The Mirrors of Downing Street | Page 6

order of men may be seen from his closer friendships. It is
impossible to imagine Mr. Gladstone enjoying the society of Mr. Lloyd
George's most constant companion although that gentleman is a far
better creature than the cause of his fortunes; and one doubts if Lord

Beaconsfield would have trusted even the least frank of his private
negotiations to some of the men who enjoy the Prime Minister's
political confidence. Nor can Mr. Lloyd George retort that he makes
use of all kinds of energy to get his work done, for one knows very well
that he is far more at his ease with these third-rate people than with
people of a higher and more intellectual order. For culture he has not
the very least of predilections; and the passion of morality becomes
more and more one of the pious memories of his immaturity.
Dr. Clifford would be gladly, even beautifully, welcomed; but after an
hour an interruption by Sir William Sutherland would be a delightful
relief.
M. Clemenceau exclaimed of him, lifting up amazed hands, "I have
never met so ignorant a man as Lloyd George!" A greater wit said of
him, "I believe Mr. Lloyd George can read, but I am perfectly certain
he never does."
I detect in him an increasing lethargy both of mind and body. His
passion for the platform, which was once more to him than anything
else, has almost gone. He enjoys well enough a fight when he is in it,
but to get him into a fight is not now so easy as his hangers-on would
wish. The great man is tired, and, after all, evolution is not to be hurried.
He loves his arm-chair, and he loves talking. Nothing pleases him for a
longer spell than desultory conversation with someone who is content
to listen, or with someone who brings news of electoral chances. Of
course he is a tired man, but his fatigue is not only physical. He
mounted up in youth with wings like an eagle, in manhood he was able
to run without weariness, but the first years of age find him unable to
walk without faintness--the supreme test of character. If he had been
able to keep the wings of his youth I think he might have been almost
the greatest man of British history. But luxury has invaded, and
cynicism; and now a cigar in the depths of an easy-chair, with Miss
Megan Lloyd George on the arm, and a clever politician on the
opposite side of the hearth, this is pleasanter than any poetic vapourings
about the millennium.
If only he could rise from that destroying chair, if only he could fling

off his vulgar friendships, if only he could trust himself to his vision, if
only he could believe once again passionately in truth, and justice, and
goodness, and the soul of the British people!
One wonders if the angels in heaven will ever forgive his silence at a
time when the famished children of Austria, many of them born with
no bones, were dying like flies at the shrivelled breasts of their starving
mothers. One wonders if the historian sixty years hence will be able to
forgive him his rebuff to the first genuine democratic movement in
Germany during the war. His responsibility to God and to man is
enormous beyond reckoning. Only the future can decide his place here
and hereafter. It is a moral universe, and, sooner or later, the judgments
of God manifest themselves to the eyes of men.
One seems to see in him an illustrious example both of the value and
perils of emotionalism. What power in the world is greater, controlled
by moral principle? What power so dangerous, when moral earnestness
ceases to inspire the feelings?
Before the war he did much to quicken the social conscience
throughout the world; at the outbreak of war he was the very voice of
moral indignation; and during the war he was the spirit of victory; for
all this, great is our debt to him. But he took upon his shoulders a
responsibility which was nothing less than the future of civilization,
and here he trusted not to vision and conscience but to compromise,
makeshift, patches, and the future of civilization is still dark indeed.
This I hope may be said on his behalf when he stands at the bar of
history, that the cause of his failure to serve the world as he might have
done, as Gladstone surely would have done, was due rather to a
vulgarity of mind for which he was not wholly responsible than to any
deliberate choice of a cynical partnership with the powers of darkness.

LORD CARNOCK

LORD CARNOCK, 1ST BARON (ARTHUR NICOLSON, 11TH

BART.)
Born, 1849. Educ.: Rugby and Oxford; in Foreign Office,