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Patrick
Shaw-Stewart
POEMS: 1916-1918.
Francis Brett Young.
Cr. 8vo. 5/- net.
POEMS : IN TIME OF WAR,
IN TIME OF PEACE.
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ppw-
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WRITERS
Madame Duclaux.
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COLLINS: 48 PALL MALL.
Patrick
Shaw-Stewart
by
Ronald Knox
48 PALL MALL, S.W.
WILLIAM COLLINS SONS & CO. LTD.
GLASGOW MELBOURNE AUCKLAND
1920
COPYRIGHT
w:
1920
Chapter One
IT may be easily thought that the times are too late
for War biographies. While the public felt it
almost heartless to indulge in any other literature
than that bearing on the one subject which pre-
possessed it, the demand for such biographies was
natural. Now that the spectre has passed by, do
we do well to linger still over the details of individual
lives cut short, instead of burying the very memories
of our dead in a cenotaph of common fame ?
There is more public appetite, perhaps, for Post-
War revelations, for the bandying of * I told you
so ' and ' Your fault all the time * between public
and ex-public characters. But it is to be hoped
that there are some who are inclined to tend the
ashes of memory in a more generous spirit, and to
pause a moment longer before they turn away from
the imperfect monuments of a generation that died
before its time.
They utter no I-told-you-so's, those patient rivals
of living greatness, they do not impute fault. They
have left to others the two-volume biographies, with
index and map. Few of them had the opportunity
to play a part which in itself made a story worth the
telling. Their letters do not speak of advances or
of hand-to-hand fighting, but of books, of quiet
hours, of welcome rest-camps ; they appeal, not for
credit or for sympathy, but for trivial daily needs,
I
458071
Patrick Shaw- Stewart.
pathetic because trivial boot-polish and pipe-
cleaners and shaving soap. Tight corners there
were, and hair-breadth escapes, but they did not
mention these did not mention them at least in
letters home, or to those who, in reading such
accounts, might feel their hearts quicken at the
reading. There is a great deal of sameness in the
experiences, and one soldier's letter might easily
stand for another. Is it necessary, then, that they
should all lie under a common mound of earth,
indiscretum atque immiserabile vu/gus ? To be sure,
that honourable sepulture is enough record of their
deaths. But if some more than others laid down
lives rich in promise, flowers without fruit,
yet already marked out by some earnest of their
futuribles; if some more than others had the eye
which sees the significant or the picturesque detail,
and the pen in some measure trained to record it,
need the survivors, the two-volume men, be jealous
if we try to preserve a few phrases of such author-
ship, a few living echoes of what they felt, or rather
for their letters always cheated us just a little
of what they meant us to think they were feeling ?
If any such distinctions are to be drawn, if we
can contrive to make some memories vocal without
slighting those other memories that are dumb, it
needs no further preface or apology to give Patrick
Shaw-Stewart a memoir of his own. The many
friends who mourn him will feel that something is
lacking to the Epic cycle which includes the
aristeia of Charles Lister and the Grenfells, if the
2
Patrick Shaw- Stewart.
tale stops short at w</ "E/cropos. And a larger
public, when it reads of an Eton and Balliol
scholar, winner of the Newcastle, the Ireland, and
so many other academic laurels, a fellow of All
Souls', who could transfer himself lightly (though
none of us supposed finally) to finance, and hold the
position of a Managing Director in Baring Brothers
before he had reached twenty-five, may guess
that this was not one of the passengers of his
generation.
Yet all who knew him will realise the difficulty of
making such a record. His penetrating insight and
his perfect humour played for preference always
with people, not with things, and a good part of
his letters, if it were published so as to be under-
stood, would have to be accompanied with a whole
Targum of footnotes, of intolerable dreariness. Of
literary remains he himself regrets, as will be seen,
that he has left practically nothing. When he was
called upon to write (for example) a paper for a
society at Oxford, he would always put off the evil
day till the last moment, and dash off what was in
the circumstances a brilliant performance without
leaving anything for posterity to cherish. He had
a genius for relating means to ends, for doing just
so much work as was required to gain this scholar-
ship, for making just so much impression as was
required to consolidate this acquaintanceship; and
his whole life (I think) was mapped out on a plan
which involved the acquisition of an assured position
in the world before he began to toy with literature,
3
Patrick Shaw- Stewart.
with Movements, with serious politics. This plan,
in itself so admirable, so much to be recommended
to the many whose desire for self-expression leads
them to express themselves far too early, is all
lamentable to the biographer. There are only two
sections in this book which were even remotely
designed by him for publication his account,
written from Salonica, of his own school days, and
his description of the Hood Battalion's Argo-voyage,
which was meant to be a contribution to the memoir
of Charles Lister,
Further, he acquired at Eton the habit of writing
in a sort of parody of journalese. The parody was
perfectly conscious; he never thought that he was
writing good English when he used long words
and far-fetched adjectival periphrases. I must
implore every reader of this book to remember that
whenever Patrick wrote, he wrote (as we used to
say) * in inverted commas ' : it was not the style
but the parody of a style which was intended to
catch your fancy. I do not mean that he copied
journalists' phrases; I mean that he wrote as a
journalist would write who possessed, and knew that
his readers possessed, a very complete classical
education, an almost verbatim knowledge of the
Bible, and an intimate acquaintance with certain
periods of history and literature; in the spirit of
such an imaginary character he coined language
for himself instead of facing when had he the time
for it ? the scholar's task of making language do
justice to his thought.
4
Patrick Shaw- Stewart.
But it was not only his style that was in inverted
commas; he was perpetually in inverted commas
to himself. I do not mean merely that he had the
very rare gift of seeing a joke against himself and
could enjoy, for all his Scottish proper pride, the
memory of an occasion when he had cut a ridiculous
figure: it went far deeper than that. He had in
boyhood I do not hesitate to record the fact,
although I have not included in this book the
documentary evidence which supports it a quality
which he calls ' hypertrophy of conscience,' what is
technically known as ' scrupulosity.' The fear that
he had done less than justice to his prayers, or that
he had taken unfair advantage of a rival, used to
weigh on his spirits like a nightmare. He outlived
these particular symptoms, but it is not difficult to
trace in them the parentage of that fierce candour
both about himself and about other people which
sometimes left his friends aghast. He hated false
enthusiasms and sham certainties; an enthymeme,
for him, should never do duty for a syllogism. He
could not bear that any action of his should be
ascribed to a good motive if there were any unworthy
motive that had put a grain on the balance of
decision. I have known him refuse a slight proffered
benefit with, * Now, then, none of your damned
Christian charity.' All this means that whatever
you find him saying about himself must be treated
as evidence for the prosecution, not for the defence.
He did not make truth an idol, but he had almost a
mania for candour.
Patrick Shaw- Stewart.
The letters which have been used in the compila-
tion of this book were mostly family letters, supplied
by his two sisters and his old nurse. For this
reason (since superscriptions and valedictions are
apt to become wearisome where there is no great
variety of correspondents) I have given extracts from
letters as a rule in preference to complete letters,
and have not been careful to distinguish in all cases
the name of the addressee, though I hope I have
left enough character in the selection of what he
wrote to his nurse * Dear ' to illustrate something
of his constant affection and thoughtful ness for her.
Having so many family letters before me, I have
naturally refused to go on the principle that nothing
written before the War can have its biographical
interest. On the contrary, it seems probable that
whereas the War period will be easy for the historians
of the future to reconstruct, their difficulty will be
to catch the atmosphere of those halcyon 1913 days,
when we lived so carelessly and so vigorously, before
we had learned to kill all generous effort by labelling
it * Reconstruction.' Personality does not spring
into being with an identity disc.
I must, however, record my gratitude to others
who have been kind enough to supply me with
material from the letters they had preserved,
especially Lady Desborough, Lady Homer, Mrs
Raymond Asquith, and Lady Hermione Buxton.
In arranging the extracts, I have tried to obtrude
as little as possible in the way of comment or
reflection, leaving the reader to isolate, to admire,
6
Patrick Shaw- Stewart.
and to skip what he chooses. Where I have
commented at any length, it is only because, as I have
indicated above, it was Patrick's way to try and
make us all think the worst of him, and the interests
of the very candour which he insisted upon demand
that, in some points, the impression made should
be supplemented by the more sparing criticism of
an impartial witness.
Chapter Two
PATRICK HOUSTON SHAW-STEWART was born on the
1 7th of August, 1888, the son of Major-General
John Heron Maxwell Shaw-Stewart, and Mary
Catherine Bedingfeld, only child of Colonel George
Chancellor Collyer. His Scottish origin, his
membership of a military family, and the fact that
his elder brother Basil was considerably older than
himself, should account for a certain reverence for
his elders as such, which was native to him he
was one of the few people in his generation to whom
it came natural to address men considerably older
than himself as * Sir.' This was part of a general
Toryism of outlook; he was an unabashed Conser-
vative in politics, an ardent defender of sport and
of the military virtues, and had a solid respect for
the conventions of an ordered society. In keeping
with such traditions, he had a habit of personal self-
respect which it was easy to recognise in spite of
that absence in him of tidiness and punctuality
which often goes with first-class brains. This
conventional background, not wholly in harmony
with the traditions of the generation into which he
was born, or of the society in which he afterwards
figured, was permanent with him, and may be laid
down as the preface to his development.
There are a few early letters, which show some
marks of precocity. The date (August, 1895) lends
8
Patrick Shaw- Stewart.
interest to the statement, ' I have discovered out of
Grandfather's GEOLOGY book, that MAN is
nothing but a highly developed ANTHROPOID
APE (Simius Homo Sapiens}.' And there is an early
trace of the determination not to be carried away
by merely conventional enthusiasms in a letter
which belongs to the following month : * We went
to Keswick and Derwentwater on the i8th. We
had a perfectly lovely day. We got there at 2 p.m.,
and after about three-quarters of an hour waiting,
went on to Lodore,
See how the water
Goes down at Lodore
Indeed it would have been quite true, if there had
only been some more water/ But for precocious
comment on life we should go to a letter written
some time later, in February, 1902, after he had
been a half at Eton (he is referring to a lady who
showed him round a picture-gallery), * This she
accomplished very creditably, I think she took
us most manfully round all the pictures in the
galleries and talked sufficiently the while (of all
offences I cannot stand a dumb girl !) ' A rapidly
developed fondness for long words is noticeable,
even before he goes to Eton :
* The atmosphere here is not exactly conducive
to a superabundant flow of correspondence, so this
small effusion must, I am afraid, content the
9
Patrick Shaw- Stewart.
inmates of No. 7 for a long, long time. As I wrote
to Father, time now seems to pass in one delicious,
lingering dream of four meals a day and then bed,
with occasionally more exciting work interspersed,
such as the record number of eggs this year 24
which I managed to discover yesterday.
* I have at last found my metier my real occu-
pation in life; in fact the only useful thing I can
do here, and which I much prefer to gardening, and
all the other occupations that is chopping up
wood.
* I feel like George Washington or Mr Gladstone,
and you have such a good and comfortable feeling
when you see your own handiwork blazing on the
" ospitable 'earth." ' [APRIL 12, 1901.]
But few boys come to their own at all till they reach
a public school, and this is probably the more true
in Patrick's case since he was never at a boarding
school until he got a scholarship at Eton and came
to College in the autumn of 1901. He seems to
have felt this himself, for the description he himself
wrote of his Eton school-time was apparently
meant to be the first chapter in a sort of auto-
biography he had planned. This and an account
of his time at Balliol were both written while he
was on service at Salonica, but the latter document
was somehow lost in transit, and, perhaps dis-
couraged by this, he never went on with the project.
The result is that we have a record of his early school
sensations far completer than any we have of his
10
Patrick Shaw- Stewart.
later career; and it seems simplest to reproduce
this at once in the place where he meant it to come.
It is not easy to say whether he meant the document
for publication as it stood; certainly he has taken
the trouble to allude only distantly and by initials
to the people who come into it. Probably he would
have revised it ; and, in uncertainty as to how drastic
this revision would have been, I have gone on the
principle of omitting those passages which might
conceivably give pain to living persons, as well as
those which deal with religion or with the higher
emotions a principle which, in the main, I have
followed throughout the book. Opinions differ
widely as to how much piety should withhold from
the public view; in the long run, the editor has
simply to fall back on his own feelings. I will
only say that the revisions I have made reduce the
document to about three-quarters of its original
length, but, for the most part, they are not such as
to interrupt the general course of the narrative.
* My first half was a welter of strange emotions,
from which I emerged with a feeling of complete-
ness and confidence which was yet to be shaken
before it was established on a more cynical basis.
In my first Christmas holidays I fell wholly back
into family life (than which I as yet suspected
nothing more satisfying) and correspondingly
suffered from nostalgia on returning to Eton. In
my second half I tended towards unhappiness, but
was saved by a timely attack of chicken-pox which
II
Patrick Shaw- Stewart.
restored me for an extra month to the bosom of my
family, followed by an extra long visit to beloved
Findon. In a letter dated the beginning of the
summer half next following this, I find myself
saying, ' ' The other boys all seem to have the
centre of their life here, but I am still centred at
home " still the day-boy, still feminine influences,
which were destined to disappear for four years,
and then return. This summer half was marked
by persistent failure at cricket, which I had mis-
takenly regarded as my game; from this moment
I became embittered with it, and never again took
it seriously a grave disillusion in an athletic
microcosm. After my first year at Eton my father
took a small house near Inverness, where, for the
moment, I was content in reunion, and remained
free of aspiration towards such toys as guns and
grouse. I stayed a week with Alan Parsons at
Ballater, and he a week with me.
* My next year at Eton was perhaps my least
happy : the extreme cosiness of " Chamber " life
was forgone, my contemporaries were more im-
patient of my idiosyncrasies, and those idiosyncrasies
had as yet shown no trace of modification; and,
while making no further athletic progress, I was
twice robbed of my very marked scholastic pre-
eminence by Foss Prior and an oppidan (whom,
indeed, he or I always beat, but who always added
to the mortification of one of us by coming in an
invariable second). I was at this time absolutely
devoid of social prudence, a quality which suddenly
12
Patrick Shaw-Stewart.
developed itself in me at the turning point of my
adolescence. As an instance, I clearly remember
how easily I was persuaded to cox one of two Junior
House Fours which College put on the river: a
thankless office from every point of view, for it
discredited me as even a humble dry-bob, classed
me with a ridiculous set of little scugs and scamps,
mocked me with an ephemeral cap only to be worn
during the race itself, and provided in the actual
exercise no opportunity whatever for distinction or
applause, but a diversity of openings of which I
plentifully availed myself for making myself look
foolish.
* At about this period came a slight dissatisfaction
with my holidays in London, later to spread to the
summer in Scotland : though as eager as ever for
the end of the half, and still touched with home-
sickness, I now began to find the time hang heavy
on me during the five weeks of family Christmas
holiday. My second summer holidays near Inver-
ness I remember to have been occupied with golf
(Alan Parsons stayed with us again), and with the
faint suggestion of feminine romance. Most
important in this second year was a considerable
intellectual quickening, which was perhaps stimu-
lated by my two winter defeats in Trials, and which
incidentally carried me to a sweeping victory in the
summer. In the autumn I had the good fortune to
be under the mellow influence of A. C. Benson, and
in the summer I came into the hands of Hugh
Macnaghten, not to emerge for a year. The former
B 13
Patrick Shaw- c tewart.
encouraged us to express ourselves in English, the
latter opened the eyes of some of us to the true
meaning of a classical education. Eton in my time
certainly did offer opportunities to those who would
avail themselves thereof, the greatest, perhaps,
though unobtrusive and esoteric, being reserved
for those who were under C. M. Wells in Head's
Division. My third year was for the most part
supremely uneventful. I performed the normal
functions of adolescence such as going into tails,
and (still unusual then) joining the Volunteers.
I played for Lower College at football, and
continued to be incompetent and unsuccessful
at cricket. I remember opening the season with
seven successive blobs in Junior Matches, till my
nerve was reduced to pulp. At this time I made
friends with , not a popular boy, perhaps a
little faute de mieux\ but, looking back, I think he
was in his way excellent company and rather good
for me. He taught me a little rather Ishmaelitish
self-assurance, which at that time I sorely needed.
(It is curious to remember the three boys who were
at that time the undisputed social leaders of my
election, and to ruminate on the benevolent feelings,
tinged with anything rather than awe, with which
I now regard them. Yet one of them at least had
in a high degree the essential qualities of boy-
leadership, and the other two at any rate a fine, early
flowering sense of social values.) Academically
this year was full of vicissitudes. At Christmas
(1903) I repeated my summer's triumph in Trials
Patrick Shaw- Stewart.
and crowned it with a total of marks 1290 out of
1450 which must have come near making a record
for these puerile and mechanical contests ; and I
had reason to hope (these intricacies are intelligible
to Etonians alone) that the order I then established
would be crystallised by our promotion into First
Hundred. Actually, however, this was deferred
for another half, at the end of which I was defeated
by Foss Prior, our promotion was certain, and my
chances of being Captain of the School seemed gone
irretrievably. At that time the prospect of the
Captaincy seemed to me my only chance of cutting
a figure in the School.
' The next half (Summer, 1904), being dis-
appointed of my great hope and at the same time
promoted to First Hundred, I flung myself des-
perately into the work for the Certificate examination,
became interested in the Colossians, and enamoured
of the Seven Against Thebes, and to every one's
astonishment carried off the Reynold's Scholarship,
not only over the heads of the eminent seniors such
as Daniel Macmillan, but also over Ronald Knox,
one year senior to me, with whom I now crossed
swords for the first time. This surprising success
gave me great self-confidence and a considerable
reputation for precocity.
I returned to Eton in September, 1904, to begin
my fourth year, notable in two of its halves for my
very last sustained intellectual effort (with one
transient exception) till after an interval of just four
years. Athletically I was mildly pleased by having
Patrick Shaw- Stewart.
my shorts as Junior Keeper of Lower College Game,
but everything else, as Michaelmas Half gave way
to Lent, faded before the really vigorous effort I
proposed to make for the Newcastle, which had a
peculiar significance in my mind. There was a
tradition that the Newcastle Scholar, if not actually
in Sixth Form at the time (I was in Second Division
under the businesslike and excellent tuition of
F. H. Rawlins), was promoted into it forthwith
this would in my case, of course, reverse my defeat
by Foss Prior on promotion into First Hundred.
To the workings of this tradition in my brain was
joined the consciousness that it was possible for me
to beat Ronald Knox. I girt myself accordingly to
a terrific struggle against endless obscurity and the
second place in the school, and quaintly enough I
set about it. The Scriptural part of the examina-
tion was highly susceptible of preparation, the
classical part being an ordinary scholarship gamut
practically not at all; and yet I spent the best
part of a valuable month in reading the Birds on a
peculiar system of my own without notes or crib.
In the same way afterwards I ploughed slowly arid
deliberately through the Scripture texts, always
(from some confused conscientious scruple) reading
every word of a book once begun, and I am almost
sure refraining from marking down the side.
I must have handicapped myself infinitely; and yet
my memory and paper lucidity carried me through,
and, defeated by Ronald Knox in Classics, I defeated
him (the priest-to-be) sufficiently in Divinity to
16
Patrick Shaw- Stewart.
upset the balance and take the Scholarship. This,
in the Eton world, was fame indeed. I was greatly
petted and applauded, and tremendously happy.
1 I returned for the Summer Half, and was pro-
moted to Sixth Form honoris causa. I rejoiced in
stick-up collars and a fag of my own ; I shook off
the spectre of Foss Prior's captaincy and at that
very moment began to wonder whether it really
mattered so very much after all. At the time of
which I am writing I still abounded in shynesses
and gaucheries; I was still smiled at as an inept
and academic Tug in Second Lower Club, and I
remember being painfully conscious of a severe,
patchy baldness (alopecia), which may or may not
have been connected with my work for the Newcastle
but which was certainly ill-timed to coincide with
the bare-headed privileges of Sixth Form. At first
I did not in the least realise though no doubt my
tutor did the results that were certain to accrue
from my premature successes in the Certificate and
Newcastle. For the remaining two years and a half
of my presumed Eton existence I had absolutely