BOOKS.
LORD MORLEY'S RECOLLECTIONS.* inesm Nemec.) A CASUAL note in Lord Morley's memoirs throws much light on the author and on his remarkable book "A lady of quality, on uncompromising Millite, dealt faithfully by me in 18951. ' You know what people are beginning to com- plain of. You are too haughty. You are not at heart a real democrat. You are not half ambitious enough.' Who knows ? " AVIto knows, indeed Lord Morley has written with the utmost candour concerning his literary life, his political activity down to the year 1911, and his friendships, but neither he, nor perhaps any one else, can answer the lady's implied questions. The portrait t hat he draws is that of a man holding himself resolutely aloof from the world—playing the great game of polities with keen interest, busying himself with the administrative problems of Ireland and Italy, but always reminding himself that there were greater and deeper things in life than Cabinet-making or Parliamentary debate. Lord Morley, in the retirement of his old age, perhaps unconsciously accentuates his detachment from his own era. The war has made a great gulf between that era and this, and he remains on the for title of the abyss. But his attitude has dignity, and frees the book from anything resembling party passion. He remarks of Mill's Representative Gozvrtnnent that it is one of the books which cannot be adequately reviewed for twenty or thirty years after it had appeared, and wonders whether this is true of all really important Looks. We are inclined to think that the next generation may perhaps be able to appreciate Lord Morley's Apologia pro rad sue more fully than his younger and war-worn contemporaries can do in these critical times. Yet it is a relief to forget the war for thh moment and follow the venerable scholar-statesman through his admirably phrased recollections of his life.
Lord Morley, in recalling his Oxford days at Lincoln College, adhere he gained an open scholarship from Cheltenham in the Mutiny year, rebukes those who "speak contemptuously of the mid- Victorian age." The age of Darwin, Tennyson, and George Eliot, Mazzini and Victor Hugo, was also, ho reminds us, the age of Liberalism in the broadest sense, and in that principle he retains his faith. Whatever the cynics may say, whatever invidious comparisons they may draw between modem Europe and the .Roman Empire of tho second century, " let us remain invincibly sure that Progress stands for a working belief that the modem world will never consent to do without." When, abandoning the idea of taking Orders, Lord Morley was called to the Bar and made his living by his pen, his best friends were Meredith and John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer and Matthew Arnold, and he was much influenced by Mazzini, Hugo, and George Sand. His estimate of Mazzini is singularly penetrating and just. Mazzini was, ho rays, the greatest prophet of democracy, but a very bad statesman because he would never compromise :— " Ho did not always strive to be just to those whom he believed to have sacrificed true wisdom to deceptive short cuts. I chanced to spend an evening with him when Garibaldi Caine to London in • Mesitettins. ny Join, 'beset Morley. 2 rola Loudon: Macmillan aud Co. [2.18. =Li
1864, the hero of a popular reception well worthy of that strange wonder of the world. Martini. Have you over seen a lion J. M. At the Zoological Gardens. Mazzoni. You know the face of a lion ? J. M. Yes, without detail. Mazzini. Is it not A. foolish face ? Is it not the face of Garibaldi 2—Sallies of unreason like this may well be set down to what Mazzini himself described as that consumption of the soul,' that lingering death, the Hell of Exile,' which only the exile himself can know. It was no small thing for that generation when the religious mysticism, of which the papacy had become the rather outworn incarnation, slowly changed into Maminian idealism."
Lord Morley devotes a few pages to his work as editor of the Fort- nightly Review, which, it seems, was regarded as " an incendiary publication " because he allowed Mr. Frederic Harrison to defend Trade Unionism. The author recalls the taunt levelled against him by the first Lord Geschen in 1888, that he wax " the St. Just of our revolution," and remarks, rather caustically, that " it would have done just as well to talk of Nero, Blue Beard, or Torquemada." St. Just, the eager young revolutionary, did not, as every one now sees, supply the right parallel. But Lord Morley, as a Liberal journalist, especially after 18E0, when he became editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, unquestionably gave a strong intellectual support to the advanced elements in his party, and thus hastened the inevit- able split. More than three-fourths of his book is concerned with polities, and to this part we must now turn. But even in the midst of his political life he could not, happily, resist the temptation to turn author again, and to add to the Cobden of his early years his Gladstone and hie Cromwell. He read widely and diligently, too, and one of the finest passages in this book is a glowing eulogy of Lucretius, the most austere and the grandest of Roman poets.
Lord Morley's intimate friendehip with Mr. Chamberlain dated from 1873. Admiral Masse, " who was fired by all the political sailor's passion for Thorough, had made up his mind that Chamber- lain and I were meant for one another," and the acquaintance " soon developed into sworn alliance and much more." Lord Morley has to trace in detail their political estrangement, but his tribute to his old friend is generous and sincere. " I have always thought him, of all the men of action that I have known, the frankest and most direct, as he was, with two exceptions, the boldest and the most intrepid." " Firm in character, he was as yet a moderate in the cast of his intelligence " " He was a master of self-control if occasion demanded. When he woo busy on temperance and the Gothenburg system, we had one of our talks with Carlyle. The sage told him that he rejoiced that this mighty reform was being attempted ; then all at once he took fire at thought of compensation for the dispossessed publican, and burst into full blaze at its iniquity. Fiercely smiting the arms of his chair, with strong voice and flashing eye, he summoned an imaginary publican before him. ' Compensation ! ' he cried, ' you dare come to me for compensation ! I'll tell you where to go for compensation I Go to your father the devil, let him com- pensate you'—sad so on in ono of his highest flights of diatribe. Chamberlain, still as a stock, listened with deferential silence for long minutes, until ho was able in patient tone to put the case of the respectable butler whom a grateful master had set up in a licensed and well-conducted tavern : was Mr. Carlyle sure that to turn him out, bag and baggage, was quite fair play 2 And as on through the arguments. The old Ram Does with the fire in his belly attentively listened, and then admitted genially that he might have been all wrong. If Carlyle had been an angry public meeting, Chamberlain's method would have been the same. I once saw him handle a gathering of exasperated shipowners in my constituency at Newcastle with equal success."
Mr. Gladstone was puzzled by Lord Morley's friendship with Mr. Chamberlain. " You are not only different," he used to say ; "man and wife are often different, but you two are the very contradiction." However this may be, it was Mr. Chamberlain who forced the author into active political life. Lord Morley defends his own decision to enter Parliament, against the advice of Matthew Arnold, who thought that the influential journalist, like John Lemoinne in Paris, had the best of it. He admits that the waste of time " was not far short of heart-breaking," and the clap-trap humiliating ; " but I soon reflected," he adds, " that what was good enough for men like Gladstone end Bright was good enough for me " ; and the House of Commons has had no more devoted apologist than the author, in many pages of his book. Lord Morley gives a very full account of his decision, after long consultations with Mr. Cham- berlain, to accept the Irish Secretaryship at the end of January, 1886. " For some days after my acceptance of office I nursed the idea that I might be useful ae a buffer between Chamberlain and the Prime Minister. I ought to have known better. A few days were enough to dispel the illusion." For Mr. Chamberlain, to the knowledge of his closest friend, believed in January, 1886, that " thefuture of thecountry . . . was boundup withthe preservation of an Irish Union." Not from Lord Morley, who know the facts. do we hoar a word of Mr. Chamberlain's alleged inconsistency in this vital matter.
His account of Mr. Parnell is vividly interesting. " The pen of Tacitus or Sallust or De Retz would be needed to do full justice to a character so remarkable." Lord Morley's thoughtful estimate is truer, we think, than that of Mr. Parnell's own colleagues who have attempted to appraise their lost leader. He likens Mr. Parnell. not to Grattan or Flood, still less to O'Connell, but to Fitzgibbon, Lord Clare, the resolute Irishman who was Pitt's chief assistant in passing the Act of Union. In a long conversation a week before the decree of divorce in the O'Shea action was pronounced, Lord Morley found Mr. Parnell serenely confident that the ease against him would collapse, and that his leadership of the Nationalists would continue. Neither of them foresaw the outcome Mr. Schnadhorst, the Liberal Party manager, was in despair. " How doth fortune banter us ! " quoted Sir William Harcourt, reflecting on the sudden dashing of the high hopes excited by the Eccles by-election. The Liberal leaders induced Mr. Gladstone to write his famous letter to Lord Morley, saying that Mr. Parnell must resign. But it was Lord Morley himself, it now appears, who persuaded Mr. Gladstone to insert the definite threat to resign his own leadership if Mr. Parnell would not go. After that, Mr. Parnell was, in the author's belief, by no means eclipsed. He was playing for time, with a pro- spect of success. His sudden death, it is plain, relieved tho Liberal Party from a very difficult situation. Lord Morley's account of his renewed experience of Dublin Castle between 1892 and 1895 is
instructive, especially at this time. I have always said," he re- marks elsewhere, " that Strafford would have made a far better business of Ireland than Cromwell did, but then that would be an awkward doctrine to preach just now " (1907). And in another place we find him telling Mr. Balfour : " The more I study the matter, the more do I fool that time makes Castlereagh bigger and Canning loss." A politician with such ideas at the back of his mind was bound to chill the Nationalists, and Lord Morley admits that he re- ceived very little support from them in his attempt to govern the country without the Crimes Act and without quarrelling openly with Ulster. The admirers of the Birroll policy, or lack of policy, may profitably consider Lord Morley's view in 1893 that a Chief Secretary could net "palliate boycotting, blackguard speeches," or the feats of the moonlighters without inspiring his own officials with contempt for him and indifference to their work.
Lord Morley gives an interesting account of the formation of the Rosebery Ministry in 1894. Sir William Harcourt at first de- manded that he, as Leader of the House, should see all the Foreign Secretary's despatches, but he did not insist on this. Lord Morley gave his support to Lord Rosebery against Sir William Harcourt as Prime Minister, and did not back the protest against the Foreign Office being held by a Peer. " It seems curious," he reflects, " that none of us realised how essentially fatal to the very idea of a sound and workable arrangement was the difference between two schools of foreign policy." Then came Lord Rosebery's admission that Home Rule was impossible without the assent of " the predominant partner," and all the clamour that that truism excited among tho Nationalists, until Lord Morley stilled the waves. We incline to think that Lord Morley regretted his choice of leaders. His praise of Sir William Harcourt is at any rate unusually warm, though not undiscriminating. Yet it may be doubted whether the Liberal Ministry, without Mr. Gladstone, could have survived for long, under any chief. Let us note, in passing, Sir William's dictum that " there are two things that you can neither mend nor end the House of Lords is ono, the other is the Popo of Rome." It was pretty but misleading phrase. By the time another Liberal Cabinet had to be formed, at the end of 1905, Lord Morley was one of the veterans of the party. He is commonly supposed to have turned the scale against the Liberal Leaguers who wanted Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman to go to the Upper House, but lie disavows the responsibility :- " One evening, while these unedifying transactions were still on foot, Tweedmouth and I left Campbell-Bannerman, cool, patient, half undecided as to his course ; we were to return after dinner, and the true counsellor of his life was to arrive from Scotland in the meantime. After the event, I thought of Tocqueville's account of his own wife, who by the way was English. ' I found in my home,' said Tocqueville, ' the support, so rarely precious in time of revo- lution, of a devoted woman, whom a firm and penetrating intelli- gence, and a spirit naturally high, held without effort equal to the level of any situation, and above every reverse.' Returning we found the Minister indescribably exultant. No surrender ! ' he called out to us in triumphant voice, with gesture to match. The decision was iron. Detachment at once fell to a low discount among the doubters, and this must be added to the many historic eases where women have played a leading part in strengthening the counsels of ministers, sovereigns, great reformers, and even popes."
Lord Morley was a great admirer of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, and he does not spare his commendation of Mr. Asquith, and of Lord Grey of Fallodon, though compliments from Lord Morley are rare indeed. A sardonic reference to " our distinguished spastics of efficiency" who " broke down or thought they had (1915) " and formed the Coalition, is the solo opinion vouchsafed as to Mr. Asquith's successors.
Much of the second volume consists of the private letters which Lord Morley as Secretary for India wrote to the Viceroy, Lord Minto, to keep him in touch with home affairs and to discuss the Indian reforms which were then in course of evolution. To these and other matters we must return, for Lord Morley's book abounds in interest.
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