" Charles--Swann
King Lehr and the Gilded Age. By Elizabeth Drexel Lehr. (Constable. 12s.)
" Mosx fitting to begin our story with the simple statement that I was born Elizabeth Drexel;" most simple in America, but hardly in England I Did not Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, once shock Philadelphia by asking "What is a Biddle ? " Mrs. Lehr, then, was a daughter of a great Philadelphia banking house, connected with the mighty house of Morgan ; she married first a son of Admiral Dahlgren and, widowed after a very short time, fell in love with Harry Lehr. Lehr was already a brilliant figure in New York " society," where his impudence, that passed in those uncritical circles for wit, and a flair for successful climbing had made him the successor of Ward McAllister as the arbiter elegantiarum of New York and the guardian angel of the sacred precincts wherein the " Four Hundred " disported themselves. Harry Lehr, it was known, was not rich ; he was a newcomer among the best people, but he had acquired a great social position. Mrs. Dahlgren was rich and of one of the families that had definitely arrived. Each partner had something to give and, as the new Mrs. Lehr thought, among those things was love. On her marriage night the illusion was shattered ; Harry Lehr told her he had married her only for money—and for his mother (he was a good American), that he did not intend -La be her husband except in public, that she must content herself with the social advantages he could offer. The secret hinted at here was simple enough ; Lehr was not merely Swann, he was Chhrlus. Years later Lehr told his wife that although he owed his social position to the charm he had for women, he had an acute physical repulsion from them. Social success, the delights of the courtier were his engrossing pursuit all through his life, to succeed in his chosen career he had to win the women, at what cost to his inner nature we can hardly guess. Great artists have sacrificed less for their art.
The interest of Mrs. Lehr's book is then twofold ; it is in the personality of Harry Lchr as seen through the eyes of
the woman whom he had deeply wronged, but yet who came to have some pity for him, and in the picture of the American rich at play in the " Gilded Age." Mrs. Lehr is not a great writer and she is, in any case, too close to the subject and yet not full enough of hate to use it to its best advantage
On th3 other hand, her limitations help her in her picture of the world in which Lehr was king. She is not writing an ostentatious denunciation of a society she has renounced, she is simply a la recherche du tetnps perdu—and she thinks that much of it was, except for ,her private tragedy, a good time. She has or seems to have no idea of the kind of picture she is painting, of the effect of the description of the vast and tasteless squandering of dollars in the pursuit of pleasure. It was a woman's world ; the men, like Mrs. Lehr's father, worked themselves to a stupor and left the social side to the women and to their male satellites. It is a kind of Satyricon dominated by women, and by women who had a haunting anxiety that some belated Cornelia. might find them out, the standards of Cornelia, in this case, being those of the Good Queen. That many men and some women did not live up to those standards was known but not admitted (though one enterprising young woman made her father pay handsomely for acknowledging the existence of his mistress). The Drexels were Catholics, but divorce still created problems, evea in non-Catholic families, and whatever went on in artistic circles where Stanford White. held sway, the orgies of the very rich were not particularly. scandalous ; they were merely stupid.
But how stupid Can there ever have been a set of rick people more devoted to what Thorsten Veblen called " con-! spicuous waste " than these ? It was not that money played so great a part in their lives ; it has played an equal part in the lives of other ruling classes, but that their taste, their, pride was not autonomous. It is the purely parasitic char-1 acter not only of the architecture, but of the whole style of life that gives the show away. One magnate's wifewho ordered! a house from a leading architect was given a reproduction of the house of Jacques Coeur at Bourges. Why should this have been regarded as misplaced humour on the archi-: tect's part ? The original Cornelius Vanderbilt' had more: in common with Jacques Coeur than he had with Francis The coats of arms ordered from Tiffanys, the passion for " exclusiveness " which might have startled Charles X are all significant of unease. These magnates, these " lords of trade," as Mrs. Lehr calls them, feared disparagement for their daughters as much as barons of Magna Charta. Mrs.! Lehr tells us that the young naval officers at Newport were called in as extra dancing men or as bridge partners but never invited to dinner. The social position to be allowed to Mrs. Leeds, whose husband was a new tinplate magnate, was a great Newport problem, yet Mrs. Leeds ultimately: married a first cousin of King George V and a brother-in-law of the Kaiser's sister. The grandchildren of men who had fought their way up , from the farms or the streets looked down on the children of men who had followed their lead— and both looked across the Atlantic to " real society," to the " effete aristocracies " of Europe who, rich or poor, at least believed in their own values ! One form of imitation of the old aristocracies took some time "to acclimate " itself. Mrs. Lehr tells us that James Speyer was the first Jew to be " received " ; that is not, I think quite exact ; one of the families on whose social glories she dwells would have some difficulty in getting round the Aryan laws in its ancestral' Germany ; but it is true enough. These grandchildren of peasants were resolved that one blood test should remain • potent, even if the task of fighting off newcomers with a hundred millions with one's share of grandfather's fifty millions was increasingly a lost battle.
In this world Harry Lehr lived his life ; in this world Mrs. Lehr sacrificed her one hope of love to spare her pious mother. Americans were doing great things but they were not noticed ' at Newport ; Edison was not there nor was Henry Adams, ' but neither was Mr. Rockefeller, neither was Mr. Hanna, neither was Mr. Hill. If Mr. Morgan had to put up with these people, may he not have agreed with his daughter Anne who called them to their faces " rich fools " ?
Henry Lehr died in his native city of Baltimore in 1929,' fateful year, and Mrs. Lehr has found peace at last in Paris, where she had had, for many years, so many friends. Among them was Robert de Montesquiou 1 . . D. W. BROGAN.. 1
Previous page
