LORD MORLEY : A PERSONAL RECOLLECTION.
y _ORD MORLEY was greatly respected by Englishmen 4 for his independence and sincerity. He was also greatly respected by those able to estimate his intel- lectual worth. It is doubtful, however, if any but a very few of his countrymen really understood him or formed anything approaching a true estimate of his character. The majority during the greater part of his career thought of him as a stern, unbending, intellectual Radical. Had he not been at Oxford a typical agnostic disciple of John Stuart Mill, a logical revolutionary ? Again, as a writer and publicist, as editor first of the Fortnightly and then of the Pall Mall, as a Member of Parliament too extreme, it was at first thought, for inclusion in any ordinary Liberal Cabinet, and finally as Chief Secretary for Ireland in Mr. Gladstone's Home Rule Cabinet, Lord Morley was regarded as a hard and unyielding votary of advanced views. Timid people indeed sometimes thought of him as Matthew Arnold humorously pretended to think of Mr. Frederic Harrison—as a man who wanted to set up a guillotine in his back-garden. Morley, it was darkly hinted, was in favour of, at any rate condoned, all the bloodshed and fury of the French Revolution. If he was not exactly a Robespierre he was very near it, and would no doubt be quite willing to proclaim a republic, wear a red cap of liberty on Sundays and insist on everybody being called " citizen," and swearing to uphold Liberty, Equality and Fraternity !
Even when people had discovered that Morley did not want to cut off their heads, or to see the gutters run with the blood of the rich and the middle classes, he was considered to be a man of dangerous views and also a man prepared to push matters to their logical conclusion—a man with a French mind without moderation or reverence for the Constitution and the three per cents.
No doubt a good deal could be quoted from Morley's writings and speeches which to hurried and anxious minds might seem to support this view. Yet, as a matter of fact, it gave an utterly false impression of his personality. Morley was by nature a man of the utmost fastidiousness. In literature and the arts his fault was to be much too Conservative. He was really almost conventional in his dislike of the loud voice and the over-emphatic manner.
It was said indeed, and with a good deal of truth, that to talk to MOrley about modern belles-lettres wal like talking to a cultivated old maid in a provincial town. I am bound to say I had my own experiences of this side. It was delightful to talk to him about the classics, but it was not by any means easy to earn his sympathy for new developments in modern literature, and especially ill fiction. Socially he was equally fastidious. He liked all that was easy and sympathetic, but he shuddered at anything that had in it the least touch of brutality or coarseness. He loved good talk and was an excellent talker, but it must be regulated by good manners, as well as good sense. He was a Reformer in all fields, and a revolutionary in many, but he greatly disliked anyone going an inch beyond what he thought proper limit.
For friendship he had a genius—to use the words he applied to Mr. Chamberlain. Everybody who knew him liked him, and generally liked him very much, and for this reason many of his intimates were the last people you would expect. For example, long before Lord Morley was a great figurt in public life he had becoine- a close friend of the late Lord Lytton. When Lord Beaconsfield turned Lord Lytton from a Diplomat into a Viceroy of India, Lord Lytton gave a farewell dinner to four or five of his best friends. To the surprise of many of them John Morley, the Radical stalwart of the middle 'seventies, was one of the sacred band. It was said indeed that the whole time Lord Lytton was in India he and Morley wrote to each other by every mail.
This is only one example where many could be given. Morley had dozens of unexpected friends among his political opponents. Indeed, a cynic might have said that he went very near following the cynical advice' of his old Oxford friend, Mark Pattison, " Vote with Whigs, but dine with the Tories." Needless to say, there was not a touch of the snob about Morley, though he so greatly loved and relished the old culture.
Though he came from a Nonconformist home, he was, I think, like Matthew Arnold, a little inclined to find the Nonconformist mind unsympathetic.
The mention of Nonconformity recalls to my mind a curiously interesting talk I had with Morley when the Liberal Cabinet of which he was a member were (I think in 1906) trying to tackle the Education Question, in accordance with the wishes of the Nonconformists. As a result, they were meeting with a very strenuous oppo- sition from the Church of England and its supporters. Sitting on the lawn of my house in the country after lunch Morley, rather to my astonishment, raised this thorny and controversial subject. I as a Unionist expected Morley to be very anti-Anglican and to take up the attitude of the Continental Liberals as to the absolute necessity of freeing education from the slightest vestige of clerical influence. Instead I found him distinctly lukewarm on the matter, or at any rate very unwilling to stake all, as some of the hot-heads wanted, on crushing the Church. He ended the conversation by saying that he had reminded his more zealous colleagues that through- out English history whenever the Church had been really roused it had always beaten the Dissenters. "And so it will be now." When I wondered whether this was the correct view of history he insisted, with even greater. emphasis, that it was. It was an interesting and poignant example of how scholarly was his political outlook, and how minutely and critically he studied history, and applied what he held to be its lessons to current politics.
Another point on which the public failed to realize Morley's attitude of mind was no less curious. They thought him to be opposed to authority and the exercise of individual power. As a matter of fact he was the most authoritative of men, and in a sense delighted in the exercise of personal power. When he had convinced himself that he held the right view he would brook no opposition to the necessary action. Any order which he had the right to give must be obeyed to the letter. I remember Lord Cromer, who liked and admired Morley, telling me with amusement an example of this trait. " I think Morley a very able and sincere man ; but he is amazingly determined to insist on his will being absolute. We were discussing an Indian point, and I happened to say, without, of course, any desire to oppose him, that I wondered how the Viceroy would like his plan. ' The Viceroy,' he said with tremendous emphasis, ' has nothing whatever to do with the matter. It is for me, the Secretary of State, to decide. He must carry out whatever I tell him.' " Lord Cromer, I think, agreed in principle ; but it was entertaining to see a man supposed to be so determined to have his own way and to dominate others almost shocked at the imperiousness of the professorial politician that Morley was supposed to be.
He was a great man and he set a noble and worthy example in a way which was missed by the world. He maintained the most complete personal independence. Though a man of no private fortune and by no means a popular writer, he was never indebted to help of any kind from the State, from the Party coffers, or from any external source. He was not one of the men who think that Directorships are the natural pasturage for a statesman who is turned out to grass by a popular verdict. Morley was as independent of office as if he had possessed £20,000 a year. And that independence he owed solely to his own efforts and his own continence in social existence. And yet he was never a hermit nor an ascetic, and liked a good dinner and a good glass of wine as well as any
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