Lord Cromer's familiar preoccupation with the classics was a point in his mental habits which deserves particular attention. I have always supposed that he inherited it from his mother, the Hon. Mrs. Baring, who was a Windham. She was a woman of learning; and she is said to have discomfited Sir William Harcourt at a dinner-table by quoting Lucan in direct disproof of a statement about the Druids which he had been rash enough to advance. She sang the odes of Anacreon to her son in his infancy, and we may conjecture that she sowed in his bosom the seeds of his love of antiquity. Lord Cromer made no pretension to be what is called an "exact" scholar, but I think it is a mistake to say, as has been alleged, that he did not take up the study of Latin and Greek until middle life. It is true that he enjoyed no species of university training, but passed from Woolwich straight into the diplomatic service. In 1861, at the age of twenty, he was appointed A.D.C. to Sir Henry Storks in the Ionian Islands, and I believe that one of the first things he did was to look about for an instructor in ancient Greek. He found one in a certain Levantine in Corfu, whose name was Romano, and their studies opened with the odes of Anacreon. Whether this was a coincidence, or a compliment to Mrs. Baring, I do not know. This is a rather different account from what Lord Cromer gave in the preface to his Paraphrases, but I report it on his own later authority.
If his scholarship was not professorial, it was at least founded upon a genuine and enduring love of the ancient world. I suppose that for fifty years, after the episode in Corfu, however busy he was, however immersed in Imperial policy, he rarely spent a day without some communing with antiquity. He read Latin, and still more Greek, not in the spirit of a pedant or a pedagogue, but genuinely for pleasure and refreshment. He had no vanity about it, and if he had any doubt as to the meaning of a passage he would "consult the crib," as he used to say. We may conjecture further that he did not allow his curiosity to be balked by the barrier of a hopelessly obscure passage, but leaped over it, and went on. He always came back to Homer, whom he loved more than any other writer of the world, and particularly to the Iliad, which I think he knew nearly by heart. But he did not, as some pundits consider dignified and necessary, confine himself to the reading of the principal classics in order to preserve a pure taste. On the contrary, Lord Cromer, especially towards the close of his life, pushed up into all the byways of the Silver Age. As he invariably talked about the books he happened to be reading, it was easy to trace his footsteps. Eight or nine years ago he had a sudden passion for Empedocles, whose fragments he had found collected and translated by Mr. Leonard, an American. Lord Cromer used to march into the Library, and greet me by calling out, "Do you know? Empedocles says" something or other, probably some parallelism with a modern phrase, the detection of which always particularly amused Lord Cromer.
In 1908 he took a fancy to Theognis, whose works I procured for him at the House of Lords, since he happened not to possess that writer at 36 Wimpole Street. He would settle himself in an armchair in the smoking-room, his eyes close to the book, and plunge into those dark waters of the gnomic elegist. He loved maxims and the expression of principles, and above all, as I have said, the discovery of identities of thought between the modern and the ancient world. He was delighted when he found in Theognis the proverb about having an ox on the tongue. I suppose this was quite well known to the learned, but the charm of the matter for Lord Cromer was that he was not deterred by any fear of academic criticism, and found out these things for himself. He read Theognis as other people read Rudyard Kipling, for stimulus and pleasure. He swept merely "scholarly" questions aside. He read his Iliad like a love-letter, but he was bored to death by discussions about the authorship of the Homeric epics.
In one matter, the serene good sense which was so prominently characteristic of Lord Cromer tinged his attitude towards the classics. He was not at all like Thomas Love Peacock, who entreated his friends to desist from mentioning anything that had happened in the world for the last 2,000 years. On the contrary, Lord Cromer was always bent on binding the old and the new together. It was very noticeable in his conversation that he was fond of setting classic instances side by side with modern ones. If books dealt with this parallelism, they exercised a charm over Lord Cramer's imagination which may sometimes have led him a little astray about their positive value. I recall a moment when he was completely under the sway of M. Ferrero's Greatness and Decline of Rome, largely because of the pertinacity with which the Italian historian compares Roman institutions with modern social arrangements. It was interesting to the great retired proconsul to discover that Augustus "considered that in the majority of cases subject peoples had to be governed through their own national institutions." It is scarcely necessary to point out that these analogies form the basis of what is, perhaps, Lord Cromer's most important late essay, his Ancient and Modern Imperialism.
In a practical administration of India and Egypt, those oceans of unplumbed antiquity, the ordinary British official has neither time nor taste to do more than skim the surface of momentary experience. But Lord Cromer had always been acutely aware of the mystery of the East, and always looked back into the past with deep curiosity. Sometimes the modern life in Egypt, exciting as it was, almost seemed to him a phantasmagoria dancing across the real world of Rameses. This tendency of thought coloured one branch of his reading; he could not bear to miss a book which threw any light on the social and political manners of antiquity. Works like Fowler's Social Life at Rome or Marquardt's Le Culte chez les Romains thrilled him with excitement and animated his conversation for days. He wanted, above all things, to realise how the ancients lived and what, feelings actuated their behaviour. On one occasion, in a fit of gaiety, I ventured to tell him that he reminded me of Mrs. Blimber (in Dombey and Son), who could have died contented had she visited Cicero in his retirement at beautiful Tusculum. "Well!" replied Lord Cromer, laughing, "and a very delightful visit that would be."
In the admirable appreciation contributed to the Times by "C." (our other proconsular "C."!) it was remarked that the "quality of mental balance is visible in all that Lord Cromer wrote, whether, in his official despatches, his published books, or his private correspondence." It was audible, too, in his delightful conversation, which was vivid, active, and yet never oppressive. He spoke with the firm accent of one accustomed to govern, but never dictatorially. His voice was a very agreeable one, supple and various in its tones, neither loud nor low. Although he had formed the life-long habit of expressing his opinions with directness, he never imposed them unfairly, or took advantage of his authority. On the contrary, there was something extremely winning in his eagerness to hear the reply of his interlocutor. "Well, there's a great deal in that," he would graciously and cordially say, and proceed to give the opposing statement what benefit he thought it deserved. He could be very trenchant, but I do not think that any one whom he had advanced to the privilege of his confidence can remember that he was so to a friend.
The attitude of Lord Cromer to life and letters—I speak, of course, only of what I saw in the years of his retirement from office—was not exactly representative of our own or even of the last century. He would have been at home in the fourth quarter of the eighteenth century, before the French Revolution. I judge him to have been born with an inflexible and commanding character, which in the person of many men exposed to such dangerous successes as he enjoyed might have degenerated into tyranny. On Lord Cromer, on the other hand, time produced a humanising and mellowing effect. It may very well prove that he has stamped his mark on the East of the twentieth century, as Turgot did his on the West of the nineteenth century; but without straying into the perilous fields of prophecy we are safe in recording the impression that Lord Cromer was not altogether a man of to-day; he looked forward and he looked backward. Probably the nearest counterpart to his manner of mind and conversation may be found in the circle of whom we read in the Diary of Fanny Burney. We can conceive Lord Cromer leaning against the Committee Box in earnest conversation with Mr. Windham and Mr. Burke at Warren Hastings' trial. We can restore the half-disdainful gesture with which he would drop an epigram ("from the Greek") into the Bath Easton Vase. His politeness and precision, his classical quotations, his humour, his predilections in literature and art, were those of the inner circle of Whigs nearly a century and a half ago, and I imagine that their talk was very much like his.
He was fond of repeating Bagehot's description of the Whigs, and it seems to me to apply so exactly to himself that I will quote part of it:—
"Perhaps as long as there has been a political history in this country there have been certain men of a cool, moderate, resolute firmness, not gifted with high imagination, little prone to enthusiastic sentiment, heedless of large theories and speculations, careless of dreamy scepticism, with a clear view of the next step, and a wise intention to take it; a strong conviction that the elements of knowledge are true, and a steady belief that the present would, can, and should be quietly improved."
In a full analysis of Lord Cromer's character, I think that every clause of this description might be expanded with illustrations. In the intellectual domain, Bagehot's words, "little prone to enthusiastic sentiment," seem made to fit Lord Cromer's detachment from all the tendencies of romanticism. His literary tastes were highly developed and eagerly indulged, but they were all in their essence pre-Revolutionary. Those who are familiar with a book once famous, the Diary of a Lover of Literature of Thomas Green, written down to the very end of the eighteenth century, have in their hands a volume in which the very accents of Lord Cromer may seem to be heard. Isaac d'Israeli said that Green had humbled all modern authors in the dust; Lord Cromer had a short way with many of the writers most fashionable at this moment. When he was most occupied with the resuscitations of ancient manners, of which I have already spoken, I found to my surprise that he had never read Marius the Epicurean. I recommended it to him, and with his usual instant response to suggestion, he got it at once and began reading it. But I could not persuade him to share my enthusiasm, and, what was not like him, he did not read Marius to the end. The richness and complication of Pater's style annoyed him. He liked prose to be clear and stately; he liked it, in English, to be Addisonian. Even Gibbon-though he read The Decline and Fall over again, very carefully, so late as 1913—was not entirely to his taste. He enjoyed the limpidity and the irony, but the sustained roll of Gibbon's antitheses vexed him a little. He liked prose to be quite simple.