MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON
pERSONALITY is the most evanescent of human attributes. However active may be our curiosity, however vigorous our application, we can derive little more than a synthetic or tabloid impression of the illustrious dead. Only a residue of a poet's character is conveyed to us by his writings ; however care- fully we may study the speeches of a vanished statesman, we are left only with the outward or apparent shapes of his mind. A few diarists, a few voluminous letter-writers, such as Jane Carlyle, transmit to posterity some intimations at least of their temperament and daily reactions. A Boswell or an Eckermann can, by the plentiful accumulation of small consistent detail, give dimensional reality to a portrait. Yet most biographies can convey only a small sector of their subject, and must leave uncharted and un- explained the vast hinterlands of character (the unrevealed valleys, swamps and meadows) which aFe the geography of any individual life on earth. How unsatisfactory, for instance, are our attempts to convey to younger people our own impressions of the striking men or women whom we have known. Those impressions, we well know, were composed of varied reactions, occurring at different levels of consciousness and possessing no uniform grades of signi- ficance. We are thus previously aware, when we encounter some
famous individual, of the type of eminence to which he belongs. At the back of our minds there are category symbols, such as " Scientist," " Statesman," " Poet," " Actress," " Explorer." Our approach is thus conditioned by expectation, and our judgement is based upon previous assumptions derived from what we already supposed or knew. Even the physical appearance of an individual, when met for the first time, is compared in our minds with those semblances of him or her which have been deposited by previous semblances ; by photographs, official portraits or caricatures. A whole process of readjustment occurs. It is this process which, in subsequent narration, is so impossible to recapture or convey.
In the nineteenth century, which was a synthetic age, eminent persons were regarded as types of the qualities or defects which they were supposed to possess. What is so strange is that they themselves ended by becoming typical. Gladstone—in voice, in glance, in stance, in manner—became exactly what people expected Mr. Gladstone to be ; Tennyson took great pains to dress his part ; Darwin in his later age assumed a simian majesty ; Herschel actually looked like the popular conception of a great astronomer ; Richard Burton acquired a Bedouin aspect, eccentric and fierce ; even the murderers of the epoch allowed their chins and foreheads to fall into Lombroso shapes. The Victorians were much disconcerted by those eminent people, such as Matthew Arnold and Robert Browning; who refused to conform to type. In our more analytical age we are perplexed by these synthetic interactions, and notice that our own statesmen look like insurance agents, our poets like retired gamekeepers, and our scientists like shopwalkers. We are inclined, therefore, to distrust the idolatry of our forbears and to imagine that, when faced with the contemporary eminent, they did not either observe or tell the truth. I do not doubt their veracity, but I suspect that they did not notice differences. My father (who was a most truthful man) had in his youth been on intimate terms with Bismarck. I used to question him regarding that tremendous figure, and obtained invariably the conventional portrait of a huge gruff man accompanied by enormous dogs. Many years later, on my return from an absence in Persia, my father asked me about Reza Shah. In describing that potentate I remarked how strange it was that this bulky Cossack trooper should have the voice of a child. " It was the same," my father answered, " with Bismarck. lie had the voice of a chorister." Yet in all those years he had never mentioned, remembered, or perhaps even noticed, Bismarck's voice Today we have changed all that. What interests us today is not the degree to which the eminent conform to expected type, but the many detailed ways in which they depart from type and disclose the exceptions of their own personality. We are thus confronted with the extreme difficulty of transmitting the dispersed quality of a given person to later generations ; and we are conscious that it is as impossible to communicate to others the flavour of an un- known individual as it is to describe to a Laplander the scent of verbena or to a Bantu the way that snow falls with such persistent tranquillity. Attempts have thus been made—and I do not claim that any of them have hitherto been very successful attempts—to produce memorial volumes in which an individual is presented as seen by several different friends. By taking sixteen or seventeen different angles of vision, it is hoped to convey a stereoscopic portrait, and thus to enhance reality. The difficulty is, of course, that each of these varied memorialists is apt to say the same sort of thing ; instead of some three-dimensional portrait resulting, we are apt to get the same remarks repeated over and over again.
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A composite memorial of this .type has recently appeared as a tribute to Edith Craig. It is called Edy, and is published by Frederick Muller for the price of 10s. 6d. The compilers of this volume wisely decided to combine articles by practised writers with other articles contributed by writers -who were unpractised. The greenhouse wreaths of the sophisticated are mingled with the tussie-mussies culled by no less devoted but far less experienced hands ; we have the tuberoses and the buttercups ; the combination is one which Miss Craig herself would much have liked. The experiment has, I feel, proved successful Edy Craig was assuredly a woman of immense personality ; yet her material achievements were never commensurate with her gifts. In her early life she was inevitably overshadowed by the conquering charm of her mother, Ellen Terry ; her brother, Gordon Craig, became a figui-e of inter- national, and even national, renown. She remained herself. As founder of the Pioneer Players, she produced one hundred and fifty plays in ten, years ; her own stage career was short and un- distinguished ; she arranged many pageants, and she created, as a memorial to her mother, the Barn Theatre Society, which, I hope, will long continue. Such achievements, useful though they were, provide but little material for an official biographer ; yet her indivi- duality was so intense, so undeviating, so persistent, so eccentric and so formidable that it deserved to be recorded and preserved. She was the kindest type of bully ; at once vague and precise, unintelligible and practical, she would order people about, slang them for their imbecility, and then force a bunch of snowdrops into their still trembling hands. She had a way of laughing suddenly " with her head tipped down, but her eyes suddenly lifted." She would bustle terribly with impatient stoop ; she was always fussing with scrapbooks and odds and ends ; she had a lovely voice.
The impression which will remain, and which has been so ex- cellently conveyed in this compilation, is an impression of truth and energy. A truthfulness, which would not permit the words " Good dog " to be engraved upon a pet's tombstone, since the dog had not been good. " Dear dog ' were the words on which Edy Craig insisted ; and they remain. Zest beyond compare ; movement, vivacity, speed, energy, a wonderfully spontaneous delight, a startled gasp of beauty, smocks and sandals, a vagrant mind, a natural majesty. She was a humorous woman ; I attacked her once upon this page for her absurd passion for collecting the brass ornaments worn by cart-horses ; she telephoned in amuse- ment. The last conversation I ever had with Edy Craig ended in gurgling laughter. Something at least of that coloured personality has in this volume been preserved from evanescence ; I hope many people will read it.
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