BOOKS.
THE LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE.*
'EVE have written so often of Lord Lawrence, that this biography, which tells us nothing new, though it justifies and solidifies many previous convictions, interests us rather for itself as a work, than -for its subject. Mr. Bosworth Smith has in the main done his work -excellently well. He has reduced his immense and, we dare say, rather intractable mass of materialsāpiles of letters, memoranda, and minutesāinto a regular and quite readable biography, in which the figure of his hero is never lost amid the profusion of historical and official details. His conception of that figure, too, is, so far as we can judge, exactly true. The strong, masterful North Irishman, with his capacity for rule, his indomitable -courage, his love of justice, and his rude straightforwardness, is thoroughly well brought out, by a friend who does not forget -that under that rough husk was one of the most tender of hearts, a man who, however rugged to the external world, was to those he loved one of the most devoted of friends. There is some- -thing almost of pathos in the contrast between the hero of the -office, who seemed to all subjects so stern and to all subordi- nates so exacting, and the man at home, who could not be at rest if his wife were absent from the room ten minutes, and who was the playfellow of all his children. No one who reads Mr. Bosworth Smith's minute narrative will doubt that John Lawrence was a king of men, a man with a royal simplicity of nature, who swayed all who came in contact with him by virtue not of arts but of qualities inherent in himself, who first ertain majesty of nature. The public instinct about his char- acter is shown conclusively to have been true, shown so conclu- sively that we doubt if there will be more discussion about him, if future historians will do any more than describe Lord Law- rence as one of the men whose greatness is beyond question, and ā¢ neWe ef Lord Lawrence. By Bosworth Smith. London ; Smith end Elder. needs bat little analysis. This effect is produced, moreover, with- out any of the usual efforts. Nothing, so far as we perceive, is con- cealed, or softened, or slurred over. Mr. Smith, though enthusi- astic for his subject, is not a slave to him, does not deny his hardness or his dominance, or his occasional want of sympathy with those he ruled so welL He does not try to hide his principal defect as a ruler, a proclivity to prejudice about personsāusually well founded, but still prejudiceāand he by no means over-exalts his intellectual power. Indeed, we have a fancy, which we cannot prove without quoting the whole book, that he rather under- rates it, that he does not in his mind do quite justice to that hard, cold, but nearly perfect, sensibleness which in John Lawrence, as in almost all men who have reigned successfully, formed the substratum of the intellectual character. He could always see the proportion of things, the meaning of events, the extent and nature of the resource in his hand. Though a man of marvellous decision, he hated to decide without careful thinking, usually, however, when he had thought, returning to his first impression. For all his simplicity, he was wonderfully difficult to take in,āno native, in particular, ever performed that feat; he was never carried away by enthusiasm ; and he had the king's feeling that, after all, the first value of men was as instruments ; and that if they were expended for the State,ā well, they were very usefully expended. He would on occasion, as in Hodson's case, employ a man in whom he utterly die- believed; and though Mr. Bosworth Smith repudiates the charge, he could be nearly merciless in using up the men who could be of use, but who did not possess his own iron force. As a rule, Mr. Smith paints the warts faithfully, and the reader who is painstaking can see well for himself where the defects, such as they are, in a most heroic figure are to be sought. The materials, in fact, for a complete and living portrait of Lord Lawrence have been brought together, under most diffi- cult circumstances, with a completeness which we heartily admire. The single defect of the book is that the materials have not been thoroughly reduced to shape. It is too big, too full of stuff, too well stocked with argument. If we were to say it was verbose, we should be unjust, for Mr. Smith writes well, is never dull, and only occasionally grandiloquent ; but there is too much of it, too much in every chapter, as well as in the whole. The sense of proportion is imperfect. Mr. Smith does not clearly see that it is in his great work, and not his little work, that John Lawrence is interesting ; that the history of his earlier life requires no details, and might be compressed into fifty pages; that his deeds were the creation of "the Punjab" and the cap- ture of Delhi; that the man is of the kind who comes out most clearly in strong outline, and needs few of the slighter touches. Still less does he need apology. Mr. Smithāquite naturally, considering the controversy about Lord Lawrence which the Tories contrived to raiseāthinks him in need of praise, and very often writes as if he were a controversialist, defending his friend against unseen, but powerful, calumniators. That may be, for what we know, the exact truth ; but that attitude detracts from the value of the biography, and has, with certain pieces justifi- catives which should have gone into an appendix, swollen its bulk to an inordinate extent, an extent the more remarkable, because Mr. Smith has unusual self-control, takes no advantage of his opportunities to inflict history on us, and has compressed Lord Lawrence's Viceroyalty as sternly as Carlyle compressed Frederick's civil administration after the Seven Years' War. The bulk is increased by a great many pages like the following, which, if the book reveals either John Lawrence or his surroundingsāand it does bothācannot but leave upon the reader an impression of intrusive superfluity :ā " And who was the man who, above all others, had done most towards this result ? To whom did all England and all India, while the memory of his deeds was too fresh and the personal sense of deliverance was too vivid to allow of aught but the simple truth being told, agree that our success was chiefly owing ? To whom but to the Chief Commissioner of the Punjab, who had fixed those keen, deep-set, grey eyes of his on that one spot from the very moment of the revolt, and had refused to look elsewhere.till he had secured and had witnessed its fall ? He it was who, ruling the most warlike end, potentially, the most turbulent of Indian provinces, had made it to be the arsenal, the anchor, the recruiting-gronnd of the whole of India, and holding it in his iron, or rather, I would say, in his easy grasp, bad crushed mutiny and disorder wherever it had shown its head, had kept thousands of armed and disarmed Sepoys in hand, had carried on the civil administration or the country, and raised its revenue as though in a time of profound peace, and yet had stripped it of its natural guardians, of the great army which successive Governors- General had thought essential to its security and that of India, hod sent regiment after regiment in quick succession to Delhi, and &mita take their places, relying on the justice of his rule, had, with prudent audacity, enlisted Sikhs and Punjabis, Afridis and Mohmands, and re- presentatives of a dozen other wild tribes, till he could boast, and truly boast, that he had called into existence an army of over 30,000 men. The natives of the Punjab generally and the civil and military officers trained in the Lawrence school, no doubt contributed, in their several degrees, nobly towards the general result. But in what chief ruler, we may well ask, did all the best elements of a province ever find an stalwart and so true a personification, in whom were they all so well summed up as was the Punjab in the person of Sir John Lawrence ? Alone the Punjab had done the work. Not a man had come from England, or was within four hundred miles of the scene of action, when Delhi fell. With the exception of the small contingent from Meerut, and the help sent by Frere from Scinde, not a man, not a rupee, not a gun, not a beast of burden, bad come from the whole of the rest of India to the support of the Delhi Field Force. What wonder, then, that the leading members of the Government of India and of the Government of England, that the chief officers of the army before Delhi, who knew the circumstances best, and the ablest of the subordinates who served under himāin spite of jealousies, and heartburuinga, and misconceptions, such as must arise at such a timeāall greeted Sir John Lawrence by acclamation as the man who had done more than any other single man to save the Indian Empire ?" All that, be it remarked, is after eight hundred well-filled pages of narrative, showing all that John Lawrence had been and done. The same defect, the defect of the novelist, who says, "See how good my hero is, how noble, and how well under- stood !" constantly reappears, and with the over-profuseness of the story, injures for the reader what is otherwise both excellent and enjoyable work. We do trust that when the popular edition is called for, Mr. Bosworth Smith himself will compress his own work with a ruthless hand, prune it down unsparingly till it occupies only one volume, in which there shall be scarcely a page of the biographer's reflections. He will find that, as always, " the more the marble wastes, the more the statue grows," and that the figure of his hero will come out still sharper, still more grand, still more attractive to a generation which knew him not. This reviewer, who has' heard more of Lord Lawrence than most men, has heard but four charges against him that were worth one moment's attention. One, a very trumpery one, but incessantly reiterated in India, is that he was a mean man. Mr. Smith, who has evidently heard this also, takes some pains to show that it was not true, and succeeds. Lord Lawrence de- tested not only waste, official or private, but expenditure on himself ; but he could give liberally and ungrudgingly, whenever there was any reason or justification, and was always the one of the family to whom all its members looked for guidance and help in pecuniary affairs. Another charge was, that he benefited by the services of other men, and was, in fact, made by them. There is not throughout his career, as here related, the faintest justification for the charge. Throughout, it is palpa- ble that the true charge lies the other way, that he was from first to last a little too much the master, a little too apt to stipulate, as it were, with those whom he selected that they would always take orders and inspiration from himself. He blamed his servants rather than praised, except when he was writing of them. The third is, that he behaved unfairly to his brother, Sir Henry, a man as much beyond him in genius as below him in efficiency. The general truth as to that story comes out thoroughly in the narrative. Lord Lawrence, essentially a typical Englishman, never mentioned his brother without admit- ting his superiority, and, when they clashed, sent in a re- quest for his own removal. But Sir Henry was essentially an Irishman, and Lord Lawrence, when under him or alongside him, fretted at his foibles till half his powers were gone. The history of the two countries is in the quarrel, or rather would be, if both countries had been blameless. And finally, it is alleged that, in the height of the struggle for Delhi, Lord Lawrence recom- mended that, if the day went against us, we should cede Peshawar to the Afghans, retire behind the Indus, and utilise the great garri- son of Peshawar, itself a, small corps crarmie, for the reconquest of India. That charge is exactly true, and is fully admitted, the only question being whether Lord Lawrence was right or wrong. We believe, notwithstanding the light of subsequent events, that he was not only absolutely right, but that in the contin- gency suggested, retreat from before Delhi, no other plan could by possibility have been adopted. And one of the most coldly luminous intellects that ever studied English politics from with- out, the Prince Consort, thought so too, and specially told Lord Lawrence that on that question he had been entirely right.
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