The Mirrors of Downing Street / Some Political Reflections by a Gentleman with a Duster

by Harold Begbie

The great man, it appeared at last, wanted amorini the size of giants; a rather Rosherville taste.

"He had knowledge," said Lady Sackville, from whose beautiful house he borrowed many ideas for Broome, and would have liked to have carried off many of its possessions, particularly a William the Fourth drum which he found in his bedroom as a waste-paper receptacle; "he had knowledge but no taste."

Her daughter said to me on one occasion, "Every chair he sits in becomes a throne," referring to the atmosphere of power and dignity which surrounded him.

It is instructive, I think, to remark how a single virtue passionately held—held, I mean, with a religious sense of its seriousness—can carry even a second-class mind to genuine greatness, a greatness that can be felt if not defined. In every sense of the word greatness, as we apply it to a saint, a poet, or a statesman, Lord Kitchener was a second-class and even a third-class person; but so driving was his sense of duty that it carried him to the very forefront of national life, and but for the political atmosphere in which he had to work for the last few years of his distinguished service to the State he might have easily become one of the great and shining heroes of British history. He had no taste; but the impression he made on those who had was the impression of a great character.

How was it that his greatness, that is to say his greatness of personality, made so pitiable an end? What was lacking that this indubitable greatness should have been so easily brayed in the mortar of politics?

The answer I think is this: a single virtue can bestow greatness, and the greatness may never fail when it has time and space in which to express itself; but many virtues of intellect and character are necessary when time is of the essence of the contract, and more especially in a situation of shared responsibility.

Lord Kitchener knew many of his own failings. He was by no means a vain man. Indeed he suffered considerable pain from the knowledge that he was not the tremendous person of the popular imagination. This knowledge robbed him of self-assurance. He tried to live up to the legendary Kitchener, and so long as he could find men as brave as himself, but of swifter and more adaptable intelligence, to do his bidding, he succeeded: many of the public, indeed, believed in the legendary Kitchener up to the day of his tragic death—death, that unmistakable reality, meeting him on a journey, the object of which was to impress Russia with the legendary Kitchener. But more and more, particularly in consultation with the quick wits of politicians, he found it impossible to impersonate his reputation.

I have been told by more than one Cabinet Minister that it was impressive to see how the lightning intellects of Mr. Lloyd George and Mr. Winston Churchill again and again reduced the gigantic soldier to a stupefied and sulking silence.

A proposal would be made by a minister, and Mr. Asquith would turn to Lord Kitchener for his opinion. Lord Kitchener would say, "It's impossible," and close his lips firmly. At this Mr. Lloyd George would attack him, pointing out the reasonableness of this proposal in swift and persuasive phrases. Lord Kitchener, shifting on his chair, would repeat, "It's impossible." Then in question after question Mr. Churchill would ask why it was impossible. "It's impossible," Lord Kitchener would mumble at the end of these questions. Finally, when nearly everybody had attempted to extract from him the reason for his refusal to countenance this proposal, he would make an impatient side movement of his head, unfold his arms, bend over the papers on the table before him, and grunt out, sometimes with a boyish smile of relief, "Oh, all right, have it your own way."

He lacked almost every grace of the spirit. There was nothing amiable in his character. Very few men liked him a great deal, and none I should say loved him. I do not think he was brutal by nature, although his nature was not refined; but he cultivated a brutal manner. He had the happiness of three or four friendships with cultivated and good women, but the beautiful creature whom he loved hungrily and doggedly, and to whom he proposed several times, could never bring herself to marry him. I think there was no holy of holies in his character, no sanctuaries for the finer intimacies of human life. As Sainte-Beuve said of Rousseau, "he has at times a little goître in his voice." One sees the fulness of his limitations by comparing him with such great figures of Indian history as the Lawrences and Nicholson: in that comparison he shrinks at once to the dimensions of a colour-sergeant.