Chapter 26

Both these qualities--his disposition to revise his opinions in the light of new arguments and changing conditions, and the silence he maintained till the process of revision had been completed--exposed him to misconstruction. Commonplace men, unwont to give serious scrutiny to their opinions, ascribed his changes to self-interest, or at best regarded them as the index of an unstable purpose. Dull men could not understand why he should have forborne to set forth all that was passing in his mind, and saw little difference between reticence and dishonesty. In so far as they shook public confidence, these characteristics injured him in his statesman's work. Yet the loss was outweighed by the gain. In a country where opinion is active and changeful, where the economic conditions that legislation has to deal with are in a state of perpetual flux, where the balance of power between the upper, the middle, and the poorer classes has been swiftly altering during the last seventy years, no statesman can continue to serve the public if he adheres obstinately to the doctrines with which he started in life. He must--unless, of course, he stands aloof in permanent isolation--either subordinate his own views to the general sentiment of his party, and be driven to advocate courses he secretly mislikes, or else, holding himself ready to quit his party, if need be, must be willing to learn from events, and to reconsider his opinions in the light of emergent tendencies and insistent facts. Mr. Gladstone's pride as well as his conscience forbade the former alternative; it was fortunate that the tireless activity of his intellect made the latter natural to him. He was accustomed to say that the capital fault of his earlier days had been his failure adequately to recognise the worth and power of liberty, and the tendency which things have to work out for good when left to themselves. The application of this principle gave room for many developments, and many developments there were. He may have shown less than was needed of that prescience which is, after integrity and courage, the highest gift of a statesman, but which can seldom be expected from an English minister, too engrossed to find time for the patient reflection from which alone sound forecasts can issue. But he had the next best quality, that of remaining accessible to new ideas and learning from the events which passed under his eyes.

With this openness and flexibility of mind there went a not less remarkable ingenuity and resourcefulness. Fertile in expedients, he was still more fertile in reasonings by which to recommend the expedients. The gift had its dangers, for he was apt to be carried away by the dexterity of his own dialectic, and to think that a scheme must be sound in whose support he could muster a formidable array of arguments. He never seemed at a loss, in public or in private, for a criticism, or for an answer to the criticisms of others. If his power of adapting his own mind to the minds of those whom he had to convince had been equal to the skill and swiftness with which he accumulated a mass of matter persuasive to those who looked at things in his own way, no one would have exercised so complete a control over the political opinion of his time. But his intellect lacked this power of adaptation. It moved on lines of its own, which were often misconceived, even by those who sought to follow him loyally. Thus, as already observed, he was blamed for two opposite faults. Some, pointing to the fact that he had frequently altered his views, denounced him as a demagogue profuse of promises, ready to propose whatever he thought likely to catch the people's ear. Others complained that there was no knowing where to have him; that he had an erratic mind, whose currents ran underground and came to the surface in unexpected places; that he did not consult his party, but followed his own impulses; that his guidance was unsafe because his decisions were unpredictable. Much of the suspicion with which he was regarded, especially after 1885, arose from this view of his character.

It was an unfair view, yet nearer to the truth than that which charged him with seeking to flatter and follow the people. No great popular leader had in him less of the demagogue. He saw, of course, that a statesman cannot oppose the general will beyond a certain point, and may have to humour it in small things that he may direct it in great ones. He was obliged, as others have been, to take up and settle questions he deemed unimportant because they were troubling the body politic. Now and then, in his later days, he so far yielded to his party advisers as to express his approval of proposals in which his own interest was slight. But he was ever a leader, not a follower, and erred rather in not keeping his finger closely and constantly upon the pulse of public opinion. In this point, at least, one may discover in him a likeness to Disraeli. Slow as he was in maturing his opinions, Mr. Gladstone was liable to forget that the minds of his followers might not be moving along with his own, and hence his decisions sometimes took his party as well as the nation by surprise. But he was too self-absorbed, too eagerly interested in the ideas that suited his own cast of thought, to be able to watch and gauge the tendencies of the multitude. The three most remarkable instances in which his new departures startled the world were his declarations against the Irish Church establishment in 1867, against the Turks and the traditional English policy of supporting them in 1876, and in favour of Irish Home Rule in 1886, and in none of these did any popular demand suggest his pronouncement. It was the masses who took their view from him, not he who took a mandate from the masses. In each of these cases he may, perhaps, be blamed for not having sooner perceived, or at any rate for not having sooner announced, the need for a change of policy. But it was very characteristic of him not to give the full strength of his mind to a question till he felt that it pressed for a solution. Those who listened to his private talk were scarcely more struck by the range of his vision than by his unwillingness to commit himself on matters whose decision he could postpone. Reticence and caution were sometimes carried too far, not merely because they exposed him to misconstruction, but because they withheld from his party the guidance it needed. This was true in the three instances just mentioned; and in the last of them it is possible that earlier and fuller communications might have averted the separation of some of his former colleagues. Nor did he always rightly divine the popular mind. His proposal (in 1874) to extinguish the income-tax fell completely flat, because the nation was becoming indifferent to that economy in public expenditure which both parties had in the days of Peel and Lord John Russell vied in demanding. Cherishing his old financial ideals, Mr. Gladstone had not marked the change. So he failed to perceive how much the credit of his party was suffering (after 1871) from the belief of large sections of the people, that he was indifferent to the interests of England outside England. Perhaps, knowing the charge of indifference to be groundless, he underrated the effect which the iteration of it produced: perhaps his pride would not let him stoop to dissipate it.

Though the power of reading the signs of the times and swaying the mind of the nation may be now more essential to an English statesman than the skill which manages a legislature or holds together a cabinet, that skill counts for much, and must continue to do so while the House of Commons remains the governing authority of the country. A man can hardly reach high place, and certainly cannot retain high place, without possessing this kind of art. Mr. Gladstone was at one time thought to want it. In 1864, when Lord Palmerston's end was approaching, and Mr. Gladstone had shown himself the strongest man among the Liberal ministers in the House of Commons, people speculated about the succession to the headship of the party; and the wiseacres of the day were never tired of repeating that Mr. Gladstone could not possibly lead the House of Commons. He wanted tact, they said, he was too excitable, too impulsive, too much absorbed in his own ideas, too unversed in the arts by which individuals are conciliated. But when, after twenty-five years of his unquestioned reign, the time for his own departure drew nigh, men asked how the Liberal party in the House of Commons would ever hold together after it had lost a leader of such consummate capacity. The Whig critics of 1864 had grown so accustomed to Palmerston's way of handling the House as to forget that a man might succeed by quite different methods, and that defects, serious in themselves, may be outweighed by transcendent merits.

Mr. Gladstone had the defects ascribed to him. His impulsiveness sometimes betrayed him into declarations which a cooler reflection would have dissuaded. The second reading of the Irish Home Rule Bill of 1886 might possibly have been carried had he not been goaded by his opponents into words which were construed as recalling or modifying the concessions he had announced at a meeting of the Liberal party held just before. More than once precious time was wasted because antagonists, knowing his excitable temper, brought on discussions with the sole object of annoying him and drawing from him some hasty deliverance. Nor was he an adept, like Disraeli and Disraeli's famous Canadian imitator, Sir John A. Macdonald, in the management of individuals. His aversion for the meaner side of human nature made him refuse to play upon it. Many of the pursuits, and most of the pleasures, which attract ordinary men had no interest for him, so that much of the common ground on which men meet was closed to him. He was, moreover, too constantly engrossed by the subjects he loved, and by enterprises which specially appealed to him, to have leisure for the lighter but often vitally important devices of political strategy. I remember hearing, soon after 1870, how Mr. Delane, then editor of the _Times_, had been invited to meet the Prime Minister at a moment when the support of that newspaper would have been specially valuable to the Liberal Government. Instead of using the opportunity in the way that had been intended, Mr. Gladstone dilated during the whole time of dinner upon the approaching exhaustion of the English coal-beds, to the surprise of the company and the unconcealed annoyance of the powerful guest. It was the subject then uppermost in his mind, and he either forgot, or disdained, to conciliate Mr. Delane. Good nature as well as good sense made him avoid giving offence by personal reflections in debate, and he usually suffered fools if not, like St. Paul's converts, gladly, yet patiently.[64] In the House of Commons he was entirely free from airs, and, indeed, from any assumption of superiority. The youngest member might accost him in the lobby and be listened to with perfect courtesy. But he had a bad memory for faces, seldom addressed any one outside the circle of his personal friends, and more than once made enemies by omitting to notice and show attention to recruits who, having been eminent in their own towns, expected to be made much of when they entered Parliament. Having himself plenty of pride and comparatively little vanity, he never realised the extent to which, and the cheapness with which, men can be captured and used through their vanity. Adherents were sometimes turned into dangerous foes because his preoccupation with graver matters dimmed his sense of what may be done to win support by the minor arts, such as an invitation to dinner or even a seasonable compliment. And his mind, flexible as it was in seizing new points of view and devising expedients to meet new circumstances, did not easily enter into the characters of other men. Ideas and causes interested him more than did personal traits; his sympathy was keener and stronger for the sufferings of nations or masses of men than with the fortunes of an individual man. With all his accessibility and kindliness, he was at bottom chary of real friendship, while the circle of his intimates became constantly smaller with advancing years. So it befell that though his popularity among the general body of his adherents went on increasing, and the admiration of his parliamentary followers remained undiminished, he had in the House of Commons few personal friends who linked him to the party at large, and rendered to him those confidential services which count for much in keeping all sections in hearty accord and enabling the commander to gauge the sentiment of his troops.

Of parliamentary strategy in that larger sense, which covers familiarity with parliamentary forms and usages, care and judgment in arranging the business of the House, the power of seizing a parliamentary situation and knowing how to deal with it, the art of guiding a debate and choosing the right moment for reserve and for openness, for a dignified retreat, for a watchful defence, for a sudden rattling charge upon the enemy--of all this no one had a fuller mastery. His recollection of precedents was unrivalled, for it began in 1833 with the first reformed Parliament, and it seemed as fresh for those remote days as for last month. He enjoyed combat for its own sake, not so much from inborn pugnacity, for he was not disputatious in ordinary conversation, as because it called out his fighting force and stimulated his whole nature. "I am never nervous in reply," he once said, "though I am sometimes nervous in opening a debate." No one could be more tactful or adroit when a crisis arrived whose gravity he had foreseen. In the summer of 1881 the House of Lords made some amendments to the Irish Land Bill which were deemed ruinous to the working of the measure, and therewith to the prospects of the pacification of Ireland. A conflict was expected which might have strained the fabric of the constitution. The excitement which quickly arose in Parliament spread to the nation. Mr. Gladstone alone remained calm and confident. He devised a series of compromises, which he advocated in conciliatory speeches. He so played his game that by a few minor concessions he secured nearly all the points he cared for, and, while sparing the dignity of the Lords, steered his bill triumphantly out of the breakers which had threatened to engulf it. Very different was his ordinary demeanour in debate when he was off his guard. His face and gestures while he sat in the House of Commons listening to an opponent would express all the emotions that crossed his mind. He would follow every sentence as a hawk follows the movements of a small bird, would sometimes contradict half aloud, sometimes turn to his next neighbour to vent his displeasure at the groundless allegations or fallacious arguments he was listening to, till at last, like a hunting leopard loosed from the leash, he would spring to his feet and deliver a passionate reply. His warmth would often be in excess of what the occasion required, and quite disproportioned to the importance of his antagonist. It was in fact the unimportance of the occasion that made him thus yield to his feeling. As soon as he saw that bad weather was coming, and careful seamanship wanted, his coolness returned, his language became measured, while passion, though it might increase the force of his oratory, never made him deviate a hand's breadth from the course he had chosen. The Celtic heat subsided, and the shrewd self-control of the Lowland Scot regained command.

It was by oratory that Mr. Gladstone rose to fame and power, as, indeed, by it most English statesmen have risen, save those to whom wealth and rank and family connections used to give a sort of presumptive claim to high office, like the Cavendishes and the Russells, the Bentincks and the Cecils. And for many years, during which Mr. Gladstone was suspected as a statesman because, while he had ceased to be a Tory, he had not fully become a Liberal, his eloquence was the main, one might almost say the sole, source of his influence. Oratory was a power in English politics even a century and a half ago, as the career of the elder Pitt shows. During the last seventy years, years which have seen the power of rank and family connections decline, it has, although less cultivated as a fine art, continued to be almost essential to the highest success, and it still brings a man quickly to the front, though it will not keep him there should he prove to want the other branches of statesmanlike capacity.

The permanent reputation of an orator depends upon two things, the witness of contemporaries to the impression produced upon them, and the written or printed record of his speeches. Few are the famous speakers who would be famous if they were tried by this latter test alone, and Mr. Gladstone was not one of them. It is only by a rare combination of gifts that one who speaks with so much force and brilliance as to charm his listeners is also able to deliver thoughts so valuable in words so choice that posterity will read them as literature. Some of the ancient orators did this; but we seldom know how far those of their speeches which have been preserved are the speeches which they actually delivered. Among moderns, a few French preachers, Edmund Burke, Macaulay, and Daniel Webster are perhaps the only speakers whose discourses have passed into classics and find new generations of readers.[65] Twenty years hence Mr. Gladstone's will not be read, except, of course, by historians. Indeed, they ceased to be read even in his lifetime. They are too long, too diffuse, too minute in their handling of details, too elaborately qualified in their enunciation of general principles. They contain few epigrams and few of those weighty thoughts put into telling phrases which the Greeks called +gnômai+. The style, in short, is not sufficiently rich or polished to give an enduring interest to matter whose practical importance has vanished. The same oblivion has overtaken all but a few of the best speeches (or parts of speeches) of Grattan, Sheridan, Pitt, Fox, Erskine, Canning, Plunket, Brougham, Peel, Bright. It may, indeed, be said--and the examples of Burke and Macaulay show that this is no paradox--that the speakers whom posterity most enjoys are rarely those who most affected the audiences that listened to them.[66]

If, on the other hand, Mr. Gladstone be judged by the impression he made on his own time, his place will be high in the front rank. His speeches were neither so concisely telling as Mr. Bright's nor so finished in diction; but no other man among his contemporaries--neither Lord Derby nor Mr. Lowe, nor Lord Beaconsfield nor Lord Cairns, nor Bishop Wilberforce nor Bishop Magee--taken all round, could be ranked beside him. And he rose superior to Mr. Bright himself in readiness, in variety of knowledge, in persuasive ingenuity. Mr. Bright spoke seldom and required time for preparation. Admirable in the breadth and force with which he set forth his own position, or denounced that of his adversaries, he was not equally qualified for instructing nor equally apt at persuading. Mr. Gladstone could both instruct and persuade, could stimulate his friends and demolish his opponents, and could do all these things at an hour's notice, so vast and well ordered was the arsenal of his mind. Pitt was superb in an expository or argumentative speech, but his stately periods lacked variety. Fox, incomparable in reply, was hesitating and confused when he had to state his case in cold blood. Mr. Gladstone showed as much fire in winding up a debate as skill in opening it.

His oratory had, indeed, two faults. It wanted concentration, and it wanted definition. There were too many words, and the conclusion was sometimes left vague because the arguments had been too nicely balanced. I once heard Mr. Cobden say: "I always listen to Mr. Gladstone with pleasure and admiration, but I sometimes have to ask myself, when he has sat down, 'What after all was it that he meant, and what practical course does he recommend?'" These faults were balanced by conspicuous merits. There was a lively imagination, which enabled him to relieve even dull matter by pleasing figures, together with a large command of quotations and illustrations. There were powers of sarcasm, powers, however, which he rarely used, preferring the summer lightning of banter to the thunderbolts of invective. There was admirable lucidity and accuracy in exposition. There was art in the disposition and marshalling of his arguments, and finally--a gift now almost lost in England--there was a delightful variety and grace of appropriate gesture. But above and beyond everything else which enthralled the listener, there stood out four qualities. Two of them were merits of substance--inventiveness and elevation; two were merits of delivery--force in the manner, expressive modulation in the voice.

No one showed such swift resourcefulness in debate. His readiness, not only at catching a point, but at making the most of it on a moment's notice, was amazing. Some one would lean over the back of the bench he sat on and show a paper or whisper a sentence to him. Apprehending the bearings at a glance, he would take the bare fact and so shape and develop it, like a potter moulding a bowl on the wheel out of a lump of clay, that it grew into a cogent argument or a happy illustration under the eye of the audience, and seemed all the more telling because it had not been originally a part of his case. Even in the last three years of his parliamentary life, when his sight had so failed that he read nothing, printed or written, except what it was absolutely necessary to read, and when his deafness had so increased that he did not hear half of what was said in debate, it was sufficient for a colleague to say into the better ear a few words explaining how the matter at issue stood, and he would rise to his feet and extemporise a long and ingenious argument, or retreat with dexterous grace from a position which the course of the discussion or the private warning of the Whips had shown to be untenable. Never was he seen at a loss either to meet a new point raised by an adversary or to make the best of an unexpected incident. Sometimes he would amuse himself by drawing a cheer or a contradiction from his opponents, and would then suddenly turn round and use this hasty expression of their opinion as the basis for a fresh argument of his own. Loving conflict, he loved debate, and, so far from being confused or worried by the strain conflict put upon him, his physical health was strengthened and his faculties were roused to higher efficiency by having to prepare and deliver a great speech. He had the rare faculty of thinking ahead while he was speaking, and could, while pouring forth a stream of glittering sentences, be at the same time (as one saw by watching his eye) composing an argument to be delivered five or ten minutes later. Once, at a very critical moment, when he was defending a great measure against the amendment--moved by a nominal supporter of his own--which proved fatal to it, a friend suddenly reminded him of an incident in the career of the mover which might be effectively used against him. When Mr. Gladstone sat down after delivering an impassioned speech, in the course of which he had several times approached and then sheered off from the incident, he turned round to the friend and said, "I was thinking all the time I was speaking whether I could properly use against ---- what you told me, but concluded, on the whole, that it would be too hard on him."