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Page 21
But there was one movement in his character which developed greatness
and by its power brought him to wonderful success and great honour;
this was a deep, an unquestioning, a religious sense of duty.
He started life with a stubborn ambition. As he went along he felt the
lightness of duty, and married his ambition to this Spartan virtue. He
remained in most respects as selfish a man as ever lived, as selfish as
a greedy schoolboy; nevertheless by the power of his single virtue, to
which he was faithful up to his last moments on this earth, he was able
to sacrifice his absorbing self-interest to the national welfare even in
a political atmosphere which sickened him at every turn.
You may see what I mean by considering that while he longed for nothing
so much in later life as the possession of Broome Park, and that while
his selfishness stopped hardly at anything to enrich that house with
pictures, china, and furniture, and that while he would shamelessly hint
for things in the houses of the people who were entertaining him, even
in the houses of his own subordinates, until the weaker or the more
timorous gave him the object of his covetousness, nevertheless for the
sake of his country he clung to the uncongenial chair in Whitehall, not
merely working like a cart-horse for what he considered to be his
nation's good, but suffering without public complaint of any kind, and
scarcely a private grumble, all the numerous humiliations that came his
way either from his own colleagues in the Cabinet or from a powerful
section of the newspapers outside.
I remember hearing from the late Mr. John Bonner, a most admirable
artist in many fields, an amusing account of an interview with Lord
Kitchener which illustrates the Field-Marshal's passion for his Kentish
home, and also sheds a telling light on the �sthetic side of his
character.
Mr. Bonner had been recommended to Lord Kitchener, who wanted amorini
scattered about the leafy gardens at Broome. Drawings were made and
approved: a few months afterwards the amorini were set up in the
gardens.
Soon came a summons to the presence of the great man. Mr. Bonner found
him a terrible object in a terrible rage. In his late years, be it
remembered, Lord Kitchener was not good to look upon. He appeared a
coarse, a top-heavy person; and in anger, his cross-eyes could be
painfully disconcerting.
Lord Kitchener forgot that Mr. Bonner was not only an artist of a
singularly beautiful spirit, but a gentleman. He blazed at him. What did
he mean by sticking up those ridiculous little figures in Broome?--what
did he mean by it?--with an unpleasant reference to the account.
The poor artist, terribly affrighted, said that he thought Lord
Kitchener had seen his drawings and approved of them. "Yes, the
drawings!--but you can't see the figures when they're up! What's the
good of something you can't see?"
The great man, it appeared at last, wanted amorini the size of giants; a
rather Rosherville taste.
"He had knowledge," said Lady Sackville, from whose beautiful house he
borrowed many ideas for Broome, and would have liked to have carried off
many of its possessions, particularly a William the Fourth drum which he
found in his bedroom as a waste-paper receptacle; "he had knowledge but
no taste."
Her daughter said to me on one occasion, "Every chair he sits in becomes
a throne," referring to the atmosphere of power and dignity which
surrounded him.
It is instructive, I think, to remark how a single virtue passionately
held--held, I mean, with a religious sense of its seriousness--can carry
even a second-class mind to genuine greatness, a greatness that can be
felt if not defined. In every sense of the word greatness, as we apply
it to a saint, a poet, or a statesman, Lord Kitchener was a second-class
and even a third-class person; but so driving was his sense of duty that
it carried him to the very forefront of national life, and but for the
political atmosphere in which he had to work for the last few years of
his distinguished service to the State he might have easily become one
of the great and shining heroes of British history. He had no taste; but
the impression he made on those who had was the impression of a great
character.
How was it that his greatness, that is to say his greatness of
personality, made so pitiable an end? What was lacking that this
indubitable greatness should have been so easily brayed in the mortar of
politics?
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