Sam Leith

Unsparing, frivolous candour

From magazine issue: 08 January 2005

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Sam Leith

Unsparing, frivolous candour
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Alexander Larman

What happened to the Rishi Sunak I knew at school?

Who knew that Macaulay claimed to have read Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison 15 times, or Don Quixote five times in Spanish? Who knew that George IV didn’t get out of bed before six in the afternoon? Or, for that matter, that he was what is now vulgarly called a ‘tit man’, and in the matter of letting ladies at court go decolleté, ‘liked ample expanses of that sort, would not let them be covered’? Or that Kaiser Wilhelm came bottom-first into the world?

Scott Fitzgerald talked of the vast carelessness of the really rich. The defining characteristic of Charles Greville was his detachment. Taste and amusement were what stirred him. He seems to have been insulated from conviction by his social status. It is difficult to credit him with a strong belief in anything at all. Like Dickens’s Lady Dedlock, he was frequently bored.

This makes him at once hard to warm to and fun — because of his unsparing, frivolous candour — to read. When William IV dies, he notes that he ‘always continued something of a blackguard and something more of a buffoon’. The funeral was ‘intolerably long and tedious, and miserably read by the Dean of Windsor’. The cardinals in Rome, he reports, are ‘a wretched set of old twaddlers’; the Pope, to whom he sucks up, is ‘a very nice, squinting old twaddle’. Greville at his best has a formidable turn of phrase. Take his visit to Beau Brummel in French exile:

I found him in his old lodging, distressing; some pretty pieces of furniture in the room, an entire toilet of Silver and a large green Macaw perched on the back of a tattered silk Chair with faded gilding; full of gaiety, impudence and misery.

The collision of those last three epithets seems to me irreproachably good. How light! How bleak!

One of the best passages here is his description of the Opera House burning to the ground, a disaster appreciated entirely as an aesthetic spectacle. Seeing a glow in the sky, he and his pals abandon their whist game and rush down to Covent Garden to watch the fun: ‘a magnificent fire . . . nothing could be more pictur- esque’. He adds, ‘Poor Arnold lost everything and was not insured.’

He chides himself frequently about a life wasted in gambling (staggering amounts even by today’s standards),

a life utterly unworthy, not merely of a man of sense but of a reasonable being; and yet though I know, feel and think this still I go on — such is the force of inveterate habit.

He sees Dickens and Jerrold performing Every Man in his Humour. He sees a 2,000-strong choir sing Handel’s ‘Messiah’ at the Crystal Palace, and isn’t too much impressed. He seems to think, having seen an early demonstration of chloroform, that the invention of general anaesthetic was the best thing before sliced bread, and how right he was.

One of the most attractive aspects of Greville as a diarist is the way he does what we all do: exaggerate like mad and then forget. Those of us exposed at a young age to literary theory have been trained to hope for, if not demand, something called Radical Alterity from the inhabitants of the benighted historical periods before the emergence of Karl Marx or Terry Eagleton. Greville’s world may be different to our own, but his worldview is pretty intelligible. He was silly, like us. His gift survived him.

Obituarising friends or colleagues, Greville’s habit is to make daft, sentimental ‘never the same again’ claims; and then, with the clarity which is his best recommendation, to gainsay them. So, on the death of the painter Sir Thomas Lawrence, he writes on 9 January 1830:

He was the longe primus of all living painters and has left no one fit to succeed him in the Royal Academy … remarkably gentleman-like, with very mild manners … agreeable in society, a very great talker … he was an irreparable loss; since Sir Joshua there has been no Painter like him…

On 22 January he reports on Sir Thomas’s ‘magnificent’ funeral:

The ceremony in the Church lasted two hours. Pretty well for a man who was certainly a rogue and a bankrupt, and probably a bugger.

Lord Holland, at whose salon Greville was a frequent visitor — he was, no bad thing, an intellectual snob — fared likewise:

His death will produce a social revolution, utterly extinguishing not only the most distinguished but the only great house of reception and constant society in England [he wrote in the autumn of 1840], an irreparable loss to the world at large.

By January:

I dined with Lady Holland yesterday. Everything there is the same as it used to be, excepting only the person of Lord Holland who seems pretty well forgotten.

If nothing else, the diaries serve as a brisk reminder that this, too, shall pass. At the beginning (6 August, 1821) Greville wrote:

For ever be this day accursed which has been to me the bitterest of my existence. The particulars will remain too deeply engraved on my memory to need being written down here.

In 1836, rereading the manuscript , he added a marginal note: