When the hardest is said of him, there remains so much to respect and like that he should be safe from those whom he has described as “the body-snatchers of history, who dig up dead reputations for malignant dissection.”
CHAPTER III
CECIL RHODES
The Nineties were the high and palmy days of the great Randlords and the “Kaffir Circus.” The romance of the time was expressed, perhaps better than in the verse of Mr. Kipling, by a song then popular about “sailing away” and “coming back a millionaire.” There was a certain virtue even in sailing away; it denoted contempt for the petty dullness of the British Isles, and to be contemptuous of the home of the race was then the mark of extreme patriotism. But most admirable of all was to come back a millionaire. The notion of snatching rich loot from remote places, and spending it in London, was intensely gratifying, even to people from whom one would naturally look for less simplicity. I remember hearing a certain great Peer of that day confess in public that he saw no future for England except as a sort of lounge and pleasure garden for those who had gathered immense wealth in the outer Empire. The more energetic sons of these islands, he argued, would always tend to sail away, and we might reasonably pray that a fair proportion would come back millionaires. The less enterprising, trained to minister to every want and whim of these conquerors, in the capacity of footmen, gardeners, gamekeepers, entertainers, and artificers in every kind, material and intellectual, would live in docile and contented servitude on wealth created overseas.
C. J. Rhodes
The curious malady of vision, of which this is an extreme example, had many victims in the latest years of the nineteenth century. During the years between the two Jubilees of Queen Victoria the eyes of a great part of the nation were at the ends of the earth. Johannesburg seemed immensely nearer to London than any English town, and the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway sounded more outlandish than the Canadian Pacific. It was the time of Consols at 114, and British pigs at what the dealer would give for them. There was an immense deal of money seeking investment, and unable, in the conditions then existing, to obtain profitable employment at home. So the millions which could not be found to cultivate the land of the Home Counties were poured out like water to finance any plausible African scheme; and our public men seemed to anticipate, not altogether without satisfaction, the time when Kent and Sussex would be to the millionaires of the Empire what Inverness and Sutherlandshire already were to the rich of Great Britain. The gold fever raged strongly. “Deeps” and “Fonteins” were the staple of conversation in all sorts of circles; if one went to the theatre the chances were that the drop-scene would display in illuminated figures the closing prices of Rand securities; and everybody who passed down Park Lane was reminded, by a certain house sprawling with naked nymphs and cupids, that the shortest way from Whitechapel to Mayfair crossed and recrossed the Equator.
It is necessary to recall this atmosphere, in which even the figure of Barney Barnato seemed invested with something of the glamour of Drake and Raleigh, to understand the place occupied by Cecil John Rhodes in the life of the Nineties. If mere swollen gamblers seemed, in the Gibbonian phrase, to “display the awful majesty of the hero,” it was natural that a man very much more than a gambler, a man with a large share of the heroic, should fire the imagination of his contemporaries. Even to-day, when we see Rhodes in a dry light, we are conscious of a quality which gives him admittance to that small and select brotherhood we agree to call great; in the full blaze of his prestige it was indeed a steady eye which could avoid being dazzled by the splendour of him. To the ordinary non-critical man of that time, his very faults, as many now esteem them, contributed to the fascination he exercised. As a nation we may be somewhat prone—though it would seem more prudent to write in the past tense—to the “unctuous rectitude” with which Rhodes sneeringly credited us. But we have always a weakness for the strong man who shows his strength by smashing the Ten Commandments, so long as he satisfies us in his observances of all the taboos and ordinances contained in that greater table of the law which we call “cricket.” Rhodes let it be known that he thought little of the Decalogue. But he succeeded in spreading the faith that he always played “cricket.” Thus a legend arose concerning him which was not quite like the truth. He appeared to his contemporaries as a compound of the qualities we like to think specially English. He was admired for a recklessness which was certainly not part of his character, and for a frankness which did not always distinguish him. In any contest between Rhodes and statesmen at home the public was always ready to assume that the man who talked gallantly about “facing the music” was in some deep sense in the right, even if by technical standards he might be proved to be in the wrong. For this faith in his essential “whiteness” there was, indeed, some justification. He had certainly made his great fortune by much the same methods that other great African fortunes were made. He had had some very queer business and political associates. He had done many things that could be called strong, and perhaps some things that could be called wrong. That his most fervent admirers were ready enough to admit. But they were not disposed to be censorious. Granted that Rhodes was a little cynical, and that in his earlier career there might be little to distinguish him (apart from manners and education) from the gamblers who “made good” in his company, it was still a fact that, arrived at great riches, he sought riches no more.
This combination of great wealth and disinterestedness appealed strongly to the British mind. We have little use for the poor idealist; his ideals, we argue, cannot be very valuable, or how could he remain poor? But we are seldom over-critical of the man who, with great wealth, subordinates money to an idea. “Big ideas,” said Rhodes once to Gordon, “must have big cash behind them.” Rhodes’s countrymen were won by the fact that the big ideas supported by the big cash were not strictly commercial ideas. Had he been a mere company promoter, on however colossal a scale, he could not have won even a passing popularity. For he had no turn for sport or for society; with something of the superstition of the Calvinist, he united the unsocial Calvinistic temper. He could be a good host at Groote Schuur, and a kindly master to his small knot of dependent intimates; but he had no taste for the ordinary rich man’s amusements. He could not have tickled the public fancy by running yachts or race-horses, or dazzled it by great display. But his “big ideas,” it was soon recognised, were really big. They had, it is true, a touch of the vulgarity which so often attaches to very big things. Personally, Rhodes was not, indeed, without a vein of vulgarity. He was, it is true, by nature and education a gentleman, and he was, of course, very much more than a gentleman. But he had a passion for diamonds and a contempt for women; he loved not merely appreciation but flattery of the grosser kind; he was strangely content with the companionship of quite inferior men; he was not exempt from that very bad failing, a tendency to bully those who were in no position to retaliate. To gloss over these defects would be to give a wholly false view of a character which owes its distinction less to fine harmonies than to striking contrasts. Rhodes had his smallness. But there was another side of his character which gave him a singular dominion over minds which might be suspected of utter incapacity for hero-worship. His superiority was admitted by men far richer than himself, who seemed incapable of respecting anything but riches and the qualities that gain riches. Barney Barnato went ever in awe of him. Beit admitted his superiority. It was the magic of his name, long before he reached greatness, which permitted of the De Beers Consolidation, and made a commercial company for many years the virtual ruler of South Africa. It was the presence of something incalculable in his character which gave him his power over brother millionaires. They had one simple motive—to make money and enjoy it after their kind. Rhodes did not despise money, or luxury, or power. He had firm faith in the “big cash”; though caring little for pleasure or society in the ordinary sense, he keenly relished magnificence of living; his enjoyment of absolutism was Sultanic. But no Beit or Barnato could ever tell when his materialism or his mysticism would predominate, and they held him accordingly in the kind of perplexed respect with which madmen have been regarded in rude ages. More normal people, of course, were closer to a real understanding of this element in the man. The decent Dutchman knew that he had a genuine passion for South Africa. The decent Englishman knew that he had a genuine passion for England. Both knew that they could trust him in large things to prefer the South African and the British interest to that of the wealthy speculator. By that mysterious process which enables whole masses of men without special information to do rough justice to the deeds and motives of the great, the impression spread to the mother country, and sufficed at the time of the Jameson raid to break the force of a fall which might otherwise have finally ruined him.