And it was not in peace and rest, but in ruin
and horror, that he reached his end.
The circumstances of that tragic history, so famous, so bitterly
debated, so often and so controversially described, remain full
of suggestion for the curious examiner of the past. There emerges
from those obscure, unhappy records an interest, not merely
political and historical, but human and dramatic. One catches a
vision of strange characters, moved by mysterious impulses,
interacting in queer complication, and hurrying at last--so it
almost seems--like creatures in a puppet show to a predestined
catastrophe. The characters, too, have a charm of their own: they
are curiously English. What other nation on the face of the earth
could have produced Mr. Gladstone and Sir Evelyn Baring and Lord
Hartington and General Gordon? Alike in their emphasis and their
lack of emphasis, in their eccentricity and their
conventionality,
in their matter-of-factness and their romance, these four figures
seem to embody the mingling contradictions of the English spirit.
As for the mise-en-scene, it is perfectly appropriate. But first,
let us glance at the earlier adventures of the hero of the piece.
Charles George Gordon was born in 1833. His father, of Highland
and military descent, was himself a Lieutenant-General; his
mother came of a family of merchants, distinguished for their sea
voyages into remote regions of the Globe.
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