LORD HALDANE.

Hawera & Normanby Star, Volume LXIII, Issue XVIII, 3 August 1912, Page 9

LORD HALDANE.

HIS INFLUENCE WITH GERMANY

That impending war between Germany and Great Britain, which looms so largely athwart the journalistic horizons of London and Berlin, seemed for the moment to become remote and unthinkable when Lord Haldane received from the hands of Emperor William recently a bronze effigy of himself. All Berlin, the despatches tell us, was agog. Was disarmament about to cease to bo a dream? Inspired organs proclaimed a new peace, and the Berlin Post suggested, amid enthusiasm, that it bo called by the name of Haldane. His Lordship, adds the German daily, is a Minister of War at home but an angel of peace abroad. The Hague, it opines, wears its laurels sheepishly when behold ing his Lordship's brow.

I The explanation of this wonder is found in the renown of Lord Haldane as interpreter of the German spirit to the British lion. No other Briton is held in such high esteem in the realm of the Hohenzollorn. Here is a man who comprehends. German literature, German philosophy, German manners, are all so many open books to him. His appreciations of the intellectual conquests of the nation miscalled an armed camp are devoured hungrily from Bremen to the Russian frontiers by the thousands of copies. The life and career of Haldane are studied like algebra and admired like Homer. The eulogy he receives from the Vossische Zeitung actually comforts the London Times. To the latter this man is the original discoverer of that new, strange Germany which began when William 11. proclaimed the future of his realm to be on the water. Haldane is the hero of the hour to a pair of puissant powers. It is at the age of two that Richard Burdon Haldane emerges with the personality of the type so dear to students of his Germanic career. His nurse happened then to discover the future link between British culture and the German mind busily shaping a pile of dirt in the garden. "If God," he explained, "made a man out of the dust of the earth, why shouldn't I?" This philosophical speculativeness of temperament is derived, according to the London Mail, from the famous old Scottish family, the Haldanes of Gleneagles. They early began intermarrying with the nobility of Caledonia. The ancestral' hall held a library of philosophy when the surrounding glens rang with shouts' of the huntsman, liichard was a deep thinker at the age of six. He could read Aristotle in Greek when lie was nine, becoming a Platonist at ten. As a lad in Edinburgh, the city of his birth, he devoured metaphysics. At his graduation '• from the university he ; took first j honors in the German philosophy he j loves. Not satisfied with that, he ! crossed over to Gottingen and absorbed | more. Thus it comes that he can quote i Hegel, Fichte, and Schopenhauer by I the chapter from memory. He might I resist Germany, says' one admirer, but he always surrenders to Germanism. Having made Germany his intellectual home, Lord Haldane, to follow our authority,, dreams with Hoffman just as he doubts with Hegel. One can not visit his beautiful home in London-

where he has lived the bachelor life so many years—without realising, says a writer in the Pall Mall Magazine, that Germany has become to Haldane what India was to Warren Hastings.

There is a distinguished trio in British public life, explains a writer in London Public Opinion, who, like the three graces, can not be thought of apart. He who thinks of one must remember the rest. The three are Lord Kosebery, Lord Haldane and Mr Asquith. Haldane's principal distinction at present is the position he holds as the living link binding Gei-many and Britain in human bonds of peace. He had other distinctions in his earlier years. "He won them much earlier than even the most successful usually do, unless they happen to "have all the accidents of birth, as Ms fellow Scot had to whom he was long first lieutenant. When your eyes rest upon Lord Haldane's soft, comfortable, plump figure and plump hands, and behold his comfortable pose and general air of sauve self-complacency as he addresses the court or a public meeting, or acts as the superior, yet tactful adviser of the British legislators on the subjects which they know they do not know very much about, you wonder what Haldane has to do with pessimistic philosophy." Yet one of his earliest achievements, when probably 'he had not quite decided whether to be Lord Chancellor or to adorn a university as professor there, was the translation of a crabbed Schop enhauer into English so graceful as to be almost poetry at times.

Lord Haldane likes to talk in Parliament, our British contemporary notes. He likes to talk on the platform. His subjects are always, or nearly always, something above mere party politics He lectures on themes dear to diners over their cigars and to the young men of literary and philosophical institutes. The ladies who work for women's rights hear him gladly. The heavier magazines open their pages to him with delight. In short, Haldane has lived much in the public eye because, our contemporary says, it delights him to do so. "H© is a clever, versatile, accomplished writer, ; speaker, and politician —a very good specimen of the man of general culture, who is equally at home in the library and in the world and who will get the most that can be- got out of j both." But on the whole he has made more of the world than of the library. But Haldane's "comfortable presence," adds Mr H. W. Massungham, in the London Outlook, reflects not only the amiability of his character, but the sham liberalism he has shepherded with loving care. Lord Haldan.e, being a philosopher, is inevitably a sceptic. That is, he does not believe in liberalism, although obliged to profess it after a fashion. "Physically, he might have sat for Browning's Bishop Blougram, and his smiling face and ample figure, habited in the garb of the most picturesque of churches, would have adorned an eighteenth-century gathering of wits and casuists." Hence, while theology— of a kind —might well have claimed him, his place in a democratic party is hard to seek. By way of answering these critics of his, Lord Haldane loses no opportunity of explaining himself on the platform. Britain, he thinks, lacks ideas, especially in politics. Germany has many. Since Britain has no great ideas of her

own, or, at any, rate, very few, need ' she shrink to borrow idoas from those who have them to spare —the Germans ? • He loves to contrast the British atti- ; tude to science with' that of the Ger- ■ mans. The British, he complains, have ! always made their fight for material ' prosperity first.. When prosperity has j been attained, Britain strives after ideas. This he deems au outcome of the ! Anglo-Saxon temperament. There is too great an aversion among AngloSaxons to anything that is abstract. There is a desire to do as much as possible by individual effort, to turn | to science and to the aid of thought i and organisation for the completion j rather than the foundation of the j social edifice. That leads to great I waste. It is a bad plan. Individualism j is too much to the fore. National! pride is too conspicuous. Patriotism ! is abused. It ceases to be a virtue at j times. Thus Frenchmen alone should not be proud of Laplace and Lavoisier. Not Germans alone should rejoice in the names of Weber, Helmholtz, Gauss and Iliemann. Others besides the English should speak with pride of Newton and of Darwin. Lord Haldane! teaches, in short, that great men nowadays belong to the world.