GENERAL SMUTS
THIS is the best account that has so far been given of the stirring career of General Smuts. As a narrative of the events which crowd the record of the sixty-seven years of his life till now it is indeed admirable. It is lucid, well arranged and always readable.
This is not to say that it is not marred by serious faults, the chief of which is a tendency to over-flamboyance and over- simple generalisation. The matter is illustrated by the title of the book. To suggest that General Smuts' leading charac- teristic is a quality of steely arrogance is to do him injustice. That he is a man of consuming energy and determination in action is true enough ; and it is not in human nature that a man of his piercing intelligence should always suffer fools gladly. Nor has he ever been a boon companion. But despite a certain aloofness in him he is a man of much warmer heart and kindlier human sympathy than the picture here drawn of him would suggest. He can exercise great personal charm, and that is not a process which can be performed with a rapier.
The tendency which we have noticed leads the author, we think, to exaggerate what he has to say of the morbid shyness, almost the misanthropy, of Smuts' early youth. It certainly leads him astray when he comes to deal with Rhodes, Smuts' earliest idol, too soon shattered, with Joharmesburg and the Uitlanders, with the Jameson Raid, or with the " mine- magnates " of the Rand, whom he treats as though every Man connected with the finance of the one great industry of South Africa were always exactly like every other and always con- temptible. This is not history, but the stock-in-trade of the film-scenario writer.
Another fault is a tendency to inaccuracy in matters of detail, not often of much importance or leading to falsification of the main story, but annoying nevertheless. We should judge that the author, though he has carefully studied his authorities, and though a publisher's note tells us that he "has verified his facts and conclusions by personal inquiry in South Africa," has not had much experience of his own of that country. His generalisations would not be so sweeping if he had ; and, with his evident sympathy with the Afrikaner, he would have acquired enough knowledge of Afrikaans not to write takhara for taakhaar, nagmaal for nachtmaal and velskoene for veldschoen.
But this is a small matter, and the merits of the book as a whole greatly outweigh its defects. The politics of South Africa, until quite recent years at any rate, have been to largely racial, often bitterly so; but Mr. Armstrong, for all his sympathy with General Smuts' people, is no mere partisan. He does justice, for instance, to Lord Milner, of whose work at the Bloemfontein Conference which preceded the South African War, at the Vereeniging Conference which ended it, and in the reconstruction which followed it, he gives an admir- able and sympathetic account, summing it up by saying of Lord Milner that "he was a great ruler, clean-handed, clean in his dealings and in his promises, and with wide vision and great ideals."
General Smuts' friendship with General Botha, perhaps the most important influence in his life, is excellently described. General Smuts' brilliance does not blind Mr. Armstrong to General I3otha's solid greatness ; and though when he tells of the work done by the first responsible government of the Transvaal he is apt at times to write as though it had all been done by the younger man, he generally reminds himself before it is too late that had it not been for the elder's tnagnetic power over his fellows, his restraining influence on the racial reac- tionaries of his own party and his magnanimous devotion to the ideal of a united South Africa, the work could not have been done at all.
Much the same, so far as General Botha is concerned, may- be said of Mr. Armstrong's account of General Smuts' work on the South African National Convention of Too&-o ; but here the author seems to forget that there were two lines of cleavage to be closed and that these two lines cut across one another. South Africa was sundered not only by inter-colonial but also by inter-racial jealousies. It was necessary to frame a Constitution which should be generally accepted as fair not only as between the Cape,- the Transvaal, the Free State and Islatal-,-but also as between the- British and- Dutch populations of all four Colonies. Mr. Armstrong deals well with the former problem : he rather neglects the latter. Otherwise he could hardly have written his account of the Convention without even mentioning the name of Sir Starr Jameson. Sir Starr was the outstanding figure among the South African British ; and they, rather than the Dutch, were the people who by that time were apt to suffer from a sense of oppression. To Sir Starr's magnanimity no less than to General Botha's the credit for the happy issue of the Convention is due ; and General Smuts' successful achievement in constitution-making would have been impossible in the absence of either.
The story of General Smuts' life after the establishment of South African Union is probably more familiar to most readers than its earlier phase. We are given a vivid account of succes- sive revolutionary strikes in Johannesburg, of the tragedy of the rebellion of Beyers and de Wet at the beginning of the Great War, and of Smuts' strenuous and not too 'successful campaign in East Africa. The comment that he was a raider rather than a General may perhaps be justified. Then follows a period of brilliant and multifarious activity while Smuts was a member of the War Cabinet in England, darkening to deep depression with the disillusionments of Versailles. Tragedy deepens with the death of Botha in 1919, which leaves Smuts a lonely Prime Minister of the Union of South Africa governing with the help of the British against the opposition of the majority of the Dutch under General Hertzog. Growing unpopularity leads finally to defeat in 1924, and not till 1933 does Smuts return to Office as a subordinate colleague of General Hertzog in a Coalition Government with the extreme • Dutch Nationalists under Dr. Malan in opposition.
Mr. Armstrong's picture of these latter years is interesting, but seems to us to be painted in too dark colours. It does not allow sufficiently for Smuts' philosophic detachment or for the resilience of his courage. His action in joining forces with Hertzog for the sake of South African unity is described in the last sentence of the book as an act of renunciation by which Smuts broke faith with his interests and his instincts and kept faith with his ideal. That he has kept faith with his ideal is true : that he has broken faith with his interests and his instincts is true only if his interests are identified with occupancy of the Prime Minister's office, and if his instincts are those of the excessive arrogance unjustly, as we think, attributed to him. In any case, is the renunciation final ? General Smuts is still only 67 years of age : he is endowed with splendid physical and mental vigour—and the end is not yet.
D. 0. MALCOLM.
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