Lord Northcliffe, with all his faults, is a man to whom statesmen may speak their minds without loss of influence, but there are other newspaper proprietors, financiers of commercialized journalism, with whom a man of Mr. Churchill's power and position should hold no personal relations. His is a mind which stands in need of constant communion with men of culture and refinement. He knows the world by this time well enough, what he does not know are the heights. His character suffers, I think, from association with second-rate people. He is too heedless of his good name.
Is it too late for him to acquire strength of character? His faults are chiefly the effects of a forcible and impetuous temperament: they may be expected to diminish as age increases and experience moulds. But character does not emerge out of the ashes of temperament. It is not to be thought that Mr. Churchill is growing a character which will presently emerge and create devotion in his countrymen. Character for him must lie in those very qualities which are now chiefly responsible for his defects—his ardour, his affectibility, his vehemence, his impetuous rashness, his unquestioned courage. One thing only can convert those qualities into terms of character, it is a new direction.
There is perhaps only one other man in the present House of Commons who could do more than Mr. Churchill for his country and the world. All Mr. Churchill needs is the direction in his life of a great idea. He is a Saul on the way to Damascus. Let him swing clean away from that road of destruction and he might well become Paul on his way to immortality. This is to say, that to be saved from himself Mr. Churchill must be carried away by enthusiasm for some great ideal, an ideal so much greater than his own place in politics that he is willing to face death for its triumph, even the many deaths of political life.
At present he is but playing with politics. Even in his most earnest moments he is only "in politics" as a man is "in business." But politics for Mr. Churchill, if they are to make him, if they are to fulfil his promise, must be a religion. They must have nothing to do with Mr. Churchill. They must have everything to do with the salvation of mankind.
It is time, high time, he hitched his waggon to a star.
Ever since I first met him, when he was still in the twenties, Mr. Churchill has seemed to me one of the most pathetic and misunderstood figures in public life. People have got it into their heads that he is a noisy, shameless, truculent, and pushing person, a sort of intellectual Horatio Bottomley of the upper classes. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Mr. Churchill is one of the most sensitive of prominent politicians, and it is only by the exercise of his remarkable courage that he has mastered this element of nervousness. Ambition has driven him onward, and courage has carried him through, but more often than the public thinks he has suffered sharply in his progress. The impediment of speech, which in his very nervous moments would almost make one think his mouth was roofless, would have prevented many men from even attempting to enter public life; it has always been a handicap to Mr. Churchill, but he has never allowed it to stop his way, and I think it is significant both of his courage and the nervousness of his temperament that while at the beginning of a speech this thickness of utterance is most noticeable, the speaker's pale face showing two patches of fiery pink in his cheeks, the utterance becomes almost clear, the face shows no sign of self-consciousness, directly he has established sympathy with his audience. It is interesting to notice an accent of brutality in his speaking, so different from the suave and charming tones of Mr. Balfour; this accent of brutality, however, is not the note of a brutal character, but of a highly strung temperament fighting its own sensibilities for mastery of its own mind. Mr. Churchill is more often fighting himself than his enemies.
His health has been against him: his heart and his lungs have not given him the support he needs for his adventurous and stormy career. At times, when every man's hand has seemed to be against him, he has had to fight desperately with both body and mind to keep his place in the firing line. Some of his friends have seen him in a state of real weakness, particularly of physical weakness, and for myself I have never once found him in a truculent or self-satisfied frame of mind. I believe he is at heart a modest man, and I am quite certain he is a delicate and a suffering man. But for the devotion of his wife I think he could not have held his place so long.
Fate, too, has opposed him. His enemies are never tired of shouting the two names of Antwerp and Gallipoli. They are convenient terms of abuse: I suppose they would have destroyed most politicians; certainly they are more deadly than such a phrase as "spiritual home," for although the world may be ignorant of the fact, every honest, educated man must acknowledge a debt of gratitude to the thinkers of ancient Germany, while to be associated with operations which involve the suffering, the death, and the defeat of British troops is in every way more fatal to reputation.
But, in truth, both these strokes of military strategy were sound in conception. I doubt indeed if the military historian of the future, with all the documents before him, will not chiefly condemn the Allies for their initial failure to make Antwerp a sea-fed menace to the back of the German Armies; while even in our own day no one doubts that if Lord Kitchener, in one of his obstinate moods, had not refused to send more divisions to Gallipoli we should have taken Constantinople. The fault of those operations lay not in attempting them but in not adequately supporting them.