That having been said, little room is left for further
reflections, and I will be content with one alone. Readers of this column would no more forgive me than I could forgive myself if I did not express the deep regret that everyone remotely connected with The Spectator must feel at the failure of Harold Nicolson to retain his seat at Leicester. The House will be very materially the poorer for the loss of a Member who never spoke without making a contribution of solid value to debate, particularly if the subject was foreign affairs, and this journal will miss, to its great loss, the illuminating glimpses he so often gave of proceedings in the House of Commons. There is something singularly pathetic about the death of Lady Oxford (was she really Margot to all the columnists who have been writing of her so familiarly?) almost at the very hour when the knell of the great party which was her life was so intimately associated had sounded. She had seen the great Gladstonian days (she was sixteen at the time of the Midlothian campaign), all the vicissitudes of the nineties, and then the splendid fruition of the Parliament of 1906, when Lloyd George and Churchill were among her husband's young lieutenants. It was a brilliant life, mirrored in little in the Auto- biography, a volume sure of a lasting place among political memoirs, —not perhaps notable for depth, but with entertainment sparkling from every page. During most of the war Lady Oxford lived at the Savoy, whence she poured out her brief, pungent, pencilled notes— no one else could have been forgiven for writing so persistently in pencil—on all her wide acquaintance. She was among those who, as Browning would have it, love well because they hate. The objects of the former emotion are too numerous to mention,—numerous and astonishingly varied. Among the latter Lloyd George and Lord Beaverbrook are notorious. From the Margot Tennant to whom Jowett extended so rare a friendship to the Lady Oxford of the Second Great War is a span of two generations. Through it all she went her unique way, fitting into no category and leaving one thing at least incontestable, that she was like no one else.
* * * *
Previous page
