C. J. Rhodes
The curious malady of vision, of which this is an extreme example, had many victims in the latest years of the nineteenth century. During the years between the two Jubilees of Queen Victoria the eyes of a great part of the nation were at the ends of the earth. Johannesburg seemed immensely nearer to London than any English town, and the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway sounded more outlandish than the Canadian Pacific. It was the time of Consols at 114, and British pigs at what the dealer would give for them. There was an immense deal of money seeking investment, and unable, in the conditions then existing, to obtain profitable employment at home. So the millions which could not be found to cultivate the land of the Home Counties were poured out like water to finance any plausible African scheme; and our public men seemed to anticipate, not altogether without satisfaction, the time when Kent and Sussex would be to the millionaires of the Empire what Inverness and Sutherlandshire already were to the rich of Great Britain. The gold fever raged strongly. “Deeps” and “Fonteins” were the staple of conversation in all sorts of circles; if one went to the theatre the chances were that the drop-scene would display in illuminated figures the closing prices of Rand securities; and everybody who passed down Park Lane was reminded, by a certain house sprawling with naked nymphs and cupids, that the shortest way from Whitechapel to Mayfair crossed and recrossed the Equator.
It is necessary to recall this atmosphere, in which even the figure of Barney Barnato seemed invested with something of the glamour of Drake and Raleigh, to understand the place occupied by Cecil John Rhodes in the life of the Nineties. If mere swollen gamblers seemed, in the Gibbonian phrase, to “display the awful majesty of the hero,” it was natural that a man very much more than a gambler, a man with a large share of the heroic, should fire the imagination of his contemporaries. Even to-day, when we see Rhodes in a dry light, we are conscious of a quality which gives him admittance to that small and select brotherhood we agree to call great; in the full blaze of his prestige it was indeed a steady eye which could avoid being dazzled by the splendour of him. To the ordinary non-critical man of that time, his very faults, as many now esteem them, contributed to the fascination he exercised. As a nation we may be somewhat prone—though it would seem more prudent to write in the past tense—to the “unctuous rectitude” with which Rhodes sneeringly credited us. But we have always a weakness for the strong man who shows his strength by smashing the Ten Commandments, so long as he satisfies us in his observances of all the taboos and ordinances contained in that greater table of the law which we call “cricket.” Rhodes let it be known that he thought little of the Decalogue. But he succeeded in spreading the faith that he always played “cricket.” Thus a legend arose concerning him which was not quite like the truth. He appeared to his contemporaries as a compound of the qualities we like to think specially English. He was admired for a recklessness which was certainly not part of his character, and for a frankness which did not always distinguish him. In any contest between Rhodes and statesmen at home the public was always ready to assume that the man who talked gallantly about “facing the music” was in some deep sense in the right, even if by technical standards he might be proved to be in the wrong. For this faith in his essential “whiteness” there was, indeed, some justification. He had certainly made his great fortune by much the same methods that other great African fortunes were made. He had had some very queer business and political associates. He had done many things that could be called strong, and perhaps some things that could be called wrong. That his most fervent admirers were ready enough to admit. But they were not disposed to be censorious. Granted that Rhodes was a little cynical, and that in his earlier career there might be little to distinguish him (apart from manners and education) from the gamblers who “made good” in his company, it was still a fact that, arrived at great riches, he sought riches no more.
This combination of great wealth and disinterestedness appealed strongly to the British mind. We have little use for the poor idealist; his ideals, we argue, cannot be very valuable, or how could he remain poor? But we are seldom over-critical of the man who, with great wealth, subordinates money to an idea. “Big ideas,” said Rhodes once to Gordon, “must have big cash behind them.” Rhodes’s countrymen were won by the fact that the big ideas supported by the big cash were not strictly commercial ideas. Had he been a mere company promoter, on however colossal a scale, he could not have won even a passing popularity. For he had no turn for sport or for society; with something of the superstition of the Calvinist, he united the unsocial Calvinistic temper. He could be a good host at Groote Schuur, and a kindly master to his small knot of dependent intimates; but he had no taste for the ordinary rich man’s amusements. He could not have tickled the public fancy by running yachts or race-horses, or dazzled it by great display. But his “big ideas,” it was soon recognised, were really big. They had, it is true, a touch of the vulgarity which so often attaches to very big things. Personally, Rhodes was not, indeed, without a vein of vulgarity. He was, it is true, by nature and education a gentleman, and he was, of course, very much more than a gentleman. But he had a passion for diamonds and a contempt for women; he loved not merely appreciation but flattery of the grosser kind; he was strangely content with the companionship of quite inferior men; he was not exempt from that very bad failing, a tendency to bully those who were in no position to retaliate. To gloss over these defects would be to give a wholly false view of a character which owes its distinction less to fine harmonies than to striking contrasts. Rhodes had his smallness. But there was another side of his character which gave him a singular dominion over minds which might be suspected of utter incapacity for hero-worship. His superiority was admitted by men far richer than himself, who seemed incapable of respecting anything but riches and the qualities that gain riches. Barney Barnato went ever in awe of him. Beit admitted his superiority. It was the magic of his name, long before he reached greatness, which permitted of the De Beers Consolidation, and made a commercial company for many years the virtual ruler of South Africa. It was the presence of something incalculable in his character which gave him his power over brother millionaires. They had one simple motive—to make money and enjoy it after their kind. Rhodes did not despise money, or luxury, or power. He had firm faith in the “big cash”; though caring little for pleasure or society in the ordinary sense, he keenly relished magnificence of living; his enjoyment of absolutism was Sultanic. But no Beit or Barnato could ever tell when his materialism or his mysticism would predominate, and they held him accordingly in the kind of perplexed respect with which madmen have been regarded in rude ages. More normal people, of course, were closer to a real understanding of this element in the man. The decent Dutchman knew that he had a genuine passion for South Africa. The decent Englishman knew that he had a genuine passion for England. Both knew that they could trust him in large things to prefer the South African and the British interest to that of the wealthy speculator. By that mysterious process which enables whole masses of men without special information to do rough justice to the deeds and motives of the great, the impression spread to the mother country, and sufficed at the time of the Jameson raid to break the force of a fall which might otherwise have finally ruined him.
Any other man but Rhodes must have been ruined, and his true greatness, the greatness that was personal to him and had nothing to do with his wealth, was never better illustrated than in the sequel. Stripped of his offices, he still continued the greatest power in South Africa, and it was simply as Cecil Rhodes, and in no other capacity, that he made his famous peace with the Matabele, a peace which survived the shock of the Boer War. The story has often been told, how to win the confidence of the natives he left the expeditionary force, and lay in a tent, which could readily have been rushed, within easy reach of the enemy, without a single bayonet to protect him; how, after a time, the natives, admiring his courage, agreed to a parley; how Rhodes went unarmed to meet the chiefs in their full war kit; how he calmly discussed with them all their grievances, and then, after three or four hours’ talk, suddenly asked, “Is there to be peace or war?” On which the chiefs threw down their spears at his feet, and the war was over. The incident well illustrates the kind of courage Rhodes possessed. No man could be further removed from the dare-devil. He was not even free from some suspicion of personal timidity. Some exceedingly brave deeds are credited to him, but it would seem that his courage was of that sort which is seen at its best when facing the ferocities of inanimate nature, the perils of fire and flood, of storm and earthquake. No unkindly critic has remarked on the fact that, when travelling with five or six other men through a lion-infested region, he habitually and instinctively took the position nearest the tent-pole; he coveted Ulysses’ privilege of being eaten last. Under fire, though he never flinched, he was hardly comfortable; he had little of the contempt of danger which distinguished his friend and follower, Dr. Jameson. Probably it is broadly true that he was at his best pitted against mere difficulties, and at his worst when he had to encounter an intelligent enemy. Even in the warfare of politics he preferred methods of suasion to those of force, and was always readier to compromise than to fight unless the nature of the issue forbade. But when his mind was set on anything his resolution could neither be bent nor broken, and he would face any incidental and unavoidable danger with the coolest stoicism. He no doubt exactly expressed the case when he said, describing his experiences in the second Matabele War, that he was in a funk all the time, but afraid to be thought afraid. His courage, in fact, though adequate to any ordinary military strain, was rather that of the statesman than of the soldier. In affairs he was singularly free from respect for persons or fear of responsibility; he had made up his mind, from a very early stage, what he wanted to do, and difficulties, personal or material, existed only to be overcome. Ordinarily he was placable and plausible, concerned rather to smooth away opposition than to crush it; but when seriously crossed he could be violent and even terrible in his rage. He demanded from most of his little court a subservience which was of small profit to him; the meaner men came to know that it paid to flatter him and concur in all his views, and it thus happened that he was deprived of sound and disinterested advice when it would have been of the greatest service. Few men of his stature—for Rhodes was, with all deductions, a very great man—have been content with creatures so small; Dr. Jameson was almost the only member of his immediate circle who enjoyed his society on equal terms. Between these two men there was real affection. They had much in common—patriotism, a love of the wild, a sense of the romantic, a passion for action. But there seems also to have been a more obscure bond which secured the friendship against the risks involved in Jameson’s frankness and Rhodes’s intolerance to any form of contradiction. Rhodes’s health was never good; he was first driven from England at the age of seventeen by physical breakdown, and when he started for South Africa the second time he was given but six months to live. All through his life the fear of death weighed heavily on him, and, with the fatalistic superstition which modified his unbelief, he fancied that he was only safe when Jameson was within reach. Moreover, Jameson was a man of education, and Rhodes almost reached the ludicrous in his reverence for “a scholar and a gentleman.” He had himself taken immense pains to get a degree. He was preparing for Oxford when forced to take his first trip abroad; in 1872 he returned to matriculate at Oriel; but it was not until 1881 that he was able to call himself a Master of Arts. There is something slightly humorous in the notion of this man, dealing with the largest practical affairs, flitting between Kimberley and Oxford in order to attain a distinction shared with many very dull and common-place people. But Rhodes’s faith in the English University system was an abiding characteristic. Sir Thomas Fuller relates that he pointed out that under the system at De Beers there was nothing but the honesty of one of the officials to prevent wholesale robbery of diamonds. “Oh,” said Rhodes, “that’s all right. Mr. —— takes charge of the diamonds. He is an Oxford man and an English gentleman. Perhaps if there were two at the job they might conspire.” “One man,” says the American philosopher, “learns the value of truth by going to Sunday school, and another by doing business with liars.” It would seem that the well-founded respect which Rhodes felt for the honesty of the English gentleman derived partly from his exhaustive experience of cosmopolitan adventurers.
Indeed, the arrogance which was one of the least pleasant characteristics of Rhodes—an arrogance which inflated his strong features and often gave a rather repellent aspect to an otherwise attractive face—was generally softened in the presence of men of science, letters, and humane learning. Rhodes might be stiff to a home politician, and overbearing to an African associate, but he was, both in London and at Groote Schuur, an easy and winning host to those whom he held in any kind of intellectual reverence, or whom he recognised as pursuing ideals he respected. The man who won the heart of Gordon must have been a remarkable man in more than his obvious aspects. There was, indeed, in Rhodes a kind of spiritual hunger contrasting almost pathetically with his superficial materialism and his blank unbelief. He had a temperament fitted for a great part in an age of faith, and it was his fate to be rather specially representative of an agnostic age. He had read in youth Winwood Reade’s Martyrdom of Man, and had adopted its dogmatic atheism. Yet he wanted vehemently to believe in something; his strong interest in the supernatural eloquently testified to this hunger. A belief of some sort was, in fact, a necessity to a man such as he; and, if there was artlessness, there was full sincerity in his claim to be the instrument of the Providence whose existence he denied. God, he once said, was “obviously” trying to produce a predominant type most fitted to bring peace, liberty, and justice to the world; and only one race approached this “ideal type” of the Almighty. This was the race to which Rhodes himself belonged, the “Anglo-Saxon,” and Rhodes believed that the best way to help on God’s work and fulfil His purpose in the world was to contribute to the predominance of the Anglo-Saxon race.
Such convictions may be philosophically absurd, but when they take possession of a mind richly endowed in practical qualities, and direct a will of altogether abnormal strength, they are bound to lead to great achievement. Rhodes belonged to that terrible order of men who conceive themselves, by virtue of the grandeur and purity of the visions that absorb and inspire them, released from the ordinary restraints appropriate to humbler people. “What have you been doing since I last saw you, Mr. Rhodes?” asked Queen Victoria once. “I have added,” was the reply, “two provinces to Your Majesty’s dominions.” In the view of most people that sublimely sufficient answer would equally serve for the epitaph of the man who rendered it in haughty assurance that it justified his life. It is certainly an answer to be pleaded in any court of historical justice which returns a favourable verdict on other great empire-builders like Clive and Warren Hastings. Rhodes is to be judged as they are. As in their case, so in his, we have to set off great splendours and virtues against not inconsiderable blemishes. As in their case, so in his, we could wish that he had sometimes not neglected those maxims of morality which are also in the main the soundest maxims in policy; that he had never taken the crooked path; that he had always disdained the counsel of crooked people. But each nature has its own temptations, and the man of strong will who is passionately determined on a great object can seldom resist the temptations to break through fences barring what he thinks the shortest way to its attainment. Rhodes was thrown in very early life among men of a cynicism quite exceptional; and it is hardly wonderful that he became himself not a little cynical. But the real greatness that underlay his character was shown by his cool estimate of wealth after he had made it. His head was no doubt a little affected by the intoxication of power. But mere money soon ceased to interest him. It is said that he would not trouble for months together to pay in dividend warrants amounting to hundreds of thousands of pounds, and, on hearing from the bank that his account was overdrawn, he would fumble in the pockets of some old dressing-gown or shooting-jacket for crumpled papers worth perhaps a million. Such a man may be at once acquitted of any ignoble worship of money. Yet much smaller men have proved capable of equal philosophy. The greatness of Rhodes lay in that very faith which, stated in words, provokes a smile, but, translated into deeds over half a lifetime and half a continent, compels a wondering respect. The racial arrogance with which the faith was expressed may sometimes offend. The acts which it prompted may sometimes appear questionable. Some of us may feel that the world is wide enough for all kinds of human talent and character, and that the burden of governing is too great for any one kind, however admirable. Others may feel strongly that the nation which most aspires to a moral domination must be more than ordinarily careful of its own morals. But when all is said the man who possessed such a faith and wrote it in characters of such sprawling bigness belongs to that small company of Englishmen who have really earned the often too lightly conceded adjective “great.”
It was in the nature of things that the majestic and challenging personality of Mr. Gladstone should evoke such variety of worship and censure that even to-day, after all has been written concerning him, the plain seeker after truth is not a little perplexed.
For he knows the man was great, and even very great, and that not merely in the sense of filling a great place over a great space of time; there was something above and beyond all that. Mr. Gladstone was more than the sum of all that Mr. Gladstone ever said or did; he had that rare quality, undefined because indefinable, which compels a homage of the spirit even when the intellect is in vehement opposition. Four only of Mr. Gladstone’s greater contemporaries seem to have been wholly insensible to this influence. Whenever he was in question, Mr. Disraeli retained the fixed sneer of a Mephistopheles; Lord Salisbury gazed on him with as little emotion as a colossal Buddha or a landscape; Lord Randolph Churchill pursued him with the catcalls of a Gavroche; Mr. Parnell watched him with the cool and scientific detachment of an entomologist studying a beetle or some other creature with which he has nothing but life in common. But such complete freedom from the spell cast by the great Liberal statesman was rare. Others, though they said many bitter and many mocking things about him, never succeeded in hiding from the world, or even from themselves, the extent to which he really impressed them. It was curious, and a little touching, to note how in the heat of the Irish debates Mr. Balfour would, on the smallest intimation that Mr. Gladstone’s feelings had been seriously hurt by some shaft of ridicule, turn from irony to almost filial solicitude. Mr. Chamberlain, whose moral and intellectual colour scheme ran less to nuance and art tint, showed with a difference, but not the less sincerely, the extent to which his old chief still remained an element in his life. After 1886 he seldom spoke about Mr. Gladstone without a curious kind of anger; the object was probably less Mr. Gladstone than himself, for being in this case unable completely to live up to his favourite philosophy of wasting no time in regretting “either mishaps or mistakes.” As to others still in the train of Mr. Gladstone, his influence was extraordinary. It was assuredly no small man, or great man in the smaller way, who could inspire in Lord Rosebery, himself gifted with a manner that struck terror into those he wished to keep at a distance, the sort of reverence Tom Brown felt for Dr. Arnold. It was a very extraordinary man indeed who, himself of the strictest sect of the Pharisees, could bend the knees of so complacent a Sadducee and so lukewarm a hero-worshipper as John Morley. But perhaps the most remarkable case of all was that of Sir William Harcourt, who, never loved, and perhaps never really loving, was tamed into a submissive loyalty scarcely congruous with his proud and difficult temperament.
Of the human greatness of Mr. Gladstone, then, there can be no question. But when we come to deal with his statesmanship, the clouds of incense sent up by various groups of worshippers conceal more than is revealed by the light of their pious candles. The more simple school of devotees, who scouted the possibility that Mr. Gladstone could in any circumstances be wrong, has naturally shrunk since his death; but those who would discriminate are divided into many sects. There is one which admires him as an inspired financier, but censures his foreign policy; there is another which venerates him mainly as the pacific idealist, the enemy of the Turkish and other tyrannies, and the friend of small peoples “struggling rightly to be free”; some point approvingly to his essential conservatism; others laud him, on the ground of his “trust in the people, tempered by prudence,” as a great democrat; still others admire chiefly his marvellous command of the technique of Parliamentary Government. In short, Mr. Gladstone is revered by all kinds of incompatible people on all kinds of incompatible grounds. But, of all tributes paid to him, the quaintest, I imagine, is that I heard from the lips of a Japanese professor in the late Nineties. He belonged to a school, then rather influential, with an enthusiasm for a sort of atheistic Christianity. People were beginning to talk about horseless carriages and wireless telegraphy. These eminent Orientals desired a Godless Religion and a Creedless Faith. They rejected all Christian dogma as a superstition not less fantastic than the wildest perversion of Taoism. They held that Darwin and Herbert Spencer had between them solved the whole riddle of the universe. They took, indeed, ground not very dissimilar to that now occupied by certain dignitaries of the Church. But they recommended, on what they considered practical grounds, the adoption of Christianity (carefully deprived of everything conflicting with the scientific notions of the time) as the State religion of the Japanese Empire. In the first place such a conversion, it was held, would remove one great obstacle to the full admission of Japan to the comity of European nations; in the second, it would provide the lower classes with a moral standard and motive superior to anything afforded by the Eastern religions in their decline.
Now it so happened that Mr. Gladstone, when eighty-five or so, was mentioned in the Japanese papers as having spent five hours of a Good Friday in public worship. For this he was praised, on grounds not a little singular, by the curious Evangelist I have mentioned. It was impossible, said the professor, for a man of such brilliant intellect to have any real belief in the religion he professed. Mr. Gladstone, of course, was in his heart of hearts as little a Christian as Professor Huxley. But, while Professor Huxley viewed great questions only from the standpoint of a scientist, Mr. Gladstone was a great practical statesman, who recognised that the vulgar could only be kept in their places by due awe of the supernatural. Therefore, like a true patriot, he endured at his great age this serious fatigue (to say nothing of this unutterable boredom) in order that he might give an example to the masses. This (the professor proceeded) was the true source of England’s greatness; her public men, instead of spending their spare time in frivolity, kept ever in mind the necessity of preserving appearances in the presence of the proletariat; and the quiet and law-abiding character of the British people was their exceeding great reward.
It was no use arguing with this learned Japanese; indeed, he was a man so illustrious that disputation with him, on the part of a nobody, seemed to savour of presumption. But I remembered enough of the spectacle of Mr. Gladstone at public worship (during one of his many visits to Brighton at the time of his last Premiership) to be very cautious ever afterwards in attempting to classify the motives of a foreigner. For, if there was one man in England for whom religion was a reality, it was Mr. Gladstone. And if there was one man in England incapable of the altruistic hypocrisy imputed to him it was again Mr. Gladstone. He was even destitute of that knack of saying pleasant insincerities which is generally reckoned as very little of a sin and very much of a social asset. Witness that old story of Disraeli and the pictures. Someone told Mr. Gladstone with great glee how Disraeli went to some picture show, and delighted the artists by most lavish praise. This work showed sublime genius; that recalled the grace of Gainsborough; this the sombre power of Caravaggio; that the splendid colour of Titian; that the severe purity of outline of Mantegna. And then, when Disraeli was well clear of the men he had flattered into frantic worship of him, he murmured to a friend: “What an ordeal; such fearful daubs I never saw!” To this story Mr. Gladstone listened with a steadily increasing frown, and at the end of it he struck the table emphatically with his fist. “I call that—devilish,” was his comment.
It was, probably, this massive seriousness—deriving from his intense sense of the eternal—that was the secret of Mr. Gladstone’s power over nearly all who came into close touch with him. It is not quite true that he altogether lacked a sense of humour. In a certain vein he could be playful and even jocose, and, though he was generally wanting in the compression which belongs to true wit, witty things occasionally escaped him. But all this was by the way, as incidental as the play of sunlight on a rock or the laughter on the surface of the deep sea; he might, in an off moment, play with an idea in much the same spirit that he took his backgammon with Mr. Armistead, but such concessions to the mood of the moment only threw into sharper relief the intense earnestness which was the basis of his character.
Every virtue has its characteristic dangers, and if Mr. Gladstone’s solemn belief in himself and his mission gave him immense power over others it also led to one side of himself exercising too much power over the other. His intellect was often unduly dominated by his prepossessions; from first to last he seldom saw things in a dry light. In his youth Macaulay noted a characteristic which endured throughout life—content with insecure foundations for an argument, he relied too much for victory on his splendid power of impressive rhetoric. He was not the less governed by prejudice because his prejudice might at one time be different from, and even contradictory to, his prejudice at another. Had Mr. Gladstone been a duller man, his temper would have ended by enfeebling the mind which it constantly reduced to subjection. But in his case a mentality already almost preternaturally active was still further stimulated by the necessity of justifying his temper. It was driven to a kind of jesuitry through the despotic conscientiousness of its master. Mr. Gladstone was incapable of consciously deceiving others; he did sometimes unconsciously deceive himself, and others through himself. On certain questions, like finance, which he could treat objectively, his reason had full play; on others his judgment was always liable to subjective disturbance. Where a broad and definite moral issue existed that judgment seldom went astray, but on whole classes of questions more or less indifferent he was governed by the same sort of likes and dislikes which determine a rich man’s wine cellar or picture collection. Thus half his mistakes in regard to Egypt were due to nothing more than want of interest. He was bored with Egypt, and intrigued with other things. Ireland, also, at first bored him; it was to him, as to so many of the Liberals, a tiresome irrelevancy breaking in on the set programme. For some time he felt towards the Irish members as a whist-player might towards some noisy person who insisted that there must be no more whist until everybody in the room had exhausted the possibilities of “tiddleywinks.” But when at last he found that “tiddleywinks” was only a slang name for Irish auction bridge, and that Irish auction bridge was vastly more exciting than any whist, he quickly discovered that the enunciation of a Home Rule policy was what Mr. Balfour called “a moral imperative of the most binding kind.”
This would seem a flippant explanation of a conversion in which Mr. Gladstone renewed his political youth. It is not meant as a flippancy. Most assuredly Mr. Gladstone did not consciously, as some very great opponents maintained at the time, reach his Home Rule position by the road of sordid or ignoble considerations. But his mind was one equally prone to innovation and to routine; it ran in grooves, but had no difficulty, when impelled by any sufficiently powerful stimulus, in jumping from one groove to another. There is a kind of roundabout on which the horses (running on rigidly prescribed lines) seem at one moment to be going straight to a certain point, and then suddenly turn, to the bewilderment of their riders, in a direction exactly opposite. Mr. Gladstone made such a swerve, and it was not surprising that there were tumbles, or that, while he was eloquently explaining that the change of course was natural and necessary, less agile characters were mainly swearing over bumps and bruises. He himself was probably not even conscious that the change was great. For Mr. Gladstone had a way of making himself at once at home in a new situation. He was like a man who often changes his house, but always carries with him the old furniture and—if possible—the old servants. The chief trouble in this case was that some of the household staff declined to join in the new move; otherwise Erin Mansions was not very different from Coercion Row. There was point, if there was also rudeness, in Lord Randolph’s gibe of “the old man in a hurry.” But the hurry was chiefly in the matter of settling down in the new quarters. Once settled Mr. Gladstone never again moved. Under all the superficial bustle of his last Premiership there was essential immobility; what he had become in 1885 he remained till the end.
Of the “rapid splendours” of that last Home Rule fight Lord Morley has discoursed eloquently. It was a wonderful affair, and a most pathetic one. The eloquence which had dazzled two generations had lost little or nothing of its magnificence. The wizardry of Mr. Gladstone’s manipulations of stubborn material still extorted the admiration of those who had known him a quarter of a century before. Half blind, very deaf, dependent on majorities that sometimes sank to eight or ten, faced with the certainty of rejection by the Lords, and the equal certainty that their action would be approved by the country, the old hero never faltered. It was a marvellous and inspiring example of the triumph of a sense of public duty over all the disabilities of age and infirmity. But through the whole splendid performance ran the note of tragedy. Mr. Gladstone knew the thing could not be done by him. He must have more than suspected what was to come when he was gone. The portent of the Newcastle programme could no more have been lost on him than the waning enthusiasm of many of his supporters for the cause of Home Rule. But for the faith which had always sustained him, this last fight must have been sad indeed. “But,” says Lord Morley, speaking of a visit just before Mr. Gladstone’s last appearance in the House of Commons, “there the old fellow was, doing what old fellows have done for long ages on a Sunday afternoon, reading a big Bible.” The same witness speaks of a “sudden solemnity” during the discussion of an intricate point in the Home Rule Bill, when Mr. Gladstone turned to him with “Take it from me, that to endure trampling on with patience and self-control is no bad element in the preparation of a man for walking firmly and successfully in the path of great public duty. Be sure that discipline is full of blessings.” Then, a moment later, he added, “When it’s all over, you and I must have our controversy out about Horace. I cannot put him as high as you do.”
After all, no man is to be pitied who could bear the weight of eighty-four years in a spirit at once so humanly gallant and so Christianly resigned.
George Meredith was impatient of talk about life’s ironies; he took things as they came, accepted Fate’s decrees with fortitude, and did not blame Nature for being natural. That is to say, he took up this attitude in debate; internally he might and did lament over things not specially lamentable. And, whatever he might say, he can hardly have failed to feel something of the irony of his position in the Nineties. He had won through long years of total neglect and hard toil. He had passed the hardly less painful period of purely esoteric appreciation. First, nobody cared for his work; then he became the oracle of a small circle; neither fate was pleasing to a nature so large and eager, so avid of fame, with so keen a zest for life, and so imperious an appetite for its best things, material and intellectual. George Meredith liked recognition; he liked also good and even fat living, old vintages, pleasant lodgment, and ease of mind. He wrote best about the sunshine when he saw it through a glass of fine claret, and lark pie was for him the best preparation for an ode to the lark. But it was long before he could afford to translate into practice his theories of good provender. In his youth, it is said, he was so poor that a single bowl of porridge had often to suffice him for the day, and long after he had reached maturity he was so little esteemed that John Morley, coming to London ten years his junior, was soon able to repay his generous welcome by printing two or three novels which would otherwise have stood small chance with the publishers. In his later middle age, though he could afford himself fairly full indulgence in those dietetic fantasies which were his joy, he was so harnessed to the daily task that he could not imagine, so he said, what he would do if turned loose in the paddock of independence. But now in the Nineties and his own sixties, just as he had grown into a cult, he had to live as a recluse at Box Hill, almost a prisoner in his arm-chair, very deaf, and with an impaired digestion.
GEORGE MEREDITH.
Concerning that “Egyptian bondage” of journalism, all Meredith’s philosophy could not prevent him expressing himself with extreme bitterness. “No slavery,” he said, “is comparable to the chains of hired journalism.” When a man talks thus it is natural to infer that he is complaining of the injury such work does to his intellect and conscience; obviously from the purely physical viewpoint writing for newspapers, for some hundreds a year in Victorian valuation, is not worse than being an Egyptian fellah, a Chinese coolie, or even an English dustman. But it is hard to believe that even on the moral and intellectual side there was much hardship; for, curiously enough, George Meredith was rather specially free from scruples of the kind which torture some men. Indeed, he was unusually wide-minded in the matter of “writing to order”; in that sense, at least, the chains hung lightly on him. There have always been journalists of great and even boisterous independence, and they were more numerous in Meredith’s time than in our own. Even now, however, the idea of the refined and penniless man of genius working against his convictions under the lash of a brutal and tyrannous proprietor belongs not to Fleet Street, where they produce newspapers, but to the Haymarket, where they produce plays. Doubtless there is a good deal of compliance in matters indifferent, or esteemed indifferent. Men with very red noses have been known to argue eloquently in favour of local option, and nothing but total abstinence is compatible with the coolness of head requisite for some arguments in favour of “the trade.” But, as mere men of business, newspaper proprietors save themselves, wherever possible, the strain of attempting to force a highly individual writer against his convictions. Mr. Massingham has never had to choose between no dinner and the advocacy of causes likely to appeal to the editor of John Bull. Mr. Bottomley has never been compelled by hunger to adopt the views of the United Kingdom Alliance or the Anti-Betting League. But Meredith did indubitably, as a Liberal, write habitually for the political columns of the Conservative Morning Post in London and the Conservative Ipswich Journal in the provinces; as a professed lover of liberty he did indubitably argue in favour of slavery; and, if all the secrets of the files were revealed, it would probably be found that, as a literary critic, he said many things in print which were contrary to his private taste and conviction.
His disgust with journalism was, it may be surmised, less concerned with morals than with money. He complains that the better the work the worse the pay, and the poorer the esteem; and, just as he could not refrain from some envy of the “best sellers” in literature (an envy which found vent in savage criticism of much of Tennyson’s work), so he was not a little disgusted that many journalists far less gifted made better incomes. In truth he was not suited to the trade. The best in journalism is still for the many, and Meredith’s manner, when all is said, was for the few. With the prestige of a name behind his books, the average of men might be induced (if only by the coward fear of being out of the fashion) to begin reading, and, having begun, it was always quite possible that he would go on long enough to find much that he could honestly like. But anonymous writing has no such advantage. Its appeal must be immediate, or the reader turns to the next column. With his peculiar tendencies George Meredith could never have been a journalist of the kind that delights the editorial soul—the man who never under-writes or over-writes either in space or quality, who can always be depended on to produce a first-class trade article, who never uses an expression queried by the printer’s reader. The highest merit of the journalist is to make complicated things clear, and dry things readable; Meredith’s genius lay in the direction of making the simplest things obscure, and the most ordinary things out-of-the-way. The dread of being common-place seems to have inclined him especially to verbal contortions when he was conscious of some thinness or ordinariness of thought. When he has really something to say he often says it strongly and naturally; there are deep things and true things in Meredith which could hardly be better, more shortly, or more lucidly expressed. Browning suffered from much the same disease; with both men it is quite a safe rule to read only so long as one can get on comfortably; skipping the hard parts means a gain altogether out of proportion to the loss. Meredith is never more obscure than when he means to tell one that a man kissed a woman, or that the sky was red at sunset. Men do quite commonly kiss women, and skies are often red at sunset. But Meredith seems to have felt that his men must be different from any other men, their kisses different from any other kisses, and the women kissed different from any other kissed women. And on no account must his sunsets be the sunsets of Tom, Dick, or Harry. Therefore, in dealing with such things, he racked his brain for some verbal violence which sometimes hit the mark, but more often did not. In one of his short poems—published, if I remember rightly, in the Nineties—there occurred the expression, “Hands that paw the naked bush.” I asked a Meredithian exactly what it meant. Pityingly he reminded me that some lines before there were references to winter and snow. “Now,” he said, “if you have closely observed a bush when the leaves are off, you will remember that here and there twigs, to the number of four or five, radiate from a sort of clump which bears a distant resemblance to the human wrist. When these twigs are covered with snow they distinctly suggest a hand with the fingers spread out. The poet saw that, as he saw everything. You, who never use your middle-class eyes except to find misprints, naturally never saw it, and you dare to charge your own insensitiveness and lack of imagination on a great genius.” This, of course, was crushing. But I can imagine an Elizabethan man of taste being equally crushing to any heretic who questioned some elaborate figure of the Ephuists, and appealed from them to the simple delicacy of him who wrote—
a thing any critic can admire and any coal-heaver can understand.
“Meredith,” says Lord Morley, “often missed ease.” It might be truer to say that he took the most cruel pains to avoid ease. Macaulay notices how Johnson used sometimes to translate into his own peculiar dialect an observation first made in strong, simple English. Thus he once said that a certain work had not “enough wit to keep it sweet,” and immediately added, “It has not sufficient vitality to preserve it from putrefaction.” One has an uneasy feeling that Macaulay was, as sometimes happened, a little innocent in his earnestness to make a point, and that Johnson was here only playing with himself; his ordinary literary style, though stiff as compared with his table talk, is yet generally muscular and masculine. But Meredith actually did in solemn fashion what Johnson may have done in a spirit of fooling. He did continually think in a natural and write in an unnatural idiom. In his familiar letters one often comes across the germ of a reflection later elaborated in a book; in the one case it is expressed in terse, vigorous English, wholly intelligible and to the point; in the other it is tortured into two pages of Meredithian “epigram,” most of which would be incomprehensible if he did not generally clinch the whole thing with one splendid sentence of quite undoubtful meaning. In these key sentences, indeed, resides the whole value of Meredith—if we exclude a certain embarrassing impression of disorderly opulence, of careless magnificence, which makes one feel rather like a boy with a great jar of “chow-chow” from Canton; he has not a vestige of an idea what he is eating, and hardly knows whether he quite likes it, but it is sweet, obviously expensive, and provocatively curious, and has a certain medicinal suggestion that excuses a little gluttony. Or we might say that a Meredith novel suggests a great firework display, meant to represent “Peace and War,” or “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves,” or “Grand Attack on a Sleeping City by Ten Thousand Aeroplanes.” One does not pretend to follow the story as if it were a piece on the stage, and much of it seems to be irrelevant; but there are plenty of bombs, squibs and Roman candles, and rockets that go up with a satisfying rush and break into floating glory.
As he was in his books, so was Meredith in society. In the company of an intimate friend or two he could be natural—could talk with easy vigour, expressing views that were often just in language that was always plain and strong. But let a stranger—especially a distinguished stranger—join the circle, and he deviated automatically into “epigram.” He seems to have felt it necessary to be brilliant, and for him brilliance meant effort; he was not content to let the good things come to the surface as they would, but pumped them up from the recesses of his being with an energy which sometimes affected the purity of the flow and not seldom made the machinery creak.
There was, indeed, something a little forced about the whole man. In his youth he was addicted to violent exercise, and especially to throwing the beetle—the great wooden mallet with which foresters split tree-trunks. He used to throw up the beetle and catch it, and this violent business, designed to preserve his health, ended by ruining it; the spinal weakness from which he suffered in later life was the direct consequence of beetle-throwing. This indiscreet athleticism is paralleled in other departments of Meredith’s life. In literature he was perpetually throwing the beetle—juggling in ponderous style with ponderous things; he is a muscular rather than a nimble wit. I remember to have seen an acrobat climb down a table leg, hand over hand, as if he were lowering himself from the Nelson Monument—a difficult feat, no doubt, but a very useless and ungainly one. Meredith’s cleverness gave often the same impression of wasted power and even compromised dignity. In life, again, he tended to this exaggerated strenuousness without adequate object; it might have been better for him, and for others, if there had been more repose. His first marriage was wrecked because he came into contact and conflict with a temperament too like his own, and the sequel proved that his generally benevolent and kindly nature had a core of hardness which might in truth be suspected from his writings. Concerning Carlyle’s matrimonial affairs, he wrote that “a woman of the placid disposition of Milton’s Eve, framed by her master to be an honest labourer’s cook and housekeeper, with a nervous disposition resembling a dumpling, would have been enough for him.” Much the same was true of himself. If, in spite of much domestic sorrow, he reached old age unbroken in his resolute optimism, his deficiencies have perhaps no less credit than his qualities. For, if he sometimes indulged in self-pity regarding small matters, he bore with great stoicism the sterner buffets of fate, and this because of a certain insensibility, illustrated again and again in his career, to the kind of wounds which are commonly most painful. It is not indifference to others, still less hardness of heart; his letters are evidence enough on that point. But one has the same sort of impression one gets from Shakespeare’s sonnets, of a second self quietly watching, and almost jeering at, the sufferings of the first and its mates. “Happily for me,” he wrote during his second wife’s hopeless and painful illness, “I have learned to live much in the spirit.” That was probably the exact truth. Things of the spirit were not always more important than the want of five pounds for a dinner or a holiday, but they did suffice to keep him taut and resolute in the presence of the sterner trials. “There was good reason,” says Lord Morley, “to be sure with him that death too was only a thing in the Natural Order.” It is only fair to add that he himself faced the approach of the “pitch-black king” with full gallantry. “Going quickly down,” he said to his old friend not long before the end, but there was “nothing morbid, introspective, pseudo-pathetic; plenty of hearty laughter; ...” “no belief in a future existence; are our dogs and horses immortal? What’s become of all our fathers?”
Such was the strength of the man. But oddly mingled with the intrepid assurance that could mock at invalidism and decay, and look with untroubled eye into the dark unknown, was a strange sensitiveness which he himself would have been the first to satirise in another. All his life he was tortured with the consciousness that his father and grandfather had been tailors, and oppressed with a fear that somebody would discover the dread secret. He made of his origin a mystery which might pique but always baffled curiosity; and he was continually wondering whether people considered him a gentleman de facto, and still more whether they suspected that he had not always been one de jure. “H—— is a good old boy,” he writes on one occasion. “He has a pleasant way of being inquisitive, and has already informed me, quite agreeably, that I am a gentleman, though I may not have been born one.” “In origin,” he says again, “I am what is called here a nobody, and any pretensions to that rank have always received due encouragement.” He not only kept silence about his birth—which was assuredly his own affair—but he took active steps to prevent the truth being known. His father—a handsome, shiftless person who made a failure of his life—was described in Meredith’s first marriage certificate as “Esquire,” and in a census paper “near Petersfield” was given as the author’s place of birth. The Merediths were, in fact, naval outfitters at Portsmouth, and had none of the “Celtic blood” to which the novelist was fond of making vague claim. George’s mother died when he was five; the father followed after various ineffective wanderings; and the boy was left a ward in Chancery, to be educated and articled to a solicitor out of the poor remnant of the family fortunes. From all this part of his life he shrank with a horror at once grotesque and pathetic. There was nothing specially ignominious in his childhood. There was certainly no ill-treatment; he was rather petted than otherwise. But he resented the environment thrust on him by the accident of birth, and, when free of it, avoided all touch with his remaining relatives.
These facts would not be worth mentioning but for their influence on Meredith’s life and work. They placed him in general society rather on the defensive, and perhaps encouraged that haughty shyness which in the presence of strangers was apt to take the form of an aggressive and self-conscious brilliance. They explain the peculiar impression given by so many of his novels, the impression of a man fascinated by aristocracy and yet a little angry at being fascinated. Despite his Liberalism and his Democratic professions, this was the thing he liked; he had an almost sensual pleasure in good company; the very titles of his great people suggest enjoyment. He himself was an aristocrat in physique; he had a kingly head and carried it like a king. He was an aristocrat also in intellect, though here not of the highest rank, which takes its distinction for granted; it was, no doubt, a dread of commonness that led him to refine excessively, and no one who dreads to be common wholly escapes being so. But all this was not solely Meredith’s fault, it was also the fault of his country. In the France of the fleur-de-lis or the France of the tricolour the lack of birth would not have irked such a nature; in Victorian England it became a fact of real importance. It was the one little insanity of a rather specially sane mind; the one want of humour in a richly humorous temperament; the one absurd weakness in one perhaps even too confident in his own strength.
In the Berlin Conference days Bismarck described Lord Salisbury as “a lath painted to look like iron.” By the Nineties the sneer had lost point in every particular. To the dullest it was clear that Lord Salisbury had not painted himself or got himself painted; whatever the man might or might not be, he was genuine, incapable himself of pose, and equally incapable of inspiring others to spread a legend concerning himself. It was equally clear (though perhaps only to the more discerning) that he did not “look like iron.” There was not wanting strength of a kind, but it was a flexible and not a rigid strength. The coarsest of all mistakes it is possible to make concerning Lord Salisbury is that of regarding him as an Imperialistic swashbuckler and gambler, ready for all risks in the pursuit of a “spirited foreign policy.” The Victorian Burleigh was, in fact, much like the Burleigh of Elizabeth, decisive enough in some domestic matters, but even excessively cautious in the conduct of foreign affairs. Though he adopted the Disraelian tradition, his methods were the very opposite of Mr. Disraeli’s. That great man really enjoyed having the eyes of all men directed on him in hope or fear. “A daring pilot in extremity,” he seemed actually pleased with waves that went high, and, though he might accept “peace with honour,” gave always the impression of disappointment of a born political artist that it was not reserved to him to play the part of a second Chatham.