Letters to Literary Statesmen

II

TO ARTHUR JAMES BALFOUR

IT was of philosophers who were merely kings that Plato had his golden dream; but if he could have foreseen the day when a king would only reign, et ne gouverne pas, he surely would have hailed a philosopher as prime minister. He would also, it may be surmised, have felt a certain intellectual affinity in you. In one respect, at least, you resemble him, —a fondness for verbal dialectic, and an extraordinary adroitness and resource in its use. Such a style of reasoning as you are often pleased to adopt seems to derive straight from Gorgias. Something like it must have been in Jowett’s mind when he said in answer to the question whether logic was a science or an art, “It is neither; it is a dodge.”

A philosopher in the hurly-burly of politics is not a thing unknown in English annals. It may be doubted, however, if honest John Bull ever before gave power to one precisely of your type. You could not say of yourself, as Walpole did in writing to Conway: “I am certainly the greatest philosopher in the world without ever having thought of being so.” If the Cecils are a great governing family, so they are a great thinking family. You early fleshed your philosophic sword; and if we may believe that other prime minister, Count von Bülow, you are to-day a statesman who “employs his leisure hours in seeking to fathom the profoundest problems of science.” This, of course, would cover the problem of a golf ball’s flight, to which, it is known, you devote your ripest powers. But the point is that the hardheaded squires of the Tory party knew what you were when they took you for their leader, — knew that you were no burly Johnson, disproving idealism by one mighty stamp of the foot, but rather of the meticulous order of Berkeley himself. You had published your Defence of Philosophic Doubt. And the real doubt, unluckily, seemed to be, from the first, exactly what you meant to say.

You have yourself jested rather pallidly of late about your fate as the Great Misunderstood of English politics. You have said, with a melancholy smile, “My utterances on a certain great question have been received with as many commentaries as if I were a classic, and have been invested with as many different meanings as if they were inspired.” But the charge that you are obscure was made before the fiscal controversy was ever heard of, and your retort that you were blindly or willfully misinterpreted was hurled by you at theological or philosophical opponents, before it was at political antagonists. Your persistent complaint of the critics of your book on the Foundations of Belief was that they completely failed to catch your drift. It must have been hard for you to forgive Leslie Stephen for saying of that attempt to buttress religion by proving that its postulates were only a trifle more unthinkable than those of science, “ the foundations of his [your] edifice are ingeniously supported by the superstructure.” But in the preface to your second edition you had to admit that even a well-known professor of theology, versed in all your subtleties, had missed your meaning by worlds away.

It is not strange, then, that when you chose to apply the method of a douche, vaporized words to a burning question of the day, your blunt and somewhat obtuse countrymen began to wonder if you were not a philosopher moving about in a world not realized. Certainly, you have had, in the last few months, to run the gauntlet of ridicule, which is, in its way as terrible, if not so speedily fatal, on the banks of the Thames as on the Seine. The rough Squire Westerns have been asked what they thought of a prime minister who could not put down malicious wresting of his language by a plain tale; while the wits of the press and of the clubs have had their fling at political leaders who “ pronounce themselves vegetarians, but with a strong partiality for mutton chops.” Mr. Frederic Harrison’s rather cruel characterization of your position on the tariff question was that you are “a Semi - Protectionist - RetaliationQuasi - Free - Trader, — what the Latin grammar would call a Paulo-post-futurum Protectionist.” With greater amenity, Mr Morley has depicted your fiscal ambiguities under the guise of an ecclesiastical apologue. There was a great controversy in the Church, and you had mounted the pulpit to expound and enforce your views. The congregation went out in agitated uncertainty, and began to ask one another, “Whom is he for?” The Presbyterian said, “He is for me.” “No,” said the Independent, “he is for me.” The Trinitarian said, “ Mr. Balfour is on my side.” “I beg pardon,” said the Unitarian, “he is on mine.” Anglican and Catholic both claimed him. “But whilst this anxious and angry hubbub was going on in the churchyard, Mr. Balfour emerged from the vestry murmuring to himself with sincere complacency, ‘I have given them the essence and the outline of my views, so transparent, so simple, so unmistakable, so beautifully clear that no honest man can pretend not to understand them.’” Such darts get under the skin, in the end, in the political world; and it is an ominous sign when even Punch assumes the disguise of our own Doctor Subtilis, Henry James, in order to shadow forth your mastery of recondite and non-committal statement. For there is still truth in Lord Rosebery’s remark: “The English love a statesman whom they understand, or at least think that they understand.”

But it would be absurd to suppose, in your case, Mr. Balfour, that the jokes of your political opponents argue conclusively that the position which they delight to depict as one of facing both ways, is in reality not shrewdly chosen and maintained with great address. It would be a good rule: Always beware a philosopher in politics when he bewails his inability to express himself more trenchantly than he has done. It proves that he will not be drawn into uttering the unwary word which will thrust his party from office. This astuteness, this immensely clever handling of an immensely difficult situation , your bitterest enemy cannot deny you. If you have carried water on both shoulders, you have at least carried it, not spilled it on the ground. Your assailants should have taken warning from your profuse confessions of ignorance, and your smiling good nature. They had heard you profess so often in the House of Commons, “I am but a child in these matters;” and should have had in mind, as possibly you had, the prophecy, “A little child shall lead them.”

You offer to-day, Mr. Balfour, the great paradox of being the public man of England most laughed at, and at the same time most loved. Possibly one explanation lies in the answer which Samuel Johnson’s old schoolfellow made, when asked what he had done with his life. “ I have tried,” he quaintly said, “to be a philosopher, but somehow cheerfulness was always breaking in.” So there has broken through your philosophy a great kindliness, with a high distinction, a wide humanity, a lettered sanity and ease, which have endeared you to the men of your day in both parties. If fall you must, you will leave office behind, but will always bear your friends with you. And as to-day the political tide seems to be running irresistibly against you, you may at least have the satisfaction of knowing that you yourself marked out with precision ten years ago the process of your own decay.

You then said: “ I have never observed in the history of this country that any party or any Government have gained credit from hanging on to office, from hanging on to their places, when they were deprived of all real influence on the course of events and when the general trend of public opinion was against them. Under such circumstances the Government may possibly do good administrative work, it may possibly continue to hold office for one month, two months, six months, or even a year more, but you will never find in the history of this country that this had the result of increasing the credit of a Government with those on whose favor their fortunes ultimately rest.”