General Smuts BOOKS OF THE DAY
By the MARQUE SS OF LOTHIAN GENERAL SMUTS, as revealed in this vivid, moving bio- graphy, is an incarnation of Goethe's profound thesis that thought is only truly thought when it flowers in action, that Mind expresses itself in action, that the Word carries with it the deed. In the main he seems to have been born and not made. Though he has the capacity for taking infinite pains, that is not the secret of his genius. He was exceptional, at any rate, in thought from the day when as a boy he wrote to a Professor at Stellenbosch asking his help and friendship in steering his way through the moral and religious tempta- tions likely to be presented by the " large puerile element " there, and stating that he did not propose to enter a public boarding department so as " to avoid temptation and to make the proper use of my precious time."
At Stellenbosch, and later at Cambridge, he seemed destined to become a student, philosopher and bookworm, the kind of man which his great protagonist Cecil :Rhodes, forbad:his:Trustees to elect as Rhodes Scholars. He worked!
day and night, took no interest in sport, amusement, dancing or the young ladies of the time, and not only carried off the
highest intellectual honours, but is said to have earned from Leslie Stephen exceptional praise as " the most brilliant student I have ever taught." But no sooner did he become State Attorney to President Kruger in the Transvaal in 1898, at the age of 28, than he showed his latent power of action by dismissing the head of the detective force—corrupt and well entrenched behind corrupt friends—and took over the detective force himself and began to purge the Augcan Stable of early Johannesburg vice and gangsterdom. Any lingering tendency to fall victim to thinking as an end in itself dis- appeared during the Boer War, when he made himself one of the most successful of guerrilla leaders in his famous raid into Cape Colony in 1901.
In this combination of the gifts of a scholar, scientist and philosopher, never happier than when reading in his great library at Irene, aloof, indifferent to the common run of human weaknesses, superior in mind to his fellows, self- confident but in no way haughty or proud, capable of ruthless practical action, idealist in ultimate purpose, without illusion in immediate method, is to be found the secret of General Smuts' great career, and of both his successes and his defeats. He has made himself not only a leader in his own Afrikandcr land, but in the British Com- monwealth and the world as a whole. His speeches on
international affairs are- awaited.. and read all round the earth, and the mark he has made in world politics and among world philosophers is deep, thopgh the story of it will figure in the second volume of Mrs. Millin's Life—to be published this autumn. Bid; with all -his administrative gifts and political talents,: he was rejected_ by his own countrymen for more than. ten years when he. was at the height of his powers for men of far inferior insight and mind and executive ability. The great dictators can be of the stuff of which General Smuts is made. But the leaders of democracy must be more warmly human, less brilliant, evoking in the common man the feeling that here is another man, better no doubt, but in his feelings and mental processes apparently like tint. himself. General Botha, Smuts' greatest colleague, was the centre of the political combination while it lasted so far aa South African politics was concerned, while Smuts framed the policies and looked after the executive side: But Botha's name General Smuts. By Sarah Gertrude Millin. Vol. T. ,(Yabar and Faber. 185.)
meant little outside, except for the distinguished few who met him at Imperial and Peace Conferences.
General Smuts is a hero after Mrs. Millin's own heart—a blaze of intellect and action. She understands Smuts better than she understood Rhodes, for Rhodes was not an intellectual and had a power of dynamic feeling which Smuts does not possess. So Rhodes to Mrs. Millin was a Colossus whom she was forced, rather against her will, to admire but whom she never fully understood, while Smuts she sees and almost idolises as a single rounded whole whom she feels she understands. She tells the story of the man and his astonishing career in her brilliant staccato prose, and with a just and penetrating insight into the politics and racial conflicts of SoUth Africa.. - Her first volume falls into a dozen main episodes. After tracing Smuts' ancestry and education she unfolds the
relentless development of the crisis, in the relations:between
England and the Transvaal which began friththe_ jam_ eson
Raid and the fall of Rhodes and ended Anzio-Boer
War. It is' a drama centring on the conflict, bititeen the patriarchal Voortrekker tradition and the Swiftly-moving modern capitalist era represented by Kimberley and Johannes-
burg and on the struggle of adamantine and immovable old Paul Kruger first with Rhodes and then with Milner. She sees in the impatience of Milner—who had a detachment from the ordindry exchanges of human intercourse even greater than Smuts' own—the immediate cause of the war of 1899. She brings out well how high and well founded were the Boers' early hopes that they might win the war and how they were frustrated by their fatal sieges of Ladysmith, Kimberley and Mafeking. Smuts, who had played a minor part as Kruger's State Secretary, begins to come into the centre of the picture in his raid into Cape Colony and during the peacemaking at Verceniging. Then comes the black despair of the reconstruc- tion era—Milner's greatest achievement—the amazing conquest of Campbell-Bannerman, the Liberal Responsible Government Constitution of 1905, the beginning of the Botha-Smuts administration in AfriCa, which lasted from 1906 to 1920, the achievement of the Union in 1909, the quarrel with Hertzog, who could not brook in those days reconciliation with the Empire that had extinguished the independence of the Boer Republics only a decade before, the struggle with Gandhi, the pre-war era of strikes on the Witwatersrand, the steady growth of the German menace and intrigue, the drama and tragedy of the rebellion so swiftly crushed by Smuts and Botha in fulfilment of their pledges at Verceniging, the campaign in South West and East Africa, and the sudden and dramatic transfer of Smuts himself to world power as a
member of the British War Cabinet. "
It is a wonderful and inspiring story, admirably told. If I have a criticism, save on matters of detail here and there, it is that Mrs. Millin underrates the " irrepressible conflict " inherent in the existence of two flags in Africa, as making almost inevitable the Boer War as the one way left to remove that obstacle' to Union, and in consequence gives too little importance to the work of the South African Con- vention which knit four colonies into a Dominion, and that in her zeal to tell the story of her hero she unconsciously, I think, minimises the part played by his colleague& For if Smuts has the capacity of a dictator he is also a good worker in a team, and his greatest accomplishments, perhaps, have been as a partner in a team. But-these do not detract from a fascinating bio- graphy showing against the background of great events what one man of exceptional intellect, 'courage, resource and capacity for action can do to mould towards nobler ends the history of his time.
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