XII
FOUR PRIME MINISTERS
What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving, how express and admirable! in action, how like an angel! in apprehension, how like a god!—Hamlet.
In every important transaction, in every impersonation of life, it is of advantage to be able to look the part. History, when it comes to deal with the first Prime Minister of Australia, will say that he possessed this advantage in a superlative degree. We are all more or less susceptible to appearances. In very many cases we can judge only by appearances. In very rare instances are we given the opportunity of getting behind the outer shell of things and judging personality.
That fortune was generous to the pioneer of the Union movement in Australia, is universally admitted. He not only spoke well, but he looked well. He won votes in country districts before he had uttered a syllable. Some of his critics said that he travelled the country on his hair. The statement was at best a half truth, and at worst a trifle libellous. For the Goddess, in emptying her horn into the lap of the future Prime Minister, gave him something more than an idealistic head of hair, useful asset though that has been. It gave him a large skull-index, a massive forehead, an impressive set of features that look their best when on a platform surmounting a vast concourse of people. It gave him a certain faculty for looking like a great man. To hear Edmund Barton concluding one of his elaborate and lawyer-like periods, to watch him closing his lips firmly and looking out with that Roscius-like gaze over the heads of the audience, is to experience an unreasonable desire to rise up in the middle of the hall and cheer. The crowd is always amenable to proper discipline, and it has been disciplined by its eyesight into believing that it could do no better than exalt Barton to the highest offices within its gift.
To endeavour to get at the personal and intellectual quality behind this imposing framework is to receive a somewhat vague, a somewhat indeterminate impression. Only the Creator and Edmund Barton himself know what is at the back of those fine eyes when the audience is intensely listening, and certain well-sounding phrases are telling their tale. Only they know, and one is no more likely to tell than is the other. The word histrionic suggests itself in this connection. It is not by any means a bad word; it is by no means intended to be used in a disparaging sense. The first Prime Minister of Australia has a knowledge of effect; he appreciates and loves effect. In that fact lies his strength and his weakness, his greatness and his less than greatness, his virtues and his demerits. There is no part he could not play if it looked well enough, there is no rôle of which he could not seem worthy, and there is no height to which he could not histrionically attain. You could fit him with no robes, place him in no position of dignity, load him with no honours to which he would not appear entitled. Whether representing the Commonwealth in London, whether taking precedence of Dukes and Earls at a banquet at Guildhall, whether voicing the aspirations of the new Commonwealth in the councils of the Empire, whether facing the flashlights of the Mansion House, or looking lofty rebuke on the disorderly ruffians of Wooloomooloo, there would never be any doubt as to his capacity for looking the character. You would say instinctively that the best man had been chosen. Personally he knows in what his strength consists. He has the confidence which comes from the consciousness of great powers; but he knows also that certain effects are obtained in a certain way.
Putting his rare dramatic faculty on one side, it is impossible to deny the ex-Prime Minister the credit of being unusually gifted, unusually able, unusually subtle-minded. This is the type of intellect from which very little could remain hid, provided that investigation seemed worth while. Edmund Barton, in the course of his half century or more on earth, has investigated quite a number of things. He has read and studied a great deal. His public career has been marked by an erudition rare in any country. But he has owed less to his reading than to the quality of his mind. It combines in a singular degree two contrasted gifts—that of close analysis with that of fervent enthusiasm, or (what is the same thing for a public man) the appearance of fervent enthusiasm. In the thousands of speeches which Edmund Barton has delivered in this and other continents, you will look in vain for any crudeness of thought, for any narrowness of vision, for any lack of illuminating powers. The daily newspaper men of Australia know well enough how the ex-Prime Minister’s utterances used to be inlaid thought on thought, word upon word, qualifying phrase on qualifying phrase. There was an absence of directness, often, but there was never an absence of mentality or of idea. When a man of such impressive gifts and of such histrionic faculty undertakes to play Peter the Hermit; when he says that such and such a thing ought to take place; when he declares, as he did in the Sydney Town Hall on a memorable occasion, that, “God means to give us this Federation”—for all the world as though he had received a direct communication from the Almighty on the subject—the result on the average individual is usually convincing, not to say overwhelming.
The less than complete political success of Edmund Barton must be attributed, not to his intellectual qualities, but to his character. It was his character that, from the day of his great appointment, fought against him. The fact is that he possessed too good a character. A worse man would have held office longer, if not with better results; his conspicuous lack of badness, of hardness, of callousness, was his chief enemy. It is not to be assumed, because this fact was so, that the great advocate of Australian Union set himself to live a life of austerity to which the vaunted virtues of Edward the Confessor or of a modern college of Cardinals would be as riotous excess. He had his redeeming faults, and, unless the Supreme Court Bench has scourged them out of him, has them now. But they were not the faults that tell most in the strenuous business of Party warfare; they were not the faults that help a man to vanquish his deadliest enemies. Sir Edmund Barton was not quite cunning enough, or, rather, he would not stoop low enough; he was not hard enough, he was not unscrupulous enough; there was much of the Macbeth temper in him; what he wanted highly, he wanted holily, or, if not holily, at any rate respectably. Whether from inherent principle or because he was averse of certain lines of conduct, or because the cui bono precept had struck too deep a root in his philosophy, he would not try ways that were open to him. He compromised, conceded, refined, and yielded more than once. In his place in the House he was always a splendid, an impressive figure; but the bull-dog tenacious quality that is the possession of many lesser men was never his. When he took a seat on the Supreme Court Bench, it was recognised that Parliament had lost the man best worth looking at within its walls, but it was recognised also that the probabilities of complete success were brighter for him in the new sphere than in the old.
To speak of Alfred Deakin, the second man to hold office as Prime Minister of Australia, is to speak of a unique personality. There is no doubt that Nature, when it conceived the idea of giving an Alfred Deakin to the world, intended him to be much disliked. It specially designed him for that purpose. To begin with, it gave him all those agreeable and outwardly attractive qualities which make a man suspected by his fellows. As in the case of Byron, all the fairies were bidden to his cradle. They came in smiling enough fashion, but they had a malignant purpose. So it was that the future Prime Minister was loaded with gifts and graces intended to drag him down. He grew up tall and straight and comely to look upon. A quick-minded, receptive, intelligent man of ideas, he was voted a most agreeable person to talk to. No one could quote the romantic poets more aptly, or talk the language of culture with better accent and discretion. When he went upon a platform, words flowed from him in a silver stream; when he stood for Parliament, audiences felt that they were being honoured above their deserts. He was member of the Victorian Legislative Assembly at twenty-three, Minister of the Crown at twenty-seven, Senior Representative of the Imperial Conference in London before he was thirty-one, member of the National Australian Convention four years later, and Prime Minister of the Commonwealth when he was forty-seven. His flatterers have combined with Nature to do their worst: there is nothing on which he has not been complimented, from his management of the affairs of a nation to his smile, or from his oratory to the way in which he holds the hand of a lady at a dance. When he made his first official visit to London the late Queen Victoria enquired, in a sentence that became famous, whether there were many men like Alfred Deakin in the Australian continent. He has been belauded impartially and comprehensively as an Adonis and a Demosthenes, as a Caius Gracchus and a Marcus Aurelius, as a Beau Brummell and a William Pitt. It is no wonder that newspaper men, knowing him only by repute, and seeing him for the first time rise in his place in Parliament, have shuddered inwardly to think what manner of insufferable and awful person such a petted individual must be.
Yet Alfred Deakin, to do him justice, has struggled manfully against his disadvantages. Nature intended him to be disliked, undoubtedly, but it is well-nigh impossible to dislike him. He has fought a great and, on the whole, a successful battle against the load of adulation that has been pressed upon him. This circumstance must always stand to his credit, while it explains a great deal that would otherwise be incomprehensible. With every inducement to develop into a snob, he has made conscientious efforts not to become one. Any unknown and undistinguished person, aware of the blighting effects of success on the average temperament, would hesitate to approach Alfred Deakin. He would say that such a man could not retain his sense of proportion, could not judge except by appearances. As a matter of fact, the Prime Minister is at his best when talking to little-known people. If you happen to be a newspaper reporter, travelling in the same train with Mr Deakin—and the present writer has often been in that position—you need not bother either to entertain him or to keep out of his way. It is more than likely, unless circumstances keep him otherwise occupied, that he will make it his business to entertain you. There are certain qualities he recognises. He has always time to spare for a man who is intelligent and earnest and anxious to get on. He does not worship success; because he has had too much of it, he knows how to value it. My own opinion is that Alfred Deakin is intensely tired of all this talk of himself as a “silver-tongued orator.” If some one could convince him that he was not really an orator at all, and had only a blundering acquaintance with the fine points of the English language, he would be intensely grateful. I remember an incident, slight but significant, which took place when he was moving, in presence of a full and adoring House, the second reading of his High Court Bill. There was only one individual—a rash and sacrilegious individual—who ventured to interject. The House was astonished; one or two members looked as if they expected the roof to fall. The Speaker’s wrath blazed out against the offender, but Mr Deakin took the latter’s part. “It was a friendly interjection, sir,” was his comment, as he replied to the rash person’s remark. The episode may have been trifling, but at least it went to show that Mr Deakin is weary of his very remarkable reputation; that he dislikes being looked upon as either a tin god or a hot-house flower, and that he would welcome anything that brought him to the ordinary level of political war.
It is necessary to get away from the glamour of Alfred Deakin’s oratory, and the shining white light of his character, in order to arrive at some reasonable estimate of his value as a politician. On the latter subject a great deal has been written, and a great deal could be written, not all of it in the language of extravagant eulogy. It is said that the “tempers” of the man of words and of the man of action are necessarily distinct. That may or may not be the case. What is certain, is that there is no instance on record of a politician combining such a gift of speech as Deakin’s with an equal faculty for wise, clear, vigorous, and resolutely determined action. As a State Minister, this darling of the gods was chiefly remarkable for what he wished to do, but failed to do, in connection with Victorian immigration. He had a great poetic conception of what might be achieved in the arid regions of Northern Victoria by letting in healing streams of water, and causing wildernesses to rejoice and blossom as the rose. He constructed channels, built reservoirs, and expended public money; but the channels ran dry, the reservoirs became barren, and the local bodies repudiated the debt. It was a splendid failure on the Minister’s part, but none the less a failure. As an advocate of Federation, Mr Deakin was a complete success. Eloquence was required, and it was forthcoming. As Prime Minister of the Commonwealth, Mr Deakin did little during his first term—as a matter of fact he had time to do very little—but he spoke finely, and went down heroically on a question of abstract principle. If he had vanquished a continent he could not have been more vociferously applauded on the manner of his downfall. He has now another magnificent opportunity, and it remains to be seen how he will use it. If he has done nothing else he has lifted the dull business of politics out of the rut of the commonplace. And that of itself is no mean achievement.
The third Prime Minister of the Commonwealth was, and still is, the chosen of the organised democrats of the continent. Careful observation of Mr Watson, both in and out of Parliament, impels the writer to the reflection that Nature intended him to be undistinguished. The reasons for coming to this conclusion are not far to seek. To begin with, Mr Watson has no aggressive, or specially assertive characteristics, whether physical or mental. He has not the gift of dazzling beauty on the one hand, nor the still more useful gift of excessive ugliness on the other. In appearance he is just an ordinary, good-looking, well-set, upright man. In times of crisis there is nothing so calculated to help its possessor as fanaticism; and Mr Watson cannot boast of being a fanatic. Fortune was never kind enough to him to treat him very unkindly. He was never assisted in his campaign on behalf of Labour by any act of injustice or sense of gross personal wrong at the hands of privileged persons. No friendly capitalist helped to make him a statesman by turning his wife and family out of doors. He has had a few ups and downs, but they have been of a minor sort. Undoubtedly it was the intention of Nature that he should go through life without attracting too much notice, that he should set up type and cultivate a garden, and assist in his spare moments at those illuminating debates that shake to their foundations the suburbs of Carlton and of Wooloomooloo.
These original designs have been upset. Certain political currents took possession of Mr Watson, and he could not get away from them. As a matter of fact, he did not wish to get away from them. He was shrewd enough to realise what an important bearing they might have on the future of a continent, and incidently on the future of Chris. Watson. The Federation movement was a timely one, so far as he was concerned. The inauguration of the Commonwealth Parliament brought with it the division of political parties into Free Trade and Protectionist, with neither of the two sides sufficiently strong to crush or always to out-vote the other. It was a great opportunity for a Labour party, which did not care two constitutional straws about either Free Trade or Protection, to hold the balance of power, and practically to usurp the functions of Government. But the Labour party wanted a leader. It wanted a man who would be sufficiently strong for the purpose—and it was a tremendously important purpose—but not one who would err from excess of strength. It did not want a notorious man, or a violent man, or a man whose name would cause any sort of alarm. It did not want a man who had been too extensively advertised in connection with socialistic movements in the past. It did not want a distinguished anarchist or a social outlaw. It wanted neither a Danton nor a Robespierre. It discovered Mr Watson, and it has made the most of the discovery.
It is not too much to say that this man, who was intended to be nothing, has become the most important political figure in the English-speaking world—or, at least, of the English-speaking world south of the Equator. That is not to assert that he has been the most talked of, or has wielded the most power. But the movement that he leads in Australia is the most momentous political-cum-social movement known to the present age, and in Australia it has gone further than in any other part of the British dominions. It happened three years ago, for the first time on record, that a man who was the avowed leader of a socialistic party—for the Labour party is socialistic in aim and purpose, if not always in detail and in method—was chosen as the political head of four million English-speaking people. That man was Watson. Without much notice and without much warning, he found himself raised to a giddy height. All eyes were upon him, all responsibility rested with him, all honours that were the gift of the electors were showered on his head. It was a trying situation, and the predictions of immediate and disastrous failure were numerous. However, the expected did not happen, and the deluge, though on general principles due to arrive, held off. Mr Watson as head of the Commonwealth Ministry acted precisely as he had acted when private member, or when leader of the irrepressible Labour party. Probably he knew that a tremendous head of limelight was being turned upon him; but he gave no outward evidence of the knowledge. If he suffered from self-consciousness, he kept the circumstance from the world.
The man’s whole career is an object lesson in the importance of keeping cool. Any study of the ex-compositor’s character must impress one fact on the mind. It is a terrible thing to suffer from what the French call tête montée; it is a magnificent thing to be able to keep cool. Whether Mr Watson’s coolness is the result of temperament or of will power, might be difficult to say. It is more than probable that it is due to the latter. So far as temperament is concerned, the man is impressionable, and many sided. You can tell by glancing at his good-looking, half-oval, half-practical face, that he has sensuous as well as mental perceptions; that he is not naturally a stoic; that the taste of power and pleasure is not wasted on him; that “the laurel, the palms, the pæan” are to him something more than names. If it were merely a question of temperament, he could let himself go with the best or the worst of us. But the man is master of himself. If Nature and preliminary training have not given him all things; if certain magnetic gifts such as oratorical fire and intellectual fervour are not his; if it be that
Knowledge to his eyes her ample page,
Rich with the spoils of time, did ne’er unroll,
it is yet a fact that he has a marvellous faculty for showing the mens æqua in arduis, for keeping his head, for being true to himself in every emergency and at any hour. Temperament may have something to do with the faculty; but it seems to be mainly the result of a resolute and altogether admirable will. People who know Mr Watson best have never been able to detect any difference in his manner as applicant for work in Sydney, as political chief of a sectional party, or as head of the Commonwealth Government. He performed the impossible when, for the better part of a session, he led the House of Representatives in the face of a large and hostile majority. A man who listened to the extremists behind him, a man who could not think and reason with bullets whistling all round him, could not have done this for a week. Mr Watson did it for four months, and he did it very well. It is more than likely he will have the opportunity of doing it again.
The fourth member of this famous quartette is Mr George Houston Reid. It is melancholy to think what vast quantities of bad writing and indifferent caricaturing have been called forth by this Prime Minister of the Commonwealth of Australia. Melancholy, because the subject is such a good one that it should have been reserved for adequate and original treatment. It is only possible now to repeat a few truisms which are known and recognised of all men. One of these truisms is that Mr Reid represents the apotheosis of intelligence, the triumph of mind over matter. He is not beautiful, or graceful, or slim, or heroic-looking. No one ever accused him of being a glass of fashion, or a mould of form. The ingenious Mr Crosland tells us that a man has no business with a figure; that it is his duty to look like a clothes-prop in youth, and like a balloon in middle life. Mr Reid and Mr Crosland are at one in this matter, with the difference that the Premier has put into practice what the mentally and physically smaller person merely suggested. Certain well-meaning but bat-eyed individuals have accused the ex-Prime Minister of being inconsistent; they point out—good, worthy souls!—that he is found talking in favour of a project at one time, and talking against it at another. These people, well meaning as they are, do not understand. Mr Reid, for his part, does understand. We see here the whole secret of his vast popularity, of his wonderful rise to power. He UNDERSTANDS. When one recollects how few people understand, there is little further to be said.
The ex-Prime Minister is a wonderful talker; and for want of anything better to talk to, he talks to public audiences. The general impression seems to be that he enjoys himself on these occasions; that he likes to hear the plaudits that greet his appearance, the laughter that echoes to his jests, even the interjections that he turns to such good account. But the writer’s opinion, derived not only from watching Mr Reid on a platform, but from private conversation with him, is that he knows himself to be mentally adapted for other and better things. What, after all, does the crowd know or care about such gifts of speech, such exquisite verbal delicacy and grace as this man possesses? True, they can appreciate what he gives them, for he is wise enough to give what they require, not what he himself knows to be most select and valuable. Whenever I think of what is rare and beautiful in the mind or heart of woman; whenever I think of those gracious and grateful beings who flitted across this planet and died in disappointment because they had found no intellectual mate; I regret that a mysterious Providence did not put me in their path after endowing me with Mr Reid’s gift of speech. It is a pity that such talent should be dissipated among the vulgar; it is a pity that it should be harnessed to any political engine; it is ten times a pity that it should have so often to put up with the wrong audience, the wrong hour, and the wrong place.
Like all great men, Mr Reid has been responsible for some erroneous impressions. One of the most popular and widespread of these is that he is, by instinct and temperament, a humorist. Nothing could be further from the truth. The late head of the Commonwealth Government is undoubtedly the most serious man that the political exigencies of Australia have ever produced. He has too much insight, too much intelligence not to be serious. Every man who possesses the faculty of making other people laugh must do so by presenting an effective contrast to their own habit of thought. In other words, he must be as different as possible from themselves. Mr Reid is entirely different in thought and disposition from ninety-nine out of every hundred of those who listen to him and laugh with him. They are volatile, fickle, amusement-loving; he is none of these. That is the reason why, when he throws for their delectation certain verbal pictures on a rhetorical screen, they laugh with such boisterous mirth and such riotous abandon. The reason why Mr Reid came to take up the rôle of jester is easy to understand. If he followed out his own inclinations, he would be either a transcendental philosopher, or a poet of the mystic school. He would never speak a word about politics, and he would never make a joke. He is too clever not to recognise the essential meanness of politics; he is too sombre in disposition not to revolt from the tinkling merriment of a crowd. But he has never got quite free from the idea that success is a desirable thing to obtain. It is the one infirmity that sticks to him. He knows that distinction for a man, physically constituted as he is, is not to be won through the channels of transcendentalism, or by the agency of the lofty rhyme. He knows that for a clever man the best and surest way to success is to play the fool. That is why he has talked on such a commonplace subject as politics to tens of thousands of people; that is why he has so successfully, so brilliantly played the fool.
As already stated, Mr Reid is too intelligent to be wedded exclusively to any one faith or shibboleth. But if he has one political leaning over another, it is in favour of Protection. It is true there is a popular idea to the contrary; but then many popular ideas flourish on the most unsubstantial foundations. There is no difficulty whatever in showing that Mr Reid’s one marked characteristic as a statesman is his fondness for Protection. The importers of New South Wales chose to make him their idol. It was not for him to object. It was apparent to him as an intelligent man that if the importer was no better, he was no worse than other people. So it came about that Mr Reid and Free Trade went hand in hand for quite a number of years. But to be strictly devoted to one faith, is to argue oneself blind to the merits of other faiths, and therefore mentally defective. To prove his catholicity of taste, Mr Reid put a few doses of Protection into the Free Trade dish which his fellow colonists were asking at his hands. When at a later stage the invitation came to him to drop fiscalism and merge his free trade in the high-tariffism of Mr Deakin, he gladly did so. There is no doubt that he was getting tired of the old formulas. How could it be otherwise? Mr Reid owes it to himself, and to his reputation as a man of broad views, to give Protection a turn, and in that direction, beyond doubt, his desire lies. There is a foolish idea, fatuously and blatantly insisted upon by newspaper writers, that, because a man has been harnessed to a party at one stage of his career he should remain harnessed to it for ever. The only universal genius is he who has come to recognise the essential quackery and futility of all political faiths now being foisted upon the community. I do not assert that Mr Reid is, or is not, a universal genius. I merely repeat that he is a man who understands. It is possible to look forward to the time when circumstances, and his own desire to be impartial, will bring him out as the champion of Protection in Australia. This is necessary to the complete and artistic balancing of his career. No one knows this better than himself. And whatever we say of G. H. Reid, whatever we think of him, whatever broad or narrow views we take of him, we are bound to admit that he touches nothing, and has touched nothing, he does not adorn.