14 
LAND & WATER 
July 27, 1916 
Letters to a Lonely Civilian 
By the Author of " Aunt Sarah and the War " 
J 
UST what would happen ! " So said men 
who met in Harley Street on the morning 
which brought the news of Sir Victor Horsley's 
death from heat-stroke in Mesopotamia. His 
thoroughness was his snare. He was ready to challenge 
sun, moon, and stars, to any plausible encounter. He 
had fought with beasts so often (strong language was 
only one of his many strengths), and had come out — 
Victor, Sir Victor, finallj' Colonel Sir Victor. The prim 
Early Victorian house and studio in Church Street, 
Kensington, was the last place from which you would 
have expected him to appear. His father, the R..'\., 
looked the parson rather than the painter ; and the 
title — I think created by Burnand — " Clothcs-Horslcy," 
enshrined the paternal horror of the undraped body, the 
very body that was to be the object of his son's almost 
religious study, and the scene of his amazing surgical 
feats. 
4: alt :je 3f: 4c 
But if the boy, Victor, seemed to be out of the picture 
in his early home, he was quite in character on the second 
occasion on which I saw him. An antivivisection meet- 
ing in Westminster had reached its most somnolent stage 
when a clatter of feet and a chatter of voices at the far 
end of the hall caused every head to turn. A platoon 
of medical students had arrived, captained by young 
Horsley. Safely entrenched, they opened fire on the 
exposed speakers and, of course, they hit. They spoke 
daggers, though they used none. At a concerted moment 
Victor Horsley climbed the platform and made what I 
suppose was his maiden speech. There were no blushes 
in it. Each chronicled success of his after years — forty 
of them — I interpreted by the decisive self-confidence of 
that early apparition. There were surprises for the 
subsequent onlooker no doubt. For neither did the 
early home, nor the raided meeting, foreshadow the future 
protagonist of the woman-suffrage movement. The 
Radical posters that plastered his house at election times 
were the wonder of Cavendish Square, and, in a way, of 
his early friends. Behind the curtain he watched the 
consternation on the faces of neighbours, a broad smile 
upon his own. He was most gay when most in earnest, 
a sane but rare conjunction. His crusade against alcohol 
was an urgently pressed one, so urgently pressed that he 
refused to operate upon men who had not abstained for a 
given number of hours before coming to the table. The 
cool hand which could extract, with infinite precision, 
the neuralgia nerve from a distracted head had in the 
end a new and strange experience pf implements— of 
knives under an Eastern sun too hot to handle. 
To the many congratulations that go to the new 
Head-masters of Eton and Harrow, I will add one other. 
They are spared the great grief which has befallen their 
predecessors — that of counting among the killed in 
action so many young heroes partly of their own creat- 
ing. The master stands in the place of parent — the 
poor platitude of the position. But often he brings to 
that nominal post a parent's (and more than many a 
parent's) watchfulness of eager affection. Name after 
name of his boys comes to him on the Roll of Honour. 
He remembers how he fostered the lives now cut down 
in their flower. But in all the condolences he finds 
himself left out. It may be that the retiring Heads of 
to-day might be more truly called the retiring Hearts. 
<i> « « ■ « « 
Mr. Sargent, who for some years past found nothing in 
the world so interesting as sunshine, has been seeking, 
and finding, it in the Rockies. He had never been so 
far West before, and he had to discover for himself how 
little poetry there is even in moonlight, let alone sunlight, 
in that dry middle of a world. He has now returned to 
the American East, and has been receiving degrees at 
Yale University. Even in the States, where judges wear 
no wigs, degrees make a little show with scarves and 
gowns and caps ; and it is reported to me that these 
sights seemed to afflict rather than to exhilarate the 
great painter who never was any sort of a symbolist. 
* « >K « li 
Great deeds of generosity, rather than great deals, 
have been afoot in Bond. Street. Mr. Duveen's sub- 
scription to the Kitchener Memorial nearly tops the list ; 
and Mr. Asher Wertheimer has made doubly sure of the 
.immortality conferrea on him by Sargent — on him and 
his family and his dog— by presenting the Sargent portraits 
to the nation after his death. Mr. Wertheimer we all 
know. Who has not had his side nudged by an alert 
companion as the great man passed on the pavement 
between his home near the Marble Arch and his palatial 
doorway in the street of picture adventures ? Mr. 
^^'ertheime^ is a man to mark, the most noticeable and 
characteristic of princely dealers ; and in painting him 
the artist made the most, perhaps more than the 
most, of his opportunity. .'Vnd at the same time, 
as if to redress the racial balance, Sargent's 
Lord J^ibblesdale has also been ceded to the nation. 
There, too, but in another sense, Sargent made the most 
of his model, adding some inches to his stature, and 
explaining to the observer at a glance the picturesque 
peer's pet name of " The Ancestor." Of course, Mr. 
Wertheimer wanted some consolation for his great renun- 
ciation, though it is a postdated one. So he went to 
Christie's and paid a fabulous price for a piece of porcelain. 
* * * * * 
It was the Americans who invented the service of 
public silence ; silence by command ; silence which cannot 
be broken, as it can in a Quaker's meeting by the impulse 
of anyone present to pray or preach. Such a silence as 
that imposed in New York, at the great assembly to 
honour the memory of Lord Kitchener, has an almost 
military precision. It came between t\to prayers. 
There was not so much as the sound of a sigh. Fifteen 
years ago, when for the third time a President of the 
United States was murdered, there was just such another 
impressive American cessation of sound. For a given 
time, no car or carriage moved ; every train on the vast 
continent stood, not idly, but at attention ; and every 
adult tongue was stilled. How lonely then must have 
sounded the irrepressible, irresponsible cry of a child 1 
***** 
There arc more Maoris in England to-day, I suppose, 
than ever before. The Maori Princess, who sings in the 
halls, has had her predecessors, and will have her suc- 
cessors — a dynasty that never fails. But the Maori 
soldier is a novelty, and particularly the Maori non- 
commissioned officer, under whom the white soldier now 
willingly, even proudly, serves. " He is an aristocrat 
and a university man in his own country," an Anzac 
explained to me. pointing to his Maori sergeant. Then 
the Maori himself explained that the Maoris knew that 
England did not think much of Maoris, and that every 
man of them in Gallipoli meant to show England what 
a Maori really was. That was why and how they charged 
as they did at Hill 07 ; and with a cry which, the New 
Zealander said, he hoped he should never hear on the 
lips of any foe of his. He knew it struck terror into the 
Turk, ^^'ith all this feeling for honour, this passion for 
praise in his success, the Maori has often one insensitive- 
ness which his white comrade can envy him. Nearly a 
year ago I was given a letter from a Chaplain in Gallipoli, 
in which he reported : "I was then called on to help 
dress the wounds of a Maori boy. He was shockingly 
torn by a shell. There was a ga^jing rent in his shoulder ; 
we could see the bones working in it ; yet he was laughing 
and jerking his shoulder and arm as if for our amusement. 
He treated it all as a great joke." Pains, no less than 
pleasures, may be cultivated sensations. Poets school us 
in the refinements of the one and the other : and perhaps 
among the many balance-sheets that readjust war-time, 
will be that in which civilisation and suffering figure 
among humanity's assets and encumbrances. W, 
