GEORGE WYNDHAM
Pie and Letters of George Wyndham. By J. W. Mack.ail I and Guy 'Wyndham. 2 vols. (Hutchinson and Co. 42s.) lkIH. MACKAIL has presented his readers with a mass of ap- parently unsifted material from which to search out the life and character of George Wyndham. He has not, however, left them to do their work unaided. About a third of the first volume is given up to a rough sketch—very brilliant and pleasing—of the life of this great country gentleman with his masterly grasp of the art of life, his passionate longing for the art of literature and his hereditary turn for !politics. If this sketch be used as a key the book in intelligent !hands should prove delightful. Indeed, we are half convinced ithat this is a very good way to write biography for judicious skippers or leisurely people who like their reading to last. 1. When George Wyndham died—very easily—in 1912, at forty-eight, he had "drunk of I e in great gulps." He
[had enjoyed most of the thin; u inch the English world t once offered to the very fey Many strange streams met
lin his blood. His great gr ' r dfather on his mother's side Iwas Lord Edward Fitzgerald, husband of Pamela, the reputed :daughter of Philippe d'Orleans and Mme. de Geniis. His great grandfather on his father's side was the first Lord Leconfield, the illegitimate son of Lord Egremont by the .:daughter of the librarian of Westminster Abbey. Wyndham, sve are told, never forgot these strange elements in hisancestry, though, certainly, there was nothing in either of his parents to make him remember them. They were simply typical Members of the English governing class of their day whose strong desire to serve their country excused the great pre- occupation of of their lives which was the keen pursuit of a manly and womanly happiness for themselves and for their sions and daughters. Their eldest son, George, had a delightful !childhood ending in Eton life and long Eton holidays in which he read and rode and play-acted among a light-hearted :cousinhood who rejoiced together in the greater English country houses. When Eton was over soldiering took its place, but his military duties, except for the short period of the udan campaign, were "largely matters of trivial routine:, and his time was filled up with hunting and shooting at home 'and in Ireland. Also, "There was London Society at its 'gayest and most brilliant. There were the great functions Me Ascot ; the drag, the betting, the champagne. In all directions he went the pace pretty hard." All this absorption In pleasure, however, went together with an intense, one m'ssht almost say an exuberant, devotion to his family and a great enthusiasm for literature, specially Elizabethan literature. He was happiest at home with his mother, whom [he vowed he loved as no mother had ever been loved before, /and his father, who wrote to him when he went to the Sudan : ." I feel to have had such a son is not to have lived in vain:* Here is a description occurring in one of his letters of his town idea of happiness : "A gorgeous four weeks, undiluted poetry and hunting, living in the rhythm of verse and gallop and more than ever convinced that a bold fencer and the English language are the two vehicles of Paradisal progression." : But if George Wyndham knew the meaning of enjoyment as the ordinary world can never know it he did not know the meaning of idleness. To him all his life "a yawn was a silent yell." Very soon we find him happily married, working as private secretary to Mr. A. J. Balfour and trying his hand at serious journalism. From then on he turned his mind to politics, and at twenty-eight he thus defines his conserva- tism: "I believe more and more in custom, less and less in conscious effort. To try and think, feel, or act as we ought upon every fresh occasion for thought, feeling and action is to begin building anew upon the foundation every time you need -a house. Give me custom to clamp together the loose spars littered in our hearts and minds. In this way we get better than a house, a tower rising tier on tier until at last we scale the heavens which none ever reached by attempting flight without wings." With these convictions he went into the House of Commons, made his way quickly, was soon in the Government, and later was Secretary for War, but from this mental position of noble traditionalism the Irish question was to shake him. In 1900 he became Chief Secretary for Ireland, and "The sorcery of-the Island to which he was attached by the filaments of ancestry and the pervasive
current of blood" enthralled him. He began to think things out anew, and he developed a far greater sympathy with the Nationalists than a Unionist Government could be expected to approve. Yet it was with the full consent of the Cabinet that he chose Sir AnthonyMacdonnell, a Catholic and a Liberal, to be permanent Under-Secretary of State upon Sir Anthony's own terms. "I should be willing," Macdonnell writes, "to take office under you on this condition—that I am given adequate opportunities of influencing the action and policy of the Irish Government and (subject, of course, to your control) am allowed freedom of action within the law."
George Wyndham gave his subordinate a great deal of rope, and it was small wonder that John Redmond could soon write of the Chief Secretary : I am obliged to be fierce with him in public but I know lie is with us "—with the Irish people that is—" in his heart, and we all know it." Small wonder, too, if men began to say that the man governing Ireland was running with the hare and hunting with the hounds.
But before the fiasco which led to his resignation Wyndham enjoyed a glittering success : "They do believe in me and tremble towards belief in the Empire because of their belief in me," he wrote. The Land Bill passed and the visit of the King and Queen to Ireland threw the country into a momentary fervour of royalty. Edward VII. "indicated a desire" that both the Chief Secretary and the Permanent Under- Secretary should remain, a desire which caused George Wyndham soon after to refuse the governorship of Bombay, which, perhaps, as things turned out, he had better have accepted.
The loyal enthusiasm soon fizzled out ; Wyndham was severely criticized on all hands, was accused of being, in fact, a Unionist in sympathy with the Catholic majority. Des- perately disappointed and overworked, "whirling rather than walking through his days," for "he had always been over-engined for his hull." Wyndham's staying power was obviously overtaxed. "Artificial stimulants and bursts of violent exercise only ran up the overdraft." He broke down and went away to recruit. During his absence the Devolution imbroglio arose. As is shown by the secret history divulged in these pages we can but see that no one was to blame. Macdonnell wrote to his chief to keep him informed of what he was doing, and 'Wyndham never read the letters but chivalrously refused to repudiate in the House of Commons a policy he would never have pursued so far alone. Resigna- tion was, of course, the only way out.
After the Irish affair George Wyndham never rose again to great political importance. Perhaps the English people were already working for a different type of leader. According to his biographer he never fully understood the urban working men "with their horse-sense, their caustic humour and their gross sentimentality."
Perhaps, on the other hand, he had outgrown his political ambition. The following sentences in a letter to Charles Boyd look as if this were the case. "Am I to parade at Westminster and intrigue in its purlieus ? No the answer is, No. I have a wife, a son, a home, six good hunters and a library of romance. I mean to enjoy them. If I am wanted I can be found."
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