Mr. Morley winced like a horse stung by a specially noxious gadfly, shifted uneasily in his seat, and then glanced at the fat and complacent speaker with a malignity of which he might have been thought incapable. In that momentary raising of the mask were revealed all the temperamental difficulties of this intellectually convinced democrat in the presence of actual living democracy. If John Morley preserved ever a certain aloofness from the people it was surely in the interests of his faith in the popular cause. In the presence of Peers and scholars he found no difficulty in maintaining the purity of his democratic creed. But real contact with the masses must have been in the long run fatal.
John Morley, indeed, had always rather more than his share of that shrinking pride, that haughty sensitiveness, which so often characterises the Liberal intellectual. The typical Tory of the older time was proud, but in a different way. His hereditary association with “muck and turnips” gave him a certain contact with realities. His family tree was in a sense public property; his skeletons were hidden in no obscure cupboard, but duly displayed for the edification of the public; and he had no particular objection to people commenting, and even joking, on certain aspects of his private life. He knew that every disagreement with his wife, every money quarrel with his son, was the gossip of all the ale-houses for miles round. He knew that the labourers called him in private “Old Tom” or something more definitely disrespectful; so long as they touched their hats in public that did not trouble him. A true aristocracy must always be shameless. But the circle in which John Morley grew up was refined and secretive as no other circle on earth; the pride of the upper classes is comparatively simple; the pride of the middle class is as nicely compounded as the melancholy of Jacques. It was this pride, and nothing else, which gave John Morley that reputation of chilly austerity which was really quite foreign to his character. Many things otherwise incomprehensible are plain when we recognise that, while he disliked being called in public “honest John,” and cherished a bookish middle-class man’s horror of emotion expressed without decorum, he was always a very social sort of person, with a keen enjoyment of all the colour and flavour of things. Lord Morley is perhaps best described as one of those true epicures of life who get the highest it has to offer at something less than the full price. He could be on excellent terms with many sportsmen and society people, because they touched his tastes on points, but he left them as soon as they manifested tendencies to stubble or covert or dancing-room. He left them thus on no particular principle, not because he was the victim of any Puritanic fanaticism against pleasure, but because he personally took no pleasure in such things: sport and party-going bored him, and his tendency throughout life was to take as much of the smooth and as little of the rough of things as he decently could. And, just as he would go off to his room at a country-house party the moment he had had enough of general society, so while he stuck to his party manfully in periods of storm, he generally found some excuse to leave the business to another when the Liberal ship drifted into the doldrums. But the notion of him as a bloodless philosopher, a sort of atheistic Puritan, a monster of plain living and high thinking, a moral sky-scraper of reinforced abstract, is quite misleading. He speaks of Joseph Chamberlain as having a “genius for friendship.” He himself had at least much quiet talent in that direction. Reared in grimy Blackburn, the son of a hard-worked surgeon, his temperament, naturally sunny and sun-loving, led him to early revolt against the “unadulterated milk of the Independent word” on which he was nurtured as a child, and at Oxford we find him musing, in Wesley’s room at Lincoln, on the rapidity with which the thoughts and habits of youthful Methodism were vanishing. He had been intended for orders, but the only foundations on which such a career could be honestly based had been destroyed in contact with the destructive criticism of the time; the teaching profession he rejected after a short and painful experience; he read for the Bar, but, to his “enduring regret,” did not make his way thither: journalism therefore alone remained—a career which may lead anywhere or nowhere, but which, as he afterwards reflected, “quickens a man’s life while it lasts,” though it may kill him in the end.