THE MAN
“He, though thus endued with a sense
And faculty of storm and turbulence,
Is yet a Soul whose master-bias leans
To home-felt pleasures and to gentle scenes.”
WORDSWORTH’S _The Happy Warrior_.
THAT element of tranquillity which Mr. Lloyd George enjoys in his own
home—that “happy fireside clime” which to him is always truly—
“The pathos and sublime
Of human life”—
perhaps accounts for the serenity of his outlook on public life.
That serenity is never more conspicuous than in seasons of hurricane.
Like some ships, he rides steadiest in rough seas. When people around
him are most disturbed, he is often the most calm.
There is doubtless an element in his nature which rejoices in conflict
and storm. I remember once finding him in his private room at the House
of Commons when it was urgent to bring him word that Scotland Yard
reported the intention of certain persons to take his life. His response
was to strike up a verse of a great Welsh hymn which passed beyond my
scope of understanding; but it was clear, from the flash of the eye,
that it was a song of rejoicing. “Well,” I said, “aren’t you at all
disturbed?” “No,” he said, “with the world in storm I rejoice. I love
all this smashing of windows and tumult of nations. I remember the
saying of a great Welsh preacher: ‘Such disturbances of the world always
mean some great movement in the realms above’—a reflection on earth of
some heavenly strife. I believe that is true.” I did not attempt to
argue with this mood; but this sympathy with unrest explains much in his
career, and most of all his skill in riding through tempests and
mastering storms. For it is at such moments that he is at his best.
Nothing seems to frighten or appall him. When the hearts of others are
dismayed he is touched with a new emotion. It is a kind of exaltation,
which seems to work in some kind of harmony with that universal spirit
which rides the storm and works through the whirlwind.
It is these moods which have most confused his critics and distorted
their judgment of him. Those who know Mr. Lloyd George only on one side
of his nature have always expected to see him fall over some political
precipice. His zeal, in their opinion, would eat him up. He would just
run the hot course of so many furious political firebrands. Some rash
and hasty blunder would occur, and he would flare out into the darkness.
Yet this disaster has never occurred. And why? Because behind all those
flashes of spirit there has been a steady pursuing purpose; discreet,
cautious, shrewd. “Whenever Mr. Lloyd George seems most rash,” said to
me an old friend of his who has seen him in many situations, “I always
know that there is a cold, shrewd calculation behind it.”
It was a true judgment. For, with his great power of words, he combines
a tremendous sense of facts. If he finds himself on the wrong course, he
will often hark back. If he has erred in speech he will apologise. After
the most vehement attack he will make friends with his victim. It is
this combination of the slow qualities with the swift—of judgment with
daring, of mercy with rigour, of slow reflection with swift attack, of
the zeal of the Cambrian with the shrewdness of the Fleming—that marks
him off from so many of his race. For it is not so much the emphasis of
one quality as the combination of several contrasted qualities that goes
to make human greatness.
Like all great stalkers and trappers, Mr. Lloyd George is very difficult
to follow. He has often doubled on his tracks whilst his faithful
disciples are still walking straight into the danger. He talks so freely
and frankly that his paths seem to be those wherein wayfarers, though
fools, may not err. But with all that frankness he really keeps his own
counsel and forms his own decisions. That is why so many simple people
are so surprised—and sometimes even a little hurt—to find that, after
they have given him the very best of their advice, he has just gone on
his own way.
Mr. Lloyd George by no means despises the tactics of public appeal. If
necessary, he will use even the theatrical in order to impress the
public mind. Soon after the Birmingham riot, at the height of the Boer
War, his friends opened the _Daily Express_ to find that there was a
scheme afoot to do him violence at a meeting to be held in Bristol that
evening. They wired a warning to the organisers of the meeting at
Bristol. They need not have troubled; for whatever danger faced him was
of Mr. Lloyd George’s own fashioning. He had deliberately gone to the
office of the _Daily Express_, advertised the place of the meeting,
announced his intention to denounce the war, and practically challenged
them to kill him. The organisers at Bristol had done their best to
conceal the meeting. This was his way of correcting the discretion of
his own friends.
This was immediately after that reverberating event at Birmingham, when
he in fact nearly lost his life. Late on that stormy evening he rang me
up in the _Daily News_ office from Birmingham. He wished me to go and
inform his wife at Wandsworth that he was safe. “But,” I said, “what I
am to tell her? Where are you?” “That I cannot divulge,” he said in a
laughing voice. “At present I am a member of the Birmingham Police
Force”—and he gave me his number. Through the telephone I could hear
the tinkling of cups. “Well,” I said, “you are having a good supper.”
“Yes,” he said, “we are making merry, and the mob are making merry
outside. We are both happy!” It was perhaps characteristic of the
calmness of his domestic life that, on reaching Wandsworth late that
night, I found the house closed and the whole family fast asleep. Mrs.
Lloyd George happily had not heard of the danger through which he was
passing at Birmingham.
Then, as now, this habit of courage was always his supreme public
characteristic. “Of all qualities in public life,” he said to me once,
“courage is the rarest.” From the earliest episodes of his career, from
that day when he defied the Bench in North Wales, here—in his
courage—has always been the conscious centre of his power. He has
always believed that if you want to destroy a popular idol you must
learn to face it and to fight it—to put it to open shame—if necessary,
to insult it. Fear rules the minds of men; and against fear courage
alone prevails. This was always the moving faith at the back of all his
great campaigns, whether of peace or of war. It was with this weapon
that he has fought both Governments at home and Prussians abroad. It was
the element of policy that underlay that frank directness of speech
which offended the cultured classes of England so profoundly at the time
of his Budget campaign.
For he convinced himself that modern public speakers had got into the
habit of referring too politely to great national evils. He believed
that the most effective weapon to use against these evils was to revive
some of the lost frankness of our forefathers. His great aim was to
prove that it was safe to speak as plainly about a duke as about an
ordinary citizen. He had known in his young days how cowed men could be,
how fearful of shadows, how frightened by ghosts. The thing he had most
admired about Mr. Chamberlain was his plainness of speech. It was his
deliberate policy to revive that habit. Mr. Lloyd George’s oratory of
the year 1911 was the direct successor of Mr. Chamberlain’s during the
years between 1886 and 1893.
As to the abuse he encountered, he counted that as a political gain. He
was fond of the story of the workman who had heard a political agent
expressing terror at the fury of a certain class. “Bless my heart!” said
the workman, “we never thinks you mean business until they squeals.” So
it was with the avalanches of calumny which fell upon Mr. Lloyd George
between 1911 and 1914. He knew that it was the penalty of challenging
the powers in high places. It showed that his proposals really “meant
business.” “Their abuse,” says Sir Fretful Plagiary in _The Critic_, “is
the best panegyric.” So Mr. Lloyd George ploughed the road to fame
through the abuse of those years.
Yet all the time he suffered. He has a heart very sensitive to the
affections of the people. He was puzzled at the way men hated him. It
was not the danger of it he minded; for he would scarcely allow the
Scotland Yard men to protect him. It was the pain of it. He frankly
hates dislike; his nature craves the sun; he is at his best among
friends. “I cannot imagine why they detest me so,” he said one day
during that time. “I seem to be the best hated man in England.” The
reply was obvious. “If one half of England hates you too much, then
surely the other half loves you too absurdly.” He was instantly all
smiles. “That is perfectly true,” he cried—and put the melancholy
thoughts aside.
During the struggle over the Licensing Bill of 1908 he received numerous
postcards written in what was intended to be blood, but looked
suspiciously like red ink. These documents generally threatened him with
instant death, probably combined with torture—“something lingering,
with boiling oil.” They came, or professed to come, from enraged
publicans fearful for their livelihood. These postcards got curiously on
his nerves. “I don’t mind so much being killed,” he said one day, “but I
should hate being killed by a publican.” There seemed to him something
curiously unsatisfactory in such a way of going out.
But in general he has taken little heed of threats. It was only with
great difficulty that the Attorney-General could persuade him to
sanction a prosecution in the famous case of the poisoned arrow
conspiracy. He was always in favour of leniency to the Suffragettes. It
is not merely that he hates excessive punishment. His haunting sense of
humour seems to be offended by the idea that he is taking up so much
room in the world. He dislikes the attendance of detectives almost as
much as Mr. Gladstone did. “Can you possibly tell me where Mr. Lloyd
George is going?” was the frequent cry of those unhappy followers of Mr.
Lloyd George to his friends in those perilous days of civil strife. “He
is always giving us the slip,” was their complaint. Sitting one day on
one of those little green chairs in the Green Park for which the
Londoner pays his obol—a favourite seat of his in those days of
peace—at the end of a long talk he sighed and looked grave. He inclined
his head towards a shabby-looking individual who was smoking a pipe and
sitting not far off under a tree reading a newspaper with apparent
indifference to the whole world around him. “There is my guardian
angel!” said Mr. Lloyd George.
It is not only in facing hostile audiences that he has displayed his
courage. He has never hesitated to tell his friends the truth. He has
that gift of leadership which consists of making followers do something
which they do not want to do. He has put aside all fear of those great
influences which overshadow English public life—birth, money, prestige,
caste. He represents in high places a new freedom from all those
bogies—almost the realisation of Robbie Burns’s dream:
“For a’ that, an’ a’ that,
It’s coming yet for a’ that,
That man to man, the world o’er,
Shall brithers be for a’ that.”
Not in his most vehement Limehouse days did he say anything stronger
than the Scotch ploughman said in his famous song:
“Ye see yon birkie ca’d a lord,
Wha struts, an’ stares, an’ a’ that;
Tho’ hundreds worship at his word,
He’s but a coof for a’ that.”
Mr. Lloyd George, in fact, always tests man by what is in him; not by
the guinea stamp, or by the pedigree. Why should he not? Birth! What
birth can there be higher than that of a Welshman?—“The oldest race in
these islands.” Money? “I can always get money for a cause; there is no
difficulty about money.” That has always been his view; and who can
wonder that such should be the belief of a man who has made millionaires
subscribe for their own taxation!
Of prestige he is perhaps more fearful. He was tremendously impressed
with Oxford when he stayed in that town for some days on his visit to
the Palmerston Club during the Boer War. “I am glad I never came here,”
he said. “I should never have recovered from the influence of this
place; it would have been with me all my life.” He was indeed strongly
gripped by Oxford and its “dreaming towers.” After two days of it he
was, for the moment, half subdued. “Ah!” he said, “how the past holds
you here.” All of which shows what a mistake our forefathers made when
they excluded the Nonconformists from our ancient universities.
It is indeed quite a mistake to suppose that Mr. Lloyd George is dead to
the voices of the past. There is no greater delusion than to regard him
as an unlettered man. If the best education is to turn a boy loose in a
library, then he has enjoyed to the full that form of schooling. He
started life with the training of a lawyer, which he always claims to be
the best mental discipline to which a human mind can be subjected. Those
laborious explorations of French and the classics through which he
passed with his “Uncle Lloyd” as companion, were certainly not less
useful as a training than the fugitive crammings of the average
University undergraduate. At any rate, he learnt to read for himself;
and to absorb what he read. Since those early days he has been a wide
reader in all his spare time. He knows his English historians better
than most Englishmen. He can hold his own with most classical scholars
in discussions on ancient history. Perhaps, indeed, Rome holds him most
of all the countries. He knows his Mommsen well, and he spent the long
convalescence from the throat illness that came to him after the Budget
in reading some of the latest Italian historians of ancient Rome. He
emerged from that illness a formidable expert in later Roman history,
especially in the land laws of the Gracchi. In fact, he has most of the
outfit of the scholar except the scholar’s pride.
Parallels from history are dangerous; but they always haunt the mind of
a well-read imaginative man. Mr. Lloyd George is very fond of them. One
evening in 1908, when we were sitting in the Orangerie at Stuttgart, in
a pause of the German tour of that year, the conversation began to turn
on the possibilities of a war between Britain and Germany. The parallel
of Rome and Carthage came like a flash from Mr. Lloyd George; it brought
from him one of those far-reaching forecasts which, in other days, would
have earned him the mantle of a prophet. “There is the same commercial
rivalry,” he said, “the same sea jealousy, the same abiding quarrel
between the soldier and the merchant, the warrior and the shopkeeper,
the civilisation that has arrived and the civilisation that is still
struggling to arrive.” He paused, and then he added: “I wonder if we
shall be as unprepared as Carthage; I wonder if we shall be as torn by
faction?”
It is curious to look back now on that conversation, in that
comfortable, well-lighted garden—the pride of that old German
town—with the vault of stars above us, and the murmur of a great city
around us. We thought no more of it at the time. But now it comes back.
In his games, Mr. Lloyd George is a keen sportsman. Golfers, as a class,
have the seriousness of religious devotees. But no man could pursue the
little white ball round a course with a steadier concentration than Mr.
Lloyd George. No player could be keener on victory. “Golf is like life,”
he loves to say, “you never quite make up for losing a hole.” His game
has much improved in recent years; though he never claims to be a
champion. He has not again repeated the achievement of “holing out in
one.” That was at Cannes in the far-off, merry days before the Great
War. It had the beauty of the unexpected. He drove off: and lo and
behold! the ball disappeared. The caddies hunted everywhere; and it was
just being pronounced a “lost ball,” when a sharp youth looked into the
hole, and there the ball was quietly reposing!
It is usual on these occasions to present the caddy with a bottle of
whisky. Mr. Lloyd George gave the lad five francs; and of course there
were candid friends who said that the caddy had put the ball in the
hole. There are always critics, even on the golf-course.
His worst enemies cannot accuse Mr. Lloyd George of “side”; so there are
some who say that he has not enough. He is, in fact, the simplest of
men, fond of being surrounded with friends, and very faithful to the
humble friends of his youth. He is curiously unconscious of his own
position in the world. To one who congratulated him on his elevation to
the Premiership he merely replied, “Oh! I had forgotten that!” And I
believe that he had.
This simplicity makes him very thorough. He knows his own ignorance.
When he was Chancellor of the Exchequer he went to Somerset House and
went carefully through the whole system of the old land taxes and their
working. When he was guiding his Budget through the House of Commons he
had a daily meeting of the Treasury experts, with whom he discussed
every detail. That is always his method—to learn all he can from
others. He is a great listener, and learns rather by the ear than by the
eye.
He is very considerate for his secretaries and his staff; but he works
them hard. He has no place for “slackers.” When he first went to the
Treasury, he astounded that august Department by beginning work at ten
o’clock. They soon caught the habit, for later on they slaved for him in
a way that astonished the onlooker. He can make others work because he
works himself.
At one time he took a great interest in the organisation of the Civil
Service. On first becoming a Minister, he was astonished to discover the
rigidity of the division between the First and Second Classes of the
Civil Service. He wished the system to be more fluid. Once he was struck
by the ability of a certain civil servant, and he wished to place him in
a position of trust. “It is impossible!” was the reply; “he is only a
second division clerk.” Mr. Lloyd George looked up with a flash of
whimsical indignation. “Why!” he replied, “I am only a second division
clerk myself!”
Whenever one tries to discover the secret of his power over men, one
comes back to that supreme gift of his—the gift of the silver
tongue—the power of public speech. That is, after all, the thing that
has made him supreme over men. To hear him at his best one must hear him
on a public platform, addressing a great public audience. There are few
fireworks, no shouting, no declaiming. He opens easily, in a soft, quiet
voice: he always works up to his effects. There are “purple patches” now
and again; but the bulk of it seems almost conversational, and is often
broken by colloquial phases—“Can you hear at the back there?” “Ah!
well, you must listen if you want me to speak to you.” He is almost
always very soon on good terms with his audience; it is only by shouting
him down that his enemies can prevent that. He is never angry on a
public platform; he seems always quite at home, as if it was his real
natural element. He can be scathing at times—withering, scornful,
contemptuous. But that mood rarely lasts long. He generally returns
swiftly to his gentler moods—persuasion, appeal, emotion. He almost
always prepares a careful peroration, generally a memorised piece of
prose poetry, very often drawn from some great phase of nature—from the
hills or the sea. Then his speeches end on the high note; and his
audiences go home with a sense of having been uplifted.
There they are right—for it is precisely his power as a speaker to
uplift the hearts of men. He has his own moods. But from those he
carefully selects the very best, and gives them to the world. No public
man can do more.
[Illustration: MRS. LLOYD GEORGE]
[Illustration: DAVID LLOYD GEORGE AS A YOUNG MAN]