Chapter 29

With these defects, Mr. Gladstone's Homeric work had the merit of being based on a full and thorough knowledge of the Homeric text. He had seen, at a time when few people in England had seen it, that the Homeric poems are an historical source of the highest value, a treasure-house of data for the study of early Greek life and thought, an authority all the more trustworthy because an unconscious authority, addressing not posterity but contemporaries. This mastery of the matter contained in the poems enabled him to present valuable pictures of the political and social life of Homeric Greece, while the interspersed literary criticisms are often subtle and suggestive, erring, when they do err, chiefly through the over-earnestness of his mind. He often takes the poet too seriously; reading an ethical purpose into descriptive or dramatic touches which are merely descriptive or dramatic. Passages whose moral tendency offends him are reprobated as later insertions with a naïveté which forgets the character of a primitive age. But he has for his author not only that sympathy which is the best basis for criticism, but a justness of poetic taste which the learned and painstaking German commentator frequently wants. That Mr. Gladstone was a sound scholar in that narrower sense of the word which denotes a grammatical and literary command of Greek and Latin, goes without saying. Men of his generation kept a closer hold upon the ancient classics than we do to-day; and his habit of reading Greek for the sake of his Homeric studies, and Latin for the sake of his theological, made this familiarity more than usually thorough. Like most Etonians, he loved and knew the poets by preference. Dante was his favourite poet, perhaps because Dante is the most theological and ethical of the great poets, and because the tongue and the memories of Italy had a peculiar attraction for him. He used to say that he found Dante's thought incomparably inspiring, but hard to follow, it was so high and so abstract. Theology claimed a place beside poetry; history came next, though he did not study it systematically. It seemed odd that he was sometimes at fault in the constitutional antiquities of England; but this subject was, until the day of Dr. Stubbs, pre-eminently a Whig subject, and Mr. Gladstone never was a Whig, never learned to think upon the lines of the great Whigs of former days. His historical knowledge was not exceptionally wide, but it was generally accurate in matters of fact, however fanciful he might be in reasoning from the facts, however wild his conjectures in the prehistoric region. In metaphysics strictly so called his reading did not go far beyond those companions of his youth, Aristotle and Bishop Butler; and philosophical speculation interested him only so far as it bore on Christian doctrine. Keen as was his interest in theology and in history, it is not certain that he would have produced work of permanent value in either sphere even had his life been wholly devoted to study. His mind seemed to need to be steadied, his ingenuity restrained, by having to deal with concrete matter for a practical end. Neither, in spite of his eminence as a financier and an advocate of free trade, did he show much taste for economic studies. On practical topics, such as the working of protective tariffs, the abuse of charitable endowments, the development of fruit-culture in England, the duty of liberal giving by the rich, the utility of thrift among the poor, his remarks were full of point, clearness, and good sense, but he seldom launched out into the wider sea of economic theory. He took a first-class in mathematics at Oxford, at the same time as his first in classics, but did not pursue the subject in later life. Regarding the sciences of experiment and observation, he seemed to feel as little curiosity as any educated man who notes the enormous part they play in the modern world can feel. Sayings of his have been quoted which show that he imperfectly comprehended the character of the evidence they rely upon and of the methods they employ. On one occasion he horrified a dinner-table of younger friends by refusing to accept some of the most certain conclusions of modern geology. No doubt he belonged, as Lord Derby (the Prime Minister) once said of himself, to a pre-scientific age. Perhaps he was unconsciously biassed by the notion that such sciences as geology and biology, for instance, were being used by some students to sap the foundations of revealed religion. But I can recall no sign of disposition to dissuade free inquiry either into those among the sciences of nature which have been supposed to touch theology, or into the date, authorship, and authority of the books of the Bible. He had faith not only in his creed, but in God as a God of truth, and in the power of research to elicit truth.

General propositions are dangerous, yet it seems safe to observe that great men have seldom been obscurantists or persecutors. Either the sympathy with intellectual effort which is natural to a powerful intellect, or the sense that free inquiry, though it may be checked by repression for a certain time or within a certain area, will ultimately have its course, dissuades them from that attempt to dam up the stream of thought which smaller minds regard as the obvious expedient for saving souls or institutions.

It ought to be added, for this was a remarkable feature of his character, that he had the deepest reverence for the great poets and philosophers, placing the career of the statesman on a far lower plane than that of those who rule the world by their thoughts enshrined in literature. He expressed in a striking letter to Tennyson's eldest son his sense of the immense superiority of the poet's life and work. Once, in the lobby of the House of Commons, seeing his countenance saddened by the troubles of Ireland, I told him, in order to divert his thoughts, how some one had recently discovered that Dante had in his last years been appointed at Ravenna to a lectureship which raised him above the pinch of want. Mr. Gladstone's face lit up at once, and he said, "How strange it is to think that these great souls whose words are a beacon-light to all the generations that have come after them, should have had cares and anxieties to vex them in their daily life, just like the rest of us common mortals." The phrase reminded me that a few days before I had heard Mr. Darwin, in dwelling upon the pleasure a visit paid by Mr. Gladstone had given him, say, "And he talked just as if he had been an ordinary person like one of ourselves." The two great men were alike unconscious of their greatness.

It was an unspeakable benefit to Mr. Gladstone that his love of letters and learning enabled him to find in the pursuit of knowledge a relief from anxieties and a solace under disappointments. Without some such relief his fiery and restless spirit would have worn itself out. He lived two lives--the life of the statesman and the life of the student, and passed swiftly from the one to the other, dismissing when he sat down to his books all the cares of politics. But he led a third life also, the secret life of the soul. Religion was of all things that which had the strongest hold upon his thoughts and feelings. Nothing but his father's opposition prevented him from becoming a clergyman when he quitted the University. Never thereafter did he cease to take the warmest interest in everything that affected the Christian Church. He lost his seat for Oxford University by the votes of the country clergy, who formed the bulk of the constituency. He incurred the displeasure of four-fifths of the Anglican communion by disestablishing the Protestant Episcopal Church in Ireland, and from 1868 to the end of his life found nearly all the clerical force of the English establishment arrayed against him, while his warmest support came from the Nonconformists of England and the Presbyterians of Scotland. Yet nothing affected his devotion to the Church in which he had been brought up, nor to the body of Anglo-Catholic doctrine he had imbibed as an undergraduate. After an attack of influenza which had left him very weak in the spring of 1891, he endangered his life by attending a meeting on behalf of the Colonial Bishoprics Fund, for which he had spoken fifty years before. His theological opinions tinged his views upon political subjects. They filled him with dislike of the legalisation of marriage with a deceased wife's sister; they made him a vehement opponent of the bill which established the English Divorce Court in 1857, and a watchfully hostile critic of all divorce legislation in America afterwards. Some of his friends traced to the same cause his less than adequate appreciation of German literature (though he admired Goethe and Schiller) and even his political coldness towards Prussia and afterwards towards the German Empire. He could not forget that Germany had been the fountain of rationalism, while German Evangelical Protestantism was more schismatic and farther removed from the mediæval Catholic Church than it pleased him to deem the Church of England to be. He had an exceedingly high sense of the duty of purity of life and of the sanctity of domestic relations, and his rigid ideas of decorum inspired so much awe that it used to be said to a person who had told an anecdote with ever so slight a tinge of impropriety, "How many thousands of pounds would you take to tell that to Gladstone?" When living in the country, it was his practice to attend daily morning service in the parish church, and on Sunday to read in church the lessons for the day; and he rarely, if ever, transgressed his rule against Sunday labour. Religious feeling, coupled with a system of firm dogmatic beliefs, was the mainspring of his life, a guiding light in perplexities, a source of strength in adverse fortune, a consolation in sorrow, a beacon of hope beyond the failures and disappointments of this present world. He did not make what is commonly called a profession of religion, and talked little about it in general society, although always ready to plunge into a magazine controversy when Christianity was assailed. But those who knew him best knew that he was always referring current questions to, and trying his own conduct by, a religious standard. He believed in the efficacy of prayer, and sought through prayer for strength and for direction in the affairs of state. He was a remarkable example of the coexistence together with a Christian virtue of a quality which Catholic theologians treat as a mortal sin. He was an exceedingly proud man, yet an exceedingly humble Christian. With a high regard for his own dignity and a sensitiveness to any imputation on his honour, he was deeply conscious of his imperfections in the eye of God, realising the weakness and sinfulness of human nature with a mediæval intensity. The language of self-depreciation he was wont to use, sometimes deemed unreal, expressed his genuine sense of the contrast between the religious ideal he set up and his own attainment. And the tolerance which he extended to those who attacked him or who had (as he thought) behaved ill in public life was largely due to this pervading sense of the frailty of human character, and of the inextricable mixture in conduct of good and bad motives. "It is always best to take the charitable view," he once observed when I had quoted to him the saying of Dean Church that Mark Pattison had painted himself too black in his autobiography--"always best," adding, with grim emphasis, "especially in politics."

In this indulgent view, more evident in his later years, and the more remarkable because his expressions were often too vehement, there was nothing of the cynical "man of the world" acceptance of a low standard as the only possible standard, for his moral earnestness was as fervent at eighty-eight as it had been at thirty, and he retained a simplicity and an unwillingness to suspect sinister motives, singular in one who had seen so much. Although accessible and frank in the ordinary converse of society, he was in reality a reserved man; not shy, stiff, and externally cold, like Peel, nor always standing on a pedestal of dignity, like the younger Pitt, but revealing his deepest thoughts only to a few intimate friends, and treating others with a courteous kindliness which, though it put them at their ease, did not encourage them to approach nearer. Thus, while he was admired by the mass of his followers, and beloved by the small inner group of family friends, the majority of his colleagues, official subordinates, and political or ecclesiastical associates, would have hesitated to give him any of friendship's confidences. Though quick to mark and acknowledge good service, or to offer to a junior an opportunity of distinction, many deemed him too much occupied with his own thoughts to show interest in his disciples, or to bestow those counsels which a young man prizes from his chief. But for the warmth of his devotion to a few early friends and the reverence he paid to their memory, a reverence touchingly shown in the article on Arthur Hallam which he published near the end of his own life, sixty-five years after Hallam's death, there might have seemed to be a measure of truth in the judgment that he cared less for men than for ideas and causes. Those, however, who marked the pang which the departure to the Roman Church of his friend Hope Scott caused him, those who in later days noted the enthusiasm with which he would speak of Lord Althorp, his opponent, and of Lord Aberdeen, his chief, dwelling upon the truthfulness and uprightness of the former and the amiability of the latter, knew that the impression of detachment he gave wronged the sensibility of his own heart. Of how few who have lived for more than sixty years in the full sight of their countrymen, and have been as party leaders exposed to angry and sometimes spiteful criticism, can it be said that there stands on record against them no malignant word and no vindictive act! This was due not perhaps entirely to natural sweetness of disposition, but rather to self-control and to a certain largeness of soul which would not condescend to anything mean or petty. Pride, though it may be a sin, is to most of us a useful, to some an indispensable, buttress of virtue. Nor should it be forgotten that the perfectly happy life which he led at home, cared for in everything by a devoted wife, kept far from him those domestic troubles which have soured the temper and embittered the judgments of not a few famous men. Reviewing his whole career, and summing up the concurrent impressions and recollections of those who knew him best, this dignity is the feature which dwells most in the mind, as the outline of some majestic Alp thrills one from afar when all the lesser beauties of glen and wood, of crag and glacier, have faded in the distance. As elevation was the note of his oratory, so was magnanimity the note of his character.

The Greek maxim that no one can be called happy till his life is closed must, in the case of statesmen, be extended to warn us from the attempt to fix a man's place in history till a generation has arisen to whom he is a mere name, not a familiar figure to be loved or hated. Few reputations made in politics so far retain their lustre that curiosity continues to play round the person when those who can remember him living have departed. Dante has in immortal stanzas contrasted the fame of Provenzano Salvani that sounded through all Tuscany while he lived with the faint whispers of his name heard in his own Siena forty years after his death.[75] So out of all the men who have held a foremost place in English public life in the nineteenth century there are but six or seven--Pitt, Fox, Wellington, Peel, Disraeli, possibly Canning, or O'Connell, or Melbourne--whose names are to-day upon our lips. The great poet or the great artist lives as long as his books or his pictures; the statesman, like the singer or the actor, begins to be forgotten so soon as his voice is still, unless he has so dominated the men of his own time, and made himself a part of his country's history, that his personal character is indissolubly linked to the events the course of which he helped to determine. Tried by this test, Mr. Gladstone's fame seems destined to endure. His eloquence will soon become merely a tradition, for his printed speeches do not preserve its charm. If some of his books continue to be read, it will be rather because they are his than in respect of any permanent contribution they have made to knowledge. The wisdom of his policy, foreign and domestic, will have to be judged, not only by the consequences we see, but also by other consequences still hidden in the future. Yet among his acts there are some with which history cannot fail to concern herself, and which will keep fresh the memory of their author's energy and courage. Whoever follows the annals of England during the memorable years from 1843 to 1894 will meet his name on almost every page, will feel how great must have been the force of an intellect that could so interpenetrate the story of its time, and will seek to know something of the dauntless figure that rose always conspicuous above the struggling throng.

There is a passage in the _Odyssey_ where the seer Theoclymenus says, in describing a vision of death: "The sun has perished out of heaven." To Englishmen, Mr. Gladstone had been like a sun which, sinking slowly, had grown larger as he sank, and filled the sky with radiance even while he trembled on the verge of the horizon. There were men of ability and men of renown, but there was no one comparable to him in fame and power and honour. When he departed the light seemed to have died out of the sky.

[63] "Gled" is a kite or hawk. The name was Gladstones till Mr. Gladstone's father dropped the final s.

[64] One of his most intimate friends has, I think, said that "he never knew what it was to be bored." Fortunate, indeed, would he have been had this been so; but that one who had watched him long and closely should make the statement shows how gently bores fared at his hands.

I recollect his once remarking on the capacity for boring possessed by a gentleman who had been introduced and had talked for some fifteen minutes to him; but his own manner through the conversation had betrayed no impatience.

[65] Sermons belong to a somewhat different category, else I should have to add the discourses of a few great preachers, such as Robert Hall, J. H. Newman, Phillips Brooks.

[66] Though one of Macaulay's speeches (that against the exclusion of the Master of the Rolls from the House of Commons) had the rare honour of turning votes.

[67] "He said that this was the hardest battle of men he had entered," _Iliad_ vi. 185.

[68] His physical courage was no less evident than his moral. For two or three years his life was threatened, and policemen were told off to guard him wherever he went. He disliked this protection so much (though the Home Office thought it necessary) that he used to escape from the House of Commons by a little-frequented exit, give the policemen the slip, and stroll home to his residence along the Thames Embankment in the small hours of the morning. Fear was not in his nature.

[69] The late Protestant Episcopal Primate of Ireland said that Disestablishment had proved a blessing to his Church; and this would seem to be now the general view of Irish Protestants.

[70] His abdication of leadership in 1875 was meant to be final, though when the urgency of Eastern affairs had drawn him back into strife, the old ardour revived, and he resumed the place of Prime Minister in 1880. It has been often said that he would have done better to retire from public life in 1880, or in 1885, yet the most striking proofs both of his courage and of his physical energy were given in the latest part of his career.

[71] For instance, he recommended Dr. Stubbs for a bishopric and Sir John Holker for a lord justiceship, knowing both of them to be Tories.

[72] His respect and regard for Mr. Bright were entirely unaffected by the fact that Mr. Bright's opposition to the Home Rule Bill of 1886 had been the chief cause of its defeat.

[73] Usually over-anxious to vindicate his own consistency, he showed on one occasion a capacity for recognising the humorous side of a position into which he had been brought. In a debate which arose in 1891 frequent references had been made to a former speech in which he had pronounced a highly-coloured panegyric upon the Church of England in Wales, the disestablishment of which he had subsequently become willing to support. He replied, "Many references have been made to a former speech of mine on this subject, and I am not prepared to deny that in that speech, when closely scrutinised, there may appear to be present some element of exaggeration." The House dissolved in laughter, and no further reference was made to the old speech.

[74] His Oxford contemporary and friend, the late Mr. Milnes Gaskell, told me that when Mr. Gladstone was undergoing his _viva voce_ examination for his degree, the examiner, satisfied with the candidate's answers on a particular matter, said, "And now, Mr. Gladstone, we will leave that part of the subject." "No," replied the examinee, "we will, if you please, not leave it yet." Whereupon he proceeded to pour forth a further flood of knowledge and disquisition.

[75] _Purgat._ xi. 100-126.

INDEX

Acton, John Edward Emerich Dalberg, Lord-- career of, 382-84 characteristics of, 399 critical taste of, 390 family of, 382 history, view of, 391-92; view of study of, 394-95 learning of, 386-89, 392 liberty, history of, projected by, 395-96 libraries of, 388-89 and note political opinions of, 384 style of, 396-97 thoroughness of, 390, 393-95 University work of, 397-98 writings of, 395

American Civil War, 55, 57, 90 and note. _See also_ United States

Arnold, Dr., 343, 346

Austen, Jane, 127

Beaconsfield, Benjamin Disraeli, Lord-- Cairns valued by, 186-87 career of, 3-16 characteristics of-- ambition, 21-22, 26, 30-31 _bonhomie_, 32, 34 courage, 11, 25-26, 65 cynicism, 30, 40-41 debating power, 47 intellectual congruity, 35-38, 42 loyalty, 33 self-confidence, 21, 26, 50, 65, 224 tactical adroitness, 48-50 tenacity, 11, 15, 23-24, 60, 65 Eastern policy of, 140, 275-76, 300, 356 education of, 39 epigrammatic phrases of, 41-42 estimates regarding, 1-2; foreign, 54, 58 family of, 3 Gladstone compared with, 418, 429, 465; contrasted with, 422; Gladstone's attitude towards, 455-56 influence of, 66-68 literary works of, 4-5, 18-19, 29, 31-33, 35, 41, 43-45, 52 note; quoted, 21 note, 25 note, 41, 50 note, 55 Lowe and, 34, 302 Northcote appreciated by, 21, 218 political views of, 6-8; foreign policy of (_see also above_, Eastern policy), 15, 56, 59, 67 Stanley and, 81 suffrage extension, policy of, 305-306, 309-10, 442 otherwise mentioned, 107, 171, 220

Bentinck, Lord George, 9

Bishops-- change in type of, 196-98 House of Lords, presence in, 112 industry of, 199 influence of, 100-101, 103

Bismarck, Prince, 54

Black, J. Sutherland, 311 note