J 899] Watts on Spencer 319 



noon, nor does he often see people, so I may take his asking me to visit 

 him as a very high compliment. He has promised to send me a copy 

 of his volume on Sociology. At three I left him and walked hack to 

 the station, and so home to Newbuildings, glad not to be a philosopher. 



" 12th April. — Yesterday and the day before I have been entertain- 

 ing Prince and Princess Sherbatoff, showing them the stud, with her 

 brother, Count Strogonoff, both highly intelligent Russians, and breed- 

 ers of Arab horses." [Sherbatoff had travelled in our footsteps in 

 Mesopotamia, and had started an Arab stud on his estate somewhere 

 between Moscow and the Ural mountains, on the same principle of 

 thorough breeding as our own.] 



" Sir Wilfrid Lawson sends me the heads of a speech he intends 

 making on the Soudan vote. It reads like the speech of Balaam, and 

 I have answered him: 'If English Liberals and humanitarians leave 

 it to the Irish to express disapproval of Kitchener's ways with the 

 wounded and his treatment of the Mahdi's head, I can only say that 

 they had better vote in silence. You praise Kitchener for his deeds 

 as a soldier. It is all the argument needed to justify the parliamentary 

 grant. Kitchener did not make the policy of the war, for that he is 

 not responsible, but he was responsible for the brutal way he conducted 

 it, a brutality which makes his success, no very great one, a disgrace.' 



: ' My final sitting to Watts. The old man was more agreeable and 

 interesting than ever, and we parted on terms of real affection. The 

 portrait is a fine one, the best, he said, he ever painted, but this is more 

 than the truth, for it cannot compare with his great achievements of 

 thirty and forty years ago. Our talk has never flagged for a moment 

 during the sittings. I told him of my visit to Herbert Spencer, and 

 asked whether he had ever painted him ? ' How could you expect me,' 

 he said, ' to paint a man with such an upper lip?' He has no opinion 

 of the philosopher as a man, and declares him to be wholly selfish. 



" 18th April. — The first nightingale. 

 Young Oliver Howard came to dine and sleep, and to consult me 

 about a hare-brained expedition he was bent on to Jerabub and Kufra. 

 I strongly advised him to turn his thoughts elsewhere. It is quite 

 enough that his brother Hubert should have got killed in Africa without 

 his doing the same, and for even a stupider reason. Neither he nor 

 any of his proposed companions have had the smallest experience of the 

 North African desert or know a word of Arabic, though one of the 

 party has been in Somaliland shooting lions. For his father's and 

 mother's sake I dissuaded him. 



" 22nd April. — Anne returned from Egypt, having left Judith and 

 Neville at Paris. 



"27th April.— With Cockerel to see the new mosaics at St. Paul's 

 about which there has been angry correspondence in the ' Times.' 



