THE PASSING OF MR A. J. BALFOUR.

Otago Witness, Issue 3016, 3 January 1912, Page 83

THE PASSING OF MR A. J. BALFOUR.

(By T. P. O’Connor.)

Mr Pickwick was extremely indignant when he heard his counsel give a friendlygood morning to the miscreant counsel who was on the other side; and similarly, a good many people outside the House of Commons are doubtless sou-prised and perhaps even a little shocked when they find the sternest political opponents of thei platform and the floor of the House on terms of warm personal friendship with each other in the dining rooms and the smoke rooms. The truth is, there grows a certain corporate feeling amid a body of men who are thrown so closely together as men are in a Legislative Assembly; and thus it comes to pass that when a great figure of any party disappears from among them, there is something of the same kind of regret as is felt when a figre disappears from the intimacy of family life. This accounts for the universal sigh with which the passing of Mr Balfour has been received by all parties and sections of the House of Commons. He was so simple, so modest, and so gracious to all sorts and conditions of men, that everybody was drawn to him personally; and though he could hit hard in a debate, bo did it always in the (grand manner, and \ with elaborate courtliness, especially when he was dealing with men from whom he was widely separated both by opinion and by class. Individually, ho was easily first in personal popularity. Add to this his very remarkable combination of gifts : extraordinary subtlety, extraordinary readiness, superb equanimity, and unconquerable courage amid all changes of fortune; and you can understand how it is that even deadly opponents regard it a great and irreparable loss to the intellect of the House of Commons that this great figure should disappear from it. But, as a matter of fact-, Mr Balfour had no choice. Of course, things were made difficult for him by many of his own friends; and divisions in one’s own ranks are alwava the hardest things for politicians to bear. But even without this unpleasant factor Mr Balfour must ha ve gone. He ha?_ a devoted sister who keeps house for him. and looks after him ; and she, it is known, has been for a long time very anxious about his health. To her assistance cams the doctor; and I believe Mr Balfour had to choose between resignation and serious, if not deadly, peril to his health. It would scarcely ho an exaggeration to say that it was a choke between flight o t premature breakdown, and perhaps death. The Farewell Speech.— It is this fact which lends additional interest, and even pathos, to the speech in which he gave farewell to his high position. I have read the speech several times, and I think it will stand out in political literature as rising worthily tn a (great and almost tragic situation. Genial, kindly, pleasantly reminiscent, modestly autobiographical—above all, free from bitterness or recrimination—it is a beautiful swan song; and only Mr Balfour, among living speakers, could have done it so well. Its dignity and its loftiness of tone will be brought into greater relief by the tumult of faction and of intri;gti« by which his passing must be followed. It is lofty music succeeded by squalid discords.

And yet I do not know that anyone who understands Mr Balfour’s temperament and leanings well will sea that there [ is any room for tears in his dis'appearI ance from the parliamentary arena. He is j one of the many examples in my parlia- | mentary experience of the man of letters I who has strayed or been forced into political life by irresistible circumstance; and. like all such men of letters, Mr Balfour always seemed to me to feel father like an exile in a foreign land in the House of Commons. I have little doubt that his happiest hours were spent in his library, and with his pen in his hand. He is a thorough Scotsman; and there is no Scotsman who hasn’t in him the stuff of the metaphysician. You find the metaphysician even in Macbeth—that greatest and subtlest of Shalkeepoare’s creations; the man who in the most agonising moments of his life stops to dream and question and doubt; the man of action commingled with, and partly defeated by, the man of thought. And so - it has often struck me, when listening to Mr Balfour’s speeches in the House ft Commons, that he was a philosopher suddenly turned into a wor’d strange and foreign to him. Ho has raised debate •often ; but he has raised it to thoughts which find little place in the day-to-day thought and work of a practical assembly. He has been talking and thinking of the eternal verities, while the true parliamentarian has his eves on the Orders of the Day; bis mind has been on the purely intellectual side of everlasting nrohlmns, while the practical politician has been thinking of the political machine—he, philosophy; they, stuffed caucuses. Defects of His Qualities.—Tn truth Mr Balfour himself felt more strongly than anybody else certain defects in his * marvellous intelligence whic h unfitted him for political and parliamentary life. He had a poor memory—he rarely had to deal with facts or figures without committing some large error which a few moments’ investigation or a retentive memory would have easily helped him to avoid. Somewhat languid in physio no, and always more or less wornout by long hours in the House of Commons, ho never prepared himself sufficiently; and his mind was so quick that he could trust to luck, to readiness, and to inspiration, i Xo .man found it .so hard to master a Hill i

but no man could take part in a debate on any bill with such little preparation and with such effectiveness. Everybody in the House had become so accustomed to hie methods that they always knew beforehand what he would do. He invariably took a sheet of notepaper from the big table which stands between the two first benches in the House, and scribbled down a few notes with the stylograph which ho was the first man in the House to adopt, and which he never gave up. And, armed with these few rough notes, he got up, and often for an hour managed to keep the whole House interested, and found every vulnerable point in the armour of his opponents. He was best in debate when he had to deal with one of those subjects which justify an appeal to first principles. Of many fine speeches I have heard him make, one that stands out especially in my memory is a speech on an Education Bill. He was dealing with the extreme Nonconformist position with regard to the character of the religious teaching to be given in the school. Analysing this position with that marvellous power of criticism which was one of his greatest gifts, ho conducted a long chain of reasoning until—apparently by an inevitable process —he arrived at the conclusion that the theory was the same as that of the re--I'igious zealots of another age in the world’s history who justified every persecution and every punishment they inflicted on the heterodox in creed. This speech was delivered in a quiet, conversational tone—with the frigidity of a scientific lecturer, —but it was so impressive that when Mr Balfour came to his peroration and his triumphant conclusion, which again was spoken in even. Low tones his own side, that had been gradually rising in passionate admiration, gave one great cheer; and, when that had died away, raised another and another—a very unusual tribute to a speech' in the House of Com mons. —As an Orator.— It would be incorrect to speak of Mr Balfour as a great orator, using that word in the usual sense; he was rather a great debater. He has neither the mind nor the voice to create great enthusiasm in large bodies of men. I believe that he was never much of a success on the platform—that terrible ordeal under which so many great parliamentarians break down. The voice, though clear and penetrating, was not resonant; had none, for instance, of the deep-laden passion that swelled under the even tones of the voice of Bright; and none of that infinite variety of tone through the long gamut of which Gladstone’s wondrous organ could move in the course of a single speech. Very often, indeed, Mr Balfour’s voice became quite unmelodious : rising to something like a shriek. His gestures again, are always awkward ; they consist mainly of raising and dropping his arms ; and this without any grace. Bright rarely ever made a gesture at all; but when he did it was a gesture which added enormously to the effectiveness of his words. There is a famous passage in a speech which Bright delivered at St. James’s Hall, in which, comparing his words of warning to the rumblings in Vesuvius before the hurst of the lava-tide, he put his hand to his ear ; and everybody in the hall almost felt, as they saw that gesture, as if the volcano were going to hurst down on that very meeting of men. Gladstone’s gesticulation was so perfect that often he looked as if he were some fine Greek statue, where every pose was beauty: Gladstone could even hold his legs in such a. wav as to make a statuesque pose. In all such graces Mr Balfour is quite deficient. He was never graceful ; alwavs the tall, thin, fragile kind, who had no power whatever of making himself statuesque. Literary Gifts.— What, then, was the quality in his parliamentary speeches that made him stand out so conspicuously? Apart from that remarkable power of analysis to which I have already alluded, there was in his utterances the distinction that comes naturally to a man with the literary gift. He could not say even a commonplace thing in a commonplace way. There was always just that little finish in his languaige which distinguishes good writing from bad writing—writing that tells from writing that is commonplace. There are many passages in his last speech which are excellent specimens of his style Take, for instance, this—they are the closing words of the speech : and they have such simplicity, such feeling, such unaffected loftiness, that they might well serve as a model for any future orator in the same circumstances : A severance like that which I announce to-day must cause pain to ail of us. But it would be, I think, much greater pain, at all events, so far as I am concerned if I felt that I was abandoning political life, if I felt that I was leaving forever the companionship, the fellowship, and the councils of those with whom, through all those decades, I have worked in perfect harmonv anti friendship. But it is not so. I hope still to have years of activity which I can devote not merely to the constituency which I repre-ent. hut to the whole country, to the whole party, to all who represent the Unionist cause in England, in Scotland, or in Ireland. Those services will not indeed he given under the same arduous conditions as t.hev have hitherto been given. They will not impose the same strain upon my grow!nig years, hut I hope they will not he without, some small value. And. at all events, this I can say. that while men grow old. and men pass those who have given service must feel, when Ho time of their service comes to an end, that behind all these individual considerations there are great and permanent causes which do not decay with human weakness or polish with human life. And to those great causes I shall ho ns devoted as vour member —I shall do all the service I can as your member —as I have done as the loader of the pnrtv. and we may feel ourselves in the future, as we have in the past, brethren engaged in the furtherance of one great cause.

| But, in spite of all I have written of 1 Mr Balfour’s (great ].>owers as a parliamen- | tarian, I adhere to the opinion that as a ! man of letters he always felt himself more :or less of an exile in political life. No- ; body who knows polities from the inside : will see any contradiction between this | statement and the fact that he worked so j hard and succeeded so greatly in the pan j tical arena. Political life is a strange I thing—fascinating, and at the same time j repelling; and always fascinating so much as to drown the voice of repulsion. The least vain man in the world cannot help feeling a certain ecstasy in the popular applause and the constant notice which ; political prominence brings. It is very much the same kind of feelinig that grows in the popular actor or actress.. It vv.ill be remembered that Mrs Siddons, after her retirement, used nightly to mention with yearning regret that at that hour she used to be speaking the lines of Lady Macbeth or some other of her great parts; and she would then re-create the applauding and rapt house which she used to hold under the potent sway of her genius. And similarly the politician who lias once known the joy of the cheering crowd, the praise, or even the blame, of the daily papers, finds it as hard to abandon it all as to abandon a devastating but intoxicating drug. Public Life.— Mr Balfour is not a vain man, but I have little doubt that he lias the same human weakness as other politicians for the delights of political battle. This is one of the reasons which has doubtless kept him in politics. There is another and a worthier reason which also accounts for politicians sacrificing ease, health, fortune, everything rather than give up. Every politician of great gifts and in a great position attaches to himself innumerable interests—public interests, party interests, personal interests ; he becomes a trustee ; and thus to abandon Iris post is to be j guilty of something like treason to many sacred interests. I have often said that 1 after a while a politician becomes a brick in the centre of a wall—that is to say, ■ that he loses all power of independent action. He is hemmed in by ciroum- ' stances, by interests, and, above all, by • friends. And thus it is that Mr Balfour probably remained in his position much longer than he himself desired. But in the freedom of private conversation he never concealed how much public life was distasteful to him. He hated the terrible work of the platform which in recent years has been such a heavy addition to the labours of the politician ; above all, he hated the overflow meeting, that last straw that breaks even the strongest and most patient political camel’s back. c ‘ You had said all you had to say,” he used to remark, “ and then you had to string words together meaning little or nothing, and you have to do so, of course, when you are quite pumped out.” One observation finally I heard Mr Balfour make—l do not think there is any indiscretion in repeating it. It was when he was seated on the front Opposition bench, and at his side was Mr Bonar Law. ‘‘Why do vou remain here?” I ventured to ask him. “ Why does one remain here? I don’t know; do yon 7” he said, turning to Mr Bonar Law. There spoke the man from his heart. It was the language of the exile in a land where, to unobserving eyes, he seemed to find his home. —T. P.’s Weekly.