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Page 4
This was no stage acting. His voice broke, his eyes filled with tears,
and his hand, holding a piece of notepaper before him, shook like a
leaf. There was not a man who heard him whose heart was not touched, and
whose humanity was not quickened. The trade secrets were pooled. The
supply of munitions was hastened.
This is the secret of his power. No man of our period, when he is
profoundly moved, and when he permits his genuine emotion to carry him
away, can utter _an appeal to conscience_ with anything like so
compelling a simplicity. His failure lies in a growing tendency to
discard an instinctive emotionalism for a calculated astuteness which
too often attempts to hide its cunning under the garb of honest
sentiment. His intuitions are unrivalled: his reasoning powers
inconsiderable.
When Mr. Lloyd George first came to London he shared not only a room in
Gray's Inn, but the one bed that garret contained with a
fellow-countryman. They were both inconveniently poor, but Mr. Lloyd
George the poorer in this, that as a member of Parliament his expenses
were greater. The fellow-lodger, who afterwards became private secretary
to one of Mr. Lloyd George's rivals, has told me that no public speech
of Mr. Lloyd George ever equalled in pathos and power the speeches which
the young member of Parliament would often make in those hungry days,
seated on the edge of the bed, or pacing to and fro in the room,
speeches lit by one passion and directed to one great object, lit by the
passion of justice, directed to the liberation of all peoples oppressed
by every form of tyranny.
This spirit of the intuitional reformer, who feels cruelty and wrong
like a pain in his own blood, is still present in Mr. Lloyd George, but
it is no longer the central passion of his life. It is, rather, an
aside: as it were a memory that revives only in leisure hours. On
several occasions he has spoken to me of the sorrows and sufferings of
humanity with an unmistakable sympathy. I remember in particular one
occasion on which he told me the story of his boyhood: it was a moving
narrative, for never once did he refer to his own personal deprivations,
never once express regret for his own loss of powerful encouragements in
the important years of boyhood. The story was the story of his widowed
mother and of her heroic struggle, keeping house for her shoemaking
brother-in-law on the little money earned by the old bachelor's village
cobbling, to save sixpence a week--sixpence to be gratefully returned to
him on Saturday night. "That is the life of the poor!" he exclaimed
earnestly. Then he added with bitterness, "And when I try to give them
five shillings a week in their old age I am called the 'Cad of the
Cabinet'!"
Nothing in his life is finer than the struggle he waged with the Liberal
Cabinet during his days as Chancellor of the Exchequer. The private
opposition he encountered in Downing Street, the hatred and contempt of
some of his Liberal colleagues, was exceeded on the other side of
politics only in the violent mind of Sir Edward Carson. Even the gentle
John Morley was troubled by his hot insistences. "I had better go," he
said to Mr. Lloyd George; "I am getting old: I have nothing now for you
but criticism." To which the other replied, "Lord Morley, I would sooner
have your criticism than the praise of any man living"--a perfectly
sincere remark, sincere, I mean, with the emotionalism of the moment.
His schemes were disordered and crude; nevertheless the spirit that
informed them was like a new birth in the politics of the whole world. A
friend of mine told me that he had seen pictures of Mr. Lloyd George on
the walls of peasants' houses in the remotest villages of Russia.
But those days have departed and taken with them the fire of Mr. Lloyd
George's passion. The laboured peroration about the hills of his
ancestors, repeated to the point of the ridiculous, is all now left of
that fervid period. He has ceased to be a prophet. Surrounded by
second-rate people, and choosing for his intimate friends mainly the new
rich, and now thoroughly liking the game of politics for its amusing
adventure, he has retained little of his original genius except its
quickness.
His intuitions are amazing. He astonished great soldiers in the war by
his premonstrations. Lord Milner, a cool critic, would sit by the sofa
of the dying Dr. Jameson telling how Mr. Lloyd George was right again
and again when all the soldiers were wrong. Lord Rhondda, who disliked
him greatly and rather despised him, told me how often Mr. Lloyd George
put heart into a Cabinet that was really trembling on the edge of
despair. It seems true that he never once doubted ultimate victory,
and, what is much more remarkable, never once failed to read the
German's mind.
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