Portraits of the Nineties

by E. T. Raymond

For Lord Hartington and such as he Mr. Chamberlain had as little consideration as d’Artagnan for the Cardinal’s unfortunate Guards; against Mr. Gladstone himself, though he could not shake off a certain reverence, he fought with full vigour and single purpose; but when Destiny ultimately forced him to enter into a contest of blades and wits with that elegant Aramis, Arthur James Balfour, he found himself constrained by a hundred scruples and a thousand memories, and, like d’Artagnan, he failed. The story ran into many chapters, in some of which the more trenchant swordsman got the upper hand, and in some of which the more subtle mind triumphed, but in the last chapter of all it was d’Artagnan who had fallen and Aramis who was only exiled.

JOSEPH CHAMBERLAIN.

(From a photograph by Messrs. Russell)

The Nineties saw the beginning of that singular competition between friendly (or at least not unfriendly) incompatibles which has affected the whole course of modern history. At the beginning of the decade Mr. Balfour enjoyed a prestige remarkable enough in itself, but quite marvellous when it was remembered that only five years before he had been a comparatively unmarked man, while at the beginning of the Eighties he was regarded as little more than an elegant trifler. He had seemingly succeeded in Ireland; Parnell was dead; the formidable solidarity of the Nationalist Party was no more; the growing recovery of Gladstonian Liberalism had been fatally interrupted. A strong rival had gone to pieces through the mental and physical decay of Lord Randolph Churchill; there were none to compare with Mr. Balfour among the younger men of Unionism, and the men of the old guard (as was seen when Mr. W. H. Smith’s death left vacant the leadership of the House of Commons) were reluctant to place their antique sword-play in disadvantageous contrast with his neat rapier work. Lord Salisbury was growing old and becoming more and more the hermit of the Foreign Office; and it seemed only a matter of a few years before Mr. Balfour would be unchallenged master of what, since the Home Rule split, was by far the greatest party in England.

To this political prestige was added a social worship seldom accorded to statesmen. Mr. Balfour was still young; he was a bachelor; he was handsome; with the exception, perhaps, of Lord Rosebery, he was the most generally interesting man in politics. There have been very few politicians who have held at the same time such a position in many worlds as that occupied by Lord Salisbury’s nephew at the beginning of the Nineties.

Mr. Chamberlain, on the other hand, was perhaps less a figure than he had been five, or even ten years before. Had he died when Parnell did he would chiefly be remembered now as a politician who, in splitting his party, had ruined his own career. Partiality or malignity would have filled in the outline with colours gracious or repellent; he might have been represented as an honest man who suffered for his integrity, or as a schemer who overreached himself. But the main fact would have been clear—that the promise of the Eighties had no more been fulfilled than that of the Seventies; the great Imperialist we know would have been as little realised as the great democratic iconoclast who might have been. It was the Nineties which determined Mr. Chamberlain’s place in history; had he not reached them, his title to greatness could not be established; had he not survived them, his stature would be much what it now is. Mr. Chamberlain’s larger career begins only with his assumption of major office in 1895; it ends, for all practical purposes, with his resignation of that office a little more than eight years later. There was an over-long first act, and a tragically protracted third, but the pith of the play is the tenure of the Colonial Secretaryship.

One of Mr. Balfour’s weaknesses resided in his inability to encourage, or even to suffer, friendship on equal terms. This Prince Arthur knew nothing of the Round Table; his colleagues in the special sense must always be in every sense his subordinates; and when he found a difficulty in getting men of strong individuality to accept such a position, he got over the difficulty by appointing men of no particular individuality. It was, on the other hand, a main strength of Mr. Chamberlain that he invited, and even compelled, either full hostility or full friendship. Those who were against him, were heartily against him; those who were for him, were for him heart and soul; and the world is happily so constituted that hearty love nearly always triumphs over hearty hatred. It was, I imagine, Mr. Chamberlain’s “genius for friendship,” as Lord Morley calls it, that explained most things that are not accounted for by his splendid debating powers and his aptitude for moving great masses of men. Concerning this last faculty, fascinated contemporaries were perhaps inclined to exaggerate. Beside the Victorian heavyweights Mr. Chamberlain was no doubt a marvel of demagogic art. He could say supremely well what the average man felt a difficulty in putting into words. He was intensely sensitive to changes in public feeling, and extraordinarily clever in just anticipating them. He had a great knack of condensing into one sharp and memorable phrase the idea he wanted to sink deep into the public mind. But he was not an orator in the sense that John Bright was, and he lacked the capacity of Lord Randolph Churchill, in his best days, of whipping a popular audience into yelling, laughing, almost hysterical sympathy. Nor should I place him on a level with the one living man who always challenges a comparison with him—I mean Mr. Lloyd George. There are times when the Prime Minister can almost bring a tear into the most tired old eye, and stimulate to an extra throb or two the driest of old hearts. The next moment the owner of these organs may sneer at himself, or at the speaker; but there it is—the effect has been produced. Personally, I never found Mr. Chamberlain affect me, though neither old nor incapable of impression, in that way. The thing he seemed most to lack was glamour. It was present in the solemn periods of Bright; it was often not absent from the stately cadences of Gladstone; it was, in another way, felt in the detached mordancies of one Cecil and the daintily constructed dilemmas of another; Joseph Chamberlain’s speech wanted it hardly less than Mr. Asquith’s. He had more fire, energy, and passion, than Mr. Asquith, but hardly more “juice.” He could say strong (even violent) things, neat things, hard things, fine things, occasionally even humorous things. But he always (at least, I found it so) failed to say things that touched what Mr. Guppy called “chords in the human mind,” or made the hearer feel that there was more in the speaker than he could ever make articulate. The whole perfection of his public speaking consisted, indeed, in a quite different kind of appeal. He depended for his effect on illuminating equally every detail of the picture he wished to present. His speeches were really verbal transparencies, with (as in the cinema shows) a very short legend under each section of the film giving in the clearest possible way the moral he intended to convey—“Will you take it lying down?” or what not. Now a transparency can do much, but it cannot raise a true thrill; the “movies” are capable of everything but moving, and their popularity has probably much to do with ultra-modern insensibility.

Mr. Chamberlain’s style was exactly fitted for most of his purposes. It was literary in no contemptible degree—his strong and simple phraseology appeals more to a present-day taste than the elephantine grandeur of his older contemporaries—and he had something of a genius for the kind of epigram which is a real compression of thought, and not a mere rhetorical trick. But the style was neither a vehicle for profound and exact thought, nor an outlet for high and splendid feeling. He failed always when he attempted to deal with a very complex and extensive theme: his serious Tariff Reform and Irish speeches are, in the reading, quite thin and inadequate. He failed also when he tried to appeal to the imponderables: his “illimitable veldt” mood simply would not convince. But he could scoff as no other; his personal attacks were far more wounding than Lord Randolph’s, partly, no doubt, because there was behind them a far deadlier purpose than anyone believed to be present in the Randolphian impishness; he could impart to what in another man would have been a mere rudeness something of the terror of the thunderbolt; and none could work more skilfully on passions which are, in relation to the higher patriotism, what the camp-follower is to the warrior.

But when all is said, it is possible to maintain that Mr. Chamberlain as a debater reached far higher levels than any he attained, even at his highest, as a platform orator. There never was a time when he was not heard with attention in the House of Commons. One reason was that he was heartily interested in the place, in its ways and forms, its juntas, caves, intrigues, plans of obstruction, moves and countermoves, plots and counter-plots, and “monkey-tricks” of all descriptions; that “industrious idleness” which repels so many earnest men was to him both important and amusing. Even the appalling physical atmosphere—the drowned light and the cooked air—suited his taste. For he was Victorian in his dislike of fresh air—or at any rate in his independence of it—and he and Lord Brampton, who shivered whenever an air from heaven penetrated his over-heated court, might have lived very comfortably together. It was not, perhaps, quite a coincidence that his favourite flower was the orchid, and that at Highbury he spent a large part of his leisure in the green-houses. Time was when he was to pay an appalling price for his aversion to open-air exercise, but during his years of vigour no man could have suffered less from those horrible conditions which explain much of the lethargy of the faithful Commons.