Maurice Baring: A Recollection
by SIR RONALD STORRS
1
MAURICE BARING was thirty-eight when I first met him, with Aubrey Herbert, in Tokatlian’s Armenian Restaurant on the Golden Horn in 19U2. lie was already at the height of his powers, and I at once realized that here was not only a rare spirit but — what the rarest by no means always is — an entrancing companion.
Maurice was a living exemplar of the truth of Renan’s phrase: “The value of a man is in proportion to his faculty of admiration” — admiration not only felt, but expressed and communicated. His interests were extraordinarily far-flung. He was equally at home with the greatest writers of English, French, Italian, Spanish, German, Latin, and Greek; with the then almost startling additions of Danish and Russian literature. Indeed it may be said that, excepting only The Lusiads of Portuguese Camoens, Maurice had absorbed the whole of European culture. His knowledge and Schwann were not expressed in vague, undocumented enthusiasm; they were exact and clear; never academic — still less pedantic — but always scholarly; with the effect of profound learning ever so lightly worn. Here indeed was instruction with delight. He loved book talk: discussions about style, meters, influences, translations; and in this respect took his acquired and cultivated inheritance very seriously, even glorying to a certain extent in the height of his brow!
He hated deprecation or depreciation of high literature, going so far as to protest in the Times: “When people hide or deny their culture—and I mean deny, not modestly conceal it — laugh at culture ... I see red; because I regard this culture as the bulwark of our civilization, rapidly alas being undermined by the relentless tide of education, and our most precious heritage, which we are fast losing.” Thus in a letter of the mid-thirties be writes: “P.S. I am sending you for Christmas the second edition of Have You Anything to Declare? You will note that I have deleted a translation by Andrew Lang of an epigram by Rufinus, and inserted one of my own. The reason of this is that the Dons at Oxford, who are preparing a complete translation of the Anthology, preferred my version.”
Withal he could be touchingly humble, asking — and often following — the advice of manifest inferiors. He had given me, for suggestions, the proofs of this book; and I found that he had rendered Horace’s flavam comam by “sun-kist hair.” I asked him why not “yellow hair,” as Horace had written — probably for the excellent reason that yellow hair was as stimulating to South Europeans as black hair is to Nordics; and when he insisted, I begged him to stand for two minutes at Hyde Park Corner and watch the buses pass. It was the moment when a certain orange was being widely advertised, and he had to endure the procession in both directions of some fifty or sixty buses labeled, in twenty-inch lettering, “Sunkist.” By luncheon I had received a telegram: “Printing Yellow, Maurice.”
This master of eight civilizations records with obvious happiness how once, when a war correspondent in the Russo-Japanese War in Manchuria, he could not decipher the address on a telegram, and asked the censor’s Cossack servant what it was. “He patted me on the back and said, ‘No, little pigeon — I am like you; I can’t read or write either.”
His deep and reverent enthusiasm for poetry seemed even to stimulate his affectionate extempore parodies and perversions of the classics; sometimes by “safety qualifications — like a Liberal MP.,”he would say; as, for instance, in “La Belle Dame sans Merci”: —
And practically no bird is, for the moment, singing.
He liked exchanging alternate stanzas of Swinburne’s “Dolores” in a rich Irish brogue, or quoting famous passages in the heavy German accent of a Royal Prince of forty years ago.
2
I AM not treating of Maurice’s prose, as well known in France, Italy, and Spain as in England; and will but name the delights of his Diminutive Dramas and Lost Diaries. But he was also a sensitive, true poet — occasional only in that his muse was as a rule fired by occasion. His Pindaric “In Memoriam A. H.” has been acclaimed as the solitary expression of high poetry which aerial warfare has yet evoked: Dantesque in its precision and absence of stock poetic diction, and of a poignancy deserving to be placed with the few great elegies: —
Such as in War the Gods
Ethereal dared when all the world was young:
Such fighting as blind Homer never sung,
Nor Hector nor Achilles never knew,
High in the empty blue.
with the noble calm of the ending cadences: —
You hear the trumpet’s call,
At dawn upon the silvery battlement,
Re-echo through the deep
And bid the sons of God to rise from sleep
And with a shout to hail
The sunrise on the city of the Grail:
The music that proud Lucifer in Hell
Missed more than all the joys that he forwent;
You hear the solemn bell
At vespers, when the oriflammes are furled;
And then you know that somewhere in the world
That shines far off beneath you like a gem,
They think of you, and when you think of them
You know that they will wipe away their tears,
And cast aside their fears;
That they will have it so,
And in no otherwise;
That it is well with them because they know,
With faithful eyes,
Fixed forward and turned upwards to the skies,
That it is well with you,
Among the chosen few,
Among the very brave, the very true.
To this poem T. E. Lawrence devoted two letters — of which these are extracts: “I think that if ever a death poem has been good, it is yours. It takes me, each time I read it, absolutely by the throat ... so simply sincere, and grievous, and splendid. 1 think Lucas will live, thanks to you, for as long as your language. You have the gift — the great gift — of just putting out your finger effortlessly, to touch us in the heart. . . . Damn it all, what a slow and clumsy way of saying that you have lifted me right out of myself in happiness. It’s a wonderful thing; makes me shiver.”
In the following sonnet, we learn explicitly what was indeed implicit in his work, and life— how passionately real for him were the great creations of the mind: —
Destroyed before the birth of Babylon;
And I was there when all the forest shone
While pale Medea culled her deadly flowers.
When Orpheus sang to life his buried joy;
And I beheld upon the walls of Troy
The woman who made of death a little thing.
Where Roland lay defeated: and the call
That fevered Tristram whispered to the sea,
And brought Iseult of Cornwall to his side,
I saw the Queen of Egypt like a bride
Go glorious to her dead Mark Antony.
Le Prince is a facet of Maurice himself.
He abounds in the briefer startling felicities. Ending a short love poem, he quotes: —
“Nothing shall come of nothing; speak again!”
Still, out of nothing God made time and place
The sun, the stars, the summer and your face.
Hear him now, epigraphic, epitaphial, lapidary, on “Williams of the Times.”
His heart with her high sorrow soared and bled,
He kept the better part and gave away
The shining salt to all who came his way.
Lighter, but in the graceful tradition of Clodia’s sparrow, lamented by Catullus, is the “Little Elegy” on Juliet’s owl.
The bird she loved more than all other birds.
He was a darling bird, so white, so wise,
Like a monk hooded in a snowy cowl,
With sun-shy scholar’s eyes:
He hooted softly in diminished thirds;
And when he asked for mice,
He took refusal with a silent pride —
And never pleaded twice.
He was a wondrous bird, as dignified
As any diplomat
That ever sat
By the round table of a Conference.
He was delicious, lovable and soft.
He understood the meaning of the night,
And read the riddle of the smiling stars.
When he took flight,
And roosted high aloft,
Beyond the shrubbery and the garden fence,
He would return and seek his safer bars,
All of his own accord; and he would plead
Forgiveness for the trouble and the search.
And for the anxious heart he caused to bleed,
And settle once again upon his perch,
And utter a propitiating note,
And take the heart
Of Juliet by his pretty winning ways.
His sense of form never deserted his verse, whatever the theme, high or light; and he threw off with unstudied ease sonnets, ballades, and triolets in those far-off happy pre-1914 days when meter, rhythm, and even the music of rhyme were still esteemed an enhancement of poetry. I feel we must have his lightest vein, too, so —
MOAN IN THE FORM OF A BALLADE
And supper, with a man whose name was Duff,
Or Sydney Herbert, or the poet Gray.
I felt inclined to chatter like a chough.
The Cardinal, whose health I drank, was Puff,
When all at once the wine went to my head,
I felt as if at sea about to luff.
I can’t remember how I went to bed.
I thought I heard Sir William Goodenough
Remark upon the road to Mandalay,
How much he liked a little bit of fluff.
Then everybody played at Blind Man’s Buff;
It must have been, I think, my nose that bled.
I heard a player shout “I’ll call the bluff.”
I can’t remember how I went to bed.
I cannot bear the taste of smoke or snuff,
Nor anything that’s brought upon a tray,
My brow is fevered and my voice is gruff.
I’ve taken what is called a “Quantum Suff”
Or “Nisi prius” as the lawyer said.
The doctor came and left me in a huff.
I can’t remember how I went to bed,
ENVOI
That startles into life the quiet dead?
I drank it till I felt I’d had enough.
I can’t remember how I went to bed.
3
MAURICE possessed a strong strain of the shrewdness of the Barings, something which reminded one of the judgment of Evelyn Baring, Lord Cromer; something too, of Sydney Smith’s idea of an extraordinary man: “He has as much wit as if he had no sense, and as much sense as if he had no wit.” He had a love — and a gift — of music; he could improvise with gay and convincing confidence in manners ranging from Chopin and Schubert to de Falla and Benjamin Britten.
These diversions involved late hours, which might wring from the guest who had missed his last train, tram, or bus a wistful “With thee conversing I forget all time.” But even from those marooned near dawn on an empty platform I never heard a regret.
Maurice had also his jokes, which though technically “practical” were (incredibly for that kind) neither boring nor offensive. On the day that Austria launched the 1914 war, we received at luncheon an urgent telegram: “Feel sure if you and I got together we could soon settle this unhappy business, Franz Josef”; and in mid-1917, in the War Cabinet Secretariat, I would be handed compromisingly affectionate telegrams from Lenin or the notorious traitor Bolo Pasha. But his range was not limited to paper. There were his athletic contortions and convolutions when voyaging, a welcome — soon a loved — guest with the Royal Navy; culminating in an easy stroll round the Gun Room Mess with a full champagne glass maintaining unstable equilibrium on the crown of his head.
In all companies he was prodigal of himself— of the God’s plenty of his endowment. Indeed, he was generous in every way.
Who but Maurice would have planned, and himself produced, the “Gepacks”? These are small square volumes, very strongly bound, of blank pages in which he pasted poems and parts of poems cut by himself from other books, thus forming unique polyglot anthologies of his own choice in English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Latin, Greek, and Russian. He would give them as presents to his friends. The first was Das Gepäck, and the series was continued to a dozen by Das Grosse Gepäck, Das Kleine Gepäck, Mein Gepäck, Uno Avulso Gepack. Another, Das Retrospective, which he gave to T. E. Lawrence, is now mine. Lawrence wrote of this: “A gorgeous little thing: Little! it’s as fat as Chesterton and Belloc combined, and ever so much riper inside than the best Stilton.”
When my books, including Harry Cust’s Definitive Gepäck, were burned with my other things in Cyprus, there came a cable: “Sending library, Maurice.” Remembering the Franz Josef, Lenin, Bolo Pasha series, I answered nothing until a small but heavy chest arrived, containing his own traveling library of little classics, in seven languages.
A day before I left for France in 1937, Maurice wrote: “You can do something for me in Paris. You can go to a bookshop called Louis Connard, No. 6, Place de la Madeleine. He has beautiful books. I should like you to explain to him that the reason why I write him, when I do, such awful scrawls, is that I can’t hold a pen or pencil. I should like you to get yourself a present there from me. I enclose the wherewithal.” And as he said goodbye to a visitor at Halfway House, his seaside home in Rottingdean, he would stop before a bookshelf, pull out a Virgil or Horace, and thrust it into one’s hand with a dédicace “From Publius Maro” or “From Walter Savage Baring.”
In his early years Maurice had joined the Church of Rome— “the only action in my life,” he said, “which I have never regretted.” His religion was strong and deep: human and tolerant as if he had been born in the faith, and wholly free from the carping and girding of so many recent converts to any faith or cause. As I was helping him to rehang the fourteen Stations of the Cross in his little private chapel, he was muttering with the lovable familiarity I have often observed in Roman Catholics — and in Moslems — “Yes! HE’d prefer a little higher,” or “No. SHE wouldn’t care for that corner.”
4
IT WAS a heart-rending perversity of fate that this kindest, most sociable and hospitable, as well as inspiring, of men should have passed the last eight years of his life lying under a steady, remorseless crescendo of discomfort, disability, and nerveracking pain. As early as 1936 he wrote: “I am in London from Monday till Thursday having what is called treatment. The doctor asked me if I could still understand simple sentences. I said yes, I could read words of one letter like the Queen in Alice in Wonderland.” A little later, “My doctor is no doubt doing me good, but he makes one feel as if one had been walking up Mount Everest.”
By 1937 he ends a letter thus, “Yours, while this machine is to him. . . .” with a yet more pathetic postscript: —
Which nobody can mend.
Unfit for either play or ploy,
But all things end. The siege of Troy
Came one day to an end.
My body is a broken toy
Which nobody can mend.
Yet to the last he could have said truly: —
Safe and all scarless still remains my mind.
As late as November, 1944, he wrote: “I finished not long ago reading the complete plays of Shakespeare from A to Z. If we accept the dates given us of when he first began to write for the stage and when he retired to Stratford, he must have written very quickly. If we accept the date given us of his birth it leaves us with six or eight (I forget which) years of complete blackout during which we haven’t the faintest idea where he was or what he did. I found on this re-reading many astonishing things; e.g. a complete and final description of the battle of France [1940] in Pericles,”
His deep devotion to the Russian people and Russian literature—as he had known both — continued to the end: up to 1943 he was writing and publishing admirable versions of Pushkin and Alexsei Tolstoi. He did the best with Soviet verse and music, but had to admit his disappointment with both. To our younger writers he grew more and more indulgent and charitable: “I don’t feel it’s really great verse, but perhaps I don’t understand.”
By the beginning of the war his eccentric typing had been replaced by slow dictation through the clear writing of his nurse, ending sometimes with two or three words in a tragically tremulous scrawl. In May, 1944, he could still say in acknowledgment of my obituary of our loved Ethel Smyth: “Yes: Landor’s obituary was truer about her than about anyone — including himself: the last two lines that is to say, Not the beginning: she strove with all her might.”
The news of the liberation of Paris reached him at Eilean Aigas in Scotland, where he lay the last five years of his life. A French military chaplain on sick leave stood at the salute by Maurice’s bedside and said the Te Deum. Anxiously he loved France, and one of his last words was, “The French must not think the English are always wrong.”
As his weariness increased upon him, he murmured, “It is so strange, I cannot say a prayer these days — not a single prayer.” “So unnecessary, Maurice,” his friend answered. “So many are saying your name to God — night and day.” “Tell them to shout it,” he murmured. At eleven that night Maurice died. The friar kneeling by his bed stood up and recited the Magnificat.