E. T. Raymond

The life of Mr. Joseph Chamberlain, like that of the Chevalier d’Artagnan, was spent in three sets of duels. The first was with a great man’s men; the second was with the great man himself; the third was with an old friend made out of a still older enemy. The first were duels of routine, provoking no great feeling—deadly, it might be, but unenvenomed; the second were duels of policy, in which awe and the instinct of self-preservation were as much elements as hatred; the third were duels of fatality, in which a certain courtesy and kindliness had always to be observed.

For Lord Hartington and such as he Mr. Chamberlain had as little consideration as d’Artagnan for the Cardinal’s unfortunate Guards; against Mr. Gladstone himself, though he could not shake off a certain reverence, he fought with full vigour and single purpose; but when Destiny ultimately forced him to enter into a contest of blades and wits with that elegant Aramis, Arthur James Balfour, he found himself constrained by a hundred scruples and a thousand memories, and, like d’Artagnan, he failed. The story ran into many chapters, in some of which the more trenchant swordsman got the upper hand, and in some of which the more subtle mind triumphed, but in the last chapter of all it was d’Artagnan who had fallen and Aramis who was only exiled.

JOSEPH CHAMBERLAIN.

(From a photograph by Messrs. Russell)

The Nineties saw the beginning of that singular competition between friendly (or at least not unfriendly) incompatibles which has affected the whole course of modern history. At the beginning of the decade Mr. Balfour enjoyed a prestige remarkable enough in itself, but quite marvellous when it was remembered that only five years before he had been a comparatively unmarked man, while at the beginning of the Eighties he was regarded as little more than an elegant trifler. He had seemingly succeeded in Ireland; Parnell was dead; the formidable solidarity of the Nationalist Party was no more; the growing recovery of Gladstonian Liberalism had been fatally interrupted. A strong rival had gone to pieces through the mental and physical decay of Lord Randolph Churchill; there were none to compare with Mr. Balfour among the younger men of Unionism, and the men of the old guard (as was seen when Mr. W. H. Smith’s death left vacant the leadership of the House of Commons) were reluctant to place their antique sword-play in disadvantageous contrast with his neat rapier work. Lord Salisbury was growing old and becoming more and more the hermit of the Foreign Office; and it seemed only a matter of a few years before Mr. Balfour would be unchallenged master of what, since the Home Rule split, was by far the greatest party in England.

To this political prestige was added a social worship seldom accorded to statesmen. Mr. Balfour was still young; he was a bachelor; he was handsome; with the exception, perhaps, of Lord Rosebery, he was the most generally interesting man in politics. There have been very few politicians who have held at the same time such a position in many worlds as that occupied by Lord Salisbury’s nephew at the beginning of the Nineties.

Mr. Chamberlain, on the other hand, was perhaps less a figure than he had been five, or even ten years before. Had he died when Parnell did he would chiefly be remembered now as a politician who, in splitting his party, had ruined his own career. Partiality or malignity would have filled in the outline with colours gracious or repellent; he might have been represented as an honest man who suffered for his integrity, or as a schemer who overreached himself. But the main fact would have been clear—that the promise of the Eighties had no more been fulfilled than that of the Seventies; the great Imperialist we know would have been as little realised as the great democratic iconoclast who might have been. It was the Nineties which determined Mr. Chamberlain’s place in history; had he not reached them, his title to greatness could not be established; had he not survived them, his stature would be much what it now is. Mr. Chamberlain’s larger career begins only with his assumption of major office in 1895; it ends, for all practical purposes, with his resignation of that office a little more than eight years later. There was an over-long first act, and a tragically protracted third, but the pith of the play is the tenure of the Colonial Secretaryship.

One of Mr. Balfour’s weaknesses resided in his inability to encourage, or even to suffer, friendship on equal terms. This Prince Arthur knew nothing of the Round Table; his colleagues in the special sense must always be in every sense his subordinates; and when he found a difficulty in getting men of strong individuality to accept such a position, he got over the difficulty by appointing men of no particular individuality. It was, on the other hand, a main strength of Mr. Chamberlain that he invited, and even compelled, either full hostility or full friendship. Those who were against him, were heartily against him; those who were for him, were for him heart and soul; and the world is happily so constituted that hearty love nearly always triumphs over hearty hatred. It was, I imagine, Mr. Chamberlain’s “genius for friendship,” as Lord Morley calls it, that explained most things that are not accounted for by his splendid debating powers and his aptitude for moving great masses of men. Concerning this last faculty, fascinated contemporaries were perhaps inclined to exaggerate. Beside the Victorian heavyweights Mr. Chamberlain was no doubt a marvel of demagogic art. He could say supremely well what the average man felt a difficulty in putting into words. He was intensely sensitive to changes in public feeling, and extraordinarily clever in just anticipating them. He had a great knack of condensing into one sharp and memorable phrase the idea he wanted to sink deep into the public mind. But he was not an orator in the sense that John Bright was, and he lacked the capacity of Lord Randolph Churchill, in his best days, of whipping a popular audience into yelling, laughing, almost hysterical sympathy. Nor should I place him on a level with the one living man who always challenges a comparison with him—I mean Mr. Lloyd George. There are times when the Prime Minister can almost bring a tear into the most tired old eye, and stimulate to an extra throb or two the driest of old hearts. The next moment the owner of these organs may sneer at himself, or at the speaker; but there it is—the effect has been produced. Personally, I never found Mr. Chamberlain affect me, though neither old nor incapable of impression, in that way. The thing he seemed most to lack was glamour. It was present in the solemn periods of Bright; it was often not absent from the stately cadences of Gladstone; it was, in another way, felt in the detached mordancies of one Cecil and the daintily constructed dilemmas of another; Joseph Chamberlain’s speech wanted it hardly less than Mr. Asquith’s. He had more fire, energy, and passion, than Mr. Asquith, but hardly more “juice.” He could say strong (even violent) things, neat things, hard things, fine things, occasionally even humorous things. But he always (at least, I found it so) failed to say things that touched what Mr. Guppy called “chords in the human mind,” or made the hearer feel that there was more in the speaker than he could ever make articulate. The whole perfection of his public speaking consisted, indeed, in a quite different kind of appeal. He depended for his effect on illuminating equally every detail of the picture he wished to present. His speeches were really verbal transparencies, with (as in the cinema shows) a very short legend under each section of the film giving in the clearest possible way the moral he intended to convey—“Will you take it lying down?” or what not. Now a transparency can do much, but it cannot raise a true thrill; the “movies” are capable of everything but moving, and their popularity has probably much to do with ultra-modern insensibility.

Mr. Chamberlain’s style was exactly fitted for most of his purposes. It was literary in no contemptible degree—his strong and simple phraseology appeals more to a present-day taste than the elephantine grandeur of his older contemporaries—and he had something of a genius for the kind of epigram which is a real compression of thought, and not a mere rhetorical trick. But the style was neither a vehicle for profound and exact thought, nor an outlet for high and splendid feeling. He failed always when he attempted to deal with a very complex and extensive theme: his serious Tariff Reform and Irish speeches are, in the reading, quite thin and inadequate. He failed also when he tried to appeal to the imponderables: his “illimitable veldt” mood simply would not convince. But he could scoff as no other; his personal attacks were far more wounding than Lord Randolph’s, partly, no doubt, because there was behind them a far deadlier purpose than anyone believed to be present in the Randolphian impishness; he could impart to what in another man would have been a mere rudeness something of the terror of the thunderbolt; and none could work more skilfully on passions which are, in relation to the higher patriotism, what the camp-follower is to the warrior.

But when all is said, it is possible to maintain that Mr. Chamberlain as a debater reached far higher levels than any he attained, even at his highest, as a platform orator. There never was a time when he was not heard with attention in the House of Commons. One reason was that he was heartily interested in the place, in its ways and forms, its juntas, caves, intrigues, plans of obstruction, moves and countermoves, plots and counter-plots, and “monkey-tricks” of all descriptions; that “industrious idleness” which repels so many earnest men was to him both important and amusing. Even the appalling physical atmosphere—the drowned light and the cooked air—suited his taste. For he was Victorian in his dislike of fresh air—or at any rate in his independence of it—and he and Lord Brampton, who shivered whenever an air from heaven penetrated his over-heated court, might have lived very comfortably together. It was not, perhaps, quite a coincidence that his favourite flower was the orchid, and that at Highbury he spent a large part of his leisure in the green-houses. Time was when he was to pay an appalling price for his aversion to open-air exercise, but during his years of vigour no man could have suffered less from those horrible conditions which explain much of the lethargy of the faithful Commons.

He loved, moreover, the good comradeship that political life engenders; to a certain type of man it is the main compensation of the career. There is more zest in broiled bones where plotting is than in a stalled ox consumed in placidity. None enjoyed better than Joseph Chamberlain the meal conspiratorial, the meal triumphal, the meal consolatory; good dining was, indeed, one of his most unfailing pleasures; like Talleyrand, he might have said, “Show me another which renews itself three times a day, and lasts an hour each time.” And it must be allowed that he had the greatest talents both as a host and as a guest. Those who knew him best acclaim him as a most admirable talker, and withal a fair and considerate one, never indulging in a conversational solitaire, but treating prandial chat as a round game in which every player must have his turn. This genial equalitarianism was one of his great advantages over Mr. Gladstone, who often failed to make fellow-diners forget his greatness.

ARTHUR BALFOUR.

This interest in Parliament and whatever appertained to it was no doubt a great part of the secret of Mr. Chamberlain’s power over that assembly. We often forget how large a share mere appetite has in the realisation of political ambitions, how far the simple capacity of being and remaining interested will take a man even of moderate capacity. But another important factor in Mr. Chamberlain’s supremacy as a debater was the real, if sometimes limited, knowledge he brought to the discussion of any subject in which he happened to be interested—and he happened to be interested in most. Deep knowledge, living at the rate he did, he could hardly hope to attain; at any rate, he seldom attained it. But he had an almost journalistic faculty of using reference books—reference books, Dickens, and French novels were almost all his reading. Mr. Balfour always hated to “prepare.” Mr. Chamberlain would take any degree of trouble to prime himself with the facts necessary for his purpose; all other facts, of course, he disregarded. Thus he was always a formidable man to attack, and as an assailant he was deadly. His sure instinct for the weak side of an opponent’s case, his command of invective and destructive analysis, above all, his capacity of fervently and sincerely hating whatever he temporarily disapproved (even if it had been his own opinion the day before) gave him a power of which he was himself probably not fully aware; otherwise, kindly as he was at bottom, he would scarcely have treated, as he sometimes did, quite petty antagonists with a severity verging on the inhuman.

It may be doubted, however, whether his qualities of speech, and even his powers as an administrator, would have sufficed to give Mr. Chamberlain his immense influence if they had not been supplemented by his knack of enchaining the personal affections of many kinds of men. There was a charm about him which is only felt in its highest expression in relation to a very strong character, but which is apt to be absent in characters of unusual strength. It was this charm which made the loss of his intimate friendship the most serious sacrifice John Morley offered on the altar of political consistency in 1886. It was a charm felt by all kinds of men who disliked his opinions and distrusted his judgment. Under its sway came many cool Colonials and still cooler Americans. It sufficed to keep Mr. Balfour his friend even when he was straining every faculty of his subtle nature to defeat Mr. Chamberlain’s most cherished ambitions. Of those associated with Mr. Chamberlain at various times, only three considerable men—Mr. Gladstone, Lord Hartington, and Lord Salisbury—seem to have been able to view him with consistent objectivity. On those who yielded to him their full allegiance his influence was quite extraordinary. No statesman ever enjoyed such absolutely unquestioning devotion as that which was yielded to Mr. Chamberlain by Mr. Jesse Collings and the other members of his personal retinue. On the other hand, there never was so splendidly steadfast a lord and protector. The Birmingham communion was as jealous and as generous as that of Rome. None could be admitted without giving up the last shred of pretension to independent thought. But once the sacrifice was made there was peace and security for the true believer. A powerful hand protected, a lavish hand provided, a paternal hand petted and patted. Mr. Chamberlain was the safer in making enemies for the solid certainty with which he built up his friendships, however humble. A tower of strength during his life, they have ensured his repute since his death.

Before 1895 that repute rested mainly on negatives. There had been, indeed, an early extra-Parliamentary period of great local achievement; it was his municipal work which gave Mr. Chamberlain for the rest of his life the kingship of Birmingham and its hinterland. There had been some small official work and the much larger prestige (now, however, largely forgotten on one side and forgiven on the other) of the “ransom” speeches. But for nearly ten years Mr. Chamberlain had been chiefly engaged in destructive energies; the duel with Gladstone employed him to the exclusion of most other things while the great veteran remained on the ground. It was as late as 1893 that he delivered that taunt—“It is the voice of a god and not of a man; never since the time of Herod has there been such slavish adulation”—which caused the famous free fight in the House of Commons. But by the middle of the decade the Home Rule fight, for the time, had been fought out. The electors had approved the slaughter of the Second Home Rule Bill; Mr. Gladstone had disappeared; Lord Rosebery and Sir William Harcourt were fighting like lion and unicorn for the shadow of a crown; the task of opposition in a House overwhelmingly Unionist had been contemptuously left to “C.-B.” The world was Mr. Chamberlain’s where to choose. He chose the Colonies, and the portals of the dullest of routine departments at once had to be watched as if they were those of the ancient temple of Janus. Within a few months came the Jameson raid; then the whole world held its breath while an English general and a French major exchanged ironic civilities at Fashoda; then succeeded the short game of bluff which ended in the long and bloody game of war with the South African Republics.

We are still too near that event for a judicial finding, and any man’s view is only a view. The finding, when it comes, is as little likely to make Paul Kruger the hero as it is to make Joseph Chamberlain the villain; the affair was no doubt, like most such things, a very mixed matter. Mr. Chamberlain would probably have taken more pains to avoid war had the Boer Republics possessed the power of the late German Empire; his critics would probably have been less numerous and bitter if the affair had cost ten millions and been over in three weeks. Stones were cast at him in great quantity, and no doubt some came from hands that had a right to throw; but some of the largest were certainly hurled by those who have since laid themselves open to equally serious charges of preferring the way of war to the way of peace. But, whatever the degree of his responsibility—and he always manfully accepted full responsibility—we can with safety acquit Mr. Chamberlain of those motives with which the ungenerous were eager to credit him. It was assuredly no mere hunger for applause that hurried him into a war which he imagined would be short, cheap, and (by all analogy then recent) comparatively bloodless. There was, indeed, a small, politician-like, electioneering, popularity-loving side to Joseph Chamberlain, and it is useless (and somewhat ignoble) on the part of his admirers to ignore it. He was himself far too big to pretend that it did not exist. He never assumed the virtues he knew himself not to possess; he went to the opposite, but more manful extreme, of scorning them. Thus he cared nothing at all about charges of inconsistency. “What I have said I have said. Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself. I am not a slave to other men’s theories or to my own past.” Again: “The man who thinks of the future is a visionary; the man who thinks of the past is a fool; I think only of the present twenty-four hours.” But if there was in him much of the empiric, and something of the mere political cheap-jack, there was also something far larger and finer. He was above all a patriot, and he was capable, as he showed in his resignation in 1903, of making the heaviest sacrifices in what he imagined to be the cause of his country.

I have never been able to share or sympathise with Mr. Chamberlain’s vision of the British Empire; the very thought of it has always filled me, in fact, with severe depression. It was a sort of Prussian pie without the crust—and half-baked at that: there was to be restriction, canalisation, and stereotyping by diplomacy and consent instead of by militarism and force. England was to be the workshop of the Empire, with some pleasant rooms over it; the Dominions were to be granaries, lumber-warehouses, bacon-factories, mines, vineyards, and wool-farms; the Crown Colonies were to supply sugar and spice and all things nice. It was a thoroughly Prussian conception, not because it involved cruelty—which, after all, was only incidental to Prussianism—but because it was at war with the idea of the natural growth of an immature community towards full nationhood, with distinctive arts, tastes, and schemes of life generally. In all his visionary materialism I think Mr. Chamberlain was most disastrously wrong; it was his whole notion of Imperial relations, and not his incidental disrespect for the principles of Free Trade, that seemed to me most inconsistent with his original Liberalism. But it is questionable whether he was ever a true Liberal; certainly, he was never a lover of freedom. His Birmingham mayoralty, excellent in its results, was more or less an amiable dictatorship; and Mr. Russell, in his Portraits of the Seventies, has told us that Gladstone once likened him to Gambetta, as un homme autoritaire. His likeness to Mr. Lloyd George has often been remarked; in nothing is it more apparent than in this, that both have such small respect for individual liberty, and both would much rather reform the people than let the people do their own reforming. But a democrat Mr. Chamberlain always remained, even when he was in closest co-operation with the Tory leaders. He never lost his first interest in the betterment of the working classes; the sight of preventible misery he hated; and the whole bent of his mind was humanitarian. But, just as a Liberal is not always a democrat, so a democrat is by no means always a Liberal. The idea of Liberalism is giving men freedom to work out their own salvation, with the minimum of State interference with individual liberty; and in certain cases this may imply extreme callousness to private misfortune, as well as considerable favouritism to the top dog. The democratic idea is only concerned with freedom so long as it is likely to operate for equality; of the three items in the Republican motto it lays least stress on liberty, and most on equality and fraternity. Mr. Chamberlain was more inclined to underline fraternity than the other two. He wanted all Englishmen to be brothers, but most of them were to be very little brothers.

To such a man, bringing his own atmosphere to the Colonial Office, and attacking the problems there in his own hastily decisive way, the case of the Boer Republics must have seemed very feeble. Here they were, straddling in a spirit of sluttish obstructiveness across the path of orderly British development; and so long as they remained all our plans for the good of a whole continent were liable to unsettlement. All such cases are arguable to some degree. If Ahab had had the good luck of David we might have heard less about his wickedness and more about his broad and enlightened statesmanship, as well as about the sheer unprogressiveness of Naboth. Let us remember how the world rang with praises of Ahab after his good luck in 1870, before we insist too strongly on the sacredness of every petty freehold. Mr. Chamberlain, at any rate, had no difficulty in making up his mind, and when he made up his mind he was quite sure (for the time being, at any rate) that he had made it up aright. “Consistency is not so important,” he once said; “the main point is that we should be always right.” He persuaded himself that he was always right by resolutely excluding every other possibility. Except for purposes of invective or banter, he refused to see any other side of a question than that which he had chosen. He thought in reason-tight compartments, approaching every matter in turn as if it were an isolated thing. By so doing he economised energy, and was able to communicate his own vigour, without appreciable loss, to his subordinates and instruments. But this driving force was achieved at the cost of much; he was the first great exemplar of the modern notion that decision and dexterity in separate matters compensate for the lack of an inspiring philosophy. Where you want to go is a secondary matter; the main things are a very fast car and an ability to turn very sharply round corners, so that if there happens to be a block in front you can dodge up a scarcely noticed alley on the left.

It was, indeed, the true tragedy of Mr. Chamberlain’s career that, while he had the fastest of cars, he did not possess a reliable route-map, and his road in political life was always chosen by instinct, hearsay, and the like. He turned up any likely-looking road, and then went full speed ahead until brought to a stop. Now, Mr. Gladstone had a map, and so had Mr. Balfour. But Mr. Gladstone’s was rejected because it was too old-fashioned, and gave no account of the more modern routes and places, and Mr. Balfour’s had the disadvantage that every road led back to the starting-place. To drop parable, the whole story of the last twenty years of the nineteenth century might have been different if Mr. Chamberlain could have co-operated with Mr. Gladstone; that he could not was as much Mr. Gladstone’s defect as his own. The whole story of the first twenty years of the twentieth century might have been different if he could have found in Mr. Balfour’s qualities the full complement of his own; that also was Mr. Chamberlain’s misfortune rather than his fault. There was a temperamental bar in the first case, and an intellectual bar in the second. Mr. Gladstone did not want to move in Mr. Chamberlain’s way and at Mr. Chamberlain’s pace. Mr. Balfour was firmly convinced of the foolishness of moving at all, except in the manner known as marking time. Thus the splendid energy and courage of Mr. Chamberlain, which might have been extraordinarily fruitful if allied with a more steadfast hold of political principle, were largely spent in comparative futility. The greatness that he achieved—and he was, after all, a very great man—was due rather to the soundness of his instincts and sympathies than to the sureness of his intellectual processes; if he thought wrong, he had often a way of guessing right. Some men are too much of the doctrinaire, and some too little. Joseph Chamberlain was too little.