THE ART OF GOVERNING PLAN OR MAN ?
By SIR STEPHEN TALLENTS
OF recent years in England there has been a'growing call for plans, and never in our history have the plan- makers been so busy. The age of great men, we are told, is over. The War produced no supreme commanders, because modern warfare is a matter of organization and planning. In the economic world, too, Mr. Keynes has lately been telling us, the leaders of the City and the captains of industry are vanished. " Their office-boys (on salaries) rule in their mausoleums " ; and " our pressing task is the elaboration of a new standard system which will justify economists in taking their seat besides other scientists."
England is not alone among the countries of the world in this persistent cry for planning. The Russian Five Years Plan and the " New Deals " of America testify to a like demand, though it is profitable to examine how far the new policies and " deviations " of the Russian system, how far the actual operations of American govern- ment disclose in reality the workings of a personality rather than a scheme. But many countries of the world are today relying frankly on the man rather than the plan ; and it is at least interesting, for all that we live in -times which to ourselves at least seem to have no precedent, to consider what history has to say on the subject.
History appears to suggest that, until at- any rate our own times, the man counted more than the plan, and that the men who most changed the world's face worked not on closely preconceived plans but at best towards what Mr. Churchill has happily described as " goals which are ill-defined but yet magnetic." Of this there is plenty of evidence, since the day when Saul the son of Kish went forth to seek his. father's asses and found a Kingdom. Cromwell's words, " He goes furthest who knows not where he is going," have often been quoted: . Mr: John Buchan, in his recent life of Cromwell,. emphasizes more than once this marked feature of Cromwell's character,-and supports it 'happily by an artist's observation when he quotes Meredith's saying that " a purpose wedded to plans may easily suffer shipwreck." Napoleon is a witness to the same phenomenon. " My real- friends," he said in the days of the Consulate, " warm supporters, used sometimes to ask me, with the best intentions and for their own guidance, what goal I planned to reach ; and I always answered that I simply did not know. This left them depressed, perhaps discontented, but .I was telling them the truth." Froude in his life of Disraeli noticed the same point. Writing of the great -kings and emperors of history, he remarked that " their operations are like the operations of the forces of nature, working from within outwards rather than towards an end of which they have been conscious." This doctrine does- not, of course, imply that greatness makes no plans or takes no pains. To take the two men who have been -quoted, Cromwell's training of his New Model is proof to the contrary. " Every operation must be carried out on a system," said Napoleon, ." because nothing succeeds by chance," -and' again " You_ may tell me that- power came to me-as it were by itself, but I know what pains and vigils and arranging it has cost me."
The enormous advances made during the last century in mechanical- science have led us to force into the mould of mechanical conceptions subjects to which they are at best but partly applicable. The craving for detailed advance plans, in fields where the material is too fluid to admit of such planning, is a symptom of this. We like, before we embark upon an enterprise, to see a complete picture of it laid out as clearly as in an engineer's blue print. • Yet there are many activities in which it would have been better if the concepts of biology or of the arts, instead of mechanical science, had commanded our minds. Government, at any rate, is nearer to an art than a . science ; and it is well, if we would understand the quality of the supreme faculty of government, tostudy not only • history but the analogies of artistic creation.
This is not easy, because so much of the artistic process is instinctive and artists are less accustomed to explaining themselves than are statesmen. It is always interesting to question artists about the nature of the process by -which their work is produced, but their answers vary • widely. They differ in their estimates of - the relative impoitance of the artist's vision and experience and of the medium in which he works, and their differences often reflect differences of fact. But most artists seem to be agreed that, whatever prior vision may have been in the artist's mind, as soon as he proceeds to its sub- stantial embodiment, his vision is liable to be profoundly modified by the reaction between his mind and his material. Professor Alexander, in his " Art and the Material," has devoted a penetrating analysis to the nature of the artistic process ; and C. E. Montague, illustrating his conclusion, attacks the common sup- position that " before a Shakespeare or a Leonardo begins to write or paint a ' Last Supper ' or a Hamlet he has already before his mind the whole thing which we now see . . . That pre-existent vision does not pre-exist at all. It only comes into existence while the technical and physical work of painting or writing goes on."
English political practice has endorsed a like view of the- true nature of government. It has rebelled, and continues to rebel, against government by the expert. England by tradition chooses her Ministers with regard to other qualities beside their intellectual capacity, recognizing that, in the art of government as in the other arts, the sub-conScious qualities are at least as important . as the conscious. She does not attach undue importance to their experience of the particular medium in which they are to work. She does not demand detailed plans from them in advance, recognizing that they will have to move-by scent and sight quite as much as by any map. She puts what she considers to be the best men to grips with her problems, and - leaves the rest to their good workmanship. She welcomes the Minister of whom it may be said, in the words - which Fred Farren once used of a • fellow performer, " He's an artist ; he -doesn't do a single -unnecessary thing."- - The process has often been tauntingly described as " muddling through " ; and in muddling through it has unhappily often enough consisted. But its failures should not be allowed to obscure its justification in history and the support which it finds in the practice of the other arts. We are fortunately insured by a deep national instinct against that undue insistence upon personality which leads to dictatorships. So insured, we shall be wrong if, through an undue belief in plan-making, we slacken our attention to the supreme and ultimate need of government—the right choice of men to be our governors.
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