THE BEST MEMORIAL NOR LIVINGSTONE.
THE burial of David Livingstone in Westminster Abbey, the honours paid to his remains by the representative men who followed his coffin, and many even of the somewhat wild eulogies upon his work, seem to us all to have been thoroughly deserved. Few men have striven to do much for mankind from so pure a motive, or have shown so vividly the best, though it is also the most usual, side of the Scottish character. He—bred originally a peasant, and always retaining some of a peasant's inarticulateness—devoted the energies of a life to raise the status of a race which hardly gave him thanks, and in order to do it, beat down that drawback in him- self, that intense suspiciousness of injustice from without which is the habitual weakness of men who have raised themselves. As we read David Livingstone's character, he was a man who longed much for appreciation, who was jealous of his own credit, who felt acutely any evidence of neglect, and who, nevertheless, being clear as to his duty, devoted his life to work in which appreciation, though it ultimately came, was most improbable, in which his credit was at any man's mercy, and in which he must neces- sarily risk the utter forgetfulness of the world. There is some- thing, to our minds, in that form of self-sacrifice, that utter crushing-down of self, specially and beautifully noble,—as noble as the self-devotion of the Captain who, knowing his own inner weakness, tied himself to the mast, fought his ship through to victory, and was found dead from fear. No honour is too great for such a one, when he can be recognised, no national care- taking for those he loved more than sufficient, no memorial, how- ever durable, can suggest exaggerated appreciation. Our single hope is that this Memorial, if one is to be raised, as we trust it will be, should be of a kind in true consonance with the character and the impelling motive of the dead. That Livingstone was at heart a genuine Missionary—that is, that he desired strongly to see Chris- tianity extended through all lands, and was prepared, if opportunity arose freely to expend himself for that end, we do not doubt, while his life and death alike show the depth of his personal piety,—but there was something else in the giant Scotchman tramping on for years through the heart of Africa, now hopeful, now bitter, but always manly and masterful, so masterful that he inspired a reverence among his followers never accorded yet by Africans, and that was the spirit of adventure, the desire to see and to know strange things, the hunger for a life as wild and lonely as daring and knowledge and restless curiosity could make it. People will accuse us of irreverence in making the comparison, but the nearest character to Livingstone's has always seemed to us to be Fenimore Cooper's hero throughout his Indian novels, the only productions of his over-fertile pen which will live at all. Natty Bumpo, the scout and hunter, with a grand object would have been David Livingstone, as he appears in all his books, and in the impression he made upon all men.
It is strange that in England, which has produced so many wanderers, the character of Wanderer should have become so depreciated that Livingstone's friends will repudiate it with in- dignation, but it is not inexplicable. The character, in itself one of the finest in the world, demanding more courage, more enter- prise, more varied capacity, more, in fact, of the elements which make up a true hero than almost any other, has for its base a quality which in itself may be either evil or good, viz., lawlessness, a dislike of ordinary restraints, a desire to dis- card fetters, a passion for breaking through obstacles by sheer individuality and will, which more than any other emotions are discernible among the Conquistadores of Spain, the discoverers of our own country, and the conquerors of all nations and times. This lawlessness, with all its accompany- ing virtues, is very nearly allied to unscrupulousness, and the majority of Adventurers have therefore been, as a rule, if not bad men, at least unscrupulous ones. Almost the only great exception to that rule is the history of Arctic exploration. Whether it has arisen from the absence of temptation, from the long-continued self-denial involved in Arc- tic expeditions, from the spiritual impression which the semi- ghastly, semi-glorious scenes of the extreme North have forced upon the voyagers, it is a fact that we can recall no Arctic voyager
upon whose character rests a stain, very few in whom the public have not recognised some special, we had almost written spiritual, felicity of character. Travellers in the South Seas, in the Austra- lian interior and in Africa have often been of another and worse though thoroughly useful type ; while the earlier explorers of America, Spanish and English, have, with some exceptions, been distinguishable from buccaneers mainly by the grandeur of their aims, and a certain mental elevation discernible among the rudest and the worst, and traceable, as we imagine, to the effect of the heat of imagination caused by the sudden disappearance of the old landmarks of thought. As the earth was round and the heavens not solid, what might not the traveller discover or acquire, what even of supernatural reward ? You can see something of that elevation even in the only successful Conquistador, the brutal swineherd Pizarro, while it is never absent from the figure of Columbus. Still it is true that so many of the great Adventurers have been bad men, or earthy men, or unscrupulous men, that the character of the Order has been discredited till, in classing Livingstone among them, half our readers will feel aa if we were depreciating his character. We do not depreciate it in the least, as they will see, when we say we believe the best memorial to his memory would be neither church, nor statue, nor institution, but the multiplication of the men to whom he belonged, the higher type of those explorers and adventurers, and it may be even con- querors, among whom Columbus ranks first, Raleigh—if we accept Canon Kingsley's estimate of his character—second, and probably Rajah Brooke the third. Such men, of course, are not to be manufactured, but they are to be helped, and a Livingstone Fund upon which they could rely would be the most appropriate and most permanent memorial, both of the man and of his work. A few hundred pounds devoted to a particular enterprise would often encourage men of the highest character to enterprises from which they now turn hopelessly, to sink into the ordinary, and to them very dreary, grooves of regular life. At present it is almost impossible to obtain funds for any enterprise of the kind ; the rich do not take to such undertakings with sufficient purpose, though one of the most successful of Arctic explorers travels at his own expense, and the Societies govern, or to be more strictly just, are compelled by economical considerations to govern over-much. Of course every now and then a candidate will present him- self unfitted for his task, which is exploration from lofty or from philosophic motive, rather than from the mere love of adven- ture ; but if such a Fund could assist oue good man out of three, its 'creation and its purpose would have been amply justified. There is no reason why the object of the Fund should be limited to Africa, though Dr. Livingstone spent his life there, and any limitation is always at the crucial moment . found to be inconvenient, but still, if such• a limitation were found necessary, there would be no objection to it. There is ample work to be done in Africa, even when we have settled the curious problem of the ultimate sources of the Nile. The first object is not merely to discover facts which, valuable or trifling in themselves, man ought to know about the planet he inhabits, but to foster the spirit of adventure now so lacking among young men, and to turn the impatience of civilisation so constantly felt and expressed into some beneficial channel. The Universities main- tain plenty of Travelling Scholarships ; suppose the nation main- tains some Scholarships of Exploration, and names them after one of the bravest, highest, and most successful explorers who ever lived.
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