The Portrait of a Lady

Canadian Forum Literary Competitions/1921-01

The Portrait of a Lady written by James Mavor

Matsuo, The Pine Tree

From The Canadian Forum, January 1921, p. 112

The psychology of Mrs. Asquith and of her Autobiography cannot be understood without realizing that her "unfettered" youth was spent in the country, isolated from the county families in the neighbourhood of her father's estate and isolated from the country folk. Sir Charles Tennant was a chemical manufacturer who inherited a lucrative business from his father. He was a man of large means derived from commerce, and of no family; there was an alleged blot in his escutcheon. For all these reasons the county people who were his neighbours looked down upon him and the Walters of The Times, who were connections of his wife and the only relations of consequence, would have nothing to do with him. His father had left him a gloomy house in a business street in Glasgow, but Charles Tennant purchased an estate in Peebleshire and there his family were allowed to grow up. When he threw himself into politics by standing for the county in which he lived, and began to contribute to party funds, Tennant soon made friends. He was a sharp, capable man of business and a good listener. The leading politicians took notice of him and enjoyed his hospitality both in London and at Glen.

Until the Tennant girls were old enough to go into society they met few people — none indeed excepting their father's political visitors. They were not sent to school (excepting, as Mrs. Asquith relates, for a very short time). They grew up without effective discipline and without systematic education. They had tutors, but these were apparently injudiciously selected. The special circumstances of their family life inevitably bred in them at once a vigorous rectitude and a contemptuous disregard of convention. The atmosphere of their household was not exactly that of a convent but the effect of their seclusion from man and womankind of their own age and standing was in many ways similar to the effect of life in a convent. It is true that the political visitors were distinguished persons and that early contact with people of brains was an enormous advantage; but these people had been educated after the manner of their kind and brought up in a society to which the Tennants were strangers. Thus the Tennants were [p. 113] with them but not of them. Then came sudden emergence from isolation, residence alone in a foreign city and complete freedom, followed by London society and the hunting field. In the former the sprightliness and precocity of Miss Margot Tennant carried her fast and far and in the latter as a first-rate horsewoman she easily excelled. Her very detachment resulting from conditions beyond her control accrued to her benefit. She had set herself to learn quickly many things which others had absorbed gradually. She thus cultivated in herself the habits of observation and criticism and her sense of humour did the rest.

Ignored she had been by the county families in her native place; but the sheer force of her vitality took London by storm. Her vivacity, reckless courage on horseback and in conversation, as well as her wholesome good nature, enabled her to make and to keep friends in spite of the strain of her audacious frankness. She knew almost every one who was worth knowing and she gradually developed a talent for making character sketches of the people she met. With some persons of importance in their day she was on exceptionally intimate terms, and these were of sufficiently diversified types — Gladstone, Jowett, Balfour, John Addington Symonds, Henry James, Morley, Curzon, for example.

Why should she not tell the story of her relations with the men and women of her time, and in telling it why should she not be candid? If every one were to write his or her history and write it truthfully, history in general would be much more reliable than it is. Yet even the most ostentatiously truthful confessions, Rousseau's for instance, have been found to stray from strict veracity. Whether or not Mrs. Asquith has strayed does not yet appear and, therefore, her narrative must be taken as what it purports to be, the history of a vivacious woman, full of healthy vigour and of the joy of life; and it should be added, a woman with the fundamental virtues and yet a woman of passion. The circumstances which have been indicated threw Mrs. Asquith into the society of the cleverest people of her time. Few of these people were learned in the academical sense, and still fewer were men and women of genius; but most of them had nimble wits and many of them had been occupied with great affairs. To the sharpness which came by nature Mrs. Asquith added the keenness which came of association with people who were even keener than she was. Her Autobiography is thus packed with bons mots. Augustine Birrell said to her, "I would advise you to live among your superiors, Margot, but to be of them" — an excellent addendum to his Obiter Dicta. "I divide the world into life-givers and life-takers," Laurence Oliphant told her — a really profound observation for the life-takers; those whose contact is exhausting to temper and injurious to character are very many and the life-givers are few. "Every gardener prunes the roots of a tree before it is planted; but no one ever pruned me," is one of Mrs. Asquith's own. One wonders whether pruning might not have destroyed instead of increasing her vitality. Jowett wrote to her, "Few qualities are better worth leaving as they are than vivacity, wit, freshness of mind, gaiety and pluck. Pray keep them all. Don't improve by an atom" — sound advice to a woman who had all of these invaluable assets.

To say that Mrs. Asquith's judgment of men and women is unerring would only mean that her judgment agreed with that of the speaker. I will not say that her judgment is unerring but rather that it is convincing. Of John Morley she says: "Although 'Honest John' — the name by which he went among Radicals — was singularly ill chosen, I never heard of Morley telling a lie". Of Chamberlain she says: "He never deceived himself, which is more than could be said of some of the famous politicians of that day". Of Sir Charles Dilke: "Whatever Dilke's native impulses were, no one could say he controlled them. Besides a defective sense of humour, he was fundamentally commonplace and had no key to his mind, which makes every one ultimately dull". (A shrewd if inelegantly expressed judgment) "If he were a horse I certainly should not buy him".

A gauche hostess said to her in a loud voice across the table: "There were some clever people in the world, you know, before you were born. Miss Tennant". Her retort was instant: "Please don't pick me out. Lady Clarke, as if I alone were responsible for the stupid ones among whom we find ourselves to-day". A retort few people would have had the sharpness and the courage to make.

In a letter from Mr. Gladstone, congratulating her upon her approaching marriage, he said: "You have a great and noble work to perform. It is a work far beyond human strength. May the strength which is more than human be abundantly granted to you". On receiving this, Mrs. Asquith remarked to a friend: "Gladstone thinks my fitness to be Henry's wife should be prayed for like the clergy: 'Almighty and Everlasting God, who alone workest great marvels'".

Some of Mrs. Asquith's reported dialogues are as brilliant in their kind as any in first-rate comedy.

"I asked Lord Salisbury if he had ever heard Chamberlain speak (Chamberlain was Colonial Secretary at the time).

Lord Salisbury: 'I heard him for the first time this afternoon'.

Margot: 'Where did you hear him and what was he speaking about?'

Lord Salisbury: 'I heard him at Grosvenor House. Let me see . . . what was he speaking about? . . . (reflectively) Australian washerwomen? I think . . or some such thing. . . .'

Margot: 'I suppose at this moment Mr. Chamber-[p. 114]lain is as much hated as Gladstone ever was?'

Lord Salisbury: 'There is a difference. Mr. Gladstone was hated, but he was very much loved. Does anyone love Mr. Chamberlain?'"

The best and longest dialogue is between Mrs. Asquith (then Miss Margot Tennant) and Peter Flower, brother of Lord Battersea, to whom she was engaged for several years. The dialogue is too long to quote; it is full of sparkle. On this dialogue it may be remarked that in some cases considerations of taste may be suffered to remain in the background. It is easy to be over-fastidious and dull, it is more difficult to throw the saving grace of abundant humour over an episode not in itself an agreeable reminiscence.

The longest and by far the best character study is the study of Mrs. Asquith's father. She knew, of course, nothing of him as a man of business, but otherwise she understood him thoroughly. Yet business was his chief concern. Almost everything that Mrs. Asquith is her father was not. Nimble-witted he was in business but not in conversation. Vivacious he certainly was not. He was brought up, she says, "among people who were most of them not only on the make, but I might almost say on the pounce". He had without doubt a keen eye to the main chance — his main chance being money. Mrs. Asquith shows that she had her main chance too; but it was not money. It was a vigorous life with a dash of a desire for power.

Mrs. Asquith's account of a hunting experience in which she was injured is an excellent piece of descriptive writing. In speaking of this and similar adventures, she remarks, "I have broken both collarbones, all my ribs, and my knee-cap; dislocated my jaw, fractured my skull, gashed my nose and had five concussions of the brain; but — I have not lost my nerve".

It seems that, candid as her Autobiography is, Mrs. Asquith's Diary, as yet unpublished, is still more free from reserve. This Diary has, she tells us, been submitted to some of her friends; notably to Henry James, John Addington Symonds, and John Morley. The impression produced by this Diary upon all of these, certainly no mean judges in affairs of literature, was sufficiently extraordinary.

Speaking of a sketch of Gladstone, Symonds says: "I feel that you have offered an extremely powerful and brilliant conception, which is impressive and convincing because of your obvious sincerity and breadth of view. The purely biographical and literary value of this bit of work seems to me very great and makes me keenly wish that you would record all your interesting experiences and your first-hand studies of exceptional personalities in the same way .

Henry James is even more enthusiastic. "It is a wonderful book. If only messieurs les romanciers could photograph experience in their fiction as she has done in some of her pages! The episode of Pachay, short as that is, is masterly — above the reach of Balzac; how far above the laborious beetle flight of Henry James! Above even George Meredith. It is what Henry James would give his right hand to do at once. The episode of Antonelli is very good too, but not so exquisite as the other". Unfortunately neither of these marvels appears in the present volume. Perhaps they are too intimately real to appear in cold print.

Henry James, after a compliment upon her "singularly searching vision", continues: "This and your extraordinary fullness of opportunity make the record a most valuable English document, a rare revelation of the human inwardness of political life in this country and a picture of manners and personal characters as "creditable" on the whole (to the country) as it is frank and acute. The beauty is that you write with such authority, that you've seen so much and lived and moved so much, and that having so the chance to observe and feel and discriminate in the light of so much high pressure, you haven't been in the least afraid but have faced and assimilated and represented for all your worth".

And John Morley is scarcely less hypnotized by Mrs. Asquith's lively pen. "It" (a letter written to him by Mrs. Asquith) "is a brilliant example of that character writing in which the French so indisputably beat us. If you like, you can be as keen and brilliant and penetrating as Madame de Sévigné or the best of them, and if I were the publisher, I would tempt you by high emoluments and certainty of fame".

Interesting as the Autobiography is it is clear from these opinions that the real bonne bouche is the Diary. Perhaps some day it may be given to the world with its studies of political characters and its cabinet secrets.

James Mavor.