Men, Women and Hervey
Lord Hervey's Memoirs. Edited by Romney Sedgwick. (William Kimber. 25s.) HERVEY, Horace Walpole, Chesterfield and Selwyn—imagine our eighteenth-century history, as written of old, without them! And yet it is the most difficult thing in the world sometimes to persuade oneself that such beings ever existed. Their world is one we never have known, an arena for very superior persons and very distinguished nitwits. The assumptions they make are so vast, the barriers they rear so lofty, that we seem to be living in a spiritual vacuum, tenanted by capitals without content—elegance and breeding, sensibility and interest. The streams that water their paradise run, as their great enemy said, "dimpling all the way." As if John Howard, Granville Sharp and the Clapham Sect were inhabitants of another planet; as if Wesley was not throughout preaching to the text, "Why will ye die, 0 House of Israel?"; or as if Quebec and Wandewash and Minden were specks in a distant globe.
The contributions of such writers, when employed to attain historical verdicts, have of late been freely criticised, and notably by Sir Lewis Namier and by Mr. Sedgwick himself. For all that, if properly applied, their value remains and must always be indis- pensable. They saw a small world, sometimes a mean one, but they lived from their birth in its inner Valhalla; what they watched they saw without prejudice, since for that their pride was too unconscious; its riches and delights were given them on a platter richly wrought, and they had the vitality of the well satisfied.
Of this class, or caste, John Lord Hervey was an eminent, though not an elevated, type. If his memoirs are'set against the fragmentary autobiographies of the contemporary men of action, against Shel- burne's or the excellent Waldegrave, or even compared with the excruciating self-exposure of Dodington, or the dull outpourings of Egmont and Barrington, their character becomes better defined; as of a Grammont without his enjoyment, or a St. Simon minus his thought. Such interests as he has, himself apart, are in the collision of human beings, and still more in their frailties and follies, with an exaggerated belief in sex as the ultimate political explanation. How far the recordings of such a man can be trusted, without check and counter-check, is a matter of opinion; it is certainly difficult to accept, word for word, these well-rounded antithetical dialogues. Yet we may take it, so deeply is his self-interest involved and so transparent his likes and hostilities, that on the portions of their natures visible to him his portraits of George II, Queen Caroline, their family and Sir Robert Walpole are authentic. And what a deplorable gang they are! The Queen was so much victimised by her husband that her hatred of her son is at least intelligible. But when we study the childish bullying King and his treatment of this country and its Ministers, and the never-surpassed insignificance of the Prince, we cease to be surprised that the following generation could speak of George Ill as "George the Good." What an unhappy age, when Henry Fox and Harry Vane, and Pulteney and Nugent, were weighty political factors. Mr. Sedgwick, to whom were due the discovery and publication of Hervey's full manuscript, relieved from Croker's mistakes and censorial omissions, in this volume presents roughly one-third of the full text. The purpose and result have been to give us in handy and continuous form a single theme, Hetvey's description of the royal family and the Court. It is a device that has manifest advantages, and adds to the small warranted company of bedside companions.
And so far, very good; when such a thing is pieced together by the best possible authority, so that the joins become almost invisible, except by taking down the original three volumes and marking the excisions one by one. The residuum is this living, mordant, savage study in black and white of the little world of St. James's, Kensington and Hampton Court. But when the editor speaks of "all that is best in the Memoirs," or of cutting away the "dead matter" of politics, "now of purely historical interest," more difficult questions begin.
One of Lytton Strachey's less reverent remarks on historians comes back to one; how news reached Freeman's home that "the Professor had gone pop in Spain"; to be attributed to a course of many years of cerebral excitement over Froude's improper use of historical material. The disturbing doubt arises, professional or professorial, whether he would not have "popped" with a vengeance over this edition of Hervey. Here is a historical work, of which large sections, sometimes thirty or forty pages at a stretch, are eliminated, without warning or Belisha asterisks or indication; the sequence sometimes ensured by insertion of a "meanwhile" or the substitution of an "a" for an "another." Sometimes this redaction means the reduc- tion of an important character-sketch, as in the case of Townshend; sometimes the omission of the miniatures in which Hervey is so rich, as of Stair or Torrington or the bishops whom he so genially despised; or, again, of some major political event like the Excise Bill and the dismissals it brought about. And always, of course, of the European events which were dragging Walpole down.
Yet, though some of this is sheer loss, the book may well stand on its merits, as a bibelot of rarefied inside information, on the matters of which Hervey knew most and in which he was genuinely interested. At least Mr. Sedgwick can claim that Hervey himself, declaring his century boasted no "great events," had asked how it could be made interesting, except to those who looked into "courts and courtiers, princes and ministers, with such curious eyes as virtuosos in microscopes examine flies and emmets." South Kensington, in short, is the best starting point from which to reach his St. James's.
KEITH FELLING.
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