THE LATE MR. WHALLEY.
THE loss of Mr. Whalley will be the extraction of a thorn out of the side of Mr. Newdegate. That excellent and independent County Member has often felt that nothing tended so much to make his morbid fears of Rome seem ridiculous in the sight of the House of Commons, as Mr. Whalley's travestie of those fears. It has even been said that Mr. Newdegate regarded Mr. Whalley as an emissary of Rome, specially commissioned to out-Herod the Protestant Herod, so as to paralyse his hands in practical England. And the hypothesis would not be so very wild, if only it were not quite beyond the powers of humanity for any one to act, and act well, through life, a part he thoroughly despised, for the purpose of bringing others to despise it too. If such a being could be, he must at least show, by glimpses, signs of the Herculean moral force that would alone suffice to play such a part ; and assuredly good Mr. Whalley never showed signs of anything Herculean of any sort, far less of the power requisite to keep on such a mask as that through the almost incessant ridicule poured upon him through a long public life. If Mr. Newde- gate ever seriously held this view of Mr. Whalley, he was certainly mistaken. But it was not an unnatural view for one in his position to take. Mr. Whalley did more to make the House of Commons impatient and ashamed of the anti-Catholic craze, than ever Mr. Newdegate could do to make it appear plausible. Indeed, it was only perhaps because Mr. Whalley did not get into Parliament till just after the Ecclesiastical Titles Act was passed, that that Act was ever passed at all. His advocacy would surely have defeated it. No wonder it was suggested that he was returned by Catholic wile, to prevent any further extension of an aggressive Protestant policy. This, at all events, was the real use of his political life. Mr. Whalley was nevertheless a thoroughly respectable and even a courageous man, with a tincture of law, and not without a faculty for business ; he published a book, for instance, on the Law of Tithe Commutation," and was an Assistant Tithe Commissioner for eleven years. He was one of the earliest students of University College, London, where, as " Dod "records, he gained the first prize in "Rhetoric and Metaphysics," soon after the opening of the College,—a fact which means, in all probability,— if we may judge by the experience of a few years later,—that he was the hardest-working student in a very dull class of some four or five young men, whom Professor Hoppus drilled in Scotch and German psychology. And possibly it was that unfortunate study which gave him that bias towards occult and abstract explanations of political tendencies to which he owed his after-fame, as a denouncer of Jesuit plots, and a friend of "the unfortunate nobleman" who was supposed to be the victim of such a plot. Metaphysics, when they take hold at all, as they sometimes do, of a mind not naturally given to fine distinctions, are very apt to twist it into a most dangerous habit of explaining events by imaginary motives. There is no effect of metaphysics so dangerous to minds not metaphysical, as the tendency it has to promote the invention of a priori master-keys for the explanation of human events. The theological mare's-nest has far more fascination for a tenacious but rather purblind mind, of somewhat less than average strength, than any other kind of mare's-nest. And Mr. Whalley had a tenacious and opinionative mind. His horror of Romanism was opinionative, not like Mr. Newdegate's, Con- servative. Mr. Newdegate is the old English squire, who believes in Church and State because his fathers have so believed, and who has some vague conviction that if Rome exerts her full influence in this country, English squires will no longer ride straight to hounds as they have been accustomed to do, but will congregate in dark corners, and be ashamed of their old amusements and their old duties. But Mr. Whalley's horror of Romanism was of a very different type. It was the opinionative horror of one who regarded Romanism as the keen Dissenters regarded it, rather than as the Tory nationalists regarded it. Romanism he looked upon less as anti-English, than as wielding a sort of wierd spell over the under- standing and the conscience. Rome was to him not so much a foreign Power, as a bad magician, who threatened to poison all the purest fountains of the mind. He was a Liberal, and a steady Liberal, on all questions which did not excite this feeling of panic. But on these questions, his mind became dim, turbid, suspicious, and irritable. Even the ridicule and impatience of the House of Commons only tended the more to convince him that he was right. When a tenacious man has possessed him- self of a master-key to all the most interesting questions of the day, the world cannot laugh him out of his belief, for he takes the laughter of the world as a new testimony to his faith. There is no possession—or shall we say, obsession ?- in existence, like the obsession of a tenacious, straightforward, rather feeble mind by an abstract opinion, which is taken up from prepossessions and prejudices, and confirmed by the easy triumphs of a little so-called independent investigation. The House of Commons will miss Mr. Whalley, not merely because they always felt at liberty to play pranks with him, to call upon him to sing the objectionable Romanist verses which he occasionally quoted, to chaff him unmercifully for his belief in "Sir Roger," and all" Sir Roger's" English and Australian mare's- nests, and generally to regard his speeches as signals for a universal romp,—but still more, we think, because his death takes away from the House of Commons a really quaint figure, which contributed to give it whatever picturesqueness and distinct- ness the House still retains. If Mr. Whalley's chief political belief was a kind of cant, as it was,—it was yet abso- lutely sincere cant. It was cant only in the sense in which true opinionativeness which has not depth of soil enough to become conviction, may still be called cant. Conviction is the emotion with which the mind bows to truths which it recognises as entirely above and beyond it,—as commanding its homage and obedience,—while opinionativeness is the inability to refrain from harping on a string which has got itself so thoroughly ingrained into the mind, that there would almost be a loss of personality in the sudden cessation of its vibrations. And in this sense, Mr. Whalley's anti-Catholic craze resembled opinionativeness more than conviction. But it was thoroughly and wholly sincere. Even those who would call his Parliamentary talk anti- Catholic cant, would mean by that phrase not in the least to impugn its sincerity, but only the power of the mind which gave utterance to it to consider gravely and calmly the possi- bility that it might all be baseless. Sincere cant is the prejudice of minds which have not had nerve and strength to restrain the desire to hold by their own favourite opinions only because they are their favourites, and because they would feel desolate if deprived of them. But it is, perhaps, only of a few Members of the House of Commons that such energy of mind as this could be expected. And it is not a trifle to say of a man, that even if he has not cleared his mind of cant, and hardly knows what the effort would mean, he is yet thoroughly sincere, and speaks only what is in him to speak. And that clearly might be said of Mr. Whalley. His mind was dim and adust, and his imagination only just vivid enough to be haunted by phantoms. He had not enough imagination to look phantoms steadily in the face. He lived in a world of political unrealities. Ghosts of an ecclesiastical and metaphysical kind floated in the air he breathed, yet there was an interest in the dim figure for that very reason. Not all men, and not all Members, have even imagination enough to be so haunted, to live at all the dusty, unreal life of abstract alarms. There was a courage in the man, too. He faced ridicule without shrinking. He could avow his allegiance to the cause of the most famous and accomplished swindler of modern times, in defiance of all the good-sense of the House, because, in his confused thought, he had become persuaded that the cause of that swindler was the cause of Protestantism too. When he thought a cause just, he was always ready to support it by personal sacrifices; and musty as were the causes his morbid fancy supposed to be just, that readiness is still a quality to be respected. Altogether, Mr. Whalley meant something,—which a great many Members of Parliament do not. What he represented, indeed, was nothing real,—was, indeed, a confused and dim bundle of ill-assorted Philistine opinions,—but real or unreal, to that queer bundle of opinions he showed the fidelity of a martyr. And it is satisfactory to be assured that even where the intellectual clothing of a man is as unsightly a bundle of old clothes as you could pick out of the old-curio- sity shop of cast-off garments, there may be virtue and manliness and the spirit of a martyr displayed by the wearer, though it be in the cause of dusty cobwebs and fantastic suspicions. The House of Commons has not so many recognisable figures, that it cannot afford to regret even the Jesuit-haunted figure who dwelt in the Welsh watch-tower, and conceived to himself the Roman Church as bending all its efforts to defraud a disreputable convert from Romanism of his English baronetcy and estates. Disinterested zeal as dim and confused and even as thoroughly wasted as Mr. Whalley's, has nevertheless a eertain dignity, in so motley an assembly of still vulgarer interests as the House of Commons.
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