Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [25]
On the principle that, like bishops, one Laureate would do as well as another, Lord Salisbury, when he became Prime Minister, appointed Alfred Austin. A journalist of deep Conservative dye, founder and editor of the National Review, Austin was also the producer of fervent topical verse on such occasions as the death of Disraeli. When a friend pointed out grammatical errors in his poems, Austin said, “I dare not alter these things. They come to me from above.” He was a tiny man—five feet high—with a round face and neat white moustache who, as a contributor of articles expounding Conservative foreign policy which he signed “Diplomaticus,” was personally acquainted with the Prime Minister and a frequent visitor to Hatfield. He had begun his career as a correspondent in the war of 1870 by gaining an interview with Bismarck at Versailles, and thirty years later was forced to the painful conclusion that Germany, in her wars of 1859–70, had “unquestionably resorted to means which one could not conceive Alfred the Great or any modern British minister employing.” His most popular work so far had been a prose book on English gardens, but within two weeks of his appointment as Laureate, he exceeded expectations with a poem in The Times celebrating Dr. Jameson’s exploit:
There are girls in the gold-reef city,
There are mothers and children too!
And they cry, Hurry up! for pity!
So what could a brave man do?…
So we forded and galloped forward,
As hard as our beasts could pelt,
First eastward, then trending northward,
Right over the rolling veldt.…
Some echo of the hilarity this provoked reaching the Queen, she queried Salisbury, who had to admit that her new Laureate’s first effusion was “unluckily to the taste of the galleries in the lower class of theatres who sing it with vehemence.” Salisbury never bothered to explain his choice of Austin beyond an off-hand remark once that “he wanted it”; but if the choice did not honor British poetry, it was a shrewd match of the British mood.
The Englishman, as an American observer noticed, felt himself the best-governed citizen in the world even when in Opposition he believed the incumbents were ruining the country. The English form of government “is the thing above all others that he is proud of … and he has an unshakeable confidence in the personal integrity of statesmen.” Austin reflected that comfortable pride. In the radiant summer of Jubilee Year, 1897, a visitor found him in linen suit and panama hat, sitting in a high-backed wicker chair, on the lawn of his country home enjoying conversation with Lady Paget and Lady Windsor. They agreed that each person should tell what was his idea of heaven. Austin’s wish was noble. He desired to sit in a garden and receive a flow of telegrams announcing alternately a British victory by sea and a British victory by land.
It was easy to make fun of Alfred Austin, with his small size, large pomposity and banal verse, and many did. Yet in his Jubilee wish there was something simple and devoted, an assurance, a complete and happy love and admiration for his country, a noncognizance of wrong, which expressed a mood and a condition which, like Lord Ribblesdale’s appearance, were to become beyond recapture.
The House of Lords, now that the Conservatives had replaced the Liberals, could lean back comfortably and follow its natural bent, which was to do as little work as possible. In the last years of the Liberals it had roused itself to “stop the rot” induced by Radical legislation and had thrown out an Employers’ Liability Bill, a Parish Councils Bill designed to make local government councils more democratic, and finally the Home Rule Bill. In the last speech of his career on March 1, 1894, Gladstone had solemnly warned that differences of “fundamental tendency” between the two Houses had reached a point in the past year which required that some solution would have to be found for “this tremendous contrariety and incessant conflict upon matters of high principle and profound