Twenty-Five Years: 1892-1916
by . New York: F. A. Stokes Company. 1925. 2 vols. 8vo. xxx+331, xiv+335 pp. $10.00.
LIKE most political autobiographies, the present one is the writer’s apologia pro vita sua. It may add little to our positive knowledge of events, but it contributes to our understanding of the man who was the official director of the foreign policy of England for eleven years to a day, during five great European crises (besides several smaller ones) the last and greatest of which culminated in the World War. To be sure, we find nothing that surprises us. Viscount Grey’s character has long been well known, and dispassionate judges have been pretty well agreed about it. Few of them have seriously questioned his essential honesty, his desire to be fair, his almost painful conscientiousness.
In judging his two volumes we must make certain allowances. Ill health and impaired eyesight prevented extensive research on the part of the author and explain his evident lack of familiarity with much of the newer literature concerning the subjects which he discusses. We may also charitably impute to advancing years his prolixity and repetitions, as well as the lack of orderly arrangement in his presentation. From the whole work we get an impression of British common sense and honest thinking, but hardly that of a subtle mind; indeed we are sometimes struck with a naïveté rather surprising in a man the best part of whose life was passed amid parliamentary deflates and diplomatic discussions.
There was nothing in the natural disposition or the education of Viscount Grey to incline him toward public life and especially toward foreign affairs. On the contrary, he never seems to have been perfectly happy except in the seclusion of the country. He preferred listening to birds to communing with statesmen. His week-end was a sacred institution which nothing short of the danger of war could cause him to sacrifice. As a hoy of eleven, when told that the stranger on the train with whom his grandfather had been ‘in incessant and animated conversation . . . of which I understood nothing and took no heed’ was Mr. Gladstone, ‘the information meant nothing to me. When he was appointed Lord Rosebery’s Parliamentary Under-Seeretary, ‘I had had no special training for Foreign Office work, nor had I till then paid special attention to foreign affairs.’ He admits his inability to speak more than a very little French, but he expresses no regret for the fact; indeed there is nothing in the book to contradict the story’ that Viscount Grey never crossed the Channel until, as Foreign Secretary, he accompanied his sovereign on an official visit to Paris.
And yet his accomplishment was notable and his reputation great. In 1914 before the outbreak of the war, if public opinion the world over could have been consulted as to what statesman in charge of the foreign policy of his country stood foremost for character, ability, and achievement, the answer by an overwhelming majority would have been in favor of Sir Edward Grey. Much has happened since then, His voice now seems to speak to us from a past age, but it is well that it too should be heard.
ARCHIBALD CARY COOLIDGE