GEORGE
LICHTHEIY
but no one would gather this from the tone of his book, which is
insuIIr
in the last degree. Foreigners make hardly any appearance. Even
Wood–
row Wilson-Asquith's contemporary and counterpart-is only noticed
in connection with the war. This is a book about British politics,
written
by an insider who clearly finds the game fascinating. It is full of Cabinet
circulars and meetings of the Imperial Defense Committee, not to mention
private letters and memoranda bearing upon conflicts over policy.
The
professionals are bound to find it enthralling. Readers not wholly
engrossed in the game of politics may think Mr. Jenkins a trifle
too
fond of his charmed world. They may also suspect him of philistinism.
In this they would be wrong. He is in fact very civilized. The reason
he has nothing to say about the literary side of the Edwardian
age,
and
almost nothing about philosophy, history, or even economics (Keynes
is mentioned just once, as a junior official in the Treasury), is that
he
has deliberately set out to write a purely political biography. Is
tIW.
worth doing? I am not sure. In any case he has done
it
very well, though
he lacks the grand manner Sir Philip Magnus deployed with such
re–
markable effect in his biography of Gladstone. But then perhaps the
grand style would not have been quite appropriate for Asquith.
Such as it is, Mr. Jenkins' work is solidly constructed and worth
reading. It tells one a great deal (though not enough) about the reasons
why British Liberalism went
to
pieces before and during World
War
1.
(The rot had set in earlier-it really went back to Gladstone's failure
in the eighteen nineties to settle the Irish problem, and to Liberal help–
lessness in the face of both socialism and imperialism.) It also relates a
few new anecdotes. Asquith, one learns, in 1912 (at the age of sixty)
struck up a sentimental relationship with the future wife of one of
his
Cabinet Ministers, then an attractive young woman of twenty-five.
His
letters to Venetia Stanley were numerous and indiscreet. He had a
habit
of penning them during Cabinet meetings. He also made a habit of
telling her Cabinet secrets, including military ones which the Germans
in the period 1914-1915 would have given much to possess. It
is
remarkable that no hint of the affair leaked out-doubly remarkable
since Asquith was quite frequently seen with her in public. When
in
May, 1915, she suddenly married his junior colleague Edwin Montagu
(for which purpose she had to convert to Judaism), Asquith was heart–
broken and temporarily lost control of the political situation. The news
reached him during a grave crisis in the management of affairs (the war
was going badly, and the Tories were after Churchill's blood for
his
conduct of the Dardanelles campaign), and it clearly had something
to
do with the curious lassitude which seems to have overtaken
him
at
this
