by John Buchan
The Prime Minister, Mr. Asquith, had in his character every traditional virtue — dignity, honour, courage, and a fine selflessness. In temperament he was equable and generous. He was a most competent head of a traditional Government and a brilliant leader of a traditional party. But he was firmly set in the old ways, and the master of an expertise which was fast losing its meaning. Like his colleagues he was immensely intelligent, but he was impercipient. New facts made little impression on his capacious but insensitive mind His Irish policy ignored the changed situation both in the south and north of Ireland, and was a score of years out of date. He had no serious philosophy to meet the new phenomena in the world of labour and in the national economy. He was most at home in the cause which had always engaged his party, the furtherance of political freedom, but it was a cause which had become for the moment of lesser importance. He was a man of wide knowledge and many intellectual interests, but he was essentially the Balliol type of the ‘seventies, rational, sceptical, a devotee of a liberty which he left half-comprehended, as a Schoolman left the mysteries of his Church. Whatever ran counter to his bland libertarianism seemed an impiety. I remember, when the audacities of Lytton Strachey’s Victorian studies were delighting the world, suggesting to Mr. Asquith that the time was ripe for a return match. It was easy, I said, to make fun of the household of faith, but I thought that just as much fun could be made out of the other side, even with the most respectful and accurate presentation. I suggested a book to be called Three Saints of Rationalism on the lines of Eminent Victorians, and proposed for the chapters John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer and John Morley. He was really shocked, as shocked as a High Churchman would be who was invited to consider the comic side of the Oxford Movement.
Let me take three figures of the time who were not impercipient. I did not know Ramsay Macdonald intimately until after the War, and I was not greatly impressed by the ordinary Labour intellectual, who seemed to be threshing and rethreshing the thin crops of Fabianism and Marxism. But I knew Philip Snowden, to whom I was introduced by Charles Masterman, who married my wife’s cousin. I have rarely met a man whose character was so four-square and compact, so wholly without loose fringes. He was like one of his own stony, grey Yorkshire moors, grim at first sight, but hiding in its folds nooks of a rare beauty. The austere face could break into the kindliest and tenderest of smiles. He had a corrosive irony in handling opponents, but he was bitter only about creeds, never about human beings.
His faith, I think, was more radicalism than any form of socialism, for he fought shy of theories and was never happy with abstractions. To his radicalism he joined something of the old nonconformist missionary fire. He knew the life of the poor at first hand, and laboured to better it, but he had no sentimentality about the transcendent virtues of the working classes, and would talk to them as firmly as to their masters. In discussion I have never known a more candid mind He put all his cards on the table, and had none of the intellectual vanity which worships a false consistency. He realised the new forces which had come into being and faced them with perfect courage. For at the back of all he had a kind of rugged, ultimate optimism. He deeply loved his country and reverenced his countrymen, and believed that there was no problem which Englishmen could not solve if only they were true to themselves and to sound reason. It was this fine union of candour and optimism about human nature — at least English human nature — which endeared him to a man like Arthur Balfour, otherwise so different in mind and antecedents.
Lord Rosebery was also a realist who recognised that the old world was passing away. I had met him occasionally ever since my Oxford days, and in the years immediately preceding the War we used to forgather every autumn at his moorland house of Rosebery and walk the green confines of Lothian and Tweeddale. I have written elsewhere of his career in politics and letters, which had by that time virtually come to an end. He had lost nearly all the aristocratic radicalism which had made him Mr. Gladstone’s chief lieutenant in Scotland, and had adopted something very like old-fashioned Toryism, with occasional outbursts against individual Tories. His creed was based largely on Burke, and, like Burke, he distrusted anything in the nature of plebiscitary democracy. He disliked the new type of demagogic statesman. He regarded the entente with France as a menace which must end in a European War. Like Philip Snowden he believed in his countrymen, but unlike him he had also an enthusiasm for the Empire, about which he knew a great deal and Snowden nothing. But he had none of the latter’s stalwart optimism about human nature, for his cosseted life had limited his knowledge of it. In our talks he was deeply pessimistic. Britain, he held, was on a razor edge internationally, and in domestic affairs was losing her former dignity and discipline. Had he written letters they would have been as devastating forecasts of calamity as those of Henry Adams — him of The Education. It was a melancholy experience for me after the War — I visited him almost every month — to see this former Prime Minister of Britain crushed by bodily weakness, sorrowing over the departing world and contemptuous of the new. It was sadly reminiscent of the old age of Chateaubriand. I went for a drive with him, I remember, at the Durdans on an April day in 1929, just before starting out for the elections in Scotland. I had never seen Surrey more green and flowery, but he was unconscious of the spring glories and was sunk in sad and silent meditations. When news of his death came a fortnight later I could not regret that my old friend was free of his bondage.
If it be a statesman’s first duty to see facts clearly and to make the proper deductions from them, then I think that Arthur Balfour was the greatest public figure of that time. He was the only man in public life for whom I felt a disciple’s loyalty. When he retired from the leadership of the Conservative party in 1911 the glamour went out of politics for me, and my feeling was that of the current parody of the Prayer Book: “Lord have mercy upon us and incline our hearts to Bonar Law.”
A statesman should not be judged by his policy alone, since much of that may be the work of others; to get at the real man we must have cross-bearings from different angles. One key to the understanding of Arthur Balfour was his conversation. Unhesitatingly I should put him down as the best talker I have ever known, one whose talk was not a brilliant monologue or a string of epigrams, but a communal effort which quickened and elevated the whole discussion and brought out the best of other people. He would take the hesitating remark of a shy man and discover in it unexpected possibilities, would probe it and expand it until its author felt that he had really made some contribution to human wisdom. In the last year of the War he permitted me to take American visitors occasionally to lunch with him in Carlton Gardens, and I remember with what admiration I watched him feel his way with the guests, seize on some chance word and make it the pivot of speculations until the speaker was not only encouraged to give his best but that best was infinitely enlarged by his host’s contribution. Such guests would leave walking on air, feeling no special obligation to Arthur Balfour — that was his cunning — but convinced that they were bigger men than they had thought.
In conversation, as in parliamentary debate, he had a delicate courtesy, which was without a suspicion of patronage. Hence he had friends of every type and of all parties, and the only grumblers were the small fry who considered that a leader should chain his soul to party headquarters. The personalities of our friends shift and change as they are lighted up differently by a change of circumstance; but Arthur Balfour seemed independent of his environment; the lighting changed, but the light seemed to be in himself as in an opal or a star-sapphire. There was nothing slack-lipped in his geniality. He could be a stern critic of incompetence and make devastating comments; as, for instance, his remark about a certain politician that if he had a little more brains he would be half-witted. Also he had strict moral standards. In the graver matters of conduct people were surprised to find that this urbane man of the world had a stiff knuckle of puritanism, the stiffer because it was so completely intelligent.
Another angle of approach was
his prose, which to my mind must rank in its dry purity with the best of our time — the prose most in consonance with the peculiar qualities of our English speech. It has an easy colloquial pitch, which hardens now and then into a delicate eighteenth-century formalism. Above all it is notable for its exquisite logic, rare in these high-coloured days, a logic which interpenetrates the sequence of sentences, the choice of illustrations and the selection of epithets. Its clarity is crystalline not watery, and it offers perfect aptness and coherence in place of flowers and tears.
From his prose style and his talk one could gather something about Arthur Balfour. A strong critical mind and a fastidious taste; but also a reverence for the plain man and the plain man’s modes of thought. The argument in his writings is usually directed against the pedant with his specious generalities. He believes in and reverences the human reason, but that reason is not the contorted visionary thing of the metaphysician; it is common sense, the ordinary consciousness, a wise appreciation of the working rules of human society — the free play of the intellect, but an intellect which can understand the intractable subject matter it works with. Just as Rosebery was a seventeenth-century type, so there was much of the eighteenth century in Balfour, for he had its aversion to too roseate dreams about humanity, but also its profound consciousness of homely worth and homely wisdom. His enthusiasm, slow to kindle, was for what was practicable, for the business of carrying on the work of the world, and his hero was the man who was willing to take a hand.
He had few of the attributes of a popular leader since he was unrhetorical and fastidious and hated all that was showy and glossy, and his mental processes were often too subtle for popular comprehension. Yet he was a great party leader because of his overwhelming power in debate, and a moral elevation of which the nation became increasingly aware.
His character will be a puzzle to future historians, and it sometimes puzzled even his friends, since it united so many assumed contradictories. For example, he combined a real earnestness and a thorough-going scepticism. We find it in his philosophy. He approaches the world of simple faiths with reverence, and will never heedlessly disturb them, since he not only sees their practical value but shares in their spiritual appeal. He is sceptical chiefly of conventional scepticism. He has none of the poetry and the sudden high visions of the great system-makers; he is never exalté, his metaphors are never grandiose, he builds no cloud cities. But he does provide a rational basis for belief, and, speculatively, he clears the air and defines the problems which he leaves for later and more fortunate philosophers to solve. Nor is his exposition without emotional fervour, and sometimes his austere style can kindle into eloquence. Take this from The Religion of Humanity. I could quote better examples of his prose, but none more typical of his essential faith.
“The ‘religion of humanity’ seems specially fitted to meet the tastes of that comparatively small and prosperous class, who are unwilling to leave the dry bones of Agnosticism wholly unclothed with any living tissue of religious emotion, and who are at the same time fortunate enough to be able to persuade themselves that they are contributing, or may contribute, by their individual efforts to the attainment of some great ideal for mankind. But what has it to say to the more obscure multitude who are absorbed, and well-nigh overwhelmed, in the constant struggle with daily needs and narrow cares; who have but little leisure or inclination to consider the precise role they are called on to play in the great drama of ‘humanity,’ and who might in any case be puzzled to discover its interest or its importance? Can it assure them that there is no human being so insignificant as not to be of infinite worth in the eyes of Him who created the Heavens, or so feeble but that his actions may have consequences of infinite moment long after this material system shall have crumbled into nothingness? Does it offer consolation to those who are in grief, hope to those who are bereaved, strength to the weak, forgiveness to the sinful, rest to those who are weary and heavy laden? If not, then, whatever be its merits, it is no rival to Christianity. It cannot penetrate and vivify the inmost life of ordinary humanity. There is in it no nourishment for ordinary human souls, no comfort for ordinary human sorrow, no help for ordinary human weakness. Not less than the crudest irreligion does it leave us men divorced from all communion with God, face to face with the unthinking energies of nature which gave us birth, and into which, if supernatural religion indeed be a dream, we must after a few fruitless struggles be again dissolved.”
Still another rare combination was his pessimism and optimism. He had none of the Victorian belief in progress. He saw no golden age in the future, and he doubted the existence of any in the past. Hope and dream, he seemed to say, but if you are wise do not look for too much; this world is a bridge to pass over, not to build upon. But at the same time he revered the fortitude of human nature, the courage with which men stumbled up the steep ascent of life. It was the business of a leader, he thought, not so much to put quality into his following as to elicit it, since the quality was already there. Above all he trusted his countrymen. After the battle of Jutland he held that they were stout-hearted enough to hear the plain truth. He revised the doctrine of the Empire so as to shift the emphasis from constitutional bonds to human loyalties.
But the most remarkable union of opposites was his devotion to what was old and his aliveness to what was new. He had the eighteenth-century sense of living in a world which was not made yesterday and emphatically would not be remade to-morrow, and he saw the long descent of the most novel problems. Like Burke, he would not destroy what many generations had built merely because some of the plasterwork was shaky. At the same time he was wholly in tune with his age and aware of every nuance of the modern world. He would never admit that there was any merit in a thing merely because it was new, but he gave it a judicial examination. We see this spirit in his philosophy. In his essay on “Berkeley” he observes that it is essential for a philosopher to possess “the instinct which tells him where, along the line of contemporary speculation, that point is to be found from which the next advance may best be made.” This instinct he had in a remarkable degree, and his channel of thought, which when he produced his first book was a backwater, became presently, under the guidance of Bergson and others, the fashionable stream. He saw deeper into labour problems than most of the Labour leaders. He was a far more prescient economist than either the practical business men or the academic expositors. He early saw the inevitable development of the Empire, and it was his hand in 1926 that wrote its new charter.
So unique a combination of qualities rarely combined made him a major force in public life, whether in or out of office. As I have said, he had none of the gifts which attract an easy popularity. He had his shortcomings too. Sometimes he used his powers on behalf of an obscurantism which was not his true creed. But he was a very great servant of the State and a great human being. To many there was something chilly in his aloofness from the passions of the market-place, something not quite human. Could he suffer and rejoice like an ordinary creature? Assuredly he could. I have seen him in old age show the light-heartedness of a boy, and he could mourn long and deeply, though silently, for the loss of friends. As the phrase goes, he “maximised” life, getting and giving of the best, and on his death-bed he looked forward to the end calmly and hopefully as the gateway to an ampler world.
CHAPTER VII — INTER ARMA
I
The outbreak of War in 1914 found me a sick man. A combination of family anxieties and public activities had played havoc with my digestion, and the remedy was either a major operation or a long spell of rest. I was thirty-nine and consequently well over the age for enlistment, and in any case no recruiting office would accept me. So I went to bed for the better part of three miserable months, while every day brought news of the deaths of my friends. In the spring of 1915 I was convalescent and was able to act as Times correspondent at the Front until after the battle of Loos. Then I was annexed for a short season by the Foreign Office. In 1916 I was at last commissione
d as an officer in the Intelligence Corps, and was in France until the early part of 1917, when I was recalled to a post under the War Cabinet. I obtained leave to have the necessary operation, and thereafter was engaged in intelligence work at home until the Armistice.
Such was my undistinguished record of service. That it was so meagre may be partly set down to my health. Compared with most men I had but a small share in the dangers of campaigning, but I had a full measure of its discomforts, since for the four years of war, and for some time afterwards, I was almost continuously unwell. The battle of the Somme was one long nightmare, when ill weather and fatigue had to be endured by a body which was nearly always in pain and was steadily declining in strength. My time in France was purgatorial, for though I had few of the hardships of the actual trenches, lengthy journeys in the drizzling autumn and winter of 1916, damp billets, and irregular meals reduced me to such a state of physical wretchedness that even to-day a kind of nausea seizes me when some smell recalls the festering odour of the front line, made up of incinerators, latrines and mud. When I was brought home I had more in the way of bodily comforts, but excessive busyness soon undid the good effects of the operation, and all my work was a struggle against the collar.
The attitude of the detached observer was always difficult for me. To achieve any peace of mind I had to have some share, however small, in the business itself. The years of war were like a trough into which I found myself flung, in company with several million others. Life seemed to stand uneasily still, and in no direction was there any prospect. Much of my pleasure in the past had been due to the gift of reacting quickly to stimuli, and regarding each new day as a new creation. But now there were no stimuli, only a leaden routine of duties. The science of war had always been one of my hobbies, but it was hard for a minor cog to find interest in the operations of a huge impersonal machine which seemed to move with little intelligent purpose.
