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When Winter Comes to Main Street, a non-fiction book by Grant Martin Overton |
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Chapter 8. They Have Only Themselves To Blame |
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_ CHAPTER VIII. THEY HAVE ONLY THEMSELVES TO BLAME =i= If people will write memoirs, they must expect to suffer. They have only themselves to blame if life becomes almost intolerable from the waves of praise and censure. I am going to speak of some books of memoirs and biography--highly personal and decidedly unusual books, in the main by persons who are personages. The Life of Sir William Vernon Harcourt concerns Sir William George Granville Venables Vernon Harcourt, who was born in 1827 and died in 1904. He was an English statesman, grandson of Edward Vernon Harcourt, Archbishop of York. He was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, and was called to the bar in 1854. He entered Parliament (for Oxford) in 1868, sat for Derby 1880-95, and for West Monmouthshire, 1895-1904. He was Solicitor-general 1873-74, Home Secretary 1880-85 and Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1886, 1892-94 and 1894-95. From March, 1894, to December, 1898, he was leader of the Liberal Party in the House of Commons. He wrote in the London Times under the signature of "Historicus" a series of letters on International Law, which were republished in 1863. His biography, which begins before Victoria ascended the throne and closes after her death, is the work of A. G. Gardiner. Memoirs of the Memorable is by Sir James Denham, the poet-author of "Wake Up, England!" and deals with most of the prominent social names of the end of the last and commencement of this century, including Mr. Gladstone, Lord Beaconsfield, Lord Byron, Robert Browning, the Bishop of London, Cardinal Howard, Lord Dunedin, Lewis Carroll, Lord Marcus Beresford and the late Bishop of Manchester. The book also deals with club life and the leading sportsmen. The Pomp of Power is by an author who very wisely remains anonymous, like the author of The Mirrors of Downing Street. I shall not run the risks of perjury by asserting or denying that the author of The Mirrors of Downing Street has written The Pomp of Power. As to the probability perhaps readers of The Pomp of Power had better judge. It is an extremely frank book and its subjects include the leading personalities of Great Britain today and, indeed, all the world. Lloyd George, Field-Marshal Sir Henry Wilson, Lord Haig, Marshal Joffre, Lord Beaverbrook, Millerand, Loucheur, Painleve, Cambon, Lord Northcliffe, Colonel Repington and Krassin of Soviet Russia are the persons principally portrayed. The book throws a searchlight upon the military and diplomatic relations of Britain and France before and during the war, and also deals with the present international situation. It may fairly be called sensational. Especially interesting is the anonymous author's revelation of the role played in the war by Field-Marshal Sir Henry Wilson, so lately assassinated in London. The author was evidently an intimate of Sir Henry and, just as evidently, he is intimately acquainted with Lloyd George, apparently having worked with or under the Prime Minister. He is neither Lloyd George's friend nor enemy and his portrait of the Prime Minister is the most competent I can recall. Can he be Philip Kerr, Lloyd George's adviser? I praise, in this slightly superlative fashion, the picture of the British Prime Minister by the author of The Pomp of Power ... and I pick up another book and discover it to be E. T. Raymond's Mr. Lloyd George: A Biographical and Critical Sketch. The author of Uncensored Celebrities is far too modest when he calls his new work a "sketch." It is a genuine biography with that special accent due to the biographer's personality and his power of what I may call penetrative synthesis. By that I mean the insight into character which coordinates and builds--the sort of biography that makes a legend about a man. Mr. Raymond does not begin with the "little Welshman" but with a Roman Emperor, Diocletian, our first well-studied exemplar of the "coalition mind." These are the words with which, after a brilliant survey of the Prime Minister's career, the author closes: "If, however, we withhold judgment on every point where a difference of opinion is possible, if we abandon to destructive criticism every act of administrative vigour which is claimed by his admirers as a triumph, if we accept the least charitable view of his faults and failures, there still remains more than enough with which to defy what Lord Rosebery once called 'the body-snatchers of history, who dig up dead reputations for malignant dissection.' If only that he imparted, in a black time, when it appeared but too likely that the Alliance might falter and succumb from mere sick-headache, his own defying, ardent, and invincible spirit to a tired, puzzled, distracted and distrustful nation; if only that he dispelled the vapours, inspired a new hope and resolution, brought the British people to that temper which makes small men great, assured our Allies that their cause was in the fullest sense our own, and finally achieved the great moral victory implied in 'unity of command'--if these things be alone considered, he will be judged to have earned for his portrait the right to a dignified place in the gallery of history; and some future generation will probably recall with astonishment that it was considered unfit to adorn the dining-room of a London club." And here are two new books by Margot Asquith! One is My Impressions of America, the other continues The Autobiography of Margot Asquith. Of the first of these books there is to say that it represents Mrs. Asquith's matured impressions and will have a value that could not possibly attach to interviews or statements she gave on this side. It also gives, for the first time, her frank and direct analyses of the personalities of the distinguished people whom she met in America. The continuation of her Autobiography is a different matter. Those who have read The Autobiography of Margot Asquith will be prepared for the new book. At least, I hope they will be prepared and yet I question whether they will. There is, after all, only one person for Mrs. Asquith to surpass, and that is herself; and I think she has done it. This new book will add Volumes III. and IV. to The Autobiography of Margot Asquith. In The Memoirs of Djemal Pasha: Turkey 1913-21 will be found the recollections of a man who was successively Military Governor of Constantinople, Minister of Public Works and Naval Minister and who, with Enver Bey and Talaat Bey, formed the triumvirate which dictated Turkish policy and guided Turkey's fate after the coup d'etat of 1913. I believe these memoirs are of extraordinary interest and the greatest importance. They give the first and only account from the Turkish side of events in Turkey since 1913. The development of relations with Germany, France and England immediately before the war is clearly traced, and a graphic account is given of the first two months of the war, the escape of the Goeben and the attempts made to keep Turkey neutral. When these failed, Djemal Pasha was sent to govern Syria and to command the Fourth Army, which was to conquer Egypt. The attack on the Suez Canal is described, and then the series of operations which culminated in the British reverses in the two battles of Gaza. Further important sections are devoted to the revolt of the Arabs and the question of responsibility for the Armenian massacres. The value of Miscellanies--Literary and Historical, by Lord Rosebery, consists not so much in his recollections of people as in the delight of reading good prose. Lord Rosebery has a natural dignity and a charm of lucid phrasing that adapts itself admirably to the essay form he has chosen. The subjects he takes up are beloved figures of the past. Robert Burns, as Lord Rosebery talks of him, walks about in Dumfries and holds spellbound by sheer personal charm the guests of the tavern. There are papers on Burke, on Dr. Johnson, on Robert Louis Stevenson, and others as great. One group deals with Scottish History and one with the service of the state. The last is a study of the genius loci of such places of mellow associations as Eton and the Turf. The sort of book one returns to! =ii= I was going to say something about Andrew C. P. Haggard's book, Madame de Stael: Her Trials and Triumphs. But so profoundly convinced am I of the book's fascination that I shall reprint the first chapter. If this is not worthy of Lytton Strachey, I am no judge: "In the year 1751 a young fellow, only fourteen years of age, went to Magdalen College at Oxford, and in the same year displayed his budding talent by writing The Age of Sesostris, Conqueror of Asia, which work he burnt in later years. "The boy was Edward Gibbon, who, after becoming a Roman Catholic at the age of sixteen, was sent by his father to Switzerland, to continue his education in the house of a Calvinist minister named M. Pavilliard, under the influence of which gentleman he became a Protestant again at Lausanne eighteen months later. "The young fellow, while leading the life of gaiety natural to his age in company with a friend named Deyverdun, became an apt student of the classics and was soon a proficient in French, in which tongue he wrote before long as fluently as in English. With young Deyverdun he worked, and in his company Edward Gibbon also played. After visiting frequently at the house of the celebrated Voltaire at Monrepos, and after being present when the distinguished French philosopher played in his own comedies and sentimental pieces, the young fellow's thoughts soon turned to the theme which was the continual subject of conversation of the ladies and gentlemen who were Voltaire's guests and formed the company of amateurs with whom the great dramatic writer was in the habit of rehearsing his plays. This was, as might have been suspected in such a society, the theme of love. "As it happened, there was in the habit of visiting Lausanne a young lady who was a perfect paragon. Her name was Suzanne Curchod, and she was half Swiss and half French, her father being a Swiss pastor and her mother a Frenchwoman. "Very handsome and sprightly in appearance, the fair Suzanne was well instructed in sciences and languages. Her wit, beauty and erudition made her a prodigy and an object of universal admiration upon the occasion of her visits to her relations in Lausanne. Soon an intimate connection existed between Edward Gibbon and herself; he frequently accompanied her to stay at her mountain home at Grassy, while at Lausanne also they indulged in their dream of felicity. Edward loved the brilliant Suzanne with a union of desire, friendship, and tenderness, and was in later years proud of the fact that he was once capable of feeling such an exalted sentiment. There is no doubt that, had he been able to consult his own inclinations alone, Gibbon would have married Mademoiselle Curchod, but, the time coming when he was forced to return to his home in England his father declared that he would not hear of 'such a strange alliance.' "'Thereupon,' says Gibbon in his autobiography, 'I yielded to my fate--sighed as a lover, obeyed as a son, and my wound was insensibly healed by time, absence and new habits of life.' "These habits of life included four or five years' service in the Hampshire Militia, in which corps Suzanne's lover became a captain, the regiment being embodied during the period of the Seven Years' War. "Upon returning to Lausanne, at the age of twenty-six, in 1763, Edward Gibbon was warmly received by his old love, but he heard that she had been flirting with others, and notably with his friend M. Deyverdun. He himself, while now mixing with an agreeable society of twenty unmarried young ladies who, without any chaperons, mingled with a crowd of young men of all nations, also 'lost many hours in dissipation.' "He was not long in showing Suzanne that he no longer found her indispensable to his happiness, with the result that she assailed him, although in vain, with angry reproaches. Notwithstanding that she begged Gibbon to be her friend if no longer her lover, while vowing herself to be confiding and tender, he acted hard-heartedly and declined to return to his old allegiance, coldly replying: 'I feel the dangers that continued correspondence may have for both of us.' "It is impossible to feel otherwise than sorry for the brilliant Suzanne at this period, as although from her subsequent manoeuvres it became evident that her principal object in life was to obtain a rich husband, from the manner in which she humiliated herself to him it is evident that she was passionately in love with the author of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. "Eventually the neglected damsel gave up the siege of an unwilling lover, while assuring her formerly devoted Edward that the day would come 'when he would regret the irreparable loss of the too frank and tender heart of Suzanne Curchod.' "Had the pair been united, one wonders what would have been the characteristics of the offspring of an English literary man like Gibbon, who became perhaps the world's greatest historian, and a beautiful woman of mixed nationality, whose subsequent career, although gilded with riches and adorned with a position of power, displays nothing above the mediocre and commonplace. "Edward Gibbon's fame, which was not long in coming, was his own, and will remain for so long as a love of history and literature exists in the world, whereas that of Suzanne Curchod rests upon two circumstances--the first that she was once the sweetheart of Gibbon, the second that she was the mother of a Madame de Stael. "When finally cast off by the Englishman, the Swiss Pastor's daughter remembered that, if pretty, she was poor, and had her way to make in the world. She commenced to play fast and loose with a M. Correvon, a rich lawyer, whom she said she would marry 'if she had only to live with him for four months in each year.' "The next lover was a pastor, who was as mercenary as herself, for he threw her over for a lady with a large fortune. After this failure to establish herself, Suzanne became tired of seeking a husband in Switzerland and went to Paris as the companion of the rich and handsome Madame Vermoneux, the supposed mistress of Jacques Necker, the rich Swiss banker, who was established in the French capital. Once in Paris, it was not long before by her seductions Suzanne succeeded in supplanting Madame Vermoneux in the still young banker's affections, with the result that she married him in 1764. "Gibbon, whom she had last seen in 1763, returned to the side of his former love when she was at length safely married to another man. We find him writing in 1765, to his friend Lord Sheffield, formerly Mr. Holroyd, that he had spent ten delicious days in Paris about the end of June. 'She was very fond of me, and the husband was particularly civil.' He continues confidentially: 'Could they insult me more cruelly? Ask me every evening to supper, go to bed and leave me alone with his wife--what an impertinent security!' "It was in the month of April in the following year, 1766, that was born Madame Necker's only child, Anne Louise Germaine, who was destined to become one of the most remarkable women of modern times. From the great literary talent displayed by this wonderfully precocious child from girlhood, it is difficult not to imagine but that in some, if merely spiritual, way the genius of her mother's old lover had descended through that mother's brain as a mantle upon herself. That she learnt to look upon Gibbon with admiration at an early age is sure. Michelet informs us that owing to the praises showered upon the historian by M. Necker, Germaine was anxious, as her mother had been before her, to become Gibbon's wife. She was, however, destined to have another husband--or rather we should say two other husbands." =iii= Recollections and Reflections by a Woman of No Importance has added greatly to the number of this author's readers, gained in the first instance by her Memories Discreet and Indiscreet, which was followed by More Indiscretions. Recollections and Reflections consists of random memories of lords and ladies, sportsmen, Kings, Queens, cooks, chauffeurs and Empresses, related with a great deal of philosophy and insight and no little wit. There are stories of Gladstone's lovemaking, of Empress Eugenie and the diamond the soldier swallowed, of Balfour's hats, Henry Irving's swelled head and the cosmetics of Disraeli. There are stories of etiquette at a hair-dressers' ball side by side with comments on Kitchener's waltzing. Lady Angela Forbes was the daughter of the fourth Earl of Rosslyn and the youngest child of one of the largest and most prominent families in England. Kitchener, Lord Roberts, Disraeli, the Kaiser, Prince Edward--she has dined or sailed or hunted with them all on the most informal terms. She tells, with engaging frankness, in Memories and Base Details, of the gaieties, the mistakes and tragedies of herself and her friends. It was Baron von Margutti who informed the Emperor Francis Joseph in 1914 that Serbia had rejected his ultimatum. The character of the Emperor is a moot question. The Emperor Francis Joseph and His Times, reminiscences by Baron von Margutti, is by a man who knew the Emperor intimately and who knew the men and women who surrounded him daily. Baron von Margutti met all the distinguished European figures, such as Edward VII, Emperor Wilhelm, Czar Nicholas and the Empress Eugenie who came to Austria to visit. He watched from a particularly favourable vantage point the deft moves of secret diplomacy which interlaced the various governments. Lord Frederic Hamilton, born in 1856, the fourth son of the first Duke of Abercorn, was educated at Harrow, was formerly in the British Diplomatic Service and served successively as Secretary of the British Embassies in Berlin and Petrograd and the Legations at Lisbon and Buenos Aires. He has travelled much and, besides being in Parliament, was editor of the Pall Mall Magazine till 1900. The popularity of his books of reminiscences is explained by the fascinating way in which he tells a story or illuminates a character. Other books of memoirs have been more widely celebrated but I know of none which has made friends who were more enthusiastic. The Vanished Pomps of Yesterday, Days Before Yesterday and Here, There and Everywhere are constantly in demand. But, all along, a surprise has been in store and the time is now here to disclose it! The talent for this delightful species of memoirising runs through the family; and Sir Frederic Hamilton's brother, Lord Ernest Hamilton, proves it. Lord Ernest is the author of Forty Years On, a new book quite as engaging as Here, There and Everywhere, and the rest of Sir Frederic's. Word from London is that Sir Frederic will have no new book this year; he steps aside with a gallant bow for Lord Ernest. I have been turning pages in Forty Years On and reading about such matters as the Copley curse, school life at Harrow where Shifner and others bowed the knee to Baal, bull fights in Peru and adventures in the Klondike. Personally the most amusing moments of the book I find to be those in which Lord Ernest describes his experiments in speaking ancient Greek in modern Greece. But this is perhaps because I, too, have tried to speak syllables of Xenophon while being rapidly driven (in a barouche) about Patras--with the same lamentable results. It is enough to unhinge the reason, the pronunciation of modern Greek, I mean. But maybe your hobby is bathing? Lord Ernest has a word in praise of Port Antonio, Jamaica, as a bathing ground. What he says about hummingbirds--but I mustn't! Forty Years On is a mine of interest and each reader ought to be pretty well left to work it for himself. _ |
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