April 
1 1 
1918 
Land & Water 
19 
Life and Letters Gj J. C Squire 
Mr. Asquith as Author 
EXCLUDING collections of political speeches, Mr. 
Asquith's Occasional Addresses, 1908-16 (Mac- 
millan, 6s. net), is his first book ; unless, indeed, 
like most able young lawyers, he wrote something 
about Torts or Company Law in an earher age. 
The book consists mainly of five considerable addresses : on 
Criticism, Biography, Ancient Universities and the Modern 
World, Culture and Character, and the Spade and the Pen 
— the last being concerned with classical studies and the 
place of archaeology. There are also lesser addresses on the 
Enghsh Bible, Omar Khayyam, and other subjects, a Latin 
speech made at Winchester, and several obituary " tributes " 
to eminent men deceased. These last, perhaps, would not 
all have been included had Mr. Asquith not desired to give 
the pubUc a respectable sized book for its money. 
• « * ♦ «« -■'" 
" BuTthe smaller book would have been well worth it. No 
professional author has constructed in our time so clear, so 
compressed, so convincing a defence of the humanities, and 
so eloquent a demonstration of their daily practical value as 
Mr. Asquith has produced in the sporadic addresses of his 
restricted leisure. It is not to be supposed that he devotes 
himself entirely to generalisations as to "culture," absorbed 
discursively, or under curriculum. Both his addresses to 
students and the others are full of incidental judgments 
upon books and men, criticisms usually indisputable, and 
often original. His criticisms of the Uteratures of the ancient 
world, as well as of English books of several centuries, would 
be well worth having if they illustrated no general argument 
at all. His tastes are, on the whole, orthodox ; one deduces 
that he is most drawn to the admittedly greatest of writers. 
But though never eccentric, he thinks independently. The 
evidences of this are everywhere. One may quote his acute 
observation that 
■ U we were given fewer of a man's letters to his friends, and more 
of his friends' letters to him, we should get to know him better 
because, among other reasons, we should be better able *o realise 
how his personality affected and appealed to others. 
One may quote also his illuminating pages .on the neglected 
autobiography of Haydon, the painter ; his description of 
Haydon as "one of the acutest and most accomplished 
critics of his time," and his question, though it be a mere 
question, why it was that Haydon was not a great portrait 
painter. We may note, incidentally, as lights on his tastes, 
that he is a close student of Bacon and a devotee of Sir 
Walter Scott, and that he beheves most of Shakespeare's 
sonnets to have had no relation with the poet's personal 
career. One has not, however, space here to enter into such 
questions of detail ; and one must be content, as to Mr. 
Asquith's general views about culture, to refer readers to 
the book itself, and especially to the noble passages on pages 
25 and 6g. Nothing is more remarkable about these addresses 
than the apparently effortless way in which their author 
"lifts" to a higher level of eloquence. He favours the sus- 
tained peroration ; but his perorations grow out of, are all 
of a piece with, what has gone before, instead of being shame- 
lessly stuck on like those of the wanton rhetorician. One 
result of this, however, is that they are not detachable : one 
always wants to take in the sentence before, so to speak. 
Instead of attempting to quote them, therefore, one may 
be permitted to pass to a few remarks upon his way of 
expressing himself : what, vaguely, we call his style. 
****** 
In his lecture on "Culture and Character," Mr. Asquith 
refers to the frequency with which " a man takes an hour to 
say what might have been as well or better said in twenty 
minutes, or spreads over twenty pages what could easil)' 
have been exhausted in ten." The offence of being "shp- 
shod and proUx" is never committed by him. There is no 
greater living master of the summary ; and the quahties of 
his speaking are present in his wnting. He surveys his 
field from a detached eminence, and sketches its main out- 
Hnes with precision and in their due proportions. His 
survey is so simple and straightforward as sometimes to 
appear easy and obvious ; but a man who should succumb 
to that impression might be recommended to attempt the 
operation for himself. The certainty with which Mr. Asquith 
grasps his general ideas is matched by, and allied to, the 
lucidity with which he formulates them. No one, I might 
add, who was not habituated to accurate expression could, 
when occasion calls, say nothing at all with Mr. Asquith's 
ease and safety. His verbal instrument is the perfect 
servant of his mind. It is indeed difficult for a politician 
to retain a sound stj'le. Whenever he rises he must play 
St. Anthony to beckoning hosts of cliches ; and according 
to his temperament he will be more liable to yield to one 
bevy or the other, to those of wooden pomposity and sham 
dignity or to those of intemperate rhetoric and sham passion. 
Mr. Asquith, as a political speaker, has been known, not 
infrequentlj', to lapse into a hollow resonance, and there 
are a few examples of this pardonable and almost unavoid- 
able humbug in the obituary speeches printed at the end 
of this volume. But as a speaker — or, rather, a writer — 
on other subjects he is entirely free from it ; and his style 
is literallv a model of its kind. 
It is what is called a classical, what used to be called a 
"correct" style : the style natural to a man of his intellect 
and temper. His sentences are close-knit : packed, but 
easy. Every phrase adds something ; but an intractable 
content never destroys the balance. In the Latinity of the 
language, in the structure of the sentences, in the objectivity, 
impersonality, of the writer's attitude, there is something 
reminiscent of the eighteenth century. There are constant 
faint traces of Johnson, of Burke, of Gibbon. We observe 
the affectionate use of words like "denigration" and "fuligi- 
nous" ; and admirably compendious phrases like that in 
wWch, referring to the production of superfluous biographies, 
he speaks of "the monuments which filial piety or mis- 
directed friendship is constantly raising to those who • 
deserved and probably desired to be forgotten." One has 
employed the word "affectionate"; and here, of course, is 
one of the places where personality does come in. Marked 
proclivities in language are in themselves windows into 
personality. And in these addresses Mr, Asquith's indivi- 
duality peeps out in all sorts of ways : in the revelation of 
his tastes, in the warm mental glow which saves from frigidity 
the most "scientific" of his paragraphs, and in his frequent 
humour. But he does not write to display his powers of 
writing ; he does not parade his tastes because they are his, 
announcing them merely because they appear to him to be* 
sensible and reasonable ; and he does not jump over the 
hedge for any joke or take even those which stand right in 
his road save in the most delicate and undemonstrative 
manner. Many readers, by no means obtuse, might well 
miss the gentle jest in his address to the Royal Society, 
which was founded by Charles II. : 
Whether the interest in anatomy displayed, as your annals show, 
by the Society in its earliest years was due to the proclivities of 
its Royal Patron, I do not know ... 
The passage on the uses of the bastinado and the knout 
in criticism might also be quoted ; and the charming account 
of Jeremy Bentham's variegated evenings. His criticisms 
and apt images are all the more enjoyable because of their 
subservience to his main purpose : his refusal to allow the 
garlands to conceal the pillar. And one must mention his 
extraordinarily happy and judicious use of quotations. They 
are never dragged in by the heels to display learning or 
import a facile colouring ; but the few he makes, both from 
Enghsh and from classical authors, are, by their very nature 
and pertinence, an unmistakable proof of large reserves. 
His temper, almost always, is amiable. But just as the 
even surface of his language is sometimes abruptly and 
effectively broken by an unusual or a colloquial word, so his 
pervasive easy tolerance now and then yields. Something 
hard comes into sight, like black rocks under a smooth sea : 
self-knowledge, determination, a settled, though usually 
concealed, contempt for the complacent, stupid, and the 
pretentious superficial. But he never Ibses his self-control. 
It would be easy to supplement this brief catalogue of 
some of Mr. Asquith's qualities with a list of the quahties 
which he does not possess. He has little, no doubt, in 
common with Rousseau, Shelley, and John the Baptist ; 
like the rest of us, he is something and not something else. 
But, reading this too slight coDection, one remembers the 
superb generalisation that "conference maketh a ready man, 
reading a full njan, and writing an exact man" ; and one 
feels that the three processes have here been operating, with 
uniform success, in one person. 
