Kitabı oku: «Here and There in London», sayfa 4
THE LOBBY OF THE HOUSE OF COMMONS DURING THE SESSION
England, Ireland, Scotland, and our forty colonies are ruled, not from Downing-street, not from Privy Councils at Buckingham Palace, nor by the Times newspaper, as some pretend, nor even by the stump orator, but by the Lobby of the House of Commons. This I know, that if I were a member of the United Kingdom Alliance, and wished to root up the liquor traffic in England – that if I were a Scotchman, and endeavoured to confirm and extend the provisions of the Forbes Mackenzie Act – that even were I of the Green Isle, and raised the cry of justice for Ireland, whatever that may mean – I’d plant myself in the Lobby of the House of Commons, and there win victory or die.
Externally the Lobby is a handsome one; little more. Mr. Timbs tells me it is “a rich apartment, forty-five feet square, and has on each side an archway, carved open screens, inscribed Domine salvam fac Reginam, and windows painted with the arms of parliamentary boroughs. The brass gas standards by Hardman are elaborately chased. The doorways lead to the library, the post-office, vote paper office, central hall, &c.” Is this all? Yes, is the answer of one of the matter-of-fact class, of whom Peter Bell is such an illustrious example.
We are not all Peter Bells. We are of those who can read sermons in stones. We fancy for every why there is a wherefore. Wealthy men, and busy men, and great men, don’t stand talking and grimacing for nothing; and when I catch one member in a corner with Brown I am not greenhorn enough to suppose that they are merely inquiring after each other’s health, or commenting on the extraordinary mildness of the season, and its probable effect on the growth of cabbages. No, no, you may be certain that the Lobby of the House of Commons, where I have seen our greatest statesmen, our proudest peers, the nation’s most illustrious guests, ambassadors, and princes, and wags, is not the place for small talk. Without studying “De Morgan on Probabilities” (a sin of which I am never likely to be guilty), you will not be far wrong if you come to the conclusion that in the Lobby, somehow or other, between the hours 4 p. m. and 2 a. m., not a little business is settled more or less agreeable to all parties concerned. (Of course I am not referring to the young sprigs of nobility, who come into the House merely as an amusement, and without the slightest idea of the rights and duties of their class, and who are neither more nor less than a parody upon the representative system of which we are all so proud.) A few sentences will point to the significancy of the Lobby. Every member of the House of Commons passes through the Lobby. That is a given fact. Another is, that the Treasury Whipper-in affects the Lobby. Another is, that if you have anything to say to your member, or if he has anything to say to you, the Lobby is the place of rendezvous. These facts are suggestive. I am member for Bullock Smithy. I am not wealthy, and I have a large family. The Ministry are hard driven, one vote will save them. I meet their Whipper-in in the Lobby. We have a little chat. I give an honest vote, and virtue is rewarded by the appointment of my son to a place in the Circumlocution Office. “This is an exaggeration!” exclaims the general public. Let me then, give another case. I am member for Bullock Smithy; I am rich, but I have no family, and I am a man of no birth. I’d give my ears, and my wife would not merely give them, but her diamond earrings as well, to see her name in the Court Circular, or to get a ticket to Lady Plantagenet’s Sunday-evening parties. Promiscuously I hint this in the Lobby, and lo! the magician’s wand waves, and I and my wife enter the stately portals we had long aspired to cross. If certain parties, in the course of the parliamentary session, find there is nothing lost by civility, where’s the harm? But look round the Lobby; the electioneering agent is there to discuss how to make things pleasant; the getter-up of public companies comes there to catch a few M.P.’s as directors. There is the local deputation of the Stoke Gas Company – limited liability – whose Bill stand for reading a third time to-night; and there is the Secretary of the United Metropolitan Association for making every householder consume his own smoke. Smith from the provinces has caught his member’s eye, and has got an order for the gallery. Alas, Smith, the gallery has been full this hour; and there are now fifty individuals, fortunate holders of orders like yourself, waiting their turn. Here is “Our Correspondent” gossiping with the door-keepers, attacking every member with whom he is on speaking terms, in order that he may concoct the luminous epistles which form the attraction of the paper whose columns he adorns. This man is a spouter at public-house discussion clubs, and fancies himself, as he stands surrounded by M.P.’s, almost an M.P. himself. What does he here? I know not, except waste his time. A grand debate is coming on; a ministerial crisis is imminent. How full the Lobby gets; and how scrutinised is every action of hon. gentlemen as they take a turn, as they all do in the course of the evening, in the Lobby! There is the leader of the Opposition; he meets his bitterest foe, and bows to him and smiles. In what agony are the quidnuncs to know the hidden meaning of that bow and smile! The Ministerialist Whipper-in has a little book in his hand, and is busy in his calculation. By the twinkle in his eye I fancy it is all right; and now he may whistle “Begone, dull care, I prythee begone from me.” He need not fear next quarter-day. Ah! that cheer which comes sounding to us through the glass doors denotes that the Premier has concluded his defence, and that the House is on his side. But out rushes the Sergeant-at-Arms. “Clear the Lobby for a division,” exclaim the door-keepers. The police point us the door: we take the hint while all the bells are tinkling, and all the members are rushing from every quarter, through the Lobby to the House, as if members and bells were alike mad. We wait outside. By the clock nearly a half-hour is gone. Hark, what a cheer! By Jove! the division is taken, and the ministry are saved. It is midnight; yet the Lobby is full and gay. We won’t go home yet. Just behind is the bar, and members are drinking pale ale and sherry, and soda with a little brandy in it, and the whole place begins to have the air of the London Tavern after an anniversary dinner on behalf of the Indignant Blind. Look at those swells just entering the House: evidently they have been dining out, and presently one of them will speak, and the whole House will be in a roar at his vinous oratory; out in the Lobby we catch faint echoes of the mirth. The House is in committee on the Cab Act, and are now enacting a clause relative to drunken and disorderly cabmen. Our friend is vehement, inconclusive, and indistinct. Happily the reporters will merely mention that he addressed the House amidst considerable laughter. As we leave the Lobby, we hear hints about “physician, heal thyself.”
OUR LONDON CORRESPONDENT
Where’s Eliza? Who was the man in the iron mask? Who was Junius? Whose were the bones discovered last year in a carpet-bag under Waterloo-bridge? You cannot tell. Neither can I tell you who is our London Correspondent. Yet he exists. I find traces of him in the most Bœotian districts of England.
“Caledonia, stern and wild,
Fit nurse for a poetic child,”
knows him. In “Tara’s halls” he has superseded the harp, and is a presence and a power. Before newspapers were, when Addison was writing the “Spectator,” and Dick Steele “Tatlers” innumerable, and De Foe his Review and all sorts of romances, in Grub-street there was an immense deal of activity in the way of letter writing. Country gentlemen wanted news, and were willing to pay for it. When there was a frost or when it was wet, when the nights were long or amusements few, when the squire was laid up with the gout or when my lady had the vapours, it was pleasant to read who ate cheesecakes and syllabubs at Spring Gardens, who drank coffee at Button’s or chocolate at the Cocoa Tree, what was the gossip of the October or Kit Kat clubs, what had become of Mrs. Bracegirdle, and how Mrs. Oldfield triumphed on the stage. Nor did the letter-writer stop here. In those days courtiers had two faces. There was one King de facto, and another de jure divino. There was a Court at St. Germains as well as at St. James’s. There were Jacobites as well as Hanoverians. There were plots and intrigues – Popish and Protestant – and in the dark days before Christmas, in old country houses, letters full of all the rumours thus created were welcomed. But the age made progress. Newspapers were established in all the leading towns of the country, and the need of the letter-writer vanished, but only for a while. In his desire to cater for the public, and to outbid his competitors, the country newspaper revived the London correspondent, but on an extended scale. Now scarce a country newspaper exists that does not avail itself of his services.
But from the general let me descend to the particular. I take up the “Little Pedlington Gazette,” and I find our London Correspondent dates from – Club, St. James’s-square. Of course, in a free country, a man may date his letters where he likes; but I’ll be bound to say the letter is written in a cheap coffee-house in Chancery-lane, and all its contents are culled from that day’s papers. From the letter, however, I am led to suppose that the writer is a member of the House of Commons – that he has the run of the clubs – that royal personages are not unfamiliar with him – and that his intimacy with Lord Derby and Mr. Disraeli is only equalled by his friendship with Palmerston and Russell. Our London Correspondent has very wonderful eyes, and I am sure his ears must be longer than those of any other animal extant. I have tried the Strangers’ Gallery in the House of Commons, and the Speaker’s, and the Reporters’, and in all I have the utmost difficulty in distinguishing emotions which an animated debate must excite in the disputants. The Parliamentary fashion is for a minister, when attacked, to sit with his hat so pulled down over his eyes that you can scarce see a feature. Lord John always sits in this way, so does Lord Palmerston. Our London Correspondent can see what no one else can, and there is not a wince of the galled jade but what is visible to his eyes. He sees Palmerston winking to Sir George Grey, and hears what Cornewall Lewis whispers to Lowe. Lord John does not chuckle quietly to himself, nor Disraeli whisper a sarcasm, nor Walpole meditate a joke, but he hears it. He possesses a rare and blessed gift of ubiquity. At the very time that he is watching these exalted personages in the House, he is chatting confidentially with Hayter in the lobby, or looking in at the Opera, or gossiping behind the scenes with Wright and Paul Bedford, or having a chop at the Garrick with Thackeray, or shining at Lady Plantagenet’s soirée “as a bright particular star.” I wonder the dear creature’s head is not quite turned with the attentions he receives from the nobility, with whom he is as intimate as I with Smiths and Browns. Occasionally I meet with a few London Correspondents imbibing together their frugal half-and-half. It does me good to hear them. It reminds me of Elia’s Captain Jackson’s bacchanalian orgies, where “wine we had none, nor, except on very rare occasions, spirits; but the sensation of wine was there.” Says one to another, “Oh, how did you get on last night?” “Pretty well,” is the reply, “considering there were none but lords there.” Walking in a low neighbourhood, I meet one. I ask after his health. “Devilish seedy,” says he; “up too late last night at Lady – ,” naming one of the proudest members of the proudest aristocracies in the world. Yet are they too uncultivated, and hairy, and outré, to pass with credit in Belgravia. Their literary efforts are not remarkable for polish. They affect a graphic style, and are not sparing in the use of slang. They eschew the classics, and evince but a very superficial knowledge of literature, save that of the current year. They are chiefly strong in politics, and for the actors on that stage have that contempt which familiarity is said to breed, but which, as in the present case, sometimes flourishes without it. They view the busy scene as the gods of Epicurus the follies of mankind. This man is a fool – that a tool. As a rule, officials are run down, and some illustrious-obscure – perhaps the borough representative, if he is on good terms with the paper – is suspiciously and inordinately puffed up. I often wish our London Correspondent would address the House. What a figure he would make on some matter of business, the details of which it is impossible to make interesting! The chances are that he is a Scotchman or an Irishman; that his impudence is merely confined to paper; that he does not shine either at the Temple Forum or Codgers’ Hall. There would be a burst of laughter when he rose. They ought to be more genial critics. I was once in the lobby when our London Correspondent of a paper published in a large manufacturing town came up to me. I had not seen him for some years. After the usual inquiries, said he, “What a capital cutting that was in the – of your book!” “You are mistaken,” said I; “the book was by so and so.” Our friend, very crest-fallen, immediately rushed off without bidding us goodbye. Once upon a time one of them produced a great sensation. Our readers will remember, when Lord John Russell dismissed Lord Palmerston, what a cry was raised about German influences by a certain morning print which seems to exist merely for the sake of disgusting intelligent people with a righteous cause. A German paper was referred to. Well, the gentleman to whom I have alluded was the correspondent of that paper, and one day, in the absence of anything of importance, he had manufactured the article very innocently out of the extraordinary paragraphs in which the morning print aforesaid rejoices, little dreaming, that in Parliament and out his letter would be quoted as evidence of a deeply-laid conspiracy to weaken the power of Lord Palmerston and undermine European liberty.
But I have not yet said who our London Correspondent is. The better class of them I think are Parliamentary reporters. There was a paper published in London kept alive merely by its Paris Correspondent. No other paper had such a correspondent, or abounded in such extraordinary tales and scandal. Yet the correspondent’s plan was very simple. Every new tale and drama which came out in Paris was worked up and sent to London as a reality, that was all. In a less degree our London Correspondent does the same, and in quiet country towns there is great wonder and lifting up of hands, especially if, as was once the case, the wrong letter is sent, and the Tory paper abounds with sneers at Lord Derby and the squirearchy, a contretemps which is avoided if the plan of one London Correspondent be adopted, who supplies thirteen different papers with the same letter at five shillings each – a plan, however, not sanctioned by respectable papers, who pay a good price and get often a good article, and for whose letters, if a little too highly coloured and seasoned, the public taste is more to blame than the newspaper proprietor, or his painstaking London Correspondent. I believe the Mr. Russell, of the Times, was the London Correspondent of one of the Irish papers, and such papers as the Liverpool Albion, Cambridge Independent, and a few others I could name, evidently have for London Correspondents literary men of superior position and respectability.
A SUNDAY AT THE OBELISK
The ancient Athenians were a restless, inquisitive people. At the Areopagus it was that Paul preached of an unknown God. Their popular assemblies met on the Pynx. There mob orators decreed the ostracism of Aristides the Just, and the death of Socrates the Good. In the metropolis we have no Pynx where our demoi are wont to assemble, but we have several spots that serve for popular gatherings on the Sunday – our working-man’s holiday. One of these is the Obelisk at the Surrey end of the Blackfriars-road. The district I allude to is what is called a low neighbourhood. If I am to believe a popular poet, it was there that the Ratcatcher’s daughter lived; and I should imagine, from the seedy, poverty-struck appearance of the place, that her papa’s avocation was not so highly remunerative as some other professions, or he would have pitched his tent, alias become a ten-pound householder, in a more fashionable quarter.
May I attempt a description of the neighbourhood? Circumstances compelled me to be there one Sunday, just as Sabbath bells were ringing for divine service, and the streets were crowded with hungering worshippers. Newman Hall’s place of worship was full, as was St. John’s Episcopal Chapel, and there was between them a Methodist Assembly, which was by no means scanty; yet all round me there were crowds to whom Sunday was no Sunday in a religious sense, to whom it was a mere day of animal rest, who were yet pale and heavy with the previous night’s gin and beer. What were they about? Well, from the Surrey Theatre, all placarded with yellow bills of “The Wife’s Revenge,” to the Elephant and Castle, there was a busy traffic going on, far busier, I should imagine, than on any other morning of the week. Happily the public-houses were shut up, but as I passed the coffee-houses were full of working-men reading newspapers, and an easy shaving shop (I write so from the placard on the door, not from actual experience) seemed doing a tremendous trade. Such shops as were open, and they were numerous, were very full, and opposite such as were shut up, what rows of barrows and costermongers’ carts there were, with all the luxuries of the season, such as Spanish onions, carrots, cabbages, apples and pears, chestnuts, sweetmeats! Did you want your likeness taken, there were artists to do it at sixpence a head. Did you need to buy old clothes, there were Hebrew maidens waiting to sell you them to any amount. One old lady was doing a thriving business in what she denominated as “spiced elder.” Boot-cleaning, though not by Lord Shaftesbury’s boys, was being carried on upon a gigantic scale. Two or three vendors of cheap prints, chiefly fancy subjects – portraits of imaginary females with very red cheeks and large eyes, and gay dresses – collected a great crowd, but I fear one consisting chiefly of admirers rather than purchasers. It may be that the tightness of the money market was felt in the Blackfriars-road, and that the lieges of that district felt that, with the Bank charging even two-and-a-half per cent., something better might be done with the money than investing it in works of art. The butchers’ stalls were well attended, though I regret to say, from casual remarks dropped as I passed by, the keepers of rival establishments were not on such friendly terms as are desirable amongst near neighbours. Women were bringing their husbands’ dinners, children were flocking about in shoals, and sots were yawning, and smoking, and gossiping, waiting for one o’clock and their beer. You ask, was no effort made to get this mass under the influence of religious teaching? Oh, yes; all the morning there was service of some kind of other at the Obelisk. As soon as one man had finished, another had commenced; and at times one man was preaching on one side and another on another. The first man I heard evidently was a working-man; and if to preach all that is required were fluency and a loud voice, evidently he would have done an immense amount of good: but he was too fluent to be clear and correct. I question whether a working-man is a good preacher to a working-man. The chances are, he imitates the worst characteristics of some favourite preacher, instead of translating Bible truth into plain every-day language. My friend had got all the stereotyped phrases, such as the “natural man,” &c., which can only be understood by persons accustomed to religious society, and therefore I did not wonder when I found he had but some twenty or thirty to hear him. To him succeeded, I regret to say, two men in seedy black, with dirty white chokers, and cadaverous faces, whose portraits were I to give, you would tell me I was drawing a caricature. I don’t doubt but what they were most respectable, well-meaning men; but I do think it is a mistake to send such out into the highways and byways. The men who go there should be of an engaging aspect, as in the crowd that pass by you may depend upon it there are but too many disposed to sneer at and ridicule religion even when it is placed before them in the most attractive form. How they got on I cannot tell, as just at that time a host of men very earnest in discussion attracted my attention. A teetotaller was hard at work, not repeating a set of phrases parrot-like which he had learnt by heart, but discussing teetotalism with a crowd evidently well ready to go into the whole subject. Short and sharp question and answer were flying fast, and all seemed very good tempered. I don’t know whether my friend succeeded in getting any to sign the pledge, but I could see that he had more success than the preachers, who seemed to me to make no impression whatever. We may depend upon it these discussions are better than speeches or lectures; they require, perhaps, greater gifts, but they will be found to yield a richer harvest. It is in the streets we find the victims, and in the streets we must seek to save them. You would not get these loungers round the Obelisk to take the trouble to come to a temperance lecture, but they, well fortified in their prejudices as established truths, were not unwilling to engage in a discussion in which they found themselves worsted. The temperance orator had an advantage over the divine. The latter could only speak of a future joy or sorrow, the former could tell the sot how much better he would have been, how much fresher he would have felt, how much more money he would have had in his pocket, if he had kept sober last night; and there stood the sot, all dirty and stupid, yet repentant, and half influenced by the orator to become a sober man himself. Such teaching is good in such places; but the speakers must be prepared to rough it – to give and take, to be ready in repartee, to be abundant in anecdote and illustration. They must have pliant tongues and good voices, or they may find their congregation moving off to listen to a social orator over the way; or, what is worse still, remaining to confute, and jeer, and laugh.
