CHARACTER SKETCH

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1679, 4 May 1904, Page 15

CHARACTER SKETCH

SIR WILLIAM HARCO'URT THE MAN WHO MIGHT HAVE BEEN PREMIER. (By T. P. O’Connor.) There is no Parliamentarian who has not read with-a pang of keen personal sorrow, the an noun cement that Sir William Harcoss-rt is about to retire from the House of Commons. Few people would have imagined some years ago-, that the day would come when Sir Wiilia.ni would ho one of the universally popular members of the House of Commons. In the days of his hot Parliamentary youth he was so masterful, so vehement and dashing in speech, so ready with the witty taunt and the brilliant and biting epithet, that lie seemed quite a different being rro.n what ho reality was. The uaru.g and relentless Parliamentary gladiator often fights for the mere love of fighting, and, wlfen lie fights, cannot reirain trom using all his mighty powers damaging weapons. And thus it often imppens that a man who is really modest seems over-confident and arrogant, and that a really kindly and genial limn passes wiith those who do not personally know him as having the same ferocity in his temper that there appears to. be in his words. As a mattew of fact, the converse is the rule. It is not your speaker who deals in boisterous expletives, in crashing vituperation and moioaut witticisms, that is the venomous man; it is he who doles out his criticism in terse sentences, and often in -colourless language. THE FIGHTER AND THE MAN. When, one Irishman complained to another of the vehemence and apparent ferocity with which, in the hot dajrys of the struggle between him and the Irish Party, Sir William Ha.rccurt was proposing a Coercion Bill, the other Irishman, who was a humorist, declared that Sir William had been quite as vehement, and apparently quite as ferocious-, when he was proposing the Hares and Rabbits Bill. The truth is, that if a man have a great command 1 of language—and especially of picturesque and poetic languagel—rif he be a master besic.es of sarcasm, of paradox, and cf phrase —if. above all, he have the true spu-fe- of the advocate—which is to put chi mgs always in the strongest form for his own side — if a man nave all these things, his language is no index to his caaraeter. unless you happen to be one of those psychologists who thoroughly grasp the truth of the maxim that words were given to man for the purpose of concealing his thoughts. And thus it was that for many years Sir William Harcourt, the formidable, daarfelesk, unsparing, triumphant Parliamentary giadiator, was understood to be the real Sir William H&rcoiurt. The fighter was mistaken for the man. A HUMANE OFFICIAL. A reputation., whether true or false, is one of the hardest things in the world to live down; and thus it was that the House of Commons was slower in recognising the real Harcourt than almost aqy other great man who has been a prominenib figure there. But tfie discovery did come years ago; and theji everybody laughed at the old misconceptions with regard to Sir William; and the House of Commons took him to its bosom for the 'kindly, good, softhearted, humane and tolerant creature that he really is. I remember once asking him a question more than twenty years ago as to the size of prison cells; it was apropos of some poor Irishman who had ju.se been sent to gaol. When Sir William got up to answer me and gave out the exact dimensions of the prison cell, there was a loud outburst of laughter; fjjr the language was such as to convey the idea that Sir William himself had been of con inside a cell. He took up the laughter seriously, and said that he had often made'kb liis business to enter a prison cell, and tilie House —recognising what Sir William meant —which was that as Home Secretary he had 1 thought it his duty to th*e unfortunate beings who had lost their liberty to see that they were not inhumanly treatedr —the House, re- • cognising Hub, burst into a cheer; it realised the tenderheartedness and conscientiousness which could be read in the words of his statement. It is notorious that there never was a more humane Home Secretary. When he took up that ofl&ce for the first time—one of the most difficult and one of the moat thankless offices in a Government—he worked seventeen and eighteen hcfuufe'a day; and! it is the tradition of the Home Department that it' never .had a kinder, more considerate, more humane head than, he. AT THE BAR. The greatest and the highest merit of Sir William Harcourt as a politician was that he tbok his work so seriously. jPetople are so familiar with him as a great figure on the political at age that they forget that it was at a comparatively late period in life that he first entered the political arena. He was forty-two years of age when first he entered the House of Commons. His life up to that moment had-been absorbed in his profession#. He had ehnsxm Mm

branch of legal life which excludes a man from entering the House of Commons; tnat is to say, he practised at the Parliamentary Bar. It is a highly-paid brauch of the profession. The work is featnjully hard while it lasts. Mr Cripps, who was one of the great Parliamentary lawyers before he entered the House of; Commons, told me that he used to get up at four o’clock every mc/rning as Rug as the work, lasted. But the space for which the work lasts its short; usually some four or five months of the ParLamentary Session; aurl the issues involved before the Parliamentary Committees are iso gigantic—sometimes involving millions —<that the fees are proportionately high. When Sir William was in the ring, he easily o’er-topped all competitors; indeed, thetr-e were few walks in lire in winch this man, as big in intellect as lie is in physique, did not o’er-top nearly eveiy other man; and he was making the huge income of £15,000 a year when he gave tup practice—as he had to do —on entering the House of Commons. From that time forward he devoted huuseif to politics with a'singlemindedness that is, unhappily, rather rare in public life. From necessity, or from want of a due sense of public .duty, the men are rare in the House of Commons' who give to that great body all their time and all their attention. Members of the same profession, as Sir WilLam Harcourt. have—often much against their will—to give to the House lv.it the few rags and remnants of their time that are left to them from the law-courts and the consulting chambers. Great business men still give to their businesses the greater part of their time and their attention. Men of leisure grudge the time taken from the hunting field or the yacht, fr-om the golf links or the giddy round of society demands. To all such people Sir William Harcourt was at once an exemplar and a reproach. From the day he lef t ins profession behind him he never looked back; he belonged, heart and soul, and with all his time and work and energy to politics, and to politics alone. A MODEL MEMBER. I find that- some of my observations about the realities of House cf Commons life have excited varied, and not altogether agreeable comments in some of the newspapers; but I persist in the underlying idea cf all these comments, tiiao pouit.es in this country are still hi tlie hands of amateurs who bring to them but a pant of their hearts and souls; who take them, more or less, as a pastime or a social advantage, or anything buit what they really are; one of fhe greatest of trusts —the trust of a mighty Empire, whose every interest and emotion and movement is radiated from the floor of the House of Commons. Amid ail ohis waste of amateurishness and halfheanbedness the figure of .Sir William Harcourt stands out —noble, devoted, gigantic. He never came down to- the House without having mastered all the details of all the great questions which were 'then beiotoa the eounitify. He ro mained the great student wdio had once been a great professor—the great worker who had always had to know ail the details of his case; and, while most members —including even Ministers in great positions—came down to die House jutst ready u> pick up their knowledge as they went along, Sir William had spent hours in his study and over his books before he set his foot in the House : and So was able to discuss the case with the fulness of mastered and profound knowledge. HIS LABORIOUS PREPARATION. Sometimes the very ardour of his preparation and the opulence of ‘his knowledge were a disadvantage to him. He had acquired such a hatred of slovenliness of statement and slackness of preparation that he was now and then overprepared. I wrote about him once that he had the exaot words of his speech before him whenever he made a great speech; he wrote me a friendly remonstrance bo the effect that it wais years since he had written out a.n entire speech. This, however, does not alter the fact. — so honourable to him—.that on all great O'Coasions he came down to ithei Honrse with noites so copious that he seemed to have written out tli/e eutioje speech to those who were not close enough to see exactly how much was on the slips of paper. Rutting these slips down on the box on the Speaker’® table, he would glance at them, and then regularly and quietly turn them ever, slip by slip, to the end of his speech. The speeches thus delivered were marvels of knowledge, of brilliant phrases, of biting and witty epigrams. Next to Disraeli he" made the most popular and universally-

known epigrams of his time. His epeeehes were always illumined by a dazzling bit of sarcasm wluch in a few words described a situation or devastated an enemy’s position. I remember once hearing him make a speech on a platform at Manchester which, I 'think he alone could have made. The Conservative associations had just held their annual gatherings, and the report of their proceedings was the material which Sir William Harcourt had to make the basis of his speech. He took up the report, read cut a passage here and a passage there, made but few comments; but gave to each passage a wealth “of meaning by liis resonant/ voice and his manner. You did not know how it was done; it was just as if some torpedoes had suddenly appeared in a hay where a. great fleet of big ironclads had been sailing in all their easy pride, and that then, in the twinkling of- an eye, they had all disappeared from right. The whole Conservative citadels and battlements were just 'laughed cut of existence in this little speech; it did not last more than half an hour. A BRILLIANT WHITER. It was, perhaps, one consequence of Sir William’s training and bent that lie should be one of the few men who are equally potent with the' pen and the tongue. Mr Gladstone as an era-tor was unapproachable ; you fcrgoit under the charm of Jus voice and manner all the long parentheses, all the conditions and sub-conditions and qualifications—you were swept away on tire great springtide of his oratory. But when he took liis pen in his hand, and you were remote from flue physical influences of the man, you found him cumbrous, and often obscure. There if no swell fault to be found with the writings of Sir William Harcourt. They have exactly the same qualities as his speeches. They teem with facts; every document has been read, noted, put away in a pigeon-lioie for use; the language is clear; everything is put with extraordinary vigour; fine and memorable phrases jostle against each other in sentence after sentence ; no man can put a case so convincingly, forcibly, and clearly; and hence it was that from the first time when —over the signature of “Historicus”- —lie began to write for the “Times,” liis letter's attracted universal attention. AS LEADER OF THE HOUSE. Sir William’s greatest moment was when he was Leader of the House of Commons and Chancellor of the Exchequer. He showed qualities which he always had, hut for which he did not gab credit—tact, patience, good temper. He had to propose one of the most contentious measures that were ever proposed to the House of Commons—the Budget which produced something like a revolution in our system of taxation, and which for the first time made the millionaire pay a huge sum to the State. Everybody on the Conservative side'was up in arms against this portentous Budget; and for months, hour after hc»;rr, day after day, Sir William liad to sit in his place and meet all attack. It has been told how lie had prepared himself for the work by sheafs of notes and memoranda, an example of that assiduity, and industry, and high conscientiousness in the discharge of his duty on which I have laid so much stress. He was able, then, to meet every amendment with abundant reasons and facts; and all this told in, time. He heat down opposition by sheer force of reasoning. A weaker or more lethargic Minister would have adopted the much simpler remedy of perfunctory argument, followed by peremptory closure. Sir William Harcourt never once used the .closure all through those weary month's, with the result that the debates were carried on to the end in a spirit of good temper. Never was a revolution carried with so little friction. And never was there a Leader of the House who led that restive nervous, difficult assembly with greater concern for the convenience of all parties, with such judiciously-mingled firmness and conciliation. Sir William was always in liis place, too ; he always treated the House as what it is—the greatest, mast potent, and most illustrious of assemblies. A GREAT WHIG. In bis opinions, as in bis character, Sir William was long misunderstood. It is bis nature to make a,good joke though the heavens fall; and he has a knack, therefore, of treating even solemn situations from the humorous point of view. When war was threatened with Russia, and Mr Gladstone got eleven millions in preparation for the fight. Sir William

was asked —tiie war scare having passed away—what we had got for the eleven millions. “Household suffrage in the counties, and devilish cheap at the money,” was his repiy. The serious meaning underneath this persiflage was, that the Ministry had been able to command the allegiance of the nation by its promptitude m meeting the peril of war, and that, as a result, it ha»i been able to carry the great reform which was then being discussed in the House of Commons. Underneath all this persiflage anybody can see that Sir William Harcourt has a very clear and a very consistent body of political opinion. He lumself used at one time to prefer to call himself a Whig ; and, perhaps, it was in some respects the truest definition of liis political point of view. Though lie was quite progressive in his views, he yet had immense respect for tradition. He gave me a singular proof of this attitude of mind once when we were discussing the future and the past. I expressed the somewhat trite view that I would like very much to be able to revisit the world a century after I had left, and see all the changes that had come in the meantime. “I have quite an opposite wish, ’ replied Sir William; “I would like to go back.” And then he added, with jierfecit seriousness, “I woul/1 like to have been a member of the Cabinet of Sir Robert Walpole.” In his love of learning, in his respect and veneration for the House of Commons, m the grand manner of his speeches a»ncT -his delivery, he remains always something like a survival of an older and a statelier time. AS A MAN. Let me end the sketch of the man in his private, rather than in his public capacity. As husband, and as father, h© has always been the kindest and the tenderest of mein. He was almost brokenhearted when his first wife died; lie remained a widower for years, and, possibly, would have so remained if he had not met a brillian t American lady—daughter of the historian Motley—a woman of remarkable charm and amiability. The affection of himself and life elder son baa always been one of those bright spots of genuine human nature that come athwart all the selfishness and worldliness of an assembly like the House of Commons, where men arc fighting for their voracious ambitions, and where often mercy is as little shown, and can be as'little shown, in the bard exigencies of public duty, as on the field strewn with the dead and dying. Whenever Hir William lias to make a speech of any importance, you are sure to see “Lomlou” Harcourt—as he is universally known —in a seat under the gallery. It is the same whenever Sir William attends a demonstration on the platform. Just below it, hidden and self-obscured, after his fashion, sits “London”; and there is something touching in the look of absorbed attention and' evidently profound nervousness and affectionate anxiety which are written on the laoe of the son while the father in going through his ordeal. It is this sense of the thorough goodness of heart and sweetness of disposition, which are behind the great swashbuckling jousts of the political athlete, which accounts for the popularity which Sir William has finally attained. It is the secret of the fact that, though he has had such fierce encounters, he neither feels nor leaves any enmity behind him in the great assembly where, for thirty-five years, he has been a commanding figure. These aro the reasons why to-day everybody feels that even the shadow and anticipation of his passing from that chamber leave iit the poorer, the less picturesque, the less classical.