PORTRAITS OF THE NINETIES

PORTRAITS OF THE SIXTIES

By Justin McCarthy.

With portrait Illustrations.

PORTRAITS OF THE SEVENTIES

By the Rt. Hon. G. W. E. Russell.

With portrait Illustrations.

PORTRAITS OF THE EIGHTIES

By Horace G. Hutchinson.

With portrait Illustrations.

T. Fisher Unwin, Ltd., London.

W. E. GLADSTONE.

[Frontispiece

(From a portrait by J. McLure Hamilton.)

PORTRAITS OF
THE NINETIES

By
E. T. RAYMOND

WITH 20 ILLUSTRATIONS

T. FISHER UNWIN, LTD.
LONDON: ADELPHI TERRACE

All rights reserved

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

PORTRAITS OF THE NINETIES

CHAPTER I
THE NINETIES

The late Mr. Justin McCarthy’s vivid Portraits of the Sixties, the late Mr. George Russell’s admirable volume dealing with the men and women of the Seventies, and Mr. Horace Hutchinson’s more recent Portraits of the Eighties form together an invaluable biographical guide to a period second in interest to none in modern history. It is the business of a less distinguished pen to attempt to give some account of leading figures during the last years of the century and of the reign of Queen Victoria.

The task is one to be approached with equal interest and trepidation. With interest, because what men thought and did in the Nineties—still more what they neglected to do and forgot to think—is still powerful to-day; what we are and suffer was in the main decided for us a quarter of a century ago. With trepidation, because the time is distant enough for the reader to demand something more than a mere essay in instantaneous photography, with its mad foreshortenings and irrelevant emphasis; while it is also near enough for errors to be exposed by competent witnesses—people who were behind the scenes at the performance, while the writer was only one of the gallery.

It requires no great courage to attempt an “appreciation” of anybody, from Homer to Addison, who has long been dead. For if one knows very little about such people, there is really very little to be known—little, that is, to tell us the very men they were. The great figures of the past are either phantoms or statues, things of mist or things of stone, without form or with nothing but form. Of a phantom there can be any view; of a statue there can be essentially but one; the only possible diversity is attained by throwing coloured lights on it, as they do on stage groups. Thus, when literary men say that the time has not yet arrived for a “final estimate” of this person or that, they do not mean that a true estimate may be formed hereafter. All they mean is that any present estimate is liable to effective contradiction. When effective contradiction becomes by the nature of things impossible, we have not necessarily attained truth, but we have achieved what is called “historical perspective.”

“Drastic measures,” said the schoolboy in Vice Versa, “is Latin for a whopping.” “Historical perspective” means immunity from being “whopped” for an unlucky guess. The learned professor to whom the mind of his own butler is probably a dark mystery discourses confidently about the secret motives of Tiglath Pilezer or Oliver Cromwell, not because he knows, but because he knows nobody else knows. An anti-authoritarian like Mr. Wells will traverse the said professor’s view (if he happens not to like it) with equal decision and for the same reason. Everybody may declare that the professor is right and Mr. Wells wrong. Nobody can prove it.

The case is different when a letter to The Times, stating an indisputable but hitherto unpublished fact, may make nonsense of the most ingenious deductions, or when (as in the case of Lord Beaconsfield) light is suddenly thrown on a quite unsuspected corner of some great man’s character. The writer is not foolish enough to pretend to “finality,” and will not be greatly perturbed if he is accused of doing less or more than justice to individuals. In some sense the ancients were right in holding that the real purpose of biography was less truth than edification. For the “verdict of history” is a futility when considered in relation to the individual arraigned before its bar; when we can be sure of doing perfect justice in the simplest police case we may begin to talk about the infallibility of a tribunal of pedants. The chief usefulness of such a verdict is that of a sign-post to the living; and for such purpose the rough method of the ancients, who put a halo round one man’s head and hung another in chains by the roadside, was perhaps more effective than the modern way of submitting all to the same sort of post-mortem examination. Carry analysis to the length of an autopsy, and hero and scoundrel look very much alike.

The writer’s view, it may be repeated, is rather that of the gallery than the green-room. It is least of all that of any individual player’s tea-party. The gallery has its defects. Attention is diverted by the crackers of nuts and suckers of oranges. The actors appear quaintly foreshortened, and throw puzzling shadows. The finer by-play sometimes passes unnoticed, or its meaning is not rightly apprehended. There is a tendency, perhaps, to think the man who mouths his part the best actor. But on the whole the gallery knows a good play when it sees it, and is more than any other part of the house free from the more cranky prepossessions of the moment. It has no pose. It has little faddism. It has neither the servility nor the malice of the deadhead. It has paid honest money, and wants honest money’s worth, is unaffectedly pleased when it gets it, and frankly angry if it doesn’t. It may be too generous when it claps, and a trifle unjust when it hisses. But it is honest in both moods.

If the writer may sometimes avail himself of the privileges of the gallery to deal frankly with the eminent, he has certainly no bias against the Nineties. He recalls them as, on the whole, a golden age. The sun shone brighter in those days. The east wind was less bitter. The women were certainly prettier and (perhaps) more modest; the steaks were juicier; the landladies were a kindlier race. There was a zest and flavour in life lacking to-day. Youth was emancipated from the harsher kind of parental control, and had not yet found a stern step-father in the State. The world was all before it where to choose, and the future was veiled in a rose-coloured mist. If some well-meaning elder suggested that one might (by working really hard) end by being Attorney-General, or even editor of The Times, one said the right thing aloud, but inwardly murmured, “Ambition should be made of jollier stuff.” Those were, in short, the days when for men now middle-aged everything was possible, except failure and death: unthinkable things notoriously invented by old fogies to depress the spirits of immortal youth.

One other thing was “unthinkable,” and that was war. A “sort of war” was, of course, familiar to the early Nineties; the public then rather enjoyed seeing the bombardment of Alexandria on the diorama (perhaps it is necessary to explain that the diorama was “the pictures” of that less advanced epoch). It relished small frontier campaigns. It was overjoyed with things like the smashing of Lobengula and the Jameson Raid. The Liberal Speaker—the Nation of those days—even thought it necessary to reprove the taste which delighted in pictures and descriptions of savage warfare; it talked about a “recrudescence of barbarism.” But of war in the real sense nobody dreamed.

Why should there be war? We had enough, and to spare, of the earth’s surface: some even rather objected to the addition of the small black baby of Uganda to our enormous family. We were willing to help Germany, as one of the Teutonic family, to help herself to other people’s belongings; as for France, the appetite of that “dying nation,” its petulance over various more or less important matters—Egypt, Siam, Newfoundland, and the like—was certainly annoying, but war with France, as with anybody else, was—well, “unthinkable.” The sound of great guns in the Eastern seas, proclaiming the advent of a Pagan Great Power, broke faintly on English ears, but few heeded the portent. One rather wooden and rigid race had smashed another race even more rigid and wooden, and had done it in a style suggestive of Western efficiency. But that was all. There might be some little stir in the Chancelleries. But no unofficial English head worried itself about a “Far Eastern question,” even after Japan had been bundled out of Port Arthur by a combination of European Powers, until towards the very end of the century.

Then, indeed, the clash of war, East, West, and South—in China, in the Philippines, in the Gulf of Mexico, in the Sudan, and in South Africa—might well have suggested some fear of the general toppling over which was to come. But each incident was treated as a thing by itself; of the way the world was going, of the real forces at work, the Nineties had little conception. Rome under the Antonines was not more sure of the impossibility of any fundamental change.

It is not altogether fanciful to connect this insensibility, this half-pathetic faith that whatever was very dull must necessarily be very solid and permanent, with the long reigns of certain European monarchs and the extended lives of many public men. Few remembered any head of the English State but Queen Victoria, or any Austrian Kaiser but Francis Joseph. William I was only lately dead; it was but yesterday that the word of Bismarck stood against the world, as it had done for a generation. Mr. Gladstone was still the first figure in British politics till nearly the middle of the Nineties: Lord Salisbury’s record extended back to the dim days of Palmerston; even the Pope seemed immortal. Huxley and Tyndal were survivals of an earlier age; the old fairy tales of science had grown common-place, and the newer wonders were still to come; though there were stirrings in letters and art, on the whole it was still the reign of the old men.

Yet this appearance of changelessness was largely deceptive. The Nineties were essentially a time of transition. They resembled that point in the life of a caterpillar when a change of skin is almost due. The thing is at once lethargic and uneasy; its qualms and its inertia alike suggest coming dissolution. But beneath its rusty coat the essential activities are going on, and presently the old constrictive covering will split, and a quite new-looking creature emerge. What may be called a sort of fatigued shabbiness was observable in the upper strata of society during the Nineties. The split in the caterpillar’s coat had begun, but had not proceeded far; patches of dead skin, of skin not quite dead, and of new skin thrusting its way through the ancient envelope gave a mottled and unsatisfactory appearance. The old society was visibly finishing; the new society had only arrived in spots; and each was not quite sure of itself. The fount of honour, which now plays steadily on new wealth, spirted fitfully after the manner of a “lady-teaser” at a fair. Sometimes the stream hit a Cunliffe-Lister, sometimes a Thomas Lipton. The ancient gentility of the squires still stuck stolidly to the land, but there was a certain restlessness in the younger generation, and when an old man died an old house often changed hands, and a mysterious somebody from the city arrived who filled the place with troops of week-end friends and gave the impression that he did not much care whether “the county” called or not.

In politics landed Toryism was already giving way to the vigorous urban and suburban varieties; its leaders were mostly stricken in years, and its cadets seemed to lack either ability or ambition. The great entertainers of the old type carried on the tradition with a massive resolution, but, as it seemed, with little conviction; it was the atmosphere of the epilogue, not even of the last act. For over all the older magnificence hung the challenge of the new millionaires who had captured Park Lane. The Embankment was beginning to be what it is now—a via dolorosa, sacred to the splendid equipages of men equally great in the City and the West. The old aristocracy seemed conscious that the new pace would kill—the pace of the petrol age just then opening up. They were right. The twentieth century had not much more than dawned before the old caterpillar skin definitely gave way, and something quite new appeared, vigorous and symmetrical, with a keen appetite and a sure objective: the aristocracy of what may be called dynamic wealth, the wealth that reproduces itself by a sort of geometrical progression.

Of this conquest of the old by the new which was proceeding in the Nineties, the closest observer was the working-class politician. While the rest were assuming the permanence of the old conditions, while Liberalism boasted itself Gladstonian, and Conservatism was still Disraelian, Labour sent Mr. Keir Hardie to the House of Commons. It had guessed rightly the main thing that had happened, however mistaken it might be on details. Up to the Nineties Labour was sicklied o’er with the pale cast of the thought of John Stuart Mill. In the Nineties it turned contemptuously away from every “’ism” that lay between Mr. Gladstone’s position and Mr. Bradlaugh’s. It was now ready to use Liberalism, but for Liberalism, in another sense, it had no use; it was, if such a word can be used where there was no sort of regard, more friendly to the squire than to the rich Radical, but only because in its view the squire did not matter much, and the great Radical did. Since the Nineties Labour has changed less than any party. Its older leaders can—and very often do—make, with applause, the same speeches to-day that struck audiences with a sense of novelty just after the setting up of that great landmark in industrial history—the London dockers’ strike.

The middle classes went on as in the days of Noë. They ate, drank, and sang “Ta-ra-ra-boom-deay.” For them there never was, and there probably never will be, a period like the Nineties. It was in many ways not a healthy period economically; the school of economic thought which was even then in the making deplored its “deleterious cheapness.” Certainly everything was cheap except Consols and Home rails, and human flesh and blood were as cheap as anything. It was a dismal equation the hopelessly (or even hopefully) poor had to work out in terms of pieces of silver and hours of labour. And the hopeful were few; the poor man could, as a rule, see nothing before him but bare subsistence. But those who had money, even a very little, could buy much with it; and it was possible to live a quite liberal life on less than the wages of a dustman to-day.

For the Londoner especially life went very well then. He suffered from the still undiminished reign of fog and the tall hat. But otherwise his lot was happy. Town was quieter, but just as amusing as it is now, less pretentious, and far less wearing; it had lost both the dismalness and the crude rowdiness of an earlier period, and had not yet developed the raucous note of the modern city. One rumbled along comfortably on a horse-omnibus, or jingled merrily in a hansom, and was moderately sure of getting somewhere. Superficially everything was slower than now; practically it was much the same. For if the Underground steam train was a trifle more leisurely, there was never a breakdown; and if the horse-omnibus was supposed to take ten minutes to Liverpool Street, it got to Liverpool Street in ten minutes. “An hour from the city” meant an hour; to-day it may mean anything from twenty minutes to a hundred and fifty, according to what the directors think of a Labour leader’s economics or the railway and omnibus men of a Minister’s policy.

Well-fed, addicted to rather more healthy ideas of recreation than his predecessors, amazingly ignorant of the outside world, deplorably educated, but not unintelligent, the average young man of the Nineties was decidedly self-satisfied. He thought himself a credit to his country, and thought his country the only country worth mentioning. Continentals were people who provided us with music-hall entertainers, barbers, bakers, cheap clerks, and picturesque guests to see the recurrent Jubilee, when John Bull, like a hospitable host, bared his big right arm and showed his muscle to the visitors—in the form of a naval display at Spithead and a procession of white, black, and yellow troops through the streets of London. The American hardly counted.

“Ta-ra-ra-boom-deay” was the personal note of the period. “Soldiers of the Queen”—

“When we say that England’s master,

Remember who have made her so”—

represented the national gesture of the time: a time of boundless confidence sustained on a basis in one sense horribly insecure and in another firm as adamant. For, while the shakiness of the material foundation of England’s “mastery” was soon to be exposed, the man of the Nineties was to be otherwise justified in his careless faith. In “reeking tube and iron shard” we were found but second-rate; it was the qualities the Nineties rather went out of their way to deride that pulled us through the evil days that followed that singular time. The English character might seem a little vulgarised just then, a little disfigured by superficial cynicism, but it still had its fellow to seek. And it was just the young rowdy of that day, and not the elder who rebuked him, who saved the period in the good opinion of its successors. The older men of the Nineties had more than a touch of Polonius; they were excellent in counsel, but of “most weak hams.” But if it was the autumn of the old excellences, it was the springtide of other things, and the Nineties will always have a claim on the reverence of Englishmen as the breeding and growing time of men as brave as any of our blood.

CHAPTER II
THE EARL OF ROSEBERY

“I would give you a piece of plate if you could get that lad to work; he is one of those who like the palm without the dust.”

So wrote Mr. William Cory, one of the masters at Eton in the Sixties, concerning a favourite pupil, Lord Dalmeny, later to be widely famed as Earl of Rosebery and Prime Minister of England. Mr. Cory seems to have belonged to a rather rare class of men, and a perhaps still rarer class of schoolmasters: those who really like boys and enjoy themselves in very young society. Others besides Bacon have deemed it a not quite wholesome taste; at any rate there is always a danger attaching to it—one may develop into a hero-worshipper of a rather pitiable kind. Worse still, one may get accustomed to the most sickly kind of incense. When Paul is in his proper position at the feet of Gamaliel it is good for Paul, but less certainly good for Gamaliel. When Gamaliel sits at the feet of Paul it is good for neither. So when the excellent Cory talks with reverent enthusiasm about the talented youth of the upper classes a normal man is conscious of a certain impatience. Young Dalmeny seems to have overpowered him. He is “surely the wisest boy that ever lived.” His Latin verses are not as other boys’. He writes “flowing, simple, dignified Latin,” “enjoys the old poetry as much as the modern,” and is (at fifteen or a little more) “a strong but wise admirer of both Napoleons.” “I am doing all I can,” says Mr. Cory, “to make him a scholar; anyhow, he will be an orator, and, if not a poet, such a man as poets delight in.”

All this is most reminiscent of the schoolboys of Thackeray, with their prize-poem inspirations, their Jacobite or Jacobin enthusiasms, and their quaint affectations of profundity. But Mr. Cory, with all his affectionate partiality for the young Scottish aristocrat, is still sagacious. He puts his finger unerringly on the weak spot. The mature Lord Rosebery, of course, did not get what the young Lord Dalmeny wanted. He just missed the palm, and he got a great deal of the dust. But the desire to have the best of all worlds, the love of facile success, the resentment of pain, trouble, and ingratitude, no doubt explain his strange and splendid but rather maimed career. Mr. Gladstone described him, while he was still young, as “the man of the future.” Judges scarcely less competent than Mr. Gladstone used Mr. Gladstone’s words when he had advanced well into later middle life.

The mistake was natural enough; there is hardly anything that Lord Rosebery might not have been, with good luck. But bad luck was his almost from the cradle. He had scarcely known his father when death left only a very old man’s life between him and a Scottish Earldom, an English Barony, half a dozen minor hereditary distinctions, a large rent-roll, and a goodly amount of cash. A few years later his mother married again; she was a daughter of the house of Stanhope, a Court beauty, and a woman of some intellectual distinction, to whom the young Dalmeny no doubt owed much of his wit, as well as the almost girlish good looks which were his in early life. There were literary elements on both sides of his ancestry. The Primroses of Jacobean days had produced preachers and writers of some eminence, and a didactic turn was natural in the family. Lord Rosebery’s father, for example, was author of a dissertation on the excellence of physical exercise and its neglect by the middle classes of these islands; he acutely pointed out that the poor cultivated their muscles at work, and the rich in sport, but the intervening order simply neglected its physique, being engaged from morning till night in making a living—all of which was clearly most unintelligent on the part of the intervening order. The son was destined to come closely enough in touch with actuality to avoid such artlessness. Nevertheless some trace of the parental self-satisfaction was a constant in Lord Rosebery’s character. He could never get out of his head the notion of his superiority to all common men in his capacity of aristocrat, and his superiority to nearly all aristocrats in his capacity of a man of intellect.

A favourite with his grandfather, but deprived of the discipline that only a closer relationship can supply, the boy followed much his own bent. He was admired at the preparatory school; he was admired at Eton. We have seen what one of the masters thought of him. With the boys he was not less a hero. For, as the worshipper already quoted remarks, he was “full of fun,” carelessly good at games, carelessly good at lessons, the very type of easy and good-natured mastery that the young aristocrat, with his liking for talent and his contempt for the “swot,” most admires. At Christchurch the same sort of thing began over again. Lord Dalmeny was a more important Arthur Pendennis, with tastes as catholic and far ampler means of indulging them. He liked horseflesh, he liked fine cookery and noble vintages, he liked old editions, he liked being heir to an Earldom, he liked equally the reputation of being superior to all that. One of the last lordly undergraduates to wear a “tuft,” he probably wore it with outward disrespect and secret conviction; it is at least recorded that he wore it once when it was not actually needed or permissible. But, though the discipline of Christchurch was mild and partial, it was still discipline. Lord Dalmeny entertained decided views as to the propriety of an undergraduate riding steeplechasers. The Authorities took up a peremptorily adverse attitude; it was not a case for compromise, and Lord Dalmeny left without taking his degree. Of such honours, indeed, he had small need. He had hardly attained his majority when his grandfather’s death made him a Peer and one of the most eligible bachelors of the moment. All the worlds, political, social, and literary, were before him where to choose.

At Eton he is said to have declared to a chum his three great ambitions—to marry a great heiress, to win the Derby, and to become Prime Minister. The first aim was accomplished early and happily by his Rothschild marriage. The fulfilment of the second arrived to him, a joy but perhaps not a blessing, when the third prize had at last come within his grasp. The story may not be true. But one feels it should be true, since it so well illustrates the fatal weakness of a very considerable man. “You fight too scattering,” said Mark Twain, in criticism of the conduct of an American general’s Indian campaign. Lord Rosebery’s defect was that he always “fought too scattering.” In natural abilities he was certainly behind no man of his time. In many ways he had a quite un-English logicality and clearness of perception. Time and time again, throughout his long career, he has (when not affected by personal or class interest) put his finger on the spot when others were fumbling about it. But he has always been very English indeed in carrying to extreme that national weakness for wanting to have one’s cake and eat it. His non-political speeches teem with enthusiasms for incompatible things; he really seems to have persuaded himself that Cromwell, Burke, and himself were all democrats. It is in his own plan of life, however, that the principle remains most obvious. Lord Rosebery, with half his talent for politics, could have surpassed the record of many men who actually went much further. With his imaginative insight and his noble sense of language he could have reached almost the highest in certain important departments of literature. With a little industry and tenacity he could have been Prime Minister for twenty splendid years instead of for twenty embarrassed months. He could, if he had wished, have wielded a power with his pen superior to that of any ordinary Prime Minister. But he wanted all sorts of things, and in all things he tended to covet the easily gained palm. Capable of great energy on occasion, he never achieved that habit of unresting, unintermitting exertion, of complete devotion to the thing in hand, which is the making of everything really first rate. Everything came easily to him—honours, money, phrases, opinions, positions; the necessity of hard work was never his, the habit of hard work he never quite formed, and there was nobody to form it for him. “Easy come, easy go,” does not apply to material possessions alone, and the testing-time proved how different in quality are the views adopted because one rather likes them from the convictions formed in sore travail of mind and spirit.

In one sense Lord Rosebery was especially a man of the Nineties. His first appearance in politics was a full twenty years before; his return to politics seemed always imminent for twenty years afterwards. But it was in the Nineties that he climbed—or was hoisted—into the highest place, and it was in the Nineties that he fell, with a great and (as was afterwards seen) final ruin. One considerable act had already been played when the decade opened—the act of “Citizen Rosebery,” the first Chairman of the London County Council. For a year or two it seemed that the man of the future had become in very fact the man of the present. With a very splendid enthusiasm Lord Rosebery threw himself into a work which, after all, could not have been highly attractive to a man of his nature—a work involving an immensity of small detail and bringing him into contact with a rather repulsive mass of petty motive and ambition. But to make London, in his own phrase, “not a unit, but a unity,” to place the great amorphous, disconnected capital, with its poverty of public spirit, on something like a level with the great provincial towns, was no mean object, and there was something heroic in the self-denial with which the clever Peer entered on his task of Lord Mayor of Greater London. Here at least the dust was cheerfully borne without thought of the palm. It might be an advantage that the palm was lacking, that civic trouble was not complicated by civic turtle, and that the Earl was not expected to consider his battalions of Moderates and Progressives in terms of prandial amenity and social precedence. But there were other hard things; thus he had to go in person round the music-halls to judge whether Mrs. Ormiston Chant was justified in her extreme view of the demoralising effect of “Zæo’s back” (“Zæo,” be it explained, was a music-hall artist—I think performing at the old Westminster Aquarium—whose scantiness of clothing offended the still vigorous Puritanism of the day). Lord Rosebery was an amateur of the legitimate stage; he has confessed his early extravagance in the matter of theatre stalls. But it is credibly reported by the chroniclers of the time that he appeared “supremely bored” by the indicted performances, and somebody remarked, parodying the old boast of the Aquarium, that at no other place in London could so many sighs be heard.

In a word, Lord Rosebery’s London County Council period was one of really hard work and much self-sacrifice. “But long it could not be.” Apart from the desolating bereavement which Lord Rosebery had suffered, it was not in his nature to be long contented with routine, and especially with routine of this kind. The inadequately “flowing tide” of 1892, indeed, found him far from desirous of any kind of activity. He was shrewd enough to see the full hopelessness of the task before Mr. Gladstone, and only his affection for that statesman—an affection almost filial in its sincerity—impelled him to take control of Foreign Affairs. We know now what could always be inferred—the strong distaste of the Liberal chiefs for attempting, with the feeble instrument the election had given them, a legislative programme which would have taxed the strength of a Cabinet supported by the largest and most homogeneous majority. Lord Rosebery was for declining the responsibility, or at best for only carrying on with routine administration. But when Mr. Gladstone asked, he could not refuse; the bond between the aged leader and the political youth was too strong to be lightly severed. One of Mr. Gladstone’s most amiable characteristics was his sympathy with youthful promise, particularly if allied with patrician blood; he had early marked Lord Rosebery as his ultimate successor; he had lost no opportunity of recommending him to the party; and gratitude, as well as fervent admiration, made the Peer, not generally an easy man to get on with, amenable to the lightest wishes of the great Commoner.

But naturally the sense of personal obligation did not fully supply the want of earnest conviction. It would probably have been better for all parties and interests if Lord Rosebery had adhered to his original desire to stand aside. During the dismal business of “ploughing the sands,” he immersed himself as far as possible in the work of the Foreign Office. He did his duty, of course. He made a great speech in defence of the Home Rule Bill when, having passed the House of Commons, it shivered friendless and naked, like a stranger bird in a coop of vicious young cockerels, in the baleful presence of the Peers. He satirised the ceremoniousness of the killing—all the preliminaries of the bull-fight, the skirmishings and the prickings and the wavings of scarlet cloth, leading up to the moment when the matador, in the person of Lord Salisbury, should deal the fatal thrust. These things, as always, he did amazingly well. But it was evident enough that his heart was little in the farce-tragedy of the Second Home Rule Bill.

When at last Mr. Gladstone took leave of his last Cabinet, and the question of a successor arose, Lord Rosebery’s mind was divided. His ambition bade him grasp the prize now it was within reach, though none was more aware of the tenuity of the gilt film and the indigestibility of the gingerbread. His clear-headed sense told him all the difficulties he would have to encounter—and those not merely matters of personal hostility, of a sneering Labouchere and a disappointed Harcourt, but questions of foreign policy on which it would be difficult to secure an adjustment between the national necessities and the traditions and temper of the Liberal Party. He decided, and there was an immediate revolt against a Peer-Premier, intensified by Lord Rosebery’s declaration in the House of Lords that the assent of England, as the “predominant partner,” was an essential preliminary to Home Rule. Lord Rosebery had some time before confessed to no very definite convictions on the subject of Ireland; he was now savagely assailed as a traitor to the cause of Home Rule. “R. not particularly agitated,” Lord Morley notes in his diary of the time, “though he knew pretty well that he had been indiscreet. ‘I blurted it out,’ he said. ‘For heaven’s sake,’ said I, ‘blurt out what you please about any country in the whole world, civilised or barbarous, except Ireland. Irish affairs are the very last field for that practice.’ R.: ‘You know that you and I have agreed a hundred times that until England agrees H. R. will never pass.’ J. M.: ‘That may be true. The substance of your declaration may be as sound as you please, but not to be said at this delicate moment.’” Morley had to clear up the mess. “It is much easier,” he comments, “to get yourself out of a scrape of this kind than to explain away another man.”

Lord Rosebery has left on record an impressive summary of the miseries of a Liberal Peer-Premier. They are miseries, no doubt, to some extent inherent to the case—at the best his own image of “riding a horse without reins” probably does not overstate them. In his own peculiar circumstances, being hardly on speaking terms with the leader of the House of Commons, they were in every way fatal. Far more than the protests of the Nonconformists, they poisoned Lord Rosebery’s Derby success with Ladas; they endowed him with the tortures of perpetual insomnia; they silvered his hair; lined his full face with wrinkles; and embittered a temper naturally genial, if hasty and imperious. “There are,” he said, in referring to his term of office, “two supreme pleasures in life, the one ideal, the other real. The ideal is when a man receives the seals of office from his Sovereign. The real pleasure comes when he hands them back.”

An experience from which probably no man could have emerged triumphant seems to have destroyed for ever what chance Lord Rosebery might have had of evading the handicap of his temperament. Pessimism now descended on him, and pessimism is always sterile. Henceforward he was the “retired raven croaking on the withered branch”; his merit was that the croak was often excellent sense and music, and always excellent English. In one of Mr. Galsworthy’s plays there is a woman who laments that she is “too fine and not fine enough.” The description seems to fit Lord Rosebery. He talks with a certain disdain of his own business. “Office,” he once said, “is indeed an acquired taste, though by habit persons may learn to relish it, just as men learn to love absinthe, or opium, or cod-liver oil.” He could nourish a fine intellectual contempt for the gawds and toys of politics and society. But beneath this philosophy was a quite keen appetite for worship of any kind. The reverence of the excellent Cory was a luxury to the youth; the man had grown to crave as a necessity a larger applause; and it was the tragedy of his life that, after many years of rather uncritical admiration, there came abruptly a time of harsh appraisement, followed by still worse things—admiration without confidence, regard without loyalty, and finally neglect without oblivion. It was no doubt balm to Lord Rosebery, the self-made outcast from the Liberal fold, to have all eyes on him when he went to Chesterfield to proclaim—what? That efficiency was an excellent thing, and that it would be an excellent thing if England were efficient. It was pleasant, no doubt, always to have the laugh of the stolid Campbell-Bannerman, to pierce him with fine points of wit, to deprive him of the best intellect of the party. But the last laugh was with “C.-B.” When the time came, the man was not Lord Rosebery. “C.-B.” needed not even to use his plain claymore against the dainty rapier of the brilliant lord; trusting, like a rhinoceros, to the natural defence of pachydermity, he simply waddled over the argumentative entanglements prepared for him, and won without fighting.

The real drama of Lord Rosebery, it was then seen, had ended in the Nineties when he laid down the Liberal leadership at Edinburgh in a speech which remains as one of the most curious and mournful monuments of political failure. The rest was merely an epilogue, full of brilliant lines and happy conceits, but adding nothing to the action. There was still to be a new reputation gained, or an old reputation extended—that of Imperial Orator in Chief. For, whatever Lord Rosebery’s deficiencies might be, he united happily, as few men can, all the patriotisms. He loved Scotland, he loved Britain, he loved the Empire; his imagination could concentrate on the homelands as well as expand to the “illimitable veldt.” He did not make the mistake of some Imperialists of thinking merely in terms of mass. He was a Little Englander only in the sense of not conceiving of England—or Scotland—as little; he was an Imperialist only in the sense of wishing to maintain and extend “the greatest secular agency for good known to mankind.” Equidistant from opposite extravagances, there was in all his great Imperial speeches a width, a dignity, and a balance, as well as a fervour of conviction, hardly to be found elsewhere, and this solitary splendour sufficed to outweigh his occasional descent in other directions into what might seem mere whim and petulance. Finally, the noble stoicism, of a finer quality than the pagan variety that belongs to the average modern, with which, in the overcast winter of his life, he has supported public care and crushing private grief, gives a hint of what might have been had the fates been less cruelly kind in his formative years.

When the hardest is said of him, there remains so much to respect and like that he should be safe from those whom he has described as “the body-snatchers of history, who dig up dead reputations for malignant dissection.”

CHAPTER III
CECIL RHODES

The Nineties were the high and palmy days of the great Randlords and the “Kaffir Circus.” The romance of the time was expressed, perhaps better than in the verse of Mr. Kipling, by a song then popular about “sailing away” and “coming back a millionaire.” There was a certain virtue even in sailing away; it denoted contempt for the petty dullness of the British Isles, and to be contemptuous of the home of the race was then the mark of extreme patriotism. But most admirable of all was to come back a millionaire. The notion of snatching rich loot from remote places, and spending it in London, was intensely gratifying, even to people from whom one would naturally look for less simplicity. I remember hearing a certain great Peer of that day confess in public that he saw no future for England except as a sort of lounge and pleasure garden for those who had gathered immense wealth in the outer Empire. The more energetic sons of these islands, he argued, would always tend to sail away, and we might reasonably pray that a fair proportion would come back millionaires. The less enterprising, trained to minister to every want and whim of these conquerors, in the capacity of footmen, gardeners, gamekeepers, entertainers, and artificers in every kind, material and intellectual, would live in docile and contented servitude on wealth created overseas.

C. J. Rhodes

The curious malady of vision, of which this is an extreme example, had many victims in the latest years of the nineteenth century. During the years between the two Jubilees of Queen Victoria the eyes of a great part of the nation were at the ends of the earth. Johannesburg seemed immensely nearer to London than any English town, and the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway sounded more outlandish than the Canadian Pacific. It was the time of Consols at 114, and British pigs at what the dealer would give for them. There was an immense deal of money seeking investment, and unable, in the conditions then existing, to obtain profitable employment at home. So the millions which could not be found to cultivate the land of the Home Counties were poured out like water to finance any plausible African scheme; and our public men seemed to anticipate, not altogether without satisfaction, the time when Kent and Sussex would be to the millionaires of the Empire what Inverness and Sutherlandshire already were to the rich of Great Britain. The gold fever raged strongly. “Deeps” and “Fonteins” were the staple of conversation in all sorts of circles; if one went to the theatre the chances were that the drop-scene would display in illuminated figures the closing prices of Rand securities; and everybody who passed down Park Lane was reminded, by a certain house sprawling with naked nymphs and cupids, that the shortest way from Whitechapel to Mayfair crossed and recrossed the Equator.

It is necessary to recall this atmosphere, in which even the figure of Barney Barnato seemed invested with something of the glamour of Drake and Raleigh, to understand the place occupied by Cecil John Rhodes in the life of the Nineties. If mere swollen gamblers seemed, in the Gibbonian phrase, to “display the awful majesty of the hero,” it was natural that a man very much more than a gambler, a man with a large share of the heroic, should fire the imagination of his contemporaries. Even to-day, when we see Rhodes in a dry light, we are conscious of a quality which gives him admittance to that small and select brotherhood we agree to call great; in the full blaze of his prestige it was indeed a steady eye which could avoid being dazzled by the splendour of him. To the ordinary non-critical man of that time, his very faults, as many now esteem them, contributed to the fascination he exercised. As a nation we may be somewhat prone—though it would seem more prudent to write in the past tense—to the “unctuous rectitude” with which Rhodes sneeringly credited us. But we have always a weakness for the strong man who shows his strength by smashing the Ten Commandments, so long as he satisfies us in his observances of all the taboos and ordinances contained in that greater table of the law which we call “cricket.” Rhodes let it be known that he thought little of the Decalogue. But he succeeded in spreading the faith that he always played “cricket.” Thus a legend arose concerning him which was not quite like the truth. He appeared to his contemporaries as a compound of the qualities we like to think specially English. He was admired for a recklessness which was certainly not part of his character, and for a frankness which did not always distinguish him. In any contest between Rhodes and statesmen at home the public was always ready to assume that the man who talked gallantly about “facing the music” was in some deep sense in the right, even if by technical standards he might be proved to be in the wrong. For this faith in his essential “whiteness” there was, indeed, some justification. He had certainly made his great fortune by much the same methods that other great African fortunes were made. He had had some very queer business and political associates. He had done many things that could be called strong, and perhaps some things that could be called wrong. That his most fervent admirers were ready enough to admit. But they were not disposed to be censorious. Granted that Rhodes was a little cynical, and that in his earlier career there might be little to distinguish him (apart from manners and education) from the gamblers who “made good” in his company, it was still a fact that, arrived at great riches, he sought riches no more.

This combination of great wealth and disinterestedness appealed strongly to the British mind. We have little use for the poor idealist; his ideals, we argue, cannot be very valuable, or how could he remain poor? But we are seldom over-critical of the man who, with great wealth, subordinates money to an idea. “Big ideas,” said Rhodes once to Gordon, “must have big cash behind them.” Rhodes’s countrymen were won by the fact that the big ideas supported by the big cash were not strictly commercial ideas. Had he been a mere company promoter, on however colossal a scale, he could not have won even a passing popularity. For he had no turn for sport or for society; with something of the superstition of the Calvinist, he united the unsocial Calvinistic temper. He could be a good host at Groote Schuur, and a kindly master to his small knot of dependent intimates; but he had no taste for the ordinary rich man’s amusements. He could not have tickled the public fancy by running yachts or race-horses, or dazzled it by great display. But his “big ideas,” it was soon recognised, were really big. They had, it is true, a touch of the vulgarity which so often attaches to very big things. Personally, Rhodes was not, indeed, without a vein of vulgarity. He was, it is true, by nature and education a gentleman, and he was, of course, very much more than a gentleman. But he had a passion for diamonds and a contempt for women; he loved not merely appreciation but flattery of the grosser kind; he was strangely content with the companionship of quite inferior men; he was not exempt from that very bad failing, a tendency to bully those who were in no position to retaliate. To gloss over these defects would be to give a wholly false view of a character which owes its distinction less to fine harmonies than to striking contrasts. Rhodes had his smallness. But there was another side of his character which gave him a singular dominion over minds which might be suspected of utter incapacity for hero-worship. His superiority was admitted by men far richer than himself, who seemed incapable of respecting anything but riches and the qualities that gain riches. Barney Barnato went ever in awe of him. Beit admitted his superiority. It was the magic of his name, long before he reached greatness, which permitted of the De Beers Consolidation, and made a commercial company for many years the virtual ruler of South Africa. It was the presence of something incalculable in his character which gave him his power over brother millionaires. They had one simple motive—to make money and enjoy it after their kind. Rhodes did not despise money, or luxury, or power. He had firm faith in the “big cash”; though caring little for pleasure or society in the ordinary sense, he keenly relished magnificence of living; his enjoyment of absolutism was Sultanic. But no Beit or Barnato could ever tell when his materialism or his mysticism would predominate, and they held him accordingly in the kind of perplexed respect with which madmen have been regarded in rude ages. More normal people, of course, were closer to a real understanding of this element in the man. The decent Dutchman knew that he had a genuine passion for South Africa. The decent Englishman knew that he had a genuine passion for England. Both knew that they could trust him in large things to prefer the South African and the British interest to that of the wealthy speculator. By that mysterious process which enables whole masses of men without special information to do rough justice to the deeds and motives of the great, the impression spread to the mother country, and sufficed at the time of the Jameson raid to break the force of a fall which might otherwise have finally ruined him.

Any other man but Rhodes must have been ruined, and his true greatness, the greatness that was personal to him and had nothing to do with his wealth, was never better illustrated than in the sequel. Stripped of his offices, he still continued the greatest power in South Africa, and it was simply as Cecil Rhodes, and in no other capacity, that he made his famous peace with the Matabele, a peace which survived the shock of the Boer War. The story has often been told, how to win the confidence of the natives he left the expeditionary force, and lay in a tent, which could readily have been rushed, within easy reach of the enemy, without a single bayonet to protect him; how, after a time, the natives, admiring his courage, agreed to a parley; how Rhodes went unarmed to meet the chiefs in their full war kit; how he calmly discussed with them all their grievances, and then, after three or four hours’ talk, suddenly asked, “Is there to be peace or war?” On which the chiefs threw down their spears at his feet, and the war was over. The incident well illustrates the kind of courage Rhodes possessed. No man could be further removed from the dare-devil. He was not even free from some suspicion of personal timidity. Some exceedingly brave deeds are credited to him, but it would seem that his courage was of that sort which is seen at its best when facing the ferocities of inanimate nature, the perils of fire and flood, of storm and earthquake. No unkindly critic has remarked on the fact that, when travelling with five or six other men through a lion-infested region, he habitually and instinctively took the position nearest the tent-pole; he coveted Ulysses’ privilege of being eaten last. Under fire, though he never flinched, he was hardly comfortable; he had little of the contempt of danger which distinguished his friend and follower, Dr. Jameson. Probably it is broadly true that he was at his best pitted against mere difficulties, and at his worst when he had to encounter an intelligent enemy. Even in the warfare of politics he preferred methods of suasion to those of force, and was always readier to compromise than to fight unless the nature of the issue forbade. But when his mind was set on anything his resolution could neither be bent nor broken, and he would face any incidental and unavoidable danger with the coolest stoicism. He no doubt exactly expressed the case when he said, describing his experiences in the second Matabele War, that he was in a funk all the time, but afraid to be thought afraid. His courage, in fact, though adequate to any ordinary military strain, was rather that of the statesman than of the soldier. In affairs he was singularly free from respect for persons or fear of responsibility; he had made up his mind, from a very early stage, what he wanted to do, and difficulties, personal or material, existed only to be overcome. Ordinarily he was placable and plausible, concerned rather to smooth away opposition than to crush it; but when seriously crossed he could be violent and even terrible in his rage. He demanded from most of his little court a subservience which was of small profit to him; the meaner men came to know that it paid to flatter him and concur in all his views, and it thus happened that he was deprived of sound and disinterested advice when it would have been of the greatest service. Few men of his stature—for Rhodes was, with all deductions, a very great man—have been content with creatures so small; Dr. Jameson was almost the only member of his immediate circle who enjoyed his society on equal terms. Between these two men there was real affection. They had much in common—patriotism, a love of the wild, a sense of the romantic, a passion for action. But there seems also to have been a more obscure bond which secured the friendship against the risks involved in Jameson’s frankness and Rhodes’s intolerance to any form of contradiction. Rhodes’s health was never good; he was first driven from England at the age of seventeen by physical breakdown, and when he started for South Africa the second time he was given but six months to live. All through his life the fear of death weighed heavily on him, and, with the fatalistic superstition which modified his unbelief, he fancied that he was only safe when Jameson was within reach. Moreover, Jameson was a man of education, and Rhodes almost reached the ludicrous in his reverence for “a scholar and a gentleman.” He had himself taken immense pains to get a degree. He was preparing for Oxford when forced to take his first trip abroad; in 1872 he returned to matriculate at Oriel; but it was not until 1881 that he was able to call himself a Master of Arts. There is something slightly humorous in the notion of this man, dealing with the largest practical affairs, flitting between Kimberley and Oxford in order to attain a distinction shared with many very dull and common-place people. But Rhodes’s faith in the English University system was an abiding characteristic. Sir Thomas Fuller relates that he pointed out that under the system at De Beers there was nothing but the honesty of one of the officials to prevent wholesale robbery of diamonds. “Oh,” said Rhodes, “that’s all right. Mr. —— takes charge of the diamonds. He is an Oxford man and an English gentleman. Perhaps if there were two at the job they might conspire.” “One man,” says the American philosopher, “learns the value of truth by going to Sunday school, and another by doing business with liars.” It would seem that the well-founded respect which Rhodes felt for the honesty of the English gentleman derived partly from his exhaustive experience of cosmopolitan adventurers.

Indeed, the arrogance which was one of the least pleasant characteristics of Rhodes—an arrogance which inflated his strong features and often gave a rather repellent aspect to an otherwise attractive face—was generally softened in the presence of men of science, letters, and humane learning. Rhodes might be stiff to a home politician, and overbearing to an African associate, but he was, both in London and at Groote Schuur, an easy and winning host to those whom he held in any kind of intellectual reverence, or whom he recognised as pursuing ideals he respected. The man who won the heart of Gordon must have been a remarkable man in more than his obvious aspects. There was, indeed, in Rhodes a kind of spiritual hunger contrasting almost pathetically with his superficial materialism and his blank unbelief. He had a temperament fitted for a great part in an age of faith, and it was his fate to be rather specially representative of an agnostic age. He had read in youth Winwood Reade’s Martyrdom of Man, and had adopted its dogmatic atheism. Yet he wanted vehemently to believe in something; his strong interest in the supernatural eloquently testified to this hunger. A belief of some sort was, in fact, a necessity to a man such as he; and, if there was artlessness, there was full sincerity in his claim to be the instrument of the Providence whose existence he denied. God, he once said, was “obviously” trying to produce a predominant type most fitted to bring peace, liberty, and justice to the world; and only one race approached this “ideal type” of the Almighty. This was the race to which Rhodes himself belonged, the “Anglo-Saxon,” and Rhodes believed that the best way to help on God’s work and fulfil His purpose in the world was to contribute to the predominance of the Anglo-Saxon race.

Such convictions may be philosophically absurd, but when they take possession of a mind richly endowed in practical qualities, and direct a will of altogether abnormal strength, they are bound to lead to great achievement. Rhodes belonged to that terrible order of men who conceive themselves, by virtue of the grandeur and purity of the visions that absorb and inspire them, released from the ordinary restraints appropriate to humbler people. “What have you been doing since I last saw you, Mr. Rhodes?” asked Queen Victoria once. “I have added,” was the reply, “two provinces to Your Majesty’s dominions.” In the view of most people that sublimely sufficient answer would equally serve for the epitaph of the man who rendered it in haughty assurance that it justified his life. It is certainly an answer to be pleaded in any court of historical justice which returns a favourable verdict on other great empire-builders like Clive and Warren Hastings. Rhodes is to be judged as they are. As in their case, so in his, we have to set off great splendours and virtues against not inconsiderable blemishes. As in their case, so in his, we could wish that he had sometimes not neglected those maxims of morality which are also in the main the soundest maxims in policy; that he had never taken the crooked path; that he had always disdained the counsel of crooked people. But each nature has its own temptations, and the man of strong will who is passionately determined on a great object can seldom resist the temptations to break through fences barring what he thinks the shortest way to its attainment. Rhodes was thrown in very early life among men of a cynicism quite exceptional; and it is hardly wonderful that he became himself not a little cynical. But the real greatness that underlay his character was shown by his cool estimate of wealth after he had made it. His head was no doubt a little affected by the intoxication of power. But mere money soon ceased to interest him. It is said that he would not trouble for months together to pay in dividend warrants amounting to hundreds of thousands of pounds, and, on hearing from the bank that his account was overdrawn, he would fumble in the pockets of some old dressing-gown or shooting-jacket for crumpled papers worth perhaps a million. Such a man may be at once acquitted of any ignoble worship of money. Yet much smaller men have proved capable of equal philosophy. The greatness of Rhodes lay in that very faith which, stated in words, provokes a smile, but, translated into deeds over half a lifetime and half a continent, compels a wondering respect. The racial arrogance with which the faith was expressed may sometimes offend. The acts which it prompted may sometimes appear questionable. Some of us may feel that the world is wide enough for all kinds of human talent and character, and that the burden of governing is too great for any one kind, however admirable. Others may feel strongly that the nation which most aspires to a moral domination must be more than ordinarily careful of its own morals. But when all is said the man who possessed such a faith and wrote it in characters of such sprawling bigness belongs to that small company of Englishmen who have really earned the often too lightly conceded adjective “great.”

CHAPTER IV
MR. GLADSTONE

It was in the nature of things that the majestic and challenging personality of Mr. Gladstone should evoke such variety of worship and censure that even to-day, after all has been written concerning him, the plain seeker after truth is not a little perplexed.

For he knows the man was great, and even very great, and that not merely in the sense of filling a great place over a great space of time; there was something above and beyond all that. Mr. Gladstone was more than the sum of all that Mr. Gladstone ever said or did; he had that rare quality, undefined because indefinable, which compels a homage of the spirit even when the intellect is in vehement opposition. Four only of Mr. Gladstone’s greater contemporaries seem to have been wholly insensible to this influence. Whenever he was in question, Mr. Disraeli retained the fixed sneer of a Mephistopheles; Lord Salisbury gazed on him with as little emotion as a colossal Buddha or a landscape; Lord Randolph Churchill pursued him with the catcalls of a Gavroche; Mr. Parnell watched him with the cool and scientific detachment of an entomologist studying a beetle or some other creature with which he has nothing but life in common. But such complete freedom from the spell cast by the great Liberal statesman was rare. Others, though they said many bitter and many mocking things about him, never succeeded in hiding from the world, or even from themselves, the extent to which he really impressed them. It was curious, and a little touching, to note how in the heat of the Irish debates Mr. Balfour would, on the smallest intimation that Mr. Gladstone’s feelings had been seriously hurt by some shaft of ridicule, turn from irony to almost filial solicitude. Mr. Chamberlain, whose moral and intellectual colour scheme ran less to nuance and art tint, showed with a difference, but not the less sincerely, the extent to which his old chief still remained an element in his life. After 1886 he seldom spoke about Mr. Gladstone without a curious kind of anger; the object was probably less Mr. Gladstone than himself, for being in this case unable completely to live up to his favourite philosophy of wasting no time in regretting “either mishaps or mistakes.” As to others still in the train of Mr. Gladstone, his influence was extraordinary. It was assuredly no small man, or great man in the smaller way, who could inspire in Lord Rosebery, himself gifted with a manner that struck terror into those he wished to keep at a distance, the sort of reverence Tom Brown felt for Dr. Arnold. It was a very extraordinary man indeed who, himself of the strictest sect of the Pharisees, could bend the knees of so complacent a Sadducee and so lukewarm a hero-worshipper as John Morley. But perhaps the most remarkable case of all was that of Sir William Harcourt, who, never loved, and perhaps never really loving, was tamed into a submissive loyalty scarcely congruous with his proud and difficult temperament.

Of the human greatness of Mr. Gladstone, then, there can be no question. But when we come to deal with his statesmanship, the clouds of incense sent up by various groups of worshippers conceal more than is revealed by the light of their pious candles. The more simple school of devotees, who scouted the possibility that Mr. Gladstone could in any circumstances be wrong, has naturally shrunk since his death; but those who would discriminate are divided into many sects. There is one which admires him as an inspired financier, but censures his foreign policy; there is another which venerates him mainly as the pacific idealist, the enemy of the Turkish and other tyrannies, and the friend of small peoples “struggling rightly to be free”; some point approvingly to his essential conservatism; others laud him, on the ground of his “trust in the people, tempered by prudence,” as a great democrat; still others admire chiefly his marvellous command of the technique of Parliamentary Government. In short, Mr. Gladstone is revered by all kinds of incompatible people on all kinds of incompatible grounds. But, of all tributes paid to him, the quaintest, I imagine, is that I heard from the lips of a Japanese professor in the late Nineties. He belonged to a school, then rather influential, with an enthusiasm for a sort of atheistic Christianity. People were beginning to talk about horseless carriages and wireless telegraphy. These eminent Orientals desired a Godless Religion and a Creedless Faith. They rejected all Christian dogma as a superstition not less fantastic than the wildest perversion of Taoism. They held that Darwin and Herbert Spencer had between them solved the whole riddle of the universe. They took, indeed, ground not very dissimilar to that now occupied by certain dignitaries of the Church. But they recommended, on what they considered practical grounds, the adoption of Christianity (carefully deprived of everything conflicting with the scientific notions of the time) as the State religion of the Japanese Empire. In the first place such a conversion, it was held, would remove one great obstacle to the full admission of Japan to the comity of European nations; in the second, it would provide the lower classes with a moral standard and motive superior to anything afforded by the Eastern religions in their decline.

Now it so happened that Mr. Gladstone, when eighty-five or so, was mentioned in the Japanese papers as having spent five hours of a Good Friday in public worship. For this he was praised, on grounds not a little singular, by the curious Evangelist I have mentioned. It was impossible, said the professor, for a man of such brilliant intellect to have any real belief in the religion he professed. Mr. Gladstone, of course, was in his heart of hearts as little a Christian as Professor Huxley. But, while Professor Huxley viewed great questions only from the standpoint of a scientist, Mr. Gladstone was a great practical statesman, who recognised that the vulgar could only be kept in their places by due awe of the supernatural. Therefore, like a true patriot, he endured at his great age this serious fatigue (to say nothing of this unutterable boredom) in order that he might give an example to the masses. This (the professor proceeded) was the true source of England’s greatness; her public men, instead of spending their spare time in frivolity, kept ever in mind the necessity of preserving appearances in the presence of the proletariat; and the quiet and law-abiding character of the British people was their exceeding great reward.

It was no use arguing with this learned Japanese; indeed, he was a man so illustrious that disputation with him, on the part of a nobody, seemed to savour of presumption. But I remembered enough of the spectacle of Mr. Gladstone at public worship (during one of his many visits to Brighton at the time of his last Premiership) to be very cautious ever afterwards in attempting to classify the motives of a foreigner. For, if there was one man in England for whom religion was a reality, it was Mr. Gladstone. And if there was one man in England incapable of the altruistic hypocrisy imputed to him it was again Mr. Gladstone. He was even destitute of that knack of saying pleasant insincerities which is generally reckoned as very little of a sin and very much of a social asset. Witness that old story of Disraeli and the pictures. Someone told Mr. Gladstone with great glee how Disraeli went to some picture show, and delighted the artists by most lavish praise. This work showed sublime genius; that recalled the grace of Gainsborough; this the sombre power of Caravaggio; that the splendid colour of Titian; that the severe purity of outline of Mantegna. And then, when Disraeli was well clear of the men he had flattered into frantic worship of him, he murmured to a friend: “What an ordeal; such fearful daubs I never saw!” To this story Mr. Gladstone listened with a steadily increasing frown, and at the end of it he struck the table emphatically with his fist. “I call that—devilish,” was his comment.

It was, probably, this massive seriousness—deriving from his intense sense of the eternal—that was the secret of Mr. Gladstone’s power over nearly all who came into close touch with him. It is not quite true that he altogether lacked a sense of humour. In a certain vein he could be playful and even jocose, and, though he was generally wanting in the compression which belongs to true wit, witty things occasionally escaped him. But all this was by the way, as incidental as the play of sunlight on a rock or the laughter on the surface of the deep sea; he might, in an off moment, play with an idea in much the same spirit that he took his backgammon with Mr. Armistead, but such concessions to the mood of the moment only threw into sharper relief the intense earnestness which was the basis of his character.

Every virtue has its characteristic dangers, and if Mr. Gladstone’s solemn belief in himself and his mission gave him immense power over others it also led to one side of himself exercising too much power over the other. His intellect was often unduly dominated by his prepossessions; from first to last he seldom saw things in a dry light. In his youth Macaulay noted a characteristic which endured throughout life—content with insecure foundations for an argument, he relied too much for victory on his splendid power of impressive rhetoric. He was not the less governed by prejudice because his prejudice might at one time be different from, and even contradictory to, his prejudice at another. Had Mr. Gladstone been a duller man, his temper would have ended by enfeebling the mind which it constantly reduced to subjection. But in his case a mentality already almost preternaturally active was still further stimulated by the necessity of justifying his temper. It was driven to a kind of jesuitry through the despotic conscientiousness of its master. Mr. Gladstone was incapable of consciously deceiving others; he did sometimes unconsciously deceive himself, and others through himself. On certain questions, like finance, which he could treat objectively, his reason had full play; on others his judgment was always liable to subjective disturbance. Where a broad and definite moral issue existed that judgment seldom went astray, but on whole classes of questions more or less indifferent he was governed by the same sort of likes and dislikes which determine a rich man’s wine cellar or picture collection. Thus half his mistakes in regard to Egypt were due to nothing more than want of interest. He was bored with Egypt, and intrigued with other things. Ireland, also, at first bored him; it was to him, as to so many of the Liberals, a tiresome irrelevancy breaking in on the set programme. For some time he felt towards the Irish members as a whist-player might towards some noisy person who insisted that there must be no more whist until everybody in the room had exhausted the possibilities of “tiddleywinks.” But when at last he found that “tiddleywinks” was only a slang name for Irish auction bridge, and that Irish auction bridge was vastly more exciting than any whist, he quickly discovered that the enunciation of a Home Rule policy was what Mr. Balfour called “a moral imperative of the most binding kind.”

This would seem a flippant explanation of a conversion in which Mr. Gladstone renewed his political youth. It is not meant as a flippancy. Most assuredly Mr. Gladstone did not consciously, as some very great opponents maintained at the time, reach his Home Rule position by the road of sordid or ignoble considerations. But his mind was one equally prone to innovation and to routine; it ran in grooves, but had no difficulty, when impelled by any sufficiently powerful stimulus, in jumping from one groove to another. There is a kind of roundabout on which the horses (running on rigidly prescribed lines) seem at one moment to be going straight to a certain point, and then suddenly turn, to the bewilderment of their riders, in a direction exactly opposite. Mr. Gladstone made such a swerve, and it was not surprising that there were tumbles, or that, while he was eloquently explaining that the change of course was natural and necessary, less agile characters were mainly swearing over bumps and bruises. He himself was probably not even conscious that the change was great. For Mr. Gladstone had a way of making himself at once at home in a new situation. He was like a man who often changes his house, but always carries with him the old furniture and—if possible—the old servants. The chief trouble in this case was that some of the household staff declined to join in the new move; otherwise Erin Mansions was not very different from Coercion Row. There was point, if there was also rudeness, in Lord Randolph’s gibe of “the old man in a hurry.” But the hurry was chiefly in the matter of settling down in the new quarters. Once settled Mr. Gladstone never again moved. Under all the superficial bustle of his last Premiership there was essential immobility; what he had become in 1885 he remained till the end.

Of the “rapid splendours” of that last Home Rule fight Lord Morley has discoursed eloquently. It was a wonderful affair, and a most pathetic one. The eloquence which had dazzled two generations had lost little or nothing of its magnificence. The wizardry of Mr. Gladstone’s manipulations of stubborn material still extorted the admiration of those who had known him a quarter of a century before. Half blind, very deaf, dependent on majorities that sometimes sank to eight or ten, faced with the certainty of rejection by the Lords, and the equal certainty that their action would be approved by the country, the old hero never faltered. It was a marvellous and inspiring example of the triumph of a sense of public duty over all the disabilities of age and infirmity. But through the whole splendid performance ran the note of tragedy. Mr. Gladstone knew the thing could not be done by him. He must have more than suspected what was to come when he was gone. The portent of the Newcastle programme could no more have been lost on him than the waning enthusiasm of many of his supporters for the cause of Home Rule. But for the faith which had always sustained him, this last fight must have been sad indeed. “But,” says Lord Morley, speaking of a visit just before Mr. Gladstone’s last appearance in the House of Commons, “there the old fellow was, doing what old fellows have done for long ages on a Sunday afternoon, reading a big Bible.” The same witness speaks of a “sudden solemnity” during the discussion of an intricate point in the Home Rule Bill, when Mr. Gladstone turned to him with “Take it from me, that to endure trampling on with patience and self-control is no bad element in the preparation of a man for walking firmly and successfully in the path of great public duty. Be sure that discipline is full of blessings.” Then, a moment later, he added, “When it’s all over, you and I must have our controversy out about Horace. I cannot put him as high as you do.”

After all, no man is to be pitied who could bear the weight of eighty-four years in a spirit at once so humanly gallant and so Christianly resigned.

CHAPTER V
GEORGE MEREDITH

George Meredith was impatient of talk about life’s ironies; he took things as they came, accepted Fate’s decrees with fortitude, and did not blame Nature for being natural. That is to say, he took up this attitude in debate; internally he might and did lament over things not specially lamentable. And, whatever he might say, he can hardly have failed to feel something of the irony of his position in the Nineties. He had won through long years of total neglect and hard toil. He had passed the hardly less painful period of purely esoteric appreciation. First, nobody cared for his work; then he became the oracle of a small circle; neither fate was pleasing to a nature so large and eager, so avid of fame, with so keen a zest for life, and so imperious an appetite for its best things, material and intellectual. George Meredith liked recognition; he liked also good and even fat living, old vintages, pleasant lodgment, and ease of mind. He wrote best about the sunshine when he saw it through a glass of fine claret, and lark pie was for him the best preparation for an ode to the lark. But it was long before he could afford to translate into practice his theories of good provender. In his youth, it is said, he was so poor that a single bowl of porridge had often to suffice him for the day, and long after he had reached maturity he was so little esteemed that John Morley, coming to London ten years his junior, was soon able to repay his generous welcome by printing two or three novels which would otherwise have stood small chance with the publishers. In his later middle age, though he could afford himself fairly full indulgence in those dietetic fantasies which were his joy, he was so harnessed to the daily task that he could not imagine, so he said, what he would do if turned loose in the paddock of independence. But now in the Nineties and his own sixties, just as he had grown into a cult, he had to live as a recluse at Box Hill, almost a prisoner in his arm-chair, very deaf, and with an impaired digestion.

GEORGE MEREDITH.

Concerning that “Egyptian bondage” of journalism, all Meredith’s philosophy could not prevent him expressing himself with extreme bitterness. “No slavery,” he said, “is comparable to the chains of hired journalism.” When a man talks thus it is natural to infer that he is complaining of the injury such work does to his intellect and conscience; obviously from the purely physical viewpoint writing for newspapers, for some hundreds a year in Victorian valuation, is not worse than being an Egyptian fellah, a Chinese coolie, or even an English dustman. But it is hard to believe that even on the moral and intellectual side there was much hardship; for, curiously enough, George Meredith was rather specially free from scruples of the kind which torture some men. Indeed, he was unusually wide-minded in the matter of “writing to order”; in that sense, at least, the chains hung lightly on him. There have always been journalists of great and even boisterous independence, and they were more numerous in Meredith’s time than in our own. Even now, however, the idea of the refined and penniless man of genius working against his convictions under the lash of a brutal and tyrannous proprietor belongs not to Fleet Street, where they produce newspapers, but to the Haymarket, where they produce plays. Doubtless there is a good deal of compliance in matters indifferent, or esteemed indifferent. Men with very red noses have been known to argue eloquently in favour of local option, and nothing but total abstinence is compatible with the coolness of head requisite for some arguments in favour of “the trade.” But, as mere men of business, newspaper proprietors save themselves, wherever possible, the strain of attempting to force a highly individual writer against his convictions. Mr. Massingham has never had to choose between no dinner and the advocacy of causes likely to appeal to the editor of John Bull. Mr. Bottomley has never been compelled by hunger to adopt the views of the United Kingdom Alliance or the Anti-Betting League. But Meredith did indubitably, as a Liberal, write habitually for the political columns of the Conservative Morning Post in London and the Conservative Ipswich Journal in the provinces; as a professed lover of liberty he did indubitably argue in favour of slavery; and, if all the secrets of the files were revealed, it would probably be found that, as a literary critic, he said many things in print which were contrary to his private taste and conviction.

His disgust with journalism was, it may be surmised, less concerned with morals than with money. He complains that the better the work the worse the pay, and the poorer the esteem; and, just as he could not refrain from some envy of the “best sellers” in literature (an envy which found vent in savage criticism of much of Tennyson’s work), so he was not a little disgusted that many journalists far less gifted made better incomes. In truth he was not suited to the trade. The best in journalism is still for the many, and Meredith’s manner, when all is said, was for the few. With the prestige of a name behind his books, the average of men might be induced (if only by the coward fear of being out of the fashion) to begin reading, and, having begun, it was always quite possible that he would go on long enough to find much that he could honestly like. But anonymous writing has no such advantage. Its appeal must be immediate, or the reader turns to the next column. With his peculiar tendencies George Meredith could never have been a journalist of the kind that delights the editorial soul—the man who never under-writes or over-writes either in space or quality, who can always be depended on to produce a first-class trade article, who never uses an expression queried by the printer’s reader. The highest merit of the journalist is to make complicated things clear, and dry things readable; Meredith’s genius lay in the direction of making the simplest things obscure, and the most ordinary things out-of-the-way. The dread of being common-place seems to have inclined him especially to verbal contortions when he was conscious of some thinness or ordinariness of thought. When he has really something to say he often says it strongly and naturally; there are deep things and true things in Meredith which could hardly be better, more shortly, or more lucidly expressed. Browning suffered from much the same disease; with both men it is quite a safe rule to read only so long as one can get on comfortably; skipping the hard parts means a gain altogether out of proportion to the loss. Meredith is never more obscure than when he means to tell one that a man kissed a woman, or that the sky was red at sunset. Men do quite commonly kiss women, and skies are often red at sunset. But Meredith seems to have felt that his men must be different from any other men, their kisses different from any other kisses, and the women kissed different from any other kissed women. And on no account must his sunsets be the sunsets of Tom, Dick, or Harry. Therefore, in dealing with such things, he racked his brain for some verbal violence which sometimes hit the mark, but more often did not. In one of his short poems—published, if I remember rightly, in the Nineties—there occurred the expression, “Hands that paw the naked bush.” I asked a Meredithian exactly what it meant. Pityingly he reminded me that some lines before there were references to winter and snow. “Now,” he said, “if you have closely observed a bush when the leaves are off, you will remember that here and there twigs, to the number of four or five, radiate from a sort of clump which bears a distant resemblance to the human wrist. When these twigs are covered with snow they distinctly suggest a hand with the fingers spread out. The poet saw that, as he saw everything. You, who never use your middle-class eyes except to find misprints, naturally never saw it, and you dare to charge your own insensitiveness and lack of imagination on a great genius.” This, of course, was crushing. But I can imagine an Elizabethan man of taste being equally crushing to any heretic who questioned some elaborate figure of the Ephuists, and appealed from them to the simple delicacy of him who wrote—

“And winking Mary-buds begin

To ope their golden eyes”—

a thing any critic can admire and any coal-heaver can understand.

“Meredith,” says Lord Morley, “often missed ease.” It might be truer to say that he took the most cruel pains to avoid ease. Macaulay notices how Johnson used sometimes to translate into his own peculiar dialect an observation first made in strong, simple English. Thus he once said that a certain work had not “enough wit to keep it sweet,” and immediately added, “It has not sufficient vitality to preserve it from putrefaction.” One has an uneasy feeling that Macaulay was, as sometimes happened, a little innocent in his earnestness to make a point, and that Johnson was here only playing with himself; his ordinary literary style, though stiff as compared with his table talk, is yet generally muscular and masculine. But Meredith actually did in solemn fashion what Johnson may have done in a spirit of fooling. He did continually think in a natural and write in an unnatural idiom. In his familiar letters one often comes across the germ of a reflection later elaborated in a book; in the one case it is expressed in terse, vigorous English, wholly intelligible and to the point; in the other it is tortured into two pages of Meredithian “epigram,” most of which would be incomprehensible if he did not generally clinch the whole thing with one splendid sentence of quite undoubtful meaning. In these key sentences, indeed, resides the whole value of Meredith—if we exclude a certain embarrassing impression of disorderly opulence, of careless magnificence, which makes one feel rather like a boy with a great jar of “chow-chow” from Canton; he has not a vestige of an idea what he is eating, and hardly knows whether he quite likes it, but it is sweet, obviously expensive, and provocatively curious, and has a certain medicinal suggestion that excuses a little gluttony. Or we might say that a Meredith novel suggests a great firework display, meant to represent “Peace and War,” or “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves,” or “Grand Attack on a Sleeping City by Ten Thousand Aeroplanes.” One does not pretend to follow the story as if it were a piece on the stage, and much of it seems to be irrelevant; but there are plenty of bombs, squibs and Roman candles, and rockets that go up with a satisfying rush and break into floating glory.

As he was in his books, so was Meredith in society. In the company of an intimate friend or two he could be natural—could talk with easy vigour, expressing views that were often just in language that was always plain and strong. But let a stranger—especially a distinguished stranger—join the circle, and he deviated automatically into “epigram.” He seems to have felt it necessary to be brilliant, and for him brilliance meant effort; he was not content to let the good things come to the surface as they would, but pumped them up from the recesses of his being with an energy which sometimes affected the purity of the flow and not seldom made the machinery creak.

There was, indeed, something a little forced about the whole man. In his youth he was addicted to violent exercise, and especially to throwing the beetle—the great wooden mallet with which foresters split tree-trunks. He used to throw up the beetle and catch it, and this violent business, designed to preserve his health, ended by ruining it; the spinal weakness from which he suffered in later life was the direct consequence of beetle-throwing. This indiscreet athleticism is paralleled in other departments of Meredith’s life. In literature he was perpetually throwing the beetle—juggling in ponderous style with ponderous things; he is a muscular rather than a nimble wit. I remember to have seen an acrobat climb down a table leg, hand over hand, as if he were lowering himself from the Nelson Monument—a difficult feat, no doubt, but a very useless and ungainly one. Meredith’s cleverness gave often the same impression of wasted power and even compromised dignity. In life, again, he tended to this exaggerated strenuousness without adequate object; it might have been better for him, and for others, if there had been more repose. His first marriage was wrecked because he came into contact and conflict with a temperament too like his own, and the sequel proved that his generally benevolent and kindly nature had a core of hardness which might in truth be suspected from his writings. Concerning Carlyle’s matrimonial affairs, he wrote that “a woman of the placid disposition of Milton’s Eve, framed by her master to be an honest labourer’s cook and housekeeper, with a nervous disposition resembling a dumpling, would have been enough for him.” Much the same was true of himself. If, in spite of much domestic sorrow, he reached old age unbroken in his resolute optimism, his deficiencies have perhaps no less credit than his qualities. For, if he sometimes indulged in self-pity regarding small matters, he bore with great stoicism the sterner buffets of fate, and this because of a certain insensibility, illustrated again and again in his career, to the kind of wounds which are commonly most painful. It is not indifference to others, still less hardness of heart; his letters are evidence enough on that point. But one has the same sort of impression one gets from Shakespeare’s sonnets, of a second self quietly watching, and almost jeering at, the sufferings of the first and its mates. “Happily for me,” he wrote during his second wife’s hopeless and painful illness, “I have learned to live much in the spirit.” That was probably the exact truth. Things of the spirit were not always more important than the want of five pounds for a dinner or a holiday, but they did suffice to keep him taut and resolute in the presence of the sterner trials. “There was good reason,” says Lord Morley, “to be sure with him that death too was only a thing in the Natural Order.” It is only fair to add that he himself faced the approach of the “pitch-black king” with full gallantry. “Going quickly down,” he said to his old friend not long before the end, but there was “nothing morbid, introspective, pseudo-pathetic; plenty of hearty laughter; ...” “no belief in a future existence; are our dogs and horses immortal? What’s become of all our fathers?”

Such was the strength of the man. But oddly mingled with the intrepid assurance that could mock at invalidism and decay, and look with untroubled eye into the dark unknown, was a strange sensitiveness which he himself would have been the first to satirise in another. All his life he was tortured with the consciousness that his father and grandfather had been tailors, and oppressed with a fear that somebody would discover the dread secret. He made of his origin a mystery which might pique but always baffled curiosity; and he was continually wondering whether people considered him a gentleman de facto, and still more whether they suspected that he had not always been one de jure. “H—— is a good old boy,” he writes on one occasion. “He has a pleasant way of being inquisitive, and has already informed me, quite agreeably, that I am a gentleman, though I may not have been born one.” “In origin,” he says again, “I am what is called here a nobody, and any pretensions to that rank have always received due encouragement.” He not only kept silence about his birth—which was assuredly his own affair—but he took active steps to prevent the truth being known. His father—a handsome, shiftless person who made a failure of his life—was described in Meredith’s first marriage certificate as “Esquire,” and in a census paper “near Petersfield” was given as the author’s place of birth. The Merediths were, in fact, naval outfitters at Portsmouth, and had none of the “Celtic blood” to which the novelist was fond of making vague claim. George’s mother died when he was five; the father followed after various ineffective wanderings; and the boy was left a ward in Chancery, to be educated and articled to a solicitor out of the poor remnant of the family fortunes. From all this part of his life he shrank with a horror at once grotesque and pathetic. There was nothing specially ignominious in his childhood. There was certainly no ill-treatment; he was rather petted than otherwise. But he resented the environment thrust on him by the accident of birth, and, when free of it, avoided all touch with his remaining relatives.

These facts would not be worth mentioning but for their influence on Meredith’s life and work. They placed him in general society rather on the defensive, and perhaps encouraged that haughty shyness which in the presence of strangers was apt to take the form of an aggressive and self-conscious brilliance. They explain the peculiar impression given by so many of his novels, the impression of a man fascinated by aristocracy and yet a little angry at being fascinated. Despite his Liberalism and his Democratic professions, this was the thing he liked; he had an almost sensual pleasure in good company; the very titles of his great people suggest enjoyment. He himself was an aristocrat in physique; he had a kingly head and carried it like a king. He was an aristocrat also in intellect, though here not of the highest rank, which takes its distinction for granted; it was, no doubt, a dread of commonness that led him to refine excessively, and no one who dreads to be common wholly escapes being so. But all this was not solely Meredith’s fault, it was also the fault of his country. In the France of the fleur-de-lis or the France of the tricolour the lack of birth would not have irked such a nature; in Victorian England it became a fact of real importance. It was the one little insanity of a rather specially sane mind; the one want of humour in a richly humorous temperament; the one absurd weakness in one perhaps even too confident in his own strength.

CHAPTER VI
LORD SALISBURY

In the Berlin Conference days Bismarck described Lord Salisbury as “a lath painted to look like iron.” By the Nineties the sneer had lost point in every particular. To the dullest it was clear that Lord Salisbury had not painted himself or got himself painted; whatever the man might or might not be, he was genuine, incapable himself of pose, and equally incapable of inspiring others to spread a legend concerning himself. It was equally clear (though perhaps only to the more discerning) that he did not “look like iron.” There was not wanting strength of a kind, but it was a flexible and not a rigid strength. The coarsest of all mistakes it is possible to make concerning Lord Salisbury is that of regarding him as an Imperialistic swashbuckler and gambler, ready for all risks in the pursuit of a “spirited foreign policy.” The Victorian Burleigh was, in fact, much like the Burleigh of Elizabeth, decisive enough in some domestic matters, but even excessively cautious in the conduct of foreign affairs. Though he adopted the Disraelian tradition, his methods were the very opposite of Mr. Disraeli’s. That great man really enjoyed having the eyes of all men directed on him in hope or fear. “A daring pilot in extremity,” he seemed actually pleased with waves that went high, and, though he might accept “peace with honour,” gave always the impression of disappointment of a born political artist that it was not reserved to him to play the part of a second Chatham.

LORD SALISBURY.

Lord Salisbury, on the other hand, was in essence as pacific as Mr. Gladstone. In practice he was even more a man of peace, since his caution took the form of guarding against war, while Mr. Gladstone inclined rather to the modern “Pacifist” line of calling war “unthinkable”—and not thinking about it till it came. There were, no doubt, occasions on which Lord Salisbury’s attitude might seem aggressive and even reckless. He was severe to Portugal. He was stern and unbending to the South African Republic. He adopted a high tone towards France over the Fashoda affair. But in such cases he either regarded the risk as small, or considered the matters at stake justified the risk, whatever it might be. In general his policy was one of cautious conciliation, and his main work at the Foreign Office was the removal, so far as might be, of any causes of quarrel between ourselves and Germany. The German Empire he equally feared and admired. France he was inclined to class with Spain among the “dying nations,” and though, like all the men of his school, he rather exaggerated the might of Russia, that Power was considered more from the Asiatic than from the European point of view. Lord Salisbury’s policy towards France and Russia was fluid and opportunist. He had no objection to France taking what she liked of the “light soil” of the Sahara; he was not intolerant of Russian ambitions in Eastern Asia. He was anxious enough not to be on bad terms with anybody. But if either of these Powers had thrown out an obvious challenge Lord Salisbury would no doubt have accepted it. The one challenge he was resolved not to accept was that of Germany, and the history of the later Salisbury administrations on their foreign side is in essence the history of elaborate attempts to buy, as cheaply as possible, a continuance of the sleeping partnership with Prussia. The price was not onerous during Bismarck’s reign. It rose sharply under William II, and Lord Salisbury died in the unhappy certainty that all his attempts to satisfy Germany had failed of their purpose. The failure was no fault of his. He had carried through in Africa—a continent “created,” as he said at the Guildhall banquet of the Diamond Jubilee year, “to be the plague of the Foreign Office”—a network of treaties and compacts not ill-designed to avert the possibility of serious wars arising from the unregulated ambitions of European Powers. But there was more passion than policy in the councils of Berlin, and, to his deep chagrin, Lord Salisbury was fated to see, before his life ended, the first steps taken towards a complete reversal of the course he had consistently followed.

If Lord Salisbury was neither “painted” nor “like iron,” the third element in the Bismarckian sneer was still more untrue. In the Nineties it was quite impossible to think of the Conservative leader as a “lath.” The slenderness of Lord Robert Cecil had gone the same way as his rather ungainly deportment; the developing statesman had shown how little youth and spareness of figure may have to do with grace; the developed statesman illustrated what the author of Eothen calls the majesty of true corpulence. In Lord Robert Cecil great height, slimness, and the scholar’s stoop made rather jarringly noticeable that untidiness which is an abiding Cecilian characteristic; in Lord Salisbury the rounded shoulders rather added to his impressiveness, as suggesting Atlas loads of responsibility, while the very massiveness of the figure cancelled the effect of imperfect valeting. No worse dressed or more majestic figure was ever seen in the House of Lords, which has never been wanting either in shabbiness or in distinction. There are some men of great rank who convey the impression of taking as keen an interest in their kit as that which animates any shop assistant out for his Sunday. There are others who give the air of caring little personally about such matters, but of having an excellent man to look after them. Lord Salisbury suggested a tailor and valet as little interested in clothes as himself. His coats always looked as if they had been made on the Laputan system of tailoring; his trousers bagged like those in the statues of Victorian philanthropists; his hats were shocking; he even looked sometimes as if he might have slept in his clothes. Indeed, though the last man on earth to be a conscious Bohemian, there was a considerable streak of Bohemianism in Lord Salisbury. In his Fleet Street days he had no difficulty in accommodating himself to the ways of a race still carrying on the tradition of George Warrington and Mr. Bludyer. Lord Morley, who sometimes met him in the waiting-room of a review editor, found in him a “gift of silence.” But The Standard had, apparently, a more human atmosphere, and with some of the distinguished writers enlisted under the banner of Mr. Mudford, the future Prime Minister established genial relations. Many years after, a fellow-leader-writer was presented to him at some official garden party. Lord Salisbury, who had a bad memory for names, and was very short-sighted, was saying the usual formal things when the sound of the journalist’s voice suddenly brought a flood of old memories. “Hello, Billy,” he said, shaking hands warmly, “whose turn is it to pay for the beer?”

Lord Salisbury’s shortness of sight is the explanation of the many true stories of his not knowing his own subordinates, and talking to a sporting Peer about military matters under the impression that he was addressing Lord Roberts. This myopia was a very considerable element in his life, and accounts in some degree for a detachment which appeared marvellous to his contemporaries. Not being able to see his audiences, he could not follow their moods, and so tended exclusively to follow his own. Thus no man merited less the title of orator. There was a fine literary quality about his speeches; though he prepared little, and spoke without effort, the fighting discipline of his journalistic days made banality or sloppiness impossible to him. The satire which seldom failed to flavour anything he said was the quite natural emanation of an ironical mind, and sprang from the same source as his dislike of declamation, display, or vulgar rhetorical artifice. It was not what is generally called cynicism; it was rather the protest of a strong, sincere, and unaffected nature against the humbug rarely absent from public life. Bad taste, really bad taste, that is to say—the taste which, to vary the French phrase, leads to artistic crime—was repulsive to him, and this dislike no doubt sometimes led him to what is more ordinarily called bad taste: the merciless mockery of pretensions which most people have agreed to respect. Detesting exaggerated emphasis, he exaggerated his own avoidance of it; he habitually spoke without gesture, generally standing motionless as an automaton, his hands hanging lifelessly at his side. In this position he used, as he called it, to “think aloud,” and his thoughts often sounded strangely both to friends and opponents. For, though Lord Salisbury was a real Tory, the tone of his mind was only in one limited sense conservative. He did want to preserve certain great things, including, of course, the Church, but he had little in common with those who oppose an equally stubborn resistance to all innovation. The doors of his understanding were never closed to the entry of new ideas, so long as such ideas were concrete and definite; what he did vehemently resent was “reform” demanded on loose general grounds. Thus he had no great objection to Parish Councils. True, the old system had worked fairly well, and very cheaply, and nobody could tell exactly how ill and dearly the new system would work. But if due cause were shown, he was not disposed to stand in the way. When, however, the Liberal leaders argued for Parish Councils, not on the ground that they would be more efficient or more economical than the old Vestries, but that they would tend to “brighten village life,” Lord Salisbury’s disgust flamed out in a characteristic piece of irony. “If the enlivenment of village life were the object,” he said, “the object would be much better served by a circus.” Again, he was assuredly not blind to the evils of over-drinking. But he denied altogether that the way to make men sober was to make public-houses fewer and less convenient. There had been much argument in favour of “reducing drinking facilities”; Lord Salisbury contended that drunkenness was no necessary consequence of drinking facilities. “There are a hundred beds at Hatfield,” he said, “but I never feel more inclined to sleep on that account.”

It is probable, indeed, that what he chiefly hated in Liberalism was that tendency to unreality which is, perhaps, its special danger. Lord Salisbury did not see a great many things, but what he did see he saw clearly, and he was specially free from the dangers of self-deception. Thus he did not see that there was an Irish question; but he did see quite clearly what Mr. Gladstone would not let himself see, that there was no English enthusiasm for Home Rule. He did not see that political arrangements wanted readjusting in correspondence with the immense material and intellectual revolution in England; but he did see quite clearly that the English people on the whole preferred a squiredom to a plutocracy, and were not in the least concerned when the House of Lords disposed of various pet projects of hasty reformers. When Liberals talked about the voice of the people and the aspirations of the masses, Lord Salisbury did not think of the people or the masses; he thought of a single working-man he had actually seen and spoken to, and, judging the rest from him, was at least secured against the worst hallucinations. When some proposal (say Local Veto) was extolled as a boon to the working-classes, Lord Salisbury again saw in his mind’s eye a quite ordinary bricklayer or carpenter in a village tavern, and in the strength of that vision declined to believe that England would rise against him as one man if the Lords threw out Local Veto on his suggestion. Proceeding on these lines, he developed an infallible pose for political imposture and pretence, and a massive disregard of merely noisy agitation. No man ever paid less attention to the transient manifestations of what is called public opinion. He was utterly unmoved by the thunders of the Press and the organised outcry of the platform. When a great procession marched past Arlington Street to Hyde Park to denounce him, he could ask his footman (quite sincerely) “What all that noise was about?” The petulant threats of a disappointed faction, the interested uproar of sects and cliques, made no impression on his colossal phlegm. But he recognised at once what he called “the firm, deliberate, and sustained conviction” of the majority of the nation. “It is no courage—it is no dignity—to withstand the real opinion of the nation,” so he said in 1868, after leading a most determined opposition to the Irish Church Bill. “All that you are doing thereby is to delay an inevitable issue—for all history teaches us that no nation was ever thus induced to revoke its own decision—and to invoke besides a period of disturbance, discontent, and possibly worse than discontent.” Thus, while he understood when to fight, he also understood when to yield, and his concessions, when he decided to make them, came with grace and spontaneity. The sword of the House of Lords was often raised to kill; it was sometimes used to salute; it was never shaken in unavailing menace.

The peculiar strength and sagacity of Lord Salisbury as a domestic statesman are best illustrated, not by what happened during his life, but by what followed his death. For it was the chief part of his success that nothing particularly happened at home while he was in chief control. The real history of the time is foreign, colonial, social, and technological history. In English political history we are mainly in the region of negatives. Lord Salisbury did not solve the Irish political problem; he only stifled down an Irish agitation. He did not solve the English social problem; he only avoided unnecessary troubling of the waters. He did not make his party the instrument of any great positive work for England; he only kept it together as the guarantee of stable administration. But the magnitude of even this negative success was seen by the sharp contrast of what followed. Within a year of his retirement the Conservative Party was shattered; within a decade everything he had striven to avoid had come to pass; Home Rule was again a living issue; the lists were set for a real battle between the House of Commons and the House of Lords; the division of England into “classes and masses” was almost complete; the Church was marked down for what he would have considered a sacrilegious mutilation. English Toryism in the true sense died with Lord Salisbury. The thing that succeeded had no convenient name, but its character may be best indicated by saying that what was specially English was not specially Tory, and what was specially Tory was not specially English. But, while the inspiration and effective control of the party passed to men without interest in Church or land, and with a cosmopolitan (or at least most loosely Imperialist) rather than an English or even British point of view, many true Tories remained. These must have recognised, when Lord Salisbury had gone, the true value of much that had been taken for granted while he was alive. He originated little; he delayed much that was good as well as much that was ill; he belonged emphatically to that class of great men who must be praised rather for what they avoided than for what they accomplished. But that he was a truly great man, and not a merely dexterous one, was now clear to those who witnessed the disaster wrought by a deficiency of character combined with an excess of ideas and tactical subtlety. Had Lord Salisbury been succeeded by another in precisely his own image, the political and social convulsions of the new century would, doubtless, not have been altogether avoided. For there were forces at work that compelled large changes. But that they would have come about in gentler fashion is hardly doubtful. For Lord Salisbury knew as few men did the difference between variable “public opinion” and the real temper of a nation, between the ditch that can be filled up or drained and the river which can only be canalised, and he would assuredly have avoided that constitutional struggle which, degenerating into mere anarchism, became the prolific parent of so many ills from which the country suffers to-day. It was a misfortune for more than Conservatism that his massive wisdom, his shrewd judgment, his cool scepticism, his contempt of mere ideas, his horror of extremes, his hatred of any kind of cant and self-illusion, his distrust of zeal and prejudice against the needless enlargement of issues were not at the service of the Conservative Party at a time when it needed above all things sane and strong control.

CHAPTER VII
LORD KITCHENER

At the battle of Omdurman, fought on September 2, 1898, the Dervishes had 10,800 killed and some 16,000 wounded; the losses of the British and Egyptian forces amounted to only 47 killed and 342 wounded.

This fact must be borne in mind in considering the character of that enormous Kitchener legend which grew up—or rather started up almost in a single night—late in the Nineties. At the beginning of the decade the name of Herbert Kitchener conveyed nothing to people outside an extremely narrow military and diplomatic circle; a year or two later vague rumours of some extremely capable soldier, a discovery of Lord Cromer’s, the very man to regain the Sudan and “avenge Gordon,” began to circulate; by the middle Nineties the new Sirdar had established a certain definite repute as a strong man who would stand no nonsense from anybody, and who had even terrorised an unfriendly Khedive; in 1896 there began to be talk about the expedition authorised by the Government on Mr. Chamberlain’s suggestion; the next two years the papers were at intervals interested in the building of the desert railway which was to be Kitchener’s instrument for the reconquest of the Sudan. Then came news, on the Good Friday of 1898, of a considerable victory at the Atbara; and after, for some months, there was almost silence. At last it was gloriously broken. A great battle had been fought and won outside Omdurman, the mushroom capital of the Khalifa, erected opposite the ruins of Khartoum on the other side of the Nile. The Dervishes had attacked with all their force; they had been utterly defeated; and, though the Khalifa and the remnants of his army had got away, his power had evidently been broken for ever. Khartoum was ours, Gordon had been splendidly avenged, and the reign of civilisation in the home of an aggressive barbarism was now assured. Kitchener, who had planned every detail of the business, and had ended it by violating the Mahdi’s tomb and throwing the body of the false prophet (parted from his head) into the Nile, suddenly emerged from the status of a comparatively unmarked man to that of the “greatest living soldier.”

The first fever had hardly died away when excitement, and with it the renown of the successful General, was intensified by the great irony which is summarised in the word “Fashoda.” Kitchener, going forward on the Nile from Omdurman, was met by a small steel rowing-boat, which proved to contain a Senegalese sergeant and two men, charged with a letter from Major Marchand, who had fought his way from the Atlantic to the Upper Nile, and now lay encamped at Fashoda, right on the Cape-to-Cairo line. Major Marchand presented his compliments, congratulated General Kitchener on what he had heard was an uncommonly fine victory, and would be honoured, charmed, and even ravished to welcome him at Fashoda under the shadow of the tricolour.

LORD KITCHENER.

Here was a pretty kettle of fish, with the prospect of a considerable amount of fat in a truly terrible fire if anything went awry in the cookery. Kitchener had been tested as a soldier; he was now to prove himself as a diplomatist. Many a British officer and gentleman, charged to the teeth with good form, might have started there and then a European war. But Kitchener, whose manners were sometimes sufficiently brusque where his own countrymen were concerned, had very fortunately much tact when dealing with foreigners, and especially when in contact with Frenchmen. He spoke their language not only accurately but with grace and fluency, and it almost seemed as if the use of that idiom dissolved much of the ice which generally abounded in his neighbourhood. During the Great War not his least service was the establishment of thoroughly good relations with the French high command; they not only trusted in him, as one who knew, and knew that they knew, but they liked him. It was not only that they never forgot that he had been a volunteer in the war of 1870, but they discovered in the grim Field-Marshal something more sympathetic than they could find in British officers of ordinarily far more expansive manner. Kitchener, on his part, had no doubt something in excess of the natural interest and friendliness which (other things being equal) most men entertain for foreigners whose language they speak well. He had a real admiration for French qualities in general, a still greater admiration for French military qualities in particular, and an admiration greater still for an individual French soldier so transparently brave and chivalrous as Marchand. “I congratulate you,” he said, in shaking hands with the Major, “on all you have accomplished,” meaning the terrible march across Africa, in which a fifth of Marchand’s little force had perished. “No,” was the French soldier’s reply, “the credit is not to me, but to these soldiers,” pointing to his troops. “Then,” said Kitchener in describing the interview, “then I knew he was a gentleman.”

It was a difficult business, that of getting the gallant Marchand to consent, helpless as he was, to the replacement of the French by the Egyptian flag. But the thing was done, and done in such a way that, though there might be chagrin, there was no hurt of that kind that festers in a proud heart: years after Kitchener and Marchand could meet without either feeling the smallest awkwardness. Indeed, not for the first time, soldiers proved themselves better at the diplomat’s trade than the diplomats themselves. The real peril of Fashoda was due to the professional speechifiers; and the embitterment of Anglo-French relations, which long survived the formal settlement of this affair, might well have been averted had statesmen, comfortably seated in palace-offices in a northern latitude, imitated the courtesy and restraint of two war-worn and nerve-racked men of war, fretted by the hundred little miseries of one of the most detestable regions of tropical Africa.

It was Omdurman and Fashoda that made the Kitchener legend, and Kitchener’s part in the Boer War scarcely added to it. Critics might say that the dispositions at Omdurman were faulty, and that though Kitchener was the prince of military organisers, he was not, and never would be, a great general in the field. The people would not have it. They had made up their mind that he was a great man; they went on thinking he was a great man; and many years later, when behind the scenes every small detractor was sneering at the “Kitchener myth,” the general public suffered no smallest shadow of doubt to creep over its full faith in him. He had carried out a clean job cleanly, winding up by a tremendous and final success a business which had been marked by one tragic failure after another. He had achieved, for less money than he had promised to spend, a complete victory, while others had merely added recklessly to the National Debt while subtracting heavily from the national prestige. The critics might say that Kitchener had much luck, that he profited by the efforts of those who preceded him, that means were available for his campaign which were beyond the reach of others. All this was nothing to the public. They saw a great success, and they honoured the man who had accomplished it, all the more because they had been accustomed to connect with defeat all the place-names in his itinerary of triumph.

But the main point of the whole thing was that summarised in the opening paragraph: “Dervishes, 10,800 killed, 16,000 wounded; British and Egyptians, 47 killed, 342 wounded.” Had Kitchener’s victory been dear in life the whole glamour of the business would have been absent. For the British people at that time took an interest in war rather like a virtuous spinster’s interest in wickedness. They liked to hear about it, to talk about it, to feel the thrill of it. But they did not like it to come too near their own homes. Their idea of a good kind of war was one waged against a barbarous foe on a picturesque far-away terrain; one which would enable the Prime Minister, in proposing the thanks of Parliament to the successful general, to talk about “thin red lines” creeping beside gorges that would appal a Canadian trapper, or scaling mountains which would terrify an Alpine guide, until they had “planted the standard of St. George upon the mountains of Rasselas,” or some equally interesting range. They liked the foe to come on bravely but rather injudiciously, and to be “mown down” by machine-guns that never jammed. They liked him to be easily surprised and bamboozled, and then they paid the highest compliments to his “unavailing heroism”; Mr. Kipling probably compensated him with a poem in cockney dialect. But if, declining himself to be surprised and bamboozled, the barbarian succeeded in surprising and bamboozling our own men, we are very apt to describe the ensuing disaster as a “treacherous massacre.” It was, perhaps, this dislike of unobliging enemies, no less than our unmixed joy over the disasters of any foreign force in similar circumstances, that contributed to the want of affection for us on the Continent. However that may be, it is certain that a great part of the popularity of Omdurman was due to the fact that it was an amazingly cheap victory of discipline and apparatus over barbaric and comparatively ill-equipped valour; and no small degree of Kitchener’s prestige was accounted for by the popular comparison of the tiny cost in life of his great feat with the large outlay, in blood as well as in money, of some of his unsuccessful predecessors. The fact was of enormous importance, both in the South African War and later. People always felt that Kitchener could do things by a kind of magic if they were do-able that way, and were thus reconciled to heavy loss when it arrived to troops for which he had responsibility. It was felt that he had no motive but to get results at the very lowest cost; that he would spare neither himself nor another in pursuing that purpose; and that no influences of any kind—personal, political, or social—would ever be allowed to interfere with his ideals of military economy and efficiency.

The public, as usual, was perfectly right in its instinct in all matters which it was competent to judge. It was less right, of course, when it attempted to appraise the military genius of Kitchener. Yet it was less wrong, probably, than the professed critics who in the Great War concentrated on the inevitable shortcomings of a man past his prime, in an unfamiliar environment, surrounded by politicians, nervous of public opinion in a country with representative institutions, who had to build up from the beginning the immense organisation needed for such an effort as that to which this country was committed. When all is said of these shortcomings, the fact remains that the only British soldier who foresaw the duration of the war, and the means necessary to bring it to a successful conclusion, was one who had spent only a few months in Europe since his early manhood, who had never handled white troops on a great scale, and had had no opportunity of applying himself to those problems which had been the life-long occupation of German and French generals. The marvel was not that Lord Kitchener made mistakes, but that he was able to form so just a judgment of the grand contours of the enormous affair with which he was called at a moment’s notice to deal. Judged only by that vast experiment, the greatness of the man is still apparent. But it would be quite unjust so to judge him. The public instinct was correct in fastening on the campaign that culminated at Omdurman as a supreme illustration of his qualities. They were less those of a great commander in the field than of a patient planner, plotter, and organiser, a super-sapper and miner, the manager of a great military business. From first to last he was always the engineer, the mathematician, and the business man; and if at the last he appeared less a business man than at the first, it was only because he was that kind of business man who must have all the threads in his own hands, and the threads of the last great business were too numerous for any one pair of hands to hold.

It was not so in the Nineties. Then Kitchener had a measurable task and immeasurable energy; he could do everything himself, and anything that he could do himself was well done. One most authentic proof of his greatness was his choice of instruments; “Kitchener’s men” have always shown themselves good for something, and generally good for most things. Another was the manner in which he impressed his personality on all who came near him. It is easy and safe to talk about the absurdity of the “Kitchener myth” in general society; the experience is much more embarrassing when an old officer of Kitchener happens to be present. For the grim man who was so ruthless to incompetence, one might almost add so cruel to misfortune, the man who treated ill-health as a kind of crime, and marriage as a kind of treason, somehow managed to get himself loved. That part of the Kitchener legend which represented him as without heart or bowels was, indeed, false. He was inexorable in business, and in general society he always assumed, partly out of shyness and partly from policy, a defensive armour that was most difficult to penetrate. But at bottom there was not a little geniality in his nature, and among intimates he was often cheerful and sometimes garrulous; the habit grew on him with years, and in most serious times, and in the midst of intensely serious discussions, he would frequently develop a curious irrelevancy and small-talkativeness. At no time did he like to be alone; if he did not talk himself—and sometimes he indulged a mood of strict taciturnity—he liked to have someone to talk to him. And, being an autocrat, he always preferred that the somebody should be one who would not take offence if suddenly snubbed for doing what he was there to do. There are kings who love the society of great lords as near as may be to their own station, and there are kings who prefer for their intimates and confidants men of inferior standing. Lord Kitchener was a potentate of the latter kind, and for the most part the true man was only seen by people who were in effect little more than members of his suite. The chief exceptions were a few favoured generals, and the few men, and the fewer women, who had the privilege of being his friends in general society. With such he could be utterly charming; and he had also a way of getting into the affections of their children: one little girl, now a mother herself, used always to say her prayers at his knee when he was a visitor at her father’s house; and the Grenfell boys were on small-brotherly terms with the grim Field-Marshal. Kitchener, in short, had a very human heart, and a quite human longing for affection. His celibacy was partly a matter of accident and partly of principle: he disliked extremely the idea of a married soldier; he seems to have shared Athos’ view that a dying warrior should cry with his last breath “Vive le roi,” and not murmur, “Adieu, my dear wife.” Thus in South Africa he would allow none of the married officers to be joined by their wives, and once in a general company, on hearing of the marriage of one of his men, he burst into an angry tirade. With such a view of the vocation of soldiering, and with the mere fact of so much of his life being passed in remote places, it is small wonder that his own marrying age went by. But, though in his later years he may not have regretted the lack of a wife, he certainly felt the want of children, and realised somewhat pathetically his own loneliness.

But this gentler side was known to very few indeed, and only guessed by a few more. To the majority of those who met Kitchener, even frequently and in some intimacy, he appeared until the very last years of his life a man of one idea and no emotions. The truth was rather that his emotions were mostly in complete subjection to his will, while the idea exercised a despotic domination over his whole being. There was really something of the old anchorite in this very modern and secular person, and it is not altogether irrelevant to recall that in his early days he was vividly interested in small minutiæ of Church ritual.

“I have heard him indulge in coarse ungentlemanly emphatics,

When the Protestant Church has been divided on the subject of the proper width of a chasuble’s hem;

I have even known him to sneer at albs, and as for dalmatics,

Words cannot convey an idea of the contempt he always expressed for them.”

The young Kitchener was far from sharing the sentiments of Gilbert’s latitudinarian hero. He would have discussed albs with fervour, and dalmatics with reverence, and would have seen nothing more ridiculous in caring about the size of a chasuble than about the strength of a platoon. He would have argued, or rather felt, that discipline, dogma—in other words, shape, consistency, and fighting unity—were as necessary in affairs of the Spirit as in secular life. In other days and other circumstances he might well have been either a peaceful abbot or the head of an order of religious knights; there was deep in his nature that passion for self-immolation which made the most businesslike people monks, as well as that passion for meticulous order and method which made monks the most businesslike people of their time. His other passions, probably, were not strong; strong or weak, they were wholly under control. He hated incontinence in any form. The effusive youth who called him “Kitchener,” and was met with the cool reply “Perhaps you’d rather use my Christian name,” was not more discouraged than the swearer of oaths or the teller of profane or unseemly anecdotes. To Kitchener might be applied the eulogy of Clarendon on Charles I: “He was so severe an exactor of gravity and reverence in all mention of religion, that he could never endure any light or profane word, with what sharpness of wit soever it was covered; and ... no man durst bring before him any thing that was profane or unclean.” Sir George Arthur has remarked on the mingled astonishment and irritation with which he listened to a questionable performance at Cairo, given on an occasion when official reasons obliged him to be present; and there was something hugely disconcerting in the manner in which he received a jest of doubtful taste made in general society. His attitude was too well known for such a thing to be a possibility among his own intimates.

It has been said that the man who is not afraid to die is lord and master of all other men. Equally true is it to say that the man who is not afraid to live according to his own plan will always dominate those who yield to fashion in opinion, to social modes, or to the weaknesses of their own natures. Kitchener’s peculiar power was due to his immense self-discipline. He could hardly be called, in the real sense, a military genius; Roberts was his superior as an intellectual soldier, and among his own subordinates there were men more richly endowed even in those qualities he really possessed in large measure—the qualities of the organiser which were so signally shown in the long preparations for the triumph, so swift and sure in its final realisation, of Omdurman. But other soldiers were sometimes off duty. Kitchener was never off duty. The moment one task was done he was preparing himself for another; he was that kind of moral athlete who never permits himself a day’s departure from strict training. Practically this rigidity has its dangers; there is such a thing in life, as in sport, as getting stale from over-fitness; and when the final test of Kitchener’s life came it might perhaps have been well for him and for others if he had wasted (as he would have thought it) a little more time during his prime. For, with all his painfully acquired lore, he lacked the full knowledge of men, and in whole departments of things he could only oppose an enormous innocence to people grown old in wile. But in the meantime he gained indefinitely in influence through his almost inhuman absorption in soldiering, his complete indifference to money, society, and everything men prize as soon as their purely material desires have reached saturation point. He received full credit for the qualities which were really his. He was conceded some qualities which, in fact, he did not possess. He was trusted as the final court of appeal on all questions relating to the East, even those affecting parts of the East with which he was really not familiar, for it is our habit to think that a man who has lived in Suez must in some mysterious way know much about Bombay. He was regarded above all as “straight,” and justly so, for, though habituation to Eastern conditions had given him in minor matters some touch of Oriental guile, he was, in all great things, the soul of truth, and in everything the essence of probity. But there were occasions on which his great prestige was something of a disadvantage. It was assumed that on all military and Eastern questions Kitchener must be right and all other men wrong, and that he must be especially right whenever his opinion happened to clash with that of a politician. A good many things might have gone better had not the infallibility of Lord Kitchener become a journalistic dogma, to be disputed only at the cost of excommunication. In the same way the magic of his personality was used to give weight to a certain set of political ideas. It was so used without collusion or privity or consent on his part; all his life he had an almost superstitious terror of politics, and no hint of sympathy with one party or reprobation of another ever crossed his lips. But it is not beyond the ingenuity of politicians to convey an impression without making a statement, and they so contrived matters that a good many people, while honouring him as a soldier and recognising him as a high-minded public servant, watched him with a certain strained attention. It needed the Great War to reveal to the working classes the true nature of the man and the absolute singleness of his aims. Then they were convinced, and he had no heartier admirers than the working men, who honoured his name, and trusted his word, above all other war-lords’.

But though Kitchener was in every sense the farthest removed from a politician, he had many of the qualities of a statesman, and his work at every period of his career (and at no period more than during the Great War) cannot be properly measured solely by his military achievements. We have seen his statesmanship at work at Fashoda, but it had its influence at every stage of his career. If the Kitchener legend, whatever measure of falsity mingled with its truth, was of immense value in sustaining the spirit of England in the great ordeal, it was not less useful in vitalising the Alliance. Frenchmen felt that they had in Kitchener someone who understood the real nature of the vast transaction before them; someone who would not yield to the traditional English conception of Continental war as colony-seizing and island-collecting, but who, on the other hand, knew in his very bones that the thing must be fought out on the main battlefield, and that no showy successes elsewhere would avail against defeat in that sombre theatre. The visit to Paris, in the gloomy days before the Marne, was that of a soldier who understood war on the great scale, and was understood at once by men grown grey in the study of war of that kind. Kitchener’s work at the War Office can never be measured by shells and machine-guns; the greatest part of it was that of a military foreign minister, able to speak a language unknown to a civilian Secretary for Foreign Affairs.

It is this latent quality of statesmanship which makes one wonder whether Lord Kitchener would not have done even greater things for the Empire had it been his lot to spend more time at its heart and less in the outer marches. But his fate was decided partly by his circumstances and partly by his peculiar constitution. He could only expect promotion by taking jobs that nobody else wanted, and he had a horror of cold weather which would have made continuous residence in a northern latitude insupportable to him. Once he got the label of the soldier of the outer Empire it stuck to him, and thus it happened that the Englishman with the broadest military outlook of his time never faced, until he was called to the greatest of all tasks, a military problem of the largest kind. His own view of himself is well known. He looked forward, just before his death, to tasks rather of a statesmanlike than a military kind; and it is permissible to distrust that optimism which professed, when the news of the Hampshire’s loss came, the comfortable belief that he had done his country all the service of which he was capable. For there was much in the man which would assuredly not have been useless in the final liquidation of accounts; and, even had no specific employment been found for his talents, the mere force of his living example would have been valuable. In the presence of one who had shown such large fidelity, such noble disdain of the objects of selfish desire, such self-forgetting devotion to a trust, it would have been more difficult for faction and self-seeking to display themselves unashamed. He is too recently dead for his spirit to work on this generation as it will, doubtless, on men still unborn. But alive he might have reminded the masses that there can be true greatness in great place, and people in great place that true greatness is a matter of a man’s soul and not of his station.

CHAPTER VIII
THE DUKE OF DEVONSHIRE

There are certain things that come to one only in maturity. One is a taste for Jane Austen. Another is a correct sense of the meaning and importance of such men as Spencer Compton Cavendish, Knight of the Garter, eighth Duke of Devonshire, Marquis of Hartington, Earl of Devonshire, Earl of Burlington, Baron Cavendish of Hardwicke, and Baron Cavendish of Keighley.

To a young man in the Nineties the mere fact of the Duke’s importance was obvious enough. Had he not been in politics time out of mind, ever since he was twenty-four? Was not his breach with Mr. Gladstone one of the cardinal facts of modern history? Was he not among the first half-dozen men accorded the distinction of “first person” reports? Was he not cartooned and quoted after the manner of the very greatest? But why? The young fellow of the Nineties saw simply a large dull man, with a large dull way of talking, a man incapable of saying a witty thing, or doing a picturesque thing; and in his haste this young fellow declared that all men were snobs, that the sole secret of the Duke’s influence was his wealth and position, that if he had been born the son of a clerk he would never have risen to be more than a clerk, but, being the son of a great noble, people hastened to find in him qualities which were simply not there.

And in some ways, no doubt, the young fellow was right. In any station Spencer Compton Cavendish would have been something, something real and substantial, something of true human worth, of strong sense, shrewd vision, and rare fidelity. But it is highly probable that, had he been born poor, he would never have been heard of beyond the limits of his parish. For he had few of the qualities, and none of the defects, that make a man rise. No human being was ever more destitute of vanity, which is one great motive of pushfulness. Though his sense of duty made him accept responsibility, he hated it; though he felt compelled to do much work, he detested exertion; utterance in any kind was painful to him; he was quite wanting in surface brilliance and in the quality people call magnetism. Such men do not readily “get on.” They find their groove, and stay in it. They are too much trusted in the positions they actually fill for anybody to be anxious to promote them, while their own laziness, pride, dislike of cultivating superiors, and general capacity of “consuming their own smoke” all conspire to keep them where they are. In most business places one will find men almost indispensable in their special jobs, who are never thought of in connection with a superior job, partly because it would be troublesome to replace them, partly because they are bad courtiers, but chiefly from the sheer difficulty of imagining them elsewhere.

The Duke of Devonshire was a man of this sort. He did not make himself, and he was not exactly made by circumstances; he was there, and the circumstances were so, and a process of adaptation, chiefly unconscious, followed. He might almost be described, politically, as a natural growth—a kind of tree which went through its destined changes of development and decay in accordance with a certain principle, but in obedience to no visible motive. He got himself planted in a certain soil without much consideration on his own part; he took such firm root that he could not unplant himself, though he constantly wished to do so; and thus it arrived that for over fifty years he was the one permanent feature in a changing landscape. The creatures of the hour, the beasts of the political field, gathered under him for shade, support, or convenience, and he gave them what he had to give, almost with the impartiality of a thing inanimate. But, just as the beech-tree is often in close association with a herd of swine, but does not follow the swine when they roam away to an oak, so the Duke remained rooted in the midst of a constantly changing company; he had all sorts of associates, but he did not follow them when they sought fresh woods and pastures new; to the end he remained what he had been from the beginning—the pure Whig. I remember a poor little Liberal Unionist of the Nineties who complained that he had been sadly misrepresented. “It is not I,” he used to say—he was about five feet high, and had a querulous little squeak—“it is not I who have deserted my party; it is my party that has deserted me.” The Duke of Devonshire could at any time have said the same thing without evoking a challenge or even a smile. He did not leave Mr. Gladstone; he merely stayed where he was. He did not leave Mr. Balfour twenty years later; Mr. Balfour took up a new position, and the Duke remained in his. Of all the Liberal Unionists he alone did not suffer “some sea change” as the result of immersion in the Tory flood. Even Mr. Chamberlain was not immune; he did not become a Conservative, but he did become a new kind of Radical. The Duke shed no particle of his old-fashioned Whiggism, with its distrust of the Crown, the Church, and the people, and its intense faith in itself. In 1902 he was still conscious of a dividing line between himself and his Conservative colleagues—a line “imperceptible to the practised eye” of Lord Rosebery. The line was assuredly there, real if not obtruded. Lord Salisbury was still too much of a Carolean theologically and too much of a modernist politically to suit a mind which envisaged Sir Robert Walpole as the ideal occupant of 10, Downing Street, and Dr. Thomas Tusher as the proper tenant of Lambeth.

If this immobility had been the result of mere stupidity the young man of the Nineties would have been justified in his scepticism. But in fact the Duke was by no means stupid. Or, rather, the fact can best be put in positive form. While the least clever of men, he had a quite uncommon gift of true wisdom. He had all the outward marks of dullness. No man was more completely without colour or atmosphere. A rather abnormal carelessness in dress contributed to his conventionality rather than relieved it. He was old-fashioned without a touch of the picturesqueness of the antique, and untidy without the piquancy of Bohemianism. Some of his contemporaries had the interest of a well-ordered “period” room; the Duke gave rather the impression of a furniture broker’s shop full of miscellaneous Victorian mahogany. His beard—though it had a certain subtle character of its own, as just a shade different from the growth of any plebeian, lay or clerical—completed the notion of carelessness without grace and individuality without distinction. His attitudes were angular; when he did not sprawl on a bench or in an arm-chair he leaned up against a pillar or a mantelpiece, and somehow he seemed to take the colour out of the most glowing examples of stuff and stone. His expression was habitually dreary, and if by chance he said he was glad to see you—and very often he did not—you would have had some little difficulty in believing it had you not reflected that “no Cavendish tells a lie,” and that he was a most typical Cavendish in that regard. He suffered from a permanent difficulty of self-expression; the simplest speech caused him torment, and (though he could be the kindest and most considerate of hosts) social chit-chat was scarcely less painful. He was most extraordinarily lazy. He dozed when he could, and yawned when he could not. His yawn was perfectly impartial—he yawned at friends, foes, and himself. Once in the middle of his own Army Estimates the fit came upon him, and he signified in the usual manner his weariness of the whole performance. This yawn was a thing of wonder, so hearty and natural that no question of manners arose. It suggested no affront, even to the most prolix speaker; it was rather a proclamation of privilege, like the wearing of a hat in the House of Commons. It seemed to say, “I am a Duke, and (possibly more to the point) a great gentleman, so that nobody can accuse me of not knowing how to ‘behave.’ But after all what is the use of owning Chatsworth, Devonshire House, all those Eastbourne ground-rents, and I really cannot trouble to think what else, if I cannot be natural? Here I am—heaven alone knows really why—condemned to this intolerable boredom. I go through it, because I feel somehow that I ought. But I claim in return the freedom of not pretending that I find it amusing. Please don’t be offended; I should be sorry if you were. But if you insist on taking offence I shall sleep none the less soundly to-night, or—who knows?—ten minutes hence if the fit takes me.”

It is related of the Duke that he once went to another seat in the House of Lords specially to listen to a speech, and fell asleep there before five minutes had elapsed. He once gave a reply to a noble lord. The noble lord was not satisfied, and made a long speech in order to say so. The Duke fell asleep, but woke automatically (as people do at the end of a sermon) when the voice ceased. Then he began to read his answer a second time, but, suddenly remembering what had already happened, abruptly sat down again without saying another word. And the House (which knew its Duke) was perfectly satisfied.

How the Duke in such circumstances managed to get the right end of any controversial stick must ultimately remain a mystery. But that he did so is a plain fact. For, if a slow thinker, he was a generally clear one, and, if a painful speaker, he made speeches which never lacked matter. His was one of those minds on which sophistry has no effect. He was not incapable of admiring eloquence and ingenuity. His attitude towards Mr. Gladstone was a singular mixture of reverence and something not unlike disdain. So much of Mr. Gladstone was admirable, and yet so much of him simply “would not do for the Duke.” One often sees a shrewd old Hodge listening to the patter of a cheap-jack at a fair. He enjoys the jokes, and has a kind of glee in the dexterity, but he is simply not made to believe in an eighteen-carat gold English lever, jewelled in thirty-seven holes, for twenty-three and six. The Duke never troubled to consider every point; he was content to say that it could not be done at the price, and leave the matter there. And if he would not buy, still less would he consider any proposal to go into the cheap-jack business himself; if anybody wanted the Duke as a colleague it was no use to propose a line in razors made only to sell. The character, of course, has its defects. The Duke was mainly negative in his wisdom. His belief in gold might make him unjust to platinum, but he was infallible in detecting pinchbeck. On things of pure spirit it was useless to consult him, but on any question which could be weighed in the balance of common-sense his judgment sought its fellow.

Hence it became a habit of a large number of people, during a long range of time, to wait till the Duke had declared himself before they made up their own minds. It sometimes took the Duke a long time to declare himself. Where, as in the case of Home Rule, the matter was comparatively simple, no man could be more sharply decisive. It was impossible for him to undergo any process of self-hypnosis such as that of which Mr. Gladstone was occasionally capable; he could not understand the distinction between “war” and “military operations” or between being “surrounded” and being “hemmed in.” In 1885 he had declared himself unalterably against Home Rule, and he saw no reason to say another thing in 1886. But in the matter of Tariff Reform the issue and the man were both more complicated, and plain “Yes” or “No” harder. The Duke was quite sure about Ireland; he was less sure about maintaining Free Trade by reverting at least partially to Protection. He knew Mr. Gladstone to the bottom; no human being had succeeded in knowing Mr. Balfour. He could only confess himself at first “completely puzzled and distracted by all the arguments pro and con Free Trade and Protection.” But, he finally decided, “whichever of them is right, I cannot think that something which is neither, but a little of both, can be right.” In both cases his judgment was an element of great importance, but, while it was of decisive effect in regard to Home Rule, it exerted less influence on the latter controversy. The public judged, as usual, rightly. In the one case Lord Hartington, as a plain and very honest Englishman in close contact with realities, might be trusted to form at least an interim judgment on behalf of plain and honest Englishmen in general. But in the other case the moral factor counted for less, and the intellectual factor for more, and the prolonged puzzlement of the Duke detracted from his influence when he finally decided (with infinite agony) on his course.

The main source of the Duke’s influence was, indeed, the general conviction that, with a masculine but ordinary understanding, he combined perfect disinterestedness and straightforwardness. This faith was not based wholly on the fact that he was a great noble; the middle class might, indeed, have been a little scandalised by the side of him illustrated in the affair of the napkin-ring. The Duke had seen in the paper that somebody had given a certain bride a set of napkin-rings. He worried about the meaning of this until he came across a knowledgeable man, who, he thought, could explain what napkin-rings were. The explanation was given that in a certain class of society people did not use clean napkins for every meal, and that therefore each member of the family kept a distinctive ring. The Duke remained silent for ten minutes. Then he suddenly exclaimed: “Good God!” It was certainly not this kind of aloofness that gave the Duke his power. Nor was it so much to the point that he was placed, by his rank and wealth, far above all vulgar ambitions. Many men as rich and as highly placed have been the objects of sleepless suspicion. Apart from money, there are plenty of temptations open to rank, and wealth is no guarantee of honesty. The Duke enjoyed public confidence in an extraordinary degree because it was so very obvious, not only that he was getting nothing, but that it was impossible for him to get anything out of politics. His yawn, in fact, was his great talisman. Everybody knew that if he had consulted his own tastes he would hardly have stirred beyond his park palings. Everybody knew that he carried out what he believed to be his political duties just as he carried out what he believed to be his social duties, not because he got any pleasure or profit from them, but because the obligations were there and had to be met. It is said that he once invited the Prince of Wales to lunch, and then forgot all about it; the Prince presumably arrived to find Devonshire House fragrant with the ducal equivalent of Irish stew; while His Grace himself had to be summoned by telephone from his club by a terrified major-domo. It was part of the Duke’s strength that such a story could be related of him. The true point was not that he was a great nobleman, and therefore disinterested; it was that he was from every point of view uninterested. It was not simply that he had no financial or social axe to grind; there was no fancy cutlery of the spiritual or intellectual kind which he desired to sharpen. Men do not always ruin their country for a fee; they more often do so for a fad. The Duke was free from all fads, except Whiggism. He had a certain honourable interest in education. He nourished, in his dry and secretive way, a distinct love of the arts in general and of certain departments in literature. But on all public questions he was able to bring his faculties, such as they were—and it was particularly easy to rate them too lowly—without subjective disturbance; it may almost be said that he thought in vacuo.

Moreover, he was in essence a very ordinary Englishman. With an effort he might think of himself as a Briton, or as a citizen of the British Empire. But his inner mind knew nothing of Acts of Union; he was English and nothing but English. And being very English, it followed that he cared a great deal about truth and very little about logic, and that he was much more inclined to follow the beaten track than to initiate. People felt that he was a safe man, who would not go far, but therefore could not go far wrong. He once described himself, rather pathetically, as “the brake on the wheel.” It is a humble, but on occasion a useful, function, and the sheer unimaginativeness of the man was time and time again an asset to his country. But such a character arouses no great enthusiasm, and if the Duke was trusted without limit, he was neither a popular idol nor the hero of a small circle. He went his way in a certain detachment, never alone but always a little lonely. Even in his own houses there was a tendency to regard him as something to gather round instead of someone to talk to. He might almost be said to fulfil the function of the dining-table rather than of the host.

The position had its compensations. The Duke was the chartered libertine of his time. He could go poaching where others could not look over the hedge. Lord Rosebery’s Derby victories caused scandal among the virtuous of his party. Nobody troubled about the Duke’s bets or race-horses. He played bridge for high points, but nobody thought of him as a gambler. He used emphatic adjectives, without the reproach attaching to the swearer of profane oaths. It may be an exaggeration to say that whatever the Duke did was right. But nobody troubled about his doing wrong; no doubt because people felt that it would not be very much wrong, after all. And in this their judgment was sufficiently sound. The man was in no sense a saint or a hero. He never said or did a thing to make a single man’s pulse beat quicker. He was incapable of the highest in any kind. But his character, however prosaic, was based on a foundation of granitic firmness. If not a great man, he was at least a true and honest one.

CHAPTER IX
ARCHBISHOP TEMPLE

It is related of Frederick Temple, when he was Bishop of London, that he offered two shillings to a cabman who had brought him from somewhere near Piccadilly to Fulham Palace. The cabman looked at the Bishop more in sorrow than in anger. “Would St. Porl,” he asked, “if he were alive now, treat a poor man like that?” “No,” said Temple, “if St. Paul were alive he would be at Lambeth, and the fare there is only a shilling.”

The wit and the philosophy were equally characteristic of the gnarled old man who, at a time of life when most people are fit only for the chimney corner, was still regarded as the strongest prelate on the Bench. Wit, the wit of the peasant rather than of the courtier—and there is no more authentic variety—Dr. Temple had in full measure; there was something reminiscent of Swift in the homely shrewdness of his judgments, and in the terse vigour with which he expressed them. The peasant predominated also in his philosophy; the Rugby boy who delivered the famous opinion that he was “a beast, but a just beast,” was probably not conscious how very right the description was. Temple had eminently the peasant’s sense of what was due from as well as to him. He was spiritual kinsman to that Scottish gardener in Mr. Chesterton’s tale who, being bequeathed “all the gold of the Ogilvies,” took it all, to the very stopping in the testator’s teeth, but left everything else. That manner which many found repellent was not the manner of a really harsh man; Temple could feel deeply, and the sobs that convulsed him when he heard of Archbishop Benson’s sudden death were the authentic heralds of a warm heart. But he had Dr. Johnson’s impatience of “foppish complaints,” of unmeaning compliments, of the little graces that matter so much with the ordinary run of men and women. Of work well and truly done he was sufficiently appreciative, but only sufficiently; after all, good work was the thing to expect, and why make a fuss about it? When people who had no right expressed appreciation of himself he snapped savagely. A courtly Rector once expressed the fear that his lordship must be very tired after such long and self-sacrificing exertions. “Not more tired than a man ought to be,” barked Temple. A careful Vicar remonstrated with him for standing so long bare-headed under a blazing sun. “My skull is thicker than yours,” was the only reply. Above all, he hated anything suggesting professional “gush.” At the laying of the foundation-stone of a new church a clergyman with tendencies that way remarked on the pleasure it must be to him to take part in ceremonies so eloquent of the extending scope of the Church in his diocese. “Not at all,” retorted Temple, “at these affairs I get nothing but cold lamb and ‘The Church’s One Foundation,’ and I’m tired of both.” Though a connoisseur in vintages, he gave up the use of wine simply in order to make easier his task as a temperance-worker; but this self-immolation (and he would have snarled at anybody who praised it as such) made him only the more acid at the expense of men who seemed to him to talk exaggerated nonsense about teetotalism as the foundation of all the virtues.

The truth was that Temple, though of good blood, was himself half a peasant, and was full of that impatience with any kind of pretence which comes of close contact with the soil. He had all the peasant’s pride, together with all the peasant’s contempt for what they call in the country “mucky pride.” Himself master of a pure and masculine style, he detested all floridity of speech. To the end of his life his manners were a little rustic, and he retained that sense of economy (having no necessary relation to meanness) which is inborn in most country people above the station of the labourer and below that of the landlord; when Primate of All England he munched his bun and sipped his milk at a tea-shop with the more satisfaction for the consciousness that they cost only twopence; the “tip” he would omit. Curiously enough, this most English of men was born on soil always Hellenic, and now officially Greek. Thirteenth of the fifteen children of an infantry officer who had been appointed Resident of Santa Maura, one of the Ionian Isles, Temple grew up to speak modern Greek and Italian as fluently as his mother tongue. His father, able and upright, but of explosive temper, came originally from the North Country, and belonged to a branch of that Temple family which, first made illustrious by the husband of Dorothy Osborne and the patron of Swift, has given so many statesmen to England. The mother of the future Archbishop was a Cornish woman by blood and a Puritan by habit and tradition, frugal, pious, authoritative, and immensely capable. She taught Frederick till he was twelve; and, though she knew no Latin, and had no notion of the low cunning of Euclid, she managed to give him a very fair grounding in these and other subjects. The only drawback of this queer kind of instruction was that the boy was left to his own devices in the matter of quantities, and years afterwards the masters at Blundell’s were horrified by his barbaric pronunciation of the polished tongue of Virgil. After his retirement from the Ionian Islands, the paternal Temple bought a small farm in Devonshire, but he could not make it pay, and was forced to take a small appointment in West Africa, where he died. His widow did her best with the farm and a small pension, and young Temple learned how to “muck out” pigsties, to handle stock, and, above all, to plough; years after he could boast that he could draw as straight a furrow as any man in Cornwall, and when as an undergraduate he applied for admission to a Chartist meeting he was allowed to pass the barrier on the testimony of his hands; they were those of an indubitable manual worker.

Mere hard work and hard living, however, fail to embitter a lad of healthy mind and body who is conscious of a creditable past and ambitious of a better future. Temple could bear with stoicism the regimen of dry bread which the poverty of the family compelled. The only severe wound was to his pride. “I think the thing that pinched me most,” said Temple long afterwards, “was to wear patched clothes and patched shoes.” But even this does not seem to have weighed much; his character was sturdy and his spirits were high; and the picture we have of him at Blundell’s is by no means that of the self-conscious poor scholar. Not only was he a hearty player and fighter, but (on the authority of the head-master) “the most impudent boy that ever lived”; and the abounding health of his mind is proved by his detestation of Swiss Family Robinson—“a hateful book,” he calls it, “the liars were so lucky.” At Balliol, where he went with a scholarship, life was hard; he had no fire in his room even in the depth of winter, and was known to read under the light of the hall lamp because he had no oil for his own. The Tractarian movement was then at its climax; Newman was preaching the last of his sermons at St. Mary’s before his conversion to the ancient Church. But Temple seems to have kept his head surprisingly amid all this ferment; he had in truth, throughout life, something of that calm outlook on religion which struck young Esmond in Master Thomas Tusher. He believed in Christianity much as a sound business man believes in double entry, but with conviction there was no emotion. No man dreamed fewer dreams, partly, no doubt, because few men did harder work; work kills dreaming, for good as well as for ill. Outwardly there was little to distinguish Temple from those great pagans of the eighteenth century who nearly made the Church in England what the Church in Ireland actually became. But he had somewhere hidden under the harsh husk of rationalism a little of that wistfulness which one notes in so many of the nineteenth-century clergy; the thing is best described by referring to Kingsley’s anxiety to be with the earliest authorities in theology and the latest authorities in science. In his earlier life, naturally enough, the tendency to modernism was most marked. Temple’s orthodoxy was called into question over his contribution to Essays and Reviews, but there seems no reason to suppose that he departed far from the straight path, and those who have survived to hear most of the great Christian dogmas attacked in conspicuous Church pulpits find inexplicable on purely doctrinal grounds the storm which broke when Mr. Gladstone offered Temple the See of Exeter.

In a wider sense, perhaps, there was a more rational basis for the outcry. For Temple, with all his good and great qualities, was too little of the mystic to appeal to those who regarded the Church as something above and beyond a useful (or even indispensable) organisation. His sense of professional duty was high, but his mind was eminently that of a practical man of affairs, and he would probably have acted more wisely, in other interests as well as his own, if he had remained in the scholastic work to which the earlier part of his life was devoted. When he went to Exeter Temple had behind him a great record as an educational bureaucrat, and a still greater record as head-master of Rugby. But he had never served as a parish priest; his disposition was aloof, his temper autocratic, his manner rugged, his voice harsh and rasping; he had little imagination, and the quality of his mind fitted him more for politics, for high finance, for law, or even for soldiering than for the duties of a Christian high priest. A great spiritual leader in the full sense Temple could never have been. But he “made good” as a Bishop as he had “made good” as a head-master, and in much the same way. His diocese became a well-managed school, and his clergy were put in their places much like the boys of Rugby; some, perhaps, regarded him as a “beast,” none could call him other than a “just beast” and an energetic one. With the laity he had a certain popularity, partly because he was severe on any sacerdotal eccentricities that annoyed them, partly because with ordinary people he was more prone to unbend than with his professional brethren. He was at his very easiest in dealing with boys.

The translation to London, after fifteen years in the West, came in the natural course of events, and the Nineties found Temple well established at Fulham. He was now an old man, but his power of work was as little diminished as the angularity of his character. In a single year he would answer about ten thousand letters, perhaps a third of them in his own hand; the meetings he attended averaged more than one a day; he held seventy or eighty confirmations and ordained a hundred and fifty priests annually, and yet found time for services and addresses for nearly every day of the year. The masculine strength of his mind, the beautiful simplicity of his life, won admiration, but Archbishop Benson had often to deplore the want of that “little more” which would have been so much in his old friend and ex-principal. “He will not say or do,” he laments, at the time of the dockers’ strike, “one thing with the idea that men should think well of him.” “It is very painful,” he says again, in 1891, “very painful, to see the Lords so unappreciative of the Bishop of London—the strongest man nearly in the House, the clearest, the highest-toned, the most deeply sympathetic, the clearest in principle—yet because his voice is a little harsh and his accent a little provincial (though of what province it is hard to say), and his figure square and his hair a little rough, and because all this sets off the idea of his independence, he is not listened to at all by the cold, kindly, worldly-wise, gallant, landowning powers.” The Archbishop was a little cross because during the dockers’ strike Cardinal Manning managed to figure much more largely than Temple in the public eye. But this was something like blaming Darwin because he was not Sir Henry Irving. Temple was Temple, and Manning was Manning; and, if Manning was wise to be always Manning, Temple was certainly wise to be always Temple. A histrionic or diplomatic Temple is something from which the very imagination recoils. And, after all, the gentle Archbishop’s repinings were hardly justified. The kind of worth which Temple represented rarely wins enthusiasm, but it seldom fails to gain respect. To suggest that Temple made any real impression on the great pagan capital would be absurd; like everybody else who has been called for generations to the See of London he was mocked by the gigantic hopelessness of his task. Before London can be made Christian it must be made human, and, though Londoners remain very human, London had long ceased to be so. “London,” says an admirer, “expected in Temple a man of grit and steel, and so it found him.” London, of course, expected nothing, and was in no way disappointed; it was little more concerned with his coming than with the appointment of a new magistrate at Bow Street, and little more concerned with his departure than with the retirement of a Lord Mayor. To London as London—London, just as ignorant of the men who make its laws as of the men who tear up its pavements—Temple was exactly nothing. To a great many people in London he was a name, and to a great many more a character. To only a tiny fraction of London was he anything else. But here, as at Exeter, he “made good” in the narrower sense. He organised and energised, wisely stirred up some dogs which had slept in his predecessor’s time, still more wisely administered soothing syrup to other dogs too emphatically awake, put down his foot in some small matters, kept it discreetly poised in some big ones, and imparted to all who worked under him something of his own single-mindedness and passion for work.

He was seventy-six when he removed to Lambeth, and could save a shilling on his cab fare. “I have still five years’ work in me,” he said to a friend after he had accepted Lord Salisbury’s offer of the Primacy, and the forecast was almost exact; he died before he had completed his sixth year as Archbishop. The work was hardly new to him; for years he had been Archbishop Benson’s chief adviser, and the change was more one of form than of substance. The duties of the highest ecclesiastical office were carried through in the same spirit as those which had gone before; in spite of failing powers the indomitable old man did all that presented itself as his proper work, and, like the patron of Gil Blas, refused to recognise that the same Time which had now reduced him to a rebellious invalidism had had some effect on his sturdy intelligence. He outlived both the century and the great Queen; it actually fell to him, born under George IV, to crown Edward VII, and, like Chatham, he was addressing the House of Lords when he sank under the blow which within a few days ended his life.

On the broad current of the national life at the beginning of a bustling new reign, the news of his death caused but a momentary ripple. But far outside the limits of his own Church and circle there were not wanting men who felt that a figure had been removed that left none to vie with it in its rugged and lonely majesty. It was not a time of popularity for the typical Victorian virtues. It stood to the age that had passed somewhat as the Regency did to the last phase of the reign of Louis XIV. But those who read at the close of 1902 the record of the full and fine life that had begun eighty-one years earlier could only admit that the age must have been great in which Temple after all never reached quite the first rank.

CHAPTER X
LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL

In 1880 Lord Randolph Churchill was regarded as a trifler; in 1885 he was definitely numbered among the three or four men who counted in British politics; in 1890 he was, politically speaking, a ghost; and in 1895 he died. His whole political career—or at least that part of it which could distinguish him from the ordinary representative of a family borough—scarcely extended to fifteen years; the significant part of it was compressed within five. Yet those five years sufficed to give him an ascendancy in the Tory Party far more marked than that which Disraeli had established after decades of laborious application. The moment before his fall it seemed certain that he, and no other, would shape Tory policy; that he would, sooner or later, oust the Cecils; that he would get rid of the Birmingham influence; and that, within some quite measurable period, he would, with undisputed authority, reign over a Cabinet of young Tories committed to the task of making actual part at least of the Young England dream of the great Jew who, with his usual generous appreciation of youthful talent, had marked Lord Randolph early as one who must, with any reasonable prudence and industry, play a great part in affairs.

LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL.

The fall came, and within a few weeks Lord Randolph was in the position of the unfortunate deer “much marked of the melancholy Jacques.” He was bankrupt, and shunned by every “fat and greasy citizen” on the look out for rich pasturage. The men who had trembled before him had begun to wonder why they could have been so foolishly submissive. Lord Salisbury congratulated himself on having got rid of a troublesome “carbuncle,” and inwardly resolved not to run a second risk. Mr. Balfour, who could not forget the comradeship of the Fourth Party days, was like a good-natured man who sees an old schoolfellow carrying a sandwich-board in the Strand; unable to give any real help, he was only too glad to bestow some of the small change of courtesy, especially when no one in particular was looking. The ordinary crowd of place-holders and place-seekers passed by on the other side. In the inner councils of the party there reigned for a moment a queer kind of glee. It was like the breakfast after a very disturbed night in a country house. The memory of the fire, or the burglars, or the Zeppelins, or the ghost which made Lady Polly scream so dreadfully (and which turned out to be only the under-footman somnambulating in his pyjamas) gives a peculiar zest to the devilled kidneys and the grilled sole, and the best appetites belong to those who were most alarmed. Now, Lord Randolph Churchill was, to the ordinary Conservative, not one but all of these terrors. He was a fire which had actually burned many dry sticks, and threatened many more. He had broken into the Cabinet with a most ingeniously contrived set of house-breaking implements. He was much in the air, and nobody knew when he was going to drop things of explosive quality. And he was, in a certain political sense, a sham ghost and a real under-footman. That “Tory Democracy,” as old as Bolingbroke and perhaps older, was never much more than a wraith, and nobody really knew how much substance there was behind the cunning magnesium glares with which Lord Randolph sought to hypnotise the masses. But everybody did know that, with all his vigour and ability and success, there was something, so to speak, unestablished about him. He was the master of his masters, as a servant may become in certain circumstances rare in real life but common in fiction; and he used his power while it remained with him without stint or scruple. But he never quite consolidated that power; he remained always like the schemer in the novel, apparently omnipotent but really always fearful of a reverse, and compelled to go on more and more boldly because to stay still is the most dangerous thing of all. The first false step was irretrievable, because there was, after all, nothing to retrieve. Lord Randolph was not a political investor. He was a margin gambler, constantly putting his winnings to a new hazard. The game is an exciting one, and while he continues to win much is heard in praise of the punter’s genius. But one break will ruin him.

In Vivian Grey Disraeli had prophetically drawn the main lines of the character and method of his admirer and imitator. Vivian, like Lord Randolph, went in for politics for the excitement of the thing, and, also like Lord Randolph, proceeded on the assumption that every man who seems dull is a dolt. We all know how Vivian fooled and bent to his purpose the stupid Marquess of Carabas. But when the house of cards went to pieces it was the clever Vivian who looked chiefly the fool. The Marquess could go back to his park, his coverts, his stables, and his cellar; the other hardly knew where to hide. Lord Randolph’s case was not dissimilar. He used and abused men in many ways more important than himself, but up to a point he showed great dexterity; his victims were generally those whom other great people were not unwilling to wound, though delicate of striking. At last he tried his strength against equals, or perhaps superiors; he failed, and all dullness extant revelled in its revenge. It is often stated that his one mistake was that he “forgot Goschen.” It would be truer to say that he forgot the prudence which had so far underlain his apparent recklessness. We can hardly believe that a man of Lord Randolph’s intelligence seriously thought there would be any difficulty in providing a stop-gap Chancellor of the Exchequer. Goschen did as well as another, but practically anybody would do. A turn of history seldom depends on the Goschens, whether in units, or tens, or hundreds. The decided and important turn that came late in 1886 was due to quite another personality. It had become a question between the survival of the Cecils and the Cecil idea and the survival of Lord Randolph and Tory Democracy. Lord Randolph had sneered at Mr. Gladstone as “an old man in a hurry.” He himself was still a young man, by all recent political standards a very young man. He was only in his late thirties. But he was in an even greater hurry than Mr. Gladstone in his middle seventies. It is said that after the defeat of the Salisbury Government in 1885 a friend asked him the course of events. “I shall lead the Opposition for five years,” he replied. “Then I shall be Prime Minister for five years. Then I shall die.” Only one-third of this prediction was fulfilled, but that was fulfilled to the letter, or rather the figure; the estimate of his span of life was almost exact. This sense, which oppressed him from an early age, that he had not long to live, was doubtless the explanation of much. He could not wait; unless the things he wanted came quickly they were useless. Hence, probably, his break with the Cecils on a detail of finance. It was a matter in itself capable of easy accommodation. But the real reasons for the rupture were real indeed. A very little experience in office had shown Lord Randolph that, while the substantial men of Conservatism had been tolerant of, if not actually enraptured with, “Tory Democracy” as a bait for the voter, the last thing they intended to suffer was Tory Democracy in terms of legislation. His great Budget at first affected the solid Tories of the Cabinet much as the glare of the boa-constrictor does the rabbit. They listened in helpless and fascinated silence to the grandiose plan, involving much of that “spoliation” so often denounced since in “revolutionary” Chancellors of the Exchequer, and for a moment it seemed as if the audacious young Minister had won by the sheer momentum of his attack. But this dazed half-acquiescence did not long endure. Was it for this, the country gentlemen asked, that they had beaten the Radicals? And they shudderingly recalled the recent Dartford speech, in which Lord Randolph had outlined a programme of reform which The Times described as “recalling the palmy days of Mr. Gladstone.” So the Dartford programme was conscientiously emasculated. “I see it crumbling into pieces every day,” wrote Lord Randolph to Lord Salisbury in November, 1886. “I am afraid it is an idle schoolboy’s dream to suppose that Tories can legislate, as I did stupidly. They can govern and make war and increase taxation and expenditure à merveille, but legislation is not their province in a democratic constitution.”

The great question, of course, was how Lord Salisbury would act. He was not, on some points, a quite typical Conservative, though his main object, like that later of Mr. Balfour, was to avoid change as much as possible. He had been heartily with Lord Randolph in Opposition. He had approved the Churchillian programme. He was not insensible to the fact that many of the younger elements in the Conservative Party were sympathetic to it. But temperamentally Lord Salisbury was averse to the whole scheme of Tory Democracy, except perhaps as a piece of protective make-believe. If the “classes and dependents of class” could be persuaded to accept something that would cover Lord Randolph’s election pledges, well and good. But if it were a choice between the support of those classes on the one hand and on the other “trusting to public meetings and the democratic forces generally to carry you through,” then his verdict was for “work at less speed and at a lower temperature than our opponents.” When the Prime Minister had arrived at this decision there were only two courses open to Lord Randolph. In fact, there was really only one. For it was not possible for him, as for so many men, to accept the rebuff with feigned cheerfulness, to eat his own words, to defend a policy not his own, and adroitly explain away the absence of a policy that was his. His audacity (so far brilliantly successful), his hot temper, his proud and intractable spirit, and perhaps, above all, his slight expectation of long life, forbade his waiting with the patience of Disraeli for the chances time might bring. It is not surprising that he decided to leave the Cabinet with the notion of being recalled on his own terms; the astonishing thing is that a man of so strong a sense of tactics should on this occasion have played so completely into the hands of his opponents. The man of strategy placed himself in a position to receive every kind of fire without the possibility of effective return. The man of drama contrived to reserve for Christmastime, when no political explosion can vie in interest with the domestic cracker, the announcement of his resignation. If he had pondered deeply on the means of sinking himself deeper than e’er plummet sounded, he could hardly have chosen, in gross and in detail, a better method. Not Goschen, but his own rashness, made his fall like Lucifer’s.

The truth, no doubt, was that he seriously miscalculated the strength of his position. He made the clever man’s mistake of under-rating dull men, forgetting the patience of their malice and the perfection of their hypocrisy. There were people with great names and claims, but little brains, who had cried “Hosannah!” as loudly as any in public, but never ceased to mutter “Crucify him” in the Carlton Club arm-chairs. He had invaded all kinds of prescriptive rights, had smothered all sorts of peddling ambitions, had trodden heavily on the tail of Tadpole and pulled unceremoniously the nose of Taper. Success like his was bound in any case to create an imposing array of enemies; he rather unnecessarily assisted in their manufacture. With intimates, indeed, and those who came into close official relation with him, he could be charming; his manner ranged from the airiest and easiest familiarity to an old-fashioned courtesy rather strangely in contrast with his boyish face and dandyish figure. But he rarely troubled whether a chance word hurt unimportant people, and the great misery of politics is that nobody can safely be classed as unimportant. “Why will you insist on being an Ishmael—your hand against every man?” asked Mr. Chamberlain (first enemy, then friend, then enemy again) when, not content with his other troubles, Churchill went out of his way to attack a warm friend and well-wisher. There was a good deal of the Ishmaelite in Lord Randolph; his nerves seemed to demand the stimulus of combat, and in the absence of war he was given to the duel. But other men have triumphed over equal difficulties, and more is needed to explain the sudden and final failure of Lord Randolph. That the showy edifice he had erected disappeared almost as suddenly as the palace of Aladdin was due as much to the character of the material as to that of the architect. He had used the actual bricks of nineteenth-century Toryism, but the mortar he employed was no more binding than snow or butter. Something very like genius enabled him to make his house look strong and habitable—so long as it was uninhabited. But with the very day of the housewarming the mischief began.

The career of Lord Randolph, in short, was founded on a hatred and an illusion. The hatred was for the middle class. The illusion was that the Conservative Party was still the party of aristocracy, that the old quarrel between the landowner on the one side and the banker, the manufacturer and the tradesman on the other, yet persisted. He failed, not because he was before, but because he was behind his time. His dislike of the middle class was seldom hidden. Nearly every contemptuous figure he invented was suggested either by trade or by the vanities of rich tradesmen. Mr. Chamberlain, because he had made money and not inherited it, was attacked for “bandying vulgar compliments” with the young Earl of Durham. Mr. Gladstone was sneered at for living in a “castle,” not because he was a Liberal, but because he was of middle-class origin. A public man of old descent might have amused himself in chopping down one of his ancestral oaks without scornful comment from Lord Randolph. But it was intolerable, in the circumstances, that the forest should “lament, in order that Mr. Gladstone may perspire.” “Marshall and Snelgrove of debate,” “lords of suburban villas, owners of vineries and pineries”—a score of such expressions of contempt for the successful middle-class man could be culled at random from Churchill’s speeches, and they account for much of the orator’s success with working-class audiences. But though, in the revulsion against the views fashionable a little earlier, he could command much popular applause, though he could inflict great damage on the Liberal claim to represent the masses, he could, no more than Disraeli, translate his own dream of “Tory Democracy” into reality. For the Tory Party was now itself very largely middle class and only very slightly democratic. It regarded Lord Randolph’s creed much as Lord Palmerston did the Christian religion—excellent in its own place, but it must not intrude in practical affairs. The party might have forgiven him if quite convinced of his insincerity. It destroyed him on the first suspicion that he might actually be in downright earnest.

It would have been better for Lord Randolph’s fame had Fate struck once and struck no more. For him was reserved a crueller destiny. The Eighties saw his brief splendours. The Nineties witnessed only the culmination of his slow and mournful decline. He himself seems hardly to have been aware of the ravages which disease and disappointment had wrought on his fine intellect, and the latter scenes were scarcely less painful to his more generous antagonists than to the few friends who still refused to believe that he was an exhausted man and a spent political force. Nobody is more quickly forgotten than a living politician who has ceased to count, and when the end came it was with an almost ridiculous sense of remoteness that the average member of the public read the inevitable homilies on Lord Randolph’s strange and sad career. He had written his name in water and builded his house on the sands.

CHAPTER XI
HERBERT SPENCER

I remember hearing a Nonconformist divine of the Nineties denounce the young man who, instead of taking a class, spent his Sunday afternoon “reading Herbert Spencer.”

It struck me at the time that the reverend gentleman was fighting an unusually extinct Satan. For even in the Nineties the number of young men who desecrated the Sabbath in this particular fashion was very small. Herbert Spencer had reached the stage of being much quoted and little read. Indeed, the reverence in which he was held had a strong resemblance to that which men pay to the departing or the departed. Lord Morley has quoted a competent critic who warned him, a day or two before the last volume of Spencer’s work was published, that the system expounded by him was, if not already dead, at least on the eve of death.

But if that were the case in England, it was by no means so in a country in which Herbert Spencer had shown from time to time considerable interest. The new agnostic Empire of Japan had taken most kindly to the Spencerian philosophy, partly because it was exceedingly prosaic and partly because it put forward a rather arrogant pretension to finality. The Japanese is intensely matter-of-fact, which is by no means the same thing as being practical, and is often the reverse of being practical; thus a Japanese engineer, in giving an estimate for a factory or a railway, will often state the cost to a fraction of a farthing—and in the end prove inaccurate by hundreds of thousands of pounds. This trait is in no way connected with stupidity: it is part of the character of a people wholly in love with formality, and dominated by a tyrannical passion for neatness of arrangement. The Japanese loves to pack his ideas, and dovetail them with one another, with the same precision with which he makes two dozen lacquer boxes fit into one, or constructs a house to hold exactly eight hundred and twenty floor-mats, each of just the same size, without an inch to spare.

What enchanted the Japanese was Herbert Spencer’s solemn way of assuming that the heavens and the earth, and all that in them is, all space, all time, all life, and all humanity could be measured and reckoned up to a millimetre or a half-centime by his particular philosophical abacus. During the Nineties the Herbert Spencer school was extraordinarily potent in Japan. At the head of it was that remarkable man, Professor Fukuzawa, who, more than any other, was responsible for supplying the moral and philosophical basis of the new Japanese civilisation. Occasionally the English master favoured his Oriental disciples with an encyclical, applauding them for their skill in keeping the masterful European at bay, and giving them hints as to how best they could realise a perfect morality unalloyed with the smallest taint of the superstition which still disgraced (and was almost necessary to) the West. At one time Herbert Spencer had apparently great hopes that Japan might realise his ideal of the State in which men are guided wholly by reason—a State untainted with imperialism, militarism, aristocratic prejudice, or ecclesiastical faddism.

HERBERT SPENCER.

Japan’s subsequent essays in self-revelation are a sufficient commentary on these facts. In one sense Japan may still be called a Spencerian country; unread here, the philosopher is still conned by hundreds of thousands of eager students in the Eastern Empire; he has been expanded and adopted by a whole succession of native pedants. Japan still admires the synthetic philosophy, but remains aristocratic, bureaucratic, imperialistic, and militarist. Most truly she does not copy the West, but makes what she borrows her own. Herbert Spencer, who was really not far from an anarchist, has been converted into one of the chief buttresses of the State which is the nearest approach extant to the Prussianised German Empire.

It must have been something of a shock, for those Japanese who had grown up in the Spencerian dogma, to meet Herbert Spencer in the flesh. Baron Kikuchi has recorded an impression of Spencer going on a railway journey in the Nineties. For such an expedition great preparations were necessary. A hammock was slung diagonally across a saloon carriage; into this the philosopher was hoisted just before the train started, and from its depths he was laboriously recovered at the journey’s end. All this ritual Baron Kikuchi witnessed at Paddington. “What,” he says, “surprised the onlooker after seeing the hammock slung and the cushions carefully packed into it was to see a fresh-complexioned gentleman proceed from a waiting-room where he had been reclining in an invalid chair, walk nimbly across the platform, and then be hoisted into the hammock.”

There was at every stage of Spencer’s life this singular contrast between the self-sufficiency of his speculative habit and his mournful physical dependence. He lived till his eighty-third year; he was not cursed with a specially feeble constitution; but he coddled himself into a state of body which is, to a very considerable extent, an explanation of his state of mind. The sedentary thinker is prone to two opposite errors. Like Carlyle, Froude, or Treitschke, he may become an extravagant admirer of mere strength. Or, perhaps like Mr. Wells, and certainly like Mr. Galsworthy to-day, he may quite unduly depreciate the value of the qualities of ordinary mankind. Herbert Spencer’s whole thought was vitiated by the valetudinarian’s contempt for things in which he could have little part. He not merely undervalued physical courage; he even saw in it something ridiculous or indelicate. On the other hand, he altogether over-appraised the kind of moral courage which reveals itself in disputatiousness. It was his lot to live in a period when heterodoxy involved no serious danger or inconvenience, and at the same time earned for its professor the reputation of intellectual daring and distinction. Thus he enjoyed most of the luxuries with few of the pangs of martyrdom; he felt all the thrills of conflict without running any of the risks; in his kind of warfare the worst that could happen was a hurt to his feelings, and against that he was protected by a vanity of triple proof. But thought that involves the thinker in no kind of responsibility tends to be irresponsible; and though Spencer boasted that he “developed his ideas rationally”—so that he did not get wrinkled like inferior men “who think from the outside”—few men were in truth more under the dominion of prejudice; nearly everything he wrote on matters of human concern was influenced by the fact that he was excessively vain, timid, and self-indulgent.

“It was one of my misfortunes,” he wrote in his autobiography, “to have no brothers, and a still greater misfortune to have no sisters.” Brothers and sisters are blessings—or otherwise—that the gods give or deny us. But most men can get a wife if they really want one. Spencer’s lack of a wife was probably a greater handicap than the absence of brothers and sisters. For whatever arguments there may be in favour of a celibate priesthood, the celibate social philosopher most obviously suffers from a grave disadvantage; he lacks both the knowledge and the discipline that prevent men of thought becoming mere pedants and theorists. No doubt a wife would not have helped Spencer to write more profoundly about the limits of the unknowable. But she and hers would have given him a far juster impression of a large slice of the knowable. Perpetually lecturing married, child-rearing, householding, and taxpaying men, Spencer passed his own life as a fussy bachelor in a succession of boarding-houses, and can hardly have paid income-tax during a great part of it. We find him as early as the middle of the century in a “fairly lively boarding-house” in St. John’s Wood, Huxley having warned him that he must not live a solitary life. At the beginning of the Nineties he made almost a home in a quiet street in the neighbourhood of Regent’s Park; but towards the end of the period (and of his life) he found that gardens and trees were poor company, and, longing for the breadth and openness of the sea, removed to Brighton. Wherever he lived, he was something of a tyrant, and very much of a crank. In his fits of depression he insisted on being carried upstairs and down in an invalid chair, and seemed never to realise that his very considerable weight was an unfair burden to a man-servant and a maid. When he was (or thought himself) ill, his bell was perpetually ringing. “Few men,” writes (very acutely) one of the ladies who kept house for him in his seventies, “are so thoughtful and considerate as he was, or so oblivious to the trouble and inconvenience they cause.”

If there was “never yet philosopher who could endure the toothache patiently,” there have been many in all times above the smaller miseries which involve no actual torture. Herbert Spencer was none of these. It is at once painful and amusing to contrast the tone of his philosophical dissertations with that of his lamentations over some discomfort which a normal man would dismiss with an energetic monosyllable. The mind revealed in the printed page as disdainfully careless of any consideration but truth, which could face without a shudder the dread emptiness of eternity as Spencer imagined it, was in private occupied with all kinds of old-maidish whims. His bed “had to be made with a hard bolster beneath the mattress, raising a hump for the small of his back, while the clothes had a pleat down the centre, so that they never strained but fell in folds around him.” He devoted an enormous amount of thought to his ear-stoppers; at that time he could not live out of London, and yet he could not bear the noise of London; so that he “corked” himself, after the manner of Miss Betsy Trotwood, whether at the club or at his lodgings. He liked whiting for breakfast, and disliked haddock, and if haddock were served he was full of complaints about the “gross defects of integration, co-ordination, or whatever else the attendant molecular shortcoming might be.” “Moral training,” he once said, “should come into every branch of education, even that of cookery.” On a steamer he once created quite a scene because Stilton was served when he had ordered Cheddar. “Oh, the hardness of heart of these inveterate men! Oh, the accursed cruelty of their inhuman persecutions!” exclaimed Mr. Stiggins when informed that he could not have the “wanity” called pineapple rum with three lumps of sugar to the tumbler. The great Victorian philosopher was scarcely less eloquent over minute inconveniences and deprivations.

The Athenæum Club had a large part in his life at this time. Elected at the age of forty-seven, he served for about seven years on the committee, but a self-admitted “lack of tact” interfered with his usefulness. Numberless stories are told of his pettishness when other members unconsciously offended. He used to drive almost daily from his lodgings to the Club, but would often stop the cab in the middle of Regent Street or some equally busy thoroughfare in order to feel his pulse. If it was regular he went on; if not he gave the order to return home. These habits of invalidism dated very far back. From the age of thirty, when he had some sort of nervous breakdown, he was continually engaged in self-analysis. There appeared to be really nothing very much the matter with him. “Appetite and digestion,” he himself says, “were both good, and my bodily strength seemingly not less than it had been.” But he slept badly: “Ordinarily my nights had from a dozen to a score wakings. For twenty-five years I never experienced drowsiness.” Possibly if he had acted a little more on instinct, and a little less on reason, things would have settled themselves; other people have managed better with worse handicaps. But he so carefully avoided one thing because he thought it did him harm, and so sedulously cultivated another because he thought it did him good, that for him the mere act of living was a business in itself. Thus he found racquets “conducive to mental calm,” and so played a game between the intervals of dictation; he dictated because he found his head would better bear that strain than writing. Sometimes he sculled in the Serpentine in order to soothe himself into tranquillity; for some time he took up vegetarianism, thinking it would be beneficial, but found that he had to rewrite what he had written during the time he was a vegetarian, because it was so “wanting in vigour.” With the same aim in view he took up billiards, fished, played cards, and sometimes occupied himself with a little shopping. We have a glimpse of him seeking a bronze for his sitting-room, but unsuccessfully, since the last available models were all French, and “French art, when not frivolous, is obscene.” His æsthetic instincts were indeed singular; his favourite colour was “impure purple,” and it is believed that when the blue flowers in his dining-room carpet faded, he employed a charwoman to stain them with red ink!

Something of his hypochondriac and introspective disposition was no doubt hereditary. Spencer describes his forebears as late to contract marriage, and much given to forecasting—everywhere their record shows “a contemplation of remote results rather than immediate results, joined with an insistence of the first as compared with that of the last.” Thinking, possibly, that this very Spencerian jargon needed translation into the vernacular, he summarises the whole family character as prone to “dwell too much upon possible forthcoming events.” Spencer’s father and grandfather were both schoolmasters, who had never done any kind of manual work, and he derived from them a hand “smaller than the average woman’s.” The father, a Wesleyan, who afterwards joined the Quakers, bequeathed to him a “repugnance to priestly rule and priestly ceremonies,” and probably something of his disposition to question all authority. The elder Spencer was, indeed, a curious combination of the ascetic and the latitudinarian; himself piously self-disciplined, he disliked applying any sort of coercion to others. Thus novel-reading was not “positively forbidden” to Herbert, but “there were impediments,” and he knew nothing in childhood of the stories with which children commonly become familiar. How much he would have gained or lost by an occasional thrashing balanced by Gulliver and the Arabian Nights is a question for curious speculation. In the absence of the thrashing young Spencer—it is himself who speaks—was guilty of “chronic disobedience,” and developed his “most marked moral trait—a disregard of authority.” His uncle, a clergyman, to whom he was sent at the age of thirteen, describes him as having “no fear of the Lord nor fear of any law or authority.” On the former point the uncle was an excellent professional judge; on the latter, the fact that Herbert promptly ran away from the Vicarage, walking home (a distance of 120 miles) in three days, is sufficiently indicative. Under the tuition of this orthodox disciplinarian Spencer acquired some knowledge of mathematics, a little Latin, less Greek, and scarcely anything besides.

His first idea of getting a living was teaching; but his uncle obtained him an opening in civil engineering, and he started work on the London and Birmingham railway. But, as ever, he was much more inclined to teach other people their business than to learn his own; he objected, also, to over-work; and it “never entered into his thoughts to ingratiate himself with those above him.” He was, in fact, quite unfit to be “integrated”—to use his own favourite expression—in any corporate scheme: too self-centred, too disputatious, too thoughtful of his own small wants and comforts. In politics it was the same; he first mixed himself up with the Chartists, but soon found it necessary to unmix, as the Chartists were “too fanatical to work with,” and finally decided, no doubt wisely, for the lonely liberty of letters. It was only by following his trade as an engineer, however, that he could keep going until, in his twenty-eighth year, a position on the Economist, worth a hundred guineas a year, enabled him to begin serious work on his Social Statics. Like all his books, this involved him in some first loss; and but for two small legacies and the little property his father left, he would have been unable to carry on. He could, of course, have earned money in the way so many men do—by hack work. But he had no idea of “getting on,” not that he had any contempt for money, or disdain for the things money buys, but it was “not worth the bother”; work as work he always disliked. He was always warning his friends against over-work, and his protests against bearing any part of the curse of Adam were often nothing but unmanly. “On the whole,” he wrote to a friend at thirty-one, “I am quite decided not to be a drudge, and as I see no probability of being able to marry without being a drudge, why, I have pretty well given up the idea.”

One advantage of not being a drudge was that he could choose his company, and even “glare” at Carlyle in disapproval of the “absurd dogmas” (so imperfectly “co-ordinated”) of that sage; another that he could find leisure to sing part-songs with George Eliot; another that he could coddle himself to his heart’s content. But such very limited independence is a little irksome, and now and again he got restive over limited means, and even took abortive steps to get some Government employment which (at the public expense) would leave him ample time for his private work. He was fifty before “adverse circumstances” had ceased to worry him, and by this time he had advanced far in invalidism. In the Nineties his work was for all practical purposes over. He had achieved a singular position. A great legend with the public, he was something of a small jest with the rather narrow circle of his familiar acquaintance. It was possible for people who knew only his name and his writings to yield for his work the admiration it really deserved, not so much for the success of the achievement as for the splendid audacity (and even impudence) of the design. The young man who really read him on “Sunday afternoons” might picture the great sceptic as peering with stern and steadfast eyes into reality, unafraid of all save intellectual dishonesty. The enthusiast for social justice might rejoice to see him haling to the bar of eternal reason (not far from the leader page of The Times) this or that temporary political offender against the laws of correct “integration” and “co-ordination.” The remote revolutionary struggling more or less rightly to be free might welcome his as the authentic voice of intellectual England. But those who knew him mingled a smile with their reverence. They might recognise his single-mindedness and his uncompromising “honesty in ideas.” They might value him as a “great thinker,” while possibly deploring that he was also a crank of the most voluminous and pertinacious kind. But whether they admired wholly or with reservations, they could hardly avoid feeling a “very tragical mirth” over the contrast between the philosophy and the philosopher. The personality of the preacher, of course, does not affect the truth of the gospel, but it cannot but affect men’s reception of the gospel; and it was not easy for those who knew Herbert Spencer intimately, and were aware how a fast-trotting cab-horse would disorder his pulse for a week, to take quite seriously all his contributions to the intellectual output of his time.

As to the philosophy itself, three brief sentences from contemporaries have a certain justice. “To Spencer,” said Huxley, “tragedy is represented by a deduction spoiled by a fact.” “Spencer,” said Professor Sidgwick, “suffered from the fault of fatuous self-confidence.” “You have such a passion for generalising,” said George Eliot, “you even fish with a generalisation.”

CHAPTER XII
MR. CHAMBERLAIN AND MR. BALFOUR

The life of Mr. Joseph Chamberlain, like that of the Chevalier d’Artagnan, was spent in three sets of duels. The first was with a great man’s men; the second was with the great man himself; the third was with an old friend made out of a still older enemy. The first were duels of routine, provoking no great feeling—deadly, it might be, but unenvenomed; the second were duels of policy, in which awe and the instinct of self-preservation were as much elements as hatred; the third were duels of fatality, in which a certain courtesy and kindliness had always to be observed.

For Lord Hartington and such as he Mr. Chamberlain had as little consideration as d’Artagnan for the Cardinal’s unfortunate Guards; against Mr. Gladstone himself, though he could not shake off a certain reverence, he fought with full vigour and single purpose; but when Destiny ultimately forced him to enter into a contest of blades and wits with that elegant Aramis, Arthur James Balfour, he found himself constrained by a hundred scruples and a thousand memories, and, like d’Artagnan, he failed. The story ran into many chapters, in some of which the more trenchant swordsman got the upper hand, and in some of which the more subtle mind triumphed, but in the last chapter of all it was d’Artagnan who had fallen and Aramis who was only exiled.

JOSEPH CHAMBERLAIN.

(From a photograph by Messrs. Russell)

The Nineties saw the beginning of that singular competition between friendly (or at least not unfriendly) incompatibles which has affected the whole course of modern history. At the beginning of the decade Mr. Balfour enjoyed a prestige remarkable enough in itself, but quite marvellous when it was remembered that only five years before he had been a comparatively unmarked man, while at the beginning of the Eighties he was regarded as little more than an elegant trifler. He had seemingly succeeded in Ireland; Parnell was dead; the formidable solidarity of the Nationalist Party was no more; the growing recovery of Gladstonian Liberalism had been fatally interrupted. A strong rival had gone to pieces through the mental and physical decay of Lord Randolph Churchill; there were none to compare with Mr. Balfour among the younger men of Unionism, and the men of the old guard (as was seen when Mr. W. H. Smith’s death left vacant the leadership of the House of Commons) were reluctant to place their antique sword-play in disadvantageous contrast with his neat rapier work. Lord Salisbury was growing old and becoming more and more the hermit of the Foreign Office; and it seemed only a matter of a few years before Mr. Balfour would be unchallenged master of what, since the Home Rule split, was by far the greatest party in England.

To this political prestige was added a social worship seldom accorded to statesmen. Mr. Balfour was still young; he was a bachelor; he was handsome; with the exception, perhaps, of Lord Rosebery, he was the most generally interesting man in politics. There have been very few politicians who have held at the same time such a position in many worlds as that occupied by Lord Salisbury’s nephew at the beginning of the Nineties.

Mr. Chamberlain, on the other hand, was perhaps less a figure than he had been five, or even ten years before. Had he died when Parnell did he would chiefly be remembered now as a politician who, in splitting his party, had ruined his own career. Partiality or malignity would have filled in the outline with colours gracious or repellent; he might have been represented as an honest man who suffered for his integrity, or as a schemer who overreached himself. But the main fact would have been clear—that the promise of the Eighties had no more been fulfilled than that of the Seventies; the great Imperialist we know would have been as little realised as the great democratic iconoclast who might have been. It was the Nineties which determined Mr. Chamberlain’s place in history; had he not reached them, his title to greatness could not be established; had he not survived them, his stature would be much what it now is. Mr. Chamberlain’s larger career begins only with his assumption of major office in 1895; it ends, for all practical purposes, with his resignation of that office a little more than eight years later. There was an over-long first act, and a tragically protracted third, but the pith of the play is the tenure of the Colonial Secretaryship.

One of Mr. Balfour’s weaknesses resided in his inability to encourage, or even to suffer, friendship on equal terms. This Prince Arthur knew nothing of the Round Table; his colleagues in the special sense must always be in every sense his subordinates; and when he found a difficulty in getting men of strong individuality to accept such a position, he got over the difficulty by appointing men of no particular individuality. It was, on the other hand, a main strength of Mr. Chamberlain that he invited, and even compelled, either full hostility or full friendship. Those who were against him, were heartily against him; those who were for him, were for him heart and soul; and the world is happily so constituted that hearty love nearly always triumphs over hearty hatred. It was, I imagine, Mr. Chamberlain’s “genius for friendship,” as Lord Morley calls it, that explained most things that are not accounted for by his splendid debating powers and his aptitude for moving great masses of men. Concerning this last faculty, fascinated contemporaries were perhaps inclined to exaggerate. Beside the Victorian heavyweights Mr. Chamberlain was no doubt a marvel of demagogic art. He could say supremely well what the average man felt a difficulty in putting into words. He was intensely sensitive to changes in public feeling, and extraordinarily clever in just anticipating them. He had a great knack of condensing into one sharp and memorable phrase the idea he wanted to sink deep into the public mind. But he was not an orator in the sense that John Bright was, and he lacked the capacity of Lord Randolph Churchill, in his best days, of whipping a popular audience into yelling, laughing, almost hysterical sympathy. Nor should I place him on a level with the one living man who always challenges a comparison with him—I mean Mr. Lloyd George. There are times when the Prime Minister can almost bring a tear into the most tired old eye, and stimulate to an extra throb or two the driest of old hearts. The next moment the owner of these organs may sneer at himself, or at the speaker; but there it is—the effect has been produced. Personally, I never found Mr. Chamberlain affect me, though neither old nor incapable of impression, in that way. The thing he seemed most to lack was glamour. It was present in the solemn periods of Bright; it was often not absent from the stately cadences of Gladstone; it was, in another way, felt in the detached mordancies of one Cecil and the daintily constructed dilemmas of another; Joseph Chamberlain’s speech wanted it hardly less than Mr. Asquith’s. He had more fire, energy, and passion, than Mr. Asquith, but hardly more “juice.” He could say strong (even violent) things, neat things, hard things, fine things, occasionally even humorous things. But he always (at least, I found it so) failed to say things that touched what Mr. Guppy called “chords in the human mind,” or made the hearer feel that there was more in the speaker than he could ever make articulate. The whole perfection of his public speaking consisted, indeed, in a quite different kind of appeal. He depended for his effect on illuminating equally every detail of the picture he wished to present. His speeches were really verbal transparencies, with (as in the cinema shows) a very short legend under each section of the film giving in the clearest possible way the moral he intended to convey—“Will you take it lying down?” or what not. Now a transparency can do much, but it cannot raise a true thrill; the “movies” are capable of everything but moving, and their popularity has probably much to do with ultra-modern insensibility.

Mr. Chamberlain’s style was exactly fitted for most of his purposes. It was literary in no contemptible degree—his strong and simple phraseology appeals more to a present-day taste than the elephantine grandeur of his older contemporaries—and he had something of a genius for the kind of epigram which is a real compression of thought, and not a mere rhetorical trick. But the style was neither a vehicle for profound and exact thought, nor an outlet for high and splendid feeling. He failed always when he attempted to deal with a very complex and extensive theme: his serious Tariff Reform and Irish speeches are, in the reading, quite thin and inadequate. He failed also when he tried to appeal to the imponderables: his “illimitable veldt” mood simply would not convince. But he could scoff as no other; his personal attacks were far more wounding than Lord Randolph’s, partly, no doubt, because there was behind them a far deadlier purpose than anyone believed to be present in the Randolphian impishness; he could impart to what in another man would have been a mere rudeness something of the terror of the thunderbolt; and none could work more skilfully on passions which are, in relation to the higher patriotism, what the camp-follower is to the warrior.

But when all is said, it is possible to maintain that Mr. Chamberlain as a debater reached far higher levels than any he attained, even at his highest, as a platform orator. There never was a time when he was not heard with attention in the House of Commons. One reason was that he was heartily interested in the place, in its ways and forms, its juntas, caves, intrigues, plans of obstruction, moves and countermoves, plots and counter-plots, and “monkey-tricks” of all descriptions; that “industrious idleness” which repels so many earnest men was to him both important and amusing. Even the appalling physical atmosphere—the drowned light and the cooked air—suited his taste. For he was Victorian in his dislike of fresh air—or at any rate in his independence of it—and he and Lord Brampton, who shivered whenever an air from heaven penetrated his over-heated court, might have lived very comfortably together. It was not, perhaps, quite a coincidence that his favourite flower was the orchid, and that at Highbury he spent a large part of his leisure in the green-houses. Time was when he was to pay an appalling price for his aversion to open-air exercise, but during his years of vigour no man could have suffered less from those horrible conditions which explain much of the lethargy of the faithful Commons.

He loved, moreover, the good comradeship that political life engenders; to a certain type of man it is the main compensation of the career. There is more zest in broiled bones where plotting is than in a stalled ox consumed in placidity. None enjoyed better than Joseph Chamberlain the meal conspiratorial, the meal triumphal, the meal consolatory; good dining was, indeed, one of his most unfailing pleasures; like Talleyrand, he might have said, “Show me another which renews itself three times a day, and lasts an hour each time.” And it must be allowed that he had the greatest talents both as a host and as a guest. Those who knew him best acclaim him as a most admirable talker, and withal a fair and considerate one, never indulging in a conversational solitaire, but treating prandial chat as a round game in which every player must have his turn. This genial equalitarianism was one of his great advantages over Mr. Gladstone, who often failed to make fellow-diners forget his greatness.

ARTHUR BALFOUR.

This interest in Parliament and whatever appertained to it was no doubt a great part of the secret of Mr. Chamberlain’s power over that assembly. We often forget how large a share mere appetite has in the realisation of political ambitions, how far the simple capacity of being and remaining interested will take a man even of moderate capacity. But another important factor in Mr. Chamberlain’s supremacy as a debater was the real, if sometimes limited, knowledge he brought to the discussion of any subject in which he happened to be interested—and he happened to be interested in most. Deep knowledge, living at the rate he did, he could hardly hope to attain; at any rate, he seldom attained it. But he had an almost journalistic faculty of using reference books—reference books, Dickens, and French novels were almost all his reading. Mr. Balfour always hated to “prepare.” Mr. Chamberlain would take any degree of trouble to prime himself with the facts necessary for his purpose; all other facts, of course, he disregarded. Thus he was always a formidable man to attack, and as an assailant he was deadly. His sure instinct for the weak side of an opponent’s case, his command of invective and destructive analysis, above all, his capacity of fervently and sincerely hating whatever he temporarily disapproved (even if it had been his own opinion the day before) gave him a power of which he was himself probably not fully aware; otherwise, kindly as he was at bottom, he would scarcely have treated, as he sometimes did, quite petty antagonists with a severity verging on the inhuman.

It may be doubted, however, whether his qualities of speech, and even his powers as an administrator, would have sufficed to give Mr. Chamberlain his immense influence if they had not been supplemented by his knack of enchaining the personal affections of many kinds of men. There was a charm about him which is only felt in its highest expression in relation to a very strong character, but which is apt to be absent in characters of unusual strength. It was this charm which made the loss of his intimate friendship the most serious sacrifice John Morley offered on the altar of political consistency in 1886. It was a charm felt by all kinds of men who disliked his opinions and distrusted his judgment. Under its sway came many cool Colonials and still cooler Americans. It sufficed to keep Mr. Balfour his friend even when he was straining every faculty of his subtle nature to defeat Mr. Chamberlain’s most cherished ambitions. Of those associated with Mr. Chamberlain at various times, only three considerable men—Mr. Gladstone, Lord Hartington, and Lord Salisbury—seem to have been able to view him with consistent objectivity. On those who yielded to him their full allegiance his influence was quite extraordinary. No statesman ever enjoyed such absolutely unquestioning devotion as that which was yielded to Mr. Chamberlain by Mr. Jesse Collings and the other members of his personal retinue. On the other hand, there never was so splendidly steadfast a lord and protector. The Birmingham communion was as jealous and as generous as that of Rome. None could be admitted without giving up the last shred of pretension to independent thought. But once the sacrifice was made there was peace and security for the true believer. A powerful hand protected, a lavish hand provided, a paternal hand petted and patted. Mr. Chamberlain was the safer in making enemies for the solid certainty with which he built up his friendships, however humble. A tower of strength during his life, they have ensured his repute since his death.

Before 1895 that repute rested mainly on negatives. There had been, indeed, an early extra-Parliamentary period of great local achievement; it was his municipal work which gave Mr. Chamberlain for the rest of his life the kingship of Birmingham and its hinterland. There had been some small official work and the much larger prestige (now, however, largely forgotten on one side and forgiven on the other) of the “ransom” speeches. But for nearly ten years Mr. Chamberlain had been chiefly engaged in destructive energies; the duel with Gladstone employed him to the exclusion of most other things while the great veteran remained on the ground. It was as late as 1893 that he delivered that taunt—“It is the voice of a god and not of a man; never since the time of Herod has there been such slavish adulation”—which caused the famous free fight in the House of Commons. But by the middle of the decade the Home Rule fight, for the time, had been fought out. The electors had approved the slaughter of the Second Home Rule Bill; Mr. Gladstone had disappeared; Lord Rosebery and Sir William Harcourt were fighting like lion and unicorn for the shadow of a crown; the task of opposition in a House overwhelmingly Unionist had been contemptuously left to “C.-B.” The world was Mr. Chamberlain’s where to choose. He chose the Colonies, and the portals of the dullest of routine departments at once had to be watched as if they were those of the ancient temple of Janus. Within a few months came the Jameson raid; then the whole world held its breath while an English general and a French major exchanged ironic civilities at Fashoda; then succeeded the short game of bluff which ended in the long and bloody game of war with the South African Republics.

We are still too near that event for a judicial finding, and any man’s view is only a view. The finding, when it comes, is as little likely to make Paul Kruger the hero as it is to make Joseph Chamberlain the villain; the affair was no doubt, like most such things, a very mixed matter. Mr. Chamberlain would probably have taken more pains to avoid war had the Boer Republics possessed the power of the late German Empire; his critics would probably have been less numerous and bitter if the affair had cost ten millions and been over in three weeks. Stones were cast at him in great quantity, and no doubt some came from hands that had a right to throw; but some of the largest were certainly hurled by those who have since laid themselves open to equally serious charges of preferring the way of war to the way of peace. But, whatever the degree of his responsibility—and he always manfully accepted full responsibility—we can with safety acquit Mr. Chamberlain of those motives with which the ungenerous were eager to credit him. It was assuredly no mere hunger for applause that hurried him into a war which he imagined would be short, cheap, and (by all analogy then recent) comparatively bloodless. There was, indeed, a small, politician-like, electioneering, popularity-loving side to Joseph Chamberlain, and it is useless (and somewhat ignoble) on the part of his admirers to ignore it. He was himself far too big to pretend that it did not exist. He never assumed the virtues he knew himself not to possess; he went to the opposite, but more manful extreme, of scorning them. Thus he cared nothing at all about charges of inconsistency. “What I have said I have said. Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself. I am not a slave to other men’s theories or to my own past.” Again: “The man who thinks of the future is a visionary; the man who thinks of the past is a fool; I think only of the present twenty-four hours.” But if there was in him much of the empiric, and something of the mere political cheap-jack, there was also something far larger and finer. He was above all a patriot, and he was capable, as he showed in his resignation in 1903, of making the heaviest sacrifices in what he imagined to be the cause of his country.

I have never been able to share or sympathise with Mr. Chamberlain’s vision of the British Empire; the very thought of it has always filled me, in fact, with severe depression. It was a sort of Prussian pie without the crust—and half-baked at that: there was to be restriction, canalisation, and stereotyping by diplomacy and consent instead of by militarism and force. England was to be the workshop of the Empire, with some pleasant rooms over it; the Dominions were to be granaries, lumber-warehouses, bacon-factories, mines, vineyards, and wool-farms; the Crown Colonies were to supply sugar and spice and all things nice. It was a thoroughly Prussian conception, not because it involved cruelty—which, after all, was only incidental to Prussianism—but because it was at war with the idea of the natural growth of an immature community towards full nationhood, with distinctive arts, tastes, and schemes of life generally. In all his visionary materialism I think Mr. Chamberlain was most disastrously wrong; it was his whole notion of Imperial relations, and not his incidental disrespect for the principles of Free Trade, that seemed to me most inconsistent with his original Liberalism. But it is questionable whether he was ever a true Liberal; certainly, he was never a lover of freedom. His Birmingham mayoralty, excellent in its results, was more or less an amiable dictatorship; and Mr. Russell, in his Portraits of the Seventies, has told us that Gladstone once likened him to Gambetta, as un homme autoritaire. His likeness to Mr. Lloyd George has often been remarked; in nothing is it more apparent than in this, that both have such small respect for individual liberty, and both would much rather reform the people than let the people do their own reforming. But a democrat Mr. Chamberlain always remained, even when he was in closest co-operation with the Tory leaders. He never lost his first interest in the betterment of the working classes; the sight of preventible misery he hated; and the whole bent of his mind was humanitarian. But, just as a Liberal is not always a democrat, so a democrat is by no means always a Liberal. The idea of Liberalism is giving men freedom to work out their own salvation, with the minimum of State interference with individual liberty; and in certain cases this may imply extreme callousness to private misfortune, as well as considerable favouritism to the top dog. The democratic idea is only concerned with freedom so long as it is likely to operate for equality; of the three items in the Republican motto it lays least stress on liberty, and most on equality and fraternity. Mr. Chamberlain was more inclined to underline fraternity than the other two. He wanted all Englishmen to be brothers, but most of them were to be very little brothers.

To such a man, bringing his own atmosphere to the Colonial Office, and attacking the problems there in his own hastily decisive way, the case of the Boer Republics must have seemed very feeble. Here they were, straddling in a spirit of sluttish obstructiveness across the path of orderly British development; and so long as they remained all our plans for the good of a whole continent were liable to unsettlement. All such cases are arguable to some degree. If Ahab had had the good luck of David we might have heard less about his wickedness and more about his broad and enlightened statesmanship, as well as about the sheer unprogressiveness of Naboth. Let us remember how the world rang with praises of Ahab after his good luck in 1870, before we insist too strongly on the sacredness of every petty freehold. Mr. Chamberlain, at any rate, had no difficulty in making up his mind, and when he made up his mind he was quite sure (for the time being, at any rate) that he had made it up aright. “Consistency is not so important,” he once said; “the main point is that we should be always right.” He persuaded himself that he was always right by resolutely excluding every other possibility. Except for purposes of invective or banter, he refused to see any other side of a question than that which he had chosen. He thought in reason-tight compartments, approaching every matter in turn as if it were an isolated thing. By so doing he economised energy, and was able to communicate his own vigour, without appreciable loss, to his subordinates and instruments. But this driving force was achieved at the cost of much; he was the first great exemplar of the modern notion that decision and dexterity in separate matters compensate for the lack of an inspiring philosophy. Where you want to go is a secondary matter; the main things are a very fast car and an ability to turn very sharply round corners, so that if there happens to be a block in front you can dodge up a scarcely noticed alley on the left.

It was, indeed, the true tragedy of Mr. Chamberlain’s career that, while he had the fastest of cars, he did not possess a reliable route-map, and his road in political life was always chosen by instinct, hearsay, and the like. He turned up any likely-looking road, and then went full speed ahead until brought to a stop. Now, Mr. Gladstone had a map, and so had Mr. Balfour. But Mr. Gladstone’s was rejected because it was too old-fashioned, and gave no account of the more modern routes and places, and Mr. Balfour’s had the disadvantage that every road led back to the starting-place. To drop parable, the whole story of the last twenty years of the nineteenth century might have been different if Mr. Chamberlain could have co-operated with Mr. Gladstone; that he could not was as much Mr. Gladstone’s defect as his own. The whole story of the first twenty years of the twentieth century might have been different if he could have found in Mr. Balfour’s qualities the full complement of his own; that also was Mr. Chamberlain’s misfortune rather than his fault. There was a temperamental bar in the first case, and an intellectual bar in the second. Mr. Gladstone did not want to move in Mr. Chamberlain’s way and at Mr. Chamberlain’s pace. Mr. Balfour was firmly convinced of the foolishness of moving at all, except in the manner known as marking time. Thus the splendid energy and courage of Mr. Chamberlain, which might have been extraordinarily fruitful if allied with a more steadfast hold of political principle, were largely spent in comparative futility. The greatness that he achieved—and he was, after all, a very great man—was due rather to the soundness of his instincts and sympathies than to the sureness of his intellectual processes; if he thought wrong, he had often a way of guessing right. Some men are too much of the doctrinaire, and some too little. Joseph Chamberlain was too little.

CHAPTER XIII
OSCAR WILDE

One evening in the early summer of 1895 the newsboys were shouting “All the winners.” Yet one line on their placards gave the lie to that eternal cry which mocks the death of great men and the fall of great empires. It referred to the sentence which, in due time, was to give birth to the one indisputably genuine and serious thing Oscar Wilde wrote, the Ballad of Reading Gaol.

OSCAR WILDE.

Oscar Wilde was one of the losers; in the long list of men of genius who have paid just forfeit it is not easy to think of a more tragic figure. Others had fallen from greater heights; none had gone more friendlessly to a lower perdition. For it was the very element of his tragedy that it could not be shared or alleviated; on the path he had henceforth to tread there could be no comrade; his offence was one at which charity itself stood embarrassed, and compassion felt the fear of compromise. On this very evening theatres were full of people chuckling over jests of almost wicked brilliance which he had turned and re-turned, polished and sharpened, with the laborious care of a lapidary, for he worked at trifles with tremendous earnestness, and the ease of the style was the reward of immense pains on the part of the writer. One of his comedies was being actually played in London while the drama of his trial was proceeding on another stage. Business is business, and managers with money at stake did not care to withdraw immediately good money-drawing pieces. But they made a due amende to outraged decency. They played Wilde’s play, but they struck his name out of the bill. The action might be mean. But it was understandable. There was no harm in the play, but the name could then hardly be pronounced without offence.

Even at this distance, when there can be pity without suspicion of condonation, it is not easy to discuss Wilde as we should any other author whose influence was considerable in his day and generation. Yet those who would pass by this ill-starred man of genius because of the event which interrupted his career as a writer would be acting almost as foolishly as the absurd people (mostly Germans) who on the same account yield him a perverse and irrational homage. Wilde was not only important in himself; he was still more important as the representative of a mood yet to some extent with us, but extraordinarily prevalent in the latter years of the nineteenth century. Of this mood he was in letters the only able English representative. There were many men who thought his thoughts, and even attempted to write his style. But they are now forgotten except by the curious; Wilde alone survives. This mood was in certain aspects one of honesty, in others one of cowardice; it was never a mood of health. The honesty was negative; it took the form of protest against certain easy and conventional shams. The cowardice was positive; it took the form of fearing to stand in competition with great realities. People like Wilde had sense to detect, and virility to denounce, certain poor players of old tricks; they had not the courage to be themselves quite genuine people; they contented themselves on the whole with doing newer tricks. There was no harm in this in itself. But they had also much conceit, and so, to impress the public with a due sense of their importance, they insisted that the tricks of which they were easily capable were really the only tricks worth doing. Their art was Art itself, and the only Art.

Now it takes all sorts to make any kind of world, and there is no sense in expecting an artist whose gift is miniature painting to follow Paul Veronese. By all means let him sneer at any dull fool who does follow Paul Veronese. But we shall do well to take very little notice of him when he says that no picture should be painted on anything larger than six square inches of ivory. A Japanese netsuke is a pleasing object; so is Ely Cathedral. Let the netsuke carver have his due credit. But if he began to talk as if Ely Cathedral were a pretentious vulgarity, which he himself could easily have built if (in Johnson’s phrase) he had “abandoned his mind to it,” we should quickly tell him to mind his own business. But this was very much the pose of Wilde and his school. They were right in depreciating uninspired imitators of great men. They were wrong in depreciating all greatness which could not be measured by their own small tapes. They were especially wrong in declaring that “popular art is bad art,” and setting up their own literary jade-work, often graceful and pleasant enough in its own way, as the sole standard of taste. “Only the great masters of style,” said Oscar Wilde once, “ever succeeded in being obscure.” If that were literally true he himself, though self-called a “lord of language,” would have to be denied the title of stylist, for though he sometimes showed confusion of thought, and very often said things so silly that one sometimes looks a second time to see whether they are really meant, he was on the whole quite extraordinarily lucid. His words, however, though nonsensical in their literal effect, do mean something and reveal something. Every very great writer is obscure in the sense that he does somehow contrive to offer a choice to his reader; thus everybody has his own particular view of Hamlet, and of many individual passages in Hamlet, though the actual obscurities are very few. But Shakespeare never meant Hamlet to be a mystery to anybody; he meant it simply to be a good play, and one understandable to every soul in the theatre. Shakespeare was thinking of his audience as something that was doing him a compliment in coming to hear his play. Wilde thought of his audience as something that was complimented by his condescension in amusing it. Shakespeare, in short, represented popular and obvious art at its highest, and there is no higher art. Wilde, on the other hand, represented art that was above all things undemocratic. Its assumption was that whatever is popular must be vulgar, that whatever is unusual has at least a presumption of being fine. In such an attitude, whether to life or to art, there is an obvious spiritual danger, and it is not without reason that most people look for corruption where there is excessive refinement. After all, all the most important things men do must be either conventional or monstrous, and he who consciously strives to be much above the common herd in things mattering not very much is fatally prone to be dreadfully below it in things that really do matter. The country or age which can show great art with a simple and obvious motive is generally healthy. The country or age which attaches immense importance to the elaboration of trifles for esoteric appreciation is generally unhealthy. In these matters wherever there is mystery there is evil.

“The two great turning-points of my life were when my father sent me to Oxford, and when society sent me to prison.” So says Wilde in De Profundis. His father was an oculist in Dublin, a clever, ill-balanced man of imperious passions and extravagant habits, who firmly believed that alcohol had pulled him through a severe illness, and drank freely on principle. Lady Wilde, poetess and Nationalist pamphleteer, was disappointed with Oscar in much the same way that Betsy Trotwood was disappointed with David Copperfield; she wanted a daughter, and, since Nature had denied her, she sought consolation by dressing, treating, and talking to her boy as if he had been a girl. It was one of the innumerable oddities of this lady to pretend descent from great people—she believed herself to come from a stem of the same tree which yielded Dante the poet—and the boy was named Oscar because his mother imagined herself she had some sort of connection with the Royal Family of Sweden. It was an unwholesome if brilliant atmosphere in which Oscar Wilde grew up, and the boy early contracted those habits of extravagance which led him, when a poor man in London, to spend hundreds a year in the matter of cabs alone. Neither at school nor at Oxford did he take any interest in sport, but he was devoted to his blue and white china, his antiques, and his wallpapers. This æstheticism earned him the resentment of some robust fellow-undergraduates, and he was once tied up in a rope and dragged to the top of a hill; when released he merely flicked the dust off his clothes and remarked, “Yes, the view is really very charming.” Perhaps the most important event of his Oxford life was the winning of the Newdigate prize. His success decided him to take up literature as a profession. And in order to make a short cut into literature he placed himself at the head of the æsthetes, clean-shaven and long-haired, in “a velvet coat, knee-breeches, a loose shirt with a turn-down collar, and a floating tie of some unusual shade fastened in a La Vallière knot,” carrying in his hand “a lily or a sunflower which he used to contemplate with an expression of the greatest admiration.”

The notoriety naturally following on this masquerade had its advantages in the way of dinner invitations, lecture engagements, and, to some extent, the smiles of publishers. But Wilde earned little and had to spend a good deal in maintaining his position; and, despite a lecturing venture in America, it was not until his marriage with Miss Constance Lloyd in 1884 that he settled down to anything like satisfactory employment. For such a man the post of editor of the Woman’s World could hardly be amusing, and Wilde retained the bitterest recollections of his connection with journalism. “In centuries before ours,” he once wrote, “the public nailed the ears of journalists to the pump. That was quite hideous. In this century journalists have nailed their own ears to the key-hole. That is much worse.” It was not, in fact, until the Nineties had well opened that Wilde began to make good and to relieve the strain on his wife’s little fortune which his extravagant habits caused. Dorian Gray, published in 1891, was a doubtful artistic success and a quite undoubtful commercial failure. But at the beginning of the next year Lady Windermere’s Fan at once took the fancy of London. Wilde had made several attempts to conquer the stage, but partly inexperience and partly obstinacy had so far stood in his way. “I hold,” he said, “that the stage is to a play no more than a picture-frame is to a painting.” But a frame can generally be had to accommodate any picture, and no stage could properly accommodate some plays. Wilde once argued for the performance of plays by puppets. “They have many advantages. They never argue. They have no crude views about art. They have no private lives. We are never bored by accounts of their virtues, or bored by recitals of their vices; and when they are out of an engagement they never do good in public or save people from drowning.... They recognise the presiding intellect of the dramatist, and have never been known to ask for their parts to be written up.” A man holding such views—which are really only a mad extension of a sane position—was likely to remain for long unacted. But when he left behind him the intricacies of five-act tragedy, and found his true métier in comedy, his success was instantaneous.

And it was well deserved. The Wilde comedies “date” a good deal. They are rather monotonous in their brilliancy. There is too much of a particular trick; one is always expecting the unexpected. The characters sit round to exchange epigrams rather too much like the Moore and Burgess Minstrels used to sit round to exchange conundrums, with a “Mr. Johnson” at one corner and a Mr. Somebody-else at the other. The epigrams themselves are often forced and sometimes merely foolish. There is little characterisation; all Wilde’s men are wits or the butts of wits, and his women, broadly speaking, are unimportant. But when all deductions are made his comedies are among the best in the language. Lady Windermere’s Fan was followed a year later by A Woman of No Importance, and in 1895 by An Ideal Husband and—the best of the series—The Importance of Being Earnest. From circumstances of considerable embarrassment Wilde suddenly mounted to high prosperity. But the change was all for the worse. With his tendencies to physical self-indulgence, a plentiful supply of ready money tempted him to fatal excess in eating and drinking, and he was a man to whom exercise of any kind was repellent. On his unsound mental constitution the brilliance of his position and prospects had an equally unfortunate effect. He grew fat and bloated in person and absurdly inflated in conceit. His features, once handsome with the comeliness of some image on a classic coin, were now puffed and of impure outline, and the richness of dress which he affected degenerated into a greasy luxuriousness. He had only three years of prosperity, but those were enough to show that he had neither the mind nor the physical constitution to bear success. Even before the tragedy which cut short his working life his friends had begun to fall away, and it was pretty clear that his career as a creative artist was likely to be limited.

Of the last chapters of his unhappy history nothing can usefully be said. The expiation was no less horrible than the sin; his last piteous work may suggest that there was final penitence and rest. But there was so much of the artificial in Wilde that it was never quite safe to infer when he was genuine and when histrionic. Almost his whole life had been spent in posing. Yet his mind was naturally precise and logical; with proper discipline it would have been of quite masculine strength. “There is something tragic,” he once said, “about the enormous number of young men there are in England at the present moment who start life with perfect profiles, and end by adopting some useful profession.” He would have been better with a useful profession. To adapt his own words, there is something tragic about the enormous number of young men there are in England at any given moment who start life with some Greek and Latin, a knack of good form and social dexterity, a more than competent physique, enough money to enable them to spend a few of their best years in rather laborious idleness, and no notion of giving the world a full equivalent of what they propose to take out of it. The number of young women in much the same case is scarcely less disquieting. The real moral of Wilde’s tragedy is not the obvious one. It is rather that even highly gifted people should have some honest trade to begin with, and leave “art” and “literature” (apart from such branches as are really trades and handicrafts) until, mayhap, they find themselves positively impelled thereto. If that were the rule the world would be poorer by some millions of bad pictures and unpleasant novels, but indefinitely richer in human cleanliness and honesty.

CHAPTER XIV
SIR WILLIAM HARCOURT

Those who seek the legislative monument of Sir William Harcourt must examine the Finance Act of 1894, which put real estate on the same footing as personal in the matter of death duties. A facetious writer once observed that the principle of graduation so beautifully exemplified in this measure must have been suggested to Sir William by a study of his own name, which is an excellent example of ascending values. William and George are but degrees in the ordinary, but with Venables we definitely reach the higher level; Vernon is still better, and Harcourt fitly crowns the whole. The full name, William George Granville Venables Vernon Harcourt, is the perfection of a crescendo; it at once soothes and stirs like the grand vibrations of organ music; it has the majestic swell and rhythm of the peaceful ocean.

It is no discredit to Sir William Harcourt that he failed to live fully up to the more stately standards of this pageant of nomenclature. Sometimes he was little more than William or George; more often he got as far as Granville and Venables; it was only occasionally that he matched the full kingliness of all twelve syllables. His career, like his name, was a mixture of the great, the almost great, and the almost ordinary. But while in the name these elements were perfectly blended, the career somehow lacked balance and unity. Sir William arrived early at eminence; he was during many years a nearly first-class figure in English politics; he had gifts, sedulously cultivated, of a quite splendid type; he was acute, clear-headed, wary, indefatigable; he liked the game of politics and knew every move in it; his judgment of men and things was shrewd; he was witty as a Sheridan comedy; he commanded a capital debating style and a manner of platform speaking which, while not of the highest, was in its way exceedingly effective. Moreover, he had no inconvenient moral impedimenta. Mr. Labouchere described him (approvingly) as a “squeezable Christian,” and therefore fitter for a Party leader than a “conscientious atheist” like Mr. John Morley. So well endowed and so little handicapped, he should have been sure of the best that politics could give. Yet the latter part of his life was embittered by the sense of failure, and failure of a kind which has no compensations. For Sir William Harcourt was not one of those happily constituted people who can enjoy the sunshine as well as another, and yet get a quiet pleasure out of a rainy day. He attached excessive importance to the very things that just eluded him, and was complicatedly cross because they did elude him—cross with circumstances, cross with people who played him false at the critical moment, and cross with himself for not being superior to being cross with them. For though he did not lack magnanimity, and though in the long run he brought himself to act generously towards more than one who had helped to frustrate his natural ambition, he could not avoid being hurt and showing that he was hurt.

“You have a Chancellor in your family, and a Lord Lieutenant of Ireland,” said John Morley to him, in the year 1894, “and you’d like to have a Prime Minister in your family, and no earthly blame to you.” True, it was no great thing to be Liberal Prime Minister just then. The estate was terribly encumbered, and the brokers’ men were already at the door. That Sir William knew as well as any. But still, if one must be a “transient and embarrassed phantom,” it was just a little better to be a phantom in a shooting jacket than a phantom in livery. To don the Primrose livery, especially, was gall to the proud Plantagenet. He was of very ancient English and French family, while Lord Rosebery sprang (many years ago, it is true) from a mere Presbyterian minister; he had been in Liberal politics when Lord Rosebery was in the nursery; he had loyally supported Mr. Gladstone through thick and thin; he had never spared himself in the House of Commons or on the platform; he was conscious of qualifications with which the Scottish nobleman, with all his graces, could not vie; and he had every reason to calculate on the support of the Radical wing of the party, which he had served faithfully, if not always with conviction. Small wonder that Sir William Harcourt was bitter when with one accord the men in the inner councils of Liberalism, the new men as well as the old, the Asquiths and Aclands, as well as the Morleys and Spencers, turned against him, and towards Lord Rosebery.

We know now that the choice, if the best possible, was still unfortunate. But in politics the things which seem most obviously unreasonable are precisely the things which are done for the most serious reasons, and there were grave reasons indeed against a Harcourt Premiership. Sir William was endowed with a temperament which sometimes made it hard for men to work with him, and might well have made it impossible for men to work under him. He was at once too difficult and too easy. He had a fatal knack of rousing antagonism, and lacked the force or inclination to crush antagonism when it arose. He sometimes used language of the kind that stirs up rebellion in men of the most temperate blood, and, while sensitive himself, took little thought of the feeling of others. But, though he thoughtlessly made enemies, he was far too kindly and warmhearted a man to convert them into victims. Thus he had to meet a most perilous combination—strong hostility and no serious fear. It would have been well with him if he could have invoked the argument of terror; it would have been better if he could have led men in silken bonds. But he could not dominate, and he could not manage. The lack of tact and the lack of resolution were both well illustrated over the matter of the Rosebery Premiership. Sir William Harcourt stood out just enough to make the position for Lord Rosebery difficult, and gave way just enough to make his own position impossible. Then he fumed in private over the arrangements in which he had publicly concurred, and, apart from his manful work in his own department, played the part of a sulking Achilles. There were, of course, many excuses. He was getting old. He had no great enthusiasm for Home Rule, or, indeed, for anything. He was, like the rest of the Liberal leaders, bitterly disappointed by the size of the majority of 1892, and incensed by the futility of the task it had in hand; “he missed,” says Lord Morley, “old stable companions, and did not take to all the new”; and altogether he might well be oppressed by a sense of anachronism. For he was a politician of the old school, and the Nineties were perpetually reminding him that the old school was going, and almost gone. More an eighteenth-century man than even a nineteenth, with a taste for elegant scholarship and rotund phrase, he could not feel entirely at home in a House of Commons which included Mr. Keir Hardie, and jibbed at Horace. Indeed, whether quite consciously or not, John Morley had, in the sentence quoted above, put his finger on the trouble. The whole secret of Sir William Harcourt’s political life was that he was a belated Whiggish aristocrat trying to realise himself in unfavourable circumstances. The whole tragedy of Sir William Harcourt’s political death was that the circumstances were too strong for the ambition. A whist-player of the gentlemanly old school, he could have borne with philosophy a rubber lost to a conspicuously better player, or one with a conspicuously better hand. But it was bitterness indeed to have the card-room turned into a Bedlam at the exact moment when the last trick looked like being his.

It is no longer easy to understand the kind of man Sir William Harcourt was. When we speak now of an opportunist in politics we think of a rather shady person “on the make.” When we speak of an idealist in politics we think of a rather foolish and impracticable person, a man of fixed idea, a crank of some kind, who would cheerfully ruin the country, to say nothing of the party to which he gives preference, for the mere satisfaction of advertising his fad. Sir William Harcourt had ideals of his own kind, and even fads. He was a sincere Whig, and a fanatical Erastian. That he was never quite in the inner Gladstonian circle is chiefly attributable to his utter hostility to sacerdotalism. Mr. Gladstone could more easily take to his bosom an unbeliever like Mr. Morley than an eighteenth-century Protestant like Sir William. But though a Ritualistic prelate could always rouse him to fury, and though he could simulate a passion for certain articles in the Newcastle programme concerning which he poked admirable fun in private, Sir William was an eminently “practical politician,” and ordinarily his views and convictions were subordinated to something in his eyes vastly more important—the due playing of the political game. Yet we should altogether misunderstand him if we inferred any more affinity to the newer style of professional politician than to the newer style of political crank. He was in one sense absolutely disinterested. He could have been a very rich man had he stayed longer at the Parliamentary Bar. He left it, in fact, for politics, the very moment he could afford to do so, and his fidelity to politics kept him a poor man till almost the end of his life; till, indeed, the death of a nephew left him lord of the rich and pleasant Nuneham domain. Titular honour attracted him no more than money. His knighthood had to be forced on him. When he was appointed Solicitor-General, Mr. Gladstone had to insist on precedent being followed; Sir William wished to escape an honour suitable enough for Mayors and other deserving municipal persons, but scarcely fitting a man of his pedigree. Many years later, much to the delight of his friends in the House of Commons, he refused a much more considerable distinction offered by King Edward. It would have been much to him to be Prime Minister of England; it was nothing to him to be Viscount Harcourt. There was more pride than humility or democratic feeling in this disregard for titles; the pride of Sir William Harcourt was as much a feature of him as his almost gigantic height, his portentous under lip, and his keen enjoyment of his own jokes. A large part of the man was what had long been underground; this parson’s son, jests about whose Plantagenet blood seemed rather unmeaning to the uninitiated, was in very fact enormously interested in his genealogy. He could boast of a descent as noble as any in Europe, and though he readily saw the ridiculous side of pride of ancestry in others he could not help attaching an importance to himself as a Vernon Harcourt only second to that of being the Vernon Harcourt. There is a tale of his wearily repeating, with reference to an absurd person named Knightley, who bored dinner tables with his pedigree, the lines:

“And Knightley to the listening earth

Reveals the story of his birth.”

But Knightley, had he possessed the necessary powers of repartee, would not have lacked material for effective retort.

Wealth in the real sense being indifferent to him, small honours beneath his consideration, and overpowering enthusiasm for the greater ideals foreign to his nature, what remained as the motive power sufficing to propel the vast bulk of this political galleon through the cross-currents of over thirty years of varied navigation? The answer would seem to be sheer love of the game of politics. Sir William Harcourt delighted in political warfare almost as an end in itself. It would be unjust, no doubt, to style him a pure opportunist. His course was determined by a sense of loyalty to his party and by a general appreciation of the philosophy of Whiggism. He had his early days of Adullamitism, when he was rather the candid friend than the consistent supporter of his own leaders. But that was in strict accord with the rules of the game. Once he ceased to be a free lance he became the staunchest of partisans. His labours for Liberalism were Herculean. Considered as a mere output of mental energy his career from the early Seventies to the late Nineties was amazing. In every fight he was put forward in the fore-front of the battle, and acquitted himself with astonishing prowess. His sword-play might lack finesse, but its effect no man could deny, least of all that man who had to bear the brunt of his sweeping strokes. He rapidly became one of the greatest of House of Commons debaters, a little given, perhaps, to the declamatory, but never degenerating into mere verbiage or claptrap. On the platform he was, perhaps, less successful: he lacked the gift of emotional appeal, and was wholly wanting in imagination. The common man could laugh heartily at his quips, could cheer his knock-down blows, but his pulses were never stirred, and even his intellect was not conquered. For somehow Sir William Harcourt, with all his energy and incisiveness, never gave the impression of quite feeling what he said. He always seemed to be engaged rather in a boxing match than a fight—a match in which he was, quite indubitably, out to win, but still a match and not an affair of life-and-death earnestness. Mr. Gladstone, Mr. Morley, and Lord Rosebery each in their way got where Sir William Harcourt could never quite reach. He rather resembled, in fact, that kind of actor who is just a little too stagey for the stage, and is never more theatrical than when his heart is wholly in a part.

But the most stagey actor may have a very real human side, and Sir William Harcourt, so generally credited with a cynical outlook on public affairs, was in his family and social relations the most large-hearted and genuine of men. It would be a mistake, also, to think of him politically as a mere gladiator. It was certainly his misfortune that he had sometimes for party purposes to simulate enthusiasm for causes he had little at heart. On Home Rule and Local Option he privately was a Laodicean (if nothing more positive), attempting in public the ecstasy of a dancing dervish—and, in truth, his figure was ill-adapted to corybantic zeal. But he did really care for good administration, sound finance, and the Whig theory of exterior policy. There was pique in his attitude towards Lord Rosebery, but not pique alone; he saw what Mr. Gladstone did not see, what the Radicals who gave their voice for a Rosebery Premiership did not see, that Liberal Imperialism would not do; those who wanted Imperialism wanted the real article, and would go to the right shop for it. Indeed, though the last years of his career were pathetically in contrast with its first promise, they did much to kill the early legend of the pure opportunist. Sir William Harcourt might be cynical as to indifferent matters, and undoubtedly many things important to others were to him indifferent. But beneath the surface there was, besides much loyalty and generosity to individuals, a larger sincerity, if not to this idea or that, at least to a general conception which might be limited, but was certainly not ignoble.

CHAPTER XV
BISHOP CREIGHTON

When Mandell Creighton was Bishop of London it fell to him to admonish an earnest High Church Vicar, working in the East End, on the subject of incense. The Vicar, pleading hard for his point, appealed to his record as a parish priest. “Dr. Creighton,” he said solemnly, “for twenty-five years I have held here a cure of souls, and——” Before he could finish the sentence Creighton cut in with a joke. “Cure them, certainly,” he said, “but surely you need not smoke them.”

The jest was quite in Creighton’s way. It was easy. It was flippant. It was made at the expense of a rather humourless sincerity. It was impolitic; in fact, widely repeated, it caused much offence. But it came into the Bishop’s head, and it had to come out. Creighton might possess self-restraint in other ways, but the sacrifice of a good thing was beyond him. Moreover, while ready to make the largest allowances for great errors and even great crimes, he was incapable of respecting what he considered mere faddism in religious matters. He had, it seems certain, religious beliefs of his own, but no religious fancies, and he was contemptuous of fancies in others, still more contemptuous of fancies that were rather more than fancies. The priest in the present case was clearly a fool; who but a fool would remain a priest in Bethnal Green for twenty-five years? Why not, then, tell him so, if it could be done with due urbanity and wit? It was the sort of thing Creighton would have said as an undergraduate at Merton, and to a rather unusual degree he retained the undergraduate mind throughout life. In full maturity both his earnestness and his flippancy were less those of manhood than of very intelligent youth; at sixty he was mentally as fresh as at twenty, and (it may perhaps be said) as foppish. The foppishness was the more real because it was unconscious, like the undergraduate’s; Creighton disclaimed “superiority” in himself, and strongly resented it in others, but he never lost that combined simper and swagger of the mind which we are so often persuaded to call Oxford. There could have been no greater contrast to Temple. Temple said what he had to say, and cared very little what people thought as to the thing said or the manner of its saying. Creighton had always some of the eagerness and wistfulness of the clever young man who feels it incumbent on him to sparkle, and is troubled with just a doubt whether he has quite “come off.” His paradoxes are often strongly reminiscent of Oscar Wilde’s; they are not so witty, but have much the same superficial smartness, essential untruth, and light contempt of average humanity. Wilde would have given a more dexterous turn to “No people do so much harm as those who go about doing good,” but the spirit of the thing is quite his, and he might actually have described an Extension lecture as “a mission to enlightened greengrocers.” This, of course, was only one side of Creighton’s character; in other moods he said many wise things, and did things still more wise. Whether he was a fundamentally wise man is another question. Wise men have a habit of ceasing to be clever, and especially of ceasing to be exceptionally educated. Creighton could not help being always a wit and always a don. As a Christian he was always ready to admit the equality of men before God. He even erred on the side of minimising the moral differences between man and man, as in that very unphilosophical generalisation that “all are so infinitely far from the perfection of God that little differences do not matter,” which is equivalent to saying that the light of a lamp is so infinitely less than the light of the sun that it does not matter whether we have a smoky lamp or not. In this way, as a Christian, Creighton was fond of showing his indifference to externals. But as an Oxford scholar he did incline to think too much of certain small things and too little of certain big things.

There were no two subjects on which he was more prone to witty depreciation than the clerical mind and the national mind. Yet he was himself very English, and very Church-of-English. Only in England would such a man find himself in holy orders; only in England, especially, would such a man find himself a Bishop. The whole tone of his mind was secular and humanist; on indifferent things he spoke as an unembarrassed pagan; when, like an ecclesiastical Wegg, he “dropped” into theology, the effect was a little awkward. There was no suspicion of insincerity in Creighton talking about “keeping open the way to Jesus,” and “growing nearer to God,” but there was (to some at least) a sense of incongruity. It gave the sort of shock one would feel if Mr. Chesterton went out dressed like the Rev. R. J. Campbell, or if Mr. Massingham went to a fancy dress ball in a colourable imitation of a Field-Marshal’s uniform.

One was prepared for everything moral, kindly, and sensible from Creighton. But to find this very clever man—“for sheer cleverness Creighton beats any man I know,” said Temple once—really did regard himself first and foremost as a “pastor of souls,” and was so despite the neat epigrams, the equally neat gold cigarette case, and the social àplomb, was not a little staggering. His countrymen, stupid as Creighton always loved to represent them, might at least partially understand him. It is safe to say no intelligent Italian or Frenchman would have done so. Such a foreigner would understand well enough a great Prince of the Church, who might or might not be a Christian. He would understand a poor saint. He would understand a humanist unbeliever full of noble sentiment. What he would hardly understand was how a man so very “broad” managed to confine himself in a “distinct branch of the Catholic Church.” Still less would he be able to comprehend how a scholar with a life-long ambition to write a great historical work should be the victim, in his own words, of a “conspiracy to prevent him from doing so.” But to the English, and also to Creighton, who loved to satirise the English, it seemed not unnatural that a man who cared little about any points of ritual should be constantly adjudicating between the Kensitites on the one hand and the extreme High Churchmen on the other, or that a man eminently qualified to write great history in which he was intensely interested should be set to compose small squabbles in which he was not interested at all.

Why Creighton took orders was much of a mystery to his set at Merton. The whole intellectual tendency of the day was towards agnosticism, and Creighton was very intellectual indeed. But, though Creighton had little sympathy with “external and mechanical orthodoxy,” and, in the words of his eulogist, “did not wear his spiritual heart on his sleeve,” but “reverted to paradox to conceal differences on which he did not care to insist,” he seems to have remained a convinced Churchman, and indeed considerably more of a High and less of a Broad Churchman than he afterwards became. His ambition to be a clergyman dated from early boyhood; but it would probably not be unjust to suggest that he was first attracted to the Church less by a spiritual urging than by the thought that the clerical career would afford him an opportunity for study and literary work. Creighton’s love for things of the mind was more Scottish than English; his family was a Scottish family, though settled in Cumberland; his father, trained as a joiner, had a furnishing and decorating business; on his mother’s side, he came of yeoman farmer stock. Healthy but short-sighted, the lad had no recreation but taking long walks—a habit which persisted and developed in later life (he once walked from Oxford to Durham in three days)—and his naturally studious bent was accentuated by this aloofness from the sports of his companions. The severity of the born student, however, was softened from a very early age by the taste of the born æsthete; Creighton’s rooms at Oxford, the moment he got a little money, were beautifully set out with choice little pieces of old furniture, blue and white china, and flowers arranged on the most correct principles of the newest school of taste. After his marriage with Miss Louise von Glehn (who first attracted him by her youth, her yellow sash, and her interest in his lectures) he removed from his pleasant rooms to a house in Oxford equally charming in its way, and the centre of much quiet intellectual junketing. But, though he delighted in Oxford, he began, as years went on, to think of University as “like living in a house with the workmen always about,” and the pressure of his tutorial duties made him long for some less arduous environment in which to carry out his design of a History of the Papacy. An opportunity presented itself at the end of 1874. The richest and oldest living within the gift of Merton, that of Embleton, forty miles north of Newcastle, became vacant; Creighton made it known that he would be willing to accept, and the offer was made him. At Embleton, lying on a desolate part of the Northumbrian coast, Creighton made himself comfortable in the old fortified vicarage which used to afford shelter to the parishioners and their cattle during Scottish moss-trooper raids; and here, in the intervals of attending to not too arduous parish duties, he brought out the first two volumes of his history. The work at once placed him in the front rank of serious writers of the day; and the praise lavished on it was not undeserved. For though the effort to be impartial where impartiality is impossible gave coldness to the narrative, these volumes, as well as those which succeeded, showed great learning, a brilliant power of analysis and exposition, and a rare faculty of imaginative sympathy. It is a curious testimony to Creighton’s fairness to find Lord Acton at a later date accusing him of too much tenderness for certain Popes, while Protestants were complaining that Luther was treated with an undue lack of reverence.

By this time parochial duties, increasing with the years, began to irk Creighton as much as the pressure of his tutorial duties had done, and he was anxious for a change. In 1884 he accepted the offer of the appointment of Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Cambridge; shortly after he took from Mr. Gladstone a Canonry at Worcester; and in 1890 Lord Salisbury offered him the vacant See of Peterborough. Nearly ten years before he had been asked if he would like to be a Bishop. “No, I should not,” he replied, “but if I were offered a Bishopric I should no doubt take it, because I have got into the habit of doing what is asked of me.” He was anxious to get on with his history; to become a Bishop meant the definite sacrifice of further literary ambitions. But though he thought it “a terrible nuisance,” and his “natural self” abhorred it, and he considered himself “an object of compassion,” it is probable that the promotion was not quite so unpleasant as he represented it to many friends and probably himself believed it to be. For both his worldly and other-worldly sides the appointment had some compensations. He really did enjoy society, and he really did feel (singular as it might seem in a man of his temperament) his mission as a Christian priest. The sense was not strong enough to make him seek great activities, but it was strong enough to make him feel it an act of cowardice and self-indulgence to refuse a call when it came. But it was in the nature of the man to mix up almost comically his various feelings. At one time we find him lamenting that living in a Palace will be bad for his children, at another he speaks of regarding his individual life as simply an opportunity of offering himself to God, and then we have the following very characteristic remark: “A good lady said to me the other day, ‘After all, men are more interesting than books.’ Doubtless this is true, but you can choose your own books, and you must take your men as you find them.” “My peace of mind,” he said in the same letter, “is gone; my books will be shut up; my mind will go to seed; I shall utter nothing but platitudes for the rest of my life, and everybody will write letters in the newspapers about my iniquities.” The picture of such a man hesitating between a certain set of tastes and the call of conscience is perhaps best illustrated in a story which may or may not be new. One of Creighton’s children was asked what he was going to do. The reply was, “Father is still praying for guidance, but mother is packing our boxes.”

Whatever his real qualms, they seem to have been excessive. Once settled down to his new work, Creighton quite enjoyed himself at Peterborough, and certainly, by all reasonable standards of episcopal efficiency, was a success. But his translation to London in 1896 was the occasion of more complaints in the same key. London was “inhuman”; it required all his efforts to remain human in such a spot. There were not so many human beings in London as in Peterborough. He was in “the very centre of all that was worldly.” He was “exposed to the most deteriorating influences.” It was “a great nuisance” that he never saw anybody intimately. “Every ass was at liberty to bray in his study.” He never seemed to be free from interviewing candidates for ordination. There was no one to be “kind” to him. But as he became more used to the new conditions the complaints became less frequent. He felt himself making some impression, not only on his vast work, but on the vast town. The newspapers recognised the richness of his personality. The gossips retailed his good things. He began to feel at home, and within a year of his promotion we find him confessing that London is “immensely interesting” with its “abundant life,” which, however, “raises the question—Where is it going?”

If he found London bewildering as well as interesting, London—or that fraction that troubled about such matters—was also a little puzzled, as well as interested, in him. There was, indeed, something of the Sphinx about this long, gaunt figure, with the bearded, spectacled face, harsh in feature as only northern English faces can be, intrinsically stern, but generally lightened by a smile half genial and half quizzical. Rapidly becoming one of the best-known of public men, he was never quite understood. The man killed himself by hard work; a constitution good enough to have taken him to fourscore was worn out at less than sixty by too conscientious efforts to keep pace with the enormous demands made on his energies. His sermons and addresses breathed much of the purest spirit of Christian faith, as well as the very soul of Christian charity. Yet he who laboured so faithfully, and preached so admirably, often talked nonsense—sometimes good nonsense and sometimes bad—and showed a quality (some called it playfulness and others flippancy) which perturbed equally the faithful and the infidel. For orthodox people could not understand this levity in a serious man, and unorthodox people seemed to think that a man of his mentality and temperament had no right to be orthodox. There was in his very toleration something insulting to enthusiasts. To people who held strong views on some question he felt to be trivial he could not emit judicious platitudes; his judgment was generally barbed with a wit that rankled with both sides. One reference to incense has already been quoted; another was, “Personally I should say, if they want to make a smell, let them.” That sort of thing does not satisfy either those who would kindle the fires of Smithfield or those who would revive the sullen reign of the saints.

The Bishop’s attitude was held very generally to denote the kind of breadth which is so easy where there is no strong conviction. But this view was quite erroneous. Creighton’s contempt might be too lightly expressed, but it was not lightly entertained. He had a reason for every dislike, and even behind every prejudice. He managed somehow to reconcile the Catholic view of the English Church with pure Erastianism. In one place one finds him ridiculing the notion that truth varies with longitude and latitude; in another he holds that “the general trend of the Church must be regulated by their (the people’s) wishes,” and that “the Church cannot go too far from the main ideas of the people”—who might conceivably, of course, become polygamists and fire-worshippers fifty years hence. In truth, this great historian often thought as cloudily and locally as a country curate, and, far more than he was aware, was influenced by the insularity he so often derided. Where he did not take the English view he took the German, being soaked, like most Victorians, in Teutonism; and he really objected to “religious observances of an exotic kind” less because they were exotic than because they were Latin.

“The Church of Rome,” he said once, “is the Church of decadent peoples.” On another occasion he observed that the Roman communion is “a small body in England, which stands in no relation to the religious life of the nation.... To join that Church is simply to stand on one side and cut yourself off from your part in striving to do your duty for the religious future of your country.” I am not concerned in the sectarian question involved; I only quote the passages to show that Creighton, with all his learning and cleverness, could talk solemn nonsense as well as the lighter kind. Yet he would have been quick to see the logical lapse of some old barbarian who condemned Christianity as the religion of under-sized people, or of the Roman governor under Nero who sent saints to the lions because this new faith of “Chrestus” stood in no relation to the religious life of a polytheistic Empire, so that for a Roman citizen to join it was to “cut himself off from his past in striving to do his duty for the religious future of his country.”

The truth is, of course, that Creighton, disliking Rome and despising the “dying nations” in her communion, wished to say something nasty without too much trouble—a natural and perhaps commendable desire. The Ulster man, when he wants to gratify it, says simply, “To Hell with the Pope”; Creighton, instead of rising to bad language, sank to bad argument, and gave the weight of his personality to the once popular doctrine that a creed is to be honoured in proportion to the wealth and material prosperity of its professors. Yet on all indifferent matters he would have been the first to hold that truth is truth if only one man (and he a scrofulous cripple) believes it, and error error, even though approved by everybody as tall as Creighton and endowed with the particular code of good manners which he approved.

CHAPTER XVI
JOHN MORLEY

I remember hearing John Morley—it was then impossible to conceive of him as containing the germ of John Viscount Morley—addressing one of the many “flowing tide” meetings which were among the chief public events of the early Nineties. I can recall nothing of the speech, except that it was about the Irish question; Mr. Morley had just been over to Ireland, and some officious policeman had struck him with a baton, or something of that sort—a proceeding which had naturally annoyed him, and imparted some acerbity to his remarks. But, of course, the speech was less interesting than the speaker. This, then, was the great John Morley, who wrote such beautiful English and spelt “God” with a small “g”—this prim, frock-coated figure, with an indefinable suggestion of the Nonconformist; slight, with the stoop of the student; the face deeply indented with crow’s-feet, but in no sense pallid, rather with the kind of unfresh floridity so often seen in the Law Courts; a sort of quiet fatigue pervading the whole, like the American character in Dickens who was “used up considerable”; the eyes at once keen and weary, like all eyes that are the overworked instruments of an active brain depending chiefly on printed matter for its impressions; the forehead well-shaped, but not impressive; everything about him suggestive rather of completeness than mass or power; the whole man compact, agile, highly articulate, trained to the last ounce, notable enough, but hardly great. Not naturally an intellectual Hercules, one would say; rather an example of the fitness that comes of a tidy habit of life and regular work at the bedroom exerciser.

John Morley. 1888.

He spoke well, but not very well—nothing like so well as most of the more considerable politicians of the day. He did not lack vehemence; indeed—perhaps as a consequence of the baton business—he sometimes rasped. Neither was there wanting elevation of phrase, though when he arrived at the rather mechanical peroration I found myself wondering (in my youthful haste) why great men permitted themselves such banalities. But there was a lack of all the greater qualities of oratory, and especially the quality of sympathy; the speaker had nothing in common with his audience apart from convictions, and those he and they held on a quite different tenure. Years afterwards I found that John Morley was far from an ineffective speaker in his own proper place; in the House of Commons he could often appeal to the heart as well as to the reason, and when he implored the House of Lords to avoid the “social shock” of the creation of Peers in 1911 his manner had almost as much effect as his matter. In the Upper House, indeed, he was almost a greater success than in the Lower; his audience liked him, and he greatly liked his audience. “What on earth do you want to go there for?” Mr. Asquith is said to have remarked when his old colleague suggested that he should sit in the House of Lords. A few years later he might have seen that the philosophical Radical was well placed there.

Among men accustomed to recognise distinction John Morley could hardly fail to be at home, and the longer he represented his Government in the Lords the better he was liked by his fellow-Peers. But a popular speaker he never was, and never could be. It is a gift common to some of the least considerable as well as some of the greatest men; two of the finest natural orators of the Nineties were members so little regarded as Mr. Sexton and Sir Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett. But, however it may be improved by cultivation, or ennobled by great character or great mentality, it is still a gift, and goes with a type of personality seldom possessed by the really bookish man. It was at this particular meeting that John Morley gave away, for those who had eyes to see, a part of the secret of his comparative failure as a platform speaker. A vulgar, genial local magnate rose to propose a vote of thanks. He allotted a few words of second-hand praise to John Morley as man of letters. He eulogised him as the faithful friend and lieutenant of the noble and revered leader—(cheers)—the Grand Old Man of Liberalism—(loud cheers)—William—(cheers)—Ewart—(frantic cheers)—Gladstone—(prolonged and uproarious cheering). And then he added that Mr. John Morley had one personal claim above all others to the audience’s respect. It was not his intellect, though that was brilliant. It was not his party service, though that was great. It was the quality recognised by every working man who knew him as “Honest John.”

Mr. Morley winced like a horse stung by a specially noxious gadfly, shifted uneasily in his seat, and then glanced at the fat and complacent speaker with a malignity of which he might have been thought incapable. In that momentary raising of the mask were revealed all the temperamental difficulties of this intellectually convinced democrat in the presence of actual living democracy. If John Morley preserved ever a certain aloofness from the people it was surely in the interests of his faith in the popular cause. In the presence of Peers and scholars he found no difficulty in maintaining the purity of his democratic creed. But real contact with the masses must have been in the long run fatal.

John Morley, indeed, had always rather more than his share of that shrinking pride, that haughty sensitiveness, which so often characterises the Liberal intellectual. The typical Tory of the older time was proud, but in a different way. His hereditary association with “muck and turnips” gave him a certain contact with realities. His family tree was in a sense public property; his skeletons were hidden in no obscure cupboard, but duly displayed for the edification of the public; and he had no particular objection to people commenting, and even joking, on certain aspects of his private life. He knew that every disagreement with his wife, every money quarrel with his son, was the gossip of all the ale-houses for miles round. He knew that the labourers called him in private “Old Tom” or something more definitely disrespectful; so long as they touched their hats in public that did not trouble him. A true aristocracy must always be shameless. But the circle in which John Morley grew up was refined and secretive as no other circle on earth; the pride of the upper classes is comparatively simple; the pride of the middle class is as nicely compounded as the melancholy of Jacques. It was this pride, and nothing else, which gave John Morley that reputation of chilly austerity which was really quite foreign to his character. Many things otherwise incomprehensible are plain when we recognise that, while he disliked being called in public “honest John,” and cherished a bookish middle-class man’s horror of emotion expressed without decorum, he was always a very social sort of person, with a keen enjoyment of all the colour and flavour of things. Lord Morley is perhaps best described as one of those true epicures of life who get the highest it has to offer at something less than the full price. He could be on excellent terms with many sportsmen and society people, because they touched his tastes on points, but he left them as soon as they manifested tendencies to stubble or covert or dancing-room. He left them thus on no particular principle, not because he was the victim of any Puritanic fanaticism against pleasure, but because he personally took no pleasure in such things: sport and party-going bored him, and his tendency throughout life was to take as much of the smooth and as little of the rough of things as he decently could. And, just as he would go off to his room at a country-house party the moment he had had enough of general society, so while he stuck to his party manfully in periods of storm, he generally found some excuse to leave the business to another when the Liberal ship drifted into the doldrums. But the notion of him as a bloodless philosopher, a sort of atheistic Puritan, a monster of plain living and high thinking, a moral sky-scraper of reinforced abstract, is quite misleading. He speaks of Joseph Chamberlain as having a “genius for friendship.” He himself had at least much quiet talent in that direction. Reared in grimy Blackburn, the son of a hard-worked surgeon, his temperament, naturally sunny and sun-loving, led him to early revolt against the “unadulterated milk of the Independent word” on which he was nurtured as a child, and at Oxford we find him musing, in Wesley’s room at Lincoln, on the rapidity with which the thoughts and habits of youthful Methodism were vanishing. He had been intended for orders, but the only foundations on which such a career could be honestly based had been destroyed in contact with the destructive criticism of the time; the teaching profession he rejected after a short and painful experience; he read for the Bar, but, to his “enduring regret,” did not make his way thither: journalism therefore alone remained—a career which may lead anywhere or nowhere, but which, as he afterwards reflected, “quickens a man’s life while it lasts,” though it may kill him in the end.

Morley was not killed by journalism, was rather made by it. Of his talent for the craft everything requisite has been said; great as it was, it was perhaps exceeded by his talent for making valuable friendships. It was journalism, for example, that gave him personal touch with the greatest formative influence of his life—John Stuart Mill. The intense admiration of the younger for the older man was natural enough: Mill had a singularly lovable nature. But there was danger in the completeness of Morley’s surrender. For Mill was in one sense a highly amiable Satan; he knew all about the past and present, but had no sense whatever of the future. The whole philosophy of individualism is founded on the presumption that the world would always remain much as it was in the middle of the nineteenth century; Mill does not seem to have had a suspicion of the way in which capital, taking always the line of least resistance in the search for profit, would cease in all its greater manifestations to preserve more than a vestige of its “private” character. All his theories depend on a balance which was destroyed within a very few years, historically speaking, of their promulgation; the balance, namely, of a mob of unrelated capitalists dealing with a mob of unrelated workers. Morley was a little unfortunate in coming, like a late investor, into the Mill philosophy at the top of the market; almost immediately the stock began to decline, and it was to some extent the inflexibility of economic opinions formed under these auspices that handicapped him when he arrived at a position of great authority in the Liberal party.

Nevertheless, in the Nineties all things seemed still possible to John Morley. He was, as a real and fervent Home Ruler, Mr. Gladstone’s chief dependence; it was he who bore the main burden of the great Committee fight on the Home Rule Bill. Mr. Gladstone’s “rapid splendours” implied an enormous amount of detail work. “It must be rather heart-breaking for you,” said Mr. Asquith to Morley; “it is brutal to put into words, but, really, if Mr. Gladstone stood more aside we might get on better.” “Though putting away this impious thought,” comments Morley, “I could not deny that a little dullness and a steady flow of straightforward mediocrity often mean a wonderful saving of Parliamentary time.” With Sir William Harcourt, again, he was on excellent terms, while keeping up the most cordial relations with the Rosebery camp. His own work at the Irish Office—his second experience of that bed of torment—was creditable. He had lost a seat, but confirmed a reputation, by his refusal to accept the principle of the eight-hours’ day. With the vulgar he was accepted, if without enthusiasm, still with respect, and the Liberal party generally regarded him as one of two possible successors to the leadership. At this time his name was always associated with that of Sir William Harcourt; they played the two Cæsars to the Augustus of Mr. Gladstone. It is just possible that, if the election of 1892 had yielded a solid Liberal majority of a hundred instead of a strangely composite and insecure majority of nominally forty, the name of John Morley might have graced the august list of British Prime Ministers. An inspiring prospect might have conquered finally the vacillation between politics and literature which endured through almost all Lord Morley’s active life. “I wonder whether you are like me,” he quotes Mr. Balfour as once saying to him; “when I’m at work in politics I long to be in literature, and vice versa.” “I should think so, indeed,” was Morley’s reply. No doubt literature was his real business, and he did wrong to desert it at all. Certainly no man of letters will regret the circumstances which led him to withdraw awhile to his study to produce that great human document, glowing with colour and pregnant with shrewd generalisation, the Life of Gladstone. But Morley’s attitude in the Nineties need only be compared with that of Disraeli during his long period of waiting, for the difference to be at once manifest between the man of letters who is incidentally and casually a man of action and the man of action who is incidentally and casually a man of letters. Both were engaged in an apparently hopeless struggle. But Disraeli never lost interest in the fight; he was as resolute and tenacious in the extremes of adversity as he was dashing and resourceful on the verge of victory. Morley’s interest, on the other hand, only lasted while he was in office; when the Rosebery break-up came he ceased to count, and his return to the Cabinet in 1905 was in a character that would have seemed quaint indeed ten years before—that of subordinate to Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman. There was assuredly nothing discreditable to Lord Morley in his failure or disinclination to control an unfortunately developing situation. But his sudden renewal of interest in politics when the once despaired-of Liberal victory and reunion at length arrived, did suggest once again what has already been hinted—that he had perhaps too sure an instinct for the sunny side of the peach.

Lord Morley, in his Recollections, quotes Disraeli’s comment on one of the first Parliamentary speeches of John Stuart Mill. Mill had not gone far when Disraeli murmured to a neighbour, “Ah, the Finishing Governess.” Perhaps something of the character inferred was transmitted from Mill to his disciple. John Morley had the frostiest of spinsterhood’s views on the importance of being merely immaculate; he could bear the reproach of barrenness, but shuddered at that of impropriety. Like many maiden aunts, having no political children of his own to think about, he took an interest in other people’s; we have seen how assiduously he looked after the little Benjamin of Mr. Gladstone’s extreme age. But a maiden aunt is not like a mother, who can never escape from the children. The maiden aunt can always disappear when she likes to Harrogate or Cheltenham, there to flirt decorously with other interests. It was thus with John Morley. While he was always ready to lose his seat rather than depart by one jot or tittle from his principles, he felt no more call to stand by his party than the maiden aunt does to stand by the nursery when it has mumps. Liberalism suffered badly from mumps between 1896 and 1903—years during which John Morley was on the whole quite pleasantly engaged. He said what his position demanded during the South African War, but in such sort that his old and dear friend Chamberlain complimented him both on his moderation and his courage in championing an unpopular cause. Meanwhile “C.-B.,” with his “methods of barbarism,” was hardly safe from mob attack. Yet nobody thinks of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman as more than a quite ordinary politician of the more honest kind, and everybody thinks of Lord Morley as a stoic hero. For the rest, immersion in the Life of Gladstone enabled him to escape without reproach from much active participation in the feuds which rent his party. That great work was finished in 1903, just at the time Liberalism was beginning to revive and reintegrate. No other member of the party had passed through the bad time with less personal discomfort. But the penalty—if penalty it were—had to be paid. In 1896 John Morley was distinctly Papabile. In 1903 nobody could conceive him as Pope.

Lord Randolph Churchill once rallied Morley—it might almost be said reproached him—with being one of those men “who believe in the solution of political problems.” The impeachment—in which, marvellous to relate, Mr. Balfour was also included—was no doubt justified. It would be quite inexact to say that Lord Morley did not take politics seriously; he took them very seriously indeed. But there are different degrees of belief; and the faith which rests on a purely intellectual basis (while it may well be more stubborn than any other) calls less imperiously for translation into works than the faith which is held with passion. John Morley, whatever his “belief in the solution of political questions,” could bear with perfect philosophy failure to solve them. A Brutus of political virtue, he was perhaps inclined rather to dine with Cæsar than to stab him. But, as an Irish critic said of him, in the course of a glowing eulogy, he also resembled Brutus in his readiness to fall gracefully on his sword when another would go on fighting for victory.