Chapter 5

The favorite Greek maxim that no man can be called happy till his life is ended must, in the case of statesmen, be extended to warn us from the attempt to fix any one’s place in history till a generation has arisen to whom he is a mere name, not a familiar figure to be loved, opposed, or hated. Few reputations made in politics keep so far green and fresh that men continue to read and write and speculate about the person when those who can remember him living have departed. Out of all the men who have played a leading part in English public life in the present century there are but seven or eight—Pitt, Fox, Canning, Wellington, Peel, O’Connell, Disraeli, perhaps Melbourne and Brougham—who still excite our curiosity. The great poet or the great artist lives longer—indeed, he lives as long as his books or his pictures; the statesman, like the musician 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 becomes a leading factor in the course which events took. Tried by this test, Mr. Gladstone’s fame seems destined to last. His eloquence will soon become merely a tradition, for his printed speeches do not preserve its charm. His main acts of policy, foreign and domestic, will have to be judged by their still unborn consequences. If 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. But 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 events of its time, and will seek to know something of the wonderful figure that rose always conspicuous above the struggling throng.

There is a passage in the “Odyssey” where the seer Theoclymenus, in describing a vision of death, says: “The sun has perished out of heaven.” To Englishmen, Mr. Gladstone has been like a sun which, sinking slowly, has grown larger as he sank, and filled the sky with radiance even while he trembled on the verge of the horizon. There were able men, and famous men, but there was no one comparable to him in power and fame and honor. Now he is gone. The piercing eye is dim, and the mellow voice is silent, and the light has died out of the sky.