THE CHARACTER OF LIVINGSTONE.

AT the meeting of the Royal Geographical Society in honour of the centenary of the birth of Living. stone, Lord Curzon said that Livingstone's was the type of character and career that will always remain "an inspira- tion for our race."

" Born with no social advantages, possessing no prospects, backed by no powerful influence, this invincible Scotsman hewed his way through the world, and carved hia name deep in the history of mankind, until in the end he was carried to his grave in Westminster Abbey amid the sorrowing admiration of an entire people, and bequeathed a name which has been, and will ever be, a light to hs countrymen. Hew did he do it ? By boldness of conception, by fertility and courage in execution, by a noble endurance in suffering and disappointment, by self-sacrifice unto death, he wrested triumph even from failure, and in the darkness never failed to see the dawn."

We propose here to look a little further into the character of Livingstone. His discoveries in Central Africa are one of the glowing pages of the history of exploration ; we need not even summarize them. What we want to do is to examine the intellectual and moral equipment which made such triumphs possible.

The first point to notice is the unfailing industry with which Livingstone made use of opportunities, or rather invented opportunities, for fitting himself for the work of a missionary and explorer. Lethargic minds find it only too easy to fancy that people who have done remarkable things have had remarkable opportunities. We can imagine someone saying, " Livingstone went as a missionary to Africa at a time when almost the whole of the interior remained to be explored. His work naturally made him friendly with the natives, and with their escort and guidance it was not very difficult to explore unknown parts." Similarly one might with fatal ease half explain away the work of Florence Nightingale : "At the time of the Crimean War the art of nursing was scarcely practised at all. In spite of the efforts of Elizabeth Fry, England was still at the mercy of the Gaups. It was not, therefore, very difficult for a woman of capacity and intellect who happened to have the sympathetic touch to appear a perfect angel of light to the neglected soldiers in the Crimea. But such an opportunity could not occur nowadays."

And so on and so forth. But the fact is that great things do not happen in this way. If we look into the history of Florence Nightingale we find that her work in the Crimea was in no sense whatever a mere brilliant seizing of an opportunity. Florence Nightingale, long before Lord Aberdeen's Government had begun to interest itself on behalf of the Turks in the Holy Places, had recognized the sorry backwardness and amateurishness of the whole system of sick-nursing in England, and had set herself by study and practice to remove the reproach from her country so far as she could. It was not so much a case of the Crimean War giving her an opportunity as of the Government of the day seizing the opportunity of making use of Florence Nightingale's steadily amassed accomplishments. Similarly, and perhaps with even more industry, Living- stone had prepared himself to be a missionary and an explorer. While he was still working in a cotton mill in Glasgow he attended classes in medicine and classes in Greek; and in what spare time remained he was instructed in the use of tools. Having passed the preliminary theological examina- tion of the London Missionary Society and undergone the prescribed training of the Society, he studied in hospitals and became a licentiate of the medical faculty in Glasgow University. That was a notable training to begin with, but on the voyage out to the Cape be studied the use of the quadrant and nautical astronomy and the art of navigation generally. Of the few men who would trouble to do that while in the position of a passenger on board ship a still smaller number would acquire the knowledge otherwise than as an academic amusement. Livingstone meant seriously to use his knowledge, and later he did use it in two remarkable feats. In one case when a Naval officer lent by the Admiralty had retired from the command of one of Livingstone's steamers on the Zambesi Livingstone himself took command with complete coolness and success. But the other feat was bolder still. When it was necessary to sell one of his steamers to raise funds, he navigated her to Zanzibar, but being unable to find a

purchaser there, he decided to take her across the Indian ocean to Bombay. This ho did, though the steamer was a

light-draught vessel intended only for river work. He had under his command only three Europeans, the rest of the crew consisting of nine Africans, of whom two had never been at sea before.

This brilliant stroke of amateur navigation was only a dramatic example of Livingstone's habitual coolness, resource, and all-round ability. When he visited Cape Town in intervals of his earlier missionary work in what is now the Transvaal

he studied astronomy, botany, and gardening. All his observations as an explorer were scrupulously scientific and exact. The mere notes of a wandering missionary, incapable of taking observations and led blindly about by native guides, would, of course, have been scientifically valueless. Such a man would not have known whether he was in new territory or not ; would not have known when he came upon a river whether he was looking upon a hitherto unknown water or had only come across another bend of a familiar river.

Livingstone's method of instructing himself became his wife's, and no picture of their joint lives as missionaries is more impressive in its way than when they were fulfilling

their respective functions and his wife was presiding over the domestic manufactures of a missionary village, such as candles and soap. Henry Drummond, when he visited the grave of

Mrs. Livingstone by the banks of the Zambesi, wrote: " It is an utter wilderness, matted with jungle grass and trodden by the beasts of the forest ; and as I looked at the forsaken mound and contrasted it with her husband's tomb in West- minster Abbey I thought perhaps the woman's love which brought her to a spot like this might be not less worthy of immortality."

The solitary white man among the hordes of an inferior

black race exists by prestige. He may have the prestige of the man who inculcates fear or that of the man who inspires

trust and respect. The prestige of fear does nothing for genuine civilization, because it gives civilization a false start and makes everything more difficult for those who follow the author of it. Livingstone's knack of creating an atmo- sphere of friendliness among the natives was a kind of wizardry. He himself said, "The polite respectful way of speaking and behaviour of what we call 'a thorough gentle- man' almost always secures the friendship and goodwill of the Africans." Hundreds of times he was in a critical position, and :seldom did he even show that he carried a firearm. In his Autobiography Sir Henry Stanley described how Livingstone took what was for him a strong line. IV hen Stanley, himself suffering from fever, was escorting Livingstone down to the coast after having discovered him at Ujiji, one of the native servants behaved insolently to Stanley. Stanley had complained of the dirtiness of the kettles and pots, and the man had said that what was good enough for the " big master " was good enough for the "little master." Stanley goes on

"I clouted him at once, not only for his insolent question, but because I recognized a disposition to fight. Ulimengo stood up freeing laid hold of me. On freein myself I searched for some handy instrument; but at this juncture, Livingstone came out of the tent, and cried out to Ulimengo Poli-poli-hapa [Gently there] ! What is the matter, Mr. Stanley ? ' Almost breathless between passion and quinine, I spluttered out my explanations. Then lifting his right hand with the curved forefinger, he said, 'I will settle this: I stood quieted ; but, what with unsatisfied rage and shameful weakness, the tears rolled down as copiously as when a child. I heard him say, Now Ulimengo, you are a big fool : a big thick-headed fellow. I believe you are a very wicked man. Your head is full of lying ideas. Understand me now, and open your ears. I am a Mgeni [guest] and only a Mgeni, and have nothing to do with this caravan. Everything in the camp is my friend's. The food I eat, the clothes on my back, the shirt I wear, all are his. All the bales and beads are his. What you put in that belly of yours comes from him, not from me. He pays your wages. The tent and the bedclothes belong to him. He came only to help me, as you would help your brother or your father. I am only the 'big master' because I am older ; but when we march, or stop, must be as he likes, not me. Try and get all that into that thick skull of yours, IIiimenge. Don't you see that he is very ill, you rascal ? Now go and ask his pardon, go on.' And Ulimengo said he was very sorry, and wanted to kiss my feet ; but I would not let him. Then Livingstone took me by the arm to the tent, saying,' Come now, you must not mind him, he is only a half-savage, and does not know any better. He is probably a Banyan slave. Why should you care what he says? They are all alike, unfeeling and hard!' Little by little I softened down; and, before night, I had shaken hands with Ulimengo. It is the memory of several small events, which, though not worth recounting singly, muster in evidence and strike a lasting impression. 'You bad fellow. You very wicked fellow. You blockhead. You fool of a man,' were the strongest terms he employed, where others would have clubbed, or clouted, or banned and blasted. His manner was that of a cool, wise, old man who felt offended and looked grave."

Stanley noticed how responsive Livingstone was to gaiety and the lighter moods. Was it not Pitt who exclaimed: " Anyone can talk sense. Give me the man who can talk nonsense !" The ability and the will to talk nonsense are generally indeed a sign of grace. Livingstone had the power of humour, which generally means—if one analyses the faculty—that a man has the capacity of seeing things in their true proportions. He was also tolerant. We take tolerance when it is in some hardly explicable way co- existent with passionate devotion to a cause to be one of the signs of a really great man. Lincoln had this tolerance for

the Southerners, though he was the most determined man in the whole of America in- his resistance to the attempt to break up the Union. Livingstone, though he was a Presbyterian, spoke handsomely of the work of the Jesuits in Africa ; and though he loathed and denounced the slave trade more than any human institution in the world he praised the courtesy of the Arabs who were guilty of the infamies that haunted him, and praised the hospitality of the Portuguese who were at the head of the cruel commerce in which the Arabs were only the agents. To Livingstone the slave trade was, in a searching and unforgettable phrase, " the open sore of the world."

Finally, in the catalogue of Livingstone's virtues there was his faultless fidelity. When Stanley discovered him, pre- maturely aged by hardship, prisoned and lost, as it were, in the heart of Africa, his lot was indeed forlorn, but his heart was that of a contented man. He had yielded himself without misgiving to what he had undertaken; he had yielded himself, in Stanley's words, "with entire and loving

submission." Compare with this the recent and very noble example of a similar spirit. Captain Scott, when misfortune had pursued him with incredible persistence, bringing his almost perfect schemes to catastrophe and himself and his companions to the certainty of a miserable death from hunger and cold, wrote, " We have nothing to complain of." So with Livingstone; long after the means had been taken from him of fulfilling his promise to Sir R. Murchison to find, if he could, the watersted north of the Tanganyika, he would not entertain the thought of returning home. He stayed within distance of his goal, while his strength dwindled, nursing his hope and revolving his pledge; the outside world faded out of his experience, and when Stanley handed him letters he was in no haste to open them, though he had not set eyes on the handwriting of a friend for years. Lord Curzon chose his

words well when he said of the man who possessed this character that as a missionary he was the zealous servant of

God, as an explorer the indefatigable servant of science, and as a denouncer of the slave trade the fiery servant of humanity.