly to the amusement of caricaturing to himself and to others the paradox involved in any feeling of satisfaction, however moderate, with things as they are,—though without indulging any but the least sanguine of all anticipations as to the im- provements which may be expected in things as they may be. There is a quicksand at the bottom of Sir Wilfrid Lawson's imagination, as there is in that of all true humourists, but it is a quicksand of limited dimensions, and not such quicksands as we see spreading away under the loose foundations of many of the Yankee humourists' life. Still, the limited imagination of a country squire, when it begins to find the bog of general scepticism quaking beneath it, yields humour elf a very specific and interesting kind. And Sir Wilfrid Lawson's rich voice and easy genial manner add to the charm. We trust the admira- tion of the present very dull House of Commons, which finds in him almost its only entertainer, will not spoil him, or make him draw too liberally on his abundant but by no means inexhaustible resources.
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