The Devonshire Ballet
The Face Without a Frown. By Iris Leveson Gower. (Muller. 15s.)
THE eighteenth century was an age of involved elegance and of enormous urbanities. Manners were not everything, for monkeys might have manners ; but ladies and gentlemen were dedicated from their birth to the service of the Graces. Without this divine assistance they could never hope to wear a wig, to carry a sword, to place a plume or flirt a fan in the style required by the mode—and the mode was paramount. " The Graces, the Graces! remember the Graces! " cries Chesterfield to his unhopeful son, and this indeed was the cry of tutors, fathers, mothers, masters, and all who had the care of elegant youth. On the other hand, it was an age that allowed and applauded the publication of indecencies which are now scarcely imaginable. We are thus confronted with a spectacle of bewildering opposites, and it is often no easy matter to discern, in this confusion of extreme beauty and of extreme vileness, the lineaments of ordinary, familiar humanity.
But here is a book in which this difficulty has been overcome, for, whatever may be its defects of construction, it certainly does present a vivid, substantial and entirely convincing portrait of that famous eighteenth-century lady—Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire. This is less the result of erudition or of competence in style than of a natural understanding and of devoted attachment. The sources given at the end of the volume are very oddly selected and are obviously, from a scholar's point of view, totally inadequate. However, this does not matter very much, for the author has an eye for colour and effective detail ; and if her tricks are sometimes troublesome and her knowledge of words not entirely reliable, her complete immersion in the personal side of her subject gives her book real vitality and real charm.
In fulfilling her main intention—that of painting a portrait of Georgiana—the author has been remarkably successful. Her feminine sense of the smaller forms and of the brighter colours of the vital pattern has come into play with happy and appropriate results. Thus, when we read of " bales of yellow straw to be twisted into hats," or of " little pointed satin shoes waiting for great buckles of white, green or amethyst," we feel at once the authentic impact of the period. Admirable, too, is the description of Chatsworth House with ostrich feathers trembling above that enormous bed and water shooting out of the copper willow tree in the garden. The same felicitous pictorial touches are evident in many other parts of the book, and in every scene the Duchess herself is an authentically animated figure. But the male portraits are sadly defective ; indeed, they are hardly portraits at all. Of the Duke we react that he was " worthy," that he was " without humanity," that he was " not a bad man," that he " might have been a good and worthy man." This follows a more elaborate attempt in which we are told that he wa!, already, at twenty-four, " the armature of the effigy he was to remain. Into the sense of this we need not, perhaps, enquire too closely. Of Charles James Fox, perhaps the most important man in Georgiana's life, we learn but little in this book ; and of Grey, her lover, nothing at all.
Of Georgian we certainly do learn a great deal, and it is for this reason that the book is valuable and also, in its ardent and artless way, attractive. The portrait is that of a charming and impetuous woman, too generous in impulse, lacking in balance, and in marly ways incorrigibly stupid. One is convinced that she never possessed
the noble and endearing qualities of her sister Harriet (Lady Bess- borough), by far the best, if not the most beautiful, of the two Spencer girls. Her passion for play,.with its wretched sequel of accumulating debts, of secret borrowings and of timorous deceit, is the passion of a silly and occasionally dishonourable woman. Her fatuous, even joyful, reception of Lady Elizabeth Foster in the Devonshire house- hold, so soon and so obviously to be her husband's mistress, is a proof neither of intelligence nor of probity. One is often led, I fear, to the conclusion that the face without a frown was the more agreeable aspect of the head without a brain. What else is one to think of the errant and emotional creature who sends her little boy of two a blessing written in her blood? She is at her best (like her biographer) in the fun and fury of the Westminster Election, the prime scene of the Devonshire ballet, with its turmoils and insults and its final fantastic procession, Fox triumphant on a chair decked with laurels and Prinney waiting on a platform outside Devonshire House. C. E. VULLIAMY.
Previous page
