Chapter 15

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."

Lord Cromer's public speeches and published writings scarcely give a hint of his humour, which was lambent and sometimes almost boyish. He loved to be amused, and he repaid his entertainer by being amusing. I suppose that after his return from Cairo he allowed this feature of his character a much freer run. The legend used to be that he was looked upon in Egypt as rather grim, and by no means to be trifled with. He was not the man, we may be sure, to be funny with a Young Turk, or to crack needless jokes with a recalcitrant Khedive. But retirement softened him, and the real nature of Lord Cromer, with its elements of geniality and sportiveness, came into full play.

Eight years ago, I regret to admit, Mr. Lloyd George was not the universal favourite in the House of Lords that he has since become. Lord Cromer was one of those who were not entirely reconciled to the financial projects of the new Chancellor of the Exchequer. He compared the Chancellor with Pescennius Niger,

"who aspired to be Emperor after the death of Pertinax, and was already Governor of Syria. On being asked by the inhabitants of that province to diminish the land tax, he replied that, so far as he was concerned, not only would he effect no diminution, but he regretted that he could not tax the air which they breathed."

The strained relations between Mr. Lloyd George and the House of Lords inspired Lord Cromer with a really delightful parallel from Dryden's _Absalom and Achitophel_ (which, by the way, was one of his favourite poems):--

"Thus, worn or weakened, well or ill content, Submit they must to DAVID'S government; Impoverished and deprived of all command, Their taxes doubled as they lost their land; And--what was harder yet to flesh and blood, Their gods disgraced, and burnt like common wood."

When he pointed this out to me, I entreated him to introduce it into a speech on the Budget. But he said that he was not sure of his audience, and then it was most painful to an orator to make a literary reference which was not taken up. Once at Sheffield, when he was urging the necessity of a strong Navy upon a large public meeting, he quoted Swinburne's splendid lines:--

"All our past comes wailing in the wind, And all our future thunders on the sea,"

without producing any effect at all. But the House of Lords is not an illiterate audience, and I recollect that on one occasion, when Lord Cromer himself was speaking on preferential treatment for the Colonies, and quoted Prior:--

"Euphemia (that is Preference) serves to grace my measure, But Chloe (that is Protection) is my real flame,"

the Peers received the couplet with hilarious appreciation.

He was very entertaining about the oddities of his life in the East, and his stories were numberless. One was of a petition which he once received from a young Egyptian with a grievance, which opened with these words:--

"O Hell! Lordship's face grow red when he hear quite ghastly behaviour of Public Works Department towards our humble servant."

He used to repeat these things with an inimitable chuckle of enjoyment.

We have been told that he who blows through bronze may breathe through silver. The severe preoccupations of Lord Cromer's public life did not prevent him from sedulously cultivating the art of verse. In 1903, before his retirement from Egypt, he published a volume of _Paraphrases and Translations from the Greek_, in the preparation or selection of which I believe that he enjoyed the advice of Mr. Mackail. It was rather unlucky that, with a view to propitiate the angry critics, Lord Cromer prefixed to this little book a preface needlessly modest. He had no cause to apologise so deeply for exercises which were both elegant and learned. It is a curious fact that, in this collection of paraphrases, the translator did not touch the Attic authors whom he knew so well--he used to copy out pages of AEschylus and Sophocles in his loose Greek script, with notes of his own--but dealt entirely with lyric and epigrammatic poets of the Alexandrian age. Perhaps it seemed to him less daring to touch them than to affront AEschylus. He was not quite sure about these verses of his; he liked them, and then he was afraid that they were unworthy of the original. Out in Cairo it was so difficult, he said, to get a critical opinion.

Among his unpublished translations there is one, from a fragment of Euripides, which should not be lost, if only because Lord Cromer himself liked it better than any other of his versions. It runs:--

"I learn what may be taught; I seek what may be sought; My other wants I dare To ask from Heaven in prayer."

Of his satirical _vers-de-societe_, which it amused him to distribute in private, he never, I believe, gave any to the world, but they deserve preservation. Some serious reflections on the advantages of the British occupation of Egypt close with the quotation:--

"Let them suffice for Britain's need-- No nobler prize was ever won-- The blessings of a people freed, The consciousness of duty done."

These were, in a high degree, the rewards of Lord Cromer himself.

After his settlement in London, Mr. T.E. Page sent him a book, called _Between Whiles_, of English verse translated into Latin and Greek. Lord Cromer was delighted with this, and the desire to write in metre returned to him. He used to send his friends, in letters, little triolets and epigrams, generally in English, but sometimes in Greek. But he was more ambitious than this. So lately as February 1911, during the course of one of our long conversations upon literature, he asked me to suggest a task of translation on which he could engage. It was just the moment when he was particularly busy with Constitutional Free Trade and Woman Suffrage and other public topics, but that made no difference. It had always seemed to me that he had been most happy in his versions of the Bucolic poets, and so I urged him to continue his translations by attempting the _Europa_ of Moschus. He looked at it, and pronounced it unattractive. I was therefore not a little surprised to receive a letter, on March 25th, in which he said:--

"Not sleeping very well last night, I composed in my head these few lines merely as a specimen to begin _Europa_:--

"When dawn is nigh, at the third watch of night, What time, more sweet than honey of the bee, Sleep courses through the brain some vision bright, To lift the veil which hides futurity, Fair Cypris sent a fearful dream to mar The slumbers of a maid whose frightened eyes Pictured the direful clash of horrid war, And she, Europa, was the victor's prize."

"They are, of course, only a first attempt, and I do not think much of them myself. But do you think the sort of style and metre suitable?"

He went steadily on till he completed the poem, and on April 27th I received a packet endorsed "Patched-up Moschus returned herewith." So far as I know, this version of the _Europa_, conducted with great spirit in his seventieth year, has never been published. It is the longest and most ambitious of all his poetical experiments.

Lord Cromer was fond of saying that he considered the main beauty of Greek poetry to reside in its simplicity. In all his verses he aimed at limpidity and ease. He praised the Greek poets for not rhapsodising about the beauties of nature, and this was very characteristic of his own eighteenth-century habit of mind. His general attitude to poetry, which he read incessantly and in four languages, was a little difficult to define. He was ready to give lists of his life-long prime favourites, and, as was very natural, these differed from time to time. But one list of the books he had "read more frequently than any other" consisted of the _Iliad_, the Book of Job, _Tristram Shandy_, and _Pickwick_, to which he added _Lycidas_ and the Tenth Satire of Juvenal. It would require a good deal of ingenuity to bring these six masterpieces into line. He was consistent in declaring that the 28th chapter of Job was "the finest bit of poetry ever written."

He was violently carried away in 1912 by reading Mr. Livingstone's book on _The Greek Genius_. It made him a little regret the pains he had expended on the Hymns of Callimachus and the Bucolics of Theocritus, and he thought that perhaps he ought to have confined himself to the severer and earlier classics. But surely he had followed his instinct, and it would have been a pity if he had narrowed his range. It was the modernness of the Alexandrian authors, and perhaps their Egyptian flavour, which had justly attracted him. He did not care very much for an antiquity which he could not revivify for his own vision. I urged him to read a book which had fascinated me, _The Religion of Numa_, by a learned American, the late Mr. Jesse Carter. Lord Cromer read it with respect, but he admitted that those earliest Roman ages were too remote and cold for him.