THE PRACTICAL VISIONARY

Otago Daily Times, Issue 21982, 17 June 1933, Page 4

THE PRACTICAL VISIONARY

MRS MILLIN’S PORTRAIT OF RHODES "Rhodes.” By Sarah Gertrude MUlln. Frontispiece, with Maps. London: Cliatto and Windus. (9s not.) Interest in Rhodes is evidently profound. He died only a generation ago, yet already there is a considerable literature concerning him, including the comprehensive study by Professor Basil Williams. published ten years since. Plus year three new biographies have appeared. One of them, by William Plomer, has been roundly condemned ns ill-natured; a second excellent short life in the “ Great Lives series received notice in these columns; the third, Mrs Sarah Gertrude Millm’s full-length portrait, is to be greeted as admirable both in scope and treatment. Mrs Mill in has. coincident with her presentation of Rhodes as an interesting, even a romantic, subject for the biographer, undertaken a task not* often successfully accomplished by a woman, of tiding the whole panorama of -the development of a nation. South Africa, in so tar as its identity was created by Rhodes, has found in this book a capable, historian. And, of course, Rhodes s ln “ u ' ence on the destinies of South Africa was so great as only to be calculable by by a serious researcher. Mrs .Mil Im, General Smuts says in an ungrudging tribute to the subject of her work, has painted “ a great picture of a great man • in a great way.” One has only to turn the pages of this volume, to glance at the maps, to realise how remarkable a man Rhodes was. and what grandeur of vision possessed him. Mrs Millin says:— Not only had he to possess a country three-quarters pf a million square miles large; to give hia name to that country; to dream in continents and nations; to control all the diamonds in

Africa, and pay for that control with the biggest cheque yet written; to own and bequeath millions of money to gee two oceans from his garden: to rest in death on a View of the World . . . but, of the immediate, the homelike sort of things, the avenue to Government House in Bulawayo (when Bulawayo became his) had to be three miles long; the streets of Bulawayo had to be wide enough for a wagon and its span of oxen to turn about . in; his Inyanga farm in Rhodesia had to bo of a hundred thousand acres. . . He had to surround bis town house with fifteen hundred acres, and to have a mountain in his garden; his fruit trees in the Cape had to be planted in batches of a hundred and fifty thousand, and he, coveted the whole of the great Drakcn- ( stein Valley for a farm, It would he possible to smile at the “homelike” aspirations of a millionaire when they assume these proportions, but in the case of Rhodes there can be no satirical mirth, for his grandiose plans were not made for self-glorification alone. They were one of the emanations of a mind that thought in Imperial terms, of a man who had the courage and ' the power to create a country. He recognised that he would not, escape criticism and condemnation. “There have been not a few men,” he said, when visiting Oxford, “who have done good service to the State, but some of whose actions have partaken of the violence of their age, and are hard to justify in a more peaceful and law-abiding age. It is among these men that my own life and actions must be weighed and measured, and I trust to the justice of my countrymen.” “He cannot but feel,” Mrs Millin adds, “that if he gets this justice, if his life and actions are fairly measured, his place in the world’s history will be a high one." Rhodes himself expected, according to a statement made to Jameson, that he would be remembered for a long time: “ I give myself four thousand years.” He worked always with a full consciousness

of the inadequacy of one lifetime for the completion of his giant schemes. It was one of his hard-pressed pioneers who said to him: “I would have ye know, Mr Rhodes, that we didna come here for posterity.” There is reproof in the inferences of that remark for the man who would measure Rhodes by the same yardstick he would apply to the politician or the land speculator. The Author Sarah Gertrude Millin, one of the bestknown South African novelists, and a respected authority on the problems of that land, was born in Cape Province. In addition to her novels, which include “The Dark River,” “ God’s Stepchildren,” and “ The Jordans.” she has written “ The South Africans,” and “ explanation of South Africa,” and “Men'On a Voyage." She lives in Johannesburg, where her husband, Mr Philip Millin, -K.C.. is in practice. J. M.