from letters. I have not yet quite come to a decision; for, had he never
left the groves of the academic for the crowded career of the man of the
world, we should never have known his amazing versatility, or even a
fraction of his noble character as it was published to the world.
Certainly the book to which this chapter forms a mere pendant must, in
parts, stand as a new revelation no less of the nobility of that
character than of his extraordinary foresight, his wonderful instinct
for the objectiveness of life. I believe that in his earliest childhood
his feeling for the prose of geography was like Wordsworth's
cataract--it "haunted him like a passion." And all the while the
subjective side of life called for the intrusion of his prying eyes. So
that you may say it was more or less pure chance that led him to give
what has proved to be the bulk of his active years to the objective side
of things, the purely actual. Take, in this very book, that which
amounts practically to a prophecy of the difficulty of capturing a point
like Spion Kop, in the passage where he describes how impossible it is
to judge of the value of a hill-top until you get there. (Pope, by the
way--and I state the point not from any desire to be pedantic, but
because Steevens had a classical way with him which would out, disguise
it how he might--Pope, I say, in his "Essay on Criticism," had before
made the same remark.) Then again you have in his chapter on Aliwal the
curiously intimate sketch of the Boer character--"A people hard to
arouse, but, you would say, very hard to subdue." Well, it is by the
objective side of life that we have to judge him. The futility of death
makes that an absolute necessity; but I like to think of a possible
George Steevens who, when the dust and sand of campaigns and daily
journalism had been wiped away from his shoon, would have combined in a
great and single-hearted career all the various powers of his fine mind.
His death, as none needs to be told, came as a great shock and with
almost staggering surprise to the world; and it is for his memory's sake
that I put on record a few of the words that were written of him by
responsible people. An Oxford contemporary has written of him:--
"I first met him at a meeting of the Russell Club at Oxford. He was
a great light there, being hon. sec. It was in 1890, and Steevens
had been head-boy of the City of London School, and then Senior
Scholar at Balliol. Even at the Russell Club, then, he was regarded
as a great man. The membership was, I think, limited to twenty--all
Radical stalwarts. I well remember his witty comments on a paper
advocating Women's Rights. He was at his best when opening the
debate after some such paper. Little did that band of ardent souls
imagine their leader would, in a few short years, be winning fame
for a Tory halfpenny paper.
"He sat next me at dinner, just before he graduated, and he was in
one of those pensive moods which sometimes came over him. I believe
he hardly spoke. In '92 he entered himself as a candidate for a
Fellowship at Pembroke. I recollect his dropping into the
examination-room half an hour late, while all the rest had been
eagerly waiting outside the doors to start their papers at once.
But what odds? He was miles ahead of them all--an easy first. It
was rumoured in Pembroke that the new Fellow had been seen smoking
(a pipe, too) in the quad--that the Dean had said it was really
shocking, such a bad example to the undergraduates, and against all
college rules. How could we expect undergraduates to be moral if Mr
Steevens did such things? How, indeed? Then came Mr Oscar Browning
from Cambridge, and carried off" Steevens to the 'second university
in the kingdom,' so that we saw but little of him. Some worshipped,
others denounced him. The Cambridge papers took sides. One spoke of
'The Shadow' or 'The Fetish,' _au contraire_: another would praise
the great Oxford genius. Whereas at Balliol Steevens was boldly
criticised, at Cambridge he was hated or adored.
"A few initiated friends knew that Steevens was writing for the
'Pall Mall' and the 'Cambridge Observer,' and it soon became
evident that journalism was to be his life-work. Last February I
met him in the Strand, and he was much changed: no more crush hat,
and long hair, and Bohemian manners. He was back from the East, and
a great man now--married and settled as well--very spruce, and
inclined to be enthusiastic about the Empire. But still I remarked
his old indifference to criticism. Success had improved him in
every way: this seems a common thing with Britishers. In September
last I knocked up against him at Rennes during the Dreyfus trial.
As I expected, Steevens kept cool: he could always see the other
side of a question. We discussed the impending war, and he was
eagerly looking forward to going with the troops. I dare not tell
his views on the political question of the war. They would surprise
most of his friends and admirers. On taking leave I bade him be
sure to take care of himself. He said he would."
What strikes me as being peculiarly significant of a certain aspect of
his character appeared in 'The Nursing and Hospital World.' It ran in
this wise--I give merely an extract:--
"Although George Steevens never used his imperial pen for personal
purposes, yet it seems almost as if it were a premonition of death
by enteric fever which aroused his intense sympathy for our brave
soldiers who died like flies in the Soudan from this terrible
scourge, owing to lack of trained nursing skill, during the late
war. This sympathy he expressed to those in power, and we believe
that it was owing to his representations that one of the most
splendid offers of help for our soldiers ever suggested was made by
his chief, the editor of the 'Daily Mail,' when he proposed to
equip, regardless of expense, an ambulance to the Soudan, organised
on lines which would secure, for our sick and wounded, _skilled
nursing on modern lines_, such nursing as the system in vogue at
the War Office denies to them.
"The fact that the War Office refused this enlightened and generous
offer, and that dozens of valuable lives were sacrificed in
consequence, is only part of the monstrous incompetence of its
management. Who can tell! If Mr Alfred Harmsworth's offer had been
accepted in the last war, might not army nursing reform have, to a
certain extent, been effected ere we came to blows with the
Transvaal, and many of the brave men who have died for us long
lingering deaths from enteric and dysentery have been spared to
those of whom they are beloved?"
Another writer in the 'Outlook':--
"As we turn over the astonishing record of George Warrington
Steevens's thirty years, we are divided between the balance of loss
and gain. The loss to his own intimates must be intolerable. From
that, indeed, we somewhat hastily avert our eyes. Remains the loss
to the great reading public, which we believe that Steevens must
have done a vast deal to educate, not to literature so much as to a
pride in our country's imperial destiny. Where the elect chiefly
admired a scarcely exampled grasp and power of literary
impressionism, the man in the street was learning the scope and
aspect of his and our imperial heritage, and gaining a new view of
his duties as a British citizen.
"A potent influence is thus withdrawn. The pen that had taught us
to see and comprehend India and Egypt and the reconquest of the
Soudan would have burned in on the most heedless the line which
duty marks out for us in South Africa. Men who know South Africa
are pretty well united. Now Steevens would have taken all England
to South Africa. Nay, more, we are no longer able to blink the
truth that all is not for the best in the best of all possible
armies, and the one satisfaction in our reverses is that, when the
war is over, no Government will dare to resist a vigorous programme
of reform. Steevens would not have been too technical for his
readers; he would have given his huge public just as many prominent
facts and headings as had been good for them, and his return from
South Africa with the materials of a book must have strengthened
the hands of the intelligent reformer. That journalism which, in a
word, really is a living influence in the State is infinitely the
poorer. And so we believe is literature. There is much literature
in his journalism, but it is in his 'Monologues of the Dead' that
you get the rare achievement and rarer promise which made one
positive that, his wanderings once over, he would settle down to
write something of great and permanent value. Only one impediment
could we have foreseen to such a consummation: he might have been
drawn into public life. For he spoke far better than the majority
of even distinguished contemporary politicians, and to a man of his
knowledge of affairs, influence over others, and clearness of
conviction, anything might have been open.
"Well! he is dead at Ladysmith of enteric fever. Turning over the
pages of his famous war-book we find it written of the Soudan: 'Of
the men who escaped with their lives, hundreds more will bear the
mark of its fangs till they die; hardly one of them but will die
the sooner for the Soudan.' And so he is dead 'the sooner for the
Soudan.' It seems bitter, unjust, a quite superfluous dispensation;
and then one's eye falls on the next sentence--'What have we to
show in return?' In the answer is set forth the balance of gain,
for we love 'to show in return' a wellnigh ideal career. Fame,
happiness, friendship, and that which transcends friendship, all
came to George Steevens before he was thirty. He did everything,
and everything well. He bridged a gulf which was deemed impassable,
for from being a head-boy at school and the youngest Balliol
scholar and a Fellow of his College and the very type of rising
pedagogue, with a career secure to him in these dusty meadows, he
chose to step forth into a world where these things were accounted
lightly, to glorify the hitherto contemned office of the reporter.
Thus within a few years he hurried through America, bringing back,
the greatest of living American journalists tells us, the best and
most accurate of all pictures of America. Thus he saw the face of
war with the conquering Turk in Thessaly, and showed us modern
Germany and Egypt and British India, and in two Soudanese campaigns
rode for days in the saddle in 'that God-accursed wilderness,' as
though his training had been in a stable, not in the quad of
Balliol. These thirty years were packed with the happiness and
success which Matthew Arnold desired for them that must die young.
He not only succeeded, but he took success modestly, and leaves a
name for unselfishness and unbumptiousness. Also he 'did the State
some service.'
"'One paces up and down the shore yet awhile,' says Thackeray, 'and
looks towards the unknown ocean and thinks of the traveller whose
boat sailed yesterday.' And so, thinking of Steevens, we must not
altogether repine when, 'trailing clouds of glory,' an 'ample,
full-blooded spirit shoots into the night.'"
I take this passage from 'Literature,' in connection with Steevens, on
account of the grave moral which it draws from his life-work:--
"His career was an object-lesson in the usefulness of those
educational endowments which link the humblest with the highest
seats of learning in the country. If he had not been able to win
scholarships he would have had to begin life as a clerk in a bank
or a house of business. But he won them, and a good education with
them, wherever they were to be won--at the City of London School,
and at Balliol College, Oxford. He was a first-class man (both in
'Mods' and 'Greats'), _proxime accessit_ for the Hertford, and a
Fellow of Pembroke. He learnt German, and specialised in
metaphysics. A review which he wrote of Mr Balfour's 'Foundations
of Religious Belief' showed how much more deeply than the average
journalist he had studied the subjects about which philosophers
doubt; and his first book--'Monologues of the Dead'--established
his claim to scholarship. Some critics called them vulgar, and they
certainly were frivolous. But they proved two things--that Mr
Steevens had a lively sense of humour, and that he had read the
classics to some purpose. The monologue of Xanthippe--in which she
gave her candid opinion of Socrates--was, in its way, and within
its limits, a masterpiece.
"But it was not by this sort of work that Mr Steevens was to win
his wide popularity. Few writers, when one comes to think of it, do
win wide popularity by means of classical _jeux d'esprit_. At the
time when he was throwing them off, he was also throwing off 'Occ.
Notes' for the 'Pall Mall Gazette.' He was reckoned the humorist
_par excellence_ of that journal in the years when, under the
editorship of Mr Cust, it was almost entirely written by humorists.
He was one of the seceders on the occasion of Mr Cust's retirement,
and occupied the leisure that then presented itself in writing his
book on 'Naval Policy.' His real chance in life came when he was
sent to America for the 'Daily Mail.' It was a better chance than
it might have been, because that newspaper did not publish his
letters at irregular intervals, as usually happens, but in an
unbroken daily sequence. Other excursions followed--to Egypt, to
India, to Turkey, to Germany, to Rennes, to the Soudan--and the
letters, in almost every case, quickly reappeared as a book.
"A rare combination of gifts contributed to Mr Steevens's success.
To begin with, he had a wonderful power of finding his way quickly
through a tangle of complicated detail: this he owed, no doubt, in
large measure to his Oxford training. He also was one of the few
writers who have brought to journalism the talents, and sympathies,
and touch hitherto regarded as belonging more properly to the
writer of fiction. It was the dream of Mr T.P. O'Connor, when he
started the 'Sun,' to have the happenings of the passing day
described in the style of the short-story writer. The experiment
failed, because it was tried on an evening paper with printers
clamouring for copy, and the beginning of the story generally had
to be written before the end of the story was in sight or the place
of the incidents could be determined. Mr Steevens tried the same
experiment under more favourable conditions, and succeeded. There
never were newspaper articles that read more like short stories
than his, and at the same time there never were newspaper articles
that gave a more convincing impression that the thing happened as
the writer described it."
A more personal note was struck perhaps by a writer in the 'Morning
Post':--
"Few of the reading public can fail to be acquainted with the
merits of his purely journalistic work. He had carefully developed
a great natural gift of observation until it seemed wellnigh an
impossibility that he should miss any important detail, however
small, in a scene which he was watching. Moreover, he had a
marvellous power of vivid expression, and used it with such a skill
that even the dullest of readers could hardly fail to see what he
wished them to see. It is given to some journalists to wield great
influence, and few have done more to spread the imperial idea than
has been done by Mr Steevens during the last four or five years of
his brief life. Still it must be remembered that, in order to
follow journalism successfully, he had to make sacrifices which he
undoubtedly felt to be heavy. His little book, 'Monologues of the
Dead,' can never become popular, since it needs for its
appreciation an amount of scholarship which comparatively few
possess. Yet it proves none the less conclusively that, had he
lived and had leisure, he would have accomplished great things in
literature. Those who had the privilege of knowing him, however,
and above all those who at one period or another in his career
worked side by side with him, will think but little now of his
success as journalist and author. The people who may have tried, as
they read his almost aggressively brilliant articles, to divine
something of the personality behind them, can scarcely have
contrived to picture him accurately. They will not imagine the
silent, undemonstrative person, invariably kind and ready unasked
to do a colleague's work in addition to his own, who dwells in the
memory of the friends of Mr Steevens. They will not understand how
entirely natural it seemed to these friends that when the long
day's work was ended in Ladysmith he should have gone habitually,
until this illness struck him down, to labour among the sick and
wounded for their amusement, and in order to give them the courage
which is as necessary to the soldier facing disease as it is to
his colleague who has to storm a difficult position. Those who
loved him will presently find some consolation in considering the
greatness of his achievement, but nothing that can now be said will
mitigate their grief at his untimely loss."
Another writer says:--
"What Mr Kipling has done for fiction Mr Steevens did for fact. He
was a priest of the Imperialist idea, and the glory of the Empire
was ever uppermost in his writings. That alone would not have
brought him the position he held, for it was part of the age he
lived in. But he was endowed with a curious faculty, an
extraordinary gift for recording his impressions. In a scientific
age his style may be described as cinematographic. He was able to
put vividly before his readers, in a series of smooth-running
little pictures, events exactly as he saw them with his own intense
eyes. It has been said that on occasion his work contained passages
a purist would not have passed. But Mr Steevens wrote for the
people, and he knew it. Deliberately and by consummate skill he
wrote in the words of his average reader; and had he desired to
offer his work for the consideration of a more select class, there
is little doubt that he would have displayed the same felicity. His
mission was not of that order. He set himself the more difficult
task of entertaining the many; and the same thoroughness which made
him captain of the school, Balliol scholar, and the best
note-writer on the 'Pall Mall Gazette' in its brightest days,
taught him, aided by natural gifts, to write 'With Kitchener to
Khartum' and his marvellous impressions of travel."
* * * * *
This record must close. Innumerable have been the tributes to this brave
youth's power for capturing the human heart and the human mind. The
statesman and the working man--one of these has written very curtly and
simply, "He served us best of all"--each has felt something of the
intimate spirit of his work.
Lord Roberts cabled from Capetown in the following words:--
"Deeply regret death of your talented correspondent, Steevens.
ROBERTS."
And a correspondent writes:--
"To-day I called on Lord Kitchener, in compliance with his request,
having yesterday received through his aide-de-camp, Major Watson,
the following letter:--
"'I am anxious to have an opportunity of expressing to you
personally my great regret at the loss we have all sustained
in the death of Mr Steevens.'
"Lord Kitchener said to me:--
"'I was anxious to tell you how very sorry I was to hear of the
death of Mr Steevens. He was with me in the Sudan, and, of course,
I saw a great deal of him and knew him well. He was such a clever
and able man. He did his work as correspondent so brilliantly, and
he never gave the slightest trouble--I wish all correspondents were
like him. I suppose they will try to follow in his footsteps. I am
sure I hope they will.
"'He was a model correspondent, the best I have ever known, and I
should like you to say how greatly grieved I am at his death.'"
Some "In Memoriam" verses, very beautifully written, for the 'Morning
Post,' may however claim a passing attention:--
"The pages of the Book quickly he turned.
He saw the languid Isis in a dream
Flow through the flowery meadows, where the ghosts
Of them whose glorious names are Greece and Rome
Walked with him. Then the dream must have an end,
For London called, and he must go to her,
To learn her secrets--why men love her so,
Loathing her also. Yet again he learned
How God, who cursed us with the need of toil,
Relenting, made the very curse a boon.
There came a call to wander through the world
And watch the ways of men. He saw them die
In fiercest fight, the thought of victory
Making them drunk like wine; he saw them die
Wounded and sick, and struggling still to live,
To fight again for England, and again
Greet those who loved them. Well indeed he knew
How good it is to live, how good to love,
How good to watch the wondrous ways of men--
How good to die, if ever there be need.
And everywhere our England in his sight
Poured out her blood and gold, to share with all
Her heritage of freedom won of old.
Thus quickly did he turn the pages o'er,
And learn the goodness of the gift of life;
And when the Book was ended, glad at heart--
The lesson learned, and every labour done--
Find at the end life's ultimate gift of rest."
There I leave him. Great-hearted, strong-souled, brave without a
hesitation, tender as a child, intolerant of wrong because he was
incapable of it, tolerant of every human weakness, slashing
controversialist in speech, statesman-like in foresight, finely versed
in the wisdom of many literatures, a man of genius scarce aware of his
innumerable gifts, but playing them all with splendid skill, with full
enjoyment of the crowded hours of life,--here was George Steevens. In
the face of what might have been--think of it--a boy scarce thirty! And
yet he did much, if his days were so few. "Being made perfect in a
little while, he fulfilled long years."
PRINTED BY WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS.
[Illustration: MAP OF THE SEAT OF WAR IN SOUTH AFRICA]
End of Project Gutenberg's From Capetown to Ladysmith, by G. W. Steevens