BEACON LIGHTS DAVID LLOYD GEORGE FLEXIBLE STATECRAFT B BY JOHN MCHUGH STUART ETWEEN 1916 and 1922 four of the world's empires crashed into the dust of history-Germany, Russia, Austria, Turkey. With them went crashing the classes that had ruled their vast marches for centuries. For fifty years, up to the beginning of these epic seven, rumors of revolution or of war in any one of these four sovereignties would have sent cabinets tumbling throughout Europe. The period 1916-1922 was no exception. The great war was being fought. Yet no fewer than seven hands strained one after the other at the helm of France's ship of state; Italy had eight Prime Ministers; the United States for the first time assumed its place as a world power and an American protagonist in the world drama, Woodrow Wilson, loomed and faded. How many other figures came on, played his kaleidoscopic times. His enemies say they were tired of that very shiftiness of his. The physical make-up of the man symbolizes at least a fluidity of character, a Celtic adaptability which, however much the English may have employed it during the days when adaptability meant everything, they never really liked it or esteemed it. He is five feet six and a half inches high and he weighs in the neighborhood of 158 pounds of pretty fit flesh. He is one of the best dressed men in England, and he moves with a quick and easy vigor that marks him as a man of action despite his looming brow and the reflective expression his bright eyes frequently assume. He has no mannerisms to speak of, unless it be his legs, and legs are probably not a mannerism. The cartoonist can eliminate his rather long hair, his eyes, his mustache, his hands-none of these alone would spell Lloyd George. But the legs do. His enemies say their shortness, their decided inward bend at the knees and their relative insignificance beneath his fine head and torso reveal the weakness of the man's character. But assertion of the weakness implies certain premises as to the character, and premises as to the character are most often based on the pulchritude of Mr. Lloyd George's upper parts alone. Lloyd George's legs are not unlike the legs of a slightly scissor hocked burro. No one who knows anything about a burro would call its legs indicative of a defect in the burro's character. The burro is particularly valuable for its sure footedness in difficult places. Mr. Lloyd George's legs, like the burro's, are highly indicative of one of the most valuable elements in his character, ornamental only to those who know their inner usefulness. But, consonant with the whole character though the legs may be, with them Mr. Lloyd George's characteristic resemblance to the burro ceases. Upon these agile, useful foundations, always incased in carefully creased trousers, rises the comfortable paunch of a middle aged man who enjoys but does not abuse the good things of life, the broad chest and easily squared shoulders of a man perfectly at ease before men, the taut neck and well modelled chin of one given to decision, the clean, firm, but expressively mobile mouth beneath its white shadow of a mustache, the solid, well shaped nose, the big, broad brow and the eyes. And if Mr. Lloyd George's legs tell the tale of one element in his character-sure footed agility-the eyes tell the tale of another, its coequal in importance. They are bright in color, but one forgets whether they are brown or blue, for they sparkle with the ingenuous merriment of blue and they shadow with the deeper emotions more capably reflected in brown. Ten feet away from him across the press tables at a public meeting I have seen the color of his eyes go black with anger-black as the eyes of a terrier aroused. Ten feet away from him across a breakfast table I have seen them go pale blue with merriment over some tale. What is the actual pigment of his iris? Sitting here writing, I do not know. They are like the eyes of a great actor in their ability to reflect the whole gamut of human emotions; but they are unlike the eyes of a histrion in two ways: they are highly perceptive as well as expressive organs, and they reflect their own, not vicarious feelings. Take, then, these two characteristics, the agile ability to put himself in any place and in any one else's place, and his capacity to perceive and to feel; add to them the capacity to select and arrange by intellectual processes the infinite number of impressions thus gained plus equal ability to express the result in a manner to move other persons-and you have the main structure of the personal mechanism that is Lloyd George. It is an outline which accords with his history and is confirmed by every personal contact with the man. His history is briefly this. He was born in 1863 in one of the least savory districts of dirty, busy Manchester. His father was a schoolmaster in the small and struggling Unitarian church school. But even the moral and intellectual parenthood of a hard driven, half starved free church schoolmaster was taken away from the young David when he was one year old. His first recollections rise from a village cobbler's shop in Carnarvon whither his widowed mother moved with her brood to keep house for the village cobbler, her brother-in-law. The Prime Minister has himself recounted how that mother saved and struggled to hold from the frugal expenses of the household sixpence a week for her boy. But out of that hard existence she and he contrived a good general schooling for him. His charm of personality and his oratorical ability soon developed and he was not long past his majority when he had seized for himself a seat in Parliament and a garret shared with a brother Welsh youngster in Lincoln's Inn. There was penury then and there has been something akin to penury in Lloyd George's life throughout until Andrew Carnegie bequeathed him an annuity of $10,000 a year. There were fifteen long years of law practice during which he said his partner was richer than he only because the expenses of a lawyer who was also a Member of Parliament, then without salary, were greater than the expenses of a lawyer who was not. And it was only in 1905 that he succeeded at the end |