Asquith (5 page)

In appearance Helen Asquith was tall, brown-haired and very good-looking in a quiet featured way. The impression which survives of her is of an unambitious woman, with a calm and quietly
assured character. “ Hers was a beautiful and simple spirit,”
^d
Haldane recorded in his autobiography. Her husband wrote: “ She had one of those personalities which it is almost impossible to depict. The strong colours of the palette seem to be too heavy and garish: it is difficult to paint a figure in the soft grey tints which would best suit her, and yet she was not neutral or negative. Her mind was clear and strong, but it was not cut in facets and did not flash lights, and no one would have called her clever or “ intellectual ”. What gave her her rare quality was her character, which everyone who knew her intimately (Haldane for instance) agrees was the most selfless and unworldly that they have ever encountered. She was warm, impulsive, naturally quick-tempered, and generous almost to a fault. . . . ”
^e

Asquith was right about the difficulties of depiction. The picture he gives is not altogether clear. But there is no doubt that he lived contentedly with her for many years; and the talent of so many of their children was such that she must surely have contributed substantially to the strain.

The first of these children, Raymond, was born in 1878. Partly on the basis of an effortless academic record which surpassed even that of his father, he left the memory of a figure of almost legendary talent when he was killed in 1916. The second son, Herbert (or Beb as he was known in the family) was born three years later. He followed his father and brother in becoming President of the Union, but not in their quality as classical scholars, although he made a minor reputation as a poet and novelist. The third son, Arthur (or Oc), born in 1883, was the least intellectual of the family. But he achieved distinction as a war-time soldier, reached the rank of Brigadier-General at 31, and was recommended for the Victoria Cross.

In 1887 Helen Asquith’s only daughter, now Lady Violet Bonham Carter, was born. The conventions of her time and
milieu
denied her any opportunity for academic achievement, but she developed a political knowledge and oratorical power which have made her one of the outstanding women of her generation. The last child was Cyril, born in 1890. His academic record was still more memorable than that of his older brother.
¹
Like Raymond and Herbert he went to the bar and rose to become a Lord of Appeal Ordinary before his relatively early death in 1954.

¹
_{The freemasonry of intellectual success within which Asquith family relations came to be conducted is perfectly summed up by the note which
Cyril received from Raymond when in 1908) he followed him (and his father) in winning the first Balliol scholarship:}

_{Dear Cyril
,}

_{Fancy
you
being as clever as
—}

_Raymond.

At least three of these children were by any standards exceptional and the other two were in no way negligible figures. The one quality which their father failed to transmit to any of them (except to Violet, to whom it was of least use) was the sustained ambition which comes from a desire to influence the development of events. Here, perhaps, their mother’s character played its part.

With the growth of Ills family—at least until 1883—greatly exceeding that of his practice, and with his Balliol fellowship expiring in 1881, Asquith’s need for additional income became intense. At first his search for this had mainly to take the form of examining and teaching, and not at a particularly elevated level. For a few years he marked papers set by the Oxford and Cambridge Board for examinations at the public schools, and reviewed the work, amongst many others, of George Curzon at Eton and Austen Chamberlain at Rugby. Then he taught himself the rudiments of economics (a subject for which his sceptical and strictly non-mathematical mind gave him neither great affinity nor particular aptitude) in order that he might pass on the teaching of Marshall and Jevons to University Extension Classes at Wimbledon and Clapham and other suburbs. He also lectured in the law to audiences of would-be solicitors. In 1880 he gave a course in Chancery Lane on the law of insurance and carriage by land.

None of this work was either well-paid or intellectually stimulating to Asquith. He was not a natural teacher, for his lucidity was unmatched by any insistent desire to impart knowledge or to open the minds of others. Even as a political speaker he neither sought nor needed any very close relationship with his audience, and as an advocate he was always a little impatient (and consequently unskilled) in dealing with the whims of juries—and even of judges. He was therefore not sorry when it became possible to tilt the balance of his income-raising efforts towards writing, which had the additional advantage of being more remunerative. His attempt at publication within the field of his profession was unsuccessful however. He did a
lot of work in preparation of a manual on the law of carriage by sea, but was frustrated by the publication, before he was ready, of a definitive text-book on the subject, and consequently abandoned his own labours.

As was his habit, he met the setback with equanimity; and it was, in any event, balanced by the growth of an intimate connection with two leading weekly papers. The first was the
Spectator
, then under the joint editorship and proprietorship of Richard Holt Hutton and Meredith Townsend. They were an incongruous couple,
¹
but they worked smoothly together and produced a successful paper, Liberal in politics but literary in much of its content, and almost all written by themselves. What was not written by them was written by a very few outside contributors, of whom Asquith was probably the most constant. His association with the paper was sufficiently close that when one or other of the two editors went away, he frequently moved in and helped to put the paper together. He wrote for them upon what he described as “ almost every kind of topic—political, social, literary, economic,”
^f
but the two essays which he chose subsequently to republish
^g
' were both on severely classical subjects—The Art of Tacitus and The Age of Demosthenes.

¹
_{“ Ostensibly they had nothing in common,” Asquith wrote of them “ Townsend, with his courtly Anglo-Indian air, tapping his snuff-box, am walking up and down his room, emitting dogmatic paradoxes: Hutton more than short-sighted, looking out on external things through a monoc with an extra-powerful lens, and talking with the almost languid, air of one who had in the old days breakfasted with Crabbe Robinson, and sat at the feet of Arthur Clough.”
(Memories and Refections
, 1, p. 68.)}

Asquith’s
Spectator
period lasted for ten years. It began, tentatively, even before his call to the bar, and it continued, perhaps with lessening intensity towards the end, until 1886, the year of the Home Rule split in the Liberal Party. Although Hutton had hitherto been a Gladstone man almost without reserve, the paper then took a firmly Unionist line against the Prime Minister, and Asquith thought that political divergence on an issue of such importance made it necessary for him to sever his connection. A few years later the Hutton-Town end partnership ended and the
Spectator
passed under the control St. Loe Strachey with whom Asquith was on friendly terms, but with whom he agreed on little beyond free trade. He never renewed his contributions.

At the end of the ’seventies, Hutton and Townsend, as well as using Asquith’s work themselves, had introduced him to the
Economist.
The
Economist
was then jointly edited by Palgrave and Lathbury but continued to live under the shadow of Walter Bagehot who had died, still in the editorial chair, only in 1877. Asquith’s work for this paper became more regular than for the
Spectator
, but the connection (as it appears from his subsequent writings about the period
^h
) was a more work-a-day and less enjoyable one for him. He was retained at a salary of .£150 a year, and in return for this he wrote, almost every week, one of the paper’s two leading articles. He found no difficulty in striking the note of rational radicalism which was called for by the paper’s tradition. This connection came to an end in 1885, but because of the growth of his work at the bar and not of any political disagreement.

The first turning point in his legal career came in 1883. Until then he was short of money, under-employed, and full of surplus intellectual energy. The first shortage, as has already been indicated, led to no great privation. His way of life in Hampstead may have been simple but it was not such as to cut him off from social contacts with those he then knew or wanted to know. Nor did it preclude regular visits to the theatre and fairly frequent journeys abroad, sometimes with and sometimes without his wife. With his wife he went mostly to Germany and Switzerland, but with male companions, often at Easter time, he used to go further south, to Provence, to the Riviera and to Tuscany. His friends were almost all the old ones of Oxford days, although Mark Napier, the son of a diplomat peer and another occupant of the chambers in Fig-Tree Court, became a close one and a frequent visitor to Hampstead.

Then, in 1881, Asquith’s intimacy with Haldane began. This was a friendship of great importance which lasted throughout the middle years of his life. R. B. Haldane, at this stage, was a rather clumsy young Scotsman of twenty-five. He came of nonconformist stock like Asquith himself, but his family were much more firmly established in the upper ranks of the middle class, and he had the advantage of some private money. Instead of going to Oxford (the Anglican influence of which was feared by his father) he had studied at Edinburgh, Gottingen and Dresden and had acquired in the course of these wanderings a strong and persistent taste for rather cloudy metaphysics. This was alien to the bent of Asquith’s own mind, which was always more
lucid and less speculative than Haldane’s. But there were many other things which bound them together. Haldane had come to London in 1877 and had gone to the Chancery bar. Although his first success came a little earlier than Asquith’s (he was earning ^1,000 a year by 1883), when they first met he was almost equally briefless. They both shared a deep interest in politics, and an attachment to the moderate left of the Liberal Party. Here Asquith’s interest was perhaps the greater, for Haldane, who stated bluntly in his
Autobiography
that Asquith “ from the beginning ... meant to be Prime Minister,” was probably more concerned with the law for its own sake and not merely as a stepping stone to politics. For neither was he as well endowed as Asquith. His diction was even cloudier than his metaphysics, and as he himself freely admitted he had “ no attractive presence ” and “ a bad voice.” Despite these deficiencies, and the fact that he was four years younger, he was at this time a little further ahead than Asquith, not only in the law but also in politics.

He was the first secretary of the Eighty Club, which took its name from the year of Gladstone’s second accession to power. It was originally composed of a group of young Liberals with radical and mildly imperialist leanings who had begun meeting under the leadership of Albert (later 4th Earl) Grey, the grandson of the Reform Bill Prime Minister, but who later found him too erratic and seceded to found the club on their own. It was not only a dining club, which entertained guests ranging from George Meredith to Charles Parnell, but also an organisation providing speakers for meetings in the country. Asquith became a member about a year after its foundation, having recently met Haldane at dinner in Lincoln’s Inn. A few months afterwards Haldane, “ most uncharacteristically ” as Asquith put it, fell ill and went to stay with his new friend in Hampstead for a long period of semi-convalescence. This visit established their intimacy. Thereafter for many years they dined together several times a week, travelled abroad in each other’s company, consulted together on every political issue, and on many legal ones too. The friendship was the closest which Asquith ever developed with any man.

Haldane was also a great favourite with Asquith’s family. His exuberance and generosity of spirit, aided rather than hindered by physical characteristics which tended always to make him a faint figure of fun, produced strong private charm of a kind which was as accessible to children as to adults. Lady Violet Bonham Carter, in an

article which she contributed to
The Times
on the centenary of his birth
²
* has testified to its effect upon herself and her brothers. She also told of an occasion—a striking example of surplus intellectual energy— when Haldane got a rare brief (concerning the alleged infestation of some property by rats), and both he and her father, who had not received one of his own for months, sat up for nearly a whole night at Hampstead, preparing every possible ramification of the case.

Behind this exuberance of Haldane’s there was a deep intellectual curiosity and seriousness of purpose. At this stage he found these characteristics matched by Asquith’s own, although as the form in which he recorded this indicates, he came to believe that there was later a change in Asquith. “ He had as fine an intellectual apparatus, in the way of grasp and understanding,” Haldane wrote, “ as I ever saw in any man. In his earlier political days he was a very serious person. I remember once passing along the Horse Guards with him. He touched my arm and pointed to the figure of John Bright walking in front of us. ‘ There,’ he said, ‘ is the only man in public life who has risen to eminence without being corrupted by London Society