pioneer, he was the inventor, of the
particular method which he practised.

I began this discussion with a reference to the spare, austere, but
quite lucid message of the cablegram announcing the death of Steevens;
and I was carried on at once to a deliberate consideration of his
literary work, because that work had, despite its vigour, its vividness,
its brilliance, just the outline, the spareness, the slimness, the
austerity which are so painfully inconspicuous in the customary painter
of word-pictures. Some have said that Steevens was destined to be the
Kinglake of the Transvaal. That is patently indemonstrable. His war
correspondence was not the work of a stately historian. He could, out of
sheer imaginativeness, create for himself the style of the stately
historian. His "New Gibbon"--a paper which appeared in 'Blackwood's
Magazine'--is there to prove so much; but that was not the manner in
which he usually wrote about war. He was essentially a man who had
visions of things. Without the time to separate his visions into the
language of pure classicism--a feat which Tennyson superlatively
contrived to accomplish--he yet took out the right details, and by
skilful combination built you, in the briefest possible space, a
strongly vivid picture. If you look straight out at any scene, you will
see what all men see when they look straight out; but when you inquire
curiously into all the quarters of the compass, you will see what no man
ever saw when he simply looked out of his two eyes without regarding the
here, there, and everywhere. When Tennyson wrote of

"flush'd Ganymede, his rosy thigh
Half-buried in the Eagle's down,
Sole as a flying star shot thro' the sky
Above the pillar'd town"--

you felt the wonder of the picture. Applied in a vastly different way,
put to vastly different uses, the visual gift of Steevens belonged to
the same order of things. Consider this passage from his Soudan book:--

"Black spindle-legs curled up to meet red-gimleted black faces,
donkeys headless and legless, or sieves of shrapnel; camels with
necks writhed back on to their humps, rotting already in pools of
blood and bile-yellow water, heads without faces, and faces without
anything below, cobwebbed arms and legs, and black skins grilled
to crackling on smouldering palm-leaf--don't look at it."

The writer, swinging on at the obvious pace with which this writing
swings, of