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THE

QUARTERLY REVIEW

No. 491.-JANUARY, 1927.

Art. 1.-A GREAT TYPE AND A GREAT TIME.

1. Henry Chaplin, A Memoir. By the Marchioness of Londonderry. Macmillan, 1926.

2. A Hundred Wonderful Years. By Mrs C. S. Peel. Lane, 1926.

MR HENRY CHAPLIN, fortunate beyond most men in his life and its circumstances, has found posthumous good fortune in his biographical memoirs. Several have collaborated in its production, but we may regard Lady Londonderry, his daughter, as the editor and perhaps writer in chief, and she has brought to this labour of love, on behalf of a very lovable subject, the devotion to be expected and a literary gift which is rather surprising. If the ideal of art be to conceal art, then we might add that the ideal of biographical art is to conceal the biographer. We may accept that as the rule, in spite of the ever glorious exception of Boswell. The first business of the biographer, after bringing his leading figure into the limelight, is, however, to see that no interference on his own part intercepts the light. That is an effacement which Lady Londonderry has wonderfully achieved. We are hardly aware of her presence throughout the book. We see no pulling of strings, hear no creak of mechanism; and the outcome is that she gives us a very living figure of her father.

Even if the subject of this memoir had no sympathetic interest for us, Lord Chaplin as a type is bound to arrest intelligent attention, because he was so typical and so exceptionally representative of a century that has Vol. 248.-No. 491.

passed. That is much to say, but not too much. He was typical not only of a time that has gone but of a time that never can return. I have referred to him as Lord Chaplin. But it is not in the least as a Lord (to be precise, his title was Viscount) that we have to think of him. He was 'The Squire'; and not even or only 'a squire.' The definite article alone fits him. The King might make a lord, but no king can ever make an English squire, least of all a squire like Mr Chaplin. He was the Squire, representative' of a great tradition, of a great social fact that since he went has ceased. Such a man can never be again, because the conditions which made him possible have gone. Mr Chaplin-I like to think of him so, far better than as Viscount-was more than typical, for he was an example of the type at its very highest and most perfect. There has never been another Squire quite like him. We have to look on him as the apotheosis of the Squire. He was not without some of the limitations of the type. There was a world of art, music, literature, largely hidden from him. It is true that he did read 'Jorrocks' with keen appreciation to his children, if that is to be literary. Let us leave it so.

If he were not of artistic taste and temperament, he was far more formidable of intellect than are most of his class. If all had been his equals, the gentlemen of England would not have needed Disraeli to speak for them in the House of Commons. Mr Chaplin was a fine forcible speaker of the robust Tory type, a remarkably good letter writer. Of the many letters that Lady Londonderry has given us in this admirable memoir every one is good. And he had the industry to write at length. Some of the best of these letters are those that he wrote to his children. You may see in them the human heart of the man and his warm sympathy with children, as well as his knowledge, probably instinctive and gained without a thought, of what would interest them.

Try as we might, we could not find a quality of the typical English squire lacking in Mr Chaplin. He had one quality perhaps in addition-a love of deer-stalking. But he might justify this. His mother was a Scotswoman, niece of no less a man than the famous stalker

and shot, Horatio Ross. With that heritage from his mother's side he might well love the tall deer' of Black Mount and the forests which he leased. Then by his wife-alas, his too short-lived wife - he had again Scottish connexion; for she was Lady Florence LevesonGower, the Duke of Sutherland's daughter. And there too, at the back of Dunrobin, is a deer forest. For the rest, see what he did that is in the tradition of the English squire, and how magnificently he did it. This son of a parson and of the Scottish lady, Horatia (Lord Nelson had been her father, Horatio's, godfather and the name had been perpetuated), became more splendidly than any before or after him the Squire, as soon as he succeeded to his heritage. Of course country parson, though true in the letter as a description of our Squire's father, is quite misleading in its implications, for, though he was indeed country parson, he was something more besides very much the country gentleman and sportsman. He really had about him qualities of what Aristotle calls the magnificent man.' He had the largeminded disregard of small things. Also, together with the qualities, he had one defect, perhaps inseparable from them--an egoism which made him regard his neighbour as one to whom he did indeed owe a duty, but a duty second, only and always, to his duty towards one other-his magnificent self. Withal he had a kindliness of heart and a sympathy and humour which hardly consist with the Aristotelian magnificence.

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Take him hunting-he was constantly with the best packs, riding the best horses. And he needed them good, for he weighed 16 stone long before any 'elderly spread' came upon him, and Custance, some years later, rated his riding weight at over 18 stone. Yet he managed to get those many stone carried over a difficult country and in fast runs with the best. At twenty-five he was hunting a pack of his own. Take him racing-at twenty-six he won the Derby with Hermit. It must be almost a calamity, a disillusionment, to win the best prize so soon-like young Alexander of Macedon, with the world too early and easily at his feet. But it does not seem to have taken the edge off Mr Chaplin's zest in racing. He loved the turf, he loved winning money on it, and, next to that, he loved losing there, to the end

which happily was very far from the days of Hermit, for he lived to be eighty-two.

Socially-he was always in the best society. This seems a snobbish phrase to write to-day; but it is the statement of what was a simple fact then, when there was a society, that was the best, composed, exclusively, of those who had generations of culture behind them. It was not then interpenetrated with the lately-becomerich who have fretted the defining line away. Mr Chaplin married the daughter of a duke. He was the close friend of King Edward VII and his Queen, and of many of the Royal Family. Politically-he was of the staunchest sect of the Tories. He rose to Cabinet rank. He regarded his political duties seriously; he was punctual in attendance at the House, and obedient to Party rules. It was because he would not take what he deemed grave burdens lightly that his viscounty was forced upon him -he was at first very reluctant to accept it-so that he might go to the more rarefied, less arduous, atmosphere of the House of Lords. In his own county his word was law-a law that was obeyed with genuine love. But he had to give up, all too early, his ancestral Blankney, an obligation forced upon him by his own too great 'magnificence.' It passed to Lord Londesborough, its principal mortgagee, in 1892. He had come into a goodly heritage, but it had not been good enough for all that he demanded of it.

'At length,' his loving biographer has to write-though with no hint of the chiding that really was the too magnificent man's due-'the resources of Mr Chaplin's once ample exchequer began to feel the strain. The financial burden of hunting a county six days a week called for retrenchment. His scale of expenditure rivalled even the profusion of Lord Chesterfield during his reign over the Pytchley; his cuisine evoked memories of the art and extravagance of Dolesio; his hospitality was boundless. Besides hunting, there were the claims of Newmarket where Fortune, fickle jade, having once given him a Hermit, now denied him any second edition of her favours. His circumstances were no secret; his indifference to economy was proverbial. At Trentham his habits provoked an amusing commentary by the Duke of Westminster at a dinner-table of large numbers. It was shortly after Mr Chaplin's marriage to the

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Duke's niece. "When our Harry," said the Duke, "is broke, which is only a question of time, all the crowned heads of Europe ought to give him 100,000l. a year in order that he may show them how to spend their money." This scene, the ducal atmosphere, the wit and extravagance of the statement, might have come straight from the pages of "Lothair," and appropriately enough, for Brentham of the novel is Trentham of reality.'

Not bad for the son of the country parson and his Scottish wife! He was an obvious and eminent exception to the rule that 'most of us think a great deal too much about our money.' His fault, if it be a fault, did not lie in that direction. If it be easy to think too much of money, it was easy for Mr Chaplin to think too little of it, and therewith to forget that the owner of great possessions owes some duty to those who are to follow him. He was a country parson's son, but he had been brought up on great expectations, as heir to his opulent Uncle Charles, the then Squire of Blankney. Henry Chaplin's father died when the boy was young and he was much at Blankney. Of his uncle's character something, no doubt, was transmitted to Henry during those years. Of that uncle Lady Londonderry writes:

Charles Chaplin was a survivor of a most ancient order of squire. A complete autocrat on his own land, and owning property in three counties, it was said of him that he could himself return no fewer than seven members to Parliament, since to vote the way the Squire ordered was the whole duty of the good tenants. He was regarded with universal respect and a good deal of awe, and was a perfect terror to the poacher. It is told of him that on one occasion when he was sitting on the Bench, a young lawyer from London, who was present, ventured to criticise a pronouncement of the Squire as not legal. "Young man," thundered Mr Chaplin, as much astonished as he was affronted by the interruption, "you are evidently a stranger in these parts, or you would know that my word is law."

9

There was always a little suggestion of this Sir Antony Absolutism about Henry Chaplin himself, though mitigated by the kindliest expression that ever beamed from human eye-always granting that kindliness to himself came just a little before his kindliness to his

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