and daring; of striking military
energy, initiative, and resource; a high, pure, and single character,
dwelling much in the region of the unseen. But as all who knew him admit,
and as his own records testify, notwithstanding an under-current of shrewd
common-sense, he was the creature, almost the sport, of impulse; his
impressions and purposes changed with the speed of lightning; anger often
mastered him; he went very often by intuitions and inspirations rather
than by cool inference from carefully surveyed fact: with many variations
of mood he mixed, as we often see in people less famous, an invincible
faith in his own rapid prepossessions while they lasted. Everybody now
discerns that to despatch a soldier of this temperament on a piece of
business that was not only difficult and dangerous, as Sir E. Baring said,
but profoundly obscure, and needing vigilant sanity and self-control, was
little better than to call in a wizard with his magic. Mr. Gladstone
always professed perplexity in understanding why the violent end of the
gallant Cavagnari in Afghanistan, stirred the world so little in
comparison with the fate of Gordon. The answer is that Gordon seized the
imagination of England, and seized it on its higher side. His religion was
eccentric, but it was religion; the Bible was the rock on which he founded
himself, both old dispensation and new; he was known to hate forms,
ceremonies, and all the "solemn plausibilities"; his speech was sharp,
pithy, rapid, and ironic; above all, he knew the ways of war and would not
bear the sword for nought. All this was material enough to make a popular
ideal, and this is what Gordon in an ever-increasing degree became, to the
immense inconvenience of the statesmen, otherwise so sensible and wary,
who had now improvidently let the genie forth from the jar.

IV

It has been sometimes contended that all the mischief that followed was
caused by the diversion of Gordon from Suakin, his original destination.
If he had gone to the Red Sea, as originally intended, there to report on
the state and look of things in the Soudan, instead of being waylaid and
brought to Cairo, and thence despatched to Khartoum, they say, no
catastrophe would have happened. This is not certain, for the dervishes in
the eastern Soudan were in the flush of open revolt, and Gordon might
either have been killed or taken prisoner, or else he would have come back
without performing any part of his mission. In f