My life and loves Vol. 2

by Frank Harris

  We were talking one afternoon about bodily exercise and muscular development when somewhat to my astonishment, Burnaby was all in favour of moderation. "Especially in youth," he said, "we can easily overdo it and develop our muscles at the cost of our vital energy. I don't know how to put it better," he went on, "but I'm sure I'm overdeveloped. I've seen little slips of fellows get the passionate love of fine women, while great athletes are never remarkable as lovers." He spoke with bitterness and I took it as a personal confession, for I had noticed the same truth; and everyone knew later that poor Burnaby's marriage was not happy. Yet Roman ladies and even empresses chose gladiators as lovers: why?

  Burnaby came to grief in a way that throws a certain light on the English aristocratic code. One of his brother officers, a captain, I think, had an intrigue with a lady and used to go to meet her at some rooms in the Temple.

  One day Burnaby on his way to Broadley crossed this officer in the square.

  Probably he told Broadley jokingly of the recontre. At any rate next week in the World, which Broadley wrote for, there appeared a paragraph warning the officer in question not to be caught on his way to No- in the Temple, as everyone knew the attraction.

  The officer called a meeting of his brother officers in the regiment and accused Burnaby of being the tell-tale. Burnaby, essentially truthful, could only say that he did not recall mentioning the fact; but it leaked out that Broadley was the paragraphist and the officers thereupon sent Burnaby, the colonel, to Coventry; and a little later, when Prince Edward was to dine with the regiment, the officers notified Burnaby that ft he appeared, no other officer would come to the table. This boycott cut Burnaby to the heart. Before going out to serve in the Sudan with Wolseley's expedition to save Gordon, Burnaby invited me to dinner in his rooms. I had often dined with him before and was always interested. He touched life on a great many more sides than the ordinary English officer; he was well read in three or four literatures and eagerly receptive to all that was fine in art and life. He was an excellent companion, too; told a good story with subtle humour and was essentially large-hearted and generous. In memory I put Fred Burnaby almost with Dick Burton among the noblest men I've known. After the dinner he told me quietly he didn't intend to come back alive. "It seems funny," he remarked in the air, "to be under sentence of death, but within a month or so I shall have entered the great 'Perhaps', as Danton I think called 'the undiscovered country'."

  I argued passionately against his decision, told him his life and achievements as a great adventurer loomed bigger in my eyes than the whole corps of officers. "I'd give a wilderness of monkeys and mediocrities," I cried, "for one Burnaby. For God's sake, get hold of yourself and live out a great life to a noble end."

  "Perhaps you don't know of the way I'm boycotted?" he asked.

  "I've heard of it through Broadley," I replied; but I had heard, too, that Colonel Ralph Vivian, who was immensely popular, had turned away from Burnaby markedly a few weeks before in Hyde Park, and I had realized for months past that Burnaby was wounded to the soul.

  Now he unburdened his pent-up sorrow.

  "Life's a more difficult game than we are apt to imagine in youth," he began.

  "Who could have a better start than I? Fairly well born with perfect health, great strength, height, too, and not so ugly as a wolf, as the French say; endowed besides, with fair brains, good verbal memory, love of adventure and travel and minded seriously to make the best of all my advantages. At thirty-five invited to Windsor, a personage in society with an uncommon reputation, and the position of a Colonel of the Guards; and at forty through no crime, no fault of my own an outlaw, an outcast." (He spoke with intense bitterness.) "I have no chance of recovery and am the worse off that the outside is still brilliant. Thank God, I know how to die!" And the whole face was transfigured, lit up by indomitable resolution and joyous courage.

  "Don't talk like that!" I cried, appalled by the chill of death in the air. "I can't listen to you; it's not worthy of your brains or sense. You have done no intentional wrong," I went on. "Your position is really the revolt of commonplace idiots against a personality, someone of distinction and achievement. It's your business to live it all down, walk through it unheeding.

  You remember Goethe said, 'When the King rides abroad, the village curs all bark at his horse's heels.' Let 'em bark."

  But Burnaby would not be encouraged. "If things were different at home," he sighed, "I might try. But no, I'm a failure, Harris; have come to grief everywhere, so 'one fight more, the best and the last'"; and again the eyes, gladly.

  I can't reproach myself. I did all I knew, argued with him, assured him that the highest public opinion would not condemn him; begged him for the sake of all of us who cared for him to play the game out. At length he interrupted me:

  "The die is cast: I'm going out to the Sudan at the beginning of the week. I'll consider what you've said and I'm infinitely obliged to you for saying it, but each man, my friend, must 'drie his own weird'."

  Tears were in my eyes and my heart was sore as we parted. All the world knows how nobly Burnaby gave his life in the battle of Abou Klea in the Sudan. The Arab rush had broken the British square and the next moment the dervishes would have entered and swept away the formation, when the giant Burnaby hurled himself into the gap in front of his old comrades of the Blues and stemmed the torrent. As the square reformed behind him, Burnaby still fighting, though bleeding from a dozen wounds, went down with an Arab spear through his throat. He had saved a thousand lives and turned disaster into victory. Bennett Burleigh, the famous war correspondent of the Telegraph, wrote to me afterwards that Burnaby saved 'all our lives.'

  As I read of his heroic death I cried like a child and then wondered whether his fellow officers were still proud of their idiotic boycott. To me dear Fred Burnaby was the hero of the Sudan, and not Charles Gordon.

  I never cared for Chinese Gordon greatly, perhaps because he was so extolled on all hands, beslobbered with the cheap adulation of those who didn't even know him by sight. I went to interview him for the Evening News when he came over from Brussels at Gladstone's behest and was about to start for the Sudan to free the garrisons beleaguered by the forces of the Mahdi.

  Perhaps because I didn't expect much, I got little or nothing from him.

  According to Stead and the Pall Mall Gazette, he was a "Christian hero…

  Christ's warrior," a blasphemous contradiction in terms only possible in England or America. Charles Gordon was un-English in one respect: there was absolutely no "side" about him; he was transparently simple and sincere.

  He was good-looking too, with a remarkable forehead, both broad and high.

  But I discounted large foreheads, for my experience rather justified the German word:

  Gross Stirn

  Wenig Gehirn. though Victor Hugo's praise is apt to infect all of us. Hugo said finely that a large forehead had much the same effect as an expanse of sky in a landscape.

  I certainly did not understand Gordon. When I asked him why he gave up his intention to go to the Congo in order to go to Khartoum instead, he smiled, saying the need in the Sudan was more urgent. "He would go to the Congo later," he added, "if God willed." I gathered that he looked on himself as an instrument in God's hands to do whatever he was called upon to do. His fatalistic belief seemed to me childish, the result of success and much praise working on a poor brain. His conceit or, if you will, his faith, went beyond reason. He had no insight into men or events. As soon as he reached Khartoum he startled Baring and shocked Gladstone by asking that his old enemy, Zebehr Pasha, the notorious slave-trader, should be sent up from Cairo to help him. Now some of us remembered that Zebehr Pasha's son, Suleiman, got up a rebellion in 1879 in Darfour against Gordon and his lieutenant, Gessi. Gessi beat Suleiman in battle, took him prisoner, and then in cold blood had him executed. Baring was of the opinion that Zebehr would do Gordon harm, and Gladstone's prejudice against the slave-dealer being insuperable, Zebehr was denied t
o Gordon.

  As if to mock his belief in providence, events fought against Gordon from the beginning. Scarcely had he reached Khartoum when the Mahdi's lieutenant, Osman Digna, took Sinkat by storm and put not only the Egyptian garrison, but every man, woman and child in the place to the sword. No wonder the garrison at Tokar made friends with their savage foe and surrendered on terms, a great many going over, heart and hand, to the enemy. Then Khartoum was threatened and a Christian England forced Gladstone's hand and a military expedition was set on foot to save the saviour.

  General Wolseley of course led the British forces and he determined, in memory, I imagine, of his Red River Expedition, to go up the Nile instead of taking the short cut by Suakim and Berber. The whole, silly tragicomedy discovered to me as by a lightning flash all the unspeakable stupidity of government by democracy, which means today by an ill-informed press and a sentimental loud-voiced minority.

  Yet amid all the hubbub there came suddenly the voice of an authentic man.

  One morning The Times published a letter from the Mahdi, if I remember rightly, to the English government. It was astoundingly well written and translated into pure Biblical English of the best. I haven't got it, I'm sorry to say, but it made an indelible impression on me as the greatest document published in my time, superior even to the letter Parnell published when Gladstone threw him over in the O'Shea divorce case. The Mahdi asked the English why they were coming out against him with horse, foot and artillery?

  Didn't they know that if they were working with God and for His high purpose, a small force would be invincible? Whereas if their aim was selfish and cruel, no force would be sufficient. Tell me what you want, he said practically, and if it is right and just, you will have no difficulty; on the other hand, if your purpose is secret and evil, you are only ploughing the sand.

  Addressed really to Gladstone, the wording of the appeal was irresistibly comic; the old Christian rhetor hoist on a petard of his own manufacture.

  The whole summer England followed the expedition up the Nile with breathless interest. At length in December, after the victory of Abou Klea, a dash to Khartoum was resolved on. As if to demonstrate the utter worthlessness of his judgment, Gordon sent down a message on 29 December that "Khartoum was all right and could hold out for years." But Wolseley knew better and early in January, Sir Charles Wilson made his dash for Khartoum; he found the town had already fallen and the Mahdist forces fired on his steamer from the walls. "Gordon a prisoner" was the first report; and then came the truth. Hearing the noise of the Mahdist inrush, Gordon ran out of his palace with drawn sword and was stabbed to death in the entrance to his palace. The whole costly expedition was turned thereby into a fiasco.

  Were the forces to return and give up the Sudan to the slave-dealer and the Mahdi? Gladstone wished to do this, but aristocratic England could not so easily accept defeat!

  As soon as Wolseley returned to England I made it my business to see him, and I was interested to find that his view of men and affairs was not very different from my own. Wolseley was always to me a lightweight: no power of personality, no depth of insight, an ordinary English gentleman with much experience of affairs. By dint of rubbing against abler men than himself he had got a sort of clever woman's flair for what was going on above his head; eminently kind and fair-minded, too, with an ambition altogether out of proportion to his capacity. All this and more was illustrated by some stories he told me. I had been asking him about courage and he astonished me by saying that a volunteer army was always better than a conscript army. "One in three of the conscripts," he added, "is sure to be a coward and that minority may bring disaster at almost any time." Somehow or other he convinced me.

  Then the talk came on Gordon, as most talks did about that time. "Oh you know," he began, "Gordon and I were in the Crimea together, every day side by side for hours in the trench before the Redan."

  "Really," I exclaimed. "That must have been interesting!"

  "Very interesting," he went on "and an object lesson in that courage we were talking about. Towards the end the trench got within eighty yards or so of the ramparts of the fort and was so shallow and muddy-wet that it did not give us much shelter. At six o'clock each evening we went off duty and others came in our stead. Gerald Graham, now General Sir Gerald Graham, was the bravest man I ever knew: six feet-odd in height and handsome to boot. Every night as the clock struck Graham used to get up, put his hands in his pockets and stroll off towards his quarters. Soon the Russians remarked this and gathered in the evening on the near rampart for a pot-shot at the big Englishman. As luck would have it, they always missed him. I remonstrated with him again and again. 'It can be only a question of time, Graham,' I said, 'and they'll get you. For God's sake, don't be so foolhardy.' But Graham went on turning himself into a cockshot every evening for weeks and I assure you after ten days or so it was a miracle how he escaped, for some hundreds used to shoot at him and the bullets buzzed like bees."

  "You didn't imitate him?" I asked, laughing.

  "No, indeed," Wolseley replied seriously. "Even at that time I meant to be Commander-in-Chief of the British Army if I could manage it, and so every evening I crawled along the muddy wet trench for a couple of hundred yards or so on my belly till I was fairly out of range. I thought myself far too valuable to make myself a cockshy."

  "And Gordon," I asked, "Gordon was a subaltern with you. How did he act?"

  "None of us could make Gordon out at that time," Wolseley replied. "One evening he'd get up, bold as brass, link arms with Graham, and stroll off with him as if the nearest Russian marksman was a thousand miles away. I came to understand bit by bit that it was all a question of his prayers with Gordon. If God had accorded him some sign of approval, he'd stroll away with Graham wholly unconcerned; if, on the other hand, he was left in doubt of the divine guidance, he'd crawl through the mud lower than I thought necessary, and longer. Gordon was a queer fish; but Graham was the bravest of the brave.

  "I remember afterwards in the Chinese war meeting Graham by chance,"

  Wolseley continued. "One evening I saw a big man on horseback in the mist and ran across to ask some question. When I reached him I saw it was Graham and in my delight I slapped him on the thigh as I put my question. "That's all right,' he answered me, 'but please don't slap that thigh: I've just got a bullet in there,' and as I looked at my hand, it was all crimson. Graham paid no more attention to wounds than to danger. You know he got the V.C. I tried time and again to get it but had no luck; life will not give us all our desires."

  To my amazement he was disappointed! Fancy a leader of armies wanting the Wolseley was an interesting man, though I think these stories of Gordon and Graham the best I ever got from him. Still, he had led an eventful life and his memories of the Civil War in America fascinated me and I shall have to tell them later, for they explain why I worked to get him made Commander-in- Chief and so attain the summit of his ambition. For a good many years we met and dined together half a dozen times every season and he was always an excellent host; and perhaps he enjoyed my cow-punching stories as much as I delighted in his memories of Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee.

  It was at Wolseley's house much later when he was the Ranger at Woolwich that I made a little jest which has been attributed to others. Alfred Austin had just been appointed Poet Laureate by Lord Salisbury, though he had no more poetry in his composition than a house-fly. He had other merits, however. For years he had written leading articles in the Standard and praised Lord Salisbury in and out of season. Accordingly, when Lord Tennyson died, Lord Salisbury appointed Alfred Austin to the post: "Alfred the Little, after Alfred the Great," as some anonymous wit declared. Of course Lord Salisbury should have appointed Swinburne or any one of half a dozen poets greater than this little creature, but no! He appointed his eulogist-a disgraceful outrage on English poetry, the gravity of which he was incapable even of understanding.

  I had met Austin often and thought him a mere journalist and place-hunter
without talent or personality, but this evening when we met at Wolseley's he treated me with marked condescension. "I've known Mr. Harris," he said,

  "when he was merely editor of the Evening News."

  His tone was so high and mighty that I replied, "I hear now that you write poetry as well as prose; which do you intend to use in the future?"

  "Oh now," he replied, "I must write a certain amount of poetry."

  "Why?" I replied, pretending ignorance.

  "Oh, to keep the wolf from the door," he replied, smiling.

  "I see," I retorted, "I see, very good: you read your poetry to the wolf, eh?"

  Austin used to avoid me afterwards, but the word pleased me infinitely, perhaps, because I was seldom witty.

  CHAPTER XVI

  Memories of John Ruskin

  I never met any one in my life whose personal appearance disappointed me more than Ruskin's. Until I saw him, I had always believed that a man of great ability showed his genius in some feature or other, but I could find nothing in Ruskin's face or figure that suggested abnormal talent. His appearance was not even prepossessing. He looked shrivelled up and shrunken: though he was perhaps five feet eight or nine in height, he was slight to frailty and stooped; in spite of a prominent, beaked nose, his face too was small, bony-thin and very wrinkled; the grey hair that must once have been reddish was carefully brushed flat; the beard and whiskers were grey, too, and straggling-thin; the eyes were bright, greyish-blue in color, now quick-glancing, now meditative under the thick out-jutting brows; the high aquiline bird-nose was set off by a somewhat receding chin. He looked like some old, unhappy bird, nothing in the face or figure impressive or arresting.

  His clothes even were old-fashioned: he wore a dark blue frock coat and a very little blue tie; his manner was shy, self-conscious, unassured. I was disappointed to doubting his ability. But as soon as he got excited in speaking his voice carried me away, a thin, high tenor, irresistibly pathetic; it often wailed and sometimes cursed but was always intense; the soul of the man in that singular, musical voice with its noble rhetoric and impassioned moral appeal.