A man like Earl Spencer is, therefore, not merely rare in present-day politics; he is almost unknown. The Peers who still take an interest in the affairs of the nation are not territorial, but rather urban and even suburban Peers. That, as in the case of Lord Curzon, they may occasionally be able to boast great descent is not to the point; their tastes are those of the town and not of the shire. They are not likely, like Walpole, to open their huntsman’s or gamekeeper’s letters before attending to official correspondence. It is true that the sort of man Earl Spencer was—and he was once the ordinary type of great lord in politics—is still to be found, but you shall hardly find him in affairs. And he has, perhaps, a little coarsened; he has grown too horsey, and lost his old taste for things of the mind. Earl Spencer was Master of the Pytchley, and astonished John Morley by the zest with which he set out on a fourteen-mile drive to the meet on a pouring wet morning, after being up half the night talking politics. But he was also the owner of a great library which he was perfectly able to appreciate—a library with which he parted, not in order to make money, but simply because he felt that such priceless books should be at the public disposal.
The great Whig nobles of a former generation were, even the greatest of them, by no means beyond criticism. They often took a selfish view of public questions. They often lacked imagination and sympathy. They were many of them most complacent pagans. Most were quite horribly calm over things like the Irish famine and the industrial shames of Great Britain. But it is not easy to point to any age or country which afforded better examples than the best of them of the cultivated mind in the sound body, of powers mental and physical carried to their highest pitch of development, of refined virility and calm strength. And of the type Earl Spencer was not the least worthy representative.
CHAPTER XXIII
SIR H. M. STANLEY
Sir Henry Morton Stanley made a double appeal to the imagination of the early Nineties. He represented both the old romance of adventurous travel and the new romance of mechanical efficiency. It was his luck to do considerable things exactly at the time when exploration had become scientific, but had not ceased to be picturesque. A generation before there was glamour, but little good business, in the conquest of the wild; on the whole the betting was decidedly on the wild. A generation later the glamour had largely departed, though the business was very good business indeed. But in the high and palmy days of Stanley the explorer had the best of both worlds. He was admired as a disinterested knight errant, and rewarded handsomely for not being one.
To-day the public is a little cynical on the whole subject. It is not so much that the world has grown smaller; the world is still a very large place. It is not so much that danger has been eliminated; it has in some ways been notably increased. But the very completeness of a modern exploration boom defeats part of its purpose. So far as it sets out to make the restless hero an efficient money-maker for himself and others it generally succeeds mightily. So far as it sets out to make the restless hero a demigod it invariably fails; it makes him, instead, something very like a bore. The public reads all about book rights, serial rights, cinema rights, oxy-hydrogen lecture rights. It reads all about the restless hero’s wife, the restless hero’s child, the restless hero’s mother, the restless hero’s schoolmaster, until it begins to be thoroughly tired with the restless hero even before he has started for the North Pole or the South, for some unpleasant range of mountains or some still more unpleasant expanse of swamps. This fatigue, of course, does not prevent much enthusiasm when the restless hero returns, particularly if he fails interestingly to do what he said he was going to do; the public is apt to be calmer if he succeeds to the foot of the letter. This enthusiasm means nothing in particular. The public will always consent to be worked up into a due state of frenzy over a returning hero; merely the chance of a “rag” is for great numbers of mysteriously constituted people too precious to miss. But the restless hero will deceive himself if he takes this worship too seriously; the public will equally worship any American cinema actor. Neither the hero nor the cinema actor, however, will be allowed to become, as of old, the “lion of the season.” The modern public may be silly in choosing its idols. It shows common sense in throwing them aside the very moment they cease to amuse.
In the Nineties there was already visible a good deal of this modern tendency to get crazes very badly and tire of them very quickly. But the “lion of the season” still existed, and Stanley, on his return from the Emin Pasha relief expedition, was a lion indeed. It is curious, at this time of day, to recall the origin of this, the last of Stanley’s great marches through the African wild. One Edouard Schnitzer, known as Emin Pasha, had been stranded in Equatorial Africa after the capture of Khartoum by the Mahdi. Why any large body of Englishmen should have been interested in this man it is not easy to say. But towards the end of 1886 there was a considerable agitation for an expedition to discover the fate of Emin, and (if he proved to be alive) to rescue him. Who better for this task than Stanley, “the man who found Livingstone”? There was no better-known story than that of Stanley and Livingstone. Every child was familiar with the woodcut of two men—one in a sun-helmet, the other in a cap—each with his adoring bevy of blacks, shaking hands with each other; underneath was printed Stanley’s “Dr. Livingstone, I presume.” Every magazine reader of more mature years knew the whole story—how James Gordon Bennett, of the New York Herald, “a tall, fierce-eyed, and imperious-looking young man,” saw Stanley in Paris, and told him to “find Livingstone.” Expenses? “Never mind about expenses. When you have spent your first ten thousand, draw on me for another ten thousand. When that is gone, draw on me for another; when that is gone, draw on me for another; draw what you like, but find Livingstone.” That was the story in its perfect dramatic form; the real story was a little different. Bennett told Stanley to go, but no terms were actually settled, and the explorer, who had already “made good” as a newspaper correspondent for Bennett in Abyssinia, found no money for him at Zanzibar, and had actually to contract a loan from the United States Consul there. But naturally the ideal account of the transaction obtained full currency. The nineteenth century had a pathetic faith in its Press, and even in the American Press; and it revelled in the vision of one strong, silent man, by the power of a mighty banking account, hurling a second strong, silent man across a dark continent to the succour of a third strong, silent man. These things no longer thrill; there are so many men now still stronger and more silent, so many banking accounts still more mighty. But to Victorian civilisation the romance of millionaire whims was yet enchanting; and James Gordon Bennett, though he persisted in living to be an oddity, never quite lost the splendour of his “find Livingstone” heroism.
As for Stanley himself, the expedition covered him with enduring glory. Every British boy born in the late Sixties and Seventies was familiar with his haggard but resolute features, and knew by heart the singular story of his life. It was the kind of story that impresses itself indelibly on the imagination of youth. Stanley’s name, of course, came to him only in mature life. He was born John Rowlands, the son of a farmer near Denbigh. His father he never knew; during his childhood he only saw his mother once, in the workhouse of St. Asaph, whither she had come with two other of her children; she would not recognise him, and when, after his first return from America, he paid her a visit, it was only to meet with a cold repulse. John Rowlands had been left as an infant in charge of his grandfather, Moses Parry, then living within the precincts of Denbigh Castle. On the death of this old man he was transferred to the care of an ancient couple, two of his uncles guaranteeing a maintenance allowance of five shillings a week. This at last failed, and the child was taken to the St. Asaph Union Workhouse; he was then in his sixth year. Young Rowlands in these dismal surroundings suffered all the pangs possible to a boy of keen sensibilities and strong natural affections who finds himself the victim, not only of privation and humiliation, but of actual tyranny. His schoolmaster was a one-handed monster named Francis, who seems to have been as bad as anybody in Dickens. “No Greek helot or dark slave,” says Stanley in his Autobiography, “ever underwent discipline as the boys of St. Asaph under the heavy, masterful hand of James Francis. The ready back-slap in the face, the stunning clout over the ear, the strong blow with the open palm on alternate cheeks, which knocked our senses into confusion, were so frequent that it was a marvel that we ever recovered them again. Whatever might be the nature of the offence, or merely because his irritable mood required vent, our poor heads were cuffed and slapped and pounded until we were speechless and streaming with blood. But, though a tremendously rough and reckless striker with his fist or hand, such blows were preferable to deliberate punishment with the birch, ruler, or cane, which with cool malice he inflicted.... If a series of errors were discovered in our lessons, then a vindictive scourging of the offender followed until he was exhausted or our lacerated bodies could bear no more.”
It is a testimony to the toughness of child nature, though none to the management of this brutal institution, that of Stanley’s thirty school-fellows one lived to be a wealthy merchant, another to be a clergyman, a third to be a colonial lawyer, and a fourth to become a man of large fortune overseas. But the iron entered deeply into young Rowlands’ soul, and the most constant motive in his life was to obliterate the stigma of pauperism. His connection with the workhouse abruptly terminated when he was about fifteen. He turned on the brutal master, gave him a severe thrashing, ran away, got first a place as a pupil teacher, then worked as a farm-boy, a haberdasher’s boy, and a butcher’s boy, until at last, at Liverpool, he obtained a job on an American sailing-ship. At New Orleans, tired of the brutality he had experienced in a voyage of eighty-three days, he ran away from the ship, and the same day chanced across the man who was to become his adopted father, a Mr. Stanley, who, once some sort of minister, was now a commercial traveller. No more striking tribute has ever been paid to the influence of American institutions than that of the ex-workhouse lad from England. “The people I passed,” he says, “appeared to me nobler than any I had seen. They had a swing of the body wholly un-English, and their facial expressions differed from those I had been accustomed to. I strove to give a name to what was so unusual. Now, of course, I know that it was the sense of equality and independence that made each face so different from what I had seen in Liverpool. These people knew no master, and had no more awe of their employers than they had of their fellow-employees.” At the same time he could not help feeling “a little contempt” for the extreme touchiness which was the defect of these high qualities. In a few weeks he had himself acquired a good deal of the American spirit; the servile taint was eradicated; and the temper and aptitudes which had been so long suppressed expanded in the “felicities of freedom.”