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.”
CHAPTER IV
MR. GLADSTONE
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.