ARTHUR BALFOUR.
This interest in Parliament and whatever appertained to it was no doubt a great part of the secret of Mr. Chamberlain’s power over that assembly. We often forget how large a share mere appetite has in the realisation of political ambitions, how far the simple capacity of being and remaining interested will take a man even of moderate capacity. But another important factor in Mr. Chamberlain’s supremacy as a debater was the real, if sometimes limited, knowledge he brought to the discussion of any subject in which he happened to be interested—and he happened to be interested in most. Deep knowledge, living at the rate he did, he could hardly hope to attain; at any rate, he seldom attained it. But he had an almost journalistic faculty of using reference books—reference books, Dickens, and French novels were almost all his reading. Mr. Balfour always hated to “prepare.” Mr. Chamberlain would take any degree of trouble to prime himself with the facts necessary for his purpose; all other facts, of course, he disregarded. Thus he was always a formidable man to attack, and as an assailant he was deadly. His sure instinct for the weak side of an opponent’s case, his command of invective and destructive analysis, above all, his capacity of fervently and sincerely hating whatever he temporarily disapproved (even if it had been his own opinion the day before) gave him a power of which he was himself probably not fully aware; otherwise, kindly as he was at bottom, he would scarcely have treated, as he sometimes did, quite petty antagonists with a severity verging on the inhuman.
It may be doubted, however, whether his qualities of speech, and even his powers as an administrator, would have sufficed to give Mr. Chamberlain his immense influence if they had not been supplemented by his knack of enchaining the personal affections of many kinds of men. There was a charm about him which is only felt in its highest expression in relation to a very strong character, but which is apt to be absent in characters of unusual strength. It was this charm which made the loss of his intimate friendship the most serious sacrifice John Morley offered on the altar of political consistency in 1886. It was a charm felt by all kinds of men who disliked his opinions and distrusted his judgment. Under its sway came many cool Colonials and still cooler Americans. It sufficed to keep Mr. Balfour his friend even when he was straining every faculty of his subtle nature to defeat Mr. Chamberlain’s most cherished ambitions. Of those associated with Mr. Chamberlain at various times, only three considerable men—Mr. Gladstone, Lord Hartington, and Lord Salisbury—seem to have been able to view him with consistent objectivity. On those who yielded to him their full allegiance his influence was quite extraordinary. No statesman ever enjoyed such absolutely unquestioning devotion as that which was yielded to Mr. Chamberlain by Mr. Jesse Collings and the other members of his personal retinue. On the other hand, there never was so splendidly steadfast a lord and protector. The Birmingham communion was as jealous and as generous as that of Rome. None could be admitted without giving up the last shred of pretension to independent thought. But once the sacrifice was made there was peace and security for the true believer. A powerful hand protected, a lavish hand provided, a paternal hand petted and patted. Mr. Chamberlain was the safer in making enemies for the solid certainty with which he built up his friendships, however humble. A tower of strength during his life, they have ensured his repute since his death.
Before 1895 that repute rested mainly on negatives. There had been, indeed, an early extra-Parliamentary period of great local achievement; it was his municipal work which gave Mr. Chamberlain for the rest of his life the kingship of Birmingham and its hinterland. There had been some small official work and the much larger prestige (now, however, largely forgotten on one side and forgiven on the other) of the “ransom” speeches. But for nearly ten years Mr. Chamberlain had been chiefly engaged in destructive energies; the duel with Gladstone employed him to the exclusion of most other things while the great veteran remained on the ground. It was as late as 1893 that he delivered that taunt—“It is the voice of a god and not of a man; never since the time of Herod has there been such slavish adulation”—which caused the famous free fight in the House of Commons. But by the middle of the decade the Home Rule fight, for the time, had been fought out. The electors had approved the slaughter of the Second Home Rule Bill; Mr. Gladstone had disappeared; Lord Rosebery and Sir William Harcourt were fighting like lion and unicorn for the shadow of a crown; the task of opposition in a House overwhelmingly Unionist had been contemptuously left to “C.-B.” The world was Mr. Chamberlain’s where to choose. He chose the Colonies, and the portals of the dullest of routine departments at once had to be watched as if they were those of the ancient temple of Janus. Within a few months came the Jameson raid; then the whole world held its breath while an English general and a French major exchanged ironic civilities at Fashoda; then succeeded the short game of bluff which ended in the long and bloody game of war with the South African Republics.
We are still too near that event for a judicial finding, and any man’s view is only a view. The finding, when it comes, is as little likely to make Paul Kruger the hero as it is to make Joseph Chamberlain the villain; the affair was no doubt, like most such things, a very mixed matter. Mr. Chamberlain would probably have taken more pains to avoid war had the Boer Republics possessed the power of the late German Empire; his critics would probably have been less numerous and bitter if the affair had cost ten millions and been over in three weeks. Stones were cast at him in great quantity, and no doubt some came from hands that had a right to throw; but some of the largest were certainly hurled by those who have since laid themselves open to equally serious charges of preferring the way of war to the way of peace. But, whatever the degree of his responsibility—and he always manfully accepted full responsibility—we can with safety acquit Mr. Chamberlain of those motives with which the ungenerous were eager to credit him. It was assuredly no mere hunger for applause that hurried him into a war which he imagined would be short, cheap, and (by all analogy then recent) comparatively bloodless. There was, indeed, a small, politician-like, electioneering, popularity-loving side to Joseph Chamberlain, and it is useless (and somewhat ignoble) on the part of his admirers to ignore it. He was himself far too big to pretend that it did not exist. He never assumed the virtues he knew himself not to possess; he went to the opposite, but more manful extreme, of scorning them. Thus he cared nothing at all about charges of inconsistency. “What I have said I have said. Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself. I am not a slave to other men’s theories or to my own past.” Again: “The man who thinks of the future is a visionary; the man who thinks of the past is a fool; I think only of the present twenty-four hours.” But if there was in him much of the empiric, and something of the mere political cheap-jack, there was also something far larger and finer. He was above all a patriot, and he was capable, as he showed in his resignation in 1903, of making the heaviest sacrifices in what he imagined to be the cause of his country.
I have never been able to share or sympathise with Mr. Chamberlain’s vision of the British Empire; the very thought of it has always filled me, in fact, with severe depression. It was a sort of Prussian pie without the crust—and half-baked at that: there was to be restriction, canalisation, and stereotyping by diplomacy and consent instead of by militarism and force. England was to be the workshop of the Empire, with some pleasant rooms over it; the Dominions were to be granaries, lumber-warehouses, bacon-factories, mines, vineyards, and wool-farms; the Crown Colonies were to supply sugar and spice and all things nice. It was a thoroughly Prussian conception, not because it involved cruelty—which, after all, was only incidental to Prussianism—but because it was at war with the idea of the natural growth of an immature community towards full nationhood, with distinctive arts, tastes, and schemes of life generally. In all his visionary materialism I think Mr. Chamberlain was most disastrously wrong; it was his whole notion of Imperial relations, and not his incidental disrespect for the principles of Free Trade, that seemed to me most inconsistent with his original Liberalism. But it is questionable whether he was ever a true Liberal; certainly, he was never a lover of freedom. His Birmingham mayoralty, excellent in its results, was more or less an amiable dictatorship; and Mr. Russell, in his Portraits of the Seventies, has told us that Gladstone once likened him to Gambetta, as un homme autoritaire. His likeness to Mr. Lloyd George has often been remarked; in nothing is it more apparent than in this, that both have such small respect for individual liberty, and both would much rather reform the people than let the people do their own reforming. But a democrat Mr. Chamberlain always remained, even when he was in closest co-operation with the Tory leaders. He never lost his first interest in the betterment of the working classes; the sight of preventible misery he hated; and the whole bent of his mind was humanitarian. But, just as a Liberal is not always a democrat, so a democrat is by no means always a Liberal. The idea of Liberalism is giving men freedom to work out their own salvation, with the minimum of State interference with individual liberty; and in certain cases this may imply extreme callousness to private misfortune, as well as considerable favouritism to the top dog. The democratic idea is only concerned with freedom so long as it is likely to operate for equality; of the three items in the Republican motto it lays least stress on liberty, and most on equality and fraternity. Mr. Chamberlain was more inclined to underline fraternity than the other two. He wanted all Englishmen to be brothers, but most of them were to be very little brothers.
To such a man, bringing his own atmosphere to the Colonial Office, and attacking the problems there in his own hastily decisive way, the case of the Boer Republics must have seemed very feeble. Here they were, straddling in a spirit of sluttish obstructiveness across the path of orderly British development; and so long as they remained all our plans for the good of a whole continent were liable to unsettlement. All such cases are arguable to some degree. If Ahab had had the good luck of David we might have heard less about his wickedness and more about his broad and enlightened statesmanship, as well as about the sheer unprogressiveness of Naboth. Let us remember how the world rang with praises of Ahab after his good luck in 1870, before we insist too strongly on the sacredness of every petty freehold. Mr. Chamberlain, at any rate, had no difficulty in making up his mind, and when he made up his mind he was quite sure (for the time being, at any rate) that he had made it up aright. “Consistency is not so important,” he once said; “the main point is that we should be always right.” He persuaded himself that he was always right by resolutely excluding every other possibility. Except for purposes of invective or banter, he refused to see any other side of a question than that which he had chosen. He thought in reason-tight compartments, approaching every matter in turn as if it were an isolated thing. By so doing he economised energy, and was able to communicate his own vigour, without appreciable loss, to his subordinates and instruments. But this driving force was achieved at the cost of much; he was the first great exemplar of the modern notion that decision and dexterity in separate matters compensate for the lack of an inspiring philosophy. Where you want to go is a secondary matter; the main things are a very fast car and an ability to turn very sharply round corners, so that if there happens to be a block in front you can dodge up a scarcely noticed alley on the left.
It was, indeed, the true tragedy of Mr. Chamberlain’s career that, while he had the fastest of cars, he did not possess a reliable route-map, and his road in political life was always chosen by instinct, hearsay, and the like. He turned up any likely-looking road, and then went full speed ahead until brought to a stop. Now, Mr. Gladstone had a map, and so had Mr. Balfour. But Mr. Gladstone’s was rejected because it was too old-fashioned, and gave no account of the more modern routes and places, and Mr. Balfour’s had the disadvantage that every road led back to the starting-place. To drop parable, the whole story of the last twenty years of the nineteenth century might have been different if Mr. Chamberlain could have co-operated with Mr. Gladstone; that he could not was as much Mr. Gladstone’s defect as his own. The whole story of the first twenty years of the twentieth century might have been different if he could have found in Mr. Balfour’s qualities the full complement of his own; that also was Mr. Chamberlain’s misfortune rather than his fault. There was a temperamental bar in the first case, and an intellectual bar in the second. Mr. Gladstone did not want to move in Mr. Chamberlain’s way and at Mr. Chamberlain’s pace. Mr. Balfour was firmly convinced of the foolishness of moving at all, except in the manner known as marking time. Thus the splendid energy and courage of Mr. Chamberlain, which might have been extraordinarily fruitful if allied with a more steadfast hold of political principle, were largely spent in comparative futility. The greatness that he achieved—and he was, after all, a very great man—was due rather to the soundness of his instincts and sympathies than to the sureness of his intellectual processes; if he thought wrong, he had often a way of guessing right. Some men are too much of the doctrinaire, and some too little. Joseph Chamberlain was too little.
One evening in the early summer of 1895 the newsboys were shouting “All the winners.” Yet one line on their placards gave the lie to that eternal cry which mocks the death of great men and the fall of great empires. It referred to the sentence which, in due time, was to give birth to the one indisputably genuine and serious thing Oscar Wilde wrote, the Ballad of Reading Gaol.
OSCAR WILDE.
Oscar Wilde was one of the losers; in the long list of men of genius who have paid just forfeit it is not easy to think of a more tragic figure. Others had fallen from greater heights; none had gone more friendlessly to a lower perdition. For it was the very element of his tragedy that it could not be shared or alleviated; on the path he had henceforth to tread there could be no comrade; his offence was one at which charity itself stood embarrassed, and compassion felt the fear of compromise. On this very evening theatres were full of people chuckling over jests of almost wicked brilliance which he had turned and re-turned, polished and sharpened, with the laborious care of a lapidary, for he worked at trifles with tremendous earnestness, and the ease of the style was the reward of immense pains on the part of the writer. One of his comedies was being actually played in London while the drama of his trial was proceeding on another stage. Business is business, and managers with money at stake did not care to withdraw immediately good money-drawing pieces. But they made a due amende to outraged decency. They played Wilde’s play, but they struck his name out of the bill. The action might be mean. But it was understandable. There was no harm in the play, but the name could then hardly be pronounced without offence.
Even at this distance, when there can be pity without suspicion of condonation, it is not easy to discuss Wilde as we should any other author whose influence was considerable in his day and generation. Yet those who would pass by this ill-starred man of genius because of the event which interrupted his career as a writer would be acting almost as foolishly as the absurd people (mostly Germans) who on the same account yield him a perverse and irrational homage. Wilde was not only important in himself; he was still more important as the representative of a mood yet to some extent with us, but extraordinarily prevalent in the latter years of the nineteenth century. Of this mood he was in letters the only able English representative. There were many men who thought his thoughts, and even attempted to write his style. But they are now forgotten except by the curious; Wilde alone survives. This mood was in certain aspects one of honesty, in others one of cowardice; it was never a mood of health. The honesty was negative; it took the form of protest against certain easy and conventional shams. The cowardice was positive; it took the form of fearing to stand in competition with great realities. People like Wilde had sense to detect, and virility to denounce, certain poor players of old tricks; they had not the courage to be themselves quite genuine people; they contented themselves on the whole with doing newer tricks. There was no harm in this in itself. But they had also much conceit, and so, to impress the public with a due sense of their importance, they insisted that the tricks of which they were easily capable were really the only tricks worth doing. Their art was Art itself, and the only Art.
Now it takes all sorts to make any kind of world, and there is no sense in expecting an artist whose gift is miniature painting to follow Paul Veronese. By all means let him sneer at any dull fool who does follow Paul Veronese. But we shall do well to take very little notice of him when he says that no picture should be painted on anything larger than six square inches of ivory. A Japanese netsuke is a pleasing object; so is Ely Cathedral. Let the netsuke carver have his due credit. But if he began to talk as if Ely Cathedral were a pretentious vulgarity, which he himself could easily have built if (in Johnson’s phrase) he had “abandoned his mind to it,” we should quickly tell him to mind his own business. But this was very much the pose of Wilde and his school. They were right in depreciating uninspired imitators of great men. They were wrong in depreciating all greatness which could not be measured by their own small tapes. They were especially wrong in declaring that “popular art is bad art,” and setting up their own literary jade-work, often graceful and pleasant enough in its own way, as the sole standard of taste. “Only the great masters of style,” said Oscar Wilde once, “ever succeeded in being obscure.” If that were literally true he himself, though self-called a “lord of language,” would have to be denied the title of stylist, for though he sometimes showed confusion of thought, and very often said things so silly that one sometimes looks a second time to see whether they are really meant, he was on the whole quite extraordinarily lucid. His words, however, though nonsensical in their literal effect, do mean something and reveal something. Every very great writer is obscure in the sense that he does somehow contrive to offer a choice to his reader; thus everybody has his own particular view of Hamlet, and of many individual passages in Hamlet, though the actual obscurities are very few. But Shakespeare never meant Hamlet to be a mystery to anybody; he meant it simply to be a good play, and one understandable to every soul in the theatre. Shakespeare was thinking of his audience as something that was doing him a compliment in coming to hear his play. Wilde thought of his audience as something that was complimented by his condescension in amusing it. Shakespeare, in short, represented popular and obvious art at its highest, and there is no higher art. Wilde, on the other hand, represented art that was above all things undemocratic. Its assumption was that whatever is popular must be vulgar, that whatever is unusual has at least a presumption of being fine. In such an attitude, whether to life or to art, there is an obvious spiritual danger, and it is not without reason that most people look for corruption where there is excessive refinement. After all, all the most important things men do must be either conventional or monstrous, and he who consciously strives to be much above the common herd in things mattering not very much is fatally prone to be dreadfully below it in things that really do matter. The country or age which can show great art with a simple and obvious motive is generally healthy. The country or age which attaches immense importance to the elaboration of trifles for esoteric appreciation is generally unhealthy. In these matters wherever there is mystery there is evil.
“The two great turning-points of my life were when my father sent me to Oxford, and when society sent me to prison.” So says Wilde in De Profundis. His father was an oculist in Dublin, a clever, ill-balanced man of imperious passions and extravagant habits, who firmly believed that alcohol had pulled him through a severe illness, and drank freely on principle. Lady Wilde, poetess and Nationalist pamphleteer, was disappointed with Oscar in much the same way that Betsy Trotwood was disappointed with David Copperfield; she wanted a daughter, and, since Nature had denied her, she sought consolation by dressing, treating, and talking to her boy as if he had been a girl. It was one of the innumerable oddities of this lady to pretend descent from great people—she believed herself to come from a stem of the same tree which yielded Dante the poet—and the boy was named Oscar because his mother imagined herself she had some sort of connection with the Royal Family of Sweden. It was an unwholesome if brilliant atmosphere in which Oscar Wilde grew up, and the boy early contracted those habits of extravagance which led him, when a poor man in London, to spend hundreds a year in the matter of cabs alone. Neither at school nor at Oxford did he take any interest in sport, but he was devoted to his blue and white china, his antiques, and his wallpapers. This æstheticism earned him the resentment of some robust fellow-undergraduates, and he was once tied up in a rope and dragged to the top of a hill; when released he merely flicked the dust off his clothes and remarked, “Yes, the view is really very charming.” Perhaps the most important event of his Oxford life was the winning of the Newdigate prize. His success decided him to take up literature as a profession. And in order to make a short cut into literature he placed himself at the head of the æsthetes, clean-shaven and long-haired, in “a velvet coat, knee-breeches, a loose shirt with a turn-down collar, and a floating tie of some unusual shade fastened in a La Vallière knot,” carrying in his hand “a lily or a sunflower which he used to contemplate with an expression of the greatest admiration.”
The notoriety naturally following on this masquerade had its advantages in the way of dinner invitations, lecture engagements, and, to some extent, the smiles of publishers. But Wilde earned little and had to spend a good deal in maintaining his position; and, despite a lecturing venture in America, it was not until his marriage with Miss Constance Lloyd in 1884 that he settled down to anything like satisfactory employment. For such a man the post of editor of the Woman’s World could hardly be amusing, and Wilde retained the bitterest recollections of his connection with journalism. “In centuries before ours,” he once wrote, “the public nailed the ears of journalists to the pump. That was quite hideous. In this century journalists have nailed their own ears to the key-hole. That is much worse.” It was not, in fact, until the Nineties had well opened that Wilde began to make good and to relieve the strain on his wife’s little fortune which his extravagant habits caused. Dorian Gray, published in 1891, was a doubtful artistic success and a quite undoubtful commercial failure. But at the beginning of the next year Lady Windermere’s Fan at once took the fancy of London. Wilde had made several attempts to conquer the stage, but partly inexperience and partly obstinacy had so far stood in his way. “I hold,” he said, “that the stage is to a play no more than a picture-frame is to a painting.” But a frame can generally be had to accommodate any picture, and no stage could properly accommodate some plays. Wilde once argued for the performance of plays by puppets. “They have many advantages. They never argue. They have no crude views about art. They have no private lives. We are never bored by accounts of their virtues, or bored by recitals of their vices; and when they are out of an engagement they never do good in public or save people from drowning.... They recognise the presiding intellect of the dramatist, and have never been known to ask for their parts to be written up.” A man holding such views—which are really only a mad extension of a sane position—was likely to remain for long unacted. But when he left behind him the intricacies of five-act tragedy, and found his true métier in comedy, his success was instantaneous.
And it was well deserved. The Wilde comedies “date” a good deal. They are rather monotonous in their brilliancy. There is too much of a particular trick; one is always expecting the unexpected. The characters sit round to exchange epigrams rather too much like the Moore and Burgess Minstrels used to sit round to exchange conundrums, with a “Mr. Johnson” at one corner and a Mr. Somebody-else at the other. The epigrams themselves are often forced and sometimes merely foolish. There is little characterisation; all Wilde’s men are wits or the butts of wits, and his women, broadly speaking, are unimportant. But when all deductions are made his comedies are among the best in the language. Lady Windermere’s Fan was followed a year later by A Woman of No Importance, and in 1895 by An Ideal Husband and—the best of the series—The Importance of Being Earnest. From circumstances of considerable embarrassment Wilde suddenly mounted to high prosperity. But the change was all for the worse. With his tendencies to physical self-indulgence, a plentiful supply of ready money tempted him to fatal excess in eating and drinking, and he was a man to whom exercise of any kind was repellent. On his unsound mental constitution the brilliance of his position and prospects had an equally unfortunate effect. He grew fat and bloated in person and absurdly inflated in conceit. His features, once handsome with the comeliness of some image on a classic coin, were now puffed and of impure outline, and the richness of dress which he affected degenerated into a greasy luxuriousness. He had only three years of prosperity, but those were enough to show that he had neither the mind nor the physical constitution to bear success. Even before the tragedy which cut short his working life his friends had begun to fall away, and it was pretty clear that his career as a creative artist was likely to be limited.
Of the last chapters of his unhappy history nothing can usefully be said. The expiation was no less horrible than the sin; his last piteous work may suggest that there was final penitence and rest. But there was so much of the artificial in Wilde that it was never quite safe to infer when he was genuine and when histrionic. Almost his whole life had been spent in posing. Yet his mind was naturally precise and logical; with proper discipline it would have been of quite masculine strength. “There is something tragic,” he once said, “about the enormous number of young men there are in England at the present moment who start life with perfect profiles, and end by adopting some useful profession.” He would have been better with a useful profession. To adapt his own words, there is something tragic about the enormous number of young men there are in England at any given moment who start life with some Greek and Latin, a knack of good form and social dexterity, a more than competent physique, enough money to enable them to spend a few of their best years in rather laborious idleness, and no notion of giving the world a full equivalent of what they propose to take out of it. The number of young women in much the same case is scarcely less disquieting. The real moral of Wilde’s tragedy is not the obvious one. It is rather that even highly gifted people should have some honest trade to begin with, and leave “art” and “literature” (apart from such branches as are really trades and handicrafts) until, mayhap, they find themselves positively impelled thereto. If that were the rule the world would be poorer by some millions of bad pictures and unpleasant novels, but indefinitely richer in human cleanliness and honesty.
Those who seek the legislative monument of Sir William Harcourt must examine the Finance Act of 1894, which put real estate on the same footing as personal in the matter of death duties. A facetious writer once observed that the principle of graduation so beautifully exemplified in this measure must have been suggested to Sir William by a study of his own name, which is an excellent example of ascending values. William and George are but degrees in the ordinary, but with Venables we definitely reach the higher level; Vernon is still better, and Harcourt fitly crowns the whole. The full name, William George Granville Venables Vernon Harcourt, is the perfection of a crescendo; it at once soothes and stirs like the grand vibrations of organ music; it has the majestic swell and rhythm of the peaceful ocean.
It is no discredit to Sir William Harcourt that he failed to live fully up to the more stately standards of this pageant of nomenclature. Sometimes he was little more than William or George; more often he got as far as Granville and Venables; it was only occasionally that he matched the full kingliness of all twelve syllables. His career, like his name, was a mixture of the great, the almost great, and the almost ordinary. But while in the name these elements were perfectly blended, the career somehow lacked balance and unity. Sir William arrived early at eminence; he was during many years a nearly first-class figure in English politics; he had gifts, sedulously cultivated, of a quite splendid type; he was acute, clear-headed, wary, indefatigable; he liked the game of politics and knew every move in it; his judgment of men and things was shrewd; he was witty as a Sheridan comedy; he commanded a capital debating style and a manner of platform speaking which, while not of the highest, was in its way exceedingly effective. Moreover, he had no inconvenient moral impedimenta. Mr. Labouchere described him (approvingly) as a “squeezable Christian,” and therefore fitter for a Party leader than a “conscientious atheist” like Mr. John Morley. So well endowed and so little handicapped, he should have been sure of the best that politics could give. Yet the latter part of his life was embittered by the sense of failure, and failure of a kind which has no compensations. For Sir William Harcourt was not one of those happily constituted people who can enjoy the sunshine as well as another, and yet get a quiet pleasure out of a rainy day. He attached excessive importance to the very things that just eluded him, and was complicatedly cross because they did elude him—cross with circumstances, cross with people who played him false at the critical moment, and cross with himself for not being superior to being cross with them. For though he did not lack magnanimity, and though in the long run he brought himself to act generously towards more than one who had helped to frustrate his natural ambition, he could not avoid being hurt and showing that he was hurt.
“You have a Chancellor in your family, and a Lord Lieutenant of Ireland,” said John Morley to him, in the year 1894, “and you’d like to have a Prime Minister in your family, and no earthly blame to you.” True, it was no great thing to be Liberal Prime Minister just then. The estate was terribly encumbered, and the brokers’ men were already at the door. That Sir William knew as well as any. But still, if one must be a “transient and embarrassed phantom,” it was just a little better to be a phantom in a shooting jacket than a phantom in livery. To don the Primrose livery, especially, was gall to the proud Plantagenet. He was of very ancient English and French family, while Lord Rosebery sprang (many years ago, it is true) from a mere Presbyterian minister; he had been in Liberal politics when Lord Rosebery was in the nursery; he had loyally supported Mr. Gladstone through thick and thin; he had never spared himself in the House of Commons or on the platform; he was conscious of qualifications with which the Scottish nobleman, with all his graces, could not vie; and he had every reason to calculate on the support of the Radical wing of the party, which he had served faithfully, if not always with conviction. Small wonder that Sir William Harcourt was bitter when with one accord the men in the inner councils of Liberalism, the new men as well as the old, the Asquiths and Aclands, as well as the Morleys and Spencers, turned against him, and towards Lord Rosebery.
We know now that the choice, if the best possible, was still unfortunate. But in politics the things which seem most obviously unreasonable are precisely the things which are done for the most serious reasons, and there were grave reasons indeed against a Harcourt Premiership. Sir William was endowed with a temperament which sometimes made it hard for men to work with him, and might well have made it impossible for men to work under him. He was at once too difficult and too easy. He had a fatal knack of rousing antagonism, and lacked the force or inclination to crush antagonism when it arose. He sometimes used language of the kind that stirs up rebellion in men of the most temperate blood, and, while sensitive himself, took little thought of the feeling of others. But, though he thoughtlessly made enemies, he was far too kindly and warmhearted a man to convert them into victims. Thus he had to meet a most perilous combination—strong hostility and no serious fear. It would have been well with him if he could have invoked the argument of terror; it would have been better if he could have led men in silken bonds. But he could not dominate, and he could not manage. The lack of tact and the lack of resolution were both well illustrated over the matter of the Rosebery Premiership. Sir William Harcourt stood out just enough to make the position for Lord Rosebery difficult, and gave way just enough to make his own position impossible. Then he fumed in private over the arrangements in which he had publicly concurred, and, apart from his manful work in his own department, played the part of a sulking Achilles. There were, of course, many excuses. He was getting old. He had no great enthusiasm for Home Rule, or, indeed, for anything. He was, like the rest of the Liberal leaders, bitterly disappointed by the size of the majority of 1892, and incensed by the futility of the task it had in hand; “he missed,” says Lord Morley, “old stable companions, and did not take to all the new”; and altogether he might well be oppressed by a sense of anachronism. For he was a politician of the old school, and the Nineties were perpetually reminding him that the old school was going, and almost gone. More an eighteenth-century man than even a nineteenth, with a taste for elegant scholarship and rotund phrase, he could not feel entirely at home in a House of Commons which included Mr. Keir Hardie, and jibbed at Horace. Indeed, whether quite consciously or not, John Morley had, in the sentence quoted above, put his finger on the trouble. The whole secret of Sir William Harcourt’s political life was that he was a belated Whiggish aristocrat trying to realise himself in unfavourable circumstances. The whole tragedy of Sir William Harcourt’s political death was that the circumstances were too strong for the ambition. A whist-player of the gentlemanly old school, he could have borne with philosophy a rubber lost to a conspicuously better player, or one with a conspicuously better hand. But it was bitterness indeed to have the card-room turned into a Bedlam at the exact moment when the last trick looked like being his.
It is no longer easy to understand the kind of man Sir William Harcourt was. When we speak now of an opportunist in politics we think of a rather shady person “on the make.” When we speak of an idealist in politics we think of a rather foolish and impracticable person, a man of fixed idea, a crank of some kind, who would cheerfully ruin the country, to say nothing of the party to which he gives preference, for the mere satisfaction of advertising his fad. Sir William Harcourt had ideals of his own kind, and even fads. He was a sincere Whig, and a fanatical Erastian. That he was never quite in the inner Gladstonian circle is chiefly attributable to his utter hostility to sacerdotalism. Mr. Gladstone could more easily take to his bosom an unbeliever like Mr. Morley than an eighteenth-century Protestant like Sir William. But though a Ritualistic prelate could always rouse him to fury, and though he could simulate a passion for certain articles in the Newcastle programme concerning which he poked admirable fun in private, Sir William was an eminently “practical politician,” and ordinarily his views and convictions were subordinated to something in his eyes vastly more important—the due playing of the political game. Yet we should altogether misunderstand him if we inferred any more affinity to the newer style of professional politician than to the newer style of political crank. He was in one sense absolutely disinterested. He could have been a very rich man had he stayed longer at the Parliamentary Bar. He left it, in fact, for politics, the very moment he could afford to do so, and his fidelity to politics kept him a poor man till almost the end of his life; till, indeed, the death of a nephew left him lord of the rich and pleasant Nuneham domain. Titular honour attracted him no more than money. His knighthood had to be forced on him. When he was appointed Solicitor-General, Mr. Gladstone had to insist on precedent being followed; Sir William wished to escape an honour suitable enough for Mayors and other deserving municipal persons, but scarcely fitting a man of his pedigree. Many years later, much to the delight of his friends in the House of Commons, he refused a much more considerable distinction offered by King Edward. It would have been much to him to be Prime Minister of England; it was nothing to him to be Viscount Harcourt. There was more pride than humility or democratic feeling in this disregard for titles; the pride of Sir William Harcourt was as much a feature of him as his almost gigantic height, his portentous under lip, and his keen enjoyment of his own jokes. A large part of the man was what had long been underground; this parson’s son, jests about whose Plantagenet blood seemed rather unmeaning to the uninitiated, was in very fact enormously interested in his genealogy. He could boast of a descent as noble as any in Europe, and though he readily saw the ridiculous side of pride of ancestry in others he could not help attaching an importance to himself as a Vernon Harcourt only second to that of being the Vernon Harcourt. There is a tale of his wearily repeating, with reference to an absurd person named Knightley, who bored dinner tables with his pedigree, the lines:
But Knightley, had he possessed the necessary powers of repartee, would not have lacked material for effective retort.
Wealth in the real sense being indifferent to him, small honours beneath his consideration, and overpowering enthusiasm for the greater ideals foreign to his nature, what remained as the motive power sufficing to propel the vast bulk of this political galleon through the cross-currents of over thirty years of varied navigation? The answer would seem to be sheer love of the game of politics. Sir William Harcourt delighted in political warfare almost as an end in itself. It would be unjust, no doubt, to style him a pure opportunist. His course was determined by a sense of loyalty to his party and by a general appreciation of the philosophy of Whiggism. He had his early days of Adullamitism, when he was rather the candid friend than the consistent supporter of his own leaders. But that was in strict accord with the rules of the game. Once he ceased to be a free lance he became the staunchest of partisans. His labours for Liberalism were Herculean. Considered as a mere output of mental energy his career from the early Seventies to the late Nineties was amazing. In every fight he was put forward in the fore-front of the battle, and acquitted himself with astonishing prowess. His sword-play might lack finesse, but its effect no man could deny, least of all that man who had to bear the brunt of his sweeping strokes. He rapidly became one of the greatest of House of Commons debaters, a little given, perhaps, to the declamatory, but never degenerating into mere verbiage or claptrap. On the platform he was, perhaps, less successful: he lacked the gift of emotional appeal, and was wholly wanting in imagination. The common man could laugh heartily at his quips, could cheer his knock-down blows, but his pulses were never stirred, and even his intellect was not conquered. For somehow Sir William Harcourt, with all his energy and incisiveness, never gave the impression of quite feeling what he said. He always seemed to be engaged rather in a boxing match than a fight—a match in which he was, quite indubitably, out to win, but still a match and not an affair of life-and-death earnestness. Mr. Gladstone, Mr. Morley, and Lord Rosebery each in their way got where Sir William Harcourt could never quite reach. He rather resembled, in fact, that kind of actor who is just a little too stagey for the stage, and is never more theatrical than when his heart is wholly in a part.
But the most stagey actor may have a very real human side, and Sir William Harcourt, so generally credited with a cynical outlook on public affairs, was in his family and social relations the most large-hearted and genuine of men. It would be a mistake, also, to think of him politically as a mere gladiator. It was certainly his misfortune that he had sometimes for party purposes to simulate enthusiasm for causes he had little at heart. On Home Rule and Local Option he privately was a Laodicean (if nothing more positive), attempting in public the ecstasy of a dancing dervish—and, in truth, his figure was ill-adapted to corybantic zeal. But he did really care for good administration, sound finance, and the Whig theory of exterior policy. There was pique in his attitude towards Lord Rosebery, but not pique alone; he saw what Mr. Gladstone did not see, what the Radicals who gave their voice for a Rosebery Premiership did not see, that Liberal Imperialism would not do; those who wanted Imperialism wanted the real article, and would go to the right shop for it. Indeed, though the last years of his career were pathetically in contrast with its first promise, they did much to kill the early legend of the pure opportunist. Sir William Harcourt might be cynical as to indifferent matters, and undoubtedly many things important to others were to him indifferent. But beneath the surface there was, besides much loyalty and generosity to individuals, a larger sincerity, if not to this idea or that, at least to a general conception which might be limited, but was certainly not ignoble.
When Mandell Creighton was Bishop of London it fell to him to admonish an earnest High Church Vicar, working in the East End, on the subject of incense. The Vicar, pleading hard for his point, appealed to his record as a parish priest. “Dr. Creighton,” he said solemnly, “for twenty-five years I have held here a cure of souls, and——” Before he could finish the sentence Creighton cut in with a joke. “Cure them, certainly,” he said, “but surely you need not smoke them.”
The jest was quite in Creighton’s way. It was easy. It was flippant. It was made at the expense of a rather humourless sincerity. It was impolitic; in fact, widely repeated, it caused much offence. But it came into the Bishop’s head, and it had to come out. Creighton might possess self-restraint in other ways, but the sacrifice of a good thing was beyond him. Moreover, while ready to make the largest allowances for great errors and even great crimes, he was incapable of respecting what he considered mere faddism in religious matters. He had, it seems certain, religious beliefs of his own, but no religious fancies, and he was contemptuous of fancies in others, still more contemptuous of fancies that were rather more than fancies. The priest in the present case was clearly a fool; who but a fool would remain a priest in Bethnal Green for twenty-five years? Why not, then, tell him so, if it could be done with due urbanity and wit? It was the sort of thing Creighton would have said as an undergraduate at Merton, and to a rather unusual degree he retained the undergraduate mind throughout life. In full maturity both his earnestness and his flippancy were less those of manhood than of very intelligent youth; at sixty he was mentally as fresh as at twenty, and (it may perhaps be said) as foppish. The foppishness was the more real because it was unconscious, like the undergraduate’s; Creighton disclaimed “superiority” in himself, and strongly resented it in others, but he never lost that combined simper and swagger of the mind which we are so often persuaded to call Oxford. There could have been no greater contrast to Temple. Temple said what he had to say, and cared very little what people thought as to the thing said or the manner of its saying. Creighton had always some of the eagerness and wistfulness of the clever young man who feels it incumbent on him to sparkle, and is troubled with just a doubt whether he has quite “come off.” His paradoxes are often strongly reminiscent of Oscar Wilde’s; they are not so witty, but have much the same superficial smartness, essential untruth, and light contempt of average humanity. Wilde would have given a more dexterous turn to “No people do so much harm as those who go about doing good,” but the spirit of the thing is quite his, and he might actually have described an Extension lecture as “a mission to enlightened greengrocers.” This, of course, was only one side of Creighton’s character; in other moods he said many wise things, and did things still more wise. Whether he was a fundamentally wise man is another question. Wise men have a habit of ceasing to be clever, and especially of ceasing to be exceptionally educated. Creighton could not help being always a wit and always a don. As a Christian he was always ready to admit the equality of men before God. He even erred on the side of minimising the moral differences between man and man, as in that very unphilosophical generalisation that “all are so infinitely far from the perfection of God that little differences do not matter,” which is equivalent to saying that the light of a lamp is so infinitely less than the light of the sun that it does not matter whether we have a smoky lamp or not. In this way, as a Christian, Creighton was fond of showing his indifference to externals. But as an Oxford scholar he did incline to think too much of certain small things and too little of certain big things.
There were no two subjects on which he was more prone to witty depreciation than the clerical mind and the national mind. Yet he was himself very English, and very Church-of-English. Only in England would such a man find himself in holy orders; only in England, especially, would such a man find himself a Bishop. The whole tone of his mind was secular and humanist; on indifferent things he spoke as an unembarrassed pagan; when, like an ecclesiastical Wegg, he “dropped” into theology, the effect was a little awkward. There was no suspicion of insincerity in Creighton talking about “keeping open the way to Jesus,” and “growing nearer to God,” but there was (to some at least) a sense of incongruity. It gave the sort of shock one would feel if Mr. Chesterton went out dressed like the Rev. R. J. Campbell, or if Mr. Massingham went to a fancy dress ball in a colourable imitation of a Field-Marshal’s uniform.
One was prepared for everything moral, kindly, and sensible from Creighton. But to find this very clever man—“for sheer cleverness Creighton beats any man I know,” said Temple once—really did regard himself first and foremost as a “pastor of souls,” and was so despite the neat epigrams, the equally neat gold cigarette case, and the social àplomb, was not a little staggering. His countrymen, stupid as Creighton always loved to represent them, might at least partially understand him. It is safe to say no intelligent Italian or Frenchman would have done so. Such a foreigner would understand well enough a great Prince of the Church, who might or might not be a Christian. He would understand a poor saint. He would understand a humanist unbeliever full of noble sentiment. What he would hardly understand was how a man so very “broad” managed to confine himself in a “distinct branch of the Catholic Church.” Still less would he be able to comprehend how a scholar with a life-long ambition to write a great historical work should be the victim, in his own words, of a “conspiracy to prevent him from doing so.” But to the English, and also to Creighton, who loved to satirise the English, it seemed not unnatural that a man who cared little about any points of ritual should be constantly adjudicating between the Kensitites on the one hand and the extreme High Churchmen on the other, or that a man eminently qualified to write great history in which he was intensely interested should be set to compose small squabbles in which he was not interested at all.
Why Creighton took orders was much of a mystery to his set at Merton. The whole intellectual tendency of the day was towards agnosticism, and Creighton was very intellectual indeed. But, though Creighton had little sympathy with “external and mechanical orthodoxy,” and, in the words of his eulogist, “did not wear his spiritual heart on his sleeve,” but “reverted to paradox to conceal differences on which he did not care to insist,” he seems to have remained a convinced Churchman, and indeed considerably more of a High and less of a Broad Churchman than he afterwards became. His ambition to be a clergyman dated from early boyhood; but it would probably not be unjust to suggest that he was first attracted to the Church less by a spiritual urging than by the thought that the clerical career would afford him an opportunity for study and literary work. Creighton’s love for things of the mind was more Scottish than English; his family was a Scottish family, though settled in Cumberland; his father, trained as a joiner, had a furnishing and decorating business; on his mother’s side, he came of yeoman farmer stock. Healthy but short-sighted, the lad had no recreation but taking long walks—a habit which persisted and developed in later life (he once walked from Oxford to Durham in three days)—and his naturally studious bent was accentuated by this aloofness from the sports of his companions. The severity of the born student, however, was softened from a very early age by the taste of the born æsthete; Creighton’s rooms at Oxford, the moment he got a little money, were beautifully set out with choice little pieces of old furniture, blue and white china, and flowers arranged on the most correct principles of the newest school of taste. After his marriage with Miss Louise von Glehn (who first attracted him by her youth, her yellow sash, and her interest in his lectures) he removed from his pleasant rooms to a house in Oxford equally charming in its way, and the centre of much quiet intellectual junketing. But, though he delighted in Oxford, he began, as years went on, to think of University as “like living in a house with the workmen always about,” and the pressure of his tutorial duties made him long for some less arduous environment in which to carry out his design of a History of the Papacy. An opportunity presented itself at the end of 1874. The richest and oldest living within the gift of Merton, that of Embleton, forty miles north of Newcastle, became vacant; Creighton made it known that he would be willing to accept, and the offer was made him. At Embleton, lying on a desolate part of the Northumbrian coast, Creighton made himself comfortable in the old fortified vicarage which used to afford shelter to the parishioners and their cattle during Scottish moss-trooper raids; and here, in the intervals of attending to not too arduous parish duties, he brought out the first two volumes of his history. The work at once placed him in the front rank of serious writers of the day; and the praise lavished on it was not undeserved. For though the effort to be impartial where impartiality is impossible gave coldness to the narrative, these volumes, as well as those which succeeded, showed great learning, a brilliant power of analysis and exposition, and a rare faculty of imaginative sympathy. It is a curious testimony to Creighton’s fairness to find Lord Acton at a later date accusing him of too much tenderness for certain Popes, while Protestants were complaining that Luther was treated with an undue lack of reverence.
By this time parochial duties, increasing with the years, began to irk Creighton as much as the pressure of his tutorial duties had done, and he was anxious for a change. In 1884 he accepted the offer of the appointment of Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Cambridge; shortly after he took from Mr. Gladstone a Canonry at Worcester; and in 1890 Lord Salisbury offered him the vacant See of Peterborough. Nearly ten years before he had been asked if he would like to be a Bishop. “No, I should not,” he replied, “but if I were offered a Bishopric I should no doubt take it, because I have got into the habit of doing what is asked of me.” He was anxious to get on with his history; to become a Bishop meant the definite sacrifice of further literary ambitions. But though he thought it “a terrible nuisance,” and his “natural self” abhorred it, and he considered himself “an object of compassion,” it is probable that the promotion was not quite so unpleasant as he represented it to many friends and probably himself believed it to be. For both his worldly and other-worldly sides the appointment had some compensations. He really did enjoy society, and he really did feel (singular as it might seem in a man of his temperament) his mission as a Christian priest. The sense was not strong enough to make him seek great activities, but it was strong enough to make him feel it an act of cowardice and self-indulgence to refuse a call when it came. But it was in the nature of the man to mix up almost comically his various feelings. At one time we find him lamenting that living in a Palace will be bad for his children, at another he speaks of regarding his individual life as simply an opportunity of offering himself to God, and then we have the following very characteristic remark: “A good lady said to me the other day, ‘After all, men are more interesting than books.’ Doubtless this is true, but you can choose your own books, and you must take your men as you find them.” “My peace of mind,” he said in the same letter, “is gone; my books will be shut up; my mind will go to seed; I shall utter nothing but platitudes for the rest of my life, and everybody will write letters in the newspapers about my iniquities.” The picture of such a man hesitating between a certain set of tastes and the call of conscience is perhaps best illustrated in a story which may or may not be new. One of Creighton’s children was asked what he was going to do. The reply was, “Father is still praying for guidance, but mother is packing our boxes.”
Whatever his real qualms, they seem to have been excessive. Once settled down to his new work, Creighton quite enjoyed himself at Peterborough, and certainly, by all reasonable standards of episcopal efficiency, was a success. But his translation to London in 1896 was the occasion of more complaints in the same key. London was “inhuman”; it required all his efforts to remain human in such a spot. There were not so many human beings in London as in Peterborough. He was in “the very centre of all that was worldly.” He was “exposed to the most deteriorating influences.” It was “a great nuisance” that he never saw anybody intimately. “Every ass was at liberty to bray in his study.” He never seemed to be free from interviewing candidates for ordination. There was no one to be “kind” to him. But as he became more used to the new conditions the complaints became less frequent. He felt himself making some impression, not only on his vast work, but on the vast town. The newspapers recognised the richness of his personality. The gossips retailed his good things. He began to feel at home, and within a year of his promotion we find him confessing that London is “immensely interesting” with its “abundant life,” which, however, “raises the question—Where is it going?”
If he found London bewildering as well as interesting, London—or that fraction that troubled about such matters—was also a little puzzled, as well as interested, in him. There was, indeed, something of the Sphinx about this long, gaunt figure, with the bearded, spectacled face, harsh in feature as only northern English faces can be, intrinsically stern, but generally lightened by a smile half genial and half quizzical. Rapidly becoming one of the best-known of public men, he was never quite understood. The man killed himself by hard work; a constitution good enough to have taken him to fourscore was worn out at less than sixty by too conscientious efforts to keep pace with the enormous demands made on his energies. His sermons and addresses breathed much of the purest spirit of Christian faith, as well as the very soul of Christian charity. Yet he who laboured so faithfully, and preached so admirably, often talked nonsense—sometimes good nonsense and sometimes bad—and showed a quality (some called it playfulness and others flippancy) which perturbed equally the faithful and the infidel. For orthodox people could not understand this levity in a serious man, and unorthodox people seemed to think that a man of his mentality and temperament had no right to be orthodox. There was in his very toleration something insulting to enthusiasts. To people who held strong views on some question he felt to be trivial he could not emit judicious platitudes; his judgment was generally barbed with a wit that rankled with both sides. One reference to incense has already been quoted; another was, “Personally I should say, if they want to make a smell, let them.” That sort of thing does not satisfy either those who would kindle the fires of Smithfield or those who would revive the sullen reign of the saints.
The Bishop’s attitude was held very generally to denote the kind of breadth which is so easy where there is no strong conviction. But this view was quite erroneous. Creighton’s contempt might be too lightly expressed, but it was not lightly entertained. He had a reason for every dislike, and even behind every prejudice. He managed somehow to reconcile the Catholic view of the English Church with pure Erastianism. In one place one finds him ridiculing the notion that truth varies with longitude and latitude; in another he holds that “the general trend of the Church must be regulated by their (the people’s) wishes,” and that “the Church cannot go too far from the main ideas of the people”—who might conceivably, of course, become polygamists and fire-worshippers fifty years hence. In truth, this great historian often thought as cloudily and locally as a country curate, and, far more than he was aware, was influenced by the insularity he so often derided. Where he did not take the English view he took the German, being soaked, like most Victorians, in Teutonism; and he really objected to “religious observances of an exotic kind” less because they were exotic than because they were Latin.
“The Church of Rome,” he said once, “is the Church of decadent peoples.” On another occasion he observed that the Roman communion is “a small body in England, which stands in no relation to the religious life of the nation.... To join that Church is simply to stand on one side and cut yourself off from your part in striving to do your duty for the religious future of your country.” I am not concerned in the sectarian question involved; I only quote the passages to show that Creighton, with all his learning and cleverness, could talk solemn nonsense as well as the lighter kind. Yet he would have been quick to see the logical lapse of some old barbarian who condemned Christianity as the religion of under-sized people, or of the Roman governor under Nero who sent saints to the lions because this new faith of “Chrestus” stood in no relation to the religious life of a polytheistic Empire, so that for a Roman citizen to join it was to “cut himself off from his past in striving to do his duty for the religious future of his country.”
The truth is, of course, that Creighton, disliking Rome and despising the “dying nations” in her communion, wished to say something nasty without too much trouble—a natural and perhaps commendable desire. The Ulster man, when he wants to gratify it, says simply, “To Hell with the Pope”; Creighton, instead of rising to bad language, sank to bad argument, and gave the weight of his personality to the once popular doctrine that a creed is to be honoured in proportion to the wealth and material prosperity of its professors. Yet on all indifferent matters he would have been the first to hold that truth is truth if only one man (and he a scrofulous cripple) believes it, and error error, even though approved by everybody as tall as Creighton and endowed with the particular code of good manners which he approved.
I remember hearing John Morley—it was then impossible to conceive of him as containing the germ of John Viscount Morley—addressing one of the many “flowing tide” meetings which were among the chief public events of the early Nineties. I can recall nothing of the speech, except that it was about the Irish question; Mr. Morley had just been over to Ireland, and some officious policeman had struck him with a baton, or something of that sort—a proceeding which had naturally annoyed him, and imparted some acerbity to his remarks. But, of course, the speech was less interesting than the speaker. This, then, was the great John Morley, who wrote such beautiful English and spelt “God” with a small “g”—this prim, frock-coated figure, with an indefinable suggestion of the Nonconformist; slight, with the stoop of the student; the face deeply indented with crow’s-feet, but in no sense pallid, rather with the kind of unfresh floridity so often seen in the Law Courts; a sort of quiet fatigue pervading the whole, like the American character in Dickens who was “used up considerable”; the eyes at once keen and weary, like all eyes that are the overworked instruments of an active brain depending chiefly on printed matter for its impressions; the forehead well-shaped, but not impressive; everything about him suggestive rather of completeness than mass or power; the whole man compact, agile, highly articulate, trained to the last ounce, notable enough, but hardly great. Not naturally an intellectual Hercules, one would say; rather an example of the fitness that comes of a tidy habit of life and regular work at the bedroom exerciser.