Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [41]
Conservative reactions were more favorable, if stunned. The Pall Mall Gazette—Lee’s kind of paper—said that the former president had delivered “a great and memorable speech that will be read and pondered over throughout the world.” The Times reproved him for taking freedom of the city too far, but granted that his basic intent was “friendly.” The Daily Telegraph praised him for his candor, and asserted that Britain had “no intention of going,” either from Egypt or India. And the editor of The Spectator thanked him for “giving us so useful a reminder of our duty.”
After a few days, two of the most acerbic columnists in the country weighed in. George Bernard Shaw praised Roosevelt’s performance “in his new character of the Innocent Abroad,” and suggested that if Britain was indeed qualified to govern other peoples without their consent, it should re-colonize America. W. T. Stead, the editor of Review of Reviews, remarked apropos of the murder of Boutros Pasha, “We have caught the assassin, tried him, and sentenced him to death. What more did Mr. Roosevelt do when an assassin made him President of the United States?”
WHEN FURTHER COMPLAINTS were heard in Parliament about Roosevelt’s “insult” to the intelligence of the British people, Balfour rose in his defense. “I was an auditor of that speech,” he said, “and I hope I am not less sensitive than others.” No foreign observer could have delivered “a kindlier, more appreciative, and more sympathetic treatment of the problem with which we have long had to deal, and of which America is now feeling the pinch.”
Sir Edward Grey spoke next. “I should have thought that to everybody the friendly intention of that speech would be obvious.… It was, taken as a whole, the greatest compliment to the work of one country in the world ever paid by the citizen of another.”
So with hyperbole on both sides of the aisle, the Little Englanders were confounded. Roosevelt spent a few relaxed days in London, gallery-hopping with Edith and lunching with a grateful King George. “He has enjoyed himself hugely,” Spring Rice wrote to a friend, “and I must say, by the side of our statesmen, looks a little bit taller, bigger and stronger.”
The Colonel declined to be taken too seriously. When a report went around that he had murmured, “Ah! Tempora mutantur!” in front of one of Frith’s vast panoramas of Victorian life, he telegrammed a denial to the editor of Punch.
STATEMENT INCORRECT. I NEVER USE ANY LANGUAGE SO MODERN AS LATIN WHILE LOOKING AT PICTURES. ON THE OCCASION IN QUESTION MY QUOTATIONS WERE FROM CUNEIFORM SCRIPT AND THE PARTICULAR SENTENCE TO WHICH YOU REFER WAS THE PRE-NUNEVITE PHRASE HULLY-GEE.
ONE LAST PUBLIC appearance was required of him before he left the Old World for the New: his Romanes Lecture at Oxford University on Tuesday, 7 June. For once, Roosevelt was not sure of himself. He wanted to strike the right donnish tone, which did not come as naturally to him as the hortatory. His subject, “Biological Analogies in History,” was one he had pondered since discovering, as a teenager, that he was equally drawn to science and the humanities. It seemed to him that these disciplines, rigorously separated in the nineteenth century, might draw closer again in the twentieth, as scientists looked for narrative explanations of the mysteries of nature, and scholars became more abstract and empirical in their weighing of evidence. Evolutionary science, in particular,