George Wyndham

George Wyndham PC (29 August 1863 – 8 June 1913) was a British Conservative politician, statesman, man of letters, and one of The Souls.

Quotes

• Gordon's journals are splendid, I delight in an eccentric man upsetting the odds which routine, formality, "Foreign" and other offices always have on their side, and making the latter appear ridiculous.
  • Letter to his sister, Mary Elcho (25 July 1885), quoted in Letters of George Wyndham 1877–1913, Vol. I (1915), p. 96

• I must say that in my judgment Swinburne's claims are immeasurably superior to those of any Englishman now living... Please read in the Volume I send, published two years ago, the 'Seamew,' the 'Jacobite's Exile,' the 'Threnody on Inchbold,' and 'The Commonweal,' his Jubilee Ode, and then consider whether any can touch him as a Poet. I believe that in the long run Public opinion will be more shocked by his neglect than by his recognition.
  • Letter to Mrs. Drew (October 1892), quoted in Letters of George Wyndham 1877–1913, Vol. I (1915), pp. 283-284

Quotes about George Wyndham

• Lord Pembroke and George Wyndham were the handsomest of the Souls.
  • Margot Asquith, The Autobiography of Margot Asquith (1920), p. 185

• 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.
  • T. S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (1920), pp. 24-25

• [H]e had been in high favour with Balfour, although the rank and file had never cottoned to his dandified and over-polished parliamentary manners, which led one Tory member to mutter in my hearing, after one of Wyndham's Burke-conscious perorations, "Damn that fellow; he pirouettes like a dancing master."
  • Viscount Lee of Fareham, ‘A Good Innings’: The Private Papers of Viscount Lee of Fareham P.C., G.C.B., G.C.S.I., G.B.E., ed. Alan Clark (1974), p. 128