was turned thereby into a fiasco.
Were the forces to return and give up the Sudan to the slave-dealer and the Mahdi? Gladstone wished to do this, but aristocratic England could not so easily accept defeat!
As soon as Wolseley returned to England I made it my business to see him, and I was interested to find that his view of men and affairs was not very different from my own. Wolseley was always to me a lightweight: no power of personality, no depth of insight, an ordinary English gentleman with much experience of affairs. By dint of rubbing against abler men than himself he had got a sort of clever woman's flair for what was going on above his head; eminently kind and fair-minded, too, with an ambition altogether out of proportion to his capacity. All this and more was illustrated by some stories he told me. I had been asking him about courage and he astonished me by saying that a volunteer army was always better than a conscript army. 'One in three of the conscripts,' he added, 'is sure to be a coward and that minority may bring disaster at almost any time.' Somehow or other he convinced me.
Then the talk came on Gordon, as most talks did about that time. 'Oh you know,' he began, 'Gordon and I were in the Crimea together, every day side by side for hours in the trench before the Redan.'
'Really,' I exclaimed. 'That must have been interesting!'
'Very interesting,' he went on 'and an object lesson in that courage we were talking about. Towards the end the trench got within eighty yards or so of the ramparts of the fort and was so shallow and muddy-wet that it did not give us much shelter. At six o'clock each evening we went off duty and others came in our stead. Gerald Graham, now General Sir Gerald Graham, was the bravest man I ever knew: six feet-odd in height and handsome to boot. Every night as the clock struck Graham used to get up, put his hands in his pockets and stroll off towards his quarters. Soon the Russians remarked this and gathered in the evening on the near rampart for a pot-shot at the big Englishman. As luck would have it, they always missed him. I remonstrated with him again and again. 'It can be only a question of time, Graham,' I said, 'and they'll get you. For God's sake, don't be so foolhardy.' But Graham went on turning himself into a cockshot every evening for weeks and I assure you after ten days or so it was a miracle how he escaped, for some hundreds used to shoot at him and the bullets buzzed like bees.'
'You didn't imitate him?' I asked, laughing.
'No, indeed,' Wolseley replied seriously. 'Even at that time I meant to be Commander-in-Chief of the British Army if I could manage it, and so every evening I crawled along the muddy wet trench for a couple of hundred yards or so on my belly till I was fairly out of range. I thought myself far too valuable to make myself a cockshy.'
'And Gordon,' I asked, 'Gordon was a subaltern with you. How did he act?'
'None of us could make Gordon out at that time,' Wolseley replied. 'One evening he'd get up, bold as brass, link arms with Graham, and stroll off with him as if the nearest Russian marksman was a thousand miles away. I came to understand bit by bit that it was all a question of his prayers with Gordon. If God had accorded him some sign of approval, he'd stroll away with Graham wholly unconcerned; if, on the other hand, he was left in doubt of the divine guidance, he'd crawl through the mud lower than I thought necessary, and longer. Gordon was a queer fish; but Graham was the bravest of the brave.
'I remember afterwards in the Chinese war meeting Graham by chance,'
Wolseley continued. 'One evening I saw a big man on horseback in the mist and ran across to ask some question. When I reached him I saw it was Graham and in my delight I slapped him on the thigh as I put my question. 'That's all right,' he answered me, 'but please don't slap that thigh: I've just got a bullet in there,' and as I looked at my hand, it was all crimson. Graham paid no more attention to wounds than to danger. You know he got the V.C. I tried time and again to get it but had no luck; life will not give us all our desires.'
To my amazement he was disappointed! Fancy a leader of armies wanting the Wolseley was an interesting man, though I think these stories of Gordon and Graham the best I ever got from him. Still, he had led an eventful life and his memories of the Civil War in America fascinated me and I shall have to tell them later, for they explain why I worked to get him made Commander-in- Chief and so attain the summit of his ambition. For a good many years we met and dined together half a dozen times every season and he was always an excellent host; and perhaps he enjoyed my cow-punching stories as much as I delighted in his memories of Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee.
It was at Wolseley's house much later when he was the Ranger at Woolwich that I made a little jest which has been attributed to others. Alfred Austin had just been appointed Poet Laureate by Lord Salisbury, though he had no more poetry in his composition than a house-fly. He had other merits, however. For years he had written leading articles in the Standard and praised Lord Salisbury in and out of season. Accordingly, when Lord Tennyson died, Lord Salisbury appointed Alfred Austin to the post: 'Alfred the Little, after Alfred the Great,' as some anonymous wit declared. Of course Lord Salisbury should have appointed Swinburne or any one of half a dozen poets greater than this little creature, but no! He appointed his eulogist-a disgraceful outrage on English poetry, the gravity of which he was incapable even of understanding.
I had met Austin often and thought him a mere journalist and place-hunter without talent or personality, but this evening when we met at Wolseley's he treated me with marked condescension. 'I've known Mr. Harris,' he said,
'when he was merely editor of the Evening News.'
His tone was so high and mighty that I replied, 'I hear now that you write poetry as well as prose; which do you intend to use in the future?'
'Oh now,' he replied, 'I must write a certain amount of poetry.'
'Why?' I replied, pretending ignorance.
'Oh, to keep the wolf from the door,' he replied, smiling.
'I see,' I retorted, 'I see, very good: you read your poetry to the wolf, eh?'
Austin used to avoid me afterwards, but the word pleased me infinitely, perhaps, because I was seldom witty.
CHAPTER XVI
I never met any one in my life whose personal appearance disappointed me more than Ruskin's. Until I saw him, I had always believed that a man of great ability showed his genius in some feature or other, but I could find nothing in Ruskin's face or figure that suggested abnormal talent. His appearance was not even prepossessing. He looked shrivelled up and shrunken: though he was perhaps five feet eight or nine in height, he was slight to frailty and stooped; in spite of a prominent, beaked nose, his face too was small, bony-thin and very wrinkled; the grey hair that must once have been reddish was carefully brushed flat; the beard and whiskers were grey, too, and straggling-thin; the eyes were bright, greyish-blue in color, now quick-glancing, now meditative under the thick out- jutting brows; the high aquiline bird-nose was set off by a somewhat receding chin. He looked like some old, unhappy bird, nothing in the face or figure impressive or arresting.
His clothes even were old-fashioned: he wore a dark blue frock coat and a very little blue tie; his manner was shy, self-conscious, unassured. I was disappointed to doubting his ability. But as soon as he got excited in speaking his voice carried me away, a thin, high tenor, irresistibly pathetic; it often wailed and sometimes cursed but was always intense; the soul of the man in that singular, musical voice with its noble rhetoric and impassioned moral appeal.
Of course, I knew a great deal about him before I met him, knew he had been a great friend of Carlyle's, knew he was perhaps the most extraordinary master of poetic English prose since Sir Thomas Browne.
I met him first, I think, at the Baroness Burdett Coutts's in Piccadilly. At any rate, wherever it was, my introducer had told Ruskin that I had been a great admirer of Carlyle and that Carlyle had said he expected considerable things from me. This recommendation of Carlyle evidently influenced Ruskin, who treated me from the beginning with caressing kindness.
According to his wish, I called on him, I think, at Morley's Hotel, in Trafalgar Square. It was, I believe, in 1886, but it may have been a year earlier or a year later. I have only disjointed memoranda of our talks. At first we spoke about Carlyle and I found that Ruskin admired him at least as fervently as I did. At the first pause in the
