[1] With this estimate of Gordon's character may be contrasted those
of Lord Cromer (the most severe of Gordon's critics), and of Lord
Morley of Blackburn; in their strictures as in their praise they help
to explain both the causes of the extraordinary influence wielded by
Gordon over all sorts and conditions of men and also his
difficulties. Lord Cromer's criticism, it should be remembered, does
not deal with Gordon's career as a whole but solely with his last
mission to the Sudan; Lord Morley's is a more general judgment.
Lord Cromer (_Modern Egypt_, vol. i., ch. xxvii., p. 565-571) says:
"We may admire, and for my own part I do very much admire General
Gordon's personal courage, his disinterestedness and his chivalrous
feeling in favour of the beleaguered garrisons, but admiration of
these qualities is no sufficient plea against a condemnation of his
conduct on the ground that it was quixotic. In his last letter to his
sister, dated December 14, 1884, he wrote: 'I am quite happy, thank
God, and, like Lawrence, I have tried to do my duty' ... I am not now
dealing with General Gordon's character, which was in many respects
noble, or with his military defence of Khartoum, which was heroic,
but with the political conduct of his mission, and from this point of
view I have no hesitation in saying that General Gordon cannot be
considered to have tried to do his duty unless a very strained and
mistaken view be taken of what his duty was.... As a matter of public
morality I cannot think that General Gordon's process of reasoning is
defensible.... I do not think that it can be held that General Gordon
made any serious effort to carry out the main ends of British and
Egyptian policy in the Sudan. He thought more of his personal
opinions than of the interests of the state.... In fact, except
personal courage, great fertility in military resource, a lively
though sometimes ill-directed repugnance to injustice, oppression and
meanness of every description, and a considerable power of acquiring
influence over those, necessarily limited in numbers, with whom he
was brought into personal contact, General Gordon does not appear to
have possessed any of the qualities which would have fitted him to
undertake the difficult task he had in hand."
Lord Morley (_Life of Gladstone_, vol. iii., 1st ed., 1903, ch. 9, p.
151) says: "Gordon, as Mr Gladstone said, was a hero of heroes. He
was a soldier of infinite personal courage and daring, of striking
military energy, initiative and resource; a high, pure and single
character, dwelling much in the region of the unseen. But as all who
knew him admit, and as his own records testify, notwithstanding an
undercurrent of shrewd common sense, he was the creature, almost the
sport, of impulse; his impressions and purposes changed with the
speed of lightning; anger often mastered him; he went very often by
intuitions and inspirations rather than by cool inference from
carefully surveyed fact; with many variations of mood he mixed, as we
often see in people less famous, an invincible faith in his own rapid
prepossessions while they lasted. Everybody now discerns that to
despatch a soldier of this temperament on a piece of business [the
mission to the Sudan in 1884] that was not only difficult and
dangerous, as Sir E. Baring said, but profoundly obscure, and needing
vigilant sanity and self-control, was little better than to call in a
wizard with his magic. Mr Gladstone always professed perplexity in
understanding why the violent end of the gallant Cavagnari in
Afghanistan stirred the world so little in comparison with the fate
of Gordon. The answer is that Gordon seized the imagination of
England, and seized it on its higher side. His religion was
eccentric, but it was religion; the Bible was the rock on which he
founded himself, both old dispensation and new; he was known to hate
forms, ceremonies and all the 'solemn plausibilities'; his speech was
sharp, pithy, rapid and ironic; above all, he knew the ways of war
and would not bear the sword for nought."