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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER XVII
W. T. STEAD

It was in the late Nineties that I first met the most talked-of journalist of his day. Though still on the sunny side of fifty, W. T. Stead gave the impression of age. His face, where the grizzling beard did not hide it, was deeply lined, and his movements had that kind of conscious alertness which, in its contrast with the self-possessed and even lazy confidence of youth in its physical competence, is a sure indication of advancing years. He was given to loose home-spuns, which made his figure appear rather more clumsy than it really was. Nothing in his negligence of dress, however, suggested the Bohemian; he might easily have passed, at first glance, for a country tradesman of the less pompous kind, say, a corn-and-seed merchant in a substantial way.

The eyes, however, at once attracted attention. They were neither full nor beautiful, and one might have known the man all his life without remembering their precise colour; doubtless they were of some kind of faded blue or undistinguished grey, like the eyes of millions of other people in northern Europe. The remarkable thing about them was negative. They struck one as the eyes of a man who used them for the special purpose of not seeing. They at once explained what Shakespeare meant when he likened the poet’s eye to the lunatic’s, and described it as “in a fine frenzy rolling.” Stead’s eyes did not roll; they were curiously and brightly still. But they did give the idea of “frenzy” as Shakespeare used the word—that is to say, of a subjective and not an objective vision, of a mental excitement, an irritation of the brain, which prevented the owner seeing things as they were. Stead looked not at but through one, just as Mrs. Jellyby looked through her visitors at the coast of Africa five thousand miles away. Whether Stead had at this time any actual malady of vision I know not; I seem to remember to have read somewhere that he went in his youth in fear of blindness. But he gave instantaneously the impression of a man who either cannot see justly or does not want to—of one, in other words, who is much more interested in his “view” of a thing than in the thing itself. “Views” belong, in fact, largely to the province of myopia. That delicate stylist, Lafcadio Hearn, had to invent a Japan of his own because he never saw the real Japan in which he spent so many years of his life; and probably much of the astonishing “viewiness” of modern Germany is simply due to the ravages of the German printed character on the German professorial eyesight. Stead was a man of views from the first; his disaster was that, while he began by possessing views, the views ended by possessing him.

Stead was born in the middle of the nineteenth century at Embleton Manse, Northumberland, “under the shadow,” as he put it, “of the grey northern hills.” His father was a Congregational minister; his mother came of a substantial farming stock. It was the case of a large family and small means, and, like his brothers and sisters, Stead was chiefly educated at home; all his formal schooling was gained in two years at Silcoates, near Wakefield, an establishment for the sons of ministers. He thus grew up without mental discipline of the more severe kind, and his natural disposition inclined him to the desultory. An insatiable curiosity ensured a wide range of reading; a quick brain enabled him to grasp as much as he wanted to know; but he did not form the habit, and there was nobody to form it for him, of systematic and thorough study; always picking and choosing, he got much knowledge, but little sense of the relation of things. At the same time he was steeped in Nonconformist mysticism. It has often been observed that beliefs in their old age tend to become the extreme opposite of what they started to be, and nineteenth-century Nonconformity, in its loose sentimentality, often contrasted strangely enough with the hard rationalism of an earlier date. Here, as in secular things, Stead picked and chose, followed his own fancies, and used his eyes to see only what he wanted to see. The germ of that spiritual wildness which distinguished him in his later years is to be found in his precocious interest in “revivals” and “conversions.” At twelve he felt himself competent to be a guide to his school-fellows, and he has himself expressed his indebtedness to Silcoates for teaching him “three important things—Christianity, cricket, and democracy.” Democracy he then associated partly with Gladstonian Liberalism, and partly with Oliver Cromwell, on whom he composed, while still at school, a warm panegyric which won him a prize of a guinea. Christianity was best illustrated, in his opinion, by the seventeenth-century Puritans, who would assuredly have put him in the pillory for his earliest views, and burned or hanged him for his later addiction to the occult. This early enthusiasm for Cromwell is interesting as an indication of the curious fashion in which ideas developed in the almost unhealthily fertile soil of Stead’s brain. He began by worshipping Cromwell as the great Puritan in religion and the great democrat (it is extraordinary how men deceive themselves when they want to) in politics. Then, since everything in Cromwell must be admirable, he began to admire Cromwell as a great Imperialist, and so insensibly developed, to the horror of his early Quaker employers at Darlington, into an Imperialist himself. It is doubtful whether thought, in the strict sense, had any part in bringing Stead to this or any other conviction. When he had got an idea into his head he could, of course, bring a very active and ingenious brain to the task of developing it. But the idea itself had its source in his taste or his emotions, if it did not arrive by sheer chance. In some respects he might be described as a gamin Carlyle. He had much of Carlyle’s faculty of smelling men and things, so to speak, across long distances of space and time; Carlyle was all nose and tongue: his nose enabled him to scent his heroes, and his tongue persuaded incautious people that they were demigods. To be just, they were generally great men. But even Carlyle sometimes went wrong, as the best hound will do; and Stead, less gifted, went wrong much more often. Lord Morley, while paying high tribute to his “invaluable” qualities as a colleague, hints at “passing embarrassments.” Such a man was, in truth, ill adapted to run in harness with people more normally gifted. He had all sorts of superstitions, and it might almost be said that an article of his would depend on his opening his Bible at one page and his Bluebook at another.

Mr. Spender, of the Westminster Gazette, recently declared that no man would have repudiated more hotly than Stead the suggestion that journalism was merely a branch of commerce. And in some sense none could more truly say that he regarded his profession as “a vacation abounding in opportunities, but weighted by solemn responsibilities.” He had a real passion for what he thought was the right; he showed fine courage in taking up unpopular causes; he sacrificed much for great ideals, and still more for small eccentricities. But the man was a most singular combination of the business man and the mystic. Those who worked with him had much the same sort of shock we feel in reading the speeches of seventeenth-century Puritan statesmen, who (to quote Macaulay) talked in Committee of Ways and Means about seeking the Lord. He might be led to consider a technical problem through reading the Book of Proverbs, or going to a spiritualistic séance. But to the problem itself he brought the coldest common sense. He could engineer a “stunt,” as the modern slang goes, as well as the most cynical living professor of that art. Such a “stunt” was the cry that sent Gordon to Khartoum. And even when, as in the “Modern Babylon” articles, his heart was fully engaged, his method was only distinguishable from that of a later date by the superiority of his intelligence and his firm sense of the importance of whatever he happened to say. His egotism was wonderful and almost touching in its naïveté. Lord Morley visited him during his imprisonment in Holloway, and found him in a “strangely exalted mood.” “As I was taking my exercise this morning in the prison yard,” he said, “I asked myself who was the man of most importance now alive? And I could only find one answer—the prisoner in this cell.” Yet ten minutes later he might easily have been criticising the “make-up” of a paper, or discussing the financial possibilities of an abridged edition of the classics, with Gibbon in twenty pages, The Republic in five, and Uncle Remus in fifty.

The beginning of the Nineties saw Stead, with the publication of the Review of Reviews, at the very height of his professional prestige. He had, by his “two keels to one” campaign, established a claim on the regard of political realists. He had, by his efforts to interest European monarchs in schemes for the preservation of peace, won the esteem of those idealists who had perhaps suspected him in his capacity of Imperialist. He enjoyed, on the one hand, the worship of every Nonconformist in England, and, on the other, the friendship of Cecil Rhodes. He exercised, in the sum, an enormous influence on the masses. He could make an author; he could almost unmake a statesman. There seemed to be little limit to the development of one whom Lord Morley has described as “for a season the most powerful journalist in the island.” But just at this period that eccentricity which had always been a large element in his character assumed the proportions of a disease. In 1890 he met a Miss Julia A. Ames, connected with a newspaper in Chicago—“a highly religious woman, a Methodist, very level-headed, and possessing a great amount of common sense.” With Miss Ames Stead was strangely impressed, and after her death in America he essayed communication by “automatic writing” with her spirit. In this, he was convinced, he attained success, and in 1893 he started a paper called Borderland, chiefly for the purpose of giving the world the “letters of Julia.” He devoted much time and money henceforth to spiritualism in its various forms, and “Julia’s Bureau” was established “to enable those who had lost their dead, who were sorrowing over friends and relatives, to get into touch with them again.”

Inevitably this preoccupation with the occult reacted on Stead’s reputation as a thinker on more mundane matters, and the end of the century found a new generation of writers wondering why he still commanded, if not the old homage, at least the interest of a large public. The truth was that, though much that Stead stood for had gone out of fashion, and though the “spook” business was never in fashion in any popular sense, he did to the end represent certain permanent British habits of mind. Thus he was thoroughly British in his irresponsible knight-errantry. I have never been able to understand how Don Quixote came to be written by a Spaniard; the Don is intrinsically as English as Mr. Pickwick, and I am persuaded that it is not a Spaniard, but an Englishman, who best understands him; one may go further and say that the English reader understands him better in the reading than the Spanish author did in the writing. There was a good deal of Quixote in Stead, and that made for his popularity. He wandered from question to question, and from capital to capital, interfering with matters in which he had strictly no concern, and rousing the tumult he loved. Then, when the bright eyes of his lady Dulcinea had been sufficiently honoured, he rode off to other adventures, splendidly unconscious that the affair after all might not have been disposed of, might even have been made more difficult, by his chivalrous intervention. The Englishman of that time was partial to such championship of the afflicted and distressed. Feeling a responsibility for the morals of the rest of the world, he preferred, like a good business man, to discharge it as cheaply as possible, and as leading articles (at the most extravagant valuation) are considerably cheaper than squadrons and army corps, the tendency was to exaggerate a little the thunders of the Press. It was then an article of faith that foreign military ambition was mainly restrained by fear of The Standard, and that foreign striving after liberty was mainly sustained by the Daily News. Thus it was natural that the spectacle of Stead lecturing Kaiser, Czar, and Sultan should in some degree stir the pulses of many Englishmen. It was an assertion of our superiority; no representative of a responsible foreign journal lectured Queen Victoria. Equally natural was it that Stead himself, finding the Czar indomitably polite, should infer that he was a sincere friend of peace, and feel easier about the Finns, or, discovering that the Sultan kept the Review of Reviews on file, should be inclined to believe that he had done a real service to Macedonia. Every journalist has something in him of Mr. Pott, who believed that his articles in the Eatanswill Gazette exercised a decisive influence on national politics. Stead sometimes seemed to think that taking a holiday was equivalent to going on a crusade.

Another point on which Stead was in harmony with average sentiment was his combination of thorough-going Imperialism with thorough-going anti-militarism. All for omelettes, but unalterably opposed to the breaking of eggs, he went only a step further than the many who liked omelettes so long as no eggs were broken except those which might be picked up cheaply at a “Queen’s shilling” apiece. He quarrelled with Rhodes over the Boer War—and so his name was struck out of the famous will—but really Rhodes was not so very far apart from himself; Rhodes, like Stead, lacked the logic of Imperialists like Lord Milner, who not only recognised the price of Empire, but wanted to have it (by conscriptive decree) always ready in the bank. Stead, no doubt, would in any case have opposed the Boer War as a war; why he should have gloried in the Boers as Boers was less obvious. But in Kruger, no doubt, he fancied some resemblance to Cromwell, and the Commandoes, with their Bibles and “infallible artillery,” reminded him of the New Model. Stead never took much of the Puritan theology, and it had probably all volatilised in the course of his feverish life; but instincts are more stubborn than opinions, and “Brother Boer” was also a brother Puritan. The furious attack on Rhodes, whom he had previously admired highly, also on Cromwellian grounds, was treated with high magnanimity. “I want you to understand,” said Rhodes, meeting him in 1900, “that if in future you should unfortunately feel yourself compelled to attack me personally as vehemently as you have attacked my policy, it will make no difference to our friendship. I am too grateful for all I have learned from you to allow anything that you may write or say to make any change in our relations.” The man who could speak thus was assuredly a great one. The man to whom it was said could not have been small.

CHAPTER XVIII
SIR HENRY FOWLER

On the surface at least there was an incurable ordinariness about Henry Hartley Fowler, afterwards first Viscount Wolverhampton. His parts, though sound, were not brilliant; imagination he had none; his voice was harsh and unsympathetic; his appearance was singularly ungainly, and he was the sort of man who always looks at his worst when best dressed; he had absolutely no “way” with him; he rose by unexciting degrees to a rather dull sort of eminence; and at the best he could only be counted a first-rate example of the second-rate man. But, as Mr. Arnold Bennett has found profit in recognising, ordinariness carried to the extreme becomes very extraordinary, and Sir Henry Fowler, as the end of the Nineties left him, remains a figure of some significance. It would be a mistake to consider him, like (say) Mr. Childers, as a mere fragment of dullness in the mosaic of Victorian politics—a foil for the brilliance of the gold and lapis lazuli. He was something positive, if sombre and not very decorative; and he almost perfectly represented a type which must be understood if we are to make any sense at all of the Victorian time.

Sir Henry Fowler was, I believe, the first Wesleyan to become a Cabinet Minister and a Peer. His Wesleyanism was one of the main facts about him. Far more than John Bright he represented English Nonconformity. Quakerism is in truth not very English, though there can be no doubt concerning the Englishness of its founder. There is a logical abandon about it quite out of harmony with the English taste for compromise. The opposite extreme to Catholicism, it yet resembles Catholicism in basing itself firmly on certain dogmas, and shrinking from no conclusion that logically follows such acceptance. Sir Henry Fowler belonged to that more English school of Nonconformity which is guided much more by taste than by logic. He had no quarrel with the doctrines of the Church. He loved its liturgy. He had something like a passion for extreme orderliness in public worship. When in London he would attend service at St. Margaret’s, Westminster; he was married by the Church, had his children baptised and confirmed in the Church, and was himself buried in accordance with the rites of the Church. Yet he was born and bred a Wesleyan, was the son of a Wesleyan minister, and the interests of Wesleyanism were one of the main cares of his life. Such a man would be incomprehensible anywhere but in England. Here he was only a rather extreme example of a strange national tendency to choose our religious opinions much as we do our cigars—by their flavour.

In politics Sir Henry Fowler’s case was much the same. His real nature was conservative. There was never a less adventurous temperament. His attitude towards the present was one of despondency, and towards the future one of apprehension. The most bigoted Tory could not be further removed than he was from that class of men described by Macaulay as “sanguine in hope, bold in speculation, always pressing forward, quick to discern the imperfections of whatever exists, disposed to think lightly of the risks and inconveniences which attend improvements, and disposed to give every change credit for being an improvement.” On the contrary, he was ever the counsellor of caution and the prophet of disaster. He hugged gloom like a garment. If Conservatives were in office, he feared for the country; if Liberals were in office his apprehensions were merely doubled—he feared for his party as well. He could discern readily enough the imperfections of whatever existed, but even more was he impressed with the dangers of bringing something else into existence. Thus he was a Home Ruler in sentiment, but though he believed in the principle he “also believed in the possibility of buying some things too dear,” and at the end of twenty years he was more convinced than at the beginning that the time was not “ripe.” Thus, also, he came into Parliament as an “advanced Radical,” but he remained in the capacity of a Radical with much genius for staying in the same place, a Radical at least implacably opposed to anything like “Socialistic proposals.” A man of his pessimism and his caution could only be in essence a Conservative. Whence, then, his position in the fore-front of Liberalism, a position so considerable that, though he was never a favourite of Mr. Gladstone, he could not be ignored? The answer is probably that the flavour of the actual Conservative Party, like the flavour of the actual Church of England, did not appeal to him. Above all he was a Puritan, and, if a certain remnant of Puritanism still persisted in the Church, it was not conspicuous or influential in the Conservative Party. There were, of course, fox-hunters and men of pleasure on the Liberal side, but in the main they were rather camp-followers than captains, and they did not give the party its character. Further, the character of Puritan also embraced that of iconoclast. Sir Henry Fowler was a little like the seventeenth-century Puritans in being much more anxious to destroy symbols than realities. They cut down the thorn of Glastonbury and dislodged the images of saints, but they left “civil and religious liberty” in rather more parlous condition than they found it. Their nineteenth-century representative had no desire to throw down or change the fabric of English life. But he did wish to chip off all its Gothic eccentricities (even if they happened to be also beauties), to make it seemly and prosaic, to harmonise it with his view of the utilitarian.

He was, indeed, that very strange product of the Victorian time, the matter-of-fact mystic. He believed in the world to come as in something just as real as a counting-house, and not altogether dissimilar. On the other hand, nothing outside the counting-house and the world to come had much reality for him. There was work and there was religion—and beyond these nothing, or nothing to speak of. Work, of course, in the widest sense—the satisfaction of certain personal ambitions, the serving of certain public ends, the rearing of children, the establishment of a status in life were all included, for this kind of saintliness has no regard for the “magnificence of destitution”; while it reads its title clear to mansions in the skies it is equally insistent on an indubitable freehold of some consequence here below. This mingling of worldliness and other-worldliness was almost as old as the man. The youth of Sir Henry Fowler was fully as serious as his manhood. The son of one of the pioneers of Methodism, who had come early under the influence of the extraordinary man who was its founder, he was sent to a school for the sons of ministers at Woodhouse Grove, in Yorkshire, which seems to have borne to the academy of Mr. Wackford Squeers the same relation that an original bears to a parody. The discipline was on much the same lines as that of Dotheboys Hall, and the diet, if more decent, was scarcely more plentiful. The boys were given one holiday a year, and the only game was fives. Here, and afterwards in an equally grave London atmosphere, the lines of the boy’s character were firmly set. Of a naturally clumsy build and serious disposition, he could hardly, in any circumstances, have grown up a handy and hearty boy. But with such schooling, and with his father “stimulating his intellectual powers” during the solitary midsummer holiday, he rapidly acquired both the virtues and disabilities which distinguished him through life. At twelve he was already a political Nonconformist, following with deep attention all debates in Parliament bearing on Dissent. At the same time the foundations had been laid of a physical awkwardness and stiffness, a distaste for exercise, and an incapacity for all the graces of life which for him made work of some kind the only tolerable condition of existence. His daughter tells us that he had little use for his hands. He could not throw a ball or hold a bat, and when he tried to play golf his clumsiness was extraordinary. The tying of a dress tie was a feat of dexterity he never mastered. He seldom walked if he could help it, and was never known to run a step. An idle day was for him one of unmitigated boredom, and he managed to communicate the weariness of it to those about him. He had a great dislike for fresh air, and could not endure an open window, whether at home, or at his office, or even at his favourite chapel. Yet he was by no means a gloomy domestic tyrant. He had married the woman of his earliest ambition, apparently by sheer force of character, for she was wealthy and much courted, and he was a sombre, reserved and heavy-footed suitor. His children he loved, and they learned to love him. He had a home in which the last word in Victorian comfort chimed harmoniously with the last word in Victorian Philistinism. He could even on occasion drink a glass of wine and take a hand of cards, though he could never recognise a five of spades at sight; he had laboriously to count the pips. In his own way he was kindness itself to his family. “Father,” says the filial biographer already quoted, “always let us have his own way and gave us everything he wanted. But, although we were only permitted such pleasures as would recommend themselves to a middle-aged statesman, ours was nevertheless a very merry home. We laughed at everything and everybody, especially at our father, and nobody enjoyed such laughter more than he did. I never knew anyone who so thoroughly appreciated a joke against himself.” But this unbending came rather late; as a younger man, with young children, he was hopelessly stiff.

There was withal a massive innocence in the man. Of many of the facts of life he was more ignorant than seemed possible for any human being. He could read the naughtiest of novels without seeing anything objectionable, and indeed would sometimes recommend to young women books full of suggestiveness which he might have picked up and glanced at with a certain interest and no understanding. This, of course, was in the evening of his life, when his daughter’s success as a novelist—a success which filled him with a certain awed delight—had modified severer early views of light literature. She relates how he used to read her manuscripts and offer “superbly useless” advice. Thus in one book there is the following scrap of conversation:

“Father,” says his daughter, “underlined the ‘No.’ ‘I should not say that; it is too conclusive. I should say ‘Not yet.’ And he didn’t understand why we laughed.”

Such was Henry Hartley Fowler at home. In business his solemnity was intensified. The shadow of a frustrated ambition hung over all this side of his life. In his youth he had cast longing eyes on the Bar; it would have pleased him to reach the Bench after a successful career as an advocate, and it was with reluctance that he took up the lower branch of the profession. However, whatever he had to do must be well done, and he had won a considerable local reputation at Wolverhampton when he joined a brother Wesleyan, Sir Robert Perks, in establishing an office in London. The understanding between them was that the firm should never touch criminal work, that it should have nothing to do with building societies, that it should not take County Court cases, and that it should never act for women. This self-denying ordinance did not interfere with the success of the business. Within four years the firm had its hands full with Parliamentary Committee work, and the twenty-five years of the partnership were equally respectable and lucrative.

Meanwhile the second great ambition of Henry Fowler—the first was his marriage to Ellen Thorneycroft—was being advanced by steady interest in municipal politics, and in 1880 he became what from his earliest manhood he had wanted to be, Member of Parliament for Wolverhampton. Ten years sufficed to build a solid House of Commons reputation and to form a number of valuable friendships, of which that with John Morley was perhaps the most constant and intimate. By the Nineties he had established himself firmly as one of the indispensables of Liberalism. Yet his position was a little singular. He was not particularly liked by his chief. He was not especially popular with his colleagues. Apart from his position as a representative of Nonconformity, he had no sort of following in the country. He could hardly have maintained himself had he not been, within his limits, a strong and able man. His main quality was a cold clearness of head which fitted him to get at once to the heart of any complicated business matter. Understanding certain things thoroughly himself, he had the gift of making them understandable to others. His style of speaking was not attractive; and on the platform he adopted the attitudes usually associated with a Victorian philanthropist’s statue, his only gesture being the monotonous sawing up and down of a clumsy hand. But he “read” well, though rather dryly—never a happy illustration, or a touch of fancy, or a suggestion of the daintier kind of scholarship; now and again, however, he would rise to a grave and liturgical kind of declamation which was not without its impressiveness. He was master of something which was not perhaps eloquence, but occasionally had the effect of such—a power of putting a case in such fashion that even partisans were a little ashamed of resisting it. One of these sudden splendours arrived opportunely to save the Liberal Government of the Nineties from defeat. Sir Henry Fowler, who had been bitterly disappointed by Mr. Gladstone’s gift of the Local Government Board, had earned his promotion from Lord Rosebery, and was more happily bestowed at the India Office. Here he had to face a serious crisis. The Viceroy in Council had decreed, in order to meet a deficiency in revenue, certain import duties on cotton and cotton goods. Lancashire, always sensitive as to its Indian market, revolted, and when the Secretary rose the dismissal of the Government seemed assured. The House would assuredly have been proof against the best debating effort of Sir William Harcourt, for it would have regarded such a speech as common form, to be met by common form in the lobbies. It would probably have been deaf to any pleading from Mr. Morley, being suspicious of him as a professor of ideals. But the plain Wolverhampton solicitor managed to carry conviction by a singular combination of sober reasoning and moral appeal. His very lack of imagination helped him; it seemed impossible that such a man could be so moved without the most powerful reasons. “The best part of my speech,” he said afterwards, “was never delivered, but I saw the tide had turned and sat down. The art of speaking is knowing when to sit down.”

Naturally enough, he never again reached the level of his Indian days, for he was seventy-six when he entered Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman’s Cabinet, and even an older man politically than he was physically. There was in the late Nineties a momentary idea of making him Sir William Harcourt’s successor. But he was neither a force with the people nor a favourite with the clubs; the gift of small talk was not his, and he had neither the capacity nor the wish to cultivate arts foreign to his nature. The ruler of men must be either a man or a riddle. Sir Henry Fowler lacked humanity, and everybody knew the answer to him.

CHAPTER XIX
AUBREY BEARDSLEY

Aubrey Beardsley represented most authentically a special aspect of the Nineties. There were two main attitudes in the thought of the period. Most that was virile was Imperialistic; Mr. Kipling was but the greatest of a whole school, and Mr. Chamberlain did not so much form an Imperialistic party as place himself at the head of a party already formed. There was much that was admirable in this enthusiasm, but it tended, like most enthusiasms, to a certain falsity of view. Mr. Balfour has remarked on the difficulty of finding any enthusiast who will tell the simple truth, and the constant contemplation of maps coloured red undoubtedly led to failure to appreciate the other colours of the palette. Too much stress was laid on Medicine Hat and Bulawayo; the silent men with strong chins, who passed their lives predominating over people black, brown, and yellow, were somewhat too readily assumed to be the only people who mattered; and, just as the earlier nineteenth-century industrialist had looked only to more machinery to cure the ills much machinery (working fatalistically) had already created, so the late nineteenth-century Imperialist, while conscious that everything was not lovely in East Ham, could only think of making things right with another slice of East Africa.