A space untrod by any one.
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.