BOOKS OF THE DAY
A Too Public Life
Tins two-volume biography of the first Lord Reading by his son is a convincing argument in favour of one-volume biographies. It is rarely indeed that in such a case two volumes are better than one. Judicious selection combined with reasonably skilful compression produces far better results than portraiture spread over a large canvas. Unfortunately, this particular book suffers from other defects than that. It consists of six chapters, occupying 375 pages, and covering Lord Reading's life from 1914 to his death in 1935. One is devoted to his brief active career as Lord Chief Justice (he held the post for eight years, but for two-thirds of the rime was employed on special missions), two to his work first as High Com- missioner and then as Ambassador at Washington, two to his Viceroyalty in India, and one, the shortest of all, to the last nine and a half years of his life, after his return to England. Here, in what is virtually an epilogue, biography is handled as biography should be. Here, almost for the first time, Lord Reading is seen as a human being rather than as a diplomatist and administrator. Here is the only mention (if I remember rightly) of any book he read,; here is an altogether attractive picture of a great man gaining for the first time some leisure from the tasks that had absorbed his whole life, and seasoning the enjoyment of it with new tasks of a different kind to keep his tireless energies exercised.
In all the rest of the book the human Rufus Isaacs hardly appears. Ills biographer, indeed, seems almost at pains to conceal 'him. Every man must, of course, be depicted against the background of his life and times and work. The trouble here is that for nine- tenths of the volume the background has become foreground. On page 22 (in the autumn of 1915) Lord Reading goes to Washington to try to arrange a loan from the then neutral America, and there- after for some 45 pages the reader is left to battle his way through masses of figures and financial discussions which would be tiresome if they had to be mastered in connection with the controversies of December, 1945, and as dealing with December, 1915, are nothing less than intolerable. Similarly with the Viceroyalty. The two chaptets, of just on zoo pages, dealing with this are in effect a detailed history of the tangled controversies of Indian factions from 19.21 to 1926, with Lord.Reading the Viceroy frequently discernible through the undergrowth, but Lord Reading the man discernible only in the most occasional and tantalisihily Attractive glimpses. All the time the reader is, Ieft groping for something that ought to be there and never is. Nothing, for example, would have been more welcome than Lord Reading's frank assessment of President Wilson, with whom he was brought in constant and intimate touch during his High Commissionership and AmbasSadorship at Washington. It is impossible that he should never have expressed an opinion about the President. Yet these pages add not an iota to our knowledge of Mr. Wilson.
It is the same thing with India. The two men who counted most in that vast country from 1921 to 1926 were Lord Reading and Mr. Gandhi. Here, indeed, expectation is half gratified. Extracts from Lord Reading's letters home after he had met the Mahatma for the first time show what rich material there was waiting to be quarried. But for later and more considered estimates of Mr. Gandhi as a personality and a political force we again wait almost wholly— admittedly not quite wholly—in vain. In 1925 Lord Reading did what no Viceroy had ever done before, left India during his term of office, to return home for a short holiday and for discussions with the Government. It must have been an interlude of peculiar interest. The Viceroy must (after a voyage which could not be completely devoid of all incident) have renew ed numberless acquaint- ances, met the members of a new Government for the first time, made contact with friends at his clubs and at the Temple, spent some weeks in real recreation, presumably read some books and seen some plays. What his biographer tells us—in eight and a half lines—is that he left India on April zoth and landed again in India on August 6th, that the object of the journey was. as I have stated, and that his absence from India needed special authorisa- tion from Parliament.
Painstaking as this record is, it is beyond reasonable measure uncritical. Opinions may differ about Lord Reading's achievements as a Viceroy, but there is rarely a suggestion here that there could be two opinions at all, and where there are two the author plainly holds that the one derogatory to his father must be wrong. Take the incident which led to the resignation (or as Mr. Lloyd George called it bluntly " dismissal ") of Edwin Montagu from the Secretary- ship of State for India. Lori Reading, impressed by the bad effect the terms imposed on Turkey by the Treaty of Sevres was having on the Moslem world, sent home a despatch urging the revision of the Treaty in three specific respects, and asked permission to publish the despatch. Permission was given by Mr. Montagu without consultation with the Prime Minister or Foreign Secretary, with the result that a first-class ...crisis stipervened and Montagu had to go. But what Lloyd George and Curzon took exception to was not so much the publication of the despatch without consultation as the publication of a despatch of such a nature at all. In their view, and it must be added in most other. people's, the proposal— Lord Reading's—to publish such a document at such a juncture was open to the gravest objections. That consideration, involving an admission that his father's judgement might have been at fault, gets from the author attention so scant as -to be negligible.
Anyone, in short, Who goes to this book for a detailed history of the debt negotiations at Washington in 1915-16, or for a detailed history of Indian affairs from 1921 to 1926, will find most or all of what he wants. But if what he seeks is a personal portrait of a great man who lived a singularly interesting life, with notable con- tacts at every point, disappointment is inevitable.
WILSON HARRIS.
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