Lansbury
The Life of George Lansbury. By Raymond Postgate. (Longmans. 2 Is.) THIS is an admirable biography. Written with a narrative skill enriched by a genuine affection—and despite some flashing examples on the other side there is, after all, something to be said for a biographer who positively likes his subject—it succeeds equally in giving an authentic picture of a man and of the social age that shaped him. Mr. Postgate has three advantages. He is George Lans- bury's son-in-law, and thus has been able to call on a rich store of family recollections of one who never departed from his deep Vic- torian sense of family. He was for many years, in so far as it was possible for a young man to hold such a relationship to an older, his close political and journalistic intimate and finally his literary executor. And he is a skilled professional writer.
Many of the Socialist pioneers of that remarkable generation of working-class-leaders of which Lansbury himself was so individual an example have not been well served in their biographies. They have either been written about by men who did not know them well—a graver defect in their case than in many others, since, being for the most part unlettered men, they have left little of their true quality on paper—or by men who loved them but had little skill with a pen. Lansbury has been fortunate.
It is perhaps inevitable that by a modern generation he should be remembered chiefly as he was in his old age : a Socialist and Christian pacifist much loved but with little effective influence on a world with which he was out of step ; a man governed by a heart so indiscriminate in its charity that it could even persuade him that with a little more time and a working knowledge of German he could have converted Hitler to " Christianity in its purest sense." But although his deep personal sense of the requirements of the Christian faith—he was for all his adult life a devout member of the Church of England—compelled him in his own view to be a pacifist, as it did also to be a Socialist, he was much more than a warm-hearted visionary. How much more Mr. Postgate shows in a narrative which spans the years from 1859 to 1940 with a detail always adequate but never oppressive.
Lansbury combined in somewhat the same way as Gandhi did a genuine saintliness with a political artfulness—there were those who were tempted at times to use a harsher term for both men—which on occasion left opponents and even friends gasping. He may have been a pacifist, but there was nothing at all passive about him ; he plunged into battle with a zest, a talent for publicity, and a lack of scruple even, that were undeniably effective in the unceasing cam- paign he conducted against the many social evils that attracted his attention and stirred his indignation. Like all great reformers he was single-minded, ruthless and egotistical. But he was completely without small personal vanity, pretence or self-interest. He was a hopeless member of a team. He could never persuade himself to those compreitnises that are for example an essential part of working as one of a Cabinet. Nor for that matter did he ever find it easy to believe that other people might be right and he wrong. But he spent his whole life and most of the money that ever came his way in the service of human betterment, and left behind him a place in the hearts of many thousands of ordinary people, particularly in the East End of London, such as few men have known or deserved.
He was one of the builders of the Labour Party. It is probable, indeed, as Mr. Postgate claims, that by his tireless journeyings up and down the country he converted more people to Socialism in the early years of the century than all the writings of Shaw and Wells and the Webbs together. But he was never wholly at home in the modern - Labour Party—least of all when he was its leader—any more than he would, or could, have been at home in any party. It is difficult to point to any permanent impact he has made upon it. He was, however, a magnificent propagandist and an agitator of genius. To suggest, as Mr. Postgate does, that he was as an editor comparable to C. P. Scott or Garvin is to let affection blind judge- ment. Nevertheless he made of the early Daily Herald an incom- parable weapon of social revolt which called to its service under his editorship some of the most shining literary spirits of .iits time— it must surely be the only paper ever to publish a free-verse poem by Osbert Sitwell as a leading article.
He was not an original thinker. But throughout his life, with a fidelity nothing could daunt, he held to a number of simple human principles—a hatred of cruelty and injustice, a belief in the essential goodness of men and women, a passionate conviction that the existence of poverty was morally wrong. These principles he trans- lated into action in a remarkable way in his early days as a member of the Poplar Board of Guaftlfalts, and it is perhaps above all in the East End of London, where he lived for most of his life and which he deeply loved, that his most permanent memorial is to be found. He was a great and perhaps a typically English character. Austere in his own life, he delightedly promoted the innocent pleasures of others and, himself a teetotaller, fought vigorously and successfully for the right to drink beer in the open air in the London Parks which, as First Commissioner of Works, he did more than any man to make truly the -possession of ordinary Londoners. This honest, affectionate, able and exciting biography is a fitting tribute to him.
FRANCIS WILLIAMS.
Previous page
