GREY OF FALLODON
BOOKS OF THE DAY
By J. A. SPENDER
SHORT biographies are the fashion of the moment, and if, as I imagine, it was Professor Trevelyan's deliberate choice to keep his Life of Lord Grey to one volume of less • than 40o pages, he could not have done his work better. He writes with charm and skill of the dual side of Grey's character, and especially of those deep inner springs from which he drew faith and tranquillity in times of grief and stress. This picture of Grey at Fallodon, Grey at his cottage in the country, Grey in the intimate comradeship of his first marriage, Grey under the tragic blows that fate rained on him, will long dwell in the memory of those who read this book, and fortunately it is not set in opposition—as was at one time the fashion—to the portrait of Grey the statesman, Grey whose main business in life it was to steer his country, as Foreign Secretary, through eleven of the most dangerous years of its history. He himself gave some handles to the caricaturists who represented him as giving grudgingly to public affairs hours snatched from fly-fishing and bird-watching, for he sighed a little too audibly in moments of depression for the quiet life with Nature. But having chosen the public life, he applied himself to it with a devotion and conscientiousness which could not have been surpassed by the most ardent professional. If there were no other record, the great series of dispatches which bear his name would prove him to be a master of his craft as Foreign Secretary. It is a tribute to his quality as a naturalist that the professionals have hailed his books on birds and fly-fishing as classics in their own subjects, but charming and perfect of their kind as they :are, the masterpieces by which Grey will be judged are still to be found in Gooch and Temperley's great series of British Documents.
It is well that this book should have been written by a man so detached from political controversy as the Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge. He gives us a judgement which canna be impugned as that of a political partisan. A political friend would have written with less patience about the attacks made on Grey by Mr. Lloyd George and his followers in the Press, but Professor Trevelyan's cool appeal to dates and facts is no doubt the better way. Again, a known partisan could hardly have kept his hands off the voluminous literature, German, Russian, American, Austrian, much of it a tissue of absurdities, which grew up about Grey in the years immediately after the War. Here, I own, I am not quite so sure that silence is the right course. The American critics have been very per- sistent ; the editors of the Austrian documents made the definite and wholly unfounded charge that Grey tried to foment war in 1908. A careful account of his proceedings in that year and the following year and the difficulties he encountered would, I think, be extremely enlightening at the present moment. The same may be said of the last months before the War and the drift of events, by no means beyond danger of repetition, which involved us in the grinding logic of the Alliance system, notwithstanding our great desire to keep clear of it.
But the limits whtich Professor Trevelyan has laid down for himself do not admit of many expansions, and for the most part he confines himself to a simple narrative of events with a running commentary of unpublished letters. if space had to be thus limited, this is 'evidently the right way, and for the ordinary reader it has the considerable advantage of enabling him to follow the main lines of British policy without too much effort. Professor Trevelyan says in his Intro- duction that he has " few revelations " to make, and that in Grey of Fallodon. By George Macaulay Treifelyan, (Longman. 16s.) itself is a judgement on Grey's career. The supposed master of secret diplomacy had no secrets. He never made a secret treaty in time of peace ; all the researches since the War have failed to reveal any material fact influencing British policy which was not known to competent persons at the time. From
first to last he had one simple dominant idea—that to let Germany conquer France would be the crowning disaster for Europe and for the British Empire., Therefore he would not give Germany the pledge for which she incessantly sought that Britain would be neutral in a war between her and France. He would be friends with Geimany if she would let him,
but he would not let her bully or bribe us out of our friendship with France, or put a veto on our friendship with Russia.
At the same time he accepted what were then and are still the limitations of British policy. He knew that the British people would not accept compulsory military service or permit the decision for peace or war to be taken out of _their hands by the conversion of the Entente with France into a military Alliance. Being a sincere democrat and member of a Liberal Cabinet, he accepted these conditions and worked within them —so worked that when the crisis came the Government of which he was a member had an all-but unanimous nation behind it. When it came to war his governing idea was equally simple. The great thing to avoid was, in his view, the estrangement of the United States, and in circumstances the difficulty of which is even now scarcely realised, he
succeeded in avoiding that worst disaster. If' it is asked whether Grey was a success or a &gni-6 as Foreign Secretary,
the answer must be that for him as for all reasonable European statesmen, but especially for him, the War was failure anti defeat. But if war could not be avoided, no one in any country did more to secure the unity and unanimity of his countrymen, to fortify them. with strong _allies, and so to save them from the immeasurable calamity of defeat.
For the tight-rope performers of the old Europe—the Holsteins, the Bfilows, the Aehrenthals, the l3erchtolds- Grey was always too good to be true. They could not believe that his policy was as simple and straightforward as it seemed to be, and read into it all-manner of traps andsnares. Whence, in the end, he was standing upright when they were all in die dust. Some of his colleagues had an equal difficulty in understanding him ; his character was too transparent to be easily understood by experts in party politics. Professor Trevelyan easily disposes of the imputations of lack of candour which some of them brought against him ; but to show his relations with his colleagues and contemporaries and the Ambassadors and Ministers with whom he was in contact would require a " conversation piece " on a large canvas.
To me the scene is still alive with faces and voices, as I remember them at moments of crisis and stress : Grey outwardly calm but deeply moved ;. Clernenceau scolding, Cambon imploring, Isvolsky expoitufating ; the sad voice.of M,etternich dutifully
and rather dourly carrying out instructions from Berlin which he knew to be disastrous, and which he was fighting to the death behind the scenes ; the despair of Lichnowsky, the shoutings of the Kaiser, the blunt comments of King Edward, the quiet gobd sense of King George. It has become the fashion to treat a statesman's home and country life as welcoMe relief to the dullness of official biography, but charming as, is Professor Trevelyan's account of Grey on that side, I still see his public life as incomparably rich and varied, to say nOthink of the tremendous drama in which he was fated to play a great and leading. part.
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