MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON
IHAVE been scanning the tributes paid to Lord Berners with that grim repugnance with which one reads the obituaries of a friend for more than forty years. It is by no means sweet or decorous to see the span of a man's life reduced to a half column in a newspaper, or to realise that even the most extraordinary
individual must lose shape, colour and vitality when described in the ordinary sequence of printed words. I could not resist the impression that he was there in the room with me, reading these obituary notices as I passed them to him one by one ; laughing at some of the passages, parodying their style, adding many fantastic variations of his own ; but saddened behind his mask of impassive derision by these dry summaries of more than sixty years of exuberant invention, by these arid residues of a life of varied, vivid achievement. In spite of his great gifts, his many opportuni- ties, his apparent flippancy, Lord Berners essentially was a melan- choly, even a tragic, man. Although he was able to achieve much success in music, painting and literature, he was too honest and too modest not to realise that he could never be a great composer, or a great artist, or a great writer. Although he was surrounded by a circle of admiring friends, drawn from every country and every generation ; although from his few intimates he secured a loyal devotion which soothed his inner loneliness ; although, by the elaborate pattern of his existence, he was able to protect himself from much of the harshness of the modern world ; he was obsessed by the mutability of human fortune and by a sense of gloomy impermanence. He was a person who lived happily but who was seldom happy ; a person who indhlged in many diverse and elegant amusements, but who fundamentally was seldom amused. A man who, although he gave constant expression to his tastes and talents, was never able to give an integrated expression of himself.
* * * * By temperament, Lord Berners was an eighteenth-century romantic of eclectic and patrician taste. He has been compared to Beck ford, but he possessed none of Beck ford's vulgarity. He has been compared to Horace Walpole, but he was blessed with none of Walpole's easy self-esteem. He was a restless, unsatisfied nature, and he sought continuously to divert or numb his intense sensitiveness by a diversity of intellectual and social occupations and by cushioning his feelings with a protective covering of flippancy. He was fully aware that the very diversity of his tastes and talents precluded concentration ; he knew, and in his darker moments he would admit, that he did not possess a genius so powerful as to render him simultaneously supreme in the three arts in which he sought to find expression ; he was too inwardly diffident to suppose that he could really excel either as composer, artist or writer, and he allowed himself, therefore, to become a brilliant amateur in music, literature and art. The tragedy was that he did not wish to become an amateur ; he had too serious a respect for the three arts to be content with the second best ; he became a dilettante in order to protect himself ; and he pretended not to take too seriously matters which in truth he regarded with the utmost seriousness. He was pleased, of course, by the success of his ballets ; he much enjoyed his painting and his books ; but he well knew that this success was only comparative, and when, in moments of loneliness, he would ask the hard question, " Compara- tive to what ? " the cruel answer would come to him: "Compared to what is best in yourself." * * * *
His first and major misfortune was that he lacked a stable or congenial family background. His father, Commodore Hugh Tyrwhitt, was a gifted but highly eccentric naval officer. On the rare occasions when the Commodore was able or willing to visit his family he would strive to make up for lost time by imposing upon his strange little son many irritated criticisms and much concentrated discipline. Commodore Tyrwhitt died when Gerald was still young. His mother was a fox-hunting woman, who possessed no intellectual equipment whatsoever ; she had the face of Mr. Gladstone and the mind of a pea-hen. Proud as she was of her gifted son, she was totally unable either to share his tastes or to understand his temperament ; her attitude towards him was that of puzzled awe. He would tease her mercilessly (" Oh, Gerald! You really do say such dreadful things! "), but he possessed so delicate and distinguished a sense of human relationships that he would treat her with the utmost consideration in all essential matters. When in later life she married a mature companion of her fox- hunting days, he established her at Faringdon, and with exquisite, if sometimes mischievous, courtesy secured for her and his elderly step-father a most contented old age. The fact remains, however, that in childhood and boyhood he was deprived of that sympathetic understanding which is the soil from which all young plants grow to self-reliance: he was an only child. At Eton, which he has described so well, and with an unexpected tone of sentiment, he was much distressed by his strange appearance. He was a man who, being a romantic such as Theophile Gautier, would much have wished to be extremely handsome. Fate and heredity had decreed otherwise: he was known to his school-fellows as "The Newt," and for years he would sign his letters to his friends with a self-lacerating portrait of that animal, wriggling across the bottom of the page.
* * * * A third misfortune was that he was never sent to the university. He had been destined by his father for the Diplomatic Service, and on leaving Eton he was sent to study languages abroad, a process of education which invariably proves disintegrating to the mind. It is true that he acquired thereby an extremely fluent acquaintance with French, German and Italian, but he was deprived of those habits of scholarship which the universities impart to intelligent men, and missed the opportunity of exercisiqg his brains in _com- petition with contemporaries of equal endowment. When eventually he presented himself for the examination, he was impeded by a strange nervous malady and failed to pass. For eleven years there- after he accepted the somewhat otiose occupation as Honorary Attache to the Embassies at Constantinople and Rome. He took no interest either in foreign or domestic politics ; he spent his time in amusing himself and the chancery, indulging in all manner of harmless mischief, studying the arts and in the intervals composing a large number of nonsense rhymes (which would not be suitable for reproduction on this staid page) and in enlivening the Embassy registers with a large number of facetious drawings. In 1918 he succeeded his uncle as ninth Baron Berners, a creation which dates from 1445. In 1923 his opera, the Carosse du Saint Sacrement, was produced at the Theatre des Champs Elysees, to be followed by no fewer than five ballets. He went on painting his pictures in the manner of the early Corot. He acquired a lovely house in the Foro Romano and the most distinguished Rolls-Royce that I have ever seen. He began to write his books. He became a cosmopolitan figure of considerable renown. Although he always retained his flippancy, his humour and his love of mischief, he was subject to bouts of increasing melancholy. He continued to surround himself with charming people and curious things ; with shells and clavichords, with musical-boxes and birds of paradise, with auriculas and tube- roses. There was some sadness in these objects as he grew old.
* * * *
Nobody who knew Lord Berners will forget him ; he remains in the memory as a gay and, in a way, formidable person. He might have been happier had he lived in another age, but his curiosity was so vivid that he was unable to detach himself from the novelties of his own. His talents were so dispersed that he failed somehow to get his centre into the middle. He was a perhaps belated type of cultured eccentric, of gifted aristocrat. Yet his patrician qualities showed themselves in something more than a contempt for vulgarity ;' they showed themselves in delicate consideration for the feelings of the friends he teased.
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