A BOOK OF THE MOMENT

MEN AND MANSIONS

[COPYRIGHT IN TILE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA BY TILE

New York Times.] Men and Mansions. By Harold Spender. (Thornton Butter- worth. 10s. 6d. net.) " Snow me a house and I will tell you what kind of a man he is or was who built it." There is truth in that saying, for men and their dwellings are intimately if not always intelligibly related. Especially is this the case when great men have built great houses for themselves and their descen- dants. They arc almost certain to have left traces which speak as eloquently as their own words about themselves, and often more so. It was therefore a happy idea to link together the men and the mansions in a series of historical essays. Mr. Harold Spender has done his work with a zest which is contagious. Every page shows the enjoyment of the author, and passes on that enjoyment to the reader.

Though Mr. Spender's interest is greater in men than in material, more human than architectural, he has a real feeling - for a beautiful structure, and especially for that indefinable charm which goes to the making of a great English country- house. Gibbon tells us in his autobiography, with perfect truth, that one of the greatest glories of these islands is our country-houses. The magnificence of the French nobility is reflected in their town dwellings, that of ours in our country houses. He goes on to say that if all the seats of our great families from Inverary to Wilton could be gathered into one square mile the result would surpass anything to be seen abroad. Gibbon strikes exactly the right note here. There is a touch of grandeur which is awe-inspiring in these tremendous houses lying, not in great centres of population, like Paris, or Venice, or Florence, or Rome but in the depths of the country, surrounded by green meadows, deep wood- lands and rushing streams, or under the shelter of some group of friendly hills. Very often there is not another great structure of stone or brick within twenty miles. They stand like the lanes of some secret or hidden deity in a kind of sacred isolation. For myself, I know nothing more amazing than to come over the Wiltshire Downs, only man-marked by the great monuments of a vanished and primitive culture, Stonehenge, Avebury, Silbury Hill, the Wansdyke, and the long barrows and round barrows on the ridges of the Downs, and then to drop down from this grey-green desert into the valley lands on the other side—valley lands which seem hardly less remote and less open to habitation and human endeavour than the Downland. The villages arc small, primitive and thatched, and the houses seem to go back almost to Anglo-Saxon times in their configuration. And then suddenly you turn up a side road, and through a park gate, and in a few minutes are face to face with a huge stone- built, prodigal Italian palace of the Renaissance, stretching forth its wealth of windows, walls and roofs, not in a heap of the undigested efforts of generation after generation of uncouth lords who wanted another wing, or another twenty bedrooms, or another big hall ; but a vast, severely-planned piece of self- conscious, ostentatious Latin magnificence. It almost takes one's breath away to find such a palace standing so august and orderly in a corner of country so simple, so pastoral, so primi- tive as Wiltshire. But, if the effect is confusing now, what must it have been in the old days—to the traveller, say, of the year of 1625—when there were no roads in those parts, and you still met, not wheeled vehicles, but trains of pack-horses, on the Downs, and when the greater part of the Wiltshire population lived in what were practically wigwams.

There were no guide-books in those days, and therefore your intelligent foreigner might have crossed the Downs on a mule, or a pony, and .felt sure that having got five days' journey away from London he would be out of reach of civilization and its conventions. Then suddenly Longleat, the spacious Hall of " Tom of Ten Thousand," would rise before him like something which had been called up by the hand of an enchanter out of the mysterious spaces of the chalk. Mr. Spender begins his book, as he very properly should, with Windsor Castle, for Windsor is unquestionably one of the wonders of the world—and this in spite of Wyatt. No doubt Wyatt did one thing for us and Windsor. He painted a great drop-scene picture in terms of stone and mortar, but unfortunately in doing so he cleared away a great many structures which, as Turner's early sketches show, must have been altogether fakinating in colour and detail. Still, it is no good crying over spilt milk. We have got in Windsor a tremendous national asset—one in which material magnificence and figurative splendour are joined with every sort of strange and noble historical tradition. Most of the things which in English history thrill and inspire us are somehow bound up with the story of Windsor. We cannot think of Windsor without thinking of every great name in English history. From William the Conqueror to William and Mary, from King John and Magna Charta to Cromwell, from Henry VIII. and Queen Elizabeth to Queen Anne and Queen Victoria, from Marl- borough to Milton, from Shakespeare to Chatham streams the mighty procession. Their feet trod the stairs, the terraces, the lawns and the stately avenues of Windsor, while in the playing fields that lie below the hill where the Castle is crouched like some mighty lion was spent the childhood of half the muster of our greatest men—playing fields immor- talized, too, by one of the greatest of English elegiac poets.

Burke not only felt all Windsor's charm, but in his last great piece of prose sanctified it in impassioned words. He speaks of " Windsor's triple girdle of kindred and coaeval

towers." He makes it the symbol of the English Constitution and of our liberties—" the triple Frank pledge " which gives

us liberty and order and which none can break. He "nicks" Windsor with three lucky words transferred from the pages of Tacitus. Tacitus, in the passage which he devotes

to the wars of Titus against the Jews tells us of the Hill of Zion that it was " Templum et Ara—a fortress and a shrine." For Burke Windsor is the British Hill of Zion, the fortress and shrine of our liberties.

Lambeth Palace follows. Cranmer's connexion with the Archi-Episcopal House is well told, and Mr. Spender makes a particularly good point, and one often forgotten, when he tells us how when Mary came to*the throne there fell on Cranmer one overpowering fear—the fear of death by

fire." " It was," he goes on, a fear that played a great

part in those days. That fear of the fire—it was the most powerful motive force in England in the sixteenth century."

Cranmer, in the end, however, found strength in his weakness, vanquished his terror, and died that awful death as a brave man and a good man should. " In the greatness of the flame he gave up the ghost."

We are very fascinatingly told the thrilling story of the connexion between Elizabeth and Hatfield and of how she sat under the tree and saw the messenger, who had ridden post-haste from London, coming towards her. It was a toss up, she knew, whether he was going to bring the order for her execution given by her dying and hating sister, or the news of that sister's death and so of her own accession. Elizabeth waited calmly, as a great lady must. As he reached the Princess, the man threw himself from his horse and knelt upon the ground with the words, " I greet Your Majesty ! " Not till the Archbishop and the Lord Chancellor in 1837 told the lady-in-waiting of the Princess Victoria at Kensington Palace that she must wake " Her Majesty " was a more heartshaking proclamation made of a change in British sovereignty.

Very good is the account of Marlborough and Blenheim, though here Mr. Spender has, I think, missed what I should like to have seen, that is, a really good interpretation of the

particular use of the barocco style of architecture as adopted by the great Vanbrugh. Blenheim, though superficially it may be like other great early eighteenth-century palaces, has something curiously special and individual about it. Castle Howard, beautiful as it is, is like a mass of other barocco work,

English and Continental. Blenheim wears its rue with a difference. I admit that I have not the power to say in what that difference resides or what was the great architect's intent. I can only feel that it is there, and wish that Mr. Spender had been able to give us an interpretation.

Though it is not perhaps quite a mansion, I hold that Mr. Spender was quite right in inserting his disquisition on Chatham and " Pitt House " at Hampstead. He tells very well the strange eclipse of Pitt and how he lived like a neurasthenic hermit unseen in his two rooms in the Hampstead house—a man, as it were, playing at being the Man in the Iron Mask and having his food passed in through the kind of trick door that they have, or used to have, abroad for the closely confined prisoner. No one knows what Chatham did in the long months of his seclusion in which he was nominally acting as Prime Minister, but really doing no official work at all.

And now I am going, greatly daring, to hazard a suggestion, which I think the dates allow me to make, and that is that during that period Chatham was all the time polishing and pointing and often actually writing the Letters of Junius and so stabbing his colleagues in a mask and cloak, and stinging the whole country into a frenzy of rage. I do not mean to say that he began Junius. Francis, I do not doubt, began the Letters. Then Chatham saw an oppor- tunity for something theatrical, mysterious and furtive (all qualities which possessed him), and so used Francis as a kind of half amanuensis—a conduit pipe through which he occasionally let out outbursts of his own violent vituperation. " Then like a chorus the passion deepened." At the end Chatham projected the vast torrent of his scorching eloquence through the Francis-Junius conduit pipe. Of course, I am not singular in the suggestion that Junius was Chatham. It is an old story. I am merely expressing my adhesion to it, and I may add that my ground for doing so is style. Junius is unquestionably a great master of style, and the only writer of the time in whom I can find a parallel to that style is Chatham. I continually hear Chatham's tones as I read the words of Junius. I believe that style, if one is sensitive to it, whether in a picture, a poem, or a piece of prose, is a far better test than any form of documentary evidence. I have two facts to support my theory. Chatham towards the end of his life wanted to train his son, William Pitt, in the art of oratory. He told him to read the letters of Junius to improve his style. The other fact is that when Junius was challenged in regard to Chatham and asked why he never said anything about him, he, Junius, replied in a rigmarole of words about tombs and weeping willows, and so forth, which is just the sort of thing one might expect Chatham to say granted he was determined to conceal himself and his motives, and yet not to say anything which would be an attack upon himself. The passage is a most careful mosaic of " ifs " and " ans."

Now, I must say a word as to Stowe, the great Whig

palace. In spite of its being rather an architectural pastkcio, it turned out a true piece of magnificence. The vast structure is now preserved for all time as a school, a school which under the Headmaster, Dr. Roxburgh, has already made itself a place in the English educational world. That is an almost miraculous achievement, and one upon which all concerned, from the Headmaster to the architect, and from the governing body to the boys, must be heartily congratulated. Stowe, indeed, has been fortunate throughout. Nothing could have been a physically happier event than the gift of the great avenue at Stowe by Old Etonians to the new Buckinghamshire school. It was a noble gesture, made possible by the daring imagination of Stowe's architect—Mr. Clough Williams-Ellis—and it is one which I feel certain will be justified by the event.

There is no better work for those who love their country, and its history and its beauties, than to bind themselves together to see that our great country-houses are not wasted, as the Abbeys were so wickedly wasted when the tower and arch and flying buttress went to the ground instead of being saved for public uses. No notable English country-house ought to be allowed to be pulled down or to fall in ruins. There are plenty of purposes for which we can use all those that are worth preserving for reasons of architecture or historical sentiment.

J. ST. LOE STRACHEY.