VIILORD ROSEBERY
Lord Rosebery’s oratory is the port at a banquet. It is a little somnolent in its charm. Mr. Birrell has a better cellar of the livelier French wines. But the Rosebery port is a wine without which no memorial dinner can come to a perfect end. It is essentially the wine of memory. It is used to moisten monumental effigies as champagne is used to christen ships. As you read his two volumes ofMiscellanies, you get the impression that, wherever there is an effigy to be unveiled, you will find Lord Rosebery present with his noble aspersion of words. I do not know whether Lord Rosebery himself chooses what effigies he will talk about or whether he has them chosen for him. It is difficult to imagine a statue on which he would not talk admirably. He is the greatest living showman of statues. Even when there is no statue to be unveiled, but only a centenary to be commemorated, he usually sees the great man in the posture of a statue—a littlelarger than life, and with the sins and scandals discreetly slurred over. Hence it would be in vain to look in his commemoration addresses for great character studies or critical interpretations of genius. They are compliments, not criticisms. They are spoken on behalf of all present. Lord Rosebery’s art is the art of the funeral speech blended with the art of the speech at a distribution of prizes. Of this difficult though minor art he is an accomplished practitioner.
Hence it would be ridiculous to judge his addresses on Burns by the same standards by which we judge the studies of Carlyle and Stevenson and Henley on the same subject. Lord Rosebery’s speeches belong to the literature of formalities, and it is their chief virtue that they express the common view with brightness of emphasis, humour of anecdote, and at times with a charming sentimental music of speech. They say what everyone present would regard as the right thing to say, and they say it very much better than anybody else on the platform could say it. He is a spokesman, not a discoverer. His freshness is that of a man who furnishes what is already known rather than of one who adds to the stock of knowledge. That he has also the gifts of the writer who can add to the stock of knowledge is shown by his humorous, fascinating andamiable portrait of Lord Randolph Churchill. Here he speaks for himself, not for the meeting. Lord Randolph is as real to him as a character in fiction, with his spell, his impudence and his disaster. As we read this story we feel that, if he cared, Lord Rosebery might write a book of reminiscences, telling with detached frankness the whole truth about himself and his great associates, which would have an immortal place in English biographical literature. For the present, however, we must be content that there should be someone who can speak the general mind on Burns and Burke, on Oliver Cromwell and Dr. Johnson, with a hint of majesty and a lulling charm.
Certainly, he reveals no secrets that are not open secrets about his heroes. He is continually asking “What is his secret?” and the answer is usually a little disappointing, a little exiguous in surprise, when it comes. Thus he tells us that the secret of Burns “lies in two words—inspiration and sympathy.” That is true, but it leaves Burns smooth as a statue. Burns appeals to us surely, not only through his inspiration and sympathy, but as the spirit of man fluttering rebelliously, songfully, satirically, against the bars of orthodoxy. Scotsmen revere him as the champion of human nature against the Levites.His errors, no doubt, were as gross as those of the Levites, but human nature turns affectionately to those who protest on its behalf against tyranny, and Burns with all his sins, was a liberator. When he comes to Burke, Lord Rosebery again asks, “What is his secret?” “The secret of Burke’s character,” he says, “is this, in my judgment—that he loved reform and hated revolution.” This, again, leaves Burke with the eyes of a statue. We shall understand the secret of Burke much better if we see him as a man who had far more passionate convictions about the duties than about the rights of human beings. He believed in good government and in good citizenship, but he was never even touched by the Utopian dream of the perfectibility of man. Lord Rosebery, indeed, brings the figures of the dead to life, not in his interpretation of their secrets, but usually in some anecdote that reminds us of their profound humanity.
His happiest speeches, as a result, are about great men whose private lives have already been laid bare to all the world. When he has to speak on Thackeray, whose life still remains half a secret, he devotes more space to literary criticism, and Thackeray remains for the most part an effigy hung with wreaths of compliments. It is the fashion nowadays to speak ill of Thackeray,and Lord Rosebery’s extravagances on the other side would tempt even a moderate man into disparagement. He refers to Thackeray as “the giant whom we discuss to-day.” There could not be a more inappropriate word for Thackeray than “giant.” One might almost as well call Jane Austen a “giantess.” Charlotte Brontë, as a young author coming under Thackeray’s spell, might legitimately feel that she was in the presence of a Titan. But a man may be a Titan to his contemporaries and yet be no Titan in the long line of great authors. Thackeray, I am convinced, is greatly underestimated to-day, but he will come back into his own only if we are prepared to welcome him on a level considerably below that of the Titans—below Dickens and Tolstoy, below even Sterne. Not that Lord Rosebery finds nothing to censure in Thackeray. Though he remarks thatVanity Fair“appears to many of us the most full and various novel in the English language,” he has no praise for “the limp Amelia and the shadowy Dobbin.” At the same time, he turns aside his censures with a compliment. “The blemishes ofVanity Fairexalt the book,” he declares; “for what must be the merits of a work which absolutely eclipse such defects?” It is one of the perils of oratory that it leads men to utter sentences of this kind. Theymean little or nothing, but they have the ring of amiability. On the other hand, Lord Rosebery makes no concession to amiability in his criticism ofEsmond. “The plot to me,” he says, “is simply repulsive. The transformation of Lady Castlewood from a mother to a wife is unnatural and distasteful to the highest degree. Thackeray himself declared that he could not help it. This, I think, only means that he saw no other than this desperate means of extricating the story. I cannot help it, too. One likes what one likes, and one dislikes what one dislikes.” An occasional reservation of this kind helps to give flavour to Lord Rosebery’s compliments. It gives them the air of being the utterances, not of a professional panegyrist, but of a detached and impartial mind. Thus he begins his eulogy of Dr. Johnson with a confession that Johnson’s own writings are dead for him apart from “two poems and some pleasing biographies.” “Speaking as an individual and illiterate Briton”—so he makes his confession. It is as though the tide withdrew in order to come in with all the more surprising volume.
One thing that must strike many readers with astonishment while reading these speeches and studies is that an orator so famous for his delicate wit should reveal so little delight in the wit ofauthors. His enthusiasm is largely moral enthusiasm. We think of Lord Rosebery as adilettante, and yet thedilettantiof literature and public life make only a feeble appeal to him. He is interested in few but men of strong character and men of action. His heroes are such men as Cromwell and Mr. Gladstone. Is it that he is an ethicaldilettante, or is it that he is seeking in these vehement natures a strength of which he feels the lack in himself? Certainly, as we read him, he casts the shadow of a man who has almost all the elements of greatness except this strength. He has been Prime Minister, he has won the Derby, he has achievements behind him sufficient (one would imagine) to fill three lives with success, and yet somehow we picture him as a brilliant failure as we picture the young man who had great possessions. These veryMiscellaniesbear the stamp of failure. They are the praises of famous men spoken from a balcony in the Castle of Indolence. They are graceful and delightful. But they are haunted by a curious pathos, for the eyes of the speaker gaze wistfully from where he stands towards the path that leads to the Hill Difficulty and the pilgrims who advance along it under heavy burdens to their perils and rewards.