C.B. died a few hours after this.
I now come to another Prime Minister, Arthur Balfour.
When Lord Morley was writing the life of Gladstone, Arthur Balfour said to me:
"If you see John Morley, give him my love and tell him to be bold and indiscreet."
A biography must not be a brief either for or against its client and it should be the same with an autobiography. In writing about yourself and other living people you must take your courage in both hands. I had thought of putting as a motto on the title-page of this book, "As well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb"; but I gave it up when my friends gave me away and I saw it quoted in the newspapers; and I chose Blake and the Bible.
If I have written any words here that wound a friend or an enemy, I can only refer them to my general character and ask to be judged by it. I am not tempted to be spiteful and have never consciously hurt any one in my life; but in this book I must write what I think without fear or favour and with a strict regard to unmodelled truth.
Arthur Balfour was never a standard-bearer. He was a self- indulgent man of simple tastes. For the average person he was as puzzling to understand and as difficult to know as he was easy for me and many others to love. You may say that no average man can know a Prime Minister intimately; but most of us have met strangers whose minds we understood and whose hearts we reached without knowledge and without effort; and some of us have had an equally surprising and more painful experience when, after years of love given and received, we find the friend upon whom we had counted has become a stranger.
He was difficult to understand, because I was never sure that he needed me; and difficult to know intimately, because of his formidable detachment. The most that many of us could hope for was that he had a taste in us as one might have in clocks or furniture.
Balfour was blessed or cursed at his birth, according to individual opinion, by two assets: charm and wits. The first he possessed to a greater degree than any man, except John Morley, that I have ever met. His social distinction, exquisite attention, intellectual tact, cool grace and lovely bend of the head made him not only a flattering listener, but an irresistible companion. The disadvantage of charm—which makes me say cursed or blessed—is that it inspires every one to combine and smooth the way for you throughout life. As the earnest housemaid removes dust, so all his friends and relations kept disagreeable things from his path; and this gave him more leisure in his life than any one ought to have.
His wits, with which I say that he was also cursed or blessed— quite apart from his brains—gave him confidence in his improvisings and the power to sustain any opinion on any subject, whether he held the opinion or not, with equal brilliance, plausibility and success, according to his desire to dispose of you or the subject. He either finessed with the ethical basis of his intellect or had none. This made him unintelligible to the average man, unforgivable to the fanatic and a god to the blunderer.