Lord Balfour
BOOKS OF THE DAY
By J. A. SPENDER
Wirtx Balfour retired from the leadership of the Unionist Party in November, 1911;' Asquith", speaking the next day at the Lord Mayor's Banquet, said it would be long before there was seen again in public life " a perSonality so invaluable to his friends, Se formidable to his foes, so interesting and attractive to friends' and foes alike, or such a unique combination of gifts and power as has made Mr. Balfour; by universal consent. the most distinguished member of the greatest deliberative Assembly in the world." Students of Asquith's style will recognise in this passage the careful choice of epithets which enabled him on these occasions to pay handsome and graceful compliments without being fulsome or insincere. " Interesting and attractive;" " most distinguished," " invaluable to _ friends," " formidable to-- foes-"—these are the mats justes for the man described in this biography.
It is a great tribute to Mrs. Dugdale's skill that she supplies from within a portrait of her uncle which is entirely in keeping with his -public' character, and goes far to explain it. The LS no break between the private and the public Balfour in her biography. - We • see • him from boyhood upwards de- veloping the habits of mind which throughout his life made hint fascinating and exasperating—to friends and foes ; the incessant 'questioning; the love of dialectics, the search for inconsistencies in the heart of popular beliefs, the delight in intellectual sword-play. His philosophy and his politics were allof-one piece, and if he can be said to have had any settled ptirpose in the early years .covered in this volume, it was to challenge the Victorian nineteenth-century- doctrinaires, whether in- philosophy or politics, and destroy them with their own weapons.. Had a clever young Tory been deliberately looking out -for a Tole in life which would have met a felt want , in his own party; he could hardly have found a better one than this -in the last twenty years of the nineteenth century. The stupid, party " was in need of precisely this kind of championship. Just as Disraeli made Toryism look romantic, so Balfour made it seem intellectually respectable, and to thousands who could not follow his arguments into the stratosphere in which they were conducted it was a genuine consolation to know that they had a 'spokesman who could hold his own with the best of Liberal highbrows.
It would be quite wrong, however, to snggest that there was anything calculating in Balfour's creed. It was no deliberate scheming but legitimate good fortune that made his philosophy -acceptable to the orthodox in religion and politics ; and he wrote with such skill and clarity that his ideas were easily relayed from pulpits and platforms. To put Liberals in their place was both in politics and philosophy his ruling passion, and he pursued it in both spheres with a warmth and energy which could not have been simulated. Lord Salisbury's choice of his nephew—the supposed dilettante philosopher—to -be • Chief Secretary for Ireland, then blazing in a land-war, astonished and mystified the onlooker at the time, but it gave him precisely the -opportunityhe wanted to carry the war of ideas into the field of practical politics. To challenge the oldLiberat-lion to a laSt great fight, to flout his favourite maxim that force was no remedy, to show the limits of-free speech, to treat political offenderS as common criminals and compel them to eat skilly and. wear prison clothes, to defend his police in " not hesitating to shoot "—what better opportunity could there be for demolishing Liberal strong- holds Balfour leapt to it, shosiing &Image and energy little expected of the philosopher, though, if judged by results, somewhat falling short of the wisdom- of a statesman.
Arthur James Balfour, First Earl. of Balfour, K.G., F.R.S., are. By his niece, Blanche E. C. Dugdale. Vol. 1. (Hutch:nson. 182.)
His own Administration (1902-1905) will probably live in history as that which concluded the Anglo-French Entente, renewed and enlarged the Japanese Alliance and put the Committee of Imperial Defence on a permanent working basis —all very considerable achievements. In domestic affairs its chief accomplishment was to have kept alive, when, by all ordinary tests, it ought to have perished. Campbell- Bannerman said in December, 1905, that it had " lived on tactics and died of tactics," and there is nothing in modem history quite like the series of operations by which Balfour evaded his opponents after his party had been split by Chamberlain's Tariff agitation. He was in a position in which either a plain no or a plain yes to Chamberlain would have ended his Government, and, in spite of all efforts to pin him_ down to one or the other, he contrived for nearly three years to sit on the razor's edge between the two, giving the Unionist Free-Traders plausible ground for thinking that he was at heart with them and letting the Protectionists hope that he was preparing the way for the triumph of their cause.
Mrs. Dugdale very loyally defends her uncle against the charge of being a mere time-server in these operations, and she makes a good case for him. His mind did actually work in this way ; an attack on Cobdenite orthodoxy would have been thoroughly congenial to him if he could have pursued it in his own way—the way of his " Notes on Insular Free Trade"—but Chamberlain's way was too crude. His seeming casuistry which, in the treatment of his colleagues in , September, 1903, looked dangerously like duplicity, reflected an intellectual subtlety which detested equally the dogmatism of both sides. All this, I believe, is true, but it was a disaster for his party. When C. B. finally called it " foolery " he was speaking for the plain people who had been mystified and alienated by three years of hair-splitting and dodging—as they thought it to be. . .
To the end Balfour seems to have been curiously unaware of the effect of his operations on public opinion. He thought the election of January, 1906, to be an " echo of the same ' movement which has produced massacres in St. Petersburg, riots in Vienna, and Socialist processions." Mrs. Dugdale is aware of this weakness in her uncle, and supplies many examples of it. He was unaffectedly surprised at the results of his speeches on the Boer war, at the anger of Noncon- formists over his Education Bill, at the public wrath about Chinese labour. These miscalculations of public opinion were to have even more serious results in the subsequent years. They raise the question whether it is a virtue in a Prime Minister not to read the newspapers. His biographer, I gather, has doubts on the point.
His nieces and nephews appear to have done their utmost to remedy this defect in their uncle. Mrs. Dugdale's account of the family circle and the vie intime at VVItittingehame is altogether charming and in the best tradition of Cecilian biography. Balfour seems to have brought to perfection ' the art of being the bachelor head of a large family. In this and many other ways Mrs. Dugdale provides abundance of lighk relief to her political story, but there are some gaps in that which will be disappointing to historical readers. She tells us practically nothing about the resignation of Lord Salisbury and the formation of Balfour's Government in 1902. We have details about the formation, of every other Government in these years—why not of this ? Was there no correspondence with the King, with Salisbury, with . Chamberlain, the Duke of Devonshire ? Did no colleague ask questions or make conditions ? Is there nothing more. on record about Chamberlain's views than the Private Secretary's memorandum five months earlier ?
Previous page
