Soon came a summons to the presence of the great man.  Mr. Bonner found him a terrible object in a terrible rage.  In his late years, be it remembered, Lord Kitchener was not good to look upon.  He appeared a coarse, a top-heavy person; and in anger, his cross-eyes could be painfully disconcerting.

Lord Kitchener forgot that Mr. Bonner was not only an artist of a singularly beautiful spirit, but a gentleman.  He blazed at him.  What did he mean by sticking up those ridiculous little figures in Broome?—­what did he mean by it?—­with an unpleasant reference to the account.

The poor artist, terribly affrighted, said that he thought Lord Kitchener had seen his drawings and approved of them.  “Yes, the drawings!—­but you can’t see the figures when they’re up!  What’s the good of something you can’t see?”

The great man, it appeared at last, wanted amorini the size of giants; a rather Rosherville taste.

“He had knowledge,” said Lady Sackville, from whose beautiful house he borrowed many ideas for Broome, and would have liked to have carried off many of its possessions, particularly a William the Fourth drum which he found in his bedroom as a waste-paper receptacle; “he had knowledge but no taste.”

Her daughter said to me on one occasion, “Every chair he sits in becomes a throne,” referring to the atmosphere of power and dignity which surrounded him.

It is instructive, I think, to remark how a single virtue passionately held—­held, I mean, with a religious sense of its seriousness—­can carry even a second-class mind to genuine greatness, a greatness that can be felt if not defined.  In every sense of the word greatness, as we apply it to a saint, a poet, or a statesman, Lord Kitchener was a second-class and even a third-class person; but so driving was his sense of duty that it carried him to the very forefront of national life, and but for the political atmosphere in which he had to work for the last few years of his distinguished service to the State he might have easily become one of the great and shining heroes of British history.  He had no taste; but the impression he made on those who had was the impression of a great character.

How was it that his greatness, that is to say his greatness of personality, made so pitiable an end?  What was lacking that this indubitable greatness should have been so easily brayed in the mortar of politics?

The answer I think is this:  a single virtue can bestow greatness, and the greatness may never fail when it has time and space in which to express itself; but many virtues of intellect and character are necessary when time is of the essence of the contract, and more especially in a situation of shared responsibility.