The Early Sir Austen
AUSTEN CHAMBERLAIN entered the House of Commons as Member for East Worcestershire in 1892 at the age of 29. He obtained minor office in 1895, became Postmaster-General with a seat in the Cabinet in 19o2 and Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1904. Conspicuous though he was throughout his public life for integrity and an almost quixotic loyalty, he was not among the great pre-War figures, and the single volume which Professor Trevelyan found adequate for Lord Grey might well be thought sufficient for Sir Austen. Sir Charles Petrie, however, has chosen, or been invited, to present not merely a " Life " but a " Life and Letters," and if the standard of spaciousness set by Joseph Chamberlain's biographer is accepted, two volumes for Austen (as Sir Charles Petrie has very sensibly and conveniently decided to call him throughout) are no doubt moderate measure.
Sir Charles explains that his method has been to let his subject, so far as possible, speak for himself through his letters and speeches, while the biographer, or editor, paints in the background in some detail. The result is not altogether satisfactory. There is too much wholesale reproduction of letters, political speeches and election addresses (we are not, for example, materially the better in 1939 for knowing that in 1892 " Aunt Mary went up to see Cecily, who is laid up with jaundice, and returned to find Millicent had caught the mumps ; Edith Beale has got them, too, and, worst of all, Auntie fell down yesterday and broke her collar-bone "), and the background gets sometimes too much paint, sometimes too little. When Sir Edmund Gosse writes from Trinity that Austen " seems the cleverest young fellow here, by what people say," the next sentence, which reads " Austen took his degree in the summer of 1885," seems deliberately to omit the one fact—what degree—that would vindicate Gosse's verdict or otherwise. The South African War, with which the name of Chamberlain is hot inconspicuously associated, gets for back- ground the single inadequate, not to say misleading, sentence : "On October 9th, 1899, the Boer Republics sent their ulti- matum, and three days later the South African War began," whereas the Curragh affair in 1914, which concerned Austen no more than any other Conservative leader and a good deal less than some, is treated with a wealth of interesting but largely irrelevant detail.
But though Sir Charles Petrie is at no great pains to paint a portrait, preferring, as he says, to leave his subject to speak for himself, a clear enough picture of a high-minded, con- scientious, rather unimaginative Conservative politician does e:nerge. We are shown too little of Austen the man—an occasional reference to his family affection, his love of Nature or his interest in pictures is not enough, and the only light thrown on the religious side of his life is an extract from a letter written on Easter Day, 1914, mentioning that " It is on this day of all others, not even excepting Christmas Day, that I always feel regret that I cannot join Ivy [his wife] at Communion." It was not agnoticism that barred the way, but the fact that, as he frequently mentioned in speeches on the Education Bills or Disestablishment, he was and remained a Nonconformist.
Austen had the advantage and disadvantage of being his father's son. It made his entry into political life obvious and easy, but the feeling that he was called to carry on his father's work gave Tariff Reform a supremacy over all his other political interests which, left to himself, he might not have accorded it. Nothing laid such strain on his personal and party loyalties as the repeated efforts first of Balfour and then of Bonar Law to evade acceptance of the undiluted Protectionist doctrine, food taxes and all. In no other con- nexion does asperity so mingle with distress as in his letters to his leaders on the tariff gospel and their derogation from it. But in the face of even such disappointment Austen's un- failing loyalty stood the strain. It was a loyalty equally to his leaders and to his Party. Nowhere is that more conspicuous than in the matter of the leadership itself. " I will not allow myself to be run against Balfour for the leadership," he wrote in 1910 to an ardent apostle of Protectionism angered by A. J. B.'s dexterous evasions. " I will not join any move-
ment, open or secret, directed against him, nor will I allow myself to be used in opposition to him "; and when the ques- tion of the actual successor had to be decided, and Bonar Law slipped in as rertius gaudens between Austen and Walter Long, Austen deals trenchantly with the suggestion someone had made to him that he should support Long in the knowledge that the latter would prove unequal to the post, and then Austen wbuld slip in unopposed. The thought, " inspired by Satan," had, he admitted, crossed his mind, but to entertain it would be to sacrifice the Party. That was decisive. The Party must be preserved at any cost. Austen never doubted that, and he never showed his conviction better than after Bonar Law, to his (Austen's) bitter disappointment, had con- sented (in 1913) to subordinate the fiscal campaign to the anti-Home Rule campaign.
" I have been too long engaged in politics," he told his constituents, " to suppose that I can always have my own way, too long to sulk because I cannot now persuade the Party to take a course in this one matter which I believe to be alike the right course and the wise course ; and though I have to admit my disappointment and acknowledge my fears, I will do my best in the future, as I have done my best in the past, to support my leaders and co-operate with my political friends." An admirable statement of a good party man's creed.
Sir Austen is shown by Sir Charles Petrie to have played a larger part behind the scenes than was commonly realised. It was he who in 1906 composed the letters between Balfour and Joseph Chamberlain registering their agreement on the Party's fiscal policy ; and—far more important—it was he who eight years later drafted the statement which Bonar Law and Lans- downe handed to Asquith on August 2nd, 1914, urging that Britain should support France and Russia, and promising the united backing of the Conservative Party. Austen's own con- victions on that subject had deep roots. At twenty-four he had attended Treitschke's lectures in Berlin, and they disturbed him. (" Treitschke has opened to me a new side of the Ger- man character—a narrow-minded, proud, intolerant Prussian chauvinism.") In 1904 he predicted that whenever war came Germany would invade Belgium. In 1908 Metternich, the German Ambassador, had asked him, " Why are you trying to isolate us? " and Austen had said plainly what he thought of a nation beginning to preach and prepare for a third " inevit- able war." The Foreign Secretary of 1924 had begun his study of the chief problem in foreign politics early.
WILSON HARRIS.
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