The Most Brilliant Peer in the House of Lords.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XLV, Issue 2, 13 July 1910, Page 2

The Most Brilliant Peer in the House of Lords.

/ ¥"\ ARKED as is the superiority o 11 Lord Rosebery to every other .) ly talking man in England, it is / not to his-tongue alone that he owes his central position just now on the political stage. He is the most appreciated of peers to-day because he proclaims the doom of the House of Lords. Archibald Philip Primrose, fif h Earl of Rosebery, some time leader of the Liberal party, onee Prime Minister of England, and always the bright particular star of the peerage, burns in the present crisis with all that genius for oratory that has made his country for years hang upon his words. The fate of the House of Lords, suspects the London “Port,” is in his hands. Lord Rosebery alone can save the hereditary chamber from extinction, and all the conservative organs in England implore him to devise the plan. He is at this moment meditating it, insist the champions of bis order, but he is content for the time being to veil his thoughts in the

tplendid rhetoric for which he Is so famed. No other speeches are so widely read and quoted as his. No other speaker was ever so many kinds of an orator as he. No other politician has sprung so many surprises upon his country; and all England now awaits the greaiest of them all—the plan which, it is confidently predicted, will, at the last moment, avert the crisis which now portends the doom of the most ancient chamber of privilege in history. His Lordship is past sixty, but no one, affirms the London “Mail,” can deem him more than a youth. His smooth shaven chin is as round now as it looked when he won the Derby—for he is the first sportsman as he is the first peer of King George’s realm. His abundant hair is parted immaculately above the brow “juvenile,” and his grace of gesture and of figure mark him still as the most elegant of men of leisure and of fashion. His collars and his neckties set the fashion as despotically ns if King George himself gave the word. His country

house parties make the social history of the realm. His manners, while wholly modern, maintain the best traditions'- of his easte. “The truest thing one can say of Lord Rosebery,” opines “The Throne,” “is that there never was anyone like him in breeding, in ability amt in brilliance combined.” He seems, thia society organ avers, to have all the wit, all the genius, all the eloquence and all the popularity in the peerage. No living Briton with a hereditary title is so famous as Lord Rosebery, or so skilled in political manipulation, or so eagerly listened to, or so influential in shaping the public opinions upon which the destinies of the coming struggle aye dependent. Yet to the English, says the London “Mail,” he is incomprehensible. Lord Rosebery’s brilliant performances in mainta’ning the traditions of the turf in England are known as intimately as is the race-track itself. “AH the classic prizes have fallen to him,” writes Mr. Alfred E. T. Watson in “Tha

Badminton,” “and nearly all the rest of the most valued prizes with the exception of the Ascot gold cup.” Not that Lord Rosebery has found luck a constant divinity, but she has not been fickle to him. He has tested her by the lapse of time, for his colours, as Mr. Watson observes, were registered first more than forty years ago. He was then at Oxford, where the university authorities regarded with excessive severity the connection between an undergraduate and the racing stud. Unlike the sons of other peers, he did not, while a student, bet on horses under an assumed name. Summoned before the rector, he met the celebrated prediction that he would end badly with the still more celebrated boast: “I shall win a Derby, marry the heiress of the year, and become Prime Minister.’* Ladas was the horse that fulfilled’ oh® part of the prophecy, and the daughter! of Baron Meyer de Rothschild was tha lady who lived out the other.

“Lord Rosebery is to that most diligent of all students of his personality, Mr. 11. W. Massingham, who writes sympathetically of his theme in the London “Outlook,” “a peculiar and entertaining example of the kind of ornate talent Which pleases the world, but is useless for its higher purposes.” To tlie late Mr. Gladstone, Lord Rosebery was an insoluble mystery. “I ask myself,” he exclaimed once, “has he common sense?” Grace, charm, sympathy, a most delightful and irrepressible humour—these are Lord Rosebery’s, according to Mr. Massingham. “The pity is that they are good for so little—in him.” It might be different were his Lordship less sentimental. Of solid qualities—practical wisdom, self poise, gravity, conscientious convictions —he has always been destitute. Lord Rosebery’s private belief has ever been that nothing matters much. “He is, indeed, the chosen leader of the thoughtless.” His vast riches and his commanding position in the state, his golden ease of speech and his ravishing charm of manner render him the universal flatterer of a people that must be flattered with superhuman skill lest its suspicion of the flatterer's sincerity be awakened.

The real obstacles to Lord Rosebery’s higher success in life are formulated by Hector Macpherson in “The Contemporary Review” as first and foremost “his own, cold, critical temperament,” next his “morbid self consciousness” and, last of all, his “lack of fundamental coherent convictions.” Lord Rosebery is ever so many kinds of a human wreck, deplores this authority. His Lordship destroyed himself in the beginning by being too brilliant, too fatally fluent and too incorrigibly pliable. He must be charming, aesthetic, fascinating, and above all he must never offend by saying “No.” The result wa‘s the perfect actor the world recognises in him. One understands him best by revealing what he cannot do. He cannot be plain and blunt in speech. He cannot be emphatic in manner. He cannot be rude in action. Nature spoiled Lord Rosebery long before his parents followed her example, Mr. Macpherson insists. Nature’s favours to this peer are catalogued appealingly—they include incredible oratorical power, the loftiest social position, the temperament called artistic, the dramatic faculty and, greater than any of the •rest of these, a fund of unalloyed, undiluted and unfailing humour. This last of nature's gifts completed the ruin of the spoiled child of fate, for by means of his sense of humour, avers Mr. Macpherson, Lord Rosebery is enabled to hide his “poverty of ideas and his unsteadiness of purpose.” By giving a piquant flavour to all manner of oratory, he ■makes up to the average individual by the personal equation what he lacks in real statesmanship. “There is no limit to the splendid influence his Lordship might exert in his day and generation if, in addition to his manifold gifts and personal charms, he had a baptism of righteousness,” Mr. Macphersons own fear is that Lord Rosebery is doomed to repeat the experience of Bolingbroke. Like Bolingbroke, he has enjoyed a few years of power, and like Bolingbroke he seems fated to spend the best of his days as an ambitious aspirant to a great career. Books are to Lord Rosebery, as he confessed himself lately, a means of rest after fatigue. When his object is to be refreshed and exalted, to lose the cares of this world in the realms of imagination, then his book becomes to him more than a means. It i<s an end in itself. That is why he looks so young for all •his sixty' odd years. Now this is a characteristic Rosebery paradox, comments the London “Nation.” The Biblical writer avers that much study M a weariness of the flesh, and the star of the House of Lords must therefore declare that books make one young. iAnyhow, Lord Rosebery says again and again that books keep him refreshed, exalted and inspired. “The man with a happy taste for books,” to quote his Lordship's precise words, “can come in, tired and soured though he might be, and fall into the arms of some great author, who raised him from the ground and took him into a new heaven and a new earth, where he would forget his bruises and rest his limbs and return to the world a refreshed and happy

man.” Incidentally Lord Rosebery noted that he could never enjoy whisky and a good book together, and he much doubted if any mortal could; but reading and smoking together—these simultaneous activities in combination he pronounced from experience divine. It is because Lord Rosebery is by temperament unfitted for political campaigning, to follow his critic further, •that his latest crusade for a new bouse of peers must dissipate itself into the vacuous. “His high strung artistic nature instinctively shrinks from displays of political pugilism. He has not Air. Gladstone’s delight in the din of battle. Lord Rosebery’s success must come at once, or he loses heart and seeks the solaces of solitude.” That explains hie weather-vane principles. He is brilliant but uncertain, and consumed with sensitive vanity’. His soul is an artist’s soul, but his intellect is a hair splitter’s intellect. “In politics as in literature he is essentially an impressionist. When the people come for guidance, he presents •them with a series of dissolving views. His speeches are so many’ intellectual fireworks, exquisite to gaze upon, but affording no light to the footsteps.” What Lord Rosebery’ has to learn from life is that no amount of political genius no greatness of platform power, no personal magnetism, can take the place of intellectual conscientiousness. “Even when he does take a decisive step and naite his colours to the mast, he is haunted by a Hamlet-like indecision which makes him haul down the colours at the first convenient opportunity.” His fate will be to dazzle for a littie, predicts this prophet, and then vanish into outer darkness.