What’s become of Baring?

Maurice Baring is one of those writers of whom it is periodically said that he is unjustly forgotten and ripe for reappraisal. In his own lifetime, he was a prolific and popular author: a uniform edition of his work published by Heinemann in 1925 lists over 50 works — novels, plays, anthologies, poetry, memoirs and reportage — most of which are now out of print. Clearly, the very volume of his output has made it difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff: in the 1970s Edmund Wilson wrote an essay entitled ‘How Not to Be Bored by Maurice Baring’.

Baring was born in 1874 into one of the grandest and most influential families in England. Barings Bank was then second only to Rothschilds, and there were five Baring peers in the House of Lords. Maurice was the seventh child of one of them, Baron Revelstoke, and in his autobiography, The Puppet Show of Memory, he describes a charmed childhood surrounded by nannies, governesses and household servants. He went to Eton and spent time at both Oxford and Cambridge though he never took a degree in either university. Destined for the Foreign Office, he passed the exam on his third try.

Baring’s life thereafter seems like an extenuated Grand Tour. Posted as an attaché to Paris at the height of the belle époque, he befriended Anatole France and Sarah Bernhardt. Moving on to Copenhagen, he was taken up by the Russian ambassador and his wife, Count and Countess Benkendorf, and made frequent visits to their home in Russia. In 1902 he was transferred to Rome, but his real interest lay in literature rather than diplomacy and in 1904 he resigned from the Foreign Office to cover the Russo-Japanese war for the Morning Post.

Baring was no dispassionate observer: ‘One can have nothing but contempt for the Japs and their German ways,’ he wrote to Edmund Gosse.