7

‘The Coming Man’, 1890–1895

CURZON DID NOT return from his travels so ‘full of beans’ as Arthur Balfour had hoped. Indeed he was so exhausted after Persia that his health gave way twice within the next twelve months. Both Westminster and his constituency thus had to resign themselves to sporadic glimpses of the Member for Southport. He made a brief parliamentary appearance in March 1890 to answer another of Labouchere’s attacks on the House of Lords, declaring it to be impertinent and preposterous to sit in annual judgement upon a more distinguished chamber; and he made a short speech on the same day appealing for tax relief for lodging-house keepers.1 But his doctors were worried about his condition and, fearing he might be in the early stages of tuberculosis, ordered him to the Mediterranean.

Early April found him in Cannes, staying with his friends the Wagrams in the Villa Rothschild. The explorer Stanley came to lunch, told Curzon of his meeting with Livingstone, and denounced Gladstone as ‘the most dangerous and incompetent of statesmen’, quite unfit to rule an empire he had never visited.2 Sailing from Marseille to Greece, Curzon then stayed with Rennell Rodd in Athens before embarking on a cruise which took him to Thermopylae, Meteora and Istanbul. He returned to London for the season and in September set off on a long tour of the country houses of his Scottish friends. Not until the autumn did he begin serious work on his Persian volumes.

Shunning the distractions of central London, Curzon decided to rent rooms in the southern suburb of Norwood. There he worked all day and for much of the night, stopping only to row on the Crystal Palace lake in the afternoons and to read The Times or The Count of Monte Cristo during dinner. He was in good health and high spirits, enjoying the isolation and the ‘furious exhilaration’ of his own society.3 He also enjoyed the work, although it was arduous, requiring an examination of almost every book written on Persia in any European language over the last five centuries. The most complicated part of his task was the compilation of facts and figures (‘in their very essence, an insult to Oriental imagination’): certain lines of the book, he claimed, cost him hours of work and pages of correspondence. Characteristically, he overdid it and prompted his doctors to order him abroad again, this time to Switzerland for two months to ‘freeze out any lingering germs’. In advance it seemed ‘a dismal prospect’ to be stuck ‘all alone in a great caravanserai of middle class consumptives, who skate all day and tea and tattle all night’.4

The reality was less dismal. Arriving in St Moritz in January 1891, he found the place ‘not merely tolerable but in many respects comic and in some exhilarating’. He divided the caravanserai into three groups: a band of ‘old grey virgins, comatose matrons and hectic yellow-haired girls’ whom he did not get to know, a smaller number of people he became ‘reasonably familiar’ with, and a few whom he liked so much that he danced with them and asked for their addresses when they left. He took some exercise, tobogganing down the hill from the hotel on to the lake ice, and skating, which he did very badly, admitting he could do ‘nothing more than run about on the ice’. Within a month his health had improved, enabling him to report that he was ‘rapidly establishing an ascendancy of luck over lung’ which would bring him back in April.5 In the meantime he worked hard on his book but still had time to write parodies of Tennyson and some excruciating doggerel which were published in the St Moritz Post. He also wrote to the Fortnightly Review about a matter which had exercised him since his visit to Greece the previous May. Horrified by the ‘hideous replicas in terracotta’ which now defaced the Parthenon as a result of Lord Elgin’s removal of the originals, he had suggested to Gladstone that some of the sculptures from the British Museum should be returned to the Acropolis. Discouraged by the old statesman’s reply that this would create a precedent for the return of all the Elgin marbles, Curzon now publicly advocated the restitution of some Parthenon relics to their original places on the sacred rock.6

The seclusion of Norwood and St Moritz enabled him to make such progress with the Persian book that by early February the first volume was nearly finished. He estimated he had written the equivalent of five hundred pages of print in four months. Work slowed down over the summer but by the beginning of September he was installed once again in Norwood, grinding at ‘old Persia, with his panorama of mingled splendour and squalor, the superb ornamental medley of dignity and decay’.7 Distracted by little more than a Beethoven concert at the Crystal Palace, he galloped through the second volume and reached the final chapter in November. By then, however, the strain had again become too much. On his doctor’s advice he cancelled a number of political meetings and went to France for a month’s rest which included a breakfast with Oscar Wilde and Wilfrid Blunt in Paris. Wilde told them he was writing a play in French for the Théâtre-Français, and they promised to go and see it when Curzon was Prime Minister.

While he was in France a laconic letter arrived from Lord Salisbury asking his former secretary whether he was ‘disposed to undertake’ the under-secretaryship for India which Sir John Gorst’s ‘migration to the Treasury’ had left vacant.8 Curzon had no hesitation in accepting the offer even though it obliged him to censor his Persian book. The required alterations, however, were much less drastic than the Prime Minister had at first demanded. Instead of omitting or rewriting the long chapter on the Shah and submitting the result to Lord Cross, the Secretary of State for India, he sent the original text to Sir Alfred Lyall, the author of some delightful Anglo-Indian verse and a distinguished veteran of the Indian Civil Service. Lyall’s censorship turned out to be extremely mild, requiring the substitution of certain adjectives and sentences rather than the rewriting of long passages. The suggested changes, Curzon told Lord Salisbury, were ‘at once considerate to H.M. the Shah, and agreeable’ to himself, and he could assure the Prime Minister that ‘no feeling of resentment lingers in the bosom of the shorn lamb’.9 Disputes with the publisher, however, were less harmoniously resolved. T. Norton Longman was horrified by the length of the first volume and asked the author, unsuccessfully, to prune it. On receiving the first instalment of the second, his despair increased, and he begged him to make the remaining chapters as short as possible because the book was already costing far more than he had anticipated. Curzon ignored the request and countered with allegations that the printers were unreasonably slow and that Longman refused to see his point of view. The acrimony continued long after the book had been published, Curzon complaining about Longman’s failure to provide detailed information of sales on his royalty statements. The work was not a financial success for either author or publisher. Ten years after its publication, Persia and the Persian Question had earned Curzon £406, a sum he dismissed as ‘a miserable return’.10

Published in May 1892, the book had a generally favourable reception. Some reviewers grumbled that it was too long or too self-important or too fatiguing to read, and a rogue polemic in the Sunday Sun declared that with ‘uncompromising egotism’ and ‘detestable prose’ Curzon had achieved the remarkable feat of writing a dull book on a most interesting subject. But the detractors were far outnumbered by the volume and quality of the praise. The Times applauded ‘the enormous amount of patient, accurate, well-directed research’, while the Standard commended the earnestness of Curzon’s study of the East and asserted that his ponderous and elaborate volumes embodied ‘all that is known, and nearly everything that is knowable, about modern Persia’. In the St James’ Gazette the author was congratulated not only for his learning, industry and faculty of exposition, but also for the ‘statesmanlike impartiality and breadth of view’. It was a book that would ‘greatly add to a high and growing reputation’.11 Curzon was pleased to learn that so many people were reading the book and already regarding it as a classic: Lucy Graham Smith, one of the Tennant sisters, told him she was reading it aloud to her mother while taking the sulphur baths in Harrogate. He was still more delighted by the reviews published later in the year in the journals, although not until he was in the Far East in the winter did he come across Blackwoods’ verdict that his work was ‘incomparably the best book on any Asiatic state in the English language’.12

Since his election to Parliament in 1886, Curzon had been only a part-time politician, attending the House of Commons for most of the sessions but speaking seldom. He remained conscientious, however, about his constituency and visited it regularly whenever he was well and in England. Even his solitude in Norwood was interrupted several times by journeys to Southport to make speeches. These were formal party occasions in which he berated the Liberals in a conventional way, especially over Home Rule, and accused them of trying to destroy a constitution which the English had been building for nine hundred years. At Westminster he took a more independent line and in his rare contributions was prepared to criticize the Government over its policies on Asia. While he admired Lord Salisbury’s mastery of the House of Lords, he was highly critical of the party leadership in the Commons. In spite of various qualities, W.H. Smith had proved a failure as Leader of the House, unable to inspire his supporters or push legislation smoothly through the Chamber. As early as 1888 Curzon had hoped for Smith’s replacement before he gave the entire party ‘creeping paralysis’.13 He even wished for the return of Lord Randolph Churchill and believed the Tories would forgive his ‘pranks and peccadilloes’ if he reformed himself and studied ‘the rudimentary canons of fair play’.14 In the event Smith remained at his post until his death in October 1891, when he was replaced by Balfour. Although the new Leader of the House claimed he never read the papers and once shirked a function with the Kaiser in order to watch Eton and Harrow play cricket,15 Balfour had developed into a serious politician in the course of Salisbury’s second government. As Chief Secretary for Ireland, he had confounded the Irish nationalists, who had greeted his appointment with derision, and his firm policies after the passing of the Irish Crimes Act prompted his opponents to substitute the effeminate nicknames with ‘Bloody Balfour’. Curzon was delighted by his colleague’s success and by his performances on the front bench after Smith’s death. ‘Balfour is getting better every day,’ he told a friend, ‘debates admirably, and is always the gentleman, polished, courteous, magnanimous, statesmanlike’.16

In spite of Curzon’s frequent absenteeism, he and his friends thought that by 1891 the time had come for him to join the Government. The post he most coveted, the under-secretaryship for Foreign Affairs, fell vacant two months before the job at the India Office when Sir James Fergusson was appointed Postmaster-General. The press assumed the position would go to Curzon, and so did his friends. In fact Lord Salisbury gave the job to J.B. Lowther, explaining to Balfour that he had done so because the Queen had refused to agree to Fergusson’s transfer unless she knew the name of his successor. Forced to make a decision on the spot, Salisbury had opted for Lowther because he was a diplomat’s son and a good linguist and had been recommended by the dying Smith.17 Unaware of the circumstances, Curzon was despondent. ‘It is a bore’, he wrote, ‘to lose one of the few things for which I have combined taste and qualification as the chance may not recur.’18 But his friends expressed greater disappointment than he did. Alfred Lyttelton was incensed by the omission, declaring it to be ‘perfectly loathsome that the best men who have studied and become authorities on these subjects should be left out’.19

The Indian under-secretaryship, however, was equally congenial and, for a 32-year-old specialist in Asian affairs, a more appropriate position. It was certainly the right place for a man who had decided to dedicate his current book to ‘the officials, civil and military, in India, whose hands uphold the noblest fabric yet reared by the genius of a conquering nation’. Curzon’s months at the India Office were some of the happiest of his life. He found the routine there absorbing and the work entertaining. Claiming to treat the officials with untypical deference, he was surprised by the ‘amazing affability’ of ‘the old boys there who were authorities and swells’ before he had been born.20 The evidence suggests that he too was appreciated both by the Office and by British officials in India. One frontier officer considered him better informed on Indian subjects than anyone he had ever met.21 The Permanent Under-Secretary was equally impressed: writing many years later, after he had become an ungenerous critic of Curzon, Sir Arthur Godley recalled that the young Under-Secretary had been excellent, a most efficient representative of the Office in the House of Commons, and ‘in every way agreeable and amusing to work with’.22

Curzon’s first performance at the despatch box was polished, confident, entirely in character. He ‘leaned on its lid’, reported the St James’ Gazette, ‘as carelessly as if he had been accustomed to stand there all his life; he even slapped the box with the familiarity of an old friend.’23 In his first major speech a few weeks later, ‘he stood at the table, looking like the great Sir Robert Peel, or some statesman of forty years’ experience, instead of a young Under-Secretary in his first innings’. If his diction was ‘rather Johnsonian’, the onlooker noted, the performance was nevertheless clear and convincing.24 Much of Curzon’s time during the session was occupied by answering questions on a range of subjects from famine in Madras to regimental band funds, and replying to the accusations of J.G. Swift MacNeill, the MP for South Donegal, who claimed it was as difficult for natives to get appointments in India as it was for Catholics to gain them in Ireland.25 His principal responsibility, however, was to steer an amendment bill to the India Councils Act (1861) through the House of Commons.

From the day of his appointment in November 1891, Curzon had been showered with advice about native appointments in India. The sick and elderly Jowett urged him to settle ‘the burning question of admitting the Natives to the Governor’s Council’, but others, including Lord Harris, the Governor of Bombay, recommended caution. Harris, who had once captained the English cricket team against Australia and later received the undeserved accolade of ‘Father of Indian Cricket’, exhorted Curzon to offer ‘a bold face’ against appointments which the vast majority of Indians did not want.26 The bill itself was a fairly mild measure, enlarging the legislative councils in India by adding some elected members and giving them wider powers to criticize and question the governments. Gladstone accepted it in spite of its limitations, but it was too advanced for Harris who argued that the introduction of the elective principle would promote divisions among the Indians and make it impossible to keep them united.27 Curzon himself, who certainly did not view the measure as a prelude to parliamentary government, agreed in principle more with Harris than with Jowett. For the Indians in their present stage of development, he told the Commons, a representative system would be ‘in the highest degree, premature and unwise’. Lord Cross, the Secretary of State for India, regarded the bill as ‘a safe and truly conservative measure’ and some years afterwards, when his deputy had become Viceroy, enquired how it had turned out in practice. The experiment, Curzon replied, had been an ‘immense success’ which had transformed the Imperial Legislative Council into a thoroughly representative body. The provincial councils, however, had flourished less well, because in Bombay and Madras the native members sometimes tried to emulate the Irish at Westminster by making foolish speeches and theatrical exits.28

Curzon’s performance as Under-Secretary added to his reputation at the same time as it widened the divide between his admirers and his detractors. While The Times and other newspapers predicted a great career, some publications could see nothing admirable in him at all. One journal, which scoffed at his speeches for exhibiting ‘well-bred signs of interior pleasure’, was repelled by his ‘air of perfectly infuriating and absolutely imperturbable conceit’.29 The Evening News attempted a balanced view, admitting the ‘ability and brilliancy’ of his speech on the Second Reading of the India Councils Bill while lamenting the fact that he irritated the House ‘by the redundancy of his verbal ornament and his blissful innocence of anything approaching to modesty of statement’: his arrogance and dogmatism made ordinary mortals experience a compulsive urge ‘to kick him out of sheer envy and resentment’.30 It is hard to find reports at this period which do not stress Curzon’s awareness of his own talents or which fail to quote versions of the ‘superior person’ rhyme, most of them demonstrably inaccurate (‘My hair is black, and smooth, and sleek’) or pointlessly exaggerated (‘I dine at Blenheim twice a week’). On his appointment to the India Office, his old antagonist Labouchere advised him to eschew his current mode of speaking. Employing an image which the Illustrated London News had used to describe John Morley’s view of George III, he urged Curzon to realize he was not ‘a divinity addressing black beetles’ when explaining the Indian policy of the Government.31 In the opinion of his enemies – and some of his friends – the advice was comprehensively neglected.

After Curzon had spent barely half a year as Under-Secretary, the country went to the polls in July 1892 in an election that was not expected to return an enervated Tory Government. Although Salisbury himself had an ambiguous attitude towards the predicted result, his nephew Balfour unequivocally wanted to lose. Remaining in power after the election was something he could neither ‘desire nor anticipate’, and he looked forward to a long holiday in which to prepare a new edition of his book, In Defence of Philosophic Doubt – a publishing event that did not in fact take place for another twenty-eight years.32 Curzon, however, naturally wanted to win and managed to increase his own majority at Southport. To his electors he once more denounced the iniquities of Home Rule, condemning Liberal policy as one of cowardice, reckless folly and ‘certain and culpable failure’, because it was bound to lead to civil war. He also stressed his commitment to progressive Conservatism, listing his party’s achievements in education, local government and allotments for working men. The one departure from previous manifestos was his acceptance of temperance reform, a change sufficiently pronounced for the Bishop of London to invite him to take charge of the Church of England’s temperance bill in the Commons in 1894.33

Gladstone, who fought the election on a radical programme he did not really believe in, gained a modest victory. His Liberals won 270 seats, two more than the Conservatives, but his Irish supporters outnumbered Salisbury’s Liberal Unionist allies and gave him a majority of about forty. No one was more distressed about the result than Queen Victoria, who considered it ‘a defect in our much famed constitution to have to part with an admirable Government like Lord Salisbury’s for no question of any importance, or any particular reason, merely on account of the number of votes’. Salisbury’s Government resigned in August and, after a doleful meeting between the monarch and the Liberal leader during which each decided the other had become senile, she was obliged to entrust the Empire ‘to the shaking hand of an old, wild, incomprehensible man of eighty-two and a half’; on inspecting his Cabinet at Osborne, the Queen found them ‘a motley crew to behold’ captained by a ‘half crazy, half silly’ old chieftain. Her opinion of her remarkable Prime Minister never changed: a year later she still regarded him as ‘a deluded old fanatic’.34

Curzon was also dismayed by the change of government. He had found his Indian work ‘entrancing’ and had regarded the possibility of defeat as ‘heart-rending’. ‘I hate leaving my office’, he confessed in August, ‘just as much as I have loved occupying it.’ Electoral defeat did, however, leave him free once more to travel, to make ‘one great and final and remote wander’.35 Two and a half years’ confinement to Europe had been too much for him, and within days of leaving office he had embarked from Southampton for another voyage around the world. He was pursued by a letter from Balfour chiding him for his ‘inveterate restlessness’ and complaining that for six months of the year Curzon was ‘quite lost to all the finer feelings of either love or friendship’. To the obsessive golfer of North Berwick, it was incomprehensible that his friend should voluntarily transform himself into an explorer of wildernesses and a ‘student of effete civilisations’.36

The first half of the journey, westwards to Japan, was tiresome but fast. Offered cheap but luxurious tickets by a German shipping line, Curzon soon regretted his acceptance of the bargain. As usual, he disliked and despised his fellow passengers, most of whom were ‘commercial Germans’ and middle-class Americans: it was an ‘aesthetic distress’, he noted in his diary, to be surrounded by so many hideous people. Arriving in the United States, he spent a few days with some friends in Washington before crossing the continent on the Canadian Pacific Railway. By the end of August he was in Vancouver and a fortnight later, one month after leaving England, he reached Japan, the first of the countries he had chosen to study on this journey. His previous travels had resulted in volumes on central Asia and Persia. This expedition was intended to produce two more on the Far East, and a further couple were planned for what he called the Central East, regions bordering India to the north and north-west. They all belonged to his vast and comprehensive project to study the problems of Asia and their implications for British India, which he saw as the true fulcrum of Asian dominion. Although one book did not materialize, a second was aborted by events, and a third emerged much shorter than he had intended, the final achievement – five authoritative volumes totalling over 2,300 pages – established him as the country’s leading expert on Asian affairs.

Curzon again enjoyed his stay in Japan, finding the country beautiful and its people attractive and hospitable. His visit was enhanced by the presence of his friend Cecil Spring Rice at the embassy, and by the hospitality of Montague Kirkwood, a legal adviser to the Japanese Government, whom he had met with his wife Ethel on the Pacific voyage. He accepted Kirkwood’s invitation to stay and then began a flirtation with his wife, whom he persuaded to act as his guide among the Shogun’s shrines and as his interpreter while hunting for curios in Tokyo markets; on an excursion to some temples he arranged matters so that he would drive alone with Ethel, whom he referred to as ‘the Kirkina’, while her husband and Spring Rice went by train. Curzon’s behaviour on these expeditions can be guessed from the tone of a letter (part of which he destroyed) written six months later by Ethel. Thanking him for a virtually unrecognizable photograph he had sent her, she declared it must have been taken when he had ‘been feeling very very good, angelic in fact, and you know you never gave me a chance of seeing you act the goody goody role, did you?’ Writing to Spring Rice, Curzon declared that the Far East would always be endeared to him by the memories of his companionship as well as the smiles of ‘the Kirkina’. Letters from Spring Rice, written a year after the visit, give the impression that she was pining for him.37

Curzon also worked in Japan, interviewing the Prime Minister and other officials, and seeing enough of the country to realize it had a brilliant future: it would soon, he predicted, achieve a technical equality with the Western powers and become ‘on a smaller scale, the Britain of the Far East’. His impression of Korea, which he visited in October with Spring Rice, could hardly have been more different. Its capital he found malodorous, its people supine and spiritless, and its military ‘not a standing army but a standing joke’.38 The tour began with a row over transport as soon as they landed. Arguing with an extortionate horse-dealer in front of the local council and a large crowd of onlookers, Curzon used high-and heavy-handed tactics. He ‘got very angry,’ Spring Rice noted in his journal, ‘explained that he was one of the most important people in England, and that it was a matter of vital importance that he should see the king that week.’ When they finally reached Seoul he became diplomatic, taking photographs of the ministers and inviting the Home Secretary to Britain. Encouraged by the King to agree that England was a fine and large country while Korea was a very dirty one, he managed to avoid giving a direct reply.39

Although Peking was also extremely dirty, Curzon was mesmerized by its street life, ‘a phantasmagoria of excruciating incident, too bewildering to grasp, too aggressive to acquiesce in, too absorbing to escape’. He was fascinated by China, ‘a country stupefied with the pride of the past’, a nation in need of that modernizing impulse to which Japan, by contrast, had too incontinently yielded. Despite China’s present weakness, he believed that she and Britain, sharing a common enemy in Russia, were natural allies, and he regretted that Chinese suspicion of foreigners provided such an obstacle to an alliance. He admitted, however, that the principal cause of that suspicion was the activities of Christian missionaries which he wished to have curtailed. Missionaries everywhere continued to irritate him. Their work was sometimes merely ridiculous, as in the case of American women trying to convert the Japanese to temperance, yet often also dangerous, as in the case of China, where they excited native hostility without achieving any compensatory advantage.40

In China, after almost two months in each other’s company, Spring Rice parted from Curzon and returned to Japan. ‘Springy’, noted Curzon in his diary, had been the most amusing and unselfish of travelling companions, and during their time together they had not exchanged a jarring word. The trip had evidently had its entertainments as well as its serious side, for Curzon described his friend as ‘equally provided with philosophic reflection and bawdy anecdote’, and congratulated him on his sexual as well as his mental agility.41 Spring Rice was unable to describe his companion as equally unselfish, for Curzon had been demanding throughout, treating the Consular Service as if its principal purpose was to arrange journeys and provide information for people like him. He admitted, however, that Curzon was ‘a really splendid man’, an excellent traveller and a prodigious worker. A fellow pupil of Oscar Browning, a fellow undergraduate at Balliol, and at one stage a rival for the same girl, Spring Rice felt an admiration for Curzon tinged by envy of his success. After returning to Tokyo, he admitted that Curzon had ‘mentally’ overtaken him and his contemporaries. Wondering whether his friend was destined for greatness, Spring Rice noted that the quality of mind and the energy that accompanied it were reminiscent of Joseph Chamberlain.42

The next stage of the journey, tramping through Annam and Cambodia, was the most arduous. Curzon was delighted by his visits to fading oriental courts and his audiences with dragon-robed monarchs, but there was no one who spoke English, and the French officials were unhelpful and unimpressive. French imperialism in Asia annoyed him because he was sure it stemmed merely from ‘schoolboy patriotism’ and jealousy of the British position in India.43 Its representatives in Indo-China, moreover, were like ‘hair cutters’, lazy, ill-educated and uninterested in foreign affairs. In addition, while they were civil to him personally, they did all in their power to prevent him obtaining useful information and even tried to stop him reading the newspapers. The only consolation, he later recalled, was the knowledge that at the end of each day’s journey he could look forward to a bottle of Moët champagne. Such luxury was not to be found on the P & O steamer he boarded after a tour of Siam. The ship had a brand of champagne so second-rate that he had to make do with Chablis and soda water instead.44

On returning to England in March 1893, Curzon settled into his routine of parliamentary attendance during the session, followed by a retreat from society to expand his latest Times articles into a book, in turn succeeded by interminable quarrels with his publishers about payment and production. As with Persia, he planned to write two volumes but on this occasion to publish the first one as soon as it was completed. In the event only the book dealing with Japan, Korea and China ever appeared; marriage, another journey and his return to office prevented a sequel on Indo-China and Siam from being written. Publication of the first edition of Problems of the Far East in the summer of 1894 went reasonably smoothly: Curzon even accepted Longman’s recommendation to omit a chapter on Japanese wrestling. But he rejected advice not to employ an agent to bargain with Longman, with the result that this intermediary, Mr Colles, soon embroiled his client in a row which led him to publish a cheaper and revised edition with Constable. Curzon quickly fell out with his new publisher as well, accusing him of dawdling and failing to advertise the book properly. By 1896 he was regretting having taken his agent’s advice, and a few years later even Colles realized he had made a mistake and suggested returning to Longman for a new edition.45

Problems of the Far East had the good fortune to be published shortly after two of the countries it dealt with had gone to war over the third. This led to increased sales – the book earned him fifty per cent more than Persia and the Persian Question – and greater public appreciation of his knowledge and judgement. It also enjoyed considerable success in the United States where one reviewer extolled its author as a ‘philosophical scholar, thoughtful traveller, sympathetic man of the world’ and the possessor of a ‘mind of singular penetration’.46 In Britain the critics sometimes seemed to be reviewing Curzon’s politics and personality rather than his book, but as on previous occasions applause was louder and more widespread than denigration. Problems of the Far East is probably the best of his early works. The unmistakable Curzonian resonance, what the Westminster Gazette called ‘the touch of the Corinthian in his style’, pervades a book appropriately dedicated ‘to those who believe that the British Empire is, under Providence, the greatest instrument for good that the world has seen and who hold, with the writer, that its work in the Far East is not yet accomplished’. It contains faults common to the age rather than to Curzon, such as superficial judgement of national characteristics, especially when French, but it is well argued, well structured and less crammed with detail than its predecessor. In addition, the Japanese victory over China showed that he had been perceptive in his estimate of the respective strengths of the warring powers.

After his return from the Far East, Curzon spoke more often in the House of Commons. His books and his spell at the India Office had enhanced his reputation, and he was often referred to as ‘the coming man’ on the Conservative benches, a worthy antagonist of H.H. Asquith and Sir Edward Grey. Although the early 1890s were a particularly turbulent period in his private life,fn1 he worked hard to maintain his reputation as an Asian expert, keeping up an enormous correspondence with consuls and other British officials stationed in the countries he had visited. He gave lectures, published articles, wrote letters to The Times and made speeches on all issues affecting Britain’s position in Asia. His constant theme was the defence of the empire. Indeed he became so obsessed by his country’s Asian dominion that he often seemed to underestimate her other strengths. Seldom referring to Britain’s contribution to constitutional or industrial development, he argued that India was the strength and greatness of England, and that only by maintaining that strength would she survive. History would judge Britain by her treatment of India, that great and sacred responsibility which ‘for some peculiar and inscrutable reason’ had been entrusted to her by Providence. It was only when this fact was understood that people would realize that ‘every nerve a man may strain, every energy he may put forward, cannot be devoted to a nobler purpose than keeping tight the cords that hold India to ourselves.’47

In his books and speeches of previous years he had concentrated on the Russian menace to India from the north-west. But during his recent journey he had identified another threat, the insidious expansion of French territory to the south-east, which, if unchecked by Britain and pursued in a combined move with the Russians, might present a real danger to India. Between 1893 and 1895 the majority of Curzon’s parliamentary interventions dealt with French encroachments in Siam and the feeble response of the British Government. As Siam fell within the orbit of the Indian system, he argued that Britain could not be indifferent to her destiny nor acquiesce in her extinction. Through the weakness of the Liberal Government, the French had been allowed to grab far more of Siam than they had ever expected, and they must now be told that no future encroachments would be tolerated. Regularly in the course of three parliamentary sessions he stood up and asked Grey, the Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs, for information on Siam, and regularly he received courteous and largely uninformative replies. ‘France has behaved criminally,’ Curzon told a friend, ‘England weakly, Siam foolishly, and when folly, weakness and crime are in competition, it is the last named that as a rule wins’. There was some consolation, however, in the thought that, in the event of war with France, the British would be able – so long as they held the Suez Canal – to pick up the French colonies in Asia.48

On domestic issues Curzon’s views were less original, less independent and more prejudiced by instinct than his positions on foreign affairs. He spoke twice in the House of Commons against the payment of MPs, arguing that such a move would encourage ‘needy, impecunious adventurers’ attracted by the salary and prestige of Parliament.49 He was also opposed to female emancipation, which he regarded as ‘the fashionable tomfoolery of the day’, and campaigned against the acceptance of women members by the Royal Geographical Society. Claiming that ladies were out of place in a scientific body and that their presence in the Anthropological Society had destroyed its scientific character and value, he succeeded in persuading the RGS to vote narrowly against the admission of women.50 Less reactionary, however, was his stance on the House of Lords. He continued to advocate the reform of the Upper Chamber and he supported the unsuccessful attempt of Lord Wolmer to remain in the Commons after the death of his father, the Earl of Selborne.

Ireland dominated the session of 1893 from Gladstone’s remarkable introduction of his second Home Rule Bill in February until its massive and predictable rejection by the House of Lords in September. The old man’s resignation the following spring, pleasing though it was to Queen Victoria, did little to energize a labouring and divided Government. It was said that Henry Campbell-Bannerman was the only member of Lord Rosebery’s Cabinet who was on speaking terms with all his colleagues,51 and the hostility between ministers, particularly between the Prime Minister and his Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir William Harcourt, was so intense that the Government was not expected to survive long. Observing the Liberal decline and realizing that he might soon be back in office, Curzon decided on a ‘last wild cry of freedom’ and embarked on his final, most dramatic and most perilous expedition to the East.

Two regions remained unfilled in the jigsaw puzzle of his Asian adventures: Afghanistan and the mountains of the Pamirs, that area on the north-west frontier through which an invading force could conceivably descend upon India. Curzon had long wanted to go to Afghanistan and had asked both the present Viceroy and his predecessor for permission to visit what was in effect a client state of the Government of India. As Britain’s relations with the Emir were delicate and could easily be blighted by a diplomatic mistake, the governments in London and Calcutta had, after some prevarication, refused the request. Privately cursing the Secretary of State for his obstinacy and ‘mulish ignorance’,52 Curzon then wrote with creaseless self-confidence to the Emir himself for an invitation. In a brilliant epistle oozing with flattery and oriental devices, he wrote of his admiration for the Afghan ruler and his desire to see ‘the person of Your Highness which is in your dominions like unto the sparkle in the heart of the diamond’.53

Without waiting for a reply, Curzon sailed to India at the beginning of August 1894. At Bombay he found a letter from the Viceroy, Lord Elgin, confirming the Indian Government’s refusal to allow him to travel in the Pamirs or to enter Afghanistan. But Curzon, armed with the support of Rosebery and Lord Roberts, who had commanded the Indian Army until the previous year, travelled straight to the viceregal summer quarters in Simla and persuaded Elgin and his Council to change their minds. Permission was given both for the journey to the Pamirs and, provided he received an invitation from the Emir in the meantime, for him to go on into Afghanistan afterwards. The only conditions he had to accept were the avoidance of a certain district in the Pamirs and an assurance that he would not cause problems with his projected articles for The Times. He paid more attention to the first restriction than to the second. Elgin was irritated by the pieces that later appeared and would have been even angrier had an official in Kashmir not persuaded Curzon to tear up an article he had drafted on the timidity of the Viceroy’s Government.54

Always a bold and usually a lucky traveller, Curzon was exhilarated by his success with Elgin and even more by the arrival a few days later of the Emir’s invitation. While still in Simla, he also had time to reflect on his more distant future. On entering Viceregal Lodge, he wondered whether he would one day be its master and to his diary he consigned the ambition to succeed Elgin in 1899.55

As a connoisseur of majestic scenery, Curzon appreciated the great crests of the Pamirs, the vast and shining glaciers, the beauty of the Hunza Valley, where Nature had exerted her supreme energy and showed ‘herself in the same moment tender and savage, radiant and appalling, the relentless spirit that hovers above the ice-towers and the gentle patroness of the field and orchard, the tutelary deity of the haunts of men’.56 As he travelled north from Gilgit, he took careful notes of the topography of the region and, after crossing the Kilik Pass beyond Hunza, became the first Western traveller to see the source of the River Oxus. He also pursued the ovis poli, a wild ram with extravagant horns named after Marco Polo, and shot two of the beasts, one of them at the height of 17,000 feet. A comparison between this animal and its cousin, the ovis karelini, was included in one of three papers written after his return which the Royal Geographical Society later published together in a short book called The Pamirs and the Source of the Oxus. The RGS also awarded Curzon its gold medal for his exploration of the area.

After travelling for some eighty miles alongside the Oxus, he turned south-west, crossing the Baroghil Pass and coming down on the upper waters of the Yarkhun River. Opposite him ‘gleamed the frozen cataract of the Great Chatiboi glacier, just as though some vast Niagara, pouring down from the skies, had suddenly been congealed in its descent, and converted into pinnacles and towers of ice’. Thanks to the help of local chiefs and British frontier officers, he managed a daily average march of twenty-one miles. But the hardships of the journey were enormous: in one day he and his pony had to ford mountain torrents twelve times. By then he had run out of liquor and was desperate, not as in Indo-China for a bottle of Moët, but for a simple glass of beer. Luck or telepathy was at work. When he finally reached grassier country at Mastuj, he was met by the native servant of a friend, Captain Younghusband, who greeted him with a bottle of Bass. Another discomfort could not, alas, be remedied by Younghusband’s servant. For the entire journey, he told Spring Rice, he had suffered from such a painful dearth of female society that he could almost feel desire for a telegraph pole surrounded by a petticoat.57

One of the finest of frontier officers, Francis Younghusband had the year before been appointed Political Agent in Chitral, a small, unstable state further down the Yarkhun Valley. He had known Curzon for some time and shared the fear, based on his own experiences in the region, that the Russians were preparing to create trouble along the frontier. He also shared the view that Chitral, described by Curzon as ‘this small chink in the mountain palisade’, must not be occupied by the Tsarist army. Meeting in Mastuj, the two travelled together to Chitral, crossing the river by means of hazardous rope bridges, made of birch or willow twigs twisted together into a cable, which, as Curzon complained, had ‘a detestable habit of swinging’. In the town itself, which they reached in October, they were entertained by the Mehtar, or ruler, who, fearful for his security, pleaded for the British officer attached to his court to be stationed with his Indian Army escort at Chitral instead of Mastuj. When the time came for the Englishmen to entertain the Mehtar, they were asked to invite the ruler’s half-brother, Amir-ul-Mulk, whom Curzon described as ‘a sullen and repulsive figure, with long black locks and a look of gloom’.58 Two months later, when Younghusband was on leave and Curzon was on his way home, the Mehtar was murdered by this sinister half-brother.

As with Spring Rice, Younghusband’s admiration for Curzon was qualified by feelings of irritation and resentment. Recalling their days together many years later, he remembered his companion as both a pleasure and a trial. He and his fellow officers were pleased that a prominent politician took such an interest in their work on the frontier but were annoyed by the endless arguments he pursued in order to discover their real opinions. Curzon’s debating manner, allied with his self-assurance, grated on the young men living solitary lives in responsible positions among the mountains. Younghusband believed it would have been toned down, to the benefit of his career, if he had served with a regiment instead of going to Oxford. Yet he realized that Curzon’s manner, however tiresome, was allied to a ‘remarkable tenderness of heart’ and a gift for warm and loyal friendship. Later he admitted he felt a deeper affection for Curzon than for any man outside his own family.59

From Chitral Curzon returned to Gilgit by a more southerly route, and then made his way to Peshawar before entering Afghanistan through the Khyber Pass in mid-November. He had made elaborate preparations for his reception by the Emir. Remembering the mediocre impression his drab Under-Secretary’s uniform had created at the Korean court, he had gone to a theatrical costumier in London and had hired an enormous pair of gold epaulettes together with several glittering foreign decorations. He had then bought a pair of patent leather boots in Bombay and borrowed a gigantic curved sword from the Commander-in-Chief in India. Thus attired he duly presented himself at Kabul, where a large escort of Afghan cavalry accompanied him through cheering crowds to meet his host. The Emir asked him some difficult questions about the medals but did not appear to doubt their authenticity. He was impressed by his guest, the first Englishman who had visited him as a private individual, and loaded him with money, which Curzon tactfully returned through gifts to the Emir and tips to his servants. In his autobiography the Emir recalled that he had found Curzon so genial, witty and well-informed that he had been determined to meet other members of the British aristocracy as often as possible.60

The visitor was no less enchanted with his host. The fancy dress, the oriental pomp, the ambience both savage and sensual, appealed strongly to him. Curzon always had a soft spot for rogues so long as they were open about their roguery, and he was delighted to be the guest of a man described by a British official as ‘a sort of Afghan Henry VIII’. He recognized him as a tyrant and a man of blood. Yet he appreciated the man’s ‘shrewd but untutored intellect’ and applauded his skill in welding the Afghan tribes into a unity which they had never previously enjoyed. The Emir, ‘at once a patriot and a monster, a great man and almost a fiend’, attracted the strong romantic side of Curzon’s nature. Had he lived in an earlier age, unrestricted by the rival empires of Britain and Russia, the Englishman thought he ‘might have founded an Empire, and swept in a tornado of blood over Asia and even beyond it’.61

Curzon remained his guest for over a fortnight and was summoned for daily audiences often lasting for several hours. Speaking in Persian through an interpreter, the Emir discoursed on subjects as diverse as the lost tribes of Israel and the efficacy of cruelty as a deterrent. In light-hearted moods he fantasized to Curzon about his expertise as a dentist, a painter and a clock-mender. On more serious days he discussed the Russian threat to their frontiers and the possibility that he might visit England. Both subjects required diplomatic handling. If Afghanistan and Britain were allies, he liked to ask, why did he not receive more weapons to defend his people against the common enemy? And disregarding the experiences of sixty years, he wondered why the British should want to strengthen their frontier with Afghanistan rather than fortify their common ‘wall’ against the Russians.

Some time earlier the British Government had invited the Emir to London. He had not yet replied, partly because he was unsure about the reception he would receive in England and partly because he was justifiably nervous of what might happen in Afghanistan during his absence. But after long discussions with Curzon, he decided to go to Britain and composed a letter of acceptance for his new friend to take to Queen Victoria.62 As a sequel to the fairy-tale character of his visit, Curzon hoped to deliver the message personally to the Queen and was much annoyed when her Private Secretary told him it could only be done through the Secretary of State. In the end the Emir, increasingly worried by the thought of a coup while he was away, decided not to go. No doubt it was just as well, for he would have been bewildered by London and disappointed when he did not receive quite the welcome – the Queen, the royal family and both Houses of Parliament waiting for him in Westminster Hall – which he envisaged.