J. St. Loe Strachey
IT is not easy for a son to estimate the achievement of his father. Nor should I wish to attempt it. But it is necessary that in this Centenary number of the Spectator, which he just did not live to see published, something should be written about the man who, in a sense, was the Spectator for so many years.
My father used to be fond of quoting Goethe's division of humanity into " puppets " and " natures." Ninety- five per cent. of men were puppets, being guided and controlled in their every thought and action by the press of circumstances around them : beings who moved along the fore-ordained track of their destiny. But the " natures " were rare creatures who had in them some- thing strange, strong, spicy and individual : creatures who would not and could not fit into the groove of things, who had to be entirely and always themselves ; who strove to be the prime-movers, not merely the cogs and pulleys of the machine of Life.
My father was certainly a " nature." I have never, I think, met anyone who preserved an individualism, so wholely unmodified and unqualified by contact with the outside world. Naturally, such an absence of adaptation had its penalties as well as its advantages. My father felt, I know, that it was this characteristic which had made an active political career (which he often regretted having missed) impossible for him. His reaction to every new situation was so quick, fresh, and spontaneous that he could never abide the dull and heavy caution, the safe ambiguity, the intellectual " wait and see " which are essential to the practising politician.
But if his exuberant individualism was fatal to his political prospects, it was precisely this that made him a unique and very great editor. Was there ever a man more . quick and eager to say exactly what he thought about anything in the world than my father ?. And this, I take it, was a supreme quality in an editor of a. journal of . opinion such as the Spectator. For this quality—and in the ultimate analysis this quality almost alone—is what the educated public demands from a journal such as the Spectator. Almost every week my father would outrage the most cherished opinions of at least one section of his readers. Each one of his leading articles was enough to ruin a politician. But it did not matter. The reader had not paid his sixpence for the Spectator in order to have his own views confirmed, but " to see what Strachey was thinking " abont_ so and so. And he knew that when he opened the paper he would find what he sought, clearly and often very forcibly expressed, with never an issue shirked or a point missed. Moreover, he had the absolute assurance that the views he read were, at any rate, the absolutely sincere, absolutely independent opinion of one man : that no interest or influence in the world had so much as breathed upon them. They might be right, or they might be wrong (very likely the reader thought them utterly wrong) ; but there they were for what they were worth. It was his public's unshakable confidence in his sincerity which was, I believe, the whole basis of my father's success as a journalist. For this his readers were very ready to forgive eccentricities and even rapid changes of party allegiances.
In the Spectator my father had no pose ; he had none of the shallow " shrewdness " of the trained publicist who adopts a peculiar attitude before his public and maintains it in the hope of making himself into " a character." He had none of the tricks of his trade. He really did just say what he thought.
The evolution of my father's political opinions was a very curious, one. It seems as if during his whole life two principles, the one conservative, the other innovating, contended for the mastery of his spirit. The actual course of his political allegiance indicates that first one and then the other of these influences dominated him, for he was first liberal, then conservative, then liberal again, then conservative, and finally liberal... (It is certainlY necessary to write the words " conservative " and "liberal " with small letters, for scarcely ever was he really either " a Conservative " or " a Liberal " in the party sense of the word. He was surely the worst " party man " imaginable, and if he had ever entered the House of Commons would have been a nightmare to his Whips.) As readers of his autobiography will remember, he was very " Left wing " in boyhood. As a boy in Somerset he sympathized strongly with the agricultural labourers, who were then, curiously .enough, perhaps the most Radical class in the community. He read the newspaper of their leader, Joseph Arch, and he would certainly have called himself a Radical. At the University, however, he fell very strongly- under the influence of orthodox Political Economy. The doctrine of Free Trade in its very widest sense ; the doctrine of Free Exchange, of economic laisseziaire, took a strong hold upon him, and he reassumed the broad, but mild, liberalism of his family. This period lasted until the nineteenth century was drawing to a close and his period of power in the editorial chair of the Spec- tator was approaching.
Then upon the issue of Home Rule he swung sharply over to conservatism. But, unlike Mr. Joseph Chamber- lain, who went through at the same time so comparable a political evolution, his Unionism, his detestation of Home Rule or any measure of Irish independence, did not modify his Free Trade faith- in the slightest. With these two attitudes estab- lished, my father's political outlook, at any rate for the important part of his life, was fixed ; and fixed, as he ' often regretfully ex- plained to Me, in the most unfortunate way conceivable for his own political fortunes. The two things he cared most about in politics, namely Free Trade and the Union, were championed respec- tively by opposite parties. Thus he could join neither of the two great parties in the nation, nor whole- heartedly oppose either. On the whole, however, I think it is true to say that he moved steadily towards " the Right " during the succeeding two decades. It is true that his Free Trade convictions remained as strong as ever and that he had a great break back towards liberalism in 1906. Perhaps many people have forgotten that at the 1906 election the Spectator definitely advised its readers to vote Liberal. This was no doubt the boldest and most dramatic political move which my father ever made.
But when the Liberals had come in and began to move slightly to the Left in social matters, the conservative element in my father's spirit reasserted itself with redoubled force; and the Spectator was soon in violent Opposition to the Liberal Government. At this time my father's Free Trade opinions made him, I think, all the more conservative, For it-was part of the Free Frade doctrine, as he had imbibed it from Sir Louis Mallet through the medium of his life-long friend, the present Sir Bernard Mallet, and the worLs of the French economist, Bastiat, that government interference of all kinds (whethei by social legislation, Trade Boards, pensions, insurances, etc.) was almost as pernicious as interference by means of tariffs.
Thus the Spectator developed intense opposition to what it considered the Socialistic tendencies of the Asquith administration. One of my memories of child- hood is of the day on which the Old Age Pensions Act was passed. For us it was a day of family mourning.
I was not, so far as I can remember, prompted in the least to wonder why the fact that certain old men and women were going to receive a few shillings a week was such a catastrophic disaster. But I saw that my father really thought that some tremendous principle had been outraged and that national decay had now set in. This was very characteristic of my father's attitude to public affairs. He was one of the few men I have ever met who really took them to heart in exactly the same way that most men take a private suc- cess or failure. He had been writing, I expect, for many weeks and months and with all his usual conviction and sincerity that the Old Age Pensions Act was a perni- cious thing ; and when, in spite of his efforts, it was passed, he really felt that something disastrous had happened. He had none of the ordinary politician's easy cynicisms—the politician's capacity to regard the out- come of such contests as of little real interest so long as he can feel that in the battle he has gained personal distinction by his prowess. Another force which moved my father towards the Right during this period was his growing belief in a coming war and his convic- tion that the only way to meet the situation was by intense naval and military preparations. To anyone who knew my father in the last few years of his life this side to his character will seem very strange ; but there is no doubt that here again he acted from a sense of deep conviction. When the War came he flung him- self into its prosecution with tremendous vigour. I think that his whole consciousness was devoted to the task of fighting the War. For him it was necessary to believe that the Allies were 100 per cent. perfect, and the Central Powers 100 per cent. evil. It was undoubtedly the intense activities and anxieties of the War period which brought on the very grave illness which, though he repelled it at its first onset in 1916, shortened his life by many years.
But perhaps the most surprising change of all in his political evolution was still to come. After the War, and when he was gradually withdrawing from active participation in the Spectator, the old liberal tendencies, the innovating, adventurous, and eager elements in his spirit, which had been so active in his youth, but had lain dormant for long years, seemed to reawaken. It was not, indeed, that he changed his politics in the sense of leaving one party or joining another. He rather stepped back from and out of the political contest. Always indepen- dent, he became positively aloof from, although never uninterested in, the. day to day issues. This relief of tension, as it were, seemed to allow a great efflorescence of his spirit ; growing leisure, although conditioned by a growing physical fatigue, allowed him to harvest in the form of a series of books beginning with his autobiography and including his historical novel, The Madonna of the Barricades, the finest fruits of his nature. Personally, I have always liked best of his books the discursive volume which he called The River of Life, written in diary form, although I believe that it was less successful than the autobiography or the novel. But in these three books are preserved permanently the final evolution of his spirit as it exhibited itself in this last period. One may see in them how mellow and how tender that spirit was. For now all the delicacy of his nature, which in a life not without struggle, had of necessity been held in check, could come to the front. It was now that he showed a receptiveness to the ideas and discoveries of the new age which won him much gratitude from a younger generation of writers and politicians. Thus a life which had been spent in the very thick of the most embittered controver- sies of his time closed in an atmosphere of deep and true
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