Synopses & Reviews
RUFUS ISAACSFIRST MARQUESS OF READINGBy His SonTHE MARQUESS OF READING, C.B.E., M.C., K.C., T.D.With 11 IllustrationsSINHHODLIST OF ILLUSTRATIONSLord Chief Justice of England, 1914, FACINGA Cartoon by Sir F, Carruthers GouldMrs, Rufus Isaacs at AixlesBains, 1897.In the Court of AppealMr, and Mrs, Rufus Isaacs at Fox Hill, Reading, 1907Mrs, Rufus Isaacs and the DelaunayBelleville at Fox Hill, Readings Three Elections, 1910.....Rufus Isaacs at the Age of 50.....The Opening of the New Legal Year, October, 1915FOREWORDNO portrait of a figure whose career was familiar to so widea public and whose personality survives in the memory ofso many friends can hope to command universal assent.Each one will have seen the original from a different angleand will cherish his own recollection as the sole authentic likeness.Moreover, the difficulties are enhanced when sitter and painterare father and son, for in those conditions to give praise may bethought uncritical and to withhold it unfilial. Nevertheless, Ihave been encouraged to undertake the task by the belief that onbalance the manifest advantages of continuous intimate contactoutweigh the possible disadvantages of occasional faulty perspective, and I shall perhaps not be blamed for feeling that itwould be in a sense a betrayal of the privilege of having so closelyshared his life to entrust the narration of it to a stranger.I hope, and I have some reason to believe, that my decisionis in accordance with his own wishes. But he did not make mytask easier by writing few and mainly formal letters and keepingalmost none or by preserving scarcely a single document earlierin date than the outbreak of the last war. A recurrent projectthat he should himselfset down in however rough a form atleast episodes from his own story was frequently discussed, occasionally contemplated and finally deferred until too late.Some years before his death I was playing golf with my fatheron a course which he was seeing for the first time. After a fewholes we approached a formidable bunker and his caddie, whohad by then formed a justly unfavourable estimate of his prowess, handed him an iron together with the advice: You had better not go for the carry, my Lord. Take thisand play short.Not go for the carry? said my father, outraged. I havegone for the carry all my life You give me a spoonI have heard him on other and greater occasions speak of hisown career, but, trivial though this incident may have been, Irecall no words of his which more aptly or concisely summarize theelements of his attitude to life or the romance of his achievement.His rise was not the progressive fulfilment of a conscious plan.I do not believe that, with the possible exception of the AttorneyGeneralship, he deliberately set out to attain any one of the greatoffices which he held. Indeed, their very diversity almostexcludes design.