A STUDY IN ICE.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 11026, 14 March 1914, Page 6

A STUDY IN ICE.

(By JAMES DOUGLAS.) ' j Tim Prime Minister is a man of ice and iron. From my perch in tlio Gallery I peer down at him sideways. On my left hand " F.C.G." is busy sketching somebody. His fierce, hairy face is curiously unlike his blandly amiable caricatures. As I glanco from his ferocious eyebrows down to Mr Asquith's polished steel mask, I wondg,'. whether it- also is discrepant. .What is the real AsquithP | The Asquith T look down upon is a thundercloud with a silver lining; his face the thundercloud, and. his white hair the silver lining. White hair softens tho features of other men, but it hardens his. It lies chill and severe on his temples. He is a man of snow with a marble mouth mid a jaw of steel, a man of ice with frozen eyes and a frozen voice. A frost-bitten man with a wintry mind and an Arctic soul. A lonely man with a bitterly desolate face, and a rare smile like glacial sunshine.

My eyes wander from the cold Prime Minister to his fiery followers. The contrast between the ieader and. tho led is absolute. The Prime Minister is an iceberg sitting on a volcano. The icecold phrases fall icily from the icy lips. They are beautiful phrases, beautiful as the crystals on the window-pane in winter; the best words in tho best order, gleaming and glittering translucently like Polar icicles. There is 110 redundancy in this laconic utterance, 110 pleonasm, no hesitance, 110 frayed ends of speech, 110 hemming and hawing. 110 groping after reluctant felicities. His phrases are disdainfully faultless. You can see his mind working behind his words like a show engine working behind clear glass, working without strain or stress, fret or friction, a perfect machine, automatically lubricated, exquisitely balanced, a miracle of bright, smooth mechanism. Tho voice is pure, cold perfection, passionlessly resonant, heartlessly melodious. It never falters or wavers, but" rolls out its precise cadences in measured lengths. Its articulations are unerringly accurate, every' vowel and every consonant cut clean, as if the keen lips were sharp knives and the keen tongue a guillotine. Almost inhuman is this curving cascade of unadorned eloquence, falling upon the silent strand of listeners, without a break ( md without a pause, poignantly isolated, seeking no sustenance of sympathy, and fearing no repugnance of antagonism. Other orators appeal for replying applauso, hut he disdains appeal as coldly as lie disdains defiance. He is enough for himself, and his power is a pitiless solitude. His primacy is painful, for not one man behind him or beside liim or before him contests his iron dominion.' Tlis hard virility makes tlio tense, attentive faces around him look like uneasy shadows. Tho most vivid personalities grow pale and vngue before his arrogant imperioUsliess. 'The cowed Opposition visibly shrivels away as he plunges a phrase like a dagger into its heart. Tho fight is unequal, and in vain his sword searches for a blade to bite or. a shield to dint. Contempt grows on his tongue as he feels the line of adversaries falling back out of range. Now and then a ragged volley of interruption- spurts forth, and he bites it into silence. The terrible swordsman is playing with his victims now, ,and as lie flicks their flesh daintily, an acid smile hovers on his lips and a chill gleam of derision lights his wary eye. He presses hard on their flying disorder, pins tliem in a corner, and then with a mocking flourish leaves | tli(sm gasping. His followers look on half afraid to cheer and half afraid to hold their silence. Now and then lie wheels round and looks at his soldiery with a glance of haughty generalship, menacingly confident, sternly self-re-liant. He is a leader who compels fear as well as faith, obedience as well as fidelity, respect as well as a kind of awed affection.

No man ever cultivated his defects | more vehemently. " Max " has caricatured him in the act of " acquiring personal magnetism,!' but Mr Asquith would rather die than be other than he is. He is a leader whom the led must take or leave. He will not hatch himself over again and hatch himself different. He scorns the arts of iilgratiation and opportunism. "I am I," he seems to say, and ho coldly declines to alter or alleviate his frigid temperament. What he is lie is, and others must conform to him, not he to tlieni. He will neither bend nor break. He will not be cajoled or coerced. There is no suppleness in his rigid spine. There he stands like a grey rock, the antithesis of his party, with its wild poetry of sentiment and sympatic, its quixotries of idealism, its gallant chivalry of adventure, its lovo of forlorn hopes, its loyalty to lost causes, its fine frenzy of pity for the weak and the poor and the oppressed. His Liberalism is governed by pure reason. . He chains up his feelings as if they were wild beasts. He habitually feels more than he says, and he habitually says less than he feels.

But there is passion under his ice and fire beneath his iron; and at times his austere loneliness is touched with a faint wistfulness and his 6torm-beaten isolation with an unwilling tenderness. For this hard, cold intollect is simple, and whatever is simple is sincere. The secret of Asquith is that he is a shy, proud Englishman, moulded by Baljiol and the Bar. His shyness is a kind of pride. Ho is armoured with reserve and cased with reticence. He understates and underacts because lio believes that the fear of gush is the beginning' of wisdom. He would rather repel than rhapsodise. For him truth is a form of good form.