I began this discussion with a reference to the spare, austere, but quite lucid message of the cablegram announcing the death of Steevens; and I was carried on at once to a deliberate consideration of his literary work, because that work had, despite its vigour, its vividness, its brilliance, just the outline, the spareness, the slimness, the austerity which are so painfully inconspicuous in the customary painter of word-pictures. Some have said that Steevens was destined to be the Kinglake of the Transvaal. That is patently indemonstrable. His war correspondence was not the work of a stately historian. He could, out of sheer imaginativeness, create for himself the style of the stately historian. His "New Gibbon"—a paper which appeared in 'Blackwood's Magazine'—is there to prove so much; but that was not the manner in which he usually wrote about war. He was essentially a man who had visions of things. Without the time to separate his visions into the language of pure classicism—a feat which Tennyson superlatively contrived to accomplish—he yet took out the right details, and by skilful combination built you, in the briefest possible space, a strongly vivid picture. If you look straight out at any scene, you will see what all men see when they look straight out; but when you inquire curiously into all the quarters of the compass, you will see what no man ever saw when he simply looked out of his two eyes without regarding the here, there, and everywhere. When Tennyson wrote of
"flush'd Ganymede, his rosy thigh
Half-buried in the Eagle's down,
Sole as a flying star shot thro' the sky
Above the pillar'd town"—
you felt the wonder of the picture. Applied in a vastly different way, put to vastly different uses, the visual gift of Steevens belonged to the same order of things. Consider this passage from his Soudan book:—
"Black spindle-legs curled up to meet red-gimleted black faces, donkeys headless and legless, or sieves of shrapnel; camels with necks writhed back on to their humps, rotting already in pools of blood and bile-yellow water, heads without faces, and faces without anything below, cobwebbed arms and legs, and black skins grilled to crackling on smouldering palm-leaf—don't look at it."
The writer, swinging on at the obvious pace with which this writing swings, of course has no chance to make as flawless a picture as the great man of leisure; but the pictorial quality of each is precisely the same. Both understood the fine art of selection.
I have sometimes wondered if I grudged to journalism what Steevens stole from letters. I have not yet quite come to a decision; for, had he never left the groves of the academic for the crowded career of the man of the world, we should never have known his amazing versatility, or even a fraction of his noble character as it was published to the world. Certainly the book to which this chapter forms a mere pendant must, in parts, stand as a new revelation no less of the nobility of that character than of his extraordinary foresight, his wonderful instinct for the objectiveness of life. I believe that in his earliest childhood his feeling for the prose of geography was like Wordsworth's cataract—it "haunted him like a passion." And all the while the subjective side of life called for the intrusion of his prying eyes. So that you may say it was more or less pure chance that led him to give what has proved to be the bulk of his active years to the objective side of things, the purely actual. Take, in this very book, that which amounts practically to a prophecy of the difficulty of capturing a point like Spion Kop, in the passage where he describes how impossible it is to judge of the value of a hill-top until you get there. (Pope, by the way—and I state the point not from any desire to be pedantic, but because Steevens had a classical way with him which would out, disguise it how he might—Pope, I say, in his "Essay on Criticism," had before made the same remark.) Then again you have in his chapter on Aliwal the curiously intimate sketch of the Boer character—"A people hard to arouse, but, you would say, very hard to subdue." Well, it is by the objective side of life that we have to judge him. The futility of death makes that an absolute necessity; but I like to think of a possible George Steevens who, when the dust and sand of campaigns and daily journalism had been wiped away from his shoon, would have combined in a great and single-hearted career all the various powers of his fine mind.
His death, as none needs to be told, came as a great shock and with almost staggering surprise to the world; and it is for his memory's sake that I put on record a few of the words that were written of him by responsible people. An Oxford contemporary has written of him:—
"I first met him at a meeting of the Russell Club at Oxford. He was a great light there, being hon. sec. It was in 1890, and Steevens had been head-boy of the City of London School, and then Senior Scholar at Balliol. Even at the Russell Club, then, he was regarded as a great man. The membership was, I think, limited to twenty—all Radical stalwarts. I well remember his witty comments on a paper advocating Women's Rights. He was at his best when opening the debate after some such paper. Little did that band of ardent souls imagine their leader would, in a few short years, be winning fame for a Tory halfpenny paper.
"He sat next me at dinner, just before he graduated, and he was in one of those pensive moods which sometimes came over him. I believe he hardly spoke. In '92 he entered himself as a candidate for a Fellowship at Pembroke. I recollect his dropping into the examination-room half an hour late, while all the rest had been eagerly waiting outside the doors to start their papers at once. But what odds? He was miles ahead of them all—an easy first. It was rumoured in Pembroke that the new Fellow had been seen smoking (a pipe, too) in the quad—that the Dean had said it was really shocking, such a bad example to the undergraduates, and against all college rules. How could we expect undergraduates to be moral if Mr Steevens did such things? How, indeed? Then came Mr Oscar Browning from Cambridge, and carried off Steevens to the 'second university in the kingdom,' so that we saw but little of him. Some worshipped, others denounced him. The Cambridge papers took sides. One spoke of 'The Shadow' or 'The Fetish,' au contraire: another would praise the great Oxford genius. Whereas at Balliol Steevens was boldly criticised, at Cambridge he was hated or adored.
"A few initiated friends knew that Steevens was writing for the 'Pall Mall' and the 'Cambridge Observer,' and it soon became evident that journalism was to be his life-work. Last February I met him in the Strand, and he was much changed: no more crush hat, and long hair, and Bohemian manners. He was back from the East, and a great man now—married and settled as well—very spruce, and inclined to be enthusiastic about the Empire. But still I remarked his old indifference to criticism. Success had improved him in every way: this seems a common thing with Britishers. In September last I knocked up against him at Rennes during the Dreyfus trial. As I expected, Steevens kept cool: he could always see the other side of a question. We discussed the impending war, and he was eagerly looking forward to going with the troops. I dare not tell his views on the political question of the war. They would surprise most of his friends and admirers. On taking leave I bade him be sure to take care of himself. He said he would."