BOOK NOTES

Manawatu Standard, Volume XLVIII, Issue 45, 21 January 1928, Page 7

BOOK NOTES

VICTORIAN SKETCHES. LORD ESHER’S REMINISCENCES. In “Cloud Capp’d Towers” Viscount Esher gives biographical studies .and incidentally refers to Eton, Cambridge and some of the great houses of England. Through this medium we are privileged to penetrate the Lowther Castle of sixty years agp, and watch the then Lord Lonsdale being wheeled to tlio head of his tablo, to sit there ladling soup and carving venison, with a background of golden racing cups. “The faro was as massive as the plate. After sunset the corridors were dimly lighted by oil lamps, and all that could be seen was the glimmer of armoured figures emerging from the gloom. Passing up the great stairs to bed was a terrifying affair. The beds were lofty, hard, and curtained, and so high from the ground that steps were provided in order to clamber into them. When, thirty years later, as Secretary to the Office of Works, King Edward drew my attention to the fact that not a single bath-room existed up to then within the walls of Windsor Castle, I was not surprised when I remembered the Lowther of- my youth.” There was Lord Lonsdale’s sister, the old Duchess of Cleveland, in whose presence no one dared to sit. “When she was in residence no one dared to whistle in the corridors or be seen with their hands in their pockets.” We accompany the youthful lord to Eton to meet Lord Rosebery, “difficult of access even to his tutor,” Hilbert Parry, the ever-laughing dark-haired boy who “whirled us into the musical society and pushed us into the football field” ; George Curzon, who “was mature at 18, clear in his outlook, consistent in aim, and brave in misfortune” ; and Edmund Warre, whose “overwhelming presence, rapid swing, magnanimous, trusting and trustworthy personality . . . pathetically inarticulate,” placed him high among the hierarchy of leaders. At Trinity Lord Esher makes friends with Lord Grey. “Sometimes Albert and I would steal away to a ball, say, at Grosvenor House, escaping without leave ,and returning by a train that left London at dawn —I am speaking of an epoch when men changed their evening coats before a ball if they had been in contact with tobacco smoke; when girls carried bouquets of lilies to a dance, and young men wore gardenias ion a tuberose instead of ‘orders.’ ” On leaving the University Lord Esher became private secretary to Lord Harrington, and spent much of his time in Devonshire House. “Lady Louise Egerton used to point out to me the stains on the green silk wall made by the heads of the powdered footmen who in the ‘late Duke’s time lounged in waiting, and whose yawns of boredom rang through the house. She was the last of the Whig ladies, who used such Whig intonations as ‘goolden’ for golden, ‘brasslet’ for bracelet, ‘chariot’ lor chariot.” The passages and rooms, we are told, were but dimly lighted, and there were but few bells. At Cbatsworth and Hardwick there were no bells at all. The picture hero given of the “sullen Marquis,” pathetically proud, always conscious of his own deficiencies, abandoning one-half of the life he would have wished to lead for the sake of people who have forgotten that he ever lived, submitting to have his unruly hair tidied by his lovely Duchess, punctually late for all dinners, even nt Marlborough House, cleverly brings to life a Duke who has for too long been regarded as simply dull. In a chapter on Hughenden we tiro given in a few short sentences tlio secret of Disraeli’s success. Bo far as the Queiin was concerned, we mo assured that it lay less in subservience to the monarch than in masculine appreciation of her sex. “He treated every woman as if she were a queen, and ho treated the Queen like a woman.” It was to Lord Esher himself that he revealed his convenient memory. “1 never contradict, I never deny; but I sometimes forget.” On tile other hand: “I never trouble to bo avenged, but when a man injures me, I put his name on a slip of paper and lock it up in a drawer. It is marvellous how men I have thus labelled have a knack of disappearing.” in a vivid chapter on King Edward VlJL.’s early hie we are shown Queen Victoria and her husband blindly struggling to achieve unreality, to make a png or a saint of a Prince who, ••thanks to nature’s deft way of looking alter her products,” became better qualified to fill his great station than "the stunted ideal oi which they had dreamed.” As a boy he was never allowed to walk in a spring garden unattended. “Driving alone with him Horn a visit to Houghton, where he borrowed a sovereign irom me to ‘tip’ the caretaker, he said, ‘I was allowed no money as a boy, and got out of the habit of carrying any, and then added sadly, ‘but 1 had no boyhood I’ ” A striking description is given oi his first week of kinship, “accessible, friendly, almost familiar, frank, suggestive, receptive, discarding ceremony, with no loss of dignity, uecisive, but neither obstinate nor imperious . . . the impression he gave me was that of a man who after long years of pent-up action, had suddenly been ireed from restraint and revelled in his liberty.” To many readers, however, the most commendable ol these essays will be that in which he delends the men of his age with great spirit against the accusations levelled at them by Mr Lytton Stracliey and Mr Harold Nicholson that there were three problems, those of sex, religion and democracy, which they faced obliquely in a spirit of compromise. “What really happened throughout the Victorian era,” ho retorts, “was the spectacle of tho two great political parties ranting on every platform to prove that one and not tho other monopolised the democratic beatitudes.” Gladstone, Newman, George Eliot, Morley, Huxley and Darwin are called in to prove that the Victorians did not attack religion 'Obliquely. “In the region of frivolity there is not so much difference between the dancing club of 1924 and the dancing saloon in 1874, except that the syncopations of the band are more obvious and class distinctions of the dancers less so. In tlieso days ladies smoke cigarettes in the restaurants; in those days gentlemen threw away their cigars before approaching the railings of Rotten-row.” He will not have it that the non-Georgians are more outspoken with regard to sex than George Eliot, Charlotte Bronte, Lecky or Swinburne. “Tho trouble that characterised these poor Victorians was this. They cared, sentimentally if you will, too much lor numbers that flowed lor old forgotten far-off things, or for familiar matters of to-day. They had no taste for caviare.”

Whatever conclusions we may reach about the relative merits of the Victorians and Georgians in their several attitudes to religion, sex and politics, this volume is sufficient proof of the Victorian aptness for biography. There is abounding vitality in these portraits, and the men and women who figure in these pages aro at least as. convincing as and far more congenial company than the more acid etchings given us

of the same people by our younger contemporaries.

A BRILLIANT NOVEL.

“Cups, Wands and Swords,” by Helen Simpson, is a quite remarkably brilliant novel which bears a resemblance to Miss Margaret Kennedy s “Red Sky ut Morning,” in that it, too, deals with the problem of a brother and sister who are so devoted that one of them, the brother in each case, goes to pieces on separation. Miss Simpson gets near to expressing plaiisn ibly the youth of to-day, maddeningly rude through sensitiveness where it wishes to gain .affection. The reader or this book will derive nothing but the purest pleasure from tho wit, rich humour, and sound philosophy that so plentifully abound in every chapter. Miss Simpson sees life very clearly, never once sinks into the banal, catches in even the snortesulived characters firmly, and gives us a whole host of “comics” that are as good as tho quaint men and women ol Compton Mackenzie’s earlier underworld. It is a queer world to which w© are taken, where an engagement must needs be celebrated by going out into the highways and coercing two drunken Guardsmen to join a party which includes two Russian dancers, a female ex-conjuror, and a highspirited collection of undergraduates. An impromptu play is then performed, at the end of which the soldiers make no effort to go, “for the class to which they belonged does not understand the art of departure; its members, if asked to tea will remain to supper, and stay the night, at great personal inconvenience, out of sheer inability to be gone.” The best part of the book, unreasonably, lies in the interchange of letters between the brilliant discontented brother lonely in Manchester and the comparatively inarticulate sister in her early days of marriage. No small art was required to make us see Celia through her simplicity .and Anthony through his sparkle.

“IT HAPPENED LIKE THAT.” Occasionally Mr Eden Phillpotts lets his pen wander away from England in order-that he may tell a story, say, of ancient Greece, but he is soon back .again on Dartmoor, and writing of the peoples and the scenes which

he has made his own. He has told many tales of Dartmoor, and many hundreds remain to bo told. In his latest work, bearing the above title, .arc twelve more, each of which would have made a novel in itself had tho author been so minded. But he preferred a series of vignettes from life, and no one who has read the tales will quarrel with his choice. They range from serious to gay, from tragic to humorous, for there are many strands in the Dartmoor pattern. Readers of “Yellow Sands” will remember Nelly and Minnie Masters, the little “go-by-the-ground” sisters who kept tho Berlin wool-shop at South Brent and threw out a bow-window to their shop when Miss Varwell left them tlieir famous legacy. They are here again, rivals, but not enemies, for the possession of Willie Travers, the sandyhaired greengrocer next door. There are “triangles” on Dartmoor, as you may see. and Mr Phillpotts uses them to effect in this tale, and also in “The Crock of Gold,” the story of a buried treasure; in “Benamin’s Mess,” where cleverness overreaches itself; and in others of the delightful twelve. The belief in witchcraft which lies so deep in so much Dartmoor life is used with excellent effect in “Easy Money for Nick,” and the selfishness which lite on the land sometimes engenders is powerfully portrayed in “The Tyrant.” These Dartmoor folk are real, and their homely wit and wisdom, the harvest of centuries on that sometimes bleak, but always fascinating, moorland comes fresh and entertaining in these short stories as in .anything more pretentious that Mr Phillpotts liqs achieved. They reveal tho author at his characteristic best.