John Bull

To caricaturists the world over John Bull is a jovial, beef-fed fellow, blundering his way along, and this despite the fact that England seems to produce more individualists than any race under the sun.

HERE are three biographies of Englishmen, two of them by Englishmen, the third by a writer, French at heart, who has made himself in speech and manner an Englishman. How do they compare with our contemporary writers of American biography—with the lives, let us say, of Mad Anthony Wayne, of Daniel Webster, of William Howard Taft? Is there real unity of culture beneath the common language and shared literary tradition, or is there a contrast of spirit and method?

Hilaire Belloc’s Wolsey (Lippincott, $5.00) shows an easy mastery of the records, penetrating analysis of minds and political intrigues; but he has not painted so well only in order to produce a portrait. The essence of his work is religious controversy. He is a volunteer in the army of the Roman Catholic Church, passionately eager to undo the schism that Henry VIII and Wolsey created, eager to mend the rent in the seamless coat. By his earnest purpose he adds new life to the history of England. His book is not so much history as drama, because he sees Henry and Catherine, Wolsey and Anne Boleyn, as figures in the tragedy of Christendom, bending events to supreme, unrealized issues. It is true that he had the dramatic form ready to hand in the Shakespearean play, and in general he conceives the leading actors on the same lines. The Shakespearean Henry VIII somewhat stronger, but Belloc follows the traditional view of Catherine, of Anne, of Wolsey himself. The climax of his book is already in the great soliloquy, with its conclusion: —

The figures are the same, but for Hilaire Belloc they are swept along in a mighty flood which lends a fateful significance to each event. Apart from the religious conflict there emerges the great figure of Wolsey as a representative Englishman, toiling with success to build the administrative foundation of modern England. His spiritual kinship is with the masters of British statecraft in India, rather than with the statesmen of England, with Warren Hastings, Lord Cornwallis, and that great company; in some degree with Marquis Curzon. And he shares with many great Englishmen the love of money — for the power and glory that it gives.

It is curious that John Drinkwater, writing of Pepys (Doubleday, Doran, $3.00), also reveals a representative Englishman. If we formed our estimate of Samuel Pepys from this book, knowing only of the famous Diary from Drinkwater’s pages, we should at once place Pepys among the notable administrators of England, a conspicuous actor in a decisive epoch, watching the tragedy of a martyr king, knowing intimately the two sons who in turn succeeded him on the throne, closely bound up with the remarkable men of the time, one of the effective creators of that tremendous factor in world history, the Royal Navy, which moulded the fate of continents. More than that, we might think of Samuel Pepys as one of the founders of natural science in England, for he was not only a Fellow of the Royal Society in its formative years, but its president at the time when it sponsored the Principia of Isaac Newton, the parent of so much of modern science. It was only on the death of Pepys, in 1703, that Sir Isaac Newton became president of the Royal Society.

John Drinkwater has done good service in showing Samuel Pepys as an important historical personage, highly esteemed and genuinely influential in his time. But the delightful diarist survives; he is the enduring Pepys, the humorous gossip, despotic yet with treasures of gentleness, deeply in love with his wife, yet repeatedly walking, rather than falling, into casual amours, and — at the same time — a notable collector of books now in the library which he donated, with other treasures, to Oxford: a connoisseur of art, a musician.

Drinkwater might well have called his book ’Pepys’s Place in English History.'

Writing his memoir of Edward John Trelawny, A Friend of Shelley (Appleton, $3.50), H. J. Massingham gives us a book saturated with personal feeling, but it is the feeling of the author more than of his subject. Hilaire Belloc is a historian, but he builds as a dramatist; we think of Drinkwater as a dramatist, but he writes not dramatically but like one of the old annalists, line upon line, little and great events gathered up day after day, year after year. There is an equal contrast between Drinkwater and Massingham; one is serene, detached, revealing himself only by his skill in line and color; the other nervous, sensitive, highly wrought seeing events of the early nineteenth century through the somewhat hectic atmosphere of his own day and hour; one might say that he is haunted by a ghost which he calls Victorianism, and at its every appearance his hair stands on end. He is anything but detached in his repeated cudgelings of unhappy Mary Shelley, after he has vigorously hammered the equally unhappy Lady Byron; he is fiercely partisan for or against the persons he describes.

It is a vivid and fascinating study, but one is inclined to think that he burns too much incense before the two major prophets of our time, Freud and Einstein, thus in a way dating his work. After all that he writes concerning the ‘inferiority complex’ which Byron injected into unfortunate Trelawny, one may remain quite unconvinced that this is the real secret of much of Trelawny’s weakness and misery. Massingham is far happier when he is showing us in Shelley’s influence the source of Trelawny’s somewhat stormy idealism. Trelawny has his prototypes and antitypes throughout the history of his country, from the days of the still more piratical Drake and Hawkins down to modern figures like Chinese Gordon, Rajah Brooke, Sir Samuel Baker, and his brother Baker Pasha: all saturated with adventure and Orientalism, like Trelawny, and each with his strongly imaginative side.

CHARLES JOHNSTON