Now consistency is certainly important; proportional representation is no doubt important too. But the consistency of Leonard Courtney rather recalls the virtue as developed in Dr. Sangrado, who believed in bleeding and hot water as a cure for everything, and in that belief “made more widows and orphans than the siege of Troy.” It will be remembered that Gil Blas once roused a certain doubt in his master by advising him to try chemical preparations, if only for curiosity. “But,” said the doctor, “I have published a book, in which I have extolled the use of frequent bleeding and aquæous draughts; and wouldst thou have me go and decry my own work?” “You are certainly in the right,” rejoined the accommodating Gil Blas, “you must not give your enemies such a triumph over you; they would say you are at last disabused, and therefore ruin your reputation; perish rather the nobility, clergy, and people, and let us continue in our old path.” There was always something of this self-indulgent recklessness of consequence in the conscientiousness of Leonard Courtney and the school of which he was almost the latest important representative. “Let my name be blighted, provided France be free,” cried Danton. “Reputation—O what is the reputation of this man or of that?” That is the point of view of the hero-blackguard whom great emergencies so often call forth. “Let what will happen, so no man can call me untrue to my principles,” is another point of view, that of the man who cannot be quite fully a hero because he is constitutionally incapable of being the least bit of a blackguard. Thin partitions divide heroism and blackguardism; all space lies between them and the great kingdom of the smug. The best of the smug can rise to very considerable heights, but their fastidiousness prevents them achieving the splendour of perfect selflessness; they might be content with the locusts and wild honey of desert exile, but they could not do without a toothbrush. Lord Courtney was not afraid of the desert. He could live without popularity and often went out of his way to flout the herd. He never feared the consequences of being right. But a greater man would have been less timorous of the consequences of being occasionally a little wrong. He would, over a dozen questions—this business of the franchise, for example, Ireland, South Africa, and the Great War—have struck a balance between opposing considerations, and in no case would he have cast into either scale the thought of his own reputation. He would not thus have been false to himself. But he would have been truer to greater interests than himself.
It may perhaps be said that the real hero of Courtney’s life was not himself, but his father. At least it is true that to his father he owed the possibility of exhibiting on a considerable stage those qualities which might otherwise have made him only a rather crotchety clerk or the more cavilling kind of accountant. Without the paternal self-sacrifice Courtney, if still inclined to public life, might no doubt have become a village Hampden, a parochial “character,” and a terrible thorn in the side of some Board of Guardians. But he certainly would not have arrived by the broad road of the University to distinction in the greater life of the nation. To many by far the most interesting part of Mr. Gooch’s admirable Life will be the pages which deal with the West-country home of the Fifties, from which young Courtney emerged to fight his way in the world. His father was manager of Bolitho’s Bank at Penzance: a quiet, reserved, intellectual, and rather depressed man, weighed down with responsibility both in his office and his home; one of those poorer middle-class fathers to whose devotion and vicarious ambition the nineteenth century owed so many of its most remarkable minds. Both he and Mrs. Courtney were Puritans, and their views united with their circumstances to make the home one of Spartan discipline and simplicity. But, if the father did not indulge his children, he literally lived for their futures, and pinched himself woefully to secure them a footing on the main staircase of life. When he left school young Courtney entered the bank. The prospects in the service of the Bolithos were not alluring, and partly with some vague idea of “getting on,” partly through a real hunger for the things of the mind, he read in his spare time, with a system unusual in youth. Thus equipped, in 1851 he won a sizarship at St. John’s, Cambridge, and as a result he was awarded in the course of four years Exhibitions amounting in the aggregate to about £170. He might, of course, just as well have had one shilling if his father had not come to his help; it was the defect then, as now, of our higher educational system that it gave no chance to the really poor. To find the sinews of war the elder Courtney had to borrow from the bank, and there is a singular pathos in the letters of the father, anxious that his son should have his full chance, but worried over the cost of the experiment of converting an obviously efficient young clerk into something incalculable and possibly not at all satisfactory. The father is “a little surprised” at the first bill, but wishes his son not to be “oppressed by the fear” that he is running his father too hard; “go on with your studies as coolly and quietly as possible, expend what is needed, and let me find the means of keeping up the race.” But he cannot help thinking that the strain is cruel. “Let no one,” he adds, “laugh you into an expense which a few minutes’ consideration may point out as unnecessary. Do not be ashamed of saying you are poor. If any man wishes to bear you down with his riches and expenditure, let him alone, or crush him down by intellect. Go on with a quiet, calm dignity, and in a short time no one will ask you whether your allowance be £50 or £500 per annum.”
When Courtney got the Second Wranglership his admirable parent did not “feel that elation some may imagine”; all this, he pointed out, was not the conclusion but the beginning of a career. “It seems,” he remarked, “you must go on very parsimoniously for the next twelve months, but do not on any account go in debt. I would rather screw up tighter at home”—where things were terribly tight already. Young Courtney was rapidly justifying himself. But even when there came a Fellowship of £160 a year the poor bank-manager refused to rejoice utterly. “Your mother often observes whatever your gains they seem to be always swallowed up.... Consider the position of the family if anything should happen to me. I do not mean to be a miserly niggard, but do not consider a thing necessary because someone richer than yourself has it. The great curse of the times is the desire of cutting a dash, being in appearance something you are not in reality.... I have written this because I find myself unable to do what I could formerly accomplish with little difficulty.”
It is the old story of the brilliant performer in the field and the humble munition-maker at home; behind every shining success lies years, and perhaps generations, of obscure effort; and the feet of the mighty tread now on dead men’s bones and now on the bodies of the living. The greatest sacrifices incidental to Courtney’s career were after all not his own.
The scholastic career did not attract, and Courtney decided for London and the Bar. How a man of his character, with a rigidity so often displayed in excess, conceived of law as his appropriate element is something of a mystery. Probably at this time his chief idea was still “getting on”; but the choice of the profession in which of all others a man has to be supple and accommodating is nevertheless singular in a person of Courtney’s moral and mental make-up. Nor is it easy to understand how Courtney, in after years so inflexible, could get on well with The Times under Delane, who “expected writers to reflect with fair closeness his spirit”—a spirit which was certainly in most respects as far removed from that of the mature Courtney as anything could well be. Yet Courtney did get on with The Times and Delane exceedingly well. He was, indeed, found impossible and “hopelessly wrong” in his attitude towards the Germans in 1870; he opposed the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine, while Delane was wholly for Germany and væ victis; but on the whole he seems to have accomplished with fair closeness the “reflection” of Delane’s views, and was even anticipated as that great editor’s successor.
The one hopeless “wrongness” which stands out in Courtney’s journalistic record was not only honourable to himself, but prophetically characteristic. He represented at once the least and the most amiable sides of the old Liberal philosophy. His faith in individualism was not only hard and narrow; it sometimes positively verged on the barbarous. He talked, indeed, much excellent sense concerning Socialism and “social reform,” about the need of individual sobriety, prudence, and industry, and the folly of expecting any one political device to supply their place. But his satisfaction with the free operation of competition, his impatience with any attempt to temper it, were marvellous. “I am not for helping the weak,” he said once; “I wish to remove impediments, to help those who are helping themselves.” He never seems to have reflected that his own success simply depended on the principle of “helping the weak,” and that it was an object for which public means might have sufficed just as well as the cruel impoverishment of the self-sacrificing father who pinched and tormented himself to give an industrious and intelligent boy what every industrious and intelligent boy, of any class or condition, should receive as a right. In this, as in other things, he was in his later years the most prophetic and alert representative of the “Benthamee” philosophy against which Carlyle raved. But there was a noble side to this rather arid faith, and Courtney was on that side, as on the other, its complete exponent. He could not see, or would not see, that complete liberty to the strong, the removal of all “impediments” in the way of those who “help themselves,” means in practice the depression and enslavement of the weak. But when the weak had ceased even to be nominally free, when they wore a brass collar like Gurth’s, instead of an invisible collar (though stronger and more throttling), wrought in the factories of Circumstance, his voice was raised with an old-prophetic fervour in their defence. To him the oppressed nation’s cause was as sacred as that of the obviously oppressed individual’s. It is true that his vision was somewhat partial and occasionally faulty. He had the prejudice of a Protestant in most Irish matters. He undoubtedly misinterpreted the spirit of the South African oligarchy, just as he misunderstood the spirit of the German nation when he urged as early as 1915 the possibility of an honourable and stable accommodation. But, however mistaken, he was always in these greater matters animated by a very noble spirit—the spirit which, in spite of its many limitations, lent a moral dignity to the old Liberalism. It is no doubt unfortunate that that spirit may be so easily confused with another, that the generous tolerance of other national aims may be construed as indifference to one’s own country’s welfare, and that the attitude of universal benevolence can so often seem to consist with a practical repudiation of the obligation of the patriot. But, if Lord Courtney incurred the reproach of loving every nation but his own, the fault was simply with his manner. At heart he had nothing in common with any of those anti-patriots who used his great name and fame.
Yet, with the widest charity, it cannot be said that his latest appearances in public were happy. And if on specific occasions he was far from helpful, in general his helpfulness was diminished by an exaggerated sense of the respect due to his own convictions. “My opinion, right or wrong,” may be not less pernicious an attitude than “My country, right or wrong,” and there were times when Lord Courtney’s passion for principle was scarcely distinguishable from mere obstinacy. He would have left a higher fame had it been his lot, as it was Bright’s, to live wholly through a period of comparative calm. But in the years when a kind of moral arthritis had stiffened joints never very supple, he came against really big things undreamed of in his political philosophy, and there was something at once grotesque and tragic in his application to them of a formula equally inappropriate and inadequate. It was even a misfortune for the moral ideals that he held aloft that they were sustained by one whose mode of thought was obviously no less antique than the Pickwickian blue coat with brass buttons and the canary-coloured waistcoat which proclaimed him the man of a past time.