Now what was it he had said in that strange tongue to achieve his result so well?
... Certainly the management of men is an art; and there are in it two factors which are nearly always set in conflict, although they ought to be harmonised. Indeed, one of them is nearly always thrust forward to the exclusion of the other: from which error in proportion civic disasters are born. These two factors in government are the direction of many and the interpretation of many. A number of men, a number too large to be appealed to individually (and the number gets too large after half a dozen or so), must be controlled and directed by him who governs, otherwise there is chaos. But it is only so controlled and directed by an interpretation of, and even a sort of subservience to, the common mind. Now control without understanding breaks a community, and sympathy without control dissolves it.
This man had succeeded, it seemed, with the mob at the wharf from which I had just sailed. His success set me thinking upon the matter of the management of men, the control of numbers: speakership, chairmanship, captaincy, and all the rest.
There is one element in the affair which is all-important, and the possession of which is a gift, like the gift of verse or ‘eye’ in a sport. It is not to be prayed for. It is not to be acquired. It is granted by the unseen powers. This element is that which you have in the good management of a pack of hounds, or in any other kind of good generalship. It consists in a mixture of detailed and general appreciation; for when those two faculties are combined—the faculty of seeing the individual, the faculty of seeing the whole—you have the genius of the human helmsman; as rare a sort of genius as there is among men.
A man can only talk of the things he himself has known, and I myself have only seen one example of this inspiration in its perfection. It was (I regret to say) an experience of the House of Commons, a nasty place in which to find anything remarkable. There I saw the Speaker of my time (Mr. Lowther, as he then was) exercising the art through two Parliaments with a perfection which I had thought impossible, and which moved me, at the watching of it, as much as I am moved by great lines of Milton or Racine, or the harmonies of certain musics.
Consider what the business was! He had before him in an ill-lit, dull, hideous oblong room six hundred men, dully ranged in ten or a dozen dull rows; half to his left, half to his right. In that dull air of futile, vulgar, and unreal verbiage there could arise, in a moment, absurdly acrid emotions. These had to be tamed and resolved whenever they should bubble up like gas from a marsh. It was a necessity to the dull life of the place, if it were to crawl along at all, that such accidents should not wholly destroy its dull function.
This great body of men would dwindle in a moment to a dozen or less—a dozen who only remained for the chance of speaking, and of whom each individual would jump up like a jack-in-the-box the very instant the last mouther had sat down. It would swell again to a full complement, a crowded House, with equal rapidity.
The man managing that assembly had to remember each man by name. Those faces, which would, for any of _us_, have become mere blobs of white within half an hour of fatigued observation, had to be recognised as individuals. The relations of each with all had to be remembered; the nature of the matter under debate, the right of one man, through experience of office or of personal work, to be remembered; the claim of another man (suffering some unjust failure) to be recognised; the danger of a third who was repetitive; of a fourth who was mad. At the same time, the very subtle distinctions between the lesser and the greater claim to speak, the length of the debate, even the excessive tedium of each speaker had to be weighed. On the top of all that, it had to be remembered of what importance was each discussion (in so far as you can call any of them important—but they seem absurdly important to the participants). On the top of all that, again, was the general arrangement of the debate suggested by the Whips and in possession of the Chair.
Now on all this incredibly complicated task, involving, I suppose, some hundreds of interior decisions during the day, Mr. Lowther never once failed. The House of his time was an instrument over which he had complete mastery through a complete comprehension and a rapidity of just decision which I have never seen equalled in any field of command.
We have a tendency to-day to use words too strong for the occasion, and the word genius is a very strong word; but I have no more doubt that Mr. Lowther, as I watched him day after day, displayed genius than I have a doubt that Mozart in music, or Houdon in sculpture, had genius. It was amazing, it was satisfactory, it was continuous.
There was an old squire with whom I often dined in those years, and who had great knowledge of men and things in that club, still aristocratic, which England then still was. Not long after my first election to the august Assembly, I told him with enthusiasm at his own table what my judgment was of this achievement. He answered me, wearily, ‘Oh! I have heard that said of every Speaker since I can remember!’ To which I re-answered, ‘Yes; but this time they are right.’
Which reminds me of how a modern poet, spared to middle age in spite of the wrath of God, famous for that he could neither scan nor rhyme—let alone think or feel—once made a speech in which he carefully set out those things which had been said against Swinburne when first that meteor flamed across the heaven of English verse. The modern poet next read to this assembly the things that had been written against himself when he first blurred into the murk of our evening. He triumphantly concluded: ‘What was said against Swinburne they have said against me!’ Then there arose an aged writer of reviews, a man whose hair, whose voice, and whose aura were all three of delicate silver. He said: ‘Yes! But in what they said of him they were wrong; in what they said of you, they were right.’
This was not an epigram, it was a paving-stone; and it reminded me of that line in the epic of Roncesvalles, ‘Christians are right and pagans are wrong.’
So in the matter of Speakers. I have seen the action of four; but of none would I say even that they had talent, saving in this case alone, where I have used another word....
So we drifted down the narrow entry and out into the open sea; and all that afternoon, under a wind now slightly lifting, now falling again, we crept eastward and a little south, making more way as the sun declined, because the wind was shifting westward on to our quarter; and of that I was glad, for I desired to look into Port Madoc, which I had not seen since I was a child. I had vivid memories of it during a wonderful journey overshadowed by that air wherewith the Creator blesses childhood, lending to everything an active flavour of the divine; which is in three things, Clarity, Magnitude, and Multiplicity of strong emotion.
For the divine reveals itself in a special multiplicity, in an infinite variety. All that there is in colour and in music, and in line and in affection, and to these added other raptures innumerable, such as we know not of nor can conceive—that is to be at last our beatitude: that is the fullness of being. In childhood our innocence permits us some little glimpse of such things; but with the passage of the years they are lost altogether. The light in the lantern goes out, and the living thing within us fails, and is stupefied, and dies.
So Musset and old Pythagoras and Mr. Tupper. If any man doubts the Fall of Man (and I see from the papers that two belated bishops and one dean are still shaky on it, through some Victorian influence upon their minds, not only of bones but of chipped stones), let him consider this decay of heaven within ourselves as the maturity of our manhood develops. The more we are of this world and the more we know of it, the further are we drifting from the shores of the Blessed. Which shores also the poet had in mind when he wrote, sang, crooned, or what not:
‘Sing to me of the islands, oh, Daughter of Cahoolin, sing, Sing to me of the West, Sing to me of the girth loosened and the lax harpstring And of rest.
‘Beyond the skerries and beyond the outer water, There lies the land. Sing to me of the islands, oh, Daughter of Cahoolin, oh, High King’s Daughter, And of the over-strand.
‘I desire to be with Brandan and his companions, in the quiet places And to drink of their spring. Sing to me of the islands, oh, Daughter of Cahoolin, and of the blessed faces. Daughter of Cahoolin, sing.’
But if you tell me that that is not the way to spell ‘Cuchulin,’ I have two answers, each of them stronger than Hercules.
The first is that the poet spelt it as he felt inclined—that is, by ear; for poets excel not, as is commonly believed, in speech but in ears; as you may see by their profiles or sidehead views; and as it is his spelling your action lies against him, not me.