The Horoscopic Approach Mn. Bloc . , in one of his more
felicitous estimates of Nell Gwyn's character, writes : "If we knew as much of her as Boswell has enabled us to know of Dr. Johnson, we should possess, in that unwritten book, the very distillation of feminine charm *which no one, except Tolstoy in War and Peace and Shakespeare in As You Like It, has ever had skill and sensibility enough to capture with words." Her charm is one of the few indisputable facts about her ; the manu- facturers of candles and footwear and the proprietors of tea shops testify to it anew year by year. Perhaps there is significance in this industrial tribute. Nell Gwyn was always good for trade ; there was no suspicion, as there was in the case of the Duchess of Portsmouth, that Charles's money was going abroad.
It would be of interest and value if there were published occasionally not biographies but notes for biographies, a col- lection of all the known facts and all the contemporary re- ferences. There, snared somewhere among the lampoons and dedications, the unreliable anecdotes, the names and the dates, would lie the elusive charm of the woman whom Rochester named "the darling strumpet of the crowd " ; she was charitable (witness her will), she was witty in a coarse, fresh, simple way (there are a dozen examples), she was wanton, she was a Protestant : strange if her charm to-day is only a relic of a dead controversy.
But Mr. flax takes the usual unreliable course of a bio- grapher who has too few. facts to play with ; he pads (" it is easy to picture," what is more likely than ? " " we may assume that."). It would be forgivable if his assumptions were more plausible, but too often they show either ignorance or want of judgement (Rochester is dismissed as "a disgusting bounder," Etheredge as a " viperious vulgarian ") ; he does' not even get his few facts right. A short study of the Calendar of Treasury Books (but Mr. Bax never goes to original autho- rities) would have prevented his repeating a stale old story : "We cannot blame the House of Commons for having kept him (the King) short of money when we realize how much of his income he lavished upon women." He attributes two of Rochester's most famous lines to Congreve and confuses Rochester, the poet, with Laurence Hyde. Mr. Bax's contributions to our knowledge of Nell Gwyn are two. The first is a horoscope on which he bases her character, to the unbeliever with comic effect. She shares her charm, an attribute which accompanies the rising of Aquarius, with the Prince of Wales, Mr. Lloyd George, Lord Baden-Powell, R. L. Stevenson, Ruskin and Jackie Coogan. She was not a natural wanton but was" fundamentally maternal," looking upon men "as wilful and lovable children who must be com- forted at any cost." His second contribution is the theory, supported by a surgeon, that she died of syphilis. This excites Mr. I3ax a good deal, but his excitement would not have been shared by his characters. The disease was too common at Court to be feared or to carry any disgrace. Rochester ad- dressed a letter to his wife from Mrs. Fourcard's baths, and Henry Savile described with humour the friends he was meeting in Leather Lane. The King and the Duchess of Portsmouth both probably suffered from it, and to add Nell Gwyn to their number is not a very important contribution to history.
It would have been of more interest if he had paid greater attention to her life before she met the King : she was cer- tainly the mistress of Buckhurst and Hart ; was she also Rochester's mistress ? There is a strong tradition that she was, and although Herr Prinz has dismissed the evidence as negligible, there remain to be explained the lines attributed to Etheredge and printed by" Captain "Alexander Smith in his scandalous little work, The School of Venus and the poem "A Rhymed Letter to Nell Gwyn" in the Victoria and Albert Museum which bears all the marks of Rochester's style. Again, one wishes that Mr. flax had contented himself with compiling the data for a biography rather than attempting
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