Poor Charlotte
The Regent and his Daughter. By Dormer Creston. (Thorn. ton Butterworth. 15s.) This book has very properly been recommended by the Book Society. It is agreeable and entertaining reading. Miss Creston has handled a mass of material with considerable skill, and laid bare a series of events of very great interest in the history of the Royal Family. The figure of Prinny " looms up portentously horrible, yet with all the queer charm of the witty man's face above the monstrous belly. The unlucky Queen Caroline is displayed in all her rialf simplicity, her awkwardness and her courage. Princess Charlotte, to whom the book is mainly devoted, is intimately presented to us, through her unhappy childhood with its struggles and rebel- lions, to its brief period of married happiness so brutally ended in childbed by the pompous folly of a doctor ; and the volume ends with an admirable sketch of Leopold with Stockmar behind him pulling the strings. Some parts of the book are very well written, with, as Mr. Philip Guedalla says in his foreword, " a loving profusion of significant detail and without condescension." Sometimes, indeed, there is an excess of detail which seems to lack significance, but these occasions are rare, and Miss Creston is to be congratulated on a successful work to be ordered from the library without hesitation.
From the library but not, perhaps, from the bookseller ; for Miss Creston, though she writes well, without affectation in phrase or word, has not the rare gift of style that will endure, and as a standard of comparison we may take her passages on Brummel, and compare them with Mrs. Woolf's study. Nor does she, perhaps, insist enough upon her con- t rasts, her significance. There is an art of omission, " the final art, the art to blot," which might be applied with effect, and we wonder if the book would not be better if it were a trifle shorter. Again, she seems now and again possessed by the fatal fear that her subject-matter is not interesting enough and interpolates comments which, though intended to throw an enlivening shaft of light, only destroy the atmosphere. Why, for instance, spoil a really admirable account of, Charlotte's funeral by dropping in, " For in the annals of the Royal Family a tragedy had befallen before which even Sir Henry Halford was powerless " ? Usually Miss Creston's comments are extraordinarily good—where, for instance, she sums up certain traits of character or analyses the result of these traits in action—but occasionally, in the attempt to enliven, she forces herself to phrases which do not ring true, and we feel that the writer who -could talk about Perdita " working away at her esteem" has no right to accuse Creevey of a heartless style.
The chief faults—no, not faults, mere flaws—appear when Miss Creston wishes to weave what is mainly family history into outside life, and then the human is brought into contact not with some other human thing, but with the mechanical. At the conclusion of the account of Charlotte's wedding we are told : " At the same time the Tower guns, with ear- shattering thuds, are announcing to the people of London that the Royal Family has been doing something of importance." All that Miss Creston wishes to tell us is that a salute was fired, because she has already told us that London knew all about the wedding. In the same way she wishes to link up the family history with literary events, so tells us a propos de holies : " On a certain Tuesday in March of this year the first two cantos of a long poem called Chikle Harokrs Pilgrimage
appeared in the booksellers' shops." The fact, we feel, might have been introduced more happily. And why, we ask, should our information be limited to " a certain Tuesday -, Which Tuesday, we now want to know ; for surely if the day is important the week is. Of course, the fact of the matter is, neither matters a tinker's curse. The reader resents the biographer playing with his mind in this way.
These things, as• suggested, are flaws ; but a more serious challenge is issued when Mr. Guedalla tells us that this is just how the past should be written of." It is a challenge issued by the whole school of which Mr. Guedalla is the brilliant head and inventor. Let us try to see what •this school does. It sees the past not from a distance in time, but from a distance in space. It is admirable in many ways thus to abolish time, but need space be substituted ? -For the result is a purely visual picture, in which human beings tend to become mark)• nettes, the world of life to become metallic. The method has its advantages ; it is at least a discovery in biography, but it should be used with caution, for the result is that all moral issues are done away with. This is partly Miss Creston's wish. When she says that moralists can draw no lesson from Brum- mel's end, since the same end might happen to anyone, we delightedly agree ; but to say that " moral considerations are altogether outside a work of genius " is obviously untrue. Can she point to a single work of genius where moral issues are not the chief spring ? In fact, most works without them are meaningless. What, for instance, would The Cenci be without the moral issues ? It is, after all, these that make Lytton Strachey's work so exciting ; he may reverse the issues, but they are there, because without these there can be no real contrasts of character. According to the Guedallian school,. biographers, like politicians, neither love nor hate ; for apart from physical attraction, which the dead cannot exert upon us, all we have to love or hate in historical figures are precisely the moral qualities. Flaubert, it is true, wished history to be written " sans amour et sans haine pour lrs personnages en jeu, an point de vue dune blague superieurc," but added rather curiously, " comme le bon Dieu wit les chores d'en hard," forgetting apparently that the bon Dieu (or. at least, so we have been led to believe for several centuries) has strong views upon what is right and what is wrong. That, it seems at least to me, is the main criticism to be levelled at this school of biography. In the end the method makes for dullness rather than interest. Skill can disguise dullness (no one would think Mr. Guedalla dull), but the ultimate satisfaction of art is not there. The reviewer then can say that Miss Creston's book is an achievement in its own line ; that it is on the whole well done (though Miss Creston should be a little more careful about some of her expressions : can a storm lie about ? we ask when we read of one doing so) ; that it is amusing and more than readable ; that it should be included in the books to be read this month. But the critic must be on his guard : the class itself must be ranked in an order of excellence.
BON AMY DOBRPE.
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