Princes in Part ibus

The Rothschilds, By Frederic Morton. (Secker and Warburg, 25s.)

'The East India Company,' Nathan [Roths- child] would reminisce at a dinner party near the end of his life, 'the East India Company had 800,000 pounds' worth of gold to sell. I went to the sale and bought it all. I knew the Duke of Wellington must have it. The Government sent for me and said they must have the gold. I sold the gold to them, but they did not know how to get the gold to Portugal. I undertook all that and sent it through France. It was the best business I have ever done.'

ALL that, in 1811, meant smuggling this huge letual quantity of minted gold through `1,e Napoleonic blockade. It must have required staggering resourcefulness, boldness, orgamsa a staggering amount of minute, long-laid „,,ard work. Mr. Nathan was assisted on the Continent by his four brothers; Jacob (James), the Youngest, had just arrived in Paris. He was n.lueteen years old. He spoke no French; he had !wed most of his life in a ghetto (at Frankfurt, 111 one of the most oppressive: a single narrow isitre,et chained off at night, the inhabitants r.liuted to 500 families in all, to twelve mar- 'ages a year, forbidden public parks, subject to ilevv-tolt wherever they walked). A few years /),;er the Rothschilds scooped the news of be,,aterloo, Mr. Nathan made what may have at-H.11 one two, three million pounds in Consols hours; London Stock Exchange in the course. of _ours; another few years and the Rothschilds the Congress the French government bonds during Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle; presently the clearing founded the first international

house. Thirty-five years before, they

had not made their first million thalers; twenty years before that, they had nothing at all. Mayer Amschel, the founder of the dynasty, had to break off his studies for the rabbinate for lack of funds and went back to the family second- hand goods shop. He added a money-changing department, managed to get some discounting of other peoples' bills, to act as go-between. handle loans; in time he was able to eliminate all tangible goods from his dealings, and deal in money alone, sheer money, and arrive at the apotheosis, the neatest, the most unproductive, the most sterile, but the most profitable and power-wielding of all middlemanships. In due course it was Amschel Rothschild and his sons and their sons and grandsons and descendants who were able to hand out the loans:they lent to governments, to empires, to princes; they themselves became princes: princes in partibus, a unique aristocracy.

The Rothschilds are part of the history of the nineteenth century, of the Industrial Revolution, of modern finance; as men and women, as a family, a clan, they should be irresistibly interesting. To students of heredity, to econornic moralists, to novelists, sociologists, psychologists. What is this enduring strain that has produced such talent—genius at times—such astuteness, stamina, industry, philanthropy, piety, pride and sang-froid (Mr. Nathan dump- ing Consols leaning against his pillar, Natty swearing the Hebraic oath in the House of Lords, Louis de Rothschild finishing his lun- cheon at his own table after his arrest by the Gestapo), such an array of private virtue, public virtue and public ruthlessness? Are the Rothschilds not the perfect, the extreme example of that split which runs through our present civilisation : the honest soldier, the man of honour, who professionally plans to kill, the family man, the devout Jew or Christian, the executive of probity, who manipulates the market, finances and develops without thought of loss or pain or quality or future?

Yet, curiously, there appears to have been written or created relatively little about the Rothschilds in fact or fiction. Some individual

biographies, a family in one of Disraeli's novels, a minor character in Stendhal (in Le Rouge et le Noir), an apparition in Proust and most

enjoyable and, apocryphal of all Father Roths- child, SJ, of Mr. Evelyn Waugh. The wone full- length Rothschild history seems to be the trans-

lation of Count Corti's The Rise of the House of Rothschild and The Reign of the House of Rothschild which appeared in 1928. It is (if memory serves) a serious, workmanlike produc- tion based on a vast deal of research, executed with mediocre vision and not well written.

The Rothschilds is a light, brief, up-to-date history of the entire family, and as such would

have been nothing to be sniffed at. Unfortunately,

the book is a sad, lifeless thing, killed by the bright over-animation of a relentlessly smart and

exclamatory style, the voice and spirit of the gossip column and the glossy magazine. Every paragraph screams. Anecdote is piled on anec- dote. There is no attempt to deal intelligently with the background of financial operations. Butlers and hothouses are made the most of. The order of St. George 'is pinned on the lapel of the Kosher Baron.' People are 'inside sophisticates' or 'steaming with commercial libido.' We are told that 'now the first minister of the ,Continent's first empire went to great length to avoid crossing the Jew Street boy,'

that 'Louis Philippe was even more nouveau to the purple than James to multi-millionairedom,' and that Rothschild 'had a kind of voluptuous complaint box affixed to the Emperor in the form of Eugenie.' We meet 'a chubby, merry Cambridge boy named Bertie,' and when Queen Victoria steps accidentally on a flower-bed, it is 'the heel of Hanover' treading `on a Rothschild petal.' This modish screeching never lets up; when it isn't the text, it's the subtitles: THE GRANDEST LARCENY EVER; A MILLION-POUND IDEA; HERMANN GORING SAYS HELLO. Before long the reader is unable to see or feel through the blur of vulgarity and overstatement. The only restful part of the book is the genealogical table. It seems a pity, and a waste of Mr. Morton's con- siderable amount of research. Many more books of this kind and we shall be faced with a Pi!king- ton on Literature.

SY BILLE BEDFORD