There is one story in Field-Marshal Sir William Robertson's
autobiography that is sure of a place among the legends of celebrated
men. It is that in which he tells by what a lucky accident he was
saved, when "a raw recruit," from deserting from the Army, of which
he was destined to become one of the most illustrious ornaments.
Another young private who occupied a bed in the room in which he
slept stole the civilian clothes in which Robertson contemplated
making his escape, and vanished. I daresay Robertson said some harsh
things at the time about the thief, who had put temptation out of his
way; but he must have thanked him almost every day of his life since.
For in taking away Robertson's clothes the thief had put a
field-marshal's baton in his knapsack.
Not many of us have the luck to become field-marshals through the
purloining of our trousers, but few of us are without experience of
the part which trifles that seem of small moment at the time play in
our careers. "Character," says Victor Hugo, "is destiny," and a
greater than Hugo has observed that it is not in our stars but in
ourselves that we are thus and thus. This is no doubt true, though
the doctrine may be carried too far. For example, I think that
Hazlitt is a little unjust to Charles James Fox when he says that the
history of his failure is written in his fluctuating chin. I doubt
whether, if the parts had been reversed, Pitt would have done any
better. But no one can compare the easy, good-natured profile of Fox
with the haughty masterfulness of Pitt's without knowing which of the
two would win in an encounter of will-power where the circumstances
were even.
I remember Lord Fisher once describing to me with great admiration a
wonderful feat of navigation by which that famous sailor, Admiral
Wilson, had brought the fleet through great perils in a fog, fighting
all the way with his obstinate chief officer over charts and
calculations. "But Wilson had his way," said Fisher. "You see, his
jaw stuck out half an inch farther than the other fellow's." There
is much virtue in a jaw that will stand no nonsense. You can read
the whole history of the most wonderful one-man achievement in the
annals of trade in the stubborn chin of Lord Leverhulme, just as you
can read the tale of Mr. Balfour's political purposelessness in his
amiable but indecisive countenance. "I can see him now," wrote a
friend quoted in Mrs. Drew's _Some Hawarden Letters_. "I can see him
now, standing at the top of the great double staircase, torn with
doubts which way to go down. 'The worst of this staircase,' he would
say, 'is that there is absolutely no reason why one should go down
one side rather than the other. What am I to do?'"
But though destiny is much a matter of chins, the Imp of Chance who
comes in and steals our trousers has no small part in determining our
lives and shaping events. I have read that Wallenstein in his youth
had a crack on the head which he, no doubt, felt was a misfortune,
but it gave him just the surgical treatment that converted him from a
dullard into a great general. Loyola got wounded in battle, and,
thanks to that circumstance, found his true vocation and became the
creator of the greatest religious order in history, and, with Luther,
perhaps the greatest maker of history for six centuries. Newton,
according to the legend, sees an apple fall and starts a train of
thought that reveals one of the profoundest secrets of the universe.
I suppose no one who has advanced far in life can fail to recall
trifles that shaped the whole course of his career--a broken
engagement, a misdirected letter, a chance meeting. At the time it
seemed nothing, and now, in the retrospect, it is seen to have meant
everything. The chin may dictate events within limits, but the Imp
of Chance has as often as not the final word.
There is an interesting speculation on the theme of what might have
happened in Mr. Asquith's book on the origin of the war. Referring
to the appointment of Baron Marschall von Bieberstein as German
Ambassador to London in 1912 and his death a few months later, he
says that he is confident, so far as one can be confident in a matter
of conjecture, that if Marschall had lived there would have been no
European War in 1914. I fancy that is a common view in informed
quarters. Marschall stood intellectually, as well as physically,
head and shoulders above the petty men with whom the Kaiser had
surrounded himself, and it is inconceivable that he would have
allowed his country to drift into war under an entire misapprehension
as to the mind and power of this country.
It is in this way that the chapter of accidents plays havoc with the
affairs of men. All the woes of Ilium sprang from an elopement, and
it is a commonplace that if Cleopatra's nose had been a shade
longer--or shorter, for that matter--the whole story of the ancient
world would have been altered. I suppose the most momentous
political event in the history of the last thousand years was the
rupture between England and America, which is said to have happened
as the result of a shower of rain. But for that rupture, the British
Commonwealth to-day would include the whole North American Continent,
and its word would be sovereign over the earth. Perhaps the seat of
authority would have been in Washington, instead of London, but
wherever it was it would have stabilised this reeling world and given
its people a security that now seems unattainable. The speculation
which attributes the enormous calamity of the loss of America to a
shower of rain is more fanciful, but hardly less reasonable, than
that which Mr. Asquith advances in regard to the European War. The
Earl of Bute was the evil genius of George III., and the inspiration
of his disastrous policy. And the origin of his sinister power was a
storm at Epsom which kept the royal party from going home. The
Prince of Wales needed someone to make up a hand at cards to pass the
time while the shower lasted, and Bute, then a young man, being
handy, was selected, and from that incident ingratiated himself with
the Prince and still more with the Prince's wife. She established
his influence over her son whom later, as George III., he led into
the ruinous part of personal government which culminated in the
Boston Tea Party, the War of Independence, and the Republic of the
Stars and Stripes.
Chance does not, of course, always play a malevolent part like this.
It sometimes works as if with a superb and beneficent design.
Lincoln, on the threshold of fifty, regarded himself as having failed
in life and he died at fifty-six, one of the world's immortals. It
was the quite unimportant incident of his debate with Douglas that
threw him into prominence on the eve of the crisis which, but for his
wisdom and magnanimity, would have left America like Europe, a group
of warring States. But in the end chance betrayed him. On the night
he was murdered the faithful guardian who had shadowed and protected
him throughout the war was sick, and his place was taken by a
substitute who became absorbed in the play, and allowed Booth to slip
unseen into the President's box and fire the fatal shot. But it
might be argued that even in this felon betrayal, chance only
completed the splendour of its design, for Lincoln's work was done,
and it was the circumstances of his death that threw the nobility of
the man into relief for all time.
And while the accidents of life so often seem to take control of
events, it is no less true that our most deeply calculated schemes
sometimes turn round and smite us. When Queen Victoria's eldest
daughter married the King of Prussia's eldest son, it was universally
agreed that a grand thing had been done for the peace of the world,
and when later a child was born, the rejoicings in London, as you may
read in the contemporary records, were like those that welcome a
great victory. That child was the ex-Kaiser William, now an exile in
Holland. In the light of to-day those rejoicings of sixty odd years
ago read like a grim comment on this queer and inexplicable world.
It is one of the agreeable features of the diverting adventure of
life that our triumphs so often come clothed in misfortune and that
the really big things that happen to us take the shape of trifles.
Whenever we are tempted to inveigh against things that go wrong, we
might do worse than remember the Field-Marshal's trousers.