Maurice Baring (27 April1874 – 14 December1945 ) was a versatile English man of letters, known as a dramatist, poet, novelist, translator and essayist, and also as a travel writer and war correspondent.
He was a youger son of the third Lord Revelstoke, of the Baring banking family, and was educated at Eton College and Trinity College, Cambridge. After an abortive start on a diplomatic career, he travelled widely, particularly in Russia. He reported as an eye-witness on the Russo-Japanese War for the London Morning Post.
At the start of World War I he joined the Royal Flying Corps, where he served as assistant to Trenchard. After the war he enjoyed a period of success as a dramatist, and began to write novels. He suffered from chronic illness in the last years of his life.
He was widely connected socially, to some of the Cambridge Apostles, to The Coterie, and to the literary group around G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc in particular. He was staunch in his anti-intellectualism with respect to the arts, and a convinced practical joker. He became a Roman Catholic convert in 1909.
Works
With the Russians in Manchuria (1905)
Flying Corps (1920)
Passing By (1921) novel
The Puppet Show of Memory (1922) autobiography
C (1924), novel
Cat's Cradle (1925) novel
Daphne Adeane (1926) novel
Robert Peckham (1930) historical novel
Lost Lectures
The Lonely Lady of Dulwich
Have You Anything to Declare?
References
Maurice Baring Restored, Selections from his work (1970) edited by Paul Horgan
Maurice Baring: A Citizen of Europe by Emma Letley
Like Chesterton, Baring converted to Catholicism partly under Belloc's influence, and it is possible, perhaps probable, that he would never have emerged as one of the foremost Catholic novelists of the century if he had never met his mercurial mentor.
Baring also brought a depth of culture that few of his generation could equal.
Baring's career as a novelist was relatively short, commencing with the publication of Passing By in 1921 when the author was already nearly 50 years old, and ending prematurely 15 years later as a result of the debilitating effects of Parkinson's disease.
MauriceBaring’s is a name one generally meets connected in a secondary or tertiary way with larger names.
Baring was of that generation of Englishmen possessed of the stiff upper lip; in his case this is sometimes forgotten, because that same lip would often collapse into a boyish smile.
In this essay, Baring obviously could not have known that he was speaking not only precisely to the posthumous condition of his own writing, but, in a wider view, even more poignantly to the artistic and intellectual life of our own day.
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