MR. CHAMBERLAIN AND MR. BALFOUR
The life of Mr. Joseph Chamberlain, like that of the Chevalier
d’Artagnan, was spent in three sets of duels. The first was with a great
man’s men; the second was with the great man himself; the third was with
an old friend made out of a still older enemy. The first were duels of
routine, provoking no great feeling—deadly, it might be, but unenvenomed;
the second were duels of policy, in which awe and the instinct of
self-preservation were as much elements as hatred; the third were duels
of fatality, in which a certain courtesy and kindliness had always to be
observed.
For Lord Hartington and such as he Mr. Chamberlain had as little
consideration as d’Artagnan for the Cardinal’s unfortunate Guards;
against Mr. Gladstone himself, though he could not shake off a certain
reverence, he fought with full vigour and single purpose; but when
Destiny ultimately forced him to enter into a contest of blades and
wits with that elegant Aramis, Arthur James Balfour, he found himself
constrained by a hundred scruples and a thousand memories, and, like
d’Artagnan, he failed. The story ran into many chapters, in some of which
the more trenchant swordsman got the upper hand, and in some of which
the more subtle mind triumphed, but in the last chapter of all it was
d’Artagnan who had fallen and Aramis who was only exiled.
[Illustration: JOSEPH CHAMBERLAIN.
(_From a photograph by Messrs. Russell_)]
The Nineties saw the beginning of that singular competition between
friendly (or at least not unfriendly) incompatibles which has affected
the whole course of modern history. At the beginning of the decade
Mr. Balfour enjoyed a prestige remarkable enough in itself, but quite
marvellous when it was remembered that only five years before he had been
a comparatively unmarked man, while at the beginning of the Eighties he
was regarded as little more than an elegant trifler. He had seemingly
succeeded in Ireland; Parnell was dead; the formidable solidarity of
the Nationalist Party was no more; the growing recovery of Gladstonian
Liberalism had been fatally interrupted. A strong rival had gone to
pieces through the mental and physical decay of Lord Randolph Churchill;
there were none to compare with Mr. Balfour among the younger men of
Unionism, and the men of the old guard (as was seen when Mr. W. H.
Smith’s death left vacant the leadership of the House of Commons) were
reluctant to place their antique sword-play in disadvantageous contrast
with his neat rapier work. Lord Salisbury was growing old and becoming
more and more the hermit of the Foreign Office; and it seemed only a
matter of a few years before Mr. Balfour would be unchallenged master of
what, since the Home Rule split, was by far the greatest party in England.
To this political prestige was added a social worship seldom accorded
to statesmen. Mr. Balfour was still young; he was a bachelor; he was
handsome; with the exception, perhaps, of Lord Rosebery, he was the
most generally interesting man in politics. There have been very few
politicians who have held at the same time such a position in many worlds
as that occupied by Lord Salisbury’s nephew at the beginning of the
Nineties.
Mr. Chamberlain, on the other hand, was perhaps less a figure than he
had been five, or even ten years before. Had he died when Parnell did
he would chiefly be remembered now as a politician who, in splitting
his party, had ruined his own career. Partiality or malignity would have
filled in the outline with colours gracious or repellent; he might have
been represented as an honest man who suffered for his integrity, or as
a schemer who overreached himself. But the main fact would have been
clear—that the promise of the Eighties had no more been fulfilled than
that of the Seventies; the great Imperialist we know would have been as
little realised as the great democratic iconoclast who might have been.
It was the Nineties which determined Mr. Chamberlain’s place in history;
had he not reached them, his title to greatness could not be established;
had he not survived them, his stature would be much what it now is. Mr.
Chamberlain’s larger career begins only with his assumption of major
office in 1895; it ends, for all practical purposes, with his resignation
of that office a little more than eight years later. There was an
over-long first act, and a tragically protracted third, but the pith of
the play is the tenure of the Colonial Secretaryship.
One of Mr. Balfour’s weaknesses resided in his inability to encourage,
or even to suffer, friendship on equal terms. This Prince Arthur knew
nothing of the Round Table; his colleagues in the special sense must
always be in every sense his subordinates; and when he found a difficulty
in getting men of strong individuality to accept such a position, he got
over the difficulty by appointing men of no particular individuality.
It was, on the other hand, a main strength of Mr. Chamberlain that he
invited, and even compelled, either full hostility or full friendship.
Those who were against him, were heartily against him; those who were
for him, were for him heart and soul; and the world is happily so
constituted that hearty love nearly always triumphs over hearty hatred.
It was, I imagine, Mr. Chamberlain’s “genius for friendship,” as Lord
Morley calls it, that explained most things that are not accounted
for by his splendid debating powers and his aptitude for moving great
masses of men. Concerning this last faculty, fascinated contemporaries
were perhaps inclined to exaggerate. Beside the Victorian heavyweights
Mr. Chamberlain was no doubt a marvel of demagogic art. He could say
supremely well what the average man felt a difficulty in putting into
words. He was intensely sensitive to changes in public feeling, and
extraordinarily clever in just anticipating them. He had a great knack of
condensing into one sharp and memorable phrase the idea he wanted to sink
deep into the public mind. But he was not an orator in the sense that
John Bright was, and he lacked the capacity of Lord Randolph Churchill,
in his best days, of whipping a popular audience into yelling, laughing,
almost hysterical sympathy. Nor should I place him on a level with the
one living man who always challenges a comparison with him—I mean Mr.
Lloyd George. There are times when the Prime Minister can almost bring
a tear into the most tired old eye, and stimulate to an extra throb or
two the driest of old hearts. The next moment the owner of these organs
may sneer at himself, or at the speaker; but there it is—the effect has
been produced. Personally, I never found Mr. Chamberlain affect me,
though neither old nor incapable of impression, in that way. The thing he
seemed most to lack was glamour. It was present in the solemn periods of
Bright; it was often not absent from the stately cadences of Gladstone;
it was, in another way, felt in the detached mordancies of one Cecil
and the daintily constructed dilemmas of another; Joseph Chamberlain’s
speech wanted it hardly less than Mr. Asquith’s. He had more fire,
energy, and passion, than Mr. Asquith, but hardly more “juice.” He
could say strong (even violent) things, neat things, hard things, fine
things, occasionally even humorous things. But he always (at least, I
found it so) failed to say things that touched what Mr. Guppy called
“chords in the human mind,” or made the hearer feel that there was more
in the speaker than he could ever make articulate. The whole perfection
of his public speaking consisted, indeed, in a quite different kind of
appeal. He depended for his effect on illuminating equally every detail
of the picture he wished to present. His speeches were really verbal
transparencies, with (as in the cinema shows) a very short legend under
each section of the film giving in the clearest possible way the moral
he intended to convey—“Will you take it lying down?” or what not. Now a
transparency can do much, but it cannot raise a true thrill; the “movies”
are capable of everything but moving, and their popularity has probably
much to do with ultra-modern insensibility.
Mr. Chamberlain’s style was exactly fitted for most of his purposes. It
was literary in no contemptible degree—his strong and simple phraseology
appeals more to a present-day taste than the elephantine grandeur of
his older contemporaries—and he had something of a genius for the kind
of epigram which is a real compression of thought, and not a mere
rhetorical trick. But the style was neither a vehicle for profound and
exact thought, nor an outlet for high and splendid feeling. He failed
always when he attempted to deal with a very complex and extensive
theme: his serious Tariff Reform and Irish speeches are, in the reading,
quite thin and inadequate. He failed also when he tried to appeal to the
imponderables: his “illimitable veldt” mood simply would not convince.
But he could scoff as no other; his personal attacks were far more
wounding than Lord Randolph’s, partly, no doubt, because there was behind
them a far deadlier purpose than anyone believed to be present in the
Randolphian impishness; he could impart to what in another man would
have been a mere rudeness something of the terror of the thunderbolt;
and none could work more skilfully on passions which are, in relation to
the higher patriotism, what the camp-follower is to the warrior.
But when all is said, it is possible to maintain that Mr. Chamberlain as
a debater reached far higher levels than any he attained, even at his
highest, as a platform orator. There never was a time when he was not
heard with attention in the House of Commons. One reason was that he was
heartily interested in the place, in its ways and forms, its juntas,
caves, intrigues, plans of obstruction, moves and countermoves, plots and
counter-plots, and “monkey-tricks” of all descriptions; that “industrious
idleness” which repels so many earnest men was to him both important and
amusing. Even the appalling physical atmosphere—the drowned light and the
cooked air—suited his taste. For he was Victorian in his dislike of fresh
air—or at any rate in his independence of it—and he and Lord Brampton,
who shivered whenever an air from heaven penetrated his over-heated
court, might have lived very comfortably together. It was not, perhaps,
quite a coincidence that his favourite flower was the orchid, and that at
Highbury he spent a large part of his leisure in the green-houses. Time
was when he was to pay an appalling price for his aversion to open-air
exercise, but during his years of vigour no man could have suffered less
from those horrible conditions which explain much of the lethargy of the
faithful Commons.
He loved, moreover, the good comradeship that political life engenders;
to a certain type of man it is the main compensation of the career.
There is more zest in broiled bones where plotting is than in a stalled
ox consumed in placidity. None enjoyed better than Joseph Chamberlain
the meal conspiratorial, the meal triumphal, the meal consolatory;
good dining was, indeed, one of his most unfailing pleasures; like
Talleyrand, he might have said, “Show me another which renews itself
three times a day, and lasts an hour each time.” And it must be allowed
that he had the greatest talents both as a host and as a guest. Those who
knew him best acclaim him as a most admirable talker, and withal a fair
and considerate one, never indulging in a conversational solitaire, but
treating prandial chat as a round game in which every player must have
his turn. This genial equalitarianism was one of his great advantages
over Mr. Gladstone, who often failed to make fellow-diners forget his
greatness.
[Illustration: ARTHUR BALFOUR.]
This interest in Parliament and whatever appertained to it was no
doubt a great part of the secret of Mr. Chamberlain’s power over that
assembly. We often forget how large a share mere appetite has in the
realisation of political ambitions, how far the simple capacity of being
and remaining interested will take a man even of moderate capacity. But
another important factor in Mr. Chamberlain’s supremacy as a debater was
the real, if sometimes limited, knowledge he brought to the discussion of
any subject in which he happened to be interested—and he happened to be
interested in most. Deep knowledge, living at the rate he did, he could
hardly hope to attain; at any rate, he seldom attained it. But he had an
almost journalistic faculty of using reference books—reference books,
Dickens, and French novels were almost all his reading. Mr. Balfour
always hated to “prepare.” Mr. Chamberlain would take any degree of
trouble to prime himself with the facts necessary for his purpose; all
other facts, of course, he disregarded. Thus he was always a formidable
man to attack, and as an assailant he was deadly. His sure instinct
for the weak side of an opponent’s case, his command of invective and
destructive analysis, above all, his capacity of fervently and sincerely
hating whatever he temporarily disapproved (even if it had been his
own opinion the day before) gave him a power of which he was himself
probably not fully aware; otherwise, kindly as he was at bottom, he would
scarcely have treated, as he sometimes did, quite petty antagonists with
a severity verging on the inhuman.
It may be doubted, however, whether his qualities of speech, and even his
powers as an administrator, would have sufficed to give Mr. Chamberlain
his immense influence if they had not been supplemented by his knack
of enchaining the personal affections of many kinds of men. There was
a charm about him which is only felt in its highest expression in
relation to a very strong character, but which is apt to be absent in
characters of unusual strength. It was this charm which made the loss of
his intimate friendship the most serious sacrifice John Morley offered
on the altar of political consistency in 1886. It was a charm felt by
all kinds of men who disliked his opinions and distrusted his judgment.
Under its sway came many cool Colonials and still cooler Americans. It
sufficed to keep Mr. Balfour his friend even when he was straining every
faculty of his subtle nature to defeat Mr. Chamberlain’s most cherished
ambitions. Of those associated with Mr. Chamberlain at various times,
only three considerable men—Mr. Gladstone, Lord Hartington, and Lord
Salisbury—seem to have been able to view him with consistent objectivity.
On those who yielded to him their full allegiance his influence was quite
extraordinary. No statesman ever enjoyed such absolutely unquestioning
devotion as that which was yielded to Mr. Chamberlain by Mr. Jesse
Collings and the other members of his personal retinue. On the other
hand, there never was so splendidly steadfast a lord and protector. The
Birmingham communion was as jealous and as generous as that of Rome.
None could be admitted without giving up the last shred of pretension
to independent thought. But once the sacrifice was made there was peace
and security for the true believer. A powerful hand protected, a lavish
hand provided, a paternal hand petted and patted. Mr. Chamberlain was
the safer in making enemies for the solid certainty with which he built
up his friendships, however humble. A tower of strength during his life,
they have ensured his repute since his death.
Before 1895 that repute rested mainly on negatives. There had been,
indeed, an early extra-Parliamentary period of great local achievement;
it was his municipal work which gave Mr. Chamberlain for the rest of
his life the kingship of Birmingham and its hinterland. There had been
some small official work and the much larger prestige (now, however,
largely forgotten on one side and forgiven on the other) of the “ransom”
speeches. But for nearly ten years Mr. Chamberlain had been chiefly
engaged in destructive energies; the duel with Gladstone employed him to
the exclusion of most other things while the great veteran remained on
the ground. It was as late as 1893 that he delivered that taunt—“It is
the voice of a god and not of a man; never since the time of Herod has
there been such slavish adulation”—which caused the famous free fight
in the House of Commons. But by the middle of the decade the Home Rule
fight, for the time, had been fought out. The electors had approved the
slaughter of the Second Home Rule Bill; Mr. Gladstone had disappeared;
Lord Rosebery and Sir William Harcourt were fighting like lion and
unicorn for the shadow of a crown; the task of opposition in a House
overwhelmingly Unionist had been contemptuously left to “C.-B.” The world
was Mr. Chamberlain’s where to choose. He chose the Colonies, and the
portals of the dullest of routine departments at once had to be watched
as if they were those of the ancient temple of Janus. Within a few
months came the Jameson raid; then the whole world held its breath while
an English general and a French major exchanged ironic civilities at
Fashoda; then succeeded the short game of bluff which ended in the long
and bloody game of war with the South African Republics.
We are still too near that event for a judicial finding, and any man’s
view is only a view. The finding, when it comes, is as little likely
to make Paul Kruger the hero as it is to make Joseph Chamberlain the
villain; the affair was no doubt, like most such things, a very mixed
matter. Mr. Chamberlain would probably have taken more pains to avoid war
had the Boer Republics possessed the power of the late German Empire; his
critics would probably have been less numerous and bitter if the affair
had cost ten millions and been over in three weeks. Stones were cast at
him in great quantity, and no doubt some came from hands that had a right
to throw; but some of the largest were certainly hurled by those who
have since laid themselves open to equally serious charges of preferring
the way of war to the way of peace. But, whatever the degree of his
responsibility—and he always manfully accepted full responsibility—we
can with safety acquit Mr. Chamberlain of those motives with which the
ungenerous were eager to credit him. It was assuredly no mere hunger for
applause that hurried him into a war which he imagined would be short,
cheap, and (by all analogy then recent) comparatively bloodless. There
was, indeed, a small, politician-like, electioneering, popularity-loving
side to Joseph Chamberlain, and it is useless (and somewhat ignoble)
on the part of his admirers to ignore it. He was himself far too big
to pretend that it did not exist. He never assumed the virtues he
knew himself not to possess; he went to the opposite, but more manful
extreme, of scorning them. Thus he cared nothing at all about charges
of inconsistency. “What I have said I have said. Do I contradict myself?
Very well, then I contradict myself. I am not a slave to other men’s
theories or to my own past.” Again: “The man who thinks of the future
is a visionary; the man who thinks of the past is a fool; I think only
of the present twenty-four hours.” But if there was in him much of the
empiric, and something of the mere political cheap-jack, there was also
something far larger and finer. He was above all a patriot, and he was
capable, as he showed in his resignation in 1903, of making the heaviest
sacrifices in what he imagined to be the cause of his country.
I have never been able to share or sympathise with Mr. Chamberlain’s
vision of the British Empire; the very thought of it has always filled
me, in fact, with severe depression. It was a sort of Prussian pie
without the crust—and half-baked at that: there was to be restriction,
canalisation, and stereotyping by diplomacy and consent instead of by
militarism and force. England was to be the workshop of the Empire,
with some pleasant rooms over it; the Dominions were to be granaries,
lumber-warehouses, bacon-factories, mines, vineyards, and wool-farms; the
Crown Colonies were to supply sugar and spice and all things nice. It was
a thoroughly Prussian conception, not because it involved cruelty—which,
after all, was only incidental to Prussianism—but because it was at war
with the idea of the natural growth of an immature community towards
full nationhood, with distinctive arts, tastes, and schemes of life
generally. In all his visionary materialism I think Mr. Chamberlain was
most disastrously wrong; it was his whole notion of Imperial relations,
and not his incidental disrespect for the principles of Free Trade,
that seemed to me most inconsistent with his original Liberalism. But
it is questionable whether he was ever a true Liberal; certainly, he
was never a lover of freedom. His Birmingham mayoralty, excellent in
its results, was more or less an amiable dictatorship; and Mr. Russell,
in his _Portraits of the Seventies_, has told us that Gladstone once
likened him to Gambetta, as _un homme autoritaire_. His likeness to Mr.
Lloyd George has often been remarked; in nothing is it more apparent
than in this, that both have such small respect for individual liberty,
and both would much rather reform the people than let the people do
their own reforming. But a democrat Mr. Chamberlain always remained,
even when he was in closest co-operation with the Tory leaders. He never
lost his first interest in the betterment of the working classes; the
sight of preventible misery he hated; and the whole bent of his mind
was humanitarian. But, just as a Liberal is not always a democrat, so
a democrat is by no means always a Liberal. The idea of Liberalism is
giving men freedom to work out their own salvation, with the minimum of
State interference with individual liberty; and in certain cases this may
imply extreme callousness to private misfortune, as well as considerable
favouritism to the top dog. The democratic idea is only concerned with
freedom so long as it is likely to operate for equality; of the three
items in the Republican motto it lays least stress on liberty, and
most on equality and fraternity. Mr. Chamberlain was more inclined to
underline fraternity than the other two. He wanted all Englishmen to be
brothers, but most of them were to be very little brothers.
To such a man, bringing his own atmosphere to the Colonial Office, and
attacking the problems there in his own hastily decisive way, the case
of the Boer Republics must have seemed very feeble. Here they were,
straddling in a spirit of sluttish obstructiveness across the path
of orderly British development; and so long as they remained all our
plans for the good of a whole continent were liable to unsettlement.
All such cases are arguable to some degree. If Ahab had had the good
luck of David we might have heard less about his wickedness and more
about his broad and enlightened statesmanship, as well as about the
sheer unprogressiveness of Naboth. Let us remember how the world rang
with praises of Ahab after his good luck in 1870, before we insist too
strongly on the sacredness of every petty freehold. Mr. Chamberlain, at
any rate, had no difficulty in making up his mind, and when he made up
his mind he was quite sure (for the time being, at any rate) that he had
made it up aright. “Consistency is not so important,” he once said; “the
main point is that we should be always right.” He persuaded himself that
he was always right by resolutely excluding every other possibility.
Except for purposes of invective or banter, he refused to see any
other side of a question than that which he had chosen. He thought in
reason-tight compartments, approaching every matter in turn as if it were
an isolated thing. By so doing he economised energy, and was able to
communicate his own vigour, without appreciable loss, to his subordinates
and instruments. But this driving force was achieved at the cost of much;
he was the first great exemplar of the modern notion that decision and
dexterity in separate matters compensate for the lack of an inspiring
philosophy. Where you want to go is a secondary matter; the main things
are a very fast car and an ability to turn very sharply round corners, so
that if there happens to be a block in front you can dodge up a scarcely
noticed alley on the left.
It was, indeed, the true tragedy of Mr. Chamberlain’s career that, while
he had the fastest of cars, he did not possess a reliable route-map,
and his road in political life was always chosen by instinct, hearsay,
and the like. He turned up any likely-looking road, and then went full
speed ahead until brought to a stop. Now, Mr. Gladstone had a map, and
so had Mr. Balfour. But Mr. Gladstone’s was rejected because it was too
old-fashioned, and gave no account of the more modern routes and places,
and Mr. Balfour’s had the disadvantage that every road led back to the
starting-place. To drop parable, the whole story of the last twenty years
of the nineteenth century might have been different if Mr. Chamberlain
could have co-operated with Mr. Gladstone; that he could not was as much
Mr. Gladstone’s defect as his own. The whole story of the first twenty
years of the twentieth century might have been different if he could
have found in Mr. Balfour’s qualities the full complement of his own;
that also was Mr. Chamberlain’s misfortune rather than his fault. There
was a temperamental bar in the first case, and an intellectual bar in
the second. Mr. Gladstone did not want to move in Mr. Chamberlain’s way
and at Mr. Chamberlain’s pace. Mr. Balfour was firmly convinced of the
foolishness of moving at all, except in the manner known as marking time.
Thus the splendid energy and courage of Mr. Chamberlain, which might
have been extraordinarily fruitful if allied with a more steadfast hold
of political principle, were largely spent in comparative futility. The
greatness that he achieved—and he was, after all, a very great man—was
due rather to the soundness of his instincts and sympathies than to the
sureness of his intellectual processes; if he thought wrong, he had often
a way of guessing right. Some men are too much of the doctrinaire, and
some too little. Joseph Chamberlain was too little.