He did not care for the play, for music, for pictures, or for literature, excepting when literature bore upon the work in hand. He did not care for society, for sport, for games of any kind. And so he was a mystery to more countries than one. He was easily bored; the ordinary life of politics bored him, his followers bored him; it often bored him to make a speech. His power was in his set purpose, his concentration upon it, his absolute disinterestedness. Save in one instance, he ground no axe and was not the cause of axe-grinding by others.
Although he was not an orator, he could and did put a case plainly, strongly, indeed with very great strength. He was cool when it paid to be cool, vigorous when vigour was required; he was seldom impassioned. When he was angriest he was least stirred. Internally he might rage, as when under general attack, when the assailants were, in a double sense, offensive, but outwardly he would be calm and pale. You would know when he felt the fiercest stress, not by his voice nor by his actions, but by his pallor. It was only in the last months of his life that he gave his temper free rein, let himself go, fiercely lashed his opponents, hitherto his partisans. There was something of revenge in this, of resentful wrath long pent up. Who shall say it was not justified, or that it was unnatural?
What he would have been as an administrator we have no means of knowing. What he would have been as the leader of an Irish parliament we may at least imagine. He had always been in Opposition. What he would have been in power we may guess but never know. But his lot would not have been enviable. It was never enviable. His death, in 1891, was a happy release.
CHAPTER XVII
"LE BRAV' GÉNÉRAL"
Who was Boulanger?
At the Cheshire Cheese, a year before the war, a young Fleet Streeter asked the question. He had heard some of us spinning yarns. But the name of Boulanger meant nothing to him. The world was created in the year he came to Fleet Street, say in 1908.
There are times when I feel it necessary to apologise for writing of the days of antiquity. There will certainly be some one to exclaim, when he sees the heading of this chapter, "Why drag Boulanger into London Days?"