THE LIFE OF HENRY LABOUCHERE.

Otago Witness, Issue 3117, 10 December 1913, Page 75

THE LIFE OF HENRY LABOUCHERE.

By T.P.

I find the same difficulty in writing about Labby that confronted his biographer ; I know so much about him and he wrote so much about himself that it is hard to know where to begin and which portion of his extraordinarily versatile career one should choose for discussion. I used to say of hi™ that he had led the Hfe not of one* man, but of several men ; and these different phases of the same existence almost suggested that aeons had separated them j that Labby was, so to speak, like the Wandering Jew or the Flying Dutchman, who was condemned to live through many generations j to survive until he became absolutely alone; and almost a different self. Just let me hurriedly sum up all Labby was in these different epochs: A discontented Eton boy, a rebellious and expelled University student, a globe-trotter, a circus man, an international gambler, a diplomat, a theatrical manager, an editor, a politician, a man about town from boyhood till he was an octogenarian. There is ' much about his gambling in this book, but there is not all. He" told me himself that he and a once well-known sportsman kept the bank at Nice for several years; and everybody who has ever seen gambling will know what keeping the bank means. He told me also that he kept horses when he was at Frankfort, and the associate of Bismarck simply that he might the more quickly get over the distance between Frankfort and Homburg, where there were in those days the gambling tables. He also told me that once as much as £4OOO depended on the turn of a single card. One of the many astonishing things about this truly astonishing man was that when a passion which once held his soul in its grip was exhausted it never again seemed to return—always excepting the one passion -which was" never sated and never wholly successful, the passion of playing a big part'in politics. He now and then dallied with a little gamble when he found himself in some part of the Continent where gambling still exists; but he said to me it bored him, and he gave to me the curious reason that he always won. Another of his observations about gambling, which was very characteristic of him, was that he used to allude to the "system" he had invented for players at Monte Carlo — a "system," he used to add, by which he understood many hundreds- of people had loet most of their fortunes. Similarly, I doubt if Labby went to a theatre once in every six months in spite of his having been a theatrical manager for 10 years of his life. I think his chief and most enduring pleasures in life were conversation, reading, and writing. His conversation was very brilliant; and sometimes it was so brilliant that it threatened to become uninteresting. That continual vein of cynicism—largely affected,' though not altogether—sometimes began to pall on you. And not because it seemed so ill-natured, for you knew that Labby was not an ill-natured man, but because it was so one-sided and so profoundly untrue ; and because, sometimes, you felt also that it wa« a pose; and a pose is a death-blow to that sincerity of conversation which is only really interesting when you know it to be free and honest exchange of thought between two intelligent minds. But, all the same, the conversation was delightful. It wan enriched,' of course, by an unexampled experience of countries and of men. Again I have to return to the point that Labby had led so many different lives that It was very difficult to imagine that one human being could have gone through it all. For instance, few people realised that Labby had spent years in America before the outbreak of the Civil war; that he had known intimately Daniel Webster—and Daniel Webster 'in contemporary American life holds almost the same place as Pitt in ours; that he had gone through the great and populous State of Minnesota when it was a desert; and that thus Labby was one of the few survivors of that almost prehistoric period of America before the war. 1 still recall his wonderful pictures of the American legislators of that period,, not flattering, but not necessary to repeat; for those days have ceased to exist, and with them the rougher habits of the time. Some Drawbacks.— And now, perhaps, I have given some reason why, as a whole, the political care?r of Labby was not as successful a? i( ought to have be-en. When he was refused office by Mr Gladstone in 1892 it was not merely because the Queen had raised objections. The Sovereign in this constitutional country passes bovoi.-d his privileges when he tries to put a bar on the selection of his colleagnes by a Prime Minister; and if Mr Gladstone had really been anxious to have Mr Labouchere as a colleague, and still more if Labby had had behind him strong, popular, and party support, Labby would have been a Cabinet Minister. He had-certainly deserved the place. One of the curious things' about this man who made it almost a fetish to dawdle through life, with the fumes of an ever eternal cigarette, as it were, symbolising Ids attitude, was that on occasion no man could put himself to so much fatigue and to so much trouble for his convictions. If you were to take seriously what he says in his letters about hi« attitude to Ireland, you imagine that he had no real feelings about ihe subject except that it was a bore and n lever for the success of his own particular plan for rearranging parties in England. But here again it was all a pose °As a matter of Fact, he did care a good deal about Ireland; and certainly no man gave to her more devoted servio I remember still the astonishment with which I watched him as, durina a phase of the struggle, he flitted about from one end of the country to the other. There fas no meeting too small, no meeting too large for him. He would go to a great

working-class centre one night, to a small village with an audience of a few scores of peopl© on the other. And unlike most men, he was not in the least affected by the conditions under which he had to live. Though hie means, which were nearly always large, permitted him to dwell in a series of palaces and surrounded by all the luxuries of wealth, he was the most devout worshipper that ever knelt before the shrine of the Simple Life. I have seen him take every meal from the early morning breakfast to the frugal dinner. His breakfast was over in a few seconds. Dressed in a morning gown, at Pope’s Villa, where he was most at nis ease, he would holt an egg, then gulp down a cup of tea, and then it was over, and a cigarette was in his mouth; and he kept smoking cigarettes nearly all day long. In the House of Commons he was often to be seen dining in the tea room. To an habitue of the House of Commons this says everything, for the food in the tea room is strictly confined to eggs or a chop and tea or coffee. If you want to get anything beyond that you have to go down to one of the dining rooms. A Medicine Fiend. — A characteristic story he told of one of his journeyings, while he was on this pilgrimage of passionate Home Rule, was that a farmer, at whose house he was stopping, anxious to do honour to the great man from London, presented him with a ham sandwich, which was encased in sponge cake. Ho laughed at the meal, and enjoyed it, and went to liis meeting quite happy. And yet there were few men who were so constantly fussing about the" body'. He was very stout when first I met him, and as he was rather a short man the stoutness was both apparent and inconvenient. He eoi himself to work to reduce his flesh, and he would tell you by the hour what tilings to eat and what to avoid; and Tie certainly justified his regime by becoming comparatively- thin, and remaining so during all the later years of his life. This was the period when the doctors began to tell the world that the thyroid gland, extracted from the sheep, accomplished, amid other marvels, the reduction of flesh; and Labby at once began to take thyroid glands in large auantities, until someone told him that :iis drug, taken in excess, reduced a man to imbecility'. He was one of the first men to discover the merits of saccharine as a substitute for sugar, giving sweetness without increasing weight. One time 1 found he had discovered that 10 drops of nux vomica after every meal was a perfect remedy for indigestion ; I was foolish enough to follow his example, with by no means pleasant results. 1 suppose there was not a day of his life that he did not take medicine in some form or another. And he was always on the lookout for some new drug. Tins tremendous tour for Home Rule wound up. of course, in a severe fit of illness. He got gojit badly, and laid to lie in bed for weeks as much bandaged up as if he were a mummy. 1 dare, say that though he was so keen about Home Rule, this tour was not altogether without the idea of helping himself to the Cabinet. If he had consulted me I might have told him a different and easier and a safer route. But that would have involved opening his purse strings, and that was Labby A weak point—his lack of common sense in the midst of oil his almost demoniac analysis of the realities of life. He preferred to spend his time and his brain and his health to spending his money. And he had so much money! He failed comparatively in political life. I have given one of the reasons. The other and much more serious one was that he did not lake himself seriously, and the world formed its estimate of him from his own. He was, as his brillaint biography tells us, essentially a Frenchman and a Voltarian. There was positively nothing English about him except his speech; and even that was French rather than English in its spirit. He loved reality, ho hated sham, he scorned to affect the sentimentality which he did not feel, unless, indeed, on the rare occasions when he- thought the assumption would be so palpable a joke as to ad<l to his favourite enjoyment of laughing at the world ; and especially that foreign English world into which a freak of fate had transferred him. I never will forget ,Ins impish look when discussing some question one day in the House—it may' have been woman suffrage. He took an attitude, and said : “ Mr Speaker, I am a man of sentiment.” A man of sentiment —this hard, apparently cynical man of the world ; never was there finch contradiction between a man’s words and the known realities of his career. And all his speaking was on the same lines, so that in the end that prosaic and conventional body of men who form the majority of most Houses of Commons always felt that he was fooling with them, and that everything he said he said with his tongue in his cheek. He fought radiantly and persistently for his colleague, Mr Bradlaugh; but even then people did not take him seriously. I remember the universal titter that went round the House when he said, in portentously solemn tones —and for the moment I believe he was quite serious—- “ This is the law.” It almost reminded one of the devil when he went into the Franciscan’s pulpit- and tried his hand at a sermon. .As Voltaire, who was the author of the immortal story, said, ‘‘lt lacked unction.” Labby always lacked unction. A Soft Spot.— Another reason of his comparative failure is brought out in that really' thrilling chapter which contains Labby’s correspondence with Mr Chamberlain at the time when the first Home Rule Bill was trembling in the balance. Labby, it would be seen there, us in several pages I of his life, a 1 wavs concentrated his ntten- ! tier, on the personal tide of every oon- ' trov.-rsv and on ’he personal and perhaps ! the selfish side of every man. He had a perfect pas Arm for intrigue: and he had. v.-hat was much mora dangerous, a perfect ! faith in intrigue. Though lie had a very

firm grasp of principles, he could not get away from the personal side of everything. He had an almost childlike faith in the omnipotence of wire-pulling. And thus it was that this brilliant and clear mind often eaw questions through a fog. If. you wanted proof of that, you find it in his constant reference to Gladstone. To him Gladstone was simply a dexterous and rather crooked old gentleman, whose policy was the outcome of his ambition and his hatreds. Gladstone was human, like everybody else; but thia is a grotesque misunderstanding of his character. Was there a soft spot in this hard nature? Yes, plenty of them. I have always thought that sudi hardness as there was in Gabby—and there was a good deal —was as much the growth of hie environment as of his natural predisposition. The rock was opened towards the middle part of his life by the birth of his daughter, Dora. From that time forward there was a subtle the man, though no one would have been more shocked than he to discover that it had been revealed. What inner softness there was in him came with that momentous event in his inner life. He became the champion of women, and more even of children. If—if—but what is the use of talking about ifs; especially in the case of one whose course is run.

Finally Labby, who had good fortune in most things, is fortunate in the relative who has added one of the most fascinating of biographies to our language, and bis raised to the memory' of his brilliant kinsman a monument that will not die.