On the surface at least there was an incurable ordinariness about Henry Hartley Fowler, afterwards first Viscount Wolverhampton. His parts, though sound, were not brilliant; imagination he had none; his voice was harsh and unsympathetic; his appearance was singularly ungainly, and he was the sort of man who always looks at his worst when best dressed; he had absolutely no “way” with him; he rose by unexciting degrees to a rather dull sort of eminence; and at the best he could only be counted a first-rate example of the second-rate man. But, as Mr. Arnold Bennett has found profit in recognising, ordinariness carried to the extreme becomes very extraordinary, and Sir Henry Fowler, as the end of the Nineties left him, remains a figure of some significance. It would be a mistake to consider him, like (say) Mr. Childers, as a mere fragment of dullness in the mosaic of Victorian politics—a foil for the brilliance of the gold and lapis lazuli. He was something positive, if sombre and not very decorative; and he almost perfectly represented a type which must be understood if we are to make any sense at all of the Victorian time.

Sir Henry Fowler was, I believe, the first Wesleyan to become a Cabinet Minister and a Peer. His Wesleyanism was one of the main facts about him. Far more than John Bright he represented English Nonconformity. Quakerism is in truth not very English, though there can be no doubt concerning the Englishness of its founder. There is a logical abandon about it quite out of harmony with the English taste for compromise. The opposite extreme to Catholicism, it yet resembles Catholicism in basing itself firmly on certain dogmas, and shrinking from no conclusion that logically follows such acceptance. Sir Henry Fowler belonged to that more English school of Nonconformity which is guided much more by taste than by logic. He had no quarrel with the doctrines of the Church. He loved its liturgy. He had something like a passion for extreme orderliness in public worship. When in London he would attend service at St. Margaret’s, Westminster; he was married by the Church, had his children baptised and confirmed in the Church, and was himself buried in accordance with the rites of the Church. Yet he was born and bred a Wesleyan, was the son of a Wesleyan minister, and the interests of Wesleyanism were one of the main cares of his life. Such a man would be incomprehensible anywhere but in England. Here he was only a rather extreme example of a strange national tendency to choose our religious opinions much as we do our cigars—by their flavour.

In politics Sir Henry Fowler’s case was much the same. His real nature was conservative. There was never a less adventurous temperament. His attitude towards the present was one of despondency, and towards the future one of apprehension. The most bigoted Tory could not be further removed than he was from that class of men described by Macaulay as “sanguine in hope, bold in speculation, always pressing forward, quick to discern the imperfections of whatever exists, disposed to think lightly of the risks and inconveniences which attend improvements, and disposed to give every change credit for being an improvement.” On the contrary, he was ever the counsellor of caution and the prophet of disaster. He hugged gloom like a garment. If Conservatives were in office, he feared for the country; if Liberals were in office his apprehensions were merely doubled—he feared for his party as well. He could discern readily enough the imperfections of whatever existed, but even more was he impressed with the dangers of bringing something else into existence. Thus he was a Home Ruler in sentiment, but though he believed in the principle he “also believed in the possibility of buying some things too dear,” and at the end of twenty years he was more convinced than at the beginning that the time was not “ripe.” Thus, also, he came into Parliament as an “advanced Radical,” but he remained in the capacity of a Radical with much genius for staying in the same place, a Radical at least implacably opposed to anything like “Socialistic proposals.” A man of his pessimism and his caution could only be in essence a Conservative. Whence, then, his position in the fore-front of Liberalism, a position so considerable that, though he was never a favourite of Mr. Gladstone, he could not be ignored? The answer is probably that the flavour of the actual Conservative Party, like the flavour of the actual Church of England, did not appeal to him. Above all he was a Puritan, and, if a certain remnant of Puritanism still persisted in the Church, it was not conspicuous or influential in the Conservative Party. There were, of course, fox-hunters and men of pleasure on the Liberal side, but in the main they were rather camp-followers than captains, and they did not give the party its character. Further, the character of Puritan also embraced that of iconoclast. Sir Henry Fowler was a little like the seventeenth-century Puritans in being much more anxious to destroy symbols than realities. They cut down the thorn of Glastonbury and dislodged the images of saints, but they left “civil and religious liberty” in rather more parlous condition than they found it. Their nineteenth-century representative had no desire to throw down or change the fabric of English life. But he did wish to chip off all its Gothic eccentricities (even if they happened to be also beauties), to make it seemly and prosaic, to harmonise it with his view of the utilitarian.

He was, indeed, that very strange product of the Victorian time, the matter-of-fact mystic. He believed in the world to come as in something just as real as a counting-house, and not altogether dissimilar. On the other hand, nothing outside the counting-house and the world to come had much reality for him. There was work and there was religion—and beyond these nothing, or nothing to speak of. Work, of course, in the widest sense—the satisfaction of certain personal ambitions, the serving of certain public ends, the rearing of children, the establishment of a status in life were all included, for this kind of saintliness has no regard for the “magnificence of destitution”; while it reads its title clear to mansions in the skies it is equally insistent on an indubitable freehold of some consequence here below. This mingling of worldliness and other-worldliness was almost as old as the man. The youth of Sir Henry Fowler was fully as serious as his manhood. The son of one of the pioneers of Methodism, who had come early under the influence of the extraordinary man who was its founder, he was sent to a school for the sons of ministers at Woodhouse Grove, in Yorkshire, which seems to have borne to the academy of Mr. Wackford Squeers the same relation that an original bears to a parody. The discipline was on much the same lines as that of Dotheboys Hall, and the diet, if more decent, was scarcely more plentiful. The boys were given one holiday a year, and the only game was fives. Here, and afterwards in an equally grave London atmosphere, the lines of the boy’s character were firmly set. Of a naturally clumsy build and serious disposition, he could hardly, in any circumstances, have grown up a handy and hearty boy. But with such schooling, and with his father “stimulating his intellectual powers” during the solitary midsummer holiday, he rapidly acquired both the virtues and disabilities which distinguished him through life. At twelve he was already a political Nonconformist, following with deep attention all debates in Parliament bearing on Dissent. At the same time the foundations had been laid of a physical awkwardness and stiffness, a distaste for exercise, and an incapacity for all the graces of life which for him made work of some kind the only tolerable condition of existence. His daughter tells us that he had little use for his hands. He could not throw a ball or hold a bat, and when he tried to play golf his clumsiness was extraordinary. The tying of a dress tie was a feat of dexterity he never mastered. He seldom walked if he could help it, and was never known to run a step. An idle day was for him one of unmitigated boredom, and he managed to communicate the weariness of it to those about him. He had a great dislike for fresh air, and could not endure an open window, whether at home, or at his office, or even at his favourite chapel. Yet he was by no means a gloomy domestic tyrant. He had married the woman of his earliest ambition, apparently by sheer force of character, for she was wealthy and much courted, and he was a sombre, reserved and heavy-footed suitor. His children he loved, and they learned to love him. He had a home in which the last word in Victorian comfort chimed harmoniously with the last word in Victorian Philistinism. He could even on occasion drink a glass of wine and take a hand of cards, though he could never recognise a five of spades at sight; he had laboriously to count the pips. In his own way he was kindness itself to his family. “Father,” says the filial biographer already quoted, “always let us have his own way and gave us everything he wanted. But, although we were only permitted such pleasures as would recommend themselves to a middle-aged statesman, ours was nevertheless a very merry home. We laughed at everything and everybody, especially at our father, and nobody enjoyed such laughter more than he did. I never knew anyone who so thoroughly appreciated a joke against himself.” But this unbending came rather late; as a younger man, with young children, he was hopelessly stiff.

There was withal a massive innocence in the man. Of many of the facts of life he was more ignorant than seemed possible for any human being. He could read the naughtiest of novels without seeing anything objectionable, and indeed would sometimes recommend to young women books full of suggestiveness which he might have picked up and glanced at with a certain interest and no understanding. This, of course, was in the evening of his life, when his daughter’s success as a novelist—a success which filled him with a certain awed delight—had modified severer early views of light literature. She relates how he used to read her manuscripts and offer “superbly useless” advice. Thus in one book there is the following scrap of conversation:

“Father,” says his daughter, “underlined the ‘No.’ ‘I should not say that; it is too conclusive. I should say ‘Not yet.’ And he didn’t understand why we laughed.”

Such was Henry Hartley Fowler at home. In business his solemnity was intensified. The shadow of a frustrated ambition hung over all this side of his life. In his youth he had cast longing eyes on the Bar; it would have pleased him to reach the Bench after a successful career as an advocate, and it was with reluctance that he took up the lower branch of the profession. However, whatever he had to do must be well done, and he had won a considerable local reputation at Wolverhampton when he joined a brother Wesleyan, Sir Robert Perks, in establishing an office in London. The understanding between them was that the firm should never touch criminal work, that it should have nothing to do with building societies, that it should not take County Court cases, and that it should never act for women. This self-denying ordinance did not interfere with the success of the business. Within four years the firm had its hands full with Parliamentary Committee work, and the twenty-five years of the partnership were equally respectable and lucrative.

Meanwhile the second great ambition of Henry Fowler—the first was his marriage to Ellen Thorneycroft—was being advanced by steady interest in municipal politics, and in 1880 he became what from his earliest manhood he had wanted to be, Member of Parliament for Wolverhampton. Ten years sufficed to build a solid House of Commons reputation and to form a number of valuable friendships, of which that with John Morley was perhaps the most constant and intimate. By the Nineties he had established himself firmly as one of the indispensables of Liberalism. Yet his position was a little singular. He was not particularly liked by his chief. He was not especially popular with his colleagues. Apart from his position as a representative of Nonconformity, he had no sort of following in the country. He could hardly have maintained himself had he not been, within his limits, a strong and able man. His main quality was a cold clearness of head which fitted him to get at once to the heart of any complicated business matter. Understanding certain things thoroughly himself, he had the gift of making them understandable to others. His style of speaking was not attractive; and on the platform he adopted the attitudes usually associated with a Victorian philanthropist’s statue, his only gesture being the monotonous sawing up and down of a clumsy hand. But he “read” well, though rather dryly—never a happy illustration, or a touch of fancy, or a suggestion of the daintier kind of scholarship; now and again, however, he would rise to a grave and liturgical kind of declamation which was not without its impressiveness. He was master of something which was not perhaps eloquence, but occasionally had the effect of such—a power of putting a case in such fashion that even partisans were a little ashamed of resisting it. One of these sudden splendours arrived opportunely to save the Liberal Government of the Nineties from defeat. Sir Henry Fowler, who had been bitterly disappointed by Mr. Gladstone’s gift of the Local Government Board, had earned his promotion from Lord Rosebery, and was more happily bestowed at the India Office. Here he had to face a serious crisis. The Viceroy in Council had decreed, in order to meet a deficiency in revenue, certain import duties on cotton and cotton goods. Lancashire, always sensitive as to its Indian market, revolted, and when the Secretary rose the dismissal of the Government seemed assured. The House would assuredly have been proof against the best debating effort of Sir William Harcourt, for it would have regarded such a speech as common form, to be met by common form in the lobbies. It would probably have been deaf to any pleading from Mr. Morley, being suspicious of him as a professor of ideals. But the plain Wolverhampton solicitor managed to carry conviction by a singular combination of sober reasoning and moral appeal. His very lack of imagination helped him; it seemed impossible that such a man could be so moved without the most powerful reasons. “The best part of my speech,” he said afterwards, “was never delivered, but I saw the tide had turned and sat down. The art of speaking is knowing when to sit down.”

Naturally enough, he never again reached the level of his Indian days, for he was seventy-six when he entered Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman’s Cabinet, and even an older man politically than he was physically. There was in the late Nineties a momentary idea of making him Sir William Harcourt’s successor. But he was neither a force with the people nor a favourite with the clubs; the gift of small talk was not his, and he had neither the capacity nor the wish to cultivate arts foreign to his nature. The ruler of men must be either a man or a riddle. Sir Henry Fowler lacked humanity, and everybody knew the answer to him.