GREAT FAMILIES

New Zealand Listener, Volume 41, Issue 1051, 16 October 1959, Page 14

GREAT FAMILIES

DONNE AND THE DRURIES, by R. C. Bald; Cambrid, University Press, English price 30/-. THE LORDS OF COBHAM, by Esmé a Cassell, English price. HE biography which tells the life, not of an individual, but of a family or group, has recently become something of a feature of English historical writing, and when such books are backed by family archives and redeemed from family piety, they can be of first-rate interest. These two volumes are cases in point. Professor Bald commands something of that magic by which the musician transposes little black marks on paper into ravishing sound. His raw material is framentary, cryptic, illegible -the battered survivals from two chests of family documents, Out of them he conjures lively men and women of Elizabethan England. Many of them bear well known names-Bacon, Drury, Burley, Donne, Holles; and they are typical of a turbulent age. But each one is a sharply etched individual, his peculiarities (and his ordinariness) made convincing and understandable. All this

is achieved without waste of a word or straining of the evidence. It is achieved also, be it added, without much concession to those who like their reading padded or predigested. This is scholarship lean, athletic, graceful and uncompromising, conveying the subdued excitement of an intellectual task dexterously achieved. The Lords of Cobham, by contrast, springs lush and generous from the rich compost-heap of aristocratic Engl@d. Dr Wingfield-Stratford’s learning has something of the engaging garrulity of an aged butler displaying family treasures. For half a century he has preached the merits of the aristocracy, and the villainy of those knaves and dupes who overthrew traditional values and gilded the devastation they had made with the deceptive words "democracy" and "progress." It is nowadays not a question of putting the clock back; but the old values are still represented in our community. With Dr Wingfield-Strat-ford’s help they can be savoured like old wine by those whose palates are not spoilt by hypocrisy. Those born outside the purple can sometimes peep behind the veil, perhaps even indulge in a little vicarious wallowing in the company of a cultivated and opulent nobility. And the heavy artillery of dogmatic scorn directed at the gods of liberalism does something to correct the overwhelming whiggery of British historiography. These two books, in diametrically different fashion, illuminate from the inside the history of the English ruling class-whose rise and self-adaptation to changing circumstances was one of the most important phenomena of the

‘modern world.

F. L. W.

Wood