The Edwardians

WE think of England under Edward VII as an obliviously happy place in which to have lived. But in the reminiscences now coming to light we find that people enjoyed themselves with a very real thought of the consequences.

THE EDWARDIANS

THE merits of the old and new type of biography are most agreeably blended in H. E. Wortham’s Edward VII, Man and King (Atlantic and Little, Brown, $4.00).

In a clear, compact style the author, with an excellent sense of proportion, follows in twelve chapters the sixty years of the Prince’s progress, and in seven chapters the meagre nine years of his reign. An introduction sums up in a brief and semi-philosophical essay the general impression of a too brief rule which, had it been possible to begin sooner or end later, might have averted some of the tragedies of the last twenty years.

To us, of a pseudo-psychological age, it seems inevitable that the son of Albert the Good and Victoria the Strict should have degenerated into Edward the Transgressor, but to those bewildered parents it was incomprehensible why, in spite of precept, and example, he should have developed into a profligate prince. This wise and discreet biographer indulges in no unnecessary gloating over gossip. He neither denies nor overemphasizes the imperfections of his hero, but he sets down naught in malice; the various adventures with ladies of title or talent whose nineteenth-century beauty enriches many of the pages are less exciting than the chapter succinctly termed ‘Baccarat.’

To us of the thirties, who are probably neither better nor worse than our forbears, it is amusing to find that the Edwardian vices are as definitely ‘dated’ as the Victorian virtues. Fashions rather than morals differentiate the two eras, and the author himself, in speaking of Edwardian society, says, ‘The décor is to our time as a Tree production at His Majesty’s to a Metro-Goldwyn picture.’

There is much of political and historical interest in this pageant of a day that is dead, and the picture of the hero is by no means the only portrait vividly set forth against a sumptuous background. When this life of a very human Prince, and of a wise King, gifted with natural tact and dignity, is ended, one feels that, with all his faults, England could have better spared a better man — she has never had to spare a better King.

The daughter of Mrs. Cornwallis-West (herself an Irish lady and one of the King’s special circle) was Daisy. Princess of Pless, who in a book three years ago skimmed the cream from her personal diaries, rich in lively comment on a vanished world. The hope of indiscreet comment and revelation is suggested by the title of her second book, Better Left Unsaid (Dutton, $5.00).

An excellent introduction by the editor, Major Desmond Chapman-Huston, prepares the reader for the diaries which follow, dating from 1996 to 1914. They were written for the most part in Germany and England, and describe with sprightly vividness the social life of the highest court circles of Europe. King Edward and Queen Alexandra, the German Emperor and the Crown Prince, besides many other royal celebrities and their satellites, flit in and out of these essentially personal pages, which are well worth turning over. ’The authenticity of the book is perhaps its greatest merit. Here was a social reporter who was no mere hanger-on, no purveyor of backstairs scandal, but one who was born, if not to the purple, certainly to lilac or lavender — a beautiful storybook Princess endowed by the fairies with all material blessings.

There is a wistful sincerity in the confidences made to her ‘dear diary,’ and underneath the gayety and lightness of the writer one feels a genuine spiritual longing for that peace which ‘The World’ did not give, and the nostalgia of an expatriated Englishwoman destined to live in an alien land during a most difficult period.

Perhaps as interesting as anything in the book are the comments on the Kaiser, made after the Princess had closed her diary. It is an illuminating analysis by one who knew him intimately and judged him impartially.

It was in Socialism that another beautiful member of the haute noblesse sought an antidote to the sawdust discovered in the pleasures and palaces mid which she has roamed for over half a century. The first sentence of the Countess of Warwiek’s latest sheaf of memories, Discretions (Scribners, $3.00), is arresting in its paradox. ‘Queen Victoria was the first person to inspire me with socialistic views.’ All through these personal reminiscences of the gay and worldly ‘Marlborough House set’ in which Lady Warwick shone as a bright particular star, one finds an incongruously serious strand woven among the glittering threads of the narrative — a strand of sympathy for the poor and downtrodden and of righteous Wrath at social injustice, ending in a public espousal of the cause of Labor. Considering that all personal diaries, letters, and records were destroyed in a fire at her family place at Easton, we can only marvel at a memory which retained so much entertaining gossip concerning ‘that curious period of English social life in Victorian and Edwardian days when the pursuit of pleasure was uppermost in the minds of the upper classes.’

The facts, comments, and anecdotes composing the record of the Prince of Wales and his circle which the Countess of Warwick was asked to write read much as if they were culled from a Who’s Who of the English aristocracy. But it is the things she was not asked to write that interest us the most, including valuable comments on politicians and prime ministers, soldiers and generals, famous throughout the world. Her picture of a changed England is the more convincing for being written by one of the chief ornaments of the old order who is now one of the warmest champions of the new.

F. HOWE