EARL SPENCER
In a famous passage Lord Morley of Blackburn referred to a meeting during
the early Nineties in the famous library at Althorp:
“A picture to remember. Spencer with his noble carriage and fine red
beard. Mr. Gladstone, seated on a low stool, discoursing as usual,
playful, keen, versatile; Rosebery, saying little, but now and then
launching a pleasant _mot_; Harcourt, cheery, expansive, witty. Like a
scene from one of Dizzy’s novels, and all the actors men with parts to
play.”
The scene is now almost as distant as one from a Sheridan comedy. The
Earl is dead; the library is in exile; the whole scheme of things to
which both belonged has passed away. The very type of aristocracy which
Earl Spencer so worthily represented seems tending to extinction; it
has at any rate become of less and less account in politics. But even
if it should, by some miracle, regain something of its old importance,
it can hardly occupy its old position. There may be room in the future
for the Tory magnate of the older kind; but the Whig aristocrat seems
to be gone for ever. In the Nineties, though somewhat decayed, he was
still powerful. The Home Rule split had robbed the Liberals of many great
names, but there were still a few old Whig Peers, and the very fact of
their diminished numbers added to their influence in the Party. Among
these great nobles there was none who stood higher than John Poyntz, Earl
Spencer. His adhesion to Home Rule was for many the greatest argument
in its favour, the more especially because he had shown during his term
of office in Ireland that he could be relentlessly firm in upholding
authority and making war on crime.
[Illustration: EARL SPENCER.]
Even those most bitterly opposed to the policy, and most disdainful of
men who had turned when Mr. Gladstone said “turn,” had to pause when they
reached, on the list of noble Home Rulers, the name of Earl Spencer.
For he was, in truth, the last man to be influenced either by vague
sentiment, or by those calculations of personal profit and loss which so
often determine the course of a politician. His mind was solid and rather
prosaic, and his parts were not quick, but he had in a rather special
degree the sort of “horse sense” for which the Duke of Devonshire was
distinguished—the sense which acts as a brake rather than as a motive
power. It was a thoroughly English mind, with all its limitations and
much of its strength, and it was none the less strong because it found
a considerable difficulty in expression. Lord Spencer was a very bad
speaker; if he had had even an ordinary degree of command over words he
would almost certainly have succeeded Mr. Gladstone as Prime Minister.
But he never got beyond the fluency necessary to any man who has to
take a part in public business; the coining of a phrase was beyond him,
and though he could make a point well enough in debate, he was quite
destitute of power over a popular audience. The fact, however, increased
rather than diminished his influence over a certain minority, and he was
undoubtedly the most powerful counter-poise on the Home Rule side to the
weight of the Duke of Devonshire. His character and position, of course,
helped. He was not, like the head of the House of Cavendish, indifferent
to politics; he had ambitions, and would have been glad to satisfy them.
But he was wholly free from one set of weaknesses, and far above one set
of temptations. He had a constitutional disdain for the kind of tricks to
which some great nobles descend in their avarice of power, while his high
rank and great possessions secured him against the temptations of mere
avarice of place.
In Earl Spencer, indeed, the Whig noble was seen at not far from his
best, and it was not difficult for those who knew him to understand why
the Whiggish oligarchy so long held its own in this country. It was not
in the smallest degree “democratic.” No men ever more hated democracy,
no men ever fought more successfully against democracy, than the Whigs.
Burke, for example, regarded the “swinish multitude” very much as an old
Greek might have regarded the slave population of his time. But there was
also the same sort of equality between the Whigs as that which existed
between the free citizens of the ancient world. They played their part
on a high stage, and indulged an unmitigated contempt for those who were
on the ground. But once a man was admitted to this jealous society he
was given the full freedom of it. He was admitted as an equal, and not
as a lackey. It was thus that Whiggism was able to command the services
of great intellects. It was thus that almost all great history was for
many years written in most unfair glorification of Whigs. It was this
liberality that long permitted Whiggism to be as illiberal as it liked
in other matters. Toryism was less wise. It tended to treat intellect
as a common thing meant for common use. The priggish and mediocre
Addison was made a Whig Secretary of State. The great Swift got an Irish
Deanery. Macaulay died a Peer, and lives as a classic. The men who (less
efficiently, it is true) did for Toryism the work Macaulay did for
Whiggism were unmarked in their lives and forgotten in their deaths.
The Tory philosopher was treated as a valet, and consequently few men
above the mentality of the valet became Tory philosophers. The tradition
on both sides weakened as the years went on. The Whig Peer of the
Nineties would have sniffed at much of the company at Holland House. The
Tory Peer of the Nineties would have considered Mr. Lecky an extremely
respectable man, worthy of some sort of place at his dinner-table, even
on an important night. But we have only to think of the long, sincere,
and equal friendship between Earl Spencer and John Morley to be reminded
of the great difference between the parties. There were writers on the
Tory side not inferior in intellect and scholarship to the son of the
Blackburn doctor. Some of them, possibly, were more fitted for active
political life. But none of them was ever considered in competition with
those “claims which cannot be ignored.” It was not until Mr. Chamberlain
joined a Conservative Cabinet that a young man like Sir Alfred Milner,
with nothing but his brains to recommend him, caught the eye of a
colleague of the Cecils.
It was not only that the Whig magnate was ready to admit any sufficiently
able man to the freedom of his circle. He habitually showed also the rare
magnanimity—or rare sagacity—of submitting to the domination of men whom
he had made, and men who could never, without his acquiescence, have
entered into serious competition with himself. Disraeli was almost the
solitary instance of the middle-class man rising to supreme position in
Toryism, and that triumph was achieved by a patient contempt of slight
and sneer, of haughty superiority and mean ingratitude, which could be
only possible to a very exceptional nature. On the other side, one man
after another of no great wealth or birth swayed Cabinets consisting
largely of great lords. Earl Spencer’s loyalty to Mr. Gladstone is highly
typical of the tradition. He formed and maintained sturdily his own
views on matters he felt himself competent to judge, and indeed it was
his stubbornness in the matter of the Navy Estimates that led to his old
chief finally relinquishing office. But if the positions had been more
than reversed, if he had possessed Mr. Gladstone’s splendid powers and
his own ample patrimony and patrician prestige, he could not have looked
for more devoted or more disinterested service than he gave, or for a
more complete absence of personal self-seeking or disloyal intrigue.
Earl Spencer, indeed, carried almost to excess the disposition to
subordinate his personal feelings to considerations of party welfare.
He was assailed, during his Irish period, by the foulest slanders and
the most furious invective. All unmoved, he proceeded, within the law,
but also with the full vigour of the law, to suppress the murder gang
which in the early Eighties almost threatened the dissolution of Irish
society. His dealing with the Invincibles was a model for the imitation
of all statesmen responsible for the restoration of law and order in
a distracted country. He aimed at nothing but what it was clearly his
duty to compass, and what he aimed at he struck dead, with the slow but
inexorable certainty of a fate. In the performance of this duty nothing
moved him. But when it was all over, and he had followed his party in
their conversion from the policy of coercion to the policy of concession,
he appeared on the same platforms with the men who had formerly assailed
him with groundless slander and measureless abuse. This magnanimity,
which his critics called rather a carelessness of personal dignity, was
characteristic of the man, and we might almost say of the Whig in the
man. He could not have felt pleasure in the “union of hearts.” But he was
ruled by the almost instinctive Whiggish subordination of private feeling
to public (or at lowest to party) interest.
The Whig could be, and often was, extraordinarily covetous. He could be,
and often was, more solicitous concerning his party than his country,
or, rather, he was too much accustomed to think of the prosperity of
his party as identical with that of his country. But he was, generally
speaking, loyal to his ideas and to the institutions which stood for
his ideas, and he understood, better than his opponents, what it meant
to play for a side. Whigs quarrelled fiercely among themselves after
the enemy was beaten; before a still formidable foe they possessed a
rare instinct of discipline. So long as the nineteenth-century Liberal
Party was mainly Whiggish it was mainly victorious; and it was no merely
reactionary inspiration which made Whiggism regard Radicalism as on the
whole a deadlier enemy than Toryism; the Radical was not so much a rebel
against the social scheme as against the Party Whip. Whiggism would
probably have conquered Radicalism and continued to give its own impress
to the Party but for the Home Rule split. But that convulsion left so few
great Whig families on the Liberal side that the influence of those who
remained was chiefly personal. So long as men like Earl Spencer lived
they were able to preserve to some extent the character of the Party. But
they left no successors. Nothing is more remarkable than the dying out of
political talent among the landed classes during the last twenty years;
and it is perhaps not altogether fanciful to connect it with the decline
of the Whigs, who, in their palmy days, not only maintained themselves in
full efficiency, but acted as a sort of pace-maker for their opponents.
The Whig nobility was never numerically in a majority, but it commanded
the greater part of aristocratic talent, and it created a certain spirit
of emulation among young Tories. But when the Whigs went over to the
Tory Party this stimulus was wanting. There was really no need for any
strenuous contest of wits in the Upper House; still less was there any
necessity for Party discipline. No doubt henceforward existed as to the
result of a party division, and though it might be desirable to justify
by argument the course decided by numbers, no case is likely to be either
attacked or defended with full vigour and acuteness when the speaker
knows that no single vote will be affected by his eloquence or his logic.
The House of Lords, it is true, is still by no means destitute of ability
and experience in public affairs: in many respects it has degenerated
less than the elective chamber. But the qualities which make men
pre-eminent in counsel and debate are now almost a monopoly of Peers who
have served in the House of Commons or in high places under the Crown.
Further, the cadets of the noble houses show an increasing disinclination
to enter politics, and a decreasing ability to satisfy such ambitions
even when they are present. Glance at the personnel of the present
Government, compare it with any Government of the nineteenth century, and
the first thing to strike one is the political decline of the historic
families. If the Liberal Party alone were affected, the fact might be
attributed to the mere advance of opinion in that Party. But on the
whole the Liberals retain more distinguished men of old family than the
Conservatives. The House of Lords was never more of one complexion. There
never was a Tory majority in the Commons so large and so compact. Yet
those very critics on the Tory side who are for ever urging that the real
Tories should show their strength are forced ruefully to admit that from
both Houses it would be difficult to pick a Government of indubitable
orthodoxy which should also be a Government of reasonable efficiency.
Territorial Toryism has almost suffered the fate of those ancient
monsters which, in a world of which they were unchallenged masters,
developed such bulk and inertia as actually to die of over-weight and
under-intelligence. In this case the intelligence has not exactly died:
it has been diverted to other things. In the old days the ordinary
course of a young man was first to take up politics as a game, and then
to adopt it as a vocation. The game lost interest when the sides became
grotesquely unequal, and the vocation is no longer felt.
A man like Earl Spencer is, therefore, not merely rare in present-day
politics; he is almost unknown. The Peers who still take an interest
in the affairs of the nation are not territorial, but rather urban and
even suburban Peers. That, as in the case of Lord Curzon, they may
occasionally be able to boast great descent is not to the point; their
tastes are those of the town and not of the shire. They are not likely,
like Walpole, to open their huntsman’s or gamekeeper’s letters before
attending to official correspondence. It is true that the sort of man
Earl Spencer was—and he was once the ordinary type of great lord in
politics—is still to be found, but you shall hardly find him in affairs.
And he has, perhaps, a little coarsened; he has grown too horsey, and
lost his old taste for things of the mind. Earl Spencer was Master of the
Pytchley, and astonished John Morley by the zest with which he set out on
a fourteen-mile drive to the meet on a pouring wet morning, after being
up half the night talking politics. But he was also the owner of a great
library which he was perfectly able to appreciate—a library with which he
parted, not in order to make money, but simply because he felt that such
priceless books should be at the public disposal.
The great Whig nobles of a former generation were, even the greatest of
them, by no means beyond criticism. They often took a selfish view of
public questions. They often lacked imagination and sympathy. They were
many of them most complacent pagans. Most were quite horribly calm over
things like the Irish famine and the industrial shames of Great Britain.
But it is not easy to point to any age or country which afforded better
examples than the best of them of the cultivated mind in the sound
body, of powers mental and physical carried to their highest pitch of
development, of refined virility and calm strength. And of the type Earl
Spencer was not the least worthy representative.