MR. JOHN RURNS.0
THE chief illustration of the rule that biographies written during the life of the subject are undesimble is perhaps the fuck that they are seldom well done. Competent biegrapbers do not care to undertake them; critical treatmentis impossible when even the bare truth may give unnecessary pain to many persons. And when criticism is indelicate or indittereet what room is there for a self-respecting critic ? This Life of Mr. John Burns is interesting just because the facts make up 0He of the most engaging stories in the politics of our time ; but as a biography it has the worst defects of its class. The author, indeed, tells us that "Mr. Burns's biography assumes an epoch-making character "; but no doubt be refers to My. Burns's life aa Mr. Burns has lived it, and not as Mr. Grubb has written it. A just enemy might conceivably write a good biography of a living man ; but the writer who is not avowedly an enemy labours under the-heavy consciousness that he may meet his subject any day,—accident may make them neigh- bours at dinner, or they might be thrown alone together in a railway-carriage with no stop between London and Plymouth. On p. 12 Mr. Grubb writes as though he were going to try really to analyse Mr. Burns's record ; but the "attack does not develop," as soldiers say. We do not complain that Mr. Burns is too much praised— we think that he has fairly earned very great praise—but that the whole narrative is undiscriminating from beginning to end. If Mr. Burns deserved praise as a Socialist, he deserves much more or much less, according to the point of view, when he changes into an economical administrator of the Local Government Board with much common-sense. Mr. Grubb praises him equally as both, and that leaves the reader perplexed and limp. Mr. Grubb has little sense of proportion, in fact, and says ridiculous things with apparent relish. We can see no likeness between Mr. Burns and Berserker, unless it Le that he resembles Berserker in wearing no armour. B it the* • From Candle Factory to British Cabinet the Life Story of the Right How. John Burns, P.C., M.P. By Arthur Page Grubb. London : Edwin Dalten.
L2a.
Berserker was not a boxer like Mr. Burns; so even that inter- pretation breaks down. Of Mr. Burns's parents we read : "In this little home, narrowed by poverty and stern toil, was born .their second son, whom they named John, barely realising,
perhaps, that in the Hebrew the name means 'the gracious gift of God"! ! Those words demonstrate as well as any the irrelevant workings of the author's mind.
For ourselves, we hazard the suggestion that Mr. Burns was never really a Socialist. He called himself one, of course, but that was rather because to his mind, burning with revolt, there seemed once to be no alternative between Whiggism and Socialism. In practice his creed was to help himself on
in a self-respecting manner, and to help others to help them- selves. He never believed in a flat uniformity by which the 'best brains would be compelled to fall back to the position of the worst, and the nation discouraged from entering with zest into the legitimate competition of the world. In the candle-factory, as a page, and as a riveter Mr. Burns was saving enough money to get himself appren- ticed as an engineer. He fed his mind' on Carlyle, Mill, and Adam Smith, and Charles XII. of Sweden was his hero. As a Schoolboy he received for a prize Huxley's Physiology from Huxley's own bands. His resolution and independence have
been tested by his career from the moment when he devoted himself to a particular purpose. That moment, when the pity of his widowed mother's struggle with adversity struck him one day on Westminster Bridge, was perhaps as memorable a point in his progress as another moment was in the life of Lord Shaftesbury when outside the walls of Harrow School he was astounded by the irreverent brutality of a pauper's funeral. To some extent Mr. Burns was driven deeper into his professions of Socialism by the intolerance of his employers, who dismissed him on account of his public speeches. He denounced "capital" more bitterly, no doubt, because he was bound to judge it by the capitalists he had met. He became positively a bogey-man to many respectable Londoners, who made him the centre of a kind of second Chartist terror. Take as an example of Mr. Grubb's want of discrimination his quotation (as though it were on all fours with the numerous incidents justly placed to the credit of Mr. Burns's good sense) of certain passages in a speech Mr. Burns made at the Old Bailey when he was tried for leading a riot :—
"And what was the initial cause of the damage being done ? If you would consult the working classes who think on political and social subjects, and who have attended large mass meetings in Hyde Park, you would find on investigation that there is a class of men who make it a practice on occasions of political demonstration to laugh and jeer from their club windows at the poverty of what they term 'the great unwashed,' to jeer at the misery their own greed has occasioned, and yet at elections these very men crave votes of those who previously had received their sneers. The crowd were not in a temper to stand oven mere laughing, and they were not disposed to respond to contemptuous jeers by a smile. And what was the result ? Stone-throwing commenced, and that was the result of the stupid, ungentlemanly, criminal conduct of the Carlton Club members."
This, of course, betrays the inexperience of Mr. Burns at that time, and one is led to conclude that the number of similar misapprehensions under stress of which he arrived at Socialism may have been very numerous. The truth, of course, is—we think we do not exaggerate—that no member of the Carlton Club ever jeered at poverty. Let us suppose that the Carlton Club is the most reactionary and the most selfish body in the world, as, for all we know, it may be in Mr. Burns's estimation ; it still remains the fact that poverty is not an object of derision to any educated man in England. The sense of humour to which misery appeals is non-existent, just as there is no longer a laugh to be raised, except among street-arabs, at the expense of lunacy, which was thought mightily droll upon the Elizabethan stage. To-day Mr. Burns knows that as well as any one.
The first time Mr. Burns was tried for riot the prosecution was not really pressed; Sir Charles Russell saw there was not a case for the Treasury. But the trial was amusing for the calling of Mr. Chamberlain as a witness. He was subpoenaed by Mr. Hyndman, who read extracts from a speech wherein Mr. Chamberlain had referred to the way in which Foulon was hanged to a lamp-post in the French Revolution with a wisp of straw in his mouth for having advised the people to eat grass. Was not that seditious and inflammatory language ? The weak and mistaken closing of Trafalgar Square to public meetings was the cause of Mr. Burns's second trial and
imprisonment. This time there Was no doubt that Mr. Burns voi. L Loudon: FiaUCIS Ge.ifi.bs. Des. net.] had done something in violation of the law, as he and Mr. Canninghame Graham bad led a rush against the police. Another procession that day was headed by William Morris and Mrs. Besaut. Mr. Burns was naturally an heroic figure when he had served his three months in Pentonville Prison. The trust the working classes pat in him was amply vindicated by his brilliant and wholly personal organisation of the great Dock Strike. One of the rare instances in which the author gives its proper value to Mr. Burns's change, or rather growth, of opinion is the comparison of Mr. Burns's judgments on the House of Commons before he entered it and after. Before his election Mr. Burns called the House of Commons a chapel-of-ease to the Stock Exchange, and added: "I would rather be a doorkeeper ht Spring Gardens than a dweller in the tents of procrastination and apathy in the House of Commons." After thirteen years in the "tents of pro- crastination" he said of the House :—"I love it. I just loVe it!" Of course, much that Mr. Burns agitated for in his earlier days has become part of the established order of things; but after making every allowance for that, we hold that he has changed less than most people think. He has shown splendid courage rather in resisting the opinions Which Socialists think be ought to hold. This biography will be of some service if it suggests to other readers, as it has to us, that Mr. Burns, with his sturdy character and deep common-sense, never believed in delusive and pauperising palliatives. He had, what he still has, the true moral bravery which saves a man from being intimidated by his friends-. if there were one moment more proper than another for writing Mr. BUMS'S biography during his life, we think that a critical sense would have found it after the promised recasting of the Poor Law. In the debates on that vastly important subject we look forward to seeing displayed all that is best in Mr. Burns's character, and all that is most valuable in his unique experience. The likeable impulses of his heart have been corrected by the accumulation of knowledge,—exactly how fax corrected we shall know then.
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