I remember hearing John Morley—it was then impossible to conceive of him as containing the germ of John Viscount Morley—addressing one of the many “flowing tide” meetings which were among the chief public events of the early Nineties. I can recall nothing of the speech, except that it was about the Irish question; Mr. Morley had just been over to Ireland, and some officious policeman had struck him with a baton, or something of that sort—a proceeding which had naturally annoyed him, and imparted some acerbity to his remarks. But, of course, the speech was less interesting than the speaker. This, then, was the great John Morley, who wrote such beautiful English and spelt “God” with a small “g”—this prim, frock-coated figure, with an indefinable suggestion of the Nonconformist; slight, with the stoop of the student; the face deeply indented with crow’s-feet, but in no sense pallid, rather with the kind of unfresh floridity so often seen in the Law Courts; a sort of quiet fatigue pervading the whole, like the American character in Dickens who was “used up considerable”; the eyes at once keen and weary, like all eyes that are the overworked instruments of an active brain depending chiefly on printed matter for its impressions; the forehead well-shaped, but not impressive; everything about him suggestive rather of completeness than mass or power; the whole man compact, agile, highly articulate, trained to the last ounce, notable enough, but hardly great. Not naturally an intellectual Hercules, one would say; rather an example of the fitness that comes of a tidy habit of life and regular work at the bedroom exerciser.
John Morley. 1888.
He spoke well, but not very well—nothing like so well as most of the more considerable politicians of the day. He did not lack vehemence; indeed—perhaps as a consequence of the baton business—he sometimes rasped. Neither was there wanting elevation of phrase, though when he arrived at the rather mechanical peroration I found myself wondering (in my youthful haste) why great men permitted themselves such banalities. But there was a lack of all the greater qualities of oratory, and especially the quality of sympathy; the speaker had nothing in common with his audience apart from convictions, and those he and they held on a quite different tenure. Years afterwards I found that John Morley was far from an ineffective speaker in his own proper place; in the House of Commons he could often appeal to the heart as well as to the reason, and when he implored the House of Lords to avoid the “social shock” of the creation of Peers in 1911 his manner had almost as much effect as his matter. In the Upper House, indeed, he was almost a greater success than in the Lower; his audience liked him, and he greatly liked his audience. “What on earth do you want to go there for?” Mr. Asquith is said to have remarked when his old colleague suggested that he should sit in the House of Lords. A few years later he might have seen that the philosophical Radical was well placed there.
Among men accustomed to recognise distinction John Morley could hardly fail to be at home, and the longer he represented his Government in the Lords the better he was liked by his fellow-Peers. But a popular speaker he never was, and never could be. It is a gift common to some of the least considerable as well as some of the greatest men; two of the finest natural orators of the Nineties were members so little regarded as Mr. Sexton and Sir Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett. But, however it may be improved by cultivation, or ennobled by great character or great mentality, it is still a gift, and goes with a type of personality seldom possessed by the really bookish man. It was at this particular meeting that John Morley gave away, for those who had eyes to see, a part of the secret of his comparative failure as a platform speaker. A vulgar, genial local magnate rose to propose a vote of thanks. He allotted a few words of second-hand praise to John Morley as man of letters. He eulogised him as the faithful friend and lieutenant of the noble and revered leader—(cheers)—the Grand Old Man of Liberalism—(loud cheers)—William—(cheers)—Ewart—(frantic cheers)—Gladstone—(prolonged and uproarious cheering). And then he added that Mr. John Morley had one personal claim above all others to the audience’s respect. It was not his intellect, though that was brilliant. It was not his party service, though that was great. It was the quality recognised by every working man who knew him as “Honest John.”
Mr. Morley winced like a horse stung by a specially noxious gadfly, shifted uneasily in his seat, and then glanced at the fat and complacent speaker with a malignity of which he might have been thought incapable. In that momentary raising of the mask were revealed all the temperamental difficulties of this intellectually convinced democrat in the presence of actual living democracy. If John Morley preserved ever a certain aloofness from the people it was surely in the interests of his faith in the popular cause. In the presence of Peers and scholars he found no difficulty in maintaining the purity of his democratic creed. But real contact with the masses must have been in the long run fatal.
John Morley, indeed, had always rather more than his share of that shrinking pride, that haughty sensitiveness, which so often characterises the Liberal intellectual. The typical Tory of the older time was proud, but in a different way. His hereditary association with “muck and turnips” gave him a certain contact with realities. His family tree was in a sense public property; his skeletons were hidden in no obscure cupboard, but duly displayed for the edification of the public; and he had no particular objection to people commenting, and even joking, on certain aspects of his private life. He knew that every disagreement with his wife, every money quarrel with his son, was the gossip of all the ale-houses for miles round. He knew that the labourers called him in private “Old Tom” or something more definitely disrespectful; so long as they touched their hats in public that did not trouble him. A true aristocracy must always be shameless. But the circle in which John Morley grew up was refined and secretive as no other circle on earth; the pride of the upper classes is comparatively simple; the pride of the middle class is as nicely compounded as the melancholy of Jacques. It was this pride, and nothing else, which gave John Morley that reputation of chilly austerity which was really quite foreign to his character. Many things otherwise incomprehensible are plain when we recognise that, while he disliked being called in public “honest John,” and cherished a bookish middle-class man’s horror of emotion expressed without decorum, he was always a very social sort of person, with a keen enjoyment of all the colour and flavour of things. Lord Morley is perhaps best described as one of those true epicures of life who get the highest it has to offer at something less than the full price. He could be on excellent terms with many sportsmen and society people, because they touched his tastes on points, but he left them as soon as they manifested tendencies to stubble or covert or dancing-room. He left them thus on no particular principle, not because he was the victim of any Puritanic fanaticism against pleasure, but because he personally took no pleasure in such things: sport and party-going bored him, and his tendency throughout life was to take as much of the smooth and as little of the rough of things as he decently could. And, just as he would go off to his room at a country-house party the moment he had had enough of general society, so while he stuck to his party manfully in periods of storm, he generally found some excuse to leave the business to another when the Liberal ship drifted into the doldrums. But the notion of him as a bloodless philosopher, a sort of atheistic Puritan, a monster of plain living and high thinking, a moral sky-scraper of reinforced abstract, is quite misleading. He speaks of Joseph Chamberlain as having a “genius for friendship.” He himself had at least much quiet talent in that direction. Reared in grimy Blackburn, the son of a hard-worked surgeon, his temperament, naturally sunny and sun-loving, led him to early revolt against the “unadulterated milk of the Independent word” on which he was nurtured as a child, and at Oxford we find him musing, in Wesley’s room at Lincoln, on the rapidity with which the thoughts and habits of youthful Methodism were vanishing. He had been intended for orders, but the only foundations on which such a career could be honestly based had been destroyed in contact with the destructive criticism of the time; the teaching profession he rejected after a short and painful experience; he read for the Bar, but, to his “enduring regret,” did not make his way thither: journalism therefore alone remained—a career which may lead anywhere or nowhere, but which, as he afterwards reflected, “quickens a man’s life while it lasts,” though it may kill him in the end.
Morley was not killed by journalism, was rather made by it. Of his talent for the craft everything requisite has been said; great as it was, it was perhaps exceeded by his talent for making valuable friendships. It was journalism, for example, that gave him personal touch with the greatest formative influence of his life—John Stuart Mill. The intense admiration of the younger for the older man was natural enough: Mill had a singularly lovable nature. But there was danger in the completeness of Morley’s surrender. For Mill was in one sense a highly amiable Satan; he knew all about the past and present, but had no sense whatever of the future. The whole philosophy of individualism is founded on the presumption that the world would always remain much as it was in the middle of the nineteenth century; Mill does not seem to have had a suspicion of the way in which capital, taking always the line of least resistance in the search for profit, would cease in all its greater manifestations to preserve more than a vestige of its “private” character. All his theories depend on a balance which was destroyed within a very few years, historically speaking, of their promulgation; the balance, namely, of a mob of unrelated capitalists dealing with a mob of unrelated workers. Morley was a little unfortunate in coming, like a late investor, into the Mill philosophy at the top of the market; almost immediately the stock began to decline, and it was to some extent the inflexibility of economic opinions formed under these auspices that handicapped him when he arrived at a position of great authority in the Liberal party.
Nevertheless, in the Nineties all things seemed still possible to John Morley. He was, as a real and fervent Home Ruler, Mr. Gladstone’s chief dependence; it was he who bore the main burden of the great Committee fight on the Home Rule Bill. Mr. Gladstone’s “rapid splendours” implied an enormous amount of detail work. “It must be rather heart-breaking for you,” said Mr. Asquith to Morley; “it is brutal to put into words, but, really, if Mr. Gladstone stood more aside we might get on better.” “Though putting away this impious thought,” comments Morley, “I could not deny that a little dullness and a steady flow of straightforward mediocrity often mean a wonderful saving of Parliamentary time.” With Sir William Harcourt, again, he was on excellent terms, while keeping up the most cordial relations with the Rosebery camp. His own work at the Irish Office—his second experience of that bed of torment—was creditable. He had lost a seat, but confirmed a reputation, by his refusal to accept the principle of the eight-hours’ day. With the vulgar he was accepted, if without enthusiasm, still with respect, and the Liberal party generally regarded him as one of two possible successors to the leadership. At this time his name was always associated with that of Sir William Harcourt; they played the two CÆsars to the Augustus of Mr. Gladstone. It is just possible that, if the election of 1892 had yielded a solid Liberal majority of a hundred instead of a strangely composite and insecure majority of nominally forty, the name of John Morley might have graced the august list of British Prime Ministers. An inspiring prospect might have conquered finally the vacillation between politics and literature which endured through almost all Lord Morley’s active life. “I wonder whether you are like me,” he quotes Mr. Balfour as once saying to him; “when I’m at work in politics I long to be in literature, and vice versa.” “I should think so, indeed,” was Morley’s reply. No doubt literature was his real business, and he did wrong to desert it at all. Certainly no man of letters will regret the circumstances which led him to withdraw awhile to his study to produce that great human document, glowing with colour and pregnant with shrewd generalisation, the Life of Gladstone. But Morley’s attitude in the Nineties need only be compared with that of Disraeli during his long period of waiting, for the difference to be at once manifest between the man of letters who is incidentally and casually a man of action and the man of action who is incidentally and casually a man of letters. Both were engaged in an apparently hopeless struggle. But Disraeli never lost interest in the fight; he was as resolute and tenacious in the extremes of adversity as he was dashing and resourceful on the verge of victory. Morley’s interest, on the other hand, only lasted while he was in office; when the Rosebery break-up came he ceased to count, and his return to the Cabinet in 1905 was in a character that would have seemed quaint indeed ten years before—that of subordinate to Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman. There was assuredly nothing discreditable to Lord Morley in his failure or disinclination to control an unfortunately developing situation. But his sudden renewal of interest in politics when the once despaired-of Liberal victory and reunion at length arrived, did suggest once again what has already been hinted—that he had perhaps too sure an instinct for the sunny side of the peach.
Lord Morley, in his Recollections, quotes Disraeli’s comment on one of the first Parliamentary speeches of John Stuart Mill. Mill had not gone far when Disraeli murmured to a neighbour, “Ah, the Finishing Governess.” Perhaps something of the character inferred was transmitted from Mill to his disciple. John Morley had the frostiest of spinsterhood’s views on the importance of being merely immaculate; he could bear the reproach of barrenness, but shuddered at that of impropriety. Like many maiden aunts, having no political children of his own to think about, he took an interest in other people’s; we have seen how assiduously he looked after the little Benjamin of Mr. Gladstone’s extreme age. But a maiden aunt is not like a mother, who can never escape from the children. The maiden aunt can always disappear when she likes to Harrogate or Cheltenham, there to flirt decorously with other interests. It was thus with John Morley. While he was always ready to lose his seat rather than depart by one jot or tittle from his principles, he felt no more call to stand by his party than the maiden aunt does to stand by the nursery when it has mumps. Liberalism suffered badly from mumps between 1896 and 1903—years during which John Morley was on the whole quite pleasantly engaged. He said what his position demanded during the South African War, but in such sort that his old and dear friend Chamberlain complimented him both on his moderation and his courage in championing an unpopular cause. Meanwhile “C.-B.,” with his “methods of barbarism,” was hardly safe from mob attack. Yet nobody thinks of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman as more than a quite ordinary politician of the more honest kind, and everybody thinks of Lord Morley as a stoic hero. For the rest, immersion in the Life of Gladstone enabled him to escape without reproach from much active participation in the feuds which rent his party. That great work was finished in 1903, just at the time Liberalism was beginning to revive and reintegrate. No other member of the party had passed through the bad time with less personal discomfort. But the penalty—if penalty it were—had to be paid. In 1896 John Morley was distinctly Papabile. In 1903 nobody could conceive him as Pope.
Lord Randolph Churchill once rallied Morley—it might almost be said reproached him—with being one of those men “who believe in the solution of political problems.” The impeachment—in which, marvellous to relate, Mr. Balfour was also included—was no doubt justified. It would be quite inexact to say that Lord Morley did not take politics seriously; he took them very seriously indeed. But there are different degrees of belief; and the faith which rests on a purely intellectual basis (while it may well be more stubborn than any other) calls less imperiously for translation into works than the faith which is held with passion. John Morley, whatever his “belief in the solution of political questions,” could bear with perfect philosophy failure to solve them. A Brutus of political virtue, he was perhaps inclined rather to dine with CÆsar than to stab him. But, as an Irish critic said of him, in the course of a glowing eulogy, he also resembled Brutus in his readiness to fall gracefully on his sword when another would go on fighting for victory.
