Talent and Eminence
IF there is one mode of twentieth-century English life which by its remoteness would now repay interpretation, it is surely that of a clerk in the Foreign Office before 1914. The author enjoyed a few months of this before war broke out and some three years of its still agreeable wartime equivalent before his release to train for a coin. mission in the Grenadiers. With these he spent six months at the front, from which he emerged with popularity and a D.S.O. lo his twenties he dines with Asquith and meets Lloyd George in the box of a theatre. He is free of all the haunts of celebrities, his acquaintance is thick with talent'and eminence, his many friends who died young are distinguished almost to the point of uniformity. Even in France, between operations, one finds wine arriving in hampers, breakfast in bed, lunch in an orchard with the band playing, and on Paris leave the automatic freedom of the Embassy. It was a glamorous and barely credible world of superb assumptions and uncritically accepted privileges, and one would give much for writing that made it live again. But hope raised by the author's Talleyrand will be disappointed. Perhaps time has been harsh with sub-Edwardian language, reducing what may once have seemed spontaneous (though always commonplace) to anaemia or vulgarity; Perhaps the assumptions and the privileges were only sustained by absolute unconsciousness.
Back in England there was ducal opposition to his marriage with the beautiful and long-courted Lady Diana ("Nor can I suppose that my reputation, that of a wild young man who played too high and drank too deep, was likely to recommend me"), but her parents soon relented, the Duke favouring a quick wedding so that he might travel in comfort before the Whitsun rush. There follow the years of parliamentary activity, of zeal for the League of Nations, and of his own literary, and Lady Diana's theatrical success. The spacious social life and the "inside" political gossip continue, but they remain the life and gossip, of a closed world. In November, 1921, after dining with the Churchills, his diary records : "Winston was in his best form, ragging Edwin (Montagu) about Gandhi, who he said ought to be laid, bound hand and foot, at the gates of Delhi and there trampled on by an enormous elephant with the new Viceroy seated on its back. He believes firmly that there is a world-wide movement of reaction and is optimistic of the future." There is also a long quotation on the General Strike, whose course he follows keenly from clubs and dinner parties. There is nothing malicious or obscurantist in these cliché-pitted pages, but for long they are almost innocent of prescience or apprehension. Hitler, it is true, appalled him from the outset, but as late as 1934 Mussolini impressed him favourably, and nineteen years later he can still write, "He is not, like Hitler, condemned out of his own mouth, nor by the notoriety and magnitude of his evil deeds"—a statement one can only read with dismay and perplexity.
In the Abyssinian crisis, as Secretary of State for War, he would have wished for strong League action but did not, apparently, feel strongly enough to press for it in Cabinet. (It may also be significant that not a single Spanish name appears in the index.) Hitler, however, had taught him a lesson, and from 1936 onwards he is sure that war is coming. Now at last one reads with a sense of conviction, and now too the reading brings back the shame and anger of those contemptible days. (Here the diary is rewarding, but Chamberlain remains a mystery. His intrigue with Grandi to get rid of his own Foreign Minister, his dead-pan indifference to the fate of the helpless Czechs, his ultimate trust in Hitler's sanity—what is one to make of these? The record says little; of awareness of the real springs of violence and tragedy it shows no sign.) We applaud Mr. Duff Cooper's resignation, but it is disconcerting to find him afterwards sounding Baldwin as Chamberlain's possible successor.
Resignation, however courageous and well-justified, seems to have dislocated his career. He served briefly as Minister of Information, and again in the Far East in a vague and impotent co-ordinating role which lapsed a month after Pearl Harbour, but there were spells of unwilling idleness before the appointment to Algiers, with Ambas- sador's rank, which, chequered with Anglo-American muddles and the tantrums of De Gaulle, was to end in Paris in 1947. Despite the great affairs and the plenitude of honours, an expiring note pervades this later period. Why? Four cabinet posts and some literary tributes are more than most men achieve. Why, faced with so much that can hardly fail of interest and even drama, should the reader feel cheated? The answer would involve a study in attitudes, both literary and other, which history has greeted with the horse's laugh. H. M. CHAMPNESS