23 FEBRUARY 1889, Page 19

SIR WILLIAM BUTLER ON GENERAL GORDON.* THIS is, beyond all

question, the best of the complete narratives of the career of General Gordon that have yet been published. Colonel Butler has much more of the gift of style than either Mr. Hake or Mr. Archibald Forbes, and he has— what cannot be claimed for Dr. Birkbeck Hill, or even for the late Mr. Andrew Wilson—a Napier eye for military picturesque- ness and symmetry. At the same time, this book, like almost everything that has been written upon Gordon since his death, is too much of a pamphlet. Colonel Butler is, it is needless to say, altogether superior to the devices of the frantic partisans who make of Gordon's death and memory, brickbats. to hurl at Mr. Gladstone. He attaches, indeed, the blame for the delay which occurred in connection with the despatch of the Khartoum Relief Expedition chiefly to the Civil Service, or "Permanent Government of England," which seems, according to him, to have a positive genius for thwarting a Liberal Execu- tive. Regarding the further and final delay in hurrying forward to Khartoum from the point where the Expedition got into actual touch with Gordon, he says, also that it " should not be borne alone by the officer who has hitherto had to sustain it, but shared, at least equally, by the naval officer to whom • Charles George Gordon. By Colonel Sir William F. Butler. "English Men of Action" Series. London : Macmillan and Co. 1869.

was specially entrusted at Korti the preparation for the journey to Khartoum, and whose execution of that duty was not completed until late in the afternoon of January 23rd, the evening previous to the morning on which the actual start was made." It may be right that these novel views of the immediate causes of the Khartoum collapse should be given to the public ; and undoubtedly the whole truth ought to be made known—if it ever can be made known—about one of the greatest political tragedies of our time. But Sir William Butler might have discharged his duty in this matter without incorporating statements that are morally certain to be controverted, in a volume belonging to so exclusively narrative a series as that of " English Men of Action." He might also have spared his readers a number of his politico-military opinions, such as that, at the time of the Indian Mutiny, Great Britain took a " deliberate vengeance unworthy of a great or civilised nation," or that " the real gainers by the Crimean War were Sardinia and Prussia, the first by knowing when to interfere with her small army, the last by knowing how to abstain altogether with her big one." One rises, indeed, from a perusal of this volume with the impression that it may, or rather must, be twenty years yet before a perfectly satisfactory and dispassionate biography of Gordon can be written.

We have said that Sir William Butler has a gift of style. In a number of passages in this book, indeed, as in his previous work, he shows that he has a fearful and wonderful style. He would have done well, perhaps, before commencing his present task, to have read what MatthewArnold says in one of his earlier essays of the Corinthian splendours of Mr. Kinglake's diction. In that case, he would hardly have printed his highly artificial first chapter about Gordon's ancestry and his name, " that goes back beyond history and even beyond tradition, into days when man began to chip the stones of primeval river-beds into leaf-shaped sharpened flints ; a name full of strange significance in our history, whether borne in Norman, Saxon, or Celtic sound, in simple or compound form, by priest, poet, or soldier, by Breakspeare, Shakespeare, Byron, or Gordon, by those whose words and deeds have stirred men's blood as none other in our history have done." Gordon, on Colonel Butler's own showing, was one of the simplest of men ; yet in these pages he seems sometimes to be posing as a Cromwell, sometimes as an unapproachable "tyrant in old tapestry." Would Gordon himself have appreciated writing like this about himself?—" Khedives and Pachas, Consuls and Com- missioners, Ministers and journalists, big and little, have sank away into oblivion ; and, looking across the dead level of the world which has taken them to their rest, or in which they still await the great effacement, we see, beyond and above all, the light that comes, when the sun has set, to carry the memory of a very noble life far into the night of Time." But when Colonel Butler gets rid of the panoply of the melodramatic sentimentalist, and forgets both Gordon and himself in his narrative, he writes admirably. Never has the marvellous story of Gordon's successes as cora- inander of the Imperialist forces in China been so succinctly and yet so spiritedly told. By means of a parallel between China and England, he lets one see at a glance what was the military problem which Gordon actually set himself to solve, when he accepted a commission from Li Hung Chang to crush the Taipings. We see the Imperialists occupying Dover. Folkestone, Canterbury, and Margate, with the intervening country between these places ; Gordon's head- quarters at Canterbury ; the Taipings holding the rest of Kent, and concentrated round Chatham ; and London, pushed back to somewhere beyond Reading, occupying the position of Nankin. Colonel Butler thinks it was a pity that Gordon did not persevere in his resolution to resign the command of the Ever-Victorious Army after the Wangs were executed, in spite of his pledge to them that their lives would be spared in the event of their surrender. But it is possible that Colonel Butler does not quite understand Gordon's motive in aban- doning his threat of resignation. Besides being greatly pressed by our military and Consular authorities at Shanghai to retain his command, may he not have looked upon Chinese treachery as he ultimately looked upon the African slave- trade,—as a fact that he could not get over, and must accept in a spirit of Christian resignation ?

Colonel Butler contributes little but strong opinions to the familiar story of Gordon's two missions to the Soudan. In some of his judgments he is too trenchant, as when he dis- misses M'tesa, the late King of Uganda, as "the usual mixture of buffoonery, cruelty, and suspicion, which seem to constitute the chief ingredients in the composition of monarchical character in Central Africa." Here Colonel Butler forgets or ignores M'tesa's remarkable sagacity, which enabled him to build up a Black Kingdom in Central Africa. It is at least possible that had M'tesa been alive now, Arab slave-dealers and fanatics would not have been able to over- throw the State of Uganda.

Colonel Butler's account of the events which led up to the fall of Khartoum is the most brilliant literary performance in

this volume ; the chief fault to be found with it is that it is too brilliant, and recalls too readily " Turpin's Ride to York " as performed in the circus. It is but just to Colonel Butler, however, to say that he exhibits the simple sincerity of Gordon's nature as it has not been exhibited before, except, of

course, in his own letters. Thus, he shows " the most heroic heart of the nineteenth century," saying,—" I do not believe a bit in the calm, unmoved man. I think it is only that he does not show it outwardly." It is plain also that Sir William Butler is not only a friend and admirer of Gordon, but in the truest sense a disciple. He sums up his hero's character thus :—

" Gordon was no ' saint ' in the usual meaning which the world attaches to the name. He was utterly removed from the class of religious Church Militant who, as passing residents in some French or Italian city, are prone to hurl their hymns on the Sabbath morning at the heads of the native heretics ; neither had he the smallest fellowship with another large class of persons who would divide religion into two parts—the muscular and the Methodist, one half John Bull and the other John Knox. Absolutely without a parallel in our modern life, Gordon stands out the foremost man of action of our time and nation, whosa ruling principle was faith and good works. No gloomy faith, no exalted sense of self- confidence, no mocking of the belief of others, no separation of his sense of God from the every-clay work to which his hand has to be put ; no leaving of religion at the church-door as a garb to be put on going in and taken off coming out ; but a faith which was a living, moving, genial reality with him, present always and everywhere, shining out in every act of his life, growing and strengthening as the years roll on, filling the desert with thought and lighting the gloom of tropical forest, until at last it enables him to sit quietly and alone, watching with light heart and pleasant jest the great cloud drawing nearer in which his life is to go down, but which to us is to make his name an unsetting sun in the firmament of memory."

This is clearly the language of the heart and not of the head. Sir William Butler not only believes in Gordon ; he believes with Gordon. This faith covers a multitude of infirmities—

even a certain want of charity—in his book.