A Remarkable Lady
Life's Ebb amid Flow. Reminiscences by the Countess of Warwick. (Hutchinson. 24s.)
PICTURE to yourself a young woman living at the end of the reign of good Queen Victoria ; she is a great aristocrat, descended from Oliver Cromwell and Nell Gwynne ; married by five clergymen in the presence of royalty at Westminster Abbey, and at twenty years of age Chitelaine of Warwick Castle. She is an exceptionally lovely woman—how lovely the numerous pictures of her early years appearing in the present volume bear witness—the acknowledged beauty of her day, and she has grown old beautifully and gracefully. She is a great huntswoman, famous for her riding, and numbers among her intimate friends princes, Cabinet Ministers (there is scarcely a Prime Minister, from Dizzy to MacDonald, who does not figure in her pages), poets, scientists, and wits. Yet the aristocrat becomes a Socialist, the huntswoman a humani- tarian who turns Easton Park into a sanctuary for animals, the friend of princes a champion of sweated workers. It is difficult enough for a man to flout the set of preferences and prejudices which compose the conventional social and moral code of the stratum of society into which he happens to have been born. How much more difficult for a woman, and not only a woman, but a Victorian woman who, born aristocrat, turns Socialist at a time when Socialism was a word of reproach, a sinister cover for Anarchism, Atheism, and Free Love, when no Socialists were aristocrats and practically no Socialists were women.
That a woman placed so " high " should stoop so " low " would to-day be a remarkable social phenomenon. In the 1890's it was a portent. The portent was made possible by a remarkable combination of qualities, political insight—the Countess of Warwick seems to have been almost alone in her age in realizing that large-scale philanthropy was no substitute for political justice—passionate hatred of cruelty and injustice, a realistic appraisement of the excuses with which rich and powerful persons salve their consciences for indulging their tastes—" Killing for necessity should be speedy and painless, but well-nourished followers of the Hunt should recognize that killing for pleasure is a form of Sadism "—and an un- shakable courage to face the obloquy and contempt, the misunderstanding, deliberate and unwitting, the dishonest slander and the honest abuse which the course she had chosen naturally provoked.
Of all the incidents recorded in this striking book the Countess's conversion to Socialism and her relations with King Edward (it would be difficult to say as to whether Society was angrier over the first or gossips busier with the second) will be read with the greatest interest. The story of her con- version is dramatic. She gives a ball at Warwick Castle, reads a criticism in The Clarion for making merry when the poor are starving, posts up to London to remonstrate with the Editor—was she not, after all, giving employment by her expenditures on champagne and lace ?—receives a lecture by him on economics, in the course of which both of them forget to lunch, returns to the Castle, orders £10 worth of books on Socialism, takes lessons from a professor of political economy, and becomes a lifelong Socialist.
That Edward VII. made her the repository of his confidence is obvious ; she is, moreover, a shrewd observer, and her remarks throw an interesting, if painful, light upon the restrictions by which the lives of royal personages are, or forty years ago were hampered. I quote some typical passages :— " He would give the most detailed care to the consideration of other people's problems and troubles, was always, ready to help and was full of wise counsel. . . . He gave to his private friendships the practical insight that might so well have served the State. But he was a thwarted man for many years. His was a practical mind bored by inaction. What faults of char- acter the prince had were caused by reason that the man was in fetters. He was forced to lead a life that would have bored the dullest mind, and the lack of an absorbing job drove him back on social duties so-called and amusements. ' He suffered in the measure that he was a man, not a puppet."
It is clear that part of the attraction of the Countess's company for the Prince lay in the fact that from her he could obtain first-hand information of the conditions under which the mass of his countrymen C. E. M. JOAD.
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