Joseph Chamberlain: Statesman and Man
EUSTACE PERCY.
By LORD MR. GARVIN'S second volume* is equal to the first in interest, which means that it is greatly superior in craftsmanship. For, frankly, to the present generation, political history between 1885 and 1895 seems a pretty sordid affair, nearly as distasteful as the senatorial politics of ,Rome in the last fifty years of the republic, without the excitement of a Sulla or the prospect of a Caesar. The parliamentary toga is wearing too thin ; the stitchery of manoeuvre and management shows too clearly. And it has already been turned inside out for inspection by innumerable commentators. The record begins with a Conservative Cabinet " eating dirt " ; it ends in the " shabby accessories " of 1895 and in " a new democratic, and journalistic habit of disparaging the House of Commons." By the way it trails miserably through two matrimonial scandals And through the " melodrama now almost unbelievable " of 1887. Of what use to re-illustrate O'Shea's vanity or the mysteries of Mr. Gladstone% mind ? Is not the whole sorry business as dead as Catiline ?
Yet in this volume it comes to life again. It does so because Mr. Garvin has chosen to tell the story of a man's life, not to re-edit the history of a period. Why should the novelists have all the good stories, any more than the devil all the good songs ? Here is a novel of character, the more original for being historically as well as imaginatively true. The central figure has a curious quality which he shares with the heroes of not a few great novels, but with only the rarest personalities in real life. He is not only himself a great character, but he seems to have a strange power of sharpening character in others. It cannot be merely his biographer's art which makes men appear so much more themselves in his company : Gladstone more ambiguous,' Morley more pinched, Harcourt more soundly human. . O'Shea broadens into genuine Dickens ; Labby almost deepens into wickedness. Oddly enough, the only character who does not quite come out " in the round " is Dilke ; one wonders whether, for all his brilliance, he had not, perhaps, something of the flatness of the .pure parliamen- tarian. In thus peopling his scene with human beings; Mr. Garvin has made a more significant contribution to history than by.any revelation of unpublished documents. The documents are there, but he does not act the showman with them ; the real revelation is in the interplay of character.
That interplay serves, of course, above all to throw the central figure into relief. Stale as the word great " has become, Chamberlain has by nature the tragic con- trasts of greatness. Essentially a man of action, his ideas are greater than his acts ; essentially a leader, he is apparently fated, by all he does, to clear a space round himself ; -there is about him always a sort of doom of loneliness and a sense 'of purposes unfulfilled. But there is in him little enough of the born genius ; the impression *.The Life of doeeph Chamberlain. Vol. 2, By J. L. Garvin. (Macmillan. 216.)- he creates is less that life is too short for his energies, than that it is too short for his growth. We all knew how these ten years changed Chamberlain's position ; Mr. Garvin shows how profoundly they changed the man himself. At the beginning he is still, after five years of Cabinet office, surprisingly an amateur in politics. We had already seen him, in the .previous volume, fumbling more than a little with foreign and imperial issues ; we now find him curiously guileless in dealing with Parnell, with Manning and Walsh, and above all with Gladstone. He has introduced a new force into politics, the radicalism of the " unauthorized programme," and of that force he is supreme master ; but he has yet to learn that in national affairs, unlike municipal affairs, a programme is not government. He does learn it, almost in a flash, as some of his old associates never learnt it to the end. Longing to clear the road for social reform, he knows that the Irish_ question must not be merely got out of the way—it must, be solved. It is the same with Egypt, with Turkey and China, with " fair trade " and " free trade," above all with Canada and the United States ; there can be no irrelevancies in the synthesis of government. So in the ten years his mind works itself out from the clear sincerity of the crusader to the complex consistency of the politician.
There is loss enough in the change. One does not barter without regret the biting freshness of the Scottish tour of 1885 for the harshness of the Home Rule debates of 1893. County Councils and free education are solid achievements, but radicalism was an idea and these items are not its fulfilment. Yet to indulge such regrets is to miss the point of the story. There is, in truth, an essential second-rateness in all parliamentary statesman- ship ; but a man may be the greater for choosing the second-rate. . Agitation and dictatorship arc the only dignified political trades ; yet here is a great agitator renouncing dictatorship when it was, in some measure, within his grasp, because lie saw too much. He saw, one thinks, that, to bridge the gulf towards which nineteenth-century industrialism was heading, radicalism would need, not merely the planks of a social reform programme, but the girders of a new nationalism too, such as Europe had dreamed of in 1848 ; and if Unionism was a rough enough piece of ironwork for such a purpose, it has outlasted some more pretentious structures, and stilt carries as much traffic to-day as the forged steel of Fascism.
To convey this sense of consistent purpose was Mr. Garvin's main, and his most difficult, task ; and it could only be conveyed by the cumulative method. A queasy generation grumbles at his length, preferring the recent fashion of movietone biography which throws its characters at your head or pokes them quirkily under your microscope. But there are some stories which must be told. in the grand manner or not at all ; and this is a story supremely worth telling which, but for Mr. Garvin, must almost certainly have remained untold.
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