Grey Eminence
Harold Laski. By Kingsley Martin. (Gollancz. 21s.) THIS is a very able book about a very able man—one of the most remarkable, in sheer grey matter, of his generation. As with many others who have become " bogeys," partly through popular prejudice and partly through their own rash unwisdom, the fierce controversies which Harold Laski provoked were in startling con- trast to his personal qualities, for he was a warm-hearted man, giving and needing affection, compassionate, almost fanatically conscientious, integer vitae ; his courage and his sincerity we take for granted, for nobody ever doubted them. Mr. Martin does full justice to these characteristics, but is not blind to mistakes and short- comings. His book, though naturally coloured by political and personal sympathy, is a searching and acute piece of analysis, and it is much more than an affectionate memoir. It is highly interest- ing and readable in itself as an evocation of a turbid phase in our recent political history. It will be, and deserves to be, widely read, and will probably excite as much controversy as did the subject of it ; but no intelligent reader, agreeing or disagreeing, will fail to regard it as a most vivid and skilful presentation of an absorbing theme.
The main impression of Harold Laski left by these pages is the amazing intellectual vitality of the man. To this there is eloquent testimony from all manner of men themselves remarkable in one way or another, and perhaps none is more impressive than that of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, a great judge and a great mind. The variety of activities with which Laski filled his 57 years of life was little short of miraculous. He was one of the most fluent speakers and writers of his time. He never blotted a line, but, as his biographer recognises, he wrote too many lines too often and dissipated his strength in trying to set the world right about every- thing everywhere. One unhappy result was that he never wrote the masterpiece of which he was capable as a scholar, and it is doubtful whether his writings, so many of them being hasty and ephemeral, will have lasting influence. But M. Martin is eminently right in saying that his real influence will live in the hearts and minds of the hosts of pupils Whom he stimulated enormously either by attraction or repulsion, and for whom he took infinite trouble. This was his greatest and most admirable gift. He killed himself by attempting more than mortal man could do, and if ever a man died for causes in which he passionately believed, it was Harold Laski.
What was it, then, in a man of such talents, which brought him in the end to a sense of frustration and disillusionment (doubtless not unconnected with sheer exhaustion)-? Mr. Martin traces clearly his intellectual pathway from Liberalism to Socialism, and then, after the shock of 1931, to Marxism. The analysis becomes foggy only when the analyst is attempting to reconcile the irreconcilable— particularly the huge miscalculations of Laski and his group about Russia. This one can only attribute to wilful blindness, through prepossession, to manifest facts. Mr. Martin rightly describes Laski as a Marxist who would not go the whole hog (for which reason he was despised and denounced by-The Kremlin when he was pathetically trying to woo it). His half-hog was " revolution by consent." What he would never face was that this formula really meant " revolution by consent, or else...." That covert but unacknowledged threat was what confronted him in his disastrous libel action, from which 'he emerged; in the eyes of himself and his friends, as a martyr to prejudiced injustice. He was, in fact, the victim of his own intellectual and emotional inconsistency. It was not the only one, for no man can be a libertarian, as Laski liked to believe himself, and a Marxian at the same time.
Between the lines of this book, perhaps even when its author least intends it, one detects the great fault which marred Laski's thought and labours. He was, as this biographer calls him, the eminence grise of an increasingly powerful political party. That eminence is of a particularly vertiginous kind. Laski said that he spent his life in preaching against the corruption of power. There is no power which corrupts so insidiously as power behind the throne. Laski's form of snobbery was his familiarity and influence with the great, and his habit of writing letters to them and telling them their duty in the end bordered on the absurd. At one time he referred to Sir Stafford Cripps as suffering from " moral arrogance " and a " Messianic complex." His own besetting sin was intellectual arrogance. He never seems to have thought it possible, in the bowels of Christ, that he might be mistaken, and the result was that there was hardly a leader of his own party whom he did not censure or quarrel with. This " Messianic complex " undoubtedly grew upon him and was at its worst during his chairmanship of the party, when Mr. Attlee, who had been most creditably tolerant with him before, at last had to tell him to hold his peace. Even after 1945, when he was certainly getting considerable instalments of his " revolution by-consent," he must needs fall into violent and con- temptuous discord with Ernest Bevin. His perpetual sniping at Mr. Churchill during the war is very difficult to understand or forgive, and it alienated some of his most attached friends. There is some- where a bad kink in a man who can be so everlastingly Athanasius against the world as Laski was. Perhaps in all this a psychologist might see the " over-compensation " of -the young prodigy who, having taken the tremendous steps of renouncing his ancestral Judaism and contracting a secret marriage outside his religion, came to Oxford, as some of his contemporaries will remember, with a painful and wholly 'unnecessary inferiority complex.
There are some minor inaccuracies. In 1910 the Warden of New College was Dr. Spooner, not H. A. L. Fisher. J. F. Fulton is certainly an " eminent scholar," but of Yale, not of Harvard. A bibliography of Laski's principal writings would have been valuable.
C. K. ALLEN.
Previous page
