Margot Asquith, an Autobiography Part 21

"My Lord! How you can dance! Who taught you, I'd like to know?"

I turned round and saw the lovely face of Kate Vaughan. She wore a long, black, clinging crepe-de-chine dress and a little black bonnet with a velvet bow over one ear; her white throat and beautiful arms were bare.

"Why," she said, "you could understudy me, I believe! You come round and I'll show you my parts and YOU will never lack for goldie boys!"

I remember the expression, because I had no idea what she meant by it. She explained that, if I became her under-study at the Gaiety, I would make my fortune. I was surprised that she had taken me for a professional, but not more so than she was when I told her that I had never had a lesson in ballet-dancing in my life.

My lovely coach, however, fell sick and had to give up the stage.

She wrote me a charming letter, recommending me to her own dancing-master, M. d'Auban, under whom I studied for several years.

One day, on returning from my early dancing-lesson to Thomas's Hotel, I found my father talking to Lord Rosebery. He said I had better run away; so, after kissing him and shaking hands with the stranger I left the room. As I shut the door, I heard Lord Rosebery say:

"Your girl has beautiful eyes."

I repeated this upstairs, with joy and excitement, to the family, who, being in a good humour, said they thought it was true enough if my eyes had not been so close together. I took up a gla.s.s, had a good look at myself and was reluctantly compelled to agree.

I asked my father about Lord Rosebery afterwards, and he said:

"He is far the most brilliant young man living and will certainly be Prime Minister one day."

Lord Rosebery was born with almost every advantage: he had a beautiful smile, an interesting face, a remarkable voice and natural authority. When at Oxford, he had been too much interested in racing to work and was consequently sent down--a punishment shared at a later date and on different grounds by another distinguished statesman, the present Viscount Grey--but no one could say he was not industrious at the time that I knew him and a man of education. He made his fame first by being Mr. Gladstone's chairman at the political meetings in the great Midlothian campaign, where he became the idol of Scotland. Whenever there was a crowd in the streets or at the station, in either Glasgow or Edinburgh, and I enquired what it was all about, I always received the same reply:

"Rozbury!"

I think Lord Rosebery would have had a better nervous system and been a happier man if he had not been so rich. Riches are over- estimated in the Old Testament: the good and successful man receives too many animals, wives, apes, she-goats and peac.o.c.ks.

The values are changed in the New: Christ counsels a different perfection and promises another reward. He does not censure the man of great possessions, but He points out that his riches will hamper him in his progress to the Kingdom of Heaven and that he would do better to sell all; and He concludes with the penetrating words:

"Of what profit is it to a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?"

The soul here is freedom from self.

Lord Rosebery was too thin-skinned, too conscious to be really happy. He was not self-swayed like Gladstone, but he was self- enfolded. He came into power at a time when the fortunes of the Liberal party were at their lowest; and this, coupled with his peculiar sensibility, put a severe strain upon him. Some people thought that he was a man of genius, morbidly sensitive shrinking from public life and the Press, cursed with insufficient ambition, sudden, baffling, complex and charming. Others thought that he was a man irresistible to his friends and terrible to his enemies, dreaming of Empire, besought by kings and armies to put countries and continents straight, a man whose notice blasted or blessed young men of letters, poets, peers or politicians, who at once scared and compelled every one he met by his freezing silence, his playful smile, or the weight of his moral indignation: the truth being that he was a mixture of both.

Lord Salisbury told me he was the best occasional speaker he had ever heard; and certainly he was an exceptionally gifted person.

He came to Glen constantly in my youth and all of us wors.h.i.+pped him. No one was more alarming to the average stranger or more playful and affectionate in intimacy than Lord Rosebery.

An announcement in some obscure paper that he was engaged to be married to me came between us in later years. He was seriously annoyed and thought I ought to have contradicted this. I had never even heard the report till I got a letter in Cairo from Paris, asking if I would not agree to the high consideration and respectful homages of the writer and allow her to make my chemises. After this, the matter went completely out of my head, till, meeting him one day in London, I was greeted with such frigid self-suppression that I felt quite exhausted. A few months later, our thoughtful Press said I was engaged to be married to Arthur Balfour. As I had seen nothing of Lord Rosebery since he had gone into a period of long mourning, I was acclimatised to doing without him, but to lose Arthur's affection and friends.h.i.+p would have been an irreparable personal loss to me. I need not have been afraid, for this was just the kind of rumour that challenged his insolent indifference to the public and the Press.

Seeing me come into Lady Rothschild's ball-room one night, he left the side of the man he was conversing with and with his elastic step stalked down the empty parquet floor to greet me. He asked me to sit down next to him in a conspicuous place; and we talked through two dances. I was told afterwards that some one who had been watching us said to him:

"I hear you are going to marry Margot Tennant."

To which he replied:

"No, that is not so. I rather think of having a career of my own."

Lord Rosebery's two antagonists, Sir William Harcourt and Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, were very different men.

Sir William ought to have lived in the eighteenth century. To ill.u.s.trate his sense of humour: he told me that women should be played with like fish; only in the one case you angle to make them rise and in the other to make them fall. He had a great deal of wit and nature, impulsive generosity of heart and a temperament that clouded his judgment. He was a man to whom life had added nothing; he was perverse, unreasonable, brilliant, boisterous and kind when I knew him; but he must have been all these in the nursery.

At the time of the split in our party over the Boer War, when we were in opposition and the phrase "methods of barbarism" became famous, my personal friends were in a state of the greatest agitation. Lord Spencer, who rode with me nearly every morning, deplored the att.i.tude which my husband had taken up. He said it would be fatal to his future, dissociating himself from the Pacifists and the Pro-Boers, and that he feared the Harcourts would never speak to us again. As I was devoted to the latter, and to their son Lulu [Footnote: The present Viscount Harcourt.] and his wife May--still my dear and faithful friends--I felt full of apprehension. We dined with Sir Henry and Lady Lucy one night and found Sir William and Lady Harcourt were of the company. I had no opportunity of approaching either of them before dinner, but when the men came out of the dining-room, Sir William made a bee-line for me. Sitting down, he took my hand in both of his and said:

"My dear little friend, you need not mind any of the quarrels! The Asquith evenings or the Rosebery afternoons, all these things will pa.s.s; but your man is the man of the future!"

These were generous words, for, if Lord Morley, my husband and others had backed Sir William Harcourt instead of Lord Rosebery when Gladstone resigned, he would certainly have become Prime Minister.

I never knew Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman well, but whenever we did meet we had great laughs together. He was essentially a bon vivant, a boulevardier and a humorist. At an official luncheon given in honour of some foreign Minister, Campbell-Bannerman, in an admirable speech in French--a language with which he was familiar--described Arthur Balfour, who was on one side of him, as l'enfant gate of English politics and Chamberlain, who was also at the lunch, as l'enfant terrible.

On the opening day of Parliament, February the 14th, 1905, he made an amusing and telling speech. It was a propos of the fiscal controversy which was raging all over England and which was destined to bring the Liberal party into power at the succeeding two general elections. He said that Arthur Balfour was "like a general who, having given the command to his men to attack, found them attacking one another; when informed of this, he shrugs his shoulders and says that he can't help it if they will misunderstand his orders!"

In spite of the serious split in the Liberal Party over the Boer War, involving the disaffection of my husband, Grey and Haldane, Campbell-Bannerman became Prime Minister in 1905.

He did not have a coupon election by arrangement with the Conservative Party to smother his opponents, hut asked Henry, before he consulted any one, what office he would take for himself and what he thought suitable for other people in his new Cabinet.

Only men of a certain grandeur of character can do these things, but every one who watched the succeeding events would agree that Campbell-Bannerman's generosity was rewarded.

When C.B.--as he was called--went to Downing Street, he was a tired man; his wife was a complete invalid and his own health had been undermined by nursing her. As time went on, the late hours in the House of Commons began to tell upon him and he relegated more and more of his work to my husband.

One evening he sent for Henry to go and see him at 10 Downing Street and, telling him that he was dying, thanked him for all he had done, particularly for his great work on the South African const.i.tution. He turned to him and said:

"Asquith, you are different from the others, and I am glad to have known you ... G.o.d bless you!"

C.B. died a few hours after this.

I now come to another Prime Minister, Arthur Balfour.

When Lord Morley was writing the life of Gladstone, Arthur Balfour said to me:

"If you see John Morley, give him my love and tell him to be bold and indiscreet."

A biography must not be a brief either for or against its client and it should be the same with an autobiography. In writing about yourself and other living people you must take your courage in both hands. I had thought of putting as a motto on the t.i.tle-page of this book, "As well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb"; but I gave it up when my friends gave me away and I saw it quoted in the newspapers; and I chose Blake and the Bible.

If I have written any words here that wound a friend or an enemy, I can only refer them to my general character and ask to be judged by it. I am not tempted to be spiteful and have never consciously hurt any one in my life; but in this book I must write what I think without fear or favour and with a strict regard to unmodelled truth.

Arthur Balfour was never a standard-bearer. He was a self- indulgent man of simple tastes. For the average person he was as puzzling to understand and as difficult to know as he was easy for me and many others to love. You may say that no average man can know a Prime Minister intimately; but most of us have met strangers whose minds we understood and whose hearts we reached without knowledge and without effort; and some of us have had an equally surprising and more painful experience when, after years of love given and received, we find the friend upon whom we had counted has become a stranger.

He was difficult to understand, because I was never sure that he needed me; and difficult to know intimately, because of his formidable detachment. The most that many of us could hope for was that he had a taste in us as one might have in clocks or furniture.

Balfour was blessed or cursed at his birth, according to individual opinion, by two a.s.sets: charm and wits. The first he possessed to a greater degree than any man, except John Morley, that I have ever met. His social distinction, exquisite attention, intellectual tact, cool grace and lovely bend of the head made him not only a flattering listener, but an irresistible companion. The disadvantage of charm--which makes me say cursed or blessed--is that it inspires every one to combine and smooth the way for you throughout life. As the earnest housemaid removes dust, so all his friends and relations kept disagreeable things from his path; and this gave him more leisure in his life than any one ought to have.

His wits, with which I say that he was also cursed or blessed-- quite apart from his brains--gave him confidence in his improvisings and the power to sustain any opinion on any subject, whether he held the opinion or not, with equal brilliance, plausibility and success, according to his desire to dispose of you or the subject. He either finessed with the ethical basis of his intellect or had none. This made him unintelligible to the average man, unforgivable to the fanatic and a G.o.d to the blunderer.

On one occasion my husband and I went to a lunch, given by old Mr.

McEwan, to meet Mr. Frank Harris. I might have said what my sister Laura did, when asked if she had enjoyed herself at a similar meal. "I would not have enjoyed it if I hadn't been there," as, with the exception of Arthur Balfour, I did not know a soul in the room. He sat like a prince, with his sphinx-like imperviousness to bores, courteous and concentrated on the languis.h.i.+ng conversation. I made a few gallant efforts and my husband, who is particularly good on these self-conscious occasions, did his best ... but to no purpose.

Frank Harris, in a general disquisition to the table, at last turned to Arthur Balfour and said, with an air of finality:

"The fact is, Mr. Balfour, all the faults of the age come from Christianity and journalism."

To which Arthur replied with rapier quickness and a child-like air: