We have a fear that the two volumes of Wilfrid Scawen Blunt’s
Diaries--published here last year by Alfred Knopf--are not as widely
known as they should be. This is natural, for the two big volumes are
expensive, but they are a mine of most interesting material. They are a
liberal education in the truth _quot homines tot sententiæ_--in other
words, that there are infinite matters of difference among honourable
men.
Blunt was a gallant dissenter and whole-hearted skeptic about
civilization. Of course these aristocratic rebels, who have never had
to pass through the gruelling discipline of middle-class life; who have
always been free to travel, to ramble about to witty week-end parties
at country houses, ride blooded horses, sit up all night drinking
port wine and talking brilliantly with Cabinet Ministers, have (or so
it seems to us) a fairly easy time compared to the humdrum plod who
wambles through a stiff continuous stint of hard work and still keeps
a bit of rebellion in his heart. And of course, since Blunt condemned
almost everything in European politics throughout his lifetime, one
begins to suspect that he was almost too pernickety. Of the unnumbered
British statesmen whom he roasted, not all can have been either fools
or knaves. The law of average forbids. But a protestant of that sort is
a magnificently healthy and useful person to have about. He had a habit
of assuming that Egypt, India, Ireland, Turkey, Germany, were always
right, and England necessarily wrong. When a country has a number of
citizens like that and regards them affectionately, it is a sign that
it is beginning to grow up. One of Blunt’s remarks to Margot Asquith is
worth remembering: “There is nothing so demoralizing for a country as
to put people in prison for their opinions.”
But the casual reader ought to have a go at Blunt’s Diaries because
they are a rich deposit of pithy human anecdote. We see him, at the age
of sixty-six or thereabouts, attending a performance of Hippolytus,
translated by Murray. “At the end of it we were all moved to tears, and
I got up and did what I never did before in a theatre, shouted for the
author, whether for Euripides or Gilbert Murray I hardly knew.” With
Coquelin père he goes to have lunch with Margot Asquith. Her little
daughter, twelve years old (now, of course, Princess Bibesco, whose
short stories are well worth your reading), dressed in a Velasquez
costume, was called on to recite poems. “Coquelin good-naturedly
suggested that ‘perhaps Mademoiselle would be shy,’ but Margot would
not hear of it. ‘There is no shyness,’ she said, ‘in this family.’” Any
lover of the human comedy will find intense joy in Blunt’s comments
on Edward VII, for instance. When his antipathies were aroused, Blunt
lived up to his name. Roosevelt’s speech in Cairo in 1910 praising
British rule in Egypt was a red rag to the elderly skeptic, who
considered that Britain had no business anywhere on earth outside
her own island. His comment in his journal was: “He is a buffoon of
the lowest American type, and roused the fury of young Egypt to the
boiling point ... he is now at Paris airing his fooleries, and is to
go to Berlin, a kind of mad dog roaming the world.” It is quaint that
the humanitarians and intense lovers of their kind are always the most
brutal in attack upon those with whom they disagree.
There are also innumerable snapshots of men of letters in mufti.
Rossetti, for instance, throwing a cup of tea at Meredith’s face. Most
of Meredith, Blunt found unreadable. His picture of Francis Thompson’s
last days is unforgettable. For our own part we find particular
amusement in the little sideviews of Hilaire Belloc--a neighbour in
Sussex in the later years. It is disconcerting to learn that Belloc’s
horse “Monster,” of whom the hilarious Hilaire speaks so highly in a
number of essays, is “a very ancient mare which he rides in blinkers.
He is no great horseman.” Belloc coming to picnic with a bottle of wine
in his pocket; Belloc out-talking Alfred Austin, Arthur Balfour, and
indeed everyone else; Belloc wondering if he would be given a peerage;
Belloc groaning because he has sworn off liquor during Lent, and
Belloc delightfully and extremely wrong in the days just preceding the
war--insisting that Germany was unprepared and afraid of France--these
are the sort of things that cannot by any stretch of exaggeration be
called malicious tattle; they are the genial byplay of civilization
that keeps us reminded that those we love and admire may be not less
absurd than ourselves.
There is much real beauty in the book, too. Blunt was a poet of very
considerable charm, and a little story told by a former schoolmate
of his seems rather characteristic. When a child he used to keep
caterpillars in paper boxes; but he always pricked holes in the lids
in the form of the constellations--so that the imprisoned caterpillars
might think they were still out of doors and could see the stars.
It’s a queer thing. Those caterpillars, somehow or other, make us think
of newspaper men.
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