SIR WILLIAM HARCOURT
Those who seek the legislative monument of Sir William Harcourt must
examine the Finance Act of 1894, which put real estate on the same
footing as personal in the matter of death duties. A facetious writer
once observed that the principle of graduation so beautifully exemplified
in this measure must have been suggested to Sir William by a study of his
own name, which is an excellent example of ascending values. William and
George are but degrees in the ordinary, but with Venables we definitely
reach the higher level; Vernon is still better, and Harcourt fitly crowns
the whole. The full name, William George Granville Venables Vernon
Harcourt, is the perfection of a _crescendo_; it at once soothes and
stirs like the grand vibrations of organ music; it has the majestic swell
and rhythm of the peaceful ocean.
It is no discredit to Sir William Harcourt that he failed to live fully
up to the more stately standards of this pageant of nomenclature.
Sometimes he was little more than William or George; more often he got
as far as Granville and Venables; it was only occasionally that he
matched the full kingliness of all twelve syllables. His career, like
his name, was a mixture of the great, the almost great, and the almost
ordinary. But while in the name these elements were perfectly blended,
the career somehow lacked balance and unity. Sir William arrived early
at eminence; he was during many years a nearly first-class figure
in English politics; he had gifts, sedulously cultivated, of a quite
splendid type; he was acute, clear-headed, wary, indefatigable; he liked
the game of politics and knew every move in it; his judgment of men and
things was shrewd; he was witty as a Sheridan comedy; he commanded a
capital debating style and a manner of platform speaking which, while
not of the highest, was in its way exceedingly effective. Moreover, he
had no inconvenient moral impedimenta. Mr. Labouchere described him
(approvingly) as a “squeezable Christian,” and therefore fitter for a
Party leader than a “conscientious atheist” like Mr. John Morley. So
well endowed and so little handicapped, he should have been sure of
the best that politics could give. Yet the latter part of his life was
embittered by the sense of failure, and failure of a kind which has no
compensations. For Sir William Harcourt was not one of those happily
constituted people who can enjoy the sunshine as well as another, and yet
get a quiet pleasure out of a rainy day. He attached excessive importance
to the very things that just eluded him, and was complicatedly cross
because they did elude him—cross with circumstances, cross with people
who played him false at the critical moment, and cross with himself
for not being superior to being cross with them. For though he did not
lack magnanimity, and though in the long run he brought himself to act
generously towards more than one who had helped to frustrate his natural
ambition, he could not avoid being hurt and showing that he was hurt.
“You have a Chancellor in your family, and a Lord Lieutenant of Ireland,”
said John Morley to him, in the year 1894, “and you’d like to have a
Prime Minister in your family, and no earthly blame to you.” True, it was
no great thing to be Liberal Prime Minister just then. The estate was
terribly encumbered, and the brokers’ men were already at the door. That
Sir William knew as well as any. But still, if one must be a “transient
and embarrassed phantom,” it was just a little better to be a phantom in
a shooting jacket than a phantom in livery. To don the Primrose livery,
especially, was gall to the proud Plantagenet. He was of very ancient
English and French family, while Lord Rosebery sprang (many years ago,
it is true) from a mere Presbyterian minister; he had been in Liberal
politics when Lord Rosebery was in the nursery; he had loyally supported
Mr. Gladstone through thick and thin; he had never spared himself in the
House of Commons or on the platform; he was conscious of qualifications
with which the Scottish nobleman, with all his graces, could not vie; and
he had every reason to calculate on the support of the Radical wing of
the party, which he had served faithfully, if not always with conviction.
Small wonder that Sir William Harcourt was bitter when with one accord
the men in the inner councils of Liberalism, the new men as well as the
old, the Asquiths and Aclands, as well as the Morleys and Spencers,
turned against him, and towards Lord Rosebery.
We know now that the choice, if the best possible, was still unfortunate.
But in politics the things which seem most obviously unreasonable are
precisely the things which are done for the most serious reasons, and
there were grave reasons indeed against a Harcourt Premiership. Sir
William was endowed with a temperament which sometimes made it hard for
men to work with him, and might well have made it impossible for men
to work under him. He was at once too difficult and too easy. He had a
fatal knack of rousing antagonism, and lacked the force or inclination
to crush antagonism when it arose. He sometimes used language of the
kind that stirs up rebellion in men of the most temperate blood, and,
while sensitive himself, took little thought of the feeling of others.
But, though he thoughtlessly made enemies, he was far too kindly and
warmhearted a man to convert them into victims. Thus he had to meet a
most perilous combination—strong hostility and no serious fear. It would
have been well with him if he could have invoked the argument of terror;
it would have been better if he could have led men in silken bonds. But
he could not dominate, and he could not manage. The lack of tact and
the lack of resolution were both well illustrated over the matter of
the Rosebery Premiership. Sir William Harcourt stood out just enough to
make the position for Lord Rosebery difficult, and gave way just enough
to make his own position impossible. Then he fumed in private over the
arrangements in which he had publicly concurred, and, apart from his
manful work in his own department, played the part of a sulking Achilles.
There were, of course, many excuses. He was getting old. He had no great
enthusiasm for Home Rule, or, indeed, for anything. He was, like the rest
of the Liberal leaders, bitterly disappointed by the size of the majority
of 1892, and incensed by the futility of the task it had in hand; “he
missed,” says Lord Morley, “old stable companions, and did not take to
all the new”; and altogether he might well be oppressed by a sense of
anachronism. For he was a politician of the old school, and the Nineties
were perpetually reminding him that the old school was going, and almost
gone. More an eighteenth-century man than even a nineteenth, with a taste
for elegant scholarship and rotund phrase, he could not feel entirely at
home in a House of Commons which included Mr. Keir Hardie, and jibbed at
Horace. Indeed, whether quite consciously or not, John Morley had, in the
sentence quoted above, put his finger on the trouble. The whole secret of
Sir William Harcourt’s political life was that he was a belated Whiggish
aristocrat trying to realise himself in unfavourable circumstances. The
whole tragedy of Sir William Harcourt’s political death was that the
circumstances were too strong for the ambition. A whist-player of the
gentlemanly old school, he could have borne with philosophy a rubber lost
to a conspicuously better player, or one with a conspicuously better
hand. But it was bitterness indeed to have the card-room turned into a
Bedlam at the exact moment when the last trick looked like being his.
It is no longer easy to understand the kind of man Sir William Harcourt
was. When we speak now of an opportunist in politics we think of a
rather shady person “on the make.” When we speak of an idealist in
politics we think of a rather foolish and impracticable person, a man
of fixed idea, a crank of some kind, who would cheerfully ruin the
country, to say nothing of the party to which he gives preference, for
the mere satisfaction of advertising his fad. Sir William Harcourt had
ideals of his own kind, and even fads. He was a sincere Whig, and a
fanatical Erastian. That he was never quite in the inner Gladstonian
circle is chiefly attributable to his utter hostility to sacerdotalism.
Mr. Gladstone could more easily take to his bosom an unbeliever like
Mr. Morley than an eighteenth-century Protestant like Sir William.
But though a Ritualistic prelate could always rouse him to fury, and
though he could simulate a passion for certain articles in the Newcastle
programme concerning which he poked admirable fun in private, Sir William
was an eminently “practical politician,” and ordinarily his views and
convictions were subordinated to something in his eyes vastly more
important—the due playing of the political game. Yet we should altogether
misunderstand him if we inferred any more affinity to the newer style
of professional politician than to the newer style of political crank.
He was in one sense absolutely disinterested. He could have been a
very rich man had he stayed longer at the Parliamentary Bar. He left
it, in fact, for politics, the very moment he could afford to do so,
and his fidelity to politics kept him a poor man till almost the end of
his life; till, indeed, the death of a nephew left him lord of the rich
and pleasant Nuneham domain. Titular honour attracted him no more than
money. His knighthood had to be forced on him. When he was appointed
Solicitor-General, Mr. Gladstone had to insist on precedent being
followed; Sir William wished to escape an honour suitable enough for
Mayors and other deserving municipal persons, but scarcely fitting a man
of his pedigree. Many years later, much to the delight of his friends in
the House of Commons, he refused a much more considerable distinction
offered by King Edward. It would have been much to him to be Prime
Minister of England; it was nothing to him to be Viscount Harcourt. There
was more pride than humility or democratic feeling in this disregard for
titles; the pride of Sir William Harcourt was as much a feature of him
as his almost gigantic height, his portentous under lip, and his keen
enjoyment of his own jokes. A large part of the man was what had long
been underground; this parson’s son, jests about whose Plantagenet blood
seemed rather unmeaning to the uninitiated, was in very fact enormously
interested in his genealogy. He could boast of a descent as noble as
any in Europe, and though he readily saw the ridiculous side of pride
of ancestry in others he could not help attaching an importance to
himself as _a_ Vernon Harcourt only second to that of being _the_ Vernon
Harcourt. There is a tale of his wearily repeating, with reference to an
absurd person named Knightley, who bored dinner tables with his pedigree,
the lines:
“And Knightley to the listening earth
Reveals the story of his birth.”
But Knightley, had he possessed the necessary powers of repartee, would
not have lacked material for effective retort.
Wealth in the real sense being indifferent to him, small honours beneath
his consideration, and overpowering enthusiasm for the greater ideals
foreign to his nature, what remained as the motive power sufficing to
propel the vast bulk of this political galleon through the cross-currents
of over thirty years of varied navigation? The answer would seem to be
sheer love of the game of politics. Sir William Harcourt delighted in
political warfare almost as an end in itself. It would be unjust, no
doubt, to style him a pure opportunist. His course was determined by
a sense of loyalty to his party and by a general appreciation of the
philosophy of Whiggism. He had his early days of Adullamitism, when he
was rather the candid friend than the consistent supporter of his own
leaders. But that was in strict accord with the rules of the game. Once
he ceased to be a free lance he became the staunchest of partisans. His
labours for Liberalism were Herculean. Considered as a mere output of
mental energy his career from the early Seventies to the late Nineties
was amazing. In every fight he was put forward in the fore-front of the
battle, and acquitted himself with astonishing prowess. His sword-play
might lack finesse, but its effect no man could deny, least of all
that man who had to bear the brunt of his sweeping strokes. He rapidly
became one of the greatest of House of Commons debaters, a little given,
perhaps, to the declamatory, but never degenerating into mere verbiage
or claptrap. On the platform he was, perhaps, less successful: he lacked
the gift of emotional appeal, and was wholly wanting in imagination. The
common man could laugh heartily at his quips, could cheer his knock-down
blows, but his pulses were never stirred, and even his intellect was not
conquered. For somehow Sir William Harcourt, with all his energy and
incisiveness, never gave the impression of quite feeling what he said. He
always seemed to be engaged rather in a boxing match than a fight—a match
in which he was, quite indubitably, out to win, but still a match and
not an affair of life-and-death earnestness. Mr. Gladstone, Mr. Morley,
and Lord Rosebery each in their way got where Sir William Harcourt could
never quite reach. He rather resembled, in fact, that kind of actor who
is just a little too stagey for the stage, and is never more theatrical
than when his heart is wholly in a part.
But the most stagey actor may have a very real human side, and Sir
William Harcourt, so generally credited with a cynical outlook on public
affairs, was in his family and social relations the most large-hearted
and genuine of men. It would be a mistake, also, to think of him
politically as a mere gladiator. It was certainly his misfortune that
he had sometimes for party purposes to simulate enthusiasm for causes
he had little at heart. On Home Rule and Local Option he privately
was a Laodicean (if nothing more positive), attempting in public the
ecstasy of a dancing dervish—and, in truth, his figure was ill-adapted
to corybantic zeal. But he did really care for good administration,
sound finance, and the Whig theory of exterior policy. There was pique
in his attitude towards Lord Rosebery, but not pique alone; he saw what
Mr. Gladstone did not see, what the Radicals who gave their voice for a
Rosebery Premiership did not see, that Liberal Imperialism would not do;
those who wanted Imperialism wanted the real article, and would go to
the right shop for it. Indeed, though the last years of his career were
pathetically in contrast with its first promise, they did much to kill
the early legend of the pure opportunist. Sir William Harcourt might be
cynical as to indifferent matters, and undoubtedly many things important
to others were to him indifferent. But beneath the surface there was,
besides much loyalty and generosity to individuals, a larger sincerity,
if not to this idea or that, at least to a general conception which might
be limited, but was certainly not ignoble.