the diminishing post-edwardians, or private lives and public process: biographical evidence

the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the editors of The Journal ofInterdisciplinary History

The Diminishing Post-Edwardians, or Private Lives and Public Process: Biographical EvidenceQueen Alexandra by Georgina Battiscombe; The Edwardians by J. B. Priestley; The EdwardianTurn of Mind by Samuel Hynes; Superior Person: A Portrait of Curzon and His Circle in LateVictorian England by Kenneth Rose; Curzon in India. I: Achievement. II: Frustration by DavidDilks; Action This Day: Working with Churchill by John Wheeler-Bennett; Churchill: AStudy in Failure, 1900-1939 by Robert Rhodes James; Elgin and Chur ...Review by: Peter StanskyThe Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Vol. 3, No. 1 (Summer, 1972), pp. 153-166Published by: The MIT PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/202467 .

Accessed: 08/05/2014 18:03

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

The MIT Press and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the editors of The Journal ofInterdisciplinary History are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Journalof Interdisciplinary History.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 169.229.32.137 on Thu, 8 May 2014 18:03:44 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=mitpress

http://www.jstor.org/stable/202467?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


Peter Stansky

The Diminishing Post-Edwardians, or Private Lives and Public Process:

Biographical Evidence

Queen Alexandra. By Georgina Battiscombe (Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1969) 336 pp. $7.50

The Edwardians. ByJ. B. Priestley (New York, Harper and Row, 1970) 302 pp. $I5.00

The Edwardian Turn of Mind. By Samuel Hynes (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1968) 427 pp. $9.75

Superior Person: A Portrait of Curzon and his Circle in Late Victorian England. By Kenneth Rose (New York, Weybright and Talley, Inc., 1969) 475 pp. $.00oo

Curzon in India. I: Achievement. II: Frustration. By David Dilks. (New York, Taplinger Publishing Co., I969) 296 pp., 307 pp. $Io.oo each

Action This Day: Working With Churchill. Edited by Sir John Wheeler- Bennett (New York, St. Martin's Press, 1969) 272 pp. $5.95

Churchill: A Study in Failure, 1900oo-939. By Robert Rhodes James (New York, World Publishing Co., 1970) 400 pp. $8.95

Elgin and Churchill at the Colonial Office, 19o5-19o8. By Ronald Hyam (New York, St. Martin's Press, 1968) 574 pp. $I6.50 The Political Diaries of C. P. Scott: 1911-1928. Edited by Trevor Wilson

(Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1970) 509 pp. $I.00oo

Whitehall Diary. I: 1916-1925. II: 1926-1930. By Thomas Jones (edited by Keith Middlemas) (New York, Oxford University Press, 1969) 358 pp., 311 pp. $8.75 each

Memoirs of a Conservative: J. C. C. Davidson's Memoirs and Papers, 1910-37. Edited by Robert Rhodes James (New York, The Macmillan Co., 1969) 446 pp. $9.95

Baldwin: A Biography. By Keith Middlemas and John Barnes (New York, The Macmillan Co., 1969) 1,149 pp. $I4.95 Peter Stansky is Associate Professor of History at Stanford University. He is the author of Ambitions and Strategies: The Struggle for the Leadership of the Liberal Party (Oxford, I964); and, with William Abrahams, ofJourney to the Frontier (Boston, I966) and The Unknown Orwell (New York, 1972).



I54 | PETER STANSKY

Historical biographers, preoccupied with answering the questions that their individual subjects give rise to-the shape of his life and of his world-tend to ignore the larger collective questions that historians, unlike biographers, find of particular interest. How, for example, is one to account for the fading, the washing-out of personality as one goes forward in time, from the color and frequently the vulgarity of- for example-the Edwardians to the drabness and business-suited feeling of the leading Tory politicians of the I92os and I930s? David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill are the notable, almost unique, excep- tions, and both were already fully engaged in political life before I914. Most of the leaders after 1918, lacking in imagination and fearful of excess, appear to be reduced in scale-earnest and serious, but less than heroic-sized-and as such provide a curious parallel to Britain's changing and diminishing position in the postwar world.

What had happened to the imperial mood, the extraordinary assurance and high spirits, the heavy-handed good fellowship, the arrogance (made perhaps more tolerable by a certain heartiness and lack of "side"), that was characteristic of England "at the top" in the early years of the century ? Admittedly, even before the war this mood was being undermined by forces of modernism. But modernism is a

phenomenon that bears no relation to the "clerkly" mentality of the Baldwins and Tom Joneses and the respectable, subfusc atmosphere that they engendered and preferred.

The twelve books under consideration here-whether biographies, diaries, memoirs, or monographs with biographical emphasis-help us to arrive at answers to this question, although it must be said that this was not their authors' intention. They as biographers are concerned with their individual subjects: certain men (and a woman) who held power, figures (and a figurehead) who were responsible for much that was happening in England in the first thirty-nine years of the twentieth century. Taken singly, these subjects are, for the most part, "characters" of greater or lesser interest, depending for interest as much on their private personality as on their public persona. Taken together, however, their lives become part of the historical process. In that light, their biographies are particularly to be valued by historians.

The qualities of the Edwardian world are touched on interestingly, if not profoundly, in the biography of Queen Alexandra by Battis- combe and in the survey of Edwardian life by Priestley. Both are good books-the latter, particularly, provides an unsophisticated but provoca- tive example of how several disciplines can be combined in the attempt



DIMINISHING POST-EDWARDIANS 1| 55

to reach a picture of an age. Battiscombe's biography, of course, con- cerns itself as well with the Victorian age, into which Alexandria was born and to which she was better suited by temperament than the post- Edwardian era in which she died. Her increasing deafness as she grew older might be seen as a symbolic effort to keep the world as it had been in her early years, and there is a pathetic sadness in one of her last letters when she described herself as "your poor old blind and deaf old loving Motherdear" (299). Battiscombe is not unctuous, as royal biographers so frequently are, and she does not make the mistake, so frequent in the genre, of thinking that virtually all of her subject's acts were important. The Queen deserves a biography, but only just, and to a certain degree her "life" is a waste of her biographer's talents. Queen Victoria had said of her future daughter-in-law: "Very clever I don't think she is." Battiscombe makes the perceptive comment:

She had beauty, she had goodness, she had intuition and sympathy and charm, but she had very little brain. This was her irredeemable defect, a root from which a vast amount of trouble was to spring. The Prince [Edward] was in no sense an intellectual, but he enjoyed the company of clever people. In particular, he enjoyed the company of clever women; ... Beyond everything else, he hated to be bored and in the long run a stupid woman, however beautiful, was bound to prove a bore. [57]

Bored, the King took a succession of mistresses whom he deemed not to be boring. The Queen tolerated them with dignity; indeed, it was almost as though, for her, they did not exist, and her attitude won her the admiration and sympathy not only of the people, but especially of her husband. The king can be taken to stand for a triumph of har- nessed bourgeois and sexual power-so characteristic of the age- projected by his own massiveness and richly fed corpulence. By con- trast, Alexandra was merely ornamental (an Art Nouveau ornament ?). Her function was to provide children, which she did, and a few Ed- wardian fashions. As it turned out, though, it was she, rather than the king, who helped mark the transition to the figurative monarchy that would come into being with the reign of George V and has continued in favor since-one that would be both attractive (or glamorous in a respectable way) and good. Victoria, of course, had striven only for the latter: She would never have felt glamor to be a desirable attribute. Edward, distrusted by his mother, was willing to do his duty as king, and although he had no belief in the value of being good, he would



I56 I PETER STANSKY

always be at pains to observe that key Edwardian commandment: "Thou shalt not be found out." In this sense, he played the game of

being king much more skillfully than his grandson and namesake Edward VIII, who would not follow the grandfatherly example of keeping mistresses, but, with a rectitude worthy of Stanley Baldwin, insisted upon marrying the woman he loved (much to Baldwin's

disapproval). Alexandra is not sufficiently representative a figure to shed much

light on the change in England's mood as the nineteenth century ended and the twentieth century began. Those who looked back at the Edwardian period from the perspective of I920 tended to see it as a time of security and assurance when measured against the frenetic

changes which the war had brought about in manners and morals. Such a view was an understandable, nostalgic oversimplification, which historians since have continued to correct. Therefore, it is not surprising that Priestley should find a good deal more in the period than the mood of a golden summer afternoon. There was melancholy and a lack of assurance, but there was also some "hopeful debate." There was

extravagance and opulence, but also an unassertive English domesticity, still to be experienced in the "at home" flavor of the handsome

pictures from the Camden Town Group, the interiors of Spencer Gore and Harold Gilman, for instance, and those of the greatest English painter of the time, W. R. Sickert. But Sickert also painted interiors that could be heavy with ennui; and his paintings of the music halls

suggest something heavy and deliberate in the gaiety that they celebrate. There was a sense of security, and a high spiritedness that approached frenzy: Priestley is very shrewd in dealing with ragtime as an illustra- tion of the latter. It is in such insights that his book is at its most

rewarding. Of course, he does not pretend to be writing anything more than an easy-going survey; and, judging it in the context of a lavishly illustrated book meant to appeal as much to viewers as to readers, one can be grateful that the text is not meretricious and that it directs attention to many semiforgotten names: William de Morgan, Stanley Houghton, and C. R. Ashbee. (It is regrettable that the book should be marred by sloppy proofreading, an uncaptioned photograph, and other

typographical signs of careless production-a carelessness singularly inappropriate to a period which took its pleasures, among them the

making of fine books, seriously.) Priestley writes jauntily on the margin; yet not even a more

rigorous and complicated approach assures coming closer to the heart




of the period. Hynes considers some of the same problems as Priestley does. He uses the materials of literary and social history in a sophisticated way, but his grasp of political history is less secure, and, in the end, one is not quite convinced that a firm and full picture of the era has emerged in The Edwardian Turn of Mind. Hynes would seem to misunderstand what is meant by the term "establishment" as it figured in the political realities of the period. He points out correctly that there was no monolithic group in England dedicated to preserving the status quo, and that there never has been. (Indeed, the great central fact of the "establishment," which accounts for its longevity, is that it has been able to adapt itself to change.) But he has too rigid a picture of even so class-ridden a country as England. It is a mistake to believe that the "establishment" ceased to rulejust because the Liberal party won a great victory in I906-in fact, most of its leaders were themselves part of the "establishment." And would not the more radical Liberal leaders, like the trade union leaders to a certain limited extent in their turn, become part of the "established orders" ? Both the Liberal and Tory parties had elements of rigidity and disorder, and neither was as completely identified with one or the other as Hynes seems to think. The members of the Conservative Cecil family one day might be literally screaming at Herbert Asquith, the Liberal prime minister, in the House of Com- mons and the next day might be defining principles of conservatism in an enlightened and modern way. Whatever the seeming paralysis of the Liberal party, there was more constructive activity among the Liberals than Hynes is willing to grant-Lloyd George and Churchill, those two vital forces, as Baldwin pointed out with severe disapproval of the former, sponsored legislation designed to improve the ordinary man's lot. They might have done more than they did, but could have comfortably got by doing less, and they were not alone: There were younger Liberals ready to apply pressure for further action.

Politics apart, Hynes' study is original and rewarding, as he in- vestigates some crucial, hitherto neglected byways of the Edwardian world. He is at his best in his brilliant chapter on "The Theatre and the Lord Chamberlain"-where he is not putting a foot interestingly wrong about politics but exploring an area overlooked by most writers, and using it to reveal how the Edwardians saw the composition of their society, divided between leaders and the led, the teachers and the taught, and the top and the bottom-a stratification which accepted the censorship of plays as a natural class obligation. But as against such considerable felicities in his account there is a heightened sense of melo-



158 | PETER STANSKY

drama and portentousness that does not seem appropriate even for that lively time before World War I. Did human character really change in England quite so decisively at that moment-was the country really an armed camp in 1914? There was the possibility of civil war and internal strife due to the wave of strikes and the violence of the suffra- gettes, but ordinary life appeared to go on in its ordinary way in spite of suffering profound shocks. It is not easy to determine how extensive these shocks were; in any event, they were redirected by the outbreak of the war.

Of the two studies of George Curzon, Tory politician, Viceroy of India, and Foreign Secretary, neither is a complete biography. The book by Rose-done in that upper middlebrow manner which comes so easily to the English-keeps quite firmly to its subtitle; except for a forty-six page epilogue, he does not carry Curzon's story beyond his appointment in 1898 as Viceroy of India. It is that later period which Dilks examines in great detail. But one must still turn to Harold Nicolson's Curzon: The Last Phase, 1919-1925 (Boston, 1934), and the official biography by the Earl of Ronaldshay (1928) to discover more about Curzon's life after his resignation from the Indian service in 1905.

Curzon conveys a rich, almost an overripe sense of the rulers of the Edwardian age. There he was-who could be more gifted or prom- ising-the protege of William Johnson Cory and Oscar Browning at Eton, at the top of the world, a member of the Souls, that glittering social set with pretensions (not wholly unjustified) to intellectuality. Yet he was a paranoid figure, wracked by ambition, determined to wipe out the very few failures that marked his early career, such as a second in his Oxford examinations. He was a man bound for success who, although he gained a good deal of it, found it insufficient to fulfill his ambitions. The viceroyship was spoiled by bitter quarreling. The prime ministership, which he had had some reason to expect, was snatched away in favor of that person of, in Curzon's phrase, "utmost insignificance," Stanley Baldwin. Here was a man who was larger than life, in both grand and ridiculous ways, losing out to post-I9I8 figures who seemed to be of diminished stature but better able to cope with the realities of the contemporary situation.

Curzon did not question the institutions with which he was sur- rounded, be they Eton or India. He was determined to enhance and master them, but he could not cope when a flexible attitude was required. He had a ruthlessness, frequently misguided, and a tough- mindedness which expressed itself in his cruel attitude toward foreigners



DIMINISHING POST-EDWARDIANS [ 159

and animals-"races unfortunate enough not to be English." The world beyond England, he felt, and a good part of England as well, was there to further the glory of the English ruling classes-who should in return have a sense of responsibility for those under their care. Curzon united a high quality of civilization with a crude desire to succeed; he was Edwardian in both respects. To give one example, there is a story told by Rose: "The German governess employed by some friends with whom he [Curzon] was staying once asked him innocently: 'Please tell me, Mr. Curzon, what is the meaning of your English word "bounder" that I sometimes hear you called?' 'It is,' he replied, 'one who succeeds in life by leaps and bounds'" (I90). Rose makes clear enough that it was Curzon's arrogance and self-assurance, masking his self-doubts, which offended so many. (But he does not fully explain the other side:

Why it was that so large a circle of friends was truly devoted to this difficult man.)

A vital center was missing in Curzon, a force which would harness for maximum effectiveness his great intelligence to his political and administrative gifts. His grand life-despite the imposed austerities of sadistic governesses, beatings at schools, and travels under extremely difficult conditions-heightened rather than integrated the disparities evident in his personality.

Dilks, in his long study of Curzon's seven years as Viceroy in

'India, provides a closer glimpse of the strengths and weaknesses of this late Victorian/Edwardian statesman. Firmly convinced of England's right to rule India, he was determined to maintain and increase her

power. It did not occur to him even to question whether the English were superior to the Indians. But he was keenly aware that the English were capable of many abuses in their rule, and, as the Empire continued to prosper, too prone to consider it a God-given possession. Curzon never doubted the need to exercise responsibility fully-indeed, one of his defects was that he could not delegate it. The Edwardian empire produced too many who were determined to live a life of pleasure and to do nothing to justify their existence, but, others, like Curzon, toiled incessantly, indeed neurotically, to justify England's imperial position. Although extremely given to form, he, like the Queen, felt that there was too much red tape in the governing of India: The administration had become needlessly complicated and lazy, and the arduous traditions of the Indian Civil Service were beginning to soften. Victoria was surprisingly acute in knowing that the English must be careful of their aggressiveness in India. Devout as she was, she was not



I60 | PETER STANSKY

in favor of strenuous missionary activity, and she was very aware of the dangers of racism. As she wrote, "We shall never be really liked in India if we keep up this racial feeling, and some day real danger may result from it" (I, 240). Curzon himself said: "I will not be a party to

any of the scandalous hushing up of bad cases of which there is too much in this country, or to the theory that a white man may kick or batter a black man to death with impunity because he is only a 'd- d

nigger.' There is too much of that spirit abroad; and I have sacrificed ease and popularity to combat it" (I, 213). Fairness was essential, but the

duty to rule must not be shirked: ". . . . a calling that I always think has been laid on Englishmen from on high" (II, 135). He drafted a statement in August I917 which recognized that there would be a move toward responsible government in India, with Indians participating. Yet, as Dilks points out, he probably did not conceive that this would mean

parliamentary government in the Western sense. Curzon fell as Viceroy, or, rather, submitted his resignation, after

his duel with another extraordinary Edwardian, Field Marshal Lord Kitchener. Kitchener felt that he must control the Indian army when he, with Curzon's blessing, went out to India as commander-in-chief; Curzon believed that the military must be controlled by the Viceroy. Kitchener could argue his case in a reasonable way: He better sup- pressed hisfolie de grandeur than did Curzon. These men seemed larger than life; as they quarreled, there was an element of the battle of the

gods before the collapse of Valhalla-perhaps it would have been more appropriate if Richard Wagner had been an English composer of the

period, rather than Sir Edward Elgar or Gustav Holst. Those who grew up in the late-nineteenth century, in assured

positions in society, had a firm grasp of their position in the world, and they entered all experiences at full tilt-certainly this was true of Winston Churchill. The Churchill literature is immense, much of it

mythagogic, and an alarming proportion of it consists of books written for children, full of the same incidents and stories. The three books considered here all have the virtue of being serious and interesting studies. One is a collection of essays, edited by Wheeler-Bennett, written by those who served Churchill during his premiership. It is civil servant history, and tends to be colorless, too reasonably admiring, and with little of the eccentricity which marked the man himself. It is also a shade too dedicated to putting down Lord Moran, the doctor who

published a mammoth book about him, and what these contributors

regard as Moran's presumption in claiming to know Churchill better



DIMINISHING POST-EDWARDIANS | I6I

than did they. The group who contributed to Action this Day called themselves members of "The Secret Circle," which in itself sounds like a theosophist group left over from Hynes' study, and their book deals mostly with Churchill at the summit of his career.

Rhodes James discusses Churchill from I900 to 1939, and fully, but in a carping and sniping tone-it is not surprising to learn that Rhodes James and Randolph Churchill were estranged shortly before the latter's death. He succeeds in pointing out the many ways in which Churchill was wrong about so many things, starting when his career began to go sour during World War I, continuing with a series of disasters of various dimensions, and ending with his backing of Edward VIII in the latter's wish to keep the throne and to marry Mrs. Simpson. But Rhodes James does not really succeed in explaining what the elements were which caused failure before I939 and success after that date. RhodesJames is justly proud of his ability, based on his experience as a clerk of the House of Commons, to gauge the importance of the mood of the Commons and its frequent changes. He is a master of political knowledge and excellent at using an extraordinarily wide range of published sources, but one does not feel that he has presented a profound picture of his subject. The greatest value of the book is its careful account of Churchill's years between 1918 and 1939, while we await the further volumes of the massive official life.

Rhodes James makes perfectly clear Churchill's flashiness and his inability to inspire trust. He, like the other leading "radical" of the pre-World War I liberal government, Lloyd George, sent shivers up and down the spines of respectable politicians: In the I920S they continued to worry about Lloyd George, and in the I930s about Churchill.

Hyman's exhaustive study, although it only covers three years, provides more insight and is continuously interesting. The Earl of Elgin, the colonial secretary, rather than his under-secretary, Churchill, is the major figure. Hyman's main concern is to follow the beginnings of transition from Empire to Commonwealth, but more engrossing, I felt, is his picture of Churchill, the man of enthusiasms. Churchill's bounci- ness dismayed Elgin, but they managed to get on fairly well, perhaps because Churchill combined a full-blown style, which he shared with Curzon, with a great sense of reality. He believed in "the principle of timely concession to retain an ultimate control" ( 16). Much of Churchill's ebullience arose from a sense that the British Empire was at a high moment in the history of the world, and he was determined to enjoy it. His mistress-his sense of destiny-was a merry muse, not the



162 | PETER STANSKY

proper Victorian maiden whom his superior, the Earl of Elgin, revered. The Edwardians most characteristic of the age were out to succeed and to have a good time, and they were deeply patriotic in a high-spirited, unquestioning way. Churchill as a young man rather enjoyed war and

fighting. Years later, he could not resist a certain feeling of pleasure at the thought of World War II.

If Churchill represents the Elgarian crescendo in Edwardian politics -"Pomp and Circumstance," so to speak-Delius' diminuendo was there as well and would triumph in the worthy careers of Tom Jones and Stanley Baldwin. Lloyd George was the strange music of Wales: a bad little elf who came out of Merlin's country, the hills of Wales, to enchant and infuriate the more sober English. He is the dominant

figure in the diaries of Charles Prestwich Scott, the great editor of the Manchester Guardian, where their disagreements and reconciliations are recorded; it is Lloyd George who gives the pages life. He was an incredible opportunist-in John Morley's words, recorded by Scott, he did not understand a principle, "but acted on feeling, impulse, vision, and his politics was not a consistent whole" (366). Like Churchill, he was not a party man. As A. J. P. Taylor has remarked, both men used the party, rather than serving it loyally. Lloyd George was coalition- minded, not in the "patriotic" fashion of the Tories, who at times liked "national" governments, but to ensure his own continuing power. His

high-flying spirit needed to touch down on new politics, cash, and secretaries in order to be recharged for further political adventures. His lack of predictability, of solidity, made the regular politicians of all

parties distrust him profoundly, although most of them did recognize, begrudgingly, how well he had served the country as Prime Minister

during World War I. Even Scott, a Liberal who was favorably inclined to Lloyd George despite many reservations, thought that he often

betrayed the principles of Liberalism. The transformation of a Lloyd George man to a Baldwin man can

be seen in the pages of the Tom Jones diary, which begins in I916 when he came to London and became part of the new War Secretariat, the famed "Garden Suburb," which all of Lloyd George's enemies viewed with deep suspicion. Jones was a member of the Labour party and considered himself as something of a Socialist, although he was not a regular Labour voter. But he rapidly adopted the civil service

mentality of being faithful to his master of the moment. He did it so well that each would confide in him, and he to them, in and out of office. He was able to suggest to Lloyd George, Bonar Law, and Baldwin



DIMINISHING POST-EDWARDIANS | I63

that his closest political loyalty was to each of them. Each successive Prime Minister represented a slowing down of the pace; Bonar Law was much slower than Lloyd George, but he was dynamic compared to Baldwin. As Jones remarked of Baldwin, "Nothing like B.L.'s Brain-much slower and always eager to consult one or two others before coming to a decision" (I, 237). Bonar Law had his reservations about Lloyd George, but Baldwin was quite obsessed by the man from Wales, as though he were defending the Worcestershire hills from the marauders from across the border. Once the Baldwins showed Jones an album of photographs: "I came across a picture of Lloyd George as Chancellor of the Exchequer defaced. How they do hate him" (I, 256). Jones maintains his own belief, despite his loyalty to Baldwin, that Lloyd George was the most remarkable figure of his acquaintance. But his primary aim as a civil servant was loyalty to his chief, and he was a speech writer for Labour leaders Ramsay MacDonald andJ. H. Thomas as well. At the same time, Jones maintained his friendships with those who were out of office-he was part of the "continuity of policy." Jones felt that there was nothing wrong with spending the first days of the Labour Government, when he was already working closely with the Labour Cabinet, with Baldwin. He believed that, despite Baldwin's loss of the General Election of 1929, "His personal prestige in the country is not seriously impaired, and he set a tone throughout the fight which commanded universal respect" (II, 189). This was Baldwin's aim, to reestablish public honor-as Edward Grey wrote to him at the beginning of 1929: "As long as you are at the head of a Government, it will stand for what is honourable. The iron entered into my soul, when LI.G.'s Govt. after the war let down and corrupted public life at home and destroyed our credit abroad. Ever since, it has been a relief to have public honour re-established and you will always stand for that. . ." (II, I66).

Was it enough? Probably little could have been done to help England cope with the problems of adjusting from a first-class to a second-class power. But the imaginative strength of a Churchill, or a Lloyd George, might have better served the country than the worthiness of Baldwin. That solid but unexciting quality is made overwhelmingly evident in the memoir by Lord Davidson, a Tory figure very close to Baldwin, and in the excessively long biography of Baldwin himself. In many ways Baldwin emerges as an attractive figure with a sense of humor, intelligence, and compassion-but these attributes are exag- gerated and, indeed, he is overpraised.



164 | PETER STANSKY

The Davidson book is a cross between a biography and an auto- biography. Concentrating on the period I9Io to 1939, it is preoccupied with an obsessive dislike of Lloyd George, who is made to represent everything that was wrong with the gay Edwardian life. As Davidson wrote to Bonar Law's sister: "I am sufficient of a Calvinist to believe that good cannot come out of evil and that Lloyd George cannot prosper" (46). Here one clearly sees how Baldwin was able to convey the feeling, quite justly, of his honesty, his "right thinking," that he was a "safe" man. Baldwin's entire political career, it would seem, and that of his chairman of the party, Davidson, was based on keeping an

eye on Lloyd George and making sure that he was not given any oppor- tunity to misuse the system for his own purposes. Memoirs of a Con- servative is essentially an editing of the papers of a minor politician, important in terms of the working of a party, but there is a certain dullness in those "inside" stories-they are far less interesting than one might expect or hope. On the whole, the age of scandal was past, although there is some enlivening reading-alas without names-in the continual opportuning of Davidson by various would-be contributors who were anxious for honors. Both Baldwin and Davidson emerge as somewhat more imaginative than had previously been thought, as evidenced by the fact that they saw the need to recruit from the left of the Tory spectrum and from the young in order to keep the

party alive. In this I,I49-page biography, we are told more about Baldwin

than anyone would care to know. The authors themselves became tired of reading their own text, not to mention the proofreaders, as the ,number of typographical errors markedly increases as the book tolls past the 7oo-page mark. Baldwin is done a disservice by the dispas- sionate nature of his biographers. They clearly favor him, but are anxious to present a complete and sophisticated portrait, with full analyses. The, book would have been less tedious if it had been more old-fashioned; then the reader could have made his own interpretations of the many documents and not have been presented with long, dull

expositions of them by the authors. It is a worthy book on a worthy subject, but it goes on much too long, and should have been cut ruth- lessly. Considering its length, there is much less sense of context than one would expect, and much less sense of the age and of the changes that England was undergoing.

Baldwin helped return England to "normalcy" when he spoke against Lloyd George at the meeting of the Tory parliamentary party




at the Carlton Club on October I9, 1922. There he said of him: "A dynamic force is a very terrible thing; it may crush you but it is not necessarily right" (I23). Politicians before World War I had not been opposed to dynamic force; for them the game of politics consisted in their interplay. Bonar Law had interjected the "new style" into parliamentary debate, and the Tories had threatened to use "dynamic forces" if they did not get their way over Ireland. But the war, and Lloyd George, were dynamic forces which had gotten out of hand. The public, apparently, preferred the "hope, love, work, faith" put to them by Baldwin, although Baldwin was astute enough to recognize the need for imaginative men, if they would cooperate. As he remarked of his appointment of Churchill as chancellor of the exchequer in his first government in I924: "It would be up to him to be loyal, if he is capable of loyalty" (282). Baldwin, his biographers assert, was a triumph of inspired common sense. But he made a dull political leader. If he had been dull and successful that would have been one thing; but for all of his common sense, he does not seem to have done what was needed for England between the wars, and his determination to hold on to his office until he was seventy, in spite of physical overstrain and increasing psychological disabilities, was unfortunate. When he finally decided to retire, he did so gracefully. But his career had its dreadful coda: the odium and abuse heaped on him in the years of the war as the man who had failed to prepare England for the holocaust. It is a fitting irony that many of those commonsense worshippers who had followed him with enthusiasm when he seemed to be assuring the peace now turned on him for not having prepared the country for war.

Perhaps, however, the Edwardian and post-Edwardian ages met in the graceful remarks Churchill and Baldwin were to make of one another. Baldwin, in a conversation with Harold Nicolson, said of Churchill: "The furnace of this war has smelted out all the base metals from him" (Io65). Churchill remarked with characteristic generosity as he dedicated a monument to Baldwin at his country house that "he was the most formidable politician I have ever known in public life" (1072). Baldwin was certainly a stronger man than he liked to appear- indeed, as A. J. P. Taylor has pointed out, his genius consisted in hiding his powers-but Churchill's "formidable" was really more applicable to Lloyd George, or to Churchill himself.

A country's position in the world plays a considerable part in shap- ing the style of its leaders. Churchill and Lloyd George, formidable alike in their confidence and gifts, benefited from coming to the fore



I66 | PETER STANSKY

while England still had an unquestioning sense of its greatness. There is a peculiar correspondence between the fussy cautious approach of Baldwin and his friends and England's cloudy understanding of her changing place in the world. The scale had diminished.



the diminishing post-edwardians, or private lives and public process: biographical evidence

Documents