LORD MORLEY'S RECOLLECTIONS

The publication of Lord Morley's Recollections is an event that in ordinary times would justify the considerable comment it has evoked, but under present conditions it has an importance far beyond its literary or historical significance. This importance is due to the fact that Lord Morley was one of the two members of the British Cabinet who, in 1914, resigned as a protest against England's entry into the war. He says in his preface that he has never regretted that step, and he further says: "The world's black catastrophe in your new age is hardly a proved and shining victory over the principles and policies of the age before it." This implies a belief on his part that England's participation in the war was wrong, that the present generation is wholly responsible for the strife, and that, as it is a more terrible struggle than any that has ever preceded it, we are so much the worse in morality and wisdom than any previous age.

Such an indictment of the contemporary world may well give pause, and justify a consideration of the extent to which it is warranted; for surely a calamity so great as the present horror that is convulsing western civilization should sober us sufficiently to make us acknowledge our sins and refrain from them in the future.

Lord Morley's words receive attention because he has to his credit achievements in both literature and politics. As a man of letters he is known as the scholarly biographer of Rousseau, Burke, Cobden, and Gladstone; as a writer on Voltaire, Cromwell, Machiavelli; and as the editor who conducted The Fortnightly Review when it was the chief outlet for the rationalistic doctrines of Huxley, Spencer, and other apostles of evolution. In politics he has been prominently identified with several of the most important and difficult questions that have confronted the British Government during the last half century. As a parliamentary supporter of Gladstone, and later as Chief Secretary for Ireland, he fought for Home Rule, and advocated a policy the wisdom of which is now generally recognized. Later, as Secretary of State

for India, he pursued a firm but liberal course in the government of that troublesome dependency, and it may be that England is partly indebted to him for the fact that Germany has been unable to stir up serious disaffection among the Hindoos. He also took a firm stand against the Boer War, and he participated, as a member of the cabinet, in framing the generous policy towards South Africa which has proved so signally triumphant by transforming in a decade the bitterly hostile Boers into loyal and enthusiastic allies. Besides this, it fell to his lot to lead the fight in the House of Lords for the modification of the veto power of that body, and in that way to stand before the public for the last time as a foremost champion of an enlightened political policy. He has been more prominent as a politician than as a writer, but the key to his character is to be found in his writings rather than in his acts as a public man. This is natural, for in politics all sorts of invisible forces are at work to influence a man's action, to justify his apparent inconsistencies in some cases, and in others to make seemingly courageous and far-sighted policies merely the reaction to prejudice and self-interest. Any extensive amount of writing, on the other hand, betrays a man's character clearly. Even Shakespeare, Homer, and Scott, the standard examples of objective authorship, by their very objectivity, reveal much else besides the fact that they were not self-centred; and a man like Lord Morley, whose work is the direct expression of his own opinion, shows plainly the powers and limitations of his personality.

His success in literature has not been unqualified, and his fame does not promise to be permanent. He possessed a virtue which, although valuable, and perhaps essential to all real success, is at a rather high premium in a materialistic and meticulous age like the present. This virtue is industry, and he displayed it in rather large measure. His cold nature makes him shun personal revelations, and we learn little of his private life from his Recollections. He mentions at some length the death of a dog, but his wife only appears a few times in momentary allusions, and usually she is disguised by being indicated only by an initial. In spite of his reticence, however, it is clear that in his early and obscure days he laid the foundation for his

future prominence chiefly by his industry. If he did not display that infinite capacity for taking pains which some declare to be genius, he certainly did exhibit an unremitting industry which has enabled him to attain to distinction worthy of genius by the exercise of what is at best talent. A friend of his is authority for the statement that, when as plain John Morley he came to London in the early sixties to seek his fortune, he submitted an article every day for a year to a certain newspaper before one was accepted; and the persistent application this indicates has enabled him to produce a large amount of writing, and to impart to it a thoroughness and accuracy which is its chief virtue.

There are very obvious defects in his writing. He seems to lack many of the qualities of the born author, and industry cannot make up for defective natural equipment. He is lacking in instinctive command of language and intuitive sense of what is idiomatic, so that what he says is without spontaneity. In his earlier days he seems to have written more slowly or more carefully than he did after politics began to make such demands on his time, for in such works as his Rousseau his language is always accurate, and sometimes even felicitous. There is a suggestion of Gibbon's impressive sweep to some of his periods, but the resemblance is very superficial; for the momentum of the Decline and Fall is missing, and we get instead only the movement without the force. Even at his best, however, his style has serious shortcomings. He is given to the solemn asseveration of the platitudinous, the pedantic, and the insignificant. He says of George Meredith: "I interested him in Lessing's Nathan der Weise, with its famous apologue of the three rings, borrowed from Boccaccio, who borrowed it from earlier people." There may be some justification for thus dragging in the sources of Lessing's play, but it suggests pedantry, as do numberless similar passages in his works. Of Lord Acton he says: "He was sometimes fatally addicted to the oblique and allusive"; and with equal truth he might have applied the same criticism to himself. He constantly uses such expressions as, "a greater person in a later time," and similar vague or indirect references which, if they don't puzzle the reader, irritate him at what seems a stilted and involved manner of speaking. Then he has

a way of deviating from the normal order that at times makes more than one reading necessary to get his meaning, especially if, as is frequently the case, an important word may be either verb or noun. He also applies syncopation to sentences rather freely. "Disraeli," he says, "intended what was on his lips the highest of all compliments." Elsewhere he writes: "I soon found my official feet, and kept a clear head and free from fuss." Besides this he indulges in other liberties. He speaks of "cheerfullness of accost"; he constantly uses "feel" where the normal word would be "feeling," and numerous other instances could be cited of petty faults into which no man with the born writer's instinct for language would ever fall.

To note things like this may seem what Hazlitt called "ultra crepidarian" criticism, the kind Macaulay indulged in when he objected to Croker's saying "mutual" instead of "common" friends, and faults that it is a worse crime to carp at than to commit. They are not mentioned, however, as violations of formal grammar or rhetoric, but because they are ineffective expressions, and to be ineffective is the chief offence a writer can commit.

Though these defects show that he has not the born writer's instinct for effective speech, he has yet more serious shortcomings. His work is never organic; it is always mechanical. However industriously his matter may be assembled, however carefully it may be arranged, it is never fused into unity. His details do not supplement and reinforce each other; they do not have cumulative effect, and we can see that his mind is not fixed on underlying principles, but is mainly concerned with cataloguing facts, even though the facts be less concrete circumstances than the records of general or individual opinion. His figures are artificial, the result of ratiocination rather than energy of feeling; and as his mind lacks warmth, and as he is without humor, what he writes gives the impression of being a sort of literary bookkeeping. Yet it is not the simple single-entry system that Boswell inveighed against in his Life of Johnson, where he says that he doesn't intend to write a conventional biography begining with his hero's birth and ending with his funeral. Lord Morley's works are much more complicated than that, for their

matter is not arranged according to a simple or obvious scheme. His biographies are nominally chronological, but they do not give a connected, to say nothing of a complete, picture of their subject. An immense amount of insignificant, if not irrelevant, detail and comment weighs most of them down, and they read like a combination of a government report and a theological discussion. His Life of Gladstone has readable passages; but that is mainly because the events dealt with are interesting to this generation, not because they are well recorded. He had no power of artistic elimination and combination, and it is not too much to say that a far clearer idea of Gladstone could have been given by a more gifted writer in one tenth the space, and with one hundredth part of the citations from diaries, letters, etc., with which he cumbers his pages and tries his reader's patience.

A circumstance that throws light on the reason for this lifelessness in his writings is the well-known fact that his work on Rousseau received quite as much notice from its author's habit of spelling God without a capital as it did from anything else. Later he departed from this practice and returned to the conventional capital; but this meant no increased respect for the Deity, for he also capitalized sin. This indicates his creed. He is a positivist. He accepts nothing which is not logically demonstrable. In politics he had to surrender this creed, for he says, referring to political practice, including his own: "So little evidence goes such a long way when your mind is made up, and circumstances are calling for decision and act." It was his creed, however; and, as has been said of liberalism, it is a state of mind rather than a creed, and it is a state of mind that imposes more limitations than powers. Certainly it is a state of mind unfavorable to the creation of inspiring or permanent literature. A Lucretius or a Voltaire, enthusiastic to destroy the creeds whose outward falsity they could see but whose animating principle was too subtle for their matter-offact minds, could produce literature of permanent interest and wide temporary appeal, because they put feeling into it; but Lord Morley has no feeling. When he was Chief Secretary for Ireland he went to see some Irish members of Parliament who