CHARACTERISTICS
(_1840_)
Be inspired with the belief that life is a great and noble calling;
not a mean and grovelling thing that we are to shuffle through as
we can, but an elevated and lofty destiny.--GLADSTONE.[112]
It is the business of biography to depict a physiognomy and not to
analyse a type. In our case there is all the more reason to think of
this, because type hardly applies to a figure like Gladstone's, without
any near or distant parallel, and composed of so many curious dualisms
and unforeseen affinities. Truly was it said of Fénelon, that half of
him would be a great man, and would stand out more clearly as a great
man than does the whole, because it would be simpler. So of Mr.
Gladstone. We are dazzled by the endless versatility of his mind and
interests as man of action, scholar, and controversial athlete; as
legislator, administrator, leader of the people; as the strongest of his
time in the main branches of executive force, strongest in persuasive
force; supreme in the exacting details of national finance; master of
the parliamentary arts; yet always living in the noble visions of the
moral and spiritual idealist. This opulence, vivacity, profusion, and
the promise of it all in these days of early prime, made an awakening
impression even on his foremost contemporaries. The impression might
have been easier to reproduce, if he had been less infinitely mobile. 'I
cannot explain my own foundation,' Fénelon said; 'it escapes me; it
seems to change every hour.' How are we to seek an answer to the same
question in the history of Mr. Gladstone?
II
INTERNAL CONFLICT
His physical vitality--his faculties of free energy, endurance,
elasticity--was a superb endowment to begin with. We may often ask for
ourselves and others: How many of a man's days does he really live?
However men may judge the fruit it bore, Mr. Gladstone lived in vigorous
activity every day through all his years. Time showed that he was born
with a frame of steel. Though, unlike some men of heroic
strength--Napoleon for example--he often knew fatigue and weariness, yet
his organs never failed to answer the call of an intense and persistent
Will. As we have already seen, in early manhood his eyes gave him much
trouble, and he both learned by heart and composed a good deal of verse
by way of sparing them. He was a great walker, and at this time he was a
sportsman, as his diary has shown. 'My object in shooting, ill as I do
it, is the invigorating and cheering exercise, which does so much for
health (1842).' One day this year (Sept. 13, '42) while out shooting,
the second barrel of a gun went off while he was reloading, shattering
the forefinger of his left hand. The remains of the finger the surgeons
removed. 'I have hardly ever in my life,' he says, 'had to endure
serious bodily pain, and this was short.' In 1845, he notes, 'a hard
day. What a mercy that my strength, in appearance not remarkable, so
little fails me.' In the autumn of 1853 he was able to record, 'Eight or
nine days of bed illness, the longest since I had the scarlet fever at
nine or ten years old.' It was the same all through. His bodily strength
was in fact to prove extraordinary, and was no secondary element in the
long and strenuous course now opening before him.
Not second to vigour of physical organisation--perhaps, if we only knew
all the secrets of mind and matter, even connected with this vigour--was
strength and steadfastness of Will. Character, as has been often
repeated, is completely fashioned will, and this superlative
requirement, so indispensable for every man of action in whatever walk
and on whatever scale, was eminently Mr. Gladstone's. From force of
will, with all its roots in habit, example, conviction, purpose, sprang
his leading and most effective qualities. He was never very ready to
talk about himself, but when asked what he regarded as his master
secret, he always said, '_Concentration_.' Slackness of mind, vacuity of
mind, the wheels of the mind revolving without biting the rails of the
subject, were insupportable. Such habits were of the family of
faintheartedness, which he abhorred. Steady practice of instant, fixed,
effectual attention, was the key alike to his rapidity of apprehension
and to his powerful memory. In the orator's temperament exertion is
often followed by a reaction that looks like indolence. This was never
so with him. By instinct, by nature, by constitution, he was a man of
action in all the highest senses of a phrase too narrowly applied and
too narrowly construed. The currents of daimonic energy seemed never to
stop, the vivid susceptibility to impressions never to grow dull. He was
an idealist, yet always applying ideals to their purposes in act. Toil
was his native element; and though he found himself possessed of many
inborn gifts, he was never visited by the dream so fatal to many a
well-laden argosy, that genius alone does all. There was nobody like him
when it came to difficult business, for bending his whole strength to
it, like a mighty archer stringing a stiff bow.
FORCE OF WILL AND POWER OR TOIL
Sir James Graham said of him in these years that Gladstone could do in
four hours what it took any other man sixteen to do, and he worked
sixteen hours a day. When I came to know him long years after, he told
me that he thought when in office in the times that our story is now
approaching, fourteen hours were a common tale. Nor was it mere mechanic
industry; it was hard labour, exact, strenuous, engrossing rigorous. No
Hohenzollern soldier held with sterner regularity to the duties of his
post. Needless to add that he had a fierce regard for the sanctity of
time, although in the calling of the politician it is harder than in any
other to be quite sure when time is well spent, and when wasted. His
supreme economy here, like many other virtues, carried its own defect,
and coupled with his constitutional eagerness and his quick
susceptibility, it led at all periods of his life to some hurry. The
tumult of business, he says one year in his diary, 'follows and whirls
me day and night.' He speaks once in 1844 of 'a day restless as the
sea.' There were many such. That does not mean, and has nothing to do
with, 'proud precipitance of soul,' nor haste in forming pregnant
resolves. Here he was deliberate enough, and in the ordinary conduct of
life even minor things were objects of scrutiny and calculation, far
beyond the habit of most men. For he was lowlander as well as
highlander. But a vast percentage of his letters from boyhood onwards
contain apologies for haste. More than once when his course was nearly
run, he spoke of his life having been passed in 'unintermittent hurry,'
just as Mill said, he had never been in a hurry in his life until he
entered parliament, and then he had never been out of a hurry.
It was no contradiction that deep and constant in him, along with this
vehement turn for action, was a craving for tranquil collection of
himself that seemed almost monastic. To Mrs. Gladstone he wrote a couple
of years after their marriage (Dec. 13, 1841):--
You interpret so indulgently what I mean about the necessity of
quiescence at home during the parliamentary session, that I need
not say much; and yet I think my doctrine must _seem_ so strange
that I wish again and again to state how entirely it is different
from anything like disparagement, of George for example. It is
always relief and always delight to see and to be with you; and you
would, I am sure, be glad to know, how near Mary [Lady Lyttelton]
comes as compared with others to you, as respects what I can hardly
describe in few words, my mental rest, when she is present. But
there is no _man_ however near to me, with whom I am fit to be
habitually, when hard worked. I have told you how reluctant I have
always found myself to detail to my father on coming home, when I
lived with him, what had been going on in the House of Commons.
Setting a tired mind to work is like making a man run up and down
stairs when his limbs are weary.
If he sometimes recalls a fiery hero of the _Iliad_, at other times he
is the grave and studious benedictine, but whether in quietude or
movement, always a man with a purpose and never the loiterer or lounger,
never apathetic, never a sufferer from that worst malady of the human
soul--from cheerlessness and cold.
We need not take him through a phrenological table of elements, powers,
faculties, leanings, and propensities. Very early, as we shall soon see,
Mr. Gladstone gave marked evidence of that sovereign quality of Courage
which became one of the most signal of all his traits. He used to say
that he had known three men in his time possessing in a supreme degree
the virtue of parliamentary courage--Peel, Lord John Russell, and
Disraeli. To some other contemporaries for whom courage might be
claimed, he stoutly denied it. Nobody ever dreamed of denying it to him,
whether parliamentary courage or any other, in either its active or its
passive shape, either in daring or in fortitude. He had even the courage
to be prudent, just as he knew when it was prudent to be bold. He
applied in public things the Spenserian line, '_Be bold, be bold, and
everywhere be bold_,' but neither did he forget the iron door with its
admonition, '_Be not too bold_.' The great Condé, when complimented on
his courage, always said that he took good care never to call upon it
unless the occasion were absolutely necessary. No more did Mr. Gladstone
go out of his way to summon courage for its own sake, but only when
spurred by duty; then he knew no faltering. Capable of much
circumspection, yet soon he became known for a man of lion heart.
MEASURE OF HIS GIFTS
Nature had bestowed on him many towering gifts. Whether Humour was among
them, his friends were wont to dispute. That he had a gaiety and
sympathetic alacrity of mind that was near of kin to humour, nobody who
knew him would deny. Of playfulness his speeches give a thousand proofs;
of drollery and fun he had a ready sense, though it was not always easy
to be quite sure beforehand what sort of jest would hit or miss. For
irony, save in its lighter forms as weapon in debate, he had no marked
taste or turn. But he delighted in good comedy, and he reproached me
severely for caring less than one ought to do for the _Merry Wives of
Windsor_. Had he Imagination? In its high literary and poetic form he
rose to few conspicuous flights--such, for example, as Burke's descent
of Hyder Ali upon the Carnatic--in vast and fantastic conceptions such
as arose from time to time in the brain of Napoleon, he had no part or
lot. But in force of moral and political imagination, in bold, excursive
range, in the faculty of illuminating practical and objective
calculations with lofty ideals of the strength of states, the happiness
of peoples, the whole structure of good government, he has had no
superior among the rulers of England. His very ardour of temperament
gave him imagination; he felt as if everybody who listened to him in a
great audience was equally fired with his own energy of sympathy,
indignation, conviction, and was transported by the same emotion that
thrilled through himself. All this, however, did not fully manifest
itself at this time, nor for some years to come.
Strength of will found scope for exercise where some would not discover
the need for it. In native capacity for righteous Anger he abounded. The
flame soon kindled, and it was no fire of straw; but it did not master
him. Mrs. Gladstone once said to me (1891), that whoever writes his life
must remember that he had two sides--one impetuous, impatient,
irrestrainable, the other all self-control, able to dismiss all but the
great central aim, able to put aside what is weakening or disturbing;
that he achieved this self-mastery, and had succeeded in the struggle
ever since he was three or four and twenty, first by the natural power
of his character, and second by incessant wrestling in prayer--prayer
that had been abundantly answered.
Problems of compromise are of the essence of the parliamentary and
cabinet system, and for some years at any rate he was more than a little
restive when they confronted him. Though in the time to come he had
abundant difference with colleagues, he had all the virtues needed for
political co-operation, as Cobden, Bright, and Mill had them, nor did he
ever mistake for courage or independence the unhappy preference for
having a party or an opinion exclusively to one's self. 'What is wanted
above all things,' he said, 'in the business of joint counsel, is the
faculty of making many one, of throwing the mind into the common
stock.'[113] This was a favourite phrase with him for that power of
working with other people, without which a man would do well to stand
aside from public affairs. He used to say that of all the men he had
ever known, Sir George Grey had most of this capacity for throwing his
mind into joint stock. The demands of joint stock he never took to mean
the quenching of the duty in a man to have a mind of his own. He was
always amused by the recollection of somebody at Oxford--'a regius
professor of divinity, I am sorry to say'--who was accustomed to define
taste as 'a faculty of coinciding with the opinion of the majority.'
Hard as he strove for a broad basis in general theory and high abstract
principle, yet always aiming at practical ends he kept in sight the
opportune. Nobody knew better the truth, so disastrously neglected by
politicians who otherwise would be the very salt of the earth, that not
all questions are for all times. 'For my part,' Mr. Gladstone said, 'I
have not been so happy, at any time of my life, as to be able
sufficiently to adjust the proper conditions of handling any difficult
question, until the question itself was at the door.'[114] He could not
readily apply himself to topics outside of those with which he chanced
at the moment to be engrossed:--'Can you not wait? Is it necessary to
consider now?' That was part of his concentration. Nor did he fly at a
piece of business, deal with it, then let it fall from his grasp. It
became part of him. If circumstances brought it again into his vicinity,
they found him instantly ready, with a prompt continuity that is no
small element of power in public business.
How little elastic and self-confident at heart he was in some of his
moods in early manhood, we discern in the curious language of a letter
to his brother-in-law Lyttelton in 1840:--
It is my nature to lean not so much on the applause as upon the
assent of others to a degree which perhaps I do not show, from that
sense of weakness and utter inadequacy to my work which never
ceases to attend me while I am engaged upon these subjects.... I
wish you knew the state of total impotence to which I should be
reduced if there were no echo to the accents of my own voice. I go
through my labour, such as it is, not by a genuine elasticity of
spirit, but by a plodding movement only just able to contend with
inert force, and in the midst of a life which indeed has little
claim to be called active, yet is broken this way and that into a
thousand small details, certainly unfavourable to calm and
continuity of thought.
Here we have a glimpse of a singular vein peculiarly rare in ardent
genius at thirty, but disclosing its traces in Mr. Gladstone even in his
ripest years.
AS ORATOR
Was this the instinct of the orator? For it was in the noble arts of
oratory that nature had been most lavish, and in them he rose to be
consummate. The sympathy and assent of which he speaks are a part of
oratorical inspiration, and even if such sympathy be but superficial,
the highest efforts of oratorical genius take it for granted. 'The work
of the orator,' he once wrote, 'from its very inception is inextricably
mixed up with practice. It is cast in the mould offered to him by the
mind of his hearers. It is an influence principally received from his
audience (so to speak) in vapour, which he pours back upon them in a
flood. The sympathy and concurrence of his time, is, with his own mind,
joint parent of the work. He cannot follow nor frame ideals: his choice
is, to be what his age will have him, what it requires in order to be
moved by him; or else not to be at all.'[115]
Among Mr. Gladstone's physical advantages for bearing the orator's
sceptre were a voice of singular fulness, depth, and variety of tone; a
falcon's eye with strange imperious flash; features mobile, expressive,
and with lively play; a great actor's command of gesture, bold,
sweeping, natural, unforced, without exaggeration or a trace of
melodrama. His pose was easy, alert, erect. To these endowments of
external mien was joined the gift and the glory of words. They were not
sought, they came. Whether the task were reasoning or exposition or
expostulation, the copious springs never failed. Nature had thus done
much for him, but he superadded ungrudging labour. Later in life he
proffered to a correspondent a set of suggestions on the art of
speaking:--
1. Study plainness of language, always preferring the simpler word.
2. Shortness of sentences. 3. Distinctness of articulation. 4. Test
and question your own arguments beforehand, not waiting for critic
or opponent. 5. Seek a thorough digestion of, and familiarity with,
your subject, and rely mainly on these to prompt the proper words.
6. Remember that if you are to sway an audience you must besides
thinking out your matter, watch them all along.--(March 20, 1875.)
The first and second of these rules hardly fit his own style. Yet he had
seriously studied from early days the devices of a speaker's training. I
find copied into a little note-book many of the precepts and maxims of
Quintilian on the making of an orator. So too from Cicero's _De
Oratore_, including the words put into the mouth of Catulus, that nobody
can attain the glory of eloquence without the height of zeal and toil
and knowledge.[116] Zeal and toil and knowledge, working with an inborn
faculty of powerful expression--here was the double clue. He never
forgot the Ciceronian truth that the orator is not made by the tongue
alone, as if it were a sword sharpened on a whetstone or hammered on an
anvil; but by having a mind well filled with a free supply of high and
various matter.[117] His eloquence was 'inextricably mixed up with
practice.' An old whig listening to one of his budget speeches, said
with a touch of bitterness, 'Ah, Oxford on the surface, but Liverpool
below.' No bad combination. He once had a lesson from Sir Robert Peel.
Mr. Gladstone, being about to reply in debate, turned to his chief and
said: 'Shall I be short and concise?' 'No,' was the answer, 'be long and
diffuse. It is all important in the House of Commons to state your case
in many different ways, so as to produce an effect on men of many ways
of thinking.'
In discussing Macaulay, Sir Francis Baring, an able and unbiassed judge,
advised a junior (1860) about patterns for the parliamentary
aspirant:--'Gladstone is to my mind a much better model for speaking; I
mean he is happier in joining great eloquence and selection of words and
rhetoric, if you will, with a style not a bit above debate. It does not
smell of the oil. Of course there has been plenty of labour, and that
not of to-day but during a whole life.' Nothing could be truer.
Certainly for more than the first forty years of his parliamentary
existence, he cultivated a style not above debate, though it was debate
of incomparable force and brilliance. When simpletons say, as if this
were to dispose of every higher claim for him, that he worked all his
wonders by his gifts as orator, do they ever think what power over such
an assembly as the House of Commons signifies? Here--and it was not
until he had been for thirty years and more in parliament that he betook
himself largely to the efforts of the platform--here he was addressing
men of the world, some of them the flower of English education and
intellectual accomplishment; experts in all the high practical lines of
life, bankers, merchants, lawyers, captains of industry in every walk;
men trained in the wide experience and high responsibilities of public
office; lynx-eyed rivals and opponents. Is this the scene, or were these
the men, for the triumphs of the barren rhetorician and the sophist,
whose words have no true relation to the facts? Where could general
mental strength be better tested? As a matter of history most of those
who have held the place of leading minister in the House of Commons have
hardly been orators at all, any more than Washington and Jefferson were
orators. Mr. Gladstone conquered the house, because he was saturated
with a subject and its arguments; because he could state and enforce his
case; because he plainly believed every word he said, and earnestly
wished to press the same belief into the minds of his hearers; finally
because he was from the first an eager and a powerful athlete. The man
who listening to his adversary asks of his contention, 'Is this true?'
is a lost debater; just as a soldier would be lost who on the day of
battle should bethink him that the enemy's cause might after all perhaps
be just. The debater does not ask, 'Is this true?' He asks, 'What is the
answer to this? How can I most surely floor him?' Lord Coleridge
inquired of Mr. Gladstone whether he ever felt nervous in public
speaking: 'In opening a subject often,' Mr. Gladstone answered, 'in
reply never.' Yet with this inborn readiness for combat, nobody was less
addicted to aggression or provocation. It was with him a salutary maxim
that, if you have unpalatable opinions to declare, you should not make
them more unpalatable by the way of expressing them. In his earlier
years he did not often speak with passion. 'This morning,' a famous
divine once said, 'I preached a sermon all flames.' Mr. Gladstone
sometimes made speeches of that cast, but not frequently, I think, until
the seventies. Meanwhile he impressed the House by his nobility, his
sincerity, his simplicity; for there is plenty of evidence besides Mr.
Gladstone's case, that simplicity of character is no hindrance to
subtlety of intellect.
Contemporaries in these opening years describe his parliamentary manners
as much in his favour. His countenance, they say, is mild and pleasant,
and has a high intellectual expression. His eyes are clear and quick.
His eyebrows are dark and rather prominent. There is not a dandy in the
House but envies his fine head of jet-black hair. Mr. Gladstone's
gesture is varied, but not violent. When he rises, he generally puts
both his hands behind his back, and having there suffered them to
embrace each other for a short time, he unclasps them, and allows them
to drop on either side. They are not permitted to remain long in that
locality before you see them again closed together, and hanging down
before him.[118] Other critics say that his air and voice are too
abstract, and 'you catch the sound as though he were communing with
himself. It is as though you saw a bright picture through a filmy veil.
His countenance, without being strictly handsome, is highly
intellectual. His pale complexion, slightly tinged with olive, and dark
hair, cut rather close to his head, with an eye of remarkable depth,
still more impress you with the abstracted character of his disposition.
The expression of his face would be sombre were it not for the striking
eye, which has a remarkable fascination. His triumphs as a debater are
achieved not by the aid of the passions, as with Sir James Graham, or
with Mr. Sheil; not of prejudice and fallacy, as with Robert Peel; not
with imagination and high seductive colouring, as with Mr. Macaulay:
but--of pure reason. He prevails by that subdued earnestness which
results from deep religious feelings, and is not fitted for the more
usual and more stormy functions of a public speaker.'[119]
III
ACTION HIS FIELD
We are not to think of him as prophet, seer, poet, founder of a system,
or great born man of letters like Gibbon, Macaulay, Carlyle. Of these
characters he was none, though he had warmth and height of genius to
comprehend the value of them all, and--what was more curious--his
oratory and his acts touched them and their work in such a way that men
were always tempted to apply to him standards that belonged to them. His
calling was a different one, and he was wont to appraise it lower. His
field lay 'in working the institutions of his country.' Whether he would
have played a part as splendid in the position of a high ruling
ecclesiastic, if the times had allowed such a personage, we cannot tell;
perhaps he had not 'imperious immobility' enough. Nor whether he would
have made a judge of the loftier order; perhaps his mind was too
addicted to subtle distinctions, and not likely to give a solid
adherence to broad principles of law. A superb advocate? An evangelist,
as irresistible as Wesley or as Whitefield? What matters it? All agree
that more magnificent power of mind was never placed at the service of
the British Senate.
His letters to his father from 1832 onwards show all the interest of a
keen young member in his calling, though they contain few anecdotes, or
tales, or vivid social traits. 'Of political gossip,' he admits to his
father (1843), 'you always find me barren enough.' What comes out in all
his letters to his kinsfolk is his unbounded willingness to take trouble
in order to spare others. Even in prolonged and intricate money
transactions, of which we shall see something latertransactions of all
others the most apt to produce irritation--not an accent of impatience
or dispute escapes him, though the guarded firmness of his language
marks the steadfast self-control. We may say of Mr. Gladstone that
nobody ever had less to repent of from that worst waste in human life
that comes of unkindness. Kingsley noticed, with some wonder, how he
never allowed the magnitude and multiplicity of his labours to excuse
him from any of the minor charities and courtesies of life.
Active hatred of cruelty, injustice, and oppression is perhaps the main
difference between a good man and a bad one; and here Mr. Gladstone was
sublime. Yet though anger burned fiercely in him over wrong, nobody was
more chary of passing moral censures. What he said of himself in 1842,
when he was three and thirty, held good to the end:--
Nothing grows upon me so much with lengthening life as the sense of
the difficulties, or rather the impossibilities, with which we are
beset whenever we attempt to take to ourselves the functions of the
Eternal Judge (except in reference to ourselves where judgment is
committed to us), and to form any accurate idea of relative merit
and demerit, good and evil, in actions. The shades of the rainbow
are not so nice, and the sands of the sea-shore are not such a
multitude, as are all the subtle, shifting, blending forms of
thought and of circumstances that go to determine the character of
us and of our acts. But there is One that seeth plainly and judgeth
righteously.
HIS SILENCES
This was only one side of Mr. Gladstone's many silences. To talk of the
silences of the most copious and incessant speaker and writer of his
time may seem a paradox. Yet in this fluent orator, this untiring
penman, this eager and most sociable talker at the dinner-table or on
friendly walks, was a singular faculty of self-containment and reserve.
Quick to notice, as he was, and acutely observant of much that might
have been expected to escape him, he still kept as much locked up within
as he so liberally gave out. Bulwer Lytton was at one time, as is well
known, addicted to the study of mediæval magic, occult power, and the
conjunctions of the heavenly bodies; and among other figures he one day
amused himself by casting the horoscope of Mr. Gladstone (1860). To him
the astrologer's son sent it. Like most of such things, the horoscope
has one or two ingenious hits and a dozen nonsensical misses. But one
curious sentence declares Mr. Gladstone to be '_at heart a solitary
man_.' Here I have often thought that the stars knew what they were
about.
Whether Mr. Gladstone ever became what is called a good judge of men it
would be hard to say. Such characters are not common even among
parliamentary leaders. They do not always care to take the trouble. The
name is too commonly reserved for those who think dubiously or downright
ill of their fellow-creatures. Those who are accustomed to make most of
knowing men, do their best to convince us that men are hardly worth
knowing. This was not Mr. Gladstone's way. Like Lord Aberdeen, he had a
marked habit of believing people; it was part of his simplicity. His
life was a curious union of ceaseless contention and inviolable
charity--a true charity, having nothing in common with a lazy spirit of
unconcern. He knew men well enough, at least, to have found out that
none gains such ascendency over them as he who appeals to what is the
nobler part in human nature. Nestors of the whigs used to wonder how so
much imagination, invention, courage, knowledge, diligence--all the
qualities that seem to make an orator and a statesman--could be
neutralised by the want of a sound overruling judgment. They said that
Gladstone's faculties were like an army without a general, or a jury
without guidance from the bench.[120] Yet when the time came, this army
without a general won the crowning victories of the epoch, and for
twenty years the chief findings of this jury without a judge proved to
be the verdicts of the nation.
It is not easy for those less extraordinarily constituted, to realise
the vigour of soul that maintained an inner life in all its absorbing
exaltation day after day, year after year, decade after decade, amid the
ever-swelling rush of urgent secular affairs. Immersed in active
responsibility for momentous secular things, he never lost the breath
of what was to him a diviner aether. Habitually he strove for the lofty
uplands where political and moral ideas meet. Even in those days he
struck all who came into contact with him by a goodness and elevation
that matched the activity and power of his mind. His political career
might seem doubtful, but there was no doubt about the man. One of the
most interesting of his notes about his own growth is this:--
There was a singular slowness in the development of my mind, so far
as regarded its opening into the ordinary aptitudes of the man of
the world. For years and years well into advanced middle life, I
seem to have considered actions simply as they were in themselves,
and did not take into account the way in which they would be taken
and understood by others. I did not perceive that their natural or
probable effect upon minds other than my own formed part of the
considerations determining the propriety of each act in itself, and
not unfrequently, at any rate in public life, supplied the decisive
criterion to determine what ought and what ought not to be done. In
truth the dominant tendencies of my mind were those of a recluse,
and I might, in most respects with ease, have accommodated myself
to the education of the cloister. All the mental apparatus
requisite to constitute the 'public man' had to be purchased by a
slow experience and inserted piecemeal into the composition of my
character.
Lord Malmesbury describes himself in 1844 as curious to see Mr.
Gladstone, 'for he is a man much spoken of as one who will come to the
front.' He was greatly disappointed at his personal appearance, 'which
is that of a Roman catholic ecclesiastic, but he is very
agreeable.'[121] Few men can have been more perplexed, and few perhaps
more perplexing, as the social drama of the capital was in time unfolded
to his gaze. There he beheld the glitter of rank and station, and
palaces, and men and women bearing famous names; worlds within worlds,
high diplomatic figures, the partisan leaders, the constant stream of
agitated rumours about weighty affairs in England and Europe; the keen
play of ambition, passions, interests, under easy manners and fugitive
pleasantry; gross and sordid aims, as King Hudson was soon to find out,
masked by exterior refinement; so much kindness with a free spice of
criticism and touches of ill-nature; so much of the governing force of
England still gathered into a few great houses, exclusive and full of
pride, and yet, after the astounding discovery that in spite of the
deluge of the Reform bill they were still alive as the directing class,
always so open to political genius if likely to climb, and help them to
climb, into political power. These were the last high days of the
undisputed sway of territorial aristocracy in England. The artificial
scene was gay and captivating; but much in it was well fitted to make
serious people wonder. Queen Victoria was assuredly not of the harsh
fibre of the misanthropist in Molière's fine comedy; yet she once said a
strange and deep thing to an archbishop. 'As I get older,' she said, 'I
cannot understand the world. I cannot comprehend its littlenesses. When
I look at the frivolities and littlenesses, _it seems to me as if they
were all a little mad_.'[122]
THE SOCIAL DRAMA
This was the stage on which Mr. Gladstone, with 'the dominant tendencies
of a recluse' and a mind that might easily have been 'accommodated to
the cloister,' came to play his part,--in which he was 'by a slow
experience' to insert piecemeal the mental apparatus proper to the
character of the public man. Yet it was not among the booths and
merchandise and hubbub of Vanity Fair, it was among strata in the
community but little recognised as yet, that he was to find the field
and the sources of his highest power. His view of the secular world was
never fastidious or unmanly. Looking back upon his long experience of it
he wrote (1894):--
That political life considered as a profession has great dangers
for the inner and true life of the human being, is too obvious. It
has, however, some redeeming qualities. In the first place, I have
never known, and can hardly conceive, a finer school of temper than
the House of Commons. A lapse in this respect is on the instant an
offence, a jar, a wound, to every member of the assembly; and it
brings its own punishment on the instant, like the sins of the Jews
under the old dispensation. Again, I think the imperious nature of
the subjects, their weight and force, demanding the entire strength
of a man and all his faculties, leave him no residue, at least for
the time, to apply to self-regard; no more than there is for a
swimmer swimming for his life. He must, too, in retrospect feel
himself to be so very small in comparison with the themes and the
interests of which he has to treat. It is a further advantage if
his occupation be not mere debate, but debate ending in work. For
in this way, whether the work be legislative or administrative, it
is continually tested by results, and he is enabled to strip away
his extravagant anticipations, his fallacious conceptions, to
perceive his mistakes, and to reduce his estimates to the reality.
No politician has any excuse for being vain.
Like the stoic emperor, Mr. Gladstone had in his heart the feeling that
the man is a runaway who deserts the exercise of civil reason.
IV
RELIGION THE MAINSPRING
All his activities were in his own mind one. This, we can hardly repeat
too often, is the fundamental fact of Mr. Gladstone's history. Political
life was only part of his religious life. It was religion that prompted
his literary life. It was religious motive that, through a thousand
avenues and channels stirred him and guided him in his whole conception
of active social duty, including one pitiful field of which I may say
something later. The liberalism of the continent at this epoch was in
its essence either hostile to Christianity or else it was indifferent;
and when men like Lamennais tried to play at the same time the double
part of tribune of the people and catholic theocrat, they failed. The
old world of pope and priest and socialist and red cap of liberty fought
on as before. In England, too, the most that can be said of the leading
breed of the political reformers of that half century, with one or two
most notable exceptions, is that they were theists, and not all of them
were even so much as theists.[123] If liberalism had continued to run in
the grooves cut by Bentham, James Mill, Grote, and the rest, Mr.
Gladstone would never have grown to be a liberal. He was not only a
fervid practising Christian; he was a Christian steeped in the fourth
century, steeped in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Every man
of us has all the centuries in him, though their operations be latent,
dim, and very various; in his case the roots were as unmistakeable as
the leafage, the blossom, and the fruits. A little later than the date
with which we are now dealing (May 9, 1854)--and here the date matters
little, for the case was always the same--he noted what in hours of
strain and crisis the Bible was to him:--
On most occasions of very sharp pressure or trial, some word of
scripture has come home to me as if borne on angels' wings. Many
could I recollect. The Psalms are the great storehouse. Perhaps I
should put some down now, for the continuance of memory is not to
be trusted. 1. In the winter of 1837, Psalm 128. This came in a
most singular manner, but it would be a long story to tell. 2. In
the Oxford contest of 1847 (which was very harrowing) the verse--'O
Lord God, Thou strength of my health, Thou hast covered my head in
the day of battle.' 3. In the Gorham contest, after the judgment:
'And though all this be come upon us, yet do we not forget Thee;
nor behave ourselves frowardly in Thy covenant. Our heart is not
turned back; neither our steps gone out of Thy way. No not when
Thou hast smitten us into the place of dragons: and covered us with
the shadow of death.' 4. On Monday, April 17, 1853 [his first
budget speech], it was: 'O turn Thee then unto me, and have mercy
upon me: give Thy strength unto Thy servant, and help the son of
Thine handmaid.' Last Sunday [Crimean war budget] it was not from
the Psalms for the day: 'Thou shalt prepare a table before me
against them that trouble me; Thou hast anointed my head with oil
and my cup shall be full.'
In that stage at least he had shaken off none of the grip of tradition,
in which his book and college training had placed him. His mind still
had greater faith in things because Aristotle or Augustine said them,
than because they are true.[124] If the end of education be to teach
independence of mind, the Socratic temper, the love of pushing into
unexplored areas--intellectual curiosity in a word--Oxford had done
none of all this for him. In every field of thought and life he started
from the principle of authority; it fitted in with his reverential
instincts, his temperament, above all, his education.
PLACE OF DANTE IN HIS MIND
The lifelong enthusiasm for Dante should on no account in this place be
left out. In Mr. Gladstone it was something very different from casual
dilettantism or the accident of a scholar's taste. He was always alive
to the grandeur of Goethe's words, _Im Ganzen, Guten, Wahren, resolut zu
leben_, 'In wholeness, goodness, truth, strenuously to live.' But it was
in Dante--active politician and thinker as well as poet--that he found
this unity of thought and coherence of life, not only illuminated by a
sublime imagination, but directly associated with theology, philosophy,
politics, history, sentiment, duty. Here are all the elements and
interests that lie about the roots of the life of a man, and of the
general civilisation of the world. This ever memorable picture of the
mind and heart of Europe in the great centuries of the catholic
age,--making heaven the home of the human soul, presenting the natural
purposes of mankind in their universality of good and evil, exalted and
mean, piteous and hateful, tragedy and farce, all commingled as a living
whole,--was exactly fitted to the quality of a genius so rich and
powerful as Mr. Gladstone's in the range of its spiritual intuitions and
in its masculine grasp of all the complex truths of mortal nature. So
true and real a book is it, he once said,--such a record of practical
humanity and of the discipline of the soul amidst its wonderful poetical
intensity and imaginative power. In him this meant no spurious
revivalism, no flimsy and fantastic affectation. It was the real and
energetic discovery in the vivid conception and commanding structure of
Dante, of a light, a refuge, and an inspiration in the labours of the
actual world. 'You have been good enough,' he once wrote to an Italian
correspondent (1883), 'to call that supreme poet "a solemn master" for
me. These are not empty words. The reading of Dante is not merely a
pleasure, a _tour de force_, or a lesson; it is a vigorous discipline
for the heart, the intellect, the whole man. In the school of Dante I
have learned a great part of that mental provision (however
insignificant it may be) which has served me to make the journey of
human life up to the term of nearly seventy-three years.' He once asked
of an accomplished woman possessing a scholar's breadth of reading, what
poetry she most lived with. She named Dante for one. 'But what of
Dante?' 'The Paradiso,' she replied. 'Ah, that is right,' he exclaimed,
'that's my test.' In the Paradiso it was, that he saw in beams of
crystal radiance the ideal of the unity of the religious mind, the love
and admiration for the high unseen things of which the Christian church
was to him the sovereign embodiment. The mediæval spirit, it is true,
wears something of a ghostly air in the light of our new day. This
attempt, which has been made many a time before, 'to unify two ages,'
did not carry men far in the second half of the nineteenth century.
Nevertheless it were an idle dream to think that the dead hand of
Dante's century, and all that it represented, is no longer to be taken
into account by those who would be governors of men. Meanwhile, let us
observe once more that the statesman who had drunk most deeply from the
mediæval fountains was yet one of the supreme leaders of his own
generation in a notable stage of the long transition from mediæval to
modern.
'At Oxford,' he records, 'I read Rousseau's _Social Contract_ which had
no influence upon me, and the writings of Burke which had a great deal.'
Yet the day came when he too was drawn by the movement of things into
the flaming circle of thought, feeling, phrase, that in romance and
politics and all the ways of life Europe for a century associated with
the name of Rousseau. There was what men call Rousseau in a statesman
who could talk of men's common 'flesh and blood' in connection with a
franchise bill. Indeed one of the strangest things in Mr. Gladstone's
growth and career is this unconscious raising of a partially Rousseauite
structure on the foundations laid by Burke, to whom Rousseau was of all
writers on the nature of man and the ordering of states the most odious
and contemptible. We call it strange, though such amalgams of contrary
ways of thinking and feeling are more common than careless observers may
suppose. Mr. Gladstone was never an 'equalitarian,' but the passion for
simplicity he had--simplicity in life, manners, feeling, conduct, the
relations of men to men; dislike of luxury and profusion and all the
fabric of artificial and factitious needs. It may well be that he went
no further for all this than the Sermon on the Mount, where so many
secret elements of social volcano slumber. However we may choose to
trace the sources and relations of Mr. Gladstone's general ideas upon
the political problems of his time, what he said of himself in the
evening of his day was at least true of its dawn and noon. 'I am for old
customs and traditions,' he wrote, 'against needless change. I am for
the individual as against the state. I am for the family and the stable
family as against the state.' He must have been in eager sympathy with
Wordsworth's line taken from old Spenser in these very days, 'Perilous
is sweeping change, all chance unsound.'[125] Finally and above all, he
stood firm in 'the old Christian faith.' Life was to him in all its
aspects an application of Christian teaching and example. If we like to
put it so, he was steadfast for making politics more human, and no
branch of civilised life needs humanising more.
Here we touch the question of questions. At nearly every page of Mr.
Gladstone's active career the vital problem stares us in the face, of
the correspondence between the rule of private morals and of public. Is
the rule one and the same for individual and for state? From these early
years onwards, Mr. Gladstone's whole language and the moods that it
reproduces,--his vivid denunciations, his sanguine expectations, his
rolling epithets, his aspects and appeals and points of view,--all take
for granted that right and wrong depend on the same set of maxims in
public life and private. The puzzle will often greet us, and here it is
enough to glance at it. In every statesman's case it arises; in Mr.
Gladstone's it is cardinal and fundamental.
V
MAXIMS OF ORDERED LIFE
To say that he had drawn prizes in what is called the lottery of life
would not be untrue; but just as true is it that one of those very
prizes was the determined conviction that life is no lottery at all, but
a serious business worth taking infinite pains upon. To one of his sons
at Oxford he wrote a little paper of suggestions that are the actual
description of his own lifelong habit and unbroken practice.
_Strathconan, Oct. 7, 1872._--1. To keep a short journal of
principal employments in each day: most valuable as an account-book
of the all-precious gift of Time.
2. To keep also an account-book of receipt and expenditure; and the
least troublesome way of keeping it is to keep it with care. This
done in early life, and carefully done, creates the habit of
performing the great duty of keeping our expenditure (and therefore
our desires) within our means.
3. Read attentively (and it is pleasant reading) Taylor's essay on
Money,[126] which if I have not done it already, I will give you.
It is most healthy and most useful reading.
4. Establish a minimum number of hours in the day for study, say
seven at present, and do not without reasonable cause let it be
less; noting down against yourself the days of exception. There
should also be a minimum number for the vacations, which at Oxford
are extremely long.
5. There arises an important question about Sundays. Though we
should to the best of our power avoid secular work on Sundays, it
does not follow that the mind should remain idle. There is an
immense field of knowledge connected with religion, and much of it
is of a kind that will be of use in the schools and in relation to
your general studies. In these days of shallow scepticism, so
widely spread, it is more than ever to be desired that we should be
able to give a reason for the hope that is in us.
6. As to duties directly religious, such as daily prayer in the
morning and evening, and daily reading of some portion of the Holy
Scripture, or as to the holy ordinances of the gospel, there is
little need, I am confident, to advise you; one thing, however, I
would say, that it is not difficult, and it is most beneficial, to
cultivate the habit of inwardly turning the thoughts to God, though
but for a moment in the course or during the intervals of our
business; which continually presents occasions requiring His aid
and guidance.
7. Turning again to ordinary duty, I know no precept more wide or
more valuable than this: cultivate self-help; do not seek nor like
to be dependent upon others for what you can yourself supply; and
keep down as much as you can the standard of your wants, for in
this lies a great secret of manliness, _true_ wealth, and
happiness; as, on the other hand, the multiplication of our wants
makes us effeminate and slavish, as well as selfish.
8. In regard to money as well as to time, there is a great
advantage in its methodical use. Especially is it wise to dedicate
a certain portion of our means to purposes of charity and religion,
and this is more easily begun in youth than in after life. The
greatest advantage of making a little fund of this kind is that
when we are asked to give, the competition is not between _self_ on
the one hand and charity on the other, but between the different
purposes of religion and charity with one another, among which we
ought to make the most careful choice. It is desirable that the
fund thus devoted should not be less than one-tenth of our means;
and it tends to bring a blessing on the rest.
9. Besides giving this, we should save something, so as to be
before the world, _i.e._ to have some preparation to meet the
accidents and unforeseen calls of life as well as its general
future.
Fathers are generally wont to put their better mind into counsels to
their sons. In this instance the counsellor was the living pattern of
his own maxims. His account-books show in full detail that he never at
any time in his life devoted less than a tenth of his annual incomings
to charitable and religious objects. The peculiarity of all this
half-mechanic ordering of a wise and virtuous individual life, was that
it went with a genius and power that 'moulded a mighty State's decrees,'
and sought the widest 'process of the suns.'
VI
MENTAL GROWTH
Once more, his whole temper and spirit turned to practice. His thrift of
time, his just and regulated thrift in money, his hatred of waste, were
only matched by his eager and minute attention in affairs of public
business. He knew how to be content with small savings of hours and of
material resources. He was not downcast if progress were slow. In
watching public opinion, in feeling the pulse of a cabinet, in softening
the heart of a colleague, even when skies were gloomiest, he was almost
provokingly anxious to detect signs of encouragement that to others were
imperceptible. He was of the mind of the Roman emperor, 'Hope not for
the republic of Plato; but be content with ever so small an advance, and
look on even that as a gain worth having.'[127] A commonplace, but not
one of the commonplaces that are always laid to heart.
If faith was one clue, then next to faith was growth. The fundamentals
of Christian dogma, so far as I know and am entitled to speak, are the
only region in which Mr. Gladstone's opinions have no history.
Everywhere else we look upon incessant movement; in views about church
and state, tests, national schools; in questions of economic and fiscal
policy; in relations with party; in the questions of popular
government--in every one of these wide spheres of public interest he
passes from crisis to crisis. The dealings of church and state made the
first of these marked stages in the history of his opinions and his
life, but it was only the beginning.
I was born with smaller natural endowments than you, he wrote to
his old friend Sir Francis Doyle (1880), and I had also a narrower
early training. But my life has certainly been remarkable for the
mass of continuous and searching experience it has brought me ever
since I began to pass out of boyhood. I have been feeling my way;
owing little to living teachers, but enormously to four dead
ones[128] (over and above the four gospels). It has been experience
which has altered my politics. My toryism was accepted by me on
authority and in good faith; I did my best to fight for it. But if
you choose to examine my parliamentary life you will find that on
every subject as I came to deal with it practically, I had to deal
with it as a liberal elected in '32. I began with slavery in 1833,
and was commended by the liberal minister, Mr. Stanley. I took to
colonial subjects principally, and in 1837 was commended for
treating them liberally by Lord Russell. Then Sir R. Peel carried
me into trade, and before I had been six months in office, I wanted
to resign because I thought his corn law reform insufficient. In
ecclesiastical policy I had been a speculator; but if you choose to
refer to a speech of Sheil's in 1844 on the Dissenters' Chapels
bill,[129] you will find him describing me as predestined to be a
champion of religious equality. All this seems to show that I have
changed under the teaching of experience.
And much later he wrote of himself:--
The stock in trade of ideas with which I set out on the career of
parliamentary life was a small one. I do not think the general
tendencies of my mind were even in the time of my youth illiberal.
It was a great accident that threw me into the anti-liberal
attitude, but having taken it up I held to it with energy. It was
the accident of the Reform bill of 1831. For teachers or idols or
both in politics I had had Mr. Burke and Mr. Canning. I followed
them in their dread of reform, and probably caricatured them as a
raw and unskilled student caricatures his master. This one idea on
which they were anti-liberal became the master-key of the
situation, and absorbed into itself for the time the whole of
politics. This, however, was not my only disadvantage. I had been
educated in an extremely narrow churchmanship, that of the
evangelical party. This narrow churchmanship too readily embraced
the idea that the extension of representative principles, which was
then the essential work of liberalism, was associated with
irreligion; an idea quite foreign to my older sentiment on behalf
of Roman catholic emancipation. (_Autobiographic note, July 22,
1894_.)
VII
LIMITATIONS OF INTEREST
Notwithstanding his humility, his willingness within a certain range to
learn, his profound reverence for what he took for truth, he was no more
ready than many far inferior men to discern a certain important rule of
intellectual life that was expressed in a quaint figure by one of our
old English sages. 'He is a wonderful man,' said the sage, 'that can
thread a needle when he is at cudgels in a crowd; and yet this is as
easy as to find Truth in the hurry of disputation.'[130] The strenuous
member of parliament, the fervid minister fighting the clauses of his
bill, the disputant in cabinet, when he passed from man of action to the
topics of balanced thought, nice scrutiny, long meditation, did not
always succeed in getting his thread into the needle's eye.
As to the problems of the metaphysician, Mr. Gladstone showed little
curiosity. Nor for abstract discussion in its highest shape--for
investigation of ultimate propositions--had he any of that power of
subtle and ingenious reasoning which was often so extraordinary when he
came to deal with the concrete, the historic, and the demonstrable. A
still more singular limitation on the extent of his intellectual
curiosity was hardly noticed at this early epoch. The scientific
movement, which along with the growth of democracy and the growth of
industrialism formed the three propelling forces of a new age,--was not
yet developed in all its range. The astonishing discoveries in the realm
of natural science, and the philosophic speculations that were built
upon them, though quite close at hand, were still to come. Darwin's
_Origin of Species_, for example, was not given to the world until 1859.
Mr. Gladstone watched these things vaguely and with misgiving; instinct
must have told him that the advance of natural explanation, whether
legitimately or not, would be in some degree at the expense of the
supernatural. But from any full or serious examination of the details of
the scientific movement he stood aside, safe and steadfast within the
citadel of Tradition.
He was once asked to subscribe to a memorial of Tyndale, the translator
of the Bible,[131] and he put his refusal upon grounds that show one
source at least of his scruple about words. He replies that he has been
driven to a determination to renounce all subscriptions for the
commemoration of ancient worthies, as he finds that he cannot signify
gratitude for services rendered, without being understood to sanction
all that they have said or done, and thus becoming involved in
controversy or imputation about them. 'I am often amazed,' he goes on,
'at the construction put upon my acts and words; but experience has
shown me that they are commonly put under the microscope, and then found
to contain all manner of horrors, like the animalcules in Thames water.'
This microscope was far too valuable an instrument in the contentions of
party, ever to be put aside; and the animalcules, duly magnified to the
frightful size required, were turned into first-rate electioneering
agents. Even without party microscopes, those who feel most warmly for
Mr. Gladstone's manifold services to his country, may often wish that he
had inscribed in letters of gold over the door of the Temple of Peace, a
certain sentence from the wise oracles of his favourite Butler. 'For the
conclusion of this,' said the bishop, 'let me just take notice of the
danger of over-great refinements; of going beside or beyond the plain,
obvious first appearances of things, upon the subject of morals and
religion.'[132] Nor would he have said less of politics. It is idle to
ignore in Mr. Gladstone's style an over-refining in words, an excess of
qualifying propositions, a disproportionate impressiveness in verbal
shadings without real difference. Nothing irritated opponents more. They
insisted on taking literary sin for moral obliquity, and because men
could not understand, they assumed that he wished to mislead. Yet if we
remember how carelessness in words, how the slovenly combination under
the same name of things entirely different, how the taking for granted
as matter of positive proof what is at the most only possible or barely
probable--when we think of all the mischief and folly that has been
wrought in the world by loose habits of mind that are almost as much the
master vice of the head as selfishness is the master vice of the heart,
men may forgive Mr. Gladstone for what passed as sophistry and subtlety,
but was in truth scruple of conscience in that region where lack of
scruple half spoils the world.
VERBAL REFINING
This peculiar trait was connected with another that sometimes amused
friends, but always exasperated foes. Among the papers is a letter from
an illustrious man to Mr. Gladstone--wickedly no better dated by the
writer than 'Saturday,' and no better docketed by the receiver than 'T.
B. Macaulay, March 1,'--showing that Mr. Gladstone was just as
energetic, say in some year between 1835 and 1850, in defending the
entire consistency between a certain speech of the dubious date and a
speech in 1833, as he ever afterwards showed himself in the same too
familiar process. In later times he described himself as a sort of
purist in what touches the consistency of statesmen. 'Change of
opinion,' he said, 'in those to whose judgment the public looks more or
less to assist its own, is an evil to the country, although a much
smaller evil than their persistence in a course which they know to be
wrong. It is not always to be blamed. But it is always to be watched
with vigilance; always to be challenged and put upon its trial.'[133] To
this challenge in his own case--and no man of his day was half so often
put upon his trial for inconsistency--he was always most easily provoked
to make a vehement reply. In that process Mr. Gladstone's natural habit
of resort to qualifying words, and his skill in showing that a new
attitude could be reconciled by strict reasoning with the logical
contents of old dicta, gave him wonderful advantage. His adversary, as
he strode confidently along the smooth grass, suddenly found himself
treading on a serpent; he had overlooked a condition, a proviso, a word
of hypothesis or contingency, that sprang from its ambush and brought
his triumph to naught on the spot. If Mr. Gladstone had only taken as
much trouble that his hearers should understand exactly what it was that
he meant, as he took trouble afterwards to show that his meaning had
been grossly misunderstood, all might have been well. As it was, he
seemed to be completely satisfied if he could only show that two
propositions, thought by plain men to be directly contradictory, were
all the time capable on close construction of being presented in perfect
harmony. As if I had a right to look only to what my words literally
mean or may in good logic be made to mean, and had no concern at all
with what the people meant who used the same words, or with what I
might have known that my hearers were all the time supposing me to mean.
Hope-Scott once wrote to him (November 24, 1841): 'We live in a time in
which accurate distinctions, especially in theology, are absolutely
unconsidered. The "common sense" or general tenor of questions is what
alone the majority of men are guided by. And I verily believe that
semi-arian confessions or any others turning upon nicety of thought and
expression, would be for the most part considered as fitter subjects for
scholastic dreamers than for earnest Christians.' In politics at any
rate, Bishop Butler was wiser.
The explanation of what was assailed as inconsistency is perhaps a
double one. In the first place he started on his journey with an
intellectual chart of ideas and principles not adequate or well fitted
for the voyage traced for him by the spirit of his age. If he held to
the inadequate ideas with which Oxford and Canning and his father and
even Peel had furnished him, he would have been left helpless and
useless in the days stretching before him. The second point is that the
orator of Mr. Gladstone's commanding school exists by virtue of large
and intense expression; then if circumstances make him as vehement for
one opinion to-day as he was vehement for what the world regards as a
conflicting opinion yesterday, his intellectual self-respect naturally
prompts him to insist that the opinions do not really clash, but are in
fact identical. You may call this a weakness if you choose, and it
certainly involved Mr. Gladstone in much unfruitful and not very
edifying exertion; but it is at any rate better than the front of brass
that takes any change of opinion for matter-of-course expedient, as to
which the least said will be soonest mended. And it is better still than
the disastrous self-consciousness that makes a man persist in a foolish
thing to-day, because he chanced to say or do a foolish thing yesterday.
VIII
MINOR MORALS
In this period of his life, with the battle of the world still to come,
Mr. Gladstone to whose grave temperament everything, little or great,
was matter of deliberate reflection, of duty and scruple, took early
note of minor morals as well as major. Characteristically he found some
fault with a sermon of Dr. Wordsworth's upon Saint Barnabas, for
hardly pushing the argument for the connection of good manners with
Christianity to the full extent of which it is fairly capable. The
whole system of legitimate courtesy, politeness, and refinement is
surely nothing less than one of the genuine though minor and often
unacknowledged results of the gospel scheme. All the great moral
qualities or graces, which in their large sphere determine the
formation and habits of the Christian soul as before God, do also
on a smaller scale apply to the very same principles in the common
intercourse of life, and pervade its innumerable and separately
inappreciable particulars; and the result of this application is
that good breeding which distinguishes Christian civilisation.
(March 31, 1844.)
It is not for us to discuss whether the breeding of Plato or Cicero or
the Arabs of Cordova was better or worse than the breeding of the
eastern bishops at Nicæa or Ephesus. Good manners, we may be sure,
hardly have a single master-key, unless it be simplicity, or freedom
from the curse of affectation. What is certain is that nobody of his
time was a finer example of high good manners and genuine courtesy than
Mr. Gladstone himself. He has left a little sheaf of random jottings
which, without being subtle or recondite, show how he looked on this
side of human things. Here is an example or two:--
There are a class of passages in Mr. Wilberforce's _Journals_,
_e.g._, some of those recording his successful speeches, which
might in many men be set down to vanity, but in him are more fairly
I should think ascribable to a singlemindedness which did not
inflate. Surely with _most_ men it is the safest rule, to make
scanty records of success achieved, and yet more rarely to notice
praise, which should pass us like the breeze, enjoyed but not
arrested. There must indeed be some sign, a stone as it were set
up, to remind us that such and such were occasions for
thankfulness; but should not the memorials be restricted wholly and
expressly for this purpose? For the fumes of praise are rapidly and
fearfully intoxicating; it comes like a spark to the tow if once
we give it, as it were, admission within us. (1838.)
There are those to whom vanity brings more of pain than of
pleasure; there are also those whom it oftener keeps in the
background, than thrusts forward. The same man who to-day
volunteers for that which he is not called upon to do, may
to-morrow flinch from his obvious duty from one and the same
cause,--vanity, or regard to the appearance he is to make, for its
own sake, and perhaps that vanity which shrinks is a more subtle
and far-sighted, a more ethereal, a more profound vanity than that
which presumes. (1842.)
A question of immense importance meets us in ethical inquiries, as
follows: is there a sense in which it is needful, right, and
praiseworthy, that man should be much habituated to look back upon
himself and keep his eye upon himself; a self-regard, and even a
self-respect, which are compatible with the self-renunciation and
self-distrust which belong to Christianity? In the observance of a
single distinction we shall find, perhaps, a secure and sufficient
answer. We are to respect our responsibilities, not ourselves. We
are to respect the duties of which we are capable, but not our
capabilities simply considered. There is to be no complacent
self-contemplation, beruminating upon self. When self is viewed, it
must always be in the most intimate connection with its purposes.
How well were it if persons would be more careful, or rather, more
conscientious, in paying compliments. How often do we delude
another, in subject matter small or great, into the belief that he
has done well what we know he has done ill, either by silence, or
by so giving him praise on a particular point as to _imply_
approbation of the whole. Now it is undoubtedly difficult to
observe politeness in all cases compatibly with truth; and
politeness though a minor duty is a duty still. (1838.)
If truth permits you to praise, but binds you to praise with a
qualification, observe how much more acceptably you will speak, if
you put the qualification first, than if you postpone it. For
example: 'this is a good likeness; but it is a hard painting,' is
surely much less pleasing, than 'this is a hard painting; but it is
a good likeness.' The qualification is generally taken to be more
genuinely the sentiment of the speaker's mind, than the main
proposition; and it carries ostensible honesty and manliness to
propose first what is the less acceptable. (1835-6.)
IX
SPIRIT OF SUBMISSION
To go back to Fénelon's question about his own foundation. 'The great
work of religion,' as Mr. Gladstone conceived it, was set out in some
sentences of a letter written by him to Mrs. Gladstone in 1844, five
years after they were married. In these sentences we see that under all
the agitated surface of a life of turmoil and contention, there flowed a
deep composing stream of faith, obedience, and resignation, that gave
him, in face of a thousand buffets, the free mastery of all his
resources of heart and brain:--
_To Mrs. Gladstone._
13 _C.H. Terrace, Sunday evening, Jan. 21, 1844._--Although I have
carelessly left at the board of trade with your other letters that
on which I wished to have said something, yet I am going to end
this day of peace by a few words to show that what you said did not
lightly pass away from my mind. There is a beautiful little
sentence in the works of Charles Lamb concerning one who had been
afflicted: 'he gave his heart to the Purifier, and his will to the
Sovereign Will of the Universe.'[134] But there is a speech in the
third canto of the _Paradiso_ of Dante, spoken by a certain
Piccarda, which is a rare gem. I will only quote this one line:
_In la sua volontade è nostra pace._[135]
The words are few and simple, and yet they appear to me to have an
inexpressible majesty of truth about them, to be almost as if they
were spoken from the very mouth of God. It so happened that (unless
my memory much deceives me) I first read that speech on a morning
early in the year 1836, which was one of trial. I was profoundly
impressed and powerfully sustained, almost absorbed, by these
words. They cannot be too deeply graven upon the heart. In short,
what we all want is that they should not come to us as an
admonition from without, but as an instinct from within. They
should not be adopted by effort or upon a process of proof, but
they should be simply the translation into speech of the habitual
tone to which all tempers, affections, emotions, are set. In the
Christian mood, which ought never to be intermitted, the sense of
this conviction should recur spontaneously; it should be the
foundation of all mental thoughts and acts, and the measure to
which the whole experience of life, inward and outward, is
referred. The final state which we are to contemplate with hope,
and to seek by discipline, is that in which our will shall be _one_
with the will of God; not merely shall submit to it, not merely
shall follow after it, but shall live and move with it, even as the
pulse of the blood in the extremities acts with the central
movement of the heart. And this is to be obtained through a double
process; the first, that of checking, repressing, quelling the
inclination of the will to act with reference to self as a centre;
this is to mortify it. The second, to cherish, exercise, and expand
its new and heavenly power of acting according to the will of God,
first, perhaps, by painful effort in great feebleness and with many
inconsistencies, but with continually augmenting regularity and
force, until obedience become a necessity of second nature....
Resignation is too often conceived to be merely a submission not
unattended with complaint to what we have no power to avoid. But it
is less than the whole of a work of a Christian. Your full triumph
as far as that particular occasion of duty is concerned will be to
find that you not merely repress inward tendencies to murmur--but
that you would not if you could alter what in any matter God has
plainly willed.... Here is the great work of religion; here is the
path through which sanctity is attained, the highest sanctity; and
yet it is a path evidently to be traced in the course of our daily
duties....
When we are thwarted in the exercise of some innocent, laudable,
and almost sacred affection, as in the case, though its scale be
small, out of which all of this has grown, Satan has us at an
advantage, because when the obstacle occurs, we have a sentiment
that the feeling baffled is a right one, and in indulging a
rebellious temper we flatter ourselves that we are merely as it
were indulgent on behalf, not of ourselves, but of a duty which we
have been interrupted in performing. But our duties can take care
of themselves when God calls us away from any of them.... To be
able to relinquish a duty upon command shows a higher grace than to
be able to give up a mere pleasure for a duty....
RESPONSIBILITY FOR GIFTS
The resignation thus described with all this power and deep feeling is,
of course, in one form of thoughts and words, of symbol and synthesis,
or another, the foundation of all the great systems of life. A summary
of Mr. Gladstone's interpretation of it is perhaps found in a few words
used by him of Blanco White, a heterodox writer whose strange spiritual
fortunes painfully interested and perplexed him. 'He cherished,' says
Mr. Gladstone, 'with whatever associations, the love of God, and
maintained resignation to His will, even when it appears almost
impossible to see how he could have had a dogmatic belief in the
existence of a divine will at all. There was, in short [in Blanco
White], a disposition _to resist the tyranny of self; to recognise the
rule of duty; to maintain the supremacy of the higher over the lower
parts of our nature_.'[136] This very disposition might with truth no
less assured have been assigned to the writer himself. These three
bright crystal laws of life were to him like pointer stars guiding a
traveller's eye to the celestial pole by which he steers.
When all has been said of a man's gifts, the critical question still
stands over, how he regards his responsibility for using them. Once in a
conversation with Mr. Gladstone, some fifty years from the epoch of this
present chapter, we fell upon the topic of ambition. 'Well,' he said, 'I
do not think that I can tax myself in my own life with ever having been
much moved by ambition.' The remark so astonished me that, as he
afterwards playfully reported to a friend, I almost jumped up from my
chair. We soon shall reach a stage in his career when both remark and
surprise may explain themselves. We shall see that if ambition means
love of power or fame for the sake of glitter, decoration, external
renown, or even dominion and authority on their own account--and all
these are common passions enough in strong natures as well as weak--then
his view of himself was just. I think he had none of it. Ambition in a
better sense, the motion of a resolute and potent genius to use strength
for the purposes of strength, to clear the path, dash obstacles aside,
force good causes forward--such a quality as that is the very law of the
being of a personality so vigorous, intrepid, confident, and capable as
his.
FOOTNOTES:
[112] Hawarden Grammar School, Sept. 19, 1877.
[113] Mr. Gladstone on Lord Houghton's _Life_; _Speaker_, Nov. 29, 1890.
[114] _Gleanings_, vii. p. 133.
[115] _Homeric Studies_, vol. iii.
[116] Book ii. § 89, 363.
[117] Non enim solum acuenda nobis neque procudenda lingua est, sed
onerandum complendumque pectus maximarum rerum et plurimarum suavitate,
copia, varietate. Cicero, _De Orat._, iii. § 30.
[118] _The British Senate_, by James Grant, vol. ii. pp. 88-92.
[119] _Anatomy of Parliament_, November 1840. 'Contemporary Orators,' in
_Fraser's Magazine_.
[120] Lord Lansdowne to Senior (1855), in Mrs. Simpson's _Many
Memories_, p. 226.
[121] Malmesbury, _Memoirs of an Ex-Minister_, i. p. 155.
[122] _Life of Archbishop Benson_, ii. p. 11.
[123] The noble anti-slavery movement must be excepted, for it was very
directly connected with evangelicalism.
[124] Paruta, i. p. 64.
[125] 'Blest statesman he, whose mind's unselfish will'
(1838).--Knight's _Wordsworth_, viii. p. 101.
[126] The first chapter in Sir Henry Taylor's _Notes from Life_ (1847).
[127] Marcus Aurelius, ix. p. 29.
[128] Aristotle, Augustine, Dante, Butler. 'My four "doctors,"' he tells
Manning, 'are doctors to the speculative man; would they were such to
the practical too!'
[129] See below, p. 323.
[130] Glanville's _Vanity of Dogmatising_.
[131] See Shaftesbury's _Life_, iii. p. 495. He refused to be on a
committee for a memorial to Thirlwall. (1875.)
[132] First Sermon, _Upon Compassion_.
[133] _Gleanings_, vii. p. 100, 1868.
[134] _Rosamund Gray_, chap. xi.
[135] Mr. Gladstone's rendering of the speech of Piccarda (_Paradiso_,
iii. 70) is in the volume of collected translations (p. 165), under the
date of 1835:
'In His Will is our peace. To this all things
By Him created, or by Nature made,
As to a central Sea, self-motion brings.'
[136] _Gleanings_, ii. p. 20, 1845.