Part 6

To speak plainly, there was never such a humiliating spectacle of public stolidity as that which for so long a time was witnessed in the popular mystification as to Mr. Gladstone's religious position. It went for nothing that his first critical Parliamentary step was to give up his seat rather than vote more money to Maynooth; nobody seemed to bear in mind that as far back as 1852 he both predicted and publicly hoped for the downfall of the temporal power of the Papacy, and that ten years later Sir George Bowyer openly attacked him on that very point in Parliament; it did not avail that he it was who paved the way for the unification of Italy by dragging into the light before all Europe the prison secrets of Neapolitan tyranny. Because he had the good sense to oppose the Ecclesiastical Titles Bill, and the loyalty to remain on terms of friendship with the companions of his youth after they became Puseyites, and avowed that he held the same views as to Church doctrine which some of the greatest Church of England divines taught, he was called on to explain, every month or so, that he was not a Jesuit. Not until he published his pamphlet on the Vatican Decrees, and by so doing threw all the Roman Catholics in England and elsewhere into a white heat of rage, was the silliness quite exploded. It is true that the dull public might plead that a real profession of religiousness on the part of a leading politician was such a novelty that it might be excused being a little puzzled, and believing the worst in its perplexity. Worst or best, Mr. Gladstone has gone on speaking and writing about his religion just as if a man's ethics and faith ought to have some connection with his politics, and, as time has passed, people appear to think it less strange. This non-reticence on the score of religion has made more serious the impression Mr. Gladstone has produced upon the public mind; but in reality it is no specialty in his mode of public thinking, but only a necessary part of it. He tracks his commonest politics to their fundamental principles, and makes of them a system. He has always in his reasoning to go back to history, and this has delayed his advance in comparison with men who dispense with that; but there never yet was a public man who explained so fully as Mr. Gladstone the reasons of his changes. All the progress of his mind is to be traced in speeches, articles, pamphlets, volumes. He has given too much explanation, not too little, for his mind has an insatiability for reasons. Most people are content when they get hold of a good one; but he wants three or four--in fact, all that can be got by searching for; and if it be true, as it certainly is, that he likes the last to have a little subtlety about it, long-sustained thinking cannot take people too deep in politics, whatever it may do now and then in religion. For instance, on the question of Reform Mr. Gladstone has certainly exhausted the process, having at last got at the final ideal argument. It turns out, as he stated it to Mr. Lowe, to be this,--that, apart from, or rather in addition to, all the hard reasons of justice and safety that Mr. Bright can urge for extending the franchise, the vote ought to be given because it has an educative power, and will make our humbler fellow-countrymen better citizens. It is open to any one, who is stupid enough, to call that argument subtle, but no one can deny that it is truly Liberal. There is not a man among us to-day who keeps the main Liberal issues so broad and clear as Mr. Gladstone does, and this simply because he will get to a principle. He adds a tremendous multiplicity of ideas in the way of side issues, but, as we above put it, they are all reasons in addition. There is a very simple test of it,--he has never recanted a single article of his Liberal progress, never gone back a single step. This hardly can be said of either Mr. Lowe or a few others who might be named. It could not even be said of so thorough a Liberal as Earl Russell. Mr. Gladstone's alleged over-refining has ended in placing and keeping him in the practical lead of his party, at a time of life when many born in the faith grow faint-hearted. Even the one bit of mysticism which his political feeling has developed--namely, the belief that the popular judgment is truest of all in very large matters--is only the full flowering of the popular trust which every Liberal professes to have. The bulk of the nation will forgive him that excess of political belief, if it be an excess, for it is the last compliment a statesman can pay them, and they have but to merit it, and it then turns to Mr. Gladstone's praise as well as theirs. But, at any rate, it will not do for Liberals to set out to argue the point with Mr. Gladstone, or they will quickly find themselves tripped up by a principle; for it is no sentimentality in him which underlies the view, but completed logic and wide recollection of historical instances.

Indeed, although it was necessary in trying to reproduce the general impression Mr. Gladstone has made upon his contemporaries to speak of this alleged over-refining, what is meant by it has been after all a kind of superfluity of mental operation. His intricacy of thinking has never hindered his activity; least of all living men has Mr. Gladstone been a dreamer. He stands in history as a reviser of fiscal policies; an introducer of new administrative modes; a widener of the boundaries of political rights; a ceaseless overthrower of public abuses. From first to last he has been, as the hatred of his opponents has too well witnessed, a man of practice. You may add to this that he reasons too minutely, if you like; but it was not by a transcendental casuistry of politics that he wearied the country: it was by his enormous energy in ceaselessly proposing wide sweeping measures. The casuistry was all in addition. The over-refining of Mr. Gladstone has, in fact, been of a wholly different kind from what is common among men; it has consisted in finding justifications afterwards for very prompt vigorous doing. Examine, if any one thinks it worth while at this time of day, the Ewelme Rectory case, or the issue of the Royal Warrant on Purchase, or the Collier appointment, and it will appear that it was for bold decision in taking a practical step that he was arraigned as much as for subsequently finding too many reasons for it. For ourselves, as we have not set out to apologize for Mr. Gladstone (men of his dimensions must be taken as they are), but simply to put down hints recalling more fully than is usual the great features of his career, there is no need for our not saying that we wish he had in some cases dispensed with these arguments in excess of the conclusion. In some instances it is as wise after all, though not so clever, to be satisfied with urging one good reason, and not to confuse ordinary people by adding five or six more not so good, the risk being that there will be a bad one among them. But the fact remains that Mr. Gladstone has not busied himself in tying mental knots for the purpose of entanglement; he has indulged in no such waste of time. The mental puzzle has always referred to some practical doing. Owing to this, his opponents have had to admit his mental sincerity, while accusing him of over-subtlety. It nearly all turned, in fact, into the psychological question of whether Mr. Gladstone's mind had not at one part of its machinery a twist, and in the meantime while this point was being discussed he went on carrying his measures. If there were Liberals who did not quite follow him in his defence of the issue of the Royal Warrant, when he drew distinctions between prerogative and statutory power, they had not the least doubt that in abolishing purchase he had effected a capital Liberal reform, and they might hope that his reasoning as well as his practice was right. Is Mr. Gladstone to be the only one to whose idiosyncrasy nothing is to be allowed? The hullabaloo which was raised when somebody could say that he had broken through a technicality seemed very like, after all, as though from this one politician perfection was expected, which was not an ill compliment at bottom; and any admirers who may admit that perfection was not always got, do not, in granting that, depreciate him much as this world goes, and may still think him the most upright of our public men. His mental machinery is complicated, whilst there is no apparatus like it for rapidity, and once set going he himself cannot always stop it; his mind, as we have said, riots in ratiocination, and will multiply arguments to the last shred of the material which any case in hand affords. But, to return to the main point,--it never leaves go of the real business. Even what has seemed to some persons his off-work, his voluminous writing, has, with the one exception of his classical studies, been no mere leisurely literature, but persistent advocacy of special objects. These productions have been meant to frame public opinion, and to give him openings for legislation, if that became possible. He has used the press because it had become the hugest instrument of the time he lived in; but it was not for the purpose of multiplying books that Mr. Gladstone wrote, but with a view to practically influencing men.

This relentless subordination of everything to practical ends--this iron determination to keep doing, even while ready frankly to depend upon his power of speaking and writing to produce conviction and popular persuasion as the means for effecting his objects, gives as the final imprint of Mr. Gladstone on one's mind that he was always meant for a Liberal. A man of this kind might be born a Conservative; it might take him time to break fully with old ties; but for him to stay finally in the ranks where thought was allowed to remain muddled, where abuses were looked on with toleration, and ease was enjoyed at the cost of others, was an impossibility. Mr. Gladstone, if only from the fact that he was a born financier and an inveterate thinker, and a man with a passion for publicly talking, belonged to the Liberals from the first. His whole life, too, has consistently lent itself to that style. If it has had in it a touch of austerity, that excellently befitted the social condition of the masses of our people. His gaze has been fixed too much upon them to be attracted by the glitter of the narrow upper circle, which so foolishly persists, amidst its gaudy splendour, in believing itself the nation. That silliness was not for Mr. Gladstone. He has been subjected to some tests. If his family was not highly placed, his father was a baronet, and he himself was educated at Eton and Oxford. Nobles have been among his friends at all periods of his life, as well as his official subordinates more than once in it. But he has passed the whole of his long career without a sparkle of the glitter of adventitious display: that proudest title of all, which it is not in the power of the Crown to bestow but only to take away--"the Great Commoner"--has descended upon him, and is still his. Then he has fenced himself off with no stiffness of manner; the only dignity he has assumed has been the natural seriousness of ardent sincerity, warning off triflers only. To everybody else he has been accessible; any person could impose on him the trouble of a written reply. His post-cards were known to be public property. But putting aside that joke, which is now worn bare, scarcely has any one so fully and ungrudgingly accepted the responsibilities of his position. He has been the public's faithful, ready servant in every particular. Nor has it been mere complaisance, or a drudging of mechanical industry; he has exhibited a real faculty of interesting himself in all that anybody has been doing actively and well. To say that he is the only statesman who, while clinging to the Church of England, has commanded the sympathies of the Dissenters, might provoke an enemy, embittered by the fact, to reply that he had tactical reasons for trying to do that; but it could have been nothing else than real width of mind and a robust versatility which enabled this High Churchman largely to divide impartial admiration between the Evangelical party and the Romanists, pointing out fully and exactly what is to be praised in each. Any one who wishes it can find the estimates set out in detail in the third and seventh volumes of "The Gleanings." This wide range of intellectual appreciation is really as much a characteristic of Mr. Gladstone as has been his unyielding tenacity and doctrinal hold within the limits of his personal confession of belief. He, a firm acceptor of the tenets of sacramental efficacy, apostolical succession, and the authority of the Church in her own sphere, could take up the semi-rationalistic book "Ecce Homo," and turn it round-and-round admiringly as a most curious and valuable mental production. Nothing in which thought was really shown has escaped his notice, or failed to arouse his interest. He has bent his look on Secularism, as a scientific inquirer might scrutinize a new species, and he has stooped to quote Mr. Bradlaugh. In one place you will find him, very likely on the page after giving a passage from Isaiah or the Psalms, citing the old poet Dunbar, or speaking of Rowe or Swift, or alluding to Rousseau; while long before it became a fashion he had words of sympathizing praise for Shelley, selecting, of all other places, _The Quarterly Review_ to print them in. But, perhaps, the clearest proof of all, alike of his power to bear testimony in spite of personal disliking, and his standing hard and fast upon a principle when he has reached it, is that he, whom Macaulay nearly half a century ago described as "a young man of unblemished character," and whom his Lordship, if he were now alive, would speak of as "the old man with personal fame unspotted," could step aside in one of his articles to recognize the public debt due to Jack Wilkes as a helper forward of our freedom. Wherever a national service has been done, Mr. Gladstone's eulogy always has been ready.

Down to this point we have not spared so much as a hint to his magnificent oratory, his unsurpassed debating skill, his not infrequent successes in literary style. These were not the things that anybody needed reminding of, and that necessity was the prescribed limit of our self-imposed task. Who has forgotten when the expounding of the Budget was the greatest intellectual treat of the Session, when sugar and railway duties and tea became natural themes for eloquence, and the unfolding of the surplus was breathlessly waited for like the _denouement_ of a novelist's plot? Those scenes are long past, it is true, but the echoes of them can still be heard, for each year since has brought a disappointing reminder to awaken them. But the matchless vigour and splendour of his debating fence has never slackened, never weakened; the only privilege of the older generation in respect of it, is that they can boast to have witnessed more of it, not to have seen better displays. As to his writings, there least of all is any reminder wanted, for he presents the public with an improving specimen each month. If any one laid themselves out to find fault with Mr. Gladstone's literature, the very worst thing they could discover to say of it, would be that it still was oratory, only written down.

This is the man who, after a few weeks of leisure, reappears next month in Midlothian; first in the field, as if that appearance was his by right of custom. How well he compares with the rest of our older party leaders! Mr. Bright, grown a little pursy, though also stricken by domestic misfortune, rests rather inertly on his laurels, which certainly are plentiful enough to invite repose; Mr. Forster has never succeeded in quite finding his way out of the clauses of his own Education Act, where he sees himself confronted with the Church of England at the end of so many vistas, that he is lost in admiration of its architecture; Mr. Goschen, by some strange weakness (which, let us hope, is only temporary) has got a scare from meeting the County Franchise wearing Joseph Arch's coat and hat; while Mr. Lowe is riding hobbies, bicycle-wise, in and out before the very select constituency of the London University, with readers of _The Fortnightly Review_ for outside spectators, just by way of showing off his little feats of mental gymnastic. In the meanwhile, Mr. Gladstone, the veteran of them all, is putting on his harness for a fresh contest, a riper, better Liberal to-day than on any previous day of fight. It is for the younger men to rally round him.

But, before taking our leave of Mr. Gladstone, we have finally to enlarge our view of him. Early in these remarks it seemed well to give a very hasty summary of his whole career; but there remains to be attempted an exact sketch of his actual position in respect of opinions and practical relations at the moment when he ceased to be Minister. Let us, first of all, at this moment when a Brummagem Imperialism is only yet half-faded, recall what was Mr. Gladstone's opinion of the historic position and natural function of England among the nations; for it has been craftily made to appear that he was willing, and indeed anxious, for this country to efface itself. In 1870, when he was still at the height of power, he published in _The Edinburgh Review_ his article on "Germany, France, and England," and the following was the view he then put forward of the international obligations and duties of his country, in spite of the sea dividing us from other lands:--

"Yet we are not isolated.... With vast multitudes of persons in each of the Continental countries we have constant relations, both of personal and commercial intercourse, which grow from year to year; and as, happily, we have no conflict of interests, real or supposed, nor scope for evil passions afforded by our peaceful rivalry, there is nothing to hinder the self-acting growth of concord.... So far from this implying either a condition or a policy of isolation, it marks out England as the appropriate object of the general confidence.... All that is wanted is that she should discharge the functions, which are likely more and more to accrue to her, modestly, kindly, impartially.... But in order that she may act fully up to a part of such high distinction, the kingdom of Queen Victoria must be in all things worthy of it. The world-wide cares and responsibilities with which the British people have charged themselves are really beyond the ordinary measure of human strength; and until a recent period it seemed the opinion of our rulers that we could not do better than extend them yet further, wherever an opening could easily, or even decently, be found. With this avidity for material extension was joined a preternatural and morbid sensibility. Russia at the Amoor, America at the Fee-jee or the Sandwich Islands, France in New Caledonia or Cochin China--all these, and the like, were held to be good reasons for a feverish excitement lest other nations should do for themselves but the fiftieth part of what we have done for ourselves.... The secret of strength lies in keeping some proportion between the burden and the back."

Is it necessary to ask whether this is a policy combining dignified patriotism and prudently-restrained common sense? Compare it for a moment with the gewgaw skimble-skamble diplomatic sensationalism with which we have been presented since. But let us go a little more into detail as to Mr. Gladstone's standing with reference to international relations. This present Government has perhaps forgotten that there is such a nation in the world as the United States of America; but Mr. Gladstone kept it well in mind, and we suppose every one will admit that he, of all statesmen, stands well with that people of our own blood, who very shortly will be the most powerful community upon the earth, and the one with whom we shall, for all time, have most to do. However, we will keep within the bounds of Europe. It is the fashion now to give precedence to Germany. Well, Mr. Gladstone was among the first to predict the success of Prussia, and she is not likely to forget who it was who preserved neutrality at a moment most critical to her. Is it France that he is not on good relations with? Why this Minister, who invited her wine trade, and strove unceasingly to increase commerce to and fro across the Channel, and who is for giving further and further political rights to his countrymen, is the only English statesman whom the bulk of Frenchmen can understand. To them our Tories must be as antiquated as their own Royalists. Italy is a growing Power in the European comity, and who is there among our statesmen who can in her fair cities arouse half the enthusiasm he can? He is, literally, the only English politician they familiarly know. With Austria, it is true, he during the recent war lost patience for a moment, but her conduct since has told that her rulers must at the time have known that he had good reasons for it; and no one has more fully appreciated the difficulties of Austria's position than he has done, or was more early in giving her, years ago, the very counsel which she has since proved was the wisest for her. There remains one other great Power to be named--Russia; the State with whom we shall have directly of necessity to stand face to face in the far East, and with whom terms will in the end have somehow to be made. It is urged against Mr. Gladstone that he has not rendered himself obnoxious enough to this remaining Power--that is, that he did not incapacitate himself for negotiating with her, and, having postponed defiance of her, might make some peaceful arrangement. Can any friend of peace think this a very grievous accusation? Mr. Gladstone has gained this position of goodwill all round at what cost?--that of having fallen into disfavour with the Turks. That is his one terrible disqualification for affairs; or, if you wish to be precisely exhaustive, and at the same time to elicit the absurdity fully, you may add to it that he has irritated the Bourbons. It is quite true, and we, indeed, wish to put it clearly forward, that he was for abating a little of our national swagger, and was prepared to see, and to welcome, advancement in other nations. But every well-grounded Liberal knows that it is only on those two conditions that England can permanently pursue her own paths of industrial development, and the world make progress. Mr. Gladstone's single sin in reference to our external relations was his readiness to favour those two results.

But how does he show when a last view is taken of him from within our politics? Here, again, first look to the circumference. In dealing with the colonies, he was for all being put in possession of a free autonomy, and then urging them to self-reliance--in those ways welding them into the integrity of the empire; and as to India, he insisted that we should strive more and more to realize what he termed the generous conception of a moral trusteeship, to be administered for the benefit of those over whom we rule. Here, once more, we get the true ring of a sound Liberalism, for those are the only principles, we venture to affirm, on which such an empire as this of ours can ever be made permanent. Treating the colonies as babies and biting the thumb at Russia, even from the most scientific frontier India can furnish, though you shout "Empress" from it as loudly as you will, has nothing truly English about it. Empire is not kept in such a mawkish, artificial manner.