British Political Leaders

by Justin McCarthy

Photograph copyright by London Stereoscopic Co.

JOHN MORLEY

JOHN MORLEY

No English public man of the present day has had a more remarkable political career than that of John Morley. Almost everything that could be against success in political life was against John Morley when he arose from the student's desk to take his place on the political platform. I am not now making any allusion to the difficulties set in a man's way by those accidents which the first Lord Lytton described grandiloquently as the "twin gaolers of the human heart, low birth and iron fortune." I am not quite certain what iron fortune may be, but if I assume it to be early poverty I do not regard it as a very formidable obstruction to human genius in our times. We have many successful men in public life just now who were born in humble station and had to struggle hard for a long time against poverty. John Morley was not born in humble life, as the phrase goes, and had not, so far as I know, to struggle against early poverty. He had an Oxford University education and was called to the bar, but did not make any effort after success in that profession. The difficulties to which I have alluded as standing in his way when he determined to seek a career in political and Parliamentary life had nothing to do with birth and with poverty—they were of quite a different order.

Morley had taken to literature as a profession, and had made for himself a distinguished name as a writer of books and an editor of reviews and newspapers before he obtained a seat in the House of Commons. Now, there is, or used to be, a sort of fixed belief in the British public mind that a literary man is not, in the nature of things, qualified for success in Parliamentary work. We are somewhat getting over this idea of late, and indeed there were at all times living evidences enough to shake such a faith. The generation which recognized the success won in Parliamentary debate by a Macaulay, a Disraeli, and a Bulwer-Lytton might well have got over the notion that literary men cannot succeed in Parliament; but even up to the time of John Morley's election to the House of Commons the idea found still a very general acceptation. Another and much more serious difficulty in John Morley's way was the fact that he was a proclaimed agnostic in questions of religious faith. Now, the average Englishman can hardly be described as one imbued with profound and exalted religious convictions, but it may be taken for granted that he thinks every respectable person who is fit to be a member of Parliament ought to conform to some recognized creed and to attend some authorized place of worship. John Morley was at one time not merely an agnostic, but an avowed and somewhat aggressive agnostic, and his brilliant pen had often been employed to deal satirically with some established doctrine.

In England there is little or no general objection to freedom of opinion so long as it is a question merely of opinion. We may know that a man holds free-thinking opinions, but we feel no wish to inflict any manner of punishment or deprivation on him so long as he keeps his opinions to himself and does not endeavor to make them prevail with others. This, however, was what John Morley had got into the way of doing. When he felt a strong conviction on any subject which seemed to him important, he always endeavored to justify his faith by argument and to bring others round to his views of the question.

I can well remember that many of Morley's admirers and friends were but little gratified when it was first made known that he intended to seek for a seat in the House of Commons. Their impression was that he was just then doing in effective and admirable style the very kind of work for which he was best qualified, and that it was a pity he should run the risk of marring such a career for the sake of entering a political field in which he might possibly win no success, and in which success, even if won, would be poor compensation for the sacrifice of better work. Morley, however, seems to have made up his mind, even at an early period of his career, that he would try his chance in Parliament. So long ago as 1865 he became a candidate for a constituency in the North of England, but was not successful; and in 1880, after he had won genuine celebrity by his biography of Edmund Burke, that of Voltaire, that of Rousseau, and other books of the same order, he became a candidate for the great metropolitan division of Westminster. Here again he was unsuccessful, and it was only in 1883 that he first obtained a seat in the House of Commons as the representative of Newcastle-on-Tyne. I can well remember listening with the deepest interest to his maiden speech in the House of Commons. The general impression of the House was that the speech would prove a failure, for only too many members had already made up their minds, according to the usual fashion of the day, that a successful literary man was not likely to become a Parliamentary success. There was a common impression also that, despite his great gifts as a writer and his proved capacity as a journalist and editor, John Morley must be an impracticable sort of person. He had been at one time well known as an associate of the famous Positivist order of thinkers—the order to which men like Frederic Harrison and Richard Congreve belonged. The average member of Parliament could see no chance for a disciple of that school, which this average member regarded merely as a group of dreamers, to make any mark in a practical assembly where the routine business of legislation had to be carried on. Morley's speech was, however, a distinct and unmistakable success.

What first impressed the House of Commons was the ready, quiet force of Morley's delivery. He had a fine, clear voice, he spoke without notes and without any manifest evidence of preparation, every sentence expressed without effort the precise meaning which he wished to convey, and his style had an eloquence peculiarly its own. What most men expected of him was the philosophical discourse of a student and a thinker no longer in his fitting place, and what was least expected of him was just that which he delivered, a ready, telling, and powerful Parliamentary speech. He had some unexpected difficulties to encounter, because he gave out his opinions so forcibly and so boldly that their utterance called forth frequent interruptions—an unusual event in the case of a maiden speech, which is generally regarded as a mere introductory ceremonial and is taken politely as a necessary matter of form. The House soon found, however, that John Morley's speech did not by any means belong to the ordinary category of maiden performances, and the very interruptions were therefore a positive tribute to the importance of the new member's argument. The interruptions were in every sense fortunate for Morley, because they enabled him at this very first opportunity to prove his ready capacity for debate. He replied on the spur of the moment to every interruption and every interjected question, and he showed all the composure, all the promptitude and the command, of a practiced Parliamentary debater. Every man in the House whose opinion was worth having at once recognized the fact that a new force had come up in Parliamentary debate, and when John Morley resumed his seat he must have known that he had accomplished a complete success. From that time onward John Morley has always been recognized as one of the most powerful speakers in the House of Commons. His voice is clear, resonant, and musical, the light of intellect gleams in his earnest eyes, his argument is always well sustained and set off with varied and appropriate illustration, and whenever he rises to speak he is sure to have a deeply attentive audience.