HIGHWAYS AND BYWAYS
“Jog, jog on, the foot-path way,
And merrily hent the stile-a:
A merry heart goes all the day,
Your sad tires in a mile-a.”
Autolycus in Shakespeare’s
The Winter’s Tale, Act IV, Sc. ii.
But, on the whole, it is the future rather than the past that rules the mind of David Lloyd George.
To him the future has always been an unexplored miracle—ever in travail with some new birth. To him, behind the veil of the coming time, there always lies a possibility of some event such as the world has never known—of some creation such as the world has never seen. He has moods when he seems “fey” with his belief. “I am out to abolish slums,” he cried one evening, in 1912, walking across London upon a winter’s night beneath a starless sky. He meant it. His bitterest enemy could not have laughed at that utterance if he had heard it.
In such moods he was at that time (1908-12) indeed “The little Brother of the poor.” He was filled with a certain storming passion of pity, so powerful that it seemed to destroy all obstacles—to bridge all difficulties. All the accumulated memories of his own childhood—all the recollections of the poor cottagers among whom he had been brought up, all their sufferings and pains, all their oppressions and tragedies, seemed to be moving behind him like some great tide and driving him on. I remember his explaining once his own consciousness of the mark which such an upbringing left on a man’s life. He was talking about the East End Settlement movement, and of its attempt to bring the leisured classes nearer to the workers. He was a little doubtful. “It is a gulf which can never be bridged,” he said. “You people can never understand what it is to be really hungry or out of work. The difference lies in security. The poor man is always in danger, and he always knows it.”
It was such a knowledge that inspired him with his enthusiasm for Old Age Pensions and for his Insurance Schemes. It was just this security that he wanted to give to the life of the poor. And yet he has never been a sentimentalist over their troubles. He looks at them, so to speak, from the inside. The sentimentalism of the philanthropic middle classes rather annoys him. What he always craves for the poor is justice, and not charity. In the days of the Insurance Act he was sincerely afraid of creating a dependent working class. He was surprised when he received so little help in his contributory policy. “I will never try to be good again,” he said laughingly one day. “They call me a demagogue, and next time I will really be one.” Such was his chaff.
In conversation he first expressed the idea of social insurance by a parallel from the Canadian farmer who insures his wheat against early winter frosts. That was the image in which he expressed his sense of the vast power of the modern State to build up a properly organised system of individual security. Having once conceived this idea, the various benefits came to him in waves of compassion—sickness, invalidity, maternity, consumption. He worked all these benefits out from his own experience of the sorrows of the poor. “I want to make the little stranger welcome,” he said one day, talking about the maternity benefit. “It is horrible to think that he should come trailing clouds of trouble instead of ‘clouds of glory.’ ” The story of the consumptive benefits is interesting. He had not felt the need of this benefit until one night he read through a very powerful medical work describing the ravages of consumption in modern Britain. The extent of the evil at once fully dawned on him. He came down in the morning with his mind fully made up. He went straight to the Treasury, called together his experts, told them to put aside £1,500,000 to fight consumption,[[143]] and so created that famous sanatorium benefit which is still proving only the first step towards removing a gigantic evil.
He faced all these familiar troubles of modern life with a “divine discontent” new to modern men. We all knew these things; but most of us had become so familiar with them that our anger was blunted. Our reforming temper had grown tired and stale. But this Welshman approached the matter with some of the ardour of the revivalist. He would not accept the ordinary excuses; he believed these evils to be curable. Fresh from the Welsh hills, he flamed with a new surprise at the power of poverty over modern civilisation. He showed some of the ingenuous dismay of a surprised Gotama emerging from his garden. He realised that private efforts had been tried and found inadequate. What he saw with a flash was that the State alone could cope with the evils produced by the State; the Government must become the parent and no longer the stepmother of its own children.
Once he realised this idea he was eager to carry it into effect. He was passing from one great effort to another—from the Insurance Act to the Land Campaign—when the Great War burst upon him. Then the very elements of civilisation had to be defended against an even greater peril.
It is recorded that the rebuilders of the Temple had to build every one with “his sword girded by his side.”[[144]] There must have been times when they had to lay down the trowel entirely and work with the sword alone. Such a time came to Mr. Lloyd George in 1914; the trowel was only laid down. Now it is being taken up again.
What struck the observer most in his achievements during those years (1908-14) was his daring and originality. Plenty of clever English minds had been working on these problems ever since 1886. But how little had been done! How long we had had to wait for Pensions and Insurance! How strangely academic and remote were all those University and West End speculations on these problems! How quarrelsome were the philanthropists! How divided were the English Labour leaders! Then from outside came this zealous Welsh Crusader, and while all these people were still talking he proceeded to act. When the world had recovered from its surprise most of the persons concerned turned round and attacked Mr. Lloyd George. However right he might be in his aim, there was always sure to be something wrong with his methods. This attitude frankly puzzled him. “Why! they talk as if I was trespassing,” he used to say. “Is charity, then, a form of property? Is kindness a monopoly?” The attitude of the doctors especially surprised him. “I have made a discovery,” he said one day with a twinkle in his eye. “I have discovered that disease is a vested interest!”
Throughout all these struggles over social reform Mr. Lloyd George tempered his enthusiasm with a very even sense of political tactics. He knew well that, to carry England with him, he must always have a great political party at his back. There were times when this was not easy. Neither of the great political party machines in this country is exactly impassioned for new ideas. It is rather typical of the faithful party man to view a new proposal with actual dislike. “Why not leave it all alone?” is a common attitude with all parties.
Then there is the value of a grievance. There is even a type of party man who actually regrets to see his cause succeed. “If we pass the Bill we shall lose the cry!” you hear him say. “Mr. Lloyd George is passing too many Acts of Parliament,” was the common complaint of the period among the very faithful.
To this type of man the Budget of 1909-10 was rather a distracting affair. They were always trying to “dilute” it. The Insurance Bill, too, would certainly have been thrown over if Mr. Lloyd George had not staked his fortunes on it; and, as to the Land Campaign, that was viewed with open disfavour in the same quarters. For every party has its priesthood; and in politics, as in religion, all priesthoods are conservative.
But, in spite of all this trouble within the party, Mr. Lloyd George was always resolute not to quarrel with the machine. One of his fixed principles was—“Keep the party machine on your side.” He was certainly not a typical party man—far from it. He regarded the party as the instrument and the cause as the end; whereas the typical party view is that the cause is the instrument and the party the end. But he knew the power of the machine; he often quoted Mr. Chamberlain as an instance showing that in the end the machine won. “Mr. Chamberlain fought both of the machines in turn,” he used to say, “and, in the end, both combined against him and beat him.” Roosevelt was another case which impressed him deeply. “Ah!” he commented, when that great man was beaten so decisively in 1913, “Roosevelt ought not to have quarrelled with the machine.”
On these grounds he has often accepted the second best in policy.
He has often allowed himself to be convinced against his will. After the defeat of the Education Bill in 1906, for instance, he was as eager to go back to the country as Mr. Gladstone after the Lords’ rejection of Home Rule in 1893. Both these great fighters felt instinctively that a party which accepts a defeat asks to be defeated again until it is finally smashed. You cannot expect a country to vote for ever for a party that accepts defeat as its proper portion. But in this case, as in others, rather than quarrel with his party, he acquiesced in the decision to go on.
Still, he was glad when the split with the Lords became irrevocable. It happened that I had the fortune of announcing to him the resolution of the Lords to throw out the Budget. It was down at Lord Renders beautiful house near Guildford, where Mr. Lloyd George was staying for the last time with that faithful Nestor of Welsh Liberalism. Mr. Lloyd George had been very anxious. He knew that the wiser Unionist leaders in the Lords had been in favour of accepting his Bill. He was afraid that the Lords were going to refuse battle on grounds so favourable to their assailants. When I told him the news his face shone. “The Lord,” he cried, “has delivered them into our hands!”
In the same way, he has always been very slow to take the step of resignation from high political office. How often have his friends—generally a man’s worst advisers—urged him to resign over some failure to gain his own way! But he well knows that there is nothing more difficult in politics than the art of resigning opportunely. You must have a great issue and you must have your people behind you. “You cannot be always resigning,” was one of his favourite sayings during the critical years of 1909-12. It is true that he often came near it, but he would generally compromise the matter and pass on. He was equally against Cabinets resigning in a hurry. After the second General Election of 1910 there was a meeting when the Liberal Cabinet, wearied out with a long struggle, was on the verge of resignation. Every member who spoke at this fateful meeting had favoured resignation. Mr. Lloyd George felt strongly opposed to it, but he was almost silenced by the unanimity of his colleagues. At last he scribbled a line and threw it across to Mr. Winston Churchill. “I feel strongly against resignation,” he wrote. “What do you think?” Mr. Winston Churchill scribbled below: “If you feel against it, speak against it.” Mr. Lloyd George spoke against it, and spoke so persuasively that the idea of resignation was dropped.
Even on fundamental issues he would often accept personal defeat for the time. He had to decide whether to go out into the wilderness or to work with men to whom he was attached, and with whose ideas he broadly and profoundly sympathised. When the draft of the new Home Rule Bill was before the Cabinet in 1910 he moved to exclude Protestant Ulster. He made the longest speech he had ever addressed to a Cabinet on that issue. He prophesied what was certainly coming—the resistance of Ulster; the refusal of Protestant England to join in coercing her; the hesitation of the Government to carry out their Act. He was in favour of telling the Irish Party straightaway that the Government of 1910 was not strong enough to include Ulster in the Home Rule Bill. He would have left the Irish Party to accept or reject the Bill as it would have then stood. He himself believed that in such a case Ulster would come in during the parliamentary discussions on the Bill. He was defeated in his proposal. Being defeated, he loyally stood by the Cabinet and steadily supported the Bill. It was not until long afterwards, when he himself became Prime Minister and responsible for policy, that he revealed to the world in that dramatic speech which drove the Irish Party out of the House, the fact that he had always been in favour of the exclusion of Ulster.
In literature and art Mr. Lloyd George does not pretend to be among the elect. He gives himself no airs and has no pretensions. He is just himself. He states, without parley, his own genuine opinions on books and pictures; and, as that is the rarest habit in the world, it is always interesting. Nine out of ten literary and artistic judgments are reflections or echoes—repeated at second-hand from some bolder speaker, or even vaguely salvaged from the dim abysses of memory. The most refreshing thing in the world, therefore, is an honest, fresh, and original judgment. It is characteristic of Mr. Lloyd George that he never hesitates to give that in any company.
In literature he votes with both hands for Byron, perhaps because Byron is the poet of liberty, and also because that great writer, with all his faults, has the quality of daring. But he boldly contends that the Welsh are among the greatest of modern poets; and he will recite their verses at large, even to English friends, in order to confirm his claim.
In prose, he is devoted to George Meredith.
In music, he places Handel first among his heroes. There, again, in great works like the Messiah, he seems to discover some quality of sublimity which elates and inspires him.
But there, again, his living passion is really nationalist and based on national affections. The only music that profoundly moves him—touches his soul—is the music of the old Welsh hymns and folk-songs. Not long ago he spoke up boldly for the music and literature of his own nation before all the world.[[145]] There he voiced his own deepest conviction on these matters. The music and songs of his own people strike the deepest chord in his nature.
In religion his outlook always seems to be broadly Christian rather than sectarian. Brought up in his uncle’s creed of the “Disciples of Christ,” which is really an attempt to hark back to the purity of the early Gospel teaching, he has an inherited hatred for dogmas. He is very fond of such parables as those of the Good Samaritan, which he instinctively regards as the best comment on the claims of priestcraft.
He has a profound interest in all forms of Christianity. There was a time, many years ago, when he was fond of going the round of the Churches. He would also listen in the old days with the closest interest to the discourses of the Salvationist preachers on Wandsworth Common; and he would often contribute to their collections, and talk to their officers. And yet, at the other extreme, he has always had a curious admiration for Roman Catholicism. He would sometimes argue that the Methodist discipline in Wales was founded on the Catholic model. I remember going with him into a London Catholic Church where he listened with rapt attention to the chanting of the Latin psalms. There was something in the roll of the language which penetrated and held him. But he was always a great listener. He would never complain at the length of a sermon. When at Brighton he would take his friends to listen to the preaching of a young Nonconformist minister at whose feet he sat with whole-hearted admiration. He would always argue that the standard of preaching among the Nonconformists had steadily risen and was now higher than among the Anglicans. He attributed that fact very largely to post-graduate colleges like Mansfield. He was a great admirer of Principal Fairbairn, and would listen to that great man’s hour-long discourses without moving an eyelid.
Wit is his most sparkling characteristic; and there are few companies of talkers among whom he is not the wittiest. His laugh will change the mood of the gravest men, just as his smile has been known to affect the attitude of immense multitudes. And yet wit is not his greatest gift. I should place higher that power of insight into deep truths which he will display in sympathetic company. Generally the theme of this insight will be politics; and there is no subject which he is more swift to illuminate with telling phrase. In these moods he will seem to be looking at all parties, and even at himself, from the outside. It is an extraordinary gift of detachment, literary and artistic in its nature, and peculiarly rare in a party politician. It goes with a Celtic love of whimsical paradox, like the talk of a man at his ease, a little disturbing to the strait sect of the faithful party men.
But it will not always be politics that his mind plays on in this manner. In moments of relaxation he will take a wider range. Sometimes it will be this very subject of religion, which is never very far absent from his thoughts. “Christianity,” he said to me once, “is like a gold-mine. We are always imagining that it is exhausted, and that no more gold can come out of it. Then humanity digs a little deeper, and it always comes across a fresh seam.” He always seems to be digging a little deeper himself.
His judgments of great men who came before are always just a little inclined to severity, perhaps as a rebound from the snobbery of history. Looking round at that great gallery of the Englishmen of Napoleonic days which adorns the breakfast-room at 10, Downing Street—Pitt, Wellington, Nelson, Fox, Burke—he said once: “None of them were very great—the greatest of them all was the man in the little frame in the corner—the man they honoured least—the Irishman, Edmund Burke.” Perhaps it was the orator and the thinker in Burke that drew him. Or perhaps, even more, the Celt.
But it would be unfair to take him too seriously in these judgments. He is above all things a conversationalist in regard to all such matters. It is only in politics that he would ask to be taken as an expert. There he works very gravely and arduously. It is sometimes said that he does not read much. When he can, indeed, he prefers, like many very busy men, to acquire knowledge by the ear; and he likes to meet men who know, and to learn from them. But he can read widely and deeply when he thinks it necessary. He will read steadily through great Blue-books when he is preparing a parliamentary case; and when he was preparing for the Insurance Act he studied deeply and widely the whole literature of English social conditions, and in the parliamentary debates he displayed astonishing mastery.
He is a great newspaper reader. It is his habit to read practically the chief daily newspapers in bed in the morning before he comes down to breakfast; and it is somewhat disconcerting for his breakfast guests to discover that he already knows all the news of the day. He never reads either a newspaper or a letter at any meal. He talks and attends to his guests, as every civilised host should do.
“He always speaks to me as if I were the only person in the world,” said one who met him rarely, and was opposed to him in politics. That utterance explains, perhaps, better than any other the secret of his social power. He has a profound sense of equality, and will treat the humblest human being as courteously as the highest. He is always very popular with humble people who serve him, such as hall-porters or maid-servants.
Not, indeed, that he suffers from that inverted snobbery which puts its boots on drawing-room sofas and reserves its insolence for crowned heads. It is well known that King George V and Mr. Lloyd George are sincere friends, and bound by mutual respect and admiration. The friendship began after the death of the King’s father, and has deepened ever since. They have much in common—habits of arduous industry, the love of home and family, the passion for simple things. In private he constantly expresses his deep esteem and regard for the King as a man and a father. He is thoroughly at home in that happy domestic atmosphere of the present Court.
He is a splendid travelling companion; he loves the novelty and stimulus of foreign touring. He likes the friendly open-air life of foreign capitals; and he is never tired of exploring new cities. They come back now as radiant memories—those travels over Europe which we took together in earlier, peaceful days—in France and the Tyrol, over plains and mountains, through villages and cities.
One experience comes vividly back. We were staying in a little Tyrolese village named Vent. Some of us, being mountain climbers by election, had set off at 3 a.m., the climber’s hour, to mount a high snow-peak, the Similaun. We returned in the afternoon to find that Mr. Lloyd George had disappeared from the inn.
He returned later and told us his experience. He had tired of his reading, looked up at the glistening peaks and decided that he, too, could and would climb mountains. He had taken his stick, set off alone, and proceeded to attack the nearest peak, without ice-axe or guide. He surmounted a rock-ridge, crossed a glacier, and reached a distant height. None of us could comprehend how he managed to return alive.
There it is again, in small matters as in big—this note of daring, of refusal to accept defeat, of assertive invincibility. It is the key-note of his character. In every study of David Lloyd George it pursues you everywhere and all the time.
There never was a time in human history when such a quality was more needed. Frowning heights lie behind and in front of—roaring cataracts of catastrophe—gleaming peaks of suffering and sacrifice—frozen glaciers of death, seamed and crevassed with agony. May he help us to win through!
[143] As a capital sum for building, in addition to £1,000,000 a year for maintenance out of the Insurance Fund. Even these sums have proved quite inadequate.
[144] Nehemiah IV, 8.
[145] At the Welsh Eisteddfod of 1917.