I N the address which Mr. Leonard Courtney delivered on Friday
week at Liskeard, when a bust of Charles Buller was unveiled—an address which was in every way a worthy tribute to a remarkable and most attractive man— there is an interesting passage on the place of humour in statesmanship. Lord Houghton, Mr. Courtney said, used to doubt whether, if Charles Buller had lived, the richness of his humour would not have stood in the way of his becoming Prime Minister, since the dull man would not have believed in his seriousness. "He was not sufficiently endowed with the great faculty of make-believe. A Prime Minister must have the double power of ready acquiescence in the commonplace, and a suppression of what is out of the way." This is, we think, true ; but, if we may distinguish, it is not the possession of humour which is incompatible with success in statesmanship, but its mistaken practice. Few of the greater statesmen have been without it, and some have even shown it in a form which interfered gravely with their efficiency. Pompey, if we are to believe Plutarch, had it to a high degree ; the humour of Caesar is apparent, not only in the reports of his friends, but in the dazzling details of his policy. The greatest statesmen among Monarchs—Elizabeth of England, Henri IV. of France, Frederick of Prussia—were humourists of a high order. Cromwell had it, to the scandal of the more fanatical, as is shown by his treatment of the Scotch divines, and by a hundred sayings. Bolingbroke and Walpole had it ; Fox possessed the gift in the amplest measure. Of Canning's humour we have examples, not only in many epigrams and speeches, but in published writings. Melbourne and Palmerston had enough and to spare ; and Disraeli had humour, as he had most other things, in his extraordinary mind. But we must distinguish carefully between humour and its correlative, wit. Disraeli had both ; Shelburne had only wit ; and the unpopularity which each attracted at various stages in his career was due rather to a wit which could be most acrid, unscrupulous, and unfeeling. Humour is a more friendly quality, and involves, indeed, a combination of merits, all of which are of the essence of statesmanship. There have been statesmen without humour, like Sully and Chatham; but their statesmanship has, as a rule, been a specialised quality directed only to one aspect of public affairs. It is as hard to define true humour as it is to define any natural, organic, and widely related quality. It is not mere mirth, but it contains mirthfulness, the capacity for seeing and rejoicing in the whimsicality of life. It involves a certain freedom from conventions, and a clear eye to discern their limitations. Especially it involves vitality, an absorbing interest in every stage of the human comedy, and the optimism
closely allied to their defects, and it is on the presumed co- existence of such defects that the prejudice against humour is founded.
The obvious truth about politics is that it is pre-eminently the sphere of the commonplace. The statesman has rarely to face a problem which involves the kind of sustained intellectual labour demanded of the lawyer and the scientist.
Now and again in certain questions this kind of task is set him ; but, as a rule, his work is intellectually simple, and depends chiefly upon the possession of experience and common-sense. This every one is willing to recognise. It is at the root of the popular respect for the business man in politics, the practical man of whatever type, and also of the general preference for a certain maturity of age in statesmen. Now a man who is distinguished especially for his humour shows gifts which have no relation to those held in popular esteem ; which, indeed, are often supposed to be incon- sistent with them. Experience is held to sober a man, but the humourist is not sobered. If he is not young in years, he shows an absurd youthfulness of spirit. He is amused by matters in which the ordinary man sees no amusement, therefore he probably lacks common-sense. To the stolid voter or the stolid Member he suggests instability of character and levity of mind. This is the primary ground of suspicion; but there is another which has more reason in it. Politics depend, as Mr. Courtney says, largely upon make-believe, upon the loyal maintenance of certain conventions. Now the essence of humour is seeing beyond artificial walls, and recognising them as things builded by men's bands and not the frowning battlements of the universe. None the less, it is desperately important that this should not be the common view. The walls should be regarded with awe and fear, that unwise spirits may not go clambering over them into the void beyond. An instructive sermon might be written on the moral value of conventions, and their political use is equally great. We cannot have everybody criticising the Constitution, or speaking disrespectfully about the Equator. If the whole world were humourists, life would be too unquiet for comfort, and there would be no work done, because there would be no provisional, if imperfect, basis to work upon. This is one of the truths that the ordinary man recognises in a dim sort of way, and it explains his distrust of the too critical and the too brilliant personage, and especially of the humourist. He represents a force of social persistence, the humourist a force of change, and though the two are mutually necessary, they are not friendly. There is, also, a very practical reason for their dislike. The humourist will in all likelihood not suffer fools gladly. He may have the brilliant man's intolerance of the commonplace, the extraordinary man's aversion from the ordinary. He will be a little impatient in practice of dull fidelity to old fashions, though in theory he may admit its value. Hence in dealing with men as a leader there is always a chance that he may fail. A suspicion of persiflage is a poor recommendation to the serious follower. No one likes to think that the man he obeys is not a thorough devotee of the gods he believes in, may even be covertly laughing at them while he does them apparent homage. No people will ever submit to be led by a sceptic, and the humourist in high places may easily acquire a reputation for scepticism.
And yet, though its dangers are great, humour is a quality which no true statesman can be destitute of. The fanatic, to be sure, has none; but then no fanatic ever was or ever could be a statesman. He may be a great regenerator of the world, a great leader of men, a great genius, but in the strict sense he will not be a statesman. Napoleon had no humour,—his cosmic brand of egotism forbade it ; and Napoleon, though he reconstructed France on lines which survive to-day, cannot, in the ordinary acceptation of the word, be called a statesman. For statesmanship is in its essence the handling of the normal, the creation of a system within which the workaday world can go smoothly on its way, and which it requires constant wisdom and energy to perpetuate. A statesman may have to destroy such a system, but it is always with the aim of con- structing another. Hence he must have a sense of perspec- tive, for the point of view of the man who builds should not be the same as that of the man who stares up in admiration at the building. He must also have tolerance. He must understand the life which he is controlling, and must not make the bonds too narrow, or insist upon one form to the exclusion of others. While he recognises the necessity of conventions, he must see that his conventions are wholly adequate to the purpose for which they are framed. And, above all, he must have a certain friendly interest in the pettiness, even in the absurdities, of the national character, and the optimism which can discern the soul of goodness in unlikely places. In a word, he must have humour,—not a cynical wit or the frivolity of the framer, but humour of the Shakespearian order, as broad and deep as humanity itself. Such a possession will enable him to avoid the dangers which are assumed to attend the quality, for, after all, it is not humour which the plain man looks askance at, but its imperfect manifestation. A man who is intolerant of honest folly, sceptical of wise conventions, and impatient of commonplace goodness has still a long way to travel before he attains to humour; and we may fairly say that the endowment in its true sense is the surest index to the superiority of intelligence and character which will always command the admiration and affection of men.
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