Balfour’s World: Aristocracy and Political Culture at the Fin de Siecle by Nancy W. Ellenberger (review)

Arthur Balfour was British prime minister from 1902 to 1905, and he served as foreign secretary in David Lloyd George’s wartime coalition. Today he is remembered, if he is remembered at all, for the “Balfour Declaration” of 1917—a British promise to secure a homeland for the Jewish people in Palestine.

In a long political career that lasted from 1874 to 1929, Balfour held the three great appointments (Privy Councillor, Knight of the Garter, Order of Merit) and every senior government post except Home Secretary. A landed Tory but not a reactionary, Balfour was a philosophical skeptic who nevertheless followed Benjamin Disraeli and Randolph Churchill in understanding the democratic need “to strike the popular imagination” (6). His uncle was Robert Cecil (Lord Salisbury), the greatest Conservative of the age, and his godfather was Arthur Wellesley (Duke of Wellington), the greatest conservative of any age. More to the point, in this book at least, Balfour moved in a number of social circles blessed with the grace and opportunity to write letters and keep diaries that yield some sense of what it was like to be young and privileged and modern at the turn of the twentieth century.

Balfour was interesting, and his world was both great and small. But this book is not written as a biography or even as a political biography, though some might see it, at a stretch, as a cultural history. Ellenberger offers it as a history of the emotions as applied to the private lives of Balfour’s closest friends, including Lloyd George, Reginald Herbert (Lord Pembroke), brother and sister George and Mary Wyndham, and sisters Laura and Margot Tennant. The book is not self-consciously interdisciplinary, though Ellenberger can bring in literature and social psychology when she feels inclined. Her sources—personal papers mostly—are trivial only for those who think that private lives do not matter. Her main rhetorical device involves strapping private and public events back to back to see how they swim—a courtship here and a war there, a personal secret and a public policy, a cabinet tiff and a family re-shuffle, and so on. She calls this technique “braided narrative,” which is a nice phrase, but it works only when the narrative intent is strong enough to know what is being braided. She writes toward the end that her main intention was to present “experiments in reconstruction from . . . fragmentary and disparate sources” (299). She indicates at the beginning that her theme is the reconstruction of “anew ‘emotional regime’ in the world of the British political elites” (8)—a “tempered, supple, amiable, animated” interior world, “freed from vehemence” (9). What she means is anyone’s guess. Whatever it is, the book offers no evidence that it is new.

Ellenberger does, however, bring her readers to some fascinating places, including country-house parties, secret assignations, hunt meets, desert campaigns, dinner party tête-à-têtes, and so on. Charles Booth once defined the poor as those who were unable to enjoy private lives; in this book, for once, we are allowed to eavesdrop on the lives of the rich. Ellenberger is at her best when she has a particular venue, or syndrome, to explore. Her 1982 doctoral thesis studied the late Victorian Cambridge “Apostles” (the members of the secret Cambridge Conversazione Society, founded in 1820), whose close bantering world, plus women, provides the model for Balfour’s. She notes various forms of loyalty and connivance. She is good on gentlemanly “habitus.” She provides some astonishing declarations of the heart that remove some of the blush from this as the age of the high imperial stiff upper lip. Women were increasingly powerful in Balfour’s world, feminists or not, as well as extremely important to him personally. As for homosexuality, and rumors of it, as chief secretary for Ireland, Balfour had to suffer a great deal of homophobic attack from political opponents generally seen...