Portraits and Miniatures (19 page)

It was a magnificent extravaganza, even if veering at times towards being a Jennifer's Diary of life in sixteenth-century Rome, but it was hardly a satisfactory synthesis of the competing roles of liberal culture and religious authority in the scheme of an ideal university between which he had veered throughout the nine Discourses. The dust was stardust, but he was frankly throwing it into the eyes of his audience while he escaped under its cover from the dilemma into which he had put himself. When, therefore, the whole series came to an end, and the work to which it led was complete, only one paragraph after the end of this pyrotechnical exhibition, I was left dazzled but intellectually unsatisfied. Newman had mostly held me spellbound in the grip of his prose, but he had convinced me neither that he had a practical plan for an Irish university in the 1850s or that he had left guidelines of great relevance for a university of any nationality or any or no faith today.

This does not mean that he did not shine splendid shafts of
light on to particular issues. I greatly enjoyed his attack on Victorian materialist values, where Nassau Senior, the first Professor of Political Economy in this University, is set up with many compliments, both to his own eminence and to the ‘unsordidness' of Oxford, to be the bull which is felled. ‘… the pursuit of wealth …' he exposes Nassau as saying, ‘is, to the mass of mankind, the great source of
moral
improvement.' Then he says: ‘I really should on every account be sorry, Gentlemen, to exaggerate, but indeed one is taken by surprise, one is startled, on meeting with so very categorical a contradiction of our Lord, St Paul, St Chrystostom, St Leo, and all Saints.'

Equally firm was his rejection in Discourse VII, many years ahead of its time, of the principle of contract funding for universities: ‘Now this is what some great men are very slow to allow; they insist that Education should be confined to some particular and narrow end, and should issue in some definite work, which can be weighed and measured. They argue as if everything, as well as every person, had its price; and that where there has been a great outlay, they have a right to expect a return in kind'.

Then, again, there is his exhortation, in Discourse VI, against losing one's way in detail and specialization. He starts with a little text: ‘A great memory does not make a philosopher, any more than a dictionary can be called a grammar.' Soon afterwards he goes into a fine passage which expands the need to command facts from a hillock, a sort of ‘Wellington at Waterloo' theory of knowledge.

I say then, if we would improve the intellect, we must ascend … It matters not whether our field of operation be wide or limited; in every case, to command it, is to mount above it. Who has not felt the irritation of mind and impatience created by a deep rich country, visited for the first time, with winding lanes and high hedges, and green steeps, and tangled woods, and every thing smiling indeed, but in a maze? The same feeling comes upon us in a strange city, when we have no map of its streets. Have you not heard of practised travellers, when they come first into a place, mounting some high hill or
church tower, by way of reconnoitring its neighbourhood. In like manner you must be above your knowledge, not under it, or it will oppress you; and the more you have of it, the greater will be the load.

So Newman could have been expected to be pretty strong on all the main issues that beset universities today. He would have been against contract funding, he would have supported tenure and academic freedom, certainly against any depredations from the state and probably instinctively against any from Archbishop Cullen, although he would have found it more difficult to speak unequivocally about this. Student loans, I think, he would have found difficult to engage with, although he would not have been in favour of encouraging the pursuit of careers of mammon in order to repay. I am not sure that he told us much about how to strike the balance between research and the teaching of the young, although his emphasis was all on the latter. He respected science, but I do not think that he regarded the advancement of the frontiers of knowledge as the most important form of human activity, any more than he did the pursuit of wealth. And there can be no doubt that he would have been on the restrictive side in recent controversies about experiments on the embryo.

I agree with the view of Professor Owen Chadwick (in his little book in the
Past Masters
series) that although Newman professed himself to have spent his life fighting liberalism, this was only true on his own very special and religious definition of liberalism, which almost equated it with intellectual brashness, and that some of his work had a considerable liberalizing influence. Yet, from the High Toryism of his outraged opposition to Catholic emancipation when he was a young Fellow of Oriel to his view when he was a very old man that issues should not be pursued when the results of the enquiry might unsettle ‘simple people', his respect for ecclesiastical authority necessarily set limits to seeing him as the patron saint of universities as republics of ideas, as unfettered as they are broad-based.

I have talked more about Newman and less about universities than you might have expected me to do. That is partly because
I have many more opportunities to talk about universities than I do to talk about Newman, and partly because I have found him a wholly absorbing even if sometimes provoking a subject.

This essay started life as a lecture given to the Institute of Contemporary British History at the London School of Economics in November 1987. It has been brought up to date mainly by the changing of tenses.

A Squith Became Prime Minister eighty-five years ago and held office for eight years, two hundred and forty-one days, which was then the longest continuous period since Lord Liverpool, the only Prime Minister to have made a reputation out of longevity. Walpole and the younger Pitt were both longer in office but their fame had other less arithmetical components. Mrs Thatcher overtook Asquith's record on 3 January 1988. I am convinced that it is essential to have a cumulative period in office of at least five years in order to rank as a Prime Minister of major impact. No one of the last one hundred years who does not fulfil this criterion has achieved the front rank. Not Rosebery, not Balfour (although, despite the electoral ignominy of his fall, he comes nearest to being the exception), not Campbell-Bannerman, not Neville Chamberlain, not Eden, not Home, not Heath, not Callaghan. That leaves three Prime Ministers who served over five years in peacetime within my eighty-five-year span and are not mentioned in my title: MacDonald, Macmillan, Wilson. I left them out partly because I have not written books about them. But nor have I about Mrs Thatcher. She however was there for so long and provided such an idiosyncratic style of government that she demands inclusion.

I begin my excursion with the currently ill-regarded and underestimated Asquith. A couple of years ago I came to re-read my life of him, first published in 1964, after an interval of nearly nine years. I was struck again by the quality of his mind and temperament and hence by his capacity to lead a government. It was not an adventurous mind which breached new frontiers, but he had knowledge, judgement, insight and tolerance. And for at least his first six years as Prime Minister he presided with an easy authority over the most talented government of this century. How would I illustrate his quality in government? I give two examples.

First, a memorandum on the constitutional position of the Sovereign, which he wrote on holiday in Scotland in September 1913 without any official advice, probably without any reference books to look at, and sent off direct to King George V. It was in reply to a rather pathetic
cri de coeur
from the King, complaining that he would be vilified by half his subjects whether or not he approved the Irish Home Rule Bill and almost suggesting that he had an equal constitutional choice between the two courses. Asquith's dismissal of this foolish idea was done with erudition and succinctness presented in a framework of muscular argument while treating the King with a firm courtesy untinged with any hint of obsequiousness. I can think of no other Prime Minister this century who could have written such a document out of the resources of his own mind with equal authority.

Second, as late as the eighth and penultimate year of his premiership he gave a brilliant and effective display of his talents as an effortless administrator. Kitchener (Margot Asquith's ‘great poster' successfully masquerading as a great man) had by 1915 become a focus of indecision at the War Office. It could be held that Asquith ought to have sacked him, but given Kitchener's hold on public opinion that course was well beyond the limits of Asquith's courage. What he did was to encourage Kitchener to go on a month's visit to Gallipoli, temporarily himself to take over the War Office (as he had done four months after the Curragh mutiny in 1914) and quickly to lance several boils that Kitchener had allowed to fester for half a year or more. It was a last
display of an exceptional administrative talent, and the fact that he enjoyed doing it contradicts the view that he was over the hill and had become indolently ineffective by 1914 at the latest.

Asquith was lazy only in the sense that because of his remarkable skill in the speedy (but perhaps too coolly detached) dispatch of public business he was able to keep a lot of time for pastimes outside politics. Nevertheless, I think he was in office too long and his style was unsuited to the demands of wartime leadership. It was not so much that Lloyd George, when he replaced him, was a better war leader. His errors of strategic judgement and his ineffectiveness in controlling a High Command backed by the King were just as great as were those of Asquith. But Lloyd George had the zest and the brio to behave as though he were a better war leader, and that was half the battle.

Asquith did not like the frenetic drama, the mock heroics, of politicians' war, although he certainly did not insulate his family from the tribulations of soldiers' war, and he could not be bothered to pretend to an enthusiasm he did not feel. The lady who, as a conversational gambit in 1915, said, ‘Mr Asquith, do you take an interest in the war?' was nearer to the bone than perhaps she imagined. His pattern of government should therefore be studied mainly in its peacetime manifestation, although part of the complaint against him was that this pattern was hardly changed when the war began.

Although in general his authority in the government was good, with no suggestion that he was frightened of strong ministers, of whom he had plenty, or that they were disrespectful of him, I do not think it could be said that he operated the Cabinet tautly. There was then no written record of its proceedings, apart from his own handwritten letters to the King after each meeting. That sounds unimaginable today, but it was a practice that he had inherited from all his predecessors, including one as efficient as Peel and another as energetic as Gladstone. I think the lack of tautness had other causes. He did not talk much in Cabinet himself. He had other Cabinet occupations. But he rather believed in letting discussion run on, almost exhausting itself before he could see developing what he liked to describe as a ‘favourable curve' for bringing it to a satisfactory conclusion.

These methods made him good at holding rumbustious colleagues together and good too at avoiding foolish decisions. It made him less good at taking wise decisions ahead of time and at galvanizing the less energetic members of his government. This latter deficiency must be seen in the context of his indisputable achievement of presiding over one of the only two major reforming left-of-centre governments of the past hundred years. He did not greatly interfere in the work of departmental ministers and when he did it was to give them necessary but slightly reluctant support where needed, rather than to correct them. Lloyd George, ironically in some ways, was the foremost beneficiary of this support, both in getting the Budget of 1909 through a reluctant Cabinet and at the time of his Marconi peccadilloes. Asquith allowed Edward Grey an almost complete independence at the Foreign Office, but as that somewhat insular and priggish birdwatcher was, in my view, one of the most overrated statesmen in the first half of this century the results were not altogether happy.

As a butcher of ministers, Asquith was in the middle grade, about half-way between Gladstone, who regarded his Cabinet colleagues, once appointed, as having the inviolate permanence of members of the College of Cardinals, and Macmillan, who in 1962 axed a third of them like junior managers in an ailing company. Asquith dropped Tweedmouth, his First Lord of the Admiralty, when he became seriously deranged, Herbert Gladstone, who was an incompetent Home Secretary but who was compensated with the Governor-Generalship of South Africa, Charles Masterman when he lost two by-elections running, and Haldane, Asquith's oldest political friend, because the Tories, foolishly from several points of view, demanded Haldane's head as the price for accepting a rotten lot of portfolios for themselves when they joined the 1915 Coalition. But he left the North Sea to engulf Kitchener and the Dublin Easter rebellion to destroy Birrell as Chief Secretary for Ireland. Birrell, in spite of splendid epigrams, ought to have gone much sooner before the rebellion also destroyed the prospect of Home Rule within a United Kingdom. He reshuffled some of his ministers a good deal, although not as much as Wilson, who had not a butcher's but a circus
master's approach to reshuffling. Under Asquith, McKenna and Churchill in particular were subjected to a number of rather pointless changes.

Asquith's own attention was mostly concentrated on the high constitutional issues of which there were plenty in the peacetime life of his government: on relations with the Lords and with the Sovereign leading to the Parliament Act, on Irish Home Rule, on Welsh Church disestablishment, and on the failed suffrage reform. Although he had himself introduced the first old-age pension in his last Budget as Chancellor before becoming Prime Minister, he left the subsequent development of national insurance as much to Lloyd George as he did foreign affairs to Grey until late July 1914. Nevertheless, it would be quite wrong to think of him as other than the leading figure in his own government, the one whom his colleagues naturally accepted as the fount of praise or rebuke, with the greatest command over the House of Commons, and the best-known figure to the public. In this last respect, being well known to the public, and only in this last respect, Lloyd George was a near runner-up.