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

• It would be hard to imagine anyone less like a professional politician than George Wyndham, either in his appearance or in his outlook on the world. In political cartoons he was sometimes shewn as a typical guardsman, but here again the target was missed. He seemed to belong to a less specialised age than our own, when men developed many sides of their nature at once, and it was more possible than it is today for one man to express himself in a single life as a statesman, a soldier, and an artist; there was an element of all these in Wyndham, and the artist in him was in frequent revolt against the routine of the statesman. At my first meeting with him, and even more when I stayed with him, I felt that he had little in common with a world of mass-production and centralised business; it would not be difficult to imagine him in one of Marlborough's campaigns advancing to greet the enemy and courteously offering the first shot in the battle to the other side, but to many of his friends this chivalrous and generous figure seemed to belong to an earlier period and to have leapt suddenly, armed with sword and pen, out of the mists of the Middle Ages.
  • Herbert Asquith, Moments of Memory: Recollections and Impressions (1937), pp. 167-168

• It suited him better to write a verse, hunt a fox and sit talking with his friends into the early hours, and he was one of those rare people who rise from their beds to watch the dawn. His days were crowded with physical and mental energies. The vowel-sounds and rhythms of Shakespeare's sonnets, the song of Roland, the water supply of the prehistoric men of the downs, the fortifications of Maiden Castle, or the result of the latest manœuvres on Salisbury plain, were all subjects which fell within the range of his talk; this interest in a multitude of problems of literature, soldiering or archaeology was not detached but always eager and pursuing, as though the quarry lay a short way in front of the hunter.
  • Herbert Asquith, Moments of Memory: Recollections and Impressions (1937), p. 169

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

• As a fact, the one Front-Bench man who seemed in the days of my youth still eternally young was for me, in those days, on the opposite Front-Bench. The wonderful thing about George Wyndham was that he had come through political life without losing his political opinions, or indeed any of his opinions. Precisely what gave him such a genius for friendship was that life had left in him so much of himself; so much of his youth; so much even of his childhood.
  • G. K. Chesterton, Autobiography (1936), p. 119

• 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