Evening Post. SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 17, 1028. DISAPPOINTED AMBITION

Evening Post, Volume CVI, Issue 112, 17 November 1928, Page 8

Evening Post. SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 17, 1028. DISAPPOINTED AMBITION

"The Greatest of Schoolboys" is a description which most people would be very slow to associate with Lord Curzon, for the impression that they have formed of him probably is that of an exceptionally stiff, proud, and talented man who can hardly have been ever young enough to be a schoolboy, great or small. But the title under which the "New Stalesman" has disguised its review of the concluding volume of Lord Ronaldshay's "Life of Lord Curzon" is justified by the opinion of a sagacious pritic who knew him in his school days and followed his career pretty closely to the end. I Lord Oxford, who examined him at Eton for a Balliol scholarship, said of him just after his death that tho Foreign Secretary of the Lausanne Treaty .vat, in no respect different from the' Eton boy; in forty or fifty years he had not- changed or developed in any essential particular; ho was still as eager, as generous, as ambitious, as dogmatic, and as chivalrous as a schoolboy, and still a» "ignorant" of what most of us speak of as "life." One of the most precocious of schoolboys, Curzon had limitations of mind and temperament which he never outgrew and which prevented his ever growing up, left him with almost a schoolboy's incapacity for understanding the opinions and sentiments of adult humanity, and conversely exposed him to the perpetual misunderstanding of his fellows whom it was his ambition to rule. and. whom but for this fatal incapacity he would have been admirably qualified to rule. Though "a mature politician at fourteen," he was a bad "mixer" even at school, and he remained a bad "mixer" to the enda sort of Coriolanus to the outward view, or a Caesar looking with scorn on the rabblement as they "shouted and clapped their chopped hands and threw up their sweaty nightcaps," yet entirely without Caesar's power of ingratiating himself with the multitude or even that of stirring the enthusiasm of his own class. "Not Understood" would indeed supply a better title for an article on Lord Curzon than "The Greatest of Schoolboys." Behind the rigid hauteur and the icy superiority there was a kindly and highly sensitive spirit, but few were privileged to see beneath the surface. Ho certainly must have boon - one of tho loneliest creatures in the world, says the "New Statesman" reviewer. In spite of his great personal eharni he soemed to be unable to make any close contact even with his nearest friends. His relations with his family wero not happy, and his relations with his staff at the Foreign Office at the ond of his life were such that there was scarcely a doorkeeper who was not glad to see his back when ho resigned. "At last we have a gentleman over us," said one of the staff when Mr. Ramsay Mac Donald took Curzoii's place at the Foreign Office. The satisfaction of the foreign -Vmbassadors and Ministers with whom Curzon had believed himself to he popular, but who hated "his schoolmasterish method of talking to them," appears to have been equally great. In the days of. democracy he had of course to pay a heavy penalty for such a weakness. If it were so, it was a grievous fault, And grievously hath Cuesar answcr'd it.. But the more fully one appreciates the grievousness of the fault and of the penalty, the greater ones wonder at the magnitude of the work that Curzon was nevertheless able to accomplish. The ambition of this astonishing youngster was one of which surely no schoolboy and very few, if any, adults had previously even dreamed. Ever since his Oxford days, we aro told, if not, indeed, since his last years at Eton, ho had set before himself the ambition of being the one Englishman of whom history would be able to say that ho had hold the two offices of Viceroy of India and Prlino Minister of England. Before the age of forty Curzon had realised the first of these ambitions. His first term as Viceroy of India was a brilliant success. "No such splendid figure had been seen in India since the days of Aurungzebe," yet at the same time no previous Viceroy had ever acquired so minute a knowledge and so effective a grip of every detail of the administration. At the end of his five years Curzon returned to England for a holiday in such a blaze of glory that he may well have regarded himself as well on the way to the second goal of his ambition. But he had not yet done with India, and accepting a second term became engaged in a battle royal with Lord Kitchener and in serious trouble over the partition of Bengal. He resigned after a year and returned home to find his prospects seriously clouded in his own party and a Liberal Government in power. When Mr. Balfour resigned the leadership of the Unionist Party in 1911 Lord Curzon was passed over in favour of a man of much less distinguished service and far inferior ability, Mr. Bonar Law, and it was to Mr. Bonar Law that the call came when the break-up of the Lloyd George War Coalition brought the Conservatives back to office in 1922. In the meantime Curzon had endured several years of purgatory as Mr. Lloyd George's Foreign Minister. How so competent, so proud, and so sensitive a man was able to allow one in whbm he had no personal confidence and whose diplom-

acy he detested lo run the Foreign Office for him during those momentous post-war years is a mystery which Lord Ronaldshay's admirable biography does not solve. But it does show that Mr. Lloyd George had Curzon's resignation in his hands for a considerable time before he accepted it, and that finally Curzon's refusal to withdraw it at a long and painful interview was met by Mr. Lloyd George's intimation that he would probably be resigning himself in a few days. Purgatory must, however, have yielded to something still far worse for the unhappy Curzon when on the death of Mr. Bonar Law the goal seemed at last to be within his reach. The dream of nearly fifty years, and the prophecy which a friend had added to congratulations on his appointment lo the Viceroyalty "you will come back in a few years ready to be Prime Minister," were to give substance at least by a message from Lord Stamfordham asking for an interview on the following day. The omens were brightened by the comments of the newspapers which Lord Curzon read on his way up to town. 1 found in the morning Press, ho wrote, an almost unanimous opinion that, tho choico lying between Baldwin and myself, there was no question as to the immense superiority of my claims and little doubt as to tho intentions of the King. The crowd of Press photographers at Paddington and my house —deceptivo and even worthless these phenomena are—at least indicated tho popular belief. The result was, as everybody knows, the most crushing blow of Lord Curzon's troubled life. Lord Stamfordham had to tell him that as the Labour Party had become the Official Opposition and had no representation in the House of Lords the King regarded the objections to having a Prime Minister in that House as insuperable. Curzon's pentup feelings were "poured out" in a torrent of agonised despair:— Such, he wrote, was tho reward I received for nearly forty years of public service in the highest offices; such was the manner in which it was intimated to me that the cup of honourable ambition had been dashed from my lips, and that I could never aspire to fill the highest office in the service of the Crown. In one of his rare moments of selfcriticism Lord Curzon had actually confided to his wife that perhaps he was "unfitted" to be Prime Minister, but when the blow fell it does not appear to have been tempered by any such misgiving. It was indeed a poor reward for nearly forty years of strenuous, self-sacrificing, efficient, and sometimes brilliant service, yet the man who had achieved that great record had at the same time proved to the satisfaction of every candid mind that, even if his powers had not been weakened by age and illhealth, .he was quite unfitted to become the Prime Minister of a democracy. - I