THE ART OF APOLOGY.
SOME correspondence which has been published this week between Lord Dalkeith and the Lord Advocate, Mr. lire, is a nice study in the ethics of apology. No doubt Mr. Use thinks that, having freely withdrawn a statement of fact in which he was misinformed, he has discharged all obliga- tions to courtesy and veracity. And probably he supposes that if he went further in an expression of regret he would be yielding political ground. Perhaps he even thinks—we do not say that he has no reason—that his political enemies have been making another man's quarrel their own, nee because their sense of the proprieties is unusually shocked, but because they want the pleasure of beholding and emphasising the humiliation, of Mr. lire, the Liberal politician. Mr. Ure, for his part (so we imagine him arguing), refuses to be humiliated.. He tells himself that generosity and candour can go too far in the political game, and holds with Taeitus Simplieftas on liberaiitas, ni acitit mochas, in ezitiunt vertuntur. Yet we think if he dis- tinguished rightly between the two sides of the question (the personal and the political) a clearer and wider apology than he has given would have appeared to him a source of strength rather than of weakness,—unless we are to suppose that the public holds courtesy lower than dialectics, and candour than tenacity.
Mr. lire said in a speech that a certain Duke who had " ostentatiously " refused a guinea donation to a. village football club owned some vacant ground by the banks of the Thames. The citizens of London had spent millions on the Thames Embankment, and to complete the work it was necessary for them to buy the vacant land of this Duke. The price was £150,000. He wanted to know what the Duke had ever done or spent upon that ground to give it that fabulous value. When there were cries of "Shame !" Mr. lire pointed out that there was no need to cry " Shame ? " as the land was sold for its market value ; but he did say that some of the unearned increment should have gone to the source which bad made the land so valuable to the Duke through no effort of his own. The reference was, as every one knows, to the Duke of Buccletteh. Mr. Use was afterwards informed that the Doke of Bucclench who bargained with the Board of Works for compensation when the Embankment was built was not the present Duke at all, but his predecessor ; that that Duke did not sell the land for £150,000, as it was not his to sell, he being only a tenant of the Crown ; that he was awarded by an arbitrator 8,325 as compensation because the whole frontage of the garden of Montagu House was cut off from the river, and because the property was depreciated in other ways. It is unnecessary to insist upon the fact that while Mr. Use in his speech spoke of the citizens of London spending millions on the Thames Embankment, in one of his subsequent letters he wrote of the special value of the Montagu House property being "derived from the simple fact that it lay adjacent to a great natural waterway and was assuredly not given to it by anything which the owner did or spent." How,, we wonder, did the citizens of London, in spending-their millions, is:time:es-any more thas‘the Duke of
Buccleuch himself, the geographical fact that the river flows past Montagu House? But that matters little. Mr. Ure undoubtedly held up the Duke to contempt by contrasting his " ostentatious " withholding of a, guinea with his alleged fabulous profit at the expense of Londoners. Afterwards he fully withdrew his statement of fact as to the Montagu House bargain in a correspondence which was published, we gather, only at the request of Lord Dalkeith. But he did nothing more. As we all know, it is impossible to overtake a false statement, and we should have thought Mr. Ure would have deemed it proper even to exhaust himself in a generous, if unavailing, pursuit. We suppose he would have taken the opportunity to say more on the subject if he had made another public speech; but, apart from speeches, there are several expedients by which a Minister can make a public statement. He need not even write to the newspapers. There is always, for instance, that convenient correspondent who wants to be informed on the very matter on which the Minister moat desires to unburden himself.
We cannot remember that any of the great essayists has written on the art of apology, yet nothing indicates the quality of the human temper so much as the spirit in which a man makes an admission or expresses a regret. Surely that is the very subject for an essayist. But Bacon, Montaigne, Lamb, and the rest are all dumb. A friend of the present writer once said, in speaking of a certain icy dame of whom he stood in awe, "If only I owed her an apology, I think I could get on better." He meant that the necessity of apologising would prove that he had candour or generosity, or was capable of deference; but as it was, he owed her no apology, except, indeed, a general one for his existence, and that was difficult to frame acceptably. We are tempted to assert the principle that an apology is the opportunity for self-recommendation. Why should men be so backward in apology seeing that it is not only so little derogatory to them, but, when opportune and appropriate, is so powerful an instrument of recommendation? Yet most poor men would give away a five-pound-note sooner than an apology. The exceptional friend to whom we have alluded no doubt felt that the one and only chance of retrieving himself from disfavour was the declaration of a particular and concrete offence; that would give him confidence ; he would have something to gain and little to lose ; he would plunge and sink or swim once for all. What he could not tolerate was a vaguely trying relation which afforded him nothing material to grasp. Of course there are men—not a common type—who apologise for their existence and their opinions in almost every word they speak, and that not by a direct form, but by their bearing and the implications of their speech. Uriah Heep was " so very umble," but not more humble than some men who have never framed the word humility in describing or thinking of themselves. Obsequiousness is an offence which goads some people to the point of madness, and rightly so, for it is not only a renunciation of dignity in him who practises it, but a reflection on the dignity of all. We remember the episode of a famous oarsman whose boat had been illicitly borrowed by a mean and unimpressive man, who was filled with consterna- tion when he heard whose boat he had taken, and learned further that the famous one had missed the boat—had, in fact, wanted it particularly—and was searching for the offender. Truth to tell, however, the famous man was a soft- hearted fellow, was only moderately angry, and would have readily forgiven the offence in response to a self-respecting apology. But he was not prepared for grovelling ; and, losing his self-control when abjectness was offered to him instead of reasonable regret, he picked up the author of this new and culminating offence and dropped him into the river. Then there is that other class of men, also a small class we think, which is generous rather than just. They are like Gold- smith's Lysippus, whose kindness won the praise of the whole world, except one sort of men,—those to whom he owed money.
The majority of men are slow to apologise fully, not at all because experience has shown them that a man who has the courage for it is in a worse position afterwards, but because pride prevents them. They cannot bring themselves to it ; it is a kind of physical pain to them to say that they have been wrong. Particularly is this so when the person who challenges them is socially or intellectually an inferior; then it is torture. Arrogance, social and intellectual, has throttled many an apology. Yet how perverse t Do we not all warm towards the friend who admits that he has been wrong, and do we not all despise him who stoops to any sophistry to prove in some superficial sense that he was right ? Newspapers often make very lame apologies for mistakes, apparently because they like to maintain the fiction of infallibility. This is uncomplimentary to the intelligence of their readers, who would certainly be more impressed by the aspiration towards infallibility tempered with candid admissions of failure on the route. Charles I. said : "Never make a defence before you are accused." But when one is accused, a gracious bearing in the dock adds enormously to the chance of being acquitted by public opinion. Mr. Ure could bring himself safely to admit that he had been mis- informed by a generally trustworthy authority—a thing that might happen to any of us—but he did not gracefully take the next step of wiping out the contemptuous picture of the Duke's "ostentatious" parsimony which happened to be the product of his own taste and judgment. There he quailed and failed. Disraeli used cynically to say that apologies only account for that which they do not alter. Mr. Ure seems to be quite willing to leave the matter there.
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