Gordon ; The Visionary Hero

BY H. W. NEVINSON.

ON the centenary of Charles Gordon's birth our thoughts turn naturally to the career of that remarkable

man ; for in the great Victorian Age, so rich in the noble adventures of mind and action, he was one of the most heroic figures. A strange and baffling figure certainly, so puzzling to the ordinary mind that most people thought him eccentric and officials called him mad. In word and action he sharply contradicted the accepted opinions and routine of common life. What makes him more difficult to understand, he abounded in apparent contradictions within himself. As he wrote to his for- midably religious sister, " Talk of two natures in one, I have a hundred, and they none think alike and all want to rule." These natures tore him with all their impulses. and for the fifty years of his life they gave him no peace. A restless mind and a body of unusual vigour drove him to successive outbursts of action, but he knew in his soul that divine contemplation was the better part. He was a soldier of a genius that is called instinctive, but he longed for a hermit's peaceful life, until the opportunity came, and then he was quickly off again to the field of action. He sought seclusion and eschewed the temptations of society, but, conscious of his powers, he suffered from the slights and suspicions of officialdom, and felt hurt when excluded from the Abyssinian and Ashanti cam- paigns. " I would rather be dead than praised," he said, and at the height of his early fame he refused to be lionized. But he recognized the alluring temptation to splendid and ambitious deeds. In the January of 1884, just before his final journey to the Sudan, he met Sir Samuel Baker in Devonshire, and we read :

" Baker pressed him to go to the Sudan if the British Government required it. ' Gordon,' the vicar who was with them records, ' was silent, but his eyes flashed, and an eager expression passed over his face as he looked at his host. Late at night, when he had retired,' Mr. Barnes adds, ' he came to my room, and said in a soft voice :

You saw me to-day f " " Yon mean in the carriage." " Yes ; you saw me—that was myself—the self I want to get rid of." ' "

This habit of self-examination, or of spiritual intro- spection, was encouraged by the Evangelical form of Christianity prevailing in his boyhood, and austerely maintained by his elder sister Augusta, to whom he wrote 1,600 letters as a kind of diary. To the religious temper this world was but a fleeting dream, through which, and beyond which, extended the soul's eternity. " It is only the material things of life," he said, " that are of no import." Hence his refusal of honours and of high salaries, of which he accepted only half Or less than half. Hence, too, his longing for death and the imagined activities of immortality. This life is but a shadow, signifying little.- Writing a memorandum to Lord Lyons, our Ambassador in Paris, upon the conditions in the Sudan, he said : " Anyhow it matters little ; a few years hence a piece of ground six feet by two will contain all that remains of -Ambassadors, Ministers, and your obedient, humble servant, C. G. Gordon."

In more than half of his nature he was always a mystic, trusting to the guidance of a mysterious influence which he called =his "Pillar," and always at war with worldly interests that he called his " Agog." When in Darfur, attempting to cheek the slave trade, at unheeded peril to himself, he wrote

" Praying for the people whom lam about to visit gives me -much strength, and it is wonderful bow something awns already to have passed betereen us when I meet -with a chief (for whom -1 have prayed.) for the first time."

And during his dubious dispute with Baring (Lord Cromer) about the employment of Zobeir, the old slaver-dealer, for the last journey ta Khartoum, he says that -he was guided by a mystic feeling he bad that he could trust him, and he only wished that Baring and Nubar felt the same. There is something peculiarly mystic too in his reflection upon the beauty of the human form, which suggested a picture of all the angels examining a raised boy's body with " the greatest curiosity and amazement." As Gordon was returning to Europe in 1880, a M. Joseph Reinach met him on the ship and described him as " un diable d'homtne." I suppose that does not mean " A devil of a fellow," but implies an admixture of something strange and daemonic. He found him the most amusing of companions, who in some queer way talked both English and French at once, and tumbled out sometimes the ideas of a profound experience of men and things, and sometimes the fantastic reflections of an overwrought brain. To the French mind Gordon's religious mysticism may well have appeared fantastic and overwrought, but to those of us who were brought up on similar religious lines it cannot appear strange. The only unusual part of it was his absolute tolerance of other modes of worship, whether Buddhist or Moslem, so long as they were founded on the worship of God. And the only possible error I can find in such a man would be that intense preoccupation with his own soul, which perhaps was the root cause, not only of his occasional brusqueness, but of that deliberate modesty which seemed to come near affectation. If this is a fault as contrasted with our common habits of brag and self-display, it is shared by men of similar nature, as, for instance, by the elusive Colonel T. E. Lawrence.

At all events, if I had wished to detect some point of weakness in a heroic character, I should have dwelt upon this self-centred introspection rather than upon the charge of repeated tippling with which the late Mr. Lytton Strachey befouled his fascinating essay. In Dr. Bernard Allen's supremely excellent book, Gordon and the Sudan, the libel has been traced to its muddy source in the writings and lectures of a Mr. Chaille-Long, a jealous enemy, whom Gordon described as a feeble fellow, who preferred talking about what he had done rather than what had to be done now. I sympathize with Mr. Lytton Strachey in his discovery of the insidious accusation, for without that he could hardly have included Gordon in his scheme of depreciating certain eminent Victorians, But it is unfortunate that the lie should have flown round the world on the wings of malicious wit while solid truth pants after it in vain.

Christianized Stoic and fatalist as he was, Gordon dis- played nothing of the Stoic's proud solemnity. Edward Clifford, the artist who drew the rapid sketch of Gordon now in the National Portrait Gallery, just before he started on his last journey in 1882, used to describe to me his sparkling blue eyes and merry smile, his intense enjoyment of life though he thought it but a passing dream, his laughing conversation. As to courage, he said :

" I am always frightened, and very mush so. It is not the fear of death, that is past,. thank God ; but I fear defeat and its coned- quences. I do not believe a bit in the calm, unmoved man."

This was the man who, armed only with a cane, stormed the breach in Chinese fortresses ; led a turbulent gang of ruffians, called the Ever Victorious Army, to the suppres- sion of a vast Chinese rebellion, and saved -Shanghai ; held the supreme command for eight years in Equatoria and the Sudan ; opened the way to the lakes through the strangling sudd ; negotiated with the crazy Emperor of Abyssinia; confronted the officialdom of India; returned to China to check a war with Russia ; explored the misery of Ireland and the historic sites of Jerusalem ;

served in Mauritius and Basutoland; and was Ou the point of taking service on the "Congo When popular acelama-; tion summoned him to the Sudan for the last time. . On all. these perilous . services ;he ,showed a shrewd insight into the heart of things, and that rapid. judgement which is called intuition, but is no more "than the powers of reason unconsciously accumulated, A swift and decisive soldier, a beneficent influence in the most wretched regions . of the world, Gordon was an example of the disregarded -

truth that the ,imaginative and unworldly visionary is often the one best- fitted- for --practical and keen-edged performance.. • At a .German _University in .January, 1885, I read with indescribable joy .Gordon's tiny last message, so charac-

teristic ,of his unfailing spirit : Khartoum all right. Could hold out for years." But by the time I read, it the end, had already conic, and the noblest 'type of British imaginative heroism was lost to the world..