But it brought with curious unexpectedness a scene not without pathos and significance. In the midst of the thrust and ripost of Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Chamberlain, a strange and yet familiar voice was heard to shout out, "They put all the blame on Parnell because he is dead." It was a startling--even an embarrassing interruption. The memory of Parnell is still dear to the vast majority of the old comrades who were compelled to separate themselves from him in the Great Irish Disruption. At the time when Mr. Gladstone made the speech quoted, Mr. Parnell was the loved leader of the whole Irish people and a united Irish party; and the speech was made at a moment particularly solemn and glorious in the strange life and career of Parnell. The great controversy between the English and the Irish leader, which Mr. Chamberlain had raked up from the almost forgotten past, took place at the moment when Mr. Parnell had gone from town to town and county to county in Ireland, in the midst of vast and enthusiastic receptions--imperial demonstrations--with salvoes of cheers, enthusiasm, and auroral hope such as have taken place so often in Irish history on the eve of some mighty victory or hideous disaster. And, then, immediately after came Parnell's imprisonment, which he bore so well--the suppression of the National Land League, and the era of unchecked and ferocious coercion in which the good intentions and kindly feelings of Mr. Forster finally were buried. To separate themselves from Mr. Parnell at that great moment in his and their life, was a thing which none of Parnell's old comrades could do; and when this startling interruption came, it was the spoken utterance of many of their thoughts brought back by Mr. Chamberlain's venomous tongue in painful reverie over a glorious but dead moment, and a tragically wrecked and superb career.
There was a painful pause, and then came, however, an antidote. It was not in the Irish Nationalist party--it was not in even his own colleagues in the small band of Parnell's supporters, that Mr. Redmond's observation found a responsive echo. A tempest of cheers broke forth from the Tory Benches--from the backers of the _Times_ and the supporters of Piggott; and to add to the painful and almost hideous irony of the situation, Mr. Chamberlain made unctuous profession of sympathy with the vindication of Parnell's memory. To those who know that of all the fierce animosities and contempts of Parnell, Mr. Chamberlain's was perhaps the fiercest--to those who remember that strange and almost awful scene when Mr. Parnell--in one of those outbursts of concentrated rage which it was almost appalling to witness--turned and rent Mr. Chamberlain as first false to his colleagues and then false to Parnell himself--to those who remembered that deadly pallor that made even more ghastly the ordinarily pale cheek of Mr. Chamberlain beneath this withering attack--to those, I say, who remembered all this, nothing could be more grotesque than Mr. Chamberlain shedding a pious tear over Parnell's grave.