LORD RHONDDA.*
LADY RHONDDA has produced a remarkable volume, but she might have made it much better if she had been a little less modest about her literary powers and had not thought it necessary to call in the aid of several outsiders. By doing so she has broken the artistic as well as biographical continuity of her work.
Lady Rhondda may be without literary experience, but that is a very small matter compared with literary instinct. That instinct she possesses, and with it, when she becomes really interested in her subject and forgets to be conventional, she develops no small amount of skill in the use of words. Moreover, she has a true sense of humour and a definite and keen appreciation of the drama of life. Add to this a real gift • D. 4. Thomas, Visanint JUfondda. By Bb Daughter and °there. London : Longman& [Zia. net.] for what, for want of a better word, we must call mental portraiture. She can give in a very few touches the picture of a mind—the animi figura, or image of the soul, as the
Romans called it. We see this power of mental portraiture, not merely in the long and exceedingly illuminating study of her father's character, but in many of the thumbnail sketches in which she shows us his friends and acquaintances. Her portrait, too, of her mother, the Dowager Lady Rhondda, is extremely vivid, and, in this case, full of accidental as well as of conscious humour.
The young Lady Rhondda is not singular in thinking that a mother, though a delightful person, is fundamentally incapable of comfort and does not understand what a comfort- able house and comfortable living mean. The younger generation always incline to think that of the older—unless they are ascetic revolutionaries and regard their parents as indulging in criminal luxury. They scorn what we esteem man's happiest lot—perfect submission to the domestic powers —i.e., to a staff of old, skilled and sympathetic family servants. They deride our hot-water system as antiquated because they want violently hot baths at impossible hours—either very late at night or very early in the morning. No self-respecting hot-water system would give or should be expected to give an unlimited flow at 102° Fahr. out of canonical hours. They find our armchairs uncomfortable, our sofas in the wrong places, and our meals timed for the wrong hours. They praise the new unpunctuality at the expense of the old. But we must not go any further down this side-path, tempting as it is, and even though we use it to illustrate indirectly Lady Rhondda's sense of humour.
A more legitimate example is the delightful story which she gives us of Lord Rhondda's mother. His father, old Mr. Thomas, had a Puritan horror of waste. His wife, on the contrary, liked to " do " herself well in every way haanc- diately the family income was adequate. Her husband in his dislike of extravagance once went so far as to burn a new fur coat which Mrs. Thomas had bought without permission, and for which she had paid £60. Here is Lady Rhondda's comment. " My grandmother, however, showed a very proper spirit on this occasion ; she bought a new coat for £60, and told him she would go on buying till ho stopped burning, which he did immediately." That is an admirable story, and told with admirable spirit. It makes us think that the grand-daughter will go on knocking at the door of the House of Lords till " the frowning Peers " are compelled to let her in. We hope so, for it is utterly absurd to allow women members of the Commons, women jurors, and women Justices of the Peace, and not women members of the House of Lords.
We have one other thing to say of Lady Rhondda's share of this book. If, besides having the boldness to write the whole of the book herself, she had first read Bacon's biographical masterpiece, The History of Henry VII., she might have made her study of Lord Rhondda's character even better than it is— and it is already very good. Curiously enough, the Welsh coal king had many points in his character which rendered him not unlike the first Tudor sovereign. Besides, Bacon, whatever his own pedigree, had immense intellectual sympathy with the Celtic temperament. He exhibits its subtlety and idealism mixed with strong, practical sense.
No doubt Henry VII. was a great deal more austere than Lord Rhondda, and he had not Lord Rhondda's reticent lovability. All the same, we feel sure that Lord Rhondda, if ho could have called up the great settler and combiner of England,
would have found a man of fellow-feeling. Lord Rhondda
pieced together coalfields and coalmines very muoh as Henry Tudor did kingdoms, principalities, provinces and parties.
It is curious to note in this context that Lady Rhondda tells us that Lord Rhondda's father had as one of his favourite sayings : " Money, like manure, does no good unless it is spread abroad." That, of course, was said by Bacon. His expression, if we remember rightly, is " Money is like muck, no good unless it be spread."
We shall not attempt to draw a picture of our own of Lord Rhondda, but we want to point out one particular fact. He strikes us as being exactly what the men of the Elizabethan Ago called, without meaning thereby anything derogatory, " a politic man "—one who, although a man of action, is also a man of reflection, who studies men and things, one who understands his own character, who acts on reason rather than on instinct, and above all who carefully thinks out a line of procedure and does not trust to improvisation at the moment. Such a man is always in a certain sense willing to pose, or, at any rate, to set himself a particular part to play in the drama of business, of politics, or whatever he has on hand, and to act it. There are more men in the world who do this than is generally supposed, and most of these self-coached actors have, we venture to say here, Lord Rhondda's trick of telling himself stories and imagin- ing himself the chief actor in the little dramas of his brain. He was a projector, and projected himself into his own projects, as, by the way, did Keats. This power of projection, after all, is only imagination carried a stage further. Does not Keats tell us that when he looks out of the window " I am the sparrow and pick up the crumbs " We hope that what we have said about the friends who have helped Lady Rhondda by contributing special chapters will not make people think that these short essays on particular points in the career of Lord Rhondda are bad per se. They are not. They are merely out of tone with the rest of the book: One of them, indeed, is a very remarkable piece of work from the literary point of view : that is the account of Lord Rhondda's illness by Sir Thomas Horder. Sir Thomas portrays for us, without rhetoric or sentimentality, the drama of the sickroom. An illness nowadays is as much a work of art as was the formal attack of sappers and miners upon a fortress in the days of Louis XIV.
We shall not say anything here as to the story of Lord Eliondda's life. To most people it is already well known, or, if not, they can find it in the book. Though he achieved a real and great success at the Food Control Office, and did there notable service to his country, the really interesting thing about Lord Rhondda was his personal character and his conduct of great business transactions. In the last resort he was a great dealer. To say this, however, is not to belittle him in any way. Dealing is essential to business, just as business is essential to life. A man who is a good buyer and a good seller not only makes a fortune for himself, but stimulates and vitalizes trade.
One word more, the sinking of the Lusitania,' in which both the principal and the biographer were participants, is told with an impressive calm and reticence. Most people would have felt it impossible not to " feature " this great tragedy with many words. Not so Lady Rhondda. She writes as if to put on a lifebelt and remain in the water for many hours unconscious was an event of no great importance. And yet her very short story of how the ship was cast away is extremely telling and astonishingly vivid.
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