The Book of the Month. 



617 



level of their high vocation. He would have been a 

 Titan at Printing House Square. .\s an ambassador 

 he felt cabined, cribbed, and confined by the hard- 

 and-fast conventionalities governing the Diplomatic 

 Service. It was the irrepressible journalistic instinct 

 in him which overflowed in the floods of despatches, 

 reports, and private letters which poured from his 

 inexhaustible pen. 



AN ENGLISH BISMARCK. 



Sir Robert Morier was Our English Bismarck, 

 without the opportunities of his great rival. The 

 two men resembled each other in their massive 

 physique, in their imperious will, in their keen 

 intellect, and in their immense grasp of European 

 affairs. Both men towered intellectually and physi- 

 cally above their fellows. Both were men of strong 

 passions, of great industry, with an Olympian con- 

 tempt for the_idiots and knaves by whom they felt 

 themselves surrounded. They both belonged to the 

 order of Supermen. And perhaps, as a natural con- 

 sequence, each recognised in the other his natural 

 rival ; predestined enemies whom the Fates decreed 

 should grapple together in deathless enmity till the 

 end of their days. 



IF HE HAD BEKN KOREIGN SECRETARY ! 



Bismarck achieved, Morier tried to achieve, and 

 Sir Robert smarted bitterly at the end under the con- 

 sciousness of his rival's triumph, while he groaned 

 comparatively impotent marooned at St. Petersburg. 

 His ambition was to have been Foreign Secretary, 

 with a free hand in a Unionist .Administration. Ah ! 

 these might-have-beens of the white nights of St. 

 Petersburg. What pathos there was in them, and 

 what tragedy ! Compared with Foreign Secretaries 

 whom I have known, how feckless and nerve- 

 less and lifeless they seemed beside this great 

 Berserker, full of fierce oaths and savage fury, 

 who was eating his life out by the side of the 

 Neva ! What would have happened to the British 

 Empire if this embodiment of primeval forces 

 had ever been in charge of her destinies who can 

 say? The experiment would have been a perilous 

 one. But it would not have been for want of trying 

 if Sir Robert Morier had not made the British 

 Empire the mistress of the world. 



HIS llAIKtD Ol' HOME RULE. 



VoT Sir Robert .Morier was a man passionate in his 

 patriotism as in all else — passionate, too, in his 

 Imperialism— and that, together with my Russophil 

 convictions, were the chief bonds that linked us 

 together in those days of 1888, and formed the basis 

 of a friendship which lasted till his death. For the 

 sake of my Imperialist enthusiasm he forgave me 

 many things. He found the hardest to forgive 

 the share with which he always credited or dis- 

 credited me and the JW/ Mall Gazdte in bring- 

 ing Mr. C.ladstone to make the plunge for Home 

 Rule. Home Rule was in his eyes the ail but 

 unpardonable sin, and upon Home Rulers, and Mr. 



Gladstone in particular, he never hesitated to empty 

 the vials of his fuliginous wrath. I remember as if 

 it were yesterday one evening in 1888 when we had 

 been dining together alone at the Embassy. Sir 

 Robert was in great spirits, and had, as was his wont 

 on great occasions, broached a bottle of some rare 

 port wine which had been given him by the King of 

 Portugal, .\fter ilinner he was pacing the room 

 looking down upon me like a wrathful Jove as he 

 discoursed on the iniquity of Home Rule. Suddenly 

 he stopped and stood facing me. " You're all of a 

 lot, the whole gang of you ! I see you standing all in a 

 row. • At one end stand the assassins who butchered 

 poor Freddy Cavendish. .Arm-in-arm with them 

 is the ' brave little woman ' who carried the 

 surgical knives to Phrenix Park. Arm-in-arm with 

 her is Mr. Parnell, and arm-in-arm with him are 

 you, and last of all, arm-in-arm with you is Mr. 

 Gladstone." His voice, gradually rising from an 

 angry snarl to a savage, concentrated, passionate, 

 bitter intensity, suddenly burst out into a roar as he 

 exclaimed, " .And I wish to God I had a dynamite 

 bomb, and then I would blow the whole blasted lot 

 of you to Hell 1 " .And at that moment I am sure he 

 felt he could have done so, and have felt that in 

 doing it he was doing God good service. 



HIS GIFT OF UTTERANCE. 



Since Morier passed over there is only one English- 

 man whose language and letters recall the picturesque 

 phrasing, the unconventional vigour, the racy idiom, 

 the stormy outbursts of our last great ambassador. 

 That man is Admiral Fisher. But the .Admiral, 

 although a man of war from his youth up, is meek 

 and mild compared with Sir Robert Morier. There 

 was in Morier something of an earlier world— a kind 

 of uprush from what Mr. Algernon Blackwood, in 

 " The Centaur," calls the Urworld, when life was 

 more fierce and splendid than it is to-day, and when 

 men caught something of the vitality of the universe 

 which makes the hills leap for joy and the morning 

 stars sing together. Yet there was in him also— as 

 perhaps was inevitable — corresponding abysses and 

 darlj -cavernous depths of rancour and despair, of 

 savage scorn and brooding hate, from which, however, 

 the great radiant son of Asgar ever rose triumphant. 



HIS DIAnOLUS. 



.At the present moment too many of our ambas- 

 sadors seem to be but the pale reflections of the 

 antipathies of Sir Robert .Morier without any of his 

 magnificent enthusiasm, his whole-souled belief. 

 They seem to have inherited his prejudices without 

 being capable of assimilating his convictions. He 

 believed with a whole heart fervently in both God 

 and Devil ; the Devil in his case being Bismarck and 

 the Empire which the .Man of Blood and Iron had 

 fashioned in his image. His God was a kind of 

 composite deity composed of a Free Trade British 

 Ilmpire resting upon an invincible Navy and united 

 by the closest bonds of friendship with Russia in the 



