THE MAGNETISM OF POLITICS.
MR. JOHN MORLEY is about to return to political life after the extremely short interval which has elapsed since his defeat at Newcastle. The Montrose Burghs will, no doubt, afford him the opportunity he desires. We do not doubt that from his point of view he is right. If he really believes, as he does, that the cause of Irish Home-rule is the cause of true peace and true Union between England and Ireland, it is fitting that it should have at least one earnest and able represen- tative in a House of Commons which, outside the Irish Radical party, has hardly any ardent believer in that cause, certainly none of Mr. Morley's calibre. But the determina- tion of so considerable a writer and thinker, to fly back into the thick of political strife, as a moth flutters back into the candle, after he has felt how much he has suffered in the distractions of political war, and on the whole to how little purpose, is interesting and significant. He was, perhaps, the one statesman of the last Cabinet who did not feel that he had lost caste by his three years' tenure of office. He had kept Ireland quiet, and had ruled it with a certain amount of success. Unionists, of course, hold, as we cer- tainly hold very strongly, that he succeeded so far as he did succeed, because he had all the powers of the present Union to help him, and not in any degree because he proposed to himself to annihilate those powers. But that is nothing to our present purpose. We are not going to return to the old and almost exhausted question whether he is right or wrong, but only to discuss what are the causes apart from political conviction which have brought him back, under circumstances so discouraging, to the battle. He has all the accomplishments of a great writer. He has every excuse, if literature could possibly furnish an excuse, for acquiescing in his defeat, and leaving the cause of Irish Home-rule to a future generation to revive, if haply it be really so sound and so just that the future can be trusted to revive it. Many men who had possessed Mr. Morley's great literary gifts would, after his fifteen years' experience of the weariness and the dust of hopeless battle, have returned with a certain sense of relief and thankfulness to their literary work, and would have rejoiced in the tranquillity of the old life. Not so Mr. Morley. Though he has endured more disappointment and more varieties of disappointment than fall to the lot of most statesmen, disappointment at the miserable inca- pacity of his Irish prot6ges even more than at what he must regard as the perversity of his English adversaries, he is not disheartened. Turning away from the brilliant career which is open to him in literature, he goes back to the miserable confusions and the fruitless efforts of a, strife which it would seem that mere politicians could wage with just as much (or just as little) effect, with an eager appetite, to us almost amazing. What is the secret of the craving which takes him back to it ?
Of course it may be said to be an imperious sense of duty. Nor are we going to deny it. But such a sense of duty is quite inseparable from an equally strong sense of desire to per- form that duty. No man in his place could feel this duty to be obligatory upon him unless the eagerness for the fray gave him full assurance that he could adequately perform it. If his intellectual conviction that the cause of Irish Home-rule is the cause of liberty were ever so strong, he would not feel himself under a positive obligation to lose himself again in the din of battle, unless he had that deep craving for the "delight of battle with his peers" which alone qualifies a man for such feats of knight-errantry. What we want to know is whence that deep delight in battle, —and such chaotic battle too,—really comes ? Mr. Morley is in most directions a profound sceptic ; a sceptic in the truest sense. Nobody knows better than he how to state the reasons against as well as for the dubious conclusions in which on most speculative subjects he is disposed to rest. If he saw it to be for his advantage, even as an Irish states- man, to set forth the position of his opponents with regard to the question on which he is divided from them, with great candour and force, there is not one of thosa opponents who could do it better. It is not for want of discerning the strength of the opposite side of the case, that he cleaves so faithfully to his own side of it. If he had as much of the moral temper of the sceptic as he has of the intellectual .qualifications for one who balances between opposite conclusions, he would certainly not rush back to the battle with the ardour which he actually displays. But the truth is that Mr. Morley has all the temper of the eager combatant, with all the intellectual furniture of the impartial thinker. He loves to breathe the air of battle, even though no one could expound better, —if he chose,—the reasons for expecting ultimate defeat as well as those for anticipating ultimate victory.
This is the true secret of the magnetism of politics for not a few men of otherwise very speculative and impartial minds. There is something of the same attraction for political strife in Mr. Balfour, though in him it appears to be combined with less of the blind ardour of battle, than it is in Mr. Morley. Here are two first-rate men, who, both of them seem to be possessed of large insight into the difficulties of confident belief, though the one always inclines towards revolutionising the world without any con- fidence that the revolution will be overruled by any higher power, and the other towards keeping it in the groove a cautious progress. Yet both are attracted to political warfare by a delight in combat which seems singularly combined with their gift for a certain intellectual neutrality. We can understand Mr. Balfour better than we can understand Mr. Morley, because at the centre of his mind there is certainly a profound trust in the orderly super- intendence of human progress which suits his attitude as a Conservative though progressive statesman. It is far less easy to understand the association of something like vehemently revolutionary sympathies, such as Mr. Morley in all his French, and in some of his English writing, displays, with a clear discernment of the case on the other side,—for Mr. Morley does not think that there is any ultimate reason for identifying the government of the world with his own principles. But even in the case of Mr. Balfour it is impressive and not without a certain strangeness to find so much speculative balance of mind united with so much pleasure in the actual occupation and duty of the conduct of the battle. In Mr. Morley's case it is still stranger, for he cannot rely on any superintend- ing power on the side on which he fights, and yet he can see, when he chooses, all the array of considerations which make against him, quite as clearly as those which make for him.
The truth is, we suppose, that the magnetism of politics for minds of considerable speculative width, comes from the joy of warfare for its own sake, which inspires so many wills, without necessary relation to the intellectual con- victions on which the minds of the combatants rest. Clough, in his "Amours de Voyage," descants powerfully on the "ruinous force of the will" in supplementing in- tellectual bias by an almost arbitrary fiat of its own. We are disposed to discern this "ruinous force of the will" its Mr. John Morley's eagerness for political combat on the revolutionary side. He discerns clearly all that can be urged on the Conservative side. No one discerns it better. But for all that he delights in the fray, and delights in it all the more when he finds himself advo- cating the losing side. Of no one can it be said more truly, " Victrix cause diis placuit, sed vieta Catoni." He can understand fully all that makes for Conservatism, but he has a special joy in all that makes for the defeat of Conservatism, and for turning politics topsy-turvy. The magnetism of politics is not an intellectual magnetism. It is a fascination for the fray itself. And there appears to be an even greater joy in the battle on the side of revolution than there is on the side of Conservatism, for the revolutionist fights for the joy of the battle alone, for the delight of upsetting conventional assumptions which irritate him, the Conservative of Mr. Balfour's type, fights as the servant and the minister of the power which has conducted the long development of human civilisation.
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