BEFORE THE WAR

Evening Post, Volume CXVIII, Issue 105, 31 October 1934, Page 3

BEFORE THE WAR

COURTS AND POLITICS

MEMORIES OF LORD ESHER

CHABACTER KEYEALED

Probably no one of our time possessed better or more varied qualifications as a Diarist than the lato Reginald Viscount Eshcr, the first volume j 61 whose "Journals and Letters" has been published, writes J. B. Firth in the "Daily Telegraph." He was marvellously well placed— at Windsor Castle —whore he was in every sense "ainicus curiae." He enjoyed universal confidence. He went through life —from Eton onwards— "proudly friended," trusted because he was disinterested, admired for his own talents, exciting no jealousies, arousing no dislikes. He was, moreover, a man of fastidious taste, an Epicurean of the highest grade, devoted to music, the arts, literature, and affairs. Again, he was par inter pares, equal, and accepted as equal, of the best. Such a man was perfectly situated and ideally qualified to be a Diarist of the first order. Not a Greville, "Who listened at the door, Who heard some secrets and invented more." but one from whom no secrets were hid because there was not the slightest danger of his indiscretion. How, then, it may be asked, did not "Reggie" Brett make a greater name for himself —meaning by that a greater noise in tho big world? Why did he cast aside ambition in the ordinary sense of the term after a. brief five years in the House of Commons and his first election rebuff? It is clear from certain passages that he did not quite know himself. There were times when he wondered whether he had chosen wisely. When the late Lord Rosebery, his intimate friend, appointed him, in 1895, Secretary to the Office of Works, ho tried to persuade himself that this was the very thing he had always longed for —"a definite office under the Crown apart from politics," and a permanency. A DIPLOMATIST. Yet the doubt persisted. Rosebery told him that he should have a diplomatist. "That is your tragedy," he said, and he was a good judge of the tragedy of success. "I don't regret, it," Eshcr boldly entered in his Jour-' nal. "It would have cost me many happy years." Moreover, he bluntly says "that he disdained the seamy side of diplomacy. At twenty-five he had confided to his Journal: "My mind has never been quite made up whether at the bottom of my heart I am a gambler or not. Perhaps that part of me was left unfinished." So he had his doubts and questionings until, in 1901, King Edward appointed him Lieutenant and Deputy Governor of Windsor Castle, a post which he held until King George made him Governor in 1928, at the age of 76. That, and the wonderful confidence which he enjoyed of the entire Royal Family, young and old, fixed him. Even so, he was always being tempted to try his, wings on wider and more ambitious flight. Ho was twice offered an Under-Secretaryship. He might have gone to the War Office with Cabinet rank in 1903. He could have been Governor of Cape Colony in 1900 and Viceroy of India in 1908. All these honours were tfnasked and all refused. As far back as 1886 he had been asked to edit the "Daily News," and in 1898 he was approached to undertake tho "Life" of Disraeli. What actually did tempt him for a moment was Sir Ernest Cassel's offer of a partnership at £5000 a year and commissions on a noble scale. But King Edward would not let him go, and he stayed. HIS GREAT WORK. About this time he had undertaken the greatest public work of his life in the reconstruction of the War Office and the organisation of the Territorial Army. Next to Haldanc, perhaps, the modern British Army owes most to Esiier. So he did much more than— in a once-famous sarcasm of the Kaiser's—"look after the drains of Windsor Castle." "I am not elated," ho said when everyone was congratulating him on his appointment, fresh from Cambridge, as private secretary to Lord Hartington. Sir William Harcourt and Lord Ripon had been his sponsors, and the latter thought so highly of the boy that he appointed him one of his trustees. A cool lad, indeed! He even confided to his Journal that he had reached the age of twenty-four without having been kissed by a woman, except his mother, "of her own accord." The last four words are curiously enigmatical. ( Yet in tho glow of first love he flamed like Young Komeo. Later, as not infrequently happens, cynicism crept in. "Remember," he wrote to his son, who edited these papers, "that to love is an art, and that one of the really artistic things is not to tear a passion to tatters, but to establish reservo, oven if it did not exist." "Two things destroy love, which is based on a foundation of passion. One is the absence of reciprocal feeling. The other is satiety. Both kill. 'To teach love' is so to train the beloved one that gifts are occasionally granted, but never lavished." There speaks Lord Chesterfield. The bloom of youth has gone. The once adorable goddess has become an intractable filly to be "trained"! ROSEBERY'S SOLITUDE. Here is an extract from a letter after a visit to Lord Rosebory, Prime Minister of England, the darling of fortune, but a depressed and nervous wreck, unable to sleep. "He complains of loneliness. Marriage frightens him —he cannot believe in fresh disinterested affection. As if that matters to anyone who understands love! Pascal said that the happiest life —the life- he would choose —begins with love and ends with ambition. R. has reversed the order You know I disapprove of second marriages, but I suppose the Prime Minister cannot in these days have a mistress. Certainly he requires, an intimate friend. Or he will die." Unhappy Rosebery! Ho admitted to Eshcr that he "made an error in not allowing Harcourt to try to form a Cabinet." He actually did propose it, but it was vehemently opposed by Morley and others, and ho "spared them the pain of a scene." He need not have worried —"all previous experience shows that they would have taken office like lambs." Again, could there bo a more acute or more understanding judgment of Rosebery than this? ,"His rapid and early growth into manhood, with the aloofness entailed by it, and that necessary element of 'pose' in everyone who is a man at an ago when others are boys, fitted him for oligarchic rule, but not to bo the Chief of a Democracy. He has been satiated with the sweets of life." Ho once went to Windsor so shattered by want of sleep that the Queen "allowed him to sit." in her presence. He remonstrated, but he could not have stood. Kneeling to kiss her hand when

leaving ho nearly fell over. "Take caie!" said (lie Queen.

THE QUEEN.

V.'hat a woman! Gladstone once forgot to kiss hands at Osborne, and only repaired the omission before dinner. "It should have been done this afternoon," said the Queen. Just that! In these pages we see the ageing Queen at close quarters. In IS9B the tir.'t signs of physical failure were noted when she did not appear at dinner. For a time she would not see her Ministers because, as she' said, "You know I cannot any longer argue." She was greatly displeased with the Prince of Wales for acting as palli bearer at Mr. Gladstone's funeral and I for kissing Mrs. Gladstone's hand in the Abbey—a beautiful act of reverence. All the Queen said was: "I am sorry for Mrs. Gladstone; as for him, I never liked him, and I will say nothing about lym." This was obstinate and autocratic. It was also shocking ingratitude towards years of loyal service. But, as Rosebery said: "You cannot treat the Queen as if she were Leonard Courtney. She is an old lady, with all the foibles and strength of one." A remarkable description is given of the death-bed scene, and of the Kaiser's extreme solicitude for his grandmother, which should atone for many sins: "After the King had left Osborne for London, the Emperor took charge of everything. His tenderness and firmness were extraordinary, so unlike what was expected of him. He refused to allow Banting's men to measure the Queen for her shell. He turned them out of the room. He sent for Reid (the physician) and took all the measurements himself. He and the King and the Duke of Connaught lifted the Queen into her coffin." "I don't want to die. yet," she. had .said just before her death. "There are several things I want to arrange." Characteristic! While the earth was slipping from her she was fretting over a detail. IDEAS ABOUT DRESS. "I regret the mystery and awe of the old Court," wrote Esher after a year's experience of the new. "However, the change was inevitable." Moreover,/ there were full compensations, and there was no change in the Royal intimacy.' Frequent reference is made to Queen Alexandra's high spirits. She had her own ideas about her dress for the Coronation. "I know," sh- said, "better than all the milliners and antiquaries. I shall wear exactly what I like and so shall all my ladies—Basta!" The idea which got about that Queen Alexandra did not shine in conversation is strongly rebutted by Lord Esher. "Her cleverness has always been under-rated —partly because of her deafness. In point of fact she says more original things and has more unexpected ideas than any member of the family." We read of the Queen being "in one of her ragging moods and too sweet for words," of her "mixture of ragging and real feeling," of her "gentleness and homeliness in rather a stately way.' ' .Specially good are the sketches of the British generals who had to face the Commission after the Boer War—sympathetically, but faithfully, drawn. The manliness and simplicity of Roberts stand out grandly: Buller's admission of his "beastly temper" is one of the most human touches in the book. There is a total absence of all malice. And it is all fresh! Queen Victoria prattling of her dolls in the upper rooms of Kensington Palace, where she had nursed them seventy-odd years before; Arthur Balfour, an undergraduate at Trinity, regarded quizzically by the intellectuals as "a Christian of a queer, undefined sort"; the golden summer afternoons in Cory's house at Eton; Hareourt's elephantine jokes and rages; "Mr. G.s" serenity in retirement; King Edward's house parties, where there were "no bores." Delicious pot-pourri of the days before the war, when, despite its blundering, the world went very well.