MARGINAL COMMENT
. By HAROLD NICOLSON
WHEN I was a young man I was much impressed by a sentence which I read in a contemporary book of maxims and apophthegms. " God has given us our relations," wrote the astute compiler of this volume, "Thank God, we can chdose our friends." My approval of this maxim was certainly not due to any restlessness on my part within the circle of my immediate family. The affection which I received from them was returned with deep devotion ; lovingly they protected me against the thorns of life. Nor was my acceptance of the truth of the epigram in any way based upon dislike of the innumerable grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins by whom my days were then surrounded. Some of my relations were rich and grand ; some of them were poor and humble ; but all of them in their different ways were gay and amicable and not too intolerant. In fact when I look back upon myself as a boy home for his holidays from a private school it remains for me a matter of astonishment that any of my relations could have tolerated me at all. I possessed no capacities other than a truly remarkable gift for destruction. At my approach porcelain vases would dissolve into fragments, books bound in leather would suddenly disintegrate, chairs constructed of oak, mahogany and walnut would spring apart, and the fibre mantles which in those days formed so central an element in the installation of acetylene gas would topple sideways along the corridors and arcades. Noisy and conversational I was during the day-time, and when evening came I would surrender sobbing to night fears. Inquisitive I was in foolish ways, asking unendurable questions, wishing to be told the contents of every letter that arrived. The banisters which belonged to my relations would be encrusted during my visits with heavy layers of jam and honey. I was as dirty and untidy as any yahoo : it is with astonished gratitude that I look back upon their unflinching hospitality and tolerance. I should, I well know, be less hospitable or kindly to my own grandchildren and nephews.
How came it that, when I read that slick apophthegm, I did not immediately exclaim "But this remark is one of quite unwarrantable cynicism! Had not God imposed me upon my own relations I should have missed much in my early life which was comfortable and kind! " How came it that I accepted the definition as both wise and true? To some extent, of course, my revolt against family pressure must have been due to an instinctive faith in individual liberty, a faith which, I am glad to say, has remained persistent throughout my years. To a larger extent, however, it was, as I now recognise, due to my dislike of assumptions. To those who were not born under the conventions of the late Victorian epoch it must be difficult to understand how compelling were the assumptions by which we were encased. Of all these assumptions the one that seemed to me the most illogical and the least proved by personal experience was that one's own relations were necessarily more lovable and more interesting than other people's relations. It seemed strange and irritating to me that I should be expected as a matter of course to feel more affection for, and deeper interest in, a second cousin once removed than I might entertain for the son or daughter of the gamekeeper. • It might well be that I possessed no selective affinities for a given cousin ; that indeed I loathed the way her hair grew and the freckles on her face. If I confessed that I disliked the daughter of the gamekeeper my parents would remark quite casually and with slight conviction, " You should try, dear, to be more tolerant of other people." But if I said that I detested a cousin, they would assume the expression which I well knew to be one of ethical reproof.
My distaste for this assumption only increased with the passage of years. I then learnt that family loyalty, or even filial duty, could become something more than an assumption and be twisted into a machine of intensive tyranny. I realised that there were people whose whole lives were actually poisoned by this convention ; that The Way of All Flesh was not in fact a fantasy, and that there really were people in the world like Mr. Dombey. " All unhappy families," wrote Tolstoy in Anna Karenina, " resemble each other ; but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." And although I retained, I hope, the gratitude which I felt personally towards those of my relations who had been kind to me when I was a beastly little boy, I saw no reason why I should expand that gratitude into any feelings of interest in their descendants or collaterals. As I have grown older, this aversion from the assumption that one should always love one's relations, irrespective of their charm, their character or their looks, has been modified. I find that I am becoming increasingly inter- ested in my relations, not because I believe that there is any moral or conventional obligation for such interest, but simply because I regard the problem of heredity as one of the most fascinating problems that exist. My interest in my distant cousins and their families has become a purely Mendelian interest ; I enjoy noticing which are the dominant and which the recessive characteristics of my breed. When once one acquires this form of curiosity, one finds oneself delving into the temperaments of one's remoter ancestors. I like to feel that I have some strain within me which I share with the brothers Adam ; I am amused, and not in the least embarrassed, to discover that I and Boswell derive from the same stock.
How curious indeed is the recurrence within families of those dominant characters which the Abbot Mendel first analysed and observed. How comes it that the Hapsburg lip should assert itself through all manner of mixtures and permutations? Even in one's own family one can notice, in the most distant collaterals, in people even who have been born and brought up overseas, some formation of bone or eyelid which identifies them with the portraits of distant generations on the walls. Even the smallest personal gestures—the way a boy will hold a book, or adjust his muffler to his neck, or hand the pepper-pot—will suddenly recall to the older generation the move- ments of a grandfather who has long been dead. In the voices of children we can often catch again l'infiexion des voix cheres qui se sons tuies. And in the habits of one's relations one can recognise again and again those quirks of impulse and diffidence, those odd divergences of conduct, with which one is all too familiar in oneself and which one can recognise in the careers or writings of one's fore- bears. Sometimes, moreover, as one reads some history or memoirs of a past century one comes across an action on the part of a forebear which beckons to one across the gulf of time. I have been reading this week Professor Newman White's two enormous volumes on the life of Shelley. To my astonishment I discovered that my great- great-grandfather was one of the six people present at the burial of Shelley's ashes in the Protestant cemetery in Rome. What induced him to be there on that occasion? He was not connected with Shelley ; there is no record that they ever met. I am deeply grateful to him for this unexpected gesture.
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After all, Shelley at that date was regarded as a revolutionary and an anarchist ; my great-great-grandfather, Sir George Cockburn, was a man of some distinction. He was a Lieutenant-General and a G.C.B. He was also a man of advanced Whig sentiments. When the Reform Bills were passed in 1832 he erected a huge column on his estate in Ireland with a commemorative inscription recording the event. Four years later he added a further inscription on the back of the column. " Alas! " runs this later inscription, " to this date a Hum Bug. July, 1836." But what induced this eccentric radical to attend the burial of Shelley? Only a short time before he had been in command of the British army of occupation in Sicily. His attendance at this funeral would scarcely commend him to the Horse Guards. Yet he stood there by the pyramid of Caius Cestius on that January after- noon in 1823, in the company of Joseph Severn and four others. How strange it seems and true!
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