OCCASIONAL BIOGRAPHIES : X. MR. LANSBURY
IT is an open secret that G. L., as everyone calls him, friends and opponents alike—enemies he has none— Was, months ago, talking about giving up the leadership of the Parliamentary Labour Party, which he has held, with the warmest appreciation of his colleagues, since the deluge of 1931. He has, in the last fevir, years, had more than his share of personal domestic sorrow. He sustained; a short time back, a severe accident and resultant • operation, which might well have laid a man of less superb physique permanently on his back. He is over seventy-six years of age. Age, however, was not the reason then; it is, of course, not the reason, or any fart of the reason, now. Of age G. L. shows no sign. Ike stands as erect as ever. His voice has lost nothing Of its range and force. His spartan habits have kept him ever green. Nor is the issue only that of Sanctions. As he told the Brighton Conference on' Tuesday, " during the last six years, first in the Labour Government and then as Leader of the Party, I have been in a kind of 1)r. TekYll and Mr. Hyde position."
In that sentence he stated the real case exactly. From the days in which he cleaned up the Board of Guardians in Poplar; to the days when he made a conspicuous success of the Office of Works, winning the surprised respect of officials who never expected to find the idealist a highly competent man of affairs, there have been oper- ative in him two strains, of which far the stronger is that Which quarrels with his administrative capacity and crosses it with a deep individualism. Again and again throughout his career the moment has come for him at which the honest man-has to follow the inner voice of his conscience, not only no matter where it may lead, but regardless of other claims and obligations, among them the responsiblity to and for colleagues. That, too, must go down before it, and has gone down. So, now, the incompatibility is not only on the Sanctions issue, or between his views and those of his colleagues. I3eneath it lies this deeper and older incompatibility, recognised by G. L. himself, between him and leadership. And this is, in its turn, an incompatibility between his individual and individualistic conscience and the cor- porate attitude and deep sense of collective responsibility of the new, Labour. Party. So it is not that G. L. is too old for the. Party. In a very real sense, he is, rather, too young for it ; too young for the eminently grown-up Mind that it has developed out of the very strain and stress of the last four or five years.
Today, G. L. is revered' and loved as were in their day Keir Hardie, and later, MacDonald and Snow- den ; perhaps more loved than any of these, because the feeling he inspires is nearer, warmer, more purely Personal than ever was the case with any of the others ; as also because his own friendliness has flowed out. so generously to all and sundry, and with so little favouritism. Vet the, issue is there ; the division is there; and he himself, in his speech, characterised it as fundamental. /IC has not changed ; his history, open as the day, is singularly of a piece. Again and again in the past his Personal conscience has for him broken through any and every other claim, and dictated action in line with its direct dictates. On women's suffrage : on the war : as a Poplar Guardian, and, now, on Sanctions, his stand is of the same nature. If there be inconsistency, he is entitled to say, as he did, that it is ,a " consistent incon- sistency."
Yet this, when all. is said and done, is one of the luxuries a leader cannot afford himself, for it is a purely individualist consistency. Characteristically, it • does not now greatly trouble G. L. that he should, through Years, have made eloquent and convincing speeches in exposition of the Party's policy on the League of Nations, extolled the Covenant as the sole guardian of collective ' security and the expression of the collective conscience and now, when the hour strikes for the translation of these words into act, should be refusing to act. For him, the course is clear, the duty simple. He harks back to an older, deeper obligation and loyalty, to his own inner voice, which says to him, " Thou shalt do no violence." Entirely undisturbed, he proclaims to colleagues committed, like himself, to the collective system, the doctrine of non-resistance. They are not surprised to find him doing it ; but they cannot turn and follow him.
So, in respect, but not in agreement, his Party now recognises the working and the voice of his individualist conscience. There, since 1931 with its shattering disil- lusionments, there have grown up a distrust of personal ascendency, as such, and a determination to work out a system of corporate rather than personal loyalty—a responsible loyalty to accepted principle. It is a tribute now to the very success with which Lansbury has done one part of the indispensable work—that of consolidating and re-charging with faith and enthusiasm the Parlia- mentary Party—that the Party as a whole, through its entire range, political, industrial and co-operative, now stands re-established in self-confidence. Free of some old illusions, it is perhaps a trifle hard-set against their arising anew. Certainly, it has disciplined itself by much hard thinking, and is therefore different from the older party in a more robust realism, a greater sense of responsibility and a deeper sense of loyalty to idea. But it is also thereby further from G. L.
There is in fact a process here which he, with his incurable and, at times, splendid nai'vetg, is tempera- mentally ill-fitted to meet or understand. All that is most generous in his mind leaped to the ideal of the League ; now, however, something deeper resists, and resumes the attitude of the conscientious objector. His questions to-day are to his own conscience, and the answers come clear and unmistakable. The Party's questions have to be the more difficult ones addressed to a social and corporate conscience. Two honesties are, in fact, in conflict.
It is a conflict in essence tragi▪ c enough. If G. L.
himself is happily not a tragic figure, the reason lies in that element simple, almost childlike, in his make-up, which simplifies issues for him, and makes his own T course transparently clear. This vivid certainty of his has .been, for fifty years, his major contribution to the Party. He is not a tragic figure, any more than were the early Christian martyrs, because he has no doubts —has never had any. His mind is not of that shape. With minds of that shape he has no natural sympathy— the only gap in his general, out-flowing kindness and immediacy of human response. This certainty gives him distinction and dignity. Had it gone with a con- nected thinking apparatus his influence on the Party and the nation might have been immense. But it never has.
The early colouring of his thinking. was, of course, supplied by the Radical prophets of the days when he was growing up—men like Frederic Denison Maurice. That characteristic colouring apart, he is an Englishman of the kind seen by the continental as typical in his resistance to purely intellectual processes, and his throw- back, always, to some deep sediment of sentiment. In feel- ing a Socialist, through and through, and without one trace of snobbery in him, he lacks one thing—the element of responsible, collective experience that is the cardinal contribution of the Trade Unionist, P. Q. IL
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