Soul music Peter Quennell
The Souls Jane Abdy and Charlotte Gere (Sidgwick and Jackson £12.95)
The Victorian moral code, so far as we can judge from memoirs and letters of the time, never gained a very firm hold on the British upper classes. Not, at least, on its more dashing and pleasure-loving representatives. Lady Palmerston in one generation and Carlyle's idolised hostess Lady Ashburton in another seem to have been remarkably free from any kind of prudish reticence; and the latter, we are told, used to complain about the difficulty
— sometimes the downright impossibility — of asking the directors of her husband's bank to dinner, and, worse still, of talking to their middle-class wives. After all, they spoke a different language; and, should she happen to say in their presence that such- and-such a young woman had 'popped two chicks' before her marriage, they would have looked utterly bewildered.
Later, the doings of 'the Marlborough
House set' alarmed and scandalised their sovereign. 'Fast!' furiously exclaimed the Queen, when through her curtains she caught sight of her son's beloved compa- nion, young Lady Warwick, leaving Wind- sor in a riding habit; and it was generally agreed, by those who did not belong to the coterie, that the Prince of Wales's closest friends were almost all of them very fast in- deed. The Queen, however, was not their only critic. Elsewhere, a group of clever and charming people, though their own moral standards were agreeably elastic, regarded the Prince's circle with aversion and dis- dain. They abhorred both baccarat and `high bridge' and often avoided race- meetings and huge Lucullan dinner-parties, but cherished poetry and Pre-Raphaelite art, had learned to bicycle, and, at night, instead of playing cards, organised intellec- tual paper-games. Friendship was a flower they assiduously cultivated; the pursuit of romantic love, their favourite pastime.
`The Souls', like the 20th-century `Bloomsburies', went by a name they had not themselves chosen. They owed it to a good-natured man of the world, who had said that, as he understood that discussing one another's souls was an occupation they particularly enjoyed, he thought they merited the title. They did not always object to this flattering nickname; nor was it whol- ly inappropriate. They were conscious of living on a high spiritual and intellectual level, certainly well above the remainder of late-Victorian society.
The Souls, written and devised by Jane Abdy and Charlotte Gere, is an amusing, informative and splendidly illustrated book, its text being divided into 14 chapters of which 11 are devoted to a household or a separate personality. The survey opens with Lord Curzon and Arthur Balfour, the acknowledged leaders of the group, and, so to speak, its archangels, whose judgments on literature and life were enthusiastically accepted. Next we come to a series of Beauties and Charmers, and in conclusion to a few privileged Americans and to various fashionable artistic or literary stars, described as 'occasional Souls', who sometimes glimmered on the verge of Heaven.
`After sixty years in half the countries of Europe', wrote the ex-ambassador Lord D'Abernon, 'I recall no social group equal in charm, interest and variety to the Souls of 1890'. They were 'intellectual without being highbrow or pretentious; critical without envy; unprejudiced but not unprin- cipled; emancipated but not aggressive ...' He might have added that, although they shared many of the same standards, they had often very different characters. Miss Margot Tennant, for example, who was im- mensely talkative and wildly daring, bore no resemblance to the ethereal Lady Horner, who is said to have had 'Burne- Jones at her feet and Ruskin at her elbow', and the atmosphere of whose country house was an extraordinary blend of 'nature and culture', activity and nonchalance; or to the future Lady Plymouth, another Pre- Raphaelite beauty, whom Burne-Jones also immortalised as 'the very epitome of the female Soul'. Similarly, Lord Curzon, the budding proconsul, was very unlike the bohemian rebel, Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, despite the fact that, in some doggerel lines he headed 'Sin', Curzon once dashed off an affectionate sketch of Blunt's 'chaotic' life at Crabbet Park, where he and a band of high-spirited guests were reputed to play tennis naked.
Among the characteristics that united the chief Souls was their hatred of dullness and stupidity, coupled with a determination to live to the full, regardless of conventional barriers. Thus, the famous chatelaine Lady Desborough, a fond wife and deeply devoted parent, besides admitting that she was 'not monogamous in the strictest sense of the word', appears to have preached what she called 'the gospel of joy' to almost everyone who crossed her threshold. Her proselytes were selected somewhat at ran- dom; and a young man, arriving for the first time, was soon taken around the garden `to have a dentist', which meant that she would do her subtle best to discover and appraise his hidden talents.
The Souls is full of interesting detail; but it is the record of a privileged elite; and to- day, when 'elite' and 'elitism' are highly Pe. jorative words, that perhaps may limit its popular appeal. This would be foolish. True, its heroes and heroines belonged to a privileged caste; but they used their worldly chances well, valued intelligence, aP.., predated beauty, welcomed artists and writers, and although some, like George Wyndham, came to a bad, or like Han"' Cust and Wilfrid Blunt, to a sad and in' conclusive end, as a rule managed to enjoY themselves — a feat that, given the limits" tions of our mortal existence, invariably deserves respect. fici I must congratulate Jane Abdy a- Charlotte Gere on the patience and learning with which they have built up their picture. Many of the portraits they draw are ex; tremely effective; but I wish that here and there they did not lapse into the verbiage °` a newspaper obituary. To read that George Wyndham's 'untimely loss' was 'acutely felt' or that Evan Charteris's `combination of aesthetic sensibility with shrewd legal knowledge' enabled him, at the Tate, `t° fulfil a doubly useful role', somen° weakens the interest of an otherwise engag- ing story.
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