"Let them suffice for Britain's need—
No nobler prize was ever won—
The blessings of a people freed,
The consciousness of duty done."
These were, in a high degree, the rewards of Lord Cromer himself.
After his settlement in London, Mr. T.E. Page sent him a book, called Between Whiles, of English verse translated into Latin and Greek. Lord Cromer was delighted with this, and the desire to write in metre returned to him. He used to send his friends, in letters, little triolets and epigrams, generally in English, but sometimes in Greek. But he was more ambitious than this. So lately as February 1911, during the course of one of our long conversations upon literature, he asked me to suggest a task of translation on which he could engage. It was just the moment when he was particularly busy with Constitutional Free Trade and Woman Suffrage and other public topics, but that made no difference. It had always seemed to me that he had been most happy in his versions of the Bucolic poets, and so I urged him to continue his translations by attempting the Europa of Moschus. He looked at it, and pronounced it unattractive. I was therefore not a little surprised to receive a letter, on March 25th, in which he said:—
"Not sleeping very well last night, I composed in my head these few lines merely as a specimen to begin Europa:—
"When dawn is nigh, at the third watch of night,
What time, more sweet than honey of the bee,
Sleep courses through the brain some vision bright,
To lift the veil which hides futurity,
Fair Cypris sent a fearful dream to mar
The slumbers of a maid whose frightened eyes
Pictured the direful clash of horrid war,
And she, Europa, was the victor's prize."
"They are, of course, only a first attempt, and I do not think much of them myself. But do you think the sort of style and metre suitable?"
He went steadily on till he completed the poem, and on April 27th I received a packet endorsed "Patched-up Moschus returned herewith." So far as I know, this version of the Europa, conducted with great spirit in his seventieth year, has never been published. It is the longest and most ambitious of all his poetical experiments.
Lord Cromer was fond of saying that he considered the main beauty of Greek poetry to reside in its simplicity. In all his verses he aimed at limpidity and ease. He praised the Greek poets for not rhapsodising about the beauties of nature, and this was very characteristic of his own eighteenth-century habit of mind. His general attitude to poetry, which he read incessantly and in four languages, was a little difficult to define. He was ready to give lists of his life-long prime favourites, and, as was very natural, these differed from time to time. But one list of the books he had "read more frequently than any other" consisted of the Iliad, the Book of Job, Tristram Shandy, and Pickwick, to which he added Lycidas and the Tenth Satire of Juvenal. It would require a good deal of ingenuity to bring these six masterpieces into line. He was consistent in declaring that the 28th chapter of Job was "the finest bit of poetry ever written."
He was violently carried away in 1912 by reading Mr. Livingstone's book on The Greek Genius. It made him a little regret the pains he had expended on the Hymns of Callimachus and the Bucolics of Theocritus, and he thought that perhaps he ought to have confined himself to the severer and earlier classics. But surely he had followed his instinct, and it would have been a pity if he had narrowed his range. It was the modernness of the Alexandrian authors, and perhaps their Egyptian flavour, which had justly attracted him. He did not care very much for an antiquity which he could not revivify for his own vision. I urged him to read a book which had fascinated me, The Religion of Numa, by a learned American, the late Mr. Jesse Carter. Lord Cromer read it with respect, but he admitted that those earliest Roman ages were too remote and cold for him.
Lord Cromer was very much annoyed with Napoleon for having laid it down that après soixante ans, un homme ne vaut rien. The rash dictum had certainly no application to himself. It is true that, under the strain of the long tropical years, his bodily health declined as he approached the age of sixty. But his mental activity, his marvellous receptivity, were not merely maintained, but seemed steadily to advance. He continued to be consumed by that lust for knowledge, libido sciendi, which he admired in the ancient Greeks. When the physicians forbade him, four years ago, to expend his failing strength any longer on political and social propaganda, instead of retiring, as most men of his age would have done, to dream in the recesses of his library, he plunged with renewed ardour into the one occupation still permitted to him: literature. The accident of his publishing a criticism which excited wide popular attention led to his becoming, when past his seventieth birthday, a "regular reviewer" for the Spectator, where the very frequent papers signed "C." became a prominent feature. Those articles were, perhaps, most remarkable for the light they threw on the writer's own temperament, on his insatiable desire for knowledge. Lord Cromer's curiosity in all intellectual directions was, to the last, like that of a young man beginning his mental career; and when he adopted the position, so uncommon in a man of his experience and authority, of a reviewer of current books, it was because he wished to share with others the excitement he himself enjoyed in the tapping of fresh sources of information.