Blackfriars 1923-05 The Life of Mark Sykes

THE LIFE OF MARK SYKES.
T HE book before me opens with the following

words: 'In the year of the Incarnation of our
Lord 1879, and of the Hegira of the Prophet 1296,
and on the Eve of the Feast of St. Patrick, an only
child was born to Sir T atton Sykes, Baronet, of Sled-
mere, in the county of York, and to Jessica Christina
his lawful wife. Mark Sykes was this only son, and
he always remained the original child of original
parents.' It may be added that he ended by securing
an original biographer. When a biography begins
with a sentence like that, we know, long before such
guesses are commonly possible in more conventional
cases, that the author is not a hack or a humdrum
eulogist, but a man with a sense of history as a back-
ground to biography. We know that the author is as
interesting as the subject. And we could distinguish
this quality of distinction, even if we had not seen on
the title page the name of Shane Leslie. The first
sentence, recording nothing but a fact such as is found
in a directory or a genealogical tree, yet gathers round
it a crystallisation of creeds and influences, like the
conjunction of stars in some horoscope of a happier
and more Christian astrology. We have foreshadowed,
as in a dissolving view of historic visions, the influ-
ences inspiring the subject and his biographer; be-
ginning with the greatest of all influences, the mystery
and majesty of their common creed. The date is
stated not only as a date, but as a dogma. The second
great element in the life of Mark Sykes, his sympathy
with Islam and the great dreams of the desert, comes
1 Mark Sykes: His Life and Letters, by Shane Leslie, with
an Introduction by the Right Hon. Winston: ChUl chill. (Cas-
,sells, 16/-.)
The Life of Mark. Syk.es
in merely to confirm a moment of time, and yet a third
name strikes the note of that noble tragedy that we
call Ireland, to which Mark Sykes always tried to do
justice and to which Shane Leslie has dedicated a
genius for literature and for life. That first sentence
must stand alone for a sample of the excellence of the
writing of the book. F or the supreme mark of excel-
lence in writing is the power to bring dead words to
life; and as a rule there is nothing so dead as a date.
It must stand alone in this short estimate of the work.
for it contains too much interesting matter to allow of
adequate interest in the manner. And if I should
select that sentence to sum up the style and spirit of
the author of the biography, I should have quite as
little difficulty in choosing a sentence to sum up what
is to be said first about the subject of it. Lord Howard
de Walden wrote of Mark Sykes, whom he had known
from boyhood: 'I know I felt that God had probably
withdrawn him rightly, because he was too good to
waste on our foul times.'
There were a great many people who felt, as at the
shock of some gong of doom, exactly what Lord
Howard de Walden expressed in those words, when
they heard the unexpected and unnatural news. I
myself, though I never knew Mark Sykes himself,
but only many of his friends, can remember looking
across at one of them with a sort of consternation, and
saying: 'Does it mean that England is not to be
saved?' It is not that we should necessarily all agree
with all that was said and done by so spirited and
adventurous a mind; on the contrary, I think the chief
charm and zest of all these letters and quotations is
in the trenchant truthfulness and almost random sin-
cerity with which he dashes down all sorts of dog-
matic impressions, that would be wildly bewildering to
anyone who thinks in the grooves of groups and
parties. As he would probably be too much of a
82 5
Blacldriars
Radical for the taste of most of his colleagues, he
would probably be too much of a Tory for mine. The
point is not the truth of each of these utterances, but
the truth of all of them; a truth that is truthful in a
fashion largely forgotten in these 'foul times.' We
are looking at something that is exceedingly rare in a
sceptical age; a thought that is really free. He did
not mind damning the Irish sometimes, just as he did
not care a button who blamed him for defending
them. He would dismiss the intense imperialism of
the South African war as stuff and nonsense driving
us into a stupid raid, with all the contempt of a Pro-
Boer, and then justify farm-burning under the circum-
stances so as to infuriate all Pro-Boers. In short, he
had intellectual independence, a thing vanishing in
the whirlwind of wordy fashions and the servile senti-
mentalism of the newspapers. His comments were
not without impatience, but never without intelli-
gence; that is to say he had not, properly speaking,
any such thing as a prejudice. Strongly as he believed
in conservative and traditional elements in a society,
as every intelligent man must, his own reactions were
hardly ever merely reactionary. They were hardly
ever the mere automatic kicking of habit against the
pricks of progress. They seem always to have been
the result of very rapid, perhaps too rapid, reflection.
In other words, his purely intellectual activity seems
to have been incessant; and he had a great knack of
slap-dash precision in literary style. A phrase like
'Carson is a lop-sided sentimentalist' has the essen-
tial quality of literature; it says exactly what it is try-
ing to say. Many other examples could be given of
the same quality, which is always of clear thinking
rather than careful writing. He did not pretend to
wield the pencil so seriously as the pen; but the
sketches with which his letters were illustrated have
much the same reckless accuracy and even subtlety.
826
The Life of Mark SYkes
There is an admirable picture of Mr. Balfour in an
air-raid, sharing a cellar with two maid-servants. The
statesman is looking at the roof; the servants are look-
ing at the floor. As a satire on our curiously strained
and uncomfortable social distinctions, it goes very
deep.
Mark Sykes was, above all, an embodiment of the
particular sort of intellectual freedom and fullness of
life which now goes with belief and not with unbelief.
His relation to the religions of the East is a very good
example of this. He was the father of Zionism, of a
much more sympathetic and imaginative Zionism than
that which has since materialised; which has, if one
may put it so, very much materialised. At the same
time, he never lost his sympathy with the simplicity
and sincerity of Islam. But his toleration was founded
on interest in religion. Vulgar toleration is founded
on indifference to religion. The modern ideal is to
reconcile all the beliefs by re-uniting all the un-
believers. His interest was in the believers, even
when they believed erroneously. That was why he
said that Jerusalem was the true Hague Tribunal of
humanity, since it was sacred to three great faiths;
and that is why it is well that his figure was blazoned
in coloured glass as a Crusader, with the motto:
~ Laetare Jerusalem.'
G. K. CHESTERTON.

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THE LIFE OF MARK SYKES.

T HE book before me opens with the following

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