The Nineties were the high and palmy days of the great Randlords and the “Kaffir Circus.” The romance of the time was expressed, perhaps better than in the verse of Mr. Kipling, by a song then popular about “sailing away” and “coming back a millionaire.” There was a certain virtue even in sailing away; it denoted contempt for the petty dullness of the British Isles, and to be contemptuous of the home of the race was then the mark of extreme patriotism. But most admirable of all was to come back a millionaire. The notion of snatching rich loot from remote places, and spending it in London, was intensely gratifying, even to people from whom one would naturally look for less simplicity. I remember hearing a certain great Peer of that day confess in public that he saw no future for England except as a sort of lounge and pleasure garden for those who had gathered immense wealth in the outer Empire. The more energetic sons of these islands, he argued, would always tend to sail away, and we might reasonably pray that a fair proportion would come back millionaires. The less enterprising, trained to minister to every want and whim of these conquerors, in the capacity of footmen, gardeners, gamekeepers, entertainers, and artificers in every kind, material and intellectual, would live in docile and contented servitude on wealth created overseas.
C. J. Rhodes
The curious malady of vision, of which this is an extreme example, had many victims in the latest years of the nineteenth century. During the years between the two Jubilees of Queen Victoria the eyes of a great part of the nation were at the ends of the earth. Johannesburg seemed immensely nearer to London than any English town, and the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway sounded more outlandish than the Canadian Pacific. It was the time of Consols at 114, and British pigs at what the dealer would give for them. There was an immense deal of money seeking investment, and unable, in the conditions then existing, to obtain profitable employment at home. So the millions which could not be found to cultivate the land of the Home Counties were poured out like water to finance any plausible African scheme; and our public men seemed to anticipate, not altogether without satisfaction, the time when Kent and Sussex would be to the millionaires of the Empire what Inverness and Sutherlandshire already were to the rich of Great Britain. The gold fever raged strongly. “Deeps” and “Fonteins” were the staple of conversation in all sorts of circles; if one went to the theatre the chances were that the drop-scene would display in illuminated figures the closing prices of Rand securities; and everybody who passed down Park Lane was reminded, by a certain house sprawling with naked nymphs and cupids, that the shortest way from Whitechapel to Mayfair crossed and recrossed the Equator.
It is necessary to recall this atmosphere, in which even the figure of Barney Barnato seemed invested with something of the glamour of Drake and Raleigh, to understand the place occupied by Cecil John Rhodes in the life of the Nineties. If mere swollen gamblers seemed, in the Gibbonian phrase, to “display the awful majesty of the hero,” it was natural that a man very much more than a gambler, a man with a large share of the heroic, should fire the imagination of his contemporaries. Even to-day, when we see Rhodes in a dry light, we are conscious of a quality which gives him admittance to that small and select brotherhood we agree to call great; in the full blaze of his prestige it was indeed a steady eye which could avoid being dazzled by the splendour of him. To the ordinary non-critical man of that time, his very faults, as many now esteem them, contributed to the fascination he exercised. As a nation we may be somewhat prone—though it would seem more prudent to write in the past tense—to the “unctuous rectitude” with which Rhodes sneeringly credited us. But we have always a weakness for the strong man who shows his strength by smashing the Ten Commandments, so long as he satisfies us in his observances of all the taboos and ordinances contained in that greater table of the law which we call “cricket.” Rhodes let it be known that he thought little of the Decalogue. But he succeeded in spreading the faith that he always played “cricket.” Thus a legend arose concerning him which was not quite like the truth. He appeared to his contemporaries as a compound of the qualities we like to think specially English. He was admired for a recklessness which was certainly not part of his character, and for a frankness which did not always distinguish him. In any contest between Rhodes and statesmen at home the public was always ready to assume that the man who talked gallantly about “facing the music” was in some deep sense in the right, even if by technical standards he might be proved to be in the wrong. For this faith in his essential “whiteness” there was, indeed, some justification. He had certainly made his great fortune by much the same methods that other great African fortunes were made. He had had some very queer business and political associates. He had done many things that could be called strong, and perhaps some things that could be called wrong. That his most fervent admirers were ready enough to admit. But they were not disposed to be censorious. Granted that Rhodes was a little cynical, and that in his earlier career there might be little to distinguish him (apart from manners and education) from the gamblers who “made good” in his company, it was still a fact that, arrived at great riches, he sought riches no more.
This combination of great wealth and disinterestedness appealed strongly to the British mind. We have little use for the poor idealist; his ideals, we argue, cannot be very valuable, or how could he remain poor? But we are seldom over-critical of the man who, with great wealth, subordinates money to an idea. “Big ideas,” said Rhodes once to Gordon, “must have big cash behind them.” Rhodes’s countrymen were won by the fact that the big ideas supported by the big cash were not strictly commercial ideas. Had he been a mere company promoter, on however colossal a scale, he could not have won even a passing popularity. For he had no turn for sport or for society; with something of the superstition of the Calvinist, he united the unsocial Calvinistic temper. He could be a good host at Groote Schuur, and a kindly master to his small knot of dependent intimates; but he had no taste for the ordinary rich man’s amusements. He could not have tickled the public fancy by running yachts or race-horses, or dazzled it by great display. But his “big ideas,” it was soon recognised, were really big. They had, it is true, a touch of the vulgarity which so often attaches to very big things. Personally, Rhodes was not, indeed, without a vein of vulgarity. He was, it is true, by nature and education a gentleman, and he was, of course, very much more than a gentleman. But he had a passion for diamonds and a contempt for women; he loved not merely appreciation but flattery of the grosser kind; he was strangely content with the companionship of quite inferior men; he was not exempt from that very bad failing, a tendency to bully those who were in no position to retaliate. To gloss over these defects would be to give a wholly false view of a character which owes its distinction less to fine harmonies than to striking contrasts. Rhodes had his smallness. But there was another side of his character which gave him a singular dominion over minds which might be suspected of utter incapacity for hero-worship. His superiority was admitted by men far richer than himself, who seemed incapable of respecting anything but riches and the qualities that gain riches. Barney Barnato went ever in awe of him. Beit admitted his superiority. It was the magic of his name, long before he reached greatness, which permitted of the De Beers Consolidation, and made a commercial company for many years the virtual ruler of South Africa. It was the presence of something incalculable in his character which gave him his power over brother millionaires. They had one simple motive—to make money and enjoy it after their kind. Rhodes did not despise money, or luxury, or power. He had firm faith in the “big cash”; though caring little for pleasure or society in the ordinary sense, he keenly relished magnificence of living; his enjoyment of absolutism was Sultanic. But no Beit or Barnato could ever tell when his materialism or his mysticism would predominate, and they held him accordingly in the kind of perplexed respect with which madmen have been regarded in rude ages. More normal people, of course, were closer to a real understanding of this element in the man. The decent Dutchman knew that he had a genuine passion for South Africa. The decent Englishman knew that he had a genuine passion for England. Both knew that they could trust him in large things to prefer the South African and the British interest to that of the wealthy speculator. By that mysterious process which enables whole masses of men without special information to do rough justice to the deeds and motives of the great, the impression spread to the mother country, and sufficed at the time of the Jameson raid to break the force of a fall which might otherwise have finally ruined him.
Any other man but Rhodes must have been ruined, and his true greatness, the greatness that was personal to him and had nothing to do with his wealth, was never better illustrated than in the sequel. Stripped of his offices, he still continued the greatest power in South Africa, and it was simply as Cecil Rhodes, and in no other capacity, that he made his famous peace with the Matabele, a peace which survived the shock of the Boer War. The story has often been told, how to win the confidence of the natives he left the expeditionary force, and lay in a tent, which could readily have been rushed, within easy reach of the enemy, without a single bayonet to protect him; how, after a time, the natives, admiring his courage, agreed to a parley; how Rhodes went unarmed to meet the chiefs in their full war kit; how he calmly discussed with them all their grievances, and then, after three or four hours’ talk, suddenly asked, “Is there to be peace or war?” On which the chiefs threw down their spears at his feet, and the war was over. The incident well illustrates the kind of courage Rhodes possessed. No man could be further removed from the dare-devil. He was not even free from some suspicion of personal timidity. Some exceedingly brave deeds are credited to him, but it would seem that his courage was of that sort which is seen at its best when facing the ferocities of inanimate nature, the perils of fire and flood, of storm and earthquake. No unkindly critic has remarked on the fact that, when travelling with five or six other men through a lion-infested region, he habitually and instinctively took the position nearest the tent-pole; he coveted Ulysses’ privilege of being eaten last. Under fire, though he never flinched, he was hardly comfortable; he had little of the contempt of danger which distinguished his friend and follower, Dr. Jameson. Probably it is broadly true that he was at his best pitted against mere difficulties, and at his worst when he had to encounter an intelligent enemy. Even in the warfare of politics he preferred methods of suasion to those of force, and was always readier to compromise than to fight unless the nature of the issue forbade. But when his mind was set on anything his resolution could neither be bent nor broken, and he would face any incidental and unavoidable danger with the coolest stoicism. He no doubt exactly expressed the case when he said, describing his experiences in the second Matabele War, that he was in a funk all the time, but afraid to be thought afraid. His courage, in fact, though adequate to any ordinary military strain, was rather that of the statesman than of the soldier. In affairs he was singularly free from respect for persons or fear of responsibility; he had made up his mind, from a very early stage, what he wanted to do, and difficulties, personal or material, existed only to be overcome. Ordinarily he was placable and plausible, concerned rather to smooth away opposition than to crush it; but when seriously crossed he could be violent and even terrible in his rage. He demanded from most of his little court a subservience which was of small profit to him; the meaner men came to know that it paid to flatter him and concur in all his views, and it thus happened that he was deprived of sound and disinterested advice when it would have been of the greatest service. Few men of his stature—for Rhodes was, with all deductions, a very great man—have been content with creatures so small; Dr. Jameson was almost the only member of his immediate circle who enjoyed his society on equal terms. Between these two men there was real affection. They had much in common—patriotism, a love of the wild, a sense of the romantic, a passion for action. But there seems also to have been a more obscure bond which secured the friendship against the risks involved in Jameson’s frankness and Rhodes’s intolerance to any form of contradiction. Rhodes’s health was never good; he was first driven from England at the age of seventeen by physical breakdown, and when he started for South Africa the second time he was given but six months to live. All through his life the fear of death weighed heavily on him, and, with the fatalistic superstition which modified his unbelief, he fancied that he was only safe when Jameson was within reach. Moreover, Jameson was a man of education, and Rhodes almost reached the ludicrous in his reverence for “a scholar and a gentleman.” He had himself taken immense pains to get a degree. He was preparing for Oxford when forced to take his first trip abroad; in 1872 he returned to matriculate at Oriel; but it was not until 1881 that he was able to call himself a Master of Arts. There is something slightly humorous in the notion of this man, dealing with the largest practical affairs, flitting between Kimberley and Oxford in order to attain a distinction shared with many very dull and common-place people. But Rhodes’s faith in the English University system was an abiding characteristic. Sir Thomas Fuller relates that he pointed out that under the system at De Beers there was nothing but the honesty of one of the officials to prevent wholesale robbery of diamonds. “Oh,” said Rhodes, “that’s all right. Mr. —— takes charge of the diamonds. He is an Oxford man and an English gentleman. Perhaps if there were two at the job they might conspire.” “One man,” says the American philosopher, “learns the value of truth by going to Sunday school, and another by doing business with liars.” It would seem that the well-founded respect which Rhodes felt for the honesty of the English gentleman derived partly from his exhaustive experience of cosmopolitan adventurers.
Indeed, the arrogance which was one of the least pleasant characteristics of Rhodes—an arrogance which inflated his strong features and often gave a rather repellent aspect to an otherwise attractive face—was generally softened in the presence of men of science, letters, and humane learning. Rhodes might be stiff to a home politician, and overbearing to an African associate, but he was, both in London and at Groote Schuur, an easy and winning host to those whom he held in any kind of intellectual reverence, or whom he recognised as pursuing ideals he respected. The man who won the heart of Gordon must have been a remarkable man in more than his obvious aspects. There was, indeed, in Rhodes a kind of spiritual hunger contrasting almost pathetically with his superficial materialism and his blank unbelief. He had a temperament fitted for a great part in an age of faith, and it was his fate to be rather specially representative of an agnostic age. He had read in youth Winwood Reade’s Martyrdom of Man, and had adopted its dogmatic atheism. Yet he wanted vehemently to believe in something; his strong interest in the supernatural eloquently testified to this hunger. A belief of some sort was, in fact, a necessity to a man such as he; and, if there was artlessness, there was full sincerity in his claim to be the instrument of the Providence whose existence he denied. God, he once said, was “obviously” trying to produce a predominant type most fitted to bring peace, liberty, and justice to the world; and only one race approached this “ideal type” of the Almighty. This was the race to which Rhodes himself belonged, the “Anglo-Saxon,” and Rhodes believed that the best way to help on God’s work and fulfil His purpose in the world was to contribute to the predominance of the Anglo-Saxon race.
Such convictions may be philosophically absurd, but when they take possession of a mind richly endowed in practical qualities, and direct a will of altogether abnormal strength, they are bound to lead to great achievement. Rhodes belonged to that terrible order of men who conceive themselves, by virtue of the grandeur and purity of the visions that absorb and inspire them, released from the ordinary restraints appropriate to humbler people. “What have you been doing since I last saw you, Mr. Rhodes?” asked Queen Victoria once. “I have added,” was the reply, “two provinces to Your Majesty’s dominions.” In the view of most people that sublimely sufficient answer would equally serve for the epitaph of the man who rendered it in haughty assurance that it justified his life. It is certainly an answer to be pleaded in any court of historical justice which returns a favourable verdict on other great empire-builders like Clive and Warren Hastings. Rhodes is to be judged as they are. As in their case, so in his, we have to set off great splendours and virtues against not inconsiderable blemishes. As in their case, so in his, we could wish that he had sometimes not neglected those maxims of morality which are also in the main the soundest maxims in policy; that he had never taken the crooked path; that he had always disdained the counsel of crooked people. But each nature has its own temptations, and the man of strong will who is passionately determined on a great object can seldom resist the temptations to break through fences barring what he thinks the shortest way to its attainment. Rhodes was thrown in very early life among men of a cynicism quite exceptional; and it is hardly wonderful that he became himself not a little cynical. But the real greatness that underlay his character was shown by his cool estimate of wealth after he had made it. His head was no doubt a little affected by the intoxication of power. But mere money soon ceased to interest him. It is said that he would not trouble for months together to pay in dividend warrants amounting to hundreds of thousands of pounds, and, on hearing from the bank that his account was overdrawn, he would fumble in the pockets of some old dressing-gown or shooting-jacket for crumpled papers worth perhaps a million. Such a man may be at once acquitted of any ignoble worship of money. Yet much smaller men have proved capable of equal philosophy. The greatness of Rhodes lay in that very faith which, stated in words, provokes a smile, but, translated into deeds over half a lifetime and half a continent, compels a wondering respect. The racial arrogance with which the faith was expressed may sometimes offend. The acts which it prompted may sometimes appear questionable. Some of us may feel that the world is wide enough for all kinds of human talent and character, and that the burden of governing is too great for any one kind, however admirable. Others may feel strongly that the nation which most aspires to a moral domination must be more than ordinarily careful of its own morals. But when all is said the man who possessed such a faith and wrote it in characters of such sprawling bigness belongs to that small company of Englishmen who have really earned the often too lightly conceded adjective “great.”
