SIR H. M. STANLEY
Sir Henry Morton Stanley made a double appeal to the imagination of
the early Nineties. He represented both the old romance of adventurous
travel and the new romance of mechanical efficiency. It was his luck to
do considerable things exactly at the time when exploration had become
scientific, but had not ceased to be picturesque. A generation before
there was glamour, but little good business, in the conquest of the wild;
on the whole the betting was decidedly on the wild. A generation later
the glamour had largely departed, though the business was very good
business indeed. But in the high and palmy days of Stanley the explorer
had the best of both worlds. He was admired as a disinterested knight
errant, and rewarded handsomely for not being one.
To-day the public is a little cynical on the whole subject. It is not
so much that the world has grown smaller; the world is still a very
large place. It is not so much that danger has been eliminated; it has
in some ways been notably increased. But the very completeness of a
modern exploration boom defeats part of its purpose. So far as it sets
out to make the restless hero an efficient money-maker for himself and
others it generally succeeds mightily. So far as it sets out to make
the restless hero a demigod it invariably fails; it makes him, instead,
something very like a bore. The public reads all about book rights,
serial rights, cinema rights, oxy-hydrogen lecture rights. It reads all
about the restless hero’s wife, the restless hero’s child, the restless
hero’s mother, the restless hero’s schoolmaster, until it begins to be
thoroughly tired with the restless hero even before he has started for
the North Pole or the South, for some unpleasant range of mountains or
some still more unpleasant expanse of swamps. This fatigue, of course,
does not prevent much enthusiasm when the restless hero returns,
particularly if he fails interestingly to do what he said he was going
to do; the public is apt to be calmer if he succeeds to the foot of
the letter. This enthusiasm means nothing in particular. The public
will always consent to be worked up into a due state of frenzy over a
returning hero; merely the chance of a “rag” is for great numbers of
mysteriously constituted people too precious to miss. But the restless
hero will deceive himself if he takes this worship too seriously; the
public will equally worship any American cinema actor. Neither the hero
nor the cinema actor, however, will be allowed to become, as of old, the
“lion of the season.” The modern public may be silly in choosing its
idols. It shows common sense in throwing them aside the very moment they
cease to amuse.
In the Nineties there was already visible a good deal of this modern
tendency to get crazes very badly and tire of them very quickly. But
the “lion of the season” still existed, and Stanley, on his return from
the Emin Pasha relief expedition, was a lion indeed. It is curious, at
this time of day, to recall the origin of this, the last of Stanley’s
great marches through the African wild. One Edouard Schnitzer, known as
Emin Pasha, had been stranded in Equatorial Africa after the capture of
Khartoum by the Mahdi. Why any large body of Englishmen should have been
interested in this man it is not easy to say. But towards the end of 1886
there was a considerable agitation for an expedition to discover the
fate of Emin, and (if he proved to be alive) to rescue him. Who better
for this task than Stanley, “the man who found Livingstone”? There was
no better-known story than that of Stanley and Livingstone. Every child
was familiar with the woodcut of two men—one in a sun-helmet, the other
in a cap—each with his adoring bevy of blacks, shaking hands with each
other; underneath was printed Stanley’s “Dr. Livingstone, I presume.”
Every magazine reader of more mature years knew the whole story—how
James Gordon Bennett, of the _New York Herald_, “a tall, fierce-eyed,
and imperious-looking young man,” saw Stanley in Paris, and told him to
“find Livingstone.” Expenses? “Never mind about expenses. When you have
spent your first ten thousand, draw on me for another ten thousand. When
that is gone, draw on me for another; when that is gone, draw on me for
another; draw what you like, but find Livingstone.” That was the story
in its perfect dramatic form; the real story was a little different.
Bennett told Stanley to go, but no terms were actually settled, and
the explorer, who had already “made good” as a newspaper correspondent
for Bennett in Abyssinia, found no money for him at Zanzibar, and had
actually to contract a loan from the United States Consul there. But
naturally the ideal account of the transaction obtained full currency.
The nineteenth century had a pathetic faith in its Press, and even in the
American Press; and it revelled in the vision of one strong, silent man,
by the power of a mighty banking account, hurling a second strong, silent
man across a dark continent to the succour of a third strong, silent
man. These things no longer thrill; there are so many men now still
stronger and more silent, so many banking accounts still more mighty.
But to Victorian civilisation the romance of millionaire whims was yet
enchanting; and James Gordon Bennett, though he persisted in living to
be an oddity, never quite lost the splendour of his “find Livingstone”
heroism.
As for Stanley himself, the expedition covered him with enduring glory.
Every British boy born in the late Sixties and Seventies was familiar
with his haggard but resolute features, and knew by heart the singular
story of his life. It was the kind of story that impresses itself
indelibly on the imagination of youth. Stanley’s name, of course, came to
him only in mature life. He was born John Rowlands, the son of a farmer
near Denbigh. His father he never knew; during his childhood he only saw
his mother once, in the workhouse of St. Asaph, whither she had come with
two other of her children; she would not recognise him, and when, after
his first return from America, he paid her a visit, it was only to meet
with a cold repulse. John Rowlands had been left as an infant in charge
of his grandfather, Moses Parry, then living within the precincts of
Denbigh Castle. On the death of this old man he was transferred to the
care of an ancient couple, two of his uncles guaranteeing a maintenance
allowance of five shillings a week. This at last failed, and the child
was taken to the St. Asaph Union Workhouse; he was then in his sixth
year. Young Rowlands in these dismal surroundings suffered all the pangs
possible to a boy of keen sensibilities and strong natural affections
who finds himself the victim, not only of privation and humiliation,
but of actual tyranny. His schoolmaster was a one-handed monster named
Francis, who seems to have been as bad as anybody in Dickens. “No Greek
helot or dark slave,” says Stanley in his Autobiography, “ever underwent
discipline as the boys of St. Asaph under the heavy, masterful hand
of James Francis. The ready back-slap in the face, the stunning clout
over the ear, the strong blow with the open palm on alternate cheeks,
which knocked our senses into confusion, were so frequent that it was a
marvel that we ever recovered them again. Whatever might be the nature
of the offence, or merely because his irritable mood required vent, our
poor heads were cuffed and slapped and pounded until we were speechless
and streaming with blood. But, though a tremendously rough and reckless
striker with his fist or hand, such blows were preferable to deliberate
punishment with the birch, ruler, or cane, which with cool malice he
inflicted.... If a series of errors were discovered in our lessons, then
a vindictive scourging of the offender followed until he was exhausted or
our lacerated bodies could bear no more.”
It is a testimony to the toughness of child nature, though none to
the management of this brutal institution, that of Stanley’s thirty
school-fellows one lived to be a wealthy merchant, another to be a
clergyman, a third to be a colonial lawyer, and a fourth to become
a man of large fortune overseas. But the iron entered deeply into
young Rowlands’ soul, and the most constant motive in his life was to
obliterate the stigma of pauperism. His connection with the workhouse
abruptly terminated when he was about fifteen. He turned on the brutal
master, gave him a severe thrashing, ran away, got first a place as a
pupil teacher, then worked as a farm-boy, a haberdasher’s boy, and a
butcher’s boy, until at last, at Liverpool, he obtained a job on an
American sailing-ship. At New Orleans, tired of the brutality he had
experienced in a voyage of eighty-three days, he ran away from the ship,
and the same day chanced across the man who was to become his adopted
father, a Mr. Stanley, who, once some sort of minister, was now a
commercial traveller. No more striking tribute has ever been paid to the
influence of American institutions than that of the ex-workhouse lad from
England. “The people I passed,” he says, “appeared to me nobler than any
I had seen. They had a swing of the body wholly un-English, and their
facial expressions differed from those I had been accustomed to. I strove
to give a name to what was so unusual. Now, of course, I know that it was
the sense of equality and independence that made each face so different
from what I had seen in Liverpool. These people knew no master, and had
no more awe of their employers than they had of their fellow-employees.”
At the same time he could not help feeling “a little contempt” for the
extreme touchiness which was the defect of these high qualities. In a few
weeks he had himself acquired a good deal of the American spirit; the
servile taint was eradicated; and the temper and aptitudes which had been
so long suppressed expanded in the “felicities of freedom.”
Mr. Stanley soon after lost his wife—whom young Rowlands describes
as having taught him “the immense distance between a lady and a mere
woman.” This bereavement induced him to adopt the young Englishman,
and he performed the ceremony in due form, filling a basin with water
and baptizing the erstwhile John Rowlands as Henry Morton Stanley.
“The golden period of my life,” says Stanley, “began from that supreme
moment.” For the first time in his life he had a proper outfit of
clothes, and was introduced to the amenities of civilised life. But his
adopted father did not long survive, and in the meantime the Civil War,
in which Stanley saw service on both sides, had broken out. When peace
was declared, Stanley, who had suffered extraordinary vicissitudes of
fortune, took advantage of a chance introduction to the New York Press
to embark on the career of free-lance journalism. His great chance as a
war correspondent came with the Abyssinian War. Gordon Bennett thought
American interest in Abyssinia too slight to justify the expense of
a special correspondent, but agreed to pay for any matter accepted
if Stanley cared to defray his own charges. Stanley agreed to this
discouraging proposal, and by good luck and management gave the _New
York Herald_ the first news of the capture of Magdala and the fall of
King Theodore. The Livingstone adventure followed, and he was a made
man. Livingstone, when found, was content to remain where he was, and
there were some wicked people who suggested that so far from Stanley
discovering Livingstone, it was Livingstone who discovered Stanley. But,
though the wound of such injurious suggestion rankled for many years,
Stanley fully established himself both with the geographers and the
general public. His expedition across Africa in 1870—he had just before
accompanied Sir Garnet Wolseley on the Ashanti campaign—raised, however,
some controversy as to his methods; he was charged with harshness to his
men, with keeping aloof from his officers, and with employing slaves.
Such criticisms, which had more or less followed all Stanley’s feats,
were specially loud after the first enthusiasm over the success of the
Emin Pasha expedition had died down. It was successful in much the
same sense as the finding of Livingstone. Emin Pasha was found, but he
did not at first want to be rescued; and when, a little later, he had
trouble with his Egyptian officers and elected to return with Stanley
to the coast, he promptly went over to the Germans, whose service he
entered. This fact, the other fact that Stanley failed to see any fault
in Emin’s conduct, and the further fact of the massacre of Stanley’s
rearguard, which he had virtually abandoned in order to push on to Emin,
rapidly cooled the great explorer’s popularity. There soon began a bitter
controversy over the fate of the rearguard. Stanley, in attacking his
critics, assailed the memory of Major Barttelot, who had been left in
charge of the ill-fated party. His critics retorted with a charge of
carelessness and mismanagement, and the effect of this wrangle was to
throw a good deal of light on Stanley’s methods.
The natives of the Lower Congo gave him a name which signified “Breaker
of Rocks,” and in doing so proved themselves no mean judges of character.
Stanley was not a cruel man nor an unprincipled, and Sir Garnet Wolseley
has spoken of his high courage and unruffled calm in positions of danger.
But he was not in the position of a soldier in charge of a military
expedition; he acted only occasionally in a quasi-military capacity;
more often he travelled as a civilian, and sometimes as in every sense
a private person. This circumstance he seems to have overlooked. “My
methods,” he said, in expressing the hope that it would be his to follow
Livingstone in opening up Africa to the “shining light of Christianity,”
“will not be Livingstone’s. Each man has his own way. His, I think, had
its defects, though the old man personally had been almost Christ-like
for goodness, patience, and self-sacrifice. The selfish and wooden-headed
world requires mastering as well as loving charity; for man is a
composite of the spiritual and earthly.” We have here the sharp contrast
between the earlier and later nineteenth-century schools of exploration,
the school of the gospel and the school of the gatling gun. Stanley had
his own conception of religion; in his way he was a decidedly pious man;
his workhouse wretchedness had inclined him to seek the Father of the
fatherless; he had resumed in later life the prayerful habits of his
boyhood, and he devoted some considerable time in his first trans-African
tour to converting a ruling chief to Christianity. But there was more of
Calvin than of Christ in his faith, and more of the Old Testament than
the New.
With the completion of the Emin Pasha expedition he retired on his
laurels, married, and went into politics. But, though after a first
unsuccessful attempt he got himself returned for North Lambeth, he
quickly found how hard is the political path of an elderly man who has
achieved distinction in other walks. He could not get into Parliamentary
ways, and even when he spoke on subjects he perfectly understood he had
the usual vice of the “man on the spot.” He could not help lecturing, and
lecturing is one of the things the House of Commons will not tolerate. If
the House did not think too well of him, he certainly thought exceedingly
ill of the House. He describes it as “a gigantic apparatus for frittering
away energy and time.” No politician claimed his undiluted admiration;
curiously enough, Mr. (now Lord) Haldane came nearest to his notion of a
capable and earnest man. It was the old quarrel of the man of action with
the place of talk—a matter on which, as on most, there are things to be
said on both sides.
One curious thing may be recalled concerning him. He was often to be seen
at public dinners. But nobody ever saw him eat anything; every dish went
away untasted.