THE EARL OF ROSEBERY
“I would give you a piece of plate if you could get that lad to work; he
is one of those who like the palm without the dust.”
So wrote Mr. William Cory, one of the masters at Eton in the Sixties,
concerning a favourite pupil, Lord Dalmeny, later to be widely famed as
Earl of Rosebery and Prime Minister of England. Mr. Cory seems to have
belonged to a rather rare class of men, and a perhaps still rarer class
of schoolmasters: those who really like boys and enjoy themselves in very
young society. Others besides Bacon have deemed it a not quite wholesome
taste; at any rate there is always a danger attaching to it—one may
develop into a hero-worshipper of a rather pitiable kind. Worse still,
one may get accustomed to the most sickly kind of incense. When Paul is
in his proper position at the feet of Gamaliel it is good for Paul, but
less certainly good for Gamaliel. When Gamaliel sits at the feet of Paul
it is good for neither. So when the excellent Cory talks with reverent
enthusiasm about the talented youth of the upper classes a normal man
is conscious of a certain impatience. Young Dalmeny seems to have
overpowered him. He is “surely the wisest boy that ever lived.” His Latin
verses are not as other boys’. He writes “flowing, simple, dignified
Latin,” “enjoys the old poetry as much as the modern,” and is (at fifteen
or a little more) “a strong but wise admirer of both Napoleons.” “I am
doing all I can,” says Mr. Cory, “to make him a scholar; anyhow, he will
be an orator, and, if not a poet, such a man as poets delight in.”
All this is most reminiscent of the schoolboys of Thackeray, with their
prize-poem inspirations, their Jacobite or Jacobin enthusiasms, and
their quaint affectations of profundity. But Mr. Cory, with all his
affectionate partiality for the young Scottish aristocrat, is still
sagacious. He puts his finger unerringly on the weak spot. The mature
Lord Rosebery, of course, did not get what the young Lord Dalmeny wanted.
He just missed the palm, and he got a great deal of the dust. But the
desire to have the best of all worlds, the love of facile success, the
resentment of pain, trouble, and ingratitude, no doubt explain his
strange and splendid but rather maimed career. Mr. Gladstone described
him, while he was still young, as “the man of the future.” Judges
scarcely less competent than Mr. Gladstone used Mr. Gladstone’s words
when he had advanced well into later middle life.
The mistake was natural enough; there is hardly anything that Lord
Rosebery might not have been, with good luck. But bad luck was his almost
from the cradle. He had scarcely known his father when death left only
a very old man’s life between him and a Scottish Earldom, an English
Barony, half a dozen minor hereditary distinctions, a large rent-roll,
and a goodly amount of cash. A few years later his mother married again;
she was a daughter of the house of Stanhope, a Court beauty, and a woman
of some intellectual distinction, to whom the young Dalmeny no doubt
owed much of his wit, as well as the almost girlish good looks which
were his in early life. There were literary elements on both sides of
his ancestry. The Primroses of Jacobean days had produced preachers and
writers of some eminence, and a didactic turn was natural in the family.
Lord Rosebery’s father, for example, was author of a dissertation on the
excellence of physical exercise and its neglect by the middle classes
of these islands; he acutely pointed out that the poor cultivated their
muscles at work, and the rich in sport, but the intervening order simply
neglected its physique, being engaged from morning till night in making
a living—all of which was clearly most unintelligent on the part of the
intervening order. The son was destined to come closely enough in touch
with actuality to avoid such artlessness. Nevertheless some trace of the
parental self-satisfaction was a constant in Lord Rosebery’s character.
He could never get out of his head the notion of his superiority to all
common men in his capacity of aristocrat, and his superiority to nearly
all aristocrats in his capacity of a man of intellect.
A favourite with his grandfather, but deprived of the discipline that
only a closer relationship can supply, the boy followed much his own
bent. He was admired at the preparatory school; he was admired at Eton.
We have seen what one of the masters thought of him. With the boys he was
not less a hero. For, as the worshipper already quoted remarks, he was
“full of fun,” carelessly good at games, carelessly good at lessons, the
very type of easy and good-natured mastery that the young aristocrat,
with his liking for talent and his contempt for the “swot,” most admires.
At Christchurch the same sort of thing began over again. Lord Dalmeny was
a more important Arthur Pendennis, with tastes as catholic and far ampler
means of indulging them. He liked horseflesh, he liked fine cookery and
noble vintages, he liked old editions, he liked being heir to an Earldom,
he liked equally the reputation of being superior to all that. One of the
last lordly undergraduates to wear a “tuft,” he probably wore it with
outward disrespect and secret conviction; it is at least recorded that
he wore it once when it was not actually needed or permissible. But,
though the discipline of Christchurch was mild and partial, it was still
discipline. Lord Dalmeny entertained decided views as to the propriety
of an undergraduate riding steeplechasers. The Authorities took up a
peremptorily adverse attitude; it was not a case for compromise, and Lord
Dalmeny left without taking his degree. Of such honours, indeed, he had
small need. He had hardly attained his majority when his grandfather’s
death made him a Peer and one of the most eligible bachelors of the
moment. All the worlds, political, social, and literary, were before him
where to choose.
At Eton he is said to have declared to a chum his three great
ambitions—to marry a great heiress, to win the Derby, and to become
Prime Minister. The first aim was accomplished early and happily by his
Rothschild marriage. The fulfilment of the second arrived to him, a joy
but perhaps not a blessing, when the third prize had at last come within
his grasp. The story may not be true. But one feels it should be true,
since it so well illustrates the fatal weakness of a very considerable
man. “You fight too scattering,” said Mark Twain, in criticism of the
conduct of an American general’s Indian campaign. Lord Rosebery’s defect
was that he always “fought too scattering.” In natural abilities he
was certainly behind no man of his time. In many ways he had a quite
un-English logicality and clearness of perception. Time and time again,
throughout his long career, he has (when not affected by personal or
class interest) put his finger on the spot when others were fumbling
about it. But he has always been very English indeed in carrying to
extreme that national weakness for wanting to have one’s cake and eat it.
His non-political speeches teem with enthusiasms for incompatible things;
he really seems to have persuaded himself that Cromwell, Burke, and
himself were all democrats. It is in his own plan of life, however, that
the principle remains most obvious. Lord Rosebery, with half his talent
for politics, could have surpassed the record of many men who actually
went much further. With his imaginative insight and his noble sense of
language he could have reached almost the highest in certain important
departments of literature. With a little industry and tenacity he could
have been Prime Minister for twenty splendid years instead of for twenty
embarrassed months. He could, if he had wished, have wielded a power with
his pen superior to that of any ordinary Prime Minister. But he wanted
all sorts of things, and in all things he tended to covet the easily
gained palm. Capable of great energy on occasion, he never achieved
that habit of unresting, unintermitting exertion, of complete devotion
to the thing in hand, which is the making of everything really first
rate. Everything came easily to him—honours, money, phrases, opinions,
positions; the necessity of hard work was never his, the habit of hard
work he never quite formed, and there was nobody to form it for him.
“Easy come, easy go,” does not apply to material possessions alone, and
the testing-time proved how different in quality are the views adopted
because one rather likes them from the convictions formed in sore travail
of mind and spirit.
In one sense Lord Rosebery was especially a man of the Nineties. His
first appearance in politics was a full twenty years before; his return
to politics seemed always imminent for twenty years afterwards. But it
was in the Nineties that he climbed—or was hoisted—into the highest
place, and it was in the Nineties that he fell, with a great and (as was
afterwards seen) final ruin. One considerable act had already been played
when the decade opened—the act of “Citizen Rosebery,” the first Chairman
of the London County Council. For a year or two it seemed that the man
of the future had become in very fact the man of the present. With a very
splendid enthusiasm Lord Rosebery threw himself into a work which, after
all, could not have been highly attractive to a man of his nature—a work
involving an immensity of small detail and bringing him into contact
with a rather repulsive mass of petty motive and ambition. But to make
London, in his own phrase, “not a unit, but a unity,” to place the great
amorphous, disconnected capital, with its poverty of public spirit, on
something like a level with the great provincial towns, was no mean
object, and there was something heroic in the self-denial with which
the clever Peer entered on his task of Lord Mayor of Greater London.
Here at least the dust was cheerfully borne without thought of the palm.
It might be an advantage that the palm was lacking, that civic trouble
was not complicated by civic turtle, and that the Earl was not expected
to consider his battalions of Moderates and Progressives in terms of
prandial amenity and social precedence. But there were other hard things;
thus he had to go in person round the music-halls to judge whether Mrs.
Ormiston Chant was justified in her extreme view of the demoralising
effect of “Zæo’s back” (“Zæo,” be it explained, was a music-hall artist—I
think performing at the old Westminster Aquarium—whose scantiness of
clothing offended the still vigorous Puritanism of the day). Lord
Rosebery was an amateur of the legitimate stage; he has confessed his
early extravagance in the matter of theatre stalls. But it is credibly
reported by the chroniclers of the time that he appeared “supremely
bored” by the indicted performances, and somebody remarked, parodying the
old boast of the Aquarium, that at no other place in London could so many
sighs be heard.
In a word, Lord Rosebery’s London County Council period was one of
really hard work and much self-sacrifice. “But long it could not be.”
Apart from the desolating bereavement which Lord Rosebery had suffered,
it was not in his nature to be long contented with routine, and
especially with routine of this kind. The inadequately “flowing tide”
of 1892, indeed, found him far from desirous of any kind of activity.
He was shrewd enough to see the full hopelessness of the task before
Mr. Gladstone, and only his affection for that statesman—an affection
almost filial in its sincerity—impelled him to take control of Foreign
Affairs. We know now what could always be inferred—the strong distaste
of the Liberal chiefs for attempting, with the feeble instrument the
election had given them, a legislative programme which would have taxed
the strength of a Cabinet supported by the largest and most homogeneous
majority. Lord Rosebery was for declining the responsibility, or at
best for only carrying on with routine administration. But when Mr.
Gladstone asked, he could not refuse; the bond between the aged leader
and the political youth was too strong to be lightly severed. One of Mr.
Gladstone’s most amiable characteristics was his sympathy with youthful
promise, particularly if allied with patrician blood; he had early marked
Lord Rosebery as his ultimate successor; he had lost no opportunity
of recommending him to the party; and gratitude, as well as fervent
admiration, made the Peer, not generally an easy man to get on with,
amenable to the lightest wishes of the great Commoner.
But naturally the sense of personal obligation did not fully supply the
want of earnest conviction. It would probably have been better for all
parties and interests if Lord Rosebery had adhered to his original desire
to stand aside. During the dismal business of “ploughing the sands,” he
immersed himself as far as possible in the work of the Foreign Office.
He did his duty, of course. He made a great speech in defence of the
Home Rule Bill when, having passed the House of Commons, it shivered
friendless and naked, like a stranger bird in a coop of vicious young
cockerels, in the baleful presence of the Peers. He satirised the
ceremoniousness of the killing—all the preliminaries of the bull-fight,
the skirmishings and the prickings and the wavings of scarlet cloth,
leading up to the moment when the matador, in the person of Lord
Salisbury, should deal the fatal thrust. These things, as always, he did
amazingly well. But it was evident enough that his heart was little in
the farce-tragedy of the Second Home Rule Bill.
When at last Mr. Gladstone took leave of his last Cabinet, and the
question of a successor arose, Lord Rosebery’s mind was divided. His
ambition bade him grasp the prize now it was within reach, though none
was more aware of the tenuity of the gilt film and the indigestibility
of the gingerbread. His clear-headed sense told him all the difficulties
he would have to encounter—and those not merely matters of personal
hostility, of a sneering Labouchere and a disappointed Harcourt, but
questions of foreign policy on which it would be difficult to secure
an adjustment between the national necessities and the traditions and
temper of the Liberal Party. He decided, and there was an immediate
revolt against a Peer-Premier, intensified by Lord Rosebery’s declaration
in the House of Lords that the assent of England, as the “predominant
partner,” was an essential preliminary to Home Rule. Lord Rosebery had
some time before confessed to no very definite convictions on the subject
of Ireland; he was now savagely assailed as a traitor to the cause of
Home Rule. “R. not particularly agitated,” Lord Morley notes in his diary
of the time, “though he knew pretty well that he had been indiscreet. ‘I
blurted it out,’ he said. ‘For heaven’s sake,’ said I, ‘blurt out what
you please about any country in the whole world, civilised or barbarous,
except Ireland. Irish affairs are the very last field for that practice.’
R.: ‘You know that you and I have agreed a hundred times that until
England agrees H. R. will never pass.’ J. M.: ‘That may be true. The
substance of your declaration may be as sound as you please, but not to
be said at this delicate moment.’” Morley had to clear up the mess. “It
is much easier,” he comments, “to get yourself out of a scrape of this
kind than to explain away another man.”
Lord Rosebery has left on record an impressive summary of the miseries
of a Liberal Peer-Premier. They are miseries, no doubt, to some extent
inherent to the case—at the best his own image of “riding a horse
without reins” probably does not overstate them. In his own peculiar
circumstances, being hardly on speaking terms with the leader of the
House of Commons, they were in every way fatal. Far more than the
protests of the Nonconformists, they poisoned Lord Rosebery’s Derby
success with Ladas; they endowed him with the tortures of perpetual
insomnia; they silvered his hair; lined his full face with wrinkles; and
embittered a temper naturally genial, if hasty and imperious. “There
are,” he said, in referring to his term of office, “two supreme pleasures
in life, the one ideal, the other real. The ideal is when a man receives
the seals of office from his Sovereign. The real pleasure comes when he
hands them back.”
An experience from which probably no man could have emerged triumphant
seems to have destroyed for ever what chance Lord Rosebery might have had
of evading the handicap of his temperament. Pessimism now descended on
him, and pessimism is always sterile. Henceforward he was the “retired
raven croaking on the withered branch”; his merit was that the croak was
often excellent sense and music, and always excellent English. In one of
Mr. Galsworthy’s plays there is a woman who laments that she is “too
fine and not fine enough.” The description seems to fit Lord Rosebery.
He talks with a certain disdain of his own business. “Office,” he once
said, “is indeed an acquired taste, though by habit persons may learn to
relish it, just as men learn to love absinthe, or opium, or cod-liver
oil.” He could nourish a fine intellectual contempt for the gawds and
toys of politics and society. But beneath this philosophy was a quite
keen appetite for worship of any kind. The reverence of the excellent
Cory was a luxury to the youth; the man had grown to crave as a necessity
a larger applause; and it was the tragedy of his life that, after many
years of rather uncritical admiration, there came abruptly a time of
harsh appraisement, followed by still worse things—admiration without
confidence, regard without loyalty, and finally neglect without oblivion.
It was no doubt balm to Lord Rosebery, the self-made outcast from the
Liberal fold, to have all eyes on him when he went to Chesterfield to
proclaim—what? That efficiency was an excellent thing, and that it would
be an excellent thing if England were efficient. It was pleasant, no
doubt, always to have the laugh of the stolid Campbell-Bannerman, to
pierce him with fine points of wit, to deprive him of the best intellect
of the party. But the last laugh was with “C.-B.” When the time came,
the man was not Lord Rosebery. “C.-B.” needed not even to use his plain
claymore against the dainty rapier of the brilliant lord; trusting, like
a rhinoceros, to the natural defence of pachydermity, he simply waddled
over the argumentative entanglements prepared for him, and won without
fighting.
The real drama of Lord Rosebery, it was then seen, had ended in the
Nineties when he laid down the Liberal leadership at Edinburgh in a
speech which remains as one of the most curious and mournful monuments
of political failure. The rest was merely an epilogue, full of brilliant
lines and happy conceits, but adding nothing to the action. There was
still to be a new reputation gained, or an old reputation extended—that
of Imperial Orator in Chief. For, whatever Lord Rosebery’s deficiencies
might be, he united happily, as few men can, all the patriotisms. He
loved Scotland, he loved Britain, he loved the Empire; his imagination
could concentrate on the homelands as well as expand to the “illimitable
veldt.” He did not make the mistake of some Imperialists of thinking
merely in terms of mass. He was a Little Englander only in the sense of
not conceiving of England—or Scotland—as little; he was an Imperialist
only in the sense of wishing to maintain and extend “the greatest
secular agency for good known to mankind.” Equidistant from opposite
extravagances, there was in all his great Imperial speeches a width, a
dignity, and a balance, as well as a fervour of conviction, hardly to be
found elsewhere, and this solitary splendour sufficed to outweigh his
occasional descent in other directions into what might seem mere whim and
petulance. Finally, the noble stoicism, of a finer quality than the pagan
variety that belongs to the average modern, with which, in the overcast
winter of his life, he has supported public care and crushing private
grief, gives a hint of what might have been had the fates been less
cruelly kind in his formative years.
When the hardest is said of him, there remains so much to respect and
like that he should be safe from those whom he has described as “the
body-snatchers of history, who dig up dead reputations for malignant
dissection.”