SIR HENRY FOWLER
On the surface at least there was an incurable ordinariness about Henry
Hartley Fowler, afterwards first Viscount Wolverhampton. His parts,
though sound, were not brilliant; imagination he had none; his voice was
harsh and unsympathetic; his appearance was singularly ungainly, and he
was the sort of man who always looks at his worst when best dressed; he
had absolutely no “way” with him; he rose by unexciting degrees to a
rather dull sort of eminence; and at the best he could only be counted
a first-rate example of the second-rate man. But, as Mr. Arnold Bennett
has found profit in recognising, ordinariness carried to the extreme
becomes very extraordinary, and Sir Henry Fowler, as the end of the
Nineties left him, remains a figure of some significance. It would be a
mistake to consider him, like (say) Mr. Childers, as a mere fragment of
dullness in the mosaic of Victorian politics—a foil for the brilliance of
the gold and lapis lazuli. He was something positive, if sombre and not
very decorative; and he almost perfectly represented a type which must be
understood if we are to make any sense at all of the Victorian time.
Sir Henry Fowler was, I believe, the first Wesleyan to become a Cabinet
Minister and a Peer. His Wesleyanism was one of the main facts about
him. Far more than John Bright he represented English Nonconformity.
Quakerism is in truth not very English, though there can be no doubt
concerning the Englishness of its founder. There is a logical abandon
about it quite out of harmony with the English taste for compromise. The
opposite extreme to Catholicism, it yet resembles Catholicism in basing
itself firmly on certain dogmas, and shrinking from no conclusion that
logically follows such acceptance. Sir Henry Fowler belonged to that more
English school of Nonconformity which is guided much more by taste than
by logic. He had no quarrel with the doctrines of the Church. He loved
its liturgy. He had something like a passion for extreme orderliness in
public worship. When in London he would attend service at St. Margaret’s,
Westminster; he was married by the Church, had his children baptised and
confirmed in the Church, and was himself buried in accordance with the
rites of the Church. Yet he was born and bred a Wesleyan, was the son of
a Wesleyan minister, and the interests of Wesleyanism were one of the
main cares of his life. Such a man would be incomprehensible anywhere
but in England. Here he was only a rather extreme example of a strange
national tendency to choose our religious opinions much as we do our
cigars—by their flavour.
In politics Sir Henry Fowler’s case was much the same. His real nature
was conservative. There was never a less adventurous temperament. His
attitude towards the present was one of despondency, and towards the
future one of apprehension. The most bigoted Tory could not be further
removed than he was from that class of men described by Macaulay as
“sanguine in hope, bold in speculation, always pressing forward, quick to
discern the imperfections of whatever exists, disposed to think lightly
of the risks and inconveniences which attend improvements, and disposed
to give every change credit for being an improvement.” On the contrary,
he was ever the counsellor of caution and the prophet of disaster. He
hugged gloom like a garment. If Conservatives were in office, he feared
for the country; if Liberals were in office his apprehensions were merely
doubled—he feared for his party as well. He could discern readily enough
the imperfections of whatever existed, but even more was he impressed
with the dangers of bringing something else into existence. Thus he was
a Home Ruler in sentiment, but though he believed in the principle he
“also believed in the possibility of buying some things too dear,” and
at the end of twenty years he was more convinced than at the beginning
that the time was not “ripe.” Thus, also, he came into Parliament as
an “advanced Radical,” but he remained in the capacity of a Radical
with much genius for staying in the same place, a Radical at least
implacably opposed to anything like “Socialistic proposals.” A man of
his pessimism and his caution could only be in essence a Conservative.
Whence, then, his position in the fore-front of Liberalism, a position
so considerable that, though he was never a favourite of Mr. Gladstone,
he could not be ignored? The answer is probably that the flavour of
the actual Conservative Party, like the flavour of the actual Church
of England, did not appeal to him. Above all he was a Puritan, and, if
a certain remnant of Puritanism still persisted in the Church, it was
not conspicuous or influential in the Conservative Party. There were,
of course, fox-hunters and men of pleasure on the Liberal side, but in
the main they were rather camp-followers than captains, and they did
not give the party its character. Further, the character of Puritan
also embraced that of iconoclast. Sir Henry Fowler was a little like
the seventeenth-century Puritans in being much more anxious to destroy
symbols than realities. They cut down the thorn of Glastonbury and
dislodged the images of saints, but they left “civil and religious
liberty” in rather more parlous condition than they found it. Their
nineteenth-century representative had no desire to throw down or change
the fabric of English life. But he did wish to chip off all its Gothic
eccentricities (even if they happened to be also beauties), to make it
seemly and prosaic, to harmonise it with his view of the utilitarian.
He was, indeed, that very strange product of the Victorian time, the
matter-of-fact mystic. He believed in the world to come as in something
just as real as a counting-house, and not altogether dissimilar. On the
other hand, nothing outside the counting-house and the world to come had
much reality for him. There was work and there was religion—and beyond
these nothing, or nothing to speak of. Work, of course, in the widest
sense—the satisfaction of certain personal ambitions, the serving of
certain public ends, the rearing of children, the establishment of a
status in life were all included, for this kind of saintliness has no
regard for the “magnificence of destitution”; while it reads its title
clear to mansions in the skies it is equally insistent on an indubitable
freehold of some consequence here below. This mingling of worldliness
and other-worldliness was almost as old as the man. The youth of Sir
Henry Fowler was fully as serious as his manhood. The son of one of the
pioneers of Methodism, who had come early under the influence of the
extraordinary man who was its founder, he was sent to a school for the
sons of ministers at Woodhouse Grove, in Yorkshire, which seems to have
borne to the academy of Mr. Wackford Squeers the same relation that an
original bears to a parody. The discipline was on much the same lines as
that of Dotheboys Hall, and the diet, if more decent, was scarcely more
plentiful. The boys were given one holiday a year, and the only game
was fives. Here, and afterwards in an equally grave London atmosphere,
the lines of the boy’s character were firmly set. Of a naturally clumsy
build and serious disposition, he could hardly, in any circumstances,
have grown up a handy and hearty boy. But with such schooling, and with
his father “stimulating his intellectual powers” during the solitary
midsummer holiday, he rapidly acquired both the virtues and disabilities
which distinguished him through life. At twelve he was already a
political Nonconformist, following with deep attention all debates in
Parliament bearing on Dissent. At the same time the foundations had been
laid of a physical awkwardness and stiffness, a distaste for exercise,
and an incapacity for all the graces of life which for him made work
of some kind the only tolerable condition of existence. His daughter
tells us that he had little use for his hands. He could not throw a
ball or hold a bat, and when he tried to play golf his clumsiness was
extraordinary. The tying of a dress tie was a feat of dexterity he never
mastered. He seldom walked if he could help it, and was never known to
run a step. An idle day was for him one of unmitigated boredom, and he
managed to communicate the weariness of it to those about him. He had a
great dislike for fresh air, and could not endure an open window, whether
at home, or at his office, or even at his favourite chapel. Yet he was
by no means a gloomy domestic tyrant. He had married the woman of his
earliest ambition, apparently by sheer force of character, for she was
wealthy and much courted, and he was a sombre, reserved and heavy-footed
suitor. His children he loved, and they learned to love him. He had a
home in which the last word in Victorian comfort chimed harmoniously
with the last word in Victorian Philistinism. He could even on occasion
drink a glass of wine and take a hand of cards, though he could never
recognise a five of spades at sight; he had laboriously to count the
pips. In his own way he was kindness itself to his family. “Father,” says
the filial biographer already quoted, “always let us have _his_ own way
and gave us everything _he_ wanted. But, although we were only permitted
such pleasures as would recommend themselves to a middle-aged statesman,
ours was nevertheless a very merry home. We laughed at everything and
everybody, especially at our father, and nobody enjoyed such laughter
more than he did. I never knew anyone who so thoroughly appreciated a
joke against himself.” But this unbending came rather late; as a younger
man, with young children, he was hopelessly stiff.
There was withal a massive innocence in the man. Of many of the facts
of life he was more ignorant than seemed possible for any human
being. He could read the naughtiest of novels without seeing anything
objectionable, and indeed would sometimes recommend to young women books
full of suggestiveness which he might have picked up and glanced at
with a certain interest and no understanding. This, of course, was in
the evening of his life, when his daughter’s success as a novelist—a
success which filled him with a certain awed delight—had modified severer
early views of light literature. She relates how he used to read her
manuscripts and offer “superbly useless” advice. Thus in one book there
is the following scrap of conversation:
“Have they any children?”
“No, only politics.”
“Father,” says his daughter, “underlined the ‘No.’ ‘I should not say
that; it is too conclusive. I should say ‘_Not yet_.’ And he didn’t
understand why we laughed.”
Such was Henry Hartley Fowler at home. In business his solemnity was
intensified. The shadow of a frustrated ambition hung over all this side
of his life. In his youth he had cast longing eyes on the Bar; it would
have pleased him to reach the Bench after a successful career as an
advocate, and it was with reluctance that he took up the lower branch
of the profession. However, whatever he had to do must be well done,
and he had won a considerable local reputation at Wolverhampton when he
joined a brother Wesleyan, Sir Robert Perks, in establishing an office
in London. The understanding between them was that the firm should never
touch criminal work, that it should have nothing to do with building
societies, that it should not take County Court cases, and that it should
never act for women. This self-denying ordinance did not interfere with
the success of the business. Within four years the firm had its hands
full with Parliamentary Committee work, and the twenty-five years of the
partnership were equally respectable and lucrative.
Meanwhile the second great ambition of Henry Fowler—the first was his
marriage to Ellen Thorneycroft—was being advanced by steady interest
in municipal politics, and in 1880 he became what from his earliest
manhood he had wanted to be, Member of Parliament for Wolverhampton.
Ten years sufficed to build a solid House of Commons reputation and to
form a number of valuable friendships, of which that with John Morley
was perhaps the most constant and intimate. By the Nineties he had
established himself firmly as one of the indispensables of Liberalism.
Yet his position was a little singular. He was not particularly liked
by his chief. He was not especially popular with his colleagues. Apart
from his position as a representative of Nonconformity, he had no sort of
following in the country. He could hardly have maintained himself had he
not been, within his limits, a strong and able man. His main quality was
a cold clearness of head which fitted him to get at once to the heart of
any complicated business matter. Understanding certain things thoroughly
himself, he had the gift of making them understandable to others. His
style of speaking was not attractive; and on the platform he adopted the
attitudes usually associated with a Victorian philanthropist’s statue,
his only gesture being the monotonous sawing up and down of a clumsy
hand. But he “read” well, though rather dryly—never a happy illustration,
or a touch of fancy, or a suggestion of the daintier kind of scholarship;
now and again, however, he would rise to a grave and liturgical kind
of declamation which was not without its impressiveness. He was master
of something which was not perhaps eloquence, but occasionally had
the effect of such—a power of putting a case in such fashion that
even partisans were a little ashamed of resisting it. One of these
sudden splendours arrived opportunely to save the Liberal Government
of the Nineties from defeat. Sir Henry Fowler, who had been bitterly
disappointed by Mr. Gladstone’s gift of the Local Government Board, had
earned his promotion from Lord Rosebery, and was more happily bestowed at
the India Office. Here he had to face a serious crisis. The Viceroy in
Council had decreed, in order to meet a deficiency in revenue, certain
import duties on cotton and cotton goods. Lancashire, always sensitive as
to its Indian market, revolted, and when the Secretary rose the dismissal
of the Government seemed assured. The House would assuredly have been
proof against the best debating effort of Sir William Harcourt, for it
would have regarded such a speech as common form, to be met by common
form in the lobbies. It would probably have been deaf to any pleading
from Mr. Morley, being suspicious of him as a professor of ideals. But
the plain Wolverhampton solicitor managed to carry conviction by a
singular combination of sober reasoning and moral appeal. His very lack
of imagination helped him; it seemed impossible that such a man could be
so moved without the most powerful reasons. “The best part of my speech,”
he said afterwards, “was never delivered, but I saw the tide had turned
and sat down. The art of speaking is knowing when to sit down.”
Naturally enough, he never again reached the level of his Indian days,
for he was seventy-six when he entered Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman’s
Cabinet, and even an older man politically than he was physically. There
was in the late Nineties a momentary idea of making him Sir William
Harcourt’s successor. But he was neither a force with the people nor a
favourite with the clubs; the gift of small talk was not his, and he
had neither the capacity nor the wish to cultivate arts foreign to his
nature. The ruler of men must be either a man or a riddle. Sir Henry
Fowler lacked humanity, and everybody knew the answer to him.