GENERAL GORDON'S LETTERS.* 'hi's little volume does not add materially—though
it does add a little, as we shall presently see—to our knowledge of General Gordon's life, or of his views of the men with whom he fought and communed, and of the events quorum magna pars fuit. Nor does it affect the vivid estimate of his religious creed—(we say "religions," rather than "theo- logical," advisedly)—which a perusal of Dr. Birkbeck Colonel Gordon in Central Africa led one to form. Perhaps, indeed, it may be best described as "Gordon on Gordon." As he himself tells us, there were two Gordons. There was Gordon the man of action, and of prompt action, who carried Homer's Iliad with him as well as the Bible and Thomas a Kempis ; there was the other Gordon who, to use his own favourite phrase, "chewed the cud," sought to improve the first Gordon, by making him wall( more humbly before God, and who seems to have been a little puzzled occasionally to make out how that Gordon could act at all. And, in this volume of letters, which cover a period of thirty years, between 1854, when their author attained his majority, and his death at Khartoum in 1884, and which have all the interest, and most of the characteristics, of a diary, we have the verdict passed by conscience upon action in the case of a man whose life was a singularly strenuous and successful effort to make per- formance but the realisation of motive.
When, indeed, regard is had not to the literary form of this book, but to the peculiar "philosophy of clothes" which per- vades it, and the circumstances under which it was written, we can think readily of but one well-known work to which it can be compared,—the " Thoughts " that the brooding mind of Marcus Aurelius struck out of the circumstances in which he found himself when campaigning against the Quadi and the Marco- m nni. (When one dwells on the essential agreement, in the midst of great diversity of culture, creed, and position, between Marcus Aurelius, Vauvenargues, and General Gordon, one is almost forced to the conclusion that the camp, and not the court or the cloister, supplies the best training for the moralist whose mission it is to encourage men to face life even more than to face death.) The Roman Emperor had the richer— though not necessarily the greater—nature of the two ; his merely scholastic culture was much more comprehensive; he looked at mankind from a loftier standpoint. Gordon, on the other hand, had a brighter temperament—the natural Gordon must surely have, as a boy, been a mischievous practical joker, for to the last he was a humourist —and had been brought into closer contact with average humanity Always a philo- sopher, Marcus Aurelius is yet also always an Emperor ; he invariably preaches the gospel of self-abnegation in the grand style. One is sometimes tempted to think of Gordon as an inspired tract-distributor, and to say of him, as Mr. Rathbone Greg said with much less justice of Kingsley, that "his feelings towards God appear to hover between those of the Negro and the Israelite, or, rather, to partake of both." Yet by both we have the same fundamental idea repeated not once, but seventy times seven,—the necessity for a constant and cheerful • Letters of General C. G. Gordon to his Sister, If. A. Gordon. London :
Macmillan and Co. S.
acceptance of events as they happen. In Gordon, it is sub- mission to the will of God; in Marcus Aurelius, it is the recognition of one's relationship to Ti.ip gArdY oidaia. Marcus Aurelius, like Epictetus, portrays man as "a little soul bearing about a corpse;" in Gordon's eyes, moral and religious progress consists in getting rid of the " scabs " of the carnal man. To both, the final mystery of death is a trifle. Marcus Aurelius regards it as simply an operation of Nature ; Gordon is ready to welcome it at any moment. Even in their outbreaks of moral impatience, if not of despair, the two resemble each other. In the same Section of Marcus Aurelius's " Thoughts " in which he teaches that "nowhere either with more quiet or more freedom from trouble does a man retire than into his own soul, particularly when he has within him such thoughts that by looking into them he is immediately in perfect tranquillity," he makes this appalling entry :—" A black character, a womanish character, a stubborn character, bestial, childish, animal, stupid, counterfeit, scurrilous, fraudulent, tyrannical." Clearly Marcus Aurelius had carried his introspection too far for the maintenance of his equanimity. Probably he had found in himself, as Mr. Arnold suggests, the germs of a Tiberius, a Caligula, a Nero, a Domitian, in "their hideous blackness and ruin." Compare with this passage what Gordon writes to his sister from the Red Sea in 1879 :—" Read the third chapter of Job ; it expresses the bitterness of my heart at this moment; yet all this I have brought about on myself, by the prayer that I may know myself. What a few f al desire ! That His will may be done, what a wish ! Better abandon prayer, ask Him to forget and pass you by, till flesh fails and you sink to the• grave. The spite in my own heart and in those around me fills me with hatred of any human being. A more detestable creature than man cannot be conceived, an,d yet you and I are cased, or sheathed, in man." This is Gordon in his agony, realising the fact that it is not good for man to be too much alone. And, indeed, we believe that in certain respects Gordon falls behind not only Marcus Aurelius, but Dinah Morris. He seems too ready to flee from his brother-men- their dinners, their hypocrisies, their conventionalities and sometimes he seems to be aware of the fact ; whereas Marcus Aurelius, while he almost sings the praises of retirement and reflection, insists that a man who seeks to cut himself adrift from his fellows is but a tumour or an abscess on the universe. Then all through his book Gordon speaks lightly, though not slightingly, of the married state. "What a blessing it is," he says, at the ripe age of fifty-two, "one was never married ! Marriage spoils human beings, I think ; if the wife is willing, the husband is not, and vice versa ; how often one sees that !" Is there not here a whiff of quasi-selfishness, of moral epicureanism Dinah Morris was as responsive to the Inner Voice as Gordon, and she obeyed the call to marriage. Nor have we any evidence of falling away on the part of Mrs. Adam Bede from the spiritual ideals of her spinsterhood, even although she did not hold forth often enough to please Seth.
We are not specially concerned to inquire into the details of General Gordon's theological creed, or to seek to discover if his residence in Africa made him half a heathen or half a Moslem. To us, he appears in this book, as in all its predecessors which unroof his conscience, as a simple Biblical Calvinist, latterly, at all events, of the English rather than of the Scotch order, who was never troubled with questionings about "the funda- mentals "—the existence of a personal God, the Trinity, the In- carnation, the Atonement—and who "must confess (p. 218) to putting great (but not salvation) strength in the Sacrament" of the Communion. Had Gordon changed his creed on any material point, he would certainly have informed his sister of the fact; it is not the sensible man that keeps his religion to himself, but the man to whom religion is (as it certainly was not to Gordon) a secondary matter. No doubt his Calvinism was tempered—as in most people of Scotch blood or descent— by humour, and it was mellowed by living among Asiatics and Africans. But here is this Calvinism in his own words, and as reduced to every-day practice :--" It is a delightful thing to be a fatalist, not as that word is generally employed, but to accept, that when things happen, and not before, God has for some wise reason so ordained them ; all things, not only the great things, but all the circumstances of life,—that is what to me is meant by the words, 'Ye are dead.' We have nothing further to do when the scroll of events is unrolled, than to accept them as being for the best; but before it is unrolled, it is another matter, for you would not say, I sat still and let things happen." Gordon puts his creed in another way :—" We are pianos; events play on us. Gladstone is no more important in the events of life than we are; the im- portance is how he acts when played on. So it is with the bedridden woman; the angels and powers watch her and Gladstone alike; both are equally interesting; that broken cup is the same as the Irish troubles." The comparison of life to a piano in the second quotation is a somewhat happy one, but Gordon does not use it in such a way as to bring out the distinction given in the first between himself and the ordi- nary fatalist. The latter looks upon the life of the individual as an _Mohan harp played upon by the winds of Destiny. The Biblical Calvinist regards life as a piano placed before man, for inscrutable reasons which are no concern of his, by the Author of his destiny, and on which he is bound to play the airs of Duty to the utmost of his ability. Whatever Gordon may have believed, he acted as if he were a free agent. His last words from Khartoum, dated December 14th, 1884, "I am quite happy, thank God, and, like Lawrence, I have tried to do my duty," breathe the spirit not of helpless fatalism, but of spiritual freedom.
Miss Gordon has done her best to keep whatever savours of politics or controversy out of this book. Still, as we have already hinted, it is useful, as emphasising, elucidating, or adding to our knowledge of the views of a man who, when dealing with the ordinary affairs of life, was eminently shrewd and practical. One or two of his opinions are worth repro- ducing. Of the slave-trade in the Soudan, he writes :—" My impression is that there is no solution short of complete eman- cipation, either by an armed force, in which case great injustice would be done, or by compensation, which we have no money to make. Short of this, the best way would be to legalise the transport of slaves ; in fact, supervise it by the Government, —which idea will shock a good many people." On the subject of missionary enterprise in Africa, he says :—" What I declaim against is the hypocrisy of terming my own or any expeditions apostolic missions or missions of philanthropy. They are not so, and under false colours will never succeed, whatever they may do in the geographical line." Of our greatest Dependency, he says :—" India is the most wretched of countries. The way Europeans live there is absurd in its luxury ; they seem so utterly effeminate, and not to have an idea beyond the rupee.
I declare I think we are not far off losing it. I should say it is the worst school for young people." At the Cape, he writes in 1882:—" I like the Boers ; they are a God-fearing people. Also I like the colonists ; they are a fine set."
The daily newspapers have given publicity, and something more than publicity, to two letters from the Queen to Miss Gordon, which are prefixed to the extracts given from the General's own letters. The first is dated February 17th, 1885, and expresses the Queen's sentiments on hearing of the death of the General. The second, dated March 16th of the same year, is an acknowledgment of the receipt from Miss Gordon of the Bible which was her brother's companion at Gravesend, Galatz, and during his first term of office in the Soudan. A rather weak attempt has been made to prove the Queen to have been guilty of unconstitutional action because in the first she speaks of "the stain left upon England for your dear brother's cruel though heroic fate !" and says,—" That the promises of support were not fulfilled—which I so frequently and constantly pressed on those who asked him to go—is to me grief in- expressible ! indeed it has made me ill." The publication of this letter, which has all the appearance of having been wriaen in a moment of grief, may have been a mistake, as the sending of General Gordon to the Soudan the second time may have been. But that the Sovereign should not be allowed to have an opinion on any event, and to express it like any ordinary woman, is surely a little absurd. Besides, it will be time enough to cry out that the Consti- tution is in danger from the Crown when the Royal will overpowers that of the Cabinet. The notable thing in con- nection with the Queen's letter is not that she brought " pressure " to bear on those who asked General Gordon to go to the Soudan, but that the "pressure," though "constant," was, by her own showing, disregarded. Pedantic constitu- tionalists should rejoice, rather than be indignant over the contents of the letter,—which, after all, merely shows how womanly the Queen is. How many of the ladies that Mr Gladstone met in 1884, one wonders, did not implore him to rescue "dear heroic" General Gordon ? -
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