GENERAL GORDON

New Zealand Listener, Volume 32, Issue 817, 25 March 1955, Page 13

GENERAL GORDON

HIS COUNTRY WAS THE WORLD, by Charles Beatty; Chatto & Windus, English ptice 21/-. ~ENERAL GORDON would doubtless have felt more at home in Cromwell’s new model army than he did as an officer in the forces of Queen Vicioria’s Government. His character, too, oné imagines, would have been regarded as less anomalous in the days of the Lord Protector than it was by his con. ternpotarie’. For writers of this century, who dismiss the possibility that religious fanaticism may still be the dominating influence in the life of a civilised human being, Gordon has presented a problem soluble only on the supposition that his strange behaviour had its origin in drunkenness of homosexuality.

Mr. Beatty has not taken this view. His estimate of Gordon's character and interpretation of Gordon's actions \are based not upon the vices but upon the exaggerated virtues of a zealot whose conscience spoke with the voice of a prophet of the Old Testament. "Gordon tried hard to love his brother and could not, because he desvised himself" is the final sentence in a book which unfortunately contains very few conclusions so plainly stated, Extravagant, obscure, and even ungrammatical phrases are as com. mon a feature of these pages as words which grate harshly on the ear\ without necessarily contributing towards lucidity. One is no less startled to read of the annexation of a native chief's "dominations" than at being told that Gordon "resonated to the misery of the innocent." Even if lingual peculiarities give no cause for objection it is unquestionably exasperating to find letters. quoted

frequently without any intimation being given, either by footfiote of bibliography, of whom they wefe written to. Yet in-spite of its defects this book | mérits atténtion as a painstaking attempt to rationalise the apparently irrational. As opposed to his faults Mr. Beatty has | a fine sense of perception which he employs to advantage in analysing the character of a man whose impulses were those of a saint rather than of a soldier, | and who showed signs of insubordination | whenever it seerned to him that the will | of the Government he served failed to | coincide with the will of God. )

R. M.

Burdon