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The second volume of the Irish Folk-History Plays, even if it reveals only Lady Gregory's talent rather than her genius, is full of odd and entertaining things, and the notes at the end of both of these volumes, short though they are, do give us the franchise of a wonderful world of folk-history. Mr. Cunninghame Graham is a grandee of contemporary literature.
It was Karl Marx, Nietzsche, Tolstoy, Cunninghame Grahame, Bernard Shaw and Auberon Herbert, who between them, with bowed gigantic backs, bore up the throne of the Archbishop of Canterbury. We may say broadly that free thought is the best of all the safeguards against freedom.
At one time or another all the famous hunters drop into its canvas chairs Cunninghame, Allan Black, Judd, Outram, Hoey, and the others; white traders with the natives of distant lands; owners of farms experimenting bravely on a greater or lesser scale in a land whose difficulties are just beginning to be understood; great naturalists and scientists from the governments of the earth, eager to observe and collect this interesting and teeming fauna; and sportsmen just out and full of interest, or just returned and modestly important.
And if you had asked any of those upper servants how such and such a Prince of Battenberg was related to, let us say, Mr. Cunninghame Graham or the Duke of Argyle, you would have been told upon the nail.
Walter Harris, the resourceful traveller and Times correspondent, did this when he sought the oases of Tafilalt, so also, in his fashion, did R.B. Cunninghame Graham when he tried in vain to reach Tarudant, and set out the record of his failure in one of the most fascinating travel books published since Eothen.
Some people seem to have a monopoly of luck. Though Saigon and Pnom-Penh do not possess the facilities for equipping shooting expeditions afforded by Mombasa or Nairobi, and though in Indo-China there are no professional European guides, such as the late Major Cunninghame; the elaborate and costly outfits customary in East Africa, with their mile-long trains of bearers, are as unnecessary as they are unknown.
He is, if not the first, then one of the first two friends I made for myself by my work, the other being Mr. Cunninghame Graham, who, characteristically enough, had been captivated by my story An Outpost of Progress. These friendships which have endured to this day I count amongst my precious possessions. Mr.
Hudson, and the parallel is the more complete because both writers have made the vanished life of the South American plains real to the English mind. Mr. Cunninghame Graham is one of the great travel writers, and ranks with Borrow and Ford, but he is more impartially interested in character than either Borrow or Ford, and has a far more vivid feeling for the spiritual values of landscape.
Her narrow cell is reported to have often resounded with peals of laughter to the scandal of some of her sisters. In support of all that, I have marked a score of Socratic passages in Woodhead, and Dalton, and Lewis, and Father Coleridge, and Mrs. Cunninghame Graham. They are very delicious passages and very tempting. But were they once begun there would be no end to them.
In the same way Mr. Belloc would really prefer the Middle Ages; as Lord Rosebery would prefer the Erastian oligarchy of the eighteenth century. Rudyard Kipling and Mr. Cunninghame Graham. But Mr. Cunninghame Graham would win. Dr. Clifford cannot get back to the Puritans; Mr. Frenchmen have all the ages behind them, and can wander back and pick and choose.
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