pardon, the gently critical analysis of the lives of the gentry, the
sidelights on the peasants, their cooking and their cottages--are all
full of interest, the book is chiefly to be valued for preserving the
fragrance of an order of living which too many of us are apt to think
of as one of harsh tyranny alleviated by wanton luxury.
HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY
THE LIFE OF THOMAS COUTTS, BANKER. By ERNEST HARTLEY COLERIDGE. 2 Vols.
Lane. 42_s._ net.
Thomas Coutts, virtual founder of the Bank of his name as it now
is, was born in 1735, and, according to the standards of Scotland,
well born, having, that is, wise, reputable forbears, relatives with
place-names of their own--Stuarts of Allanbank and the like--and a
coat-of-arms. "Instead of which," as the old story has it, at the
age of twenty-eight he married his mother's nursemaid, and loved and
served her faithfully until, after some fifty years' partnership, she
wandered out of her mind and then out of his world. By that time his
three daughters by her had married, one an Earl of Guilford, one a
Marquis of Bute, and one Sir Francis Burdett. By that time also Coutts
was one of the most considerable bankers in London, and one of the
richest men in England. It might now be thought that his adventures in
life were over--but not at all. At seventy years of age he stepped once
more into the _Pays du Tendre_, and took into his protection--which in
his case, it really appears, had no secondary meaning--Miss Harriot
Mellon, a low comedy actress of abundant charm, humble birth, little
education, and excellent disposition. She was then twenty-eight. He
fell headlong in love with her and head over heels. He endowed her with
stock and other movables to the amount of £500 a year, and when, at
the age of eighty, he made her his second wife he settled the whole of
that endowment upon herself. At his death, Mr. Coleridge tells us, her
private fortune could not have been less than £200,000. Notwithstanding
the estrangement and unconcealed disgust of "the ladies," as he always
called his daughters, she made him perfectly happy for nine years; and
when, at eighty-nine, he died, very reasonably, he left her practically
everything he possessed.
That in outline is the life-history of Thomas Coutts as Mr. Ernest
Coleridge pleasantly and ably narrates it in two portly volumes. The
book offers a view of eighteenth-century manners which is not often,
and seldom so well, illustrated. Coutts must have been, and he was,
a notable man of affairs; but he was a good deal better than that.
He knew, of course, everybody who was anybody. He was the friend and
correspondent of Lord Bute, the favourite of Lord Chatham, of William
Pitt. He lent, _mero motu ejus_, £10,000 to Charles Fox without
security of any kind. He lent large sums to the Duchess of Devonshire,
and forwent the interest until such time as her son was pleased to
pay it; for her husband never would. He lectured that great and gay
lady upon her follies with perfect freedom and no result. All the
royal rips, sons of George III., banked with him, or, in other words,
borrowed from him; and they dined with him too. Edward Duke of Kent,
the only one of them who was not a rip, made a friend of him as well
as a convenience. It is interesting to remark how Coutts deals with
these disreputable magnates. He is respectful of their degree in so far
as he is shopkeeper and they customers; but outside the bank-parlour
he stands on level terms. His children are to commence with their
children; his wife's table is as good as their tables. Servant-girl
or not, his wife, Mrs. Coutts, is the equal of their wives. There is
nothing of Sir Pertinax MacSycophant in his letters, although, as a
trader, he continually has his eye upon business, and is never above
doing himself a good turn. Mr. Coleridge is to be congratulated upon
having presented so engaging a picture of the sound, cautious, and
upright Scots merchant, who kept his head and his balance through
the convulsions of the American and French wars, and cultivated the
domestic virtues in the same social set as Old Q. and the Duchess of
Gordon.
But, except for that sappy core of romance which twice betrayed itself
in act and once in word, Tom Coutts was a dry stick. While his views of
political affairs were sound and uncommonly independent, his expression
of them was not interesting. He was by inheritance a Tory, yet he was
staunch upon the American war. "The idea," he wrote in 1775 to Lord
Stair, "of reducing such a continent to obedience (especially after
letting them have so much time to unite) appears to me, so far as I am
capable of judging, to be absolutely impossible." So, too, he opposed
the war with revolutionary France. "The war made against their growth
seems to me to be exactly the way to encourage instead of destroying
them. There is no instance of opposition by force of arms subduing
opinions! which by such manners have always grown stronger and more
inveterate." One might be reading the present Dean of St. Paul's. The
same faculty of seeing things as they really were allowed him to have
no good opinion of Pitt's Reform proposals of 1784, and gave him as
early as 1785 a plan of dealing with Irish disaffection which was in
fact adopted in 1800, to our cost. "As to Ireland, I apprehend it is an
aristocracy of about thirty nobles, etc., who command two hundred votes
in the Lower House, and that these thirty may be bought and a union
accomplished more easily than that heap of nonsense called the Irish
propositions." They _were_ bought.
Mr. Coleridge prints a recently discovered bundle of his love-letters
to Harriot Mellon, from which, if one could feel love-letters to be
fair game, it would be tempting, and easy, to make extracts. They are
striking by their extraordinary difference from his other familiar
correspondence. Coutts becomes emotional, profuse, sentimental, and
occasionally ridiculous. Few love-letters, however, will stand the
test of examination in cold blood. It can be said of his at least that
there is nothing in them which is not intended to honour the recipient.
To Coutts his Harriot was a pattern of womanly virtue. It is Mr.
Coleridge's opinion, as it is our own, that she deserved it. That she
made him happy is obvious; that she returned him a grateful love let
this, which was written by herself five years after her wedding-day,
bear witness:
"I never lose my spirits." My blessed Tom said these words to me in a
dream. After he had kissed me and laid his dear head on my bosom, I
felt his tears on my cheek--I was so happy, but so melancholy happy.
He looked so well, tranquil and divine.... I see him at this moment,
upright, beautiful and composed, as in his long and immaculate life.
He looks just as I first saw his dear, blessed face upwards of twenty
years ago.
That is both tenderly and prettily said. Tom Coutts, in his marriage as
in other things, knew what he was about.
THE TURKS IN EUROPE. By W. E. D. ALLEN. Murray. 10_s._ 6_d._ net.
"La Turquie est le pays classique du massacres," it has been truly
said.... "Son historie se résume à ceci: pillages, meurtres, vols,
concussions--sur toutes les échilles--révoltes, insurrections,
répercussions, guerres étrangères, guerres civiles, révolutions,
contre-révolutions, séditions, mutineries." All these things are the
theme of Mr. Allen's interesting and well-written sketch of the Turkish
power, from the rise of Osman in the thirteenth century down to the
Treaty of Bukarest in 1913. Mr. Allen does not, however, confine
himself to a mere record of horrors. He contrives throughout his book
to draw in a few lines the characters of the chief actors in the drama,
and, especially in the later chapters, to expose the policies, European
and Turkish, which have created and complicated the long nightmare
of the Near East. Many of our troubles of the last forty years are
attributed by him to the Treaty of Berlin in 1878, the triumph of Lord
Beaconsfield's policy. It was a treaty concluded, he says, "in a spirit
of shameless bargain, with a sublime disregard of elementary ethics,
and in open contempt of the right of civilised peoples to determine
their own future. It was essentially a temporary arrangement concluded
between rival Imperialist States." A few years later the "grim raw
races" in the Balkans were again in a savage ferment, and we could
enjoy "the spectacle of the heads of the civilised world, in their
palaces in the capitals of Europe, setting those same 'grim raw races'
to kill." Mr. Allen in his narrative of this later period does not
spare his criticism of the diabolic diplomacy of Berlin and Vienna,
of the brilliant cunning of their agents in Turkey--and notably Baron
Marschal von Bieberstein.
ST. CATHERINE OF SIENA. By ALFRED W. POLLARD. Sidgwick & Jackson. 3_s._
net.
In this little volume, one of a series called _Messages of the Saints_,
Mr. Pollard has re-told the ever-fascinating story of St. Catherine,
Siena's fourteenth-century saint. "In the present sketch," says the
author, "there is nothing original, save possibly its point of view and
(I believe) the chapter on St. Catherine's book."
Its point of view is that of an ardent if critical admirer of St.
Catherine, and full justice is done to what after all are the qualities
which made of her not only the most lovable, but perhaps the most
amazing of saintly women. _Amor vincit omnia_ is the motto which
springs to the mind as most fit for Catherine of Siena. In an age of
cruelty she is love personified. It was love for her fellow-creatures,
concern for their immortal welfare, that led her, a poor ignorant
"little bit of a woman," to face with the simplicity of a child and
the wisdom born of simplicity princes and popes, and force them, not to
her own will, but to what she conceived to be the Will of God.
To all who have lived long enough in Siena, Catherine becomes a living
personality. So real indeed that it would scarcely be surprising to
meet her one evening at dusk in that long steep street--still the
street of the tanners--where six hundred years ago she walked with her
lantern on her way to the sick and dying during the plague. In Siena
one is apt to forget that St. Catherine was a figure in politics and
the composer of a book about which the learned dispute. Still, on the
day of her festival the townsfolk sing the "Praise of Catherine," to
them merely the tanner's daughter who, greatly to the glory of their
beautiful little city, somehow became a saint.
Mr. Pollard's chapter on the _Libro della Divina Dottrina_, the
treatise said to have been dictated by St. Catherine while in a trance,
is valuable because it summarises typical pronouncements of the mystic
upon the various stages of the soul in its pilgrimage towards a
spiritual goal.
As a revelation of the subconscious self, if for no other reason, St.
Catherine's book has its own intense interest. Those who are already
familiar with her story may, by the help of Mr. Pollard's pleasant
sketch, refresh their memory of its details, and to those who are not
it should, as he hopes, prove a stimulating introduction to the life of
a wonderful woman.
VICTORIAN RECOLLECTIONS. By J. H. BRIDGES. Bell. 7_s._ 6_d._ net.
Mr. Bridges deliberately adopts the attitude of the _laudator temporis
acti se puero_. The worst of this prose is that, just as it may
attract the sympathy of men of his own generation, it inevitably
repels slightly those of a younger. Nothing is more tiresome than to
listen to judgments on life and manners whose chief point lies in the
opening words, "Well, I tell you in 185--we did not," or "we did"--such
criticism automatically provokes the retort, "Well, this isn't 185--,"
whereat your ancient growls, "I would to God it were," and youth and
eld stand back to uncomfortable back, with no chance of doing any
useful work.
Fortunately Mr. Bridges, although angry at the modern depreciation of
things Victorian, is better than his threat. He is not too comparative,
and although overfond of censure, his blame has a humorous quality
which keeps it inoffensive. At times the humour is unconscious, as
in Mr. Bridges' charming suggestion that the beauty of the primrose
is more noticed and "more respected" because ardent Tory enthusiasm
associated Peter Bell's flower with the late Lord Beaconsfield: but
Mr. Bridges' essentially "pawky" quality of mind--we use the word in
an amiable sense--crops out not infrequently as, for instance, in his
grave statement that he would be "in favour of a law forbidding anyone
to own more than 150 newspapers."
Mr. Bridges gives an account of his schooldays under a flogging master,
which adds yet another count to the indictment against Victorian
methods of education. He does not tell us much that is unfamiliar,
either of Eton or Oxford, though many will be glad to have his
description of the old-time Don, and the Dean Gaisford's letter to a
noble father who enquired after his son's University progress:
"My Lord, Such letters give much trouble to
"Your humble servant,
"THE DEAN OF CHRIST CHURCH."
In the late fifties Mr. Bridges visited Canada and the United States,
and he records his conviction that Senator Douglas was Lincoln's
"superior as speaker and politician," a verdict which makes one wonder
a little what his standards of oratory are, and how a politician,
obviously inferior in moral character, who also fails to keep his
country's confidence can be called the inferior of one who wins its
trust. Mr. Bridges abandoned his plan to settle in the New World, and
returned to England and started farming, first in the Eastern counties
and subsequently in Shropshire. In the chapters dealing with his life
in rural England he sketches some village types for the reader with a
genuine feeling for character. Particularly good is the final chapter,
"A Survival," with its touching picture of Old Tom, "the last survivor
hereabouts of the old-style agricultural labourer." Whatever one's
political colour, one cannot help sympathising with Mr. Bridges and Old
Tom in their lament at the decay of rural England, and at the growth
of conditions which made it possible for "more and more people to wax
rich in London and in the big towns, while no one can earn a living in
the country." Though the latter ceased to be true during the war, one
is yet uncertain how far the prosperity then enjoyed by the farmer will
continue as war conditions slowly depart.
THE LIFE OF LIZA LEHMANN. By HERSELF. T. Fisher Unwin. 10_s._ 6_d._ net.
Born in London, daughter of a Scotswoman, educated in Italy, married to
an Englishman, Liza Lehmann's heart--and she was a woman who always let
her heart rule her head--was unconsciously fixed in England. Yet as we
turn the pages of her autobiography there is hardly one in which we do
not feel conscious that she belonged by unalterable temperament to the
land of _Die Gartenlaube_ and _Familie Buchholz_. Many English singers
and audiences in the happy days before the war have felt that for all
their devotion to Schumann, the domestic intimacies of _Frauenliebe und
Leben_ were too intensely German for an English sense of proportion
and sense of humour. Let them read _The Life of Liza Lehmann_ in
their own tongue, and they will turn with relief to the reticence and
dignity of Chamisso's lyrics. It is evident that she was a woman who
never did an act, never cherished a thought, that was not a kind one.
She collaborated in an opera with Mr. Laurence Housman; he considered
that she had wrecked his play, she thought that he had wrecked her
music; but she records the awkward incident without the least trace of
ill-will, nay, without the least supposition that he or anyone else in
the world could have borne ill-will to her. Liszt, Brahms, Browning,
and Verdi were among her acquaintances; but she has little to tell us
about them. They counted for far less in her life than Madame Clara
Butt, Mr. Kennerley Rumford, Mr. Arthur Boosey, and Mr. Landon Ronald;
and even these were unsubstantial shadows compared to her mother, her
husband, and her sons. A large proportion of her book is taken up with
newspaper criticisms and interviews, mostly American. They gave the
authoress no little pleasure, and they will give the reader no little
amusement; indeed, as studies of American literary style, they are most
instructive. The final chapter, dealing with the death of her elder
son, so shortly to be followed by her own, can hardly be touched upon
in a review; it seems an intrusion to read it.
THE GLORY OF THE COMING. By IRVIN S. COBB. Hodder & Stoughton. 7_s._
net.
THE 25TH DIVISION IN FRANCE AND FLANDERS. Harrison. 4_s._ net.
These two war books, extremely dissimilar, belong to two well-known
types. Mr. Cobb is an American journalist, and he gives a lively,
journalistic account of the coming and doing of the American armies in
France. The other book is a detailed and somewhat bare record of the
doings of the 25th Division, by Lieut.-Col. M. Kincaid-Smith. The 25th
Division made a great name for itself in the war; this book shows that
it was not unearned.
THE PARAVANE ADVENTURE. By L. COPE CORNFORD. Hodder & Stoughton. 7_s._
6_d._ net.
The story of the paravane, the remarkable anti-submarine contrivance
invented by Commander Burney and used by the Allied navies and also
by merchant ships during the later period of the war, is told by Mr.
Cope Cornford in a popular style and with considerable enthusiasm. It
is possible that he is over-enthusiastic, for in a prefatory note he
tells us that some naval officers and also the Admiralty consider that
he exaggerates the effects of the paravane. There is no doubt, however,
as the official figures themselves show, that paravanes and "Otters"
(as they were called when fitted to merchant vessels) did have an
enormous success. The total tonnage of H.M. ships and merchant ships
definitely saved by them comes to over a quarter of a million; and the
financial saving to the British Empire is estimated at approximately
£100,000,000. Mr. Cope Cornford has a good deal of criticism--some open
and more, we think, implied--to make against the Admiralty. Exactly
how far it is justified we cannot say; but there are certainly a good
many people with inside knowledge who assert that the Admiralty were
decidedly cold about the paravane, even if they did not actually
"crab" it. And the rewards and honours bestowed on the brilliant young
officers who devoted themselves to the paravane and Otter services were
not particularly generous.
SUBMARINES AND SEA POWER. By CHARLES DOMVILLE-FIFE. Bell. 10_s._ 6_d._
net.
Mr. Domville-Fife's purpose is to discuss the importance of the
submarine arm in naval warfare of the future. His treatment of the
subject is very balanced and his conclusions are cautious. He gives us
a great deal of interesting information about the history of submarine
craft (beginning as far back as 1578) and of the submarine explosive
mine. In dealing with the tactics of submarines and their influence in
naval strategy, he speaks as an expert; for not only has he devoted
many years to their study, but during the war he was in command of
anti-submarine craft and an instructor at H.M. School of Submarine
Mining. The economic influence of the submarine on this country, Mr.
Domville thinks, is summed up in the words of Lord Selborne in 1915:
"After the war the whole question of our agricultural and economic
policy of the food production at home will have to be revised in the
light of our submarine experience." But what of the League of Nations?
Are we not entitled to voice our views of the future of naval warfare
in the light of that? Here Mr. Domville-Fife is guarded. He looks
forward "steadfastly and even hopefully towards the vivid dawn of a new
era." But he is not for abandoning the old motto, _Si vis pacem para
bellum_.
POLITICS AND ECONOMICS
BEFORE THE WAR. By VISCOUNT HALDANE. Cassell. 7_s._ 6_d._ net.
THE ECONOMIC CONSEQUENCES OF THE PEACE. By JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES, C.B.,
Fellow of King's College, Cambridge. Macmillans. 8_s._ 6_d._ net.
These two books must rank among the most important documents yet
produced which bear upon the antecedents and the consequences of the
war in so far as British policy is involved. Lord Haldane was for many
years War Minister, and during the critical period of Anglo-German
relations he was also a sort of supplementary Foreign Secretary whose
influence over the most important department of Foreign Affairs was
very great, partly because of the weight his opinion carried with
Sir Edward Grey and Mr. Asquith, and partly because of his special
knowledge of Germans and Germany. His book has a double subject as it
has a double object. He outlines the main elements and the principal
stages in our policy _versus_ Germany before the war, and he sketches
what was done during his administration to perfect the organisation
of our Army. He defends our national policy (there are interesting
sidelights thrown by his personal experiences with the Emperor and
among the governing classes of Prussia) on the ground that we did
the best we could when we combined an earnest effort to prevent war
with a resolution to be ready for it; and in his personal apologia he
argues, in effect, that in the circumstances (we must not forget that
the nation as a whole, and Parliament in particular, viewed military
expenditure with a very jealous eye) his régime did the utmost that
could have been expected. It is now commonly conceded, even by those
who distrusted Lord Haldane's views in foreign affairs, and those who
were bitterly against him because of his refusal to adopt universal
military service, that he did a great work at the War Office. What
he says about the efficiency of his Expeditionary Force ("If the
warrior looked slender he was at least as well prepared for the ring
as science could make him") must be universally admitted; and with
his great work in that department must be coupled the creation of the
Territorial Force. On the point of compulsory service Lord Haldane
defends himself by saying that in 1912 the General Staff was allowed
to investigate "the question whether we could or could not raise a
great army." "The outcome was embodied in a report made to me by Lord
Nicholson, himself a soldier who had a strong desire for compulsory
service and a large army. He reported, as the result of a prolonged and
careful investigation, that, alike as regarded officers and as regarded
buildings and equipment, the conclusion of the General Staff was that
it would be in a high degree unwise to try, during the period of unrest
on the Continent, to commence a new military system." We might have
become "seriously weaker before we had a chance of becoming stronger,"
and an enemy might have sprung on us. "I quite agreed, and not the less
because it was highly improbable that the country would have looked
at anything of the sort." We imagine that the one thing which should
(in the light of our subsequent experience) have been done and was not
done (though lack of money would have been a severe limitation to the
actual accumulation of large stores, whether of rifles or of clothing)
was to prepare a scheme whereunder the material for a greatly expanded
force would be easily and rapidly obtained immediately an emergency had
arisen.