Further Light on a Life: George Longmore in Cape Colonyby Mary Lu MacDonald Biographically, in his roles as military officer and public servant, George Longmore left traces which can be followed up almost two centuries after his birth. Bibliographically, he left ten books or separately published poems in pamphlet format, one play, a great many poems and one series of prose tales set in the Peninsular War printed in the newspapers and periodicals of at least two, and probably three, continents. About his private life we know almost nothing, and it seems likely that this absence of information will persist. The vital statistics are rapidly summarized. Two baptismal dates, August 13 and August 18, 1793, have been found in two repositories.1 Both documents were copied from the original register, which does not seem to have survived. At an unspecified date young George entered the Royal Military College at Great Marlowe in England, from which he graduated in 1809 with a commission as Ensign.2 The covering letter, filed with the record of his commission, dated Horse Guards, 29th June, recommending Longmore for one of the vacant ensigncies in the Royal Staff Corps, states that “He is one of those Cadets who received a Certificate of the first class in the last Examinations.”3 Unfortunately, there are no records extant for gentlemen cadets before the opening of Sandhurst’s first buildings in 1812. All of Longmore’s promotions, to Lieutenant in 1811, to Captain in 1825, and to Major in 1832, were achieved “without purchase” — which is to say, through seniority and merit. When he sold his Majority in 1839 it appears that the purchaser paid £16004 for the commission. There is no record of the amount of money Longmore personally received from the sale, which was partially negotiated through an agent. It seems to have been unusual for an individual on half pay to sell a commission which then became part of active service. The Royal Staff Corps had been disbanded on October 1, 1837. Longmore’s petition to Lord John Russell, requesting permission to resign, states that he had left the army against his wishes because of the reduction of the Staff Corps. He also states that he had served three years in the Peninsula, three and a half in the Netherlands and France, five and a half in Canada and five in Mauritius. The War Office Returns of Service for the Royal Staff Corps allow us to verify his statement.5 The Corps headquarters was at Hythe, Kent, on the south coast of England. Following the defeat of Napoleon, Longmore returned to Hythe, then, in the latter part of 1815, was stationed first in Brussels, and then in France. Between January 1816 and June 1819 he was principally at Hythe. From October 1819 to December 1820 he was stationed at Lachine, where the Royal Staff Corps were building the Lachine Canal. He was in Montreal January to April of 1821 and 1822. From 1821 to 1824 he spent the May to September period at Grenville, where another canal was being constructed. He spent the winter of 1822-23 at Chambly, another canal site, and the winter of ’23-’24 in Montreal. He sailed for Hythe in November 1824. For a year, beginning in May 1825, he was recruiting in Scotland at Edinburgh, Glasgow, Paisley and Haddington. Tales of Chivalry and Romance and The War of the Isles were published in Edinburgh in 1826. From Scotland he returned to Hythe, where he remained until sailing for Mauritius in April 1827. In 1828 he was signing the monthly return for Mauritius as Officer Commanding, Grand River, N.W. Mauritius. Records for the Royal Staff Corps become sketchy in July 1830 and only luck would allow a researcher to check an individual’s career after that date. The Staff Corps abandoned Mauritius in June 1832. In August 1832, Longmore went on half pay. In one of his later petitions he states that he was acting Surveyor-General at Mauritius for the three years before he went on half pay, which may partially explain his absence from Staff Corps records after July 1830. There is no record of Longmore’s place of residence between the summer of 1832 and November 1834, when he took up his appointment as a Stipendiary Magistrate in Cape Colony, but it seems likely that he was in England or Scotland. For the remainder of his life he resided either in Cape Town or at Wynberg, the town about thirty miles south of Cape Town where he was Magistrate until 1846.6 The magistracy was one of four special appointments to supervise the apprenticeship of the freed slaves. In later years Longmore was the first Serjeant-at-Arms and first Librarian of the Cape Legislature. He also served as Aide-de-Camp to two governors. From 1836 until his death he was a member of the Committee of the South African Library in Cape Town, serving for most of those thirty-one years as Secretary. He was well known as a writer, publishing seven volumes of poetry and many uncollected verses in Cape Colony. His poetry appears in many modern English-language anthologies of South African poetry. He was also known as a watercolour artist. Some of his paintings remain in Cape Town collections today. Longmore’s first wife’s Christian name was Elizabeth. She died December 2, 1863 at the age of sixty-six.7 It appears that she was a niece of Sir Benjamin D’Urban.8 The couple had three daughters. In addition to Anne (or Anna) Maria and Cecilia Elizabeth,9 there was a third daughter, Caroline, who as “Miss Longmore” survived her father, along with his second wife, Jane Catherine Hide, whom he married three months before his death.10 Anne Maria, who on her marriage in 1835 had been referred to as “the youthful bride” died at Rondesbosch on August 22, 1840, at the age of twenty.11 Cecilia’s husband died about 184812 and there does not seem to be any mention of her after that date. Additional information about the Longmore family itself can be found in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography entries on Dr. George Longmore,13 the poet’s father, and Nicholas Cox,14 his maternal grandfather. In the history of Cape Colony, Longmore’s contribution to the cultural life of the community is overshadowed by his inadvertent involvement in one of the major political battles in its early nineteenth-century history. Having traced him to Cape Town, it comes as a shock to a researcher to discover that over a thousand pages of correspondence in the Cape Archives and six reels of Colonial Office microfilmed records are keyed in his name. Since he was accused of lying, financial irregularities, and the taking of bribes by one colonial official, and since the accusations were believed by the Colonial Office, it becomes important to sort out the details of the “affair”. Was one of our earliest native-born literary figures a scoundrel? The causes of George Longmore’s problems lay in Cape Colony history. For modern Canadians to understand them, some background is necessary. The advent of British rule at the Cape provided stability in some aspects of political and economic life, but it caused problems in other sectors. Faced with the difficulty of governing a financially dependent colony whose residents were divided linguistically, culturally, and economically, the British eschewed elections and ruled through a Governor and appointed Council. To the problems created by an undemocratic government must be added the pettiness, cheese-paring and bungling of the Colonial Office. In addition, sporadic border wars kept governors in the field and away from Cape Town for long periods. New governors and new officials, armed with new policy instructions, were continuously being appointed to replace predecessors judged in London to have failed in their task. The circumstances in which Longmore lost his job as a magistrate in 1846 were basically political. The Colonial Office was being forced to cut expenses. Pressure was therefore applied to colonial governments, in North America as well as in Africa, both to reduce overall expenditures and to assume responsibility locally for the support of some institutions such as the magistracy. In Cape Colony, where a small appointed council governed in conjunction with the appointed governor, the council decided that if the colony must pay the magistrates, it should have the right to appoint them. The fact that the four were identified both with a former governor, Sir Benjamin D’Urban, whose reforms had been unpopular with the landowning class, and with the freeing of the slaves whose terms of apprenticeship had been overseen by the magistrates, made it even easier to dismiss them. General George Napier, who had succeeded D’Urban, was not sympathetic to the four who were to lose their £450 per annum jobs. He seems, from his correspondence, to have been unsympathetic to most things in the colony associated with D’Urban. Once the six-year term of apprenticeship which phased out slavery was ended, the magistrates were notified that their services were no longer required. They were temporarily given civil responsibilities and remained in their posts, fighting rear-guard action within the colony and applying frantically for other positions. George Longmore applied in 1840 and 1842 to return to Mauritius as Surveyor-General, but was told that there was no vacancy. In 1842 and 1843 he applied for the post of Civil Commissioner for the administrative district of Worcester and was told that others had greater claim to the position. On December 31, 1845, the four were notified that their employment was to be terminated. Longmore’s successor took office on September 1, 1846. In October, Longmore was forced into bankruptcy by the actions of one creditor who had bought up three of his notes. The bankruptcy was a disaster. Longmore was certainly not the first individual to have seen the vultures gather the minute trouble threatened, and he was also not the last to claim that a conspiracy had deprived him of receiving the proper value for his property when it was auctioned. Bankruptcy was so common in Cape Colony that, right through into the late 1860s, the local newspapers carried a weekly column listing the latest insolvencies. Longmore’s creditors accepted what payment was avail able and all but one signed off his debt. His social standing in the colony does not seem to have been impaired. Certainly, he continued to be Secretary of the very gentlemanly committee of the Cape Town Library and he served on committees for balls and other social functions. At the end of 1847, Sir Harry Smith, the newly-appointed Governor arrived. Smith had served in the colony and earlier, in the Peninsula, under D’Urban. He knew Longmore and immediately appointed him as magistrate at Mosel Bay. The magistracy was approved and gazetted, but Longmore never took up the appointment because Smith offered him the post of colonial aide-de-camp, which appointment was also approved by Whitehall. Longmore appears to have been out of work from September 1, 1846, to July 20, 1848. We do not know how he supported himself and his family in that period, but it does not appear to have been by literary endeavours, since no known works of his bear dates from that time. Longmore served as aide-de-camp to Smith and to his successor, General Cathcart.15 This appointment continued until January 1852. Longmore immediately began to apply for re-entry into the colonial civil service and Lieutenant-Governor C.H. Darling was about to appoint him to a magistracy when the roof fell in. Darling had arrived at the Cape in March 1852 with instructions that he was to be the chief civil authority while the Governor was in the field dealing with border wars. Previously the Colonial Secretary — (that is, the Secretary to the Colonial Executive Council) — had chaired the Council in the Governor’s absence. Since both Smith and Cathcart had spent most of their time defending the colony’s borders, the Secretary had acquired considerable power. From at least 1845 the Secretary was one John Montagu. From subsequent correspondence it is obvious that Montagu was well-connected in England, although the name of his patron, unless it was Lord Bathurst himself, has not emerged. He made a name for himself at Whitehall by bringing Cape finances under control, — assiduously collecting taxes and reducing expenditures. Although there was considerable agitation in the colony for representative government, Montagu was firmly opposed, saying that it would be too expensive and that not all the colonists could be trusted. A “party” which shared his views formed around him, polarizing the split within the colony. The Montagu group, in their newspaper The Cape Monitor, opposed the “democratic faction” whose newspaper was the South Africa Commercial Advertiser, under the editorship of John Fairbairn. Montagu appears to have gone out of his way to frustrate Lieut. Gov. Darling in the exercise of his authority. Darling was not a man who could be manipulated and not a man to put up with a subordinate who was usurping authority. Two months after Darling’s arrival Montagu left for England on medical leave. His deputy, Richard Southey, was to be acting Colonial Secretary and his eldest son, also John Montagu, was to be chief clerk in the Secretary’s office. Montagu’s departure had been preceded by a petition for his recall16 so it seems likely that the real purpose of his trip to England was to put his own case before the Colonial Office. Richard Southey then set out to discredit Darling with the Colonial Office and to undermine his authority in the colony. The issue he selected was Darling’s intention to appoint Longmore to a magistracy. The method was to show that Darling was about to make an improper appointment which Southey, because it was his duty to the public, had to stop. It was represented that Longmore was an undischarged bankrupt and therefore not eligible to hold a civil appointment. The reply to this charge was that the law which prevented his employment was passed after his bankruptcy and so did not apply; and further, that he had been approved for a magistrate’s job in 1848. The next tactic of the Montagu/Southey group was to produce a petition from one, Michael Butler, Longmore’s one remaining creditor, requesting that the Lieutenant Governor intercede on his behalf to see that the debt was paid, and stating that he had only lent money to Longmore because he was afraid that he would lose his license to sell liquor if he did not. Darling chose to believe Longmore, who answered that he had said and done nothing which would give Butler the impression that his license was at stake. The next move was a long document alleging all sorts of personal financial irregularities on Longmore’s part, all culminating in his insolvency; allegations that Longmore had drawn on his son-in-law who had rejected the bills outright; and that Longmore had been in serious debt to a tavern owner who had then been allowed to operate illegally. This last document, combined with the two preceding ones, seems to have been completely accepted by the Colonial Office, despite the fact that Darling’s actions and Longmore’s explanations had been approved by both Cathcart and the Cape Executive Council. Longmore did not know of the final allegations until July 1853. His lengthy reply to them is dated 20 July 1853. It was forwarded by Darling to Whitehall in an attempt to change the Duke of Newcastle’s decision, outlined in a despatch dated 10th May 1853,17 but it was too late. The Newcastle despatch instructed Cathcart to reinstate Southey, whom Darling had removed, in his duties. It stated that Southey made mistakes in his handling of the Longmore case, but that they were made in a good cause in endeavouring to prevent a most improper appointment. The Duke considered that the disclosures made by Southey were “amply sufficient to show that the gentleman was wholly disqualified for the situation of a magistrate in the colony” and referred to “ . . .the heavy imputation of misconduct.” Newcastle forbade Longmore’s appointment to a magistracy unless he could “succeed in removing the imputations under which he labours” — and added that he doubted Longmore would be able to do this. Longmore made a further application for employment in 1861, supported with obvious sincerity by the Governor, Sir George Grey, and also by Richard Southey, but again it was turned down. The Colonial Office notation on the letter reads “Major Longrnore’s normal sense must be as obtuse as ever, as he obviously thinks nothing of his former delinquencies.”18 So Longmore’s advancement was permanently blocked. Whom should we believe, Southey or Longmore? Essentially it is one man’s word against another’s and each of us must make our own decision. For myself, after reading through all the extant papers, I find myself coming down on Longmore’s side. The factors which influence that decision are these: the Cape Executive Council believed that Southey had behaved improperly and had accepted Longmore’s defense; the most damaging allegations against Longmore were unsupported except in documents solicited by Southey and John Montagu Jr. to prove their point against Darling; Longmore’s defense, although it shows him to have been naive, makes sense; a suspicion, based on the tone of Southey’s letters that Southey would have said or done anything that was necessary, including the betrayal of an old acquaintance, to get rid of Darling (Longmore’s sense of injury in this connection is particularly touching); the unreasoning habit of the Colonial Office to take at face value anything submitted by Southey or Montague and to discount everything submitted by Darling; and, finally, that the first session of the first Legislative Assembly in Cape Colony in June 1854 elected “behind closed doors” George Longmore to the second highest of the four appointments in its gift, that of Serjeant-at-Arms. The salary of £250 p/a, supplemented three years later by an additional £50 p/a as Legislative Librarian, was a long way from the £450 which he had been paid as a magistrate, but at least it continued without interruption until his death in 1867. The Cape Assembly, as well as the earlier Executive Council, thought George Longmore a fit person to hold appointed office and was willing to fight with the Colonial Office to make the appointment stick. John Montagu Sr. died in England. His widow was granted a pension from the Civil List because it was generally accepted that the Cape Legislature would never vote one for her. Richard Southey remained in the Cape Colony civil service and continued to rise within it, although someone else was appointed to Montagu’s job. Lieutenant Governor Darling departed for another post in September 1854. At intervals throughout his South African career, and always during periods of stable employment, Longmore continued to publish volumes of poetry. The Spirit of the Age, 1837; The Missionary, 1839; Guy Alaric, 1844; Don Juan, A Sequel, Cantos XIX and XX, 1850; Florio: or The Muse and the Maid, with other poems, 1851; Byzantium, 1855; and The Pilgrims of Faith, in three cantos with minor poems, 1860, were all published in Cape Town. Uncollected poems and stories appeared in Cape Town newspapers and periodicals. 19 Whatever assessment one makes of the literary quality of Longmore’s works, he stands out from other early Canadian writers in respect to the quantity of his publications. His first book appeared in 1824 and the tenth in 1860 when he was sixty-seven years old. His last three publications were partial recyclings of earlier works: “Euphrosyne” which appeared in Florio, was reworked from The Canadian Review and Literary and Historical Journal, “Florio” itself had appeared in Sam Sly’s African Journal in 1845 and 1846; Byzantium is based on “The Fall of Constantinople” which appears in Tales of Chivalry and Romance and in The Canadian Magazine and Literary Repository; and the first canto of The Pilgrims of Faith is a revised version of Guy Alric. In the latter two cases, Longmore acknowledged the earlier publications in prefaces. The Spirit of the Age, the first of Longmore’s works to be published at the Cape, is subtitled “A Satire”. Although the poem was published in 1837, Longmore states in the preface that it was written at the end of 1832, which is to say, shortly after the passage of the First Reform Act. Dedicated to Sir Robert Peel, the work opposes changes which would alter the “regular proportion and form” of the British Constitution, spread “Innovation and Recklessness”, make British foreign policy “succumbent to France” and would attack Established Religion and its ministers. Notes to the text make the work even more vehemently anti-French, and hand-written additions and emendations to the copy held by the South African Library further intensify this tendency. What disturbed Longmore in the British political scene was evidently the riots which had preceded the Reform Bill. He draws a parallel with the riots of the French Revolution, which brought about the end of the monarchy. The author feels that Britain must avoid the same descent into republicanism and thence into “martial despotism” which occurred in France. Longmore is one of the few writers of his day who seems to have had a more or less neutral view of Napoleon. On the one hand, as he did throughout all his works, he deplores war, its devastation, and those who initiate it; on the other hand, he perceives Napoleon as having been instrumental in establishing a free Poland. Having deplored politically-motivated violence and the social degeneration it produces:
Longmore goes on to deplore the decline in literature which he perceives as accompanying it, beginning with “The licentiousness / Of a vile pandering, prostituted Press”.21 Poetry is no longer what it was in the days of Hemans, Landon, Scott and Wilson; the theatre is no longer full of noble sentiments as in the days of Mitford and Knowles; fiction no longer gives “Lessons to please, yet benefit mankind”22 as in Scott’s novels. Two pages condemn the advent of romances, with their “lure of Vice”23 and two praise Scott. Periodicals are described as increasing in quantity while declining in quality, and criticism has been given over to the uneducated and uninformed — “Vox populi is now the influence”.24 One of the last of the handwritten notes,25 possibly written about twenty years later when the other works were also emended, states “The author’s opinions have moderated considerably since this Satire was written, on the subject of Reform.” He had predicted, in the final pages of the poem, that the initiation of Reform would be seen by history as the moment when Britain’s decline began. Twenty years later this did not seem to have been the case. Although it rhymes and scans properly throughout most of the text, The Spirit of the Age is a long way from being great literature. Longmore is prone to sentences of twelve, sixteen, or even nineteen lines, through the subordinate clauses of which it is difficult to follow the principal idea. As intellectual history it is, however, a splendid example of the responses of a middle-class Tory to the idea of electoral reform, as well as evidence that fear of French revolutionary methods being carried over into Britain had been revived by the 1830 Revolution in France. Longmore’s next publication was the long two-part poem The Missionary, printed, as was its predecessor “for the author” in Cape Town in 1839. In his preface to The Pilgrims of Faith (1860) Longmore referred to the impression made on him by a discourse delivered in Cape Town in 1839 by the Rev. J. Williams, missionary to the South Sea Islands. The impression was certainly a deep one because it resulted in both The Missionary and Guy Alric (1844). The latter was revised and incorporated into The Pilgrims of Faith as its first canto. Certain themes are constant in all the missionary poems. Christianity is seen as synonymous with peace and reason,26non-Christian religious practices are characterized as “idolatrous, bloody and sinful rites.”27The alternative to Christianity is ignorance and superstition. Non-Christian religion is always depicted as violent — blood, torture, guilt victim, human sacrifice, child murder are words and phrases used to describe it. Purity, nobility, balm and divine love describe Christianity. Almost all Longmore’s Cape Colony works, perhaps because Christianity was a missionary religion in Africa, are based on the idea of Christianity as a civilizing influence. It is significant, however, that the missionary activities in his poems take place in Tahiti, not Cape Colony. Longinore’s knowledge of Biblical texts seems to be extensive and he convinces us through his poetry that his Christian beliefs are deep, personal, and genuine, rather than something put on for social advancement. While he regards Christianity as the ideal, and missionaries as its finest exponent, he does not automatically regard all Christians as superior to all non-Christians. Those individuals who are nominally Christian, but who are greedy, power-hungry and oppressive come lower on the scale than those who have missed the opportunity to be Christian and so cannot be expected to behave in a Christian manner. The natives who are central figures in his South Seas missionary works are depicted in the same manner as Longmore depicted Tecumthé, lacking only Christianity to make them superior beings. A further element of Longmore’s belief is that he sees nature as pointing to the Creator. There are many descriptions of natural beauty in the missionary poems. The beauty always leads to contemplation of “nature’s God”, a phrase Longmore uses so frequently that it begins to leap off the page. Nature’s God is the monotheistic Christian one:
Nature is also equated with truth and reason, as is Christianity, so that the scenes describing inanimate matter contain much interdependent imagery, linking Biblical images with both natural and rational. There is no personification of natural forces or creatures — all are expressions of divinity rather than humanity. In 1850 and 1851, George Longmore published two completely secular long poems in separate volumes. The first was his Don Juan, A Sequel. It too was printed “for the author”, but the South African Library copy is signed in Longmore’s handwriting “with the author’s best regards” and the Preface is signed “G.L.” Don Juan was known in the colony as Longmore’s work.29 In the two Cantos, which together total 107 pages, Longmore returns to his youthful fascination with Byron and Byronic verse forms. His preface defends the morality of Byron’s work saying, essentially, that Byron just depicted things as they are and that the vice was in the mind of the reader. He also gives his justification for numbering his two cantos nineteen and twenty, and apologizes that his poetic gifts do not equal those of Byron. The “Apotheosis to Lord Byron” which precedes Canto XIX praises Byron as a social critic. In the Byronic manner (as also in the manner of The Charivari) the writer alternates groups of stanzas of plot development with groups devoted to moralizing and general social commentary. In Canto XIX, set at an Abbey, Don Juan is carrying on a flirtation with a married woman, and is silently adored by a young girl. His relations with both appear to have been sexually innocent. Various jealous women gossip about the flirtation. A message from Catherine the Great recalls him to diplomatic duty in Paris. He departs hastily in the night, without farewells, leaving the unhappy women behind. Canto XX is set in Paris where the Don is smitten by one of Marie Antoinette’s attendants. The two had got no further than exchanging tender looks when the Canto ends. The social commentary in Don Juan deals with almost every human foible, but his most censorious comments are reserved for women and “the mob”.
A stanza on the “brute-ferocity” of the “mob-monster”31 is preceded by one giving Longmore’s view of the way in which “man” is transformed into “mob”.
In most of the social commentary Longmore seems to suggest that the rich and powerful, not the sufferers themselves, are responsible for the condition of the poor and starving. For women he shows little sympathy: they are weak, faithless, jealous, gossiping and inclined to set their virtue easily aside. They are also more acceptable the more beautiful they are. Unfortunately, men do not seem to be able to do without them. The broadsheet parody of the Don Juan sequel published in Cape Town under the pseudonym of Byronulus Redivivulus is probably accurate in its summation of the poem:
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the Don Juan volume, as it has come down to us, is in the emendations written in Longmore’s hand — presumably in 1859 when it was presented to Charles Cowen — which give us an idea of what he perceived as improvements in the text. In terms of his own biography it is notable that Stanza X of Canto XIX, originally in praise of friendship, has been entirely crossed out and that the substitute stanza is very cynical on the same subject. The 1851 volume Euphrosyné, A Turkish Tale; Florio, or the Muse and the Maid; With Other Poems was published over Longmore’s name. Although he does not acknowledge its previous publication, “Euphosyné” is a revised version of the long poem of the same title published in Montreal in July 1824. When serial publication of “Florio” began in Cape Town in 1845 the author, who signed himself “Launcelot” stated that it had been written very shortly after Byron’s death34 and recently found among some old papers. In this instance olympian digressions on love and poetry alternate with the account of how Myrtilla lost her lover, Florio, through jealousy and suspicion — the whole cast in Byronic verse form. The “Other Poems” are varied in both style and subject. According to the author’s dedicatory preface, many of them had initially appeared in the Cape Literary Magazine during the 1840s. A number follow Longmore’s frequent method of elaborating and versifying a story or item which he had read somewhere and which had caught his imagination. Another group of poems is about various aspects of love, although the principal emotion appears to be one of disillusionment. Only two poems could be considered personal: “Ode to the Peninsular Army. On Receiving the War Medal” and “Lines on the Death of Sir Benjamin D’Urban”. However, any emotion evoked by either subject is distant and controlled. Longmore’s next publication was Byzantium: A Poem in Two Cantos. In his dedication to Charles A. Fairbridge he writes that a copy of the poem had been presented to Scott some years earlier. Two letters from Scott, the first, in 1826, acknowledging receipt of Tales of Chivalry, and the other, dated 1827, acknowledging receipt of The War of the Isles are appended. Scott’s letters are cordial and encouraging, but brief. Byzantium appears to be a revised version of “The Fall of Constantinople”, printed in Tales of Chivalry and Romance, which first appeared in the December 1823 and January 1824 numbers of the Canadian Magazine. Byzantium, in Longmore’s thought, symbolizes Christianity, and is, to some extent, associated with Greece. The forces which overthrew the empire were Turkish and infidel. A “Concluding Note” brings the political level of the author’s intention up-to-date. War with Russia over Turkey is imminent. Britain and France will certainly win. It is necessary to support Turkey against Russian attempts to extend its “power and dominion” but Longmore does so with obvious reluctance. He calls the Turks barbarians, despots and infidels, and says that Turkish Christians must be rescued from the Ottoman grip. As a solution, he suggests the restoration of the Byzantine Empire under the control of Greek Christians. His final justification is that the Ottoman Empire is weak and fading out and that “Power in the end must centre in the portion of mankind which is advancing and pass from that which is receding. . .”35 — a neat way of putting together the ideas of national progress and Christian virtue so often allied in early nineteenth-century thought. Longmore’s last major work, The Pilgrims of Faith, is a two hundred and fifteen page, three canto poem, published in his own name in 1860. It was dedicated to Sir George Grey, then Governor of Cape Colony. The “Dedicatory Lines” also appear in a handwritten version in Grey’s corre spondence. In the handwritten version the title reads “Lines to His Excellency Sir George Grey, K.C.B. on his aboriginal policy.” The basic story, though lengthy, is a simple one. The young Englishman, Guy Alric, decides to become a missionary. His fiancée, Edith, agrees to join him, so they marry and set out for the South Seas. On the way Alric calms a rebellion on a convict ship they encounter. However, there is a storm and the convict ship sinks with the loss of all passengers and crew, except for one young man who had repented and prayed for forgiveness during the panic raised by the storm. Accompanied by this young man, Edgar, Alric and Edith land on Tahiti. They meet the chief Vara and his granddaughter Vahine, who are converted. Vahine converts Pomare, who is her cousin and the daughter of King Otu. Vara explains to Alric and Edith that Vahine is the daughter of a white man and his late daughter Meha. The white man had been kidnapped by other whites and taken from the island. Meha died a few months after producing Vahine, but seems to have been imbued with some Christian ideas by her white beloved. These ideas work on Vara, persuading him to give up the violence and idolatry of his culture and making him immediately receptive to the Christian message when Alric appears. A deus ex machina in the form of Ralph arrives, bringing a pardon for Edgar. Ralph proves to be both Edgar’s uncle and Vahine’s father. He gives his blessing to their marriage and all live happily. Pomare becomes queen of Tahiti and her people become Christian. However, invaders force her to flee and Longmore laments that she was abandoned by Britain and France. He ends with a plea for British support of all missionaries. The philosophy and imagery of the poem do not depart from those outlined in the discussion of The Missionary above. The ideas implanted in 1839 by Williams’ speech remained unchanged throughout the next two decades. Longmore continues to equate Christianity with reason and sees the “instinct” of the native way of life as a barrier between native society and Christianity. Vahine, who unites the white and native strains is as perfect a being as Alric and Edith. The native religion is violent and Vara himself had killed his own brother as a sacrifice to the gods. Tahiti escapes the evils of man for a time because Pomare was a Christian queen. The book ends with seven “Minor Poems”, either patriotic — the patriotism is directed to Britain, not the Cape — or philosophical. The latter reveal a cynical and disillusioned author. Several of the poems had pre viously appeared in newspapers or in the Cape Monthly Magazine, a periodical printed in Cape Town between 1857 and 1862. Among Longmore’s uncollected works are the words to a song entitled “Prince Alfred’s Welcome”. With music composed by George S. Darter, the lengthy song was dedicated “by his gracious permission” to the Prince himself, on the occasion of his visit to South Africa in 1860. There is also an undated poem on the death of one, W.R. Thomson, which concludes a biography of the man. A number of works appeared in the Cape Monthly Magazine. The first of these, “Erin’s Bard”36 is a tribute to the memory of Thomas Moore. A few months later “The Lake,”37 a verse translation of one of Lamartine’s lyrics was printed. Longmore’s attempt to follow the original closely has resulted in some oddly inverted sentences. “The Maid of Zaragoza”38 is another example of a story which Longmore read and then turned to verse. The subject is the heroism of a young lower-class woman in rallying her people to defend their city and defeat the French. One poem, “Stanzas”39 is noted as a translation from a seventeenth-century Dutch poet. It is a warning to beautiful maidens that their beauty will fade and they will need the lovers they are now callously rejecting. These works are all signed “G.L.”40 In the Cape Monthly Magazine Longmore published two short stories, both set in the “Spanish War”. “La Gitana; or, The Spy” is introduced as “one of a series which it was the intention of its author to have published a few years ago, under the title of ‘Tales of a Campaigner’.” The story, which appears in three successive issues,41concerns a young British officer, rescued by a gypsy woman and the young girl who accompanied her because he had protected the girl from being assaulted by another officer. He is nursed back to health and the gypsy, who is a French spy, arranges for him to be exchanged for a French prisoner. The Englishman and the girl are obviously interested in each other, but the story ends inconclusively with his departure for the British lines. “The Sisters of Madrid”, published in five parts between August and December of 1850, is set in 1812 when English and French in turn occupied the city of Madrid. A French officer, Count Victor de Montholu, and an English officer, Horace Vernon, are successively billeted in the home of Don Francisco d’Avila, the father of Jacinta and Theresa. Ultimately, the two young men marry the two girls, but not without the interruptions of war and one elopement necessitated by parental opposition. Without any seeming good reason, other than the necessity of a secret wooing of Jacinta by the Count since her father is anti-French, the Count is repeatedly described as handsome, brave and intelligent, but lacking in moral fibre. Vernon is, of course, the soul of rectitude and honour. It is easy to see Vernon as the persona of George Longmore. Some of the descriptions of the confusions of war, of particular places, and of Waterloo the day after the famous battle, are sharp and immediate, in contrast to the scenic set-pieces which have no apparent connection with the real world. Was Longmore himself the almost-paragon which he made of Horace Vernon? Probably not. He was certainly intelligent. He was obviously an able officer, since he rose to the rank of Major without having to purchase any of the commissions he held en route. Trained as a military engineer, he had acted as Surveyor-General at Mauritius, but he does not seem to have used any of that training after he left the army, other than to be known, as were so many other military engineers, as a watercolour artist. He evidently had considerable facility for writing, as his many published works indicate, although it could be argued that nothing he wrote in later life was as good as The Charivari, published a few months before his 31st birthday. That he was a convinced Tory and a staunch, believing member of the Church of England is evident from his formal writing. Allied with this role is his patronizing attitude towards women and his concern for the conversion of non-whites. It is clear that he wished to improve the lot of the latter, and it is also clear from state correspondence that he had been zealous in his protection of the former slaves. In one of his petitioning letters he hinted that this zeal had earned him enemies among the slave-holders and was the cause of his dismissal from the magistracy. Throughout his works he always wrote sympathetically of the poor, and, in The War of the Isles and the Spanish stories, of Spanish peasants. Tecumthé is portrayed as a brilliant leader, not a savage. In Longmore’s day it was considered quite liberal to see Christian civilization as a panacea for “third world” problems, and it was not considered inconsistent to wish to aid and improve the lower classes while still not intending to raise their status. It is evident from Longmore’s many job petitions that he was only a marginal member of the administrative class. An officer and a gentleman by birth and education, he was nonetheless not one of the rich and powerful. He prospered when he had a patron, and foundered without one. From his defence when accused in 1853 of impropriety as a magistrate we can deduce that he was, at best, naive. His account of his actions is so ingenuous that it is convincing. From his bankruptcy and the tangled affairs involved in it, it is certain, either that he had no head for money, or that he was a spendthrift, since he had been living beyond his means for some years. He may well have been vain and frivolous. The comment in the Scribbler in 1822 referring to his white breeches, silk stockings, and shapely legs is echoed by another in 1856 referring to his uniform as Serjeant-at-Arms lacking a proper pair of breeches and commenting “the Major has good legs, has he not?”42 His name appears on lists of those attending Cape Town subscription balls every year from 1845 to 1866. To like dancing and to be fond of clothes does not necessarily indicate a vain and frivolous person, but the fact that these characteristics are among the few personal qualities which have come down to us, indicates that they may have been notable features of his character. Nonetheless he appears to have had devoted friends and to have earned the respect of most of the superior officers and governors-general under whom he served. There was much competition for the jobs in the gift of the Cape Assembly in 1854 and it seems significant that he was awarded one of the two top ones, despite the fact that everyone knew the Colonial Office had forbidden his reentry into the Civil Service. In addition, whatever his troubles, he always continued as Secretary of the Cape Town Library Committee, a focal point for the colony’s cultural elite. His peers must have felt that his troubles did not dishonour him. Longmore was a good, though not a great poet. His work was almost always correct where rhyme and metre were concerned, but was fundamentally conventional in both form and content. The ideas embodied in his poetry and prose were those of the conservative, Christian majority in the first half of the nineteenth century. He saw nature, truth, reason, and progress as gifts of God to His Christian believers. For Longmore, education automatically led to enlightenment. Just as he adhered rigorously to form and order in his work, so he believed in the existence of a divinely-originated hierarchical social order. His major early works, The Charivari, “Tecumthé”, and The War of the Isles show more creative imagination and immediate emotional involvement than his later books, perhaps because his career problems in Cape Colony put limits on his intellectual freedom, forcing him to work within a narrower, more rigid framework in order to maintain his social status. On February 14, 1847, Longmore wrote from Wynberg to Sir Benjamin D’Urban,43 then Commander of the Forces in Canada, seeking a post in his native land. It is interesting to speculate on the effect a return to Canada, where two of the three early works are set, might have had on his writing, and on the difference his presence here for the last twenty years of his life might have had on our literary history. Notes
South Africa Advertiser, December 3,1863.[back] South Africa Advertiser and Mail, May 27, 1867.[back] South Africa Commercial Advertiser, August 26, 1840.[back] DCB. V, 501-03.[back] DCB. IV, 179-80.[back] CO48/408, 540.[back] The Spirit of the Age, 9.[back] Ibid., 14.[back] Ibid., 32.[back] Ibid., 30.[back] Ibid., 34.[back] Ibid., bottom of p. 39.[back] The Missionary, Preface, i.[back] Ibid., 40.[back] Ibid., LXVIII, 23.[back] Ibid., LXVII, 23.[back] Seary, op. cit., 528.[back] Sam Sly’s African Journal, May 29, 1845.[back] Byzantium, 65.[back] Cape Monthly Magazine, January, 1857.[back] Ibid., June, 1857.[back] Ibid., April, 1859.[back] Ibid., July, 1859.[back] Cape Monthly Magazine, June, July, August, 1858.[back] Cape Monitor, March 19, 1846. Letter to the editor signed “Kitty Fisher”.[back] |