There are certain things that come to one only in maturity. One is a taste for Jane Austen. Another is a correct sense of the meaning and importance of such men as Spencer Compton Cavendish, Knight of the Garter, eighth Duke of Devonshire, Marquis of Hartington, Earl of Devonshire, Earl of Burlington, Baron Cavendish of Hardwicke, and Baron Cavendish of Keighley.

To a young man in the Nineties the mere fact of the Duke’s importance was obvious enough. Had he not been in politics time out of mind, ever since he was twenty-four? Was not his breach with Mr. Gladstone one of the cardinal facts of modern history? Was he not among the first half-dozen men accorded the distinction of “first person” reports? Was he not cartooned and quoted after the manner of the very greatest? But why? The young fellow of the Nineties saw simply a large dull man, with a large dull way of talking, a man incapable of saying a witty thing, or doing a picturesque thing; and in his haste this young fellow declared that all men were snobs, that the sole secret of the Duke’s influence was his wealth and position, that if he had been born the son of a clerk he would never have risen to be more than a clerk, but, being the son of a great noble, people hastened to find in him qualities which were simply not there.

And in some ways, no doubt, the young fellow was right. In any station Spencer Compton Cavendish would have been something, something real and substantial, something of true human worth, of strong sense, shrewd vision, and rare fidelity. But it is highly probable that, had he been born poor, he would never have been heard of beyond the limits of his parish. For he had few of the qualities, and none of the defects, that make a man rise. No human being was ever more destitute of vanity, which is one great motive of pushfulness. Though his sense of duty made him accept responsibility, he hated it; though he felt compelled to do much work, he detested exertion; utterance in any kind was painful to him; he was quite wanting in surface brilliance and in the quality people call magnetism. Such men do not readily “get on.” They find their groove, and stay in it. They are too much trusted in the positions they actually fill for anybody to be anxious to promote them, while their own laziness, pride, dislike of cultivating superiors, and general capacity of “consuming their own smoke” all conspire to keep them where they are. In most business places one will find men almost indispensable in their special jobs, who are never thought of in connection with a superior job, partly because it would be troublesome to replace them, partly because they are bad courtiers, but chiefly from the sheer difficulty of imagining them elsewhere.

The Duke of Devonshire was a man of this sort. He did not make himself, and he was not exactly made by circumstances; he was there, and the circumstances were so, and a process of adaptation, chiefly unconscious, followed. He might almost be described, politically, as a natural growth—a kind of tree which went through its destined changes of development and decay in accordance with a certain principle, but in obedience to no visible motive. He got himself planted in a certain soil without much consideration on his own part; he took such firm root that he could not unplant himself, though he constantly wished to do so; and thus it arrived that for over fifty years he was the one permanent feature in a changing landscape. The creatures of the hour, the beasts of the political field, gathered under him for shade, support, or convenience, and he gave them what he had to give, almost with the impartiality of a thing inanimate. But, just as the beech-tree is often in close association with a herd of swine, but does not follow the swine when they roam away to an oak, so the Duke remained rooted in the midst of a constantly changing company; he had all sorts of associates, but he did not follow them when they sought fresh woods and pastures new; to the end he remained what he had been from the beginning—the pure Whig. I remember a poor little Liberal Unionist of the Nineties who complained that he had been sadly misrepresented. “It is not I,” he used to say—he was about five feet high, and had a querulous little squeak—“it is not I who have deserted my party; it is my party that has deserted me.” The Duke of Devonshire could at any time have said the same thing without evoking a challenge or even a smile. He did not leave Mr. Gladstone; he merely stayed where he was. He did not leave Mr. Balfour twenty years later; Mr. Balfour took up a new position, and the Duke remained in his. Of all the Liberal Unionists he alone did not suffer “some sea change” as the result of immersion in the Tory flood. Even Mr. Chamberlain was not immune; he did not become a Conservative, but he did become a new kind of Radical. The Duke shed no particle of his old-fashioned Whiggism, with its distrust of the Crown, the Church, and the people, and its intense faith in itself. In 1902 he was still conscious of a dividing line between himself and his Conservative colleagues—a line “imperceptible to the practised eye” of Lord Rosebery. The line was assuredly there, real if not obtruded. Lord Salisbury was still too much of a Carolean theologically and too much of a modernist politically to suit a mind which envisaged Sir Robert Walpole as the ideal occupant of 10, Downing Street, and Dr. Thomas Tusher as the proper tenant of Lambeth.

If this immobility had been the result of mere stupidity the young man of the Nineties would have been justified in his scepticism. But in fact the Duke was by no means stupid. Or, rather, the fact can best be put in positive form. While the least clever of men, he had a quite uncommon gift of true wisdom. He had all the outward marks of dullness. No man was more completely without colour or atmosphere. A rather abnormal carelessness in dress contributed to his conventionality rather than relieved it. He was old-fashioned without a touch of the picturesqueness of the antique, and untidy without the piquancy of Bohemianism. Some of his contemporaries had the interest of a well-ordered “period” room; the Duke gave rather the impression of a furniture broker’s shop full of miscellaneous Victorian mahogany. His beard—though it had a certain subtle character of its own, as just a shade different from the growth of any plebeian, lay or clerical—completed the notion of carelessness without grace and individuality without distinction. His attitudes were angular; when he did not sprawl on a bench or in an arm-chair he leaned up against a pillar or a mantelpiece, and somehow he seemed to take the colour out of the most glowing examples of stuff and stone. His expression was habitually dreary, and if by chance he said he was glad to see you—and very often he did not—you would have had some little difficulty in believing it had you not reflected that “no Cavendish tells a lie,” and that he was a most typical Cavendish in that regard. He suffered from a permanent difficulty of self-expression; the simplest speech caused him torment, and (though he could be the kindest and most considerate of hosts) social chit-chat was scarcely less painful. He was most extraordinarily lazy. He dozed when he could, and yawned when he could not. His yawn was perfectly impartial—he yawned at friends, foes, and himself. Once in the middle of his own Army Estimates the fit came upon him, and he signified in the usual manner his weariness of the whole performance. This yawn was a thing of wonder, so hearty and natural that no question of manners arose. It suggested no affront, even to the most prolix speaker; it was rather a proclamation of privilege, like the wearing of a hat in the House of Commons. It seemed to say, “I am a Duke, and (possibly more to the point) a great gentleman, so that nobody can accuse me of not knowing how to ‘behave.’ But after all what is the use of owning Chatsworth, Devonshire House, all those Eastbourne ground-rents, and I really cannot trouble to think what else, if I cannot be natural? Here I am—heaven alone knows really why—condemned to this intolerable boredom. I go through it, because I feel somehow that I ought. But I claim in return the freedom of not pretending that I find it amusing. Please don’t be offended; I should be sorry if you were. But if you insist on taking offence I shall sleep none the less soundly to-night, or—who knows?—ten minutes hence if the fit takes me.”

It is related of the Duke that he once went to another seat in the House of Lords specially to listen to a speech, and fell asleep there before five minutes had elapsed. He once gave a reply to a noble lord. The noble lord was not satisfied, and made a long speech in order to say so. The Duke fell asleep, but woke automatically (as people do at the end of a sermon) when the voice ceased. Then he began to read his answer a second time, but, suddenly remembering what had already happened, abruptly sat down again without saying another word. And the House (which knew its Duke) was perfectly satisfied.

How the Duke in such circumstances managed to get the right end of any controversial stick must ultimately remain a mystery. But that he did so is a plain fact. For, if a slow thinker, he was a generally clear one, and, if a painful speaker, he made speeches which never lacked matter. His was one of those minds on which sophistry has no effect. He was not incapable of admiring eloquence and ingenuity. His attitude towards Mr. Gladstone was a singular mixture of reverence and something not unlike disdain. So much of Mr. Gladstone was admirable, and yet so much of him simply “would not do for the Duke.” One often sees a shrewd old Hodge listening to the patter of a cheap-jack at a fair. He enjoys the jokes, and has a kind of glee in the dexterity, but he is simply not made to believe in an eighteen-carat gold English lever, jewelled in thirty-seven holes, for twenty-three and six. The Duke never troubled to consider every point; he was content to say that it could not be done at the price, and leave the matter there. And if he would not buy, still less would he consider any proposal to go into the cheap-jack business himself; if anybody wanted the Duke as a colleague it was no use to propose a line in razors made only to sell. The character, of course, has its defects. The Duke was mainly negative in his wisdom. His belief in gold might make him unjust to platinum, but he was infallible in detecting pinchbeck. On things of pure spirit it was useless to consult him, but on any question which could be weighed in the balance of common-sense his judgment sought its fellow.

Hence it became a habit of a large number of people, during a long range of time, to wait till the Duke had declared himself before they made up their own minds. It sometimes took the Duke a long time to declare himself. Where, as in the case of Home Rule, the matter was comparatively simple, no man could be more sharply decisive. It was impossible for him to undergo any process of self-hypnosis such as that of which Mr. Gladstone was occasionally capable; he could not understand the distinction between “war” and “military operations” or between being “surrounded” and being “hemmed in.” In 1885 he had declared himself unalterably against Home Rule, and he saw no reason to say another thing in 1886. But in the matter of Tariff Reform the issue and the man were both more complicated, and plain “Yes” or “No” harder. The Duke was quite sure about Ireland; he was less sure about maintaining Free Trade by reverting at least partially to Protection. He knew Mr. Gladstone to the bottom; no human being had succeeded in knowing Mr. Balfour. He could only confess himself at first “completely puzzled and distracted by all the arguments pro and con Free Trade and Protection.” But, he finally decided, “whichever of them is right, I cannot think that something which is neither, but a little of both, can be right.” In both cases his judgment was an element of great importance, but, while it was of decisive effect in regard to Home Rule, it exerted less influence on the latter controversy. The public judged, as usual, rightly. In the one case Lord Hartington, as a plain and very honest Englishman in close contact with realities, might be trusted to form at least an interim judgment on behalf of plain and honest Englishmen in general. But in the other case the moral factor counted for less, and the intellectual factor for more, and the prolonged puzzlement of the Duke detracted from his influence when he finally decided (with infinite agony) on his course.

The main source of the Duke’s influence was, indeed, the general conviction that, with a masculine but ordinary understanding, he combined perfect disinterestedness and straightforwardness. This faith was not based wholly on the fact that he was a great noble; the middle class might, indeed, have been a little scandalised by the side of him illustrated in the affair of the napkin-ring. The Duke had seen in the paper that somebody had given a certain bride a set of napkin-rings. He worried about the meaning of this until he came across a knowledgeable man, who, he thought, could explain what napkin-rings were. The explanation was given that in a certain class of society people did not use clean napkins for every meal, and that therefore each member of the family kept a distinctive ring. The Duke remained silent for ten minutes. Then he suddenly exclaimed: “Good God!” It was certainly not this kind of aloofness that gave the Duke his power. Nor was it so much to the point that he was placed, by his rank and wealth, far above all vulgar ambitions. Many men as rich and as highly placed have been the objects of sleepless suspicion. Apart from money, there are plenty of temptations open to rank, and wealth is no guarantee of honesty. The Duke enjoyed public confidence in an extraordinary degree because it was so very obvious, not only that he was getting nothing, but that it was impossible for him to get anything out of politics. His yawn, in fact, was his great talisman. Everybody knew that if he had consulted his own tastes he would hardly have stirred beyond his park palings. Everybody knew that he carried out what he believed to be his political duties just as he carried out what he believed to be his social duties, not because he got any pleasure or profit from them, but because the obligations were there and had to be met. It is said that he once invited the Prince of Wales to lunch, and then forgot all about it; the Prince presumably arrived to find Devonshire House fragrant with the ducal equivalent of Irish stew; while His Grace himself had to be summoned by telephone from his club by a terrified major-domo. It was part of the Duke’s strength that such a story could be related of him. The true point was not that he was a great nobleman, and therefore disinterested; it was that he was from every point of view uninterested. It was not simply that he had no financial or social axe to grind; there was no fancy cutlery of the spiritual or intellectual kind which he desired to sharpen. Men do not always ruin their country for a fee; they more often do so for a fad. The Duke was free from all fads, except Whiggism. He had a certain honourable interest in education. He nourished, in his dry and secretive way, a distinct love of the arts in general and of certain departments in literature. But on all public questions he was able to bring his faculties, such as they were—and it was particularly easy to rate them too lowly—without subjective disturbance; it may almost be said that he thought in vacuo.

Moreover, he was in essence a very ordinary Englishman. With an effort he might think of himself as a Briton, or as a citizen of the British Empire. But his inner mind knew nothing of Acts of Union; he was English and nothing but English. And being very English, it followed that he cared a great deal about truth and very little about logic, and that he was much more inclined to follow the beaten track than to initiate. People felt that he was a safe man, who would not go far, but therefore could not go far wrong. He once described himself, rather pathetically, as “the brake on the wheel.” It is a humble, but on occasion a useful, function, and the sheer unimaginativeness of the man was time and time again an asset to his country. But such a character arouses no great enthusiasm, and if the Duke was trusted without limit, he was neither a popular idol nor the hero of a small circle. He went his way in a certain detachment, never alone but always a little lonely. Even in his own houses there was a tendency to regard him as something to gather round instead of someone to talk to. He might almost be said to fulfil the function of the dining-table rather than of the host.

The position had its compensations. The Duke was the chartered libertine of his time. He could go poaching where others could not look over the hedge. Lord Rosebery’s Derby victories caused scandal among the virtuous of his party. Nobody troubled about the Duke’s bets or race-horses. He played bridge for high points, but nobody thought of him as a gambler. He used emphatic adjectives, without the reproach attaching to the swearer of profane oaths. It may be an exaggeration to say that whatever the Duke did was right. But nobody troubled about his doing wrong; no doubt because people felt that it would not be very much wrong, after all. And in this their judgment was sufficiently sound. The man was in no sense a saint or a hero. He never said or did a thing to make a single man’s pulse beat quicker. He was incapable of the highest in any kind. But his character, however prosaic, was based on a foundation of granitic firmness. If not a great man, he was at least a true and honest one.