some fifteen years ago, at the time when the brilliant young politicians
who called themselves (or were rather ineptly called) the Hooligans had
the graceful habit of asking some of their elders to dine with them in a
private room of the House of Commons. At one of these little dinners the
only guests were Lord Cromer and myself. I had never seen him before,
and I regarded him with some awe and apprehension, but no words had
passed between us, when the division-bell rang, and our youthful hosts
darted from the room.
The moment we were left alone, Lord Cromer looked across the deserted
tablecloth and said quietly, as though he were asking me to pass the
salt, "Where is Bipontium?" I was driven by sheer fright into an
exercise of intelligence, and answered at once, "I should think it must
be the Latin for Zweibruecken. Why?" "Oh! I saw this afternoon that my
edition of Diodorus Siculus was printed _ex typographia societatis
Bipontinae_, and I couldn't imagine for the life of me what 'Bipontium'
was. No doubt you're quite right." Nothing could be more characteristic
of Lord Cromer's habit of mind than this sudden revulsion of ideas. His
active brain needed no preparation to turn from subject to subject, but
seemed to be always ready, at a moment's notice, to take up a fresh
line of thought with ardour. What it could not endure was to be left
stranded with no theme on which to expatiate. In succeeding years, when
it was often my daily enjoyment to listen to Lord Cromer's desultory
conversation, as it leaped from subject to subject, I often thought of
the alarming way in which "Bipontium" had pounced upon me at the
dinner-table in the House of Commons.
Some years passed before I had the privilege of renewing my experience
of that evening. It was not until after his retirement from Egypt in the
autumn of 1907 that I saw him again, and not then for some months. He
returned, it will be remembered, in broken health. He used to say that
when King Edward VII. wrote out to Cairo, strongly pressing him to stay,
he had replied, in the words of Herodotus, "I am too old, oh King, and
too inactive; so bid thou one of the younger men here to do these
things." He very soon, however, recovered elasticity of mind and body
when the load of office was removed from his shoulders, and "inactive"
was the last epithet which could ever be applied to Lord Cromer. He
began to attend the House of Lords, but, like a wise man, he was in no
hurry to speak there till he had grown accustomed to the tone of the
place. His earliest utterance (I may note the date, February 6th, 1908)
we listened to with equal respect and curiosity; this was a new element
from which much enjoyment might be expected.
This maiden speech was not long, but it produced a very happy
impression. The subject was the Anglo-Russian Convention, of which the
orator cordially approved, and I recall that a certain sensation was
caused by Lord Cromer's dwelling on the dangers of the Pan-Islamite
intrigues in Egypt. This is the sort of thing that the House of Lords
enjoys--a man of special knowledge speaking, almost confidentially, of
matters within his professional competency. During that year and the
next Lord Cromer spoke with increasing frequency. There were great
differences of opinion with regard to his efficiency in Parliament. I
may acknowledge that I was not an unmeasured admirer of his oratory.
When he rose from his seat on the Cross-bench, and advanced towards the
table, with a fine gesture of his leonine head, sympathy was always
mingled with respect. His independence and his honesty were patent, and
his slight air of authority satisfactory. His public voice was not
unpleasing, but when he was tired it became a little veiled, and he had
the sad trick of dropping it at the end of his sentences. I confess that
I sometimes found it difficult to follow what he was saying, and I do
not think that he understood how to fill a large space with his voice.
He spoke as a man accustomed to wind up the debates of a council sitting
round a table, rather than as a senator addressing the benches of
Parliament.
He was interested in the art of eloquence, and fond of criticising in
private the methods of other speakers. He had a poor opinion of much
studied oratory, and used to declare that no one had ever convinced him
by merely felicitous diction. Perhaps he did not sufficiently realise
that his own strength of purpose offered rather a granitic surface to
persuasion. But no doubt he was right in saying that, coming as he did
from the florid East, he found English eloquence more plain and
businesslike than he left it. He used to declare that he never spoke
impromptu if he could possibly help doing so, and he made great fun of
the statesmen who say, "Little did I think when I came down to this
House to-day that I should be called upon to speak," and then pour out
by heart a Corinthian discourse. Lord Cromer always openly and frankly
prepared his speeches, and I have seen him entranced in the process. As
he always had a classical reference for everything he did, he was in the
habit of mentioning that Demosthenes also was unwilling to "put his
faculty at the mercy of Fortune."
He became an habitual attendant at the House of Lords, and, while it was
sitting, he usually appeared in the Library about an hour before the
House met. He took a very lively interest in what was going on,
examining new books, and making a thousand suggestions. If the Lords'
Library contains to-day one of the most complete collections of Latin
and Greek literature in the country, this is largely due to the zeal of
Lord Cromer, who was always egging me on to the purchase of fresh
rarities. He was indefatigable in kindness, sending me booksellers'
catalogues in which curious texts were recorded, and scouring even Paris
and Leipzig in our behalf. When I entered into this sport so heartily as
to provide the Greek and Latin Fathers also for their Lordships, Lord
Cromer became unsympathetic. He had no interest whatever in Origen or
Tertullian, and I think it rather annoyed him to recall that several of
these oracles of the early Church had written in Greek. Nothing in
history or philosophy or poetry which the ancient world had handed down
to us came amiss to Lord Cromer, but I think he considered it rather
impertinent of the Fathers to have presumed to use the language of
Attica. He had not an ecclesiastical mind.
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.
In many ways, Lord Cromer, during those long and desultory conversations
about literature which will be so perennial a delight to look back upon,
betrayed his constitutional detestation of the Romantic attitude. He
believed himself to be perfectly catholic in his tastes, and resented
the charge of prejudice. But he was, in fact, irritated by the excesses
and obscurities of much that is fashionable to-day in the world of
letters, and he refused his tribute of incense to several popular idols.
He thought that, during the course of the nineteenth century, German
influences had seriously perturbed the balance of taste in Europe. I do
not know that Lord Cromer had pursued these impressions very far, or
that he had formed any conscious theory with regard to them. But he was
very "eighteenth century" in his suspicion of enthusiasm, and I always
found him amusingly impervious to ideas of a visionary or mystical
order. It was impossible that so intelligent and omnivorous a reader as
he should not be drawn to the pathetic figure of Pascal, but he was
puzzled by him. He described him as "manifestly a man full of contrasts,
difficult to understand, and as many-sided as Odysseus." On another
occasion, losing patience with Pascal, he called him "a half-lunatic man
of genius." Fenelon annoyed him still more; the spiritual experiences of
the Archbishop of Cambrai he found "almost incomprehensible." His
surprising, but after all perfectly consistent, comment on both Fenelon
and Pascal was, "How much more easy Buffon is to understand!"
He recommended all young men who intend to take a part in politics
carefully to study pre-Revolutionary history, and one of his objections
to the romantic literature of Rousseau downwards was that it did not
help such study. It was too individualistic in its direction. It tended,
moreover, Lord Cromer thought, to disturb the balance of judgment, that
"level-headedness" which he valued so highly, and had exercised with
such magnificent authority. He disliked the idea that genius involved a
lack of sanity, or, in other words, of self-command. He regretted that
Dryden had given general currency to this idea by his famous lines in
_Absalom and Achitophel_:--
"Great wits are sure to madness near allied,
And thin partitions do their bounds divide;"
but Lord Cromer was himself, perhaps, too ready to account by insanity
for every odd or confused expression in literature. He had nothing to
say about Mazzini, whom he swept aside impatiently, except that he "was
a semi-lunatic," and I have heard him declare of Chatterton and
Verlaine--a strange couple--that they were a pair of madmen. He objected
violently to Baudelaire, but I think he knew very little about that
poet's works.
If I mention these things, it is because they seem to be necessary to
give human character to any sketch of the mind of Lord Cromer. He
himself hated mere eulogy, which he said had ruined most of the
biographies of the world. The official lives of Disraeli and Gladstone
did not escape a measure of his blame in this respect, and it will be
recalled that resentment against what he thought a shadowless portrait
led to his own very vivacious paper on Disraeli, which he afterwards
issued as a pamphlet. He was an avid reader of memoirs, and of political
memoirs in particular, but he almost always passed upon them the same
criticism--that they were too _public_. "I don't want Mr. ----," he
would say, "to tell me what I can learn for myself by turning up the
file of the _Morning Post_. I want him to tell me what I can't find out
elsewhere. And he need not be so very much afraid of hinting that his
hero had faults, for if he had not had defects we should never have
heard of his qualities. We are none of us perfect, and we don't want a
priggish biographer to pretend that we are." He was speaking here mainly
of political matters; but Lord Cromer's training and experience had a
strong bearing on his literary tastes. With him politics reacted on
literature, although he liked to fancy that he kept them wholly apart.
No doubt a selection from his correspondence will one day be given to
the world, for he was a vivid, copious, and daring letter-writer. I
suppose that he wrote to each of his friends mainly on the subject which
absorbed that friend most, and as his own range of sympathies and
interests was very wide, it is probable that his letters will prove
excellent general reading. As in so many other of the departments of
life, Lord Cromer did not think letter-writing a matter to be lightly
regarded or approached without responsibility. He said:--
"There are two habits which I have contracted, and which I have
endeavoured to pass on to my children, as I have found them useful.
One is to shut the door after me when I leave the room, and the
other is always to affix the day of the month and the year to every
document, however unimportant, that I sign. I have received numbers
of letters, not only from women, one of whose numerous privileges
it is to be vague, but also from men in high official positions,
dated with the day of the week only. When the document is
important, such a proceeding is a fraud on posterity."
He often, both in conversation and in letters, took up one of his
favourite classic tags, and wove a shrewd modern reflection round it.
For instance, a couple of years before the war, a phrase of Aristotle
recommending a ruthless egotism in the conduct of war, led him to say:--
"I think that at times almost every modern nation has acted on this
principle, though they gloss it over with fine words. Its principal
exponents of late have unquestionably been the Hohenzollerns."
And, in connection with the axiom of Thucydides that war educates
through violence, he wrote, about the same time:--
"The Germans, who, in spite of their culture, preserve a strain of
barbarism in their characters, are the modern representatives of
this view. There is just this amount of truth in it--that at the
cost of undue and appalling sacrifices, war brings out certain
fine qualities in individuals, and sometimes in nations."
This may, surely, be taken as a direct prophecy of the magnificent
effort of France. Lord Cromer's reflections, thrown off in the warmth of
personal contact, often had a pregnant directness. For instance, how
good this is:--
"The prejudice against the Boeotians was probably in a large
measure due to the fact that, as the late Lord Salisbury might have
said, they 'put their money on the wrong horse' during the Persian
war. So also, it may be observed, did the oracle at Delphi."