THE "NOBLE SAVAGE."
13ERNAL OSBORNE has revenged the wrongs of LVI many a Member on whom the present First Commis- sioner of Works has ruthlessly trampled, by dubbing Mr. Ayrton the "noble savage," and declaring him to be
As free as Nature first made Man, When wild in woods the noble savage ran."
Nor was the sarcasm the less effective because it was delivered upon Mr. Ayrton in the course of a speech which supported him against the censure of Mr. Cowper-Temple. But heartily as the House appreciated Mr. Osborne's thrust, it was, like most of his thrusts, a somewhat random one, made on rather a superficial acquaintance with Mr. Ayrton's political cha- racter. No Member of the House of Commons has, strictly speaking, less of the life of the "noble savage" in him than the First Commissioner of Works. His love of excruciation is not savagery, but a kind of political gourmandise of an in- tensely complex type ; and as for the "nobility" of the ideal savage,—the love of "wild justice," the fortitude or indiffer- ence to pain, the taciturnity, the austere equanimity of that partly fictitious personage,—Mr. Ayrton has never evinced a sign of any such attribute. There is no quality more clearly the product of what we are pleased to term civilization, than that morbid propensity for always dropping corrosive-sublimate in his talk, which has done so much to make Mr. Ayrton the most unpopular man in the House of Commons. Mr. Ayrton, as we must candidly own, is, in this respect, completely impartial. He does not, like the "noble savage," display special ingenuities in torturing his ene- mies. Revenge is not the exciting principle of his secretion of venom. Fear is not, as in the case of the electric eel, the irri- tant which stimulates him to the discharge of his paralyzing shocks. On the contrary, he stings solely for the same kind of reason for which a child skips or a poet sings,—because Nature —no doubt an artificial nature, but still his nature—will have it so. Hehas never been accustomed to spare any one who came in his way,—from the Queen to the working-man, —and, of course, Members of Parliament who put questions to the First Commissioner. of Works, and eminent architects employed by the Board of Works, cannot expect to escape Mr. Ayrton's functional discharges of sarcasm, when he bestows them with such grand impartiality on all created beings besides. He severely snubbed the Queen for her want of sympathy with "the living," on occasion of the Reform Demonstra- tion in December, 1866; but he seized the same oppor- tunity for a balancing sneer at the people who had made that demonstration, remarking that the vast number who had stayed away had given a striking proof of their "love of in- dustry and home." If he delights in rending the City Corpo- rations, and depositing the contents of his little poison-bags in the sleek cellular tissue of an otherwise comfortable Alderman, he delights no less in sending shooting pains through eminent Artists and Architects, and in blistering, if that be possible, the sublime self-satisfaction of Lord Elcho. If it be any satisfaction to Mr. E. Barry that he suffers with humanity at large, so far as humanity at large has points of contact with the career of Mr. Ayrton, he may be perfectly satisfied that it is so, and that had Sir Christopher Wren or Michael Angelo been appointed by Parliament to superintend the ornamenta- tion of Sb. Stephen's, instead of himself, Sir Christopher Wren • or Michael Angelo would have received precisely the same sort of letters as those which have gained for Mr. Ayrton the inaccurate appellation of the Noble Savage.' It is only fair to Mr. Ayrton to observe, that as far as we can judge, he never shows a sign of a vindictive nature. He evinces no irrita- tion at attack, and never resents an injury at all more bitterly than he does a mistake or a difference of opinion. It is his instinct to give pain, but not at all more so when he is suffering himself, if he does suffer, than when he is master of the situation. As far as our observation goes, there is no sort of preference in Mr. Ayrton for one kind of victim over another. All is grist which comes to his mill, from the Queen, the nobility, and the House of Commons—which he was once pleased to taunt with its "uxoriousness)" for eschew- ing late debates—down to the market-gardener and the work- ing-man. Parliament would be wise to regard him—not as a 'noble savage,' for a noble savage at least distinguishes be- tween enemies and friends, and only scalps the former, but as a mere incarnation of one of the involuntary plagues of political life, a species of political rheumatism or neuralgia, such as the poet wrote of,— "‘ This racks the joints, this fires the veins,
That every labouring sinew strains,"
—and with which no one thinks of getting angry, however much he may suffer. Mr. Ayrton may be a public calamity ; but really there is nothing at all more personal about his attacks' than about the attentions of a gnat or a hornet, whose stings, painful as they are, no one thinks of regarding as in any special measure uncomplimentary to himself. The First Commis- sioner of Works is as free from petty resentments as an epidemic or a blight. He falls on all who come in his line of passage, from the king to the peasant, with just as little respect of persons as Care or Death.
The true question for the House of Commons is not whether the First Commissioner of Works is a moral blister to the House, but whether it is desirable that, being what he is, they should put forth a little fortitude, and bear him. For this there may be two reasons,—the possible advantages of his rule at the Board of Works, and the intrinsic advantages in a time of political effeminacy of having a little scope for forti- tude and self-control. As to the former reason, there is evi- dence, we think, that Mr. Ayrton is likely to introduce a kind of reform into the Board of Works which is greatly for the public benefit, but which no man with much tenderness for the artistic part of his work and the feelings of the former employes, would have been likely to introduce. The appoint- ment of Captain Galton as Comptroller of the building depart- ment and financial superintendent of all the building accounts, is probably a great reform ; nor does it at all necessarily imply that Art will be neglected, as Art, by the Department in future. No doubt, while Mr. Ayrton is at the head, who piques himself on knowing nothing at all about Art, and hardly believing that anything at all on that subject is knowable, there is more than danger, something like a moral certainty, that considerations touching the splen- dour and ornamentation of the metropolis will be altogether passed by. But that is not at all the necessary effect of the system. Captain Galton may, under milder regimes, be aided by counsellors who do not hesitate to advise pecuniary sacrifices for the sake of the mere embellishment of London ; and these sacrifices will be the smaller, and the effect of them all the greater, for Captain Galton's responsible superintendence. Still the system probably needs introducing by such a man as Mr. Ayrton, who is as impervious to hostile criticism as to friendly solicitation. When the new system is well inaugu- rated, it will be time to soften its rigours by finding a com- paratively genial successor to Mr. Ayrton ; and who would not seem comparatively genial after Mr. Ayrton But in the next place, is not a chastening of this kind, which no one for the time can possibly consider joyous, but only grievous, a really capital discipline for our somewhat enervated House of Commons and British public ? There are times, we do not say when a man should wear a hair shirt simply to torture himself, but when, if he happens for other reasons to need a hair shirt, it should be rather a motive in its favour than against it that it is a constant irritation to his skin. The temper of the House of Commons is becoming so relaxed, that it tolerates nothing but 'conciliatory' manners, as they are called. Something of irritable pride and self-importance is often the result of a great popular change in public bodies. The other day a Member actually addressed a question to the Prime Minister concerning the ornamen- tation of the House of Commons, on the express ground that Mr. Ayrton's scornfulness in answering questions was unendurable, while another went into a sulk because the question he had put to a Cabinet Minister was an- swered by the Secretary of the Treasury ! An honourable Member so effeminate as this should call to mind the value attached by Socrates to the temper of Xanthippe, as a per- petual discipline in self-control. Is there not such a virtue also even for public bodies? Is it well for a public body, which ought to practise fortitude and long-suffering on the- largest scale in dealing with the perpetual disappointments and crosses of the Irish question, or the question even of Pauperism in England, to despise all opportunities of prac- tising self-control in its personal relations with officials ? Mr. Ayrton is an admirable daily opportunity of this kind on a small scale. He tries the temper of some Members nearly every day by positive wounds. He tries the nerves of all by a style and bearing which may be said to be a political equi- valent to the noise made by cruel schoolboys with their slate-pencils on their slates, to make "the blood run cold."' And who can be a better drill-serjeant for them in those small exercises of forbearance and self-restraint which, by frequent reiteration, may fit them to bear calmly with great political ingmtitudes and abrupt political jars, than Mr. Ayrton ?
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