A Romantic Aristocrat by T.S. Eliot

It is impossible to overlook the merits of scholarship and criticism / exhibited by George Wyndham's posthumous book, and it is impossible to / deal with the book purely on its merits of scholarship and criticism. To / attempt to do so would in the first place be unfair, as the book is a / posthumous work, and posthumous books demand some personal attention to / their writers. This book is a collection of essays and addresses, / arranged in their present order by Mr. Whibley; they were intended by / their author to be remodelled into a volume on "romantic literature"; / they move from an ingenious search for the date of the beginning of / Romanticism, through the French and English Renaissance, to Sir Walter / Scott. In the second place, these essays represent the literary work of / a man who gained his chief distinction in political life. In the third / place, this man stands for a type, an English type. The type is / interesting and will probably become extinct. It is natural, therefore, / that our primary interest in the essays should be an interest in George / Wyndham.

Mr. Charles Whibley, in an introduction the tone of which is well suited / to the matter, has several sentences which throw light on Wyndham's / personality. What issues with surprising clearness from Mr. Whibley's / sketch is the unity of Wyndham's mind, the identity of his mind as it / engaged in apparently unrelated occupations. Wyndham left Eton for the / army; in barracks he "taught himself Italian, and filled his leisure / with the reading of history and poetry. " After this Coldstream culture / there was a campaign in Egypt; later, service in South Africa / accompanied by a copy of Virgil. There was a career in the Commons, a / conspicuous career as Irish Secretary. Finally, there was a career as a / landowner-2400 acres. And throughout these careers George Wyndham went / on not only accumulating books but reading them, and occasionally / writing about them. He was a man of character, a man of energy. Mr. / Whibley is quite credible when he says:

/ Literature was for him no parergon, no mere way of escape from / politics. If he was an amateur in feeling, he was a craftsman in / execution;

and, more significantly,

/ With the same zest that he read and discoursed upon _A Winter's / Tale_ or _Troilus and Cressida_, he rode to hounds, or threw himself / with a kind of fury into a "point to point," or made a speech at the / hustings, or sat late in the night talking with a friend.

From these and other sentences we chart the mind of George Wyndham, and / the key to its topography is the fact that his literature and his / politics and his country life are one and the same thing. They are not / in separate compartments, they are one career. Together they made up his / world: literature, politics, riding to hounds. In the real world these / things have nothing to do with each other. But we cannot believe that / George Wyndham lived in the real world. And this is implied in Mr. / Whibley's remark that:

/ George Wyndham was by character and training a romantic. He looked / with wonder upon the world as upon a fairyland.

Here is the manifestation of type.

There must probably be conceded to history a few "many-sided" men. / Perhaps Leonardo da Vinci was such. George Wyndham was not a man on the / scale of Leonardo, and his writings give a very different effect from / Leonardo's notebooks. Leonardo turned to art or science, and each was / what it was and not another thing. But Leonardo was Leonardo: he had no / father to speak of, he was hardly a citizen, and he had no stake in the / community. He lived in no fairyland, but his mind went out and became a / part of things. George Wyndham was Gentry. He was chivalrous, the world / was an adventure of himself. It is characteristic that on embarking as a / subaltern for Egypt he wrote enthusiastically:

/ I do not suppose that any expedition since the days of Roman / governors of provinces has started with such magnificence; we might / have been Antony going to Egypt in a purple-sailed galley.

This is precisely the spirit which animates his appreciation of the / Elizabethans and of Walter Scott; which guides him toward Hakluyt and / North. Wyndham was enthusiastic, he was a Romantic, he was an / Imperialist, and he was quite naturally a literary pupil of W. E. / Henley. Wyndham was a scholar, but his scholarship is incidental; he was / a good critic, within the range allowed him by his enthusiasms; but it / is neither as Scholar nor as Critic that we can criticize him. We can / criticize his writings only as the expression of this peculiar English / type, the aristocrat, the Imperialist, the Romantic, riding to hounds / across his prose, looking with wonder upon the world as upon a / fairyland.