and damned the politician with all the vigour of the Old Testament vernacular.
I have often listened to a minister's confidential gossip about Lord Fisher; nothing in these interesting confidences struck me so much as the self-satisfaction of the little minister in treating the man of destiny as an amusing lunatic.
Born at Morley, Yorkshire, 1852. Educ.: City of London School; Balliol College, Oxford; gained 1st class, Lit. Hum. 1874; Barrister Lincoln's Inn, 1876; Q. C. 1890; Home Sec'y, 1892-95; Ecclesiastical Commissioner, 1892-95; Chancellor of the Exchequer, 1905-8; Sec'y for War, 1914; 1st Lord of the Treasury and Prime Minister, 1908-16; LL.D. Edinburgh, Glasgow, Cambridge, Leeds, St. Andrews, and Bristol.
RT. HON. HERBERT HENRY ASQUITH
"Not to mention loss of time, the tone of their feelings is lowered: they become less in earnest about those of their opinions respecting which they must remain silent in the society they frequent: they come to look upon their most elevated objects as unpractical, or at least too remote from realization to be more than a vision or a theory: and if, more fortunate than most, they retain their higher principles unimpaired, yet with respect to the persons and affairs of their own day, they insensibly adopt the modes of feeling and judgment in which they can hope for sympathy from the company they keep."—JOHN STUART MILL.
Nothing in Mr. Asquith's career is more striking than his fall from power: it was as if a pin had dropped.
Great men do not at any time fall in so ignominious a fashion, much less when the fate of a great empire is in the balance.
The truth is that Mr. Asquith possesses all the appearance of greatness but few of its elements. He has dignity of presence, an almost unrivalled mastery of language, a trenchant dialectic, a just and honourable mind; but he is entirely without creative power and has outgrown that energy of moral earnestness which characterized the early years of his political life.
He has never had an idea of his own. The "diffused sagacity" of his mind is derived from the wisdom of other men. He is a cistern and not a fountain.
His scholarship has made no difference to scholarship. His moral earnestness has made no difference to morality. He acquired scholarship by rote, politics by association, and morality by tradition. To none of these things did he bring the fire of original passion. The force in his youth was ambition, and the goal of his energy was success. No man ever laboured harder to judge between the thoughts of conflicting schools; few men so earnest for success ever laboured less to think for themselves. He would have made a noble judge; he might have been a powerful statesman; he could never have been a great man as Mazzini, Bismarck, and Gladstone were great men.
There are reasons for suspecting his moral qualities. When he allowed Lord Haldane to resign from the Cabinet at the shout of a few ignorant journalists he sacrificed the oldest of his friends to political exigencies. This was bad enough; but what made it worse was the appearance of heroic courage he assumed in paddling to Lord Haldane's rescue long after the tide of abuse had fallen. During the time he should have spoken to the whole nation, during the time he should have been standing sword in hand at the side of his friend, he was in negotiation with Sir Edward Carson.
It is a mistake to say that he brought England into the war. England carried Mr. Asquith into the war. The way in which politicians speak of Mr. Asquith as having "preserved the unity of the nation" in August, 1914, is index enough of the degraded condition of politics. A House of Commons that had hesitated an hour after the invasion of Belgium would have been swept out of existence by the wrath and indignation of the people. Mr. Asquith was the voice of England in that great moment of her destiny, a great and sonorous voice, but by no means her heart. He kept faction together at a moment when it was least possible for it to break apart; but he did not lead the nation into war. It was largely because he seemed to lack assurance that Lord Haldane was sacrificed. The Tories felt that Mr. Asquith would not make war whole-heartedly: they looked about for a scapegoat; Lord Haldane was chosen for this purpose by the stupidest of the Tory leaders; and the bewildered Prime Minister, with no mind of his own, and turning first to this counsellor and then to that, sacrificed the most intellectual of modern War Ministers, called Sir Edward Carson, to his side, and left the British war machine to Lord Kitchener.
We must make allowance for the time. No minister in our lifetime was confronted by such a gigantic menace. Moreover, the Cabinet was not united. Mr. Asquith came out of that tremendous ordeal creditably, but not, I think, as a great national hero. As for his conduct of the war, it was dutiful, painstaking, dignified, wise; but it lacked the impression of a creative original mind. He did not so much direct policy and inspire a nation as keep a Cabinet together. One seemed to see in him the decorative chairman of a board of directors rather than the living spirit of the undertaking.
When the historian comes to inquire into the trivial consequences of Mr. Asquith's fall from power he will be forced, I think, to lift that veil which Mr. Asquith has so jealously drawn across the privacy of his domestic life. For although he ever lacked the essentials of greatness, Mr. Asquith once possessed nearly all those qualities which make for powerful leadership. Indeed it was said in the early months of the war by the most able of his political opponents that it passed the wit of man to suggest any other statesman at that juncture for the office of Prime Minister.
His judicial temperament helped him to compose differences and to find a workable compromise. His personal character won the respect of men who are easily influenced by manner. There was something about him superior to a younger generation of politicians—a dignity, a reticence, a proud and solid self-respect. With the one exception of Mr. Alfred Spender, a man of honour and the noblest principles, he had no acquaintance with journalism. He never gave anybody the impression of being an office-seeker, and there was no one in Parliament who took less pains to secure popularity. Above all things, he never plotted behind closed doors; never descended to treason against a rival.
Search as men may among the records of his public life they will fail to discover any adequate cause of his fall from power. He was diligent in office; he took always the highest advice in every military dispute; settled the chief difficulty at the War Office without offence to Lord Kitchener; he gave full rein to the fiery energy of Mr. Lloyd George; he was in earnest, but he was never excited; he was beset on every side, but he never failed to maintain the best traditions of English public life; he was trusted and respected by all save a clique. Even in the humiliation of the Paisley campaign he was so noble a figure that the indulgence with which he appeared to regard the rather violent aid of a witty daughter was accepted by the world as touchingly paternal—the old man did not so much lean upon the arm of his child as smile upon her high-spirited antics.
One must trespass upon the jealously guarded private life to discover the true cause of his bewildering collapse. Mr. Asquith surrendered some years ago the rigid Puritanism of early years to a domestic circle which was fatal to the sources of his original power. Anyone who compares the photographs of Mr. Asquith before and after the dawn of the twentieth century may see what I mean. In the earlier photographs his face is keen, alert, powerful, austere; you will read in it the rigidity of his Nonconformist upbringing, the seriousness of his Puritan inheritance, all the moral earnestness of a nobly ambitious character. In the later photographs one is struck by an increasing expression of festivity, not by any means that beautiful radiance of the human spirit which in another man was said to make his face at the age of seventy-two "a thanksgiving for his former life and a love-letter to all mankind," but rather the expression of a mental chuckle, as though he had suddenly seen something to laugh at in the very character of the universe. The face has plumped and reddened, the light-coloured eye has acquired a twinkle, the firm mouth has relaxed into a sportive smile. You can imagine him now capping a "mot" or laughing deeply at a daring jest; but you cannot imagine him with profound and reverend anxiety striving like a giant to make right, reason, and the will of God prevail.
Like Mr. Lloyd George, his supplanter, he has lost the earnestness which brought him to the seats of power. A domestic circle, brilliant with the modern spirit and much occupied in sharpening the wits with epigram and audacity, has proved too much for his original stoicism. He has found recreation in the modern spirit. After the day's work there has been nothing so diverting for him as the society of young people; chatter rather than conversation has been as it were prescribed for him, and when he should have been thinking or sleeping he has been playing cards.
It is possible to argue that this complete change from the worries of the day's work has been right and proper, and that his health has been the better for it; but physical well-being can be secured by other means, and no physical well-being is worth the loss of moral power. There are some natures to whom easy-going means a descent. There are some men, and those the strongest sons of nature, for whom the kindest commandment is, "Uphill all the way."
Mr. Asquith, both by inheritance and temperament, was designed for a strenuous life, a strenuous moral life. He was never intended for anything in the nature of a flâneur. If he had followed his star, if he had rigorously pursued the path marked out for him by tradition and his own earliest propensities, he might have been an unpleasant person for a young ladies' tea-party and an unsympathetic person to a gathering of decadent artists; he might indeed have become as heavy as Cromwell and as inhuman as Milton; but he would never have fallen from Olympus with the lightness of thistledown.
Born, 1865, in Dublin. Educ.: in Trade Schools; trained as a book-seller, and worked in the establishment of George Newnes; LL.D., Rochester Univ., U.S.A.; Proprietor of the London Times, Daily Mail, and a number of other journals; Cr. Bart. in 1904; Viscount, 1917; Chairman of the British War Mission to the United States, 1917; Director of the Aerial Transport Committee, 1917; Director of Propaganda in Enemy Countries, 1918.
" ... We cannot say that they have a great nature, or strong, or weak, or light; it is a swift and imperious imagination which reigns with sovereign power over all their beings, which subjugates their genius, and which prescribes for them in turn those fine actions and those faults, those heights and those littlenesses, those flights of enthusiasm and those fits of disgust, which we are wrong in charging either with hypocrisy or madness."—VAUVENARGUES.
A great surgeon tells me he has no doubt that Carlyle suffered all his life from a duodenal ulcer. "One may speculate," he says, "on the difference there would have been in his writings if he had undergone the operation which to-day is quite common."
This remark occurs to me when I think about Lord Northcliffe.
There is something wrong with his health. For a season he is almost boyish in high spirits, not only a charming and a most considerate host, but a spirit animated by the kindliest, broadest, and cheerfullest sympathies. Then comes a period of darkness. He seems to imagine that he may go blind, declares that he cannot eat this and that, shuts himself up from his friends, and feels the whole burden of the world pressing on his soul.
It is impossible to judge him as one would judge a perfectly healthy man.
The most conspicuous thing in his character is its transilience. One is aware in him of an anacoluthic quality, as if his mind suddenly stopped leaping in one direction to begin jumping in a quite contrary direction. It cannot be said that his mind works in any direction. It is not a trained mind. It does not know how to think and cannot support the burden of trying to think. It springs at ideas and goes off with them in haste too great for reflection. He drops these ideas when he sees an excuse for another leap. Sequence to Lord Northcliffe is a synonym for monotony. He has no esprit de suite. But he has leaps of real genius. An admirable title for his biography would be, "The Fits and Starts of a Discontinuous Soul." There is something of St. Vitus in his psychology. You might call him the Spring-Heeled Jack of Journalism.
A story told of one of his journalists illustrates the difficulty of dealing with so uncertain a person. Lord Northcliffe invited this journalist, let us call him Mr. H., to luncheon. They approached the lift of Carmelite House, and Lord Northcliffe drew back to let his guest enter before him—he has excellent manners and, when he is a host, is scrupulously polite to the least of people in his employment. Mr. H. approached the lift, and raising his hat and making a profound bow to the boy in charge of it, passed in before Lord Northcliffe. Nothing was said during the descent. On leaving the lift Mr. H. again raised his hat and bowed low to the boy. When they were out of earshot Lord Northcliffe remonstrated with him on his behaviour. "You shouldn't joke," he said, "with these boys, it makes discipline difficult." "Joke!" exclaimed Mr. H., "good heavens, I wasn't joking; how do I know that to-morrow he will not be the editor of the Daily Mail?"
This story has a real importance. It emphasizes a remarkable characteristic of Lord Northcliffe's variability. It emphasizes the romantic quality of his mind. Nothing would please him more than to discover in one of his office boys an editor for The Times. His own life has given him almost a novelette's passion for romance. He lives in that atmosphere. Few men I have known are so free from snobbishness or so indifferent to the petty conventions of society. The dull life of the world is hateful to him. He would make not only the journalism of the suburbs sensational, he would make the history of mankind a fairy-story.
It is difficult to understand his power in the world. He is not the great organizer that people suppose; all the organization of his business has been done by Lord Rothermere, a very able man of business; nor is he the inspirational genius one is so often asked to believe. Mr. Kennedy Jones is largely responsible for the journalistic fortunes of Lord Northcliffe.
I am disposed to think that it is the romantic quality of his mind which is the source of his power. All the men about him are unimaginative realists. He is the artist in command of the commercial mind, the poet flogging dull words into a kind of wild music. Mr. Kennedy Jones could have started any of his papers, but he could never have imparted to them that living spirit of the unexpected which has kept them so effectually from dulness. Carmelite House could give the news of the world without Lord Northcliffe's help, but without his passion for the twists and turns of the fairy-story it could never have presented that news so that it catches the attention of all classes.
I have never been conscious of greatness in Lord Northcliffe, but I have never failed to feel in his mind something unusual and remarkable. He is not an impressive person, but he is certainly an interesting person. One feels that he has preserved by some magic of temperament, not to be analyzed by the most skilful of psychologists, the spirit of boyhood. You may notice this spirit quite visibly in his face. The years leave few marks on his handsome countenance. He loves to frown and depress his lips before the camera, for, like a child, he loves to play at being somebody else, and somebody else with him is Napoleon—I am sure that he chose the title of Northcliffe so that he might sign his notes with the initial N—but when he is walking in a garden, dressed in white flannels, and looking as if he had just come from a Turkish bath, he has all the appearance of a youth. It is a tragedy that a smile so agreeable should give way at times to a frown as black as midnight; that the freshness of his complexion should yield to an almost jaundiced yellow; and that the fun and frolic of the spirit should flee away so suddenly and for such long periods before the witch of melancholy.
Of his part in the history of the world no historian will be able to speak with unqualified approval. His political purpose from beginning to end, I am entirely convinced, has been to serve what he conceives to be the highest interests of his country. I regard him in the matter of intention as one of the most honourable and courageous men of the day. But he is reckless in the means he employs to achieve his ends. I should say he has no moral scruples in a fight, none at all; I doubt very much if he ever asks himself if anything is right or wrong. I should say that he has only one question to ask of fate before he strips for a fight—is this thing going to be Success or Failure?
In many matters of great importance he has been right, so right that we are apt to forget the number of times he has been wrong. Whether he may not be charged in some measure at least with the guilt of the war, whether he is not responsible for the great bitterness of international feelings which characterized Europe during the last twenty years, is a question that must be left to the historian. But it is already apparent that for want of balance and a moral continuity in his direction of policy Lord Northcliffe has done nothing to elevate the public mind and much to degrade it. He has jumped from sensation to sensation. The opportunity for a fight has pleased him more than the object of the fight has inspired him. He has never seen in the great body of English public opinion a spirit to be patiently and orderly educated towards noble ideals, but rather a herd to be stampeded of a sudden in the direction which he himself has as suddenly conceived to be the direction of success.
The true measure of his shortcomings may be best taken by seeing how a man exercising such enormous power, power repeated day by day, and almost at every hour of the day, might have prepared the way for disarmament and peace, might have modified the character of modern civilization, might have made ostentation look like a crime, might have brought capital and labour into a sensible partnership, and might have given to the moral ideals of the noblest sons of men if not an intellectual impulse at least a convincing advertisement.
The moral and intellectual condition of the world, a position from which only a great spiritual palingenesis can deliver civilization, is a charge on the sheet which Lord Northcliffe will have to answer at the seat of judgment. He has received the price of that condition in the multitudinous pence of the people; consciously or unconsciously he has traded on their ignorance, ministered to their vulgarities, and inflamed the lowest and most corrupting of their passions: if they had had another guide his purse would be empty.
All the same, it is the greatest mistake for his enemies to declare that he is nothing better than a cynical egoist trading on the enormous ignorance of the English middle-classes. He is a boy, full of adventure, full of romance, and full of whims, seeing life as the finest fairy-tale in the world, and enjoying every incident that comes his way, whether it be the bitterest and most cruel of fights or the opportunity for doing someone a romantic kindness.
You may see the boyishness of his nature in the devotion with which he threw himself first into bicycling, then into motoring, and then into flying. He loves machinery. He loves every game which involves physical risk and makes severe demands on courage. His love of England is not his love of her merchants and workmen, but his love of her masculine youth.
He has been generosity itself to his brothers, with all of whom he does not, unfortunately, get on as well as one could wish. The most beautiful thing in his life is the love he cherishes for his mother, and nothing delights him so much as taking away her breath by acts of astonishing devotion. A man so generous and so boyish may make grave mistakes, but he cannot be a deliberately bad man.
Born in Scotland 1848; s. of Jas. M. Balfour and Lady Blanche Cecil; nephew of the late Marquis of Salisbury and therefore 1st cousin to the present Marquis, Lord Robert Cecil, and Lord Hugh Cecil. Educ.: Eton and Trinity Coll., Cambridge; LL.D. Edinburgh, St. Andrews, Cambridge, Dublin, Glasgow, Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham, Bristol, Sheffield, Columbia (New York); D.C.L. Oxford. M.P. for Hertford, 1874-85; Private Sec'y to his uncle, the late Marquis of Salisbury, 1878-80; served on Mission to Berlin with Salisbury and Beaconsfield, 1878; Privy Councillor, 1885; President of Local Government Board, 1885-86; Sec'y for Scotland, 1886-87; Lord Rector, St. Andrews, 1886; Sec'y for Ireland, 1887-91; Lord Rector, Glasgow, 1890; Chancellor of Edinburgh since 1891; First Lord of Treasury, 1891-92; President British Association, 1904; Prime Minister, 1902-1905; Leader of the Commons, 1895-1906; 1st Lord of the Admiralty 1915-16; Head of British Mission to America, 1917; Author of a series of philosophical and economic works.
"A sceptre once put into the hand, the grip is instinctive; and he who is firmly seated in authority soon learns to think security and not progress, the highest lesson of statecraft."—J.R. LOWELL.
In one of the Tales Crabbe introduces to us a young lady, Arabella by name, who read Berkeley, Bacon, Hobbes, and Locke and was such a prodigy of learning that she became the wonder of the fair town in which, as he tells us, she shone like a polished brilliant. From that town she reaped, and to that town she gave, renown:
One feels that in Mr. Balfour there is something of both the learned Lady and the lofty Spire. He is at once spinsterish and architectural. I mean that he is a very beautiful object to look at, and at the same time a frustrated and perverse nature. Moreover his learning partakes of a drawing-room character, while his loftiness dwindles away to a point which affords no foothold for the sons of man. One may look up to him now and again, but a constant regard would be rewarded by nothing more serviceable to the admirer than a stiff neck. He points upward indeed, but to follow his direction is to discover only the void of etheric vacancy. Like his learning, which may astonish the simple, but which hardly illuminates the student, his virtues leave one cold. Someone who knows him well said to me once, "He is no Sir Galahad. Week-ending and London society have deteriorated his fibre."
He began life well, but he has slackness in his blood and no vital enthusiasm in his heart. His career has been a descent. He has taken things—ethically and industrially—easily, too easily.
It is a pity that Nature forgot to bestow upon him those domestic motions of the heart which humanize the mind and beautify character, for in many ways he was fitted to play a great part in affairs of State and with real emotion in his nature would have made an ideal leader of the nation during the struggle with Germany. He is a conspicuous example of the value of sensibility, for lacking this one quality he has entirely failed to reach the greatness to which his many gifts entitled him.
Few men can be so charming: no man can be more impressive. His handsome appearance, his genial manner, his distinguished voice, his eagerness and playfulness in conversation, all contribute to an impression of personality hardly equalled at the present time. He might easily pass for the perfect ideal of the gentleman. In a certain set of society he remains to this day a veritable prince of men. And his tastes are pure, and his life is wholesome.
A lady of my acquaintance was once praising to its mother a robust and handsome infant who could boast a near relationship with Mr. Arthur Balfour. "Yes," said the mother, with criticism in her eyes and voice, "I think he is a nice child, but we rather fear he lacks the Balfourian manner." Even in childhood!
This Balfourian manner, as I understand it, has its roots in an attitude of mind—an attitude of convinced superiority which insists in the first place on complete detachment from the enthusiasms of the human race, and in the second place on keeping the vulgar world at arm's length.
It is an attitude of mind which a critic or a cynic might be justified in assuming, for it is the attitude of one who desires rather to observe the world than to shoulder any of its burdens; but it is a posture of exceeding danger to anyone who lacks tenderness or sympathy, whatever his purpose or office may be, for it tends to breed the most dangerous of all intellectual vices, that spirit of self-satisfaction which Dostoievsky declares to be the infallible mark of an inferior mind.
To Mr. Arthur Balfour this studied attitude of aloofness has been fatal, both to his character and to his career. He has said nothing, written nothing, done nothing, which lives in the heart of his countrymen. To look back upon his record is to see a desert, and a desert with no altar and with no monument, without even one tomb at which a friend might weep. One does not say of him, "He nearly succeeded there," or "What a tragedy that he turned from this to take up that"; one does not feel for him at any point in his career as one feels for Mr. George Wyndham or even for Lord Randolph Churchill; from its outset until now that career stretches before our eyes in a flat and uneventful plain of successful but inglorious and ineffective self-seeking.
There is one signal characteristic of the Balfourian manner which is worthy of remark. It is an assumption in general company of a most urbane, nay, even a most cordial spirit. I have heard many people declare at a public reception that he is the most gracious of men, and seen many more retire from shaking his hand with a flush of pride on their faces as though Royalty had stooped to inquire after the measles of their youngest child. Such is ever the effect upon vulgar minds of geniality in superiors: they love to be stooped to from the heights.
But this heartiness of manner is of the moment only, and for everybody; it manifests itself more personally in the circle of his intimates and is irresistible in week-end parties; but it disappears when Mr. Balfour retires into the shell of his private life and there deals with individuals, particularly with dependents. It has no more to do with his spirit than his tail-coat and his white tie. Its remarkable impression comes from its unexpectedness; its effect is the shock of surprise. In public he is ready to shake the whole world by the hand, almost to pat it on the shoulder; but in private he is careful to see that the world does not enter even the remotest of his lodge gates.
"The truth about Arthur Balfour," said George Wyndham, "is this: he knows there's been one ice-age, and he thinks there's going to be another."
Little as the general public may suspect it, the charming, gracious, and cultured Mr. Balfour is the most egotistical of men, and a man who would make almost any sacrifice to remain in office. It costs him nothing to serve under Mr. Lloyd George; it would have cost him almost his life to be out of office during a period so exciting as that of the Great War. He loves office more than anything this world can offer; neither in philosophy nor music, literature nor science, has he ever been able to find rest for his soul. It is profoundly instructive that a man with a real talent for the noblest of those pursuits which make solitude desirable and retirement an opportunity should be so restless and dissatisfied, even in old age, outside the doors of public life.
The most serious effect upon his character of this central selfishness may be seen in his treatment of George Wyndham. Mr. Balfour has had only one friend in his parliamentary life, Alfred Lyttelton, but George Wyndham came nearer to his affections than any other man in the Unionist Party, and was at one time Mr. Balfour's devoted admirer. Nevertheless, in the hour of his tragedy, in the hour which broke his heart and destroyed his career, Mr. Balfour, who should have championed him against the wolves of the Party, and might, I verily believe, have saved both him and Ireland, turned away his face and rendered homage to political opportunism. Wyndham's grave and the present condition of Ireland stand as sorrowful reminders of that unworthy act.
Wyndham was by no means a first-rate politician, but he was a sincere man, something too of a genius, and I think there was genuine inspiration in his method of solving the Irish question.
This incident reveals in Mr. Balfour a capacity for meanness which rather darkens his good qualities. It prevents one from believing that his conduct has always been guided by noble and disinterested motives. The historian might have said that although he mistook astuteness and adroitness in parliamentary debate for statesmanship, and although he accomplished nothing for the good of his country, he yet lent a certain dignity and nobleness to public life at a time when it was besieged by new forces in democracy having no reverence for tradition and little respect for good manners; but when the full truth of the Wyndham incident is related it will be difficult for the historian to avoid a somewhat harsh judgment on Mr. Balfour's character.
Nor does the Wyndham incident stand alone. His treatment of Mr. Ritchie and Lord George Hamilton was very bad. Then there was the case of Joseph Chamberlain, who had good reason never to forgive him. Some day Mr. Asquith (or will it be Mrs. Asquith) may tell the story of dealings with Mr. Balfour which were not of a handsome character. The more these things are revealed the worse I think it will be for Mr. Balfour's character.
But such is the personal effect of the man that even those whom he has treated badly never bring any public charge against him. With the exception of Mr. Asquith, and Joseph Chamberlain, all forgave him, and even sought to find excuses for his inexplicable lapse. But I am inclined to think that this indicates weakness on the part of the victim rather than grace on the part of the victimizer.
There are other ways in which his lack of sensibility manifests itself in an unpleasant fashion. He is so self-absorbed that he appears to be wholly unaware of those who minister to his comfort. Of his servants he never knows the least detail, not even their names, and even a devoted secretary who has served him faithfully for many years may find himself treated almost as a stranger in a moment of need. I fear it must be said that in financial matters Mr. Balfour is as close-fisted as any miser, although I believe that this meanness has its rise, not so much in avariciousness as in a total incapacity to realize the importance of money to other people.
It has been said that the whole history of philosophical thought is an attempt to separate the object and the subject. Mr. Balfour appears to have made this separation complete. For him there is no object. His mind has embraced his subjective self, and has not merely refused the fruitless effort of attempting to stand outside its functions in order to perceive its own perceptions, but, abandoning the unperceived perceptions and the inactive activities of ultimate reality, it has canonized its own functions and deified its own subjective universe. So complete, indeed, is this separation that he can scarcely be called selfish, since for him there exists no objective field for the operation of unselfishness.
I lament this self-absorption of Mr. Balfour as much as I lament in his cousin Lord Robert Cecil the lack of the fighting qualities of leadership. To no man of the Unionist Party after the death of Lord Beaconsfield and Lord Salisbury have more hopeful opportunities presented themselves for creative statesmanship. He might have settled the Irish Question. He might have avoided the Boer War, in the conduct of which he behaved with real nobleness at the beginning. He might have saved Germany from her own war-mongers. In any case he might have led the Unionist Party towards construction and so have prevented the slap-dash methods at reform set going by Mr. Lloyd George after a long and irritating period of Tory pottering. For few men in modern times have exercised so great a fascination over that curious and easily satisfied body, the House of Commons, and no man in the public life of our times has enjoyed a more powerful prestige in the constituencies. Indeed, he stood for many years as the most dignified and honourable figure in the public life of Great Britain, and his influence in politics during the first part of that period was without serious rivalry.
It must not be forgotten, too, that in the days of "bloody Balfour" he was not merely chivalrous, but even Quixotic, in taking upon himself the mistakes and misdoings of his subordinates in Ireland. He certainly had the makings of a chivalrous figure, and perhaps even a great man. One thinks that he began his descent unconsciously, and that carelessness rather than any inherent badness led gradually to an egoism which has proved fatal to his powers and to his character.
To the self-absorbed, vision is impossible. Mr. Balfour, unable to penetrate the future, has lived from day to day, enjoying the game of politics for the fun of confounding critics and managing colleagues, enjoying too the privilege and dignity of power, but never once feeling the call of the future, or experiencing one genuine desire to leave the world better than he found it. And now he ends his political career clinging to a decorative office under the leadership of Mr. Lloyd George.
At the end of his Gifford Lectures, after an argument which induced one of his listeners to say that he had a stammer in his thoughts, Mr. Balfour announced his faith in God. One may recall Pascal's exclamation, "How far it is from believing in God to loving Him!"
I have always thought it significant of his true nature that Mr. Balfour should be one of the worst offenders in that unlovely Front Bench habit of putting his feet up on the Clerk's table. The last time I was in the House of Commons Mr. J.H. Thomas was lying back on the Opposition Front Bench with his legs in the air and his muddy boots crossed on the table. The boorishness of this attitude struck my companion very sharply. But I pointed out to him that the difference between Mr. Thomas, the Labour member, and Mr. Balfour, the great gentleman, was merely a size in boots.
Born, 1846; entered Army, 1866; Colonel, 1899; Burmah Campaign, 1891; Viscount, 1914; Baron, 1914; Earl, 1914; Sec'y for War, 1914; died, 1917.
"I never knew a man so fixed upon doing what he considered his duty."—CROKER PAPERS.
Soon after he had taken his chair at the War Office, Lord Kitchener received a call from Mr. Lloyd George. The politician had come to urge the appointment of denominational chaplains for all the various sects represented in the British Army.
Lord Kitchener was opposed to the idea, which seemed to him irregular, unnecessary, and expensive, involving a waste of transport, rations, and clerks' labour. But Mr. Lloyd George stuck to his sectarian guns, and was so insistent, especially in respect of Presbyterians, that at last the Secretary of State for War yielded in this one case. He took up his pen rather grudgingly and growled out, "Very well: you shall have a Presbyterian." Then one of his awkward smiles broke up the firmness of his bucolic face. "Let's see," he asked; "Presbyterian?—how do you spell it?"
This was one of his earliest adventures with politicians, and he ended it with a sly cut at unorthodoxy. A little later came another political experience which afforded him real insight into this new world of Party faction, one of those experiences not to be lightly dismissed with a jest.
He discovered at the War Office that preparations had been made for just such an emergency as had now occurred. The thoughtfulness and thoroughness of this work struck him with surprise, and he inquired the name of its author. He was told that Lord Haldane had made these preparations. "Haldane!" he exclaimed; "but isn't he the man who is being attacked by the newspapers?"
A chivalrous feeling which does not seem to have visited the bosoms of any of Lord Haldane's colleagues visited the bosom of this honest soldier. Someone about him who had enjoyed personal relations with various editors was dispatched to one of the most offending editors conducting the campaign against Lord Haldane with the object of stopping this infamous vendetta.
"I know what you say is true," replied this editor, "and I regret the attack as much as Lord Kitchener does; but I have received my orders and they come from so important a quarter that I dare not disobey them." He gave Lord Kitchener's emissary the name of a much respected leader of the Unionist Party.
Thus early in his career at the War Office Lord Kitchener learnt that the spirit of the public school does not operate in Westminster and that politics are a dirty business.
At no time in his life was Lord Kitchener "a racehorse amongst cows," as the Greeks put it, being, even in his greatest period, of a slow, heavy, and laborious turn of mind; but when he entered Mr. Asquith's Cabinet he was at least an honest man amongst lawyers. He was a great man; wherever he sat, to borrow a useful phrase, was the head of the table; but this greatness of his, not being the full greatness of a complete man, and having neither the support of a keen intellect nor the foundations of a strong moral character, wilted in the atmosphere of politics, and in the end left him with little but the frayed cloak of his former reputation.
There is no doubt that his administration of the War Office was not a success. In all important matters of strategy he shifted his ground from obstinacy to sulkiness, yielding where he should not have yielded at all, and yielding grudgingly where to yield without the whole heart was fatal to success: in the end he was among the drifters, "something between a hindrance and a help," and the efforts to get rid of him were perhaps justified, although Mr. Asquith's policy of curtailing his autocracy on the occasions when he was abroad had the greater wisdom.
I shall not trouble to correct the popular idea of Lord Kitchener's character beyond saying that he was the last man in the world to be called a machine, and that he solemnly distrusted the mechanism of all organizations. He was first and last an out-and-out individualist, a believer in men, a hater of all systems. As Sir Ian Hamilton has said, wherever he saw organization his first instinct was to smash it. I think his autocracy at the War Office might have been of greater service to the country if all the trained thinkers of the Army, that small body of brilliant men, had not been in France. Even in his prime Lord Kitchener was the most helpless of men without lieutenants he could trust to do his bidding or to improve upon it in the doing.
It will better serve the main purpose of this book to suggest in what particulars the real greatness of this once glorious and finally pathetic figure came to suffer shipwreck at the hands of the politicians.
Lord Kitchener's greatness was the indefinable greatness of personality. He was not a clever man. He had no gifts of any kind. In the society of scholars he was mum and among the lovers of the beautiful he cut an awkward figure. At certain moments he had curious flashes of inspiration, but they came at long intervals and were seldom to be had in the day of drudgery, when his mind was not excited. On the whole his intelligence was of a dull order, plodding heavily through experience, mapping the surface of life rather than penetrating any of its mysteries, making slowly quite sure of one or two things rather than grasping the whole problem at a stroke.
But there was one movement in his character which developed greatness and by its power brought him to wonderful success and great honour; this was a deep, an unquestioning, a religious sense of duty.
He started life with a stubborn ambition. As he went along he felt the lightness of duty, and married his ambition to this Spartan virtue. He remained in most respects as selfish a man as ever lived, as selfish as a greedy schoolboy; nevertheless by the power of his single virtue, to which he was faithful up to his last moments on this earth, he was able to sacrifice his absorbing self-interest to the national welfare even in a political atmosphere which sickened him at every turn.
You may see what I mean by considering that while he longed for nothing so much in later life as the possession of Broome Park, and that while his selfishness stopped hardly at anything to enrich that house with pictures, china, and furniture, and that while he would shamelessly hint for things in the houses of the people who were entertaining him, even in the houses of his own subordinates, until the weaker or the more timorous gave him the object of his covetousness, nevertheless for the sake of his country he clung to the uncongenial chair in Whitehall, not merely working like a cart-horse for what he considered to be his nation's good, but suffering without public complaint of any kind, and scarcely a private grumble, all the numerous humiliations that came his way either from his own colleagues in the Cabinet or from a powerful section of the newspapers outside.
I remember hearing from the late Mr. John Bonner, a most admirable artist in many fields, an amusing account of an interview with Lord Kitchener which illustrates the Field-Marshal's passion for his Kentish home, and also sheds a telling light on the æsthetic side of his character.
Mr. Bonner had been recommended to Lord Kitchener, who wanted amorini scattered about the leafy gardens at Broome. Drawings were made and approved: a few months afterwards the amorini were set up in the gardens.
Soon came a summons to the presence of the great man. Mr. Bonner found him a terrible object in a terrible rage. In his late years, be it remembered, Lord Kitchener was not good to look upon. He appeared a coarse, a top-heavy person; and in anger, his cross-eyes could be painfully disconcerting.
Lord Kitchener forgot that Mr. Bonner was not only an artist of a singularly beautiful spirit, but a gentleman. He blazed at him. What did he mean by sticking up those ridiculous little figures in Broome?—what did he mean by it?—with an unpleasant reference to the account.
The poor artist, terribly affrighted, said that he thought Lord Kitchener had seen his drawings and approved of them. "Yes, the drawings!—but you can't see the figures when they're up! What's the good of something you can't see?"
The great man, it appeared at last, wanted amorini the size of giants; a rather Rosherville taste.
"He had knowledge," said Lady Sackville, from whose beautiful house he borrowed many ideas for Broome, and would have liked to have carried off many of its possessions, particularly a William the Fourth drum which he found in his bedroom as a waste-paper receptacle; "he had knowledge but no taste."
Her daughter said to me on one occasion, "Every chair he sits in becomes a throne," referring to the atmosphere of power and dignity which surrounded him.
It is instructive, I think, to remark how a single virtue passionately held—held, I mean, with a religious sense of its seriousness—can carry even a second-class mind to genuine greatness, a greatness that can be felt if not defined. In every sense of the word greatness, as we apply it to a saint, a poet, or a statesman, Lord Kitchener was a second-class and even a third-class person; but so driving was his sense of duty that it carried him to the very forefront of national life, and but for the political atmosphere in which he had to work for the last few years of his distinguished service to the State he might have easily become one of the great and shining heroes of British history. He had no taste; but the impression he made on those who had was the impression of a great character.
How was it that his greatness, that is to say his greatness of personality, made so pitiable an end? What was lacking that this indubitable greatness should have been so easily brayed in the mortar of politics?
The answer I think is this: a single virtue can bestow greatness, and the greatness may never fail when it has time and space in which to express itself; but many virtues of intellect and character are necessary when time is of the essence of the contract, and more especially in a situation of shared responsibility.
Lord Kitchener knew many of his own failings. He was by no means a vain man. Indeed he suffered considerable pain from the knowledge that he was not the tremendous person of the popular imagination. This knowledge robbed him of self-assurance. He tried to live up to the legendary Kitchener, and so long as he could find men as brave as himself, but of swifter and more adaptable intelligence, to do his bidding, he succeeded: many of the public, indeed, believed in the legendary Kitchener up to the day of his tragic death—death, that unmistakable reality, meeting him on a journey, the object of which was to impress Russia with the legendary Kitchener. But more and more, particularly in consultation with the quick wits of politicians, he found it impossible to impersonate his reputation.
I have been told by more than one Cabinet Minister that it was impressive to see how the lightning intellects of Mr. Lloyd George and Mr. Winston Churchill again and again reduced the gigantic soldier to a stupefied and sulking silence.
A proposal would be made by a minister, and Mr. Asquith would turn to Lord Kitchener for his opinion. Lord Kitchener would say, "It's impossible," and close his lips firmly. At this Mr. Lloyd George would attack him, pointing out the reasonableness of this proposal in swift and persuasive phrases. Lord Kitchener, shifting on his chair, would repeat, "It's impossible." Then in question after question Mr. Churchill would ask why it was impossible. "It's impossible," Lord Kitchener would mumble at the end of these questions. Finally, when nearly everybody had attempted to extract from him the reason for his refusal to countenance this proposal, he would make an impatient side movement of his head, unfold his arms, bend over the papers on the table before him, and grunt out, sometimes with a boyish smile of relief, "Oh, all right, have it your own way."
He lacked almost every grace of the spirit. There was nothing amiable in his character. Very few men liked him a great deal, and none I should say loved him. I do not think he was brutal by nature, although his nature was not refined; but he cultivated a brutal manner. He had the happiness of three or four friendships with cultivated and good women, but the beautiful creature whom he loved hungrily and doggedly, and to whom he proposed several times, could never bring herself to marry him. I think there was no holy of holies in his character, no sanctuaries for the finer intimacies of human life. As Sainte-Beuve said of Rousseau, "he has at times a little goître in his voice." One sees the fulness of his limitations by comparing him with such great figures of Indian history as the Lawrences and Nicholson: in that comparison he shrinks at once to the dimensions of a colour-sergeant.
But in attempting to study a man of this nature, for our own learning, we should rather observe how notable a victory he achieved in making so much of so little than vociferate that he was not this thing or that.
He began life with no gifts from the gods; it was not in his horoscope to be either a saint or a hero; no one was less likely to create enthusiasm or to become a legend; and yet by resolutely following the road of duty, by earnestly and stubbornly striving to serve his country's interests, and by never for one moment considering in that service the safety of his own life or the making of his own fortune, this rough and ordinary man bred in himself a greatness which, magnified by the legend itself created, helped his country in one of the darkest hours, perhaps the very darkest, of its long history.
One could wish that behind this formidable greatness of personality there had been greatness of mind, greatness of character, greatness of heart, so that he might have been capable of directing the whole war and holding the politicians in leash to the conclusion of a righteous peace. But these things he lacked, and the end was what it was.
"Character," says Epicharmus, "is destiny to man." Lord Kitchener, let us assert, was faithful to his destiny. And he was something more than faithful, for he sanctified this loyalty to his own character by a devotion to his country which was pure and incorruptible. Certainly he can never be styled "the son of Cronos and Double-dealing."
Born, 1864. Educ.: at Eton and Oxford. Private Secretary to his father, the late Marquis of Salisbury, 1886-88; called to the Bar, 1887; M.P. for East Marylebone, 1906-10; for Hitchin Division of Herts, 1912; Under Secretary for Foreign Affairs, 1915-16; Assistant Secretary for Foreign Affairs, 1918; Manager of Blockade, 1916-18. Author of Principles of Commercial Law and Our National Church.
"Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm."—EMERSON.
If a novelist take for his hero an educated gentleman who expresses contempt for the licence and indecencies of modern life, it is ten to one that the critics, who confess themselves on other occasions as sick of prurient tales, will pronounce this hero to be a prig. In like manner, let a politician evince concern for the moral character of the nation and it is ten to one his colleagues in the House of Commons and his critics in the Press, and everywhere the very men most in despair of politics, will declare him to be a fanatic.
This has been the unfortunate fate of Lord Robert Cecil. He is regarded by his countrymen as unpractical. Men speak well of him, and confess willingly that he is vastly superior in character and intellect to the ruck of politicians, but nevertheless wind up their panegyrics with the regretful judgment that, alas, he is a fanatic.
It is a thousand pities, I think, that he is not a fanatic. It is for the very reason he is not fanatical that his progress in politics has been in the suburbs of the second rank. He has every quality for the first rank, and for the foremost place in that rank, save the one urging passion of enthusiasm. It is a sense of humour, an engaging sense of diffidence, a continual deviation towards a mild and gentle cynicism, it is this spirit—the very antithesis of a fanatical temper—which keeps him from leadership.
The nation has reason on its side for suspecting Lord Robert Cecil. In the mind of the British people nothing is more settled than the conviction that the conquering qualities of a great captain are courage and confidence. He has given no sign of these qualities. Nature, it would seem, has fashioned him neither pachydermatous nor pugilistic. He appears upon the platform as a gentleman makes his entrance into a drawing-room, not as a toreador leaps into the bull ring. He expresses his opinions as a gentleman expresses his views at a dinner-table, not as an ale-house politician airs his dogmatisms in the tap-room. The very qualities which give such a grace and power to his personality, being spiritual qualities, prevent him from capturing the loud and grateful loyalty of a political party.
Now, while a man like Mr. Lloyd George can only affirm his own essence by the exercise of what we may call brute force, and by making use of vulgar methods from which a person of Lord Robert Cecil's quality would naturally shrink, it is nevertheless not at all necessary for a man of noble character and greater power to employ the same means in order to earn the confidence of his countrymen.
What is necessary in this case is not brute force but fanaticism, and by fanaticism I mean that spirit which in Cromwell induced Hume to call him "this fanatical hypocrite," and which Burke adequately defined in saying that when men are fanatically fond of an object they will prefer it to their own peace.
Lord Robert Cecil need not adopt the tricks of a mountebank to achieve leadership of the British nation, but he must contract so entire a faith in the sacred character of his mission that all the inhibiting diffidencies of his modest nature will henceforth seem to him like the whisperings of temptation. He must cease to watch the shifts of public opinion. He must cease merely to recommend the probable advantage of rather more idealism in the politics of Europe. He must act. He must learn to know that a man cannot give a great idea to the world without giving himself along with it. The cause must consume the person. Individual peace must be sacrificed for world's peace.
From the very beginning of the War Lord Robert Cecil perceived that the need of the nation was not for a great political leader, but for a great moral leader. He told me so with an unforgettable emphasis, well aware that under the public show of our national life the heart of the British people was famishing for such guidance. He numbered himself among those anxiously scanning the horizon for such a leader. He should have been instead answering the inarticulate cry of the people for that leader.
No good man of my acquaintance is more powerfully convinced of the goodness of British nature. He watches the British people with an abiding affection. He believes that they possess, even those of them who appear most degraded and sordid, the foundational virtues of Christian character—a love of justice, an instinct for kindness, and faith in truth. He knows that they are more capable than any other people in Europe of generous self-sacrifice, and that any absence of grace in their manner which must distress the superficial observer comes rather of a passion for honesty than a lack of beauty. And this knowledge of his goes with the conviction that no man will ever appeal to the British nation in vain who bases his appeal on justice, fair play, and charity. What a nation to lead! What an inspiration for a true leader!
He is convinced that no moral appeal has ever been made to the British people in vain. And yet he has never made that appeal. With grief and sorrow he watches the stampeding of the nation he so deeply admires into murderous and indiscriminate hatred of our enemies in the late war. He saw the majority of the British people's war-like mood degraded and vulgarized by the propaganda of hate. But he made no move to save the national honour. The better part, and as I firmly believe the greater part, of the nation was waiting for moral leadership: particularly were the young men of the nation who marched to death with the purest flame of patriotism in their hearts hungering for such leadership; but Lord Robert Cecil, the one man in Parliament who might have sounded that note, was silent. The voice that should have made Britain's glory articulate, the voice that might have brought America into the War in 1914 and rendered Germany from the outset a house divided against itself, was never heard. Lord Robert Cecil looked on, and Mr. Lloyd George sprang into the prize-ring with his battle-cry of the knock-out blow.
I wonder if even the sublimest humility can excuse so fatal a silence. Great powers have surely great responsibilities.
I remember speaking to Lord Robert on one occasion of the shooting of Miss Cavell—a brutal act which distressed him very deeply. I said I thought we weakened our case against Germany by speaking of that atrocious act as a "murder," since by the rules of war, as she herself confessed, Miss Cavell incurred the penalty of death. He replied: "What strikes me as most serious in that act is not so much that the Germans should think it no crime to shoot a woman, but that they should be wholly incapable of realizing how such an atrocious deed would shock the conscience of the world. They were surprised—think of it!—by the world's indignation!"
In this remark you may see how far deeper his reflections take him than what passes for reflection among the propagandists of hate. Abuse of Germany never occupied his mind, which was sorrowfully engaged in striving to comprehend the spiritual conditions of the German people: he realized, that is to say, that we were not fighting an enemy who could be shouted down or made ashamed by abusive epithets, but that we were opposing a spirit whose anger and temper were entirely different from our own, and therefore a spirit which must be understood if we were to conquer it. It was not merely the armies of Germany which must be defeated, it was the soul of Germany which had to be converted. He saw this clearly: he never ceased to work to that end; but he failed to take the nation into his confidence and the public never understood what he was after. A fanatic would have left the nation in no doubt of his purpose.
Every now and then he has half let the nation see what was in his mind. For example, he has taken those illuminating, those surely inspired, words of Edith Cavell as the text for more than one address—Patriotism is not enough. But beautiful and convincing as these addresses have been, their spirit has always had the wistful and piano tones of philosophy, never the consuming fervour of fanaticism. He knows, as few other men know, that without a League of Nations the future of civilization is in peril, even the future of the white races; but he has never made the world feel genuine alarm for this danger or genuine enthusiasm for the sole means that can avert it. He has not preached the League of Nations as a way of salvation; he has only recommended it as a legal tribunal.
It is apparently difficult for a politician, however statesmanlike his qualities, to realize that politics cannot be even divorced from morality, much less to comprehend that morality is the very sinew of politics, being in truth nothing more than the conscience of a nation striving to express itself in State action. Because of this politics become degraded and sink to the lowest levels of a mere factional manoeuvring for place. They engage the attention of the attorney, and earn nothing but the contempt of the wise. They become like the perversions of art in the hands of those who assert that art has nothing to do with morals; they interest only a handful of experts.
But a man like Lord Robert Cecil does surely apprehend that the essence of politics is morality and, therefore, his unwillingness to use moral weapons in the political arena is hard to understand. He debates where he should appeal; he criticizes where he should denounce; and he accepts a compromise where he should lead a revolt. He is also altogether too civil for the rogues with whom he has to do.
I remember being in the House of Commons on an afternoon when Mr. Lloyd George was expected to make an important speech. Lord Robert Cecil sat in a corner seat on the back benches; his brother, Lord Hugh, occupied the corner seat on the front bench below the gangway. During the Prime Minister's speech, which was a succession of small scoring points against the Labour Party delivered with that spirit of cocksureness which has grown with him in the last few years, I noticed Lord Robert make a pencilled note on a slip of paper and pass it across the gangway with a nod of his head toward Lord Hugh. I watched the journey of this little paper and watched to see its effect. Lord Hugh unfolded the slip of paper, read it, smiled very boyishly all over his face, and, folding it up again, slowly turned his head and looked back towards his brother. The smile they exchanged was a Cecilian biography. One saw in the light of that instant and whole-hearted smile the danger of a keen sense of ironical humour. Both these men have the making of creative fanatics; in both of them there is an intense moral earnestness and in both great intellectual power; but nature has mixed up with these gifts, which were intended for mankind, a drollery of spirit, only amusing in the confidence of private life which they have allowed to weaken their sincerities. Humanity may be thankful that St. Paul was without a sense of humour.
During the war, as Minister of Blockade, Lord Robert Cecil rendered services of the greatest magnitude to his countrymen: he kept Sweden out of the war when the Russian Foreign Office could hardly breathe for anxiety on this point, and at a time when many British newspapers were doing their best to facilitate the great desire of Germany to march an army through Sweden and Finland to the thus easily reached Russian capital. His work, too, at the Peace Conference in Paris entitles him to the gratitude of the nation: he kept the idea of the League of Nations alive in an atmosphere that was charged with war. He prevented these conferences from making "a Peace to end Peace." But on the whole I feel that he is rather the shadow of great statesmanship leaning diffidently over the shoulder of political brute force than the living spirit of great statesmanship leading the moral conscience of the world away from barbarism towards nobler reason and less partial truth.
The Rt. Hon. Winston Churchill (Leonard Spencer) son of Lord Randolph Churchill. Born, 1874. Educ: Harrow and Sandhurst. Entered army in 1895; served with Spanish Forces in Cuba, 1895; in operations in India, 1897-98; on the Nile and at the Battle of Khartoum, 1899; was given the Khartoum Medal in that year; Correspondent of the Morning Post in South Africa, 1899-1900; taken prisoner and escaped, 1900; in long series of actions including Spion Kop, Pieters, and capture of Pretoria; M.P. Oldham, 1900-06; M.P. for Manchester, 1906-08; commissioned Colonel, 1916; retired, 1916; Under Colonial Secretary, 1906-08; President Board of Trade, 1908-10; Home Secretary, 1910-11; First Lord of the Admiralty, 1911-15; Minister of Munitions, 1917; Rector of Aberdeen Univ., 1914; Chairman of the Duchy of Lancaster, 1915; Author of a series of books (campaign records), and also of the Life of Lord Randolph Churchill.
"He was not free from that careless life-contemning desperation, which sometimes belongs to forcible natures.... He was too heedless of his good name and too blind to the truth that though right and wrong may be near neighbours, yet the line that separates them is of an awful sacredness."—JOHN MORLEY (of Danton).
Mr. Winston Churchill was one of its most interesting figures in the Parliament which included Joseph Chamberlain, Charles Dilke, and George Wyndham. With the fading exception of Mr. Lloyd George, he is easily the most interesting figure in the present House of Commons.
There still clings to his career that element of great promise and unlimited uncertainty which from his first entrance into politics has interested both the public and the House of Commons. He has disappointed his admirers on several occasions, but not yet has he exhausted their patience or destroyed their hopes.
His intellectual gifts are considerable, his personal courage is of a quality that makes itself felt even in the bosom of hate, and he possesses in a unique degree the fighting qualities of the born politician. No man is more difficult to shout down, and no man responds more gratefully to opposition of the fiercer kind. If on several occasions he has disappointed his friends, also on several occasions he has confounded his enemies.
From his youth up Mr. Churchill has loved with all his heart, with all his mind, with all his soul, and with all his strength, three things—war, politics, and himself. He loved war for its dangers, he loves politics for the same reason, and himself he has always loved for the knowledge that his mind is dangerous—dangerous to his enemies, dangerous to his friends, dangerous to himself. I can think of no man I have ever met who would so quickly and so bitterly eat his heart out in Paradise.
He was once asked if politics were more to him than any other pursuit of mankind.
"Politics," he replied, "are almost as exciting as war, and quite as dangerous."
"Even with the new rifle?"
"Well, in war," he answered, "you can only be killed once, but in politics many times."
Unhappily for himself, and perhaps for the nation, since he has many of the qualities of real greatness, Mr. Churchill lacks the unifying spirit of character which alone can master the discrepant or even antagonistic elements in a single mind, giving them not merely force, which is something, but direction, which is much more. He is a man of truly brilliant gifts, but you cannot depend upon him. His love for danger runs away with his discretion; his passion for adventure makes him forget the importance of the goal. Politics may be as exciting and as dangerous as war, but in politics there is no V.C.
I am not enamoured of the logic of consistency. It seems a rather ludicrous proceeding for an impecunious young man to join a very strictly political club with the idea in his mind that he will always be in favour of that particular party's programmes. Most of us, I think, will agree that a man who never changes his opinion is a stupid person, and that one who boasts in grave and hoary age of his lifelong political consistency is merely confessing that he has learnt nothing in the school of experience. One sees the danger of this state of mind when he thinks of the theologians who burned men of science at the stake rather than be false to their Christian dogmas.
Nevertheless, illogical and ridiculous as consistency may appear, amounting in truth to nothing more than either inability to see the other side of an argument or a deliberate refusal to acknowledge an intellectual mistake, who can doubt that this quality of the mind creates confidence? On the other hand, who can doubt that one who appears at this moment fighting on the left hand, and at the next moment fighting just as convincingly on the right, creates distrust in both armies?
A newspaper which says at one time, "France must be rolled in mud and blood, her colonies must be taken from her and given to Germany, she has no sense of honour"; and at another time describes every German as a Hun and hails France as the glory of civilization, does not encourage the judicious reader to look for guidance in its editorial pronouncements. But the newspaper which felt itself obliged to offer France a respectful admonition on one occasion and even to oppose French policy with firmness and to express sympathy with the Germans might afterwards acclaim the great virtues of France and oppose itself to the German nation without any loss of our respect. In the one case the inconsistency arises from hysterical and immoral passion, in the other from a moral principle.
There is only one region in which consistency has the great sanction of an indubitable virtue: it is the region of moral character. A good man, a man who makes us feel that righteousness is the breath of his nostrils, may change his intellectual opinions many times without losing our confidence, deeply as we may deplore his change. Goodness has an effect on men's minds which can hardly be exaggerated. Conduct is the one sphere in which consistency has an absolute merit. A man whose whole life is governed by moral principle has a constituency in the judgment of all honest people and may be said to represent mankind rather than a party. Even a cynical opportunist like Lord Beaconsfield had to confess, "So much more than the world imagines is done by personal influence."
Mr. Churchill has not convinced the world of this possession. He carries great guns, but his navigation is uncertain, and the flag he flies is not a symbol which stirs the blood. His effect on men is one of interest and curiosity, not of admiration and loyalty. His power is the power of gifts, not character. Men watch him, but do not follow him. He beguiles the reason, but never warms the emotions. You may see in him the wonderful and lightning movements of the brain, but never the beating of a steadfast heart. He has almost every gift of statesmanship, and yet, lacking the central force of the mind which gives strength and power to character, these gifts are for ever at the sport of circumstance. His inconsistencies assume the appearance of shifts and dodges.
There is one particular way in which I think his inconsistencies have been dangerous to his career. They have brought him too often into inferior company.
Lord Northcliffe, with all his faults, is a man to whom statesmen may speak their minds without loss of influence, but there are other newspaper proprietors, financiers of commercialized journalism, with whom a man of Mr. Churchill's power and position should hold no personal relations. His is a mind which stands in need of constant communion with men of culture and refinement. He knows the world by this time well enough, what he does not know are the heights. His character suffers, I think, from association with second-rate people. He is too heedless of his good name.
Is it too late for him to acquire strength of character? His faults are chiefly the effects of a forcible and impetuous temperament: they may be expected to diminish as age increases and experience moulds. But character does not emerge out of the ashes of temperament. It is not to be thought that Mr. Churchill is growing a character which will presently emerge and create devotion in his countrymen. Character for him must lie in those very qualities which are now chiefly responsible for his defects—his ardour, his affectibility, his vehemence, his impetuous rashness, his unquestioned courage. One thing only can convert those qualities into terms of character, it is a new direction.
There is perhaps only one other man in the present House of Commons who could do more than Mr. Churchill for his country and the world. All Mr. Churchill needs is the direction in his life of a great idea. He is a Saul on the way to Damascus. Let him swing clean away from that road of destruction and he might well become Paul on his way to immortality. This is to say, that to be saved from himself Mr. Churchill must be carried away by enthusiasm for some great ideal, an ideal so much greater than his own place in politics that he is willing to face death for its triumph, even the many deaths of political life.