Mr. Stanley soon after lost his wife—whom young Rowlands describes as having taught him “the immense distance between a lady and a mere woman.” This bereavement induced him to adopt the young Englishman, and he performed the ceremony in due form, filling a basin with water and baptizing the erstwhile John Rowlands as Henry Morton Stanley. “The golden period of my life,” says Stanley, “began from that supreme moment.” For the first time in his life he had a proper outfit of clothes, and was introduced to the amenities of civilised life. But his adopted father did not long survive, and in the meantime the Civil War, in which Stanley saw service on both sides, had broken out. When peace was declared, Stanley, who had suffered extraordinary vicissitudes of fortune, took advantage of a chance introduction to the New York Press to embark on the career of free-lance journalism. His great chance as a war correspondent came with the Abyssinian War. Gordon Bennett thought American interest in Abyssinia too slight to justify the expense of a special correspondent, but agreed to pay for any matter accepted if Stanley cared to defray his own charges. Stanley agreed to this discouraging proposal, and by good luck and management gave the New York Herald the first news of the capture of Magdala and the fall of King Theodore. The Livingstone adventure followed, and he was a made man. Livingstone, when found, was content to remain where he was, and there were some wicked people who suggested that so far from Stanley discovering Livingstone, it was Livingstone who discovered Stanley. But, though the wound of such injurious suggestion rankled for many years, Stanley fully established himself both with the geographers and the general public. His expedition across Africa in 1870—he had just before accompanied Sir Garnet Wolseley on the Ashanti campaign—raised, however, some controversy as to his methods; he was charged with harshness to his men, with keeping aloof from his officers, and with employing slaves. Such criticisms, which had more or less followed all Stanley’s feats, were specially loud after the first enthusiasm over the success of the Emin Pasha expedition had died down. It was successful in much the same sense as the finding of Livingstone. Emin Pasha was found, but he did not at first want to be rescued; and when, a little later, he had trouble with his Egyptian officers and elected to return with Stanley to the coast, he promptly went over to the Germans, whose service he entered. This fact, the other fact that Stanley failed to see any fault in Emin’s conduct, and the further fact of the massacre of Stanley’s rearguard, which he had virtually abandoned in order to push on to Emin, rapidly cooled the great explorer’s popularity. There soon began a bitter controversy over the fate of the rearguard. Stanley, in attacking his critics, assailed the memory of Major Barttelot, who had been left in charge of the ill-fated party. His critics retorted with a charge of carelessness and mismanagement, and the effect of this wrangle was to throw a good deal of light on Stanley’s methods.
The natives of the Lower Congo gave him a name which signified “Breaker of Rocks,” and in doing so proved themselves no mean judges of character. Stanley was not a cruel man nor an unprincipled, and Sir Garnet Wolseley has spoken of his high courage and unruffled calm in positions of danger. But he was not in the position of a soldier in charge of a military expedition; he acted only occasionally in a quasi-military capacity; more often he travelled as a civilian, and sometimes as in every sense a private person. This circumstance he seems to have overlooked. “My methods,” he said, in expressing the hope that it would be his to follow Livingstone in opening up Africa to the “shining light of Christianity,” “will not be Livingstone’s. Each man has his own way. His, I think, had its defects, though the old man personally had been almost Christ-like for goodness, patience, and self-sacrifice. The selfish and wooden-headed world requires mastering as well as loving charity; for man is a composite of the spiritual and earthly.” We have here the sharp contrast between the earlier and later nineteenth-century schools of exploration, the school of the gospel and the school of the gatling gun. Stanley had his own conception of religion; in his way he was a decidedly pious man; his workhouse wretchedness had inclined him to seek the Father of the fatherless; he had resumed in later life the prayerful habits of his boyhood, and he devoted some considerable time in his first trans-African tour to converting a ruling chief to Christianity. But there was more of Calvin than of Christ in his faith, and more of the Old Testament than the New.
With the completion of the Emin Pasha expedition he retired on his laurels, married, and went into politics. But, though after a first unsuccessful attempt he got himself returned for North Lambeth, he quickly found how hard is the political path of an elderly man who has achieved distinction in other walks. He could not get into Parliamentary ways, and even when he spoke on subjects he perfectly understood he had the usual vice of the “man on the spot.” He could not help lecturing, and lecturing is one of the things the House of Commons will not tolerate. If the House did not think too well of him, he certainly thought exceedingly ill of the House. He describes it as “a gigantic apparatus for frittering away energy and time.” No politician claimed his undiluted admiration; curiously enough, Mr. (now Lord) Haldane came nearest to his notion of a capable and earnest man. It was the old quarrel of the man of action with the place of talk—a matter on which, as on most, there are things to be said on both sides.
One curious thing may be recalled concerning him. He was often to be seen at public dinners. But nobody ever saw him eat anything; every dish went away untasted.
CHAPTER XXIV
JUSTIN McCARTHY
I first met Justin McCarthy in the schoolroom of a little Gloucestershire village. It was during the short-lived “union of hearts” between the General Election of 1886 and the general upset which followed the Parnell divorce case. Justin McCarthy was appearing on the platform of a popular county member of that time, one Arthur Brend Winterbotham, a fine specimen of the more hearty type of middle-class Liberal. Winterbotham had the reputation of a shrewd man of business; he was a Stroud Valley weaver in a highly comfortable way. But on the platform one would imagine that he had no thought but for the People—“the People, Lord, the People, not Crowns, not Kings, but Men”; to use one of his favourite quotations. In politics he was a perfect Lawrence Boythorne of a man, irresistible in his frank good-humour; his silence was one expansive smile, and his speaking one melodious roar. His strong and splendid voice had a wonderful trick of falling when he spoke of the tears Liberalism intended to dry if it could only get hold of an official pocket-handkerchief; it vibrated with splendid scorn when he exposed the democratic pretences of the Tories. He was never more effective than when reading a newspaper extract; he seemed to be able to impart the dignity of Isaiah to something in the Daily News. To hear him quote an enemy’s speech, and add, “‘Loud cheers,’ gentlemen! The newspaper says ‘loud cheers’—but were they the cheers of agricultural labourers?” was a liberal education in platform style. And each of his chins—he had a number—was worth hundreds of votes.
JUSTIN McCARTHY.