James Bryce—Welder of English-Speaking Friendship
James Bryce. By H. A. L. Fisher. (Macmillan. 32s. net.)
THE Life of James Bryce, by Mr. H. A. L. Fisher, may arouse many readers to a wide survey of the world to-day and suggest
profound thoughts upon its problems ; but it demands of a reviewer the humbler task of welcoming it heartily and immediately. Bryce came terrifically near omniscience, and his biographer, the Warden of New College, is himself a very learned statesman ; but the consequent alarm with which this book may be approached vanishes as soon as it is opened. If it had to be in two volumes, yet they are not bulky volumes, and they are surprisingly easy to read. They cannot have been easy to write. To the vast range of ground which Bryce literally travelled, and the vast regions of knowledge in which he was figuratively a voyager, the reader is introduced so genially that he is relieved of all sense of oppression, without loss of interest or of respect. For the biographer—if one may guess without impertinence —is in one way at least like his subject ; a certain funda- mental modesty keeps his touch light and human, through passages where the least self-obtrusion must have made his ripe knowledge a bore.
James Bryce, born in 1838, drew his nurture from Belfast, Glasgow and Oxford. He got a fellowship, went to the English Bar, and about the same time made a lasting mark with a book on the Holy Roman Empire, very short and dreadfully condensed, but illuminating to a surprisingly large and varied circle of readers. Alert, retentive, untiring, wiry, and intrepid, he, through a long life, studied—both in books without number and afoot in remote solitudes and among motley crowds—jurisprudence, botany, geology, the whole course of history, almost the whole face of the globe, and the manners of many strange peoples. His constant and eager contact with English political life and social progress was equally unremitting. He was an active Member of Parliament for over twenty-six years and more than once a Cabinet Minister ; founded the study of law in Manchester and helped to re-create it in Oxford ; twice in his life did valiant service to the cause of English secondary education ; lent a helping hand to many forms of social service ; was all his days the persistent and fearless champion of obscured and oppressed peoples far away whom he knew and loved, and—most notably of all—by his most laborious and most famous book, made the by no means oppressed people of America intelligible to Europe and to themselves ; taught by early experience and unhampered by early prejudice he played a rarely independent and far-seeing part in regard to the Irish question, and in his seventieth year (when Mr. Fisher's admirably rapid first volume ends) was discharging not more unsuccessfully than his predecessors and less so than his successors, the eminent but thankless office of Chief Secretary for Ireland, when the unlooked for opportunity for which his whole career had trained him came, and he went to Washington as Ambassador. All the while his heart had remained anchored in the love of a few lifelong friends— in later years of a lady well fitted to share in all his joys and endeavours, and in a childlike, unmetaphysical and untroubled loyalty to some great, simple truths early learnt.
The American and, let it be added, the Canadian people, also, appreciated fully what we at home realize with perhaps less adequate appreciation, that the crowning adventure of Bryce's life in the untried field of diplomacy resulted in a signal achievement with solid results which must outlast any eclipse. From it he returned, well stricken in years (via, of course, most quarters of the globe), in time for the outbreak of the War. Bryce, for all his personal toughness and daring, loved peace and gentle ways ; distrusted martial propensities ; loved the old Germany that he had once known well ; and was slow to believe in the potency of wrong and unreason there, or anywhere, except in Turkey. It is therefore no little thing that from the moment of the invasion of Belgium; the old man, who for days past had faltered, threw his soul into the War. Perhaps in his un- wavering conviction that the War must be fought out at all costs to the end, and therewith his passionate desire that the ensuing settlement should lay in righteousness the foundations of lasting peace, he represented as completely as could be the best mind of his own people. But, of course, his public career was almost over, though his Report as a chairman of a Commission upon German atrocities was a great War service ; and the bulk of Mr. Fisher's second volume is but the record of a shrewd observer and a wise but unavailing counsellor. Every cause for which he cared was in his last years faring ill ; the Great War ended in the Little Peace ; the American people, whom he loved and trusted better than he did their institutions and public methods, were, after one splendid effort, signally failing to make good ; in his own country democracy, the object of his temperate faith, seemed about to perish through slack tolerance of " direct action." It was an amazing achievement that, amid all this and when well over eighty, he wrote his memorable book—up to date, immensely well informed, sober and sweet tempered—on Modern Democracies. The comparative diffuseness of Mr. Fisher's later chapters may well be pardoned. He was himself an important member of an Administration which Bryce bitterly condemned, and could not have told his tale so fully or so fairly had he tried to write with greater grip. He succeeds in keeping us aware that, if his hero died much disappointed, he died undefeated and undismayed.
Already, since his death, much has happened which forbids younger men, who partake in any of his enthusiasms, to indulge in very gloomy views. But in closing the pages of a biography we think rather of the man than of his times. A slight acquaintance could easily take stock of James Bryce's defects, and might be assured that he knew them all but did not know all his strength. He lacked the dramatic quality ; and he lacked repose. With his incessant activity, his rapid utterance, and his manner, in casual intercourse, as of a brusque man who has to catch a train, the House of Commons, which attended little to his unanswerable argu- ments, and, like Charles Lamb, is somewhat anti-Caledonian, was not wholly to blame. Again he had no great literary faculty and he knew it ; the multitude of facts, often petty and dry, which poured into him and poured out of him, might create the illusion of a mind wanting in philosophy, and, which is worse, in poetry. But a great illusion it would be. This man who loved facts, and who also loved men, and whose love for both drew its strength from a deeper source, did, it may well be, more than any other man of modern times to make possible the growth of understanding and sympathy between widely separated nations of men. And, without appraising the fruit of his labours, we are led by Mr. Fisher's simply told story to the ruling thought of a poet whom he valued deeply :- " Who would not give, If so he might, to duty and to truth, The eagerness of infantine desire."
It was granted to James Bryce that he might do this ; and
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