MR. BONAR LAW.
" OH, gentlemen, what shadows we are and what shadows we pursue ! " It was natural to Burke, the great metaphysical poet of politics, to speak in that mood of passion and melancholy of the way in which Death dashes the hopes and aspirations of the statesman. The aims of politics seem so great and so real to those that deal with them and cast the kingdoms old into another mould and clash the nations together as the musician clashes his cymbals that the statesman often seems above the destiny of ordinary men. And then the spoiler comes, and the open grave, and all the far-stretched greatness is covered with the two narrow words. No wonder if there comes the heart-cry of Burke's Bristol speech.
Yet Mr. Bonar Law was a statesman to whom such feelings were utterly unknown; a statesman, nevertheless, to whom great power and place came at the height of the greatest war that mankind has ever seen, when Europe fell in ruins and all Asia and half Africa reeled beneath the dreadful impact. Mr. Bonar Law would never have thought or said that he was a shadow pursuing shadows. Such reactions were utterly foreign to his nature. Though not a commonplace man or an indifferentist, or a man of insensitive nature, he was too sincere, too honest with himself for such a mood. Men who feel like Burke are the men of intense and egotistical ambition. Men who follow a plain duty on a plain road never have a moment of exultation, of intense, almost desperate, self-absorption—of a wilful agony—in which the ego seems to absorb the universe, though it is in truth but beating its wings against the bars. But also they never experience the agonies of disillusionment and disappointment. They ask little of life, they build no cloud-castles, they never deceive themselves or others, and they have their reward in a calmness and truthful- ness of outlook which gives them that power of self- understanding and self-control which in the last resort is the thing best worth having and is therefore the envy of mankind.
Mr. Bonar Law, though he knew the world as it is, and faced it bravely, had always a kind of natural innocence, a quality of wistfulness which opened men's hearts to him. He had no arts, and never deliberately. tried to capture any man. But this honest simplicity made him one of the greatest charmers in public life. He made friends far more easily than those who delibe- rately Seek to win hearts and make follower. Men of Mr. Bonar Law's nature are often optimists and fall, as it were, under the influence of their own virtues. Their virtues become their arts.
Some physical condition, and still more, the sadness which touched his private life so heavily, rendered Mr. Bonar Law at heart, if not a sad man, at any rate a man touched with a sense of tender melancholy. He was not a discontented or an unhappy man, nay, in some ways he was a very happy one, intensely happy in his friends and still more in his family. Yet there was in him a touch of discouragement. This never affected his public life, but it was sequestered in the inner self. Still, one may feel that in the end he under stood what his countrymen thought of him. It surprised him, but he could not, and did not, we are sure, doubt their sincerity.
J. Si. LOE STRACHEY.
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