RAMSAY MACDONALD
By MARY AGNES HAMILTON
DRAMA was, although he would never admit it, the breath of MacDonald's nostrils. He loved movement, pageantry, colour, crisis. To the last he expected, like a child, that a messenger might at any moment arrive, bringing news of high events. The last messenger has come and gone, and, still dramatically, life for him is rounded off. To that extent, his end is as he could have wished. It recovers, in its last paragraph, the colour that had belonged to it always, until its closing years. For the strangest doom had, in these last years, begun to overtake a man who, before then, was never other than vivid. He was fading, and there was nothing he could be less easily reconciled to than that. Now, how- ever, he is again the subject of attempted interpretation ; his career is interrogated, in the effort to extract thence the secret of what remained, always, to those who knew him, an enigmatic personality. He will not, now, write those Reminiscences, based, perhaps, on the diary he always kept, that might, or might not, have helped. As a writer he had many gifts, but not the highest—that of objectivity. The picture of himself would have been arranged—in what light ? One does not know.
His personality is, of course, the secret of his career, and its explanation. Take everything one likes away from him— deny him the higher kind of ability, imagination, constructive ideas, power to act, except in patent emergency—and he yet remains one of the most salient figures of our epoch, and, among the politicians, by far the most interesting. The out- line of his career is fascinating, and the man who filled up that outline, infinitely picturesque.
Yet here one meets the contradiction that runs right through, as a continuous strand. The career is dramatic and unconventional : the person, in many ways, deeply conven- tional. It is so, from the start. He chose to shroud the circumstances of his birth in deep obscurity. But the action of his mother in refusing to marry a man she had loved but found insufficient, and preferring, with all that cost in 1866, to bear and bring up her boy by her own efforts, showed qualities any son might have been proud to blazon. The home she made for him was as happy as the home he made himself when he married Margaret Gladstone thirty years later. For him, however, her action created a sense of deep social inferiority which he revealed even as Prime Minister, in many ways. Strange, too, that a man who, professedly, be- longed to no orthodox religious community should yet state that, deeply as he loved his children, there was one act, and only one, that would cause him to break with any one of them— their becoming a Roman Catholic.
The same conventionality appeared in his aesthetic and in his historic taste, and runs right through his politics. Yet it was crossed by, an enormous courage. He went back to Lossiemouth, and there built a house for his mother, as soon as he could afford it ; he lived there, where everyone knew about him, to the last. In the War his courage made him adherents whom nothing that afterwards happened could wholly, in their hearts, detach from allegiance to him. Those who lived through that period realised a quality of sheer heroism about his stand then, which remains, although it has not quite the accent that they adored at the time. Certainly, his stand then cost him a great deal. He who hated unpopularity met its fullest blast ; he endured it, and came through. His fortitude was the more remarkable that he had no trace of the minority or opposition mind, and found himself comfortable neither with the intellectuals nor the sentimentalists among the pacifist group.
This discomfort was pretty constant. Here one comes upon the most singular feature of his career. By birth, he was placed in the ranks of the dispossessed. If there was a workman's party, he had to belong to it, and did brilliantly belong to and lead it through years of arduous service. Having got there, his eminent gifts, and above all, the rare combination in him of the orator of great emotional appeal and the strategist of supreme ability, took him, irresistibly, to leadership. Yet all the time something in him, deeper than his reason, was out of touch with his associates. This was always obscurely felt. Despite his admitted ascendency over the Labour Party from the time when his drive and energy and his hard work brought it into being as a distinct party in the State, he was at no time wholly or easily trusted ; always he was at once the centre of interest, emotion, question and discomfort.
Attacks on him were largely misdirected ; he was suspected, at one stage, of being too " left," too intran- sigent, too pacifist ; he was described, outside, as the great emotional force in the party, whereas his strength there was rooted rather in the qualities of the chess-player, the political tactician ; if he liked reading books on military strategy, the reason was that strategy interested him, and he was a master in it. His seat, however, was uneasy ; passionate admiration in the country went hand in hand with suspiciousness in the House of Commons. Only the fact that Henderson, whom everyone trusted, staunchly supported him kept him safe in his place as leader before the War and brought him back there after it.
From 1929 on his party's distrust of his " Council of State " ideas exacerbated his feelings and made him glad, when the chance came in 1931, to be rid of uncom- fortable colleagues and uncongenial associates. His action in 1931 was, in truth, his most successful, because his most genuine. Ignorant of modern economics and finance, he quite sincerely believed what he was told about the critical position of his country. He liked crises ; here was drama of the kind to which his best qualities rose. He was glad to get rid of a party that would drag him back into the dark wildernesses of oppo- sition, which did not suit him at all. No one could have expected him in 1931 to lift again the black cap cup of vilifica- tion drained in 1914. A congenial role at last presented itself; he could be the saviour of his country, and for a period all things to all men—with the insignificant exception of the men he had worked with for thirty years. Even they could have forgiven him if he could have accomplished the final act of sincerity—if he could have refrained from claiming that he was a Socialist.
Here one comes back to the fundamental dichotomy in his make-up : to that quarrel between his mind and his nature which gives so singular an accent to his entire story and personality. He was not really an idealist, if an idealist be a person for whom ideas have independent authority ; his abstracts were never more than vague pictorial groupings. More important, indeed determinant, was the fact that, although intellectually convinced about Socialism, he could not handle the modern economic argument, and remained, and was bound to remain, emotionally and temperamentally aloof from it. Other people are of the essence of Socialism : its vital content is the realisation of them, as possessing equal authority with oneself. The experience here of everyone who got at all near to MacDonald is the same— others were not real to him ; no one and no thing was fully real to him, save himself. So, while he believed in Socialism as a formal creed, he did not, could not, believe that it would work. As he got near, he shied from its application ; he could do no other. Here is, at the same time, the explana- tion of the loneliness of which a man with many gifts of personal attraction often complained. He was completely, fatally and tragically, self-enclosed.
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