In what
other Lepantos besides Trafalgar Square Cunninghame Graham has
fought, I cannot tell. He is a fascinating mystery to a sedentary
person like myself. The horse, a dangerous animal whom, when I
cannot avoid, I propitiate with apples and sugar, he bestrides and
dominates fearlessly, yet with a true republican sense of the
rights of the fourlegged fellowcreature whose martyrdom, and man's
shame therein, he has told most powerfully in his Calvary, a tale
with an edge that will cut the soft cruel hearts and strike fire
from the hard kind ones. He handles the other lethal weapons as
familiarly as the pen: medieval sword and modern Mauser are to him
as umbrellas and kodaks are to me. His tales of adventure have the
true Cervantes touch of the man who has been there--so
refreshingly different from the scenes imagined by bloody-minded
clerks who escape from their servitude into literature to tell us
how men and cities are conceived in the counting house and the
volunteer corps. He is, I understand, a Spanish hidalgo: hence the
superbity of his portrait by Lavery (Velasquez being no longer
available). He is, I know, a Scotch laird. How he contrives to be
authentically the two things at the same time is no more
intelligible to me than the fact that everything that has ever
happened to him seems to have happened in Paraguay or Texas
instead of in Spain or Scotland. He is, I regret to add, an
impenitent and unashamed dandy: such boots, such a hat, would have
dazzled D'Orsay himself.
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