THE MAN
“He, though thus endued with a sense
And faculty of storm and turbulence,
Is yet a Soul whose master-bias leans
To home-felt pleasures and to gentle scenes.”
Wordsworth’s The Happy Warrior.
That element of tranquillity which Mr. Lloyd George enjoys in his own home—that “happy fireside clime” which to him is always truly—
“The pathos and sublime
Of human life”—
perhaps accounts for the serenity of his outlook on public life.
That serenity is never more conspicuous than in seasons of hurricane. Like some ships, he rides steadiest in rough seas. When people around him are most disturbed, he is often the most calm.
There is doubtless an element in his nature which rejoices in conflict and storm. I remember once finding him in his private room at the House of Commons when it was urgent to bring him word that Scotland Yard reported the intention of certain persons to take his life. His response was to strike up a verse of a great Welsh hymn which passed beyond my scope of understanding; but it was clear, from the flash of the eye, that it was a song of rejoicing. “Well,” I said, “aren’t you at all disturbed?” “No,” he said, “with the world in storm I rejoice. I love all this smashing of windows and tumult of nations. I remember the saying of a great Welsh preacher: ‘Such disturbances of the world always mean some great movement in the realms above’—a reflection on earth of some heavenly strife. I believe that is true.” I did not attempt to argue with this mood; but this sympathy with unrest explains much in his career, and most of all his skill in riding through tempests and mastering storms. For it is at such moments that he is at his best. Nothing seems to frighten or appall him. When the hearts of others are dismayed he is touched with a new emotion. It is a kind of exaltation, which seems to work in some kind of harmony with that universal spirit which rides the storm and works through the whirlwind.
It is these moods which have most confused his critics and distorted their judgment of him. Those who know Mr. Lloyd George only on one side of his nature have always expected to see him fall over some political precipice. His zeal, in their opinion, would eat him up. He would just run the hot course of so many furious political firebrands. Some rash and hasty blunder would occur, and he would flare out into the darkness.
Yet this disaster has never occurred. And why? Because behind all those flashes of spirit there has been a steady pursuing purpose; discreet, cautious, shrewd. “Whenever Mr. Lloyd George seems most rash,” said to me an old friend of his who has seen him in many situations, “I always know that there is a cold, shrewd calculation behind it.”
It was a true judgment. For, with his great power of words, he combines a tremendous sense of facts. If he finds himself on the wrong course, he will often hark back. If he has erred in speech he will apologise. After the most vehement attack he will make friends with his victim. It is this combination of the slow qualities with the swift—of judgment with daring, of mercy with rigour, of slow reflection with swift attack, of the zeal of the Cambrian with the shrewdness of the Fleming—that marks him off from so many of his race. For it is not so much the emphasis of one quality as the combination of several contrasted qualities that goes to make human greatness.
Like all great stalkers and trappers, Mr. Lloyd George is very difficult to follow. He has often doubled on his tracks whilst his faithful disciples are still walking straight into the danger. He talks so freely and frankly that his paths seem to be those wherein wayfarers, though fools, may not err. But with all that frankness he really keeps his own counsel and forms his own decisions. That is why so many simple people are so surprised—and sometimes even a little hurt—to find that, after they have given him the very best of their advice, he has just gone on his own way.
Mr. Lloyd George by no means despises the tactics of public appeal. If necessary, he will use even the theatrical in order to impress the public mind. Soon after the Birmingham riot, at the height of the Boer War, his friends opened the Daily Express to find that there was a scheme afoot to do him violence at a meeting to be held in Bristol that evening. They wired a warning to the organisers of the meeting at Bristol. They need not have troubled; for whatever danger faced him was of Mr. Lloyd George’s own fashioning. He had deliberately gone to the office of the Daily Express, advertised the place of the meeting, announced his intention to denounce the war, and practically challenged them to kill him. The organisers at Bristol had done their best to conceal the meeting. This was his way of correcting the discretion of his own friends.
This was immediately after that reverberating event at Birmingham, when he in fact nearly lost his life. Late on that stormy evening he rang me up in the Daily News office from Birmingham. He wished me to go and inform his wife at Wandsworth that he was safe. “But,” I said, “what I am to tell her? Where are you?” “That I cannot divulge,” he said in a laughing voice. “At present I am a member of the Birmingham Police Force”—and he gave me his number. Through the telephone I could hear the tinkling of cups. “Well,” I said, “you are having a good supper.” “Yes,” he said, “we are making merry, and the mob are making merry outside. We are both happy!” It was perhaps characteristic of the calmness of his domestic life that, on reaching Wandsworth late that night, I found the house closed and the whole family fast asleep. Mrs. Lloyd George happily had not heard of the danger through which he was passing at Birmingham.
Then, as now, this habit of courage was always his supreme public characteristic. “Of all qualities in public life,” he said to me once, “courage is the rarest.” From the earliest episodes of his career, from that day when he defied the Bench in North Wales, here—in his courage—has always been the conscious centre of his power. He has always believed that if you want to destroy a popular idol you must learn to face it and to fight it—to put it to open shame—if necessary, to insult it. Fear rules the minds of men; and against fear courage alone prevails. This was always the moving faith at the back of all his great campaigns, whether of peace or of war. It was with this weapon that he has fought both Governments at home and Prussians abroad. It was the element of policy that underlay that frank directness of speech which offended the cultured classes of England so profoundly at the time of his Budget campaign.
For he convinced himself that modern public speakers had got into the habit of referring too politely to great national evils. He believed that the most effective weapon to use against these evils was to revive some of the lost frankness of our forefathers. His great aim was to prove that it was safe to speak as plainly about a duke as about an ordinary citizen. He had known in his young days how cowed men could be, how fearful of shadows, how frightened by ghosts. The thing he had most admired about Mr. Chamberlain was his plainness of speech. It was his deliberate policy to revive that habit. Mr. Lloyd George’s oratory of the year 1911 was the direct successor of Mr. Chamberlain’s during the years between 1886 and 1893.
As to the abuse he encountered, he counted that as a political gain. He was fond of the story of the workman who had heard a political agent expressing terror at the fury of a certain class. “Bless my heart!” said the workman, “we never thinks you mean business until they squeals.” So it was with the avalanches of calumny which fell upon Mr. Lloyd George between 1911 and 1914. He knew that it was the penalty of challenging the powers in high places. It showed that his proposals really “meant business.” “Their abuse,” says Sir Fretful Plagiary in The Critic, “is the best panegyric.” So Mr. Lloyd George ploughed the road to fame through the abuse of those years.
Yet all the time he suffered. He has a heart very sensitive to the affections of the people. He was puzzled at the way men hated him. It was not the danger of it he minded; for he would scarcely allow the Scotland Yard men to protect him. It was the pain of it. He frankly hates dislike; his nature craves the sun; he is at his best among friends. “I cannot imagine why they detest me so,” he said one day during that time. “I seem to be the best hated man in England.” The reply was obvious. “If one half of England hates you too much, then surely the other half loves you too absurdly.” He was instantly all smiles. “That is perfectly true,” he cried—and put the melancholy thoughts aside.
During the struggle over the Licensing Bill of 1908 he received numerous postcards written in what was intended to be blood, but looked suspiciously like red ink. These documents generally threatened him with instant death, probably combined with torture—“something lingering, with boiling oil.” They came, or professed to come, from enraged publicans fearful for their livelihood. These postcards got curiously on his nerves. “I don’t mind so much being killed,” he said one day, “but I should hate being killed by a publican.” There seemed to him something curiously unsatisfactory in such a way of going out.
But in general he has taken little heed of threats. It was only with great difficulty that the Attorney-General could persuade him to sanction a prosecution in the famous case of the poisoned arrow conspiracy. He was always in favour of leniency to the Suffragettes. It is not merely that he hates excessive punishment. His haunting sense of humour seems to be offended by the idea that he is taking up so much room in the world. He dislikes the attendance of detectives almost as much as Mr. Gladstone did. “Can you possibly tell me where Mr. Lloyd George is going?” was the frequent cry of those unhappy followers of Mr. Lloyd George to his friends in those perilous days of civil strife. “He is always giving us the slip,” was their complaint. Sitting one day on one of those little green chairs in the Green Park for which the Londoner pays his obol—a favourite seat of his in those days of peace—at the end of a long talk he sighed and looked grave. He inclined his head towards a shabby-looking individual who was smoking a pipe and sitting not far off under a tree reading a newspaper with apparent indifference to the whole world around him. “There is my guardian angel!” said Mr. Lloyd George.
It is not only in facing hostile audiences that he has displayed his courage. He has never hesitated to tell his friends the truth. He has that gift of leadership which consists of making followers do something which they do not want to do. He has put aside all fear of those great influences which overshadow English public life—birth, money, prestige, caste. He represents in high places a new freedom from all those bogies—almost the realisation of Robbie Burns’s dream:
“For a’ that, an’ a’ that,
It’s coming yet for a’ that,
That man to man, the world o’er,
Shall brithers be for a’ that.”
Not in his most vehement Limehouse days did he say anything stronger than the Scotch ploughman said in his famous song:
“Ye see yon birkie ca’d a lord,
Wha struts, an’ stares, an’ a’ that;
Tho’ hundreds worship at his word,
He’s but a coof for a’ that.”
Mr. Lloyd George, in fact, always tests man by what is in him; not by the guinea stamp, or by the pedigree. Why should he not? Birth! What birth can there be higher than that of a Welshman?—“The oldest race in these islands.” Money? “I can always get money for a cause; there is no difficulty about money.” That has always been his view; and who can wonder that such should be the belief of a man who has made millionaires subscribe for their own taxation!
Of prestige he is perhaps more fearful. He was tremendously impressed with Oxford when he stayed in that town for some days on his visit to the Palmerston Club during the Boer War. “I am glad I never came here,” he said. “I should never have recovered from the influence of this place; it would have been with me all my life.” He was indeed strongly gripped by Oxford and its “dreaming towers.” After two days of it he was, for the moment, half subdued. “Ah!” he said, “how the past holds you here.” All of which shows what a mistake our forefathers made when they excluded the Nonconformists from our ancient universities.
It is indeed quite a mistake to suppose that Mr. Lloyd George is dead to the voices of the past. There is no greater delusion than to regard him as an unlettered man. If the best education is to turn a boy loose in a library, then he has enjoyed to the full that form of schooling. He started life with the training of a lawyer, which he always claims to be the best mental discipline to which a human mind can be subjected. Those laborious explorations of French and the classics through which he passed with his “Uncle Lloyd” as companion, were certainly not less useful as a training than the fugitive crammings of the average University undergraduate. At any rate, he learnt to read for himself; and to absorb what he read. Since those early days he has been a wide reader in all his spare time. He knows his English historians better than most Englishmen. He can hold his own with most classical scholars in discussions on ancient history. Perhaps, indeed, Rome holds him most of all the countries. He knows his Mommsen well, and he spent the long convalescence from the throat illness that came to him after the Budget in reading some of the latest Italian historians of ancient Rome. He emerged from that illness a formidable expert in later Roman history, especially in the land laws of the Gracchi. In fact, he has most of the outfit of the scholar except the scholar’s pride.
Parallels from history are dangerous; but they always haunt the mind of a well-read imaginative man. Mr. Lloyd George is very fond of them. One evening in 1908, when we were sitting in the Orangerie at Stuttgart, in a pause of the German tour of that year, the conversation began to turn on the possibilities of a war between Britain and Germany. The parallel of Rome and Carthage came like a flash from Mr. Lloyd George; it brought from him one of those far-reaching forecasts which, in other days, would have earned him the mantle of a prophet. “There is the same commercial rivalry,” he said, “the same sea jealousy, the same abiding quarrel between the soldier and the merchant, the warrior and the shopkeeper, the civilisation that has arrived and the civilisation that is still struggling to arrive.” He paused, and then he added: “I wonder if we shall be as unprepared as Carthage; I wonder if we shall be as torn by faction?”
It is curious to look back now on that conversation, in that comfortable, well-lighted garden—the pride of that old German town—with the vault of stars above us, and the murmur of a great city around us. We thought no more of it at the time. But now it comes back.
In his games, Mr. Lloyd George is a keen sportsman. Golfers, as a class, have the seriousness of religious devotees. But no man could pursue the little white ball round a course with a steadier concentration than Mr. Lloyd George. No player could be keener on victory. “Golf is like life,” he loves to say, “you never quite make up for losing a hole.” His game has much improved in recent years; though he never claims to be a champion. He has not again repeated the achievement of “holing out in one.” That was at Cannes in the far-off, merry days before the Great War. It had the beauty of the unexpected. He drove off: and lo and behold! the ball disappeared. The caddies hunted everywhere; and it was just being pronounced a “lost ball,” when a sharp youth looked into the hole, and there the ball was quietly reposing!
It is usual on these occasions to present the caddy with a bottle of whisky. Mr. Lloyd George gave the lad five francs; and of course there were candid friends who said that the caddy had put the ball in the hole. There are always critics, even on the golf-course.
His worst enemies cannot accuse Mr. Lloyd George of “side”; so there are some who say that he has not enough. He is, in fact, the simplest of men, fond of being surrounded with friends, and very faithful to the humble friends of his youth. He is curiously unconscious of his own position in the world. To one who congratulated him on his elevation to the Premiership he merely replied, “Oh! I had forgotten that!” And I believe that he had.
This simplicity makes him very thorough. He knows his own ignorance. When he was Chancellor of the Exchequer he went to Somerset House and went carefully through the whole system of the old land taxes and their working. When he was guiding his Budget through the House of Commons he had a daily meeting of the Treasury experts, with whom he discussed every detail. That is always his method—to learn all he can from others. He is a great listener, and learns rather by the ear than by the eye.
He is very considerate for his secretaries and his staff; but he works them hard. He has no place for “slackers.” When he first went to the Treasury, he astounded that august Department by beginning work at ten o’clock. They soon caught the habit, for later on they slaved for him in a way that astonished the onlooker. He can make others work because he works himself.
At one time he took a great interest in the organisation of the Civil Service. On first becoming a Minister, he was astonished to discover the rigidity of the division between the First and Second Classes of the Civil Service. He wished the system to be more fluid. Once he was struck by the ability of a certain civil servant, and he wished to place him in a position of trust. “It is impossible!” was the reply; “he is only a second division clerk.” Mr. Lloyd George looked up with a flash of whimsical indignation. “Why!” he replied, “I am only a second division clerk myself!”
Whenever one tries to discover the secret of his power over men, one comes back to that supreme gift of his—the gift of the silver tongue—the power of public speech. That is, after all, the thing that has made him supreme over men. To hear him at his best one must hear him on a public platform, addressing a great public audience. There are few fireworks, no shouting, no declaiming. He opens easily, in a soft, quiet voice: he always works up to his effects. There are “purple patches” now and again; but the bulk of it seems almost conversational, and is often broken by colloquial phases—“Can you hear at the back there?” “Ah! well, you must listen if you want me to speak to you.” He is almost always very soon on good terms with his audience; it is only by shouting him down that his enemies can prevent that. He is never angry on a public platform; he seems always quite at home, as if it was his real natural element. He can be scathing at times—withering, scornful, contemptuous. But that mood rarely lasts long. He generally returns swiftly to his gentler moods—persuasion, appeal, emotion. He almost always prepares a careful peroration, generally a memorised piece of prose poetry, very often drawn from some great phase of nature—from the hills or the sea. Then his speeches end on the high note; and his audiences go home with a sense of having been uplifted.
There they are right—for it is precisely his power as a speaker to uplift the hearts of men. He has his own moods. But from those he carefully selects the very best, and gives them to the world. No public man can do more.
MRS. LLOYD GEORGE
DAVID LLOYD GEORGE AS A YOUNG MAN