emotion, to rise to a cult of humanity that goes beyond the limits of any particular creed- that is the purpose of French education, that is the atmosphere with which it succeeds, from the first days of school, in surrounding the child. Of the shortcomings of this kind of education I need not speak at length here. I need merely to point out its too exclusively literary character, the indifference it sometimes shows to facts, and in consequence its lack of precision, its tendency to be content with superficial impressions, its sometimes exaggerated taste for tradition which results, not exactly in an embargo on new ideas, but in a discrediting of new forms as they try to express themselves. It is in fact a

summary of the mentality of a man at the age of thirty.

Perhaps if the nation could double the number of its children it would be in a position to bring back into the speech and the life of the country that Celtic sense of mystery and naïve wonder, that adventurous taste for the unknown, that faculty of looking at the world with virgin eyes and not with eyes that reflect tradition, which are the normal birthright of every child. And the presence of two or three children at least in a family is necessary to create the atmosphere of spontaneity in which the spirit of the future can best be developed and realize the diverse forms of its ideal.

LORD CURZON, from his earliest days, was a man who aroused interest and curiosity. Men might like or dislike him, — and it was quite possible for the same person to do both, but they could not leave him alone. As a result, much has been written about him without somehow giving any feeling of certitude that we really know the man. He was difficult to understand, perhaps even impossible, and yet, in some respects, quite easy. Milton says that 'nothing profits more than self-esteem founded on just and right,' and throughout his career Lord Curzon possessed and displayed that frank recognition of

1 From the New Criterion (London literary quarterly), April

his own worth which never goes with a servile mind or inferior breeding. Contrary to the vulgar belief, he was neither conceited nor self-satisfied; it was merely that he possessed in an unusual degree self-knowledge and self-respect, and of this combination the man in the street is always a little suspicious vagueness and illusion being ever instinctively at war with clarity and realism. Curzon (he's great enough for us to drop the prefixes which he sought so assiduously and wore with such magnificence) knew he was remarkably able; he liked high places, — the higher the better, and it seemed to him quite natural, the average of his contemporaries being but mediocre,

that they should without hesitation and almost without exception- give place to him. Sometimes, having a great deal of human nature, if not a great deal of ability, they did hesitate, and then there was trouble. Then Curzon was baroque, and, almost to the very end of his career, baroque was disliked both by the cultivated and by the crowd. An example of his sympathy with literary rococo was a great and quite undeserved admiration for a poem like Tennyson's 'Blow, Bugle, Blow!' He should have been born a hundred years earlier or thirty years later, because baroque is once more coming into fashion! He was the great nobleman of the eighteenth century to his finger tips, and greatness, in the decorative and spectacular sense, is disliked by modern democracies. The crowd always has and always will distrust anything that does not conform to its own drab standards.

Curzon's inherent feeling of responsibility had deep and rich foundations, as history will one day show; men were overready they always are to be annoyed and irritated by its outward manifestations, without pausing to consider its deeper consequences. Its greatest result was that, literally from cradle to coffin, it never permitted its possessor to offer anything less than his very best. Is that a little thing in these pinchbeck days? His will, an historic document of the first importance, will remain for all time to prove the truth of this submission.

I first came to know Curzon well when spending Christmas in the same country house in 1910. We had a great subject in common - India. My warm admiration for such servants of the Indian Empire as Lord Dufferin, Lord Lansdowne, and Sir Mortimer Durand aroused his interest and touched, as it happened, the matter that was nearest to his heart. There was also our

common enthusiasm for the gracious lady known as John Oliver Hobbes. Speaking with the highest admiration of her personality as known to the world, and of her published writings, Curzon said she was one of those rare natures that reserve their very best for their friends. He told of treasuring a large correspondence which they had kept up for many years, and said that, although most of the letters were too personal and too frank for publication, they were in many respects superior to anything she had written. Yet I think it was my enthusiasm for the great viceroys who preceded him that really won his approval. Nor did he hide under a cloak of mock modesty his view that, when the records came to be set forth, his own name and work in India would stand as high as any, not even perhaps excluding Warren Hastings and Dalhousie, for both of whom he had the greatest admiration. I was in no wise fatigued by a certitude which others might have found a little cock

sure.

When I enlarged on my sense of the distinguished position Lord Dufferin, in a very crowded career, found time to achieve as a writer and an orator, he made it plain that even there he felt himself no whit behind. Yet I think on this point he was perhaps a little wrong. Dufferin had an Irish heart, a quiet human sympathy, and an ardent nature that gave his eloquence a warmth and an appeal that was, as a rule, beyond Curzon's reach. Not on strictly classical lines the fine orator that Curzon was, Dufferin could make a greater popular appeal; what Curzon once described as 'Dufferin's courtly charm' was as irresistible in public as it was in private.

This meeting in due course led to my undertaking to collect and edit a volume of Curzon's speeches. I worked at it intermittently in the early part of

1914; it was, save for the introduction by Lord Cromer and my own editorial preface, ready for the press when the war broke out in August, and I speedily forgot all about it; but, as we shall see, Curzon did not.

The volume was entitled Subjects of the Day, and my idea was, excluding all mere Party speeches, to compile a volume that would exhibit something of the sweep of the orator's intellect, the breadth and amplitude of his interests, the fineness and versatility of his mind. Apart from one on Home Rule and one delivered in the House of Lords on the Finance Bill of 1909, the only speeches that might have been labeled political were the remarkable one on Lord Rosebery's motion for the reform of the House of Lords, and four on Woman Suffrage, in which he said in a manner that was final all that could be said against the proposal - I have no doubt that later, when he came to change his mind on the subject, he could have made equally fine speeches in its defense. He was unusually capable of seeing clearly both sides of a question, but he knew that to permit himself to be unnerved by doing so was to undermine his value as a practical statesman, and he was not going to be guilty of a weakness for which he could never find it in his heart to forgive George Wyndham or Lord Balfour.

It has often been said that to wade through a volume of old speeches is the most dismal of entertainments. That, as a rule, is quite true, yet I think it is not so where Curzon is the author, because the marked superiority of form in his speeches gives them a claim to permanent interest; indeed, he was never once guilty of a speech that was improvised, hurried, or slovenly. Nor did he ever speak on any subject without having first completely mastered it. This was the basic principle of his whole career. Let it be said again that

he never gave to his contemporaries or the Empire, either in private or in public, anything less than his best. Others might do so; Curzon could not. It was this inflexible determination to live up to his own high standard, to his own ideal of himself, that gave him an appearance of hardness, harshness, and superiority which undeservedly won the jibes of lesser men. Meretricious themselves, they mistook his selfknowledge and self-mastery for selfconceit. If ever anyone literally obeyed the injunction, 'Know thyself,' it was Curzon; where he may sometimes have failed was in his knowledge of other men. Fully alive as he was to his own quality, .never made the fatal error of thinking that talent or even genius can fully discharge its task without effort, and he labored assiduously and unendingly. When he tried men or women and found them wanting, he dropped them. It being often unfair to judge from one action only, he was sometimes wrong; yet any other course was difficult to his practical mind and unbending pride.

Something Renaissance in him loved the glitter of life: the warm radiance of Royal smiles; the high respect due to rulers and viceroys; the magnificence of courts and castles; the dignity and importance of being a great and discerning patron of literature, of learning, and, more especially, of architecture; the discriminating applause of important gatherings of cultivated persons even the inevitable fatigues and boredoms of perpetual office were such as his soul loved. He knew his fitness for these things; he achieved them, but no man could truthfully say that he did not work hard for them, or that he ever desired the palm without the dust and heat.

tainly thought so, and there can be little doubt that from his Oxford days he intended deliberately to qualify for the position of an Elder Statesman, and it is but justice to record that never at any time was he a mere Party politician. Yet the false pride of the small-minded and the second-rate was never his, and he freely admitted that he could never have entered the House of Commons had he not at the beginning of his career received substantial aid from Party funds. If the Party leaders of the day considered that fact as making him amenable, they soon discovered their mistake. However it may have appeared to the uninformed, he never from the beginning to the end of his career subordinated what he conceived to be his duty to any consideration whatsoever; his stalwart integrity was impregnable.

To an ambitious and able young man, but slenderly endowed with this world's goods, writing made an obvious appeal; it could win him, not only a degree of early fame, but some very necessary money. A conservative in the sense that he wished always to see preserved everything good in the past, he was alive to the value of the old tradition that an English statesman should also be a man of letters.

In 1883, at the age of twenty-four, he won the Lothian Essay Prize at Oxford, and in the following year the Arnold Essay Prize. Five years later, before he was thirty, his Russia in Central Asia attracted considerable and well-merited attention. It has been described recently by a brilliant writer as a book more admired than read. That may well be true, yet because it was good work it brought its author a lasting reputation, and books not read by the multitude have often a great and permanent value; they are absorbed by and influence those who shape thought and events. Curzon's first book is well

worth reading to-day. From his Oxford days to the day of his death he wrote regularly, and in the earlier period of his career made quite a handsome addition to his income from journalism and authorship. During the last years of his life, clouded as they were with great disappointment, unflinchingly borne, and considerable physical pain, he found time to collect and put in more or less good order a mass of valuable material, the bulk of which will certainly one day be published.

His writings are too well known and too easily accessible to require many words here, except perhaps from one particular angle. In Subjects of the Day I included three of his articles that attracted considerable attention when published in the Times. They were tributes to George Wyndham, Alfred Lyttelton, and Sir William Anson. Although written, they are really eulogies or orations spoken over the bodies of the newly dead. They have a classic restraint, a rich dignity, and a noble eloquence such as few could compass; they have that rarest and most dangerous of all literary qualities - tenderness. These tributes stand at the head of their class. That such appreciations are extremely difficult to write everyone who has tried them knows only too well. Indeed, in literature, they are the supreme examples of

Oh, the little more, and how much it is!

And the little less, and what worlds away!

In the George Wyndham tribute Curzon may seem to give his subject too high a place; yet, measured by promise, possibility, and capacity, he was right, though practical statesmanship might not seem to justify the estimate.

Those who denied Curzon, as a man and a writer, the possession of sweetness and tenderness must revise their judgment if they will ponder the following passage from his tribute to Alfred

Lyttelton. It not only permanently enriches English literature; it is a mirror in which is revealed with shimmering beauty the very sound and sight and soul of Lyttelton:

All will remember his endearing manner, that seemed almost to partake of the nature of a caress, and was equally captivating to age and youth, to high and low, to women

and to men. They will see again the sparkle of his merry eyes and hear the shout of his joyous laughter. They will picture once more the virile grace of his figure, loosely knit, but eloquent of sinews and muscles well attuned, his expressive gestures, and swinging gait. They will measure the quality of his mind, moderate and well balanced in its inclinations, emphatic but not censorious in his judgments. They will think on his high and unselfish character, and of his honorable and stainless life; and, as he passes into the land of silence and becomes a shadow among shadows, they will reflect with a lifelong pride that they knew and loved this glorious living thing, while he shed a light as of sunbeams and uttered a note as of the skylark in a world of mystery, half gladness and half tears.

Does it not also reveal clearly the soul of the man who wrote it? Here is no frigid, conceited public orator uttering a formal oration over a political colleague. The cry is from the soul, and the passage is drenched with the personal emotion of a quick brain and warm heart suffering from the intolerable pain of recent loss.

Subjects of the Day included four of Curzon's most important speeches on the Empire, and gave some idea of his knowledge and services. It is now doubly sad to reflect that the first and most interesting, because most personal, of these was that delivered at the dinner given to Lord Milner in May 1906, after his return from South Africa.

The subjects on which Curzon spoke with accomplished mastery were un

believably varied. Putting aside India, the Empire, and public affairs as more or less the everyday business of a statesman of the foremost rank, his themes in this one volume included Eton, Old London, Birds, English Scenery, Literature and Poverty, the Houses of Great Men, Oxford, Old Masters, Universities, and Smoke that abomination which is destroying all our great architectural possessions. How far ahead he was of his time is evidenced by his tender and eloquent appeal for birds twelve years before the Hudson Bird Sanctuary became an accomplished fact. On all these matters - and many more - he was entitled to be heard. Men who had devoted their lives to any one of them freely admitted that he touched nothing without adorning it, and that to any issue he chose he could bring a sure knowledge that was astounding.

His industry was almost superhuman. He worked far into the night, and early morning found him hard at his correspondence. To the very end of his life, in or out of office, he answered every letter by return and in his own hand. It was his immense knowledge which gave him that feeling of power so often mistaken for arrogance. It gave him also and rightly so-something — not unlike a contempt for those less industrious and less competent than himself, which he did not always successfully conceal that is, assuming that he very often tried to do so!

Of the many truly fine speeches in Subjects of the Day, I personally should be inclined to place highest that delivered at the Albert Hall in December 1907, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Indian Mutiny. It is a noble piece of oratory, and ranks with the greatest oratorical utterances of the past. Addressing the small band of survivors, he said, with a simplicity that was Greek in its restrained beauty: