The Edwardian Era

THE MAN of the MONTH

[D. Appleton-Century, $3.00]

THE reign of Edward VII was hardly long enough to make an epoch, and ‘Edwardian’ will never have the rich and varied content of that useful epithet ‘ Victorian.’ The real break, the date that makes an era for England and for the world, is not 1901, but 1914. Exact dates, however, are perhaps more important for the chronicler than for the historian. Certainly the last years of the nineteenth century and the first years of the twentieth mark a change in the confident, secure, and decent society we like to label Victorian. It is this troubled era of disintegration of Victorian certainties that forms the subject of M. Maurois’s latest book.

M. Maurois is attempting to do three different things, not necessarily irreconcilable, but in this book, at least, imperfectly reconciled. He is writing in the tradition of Strachey a biography of Edward VII. He is narrating a straightforward history of England from about 1870 to 1910, and he is continuing those probings into the English national character which have occupied him pretty continuously since the days of Colonel Bramble.

As a biographer, he is very successful indeed. He has the lightness of touch, the willingness to make (without overmuch worry about the debt) an artist’s borrowings from the weighty modern science of psychology, and the eye for the telling detail and the significant, as opposed to the trivial, anecdote. Not even on the subject of Edward’s education is he tempted into the excesses of irony and psychological speculation common to the worst of the new biographers. The little Prince of Wales was a sociable lad, fond of sports and not fond of books. His upright, scholarly father submitted him to an education wholly bookish, and jealously guarded him from the corrupting association of youths of his own age. As a result, Edward came to hate books and love sports and good companions, and with his freedom took to cigars, horse races, cards, Paris, and Biarritz. But his native good sense saved him from excesses, and his natural gifts for sociability riped into tact and common sense. This M. Maurois tells us, and no more. His Edward is neither stuffed nor debunked. He is the constitutional king whose simple human qualities left the monarchy stronger at his death than at his accession. Likewise the brief sketches, a page or two long, of English political leaders show M. Maurois at his best. His Balfour, in particular, is a masterpiece of condensation.

As a history of England from 1870 to 1910, M. Maurois’s book is readable, as accurate as can be without a scholarly apparatus, and filled with the kind of generalization that provokes thought. At certain moments, like the funeral of Queen Victoria, the narrative is most successfully dramatic. Yet something is lacking. For one thing, the author tries to do too much. Nothing is omitted — labor unions, old-age pensions, suffragettes, the Daily Mail, Shaw, Wells, Galsworthy, the Rothschilds, the unearned increment, the White Man’s burden, and a hundred other bits of economic, social, intellectual, and political history. But these elements seem strewn about, not fitted into a whole. There are indications — far-fetched though the idea may seem that M. Maurois’s interest in modern literary movements may have led him to apply a mild form of the ‘stream of consciousness’ technique to the writing of history. Yet the explanation for the failure of the book to achieve ordinary integration as history is probably much simpler. All great history is — perhaps unfortunately — long-winded, and M. Maurois had in this short volume inadequate breathing space.

It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that what M. Maurois most enjoyed about this book was the opportunity it gave him to indulge his predilection for making generalizations about the English. Now this is an art about which critical judgments may legitimately differ. It will appear to some that — to take only the Latinsboth Mr. Santayana and Señor de Madariaga have written more penetratingly about these strange islanders than has M. Maurois. Yet the level of M. Maurois’s appreciations of the English character has been uniformly high, and his Gallic irony has been softened by admiration, and indeed by love, into an instrument of appraisal rather than of destruction. The EdWardian Era hardly adds anything new to what M. Maurois has already said on this subject. Edward himself appears at times like a Colonel Bramble enthroned. The key to the English is still their distrust of logic, their love of fair play, their self-confident, practical energies, their complacent separation of the Word and the Deed, their capacity for ‘muddling through.’ Yet it is hard to banish the suspicion that M. Maurois has been popular with Anglo-Saxon peoples above all because he told them what they liked to hear about themselves. At any rate, it cannot be denied that M. Maurois has done his part to keep alive an entente cordiale which, unfortunately for the cause of world peace, has been seriously disturbed by post-war events. There is certainly nothing in The Edwardian Era to weaken Anglo-French friendship, and much to strengthen it.

CRANE BRINTON