A CONTEMPORARY PERSONALITY
.Contemporary Personalities. By the Rt. Hon. The Earl of Birkenhead, P.C., D.L., D.C.L., LL.D., High Steward of Oxford University, Lord Rector of Glasgow University, Treasurer of Gray's Inn. (Cassell. 21s. net.) MANY distinguished personalities go to compose this remark- able book—they amount altogether to thirty-two—but one is unfortunately missing. Lord Birkenhead's own personality is one of the most interesting of the day, and his portrait on the frontispiece, with its sensitive; fastidious appearance, and a certain expression of youthfulness that contrasts so strangely with his full bottomed wig and embroidered robe, has a highly intriguing air. AOcharacter of him drawn by one of his subjects—by Lord Rosebery, for instance, or L.r. Churchill—or even by himself, though it may be doubted if he could do it quite so well, would have been very attractive.
But the omission is not so serious as it seems. For as you go through this gallery of modern art, and observe the quality of
the various portraits, drawn with an almost monotonous brilliance, but generally, too, with admirable insight, it is the artist himself who gradually emerges. He is walking, so to speak, at your side, very frank, very friendly, very witty, but always a little dangerous. He possesses a "power of mordant and corrosive sarcasm." You feel, as he says of one of his characters, that "the man who would enter into a controversy with him must think clearly, think deeply, and think ahead : otherwise he will think too late." There is, however, no need for alarm. It is not of any of us that Lord Birkenhead is thinking. He is thinking of certain people in the Tory Party, who are generally known as Die-hards, and of a famous meeting at the Carlton Club as the result of which an attempt was made to " extrude " him, as he says, "with contempt" from the Party's councils. He is reflecting how Toryism, like Labour, " can only be induced to accept intellect by progressive and very tiny doses." That is why Toryism and Labour understand each other so well. He is thinking, too, of Disraeli, whose "incredible efforts and unforgettable career," seem to run like a refrain through the pages of this book. Like Disraeli himself, and like many of the person- alities who are here portrayed—Mr. Lloyd George, for instance, and Mr. Snowden, Lord Hewart and Lord Leverhuhne- Lord Birkenhead has risen "against great odds." When he looks back, as he does in the portrait of his lamented brother, Sir Harold Smith—a most sympathetic and admirable piece of work—to the little house at Birkenhead where they both once lived, brought up by a mother who was left a widow with five young children, and an income of about 000 a year to educate, clothe and support them, the scene of those early years must be curiously remote. It was with the gaining of a scholarship at Wadham at the age of eighteen that his active career began. Like Lord Carson, he z` held his own and perhaps a little more than his own" in a society of" very brilliant and remarkable young men" at Oxford, and from the first he has been dependent entirely upon his own exer- tions. You can feel in this book the intensity of the effort. But very decisively he hascome through. In the struggle for success he has succeeded ; and now as Secretary of State for India—though it is, as he says, a "thankless post, offering in the circumstances of the time no outlet for ambition, and grave risk of personal discredit "—he is "happily once again restored to the Councils of a historic party." Like Disraeli, Lord Birkenhead is always a man of letters. He has not mastered Johnson's prose without avail. He can observe and admire, and often too he can improvise, "that subtle cadence of the sentence which is pure gold to him who has studied the
qualities of spoken rhetoric." A few of his portraits—like those, for instance, of Mr. Asquith and Mr. Churchill—are most delightful works of art. How much further will these high talents, this "keen wit and vehement personality," these large ambitions and high, if sometimes narrow, patriotism carry our author on his way ? It is a fascinating speculation. But prophecy, as he says, is always a fruitful method of imperilling one's reputation.
P. 111.
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