THE GOVERNING CLASS
By LORD DAVID CECIL
THE trouble with professional historians is that they tend to kill the past. They can hardly be blamed. Their aim is to dissect and analyse a former age: and how can one dissect and analyse a living body? The vivid breathing confusion of character and event and passion which make up a period of history has to be stilled, its elements to be tidied and grouped into movements and social classes and intellectual tendencies and economic causes, before the historian can set to work on his task of discovering their trend and significance. Meanwhile the spirit of life has left them. Reading the finished product, we find it hard to realise it is about real people, or to imagine what they would have seemed like to us if we had seen them. It is here the memoir-writer comes to our aid. For he has seen them. And his recollections, trivial often in them- selves—a great man's trick of speech, the way people in a famous house amused themselves after dinner—will suddenly bring the past to life. We get a direct revealing whiff of the atmosphere of a vanished society.
Mrs. Dugdale's book* gives us such a whiff. It is a modest work, a hundred and ninety brief lightly-written pages of anecdote. But its author is an exceptionally acute observer, at once appreciative and ironical, and expressing herself in a neat, lively style. Moreover, fortune placed her in an excellent position for observation. On her father's side the niece of Lord Balfour, on her mother's of the Duke of Argyle, related also to the 3rd Lord Salisbury and with a foot in the Scottish intellectual circle of Butcher and Andrew Lang, she grew up at the centre of the most active section of the British aristocracy during the end of the nineteenth century. From her book we get a picture of the old governing class during the last period when it still did most of the governing.
It is a varied picture. Mrs. Dugdale distinguishes brilliantly between the English political Cecils, the Lowland intellectual Balfours, and those magnificent and fanatical Lords of the Isles, the Campbell family. Yet seen at the distance of forty years and compared with our contemporaries, the three groups show enough in common to form a corporate and representative personality. It is not the personality everyone would expect. Aristocracies, perhaps because the word has vague associations with the French nobility of the pre-Revolutionary period, are often conceived of as graceful, elegant, formal and conven- tional. Not so were the inhabitants of the country houses where Mrs. Dugdale spent her childhood. To the British aristocracy, rural, active, independent, form and taste had never meant so much as to the urban French, disciplined by all the polished ceremonial of a despotic court. The nineteenth cen- tury had intensified this difference. Mrs. Dugdale's relations are thoroughly un-Gallican; Lady Victoria Campbell directing the inhabitants of the island of Tiree from a rowing-boat, one of Lord Salisbury's sons unself-consciously driving his car back- wards through the streets, because it was stuck in reverse. Further, they were all as Victorian, essentially, as the people they governed. Indeed, the scale of their lives made them • Family Homespun, by Blanche Dugdale. Murray, 9s. exhibit all the more positive Victorian qualities in an especially large way.
Two qualities predominated in their composition, vitality and moral seriousness. Men and women alike were untiringly strenuous. Their lives passed in a ceaseless round of political meetings, philanthropic activities, local duties, big social gatherings, sport, reading, and to the accompaniment of incessant conversation, of an argumentative, incisive, dogmatic sort. But all was directed and disciplined by their moral sense. Most of them were religious ; the Cecils and the Campbells were passionately interested in ecclesiastical questions. But even those members of the group not avowedly pions were controlled by the sense of duty; throwing themselves into causes, women's suffrage, the improvement of conditions in the Scottish islands. They took their position as born governors for granted ; but felt it a responsibility they must exercise " for ever in their great Taskmaster's eye." Even their culture was a sober, serious affair, unaesthetic, unseusuous, more concerned with ideas than style, and strictly limited in range by their moral views. No one could have been less like the exquisite frivolous idea of the aristocrat.
Yet they were not weighed down by the burden of their conscientiousness; compared with it they seem strangely un- perturbed. The relative serenity of their age had something to do with it : and their confidence in themselves engendered by their privileged place. Once they had squared their actions with their conscience, they were careless what others thought of them. " Uncle Arthur " asked a little niece of Lord Balfour, absorbed in some scheme for improving the lot of the Irish labourer, " will they stop calling you Bloody Balfour when you give them the potatoes?" " I should think it highly im- probable " was his unruffled reply.
The remark illustrates another quality, which saved them from over-solemnity; their humour, cleverness, zest for life and lack of sentimentality combined to make them find the incongruities of existence unfailingly entertaining; and round the creeds and the causes sparkled always a high-spirited laughter. Listen to the only lesson offered to a child by Lord Balfoar's sister, Mrs. Sidgwick, pioneer of female education and principal of Newnham. " I suffered," says Mrs. Dugdale, " from a particularly inappropriate outburst of giggling at the luncheon table. Aunt Nora suggested to me the art of winking quite imperceptibly at some person whom one could trust. ' I have found it useful all my life,' she said, and if you observe your Uncle Arthur and me very carefully, you will see we often communicate with each other in that way." Such advice gives one confidence in the government of Newnham, under the sway of Mrs. Sidgwick.
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