Portraits and Miniatures (34 page)

I therefore have no doubt about my duty in relation to fund-raising as Chancellor of the University of Oxford. But I have a certain amount of general caution, I do not want ‘the idea of a university', to use Cardinal John Henry Newman's famous phrase, to become that of locating the nearest potential benefactor and squeezing him until the pips squeak.

A
Daily Telegraph
article of 1988.

Good Biography as a general rule dates much more quickly than does good fiction. Perhaps this is simply because it is a lower art form, and therefore, like perfectly decent but undistinguished wine, suffers rather than benefits from age.

In any event I am convinced that it is so. No one who has ever liked Dickens or Dostoevsky, Jane Austen or George Eliot is likely to find them dated on a return visit. Yet the general run of good-quality pre-1914 biography is not much read or appreciated today. Maybe the highest peaks survive intact. In this category of outstanding Victorian biography there would, I suppose, be strong support for Froude's
Carlyle,
G. O. Trevelyan's
Macaulay
and Morley's
Gladstone.
Yet I do not think that either Trevelyan or Froude survive as well as the subjects' own non-biographical writing, and Morley's smooth-flowing three-volume narrative does not capture the Grand Old Man's massive inner turbulence, which made him so quintessential a figure of his age, nearly as well as do Gladstone's own
Diaries.

If we step down a rank, however, which means that we are still dealing with works that were greeted as highly competent and comprehensive portraits when they appeared, we are into a pace and style of treatment that seems as remote today as a hansom cab in a pea soup fog. When over forty years ago I first read books like A. G. Gardiner's
Sir William Harcourt
and J. A. Spender's
Campbell-Bannerman
I found them useful and enjoyable. Now, however, I would much rather re-read a chapter (in the course of looking up an incident) in the present Lord Moran's
C.B.
(1973) just as I prefer Robert Blake's
Disraeli
to Moneypenny
and Buckle's six volumes. On Harcourt, who was an engaging and rumbustious figure sometimes known as ‘the great gladiator', there is nothing much to switch to, which makes him one of the rare undeveloped sites available to a young biographer in the overcrowded world of today.

Despite the Disraeli example the difference is not just a question of length. It is much more one of angle of view. The old tombstone lives, in Lytton Strachey's words ‘those two fat volumes with which it is our custom to commemorate the dead', mostly unrolled the career of the commemorated one with political respect and personal discretion. An occasional short chapter on his literary taste or country pursuits was about the nearest one got to inquisitive dissection of character. It is as impossible to imagine Alistair Home's
Macmillan
being published fifty or sixty years ago, as it would be to imagine the
Life of Sir Michael Hicks Beach
by his daughter being published today.

Was it Strachey himself who was most responsible for the change? He was certainly contemptuous of the prevailing style, tried to miniaturize it as much as any Japanese woman ever did to constrict the size of her feet, and believed that in achieving this by a preference for aphorism over fact he could make each small picture into an iconoclastic work of art. In a sense he was as sterile as he was brilliant. He had remarkably few imitators. And, with a short pause for breath, the bland multi-volume portraits resumed their sway. Clustered around 1932, the year of Strachey's death, were Ronaldshay's
Curzon,
Spender and Cyril Asquith's
Asquith,
and Mrs Dugdale's
Balfour,
all of them in the strict tradition of the
genre.

Yet Strachey had shot a destructive arrow into the established school, the poison of which spread slowly but surely. Eventually, when assisted by the wartime and post-war paper shortage, it did so fatally. In the 1940s and early 1950s the tombstones got much smaller (G. M. Young's
Stanley Baldwin,
Keith Feiling's
Neville Chamberlain,
even Harold Nicolson's
George V
managed to do it in single not over-gross volumes). And when later a taste for books of 300,000 words and more was re-imported from America, where there has been a foolish trend to value
biographies, as though they were fat cattle, by dead weight on the hoof, they were of a very different format and content. Simultaneous multi-volume publication was out and a mixture of scandalous revelation and psychological analysis was in.

Far less, therefore, than in the case not merely of fiction but of most other literary forms, do unchanging standards apply to political biography. I consequently think it best to confine my choice to the ‘moderns' - mostly post-1945 with only a brief glance back to illustrate the change of habit.

First, J. L. Garvin's
Joseph Chamberlain
as a good illustration of the tradition: spacious, sympathetic, even adulatory, but well written by a professional (much better than by a relation, which was only too frequent at that period), with even a touch of pace. The only trouble was that he never finished it and left the last two volumes (of five) to be done by Julian Amery over twenty years later.

Next, in view of what I have said about Strachey,
Eminent Victorians
must be included. None of the four subjects were politicians, of course, but they all, soldier, headmaster, worldly prelate, lady with the lamp, were sufficiently wily public figures to qualify for inclusion in the category. From the 1930s I chose Churchill's
Great Contemporaries.
It wears remarkably well. The style is a bit florid, and he is much better on British politicians than on either foreigners or Bernard Shaw and T. E. Lawrence. The essays on Asquith, Balfour and Curzon each contain phrases that are as illuminating as they are memorable.

Moving on into the 1950s, I regard Philip Magnus's
Gladstone
as a very good book, in no way definitive, but the work of a sensitive architect pulling together into a compact shape what had become a house almost submerged in a sprawl of outbuildings. Although substantially longer, Blake's
Disraeli
deserves to be put in the same category, even though he had far less sympathy with Disraeli as a character that Magnus did with Gladstone.

John Grigg's
magnus opus
opened in 1973 with the promise of being the long missing (but not for want of other people trying) great biography of
Lloyd George.
Now twenty years later he is showing signs of emulating Garvin on Chamberlain (or, from
across the Atlantic, Schlesinger on Roosevelt) and leaving us stranded half-way across the river, three fine arches of the bridge built but not much early prospect of reaching dry land. He has been particularly good on what one would expect to elude him most; the socio-topographical background of Lloyd George's North Wales life.

I end with two books which, although not in the least malevolently written, have greatly enhanced the reputations of the authors while putting their subjects through all the (fortunately posthumous) rigours of having their portrait painted in the style of Sutherland. John Campbell's
F. E. Smith
(1983) and Ben Pimlott's
Hugh Dalton
(also 1983, although supplemented by two volumes of his diaries in 1985 and 1986), are both memorable and definitive. They skilfully extract the treasures and seal up the tombs, probably never to be opened again.

This essay is based on a combination of a speech at an OUP lunch for the publication of the new edition of the
Oxford English Dictionary
and of an article in the
Independent Magazine.

A Hundred and ten years ago James Murray started serious work on the first edition of the
Oxford English Dictionary.
It was part of a great late-Victorian wave of collating information in a much more systematic way than had hitherto been done. Leslie Stephen began producing the
Dictionary of National Biography
in 1888.
Who's Who
first appeared in something approaching its modern form in 1897.

Murray's work took longer to mature. He began publication in 1884, but it was 1928 and thirteen years after his own death before the project was complete. There was a substantial supplement published in 1972, and in 1989 a complete new edition with 5000 new words and a total of over 21,000 pages in twenty separate volumes was launched upon the world at the modest price of £1500.

The period since Murray began has to a remarkable extent coincided with two superficially contradicting developments. The first has been the decline of British power in the world. The second has been the advance of the English language.

In 1879 the Empire was approaching its zenith, Queen Victoria, to whom the first edition was dedicated, had recently been made an empress by Disraeli, on top of being a queen. Hardly another empire was proclaimed until Jean Bédel Bokassa rather overreached himself in the Central African Republic a hundred years later. The Zulu War, the epitome of an imperialist
adventure, was also being fought in 1879 and Rorke's Drift and Isandhlwana engraved themselves on the history of British bravery and incompetence. More significantly, Britain was still just ahead of Germany and the United States as an industrial power and the leading exporter in the world. Within a decade or so, however, the apogee was past, and it soon became downhill all the way for British imperial and industrial refulgence.

The language, on the other hand, supported by the
Oxford English Dictionary,
has gone from strength to strength. If the agents of the old imperialism sometimes advanced with a Bible in one hand and a bottle of whisky in the other, their descendants have replaced these insignia with the OED and a glass of British Council wine. Of course we have been lucky in this linguistic context in having the United States as an immensely powerful ally. Like Blücher at the battle of Waterloo, it may have arrived on the scene a little late in the day but its intervention has been even more decisive than was that of the Prussians in 1815.

The French were in both cases the victims of afternoon reinforcements, and I always felt a good deal of sympathy when I observed close up, and suffered some inconvenience from, their determined rearguard action to hold the European Community as the last international organization that was a Francophone bastion. With Britain alone they might at least have hoped to draw a linguistic war. But against Britain and North America, not to mention Australasia, most of Africa, and the curious influence of India - which is at once a great reservoir of English-speaking millions and the potential breeding ground of a new language that has some but by no means all of the characteristics of metropolitan English - the French, allied with the Québecois, the Maghreb, most of the Sahara, and hardly anybody else, are sadly outgunned.

How sullenly resentful the British would have been had it been the other way round: if Creole influence had crept up from New Orleans and that of New France down from Detroit and the heartland of the United States had become Francophone, and that as a result French became the twentieth-century international language of commerce and summits and airlines as well as the nineteenth-century language of diplomacy and gastronomy and sleeping cars.

This emphatically did not happen. An Air France pilot landing a Concorde at Charles de Gaulle airport is supposed to talk to ground control in English. And a former French Ambassador to the United Nations is alleged to have lost his place as chairman of the late 1980s-instituted weekly lunch of the five permanent Security Council members at least partly because he took his rules too much
au pied de la lettre
and tried to talk to his colleagues in French. The British Ambassador, who got the job in his place, did not mind, but the American, the Russian and the Chinese Ambassadors did.

But whatever had happened in America we would have had in the OED a priceless weapon of attack or defence. As Belloc wrote:

Whatever happens, we have got
The Maxim gun, and they have not.

which, modified to adjust to the new imperialism, I render (with some sacrifice of the not very poetic original rhythm) as:

For we have got
The OED, and they have not.

And as from 1989, moreover, we have got the OED Mark II, which modern weapon is not only formidable against our linguistic enemies, but more surprisingly is not rivalled by the intellectual armaments industry of our principal ally. The production of the Dictionary must be almost the only field of university endeavour (except for living amongst mediaeval and baroque buildings, which is not exactly a field of endeavour) where Oxford is not challenged by Harvard or any other of the great American universities.

The price paid is perhaps that when the name Oxford is mentioned throughout the educated English-speaking world it is the Dictionary that comes to mind at least as quickly as the University. If a poll were conducted from Seattle to Singapore and from Auckland to Accra as to which was the more indispensable
cultural asset to the world, I would be a little uneasy during the compilation of the results. But, of course, the question would be even more meaningless than most opinion poll questions, for the Dictionary would not exist without the Oxford University Press, and the Press would not exist without the University.

This slight essay was first published as a
Spectator
review of
The Queen of Games
by Nicky Smith (Weidenfeld and Nicolson).

I Once Had a long audience with the late Emperor of Japan. We had obviously both been concerned to find subjects to keep us going. I had been told that he had written thirteen books, mainly on marine biology. I endeavoured to ‘show awareness' as editors encourage political writers to do, but he deflected my compliments, at once modestly and grandly. ‘No, no,' he said, ‘I do not write them myself. I employ scholars to do that.'