SIR AUSTEN
By WILSON HARRIS
IN Sir Austen Chamberlain the world has lost an outstanding example of all that was best and most characteristic in English public life. Characteristic, indeed, externally—with the monocle and the white slip and the faultless tailoring— almost to the point of caricature. In all that Sir Austen was his father's son. But a glance was enough to show where the resemblance ended and the differences began. In Joseph Chamberlain every feature was sharp, the glance searching, challenging, defiant. In Sir Austen all the contours were rounded ; F. C. G.'s cartoons could never have made of him what they made, at the turn of the century, of Joseph. The features -reflected accurately the differences of temperament and mind. The son had none of the father's mental swiftness, none of the capacity for the deadly rapier-thrust in debate. But he had none of the father's acerbity either. Rugby and Trinity had softened the rough edges and perhaps a little blunted the sharp edge too. Joseph Chamberlain was all steel—but Gladstone's tribute to his son's maiden speech could bring tears to his eyes.
Sir Austen's public career, particularly his career at the Foreign Office, where he presided longer then anyone since Grey, is known to the world. He was not a brilliant Minister. Brilliance was never among his qualities. But he was intensely industrious ; no paper left his room unread ; and at home and abroad his unswerving integrity and utter incapacity to be even diplomatically disingenuous demonstrated once more that character is a greater asset to any statesman than brilliance. He no doubt had his prejudices. His love of France was primarily cultural, not political—as he quoted, for example, /a plus belle femme du monde ne peut dormer que ce qu'elle a, you could hear him savouring the words as his lips framed them—but Locamo was achieved because Sir Austen was dissuaded from his first impulse to strike an alliance a deux with France.
Not only was he not brilliant, his mind worked with marked slowness. His thought sank into grooves and grew rigid there. In his early dealings with Russia there was no flexibility, because there was neither imagination nor sympathy to form a basis for understanding. Moscow had some reason for setting up monocled effigies of the British Foreign Minister as cockshies—to the Foreign Minister's sardonic amusement. But he was no reactionary. The Note he sent to China at Christmas, 1926, in the face of great provocation (Borodin was in full activity at Hankow) was a model of constructive conciliation, and from its despatch the progressive improve- ment in Anglo-Chinese relations may be dated. He gave firm and convinced (though compared with enthusiasts like Lord Cecil, strictly limited) support to the League of Nations, and by making it his practice to attend every meeting of the League Council from the day he was appointed Foreign Secretary he did more for the League's prestige than any British delegate before him. Mr. Eden may be regarded as his political godson, having served as his Parliamentary Private Secretary for three of his five years at the Foreign Office.
I have seen few references, perhaps none, to Sir Austen's charm. But the word is right. He was the soul of honour and the soul of courtesy, incapable of affectation, never unapproachable, and with a smile which brought warmth into the first contact with even the most apprehensive of visitors. His fruitful collaboration with Briand and Strese- tnann was based firm on personal friendship. He was cons- cientious almost to a fault ; his resignation of the Secretary- ship for India in 1917, after the report on scandals in Mesopotamia for which The could at most be held only remotely and indirectly responsible, was regarded by political friends and opponents alike as verging on the quixotic. Self-assertiveness was utterly alien to him. He abandoned his hope of the Conservative leadership in favour of Mr. Bonar Law in 1921. He stuck to Mr. Lloyd George when other Conservatives left the Liberal Prime Minister in 1922. He deliberately stood aside for younger men when the National Government of 1931 was formed. Scrupulously just, he never learned how to bear malice. In 1926 he had made a bad mistake in promising to support the Spanish claim to a permanent seat on the League Council. Every British journalist at Geneva was against him. Day after day they were attacking, not him personally, but his policy, in their papers. Yet when he met them from time to time for confidential talks it was, then as always, with an unaffected cordiality and an unreserved candour that in one at least of the company inspired genuine emotion.
He was a competent rather than an eloquent or a ready speaker, but never better than in his last years as a back- bencher. Words did not flow easily to his lips, and he would stand sometimes for an almost painful period silently beating the air with a curious gesture peculiarly his own. His speeches were prepared carefully, and he was not always alive to their implications. I was in the House of Commons one day in 1917 when Mr. Chamberlain, no longer Secretary for India, moved from a back-bench a resolution criticising in effect the close relations between to Downing Street under the new Lloyd George regime and the Northcliffe Press. The speaker was contrasting Mr. Asquith's practice and Mr. Lloyd George's. "The right honourable gentleman," he had occasion to remark incidentally of the former, "was always conspicuously loyal to his colleagues." There was not a shadow of arriere-pensie in the words (as Sir Austen assured me when I asked him years afterwards), but the House, with the events of December, 1916, fresh in mind, in a flash put its own interpretation on them and broke into a roar of "hear, hears" addressed with manifest intention to the central figure on the Government front bench.
Neither could Sir Austen be described as a ready writer, but he knew how to say what he wanted to say clearly and cleanly; what, I suppose, was the last article he wrote, a full-length review of Professor Trevelyan's Grey of Fallodon in the Daily Telegraph of March 1st was admirably done. He there linked Grey with Castlereagh as the greatest of British Foreign Secretaries. He himself will not stand beside Grey in history, but in their simplicity, their integrity and, incidentally, their love of Nature (with Grey it was birds, with Chamberlain flowers) the two men had much in common. Sir Austen was well-read, familiar with the by-ways as well as the highways of literature. He would turn from some major international problem to discuss with zest the eminently unsophisticated poetry of Anne and Jane Taylor (who else remembers it today ?) and one of the most delightful of the sketches in his Down the Years tells of an evening at the Paris Peace Conference when he and Mr. Balfour revived their memories of that undeservedly forgotten Victorian novel The Initials, with a heroine whom both statesmen hailed as their favourite character in fiction.
Elder statesman though he was, seventy-three though his years may have been, Sir Austen Chamberlain has gone out of life full of youth and vigour. As a public man who carried a high reputation unstained through forty-five years of public life he will be mourned throughout the world. To those who ever experienced personal contact with him the news of his death brings a keener and more intimate sorrow.
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