AN EMINENT GEORGIAN
Some Extracts from an Essay in the Manner of a Distinguished Writer
Duringthe latter part of the closing year of the nineteenth century, an English traveller, sojourning with his wife and daughter near the hot springs of Rotorua in New Zealand, was observed one day to dash from the verandah of his hotel, hatless, into the street, and accost a passing urchin. The lad was singularly unprepossessing; he squinted, his right shoulder was strangely deformed, and his ears were much too large for his head. Unlike most children in receipt of flattering attentions from an elderly and distinguished stranger, he snarled, spat on the ground, and hurried away muttering oaths. The astonished relatives of the traveller, hurrying out in pursuit of him—in the belief, as the wife said afterwards, that he was suddenly demented—found their husband and parent almost beside himself with excitement. “That boy,” he said, pointing towards the receding figure a hand that shook with emotion—“that boy will end as Prime Minister of England.” Convinced that his mind was wandering, they led him back with soothing words to the hotel; but his unerring judgment was once again to be confirmed by the verdict of time. The speaker was Dr. QuankBrane, the eminent psychologist; the boy, soon to be known to the greater part of the universe, equally for the profundity of his wisdom and the variety of his gifts and achievements, was Erasmus Galileo McCann, philosopher, scientist, theologian, naval and military strategist, scholar, economist and some time First Minister of the Crown.
The boyhood of this monument of versatile genius, no less than his manhood, was remarkable. At the age of one, when dropped by his nurse, a fact which accounted for the deformity of his shoulder, he was distinctly heard, as if in anticipation of his interjectional habits of later life, to rip out an accusing oath; and, when the startled slattern turned up her hands and eyes in horror, he added, “Don’t stare like a fool, go and get the doctor!” At three years old his father presented him with all the volumes of Buckle’sHistory of Civilisation, which he had completely mastered before he was five. His dissertation ofThe Lesser Cists in Invertebrates, published at the age of seven, is still a standard work of this little known branch of biological science. Many years later an old friend of the family told an admiring conclave of relatives of an encounter with the young McCann, in which he himself was considerably worsted. In the course of a journey across the Warraboora plains,a wild and almost uninhabited tract of country, his provisions gave out. Some friendly natives whom he encountered contrived to spare him a few dried corn cobs, but these could hardly last him indefinitely. Starvation stared him in the face. One day, however, as he was making a frugal meal of a large aboriginal lizard, that he found entangled in the undergrowth, a strange urchin dropped on his head from out of a tree fern, uttering savage whoops, tore the carcass from his astonished fingers, and devoured it without a word of apology.
“That,” said the older man with resignation, “was my last morsel of food. I must now die.”
“Je n’en vois pas la nécessité,” returned the youth (it was McCann), quoting La Rochefoucauld with the nonchalance of complete familiarity; wherewith he swung himself into the branches of a Kauri pine, and disappeared without another word. Giving himself up for lost, the lonely traveller prepared for death; but before nightfall the youth returned with a wallet of provender, and accompanied by guides who piloted them back to civilisation. The boy appeared blissfully unaware that he had done anything remarkable. “Such astonishing sang-froid,” the traveller used to conclude, “I never encountered before or since. I knew he was destined for greatness.”
His schooldays and college life were curiously uneventful. He secured the uncoveted distinction of remaining at the bottom of the bottom form of the school for three years, and of failing ignominiously in the Cambridge Junior Local. Wiseacres shook their heads and quoted scores of instances of infantile precocity. It began to look as though the early promise was after all no more than a false dawn; and then, to everyone’s astonishment, at the age of 19½ he planned, financed and brought outThe People’s Piffle, a daily journal exactly corresponding to the literary appetites of the masses of the British reading public. Among other novel features of this newspaper, alternative opinions were presented in parallel columns on the leader page, the appointment of the editor was subject to confirmation or change every three months by a referendum of the readers, and, in place of the obsolete insurances against accident, continued subscription for a period of 25 years or longer conferred a pensionable right upon the subscriber.
So momentous a development in the literary activities of the country created a profound impression. More than one well-known actress sent him her autograph unsolicited. A film star was heard to refer to him as “some guy.” The Prime Minister of the day shook hands with him in public. Lord Thundercliffe shook in hisshoes, and redoubled his fulminating denunciations of everything. But the day of Lord Thundercliffe was over: a new era was at hand, the era of universal genius; and McCann, its prophet and its leader, was even then poising himself on the crest of the wave that was to sweep away the wreckage of the old century, and sweep in the reforms of the new, and sweep him personally into a position of eminence hitherto unknown in our annals.
Just at about this time a resident at Claydamp-on-the-Wash was astonished, in the course of a country walk, to see a tall, thin gentleman leaning over a gate in an attitude of insupportable dejection. The enormous brogues; the ill-fitting brown suit; the high-domed forehead; the bushy brown spade beard; the huge spectacles perched on the lofty sensitive nose; the dreamy eyes looking far away into the mists, all suggested a certain literary personage. Could it be? Was it possible? Overcoming a natural hesitation at intruding upon the privacy of one who was obviously a recluse, he hesitatingly ventured to approach. “I beg your pardon,” he said, “but surely I am addressing Mr. Lytton Strachey?” and without giving the stranger time to answer he added, “Is anything the matter? Can I help in any way?”
The solitary turned upon him eyes that were suffused with tears. “Oh, no,” he replied, “no. Nothing. I was born too early, that is all.” And on being pressed for a further explanation he continued, “By the ordinary processes of Nature I must inevitably predecease this monstrosity of talent; and I am excluded from the possibility of writing the only Georgian biography that offers any kind of scope for my abilities.”
He was of politics; and he was not of politics. He built up abstract theories of Government in his articles in the morning Press: and demolished them in the evening in his speeches in the House of Commons. He attracted the sympathies of simple folk by a life of Spartan discipline; and disgusted them by a profuse and shameless bestowal of peerages and honours. He angled for the votes of the mercenary and idle by a wholesale creation of state benevolences; and threw away what he had gained by an almost niggardly supervision and husbandry of the national income. As Controller and chief proprietor of the great Press Trust, he denounced the infamies and exactions of the great profiteering combines in which he himself was the principal partner: and as Prime Minister of a secular Government he disestablished the Church of which he, asCardinal Archbishop, was the protesting head. Writing at about this time Count Puffendorff Seidlitz, the Megalomanian Ambassador, reported to his Government that it was perfectly vain to cherish the slightest hope of undermining the national popularity of one who so supremely embodied in himself the qualities, and the inconsistencies, and the portentous humbug that chiefly characterised the nation of which he was the head. Nothing could be done at present. Above all there must be no haste. “But I do not despair,” he added, “for, though ignorant of music, the man has a certain coarse feeling for the arts—and that, in a country of Philistines, must in the long run betray him into our hands.”
Fatal self-complacency! At the very moment when those words were being penned, McCann was—where? He was in the anteroom of the Princess Vodkha, that luckless Ambassador’s sovereign, waiting to seal with a courtly handclasp the Trade Agreement between Megalomania and this country. Poor Count Puffendorff Seidlitz! Where Lord Thundercliffe and his brother Lord Miasma has failed, it was hardly to be supposed that he would succeed.
So ended, in a thin filmy haze, a life of service and sacrament. To the very end they thoughthe might be saved. The general public, brought suddenly to the realisation of the approaching calamity, stood dumbly in the streets, or hurried away—hoping. But the sands were running down; the tide, long since turned, was ebbing with inexorable swiftness; the night was indeed at hand. A greater and more terrible accuser than Lord Thundercliffe hovered over the sick man’s bed; and a greater and wiser Judge than public opinion was waiting to pronounce the verdict from which there is no appeal.