Haldane of Cloan
"' ABOUT the ups and down: of my career," writes Lord Haldane in his Autobiography, " I have not cared as mach as many people seem to do." Indeed, looking back upon it, " it seems odd " to him " that the ups should have come at all." Ile has always been " more immersed in the study of the meaning of life as 'a whole than in its particular occur- • rences." Of certain serious handicaps he has always, he says, been aware, such as " a poor voice " and " a dubiously attractive personality." He can only trace these " ups," he modestly declares, to a strong natural " inclination for work," . an "undue confidence" in his own "capacities" and "some :courage in seizing opportunities." What interests him in his own recollections is the fact that he was brought into contact with an unusual variety of men.
For many years an overworked barrister, for forty years a member of Parliament, for ten a Cabinet Minister (the sentences ran concurrently, we imagine), the only recreations of his life were dining out when he was in London, reading and talking when he was at Cloan, the small estate in Perthshire which had been for many generations in his family. Very few men we should think have had so wide a friendly acquaint- ance. It was his nature to work, he even, so to speak, worked at his leisure, and worked to make friends, patiently overcoming the handicap of which he spoke so frankly and then out- distancing the men who started in front of him.
A pleasant childhood laid the foundation for a successful life. The Haldanes seem to have been a peculiarly united family whom no divergence of opinion had power to divide. The father was a " writer to the signet " and the whole family spent several months of the year in Edinburgh, the boys attending the Edinburgh Academy. But their real home was at Cloan, where they read with a tutor, a learned man and the beloved friend of both parents and children. A strict Calvinist in theory, the Edinburgh lawyer was, nevertheless, the kindest And most indulgent of fathers just as his less dogmatic wife was the most sympathetic and devoted of mothers.
In such an atmosphere Richard "Haldane developed very earl•. When he was sixteen years old he went to the Edin- burgh University; he was already familiar with many very serious books. The professors treated him as a man. Great scholars such as Seller, Masson and Blackie asked him to meet their friends. He talked with delight to Jowett and Matthew Arnold, becoming at home with these and other great Victorians not altogether to his peace of mind. He read Strauss and Renan and began to doubt the religion which he had taken from his father for granted. With the marvellous good sense which was born in him he did not keep his spiritual growing- pains a secret but consulted experts and sought a remedy. On Professor Blackie's advice his parents decided to send him to Gottingen, there to study philosophy under Lotze, hoping that with the great man's aid their son might refind his faith. Lord Haldane gives a -wonderful picture of his departure from Leith Harbour on his great adventure, his mother and his old- nurse seeing him off. He arrived in GOttingen in the grey dawn of morning. The first object that fixed his sleepy attention was a small cart containing a man and a calf drawn by a woman and a dog ! A sense of the utter strangeness of the country he was in completely- overcame him, he tells us ; his heart sank utterly and he home.
The experiment did not fail. The boy threw his whole energies into his subject, and though he never regained- his orthodoxy or the power to say a creed, yet between Kant and Hegel and Professor Lotze's comments thereon he• obtained a kind of mental peace, a passionless faith, " an intellectual love of God," as he calls it, in which he found salvation from all fear both of life and death ; not " by fire," but by a
process apparently of spiritual refrigeration. -
After his return from Germany, Richard Haldane came to London and read for the Bar. Rising rapidly in his profession he was able before many years were over to throw himself into political and social life. No set-back whatever occurred in his career. In all his recollection Fate dealt him but two heavy blows—neither of which interrupted his course. The woman whom he was to have married broke off her engagement ; and the world, his own world of intelligent people, misjudged him cruelly at -the time of the War. The first wound was never healed ; the second, we gather, continued to smart at intervals but was closed by Lord Haig who visited him " sitting solitary in his study" an hour after the victorious commander-in-chief had ridden through London with the King at the head of the British troops. He came into Lord Haldane's room for a moment only and left a book inscribed on the first page to " The greatest Secretary of State for War England has ever had."
" I incline to the view that, despite its drawbacks, old age is preferable to youth." This is -Lord Haldane's final judg- ment, after, as his sister used to say, he had " retired from the business of a General Practitioner and became a Consultant." He loved to think about the men he had known or still knew in politics. Some of his criticisms are unexpected, but of course not all. Lord Morley had " the most interesting personality " that he had known ; Lord Grey is certainly the most attractive character whom he draws. Mr. Ramsay Macdonald, he thought, has " something of the international mind," a very rare asset for an English Prime Minister. He writes of King Edward VII. with positive emotion. He knew him more intimately than was usually supposed, and felt towards him a mixture of love and loyalty which seemsalmost out of character.
A certain atmosphere of coldness pervades these reminiscences as a whole, but they contain not a word of cynicism, or a word of party prejudice. Whoever reads them cannot but feel what a great deal of conscience and serious thought is to be found in the innermost circles of English political life.
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