course has no chance to make as flawless a picture as the
great man of leisure; but the pictorial quality of each is precisely the
same. Both understood the fine art of selection.

I have sometimes wondered if I grudged to journalism what Steevens stole
from letters. I have not yet quite come to a decision; for, had he never
left the groves of the academic for the crowded career of the man of the
world, we should never have known his amazing versatility, or even a
fraction of his noble character as it was published to the world.
Certainly the book to which this chapter forms a mere pendant must, in
parts, stand as a new revelation no less of the nobility of that
character than of his extraordinary foresight, his wonderful instinct
for the objectiveness of life. I believe that in his earliest childhood
his feeling for the prose of geography was like Wordsworth's
cataract--it "haunted him like a passion." And all the while the
subjective side of life called for the intrusion of his prying eyes. So
that you may say it was more or less pure chance that led him to give
what has proved to be the bulk of his active years to the objective side
of things, the purely actual. Take, in this very book, that which
amounts practically to a prophecy of the difficulty of capturing a point
like Spion Kop, in the passage where he describes how impossible it is
to judge of the value of a hill-top until you get there. (Pope, by the
way--and I state the point not from any desire to be pedantic, but
because Steevens had a classical way with him which would out, disguise
it how he might--Pope, I say, in his "Essay on Criticism," had before
made the same remark.) Then again you have in his chapter on Aliwal the
curiously intimate sketch of the Boer character--"A people hard to
arouse, but, you would say, very hard to subdue." Well, it is by the
objective side of life that we have to judge him. The futility of death
makes that an absolute necessity; but I like to think of a possible
George Steevens who, when the dust and sand of campaigns and daily
journalism had been wiped away from his shoon, would have combined in a
great and single-hearted career all the various powers of his fine mind.

His death, as none needs to be told, came as a great shock and with
almost staggering surprise to the world; and it is for his memory's sake
that I put on record a few of the words that were written of him by
responsible people. An Oxford contemporary has wr