Lord Salisbury, on the other hand, was in essence as pacific as Mr. Gladstone. In practice he was even more a man of peace, since his caution took the form of guarding against war, while Mr. Gladstone inclined rather to the modern “Pacifist” line of calling war “unthinkable”—and not thinking about it till it came. There were, no doubt, occasions on which Lord Salisbury’s attitude might seem aggressive and even reckless. He was severe to Portugal. He was stern and unbending to the South African Republic. He adopted a high tone towards France over the Fashoda affair. But in such cases he either regarded the risk as small, or considered the matters at stake justified the risk, whatever it might be. In general his policy was one of cautious conciliation, and his main work at the Foreign Office was the removal, so far as might be, of any causes of quarrel between ourselves and Germany. The German Empire he equally feared and admired. France he was inclined to class with Spain among the “dying nations,” and though, like all the men of his school, he rather exaggerated the might of Russia, that Power was considered more from the Asiatic than from the European point of view. Lord Salisbury’s policy towards France and Russia was fluid and opportunist. He had no objection to France taking what she liked of the “light soil” of the Sahara; he was not intolerant of Russian ambitions in Eastern Asia. He was anxious enough not to be on bad terms with anybody. But if either of these Powers had thrown out an obvious challenge Lord Salisbury would no doubt have accepted it. The one challenge he was resolved not to accept was that of Germany, and the history of the later Salisbury administrations on their foreign side is in essence the history of elaborate attempts to buy, as cheaply as possible, a continuance of the sleeping partnership with Prussia. The price was not onerous during Bismarck’s reign. It rose sharply under William II, and Lord Salisbury died in the unhappy certainty that all his attempts to satisfy Germany had failed of their purpose. The failure was no fault of his. He had carried through in Africa—a continent “created,” as he said at the Guildhall banquet of the Diamond Jubilee year, “to be the plague of the Foreign Office”—a network of treaties and compacts not ill-designed to avert the possibility of serious wars arising from the unregulated ambitions of European Powers. But there was more passion than policy in the councils of Berlin, and, to his deep chagrin, Lord Salisbury was fated to see, before his life ended, the first steps taken towards a complete reversal of the course he had consistently followed.

If Lord Salisbury was neither “painted” nor “like iron,” the third element in the Bismarckian sneer was still more untrue. In the Nineties it was quite impossible to think of the Conservative leader as a “lath.” The slenderness of Lord Robert Cecil had gone the same way as his rather ungainly deportment; the developing statesman had shown how little youth and spareness of figure may have to do with grace; the developed statesman illustrated what the author of Eothen calls the majesty of true corpulence. In Lord Robert Cecil great height, slimness, and the scholar’s stoop made rather jarringly noticeable that untidiness which is an abiding Cecilian characteristic; in Lord Salisbury the rounded shoulders rather added to his impressiveness, as suggesting Atlas loads of responsibility, while the very massiveness of the figure cancelled the effect of imperfect valeting. No worse dressed or more majestic figure was ever seen in the House of Lords, which has never been wanting either in shabbiness or in distinction. There are some men of great rank who convey the impression of taking as keen an interest in their kit as that which animates any shop assistant out for his Sunday. There are others who give the air of caring little personally about such matters, but of having an excellent man to look after them. Lord Salisbury suggested a tailor and valet as little interested in clothes as himself. His coats always looked as if they had been made on the Laputan system of tailoring; his trousers bagged like those in the statues of Victorian philanthropists; his hats were shocking; he even looked sometimes as if he might have slept in his clothes. Indeed, though the last man on earth to be a conscious Bohemian, there was a considerable streak of Bohemianism in Lord Salisbury. In his Fleet Street days he had no difficulty in accommodating himself to the ways of a race still carrying on the tradition of George Warrington and Mr. Bludyer. Lord Morley, who sometimes met him in the waiting-room of a review editor, found in him a “gift of silence.” But The Standard had, apparently, a more human atmosphere, and with some of the distinguished writers enlisted under the banner of Mr. Mudford, the future Prime Minister established genial relations. Many years after, a fellow-leader-writer was presented to him at some official garden party. Lord Salisbury, who had a bad memory for names, and was very short-sighted, was saying the usual formal things when the sound of the journalist’s voice suddenly brought a flood of old memories. “Hello, Billy,” he said, shaking hands warmly, “whose turn is it to pay for the beer?”

Lord Salisbury’s shortness of sight is the explanation of the many true stories of his not knowing his own subordinates, and talking to a sporting Peer about military matters under the impression that he was addressing Lord Roberts. This myopia was a very considerable element in his life, and accounts in some degree for a detachment which appeared marvellous to his contemporaries. Not being able to see his audiences, he could not follow their moods, and so tended exclusively to follow his own. Thus no man merited less the title of orator. There was a fine literary quality about his speeches; though he prepared little, and spoke without effort, the fighting discipline of his journalistic days made banality or sloppiness impossible to him. The satire which seldom failed to flavour anything he said was the quite natural emanation of an ironical mind, and sprang from the same source as his dislike of declamation, display, or vulgar rhetorical artifice. It was not what is generally called cynicism; it was rather the protest of a strong, sincere, and unaffected nature against the humbug rarely absent from public life. Bad taste, really bad taste, that is to say—the taste which, to vary the French phrase, leads to artistic crime—was repulsive to him, and this dislike no doubt sometimes led him to what is more ordinarily called bad taste: the merciless mockery of pretensions which most people have agreed to respect. Detesting exaggerated emphasis, he exaggerated his own avoidance of it; he habitually spoke without gesture, generally standing motionless as an automaton, his hands hanging lifelessly at his side. In this position he used, as he called it, to “think aloud,” and his thoughts often sounded strangely both to friends and opponents. For, though Lord Salisbury was a real Tory, the tone of his mind was only in one limited sense conservative. He did want to preserve certain great things, including, of course, the Church, but he had little in common with those who oppose an equally stubborn resistance to all innovation. The doors of his understanding were never closed to the entry of new ideas, so long as such ideas were concrete and definite; what he did vehemently resent was “reform” demanded on loose general grounds. Thus he had no great objection to Parish Councils. True, the old system had worked fairly well, and very cheaply, and nobody could tell exactly how ill and dearly the new system would work. But if due cause were shown, he was not disposed to stand in the way. When, however, the Liberal leaders argued for Parish Councils, not on the ground that they would be more efficient or more economical than the old Vestries, but that they would tend to “brighten village life,” Lord Salisbury’s disgust flamed out in a characteristic piece of irony. “If the enlivenment of village life were the object,” he said, “the object would be much better served by a circus.” Again, he was assuredly not blind to the evils of over-drinking. But he denied altogether that the way to make men sober was to make public-houses fewer and less convenient. There had been much argument in favour of “reducing drinking facilities”; Lord Salisbury contended that drunkenness was no necessary consequence of drinking facilities. “There are a hundred beds at Hatfield,” he said, “but I never feel more inclined to sleep on that account.”

It is probable, indeed, that what he chiefly hated in Liberalism was that tendency to unreality which is, perhaps, its special danger. Lord Salisbury did not see a great many things, but what he did see he saw clearly, and he was specially free from the dangers of self-deception. Thus he did not see that there was an Irish question; but he did see quite clearly what Mr. Gladstone would not let himself see, that there was no English enthusiasm for Home Rule. He did not see that political arrangements wanted readjusting in correspondence with the immense material and intellectual revolution in England; but he did see quite clearly that the English people on the whole preferred a squiredom to a plutocracy, and were not in the least concerned when the House of Lords disposed of various pet projects of hasty reformers. When Liberals talked about the voice of the people and the aspirations of the masses, Lord Salisbury did not think of the people or the masses; he thought of a single working-man he had actually seen and spoken to, and, judging the rest from him, was at least secured against the worst hallucinations. When some proposal (say Local Veto) was extolled as a boon to the working-classes, Lord Salisbury again saw in his mind’s eye a quite ordinary bricklayer or carpenter in a village tavern, and in the strength of that vision declined to believe that England would rise against him as one man if the Lords threw out Local Veto on his suggestion. Proceeding on these lines, he developed an infallible pose for political imposture and pretence, and a massive disregard of merely noisy agitation. No man ever paid less attention to the transient manifestations of what is called public opinion. He was utterly unmoved by the thunders of the Press and the organised outcry of the platform. When a great procession marched past Arlington Street to Hyde Park to denounce him, he could ask his footman (quite sincerely) “What all that noise was about?” The petulant threats of a disappointed faction, the interested uproar of sects and cliques, made no impression on his colossal phlegm. But he recognised at once what he called “the firm, deliberate, and sustained conviction” of the majority of the nation. “It is no courage—it is no dignity—to withstand the real opinion of the nation,” so he said in 1868, after leading a most determined opposition to the Irish Church Bill. “All that you are doing thereby is to delay an inevitable issue—for all history teaches us that no nation was ever thus induced to revoke its own decision—and to invoke besides a period of disturbance, discontent, and possibly worse than discontent.” Thus, while he understood when to fight, he also understood when to yield, and his concessions, when he decided to make them, came with grace and spontaneity. The sword of the House of Lords was often raised to kill; it was sometimes used to salute; it was never shaken in unavailing menace.

The peculiar strength and sagacity of Lord Salisbury as a domestic statesman are best illustrated, not by what happened during his life, but by what followed his death. For it was the chief part of his success that nothing particularly happened at home while he was in chief control. The real history of the time is foreign, colonial, social, and technological history. In English political history we are mainly in the region of negatives. Lord Salisbury did not solve the Irish political problem; he only stifled down an Irish agitation. He did not solve the English social problem; he only avoided unnecessary troubling of the waters. He did not make his party the instrument of any great positive work for England; he only kept it together as the guarantee of stable administration. But the magnitude of even this negative success was seen by the sharp contrast of what followed. Within a year of his retirement the Conservative Party was shattered; within a decade everything he had striven to avoid had come to pass; Home Rule was again a living issue; the lists were set for a real battle between the House of Commons and the House of Lords; the division of England into “classes and masses” was almost complete; the Church was marked down for what he would have considered a sacrilegious mutilation. English Toryism in the true sense died with Lord Salisbury. The thing that succeeded had no convenient name, but its character may be best indicated by saying that what was specially English was not specially Tory, and what was specially Tory was not specially English. But, while the inspiration and effective control of the party passed to men without interest in Church or land, and with a cosmopolitan (or at least most loosely Imperialist) rather than an English or even British point of view, many true Tories remained. These must have recognised, when Lord Salisbury had gone, the true value of much that had been taken for granted while he was alive. He originated little; he delayed much that was good as well as much that was ill; he belonged emphatically to that class of great men who must be praised rather for what they avoided than for what they accomplished. But that he was a truly great man, and not a merely dexterous one, was now clear to those who witnessed the disaster wrought by a deficiency of character combined with an excess of ideas and tactical subtlety. Had Lord Salisbury been succeeded by another in precisely his own image, the political and social convulsions of the new century would, doubtless, not have been altogether avoided. For there were forces at work that compelled large changes. But that they would have come about in gentler fashion is hardly doubtful. For Lord Salisbury knew as few men did the difference between variable “public opinion” and the real temper of a nation, between the ditch that can be filled up or drained and the river which can only be canalised, and he would assuredly have avoided that constitutional struggle which, degenerating into mere anarchism, became the prolific parent of so many ills from which the country suffers to-day. It was a misfortune for more than Conservatism that his massive wisdom, his shrewd judgment, his cool scepticism, his contempt of mere ideas, his horror of extremes, his hatred of any kind of cant and self-illusion, his distrust of zeal and prejudice against the needless enlargement of issues were not at the service of the Conservative Party at a time when it needed above all things sane and strong control.

CHAPTER VII
LORD KITCHENER

At the battle of Omdurman, fought on September 2, 1898, the Dervishes had 10,800 killed and some 16,000 wounded; the losses of the British and Egyptian forces amounted to only 47 killed and 342 wounded.

This fact must be borne in mind in considering the character of that enormous Kitchener legend which grew up—or rather started up almost in a single night—late in the Nineties. At the beginning of the decade the name of Herbert Kitchener conveyed nothing to people outside an extremely narrow military and diplomatic circle; a year or two later vague rumours of some extremely capable soldier, a discovery of Lord Cromer’s, the very man to regain the Sudan and “avenge Gordon,” began to circulate; by the middle Nineties the new Sirdar had established a certain definite repute as a strong man who would stand no nonsense from anybody, and who had even terrorised an unfriendly Khedive; in 1896 there began to be talk about the expedition authorised by the Government on Mr. Chamberlain’s suggestion; the next two years the papers were at intervals interested in the building of the desert railway which was to be Kitchener’s instrument for the reconquest of the Sudan. Then came news, on the Good Friday of 1898, of a considerable victory at the Atbara; and after, for some months, there was almost silence. At last it was gloriously broken. A great battle had been fought and won outside Omdurman, the mushroom capital of the Khalifa, erected opposite the ruins of Khartoum on the other side of the Nile. The Dervishes had attacked with all their force; they had been utterly defeated; and, though the Khalifa and the remnants of his army had got away, his power had evidently been broken for ever. Khartoum was ours, Gordon had been splendidly avenged, and the reign of civilisation in the home of an aggressive barbarism was now assured. Kitchener, who had planned every detail of the business, and had ended it by violating the Mahdi’s tomb and throwing the body of the false prophet (parted from his head) into the Nile, suddenly emerged from the status of a comparatively unmarked man to that of the “greatest living soldier.”

The first fever had hardly died away when excitement, and with it the renown of the successful General, was intensified by the great irony which is summarised in the word “Fashoda.” Kitchener, going forward on the Nile from Omdurman, was met by a small steel rowing-boat, which proved to contain a Senegalese sergeant and two men, charged with a letter from Major Marchand, who had fought his way from the Atlantic to the Upper Nile, and now lay encamped at Fashoda, right on the Cape-to-Cairo line. Major Marchand presented his compliments, congratulated General Kitchener on what he had heard was an uncommonly fine victory, and would be honoured, charmed, and even ravished to welcome him at Fashoda under the shadow of the tricolour.

Here was a pretty kettle of fish, with the prospect of a considerable amount of fat in a truly terrible fire if anything went awry in the cookery. Kitchener had been tested as a soldier; he was now to prove himself as a diplomatist. Many a British officer and gentleman, charged to the teeth with good form, might have started there and then a European war. But Kitchener, whose manners were sometimes sufficiently brusque where his own countrymen were concerned, had very fortunately much tact when dealing with foreigners, and especially when in contact with Frenchmen. He spoke their language not only accurately but with grace and fluency, and it almost seemed as if the use of that idiom dissolved much of the ice which generally abounded in his neighbourhood. During the Great War not his least service was the establishment of thoroughly good relations with the French high command; they not only trusted in him, as one who knew, and knew that they knew, but they liked him. It was not only that they never forgot that he had been a volunteer in the war of 1870, but they discovered in the grim Field-Marshal something more sympathetic than they could find in British officers of ordinarily far more expansive manner. Kitchener, on his part, had no doubt something in excess of the natural interest and friendliness which (other things being equal) most men entertain for foreigners whose language they speak well. He had a real admiration for French qualities in general, a still greater admiration for French military qualities in particular, and an admiration greater still for an individual French soldier so transparently brave and chivalrous as Marchand. “I congratulate you,” he said, in shaking hands with the Major, “on all you have accomplished,” meaning the terrible march across Africa, in which a fifth of Marchand’s little force had perished. “No,” was the French soldier’s reply, “the credit is not to me, but to these soldiers,” pointing to his troops. “Then,” said Kitchener in describing the interview, “then I knew he was a gentleman.”

It was a difficult business, that of getting the gallant Marchand to consent, helpless as he was, to the replacement of the French by the Egyptian flag. But the thing was done, and done in such a way that, though there might be chagrin, there was no hurt of that kind that festers in a proud heart: years after Kitchener and Marchand could meet without either feeling the smallest awkwardness. Indeed, not for the first time, soldiers proved themselves better at the diplomat’s trade than the diplomats themselves. The real peril of Fashoda was due to the professional speechifiers; and the embitterment of Anglo-French relations, which long survived the formal settlement of this affair, might well have been averted had statesmen, comfortably seated in palace-offices in a northern latitude, imitated the courtesy and restraint of two war-worn and nerve-racked men of war, fretted by the hundred little miseries of one of the most detestable regions of tropical Africa.

It was Omdurman and Fashoda that made the Kitchener legend, and Kitchener’s part in the Boer War scarcely added to it. Critics might say that the dispositions at Omdurman were faulty, and that though Kitchener was the prince of military organisers, he was not, and never would be, a great general in the field. The people would not have it. They had made up their mind that he was a great man; they went on thinking he was a great man; and many years later, when behind the scenes every small detractor was sneering at the “Kitchener myth,” the general public suffered no smallest shadow of doubt to creep over its full faith in him. He had carried out a clean job cleanly, winding up by a tremendous and final success a business which had been marked by one tragic failure after another. He had achieved, for less money than he had promised to spend, a complete victory, while others had merely added recklessly to the National Debt while subtracting heavily from the national prestige. The critics might say that Kitchener had much luck, that he profited by the efforts of those who preceded him, that means were available for his campaign which were beyond the reach of others. All this was nothing to the public. They saw a great success, and they honoured the man who had accomplished it, all the more because they had been accustomed to connect with defeat all the place-names in his itinerary of triumph.

But the main point of the whole thing was that summarised in the opening paragraph: “Dervishes, 10,800 killed, 16,000 wounded; British and Egyptians, 47 killed, 342 wounded.” Had Kitchener’s victory been dear in life the whole glamour of the business would have been absent. For the British people at that time took an interest in war rather like a virtuous spinster’s interest in wickedness. They liked to hear about it, to talk about it, to feel the thrill of it. But they did not like it to come too near their own homes. Their idea of a good kind of war was one waged against a barbarous foe on a picturesque far-away terrain; one which would enable the Prime Minister, in proposing the thanks of Parliament to the successful general, to talk about “thin red lines” creeping beside gorges that would appal a Canadian trapper, or scaling mountains which would terrify an Alpine guide, until they had “planted the standard of St. George upon the mountains of Rasselas,” or some equally interesting range. They liked the foe to come on bravely but rather injudiciously, and to be “mown down” by machine-guns that never jammed. They liked him to be easily surprised and bamboozled, and then they paid the highest compliments to his “unavailing heroism”; Mr. Kipling probably compensated him with a poem in cockney dialect. But if, declining himself to be surprised and bamboozled, the barbarian succeeded in surprising and bamboozling our own men, we are very apt to describe the ensuing disaster as a “treacherous massacre.” It was, perhaps, this dislike of unobliging enemies, no less than our unmixed joy over the disasters of any foreign force in similar circumstances, that contributed to the want of affection for us on the Continent. However that may be, it is certain that a great part of the popularity of Omdurman was due to the fact that it was an amazingly cheap victory of discipline and apparatus over barbaric and comparatively ill-equipped valour; and no small degree of Kitchener’s prestige was accounted for by the popular comparison of the tiny cost in life of his great feat with the large outlay, in blood as well as in money, of some of his unsuccessful predecessors. The fact was of enormous importance, both in the South African War and later. People always felt that Kitchener could do things by a kind of magic if they were do-able that way, and were thus reconciled to heavy loss when it arrived to troops for which he had responsibility. It was felt that he had no motive but to get results at the very lowest cost; that he would spare neither himself nor another in pursuing that purpose; and that no influences of any kind—personal, political, or social—would ever be allowed to interfere with his ideals of military economy and efficiency.

The public, as usual, was perfectly right in its instinct in all matters which it was competent to judge. It was less right, of course, when it attempted to appraise the military genius of Kitchener. Yet it was less wrong, probably, than the professed critics who in the Great War concentrated on the inevitable shortcomings of a man past his prime, in an unfamiliar environment, surrounded by politicians, nervous of public opinion in a country with representative institutions, who had to build up from the beginning the immense organisation needed for such an effort as that to which this country was committed. When all is said of these shortcomings, the fact remains that the only British soldier who foresaw the duration of the war, and the means necessary to bring it to a successful conclusion, was one who had spent only a few months in Europe since his early manhood, who had never handled white troops on a great scale, and had had no opportunity of applying himself to those problems which had been the life-long occupation of German and French generals. The marvel was not that Lord Kitchener made mistakes, but that he was able to form so just a judgment of the grand contours of the enormous affair with which he was called at a moment’s notice to deal. Judged only by that vast experiment, the greatness of the man is still apparent. But it would be quite unjust so to judge him. The public instinct was correct in fastening on the campaign that culminated at Omdurman as a supreme illustration of his qualities. They were less those of a great commander in the field than of a patient planner, plotter, and organiser, a super-sapper and miner, the manager of a great military business. From first to last he was always the engineer, the mathematician, and the business man; and if at the last he appeared less a business man than at the first, it was only because he was that kind of business man who must have all the threads in his own hands, and the threads of the last great business were too numerous for any one pair of hands to hold.

It was not so in the Nineties. Then Kitchener had a measurable task and immeasurable energy; he could do everything himself, and anything that he could do himself was well done. One most authentic proof of his greatness was his choice of instruments; “Kitchener’s men” have always shown themselves good for something, and generally good for most things. Another was the manner in which he impressed his personality on all who came near him. It is easy and safe to talk about the absurdity of the “Kitchener myth” in general society; the experience is much more embarrassing when an old officer of Kitchener happens to be present. For the grim man who was so ruthless to incompetence, one might almost add so cruel to misfortune, the man who treated ill-health as a kind of crime, and marriage as a kind of treason, somehow managed to get himself loved. That part of the Kitchener legend which represented him as without heart or bowels was, indeed, false. He was inexorable in business, and in general society he always assumed, partly out of shyness and partly from policy, a defensive armour that was most difficult to penetrate. But at bottom there was not a little geniality in his nature, and among intimates he was often cheerful and sometimes garrulous; the habit grew on him with years, and in most serious times, and in the midst of intensely serious discussions, he would frequently develop a curious irrelevancy and small-talkativeness. At no time did he like to be alone; if he did not talk himself—and sometimes he indulged a mood of strict taciturnity—he liked to have someone to talk to him. And, being an autocrat, he always preferred that the somebody should be one who would not take offence if suddenly snubbed for doing what he was there to do. There are kings who love the society of great lords as near as may be to their own station, and there are kings who prefer for their intimates and confidants men of inferior standing. Lord Kitchener was a potentate of the latter kind, and for the most part the true man was only seen by people who were in effect little more than members of his suite. The chief exceptions were a few favoured generals, and the few men, and the fewer women, who had the privilege of being his friends in general society. With such he could be utterly charming; and he had also a way of getting into the affections of their children: one little girl, now a mother herself, used always to say her prayers at his knee when he was a visitor at her father’s house; and the Grenfell boys were on small-brotherly terms with the grim Field-Marshal. Kitchener, in short, had a very human heart, and a quite human longing for affection. His celibacy was partly a matter of accident and partly of principle: he disliked extremely the idea of a married soldier; he seems to have shared Athos’ view that a dying warrior should cry with his last breath “Vive le roi,” and not murmur, “Adieu, my dear wife.” Thus in South Africa he would allow none of the married officers to be joined by their wives, and once in a general company, on hearing of the marriage of one of his men, he burst into an angry tirade. With such a view of the vocation of soldiering, and with the mere fact of so much of his life being passed in remote places, it is small wonder that his own marrying age went by. But, though in his later years he may not have regretted the lack of a wife, he certainly felt the want of children, and realised somewhat pathetically his own loneliness.

But this gentler side was known to very few indeed, and only guessed by a few more. To the majority of those who met Kitchener, even frequently and in some intimacy, he appeared until the very last years of his life a man of one idea and no emotions. The truth was rather that his emotions were mostly in complete subjection to his will, while the idea exercised a despotic domination over his whole being. There was really something of the old anchorite in this very modern and secular person, and it is not altogether irrelevant to recall that in his early days he was vividly interested in small minutiæ of Church ritual.

The young Kitchener was far from sharing the sentiments of Gilbert’s latitudinarian hero. He would have discussed albs with fervour, and dalmatics with reverence, and would have seen nothing more ridiculous in caring about the size of a chasuble than about the strength of a platoon. He would have argued, or rather felt, that discipline, dogma—in other words, shape, consistency, and fighting unity—were as necessary in affairs of the Spirit as in secular life. In other days and other circumstances he might well have been either a peaceful abbot or the head of an order of religious knights; there was deep in his nature that passion for self-immolation which made the most businesslike people monks, as well as that passion for meticulous order and method which made monks the most businesslike people of their time. His other passions, probably, were not strong; strong or weak, they were wholly under control. He hated incontinence in any form. The effusive youth who called him “Kitchener,” and was met with the cool reply “Perhaps you’d rather use my Christian name,” was not more discouraged than the swearer of oaths or the teller of profane or unseemly anecdotes. To Kitchener might be applied the eulogy of Clarendon on Charles I: “He was so severe an exactor of gravity and reverence in all mention of religion, that he could never endure any light or profane word, with what sharpness of wit soever it was covered; and ... no man durst bring before him any thing that was profane or unclean.” Sir George Arthur has remarked on the mingled astonishment and irritation with which he listened to a questionable performance at Cairo, given on an occasion when official reasons obliged him to be present; and there was something hugely disconcerting in the manner in which he received a jest of doubtful taste made in general society. His attitude was too well known for such a thing to be a possibility among his own intimates.

It has been said that the man who is not afraid to die is lord and master of all other men. Equally true is it to say that the man who is not afraid to live according to his own plan will always dominate those who yield to fashion in opinion, to social modes, or to the weaknesses of their own natures. Kitchener’s peculiar power was due to his immense self-discipline. He could hardly be called, in the real sense, a military genius; Roberts was his superior as an intellectual soldier, and among his own subordinates there were men more richly endowed even in those qualities he really possessed in large measure—the qualities of the organiser which were so signally shown in the long preparations for the triumph, so swift and sure in its final realisation, of Omdurman. But other soldiers were sometimes off duty. Kitchener was never off duty. The moment one task was done he was preparing himself for another; he was that kind of moral athlete who never permits himself a day’s departure from strict training. Practically this rigidity has its dangers; there is such a thing in life, as in sport, as getting stale from over-fitness; and when the final test of Kitchener’s life came it might perhaps have been well for him and for others if he had wasted (as he would have thought it) a little more time during his prime. For, with all his painfully acquired lore, he lacked the full knowledge of men, and in whole departments of things he could only oppose an enormous innocence to people grown old in wile. But in the meantime he gained indefinitely in influence through his almost inhuman absorption in soldiering, his complete indifference to money, society, and everything men prize as soon as their purely material desires have reached saturation point. He received full credit for the qualities which were really his. He was conceded some qualities which, in fact, he did not possess. He was trusted as the final court of appeal on all questions relating to the East, even those affecting parts of the East with which he was really not familiar, for it is our habit to think that a man who has lived in Suez must in some mysterious way know much about Bombay. He was regarded above all as “straight,” and justly so, for, though habituation to Eastern conditions had given him in minor matters some touch of Oriental guile, he was, in all great things, the soul of truth, and in everything the essence of probity. But there were occasions on which his great prestige was something of a disadvantage. It was assumed that on all military and Eastern questions Kitchener must be right and all other men wrong, and that he must be especially right whenever his opinion happened to clash with that of a politician. A good many things might have gone better had not the infallibility of Lord Kitchener become a journalistic dogma, to be disputed only at the cost of excommunication. In the same way the magic of his personality was used to give weight to a certain set of political ideas. It was so used without collusion or privity or consent on his part; all his life he had an almost superstitious terror of politics, and no hint of sympathy with one party or reprobation of another ever crossed his lips. But it is not beyond the ingenuity of politicians to convey an impression without making a statement, and they so contrived matters that a good many people, while honouring him as a soldier and recognising him as a high-minded public servant, watched him with a certain strained attention. It needed the Great War to reveal to the working classes the true nature of the man and the absolute singleness of his aims. Then they were convinced, and he had no heartier admirers than the working men, who honoured his name, and trusted his word, above all other war-lords’.

But though Kitchener was in every sense the farthest removed from a politician, he had many of the qualities of a statesman, and his work at every period of his career (and at no period more than during the Great War) cannot be properly measured solely by his military achievements. We have seen his statesmanship at work at Fashoda, but it had its influence at every stage of his career. If the Kitchener legend, whatever measure of falsity mingled with its truth, was of immense value in sustaining the spirit of England in the great ordeal, it was not less useful in vitalising the Alliance. Frenchmen felt that they had in Kitchener someone who understood the real nature of the vast transaction before them; someone who would not yield to the traditional English conception of Continental war as colony-seizing and island-collecting, but who, on the other hand, knew in his very bones that the thing must be fought out on the main battlefield, and that no showy successes elsewhere would avail against defeat in that sombre theatre. The visit to Paris, in the gloomy days before the Marne, was that of a soldier who understood war on the great scale, and was understood at once by men grown grey in the study of war of that kind. Kitchener’s work at the War Office can never be measured by shells and machine-guns; the greatest part of it was that of a military foreign minister, able to speak a language unknown to a civilian Secretary for Foreign Affairs.

It is this latent quality of statesmanship which makes one wonder whether Lord Kitchener would not have done even greater things for the Empire had it been his lot to spend more time at its heart and less in the outer marches. But his fate was decided partly by his circumstances and partly by his peculiar constitution. He could only expect promotion by taking jobs that nobody else wanted, and he had a horror of cold weather which would have made continuous residence in a northern latitude insupportable to him. Once he got the label of the soldier of the outer Empire it stuck to him, and thus it happened that the Englishman with the broadest military outlook of his time never faced, until he was called to the greatest of all tasks, a military problem of the largest kind. His own view of himself is well known. He looked forward, just before his death, to tasks rather of a statesmanlike than a military kind; and it is permissible to distrust that optimism which professed, when the news of the Hampshire’s loss came, the comfortable belief that he had done his country all the service of which he was capable. For there was much in the man which would assuredly not have been useless in the final liquidation of accounts; and, even had no specific employment been found for his talents, the mere force of his living example would have been valuable. In the presence of one who had shown such large fidelity, such noble disdain of the objects of selfish desire, such self-forgetting devotion to a trust, it would have been more difficult for faction and self-seeking to display themselves unashamed. He is too recently dead for his spirit to work on this generation as it will, doubtless, on men still unborn. But alive he might have reminded the masses that there can be true greatness in great place, and people in great place that true greatness is a matter of a man’s soul and not of his station.

CHAPTER VIII
THE DUKE OF DEVONSHIRE

There are certain things that come to one only in maturity. One is a taste for Jane Austen. Another is a correct sense of the meaning and importance of such men as Spencer Compton Cavendish, Knight of the Garter, eighth Duke of Devonshire, Marquis of Hartington, Earl of Devonshire, Earl of Burlington, Baron Cavendish of Hardwicke, and Baron Cavendish of Keighley.

To a young man in the Nineties the mere fact of the Duke’s importance was obvious enough. Had he not been in politics time out of mind, ever since he was twenty-four? Was not his breach with Mr. Gladstone one of the cardinal facts of modern history? Was he not among the first half-dozen men accorded the distinction of “first person” reports? Was he not cartooned and quoted after the manner of the very greatest? But why? The young fellow of the Nineties saw simply a large dull man, with a large dull way of talking, a man incapable of saying a witty thing, or doing a picturesque thing; and in his haste this young fellow declared that all men were snobs, that the sole secret of the Duke’s influence was his wealth and position, that if he had been born the son of a clerk he would never have risen to be more than a clerk, but, being the son of a great noble, people hastened to find in him qualities which were simply not there.

And in some ways, no doubt, the young fellow was right. In any station Spencer Compton Cavendish would have been something, something real and substantial, something of true human worth, of strong sense, shrewd vision, and rare fidelity. But it is highly probable that, had he been born poor, he would never have been heard of beyond the limits of his parish. For he had few of the qualities, and none of the defects, that make a man rise. No human being was ever more destitute of vanity, which is one great motive of pushfulness. Though his sense of duty made him accept responsibility, he hated it; though he felt compelled to do much work, he detested exertion; utterance in any kind was painful to him; he was quite wanting in surface brilliance and in the quality people call magnetism. Such men do not readily “get on.” They find their groove, and stay in it. They are too much trusted in the positions they actually fill for anybody to be anxious to promote them, while their own laziness, pride, dislike of cultivating superiors, and general capacity of “consuming their own smoke” all conspire to keep them where they are. In most business places one will find men almost indispensable in their special jobs, who are never thought of in connection with a superior job, partly because it would be troublesome to replace them, partly because they are bad courtiers, but chiefly from the sheer difficulty of imagining them elsewhere.

The Duke of Devonshire was a man of this sort. He did not make himself, and he was not exactly made by circumstances; he was there, and the circumstances were so, and a process of adaptation, chiefly unconscious, followed. He might almost be described, politically, as a natural growth—a kind of tree which went through its destined changes of development and decay in accordance with a certain principle, but in obedience to no visible motive. He got himself planted in a certain soil without much consideration on his own part; he took such firm root that he could not unplant himself, though he constantly wished to do so; and thus it arrived that for over fifty years he was the one permanent feature in a changing landscape. The creatures of the hour, the beasts of the political field, gathered under him for shade, support, or convenience, and he gave them what he had to give, almost with the impartiality of a thing inanimate. But, just as the beech-tree is often in close association with a herd of swine, but does not follow the swine when they roam away to an oak, so the Duke remained rooted in the midst of a constantly changing company; he had all sorts of associates, but he did not follow them when they sought fresh woods and pastures new; to the end he remained what he had been from the beginning—the pure Whig. I remember a poor little Liberal Unionist of the Nineties who complained that he had been sadly misrepresented. “It is not I,” he used to say—he was about five feet high, and had a querulous little squeak—“it is not I who have deserted my party; it is my party that has deserted me.” The Duke of Devonshire could at any time have said the same thing without evoking a challenge or even a smile. He did not leave Mr. Gladstone; he merely stayed where he was. He did not leave Mr. Balfour twenty years later; Mr. Balfour took up a new position, and the Duke remained in his. Of all the Liberal Unionists he alone did not suffer “some sea change” as the result of immersion in the Tory flood. Even Mr. Chamberlain was not immune; he did not become a Conservative, but he did become a new kind of Radical. The Duke shed no particle of his old-fashioned Whiggism, with its distrust of the Crown, the Church, and the people, and its intense faith in itself. In 1902 he was still conscious of a dividing line between himself and his Conservative colleagues—a line “imperceptible to the practised eye” of Lord Rosebery. The line was assuredly there, real if not obtruded. Lord Salisbury was still too much of a Carolean theologically and too much of a modernist politically to suit a mind which envisaged Sir Robert Walpole as the ideal occupant of 10, Downing Street, and Dr. Thomas Tusher as the proper tenant of Lambeth.

If this immobility had been the result of mere stupidity the young man of the Nineties would have been justified in his scepticism. But in fact the Duke was by no means stupid. Or, rather, the fact can best be put in positive form. While the least clever of men, he had a quite uncommon gift of true wisdom. He had all the outward marks of dullness. No man was more completely without colour or atmosphere. A rather abnormal carelessness in dress contributed to his conventionality rather than relieved it. He was old-fashioned without a touch of the picturesqueness of the antique, and untidy without the piquancy of Bohemianism. Some of his contemporaries had the interest of a well-ordered “period” room; the Duke gave rather the impression of a furniture broker’s shop full of miscellaneous Victorian mahogany. His beard—though it had a certain subtle character of its own, as just a shade different from the growth of any plebeian, lay or clerical—completed the notion of carelessness without grace and individuality without distinction. His attitudes were angular; when he did not sprawl on a bench or in an arm-chair he leaned up against a pillar or a mantelpiece, and somehow he seemed to take the colour out of the most glowing examples of stuff and stone. His expression was habitually dreary, and if by chance he said he was glad to see you—and very often he did not—you would have had some little difficulty in believing it had you not reflected that “no Cavendish tells a lie,” and that he was a most typical Cavendish in that regard. He suffered from a permanent difficulty of self-expression; the simplest speech caused him torment, and (though he could be the kindest and most considerate of hosts) social chit-chat was scarcely less painful. He was most extraordinarily lazy. He dozed when he could, and yawned when he could not. His yawn was perfectly impartial—he yawned at friends, foes, and himself. Once in the middle of his own Army Estimates the fit came upon him, and he signified in the usual manner his weariness of the whole performance. This yawn was a thing of wonder, so hearty and natural that no question of manners arose. It suggested no affront, even to the most prolix speaker; it was rather a proclamation of privilege, like the wearing of a hat in the House of Commons. It seemed to say, “I am a Duke, and (possibly more to the point) a great gentleman, so that nobody can accuse me of not knowing how to ‘behave.’ But after all what is the use of owning Chatsworth, Devonshire House, all those Eastbourne ground-rents, and I really cannot trouble to think what else, if I cannot be natural? Here I am—heaven alone knows really why—condemned to this intolerable boredom. I go through it, because I feel somehow that I ought. But I claim in return the freedom of not pretending that I find it amusing. Please don’t be offended; I should be sorry if you were. But if you insist on taking offence I shall sleep none the less soundly to-night, or—who knows?—ten minutes hence if the fit takes me.”

It is related of the Duke that he once went to another seat in the House of Lords specially to listen to a speech, and fell asleep there before five minutes had elapsed. He once gave a reply to a noble lord. The noble lord was not satisfied, and made a long speech in order to say so. The Duke fell asleep, but woke automatically (as people do at the end of a sermon) when the voice ceased. Then he began to read his answer a second time, but, suddenly remembering what had already happened, abruptly sat down again without saying another word. And the House (which knew its Duke) was perfectly satisfied.

How the Duke in such circumstances managed to get the right end of any controversial stick must ultimately remain a mystery. But that he did so is a plain fact. For, if a slow thinker, he was a generally clear one, and, if a painful speaker, he made speeches which never lacked matter. His was one of those minds on which sophistry has no effect. He was not incapable of admiring eloquence and ingenuity. His attitude towards Mr. Gladstone was a singular mixture of reverence and something not unlike disdain. So much of Mr. Gladstone was admirable, and yet so much of him simply “would not do for the Duke.” One often sees a shrewd old Hodge listening to the patter of a cheap-jack at a fair. He enjoys the jokes, and has a kind of glee in the dexterity, but he is simply not made to believe in an eighteen-carat gold English lever, jewelled in thirty-seven holes, for twenty-three and six. The Duke never troubled to consider every point; he was content to say that it could not be done at the price, and leave the matter there. And if he would not buy, still less would he consider any proposal to go into the cheap-jack business himself; if anybody wanted the Duke as a colleague it was no use to propose a line in razors made only to sell. The character, of course, has its defects. The Duke was mainly negative in his wisdom. His belief in gold might make him unjust to platinum, but he was infallible in detecting pinchbeck. On things of pure spirit it was useless to consult him, but on any question which could be weighed in the balance of common-sense his judgment sought its fellow.

Hence it became a habit of a large number of people, during a long range of time, to wait till the Duke had declared himself before they made up their own minds. It sometimes took the Duke a long time to declare himself. Where, as in the case of Home Rule, the matter was comparatively simple, no man could be more sharply decisive. It was impossible for him to undergo any process of self-hypnosis such as that of which Mr. Gladstone was occasionally capable; he could not understand the distinction between “war” and “military operations” or between being “surrounded” and being “hemmed in.” In 1885 he had declared himself unalterably against Home Rule, and he saw no reason to say another thing in 1886. But in the matter of Tariff Reform the issue and the man were both more complicated, and plain “Yes” or “No” harder. The Duke was quite sure about Ireland; he was less sure about maintaining Free Trade by reverting at least partially to Protection. He knew Mr. Gladstone to the bottom; no human being had succeeded in knowing Mr. Balfour. He could only confess himself at first “completely puzzled and distracted by all the arguments pro and con Free Trade and Protection.” But, he finally decided, “whichever of them is right, I cannot think that something which is neither, but a little of both, can be right.” In both cases his judgment was an element of great importance, but, while it was of decisive effect in regard to Home Rule, it exerted less influence on the latter controversy. The public judged, as usual, rightly. In the one case Lord Hartington, as a plain and very honest Englishman in close contact with realities, might be trusted to form at least an interim judgment on behalf of plain and honest Englishmen in general. But in the other case the moral factor counted for less, and the intellectual factor for more, and the prolonged puzzlement of the Duke detracted from his influence when he finally decided (with infinite agony) on his course.

The main source of the Duke’s influence was, indeed, the general conviction that, with a masculine but ordinary understanding, he combined perfect disinterestedness and straightforwardness. This faith was not based wholly on the fact that he was a great noble; the middle class might, indeed, have been a little scandalised by the side of him illustrated in the affair of the napkin-ring. The Duke had seen in the paper that somebody had given a certain bride a set of napkin-rings. He worried about the meaning of this until he came across a knowledgeable man, who, he thought, could explain what napkin-rings were. The explanation was given that in a certain class of society people did not use clean napkins for every meal, and that therefore each member of the family kept a distinctive ring. The Duke remained silent for ten minutes. Then he suddenly exclaimed: “Good God!” It was certainly not this kind of aloofness that gave the Duke his power. Nor was it so much to the point that he was placed, by his rank and wealth, far above all vulgar ambitions. Many men as rich and as highly placed have been the objects of sleepless suspicion. Apart from money, there are plenty of temptations open to rank, and wealth is no guarantee of honesty. The Duke enjoyed public confidence in an extraordinary degree because it was so very obvious, not only that he was getting nothing, but that it was impossible for him to get anything out of politics. His yawn, in fact, was his great talisman. Everybody knew that if he had consulted his own tastes he would hardly have stirred beyond his park palings. Everybody knew that he carried out what he believed to be his political duties just as he carried out what he believed to be his social duties, not because he got any pleasure or profit from them, but because the obligations were there and had to be met. It is said that he once invited the Prince of Wales to lunch, and then forgot all about it; the Prince presumably arrived to find Devonshire House fragrant with the ducal equivalent of Irish stew; while His Grace himself had to be summoned by telephone from his club by a terrified major-domo. It was part of the Duke’s strength that such a story could be related of him. The true point was not that he was a great nobleman, and therefore disinterested; it was that he was from every point of view uninterested. It was not simply that he had no financial or social axe to grind; there was no fancy cutlery of the spiritual or intellectual kind which he desired to sharpen. Men do not always ruin their country for a fee; they more often do so for a fad. The Duke was free from all fads, except Whiggism. He had a certain honourable interest in education. He nourished, in his dry and secretive way, a distinct love of the arts in general and of certain departments in literature. But on all public questions he was able to bring his faculties, such as they were—and it was particularly easy to rate them too lowly—without subjective disturbance; it may almost be said that he thought in vacuo.

Moreover, he was in essence a very ordinary Englishman. With an effort he might think of himself as a Briton, or as a citizen of the British Empire. But his inner mind knew nothing of Acts of Union; he was English and nothing but English. And being very English, it followed that he cared a great deal about truth and very little about logic, and that he was much more inclined to follow the beaten track than to initiate. People felt that he was a safe man, who would not go far, but therefore could not go far wrong. He once described himself, rather pathetically, as “the brake on the wheel.” It is a humble, but on occasion a useful, function, and the sheer unimaginativeness of the man was time and time again an asset to his country. But such a character arouses no great enthusiasm, and if the Duke was trusted without limit, he was neither a popular idol nor the hero of a small circle. He went his way in a certain detachment, never alone but always a little lonely. Even in his own houses there was a tendency to regard him as something to gather round instead of someone to talk to. He might almost be said to fulfil the function of the dining-table rather than of the host.

The position had its compensations. The Duke was the chartered libertine of his time. He could go poaching where others could not look over the hedge. Lord Rosebery’s Derby victories caused scandal among the virtuous of his party. Nobody troubled about the Duke’s bets or race-horses. He played bridge for high points, but nobody thought of him as a gambler. He used emphatic adjectives, without the reproach attaching to the swearer of profane oaths. It may be an exaggeration to say that whatever the Duke did was right. But nobody troubled about his doing wrong; no doubt because people felt that it would not be very much wrong, after all. And in this their judgment was sufficiently sound. The man was in no sense a saint or a hero. He never said or did a thing to make a single man’s pulse beat quicker. He was incapable of the highest in any kind. But his character, however prosaic, was based on a foundation of granitic firmness. If not a great man, he was at least a true and honest one.

CHAPTER IX
ARCHBISHOP TEMPLE

It is related of Frederick Temple, when he was Bishop of London, that he offered two shillings to a cabman who had brought him from somewhere near Piccadilly to Fulham Palace. The cabman looked at the Bishop more in sorrow than in anger. “Would St. Porl,” he asked, “if he were alive now, treat a poor man like that?” “No,” said Temple, “if St. Paul were alive he would be at Lambeth, and the fare there is only a shilling.”

The wit and the philosophy were equally characteristic of the gnarled old man who, at a time of life when most people are fit only for the chimney corner, was still regarded as the strongest prelate on the Bench. Wit, the wit of the peasant rather than of the courtier—and there is no more authentic variety—Dr. Temple had in full measure; there was something reminiscent of Swift in the homely shrewdness of his judgments, and in the terse vigour with which he expressed them. The peasant predominated also in his philosophy; the Rugby boy who delivered the famous opinion that he was “a beast, but a just beast,” was probably not conscious how very right the description was. Temple had eminently the peasant’s sense of what was due from as well as to him. He was spiritual kinsman to that Scottish gardener in Mr. Chesterton’s tale who, being bequeathed “all the gold of the Ogilvies,” took it all, to the very stopping in the testator’s teeth, but left everything else. That manner which many found repellent was not the manner of a really harsh man; Temple could feel deeply, and the sobs that convulsed him when he heard of Archbishop Benson’s sudden death were the authentic heralds of a warm heart. But he had Dr. Johnson’s impatience of “foppish complaints,” of unmeaning compliments, of the little graces that matter so much with the ordinary run of men and women. Of work well and truly done he was sufficiently appreciative, but only sufficiently; after all, good work was the thing to expect, and why make a fuss about it? When people who had no right expressed appreciation of himself he snapped savagely. A courtly Rector once expressed the fear that his lordship must be very tired after such long and self-sacrificing exertions. “Not more tired than a man ought to be,” barked Temple. A careful Vicar remonstrated with him for standing so long bare-headed under a blazing sun. “My skull is thicker than yours,” was the only reply. Above all, he hated anything suggesting professional “gush.” At the laying of the foundation-stone of a new church a clergyman with tendencies that way remarked on the pleasure it must be to him to take part in ceremonies so eloquent of the extending scope of the Church in his diocese. “Not at all,” retorted Temple, “at these affairs I get nothing but cold lamb and ‘The Church’s One Foundation,’ and I’m tired of both.” Though a connoisseur in vintages, he gave up the use of wine simply in order to make easier his task as a temperance-worker; but this self-immolation (and he would have snarled at anybody who praised it as such) made him only the more acid at the expense of men who seemed to him to talk exaggerated nonsense about teetotalism as the foundation of all the virtues.

The truth was that Temple, though of good blood, was himself half a peasant, and was full of that impatience with any kind of pretence which comes of close contact with the soil. He had all the peasant’s pride, together with all the peasant’s contempt for what they call in the country “mucky pride.” Himself master of a pure and masculine style, he detested all floridity of speech. To the end of his life his manners were a little rustic, and he retained that sense of economy (having no necessary relation to meanness) which is inborn in most country people above the station of the labourer and below that of the landlord; when Primate of All England he munched his bun and sipped his milk at a tea-shop with the more satisfaction for the consciousness that they cost only twopence; the “tip” he would omit. Curiously enough, this most English of men was born on soil always Hellenic, and now officially Greek. Thirteenth of the fifteen children of an infantry officer who had been appointed Resident of Santa Maura, one of the Ionian Isles, Temple grew up to speak modern Greek and Italian as fluently as his mother tongue. His father, able and upright, but of explosive temper, came originally from the North Country, and belonged to a branch of that Temple family which, first made illustrious by the husband of Dorothy Osborne and the patron of Swift, has given so many statesmen to England. The mother of the future Archbishop was a Cornish woman by blood and a Puritan by habit and tradition, frugal, pious, authoritative, and immensely capable. She taught Frederick till he was twelve; and, though she knew no Latin, and had no notion of the low cunning of Euclid, she managed to give him a very fair grounding in these and other subjects. The only drawback of this queer kind of instruction was that the boy was left to his own devices in the matter of quantities, and years afterwards the masters at Blundell’s were horrified by his barbaric pronunciation of the polished tongue of Virgil. After his retirement from the Ionian Islands, the paternal Temple bought a small farm in Devonshire, but he could not make it pay, and was forced to take a small appointment in West Africa, where he died. His widow did her best with the farm and a small pension, and young Temple learned how to “muck out” pigsties, to handle stock, and, above all, to plough; years after he could boast that he could draw as straight a furrow as any man in Cornwall, and when as an undergraduate he applied for admission to a Chartist meeting he was allowed to pass the barrier on the testimony of his hands; they were those of an indubitable manual worker.

Mere hard work and hard living, however, fail to embitter a lad of healthy mind and body who is conscious of a creditable past and ambitious of a better future. Temple could bear with stoicism the regimen of dry bread which the poverty of the family compelled. The only severe wound was to his pride. “I think the thing that pinched me most,” said Temple long afterwards, “was to wear patched clothes and patched shoes.” But even this does not seem to have weighed much; his character was sturdy and his spirits were high; and the picture we have of him at Blundell’s is by no means that of the self-conscious poor scholar. Not only was he a hearty player and fighter, but (on the authority of the head-master) “the most impudent boy that ever lived”; and the abounding health of his mind is proved by his detestation of Swiss Family Robinson—“a hateful book,” he calls it, “the liars were so lucky.” At Balliol, where he went with a scholarship, life was hard; he had no fire in his room even in the depth of winter, and was known to read under the light of the hall lamp because he had no oil for his own. The Tractarian movement was then at its climax; Newman was preaching the last of his sermons at St. Mary’s before his conversion to the ancient Church. But Temple seems to have kept his head surprisingly amid all this ferment; he had in truth, throughout life, something of that calm outlook on religion which struck young Esmond in Master Thomas Tusher. He believed in Christianity much as a sound business man believes in double entry, but with conviction there was no emotion. No man dreamed fewer dreams, partly, no doubt, because few men did harder work; work kills dreaming, for good as well as for ill. Outwardly there was little to distinguish Temple from those great pagans of the eighteenth century who nearly made the Church in England what the Church in Ireland actually became. But he had somewhere hidden under the harsh husk of rationalism a little of that wistfulness which one notes in so many of the nineteenth-century clergy; the thing is best described by referring to Kingsley’s anxiety to be with the earliest authorities in theology and the latest authorities in science. In his earlier life, naturally enough, the tendency to modernism was most marked. Temple’s orthodoxy was called into question over his contribution to Essays and Reviews, but there seems no reason to suppose that he departed far from the straight path, and those who have survived to hear most of the great Christian dogmas attacked in conspicuous Church pulpits find inexplicable on purely doctrinal grounds the storm which broke when Mr. Gladstone offered Temple the See of Exeter.

In a wider sense, perhaps, there was a more rational basis for the outcry. For Temple, with all his good and great qualities, was too little of the mystic to appeal to those who regarded the Church as something above and beyond a useful (or even indispensable) organisation. His sense of professional duty was high, but his mind was eminently that of a practical man of affairs, and he would probably have acted more wisely, in other interests as well as his own, if he had remained in the scholastic work to which the earlier part of his life was devoted. When he went to Exeter Temple had behind him a great record as an educational bureaucrat, and a still greater record as head-master of Rugby. But he had never served as a parish priest; his disposition was aloof, his temper autocratic, his manner rugged, his voice harsh and rasping; he had little imagination, and the quality of his mind fitted him more for politics, for high finance, for law, or even for soldiering than for the duties of a Christian high priest. A great spiritual leader in the full sense Temple could never have been. But he “made good” as a Bishop as he had “made good” as a head-master, and in much the same way. His diocese became a well-managed school, and his clergy were put in their places much like the boys of Rugby; some, perhaps, regarded him as a “beast,” none could call him other than a “just beast” and an energetic one. With the laity he had a certain popularity, partly because he was severe on any sacerdotal eccentricities that annoyed them, partly because with ordinary people he was more prone to unbend than with his professional brethren. He was at his very easiest in dealing with boys.

The translation to London, after fifteen years in the West, came in the natural course of events, and the Nineties found Temple well established at Fulham. He was now an old man, but his power of work was as little diminished as the angularity of his character. In a single year he would answer about ten thousand letters, perhaps a third of them in his own hand; the meetings he attended averaged more than one a day; he held seventy or eighty confirmations and ordained a hundred and fifty priests annually, and yet found time for services and addresses for nearly every day of the year. The masculine strength of his mind, the beautiful simplicity of his life, won admiration, but Archbishop Benson had often to deplore the want of that “little more” which would have been so much in his old friend and ex-principal. “He will not say or do,” he laments, at the time of the dockers’ strike, “one thing with the idea that men should think well of him.” “It is very painful,” he says again, in 1891, “very painful, to see the Lords so unappreciative of the Bishop of London—the strongest man nearly in the House, the clearest, the highest-toned, the most deeply sympathetic, the clearest in principle—yet because his voice is a little harsh and his accent a little provincial (though of what province it is hard to say), and his figure square and his hair a little rough, and because all this sets off the idea of his independence, he is not listened to at all by the cold, kindly, worldly-wise, gallant, landowning powers.” The Archbishop was a little cross because during the dockers’ strike Cardinal Manning managed to figure much more largely than Temple in the public eye. But this was something like blaming Darwin because he was not Sir Henry Irving. Temple was Temple, and Manning was Manning; and, if Manning was wise to be always Manning, Temple was certainly wise to be always Temple. A histrionic or diplomatic Temple is something from which the very imagination recoils. And, after all, the gentle Archbishop’s repinings were hardly justified. The kind of worth which Temple represented rarely wins enthusiasm, but it seldom fails to gain respect. To suggest that Temple made any real impression on the great pagan capital would be absurd; like everybody else who has been called for generations to the See of London he was mocked by the gigantic hopelessness of his task. Before London can be made Christian it must be made human, and, though Londoners remain very human, London had long ceased to be so. “London,” says an admirer, “expected in Temple a man of grit and steel, and so it found him.” London, of course, expected nothing, and was in no way disappointed; it was little more concerned with his coming than with the appointment of a new magistrate at Bow Street, and little more concerned with his departure than with the retirement of a Lord Mayor. To London as London—London, just as ignorant of the men who make its laws as of the men who tear up its pavements—Temple was exactly nothing. To a great many people in London he was a name, and to a great many more a character. To only a tiny fraction of London was he anything else. But here, as at Exeter, he “made good” in the narrower sense. He organised and energised, wisely stirred up some dogs which had slept in his predecessor’s time, still more wisely administered soothing syrup to other dogs too emphatically awake, put down his foot in some small matters, kept it discreetly poised in some big ones, and imparted to all who worked under him something of his own single-mindedness and passion for work.

He was seventy-six when he removed to Lambeth, and could save a shilling on his cab fare. “I have still five years’ work in me,” he said to a friend after he had accepted Lord Salisbury’s offer of the Primacy, and the forecast was almost exact; he died before he had completed his sixth year as Archbishop. The work was hardly new to him; for years he had been Archbishop Benson’s chief adviser, and the change was more one of form than of substance. The duties of the highest ecclesiastical office were carried through in the same spirit as those which had gone before; in spite of failing powers the indomitable old man did all that presented itself as his proper work, and, like the patron of Gil Blas, refused to recognise that the same Time which had now reduced him to a rebellious invalidism had had some effect on his sturdy intelligence. He outlived both the century and the great Queen; it actually fell to him, born under George IV, to crown Edward VII, and, like Chatham, he was addressing the House of Lords when he sank under the blow which within a few days ended his life.

On the broad current of the national life at the beginning of a bustling new reign, the news of his death caused but a momentary ripple. But far outside the limits of his own Church and circle there were not wanting men who felt that a figure had been removed that left none to vie with it in its rugged and lonely majesty. It was not a time of popularity for the typical Victorian virtues. It stood to the age that had passed somewhat as the Regency did to the last phase of the reign of Louis XIV. But those who read at the close of 1902 the record of the full and fine life that had begun eighty-one years earlier could only admit that the age must have been great in which Temple after all never reached quite the first rank.