Bahadur, was born in the State of Hyderabad, but
educated in England; and there are some--at Cambridge and elsewhere--who
will remember his keenly discriminating interest in British history and
literature, and the comprehensive way he, in a few words, would indicate
his impressions of poets and heroes, long dead, but to him ever-living.
His appreciation was both ardent and just; he could swiftly recognise
the nobler elements in characters which at first glance might seem
startlingly dissimilar; and he could pass without apparent effort from
study of the lives of men of action to the inward contemplations of
abstruse philosophers.
To those who have not met him, it may appear paradoxical to say that his
tastes were at the same moment acutely fastidious and widely
sympathetic; but anyone who has talked with him will recall the blend of
high impersonal ideas with a remarkable personality which seldom failed
to stimulate other minds--even if those others shared few if any of his
intellectual tastes.
A famous British General (still living) was once asked, "What is the
most essential quality for a great leader of men?" And he replied in one
word "SYMPATHY." The General was speaking of leadership in relation to
warfare; and by "Sympathy" he meant swift insight into the minds of
others; and, with this insight, the power to arouse and fan into a flame
the spark of chivalry and true nobility in each. The career of the Nawab
Nizamat Jung has not been set in the world of action,--he is at present
a Judge of the High Court in Hyderabad,--but nevertheless this
definition of sympathy is not irrelevant, for the Nawab's personal
influence has been more subtle and far-reaching than he himself is yet
aware. His love of poetry and history, if on the one hand it has
intensified his realisation of the sorrows and tragedies of earthly
life, on the other hand has equipped him with a power to awake in others
a vivid consciousness of the moral value of literature,--through which
(for the mere asking) we any of us can find our way into a kingdom of
great ideas. This kingdom is also the kingdom of eternal realities--or
so at least it should be; and those who in the early nineties in England
talked with Nizamoudhin (as he then was) could scarcely fail to notice
that he valued the genius of an author, or the exploits of a character
in history, chiefly in proportion to the permanent and vital nature of
the truths this character had laboured to e
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