Page:The empire and the century.djvu/534

 everything good-bye. The specialist doctor, with his 'bad prognosis,' is the mute with the bowstring of our Western life. The message acts variously on various men. Balzac, in 'La Feau de Chagrin,' has made a classic study of the effect on one kind of temperament; Rhodes was of sterner stuff:

So he with Ulysses. The message could not daunt, but perhaps it hurried him. Under threat of death he first went to South Africa. Again, and yet again, in his most strenuous and confident years a grim reminder came, and breathed into his work a kind of hungry fever; in the closing years he learned to look certitude quietly in the face. Thus to his own eye he was ever that 'old man planting oak saplings,' of whom he once spoke in a passage quite home-spun, but surely most touching. I, at least, know none other in his speeches that so appeals. And, indeed, when the biographer comes to seek for some one central thread on which the best and the worst of Cecil John Rhodes may alike be strung, something which makes both consistent, I think it is here that he may find it. He had no time, therefore he shunned delights and lived laborious days; he had no time, therefore he fell to the one fatal temptation, that of the short-cut. I often find myself applying to him those quaint, fine lines of Marvell's 'To his Coy Mistress.' Rhodes's mistress was a cause, a dream, the destiny of a continent; and sometimes, when the date for realization was pushed further off by a mutiny of native warriors or of parliamentary mugwumps, by a rinderpest, or a red-tape delay, or a war, I have seemed to detect in his grumble or impatient fling the very note of the delayed lover:

Had we but world enough and time.

This coyness, lady, were no crime &hellip;