Marginal Comment
By HAROLD NICOLSON WE were indulging the other day in that ex- cellent conversational gambit, 'links with the past.' An elderly guest told us that he had known a man, a Glasgow professor, who had seen Napoleon crossing the Rhine at Bonn after the battle of Leipzig. I had always supposed that the remnants of the Grande Armee had crossed the river, not at Bonn, but at Mainz: but I let that pass. Nor was I able, owing to my inability to do even the simplest sum quickly, to work out the dates. But on returning to my fiat I took up pad and pencil and convinced myself of the credibility of this story. On these occasions it is prudent to assume that the original observer and the narrator must each have been at least ten years of age at the time of the experience and at the time the story was first told. Napoleon crossed the Rhine in November, 1813, so that if the Glasgow professor was ten years old at the time he witnessed the event, and if my friend was also ten years old at the time he heard the story, then the Glasgow professor must haye been aged eighty-five when he related his -experience. I was relieved to find that my friend, who is a scholar and not given to fiction or vaunting, must have been telling the truth.
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Inevitably, his story inspired others present to tell their own stories of a similar nature. As always on such occasions, we were treated to the tale of the old French lady at a dinner party who was heard to remark, 'Comme Louis X1V toujours a mon marl.' The design, and even the date, of this story have been almost obliterated by much thumbing in the market place. We were not sure whether the lady was the Duchesse de Richelieu, the Duchesse de la Rochefoucauld or the Princesse de Polignac. An even more distress- ing uncertainty arose from the fact that none of us was positive as to when the narrator had been present at the dinner party at which the Duchess or the Princess had emitted this startling remark. We were all agreed, however, that we had heard the story from someone of the last generation. I had myself heard the story from my father-in- law, but I refrained from saying so, since I do not remember whether he told me that he had heard the remark himself or whether he had been told it by his own father, an important distinc- tion which disturbs chronology. But assuming that this Duke or Prince was page to Louis Sometimes . Quatorze, he must have been born in 1700: sup- posing that at the age of eighty-four he married a girl of fourteen, his widow would have reached the age of eighty in 1850 and, even had she been tough enough to go to dinner parties, my father- in-law would not have been born and my father (a most truthful man) would have been but one year old. Even supposing that the remark was made when the old widow was ninety-four, and that it was overheard by her little great-grandson aged ten, then it was just possible that the little boy may have repeated his experience to some member of my father's generation. But it is not possible (unless, as is very likely, my sums have gone all wrong again) that anybody of my father's generation can himself have heard the original remark.
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I am thus confirmed in my impression that narrators of these most dramatic links with the past are apt to skip a generation. And if they skip one generation, then why not two or even three? We then get to the position when a man knew a man who knew a man who knew a woman who as a little girl was told about a man who remembered Doctor Johnson as an under- graduate playing marbles in the street outside Pembroke. I do not admit that such concatena- tions deserve the honoured name of 'links with the past.' They are but imaginary chains of fic- tion. I shall on this occasion refrain from again cribbing the story told me by a friend of mine who, being then in our Embassy at St. Peters- burg, attended the Borodino centenary celebra- tions and heard the conversation between a survivor of that battle and the Emperor Nicolas IL It is an excellent story, and one that confirms my belief that centenarians, be they moujiks or duchesses, are apt in their reminiscences to be- come confused. But I regret that I did not myself collect, or encourage my sons to collect, links with the past with the energy with which school- boys and schoolgirls today collect the autographs of athletes, film stars and band leaders. I cer- tainly saw Abdul Hamid twice, I think I saw Rasputin once, I sat on Mr. Gladstone's knee, I ran for a quarter of a mile holding on to the landau in which Queen Victoria was seated, and I once met a woman who had known the Guiccioli and breakfasted with Samuel Rogers. My album of links, none the less, is a sparse and somewhat dishevelled volume. Yet I can boast that there are but few of my contemporaries who ever sat on Mr. Gladstone's knee.
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What is so distressing about the reminiscences of the old is that they can so seldom describe what the great men of the past really looked like or even exactly what they said. Few of us have been endowed with Boswell's exact memory or with Saint-Simon's powers of evocative descrip- tion. Moreover, it is almost impossible to convey to later generations such evanescent qualities as charm or wit. Mimicry is an excellent medium and 'I certainly learnt more from the imitations of Edmund Gosse, Ellen Terry and Lord Curzon about Teanyson's and Swinburne's manner of speaking than I could have derived from a million documents. But how can I, who have no gift for mimicry, convey to my great-grand- children the charm of the Empress Eugenie or Clemenceau's raucous wit? To this day I am not intimately convinced, in spite of much read- ing, of the infectious charm of Charles James Fox or how it came that staid matrons fell oil their chairs with laughter when listening to Sydney Smith. I fear that these attractions are incommunicable. I have in my possession some comments scribbled by John Cam Hobhouse in the margins of his copy of Moore's Life of Byron. Moore remarks somewhere that it is not easy for us, even a few years after their deaths, to recall the exact appearance 'and voice of our friends, 'How true!' Hobhouse has scribbled, 'The most lively thing that I remember about dear B. i5 his cough.'
I should thus advise young people who wish to accumulate a collection of links with which to enrapture their great-grandchildren to note particularly the height of their heroes, the waY they enter a room or move their arms, and above all their tone of voice. My father, who knew Bis- marck well, used in his old age to tell me many stories about him. He would describe how at 3 reception in the Wilhelmstrasse the guests would be aligned as if waiting for royalty and that the first warning of the Chancellor's approach was the sound of the claws of his Great Danes clicking on the parquet flooring of the anteroom. MY father would describe to me the vast bulk of Bismarck, his eighteenth-century courtesy, and the utter simplicity of manner which, my father assured me, was the mark of all great men. And then, years later, when I had returned from Persia, my father asked me about Reza Shah. 'The startling thing,' I answered, 'about this enor- mous man is that he has the voice of a boy.' Like Bismarck,' my father said. 'But really,' I pro- tested, 'you have told me endless stories about Bismarck and you never told me that."Didnt I?' he laughed. 'Yes, it was like a boy of thirteen speaking. "Guten Abend, Herr Botschaftssekre- tar," he would pipe. It always struck me as very' odd indeed.'
So remember, when you start your collection of links with the past, to notice, and if possible to imitate, the voices of the great.
. . . the most ephemeral . . .
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