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J. H. M. Yes, that is true enough of the time of the Industrial Revolution and long after, but to-day with the abolition of the laws against combination, with limitation of output and restriction of apprenticeship in the skilled trades, the workman is more of an autocrat than a serf. He is certainly better off than he ever has been before.

LORD MORLEY. How better off?

J. H. M. Financially.

LORD MORLEY. Yes, but is he a better man than he was? Does he care about the things of the mind? How do he and his wife spend their money? On vain pleasures-his wife on meretricious finery, himself on betting (Dec. 21, 1919).

Lord Haldane once described Lord Morley to me as the richest mind of his time.' Unquestionably, and on looking through my diaries with their records of conversations à deux, written down within a few hours of the event, I find the lodes of ore so full of the precious metal of his mind that my only difficulty is to know where to stop, for the yield is almost inexhaustible. There are records of many conversations on Women in general, and on Mrs Asquith and others in particular, on Field Sports, on Capital Punishment, on Oratory, on Lord Haldane's ideas of public morality, on Ireland, a subject to which he always returned, on Modern Democracy, on India, and a hundred other things. But exigencies of space compel me to omit these things and pass on to those conversations on life and literature which will serve to show the catholic quality of his mind. These colloquies will be found discursive and at times elusive as all good conversation is-I make no attempt to 'edit' them. A true conversation is not like a Platonic dialogue, which is such a thing of art that the end is always implicit in the beginning and the talk is conducted as in a conduit-pipe towards a carefully appointed conclusionthe mental current of thought is never vagrant and rarely obscure. But the talk of ordinary life does not follow the rules of the grove of Academus. It has all the vagrancy of a stream in which deep pools alternate with murmuring ripples, there is a play of light and shade, the course is now slow, now rapid, and sometimes itself divides into two streams, one flowing along the surface in open talk, the other losing itself for a time in the underground of sub-consciousness until it rejoins

the main stream of conversation and gives it a new direction. One of the interlocutors may make a remark which the other, intent on his own process of thought, may appear not even to hear or may seem to ignore, only to return to it later with a sudden riposte. The process is not logic nor is the result art; but it is in such unstudied self-expression that you find the man.

I reproduce some of these conversations with as little comment as may be, leaving the reader, if he be so minded, to discover the train of association of ideas for himself.

LORD MORLEY. I was intrigued by your reference to Burke's saying about the trivial things such as a face at an inn' which 'change the face of history.' I've been hunting for the locus in quo. Here it is in the 'Letters on a Regicide Peace.' Was he referring to Peter the Great? But what a mind was Burke's! Macaulay was right, the greatest mind since Milton. . . . I don't like the Belgians. I don't know what Wellington thought of them. They were at Waterloo. J. H. M. Yes, but not longer than they could help. LORD MORLEY. Ah! I never tire of reading of Waterloo. J. H. M. Then you remember Stendhal's description in the 'Chartreuse de Parme'?

LORD MORLEY. No, I must look it up. You have quoted in your article Renan's prologue to his 'Souvenirs de mon enfance.' It's one of the finest things in French literature. I met him once. Do you like Hardy's Dynasts'? J. H. M. Yes, I find the metre sometimes uncouth, but I like the magnitude of conception.

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LORD MORLEY. Uncouth is the word. I'read' Hardy's first novel when he submitted it to the Macmillans, was impressed, but rejected it, and then got him to come and see me, and was the cause of his writing another and a better one. But I didn't like his hanging Tess. It was needlessly poignant, and I wrote and told him so.

J. H. M. Mr Hardy is one of those rare writers who never disappoint you when you meet them in the flesh. He has what Thucydides makes Pericles call 'the simplicity of all noble

natures.'

LORD MORLEY. Yes. Meredith, too, perhaps. But Meredith was not simple. He was striking to meet but not exactly charming. He was too hard for that. But Matthew Arnold had charm (Feb. 15, 1918).

His admiration for Hardy, with whom he shared the

distinction of being the last of the great Victorians, was whole-hearted and complete. There is something Shakespearean about Hardy,' was a frequent comment of his. On my leaving Flowermead one day for a visit to Max Gate, he said at parting, Give Hardy my love,' and of such greetings he was not prodigal. Another day we discussed the verdict of Time on the reputations of two great Victorians:

LORD MORLEY. What do you think of Carlyle?

J. H. M. He lives as a great prose colourist. Is not the Essay on History a wonderful piece of imaginative writing? LORD MORLEY. Yes, and the Essay on Burns.

J. H. M. And on Johnson. Macaulay's essay on the same theme is vulgarity itself in comparison.

LORD MORLEY. As for Macaulay, Acton used to say the essays were already dead and that he was all wrong about Warren Hastings. Does his history' stand the test of time?

J. H. M. Yes Firth praises it, and he speaks with unimpeachable authority. Do you still read Burke?

LORD MORLEY. Often. Perhaps his attitude on America stands in need of revision. You ought to write a book about him.

J. H. M. No. I have not the courage to follow you.

LORD MORLEY. My little book was inadequate. He is a great theme. What a mind! His fame grows greater with time. Macaulay was right when he said of certain passages, 'How divine!' Who can compare with him? Taine? Tocqueville? No.

Of contemporary literature he read but little in his latter years. The discovery of a new 'genius' every week in these days of loud advertisement left unmoved and incurious the man who had lived, moved, and had his being among the great minds of the Victorian age. He could be very ironical at times:

LORD MORLEY. Do you know Masefield?

J. H. M. No, but I've met him.

LORD MORLEY. Massingham mentioned his name to me the other day and was surprised to hear I didn't know who he was. He urged the value of his poetry, and I asked him, 'Is it very great?' to which Massingham replied, 'Perhaps not, but he is young.' I said, 'So were Shelley and Keats.' How old is Masefield?

J. H. M. Forty or forty-five, I should think.
LORD MORLEY. Well, he'll have to make haste.

Of Mr Gladstone, Lord Morley was, as might be expected, full of eloquent memories:

'I remember once staying at a country-house party at which Mr G. and Huxley were two of the guests. On Sunday Mr G. went to church and we infidels stayed behind and discussed Mr G. Some one raised the question how much a man owed in his career to environment, and instanced Mr G. and what he owed to Eton and Christ Church. Huxley would have none of it. He said, "Put him in the middle of a ploughed field with nothing but his shirt to cover him, and no power on earth could prevent that man becoming Prime Minister.""

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He was well aware of Mr Gladstone's weaknesses and, not the least, his inveterate casuistry. When discussing the suffrage question in January 1913 and the Cabinet difficulties into which Mr Asquith had got himself, he said, 'Mr G. would never have got himself into such a position-he would never have given an undertaking in which he could not discover, if need be, some ambiguity which permitted an escape. His mind was like that.'

This was like an echo of his scathing criticism of Mr Gladstone in the days before he knew him and when he was at war with him on the question of the endowment of Church schools out of the Education grant.*

A discussion of Mr Lytton Strachey's monograph on Queen Victoria' provoked the following:

LORD MORLEY. Rosebery doesn't like it. He thinks it too flippant. He has a reverence for Queen Victoria.

J. H. M. So had Mr Gladstone.

LORD MORLEY. No.

J. H. M. Indeed! I thought that, as Burke said of Chatham, the eyes of the eagle blenched' in that dazzling presence. LORD MORLEY. You are much mistaken.

The following extract will offend only the prudish-it

* Thus of one of Gladstone's arguments in this cause he wrote in 1873, 'A poorer sophism was never coined, even in that busy mint of logical counterfeits.'-'National Education,' p. 57.

goes to show how little of a prude was the subject of this memoir:

J. H. M. Have you read Mrs O'Shea's book?

LORD MORLEY. No. I wouldn't touch it with a pair of tongs.

J. H. M. Neither have I, but I wanted to ask you a question about it. She says that Mr Gladstone telegraphed to Parnell on the day of the introduction of the Home Rule Bill to ask for an assurance of his support. Is that true?

LORD MORLEY. The story carries with it its own refutation on the face of it.

J. H. M. She also says that Mr Gladstone knew all along the nature of Parnell's relations with her.

LORD MORLEY. I dare say he did. Mr. G. was a man of the world. He knew that in politics you have to take men as you find them. I remember Lord Granville once said to me, 'I have known five of Queen Victoria's Prime Ministers all of whom have committed adultery.'

And he started guessing who they were. But that is another story. His views on public morality as distinct from private morality-a distinction which he both accepted and enforced-were not in the least what the public have thought them to be. He was much more of a 'realist' than is commonly supposed.

J. H. M. Lord Fitzmaurice told me a curious story about Disraeli the other day- very characteristic, I thought. He said that years after his shabby treatment of Peel he took one of Peel's daughters in to dinner. Disraeli began in a tone of tender and respectful reminiscence of her father. This was too much for the daughter, who, with great spirit, replied, 'I wonder you can talk of my father like that after the way you treated him.' Disraeli showed his usual effrontery and replied, 'My dear lady, I was young-I had to get on.' And look at his stolen eloquence-his theft of another man's speech. He was mean.

LORD MORLEY. These are small things. Why do people always talk as if a politician was to be so much better than other men in other professions?

J. H. M. But he was an adventurer. Birrell hit it off the other day; he told me Disraeli's career was 'all picaresque.'

LORD MORLEY. I don't agree. He was a great statesman. Look at his vision of democracy, his Reform Bill, his views on the American Civil War. And look at his courage! His speech vindicating the Jews-Lord John Russell sat opposite

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