“Father,” says his daughter, “underlined the ‘No.’ ‘I should not say that; it is too conclusive. I should say ‘Not yet.’ And he didn’t understand why we laughed.”
Such was Henry Hartley Fowler at home. In business his solemnity was intensified. The shadow of a frustrated ambition hung over all this side of his life. In his youth he had cast longing eyes on the Bar; it would have pleased him to reach the Bench after a successful career as an advocate, and it was with reluctance that he took up the lower branch of the profession. However, whatever he had to do must be well done, and he had won a considerable local reputation at Wolverhampton when he joined a brother Wesleyan, Sir Robert Perks, in establishing an office in London. The understanding between them was that the firm should never touch criminal work, that it should have nothing to do with building societies, that it should not take County Court cases, and that it should never act for women. This self-denying ordinance did not interfere with the success of the business. Within four years the firm had its hands full with Parliamentary Committee work, and the twenty-five years of the partnership were equally respectable and lucrative.
Meanwhile the second great ambition of Henry Fowler—the first was his marriage to Ellen Thorneycroft—was being advanced by steady interest in municipal politics, and in 1880 he became what from his earliest manhood he had wanted to be, Member of Parliament for Wolverhampton. Ten years sufficed to build a solid House of Commons reputation and to form a number of valuable friendships, of which that with John Morley was perhaps the most constant and intimate. By the Nineties he had established himself firmly as one of the indispensables of Liberalism. Yet his position was a little singular. He was not particularly liked by his chief. He was not especially popular with his colleagues. Apart from his position as a representative of Nonconformity, he had no sort of following in the country. He could hardly have maintained himself had he not been, within his limits, a strong and able man. His main quality was a cold clearness of head which fitted him to get at once to the heart of any complicated business matter. Understanding certain things thoroughly himself, he had the gift of making them understandable to others. His style of speaking was not attractive; and on the platform he adopted the attitudes usually associated with a Victorian philanthropist’s statue, his only gesture being the monotonous sawing up and down of a clumsy hand. But he “read” well, though rather dryly—never a happy illustration, or a touch of fancy, or a suggestion of the daintier kind of scholarship; now and again, however, he would rise to a grave and liturgical kind of declamation which was not without its impressiveness. He was master of something which was not perhaps eloquence, but occasionally had the effect of such—a power of putting a case in such fashion that even partisans were a little ashamed of resisting it. One of these sudden splendours arrived opportunely to save the Liberal Government of the Nineties from defeat. Sir Henry Fowler, who had been bitterly disappointed by Mr. Gladstone’s gift of the Local Government Board, had earned his promotion from Lord Rosebery, and was more happily bestowed at the India Office. Here he had to face a serious crisis. The Viceroy in Council had decreed, in order to meet a deficiency in revenue, certain import duties on cotton and cotton goods. Lancashire, always sensitive as to its Indian market, revolted, and when the Secretary rose the dismissal of the Government seemed assured. The House would assuredly have been proof against the best debating effort of Sir William Harcourt, for it would have regarded such a speech as common form, to be met by common form in the lobbies. It would probably have been deaf to any pleading from Mr. Morley, being suspicious of him as a professor of ideals. But the plain Wolverhampton solicitor managed to carry conviction by a singular combination of sober reasoning and moral appeal. His very lack of imagination helped him; it seemed impossible that such a man could be so moved without the most powerful reasons. “The best part of my speech,” he said afterwards, “was never delivered, but I saw the tide had turned and sat down. The art of speaking is knowing when to sit down.”
Naturally enough, he never again reached the level of his Indian days, for he was seventy-six when he entered Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman’s Cabinet, and even an older man politically than he was physically. There was in the late Nineties a momentary idea of making him Sir William Harcourt’s successor. But he was neither a force with the people nor a favourite with the clubs; the gift of small talk was not his, and he had neither the capacity nor the wish to cultivate arts foreign to his nature. The ruler of men must be either a man or a riddle. Sir Henry Fowler lacked humanity, and everybody knew the answer to him.
CHAPTER XIX
AUBREY BEARDSLEY
Aubrey Beardsley represented most authentically a special aspect of the Nineties. There were two main attitudes in the thought of the period. Most that was virile was Imperialistic; Mr. Kipling was but the greatest of a whole school, and Mr. Chamberlain did not so much form an Imperialistic party as place himself at the head of a party already formed. There was much that was admirable in this enthusiasm, but it tended, like most enthusiasms, to a certain falsity of view. Mr. Balfour has remarked on the difficulty of finding any enthusiast who will tell the simple truth, and the constant contemplation of maps coloured red undoubtedly led to failure to appreciate the other colours of the palette. Too much stress was laid on Medicine Hat and Bulawayo; the silent men with strong chins, who passed their lives predominating over people black, brown, and yellow, were somewhat too readily assumed to be the only people who mattered; and, just as the earlier nineteenth-century industrialist had looked only to more machinery to cure the ills much machinery (working fatalistically) had already created, so the late nineteenth-century Imperialist, while conscious that everything was not lovely in East Ham, could only think of making things right with another slice of East Africa.
Aubrey Beardsley