Studies of men

Contents

PAGE CARDINAL NEWMAN. ; ; : ‘ Te LORD GRANVILLE : ; e ‘ 8 MR. BALFOUR ; : ; 3 ; 17 MR. PARNELL ; : : s : 38 THE SEVENTH DUKE OF DEVONSHIRE . : j 48 MR. SPURGEON : ; : ; , 55 TENNYSON . , : : : : 66 THE GERMAN EMPEROR 5 : : ; 86 THE BIRTHPLACE OF THE BISMARCKS . é ; 97 A VISIT TO PRINCE BISMARCK . : Ne | FOr THE MASTER OF BALLIOL : i ; ey, PST PROFESSOR TYNDALL . : E : : 167 SIR EDWARD BURNE-JONES : : 3 eS) LORD ROSEBERY : , ; . ». £93 SIR WILLIAM HARCOURT : 4 : ean ono MRS. HUMPHRY WARD ‘ . ; e226 LORD BOWEN ; ; 5 : ISNT WILLIAM WALTER PHELPS : : : ee PRESIDENT CARNOT . | : : : Boar

THE PRIME MINISTER . : a : » 269 viii CONTENTS

PAGE MR. FROUDE . : : 7 5s V 286 MR. WINTHROP : : : : gO OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES 5 : : a ere MR. JOHN WALTER. : ; : seine FRANCIS MAGNARD. ‘ : : Seo LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL . a : 5 5368

II

If there be in fact—it is what the Irish are for ever alleging against him—anything cynical or contemptuous in Mr. Balfour, it is, I think, intellectual and not emotional or supercilious. He has a clear intelligence, and with it a certain impatience of that sort of intelligence which is less clear than his own. He treated Mr. Parnell with respect—no question about the clearness of his intelligence or that he was a man who, so far as mental gifts and force of character went, was entitled to respect. He treated the rest of the Irish with civility. This latter attitude did not prevent his saying many plain things to them. ‘They were said within the strictest limits of decorum, and were for that reason the more deadly. It isa secret which none of the Irish except Mr. Parnell has discovered. You might say of them, or an Irishman might, as Grattan said of Corry : ‘There is scarce a word they utter which is not a violation of the privileges of the House.’ The passage is interesting enough to continue :—

‘But I did not call him to order. Why? Because the limited talents of some men render it impossible for them to be severe without being unparliamentary, but before I sit down I shall show him how to be severe and Parliamentary at the same time.’

It is not quite in Mr. Balfour’s manner to announce beforehand that he is going to crush an enemy; he is not Irish, he is Scotch. But Grattan’s menace is one which Mr. Balfour has often fulfilled. He is a debater who answers to the description of Fox, probably the greatest debater the House ever saw,—he goes out in all weathers. This is not comparing him to Fox; comparisons may almost always be avoided, and are almost always misleading. Nor is it much of a compliment to say of any man that he reminds us of some other man. It is enough if he reminds us of himself, if he be individual, genuine, and a real force.

Five years ago Mr. Balfour was, like Napoleon Third, the nephew of his uncle. To-day it.is not quite clear whether the uncle or the nephew be the stronger man. Lord Salisbury is sixty-one, Prime Minister, Foreign Minister, the chief of a great party. Mr. Balfour is but forty-three, and his public career may be said to date from his acceptance of the Irish Secretaryship. But he is to-day leader of the assembly which, little as Lord Salisbury likes it, is the real centre of political authority in this country. He has made himself in these few years what he is—one of the first three debaters in the House. He has made himself master of the art not only of debate but of legislation. His conduct of the Land Purchase Bill was probably the ‘most skilful among some similar exploits because the Land Purchase Bill was one of the most difficult measures ever submitted to the House, and because Mr. Balfour succeeded where Mr. Gladstone had failed.

His education as a debater and legislator and master of Parliamentary strategy and tactics had to be carried on while he was governing Ireland, and governing it with a success for which there is no precedent in these days. His duties in Dublin were more difficult than ~ his duties in Westminster. He had to meet in Ireland the most powerful politico-agrarian organisation of modern times ; to deal with a conspiracy, criminal in. part and dependent on crime, to which a great portion of the Irish people were parties. He had to meet in the House of Commons one of the two or three greatest Parliamentary leaders of this century: the rival of Peel and of Disraeli. He had been Mr. Gladstone’s pupil and friend. Like everybody who comes in personal contact with that commanding nature, he had felt its influence deeply. People said he would never shake it off, just as Sir Stafford Northcote never shook it off. But Mr. Balfour is made of sterner stuff than the amiable Devonshire baronet. He broke with Mr. Gladstone completely. He emancipated his mind from the servitude in which the elder statesman would have kept it. He drew the necessary distinction between the Gladstone of other days, whom we all honoured and still honour, and the Gladstone who took the plunge of 1886, and whose moral nature seemed from that moment to suffer a transformation not less extraordinary than that of his political principles.

Mr. Balfour, like others, had to choose between an old friendship and the obligations of public duty. He chose with no more hesitation than any man of a generous nature must feel when such an alternative is put before him. The obligation of public duty was paramount ; it is a tradition of English statesmanship that it should be paramount. He exposed Mr. Gladstone’s perversions and prevarications of Irish affairs. His speeches on Mitchelstown and the even more melancholy Dopping incident, and Mr. Balfour's replies to them, may serve as samples. Not since Disraeli quitted the House of Commons had Mr. Gladstone been met in this spirit or with this firmness. He hardly knew what to make of it. He assumed towards his old friend that air of pained regret for his unaccountable errors which has often proved so effective. But in this case it was not effective. Fact and argument were too much for rhetoric; the truth prevailed: the victory in debate rested with the younger man, and Mr. Gladstone changed his methods.

The Gladstonian idclaters, in the press and elsewhere, told you in those days that Mr. Balfour ‘ insulted’ their god. I heard the same thing said of Mr. Bright, when Mr. Bright refused to follow his lifelong friend and leader down the steep grade that led to the Parnellite camp. ‘They meant, in each case, the same thing. It was an ‘ insult’ to Mr. Gladstone to cling to an opinion or a policy after he had abandoned it. It was an insult to prove him in the wrong ; to state facts when he took refuge in fancies; to rely on evidence rather than on the accuracy of his emotions. All these offences Mr. Balfour committed ; and Mr. Bright before him. To both of them the necessity of breaking with a friend was distressing, and to both of them loyalty to truth and to reason and to the Union were more than sentiment and affection.

Mr. Balfour gained a hold at the same time on the ‘people. It may be doubted whether he greatly cared to. His mind is not of that order which requires the confirmation of a popular majority for the verification of truth. He would not, I think, put the Sermon on the Mount to vote, either in the House of Commons or before the constituencies. He has convictions which a general election would not upset; beliefs which are not at the disposal of a political caucus. He would dare to say an unpopular thing, or to do one. The © outcry against his Irish policy, whether in Ireland or England, never moved him. He had studied the situation ; he had made up his mind; he had adopted a policy. Ifthe country and the House agreed with him and supported him, well and good. He rejoiced in the support for the sake of the policy he thought wise, and of the country to which it would restore peace. If not, if his majority failed him, he would hand over his authority to another. But in no circumstances can I conceive Mr. Balfour undergoing a conversion because a majority was not to be had at any other price. Never would he have appealed to the people of England at one election to give him a majority to maintain the Union and to deal with Ireland independently of the Irish, and when it had been refused have discovered that Ireland could only be dealt with dependently upon the Irish, and by disunion.

Nevertheless—or may it have been because he would neither flatter them nor surrender to them ?—the people of England presently began to respect this young man, and to like him. He succeeded to that inheritance of sympathetic goodwill which a former colleague had flung away. He became a popular favourite without ever making an appeal to popular passion or prejudice or a single concession to popular caprice. It was creditable both to the people and to him. Mr. Bryce notes it as a trait of the American people that they expect conformity, and neither understand nor respect independence, nor tolerate a statesman or writer who refuses to obey their wish. I do not believe it. I believe the exact contrary. I think it far more likely to be true of England than of America, because the political training and general intelligence of the new majority in England are so far inferior to the

American standard. Mr. Balfour’s career shows that it is not true, or not always true, here. More than that, he is by birth, and by nature, what is called an aristocrat, and not a democrat. In tastes and in feelings as well as in opinion and in his political ideas, he is remote from any conceivable democratic view. But even this remoteness and this spirit of self-reliance do not diminish the regard in which he is held. He attracts a greater audience than any other of his party to any platform from which he speaks. He speaks with tact and good sense and good breeding, and knows how to reach other minds.

When the Tories of Birmingham revolted against the edict of the Carlton Club which condemned them to accept a Liberal Unionist candidate, the situation was perhaps the most perilous, from a party point of view, which has occurred since the Unionists have been in power. The local managers simply refused to be bound by the solemn compact between their leaders and the Liberal Unionists. They were determined to reclaim that share in the Parliamentary representation of Birmingham to which their numbers entitled them. As so often happens with the local ‘ bosses,’ they shut their eyes to all consideration of general policy. For a moment, it seemed as if the alliance between Tories and Liberal Unionists might be endangered by this stubbornness in Birmingham,—an alliance on which depended not merely the existence of their Government but the existence of the Union. Mr. Balfour was asked to go down and talk to these rebellious and stiff-necked gentlemen of the Midlands. He went. He made them a short speech,—short, but so full of sweetness and light, so persuasive, so convincing, that they were completely won over. They renounced their — claims. They submitted themselves to the authority of the Carlton and of the Cabinet. They did what they were wanted to do. The breach was healed ; the peril averted. It was said at the time, and I think truly said, that nobody but Mr. Balfour could haye wrought this miracle. Wrought it was, at any rate, and by him, and it is a good illustration of the singular fascination he exercises upon popular bodies as well as upon the House of Commons and upon individuals.

Ill [LoNDON, may 1894]

They who did not hear and do not read Mr. Balfour on Monday on the Welsh Disestablishment Bill, and who yet care to know what sort of a speech he made, may well be puzzled by the conflicting opinions of the papers. ‘One of the most brilliant, searching, and impressive speeches that he has ever delivered in the House of Commons,’ says the chief Unionist authority. Then if you turn to the party organ of Liberalism you read: ‘His speech on the first reading of the Welsh Church Bill was one of the tamest and the most perfunctory he has ever delivered in the House of Commons.’ This you may think nothing but the natural antagonism of friend and foe. But it is not quite that. There is a streak of fairness even in politics, if you know where to look for it. Turn to another Liberal organ and you will find this speech described as expert, unequal, but with intervals of eloquence and force, and its tone almost consistently good. Take a third Liberal authority, and you will be assured that Mr. Balfour made the best of a bad case. A fourth Liberal thinks nothing could have been more admirably attuned than the opening, that it was in the best Gladstonian parliamentary style, and that it ‘had that elevation of tone which Mr. Balfour perhaps recalls to one more than any other speaker left in the House.’

As to Mr. Balfour, it may be said on the evidence of the best judges on both sides of the House of Commons, that he is rapidly becoming a very great member of Parliament indeed. I have heard from a dozen sources a remark to the effect that Mr. Gladstone’s mantle has descended upon him and not upon any of those who sat by the great Liberal’s side. Mr. Balfour inherits the great traditions which to Mr. Gladstone were always precious ; traditions from which he never departed till late in life, and seldom then. He has something of the dignity, the elevation of tone, the courtesy, the grand manner, which distinguished Mr. Gladstone. It might be hard to say who else on the floor of the House has them. The Speaker has, and he has also the authority which, in a measure, belongs to his office but which is never really effective unless it be personal also.

On one ever-memorable occasion Mr. Peel showed how full the measure of it was, when Mr. Gladstone totally failed to exert his as Leader of the House—I mean the night of the riot last year. I always thought, and I still think, that Mr. Gladstone knew himself to be responsible for that deplorable explosion of pent-up passions—passions which he, perhaps unwittingly at first and beyond question in the end regretfully, had provoked. So depressing was the effect upon himself that when the Speaker called upon him to give an account of what had happened, he could not. During the tumult, the din of battle, the exchange of blows, the old man had sat with a white, scared face, shrinking from the reality which was before him. He had made no effort to quell the riot. It is no reproach to an old man past eighty that he had not. But neither had Mr. Balfour, nor was Mr. Balfour, when asked by the Speaker for his statement, in much better condition to give it than Mr. Gladstone. It was not a question mainly of age, but of temperament, and both men seemed to feel the same abhorrence of a violent scene, and the same incapacity to deal with it or to accept any part, even for good, in such a transaction. Whereas the mere return of the Speaker to the chair, his mere presence, his look, and the sound of his magnificent voice, every tone instinct with command, had sufficed to restore order. I had no intention of recurring to this painful episode, but it throws light on the analogies between Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Balfour. Neither of them was, or is, an ideal leader, because both of them possess in a high degree certain qualities which fit them for other things than the leadership of an assembly which is often turbulent and often, like Martha, anxious about many things which are not vital nor of high import.

Mr. Balfour’s growth as leader and as debater has been retarded much more by his qualities than by his defects. It was long before he could persuade himself to take politics very seriously ; and I am certain that nobody else could have persuaded him to do it. The two things he had most in common with Mr. Gladstone were sweetness of nature and intellectuality. Mr. Gladstone was put so early to political work that the more delicate and tender traits of his character took on a certain robustness which was perhaps in the beginning foreign to him. The gold was alloyed to make it more fit for the mechanical arts of public life. Mr. Balfour entered politics as an amateur, and an amateur he long remained. He served no regular apprenticeship. His membership of the Fourth Party left him full leisure for the pursuits he preferred. As a statesman, Ireland taught him his fullest if not his first lesson. To govern that country, and to govern it firmly and well, is no holiday task, nor can any man emerge from a four years’ experience of rule at Dublin Castle without a feeling that he has been tried as by fire. If he is not consumed he comes out the stronger. It adds temper to the steel, but there must be steel.

Then, in the true English fashion, having thoroughly learned the high and difficult business of administration and of government, Mr. Balfour was summoned to a post requiring totally different qualifications. Upon the death of Mr. W. H. Smith, he was made leader of the House of Commons. Perhaps you remember with what eager glee, during the first few weeks and even months, the Gladstonian organs predicted and proclaimed his failure. He made various mistakes. He provoked hostilities among his own followers, some of whom talked of mutiny and of deposing their chief. Mr. Balfour’s way of meeting the revolt was entirely characteristic. ‘ By all means,’ he said, ‘ I shall be only too delighted if you will; and if you disown my authority I shall go to-morrow.’ The rebels collapsed. Quite slowly, as if there were always leisure and always time enough for everything, he learnt his business. The only real obstacle to his success was his easy indifference. He had other interests in life than the second reading of a stupid bill, or the discipline of a party which, if not stupid, was, in Mill’s time, as he told us, the stupider. He came down to the House late and went — away early. Not on those terms can this zealous and - exacting body be controlled. I imagine that Mr. Balfour went through a struggle with himself as he did with the House. He had to choose whether he would lead or not. He came to see clearly what sacrifices leadership involves, and what Mr. Disraeli meant when he said that the secret of leading the House of Commons is to be always there. It is a hard trial and a hard life, physically and mentally. But Mr. Balfour resolved to accept the conditions, and to apply himself to the duties of the post he had accepted as he would toa problem in metaphysics. From that moment his success was secure,—secure but very far from complete. It is not complete yet. He is growing. If anybody thinks that a criticism, perhaps he will recall the definition of wisdom as ‘to grow old learning, and perhaps he will remember that Mr. Gladstone once accepted it as a description of his own life.

As matters now stand, Mr. Balfour has but one rival in the House as a debater, and if you look at oratory as something more than a provision for the contentious necessities of the moment, he has none. Alone he touches the note which rang from the silver trumpet that was Mr. Gladstone’s. Alone he breathes the upper air. Alone he treads with a sure foot the heights which Mr. Bright and Mr. Gladstone—and in our time no other—trod before him. He is not yet, and he probably may never be, the equal of either, but he is of kin to both. He has not Bright’s noble simplicity. He has not Mr. Gladstone’s infinite variety, nor his august personality. But he has the intellectual integrity of the one, and the power which the other possessed in a still higher degree, of broadening the range of debate and lifting it into a purer region.

He is capable, and I know not who else is capable, of

C the heroic strain in the commonly rather prosaic afiairs which a Legislature has ‘to deal with. In a few sentences near the end of the Welsh speech there is a tone which has hardly been heard in the House since death closed the lips of Mr. Bright. He said : ‘I cannot say how this battle of disestablishment, of which the first guns were fired on Thursday night, will end. I dare not venture to prophesy, for I do not know. But this I will say, that this is one of those causes in which, if we are to be defeated, I would rather perish with the side that loses than triumph with the side which is victorious.’ That is what I mean by the heroic, which I might equally well cite as an example of spiritual exaltation. It is followed almost at once by the philosophical estimate, never wanting from any speech on a subject on which Mr. Balfour really feels deeply :

‘I suppose we all attempt to gauge and estimate the forces which are silently at work moulding the future of society. I believe that those forces are on our side. (Hear, hear!) I believe now that the prospects of the Church Establishment, even in the face of this bill, are far brighter than they were a generation ago. I think a new spirit is springing up. The democracy, which is slowly moulding for good or for evil the creed on which it will attempt to guide the destinies of this country, is not, I _ think, in harmony with the kind of speeches to which we have listened to-night or with the idea which lies behind such speeches. I believe the democracy hold, as I hold, that for the welfare of the community this standing witness to great spiritual forces in every parish of the country is a vital necessity, and that they will not allow the machinery by which these great objects are to be carried out to be impaired, either to satisfy the greed of a too | economical ratepayer or to satisfy the envy of rival Noncomformist sects.’ 5

There are in this same speech other passages which reveal the real Balfour very clearly, but I will make no more quotations. These are enough to indicate that the Leader of the Opposition understands well how to appeal to the whole House, and that there are subjects of which the interest is to him immensely greater than the interest of politics.

Feb. 1895.—Mr. Balfour’s reappearance as a theologian, long expected though it has been, stirs no little interest among not theologians only, but among philosophers, men of science, and men of the world.. The newspapers, which seldom seek to handle such matters editorially, discuss him with animation, if not always with a very clear view of what he is aiming at. They discuss him in certain quarters, also, with a feeling of dismay, due to their perception of the fact that the Conservative leader is in the high sense of the word a sceptic; such a sceptic, that is, as Montaigne was, ‘as Pascal was, and perhaps, nearest of all, as Newman was. His spirit, where it is not sceptical, is essentially scientific. Perhaps there is not so very much difference between the two. His book is entitled The Foundation of Belief: At first sight, or as a first impression, he may seem rather to unsettle the foundations than to strengthen them. That will not, I think, be found the ultimate effect of this treatise. It might almost be described as a new religion on the ruins of the new philosophy. ‘That would come as near the truth as most epigrams do. But the book cannot be dismissed in an epigram, and of course cannot be reviewed by cable. I do not attempt an account of it. I wish only to remark that it cannot be put aside, either by metaphysicians or theologians. It is, from whatever point, of view you look at it, a contribution to the thought of the time on the most important and difficult problems of all time.

Mr. Balfour has long been a philosophical student. He knows the literature of his subject. Long before he made a name in politics or led a party or graduated as a statesman, he was known to his friends and to a few readers of unusual books as an acute and daring thinker, trained in a severe school of dialectic. Historically and ethically he is master of his subject, and as a logician he has not many superiors in this or other fields. Thus equipped, he has plunged into what may still be called the conflict between religion and science. He attacks Rationalism and Naturalism, of which he deems an ethical Nihilism the inevitable outcome. He rejects the philosophy of the senses. He declares the assumption of the existence of a God more defensible on scientific grounds than the proposition of science that there is an independent material world. Nevertheless, he shrinks throughout from anything like a definite statement of belief. He offers only a provisional solution of existing difficulties. Once more he affirms, as all theologians have had to affirm, the necessity of faith, which he curiously qualifies as a faith not in excess of reason, as if reason ‘had anything to do with that - matter. The synthesis of which he is in search, a synthesis in which scientific thought and religious thought may find a common denominator, is not to be had without sacrifices on both sides.

Some of the admissions and assertions Mr. Balfour makes must leave the orthodox aghast. Most certainly they will not accept his processes, hardly even his conclusions, nor yet his definition of the knowable and unknowable, and still less his adoption of Hume’s .

arguments. Hume, nevertheless, and his own mind, led him to a conclusion remote from Hume’s, and though he will not base a conclusion on the old argument from design, which Hume refuted once for all, he reaches in the end the theory that the origin of the world must be sought in the presupposition of a rational being. On that the new religion is to rest, and the new religion on such a basis is not so very far off from the old, except that it will contain a good deal less of dogmatic theology and much more of spiritual insight, as well as of that unflinching effort toward truth to which the intellect and reason have more to say than mere unaided faith. As a whole, Mr. Balfour’s book will be thought an attempt to make a stand against Agnosticism, and so it is; but Agnosticism has none the less a firmer hold on his mind than he himself is aware of, and the ultimate effect of his speculations may supply a foundation for scepticism rather than a foundation for belief.

[LONDON, OCTOBER 1891]

Sincutar indeed is the decree of destiny which on the same day struck down two of the three foremost men in the House of Commons. Mr. W. H. Smith was its actual leader, Mr. Parnell had proved himself its master ; and whatever may be said of his position at the moment of his death, the record of the last ten years cannot be blotted out, and that record may almost be summed up in a sentence. This one man, an Irishman, at first without a following, and at the last with only a minority of one-eighth of the whole body, set himself to defy, to degrade, and to overmaster the most ancient and powerful and dignified legislative body in the world. And he succeeded. He forced Parliament to tolerate him, to listen to him, to give up its time to do the work he wanted done, to register his policy in many -and many an Act, to treat with him as an equal, to accept whatever humiliation he chose to put upon this august assembly, and finally almost to pass a bill for the disunion of the Kingdom it exists to protect. He entered in 1881 upon a struggle with the most powerful party leader of modern times, who had not only a party, but the whole force of English public opinion behind him in his effort to maintain the union of these kingdoms and to put down rebellion. In five years he had — 38 beaten him, forced him to capitulate, imposed his own policy upon him, imposed himself upon him, and become his leader and the real leader of what was left of a proud party with a splendid history. He had been, during this same period and after, the true author of the agrarian and social revolution which has transformed the Ireland of 1880 into the Ireland of to-day. There could not be a better measure of this man’s transcendant ability than the difference between the two.