British Personalities
I
THERE was once, says the Japanese Æsop, a poor husbandman who wrung with great toil a pitiful subsistence from a few tan of rice-land. On this land was an old tree-stump. One day, while the husbandman was complaining to Heaven of his hard lot, a hare ran across the field, and, striking its head against the tree-stump, fell senseless. The husbandman, being an indifferent Buddhist, with no objection to flesh-meat, took the hare home for his dinner. Afterward he reflected. ‘How much easier,’ said he, ‘is it to pick up hares which stun themselves against treestumps than to labor all day in the heavy mud of the paddy field! I will erect more tree-stumps. I shall get more hares and live all my years in ease and fatness.’ So he planted tree-stumps everywhere, neglected his husbandry, and, in due time, perished miserably, victim of the wrath of Heaven and of his own impious folly.
There is something in the attitude of the British Opposition parties which reminds one of this Japanese husbandman. Ever since 1918 they have been depending, not on their own energy, or vision, or originality, but on the mistakes of Mr. Lloyd George’s Government. It must be admitted that they have enjoyed vastly better luck than the fool of the fable. Not once alone has the chance meal come to them. Government hares, for whom all the year is March, are constantly coming into disastrous collision with fact; and their incaution so far has saved even the trouble of preparing traps. There is, to drop metaphor, scarcely an error of commission or omission which the Prime Minister and his colleagues have failed to perpetrate during the last three years. Their record is nothing so simple as doing the things which they ought not to have done and leaving undone the things they ought to have done. There are few things that they have done that they have not also come to undo, and they have done most things to which, at some time or another, they have declared no pressure should compel them.
But the Government itself is not undone. Thanks to the feebleness of the Opposition, it takes no hurt from a superiority to consistency carried to lengths of which the late Mr. Chamberlain — who declared that it was not important to be consistent, but only ‘to be always right’ — never dreamed. A minister will compliment himself highly on the inception and passage of a certain act of Parliament. Six months later, the same minister is equally eloquent and assured in proposing its repeal. On both occasions he has the warm approbation of the greater part of the press, while the public looks on with languid and not unsympathetic amusement.
Resignation on a question of principle is now almost unknown; and rare examples are treated with a disrespect not likely to encourage such quixotry. When Dr. Addison, taking amiss the reversal of his policy, left the Government, there were but two feelings among his colleagues. One was that he was presumptuous to indulge a delicacy not practised by his betters. The other was scandalized astonishment at his unthriftiness. Every speech on the subject seemed to have as its inspiration a vision of the unhappy ex-Minister selling toys on Ludgate Hill some years hence.
Yet it would no doubt be unjust to connect what Gladstone would certainly have considered a shameless disregard, not only of the etiquette of statesmanship, but of the basic principles of Cabinet Government, with a mere desire to retain the emoluments of office. There is no reason to suppose that men of affairs are more grasping than they were; and many of them, we may note, could do better in business. The explanation is rather to be found in the peculiar psychology of the modern British minister. The great trouble of England just now is not the sordid greed, but the lofty and disinterested ambition, of her new race of supermen. Whether they represent a hitherto unknown variety of politician, or whether they have only caught Mr. Lloyd George’s complaint, they are all afflicted with the fatal desire to do good, and with the equally fatal illusion that good can be done by no others than themselves.
Perhaps the fault, in the first place, was that of the public. There was a time when the average British citizen deeply resented any attempt to overgovern him. He said in effect: ‘Take your salaries, concoct your jobs, talk your nonsense, break every commandment of God and Lindley Murray, but spare us one thing: do not govern us.’ That was laissez faire. A wholesome instinct, it was carried just a little too far, and after a time the British people, thinking undergovernment had been overdone, ventured to remark: ‘After all, for what are all these salaries paid, these privileges and honors given, if not for doing something?’ It was a natural question, but, as the event proved, an imprudent one. ‘So,’reflected the brighter and more adaptable politicians, ‘England wants government. Well, England shall have it.’
England has been having it ever since, and too much of it. The modern minister does not look on himself as an administrator, but as a creative artist. He goes about like an inversion of the old enemy, seeking, not what he may devour, but what he may contrive. In one of Mr. Henry Arthur Jones’s comedies, there is a woman who, seeking a pretext for her husband’s baronetcy, asks feverishly: ‘Oh, what does the town want? A museum, a winter garden, swings on the common, a parrot-house? Oh, do tell me, someone ! ’
That has long been the frame of mind of Mr. Lloyd George and his lieutenants. They are all consumed with a raging desire to do things, or (if they can think of nothing to do) to undo something that has already been done— the more solid, the better. It is easy to picture them in the watches of the night, wakeful in well-doing, torturing themselves as to what the country really does want, and never, by any chance, considering the preposterous possibility that it might want to be left alone. Suddenly a bright idea arrives; the minister dashes out of bed, imprisons it on paper, to mention it at the Cabinet next day; in a month, it becomes a bill; in three months, an act; and in twelve, a repeal bill.
To all this disinterested fury of legislative philanthropy the British public has so far been able to oppose only its character. It has listened helplessly, in wide-eyed bovine astonishment, to the explanation of plans for its benefit. Only when acts of Parliament were due to come into operation, did it summon up its passive strength, and that has generally sufficed in the long run to secure either formal repeal or informal noneffectiveness. The nation has been dazed by the nimbleness of mind on the Treasury Bench; and, however convinced that this quickness is not quite English, and therefore not quite safe, it has not felt the requisite confidence to declare decisively that there must be an end to all this passion for edification and lust of well-doing. It has lost all its illusions. They could hardly survive the quick changes of last year, culminating in that great Irish volte-face, which is now seen to have been as misjudged in time and method as it was, no doubt, right in principle. Still less could illusions endure after the verdict of the Geddes Committee on the finance of the ‘LandFit-for-Heroes’ schemes. Even less yet, could they continue, in face of £1,100,000,000 budgets and income tax, at six shillings in the pound.
Yet, curiously enough, there is no conscious and intelligent revulsion against the Government, on the scale which would seem to be justified by the deep disappointment of the nation. The Coalition is unpopular. The capricious genius at its head is deeply distrusted, even where he is still liked. He is not only losing his hold on the popular imagination, but (what is a serious thing in a man of his temperament) he knows it. The last year has been a great change in him. He can rise, with an effort, to a particular emergency, but he has no longer the zest, the gay courage, and the boundless self-confidence, which once distinguished him. He is a worried man, with lessened self-control, and an air that suggests a pained premonition of coming failure.
Mr. Balfour was in much such a situation and mood during those months before the great defeat of 1906. Yet, despite the surface similarity of the circumstances, they are really very different. There should be, on the face of things, ample opportunity for the Opposition, and a daily clearer prospect of an alternative Government. Yet at no time since the war has there appeared less evidence of constructive processes in British politics. The Coalition is slowly dissolving; it has certainly lost the greater part of whatever spiritual vitality it once possessed, and its cohesion is almost purely mechanical. It might be compared, not inaptly, to the sick man in Poe’s grim tale, who was really dead, but was maintained in a ghastly appearance of life by the spell of the mesmerist. When the spell was broken, it will be remembered, the seeming solid body liquefied, almost on the instant, into putrescence. Such a fate might well be that of Mr. Lloyd George’s Administration, if the natural forces at work were permitted their full disintegrative efficacy. But, while there is no incantation powerful enough to restore vitality, dissolution is held in check, not, as in the Poe tale, by a powerful exterior will, but merely by its absence. Decay proceeds, and can hardly be arrested; but there is no authoritative voice to say, ‘You are dead; the only decent thing you can do is to get buried.’
II
Mr. Asquith possesses no such voice. For him also there is appropriateness in a parable of life-in-death. When the Japanese Napoleon, the great Hideyoshi, died at the crisis of his Korean campaign, his followers were afraid to permit intelligence of their loss to reach the enemy. So the body, embalmed with great skill, and ‘plated in habiliments of war,’ was mounted on the customary charger, surrounded by the usual pomp, and shown at the head of the army. All, however, to no avail; prestige could not compensate the loss of living vigor; the Koreans found that, whether or not Hideyoshi lived, his genius was dead; and when the trick was finally exposed, they were even more contemptuously confident than if it had never been attempted. In the same way, it would have paid the Independent Liberals better to have put any living sergeant-major at their head rather than have paraded the defunct dignity and prestige of Mr. Asquith. For Mr. Asquith has too obviously survived his qualities. The strain of the war, the weight of years, the oppression of cruel bereavement, the desolating sense of being an anachronism in this new and harsh world — all these factors, and perhaps others still more personal, have deprived him of the energy, still more of the hope and eagerness, necessary to the leader of a party whose first task is to remake itself.
On one ground, indeed, Mr. Asquith, if he were other than himself, might win the sympathy of a people overwrought with bureaucratic meddling. He is the representative of what Mr. Lloyd George condemned as ‘humdrum Liberalism’; he has laissez faire in the very marrow of his bones; and the average British citizen is beginning to rediscover virtue in that philosophy. But Mr. Asquith has not the knack of putting an old truth in a new way; he is, carelessly rather than deliberately, sympathetic with youth (unless it be enveloped in crêpe-de-Chine or georgette), and his appeal to the rank-andfile is feeble. I happened to be at a dinner of the Cobden Club which Mr. Asquith addressed, a little while ago, and the whole business seemed highly symbolical of his situation as a leader. There were few under seventy present; the chairman tottered under the weight of over eighty years; and every argument, allusion, and form of speech belonged to the golden age of Queen Victoria. Where he happens to be upto-date, Mr. Asquith contrives always to be unpopular. His arguments for the revision of the Versailles Treaty are, of course, inspired only by economic convictions, and his attitude is scarcely distinguishable from that of the Prime Minister himself; but somehow he can never speak on the subject without suggesting that kind of charity to the late enemy that infuriates a people which, while it does not want to perpetuate hate, is equally indisposed to ‘slobber.’
Most important of all, Mr. Asquith has not shown fight. Nine times out of ten he agrees with the Government , and the tenth time he attacks it with the caution of one who fears a damaging retort. He is easily cowed by the Prime Minister; he shows not only dislike but timidity in the House of ‘Hard Faces’; as Lord Morley said of Harcourt, he ‘misses old stable companions, and dislikes new ones’; and he has little encouragement, and even some disdain, for members of his own slender cohort. Mr. Balfour was in somewhat the same position after the disaster of 1906. But in that case the first failure was the last. Mr. Balfour — one accepts thankfully the privilege of the past tense, to speak of the great Commoner under his own honored name — set to work to study the new assembly as he would have studied a new language; and he was rewarded by perhaps the most remarkable recovery of which English political history affords example. Mr. Asquith lacks both the patience and the heart to copy Mr. Balfour, and the result has been a constant, progressive, and apparently irremediable diminution of his own prestige.
Nor can it be said that there is much hope in the other leaders of the Independent Liberals. Sir Donald Maclean, honest and not unintelligent, is still pedestrian and uninspiring; and the only other possible chief, Sir John Simon, is a younger, smaller, more acrid, and less majestic Asquith. There is often a rough justice in nicknames, and those who know Sir John Simon best call him ‘Foxy.’ It is certain that, he does not lack subtlety; and people who delight in the mere display of adroitness, without reference to the occasion of its exercise, never lose zest in retelling the story of how Lord Northcliffe’s brother, Lord Rothermere, was hurled out of office, as if by some patent ejector, through the patient ingenuity of Sir John Simon. This eminent lawyer showed, by his refusal of the Lord Chancellorship when it was to be had for the asking, that he nourishes political ambitions of the highest; and of late he has been playing Prince Hal to Mr. Asquith’s moribund Bolingbroke.
But in this case the crown has to be won; and though there may be no reason to doubt Sir John’s qualification to wear the purple, his capacity to snatch it from its present wearer is another question. Like Mr. Asquith, he has clearness of head, lucidity of expression, and that gift of rather depressing infallibility which belongs to all who are in the succession of John Stuart Mill. But, still more than Mr. Asquith, he is deficient in the power of raising men’s pulses; no great word ever falls from his lips, and the lesser words never attain enough momentum to give, as with Mr. Lloyd George, the suggestion of greatness to what, when analyzed, may be really of little account. That he is not incapable of sacrifice for principle was shown by his resignation from the Government on the question of conscription. It is not always, however (as Macaulay remarked about the Nonjurors), that martyrdom permanently elevates; and the grave interruption to his career which resulted from his self-pronounced decree of exile seems to have had a somewhat unfavorable effect on the externals of Sir John Simon’s political character. Never constructive, he has become rather harshly and narrowly critical; and the genuine, if rather mechanical, geniality he displayed in the days when he was the infant phenomenon of politics, has given place to something sharp and cynical. He seemed formerly to regard everybody, friend or foe, with a good nature slightly tinctured with contempt; the contempt remains, but it has a more acid flavoring.
Moreover, if he does not share Mr. Asquith’s stately indifference to popularity, he is at least as deficient in the arts which ensure it. Freely spending a great professional income, he makes no impression as an entertainer; showing himself much in public, he fails altogether to capture the heart or inflame the imagination of the people. Like his nominal leader, he might prove a perfectly competent general for a political army already in being; he is hardly the man to make a small company formidable, or a dispirited company enthusiastic.
Beyond these, there is little or nothing. Hopelessly scattered is that brilliant knot of men who surrounded Mr. Asquith between 1909 and 1914. Some, like Lord Haldane, are superannuated; some, like Mr. Churchill, have so far dropped to the Right as to make return to Liberalism almost impossible; some, like Mr. Reginald McKenna, — who seemed rather like a banker when he was in politics, and seems much more like a statesman now he is a banker, — have left politics altogether.
III
Without doubt, the true strength of Liberalism is with the Independents, and not with that depressed and somewhat depressing fragment which tries to persuade itself that Mr. Lloyd George is still, at bottom, the man of the Budget and the Land Campaign. But though an election would probably give Mr. Asquith a considerably increased following in the House of Commons, it is not easy to see how Liberalism can yet reëstablish itself as a serious candidate for power. In rustic England a crude form of pleasantry used to be popular. A father or big brother, with a cake to divide among the youngsters, would begin by announcing, ‘Them as asks shan’t have; them as don’t ask don’t want.’ Of course everybody asked. It was the only policy, however unpromising. But that is precisely what the Liberals are not doing. In their whole attitude, in everything they say and do, resides the implication that they do not expect to win an election when it comes. Consequently, they must lose that very powerful body of opinion which, on grounds not necessarily frivolous, likes to be on the winning side. The Liberals might have a chance if they assumed success. They are ensuring defeat by acknowledging in advance that it is certain.
A little time ago it might have seemed possible to modify somewhat this view. For a moment it appeared that the return to politics of Viscount Grey of Fallodon had influenced the situation to the marked advantage of the Independent Liberals. Lord Grey, onee the most highly praised, has latterly been the most unjustly depreciated, of British statesmen. His judgment and his knowledge have been equally questioned. He has, however, never lost the confidence — of popularity in its true sense he never had anything to lose — of those who place a due value on moral qualities in their man of affairs, and there are many who would willingly sacrifice much more clever and brilliant men if they could in exchange be assured of the singleness of mind, the sobriety of judgment, the perfect honesty and absence of self-seeking, which they know would characterize the administration of Lord Grey.
That he has always been a little aloof from his own party, and that he has been an object of sleepless suspicion to its extreme Left wing, would have been no disadvantage. For he is free from the suspicions which, however unjustly, dog the footsteps of the Independent Liberal leaders. While none could imagine Lord Grey favoring the perpetuation of hatreds in Europe, or pursuing a policy of militant imperialism elsewhere, it was equally out of the question to suspect him of any leaning toward the Teutonic camp in Europe, or toward the Little England conventicle at home.
Again, while political convictions, as well as the natural instincts of his class, would impress on him the vital importance of economy in national housekeeping, he would with equal certainty avoid the opposite error of maiming essential public services. On questions like defense, on questions like education, he might be depended on to trim between the opposite extremes of dangerous meanness and prodigal extravagance. Men like Lord Grey are the best fitted to check the exaggerations of experts. They know that, as the late Lord Salisbury said, ‘To the soldier nothing is safe, to the doctor nothing is wholesome, to the theologian nothing is innocent’; and they are gifted — it is perhaps an hereditary power, the result of ages of family experience in practical affairs — with an almost automatic perception of the frontier line between a saving prudence and a ruinous overinsurance.
Moreover, after a surfeit of Celtic brilliance, there was something inviting in Lord Grey’s English unimaginativeness; after so much twopence-colored epic, it was a relief to contemplate the reign of a penny-plain prosaist. It is quite true that Lord Grey is not qualified for the part of a popular leader. He has never had to fight for anything. All the places he has occupied have been thrust on him, almost against his inclination. Over the public he exercises no charm or witchery of speech, and even the connoisseur can find little to commend beyond lucidity and the dignity of perfect temperance of phrase. He belongs, in short, to that order of men whom everyone respects but nobody idolizes. His own party has always contained a large minority positively hostile to him; and, though he has often been supported against this faction by the Conservatives, it cannot be said that in any quarter he commands more than a partial and lukewarm approval.
His position as a peer is a disadvantage the more. But against all this is that power of being ‘pontifical’ which Lord Birkenhead, himself conscious of some deficiency in that regard, so strongly resents. The English people have still at heart a weakness for the pontifical. They may laugh at it, but they are impressed by it, and rather scandalized by its converse. They are somewhat tired of having grave international matters discussed in the spirit of a ‘rag’; they feel instinctively the danger of treating allies as if they were Opposition leaders; they remember how Gladstone would have dealt with a Lord Northcliffe, and ask themselves whether the new style does not betoken a certain weakness.
Perhaps the truth of the matter cannot be put more tersely than by Lord Robert Cecil, in a speech the other day. Wherein, he asks, resides the special fitness of Lord Grey to head a Government? ‘Perhaps I may be allowed to put it like this. I do not know of any other man who differs so completely, both in his qualities and his defects, from the Prime Minister, and I am quite sure that the people of this country require in their statesmen that characteristic above all others at the present time.’
IV
This acid judgment probably commands, at any rate, the limited assent of a majority. People admire Mr. Lloyd George; they revel in his cleverness; they like to back him, as they would Dempsey or Carpentier, against less agile and dexterous professors of the noble art of political self-defense. But they never quite trust him — not because they feel that he is dishonest, but because they recognize that he has so little respect for facts, whether as concerns things or persons, and so exceptional a capacity for convincing himself of the impossibility of his ever being wrong. On those, indeed, who come within the orbit of his personal influence, Mr. George continues to exercise a power which is almost magical, and would, in the Middle Ages, have put him in serious danger of a trial for sorcery. Solemn people, with a deep sense of duty, like Mr. Chamberlain; flippant people, with a keen sense of humor, like Lord Birkenhead, are equally under the dominion of his spell while he is near them.
The only remedy for such atrophy of the powers of independent judgment is lack of propinquity; and the efficacy of a few months’ rest-cure is strikingly illustrated by the case of Mr. Bonar Law. While he was in the Cabinet, no man had more completely subordinated himself to the Prime Minister; he was, like the Jesuit, a corpse in the hands of his superior. But since his return to the House of Commons as a private member, he has revealed an individuality of view which even permits the discontented Conservatives to hope that the time may come when he will again lead a united and distinct Tory Party.
The general public, which cannot always be under the spell of Mr. George’s oratory, and in the nature of things cannot feel the more subtle charm of his personality, has shared the advantages of the detachment which Mr. Bonar Law has found so efficacious; and the tinge of distrust which mingled even with the postArmistice worship has been steadily stimulated by the contortions and tergiversations of the last twelve months. In this distrust every colleague of the Prime Minister is included, with one possible exception; and there are not wanting those who incline to look on the Earl of Balfour’s garter as a bowstring, and his peerage as a mausoleum, thoughtfully provided lest, haply, Mr. Balfour’s great services at Washington should linger inconveniently in the public mind. No particle of such distrust, however, attaches to Lord Grey; and Lord Robert Cecil is probably not far wrong when he holds that there would be a general sigh of relief if the late Foreign Secretary were entrusted with the formation of a Government.
But Lord Grey cannot form a Government until he has a due following in the House of Commons and in the country. That he might, in given circumstances, successfully lead a reunited Liberal Party is doubtless true. It is also possible that he might, in other given circumstances, become, almost despite himself, the head of a counter-Coalition, composed of various elements theoretically discordant, but practically harmonious. But, for the moment, it is as futile to discuss such possibilities as to consider a problem in physics without reference to friction and gravitation. Lord Grey keeps studiously aloof from his old party; and even if he were identified with it, his bid for the leadership, in the absence of Mr. Asquith’s resignation, would merely imply a new schism. On the other hand, he has no party of his own, unless we exclude Lord Robert Cecil, whose efforts to ‘swarm alone’ have so far only earned the fate of Gilbert’s unconventional bee; that is to say, he has been decisively sent to Coventry by his old hive.
It has been suggested, once or twice, by the organ of the ‘Die-Hard’ Conservatives, that Lord Grey might form a combination of which they were the chief constituent. But it is difficult to see Lord Grey, with his genuine democratic sympathies and his enthusiasm for the League of Nations, in that galley, and not much easier to imagine a Die-Hard crew obedient to such a captain.
On the face of things, therefore, the prospect of an alternative Government is not materially advanced by Lord Grey’s resumption of political activities. That he is a formidable addition to the critics of the Government is a fact of relatively small importance. Critics, in fact, are the smallest want of the time, since the Government so largely saves them their labors by making their task superfluous. The one great need is a sound alternative administration, and that Lord Grey is apparently even more powerless than Mr. Asquith to offer.
(Next month Mr. Raymond will deal with the outstanding figures in the Labor Party, and will set down certain general conclusions.)