A BOOK OF THE MOMENT

' LORD MORLEY AS DIALECTICIAN [CONCLUDING NOTICE.] [COPYRIGHT IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA BY THE New York Times.] John, Viscount Morley. By Brigadier-General John H. Morgan. (John Murray. 10s. (3d. net.) AN exceedingly delightful and interesting thing about Morley's conversation was that he was an intellectual mount who never refused his fences. He would do his best at anything and everything at which you put him. For example, General Morgan, with the true spirit of a Boswell, though he makes a little apology for it, took him up to that fine old five-bar gate which has been tried by, and given a spill to, so many good goers—the difference between men and women. General Morgan insisted that women were different from men.

Morley's disquisition on the subject gives a perfect example of his style in conversation. He loved to begin with a great

abstract proposition, and then pronounce a dogmatic decision. But he was seldom or never content with an ex-cathedra .statement. Out of his well-filled mind and keen and poignant 'memory he would give individual illustrations and draw

inferences from his own experience.

"Loan MORLEY ! I've heard that SO often [ix., that women are different]. But I never hear how or in what respect they are different.

J. H. : In their lack of the creative instinct—in art, in science, in literature, in music. Nature seems to have exhausted herself in endowing them with the greatest of all creative functions. LORD MORL.EY : I don't agiee.

J. H. M.: Well, you have known all the great Victorian sages. 'Can you recall one woman whom you would place on the same level as Mill, Huxley, Darwin, Browning, Carlyle, and all the rest of them ?

LORD MORLEY : Yes. George Eliot. She was even greater in her conversation than in her books.

J. H. M.: Wasn't Mill, in spite of his vindication of women's intellect, a very bad judge of it ?

Loan MORLEY : Yes, that's very true. I once asked Carlyle if Mrs. Mill was as great a woman as Mill thought her. Carlyle replied, Mrs. Mill has the most unwise appetite for knowledge of any woman I know.' She used to ask Mill the most elementary questions about every conceivable subject, which enabled Mill to give with an air of profound wisdom the most satisfying answers, and that flattered him. As for her daughter, of whom Mill had an inordinate opinion, she was a terrible bore.

J. II. M.: Do you really think it easy for men and women to deliberate together ?

LORD MORLEY : No, but education will change all that.

J. H. M.: Your friend Meredith seemed to think the process would be a long one. Do you remember the first page of Richard Feverel : Woman will be the last thing to be civilized by man' ?

LORD MORLEY : That's true but man has not yet completed the civilization of himself. In civilizing women he will civilize mankind."

Here is another example of Morley in his literary vein, and one equally delightful :- "Loan MORLEY : I was intrigued by your reference to Burke's saying about the trivial things such as • a face at an inn' which change the face of history.' I've been hunting for the locus in .quo. Here it is in the Letters on. a Regicide Peace. Was he referring to Peter the Great ? But what a mind was Burke's ! Macaulay was right, the greatest mind since Milton. . . . I don't like the Belgians. I don't know what Wellington thought of them. They were at Waterloo.

J. H. M.: Yes, but no longer than they could help.

Loam MORLEY : I never tire of reading of Waterloo.

J. H. M.: Then you remember Stendhal's description in the ' Chartreuse de Parrne ?

Loan MORLEY : No, I must look it up. You have quoted in your article Renan's prologue to his Souvenirs de mon cnfancc. It's one of the finest things in French literature. I met him once. .Do you like Hardy's Dynasts?

J. H. M.: Yes, I find the metre sometimes uncouth, but I like the magnitude of conception.

Loup Mcauxy : Uncouth is the word. I ' read ' Hardy's first novel when he submitted it to the Macmillans, was impressed, but rejected it, and then got him to come and see me, and was the cause of his writing another and a better one. But I didn't like his hanging Tess. It was needlessly poignant, and I wrote and told him..so.

J. H. M.: Mr. Hardy is one of those rare writers who never disappoint you when you meet them in the flesh. He has what Thuoydides makes Pericles call the simplicity of all noble natures.' Loan MORLEY : Yes. Meredith, too, perhaps. But Meredith was.not simple. He was striking to meet, but not exactly charming. He was too hard for that. But Matthew Arnold had charm. 1February 15th, 1918.) " That, to my mind, is excellent talk. On another occasion Morley spoke out of a full heart about Burke :— " Loan MORLEY : What do you think of Carlyle ?

J. H. M.: He lives as a great prose colourist. Is not the Fssuy in History a wonderful piece of imaginative writing ? LORD Moitimv : Yes, and the Essay on Burns. J. H. N.: And on Johnson. Macaulay's essay on the Kuno theme is vulgarity itself in comparison.

LORD MORLEY : As for Macaulay, Acton used to say the essays were already dead and that he was all wrong about Warren Hastings. Does his 'history' stand the test of time ? J. H. : Yes. Firth praises it, and he speaks with unim- peachable authority. Do you still read Burke ? LORD MoaLay : Often. Perhaps his attitude on America stands in need of revision. You ought to write a book about him.

J. H. M.: No. I have not the courage to follow you.

Loan MORLEY : My little book was inadequate. He is a great theme. What a mind! His fame grows greater with time. Macaulay was right when he said of certain passages, 'How divine !' Who can compare with him ? Tame? Tocqueville ? No."

Before I finish my notice of this fascinating book, it may be interesting to put on record a personal testimony to its

accuracy and the reality of the conversations recorded. Speaking generally, the conversations almost strike me in the face by the fidelity of their characterization. As I read I seem to hear the timbre of Morley's voice and to note his curious little twitches, or rather exhibitions of muscular rigidity, to put the matter pathologically. Morley seemed to stiffen just before and while he was saying a good thing, as a cat stiffens just before she pounces. The atmosphere feels to me exactly right. And now for the specific example.

General Morgan describes how in 1919 Lord Morley met Clemeneeau after many years at luncheon at Lord Curzon's. This is how Morley described the incident to General Morgan :— " Clemeneeau said to me, "I used to be an idealist, but the older I grow the more I am convinced that it is Force that counts." I replied,' added Lord Morley, as he narrated the encounter to me, '"Then you have come to agree with Machiavelli ? " But Clemenceau doesn't like having his conclusions sharpened, and he said nothing.'"

By an accident it happened that Morley made a similar statement to me even before he could have made it to General

Morgan, because, as it chanced, he made it to me as he was walking away from the luncheon in question. I literally ran up against him in the street. Owing, not to any friction,

but to the distractions of the War and at the end of it to a-

very severe illness, I had not seen John Morley since July, 1914. I was shocked to see how much he had aged ; but he recognized me perfectly well, and we soon fell into eager and intimate talk as we walked together for some twenty.

minutes or so. Unfortunately I did not record the incident at the moment, but my memory is exact on one of his remarks.

He told me, with all his old zest, how he had just come from a luncheon party of only two or three people, where he had met Clemenaeau. He added, which, of course, I knew, that he had in former times been on very intimate terms with Clemenceau and that in those days they seemed to be acting on very much the same lines. Morley then went on to say how he had put one or two searching interrogatories to Clemenceau as to his existing views on the great problems of government, and added, as recorded above, that Clemenceau had admitted that the older he grew the more convinced he was that Force ruled the world. I remember also his describing with a distinct air of triumph how he had, to use Dr. Johnson's phrase, "downed him" with Machiavelli. He did not, however, make to me the brilliant and character- istic comment that Clemenceau did not like having his con- clusions sharpened. That is a most illuminating phrase.

Morley was always sharpening one's conclusions, and very often after the said process of sharpening had been carried out, they ran into one's fingers and caused an acute pang of pain or embarrassment. That, of course, is how it should be in dialectic. Half the power of Socrates over men's minds rested in this process of sharpening conclusions. Morley, like the Greek, made" one see what it really meant and what it really involved to hold a particular conclusion. He would not let you pretend that a stiff glass of brandy, or, say, a dose of arsenic, was just a little soothing syrup which could do nobody any harm.

I parted from Morley under the pleasantest conditions. It was delightful to see, in spite of his physical feebleness—

a feebleness which had its mental reactions—how much he had enjoyed his dialectical triumph over Clemenceau; but one felt, at the same time, that he had done the thing so well and so courteously that nothing had passed that could wound an old friend. Once alain, he was not a quarrelsome man, either in theory or in practice.

I may add that, feeling very strongly, as I did, about the Montagu policy, I took this opportunity to play a little of the part he had been playing with Clemenceau and to ask him what he really thought about the state into which India was rapidly drifting. As I felt would probably be the case, I found him very strongly against the new way of governing India. I urged him to speak out—indeed, told him it was his duty to do so ; but he refused, partly, I think, from the physical difficulty of making a speech in the House of Lords, and partly from his desire not to embarrass the Government and the new Secretary of State.

It is evident, however, from his talks with General Morgan that what he said to me was no passing impatience, but a settled conviction. Here is a confirmatory passage, dated January 21st, 1921 :—

" ' Montagu calls himself my disciple,' he went on, in accents of repudiation. 'I see very little of my teaching in him. This dyarchy won't work. AS for his strange plea for rousing the masses of India out of their "pathetic content" by reforms for which they do not ask, and for which they cannot work, it's a most unwise remark. My reforms were quite enough for a generation at least.' " Alas that I cannot give more examples to prove the faith that is in me in regard to the charm of the present book ! Still, justice requires one or two more words. That Morley always intended to be fair I am sure ; but that he was, in fact, very unfair in his comments upon Lord Haldane's action at the beginning of the War is to me perfectly clear. In any ease, Morley's criticisms show, as I have again and again insisted in the Spectator, how monstrous it is to suggest that Lord Haldane flinched at the issues of the War or that he was in any sense a pro-German. He was just the opposite. He organized the British Army so as to make it able to

produce an Expeditionary Force, and the essential object of the Expeditionary Force was to act as the left wing of the French Army in case of a German invasion of France, particularly through Belgium. The French should never have left the Belgian gap open. However, that is much too long a story to go into here. I merely enter this caveat in regard to Lord Haldane on finding the suggestion in one of Lord Morley's statements that he, Lord Morley, did not realize what Lord Haldane was up to till too late. If the facts were well known and well understood by an outsider like me, as they were in 1913, how could they have been concealed from a member of the Imperial Defence Committee ? Lord Morley may have been disappointed in him, but he was certainly not deceived by Lord Haldane. For once Morley forgot to sharpen his colleague's conclusions

J. Sr. LOE STEACHEY.