"Proud Tower"

[fiefoe]

Barbara Tuchman's vivid description of Edwardian aristocrats:

• Prime Minister for the third time. He was Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne-Cecil, Lord Salisbury, ninth Earl and third Marquess of his line. Lord Salisbury was both the epitome of his class and uncharacteristic of it—except insofar as the freedom to be different was a class characteristic.。。 Melancholy, intensely intellectual, subject to sleepwalking and fits of depression which he called “nerve storms,” caustic, tactless, absent-minded, bored by society and fond of solitude, with a penetrating, skeptical, questioning mind, he had been called the Hamlet of English politics. He was above the conventions and refused to live in Downing Street.
• He harnessed the river at Hatfield for an electric power plant on his estate and strung up along the old beams of his home one of England’s first electric light systems, at which his family threw cushions when the wires sparked and sputtered while they went on talking and arguing, a customary occupation of the Cecils.
• Wearing for the occasion a kind of sombrero hat and a short sleeveless cloak with a hole in the middle in which he resembled a monk, he would be accompanied by a young coachman to push him up the hills. At the downhill slopes, the young man would be told to “jump on behind,” and the Prime Minister, with the coachman’s hands on his shoulders, would roll away, cloak flying and pedals whirring.
• In the opinion of Lord Morley his speeches were always a pleasure to read because “they were sure to contain one blazing indiscretion which it is a delight to remember.” Whether these were altogether accidental is open to question, for though Lord Salisbury delivered his speeches without notes, they were worked out in his head beforehand and emerged clear and perfect in sentence structure. In that time the art of oratory was considered part of the equipment of a statesman and anyone reading from a written speech would have been regarded as pitiable. When Lord Salisbury spoke, “every sentence,” said a fellow member, “seemed as essential, as articulate, as vital to the argument as the members of his body to an athlete.”
• He was not rank-conscious; he was indifferent to honors or any other form of recognition. It was simply that as a Cecil, and a superior one, he was born with a consciousness in his bones and brain cells of ability to rule and saw no reason to make any concessions of this prescriptive right to anyone whatever... He regarded himself not as responsible to the people but as responsible for them. They were in his care.
• To widen the suffrage among the poor while increasing taxes upon the rich would end, he wrote, in a complete divorce of power from responsibility; “the rich would pay all the taxes and the poor make all the laws.”
• The pressures of democracy encircled, but had not yet closed in around, the figure whom Lord Curzon described as “that strange, powerful, inscrutable, brilliant, obstructive deadweight at the top.”
• A minister’s function was not to do the work but to see that it got done, much as he managed his estate. Details such as decimal points, which Lord Randolph Churchill when Chancellor of the Exchequer shrugged aside as “those damned dots,” were not his concern.
• To be a lord, wrote a particularly picturesque exemplar, Lord Ribblesdale, in 1895, “is still a popular thing.” Known as the “Ancestor” because of his Regency appearance, Ribblesdale was so handsome a personification of the patrician that John Singer Sargent, glorifier of the class and type, asked to paint him.
• Sargent’s Ribblesdale stared out upon the world in an attitude of such natural arrogance, elegance and self-confidence as no man of a later day would ever achieve. When the picture was exhibited at the Salon in Paris and Ribblesdale went to see it, he was followed from room to room by admiring French crowds
• As he himself wrote of the average nobleman, “the ease of his circumstances from his youth up tends to produce a good-humored attitude.… To be pleased with yourself may be selfish or it may be stupid, but it is seldom actively disagreeable and usually it is very much the reverse.”
• as Rudyard Kipling pointed out, for purposes of venting chauvinist sentiments, France had Germany, Britain had Russia, and America had Britain, the only feasible country “for the American public speaker to trample upon.”
• The victories of diplomacy, he said, were won by “a series of microscopic advantages; a judicious suggestion here, an opportune civility there, a wise concession at one moment and a farsighted persistence at another; of sleepless tact, immovable calmness and patience that no folly, no provocation, no blunder can shake.” But he regarded these refinements as wasted on a democracy like the United States, just as he regarded the vote as too good for the working class. He simply let Olney’s note go unanswered for four months.
• Here was the fundamental difficulty of Tory Democracy. Its advocates thought it possible to meet the demands of the workers while at the same time preserving intact the citadel of privilege, but Balfour suspected the bitter truth of history: that progress and gain by one group is never accomplished without loss of some permanent value of another.
• Balfour did, in fact, hold certain basic convictions, but he could see arguments on both sides of a matter, which is the penalty of the thoughtful man... In 1887 Salisbury’s surprising appointment of his nephew to the difficult and dangerous post of Chief Secretary for Ireland was expected to prove a fiasco.
• According to Morley, he operated on Dr. Johnson’s principle that “to treat your adversary with respect is to give him an advantage to which he is not entitled.”
• who liked to come over to listen to Balfour, said the pleasure lay in hearing “ideas and arguments being produced in exactly the right sequence without any appearance of premeditation, the whole masterly process of thought, argument and phrasing being carried out with such consummate skill and such perfect ease, that to witness the exercise of the art was sheer delight.”

             
The Anarchists:

• SO ENCHANTING WAS THE VISION of a stateless society, without government, without law, without ownership of property, in which, corrupt institutions having been swept away, man would be free to be good as God intended him, that six heads of state were assassinated for its sake in the twenty years before 1914. They were President Carnot of France in 1894, Premier Canovas of Spain in 1897, Empress Elizabeth of Austria in 1898, King Humbert of Italy in 1900, President McKinley of the United States in 1901, and another Premier of Spain, Canalejas, in 1912. Not one could qualify as a tyrant. Their deaths were the gestures of desperate or deluded men to call attention to the Anarchist idea.
• The Anarchists believed that with Property, the monarch of all evil, eliminated, no man could again live off the labour of another and human nature would be released to seek its natural level of justice among men.
• They were not men of the ivory tower except in so far as their heads were in ivory towers. They were able to draw blueprints of a state of universal harmony only by ignoring the evidence of human behavior and the testimony of history.
• There it opened with more ferocity, continued in more savagery and excess and lasted longer than in any other country. Spain is the desperado of countries, with a tragic sense of life... Like Russia, Spain was a cauldron in which the revolutionary element boiled against a tight lid of oppression.
• The English working class, to whom acts of individual violence came less naturally than to Slavs and Latins, was on the whole not interested. An occasional intellectual like William Morris was a torch-bearer; but he was mainly interested in his personal version of a utopian state,
• In 1891 with the appearance of The Soul of Man Under Socialism a strange recruit alighted briefly on the movement like a gorgeous butterfly and then flew off. The author of the essay was Oscar Wilde. He had been much moved by the personality of Kropotkin and saw true freedom for the Artist in a society in which, “of course, authority and compulsion are out of the question.”
• In court, when reproached by the judge for endangering innocent lives, he replied with icy hauteur, in words that should have been blazoned on some Anarchist banner, “There are no innocent bourgeois.”
• We who hand out death know how to take it.… Mine is not the last head you will cut off. You have hung in Chicago, beheaded in Germany, garroted at Jerez, shot in Barcelona, guillotined in Paris, but there is one thing you cannot destroy: Anarchism.… It is in violent revolt against the established order. It will finish by killing you.”
• Addressing Felix Fenéon, the art critic and first champion of the Impressionists, who was one of the defendants,
• The sterility of deeds of terror was already beginning to be recognized by leaders like Kropotkin, Malatesta, Reclus and even Johann Most. Searching for other means of bringing down the State, they were always tripped up by the inherent paradox: Revolution demands organization, discipline and Authority; Anarchism disallows them.
• Yet in the end there was a kind of tragic sense in the Anarchist rejection of Authority. For, as the Jesuit-educated Sebastien Faure said in a moment of cold realism, “Every revolution ends in the reappearance of a new ruling class.”
• Canovas’... death proved to be one of those accidents that give a decisive jerk to the course of events. With Canovas gone, the Liberals succeeded in taking office and soon retreated before the wild howls of Hearst-engendered indignation against “Butcher” Weyler then reverberating from the United States. General Weyler was relieved just when he was close to restoring order and the Cuban insurrection flared up again, providing the imperialists in the United States with the excuse for the most deliberately manufactured war of the century. Had Canovas lived, the excuse might not have been available.
• She wrote sad romantic poetry and had seen her son’s life end in the most melodramatic suicide of the century. Her first cousin, King Ludwig of Bavaria, had died insane by drowning; her husband’s brother, Maximilian, by firing squad in Mexico; her sister by fire at a charity bazaar in Paris. “I feel the burden of life so heavily,” she wrote her daughter, “that it is often like a physical pain and I would far rather be dead.”
• Germans were not fit for Anarchism, as Bakunin had said with disdain, for with their passion for Authority, “they want to be at once both masters and slaves and Anarchism accepts neither.”
• in 1897, an Anarchist blacksmith named Pietro Acciarito had attempted to kill King Humbert, leaping upon him in his carriage with a dagger in the identical manner of Caserio upon President Carnot. More alert than Carnot to these occupational hazards, the King jumped aside, escaped the blow, and remarking with a shrug to his escort, “Sono gli incerti del mestiere” (“These are the risks of the job”), ordered his coachman to drive on.
• The inoffensive monarch who found himself presiding over this situation had a fierce white moustache, personal courage, a gallant soul and no more noticeable talent for kingship than any of the House of Savoy. Humbert
• Their leader, Alexander Ulyanov, justified the use of terror at his trial as the only method possible in a police state. He was one of three brothers and three sisters, all revolutionaries, of whom a younger brother, Vladimir Ilyich, swore revenge, changed his last name to Lenin, and went forth to work for revolution.
• However self-limited its acts, however visionary its dream, Anarchism had terribly dramatized the war between the two divisions of society, between the world of privilege and the world of protest.
• It was the last cry of individual man, the last movement among the masses on behalf of individual liberty, the last hope of living unregulated, the last fist shaken against the encroaching State, before the State, the party, the union, the organization closed in.