14 
LAND & WATER 
August 3, 1916 
Letters to a Lonely Civilian 
By*the Author of "Aunt Sarah and the War" 
LORD LYTTON'S acceptance of office as Civil 
Lord of the Admiralty accounts for one of the 
younger men of ability too long allowed to 
stand aloof from public posts. Another such. 
Lord Lovat, was closeted with the King the other even- 
ing ; I say closeted because what passed must still be 
kept so close. With the name of a third, Colonel Sir 
Mark Sykes, M.P., the journalists begin to be busy ; and 
there is perhaps promise in even these vague prelimin- 
aries, liicse three men average forty years apiece. 
Their c; pab'.lities are beyond cavil. They have been 
kept out of official life only by their own diffidence and 
because they really care for the things which commoner 
I oliticians jest about and jostle among staled conventions. 
* * * * * 
Perhaps there were other reasons why Lord Lytton 
was long let alone. He could not with any sort of con- 
venience have been Home Secretary, for instance, when 
Lady Constance Lytton went to gaol ; his deep dissen- 
sion from Winston Churchill was due to his deeper 
devotion to his sister. Cabinets are reputed schools of 
cynicism ; and Lytton could not be a cynic if he tried ; no, 
not even when he was assured that women should not 
vote because they already influence their voting 
husbands— a fatuity brought home to him, really 
home, by his own wife's inability to cool his fervour for 
the female franchise. The governorship of a Colony 
was more than once discussed for him ; but that, in his 
case, meant a form of domestic banishment only to be 
mitigated by wealth the Lji;tons do not possess. 
* * * * * 
When I last heard L\i:ton speak, he was combating an 
"anti" under the shadow of Lutyens's lovely church in the 
Hampstead suburb. Lutyens is his brother-in-law ; but 
in any case Lvtton stands for Garden Cities (he possesses 
one of his own) rather than for the Victorian Knebworth, 
pretentious even in its bookshelves, pompous for all its 
flowers. Old Bulwer loved to spend some of his in- 
dustrious earnings on sham temples for his lawns, and did 
not disdain for his Pompeian interior walls an " an- 
cestral " portrait from Wardour Street. His dutiful 
descendants have done a little half-clandestine clearing 
out of bric-a-brac, even a little burning. Once and again 
they have had to let Knebworth ; and the consolation 
is that these temporary absences were less hard than 
if the house had been more perfectly to their mind. The 
author of The Last of the Barons Uved the " title role." 
By his politics and his pen he gained that first step in the 
peerage. " It is for you to make the second," he 
calmly, perhaps even ironically, remarked to his son 
Robert, as thev rode together in the Park. Nothing 
in the world "seemed less Ukely. Yet Robert went 
even one better. He made his father the Last of the 
Barons by becoming the first of the Earls. 
if * * * * 
We are all very voluble, even now, about our dislikes. 
But what's important (says Ruskin) is to like things, 
to know why you like them, and to say you like them. 
So hear a few of my likings these last days. I liked the 
neutral dog in the" firing-line who, doglike, when he had 
gobbled all he could get from ours, crossed over to the 
German lines for a final savoury ; and I liked those dogs 
of Germans who made him welcome and took care he 
was not hit on his way home. You remember the fabled 
lion who, when shown pictures of lions in their encounters 
with men, where men were invariably victors, imagined 
the different tale to be told were a lion instead of a man, 
the artist ? And in that spirit the go-between dog, 
friend of man, even of German, may surely have devised 
under those strange conditions, a variant on Dr. Watts's 
doggerel " Let dogs delight to bark and bite 1 " 
« « * * * 
Another thing I have particularly Hked is that beauti- 
ful symbohc drawing of Ireland in a daily paper ; though 
not even that, nor Willie Yeats's play, nor one of the 
traditional cryptic names of Ireland, quite reconciles me 
to Ireland as an aged crone. For all her griefs, she is 
not older than Britannia ; and Siangan's immortally 
young " Dark Rosaleen " she remains for me. 
* « * * * 
Of course I liked (but " like " is too cold a word) the 
men in the Trenches who, when promised a reward for 
doing two super-jobs, chose as their due the rescinding 
of the order for their well-won rest, and chanced them- 
selves as victims for a third venture. And I liked (again 
that inadequate vocabulary) the record, buried among 
columns of obituary notices, concerning Major Stanley 
Livingstone Jones, K.C. He was born in Nova Scotia ; 
he qualified for the law ; he was one of the first half- 
dozen men in Canada to enlist ; he went to the front ; 
wounded in January, 1915. he was sent home — England 
is " home " to Canadians in war-time ; he returned to 
the trenches in ^lay, 1915 ; a second wound sent him 
home a second time ; he was again at the front in August, 
1915 ; in April of this year he came home suffering from 
concussion ; but returned to the fighting line in May. 
At Ypres, on June 2nd, he was reported as wounded and 
a prisoner ; and si.\ days later he died. I do not forget 
that he was " well treated " by his captors, who must 
have had some inkling of his story, for they buried him 
with full military honours ; and a crowning touch of 
completion may be given to an unsurpassed tale — he 
leaves a widow serving as a Red Cross officer in France _ 
* * * * * 
" Too many lawyers in politics 1 " Here was a King's 
Counsel whom Canada will never count superfluous in 
her public story. Other brave men make but one sharp 
renunciation — and one seems as much as you may decently 
ask of them. They go once to death, and great is their 
glory. Four times this lawyer sought the field of sacrifice, 
four times he bade those farewells of which a man may 
say in historic words, " Now the bitterness of death is 
past." There was once a Jones who left a legacy to as 
many of his namesakes as his money might cover, a 
mere fraction, of course, of so numberless a clan. 
But Stanley Livingstone Jones, himself an explorer c f 
Dark [Valleys, leaves to all his namesakes a fortune 
that can never wane, a memory of which we say, as 
Shelley said of love : It has this difference from gold or 
clay, that to divide is not to take away. Many another 
Jones may come to your mind. Sir Inigo, architect 
and recusant ; Paul," the pirate— let the alliteration 
carry the disputed epithet ; Sir William, Orientalist ; 
Sir Edward Bume, Pre-Raphaehte painter, most likeable 
man. The list could be drawn out, as long as Harley 
Street ; and still at its head should stand this man of 
law who took and took and retook and took again his 
sword so that the larger Law of Right in the world might 
though he should perish, hold its sovereignty and have, 
its sanctions. 
I hear from New York thai Mr. Sargent is still walking 
lame, after the accident as he left his London studio, when 
one of the cases containing his pictures fell on his foot 
and crushed it. He limps, and lags, and, when caught 
afoot by a wordy admirer, has to ask to be allowed 
to sit down. It he were still painting portraits, this 
disability would be an interruption indeed ; for it is a 
jest against^ his habit of running backwards and forwards, 
to considei ,his sitter and his canvas, that he paints with 
his feet as 'well as with his hands. Naturally enough 
Har\'ard as well as Yale has now given him its honours. 
But it is less what he has received than what he has 
parted with that comes as a surprise. This is the 
portrait of Mme. Gautreau, painted in his Paris period, 
and, being a cause of some superfluous misunderstanding 
with the patron, retained by the painter even until now. 
His own walls will miss the exquisite lady who has been 
all theSe years a sort of hostess there ; and New York will 
henceforth show her its wonted hospitality to a welcome 
guest. Another lady, by the way, who goes from London 
to New York is Epstein's, and very much Epstein's, 
sculptured version of Miss Iris Tree, The abductor 
in this case is Mr. John Quinn. W'. 
