LORD ROBERT CECIL
"Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm."—EMERSON.
If a novelist take for his hero an educated gentleman who expresses contempt for the licence and indecencies of modern life, it is ten to one that the critics, who confess themselves on other occasions as sick of prurient tales, will pronounce this hero to be a prig. In like manner, let a politician evince concern for the moral character of the nation and it is ten to one his colleagues in the House of Commons and his critics in the Press, and everywhere the very men most in despair of politics, will declare him to be a fanatic.
This has been the unfortunate fate of Lord Robert Cecil. He is regarded by his countrymen as unpractical. Men speak well of him, and confess willingly that he is vastly superior in character and intellect to the ruck of politicians, but nevertheless wind up their panegyrics with the regretful judgment that, alas, he is a fanatic.
It is a thousand pities, I think, that he is not a fanatic. It is for the very reason he is not fanatical that his progress in politics has been in the suburbs of the second rank. He has every quality for the first rank, and for the foremost place in that rank, save the one urging passion of enthusiasm. It is a sense of humour, an engaging sense of diffidence, a continual deviation towards a mild and gentle cynicism, it is this spirit—the very antithesis of a fanatical temper—which keeps him from leadership.
The nation has reason on its side for suspecting Lord Robert Cecil. In the mind of the British people nothing is more settled than the conviction that the conquering qualities of a great captain are courage and confidence. He has given no sign of these qualities. Nature, it would seem, has fashioned him neither pachydermatous nor pugilistic. He appears upon the platform as a gentleman makes his entrance into a drawing-room, not as a toreador leaps into the bull ring. He expresses his opinions as a gentleman expresses his views at a dinner-table, not as an ale-house politician airs his dogmatisms in the tap-room. The very qualities which give such a grace and power to his personality, being spiritual qualities, prevent him from capturing the loud and grateful loyalty of a political party.
Now, while a man like Mr. Lloyd George can only affirm his own essence by the exercise of what we may call brute force, and by making use of vulgar methods from which a person of Lord Robert Cecil's quality would naturally shrink, it is nevertheless not at all necessary for a man of noble character and greater power to employ the same means in order to earn the confidence of his countrymen.
What is necessary in this case is not brute force but fanaticism, and by fanaticism I mean that spirit which in Cromwell induced Hume to call him "this fanatical hypocrite," and which Burke adequately defined in saying that when men are fanatically fond of an object they will prefer it to their own peace.
Lord Robert Cecil need not adopt the tricks of a mountebank to achieve leadership of the British nation, but he must contract so entire a faith in the sacred character of his mission that all the inhibiting diffidencies of his modest nature will henceforth seem to him like the whisperings of temptation. He must cease to watch the shifts of public opinion. He must cease merely to recommend the probable advantage of rather more idealism in the politics of Europe. He must act. He must learn to know that a man cannot give a great idea to the world without giving himself along with it. The cause must consume the person. Individual peace must be sacrificed for world's peace.
From the very beginning of the War Lord Robert Cecil perceived that the need of the nation was not for a great political leader, but for a great moral leader. He told me so with an unforgettable emphasis, well aware that under the public show of our national life the heart of the British people was famishing for such guidance. He numbered himself among those anxiously scanning the horizon for such a leader. He should have been instead answering the inarticulate cry of the people for that leader.
No good man of my acquaintance is more powerfully convinced of the goodness of British nature. He watches the British people with an abiding affection. He believes that they possess, even those of them who appear most degraded and sordid, the foundational virtues of Christian character—a love of justice, an instinct for kindness, and faith in truth. He knows that they are more capable than any other people in Europe of generous self-sacrifice, and that any absence of grace in their manner which must distress the superficial observer comes rather of a passion for honesty than a lack of beauty. And this knowledge of his goes with the conviction that no man will ever appeal to the British nation in vain who bases his appeal on justice, fair play, and charity. What a nation to lead! What an inspiration for a true leader!
He is convinced that no moral appeal has ever been made to the British people in vain. And yet he has never made that appeal. With grief and sorrow he watches the stampeding of the nation he so deeply admires into murderous and indiscriminate hatred of our enemies in the late war. He saw the majority of the British people's war-like mood degraded and vulgarized by the propaganda of hate. But he made no move to save the national honour. The better part, and as I firmly believe the greater part, of the nation was waiting for moral leadership: particularly were the young men of the nation who marched to death with the purest flame of patriotism in their hearts hungering for such leadership; but Lord Robert Cecil, the one man in Parliament who might have sounded that note, was silent. The voice that should have made Britain's glory articulate, the voice that might have brought America into the War in 1914 and rendered Germany from the outset a house divided against itself, was never heard. Lord Robert Cecil looked on, and Mr. Lloyd George sprang into the prize-ring with his battle-cry of the knock-out blow.
I wonder if even the sublimest humility can excuse so fatal a silence. Great powers have surely great responsibilities.
I remember speaking to Lord Robert on one occasion of the shooting of Miss Cavell—a brutal act which distressed him very deeply. I said I thought we weakened our case against Germany by speaking of that atrocious act as a "murder," since by the rules of war, as she herself confessed, Miss Cavell incurred the penalty of death. He replied: "What strikes me as most serious in that act is not so much that the Germans should think it no crime to shoot a woman, but that they should be wholly incapable of realizing how such an atrocious deed would shock the conscience of the world. They were surprised—think of it!—by the world's indignation!"
In this remark you may see how far deeper his reflections take him than what passes for reflection among the propagandists of hate. Abuse of Germany never occupied his mind, which was sorrowfully engaged in striving to comprehend the spiritual conditions of the German people: he realized, that is to say, that we were not fighting an enemy who could be shouted down or made ashamed by abusive epithets, but that we were opposing a spirit whose anger and temper were entirely different from our own, and therefore a spirit which must be understood if we were to conquer it. It was not merely the armies of Germany which must be defeated, it was the soul of Germany which had to be converted. He saw this clearly: he never ceased to work to that end; but he failed to take the nation into his confidence and the public never understood what he was after. A fanatic would have left the nation in no doubt of his purpose.
Every now and then he has half let the nation see what was in his mind. For example, he has taken those illuminating, those surely inspired, words of Edith Cavell as the text for more than one address—Patriotism is not enough. But beautiful and convincing as these addresses have been, their spirit has always had the wistful and piano tones of philosophy, never the consuming fervour of fanaticism. He knows, as few other men know, that without a League of Nations the future of civilization is in peril, even the future of the white races; but he has never made the world feel genuine alarm for this danger or genuine enthusiasm for the sole means that can avert it. He has not preached the League of Nations as a way of salvation; he has only recommended it as a legal tribunal.
It is apparently difficult for a politician, however statesmanlike his qualities, to realize that politics cannot be even divorced from morality, much less to comprehend that morality is the very sinew of politics, being in truth nothing more than the conscience of a nation striving to express itself in State action. Because of this politics become degraded and sink to the lowest levels of a mere factional manoeuvring for place. They engage the attention of the attorney, and earn nothing but the contempt of the wise. They become like the perversions of art in the hands of those who assert that art has nothing to do with morals; they interest only a handful of experts.
But a man like Lord Robert Cecil does surely apprehend that the essence of politics is morality and, therefore, his unwillingness to use moral weapons in the political arena is hard to understand. He debates where he should appeal; he criticizes where he should denounce; and he accepts a compromise where he should lead a revolt. He is also altogether too civil for the rogues with whom he has to do.
I remember being in the House of Commons on an afternoon when Mr. Lloyd George was expected to make an important speech. Lord Robert Cecil sat in a corner seat on the back benches; his brother, Lord Hugh, occupied the corner seat on the front bench below the gangway. During the Prime Minister's speech, which was a succession of small scoring points against the Labour Party delivered with that spirit of cocksureness which has grown with him in the last few years, I noticed Lord Robert make a pencilled note on a slip of paper and pass it across the gangway with a nod of his head toward Lord Hugh. I watched the journey of this little paper and watched to see its effect. Lord Hugh unfolded the slip of paper, read it, smiled very boyishly all over his face, and, folding it up again, slowly turned his head and looked back towards his brother. The smile they exchanged was a Cecilian biography. One saw in the light of that instant and whole-hearted smile the danger of a keen sense of ironical humour. Both these men have the making of creative fanatics; in both of them there is an intense moral earnestness and in both great intellectual power; but nature has mixed up with these gifts, which were intended for mankind, a drollery of spirit, only amusing in the confidence of private life which they have allowed to weaken their sincerities. Humanity may be thankful that St. Paul was without a sense of humour.
During the war, as Minister of Blockade, Lord Robert Cecil rendered services of the greatest magnitude to his countrymen: he kept Sweden out of the war when the Russian Foreign Office could hardly breathe for anxiety on this point, and at a time when many British newspapers were doing their best to facilitate the great desire of Germany to march an army through Sweden and Finland to the thus easily reached Russian capital. His work, too, at the Peace Conference in Paris entitles him to the gratitude of the nation: he kept the idea of the League of Nations alive in an atmosphere that was charged with war. He prevented these conferences from making "a Peace to end Peace." But on the whole I feel that he is rather the shadow of great statesmanship leaning diffidently over the shoulder of political brute force than the living spirit of great statesmanship leading the moral conscience of the world away from barbarism towards nobler reason and less partial truth.