Lord Haldane.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XLVII, Issue 26, 26 June 1912, Page 2

Lord Haldane.

The Bond of Union Between England and Germany.

THAT impending war between Germany and Great Britain, which looms so direly athwart

the journalistic horizons of London and Berlin, seemed for the moment to become remote and unthinkable when Lord Haldane received from the hands of Emperor William recently a’ bronze effigy of himself. All Berlin, the despatches tell us, was agog. Was disarmament about to cease to be a dream' Inspired organs proclaimed a new' peace, and the Berlin “Post” suggested, amid enthusiasm, that it be called by the name of Haldane. His Lordship, adds the German daily, is a Minister of War at home but an angel of peace abroad. The Hague, it opines, wears its laurels sheepishly when beholding his (Lordship's brow. The explanation of this wonder is found in the renown of Lord Haldane as interpreter of the German spirit to the

British lieu. Xo ot her Briton is held in such high esteem in the realm of the llohenzollern. Here is a man who comprehends, German literature, German philosophy, German manners, are all so many open books to him. His appreciations of the intellectual conquests of the nation miscalled an armed camp are devoured hungrily from Bremen to the Russian frontiers by the thousands of copies. The life and the career of Haldane are studied like algebra and admired like Homer. The eulogy he rci ecives from the “Vossisehe Zeitung” actually comforts the London "Times.” To the latter this man is the original discoverer of that new', strange Germany which began when William 11. proclaimed the future of his realm to be on the water. Haldane is the hero of the hour to a pair of puissant powers.

It is at the age of two that Richard Bunion Haldane emerges with the personality of the type so dear to students of ll

Iris Germanic career. His nurse happened then to discover the future link between British culture and the German mind busily shaping a pile of dirt in tin* garden. “If God,’’ he explained, “made a man out of the dust of the earth, why shouldn't JI" This philosophical speeulativeness of temperament is derived, according to the London "•Mail,” from tho

famous old Scottish family, the Haldanes of Gleneagles. They early began intermarrying with the nobility of Caledonia. The ancestral hall held a library of philosophy when the surrounding glens rang with shouts of the huntsman. Richard was a deep thinker at the age of six. He could read Aristotle in Greek when he was nine, becoming a I’latonist at ten. As a lad in Edinburgh, the city of his birth, he devoured metaphysics. At his graduation from the university he took first honours in the German philosophy he loves. Not satisfied with that, he crossed over to Gottingen and absorbed more. Thus it comes that he can quote Hegel, Fichte, ami Schopenhauer by the chapter from memory. He might resist Germany, says one admirer, but he always surrenders to Germanism.

Having made Germany Iris intellectual home, Lord Haldane, to follow our authority. dreams with Hoffman just as 110

doubts with Hegel. One can not visit his beautiful home in London —where he has lived the bachelor life so many years —without realizing, says a writer in "The Pall Mall Magazine,’’ that Germany has become to Haldane what India was to Warren Hastings.

There is a distinguished trio in British public life, explains a writer in London “Public Opinion,” who, like the three graces, ran not. be thought of apart. He who thinks of one must remember the rest. The three are Lord Rosebery, Lord Haldane, and Mr. Asquith. Haldane’s principal distinction at present, besides his post at the head of the War Office, is the position he holds as the living link binding Germany and Britain in human bonds of peace. He had other distinctions in his earlier years. "He won them much earlier than even the most successful usually do, unless they happen to have all the accidents of birth, as his fellow >Scot had# io whom he was long first lieutenant. When your eyes rest upon Lord Haldane’s soft, comfortable, plump figure ami plump bands, and behold Iris comfortable pom* and general air of suave selfeomplacem y as he addresses the court or a puldie meeting, or acts ns the superior#

yet tactful adviser of the British legislators on the subjects which they know they do not know very much about, you ■wonder what Haldane has to do with pessimistic philosophy.” Yet one of his earliest achievements, when probably he had not quite decided whether to be Lord Chancellor or to adorn a university as professor there, was the translation of a crabbed Schopenhauer into English so graceful as to be almost poetry at times.

Lord Haldane likes to talk in Parliament, our British contemporary notes. He likes to talk on the platform. His subjects are always, or nearly always, something above mere party politics. He lectures on themes dear to diners over their cigars and to the young men of literary and philosophical institutes. The ladies who work for women’s rights hear him gladly. The heavier magazines open their pages to him with delight. In short, Haldane has lived much in the public eye because, our contemporary says, it delights him to do so. “He is a clever, versatile, accomplished writer, speaker, and politician—a very good specimen of the man of general culture, who is equally at home in the library and in the world and who will get the most that can be got out of both.” But on the whole he has made more of the W'orld than of the library.

But Haldane's “comfortable presence,” adds Mr. 11. W. Massingham, in the London “Outlook,” reflects not only the amiability of his own character, but the sham liberalism he has shepherded with loving care. Lord Haldane, bring a philosopher, is inevitably a sceptic. That is, he does sot believe in liberalism, although obliged to p .rofess it after a fashion. “Physically, he might have sat for Browning’s Bishop Blougram, and his smiling face and ample figure, habited in the garb of the most picturesque of churches, would have adorned an eight-eenth-century gathering of wits and casuists.” Hence, while theology—of a kind—might well have claimed him, his place in a democratic party is hard to seek.

By way of answering the.«e critics of his. Lord Haldane loses no opportunity of explaining himself on the platform. Britain, he thinks, lacks ideas, especially an politics. Germany has many. Since Britain has no great ideas of her own, or, at any rate, very few, need she shrink to borrow ideas from those who have ■them to spare —the Germans? He loves to contrast the British attitude to science with that of the Germans. The British, he complains, have always made their fight for material prosperity first. When prosperity has been attained, Britain strives after ideas. This he deems an outcome of the Anglo-Saxon temperament. There is too great an aversion among Anglo-Saxons to anything that is abstract. There is a desire to do as much as possible by individual effort, to turn to science and to the aid of thought and organization for the completion rather than the foundation of the social edifice. That leads to great waste. It is a bad plan. Individualism is too much to the fore. National pride is too conspicuous. Patriotism is abused. It ceases to be a virtue at times. Thus (Frenchmen alone should not be proud of Laplace and Lavoisier. Not Germans alone should rejoice in the names of Weber, Helmholtz, Gauss, and Riemann. Others besides the English should speak with pride of Newton and of Darwin. Lord Haldane teaches, in short, that great men nowadays belong to the world.