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.
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.”
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.