The Terrific Duchess
Sarah Churchill. By Frank Chancellor. (Philip Allen. 12s. 6d.) MR. CHANCELLOR has renounced writing a " lively " bio- graphy and has aimed at a faithful portrait." " The chief aim of a biographer," he justly says, " should be to tell the truth about his subject " ; and he might have added that in discovering the truth is where the biographer gets his fun. But then biography is anoint; all art is distortion, not to achieve falsehood, but to portray truth more vividly. Mr. Chancellor does tell the truth, but lie has been so scrupulous that he has made the portrait a trifle too formal ; and his careful avoidance of the dramatic tends to rob his picture of life. The only piece of drama he presents is where he quotes the Duchess' well-known account of her pursuit of Anne to Kensington for a last, despairing interview. He claims that previous volumes on Sarah Churchill have been malicious, or have submerged her under descriptions of her time, or paid too much attention to the Duke : but surely this is not true. To quote only one of several well-proportioned works, there is Mrs. Thomson's admirable biography. His publishers claim that he has thrown "a new and pleasing light upon her domestic relations with the great Duke." Pleasing, yes ; but not new : the light shines as strong in Lord Wolseley's un- finished life of the Duke.
But no book about the tremendous, strong-willed Duchess can be dull. There is so much material, provided by the Duchess herself, in depicting the years from her coming to Court to 1710, that much of the inner history of the time is revealed, and as much of the Duchess' character as she thought fit to make known. Mr. Chancellor is a little too inclined to trust everything the Duchess says, and though he knows the account was slightly garbled, it was probably more so than he supposes, as Mr. William King showed in his preface to his edition of. the Account. And so he is apt to take his subject's opinion of the people she disliked for accurate pictures. He accepts the Duchess' Mrs. Masham, regards her as a snake, ill-favoured, deferential, smooth-voiced, mean," neglecting Swift's view that she was a person " of great truth and sincerity, without the least admixture of falsehood or disguise ; of a boldness and courage superior to her sex ; firm .and disinterested in her friendship." The most he has to say
about the " all-accomplished " Somers is to echo a remark Sarah Churchill makes about him in her Characters, that he made money dishonourably. In fearing to submerge his heroine, he passes much too lightly over the other characters she had to do with ; he gives us, for instance, no clear con- ception of Godolphin, and altogether skates so rapidly over the polities of the day that we get no sense of the excitement they engendered at the time—and, indeed, no clear view of what they were about. •
The list of authorities given at the end is respectable enough,- but Mr. Chancellor has given only the published sources available to the general reader, and has omitted the more recondite ones. But is not this the wrong way about ? If the sources arc available, we know them. What we want to know is where he gets his information about lesser-known points : where, for instance, he learns that William III hated Marlborough ? The authorities he quotes for Vanbrugh are poor ; only Lovegrove and Beresford Chancellor. Failing Mr. Webb's Introduction to the fourth volume of the Nonesuch I'm/brag/4 there arc the Newcastle MSS. Had Mr. Chancellor consulted either of these sources, he would have avoided the error of saying that the Duchess dismissed Vanbrugh after litigation, whereas Vanbrugh himself threw up the job iii 1716, and there was no law-suit until 1721. Indeed, except where the Duchess herself is concerned, Mr. Chancellor's his; torical researches are superficial, a weakness where a person or political importance is in question. His views of Charles IL indeed, are very strange : he had " no strength of character " ; he was " too indolent and self-indulgent for any serious appli- cation to business." This of the man whose character was so strong, his application to business (though hidden) sin strenuous, that he restored absolute monarchy and dished the Whigs ! Mr. Chancellor's short description of the Restoration period is too distorted even for art. " Young men of hunt ton vastly diverted the town by appearing naked in the streets." Did they Surely the only recorded occasion is when Sedley vastly shocked the town by stripping himself on a balcony. Public nakedness, on the whole, was confined to religious fanatics.
Yet it would not be fair to say that Mr. Chancellor does not give an accurate account of the great Sarah ; only that his work lacks profundity and movement. Nothing much in the way of facts is produced that is not to be found in other biographies ; but Mr. Chancellor does make the point that the Duchess, outwardly so successful, failed inwardly because Of her lack of sympathy with others. She was hopelessly int- percipient. Another reason was that to her own mind she was always in the right. And besides, there was much of Atossa in her. Pope, of course, missed the pathetic side of the poor old woman, bed-ridden and hag-ridden by a spectral Walpole, playing over her tunes on her musical box, living in present hatred of her descendants, and in her memories of glory and the great Duke, and muttering to herself the passage from Aureng-Zebe which begins : " When I consider life, 'tis all a cheat." But it was she, as Mr. Chancellor points out, who had cheated herself ; she had no good cause to complain against life. After all, she was the greatest woman of her
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