I do not forget that I am in debt to the party generally for

kindness, indulgence, and confidence, much beyond what I have

deserved. Deeming myself unable to hold it together from my

present position in a manner worthy of it, I see how unlikely it

is that I should hereafter be able to give any material aid in the

adjustment of its difficulties. Yet if such aid should at any time

be generally desired with a view to arresting some great evil or

procuring for the nation some great good, my willingness to enter

into counsel for the occasion would follow from all I have said.

But always with the understanding that as between section and

section I could not become a partisan, and that such interference

even in the case of its proving useful would entail no obligation

whatever on those accepting it, and carry with it no disturbance

of any arrangement subsisting at the time.

The situation proved, as Lowe had foreseen, an anarchic experiment. Mr.

Gladstone went up to London for the session, and followed his ordinary

social course:—

_March 9, 1874._—Off at 4.45 to Windsor for the fête. We dined at

St. George’s Hall. I was presented to the Duchess of C. by the

Queen, and had a few kind words from H.M. 11.—Archbishop Manning,

9-11. It is kind in him to come, but most of it is rather hollow

work, limited as we are. 16.—Dined at Marlborough House. A civil

talk with Disraeli. 20.—Finished _Vivian Grey_. The first quarter

extremely clever, the rest trash.

_May 15._—Emperor of Russia’s reception at 3.15. He thanked me for

my conduct to Russia while I was minister. I assured his Majesty I

had watched with profound interest the transactions of his reign,

and the great benefits he had conferred upon his people. He hoped

the relations of the two countries would always be good.... Dined

at Marlborough House. Stafford House ball afterwards. The emperor

complained of the burden and late hours of evening entertainments.

Princess of Wales so nice about her picture. D[israeli] complained

of my absence, said they could not get on without me. 20.—Dined at

the F.O. to meet the emperor. It was very kind of Derby. Much work

at Hawarden in arranging books and papers.

The House of Commons is hardly attractive to an irregular and perfunctory

attendant; and Mr. Gladstone’s thoughts all turned to other fields. To

Mrs. Gladstone he wrote early in April:—

The anti-parliamentary reaction has been stronger with me even

than I anticipated. I am as far as possible from feeling the want

of the House of Commons. I could cheerfully go there to do a work;

but I hope and pray to be as little there as possible, except for

such an aim. In London I think we were too much hustled to speak

leisurely or effectually of the future. It will open for us by

degrees. I shall be glad when the matter of money, after all a

secondary one, is disentangled, but chiefly because it seems to

put pressure upon you. I spoke to Stephen about these matters on

Saturday; he was kind, reasonable, and in all ways as satisfactory

as possible. There is one thing I should like you to understand

clearly as to my view of things, for it is an essential part of

that view. I am convinced that the welfare of mankind does not now

depend on the state or the world of politics; the real battle is

being fought in the world of thought, where a deadly attack is

made with great tenacity of purpose and over a wide field, upon

the greatest treasure of mankind, the belief in God and the gospel

of Christ.

In June Sir Stephen Glynne died,—“a dark, dark day.” “My brother-in-law,”

wrote Mr. Gladstone at a later date, “was a man of singular refinement and

as remarkable modesty. His culture was high and his character one of deep

interest. His memory was on the whole decidedly the most remarkable known

to me of the generation and country. His life, however, was retired and

unobtrusive; but he sat in parliament, I think, for about fifteen years,

and was lord-lieutenant of his county.”

I thank you much—Mr. Gladstone said to the Duke of Argyll—for your

kind note. Your sympathy and that of the duchess are ever ready.

But even you can hardly tell how it is on this occasion needed and

warranted. My wife has lost the last member of a family united by

bonds of the rarest tenderness, the last representative of his

line, the best of brothers, who had ever drawn closer to her as

the little rank was thinned. As for me, no one can know what our

personal relations were, without knowing the interior details of a

long family history, and efforts and struggles in common carried

on through a long series of years, which riveted into the closest

union our original affection. He was a very rare man, but we

grieve not for him; he sleeps the sleep of the just. The event is

a great one also to the outward frame of our life here.(310)

(M159) In the same letter he says it is most painful to him to be dragged

into ecclesiastical turmoil, as for example by the Scotch patronage bill,

which he considers precipitate, unwise, and daring, or the bill directed

against the endowed schools commissioners, of whom his brother-in-law,

Lord Lyttelton, was one. In the last case he acted as a leader of an

organised party, but in the more important instance of a bill devised, as

Mr. Disraeli said, to put down ritualism, his dissent from most of those

around him fulfilled all the anticipations that had pointed to retirement.

The House was heartily in favour of the bill, and what is called the

country earnestly supported it, though in the cabinet itself at least four

ministers were strenuously hostile. Mr. Gladstone writes to his wife a

trenchant account of his vigorous dealing with a prominent colleague who

had rashly ventured to mark him for assault. He sent word to the two

archbishops that if they carried a certain amendment he should hold

himself “altogether discharged from maintaining any longer the

establishment of the church.” He wrote to Lord Harrowby when the recess

came:—

I think, or rather I am convinced, that the effect _either_ of one

or two more ecclesiastical sessions of parliament such as the

last, or of any prolonged series of contentious proceedings under

the recent Act, upon subjects of widespread interest, will be to

disestablish the church. I do not feel the dread of

disestablishment which you may probably entertain: but I desire

and seek so long as standing ground remains, to avert, not to

precipitate it.

To another correspondent—

Individually I have serious doubts whether the whole of the penal

proceedings taken in this country with respect to church matters

from the day of Dr. Hampden downwards, have not done considerably

more harm than good. There is no doubt at all that all the evils,

of whatever kind, at which they were aimed, exist at this moment

among us in a far more aggravated shape than when they began....

My object and desire has ever been and still is, to keep the

church of England together, both as a church and as an

establishment. As a church, I believe she is strong enough, by

virtue of the prayer-book, to hold together under all

circumstances; but as an establishment, in my opinion, she is not

strong enough to bear either serious secession or prolonged

parliamentary agitation.

Finally, in a letter dated from Whittinghame (Nov. 17)—

There are already too many causes of demoralisation operating upon

the House of Commons. If it is also to become a debased copy of an

ecclesiastical council, all the worst men and worst qualities of

the worst men will come to the front, and the place will become

intolerable.

Even any member of parliament who shares none of Mr. Gladstone’s theology,

may sympathise to the full with his deep disgust at theologic and

ecclesiastical discussions as conducted in that secular air. We can easily

understand how detestable he found it, and how those discussions fortified

his sense of estrangement from the ruling sentiments of the parliamentary

party of which he was still the titular leader.

Of course the whigs, always for keeping a parliamentary church in its

proper place, disliked his line. Liberals like Thirlwall read his speeches

“with great pain and suspicion,” and declared their confidence to be

shaken. Hardly any section was completely satisfied. His mind in the

autumn and winter of 1874 was absorbed, as we shall see within a few

pages, in an assault upon the decrees of the Vatican Council of 1870. This

assault, as he told Lord Granville (Dec. 7, 1874), while tending “to

hearten” the party generally, was against his resumption of formal

leadership, because it widened the breach with the Irishmen in the House

of Commons. Apart from this there were many questions, each with a group

of adherents to a special view, but incapable of being pursued by common

and united action. He ran through the list in writing to Lord Granville.

It has historic interest:—

1. Extension of the suffrage, with redistribution of seats abreast

or in the rear. 2. Disestablishment in Scotland, England. 3. Land

laws. 4. Retrenchment. 5. Colonial policy, territorial extension

of the empire. 6. Reform of local government taxation. 7. Secular

education. 8. Undenominational education. 9. Irish affairs. On no

one of these is there known to exist a plan desired by the entire

party, or by any clear and decisive majority of it.

On the whole, he was persuaded that neither the party generally nor the

country desired another period of active reforms, even if he were fit to

conduct them. Besides this he confessed his “apprehension that differences

would spring up, and great shrinking from any breach with the party, and a

determination, often expressed, never, if he could help it, to lead one

branch of it against another.” In many forms he carried Lord Granville

with him round the circle of his arguments. He once sent his points on

half-a-dozen scraps of paper. Granville playfully replied, “I should like

to treat them as old Lord Bessborough used to treat his playing-cards when

luck was adverse—tear them up into small bits and toss them in the fire.”

Nothing shook him, not even Mrs. Gladstone’s misgivings. To her he wrote

from Carlton House Terrace on the eve of the session of 1875:—

Now for the grave matter about the leadership. I have had much

conversation with Granville and Cardwell, and I am going to see

Hartington, also Goschen, to-morrow. My letter is rewritten and

improved, but I am obliged to stand to my conclusion, for many

reasons. Among them the church reason is one of the most serious,

and the other the undefined and prolonged character of the service

if now undertaken. This, while arguing and deprecating, they admit

I think to a great extent. Our old colleagues are inclined to come

up on Thursday if they can, and this will be rather to hear than

to debate. Hartington will succeed. I am indeed sorry that you and

I have not been able to take the same view of this important

subject, but you know that I am acting on convictions very long

entertained, and will I am sure believe that I have probed myself

deeply, and used all the means in my power to get at a right

conclusion. Nay, I think you will be more reconciled, when I tell

you that Granville did not really see his way either to a nominal

leadership, or to making any arrangement by which I could after a

short time with some certainty have escaped. I saw Clark last

night and this morning; he gives an excellent account of me and

makes it impossible for me to plead health as my reason.

The drama went rapidly forward:—

_Jan. 12._—I find that the agreement made yesterday that I should

meet my former colleagues on Monday will require me to remain

until this day, though after a pretty busy morning the pressure is

less. I have, however, to preside in the evening at the meeting of

the Metaphysical Society, and to listen, though I hope nothing

more, to a tough discussion. Manning, I am sorry to say, will be

there. His pamphlet is at length going to press, and will extend

he says to 150 pages. Newman is not out yet.

_11 Carlton House Terrace, Jan. 14, ’75._—This great affair is

nearly arranged. My old colleagues all submit under protest; and I

shall be free. An article in the _Times_ this morning is

undisguisedly aimed at getting rid of me; but it does not express

any of their feelings. We have had a morning at Granville’s;

Halifax, Granville, Cardwell, Hartington, Aberdare, Forster,

Carlingford, Stansfeld, Selborne, Goschen, Lowe, Kimberley,—in

short all, I think, except Argyll and Bright. There was argument

and exhortation, and much kindness. My letter to Granville will be

accompanied by a short reply from him expressing difference of

opinion and regret. They are afraid of being blamed by the party

if they seem to show indifference.

The Queen thanked Mr. Gladstone for communicating to her his resolution of

retiring from the more active duties of parliamentary life. She was not

entirely unprepared for it after what he told her himself last year. “She

knows that his zeal and untiring energy have always been exerted with the

desire of advancing the welfare of the nation and maintaining the honour

of the crown, and she thanks him for his loyal assurances of support on

all occasions when it may become necessary.”

(M160) The Duke of Argyll wrote “sincerely to congratulate” him upon his

withdrawal. Bright on the other hand (Jan. 17) said he could not applaud,

yet he would not blame: Mr. Gladstone’s course seemed so unfortunate if

not disastrous to the great public interests committed to him:—

For myself, says Bright, if I could have foreseen either the

result of the election of last year, or your retirement from the

conduct of the party, I should certainly have withdrawn from

parliament, where now I seem to have quite as little of duty or of

a mission as you have. The front opposition bench is full of

discord, and when you are not there full of jealousy, and I find

myself without any particular attraction to any particular part of

the House. However, I will not complain; some door of escape may

open for me, and I can become a spectator as you are proposing to

be.

I hope on some occasion I may have the chance of seeing you when

you come to town. I have had so much pleasure in your friendship,

and have gained so much from it, that I would fain hope it need

not cease now, when our association will necessarily be less

frequent than it has been of late years. Whether you come back to

the political field or turn wholly to study and to literature, I

am sure you will be usefully employed, and I hope that nothing but

blessing may rest upon all your labours.

The feeling among liberals in the country was of deep dismay. Some of the

whigs doubtless found solace in the anticipation that a new middle party

might be formed, with “a recovery of the old liberal position demolished

for the time by John Mill, Gladstone, and Cobden.”(311) But this was

limited to a narrow circle. “All sunshine is gone out of politics,” was a

general phrase. The news was compared by one correspondent to Gelon’s

message to the Greeks, that the spring was taken out of their year.(312)

An organ of the stiff nonconformists said,(313) “Against his government we

felt that we had a great grievance; for himself, the nonconformists of

this country have long cherished a loyalty more fervent, we are inclined

to imagine, than that with which he has been regarded by any other section

of the community. He, beyond all other modern statesmen, with perhaps here

and there a doubtful exception, gave us the impression of a man who

regarded politics as a part of Christian duty.” And the same writers most

truly added, “We do not know what the English people have done for Mr.

Gladstone that can be compared for a moment with what Mr. Gladstone has

done for them. Claims on him we have none. He has far more than discharged

any debt that he could have owed to the nation.” These words are a just

remonstrance against the somewhat tyrannical conventions of English public

life.

When the session began, he wrote to Mrs. Gladstone (Feb. 15): “I came down

to the House and took my seat nearly in the same spot as last year,

finding Bright my neighbour, with which I was very well pleased. Granville

and Hartington both much preferred my continuing _on_ the front bench to

my going elsewhere.” Lord Hartington, strongly encouraged against his own

inclinations by Mr. Gladstone, accepted a thankless and unpromising post,

and held it with honour and credit for five difficult years to come.

Chapter II. Vaticanism. (1874-1875)

Let no susceptibilities, puritan, protestant, anglican, or other,

be startled if we observe that Rome is, and may long be, in some

important respects, the centre of the Christian world. It is

indeed a centre which repels as well as attracts; which probably

repels even more than it attracts; but which, whether repelling or

attracting, influences.—-GLADSTONE (1875).

I

One question, as the reader by this time well knows, living deepest in Mr.

Gladstone’s heart and mind from his first book in 1838 onwards, was the

relation of the churches to modern society. English statesmen are wont to

be either blind to the existence of such a question, or else they seek an

easy refuge from it in a perfunctory erastianism, sometimes intellectually

refined, sometimes a little brutish, but always shallow. In all the three

great branches of Christianity, the Latin, the Greek or orthodox, the

protestant, Mr. Gladstone’s interest was incessant, sincere, and profound.

It covered their theology, their organisation, their history and

principles of growth, the bearings of their system upon individual

character and social well-being all over Europe. He was one of the very

few public men capable of discerning that the fall of the temporal power

of the pope marked a more startling change and a profounder crisis in

human history, than the unification of Italy, the unification of Germany,

the reconstructed republic in France, perhaps even than the preservation

of the American union. He knew the force of ideas in the world; he

realised the vast transformations that had in their succession swept over

the minds of men since cardinal dogmas had been established; he

comprehended the motion in articles of faith, as men made their “voyagings

through strange seas of thought”; he was alive to the fact that moral

crises brought on by change in intellectual outlook and temperature, are

of deeper concern than questions of territory, or dynasty, or form of

government. The moral crisis is what reaches furthest and matters most. A

movement of the first magnitude was accentuated by Pius IX., when by the

Syllabus of 1864 he challenged modern society in all its foundations, its

aims, its principles, in the whole range of its ideals. Some called this

daring ultimatum the gravest event since the French uprising in 1789. The

Syllabus prepared the way for a more elaborately organised operation on

behalf of papal authority. The train was secretly laid for a grand

reaction, a grand re-installation of the Christian faith.(314)

(M161) The pope had been despoiled of territory, his sway within the walls

of Rome itself was in constant danger, his most powerful protector north

of the Alps had been weakened and humiliated by protestant Prussia. He was

now to be compensated for his calamities by a majestic demonstration of

his hold upon the spiritual allegiance of millions of adherents in every

portion of the habitable globe. The twentieth ecumenical council assembled

in St. Peter’s at Rome on December 8, 1869. In this gathering of catholic

prelates from both hemispheres, two antagonistic schools confronted one

another. The ultramontanes held that the revolutionary welter and

confusion of the modern world could only be healed by solemn affirmation

of the principle of sovereign authority lodged in an infallible pope, with

absolute power to define by that apostolic authority what ought to be held

as articles of faith or morals. The assumptions, the standards, the ruling

types of the modern age, they boldly encountered with rigid iteration of

maxims of old time, imposing obedience and submission to a fixed social

order and a divinely commissioned hierarchy. Inflexibility was to be the

single watchword by which the church could recover a world that, from

Naples even to Mexico, seemed to be rapidly drifting away from her. The

opposing school took other ground. Perhaps they saw that supremacy is one

thing, and infallibility another thing quite different. The liberal

catholics did not contest the dogma of papal infallibility; they

questioned the expediency of its proclamation; they were for associating

ideas of religion with ideas of liberty; they were not for extending the

domain of miracle and the supernatural.

Then as in the old historic councils, influence of race and nation had

decisive effects. It could not be otherwise in what was in essence a

conflict between a centralised doctrinal authority on the one hand, and

the inextinguishable tendency towards national churches on the other. The

Italian bishops went with the pope. The Germans, as of old they had been

for emperor against priest, were now on the side of freedom against what

certain of them did not hesitate to call tyranny and fraud. Some of the

ablest of the French were true to Gallican tradition and resisted the

decree. Among the most active and uncompromising of all the ultramontane

party was our English Manning.(315)

II

At the end of November 1869, Acton had written to Mr. Gladstone from Rome.

“Your letter is a very sad one,” Mr. Gladstone answered. “I feel as deep

and real an interest in the affairs of other Christian communions as in my

own; and most of all in the case of the most famous of them all, and the

one within which the largest number of Christian souls find their

spiritual food.” Before Manning left for Rome, an amiable correspondence

took place between Mr. Gladstone and him. “How sad it is for us both”—this

was Mr. Gladstone’s starting-point—“considering our personal relations,

that we should now be in this predicament, that the things which the one

looks to as the salvation of faith and church, the other regards as their

destruction.”

To Mr. Odo Russell, now the informal agent of the British government in

Rome, the prime minister wrote:—

It is curious that Manning has so greatly changed his character.

When he was archdeacon with us, all his strength was thought to

lie in a governing faculty, and in its wise moderation. Now he is

ever quoted as the _ultra_ of ultras, and he seems greatly to have

overshot his mark. The odds seem to be that the child yet unborn

will rue the calling of this council. For if the best result

arrive in the triumph of the fallibilitarians, will not even this

be a considerable shock to the credit and working efficacy of the

papal system? You must really be _all_ eyes and ears, a very Argus

in both organs, until the occasion has gone by.

As for the issue of the council, Acton, having Mr. Odo Russell in

agreement with him, from the first conveyed to Mr. Gladstone his opinion

that the pope would prevail.

The only hope in my mind, said Mr. Gladstone in reply, is that

there may be a real minority, and that it may speak plainly. A few

bold men would easily insure themselves a noble immortality. But

will _any_ have the courage? The Italian government have one and

only one method in their hands of fighting the pope: and that is

to run, against nomination from Rome, the old and more popular

methods of choosing bishops by clerical election, with the

_approbation of the flock_.(316) Unless they resort to this they

can do nothing.

All the accounts from Rome, he tells Lacaita (Jan. 2, 1870), are

as bad as possible. For the first time in my life, I shall now be

obliged to talk about popery; for it would be a scandal to call

the religion they are manufacturing at Rome by the same name as

that of Pascal, or of Bossuet, or of Ganganelli. The truth is that

ultramontanism is an anti-social power, and never has it more

undisguisedly assumed that character than in the Syllabus.

(M162) The French government wrote despatches of mild protest but said

nothing of withdrawing their garrison. Mr. Gladstone and Lord Clarendon

were for informing the Roman court that they were cognizant of the French

despatches, and approved of their tenour. The Queen and the cabinet,

however, were entirely averse to meddling with the council, and nothing

was done officially. This did not prevent Mr. Gladstone from telling

Archbishop Manning what impediments would be placed in the way of Irish

legislation by the state of English feeling as to the Syllabus and other

papal proceedings. “_My_ feelings and convictions,” he says (April 16),

“are as you well know decidedly with your ‘opposition,’ which I believe to

be contending for the religious and civil interests of mankind against

influences highly disastrous and menacing to both. But the prevailing

opinion is that it is better to let those influences take their course,

and work out the damage which they will naturally and surely entail upon

the see of Rome and upon what is bound to it.” In parliament there was an

utter aversion to the Roman policy, and he gives instances, noting even a

change of opinion about the Irish land bill. “What I have described is no

matter of speculation. I know it by actual and daily touch. I am glad you

have moved me to state it in some detail. It is to me matter of profound

grief, especially as regards land in Ireland.”

To Lord Acton:—

Of all the prelates at Rome, none have a finer opportunity, to

none is a more crucial test now applied, than to those of the

United States. For if there, where there is nothing of covenant,

of restraint, or of equivalent between the church and the state,

the propositions of the Syllabus are still to have the countenance

of the episcopate, it becomes really a little difficult to

maintain in argument the civil rights of such persons to

toleration, however conclusive be the argument of policy in favour

of granting it. I can hardly bring myself to speculate or care on

what particular day the foregone conclusion is to be finally

adopted. My grief is sincere and deep, but it is at the whole

thing, so ruinous in its consequences as they concern faith. In my

view, the size of the minority, though important, is not nearly so

important as the question whether there will be a minority at all.

There was a minority. In a division taken at a late stage, 451 composed

the majority, 88 resisted, and 62 were for a new examination. Then the

minority turned their backs on Rome; and on July 18 the definition of

infallibility was acclaimed in St. Peter’s in presence of the pope by 533

against 2.

Mr. Gladstone is very glad when Clarendon instructs Mr. Russell to turn

his back on the festivities at Rome. “The whole proceeding has been

monstrous, and it will hereafter become one of the laughing-stocks of

history. The fanaticism of the middle ages is really sober compared with

that of the nineteenth century.” “The proclamation of Infallibility,” he

said to Bishop Moriarty, “I must own I look upon as the most portentous

(taking them singly), of all events in the history of the Christian

church.”

III

The next day, as we know, war was declared by France against Germany, the

French garrison left Rome, and on September 20 the Italians marched in.

A month before the war broke out, Mr. Gladstone wrote to Lord Clarendon:

“I would avoid any official support of the Italian application to France

for the evacuation of Rome, by saying that this country had always

abstained from mixing in that question; and that we were the more induced

to persevere in that policy from being well convinced that the French

government is perfectly aware that in this country the occupation of any

part of the pontifical territories by French troops is regarded with

regret, pain, and disapproval. Further, that those who most strongly

entertain these sentiments, are generally the persons who most highly

value, and have most striven to promote, the good understanding between

France and England.”

The occupation of Rome by the Italian government brought upon Mr.

Gladstone various demands and movements from different parts of the

country. His cabinet agreed that the proper course was to decline all

interference with a view to the restoration of the temporal power, though

they accepted the task of promoting, by means of friendly representations,

arrangements to secure the pontiff’s freedom and becoming support. Then

some of his presbyterian friends asked him why he should even do so much

as this, when he would take no such steps for the moderator of the free

church. Now consider, Mr. Gladstone replied: “the pope is a sovereign who

was in lawful possession of large revenues, and who had charged himself

with the support of a body of cardinals, ministers, nuncios, servants, and

guards out of those revenues. He has been dispossessed, not for any fault

of his own, but because clerical dominion was deemed intolerable. In the

maintenance of the pope and his court, followers and agents, six millions

of our fellow-subjects or thereabouts are deeply interested; and they are

making demands upon us which we are forced to decline. But I should for

one be ashamed to deny that there are the strongest equitable claims upon

the Italian government growing out of the past state of things; that in

these equitable claims the six millions I speak of have a real interest

and share; and as the matter is international, and they have no _locus

standi_ with the Italian government, it is our part so far to plead their

cause if need be.”

IV

(M163) Four years elapsed before Mr. Gladstone was in a position to follow

up his strong opinions on the injury done, as he believed, to human

liberty by the Vatican decrees. But the great debate between ultramontanes

and old catholics was followed by him with an interest that never

slackened. In September 1874 he went to Munich, and we can hardly be wrong

in ascribing to that visit the famous tract which was to make so lively a

stir before the end of the year. His principal object was to communicate

with Dr. Döllinger, and this object, he tells Mrs. Gladstone, was fully

gained. “I think,” he says, “I have spent two-thirds of my whole time with

Dr. Döllinger, who is indeed a most remarkable man, and it makes my blood

run cold to think of _his_ being excommunicated in his venerable but,

thank God, hale and strong old age. In conversation we have covered a wide

field. I know no one with whose mode of viewing and handling religious

matters I more cordially agree.... He is wonderful, and simple as a

child.”

“I think it was in 1874,” Döllinger afterwards mentioned, “that I remember

Gladstone’s paying me a visit at six o’clock in the evening. We began

talking on political and theological subjects, and became, both of us, so

engrossed with the conversation, that it was two o’clock at night when I

left the room to fetch a book from my library bearing on the matter in

hand. I returned with it in a few minutes, and found him deep in a volume

he had drawn out of his pocket—true to his principle of never losing

time—during my momentary absence.”(317) “In the course of a walk out of

Munich in the travelling season of 1874,” Mr. Gladstone wrote sixteen

years later, “Dr. Döllinger told me that he was engaged in the work of

retrial through the whole circle of his Latin teaching and knowledge. The

results were tested in his proceedings at Bonn, when he attempted to

establish a _formula concordiae_ upon the questions which most gravely

divided Christendom.”(318) Among other topics Mr. Gladstone commended to

his mentor the idea of a republication in a series, of the best works of

those whom he would call the Henotic or Eirenic writers on the differences

that separate Christians and churches from one another. He also read

Pichler on the theology of Leibnitz, not without suspicion that it was

rather Pichler than Leibnitz. But neither Leibnitz nor Pichler was really

in his mind.

After the session of 1874, when the public ear and mind had been possessed

by the word Ritualism, he had as usual sought a vent in a magazine article

for the thoughts with which he was teeming.(319) He speaks with some

disdain of the question whether a handful of the clergy are or are not

engaged in “an utterly hopeless and visionary effort to Romanise the

church and people of England.” At no time, he says, since the sanguinary

reign of Mary has such a scheme been possible. Least of all, he proceeds,

could the scheme have life in it “when Rome has substituted for the proud

boast of _semper eadem_ a policy of violence and change in faith; when she

has refurbished and paraded anew every rusty tool she was fondly thought

to have disused; when no one can become her convert, without renouncing

his moral and mental freedom, and placing his civil loyalty and duty at

the mercy of another; and when she has equally repudiated modern thought

and ancient history.” If these strong words expressed his state of mind

before he went abroad, we may readily imagine how the Bavarian air would

fan the flame.

Though Dr. Döllinger himself—“so inaccessible to religious passions”—was

not aware of the purpose of his English friend, there can be little doubt

that Mr. Gladstone returned from Munich with the same degree of internal

ferment as that which had possessed his mind on his return from Naples

three-and-twenty years before. In October he writes to Lord Acton from

Hawarden:—

What you have said on the subject of ultramontanism and of the

mode in which it should be handled, appears to me to be as wise

and as good as is possible. It is really a case for hitting hard,

but for hitting the right men. In anything I say or do on the

subject, I would wish heartily and simply to conform to the spirit

of your words. But I feel myself drawn onwards. Indeed some of

your words help to draw me. The question with me now is whether I

shall or shall not publish a tract which I have written, and of

which the title would probably be, “The Vatican Decrees in their

bearing on Civil Allegiance: a Political Expostulation.” I incline

to think that I ought to publish it. If it were in your power and

will to run over here for a night or two I should seek to profit

by your counsel, and should ask you to read as much of the MS. as

your patience would endure. A more substantial attraction would be

that I could go over much of my long and interesting conversations

with Döllinger.

V

(M164) The pamphlet(320) appeared in November, and was meant for an

argument that the decree of infallibility aimed a deadly blow at the old

historic, scientific, and moderate school; it was a degradation of the

episcopal order; it carried to its furthest point that spirit of

absolutist centralisation, which in its excesses is as fatal to vigorous

life in the church, as in the state; it overthrew the principle not even

denied by the council of Trent in the sixteenth century, that the pope and

his judgments were triable by the assembled representatives of the

Christian world.

Thrice in history it seemed as if the constitutional party in the church

was about to triumph: at the council of Constance in the fifteenth

century; in the conflict between the French episcopate and Innocent XI. in

the days of Bossuet; and thirdly, when Clement XIV., exactly a hundred

years before now, dealt with the Jesuits and “levelled in the dust the

deadliest foes that mental and moral liberty have ever known.” From July

1870 all this had passed away, and the constitutional party had seen its

death-warrant signed and sealed. The “myrmidons of the apostolic chamber”

had committed their church to revolutionary measures. The vast new claims

were lodged in the reign of a pontiff, who by the dark Syllabus of 1864

had condemned free speech, a free press, liberty of conscience, toleration

of nonconformity, the free study of civil and philosophic things

independently of church authority, marriage unless sacramentally

contracted, and all definition by the state of the civil rights of the

church.

(M165) “It has been a favourite purpose of my life,” Mr. Gladstone said,

“not to conjure up, but to conjure down, public alarms. I am not now going

to pretend that either foreign foe or domestic treason can, at the bidding

of the court of Rome, disturb these peaceful shores. But although such

fears may be visionary, it is more visionary still to suppose for one

moment that the claims of Gregory VII., of Innocent III., and of Boniface

VIII. have been disinterred in the nineteenth century, like hideous

mummies picked out of Egyptian sarcophagi, in the interests of archæology,

or without a definite and practical aim.” What, then, was the clear and

foregone purpose behind the parade of all these astonishing reassertions?

The first was—by claims to infallibility in creed, to the prerogative of

miracles, to dominion over the unseen world—to satisfy spiritual

appetites, sharpened into reaction and made morbid by “the levity of the

destructive speculations so widely current, and the notable hardihood of

the anti-Christian writing of the day.” This alone, however, would not

explain the deliberate provocation of all the “risks of so daring a raid

upon the civil sphere.” The answer was to be found in the favourite

design, hardly a secret design, of restoring by the road of force when any

favourable opportunity should arise, and of re-erecting, the terrestrial

throne of the popedom, “even if it could only be re-erected on the ashes

of the city, and amidst the whitening bones of the people.”

And this brings the writer to the immediate practical aspects of his

tract. “If the baleful power which is expressed by the phrase _Curia

Romana_, and not at all adequately rendered in its historic force by the

usual English equivalent ‘Court of Rome,’ really entertains the scheme, it

doubtless counts on the support in every country of an organised and

devoted party; which, when it can command the scales of political power,

will promote interference, and while it is in a minority, will work for

securing neutrality. As the peace of Europe may be in jeopardy, and as the

duties even of England, as one of its constabulary authorities, might come

to be in question, it would be most interesting to know the mental

attitude of our Roman catholic fellow-countrymen in England and Ireland

with reference to the subject; and it seems to be one on which we are

entitled to solicit information.” Too commonly the spirit of the convert

was to be expressed by the notorious words, “a catholic first, an

Englishman afterwards”—words that properly convey no more than a truism,

“for every Christian must seek to place his religion even before his

country in his inner heart; but very far from a truism in the sense in

which we have been led to construe them.” This, indeed, was a new and very

real “papal aggression.” For himself, Mr. Gladstone said, it should not

shake his allegiance to “the rule of maintaining equal civil rights

irrespectively of religious differences.” Had he not given conclusive

indications of that view, by supporting in parliament as a minister since

the council, the repeal in 1871 of the law against ecclesiastical titles,

whose enactment he had opposed twenty years before?

That the pamphlet should create intense excitement, was inevitable from

the place of the writer in the public eye, from the extraordinary

vehemence of the attack, and above all from the unquenchable fascination

of the topic. Whether the excitement in the country was more than

superficial; whether most readers fathomed the deep issues as they stood,

not between catholic and protestant, but between catholic and catholic

within the fold; whether in fastening upon the civil allegiance of English

Romanists Mr. Gladstone took the true point against Vaticanism—these are

questions that we need not here discuss. The central proposition made a

cruel dilemma for a large class of the subjects of the Queen; for the

choice assigned to them by assuming stringent logic was between being bad

citizens if they submitted to the decree of papal infallibility, and bad

catholics if they did not. Protestant logicians wrote to Mr. Gladstone

that if his contention were good, we ought now to repeal catholic

emancipation and again clap on the fetters. Syllogisms in action are but

stupid things after all, unless they are checked by a tincture of what

seems paradox.(321) Apart from the particular issue in his Vatican

pamphlet, Mr. Gladstone believed himself to be but following his own main

track in life and thought in his assault upon “a policy which declines to

acknowledge the high place assigned to liberty in the counsels of

Providence, and which upon the pretext of the abuse that like every other

good she suffers, expels her from its system.”

Among the names that he was never willing to discuss with me—Machiavelli,

for instance—was Joseph de Maistre, the hardiest, most adventurous, most

ingenious, and incisive of all the speculative champions of European

reaction.(322) In the pages of de Maistre he might have found the reasoned

base on which the ultramontane creed may be supposed to rest. He would

have found liberty depicted less as a blessing than a scourge; even

Bossuet denounced as a heretic with dubious chances of salvation, for his

struggle on behalf of a national church against Roman centralisation; the

old Greeks held up to odium as a race of talkers, frivolous, light, and

born incorrigible dividers. In dealing with de Maistre, Mr. Gladstone

would have had a foeman worthier of his powerful steel than the authors of

the Syllabus, Schema, Postulatum, and all the rest of what he called the

Vaticanism of 1870. But here, as always, he was man of action, and wrote

for a specific though perhaps a fugitive purpose.

VI

(M166) At the end of the year the total number printed of the tract was

145,000, and of these 120,000 were in a people’s edition. “My pamphlet,”

he tells Lacaita, “has brought upon me such a mass of work as I can hardly

cope with, and I am compelled to do all things as succinctly as possible,

though my work is with little intermission from morning till night. I

agree with you that the pamphlet in the main tells its own story; and I am

glad there is no need to select in a hurry some one to write on the

difference between papism and Catholicism.... There is no doubt that the

discussion opens, _i.e._ makes a breach in the walls of the papal

theology, and it ought to be turned to account. But I shall have enough to

do with all my hands, if I am to work properly through the task I have

undertaken. Not, I trust, for long, for I think another pamphlet should

suffice to end it on my side. But I am vexed that Manning (as if he had

been pulled up at Rome), after having announced his formal reply six weeks

ago, hangs fire and now talks of delaying it.” The result, he assures Lord

Granville (Nov. 25), “must be injurious to the pestilent opinions that

have so grievously obtained the upper hand in that church, and to the

party which _means_ to have a war in Europe for the restoration of the

temporal power. To place impediments in their way has been my principal

purpose.”

He told Acton (Dec. 18), “When you were putting in caveats and warnings,

you did not say to me, ‘Now mind, this affair will absorb some, perhaps

many, months of your life.’ It has been so up to the present moment, and

it evidently will be so for some time.” With Acton he carried on elaborate

correspondence upon some of the questions raised by the Syllabus, notably

on the effect of the pope’s disciplinary judgment on anglican marriages,

converting them into relations that were not marriage at all. He fears

that he has conceded too much to the papal party in not treating the

Syllabus as _ex cathedra_; in allowing that the popes had been apt to

claim dogmatic infallibility for wellnigh a thousand years; as to the

ecumenicity of the Vatican council. Among other matters he was reading

“the curious volumes of _Discorsi di Pio IX._, published at Rome, and he

might find it his duty to write collaterally upon them.” This duty he

performed with much fidelity in the _Quarterly Review_ for January 1875.

He is active in interest about translations; keen to enlist auxiliaries in

every camp and all countries; delighted with all utterances from Italy or

elsewhere that make in his direction, even noting with satisfaction that

the agnostic Huxley was warm in approval. “I pass my days and nights,” he

tells the Duke of Argyll (Dec. 19), “in the Vatican. Already the pope has

given me two months of incessant correspondence and other hard work, and

it may very well last two more. Nor is this work pleasant; but I am as far

as possible from repenting of it, as no one else to whom the public would

listen saved me the trouble. It is full of intense interest. Every post

brings a mass of general reading, writing, or both. Forty covers of one

kind or another to-day, and all my time is absorbed. But the subject is

well worth the pains.” The Italians, Lord Granville told him, “generally

approved, but were puzzled why you should have thought it necessary.”

Retorts and replies arose in swarms, including one from Manning and

another from Newman. He was accused by some of introducing a Bismarckian

_Kulturkampf_ into England, of seeking to recover his lost popularity by

pandering to no-popery, of disregarding the best interests of the country

for the sake of his own restoration to power.(323)

I have now finished reading—he said at the beginning of

February—the 20th reply to my pamphlet, They cover 1000 pages. And

I am hard at work preparing mine with a good conscience and I

think a good argument. Manning has been, I think, as civil as he

could. _Feb. 5._—All this morning I have had to spend in hunting

up one important statement of Manning’s which I am almost

convinced is a gross mis-statement.... _Feb. 6._—Manning in his

200 pages has not, I venture to say, made a single point against

me. But I shall have to show up his quotations very seriously. We

have exchanged one or two friendly notes. 8.—Worked on Vaticanism

nearly all day and (an exception to my rule) late at night.

14.—Eight hours’ work on my proof sheets. 15.—Went through Acton’s

corrections and notes on my proofs. 19.—Worked much in evening on

finishing up my tract, Dr. Döllinger’s final criticisms having

arrived. He thinks highly of the work, which he observes will cut

deeper than the former one, and be more difficult to deal with. By

midnight I had the revises ready with the corrections.

20.—Inserted one or two references and wrote “Press” on the 2nd

revises. May the power and blessing of God go with the work.

The second tract was more pungent than the first, and it gave pleasure to

an important minister abroad who had now entangled himself by Falk laws

and otherwise in a quarrel with the papacy. “I have had a letter of

thanks,” Mr. Gladstone writes to Hawarden (March 6), “from Bismarck. This

pamphlet is stouter, sharper, and cheaper than the last, but is only in

its eleventh thousand, I believe.” Among others who replied to

_Vaticanism_ was Dr. Newman; he appended a new postscript of

four-and-twenty pages to his former answer to the first of Mr. Gladstone’s

pamphlets. Its tone is courteous and argumentative—far too much so to

please the ultras who had the pope’s ear—and without the wild hitting that

Mr. Gladstone found in Manning.

Newman wrote to thank him (Jan. 17, 1875) for a letter that he described

as “forbearing and generous.” “It has been a great grief to me,” said

Newman, “to have had to write against one whose career I have followed

from first to last with so much (I may say) loyal interest and admiration.

I had known about you from others, and had looked at you with kindly

curiosity, before you came up to Christ Church, and from the time that you

were launched into public life, you have retained a hold on my thoughts

and on my gratitude by the various marks of attention which every now and

then you have shown me, when you had an opportunity, and I could not fancy

my ever standing towards you in any other relation than that which had

lasted so long. What a fate it is, that now when so memorable a career has

reached its formal termination [retirement from leadership], I should be

the man, on the very day on which it closed, to present to you amid the

many expressions of public sympathy which it elicits, a controversial

pamphlet as my offering.” But he could not help writing it, he was called

upon from such various quarters; and his conscience told him that he who

had been in great measure the cause of so many becoming catholics, had no

right to leave them in the lurch, when charges were made against them as

serious as unexpected. “I do not think,” he concluded, “I ever can be

sorry for what I have done, but I never can cease to be sorry for the

necessity of doing it.”

VII

(M167) This fierce controversial episode was enough to show that the habit

and temperament of action still followed him in the midst of all his

purposes of retreat. Withdrawal from parliamentary leadership was

accompanied by other steps, apparently all making in the same direction.

He sold the house in Carlton House Terrace, where he had passed

eight-and-twenty years of work and power and varied sociability. “I had

grown to the house,” he says (April 15), “having lived more time in it

than in any other since I was born, and mainly by reason of all that was

done in it.” To Mrs. Gladstone he wrote (Feb. 28):—

I do not wonder that you feel parting from the house will be a

blow and a pang. It is nothing less than this to me, but it must

be faced and you will face it gallantly. So much has occurred

there; and thus it is leaving not the house only but the

neighbourhood, where I have been with you for more than

thirty-five years, and altogether nearly forty. The truth is that

innocently and from special causes we have on the whole been

housed better than according to our circumstances. All along

Carlton House Terrace I think you would not find any one with less

than £20,000 a year, and most of them with, much more.

He sold his collection of china and his Wedgwood ware.(324) He despatched

his books to Hawarden. He can hardly have resolved on retirement that

should be effective and complete, or else he must have arranged to quit

the House of Commons. In his diary he entered (March 30, 1875):—

Views about the future and remaining section of my life. In

outline they are undefined but in substance definite. The main

point is this: that setting aside exceptional circumstances which

would have to provide for themselves, my prospective work is not

parliamentary. My ties will be slight to an assembly with whose

tendencies I am little in harmony at the present time; nor can I

flatter myself that what is called the public out of doors is more

sympathetic. But there is much to be done with the pen, all

bearing much on high and sacred ends, for even Homeric study as I

view it, is in this very sense of high importance; and what lies

beyond this is concerned directly with the great subject of

belief.

To Mrs. Gladstone he wrote (May 19, 1875): “I am feeling as it were my way

towards the purposes of the rest of my life. It will I dare say clear by

degrees. For the general business of the country, my ideas and temper are

thoroughly out of harmony with the ideas and temper of the day, especially

as they are represented in London.”

The movement of negation had been in full swing for a dozen years before

the force and weight of it had, amid the stress and absorption of daily

business, reached his inner mind. In May 1872, in a speech as member of

the council of King’s College—“averse from, and little used to platform

speaking,” as he described himself to Manning—he used some strong language

about those who promulgate as science what is not science and as religion

what is not religion; but he took care to sever himself from the recent

Roman decrees, which “seemed much to resemble the proclamation of a

perpetual war against the progress and the movement of the human

mind.”(325) In December 1872, he caused a marked sensation by an address

at Liverpool, in which he spoke of Strauss’s book on _New and Old

Belief_.(326) He had become a member of the metaphysical society, where

eminent representatives of every faith and of no faith discussed every

aspect of the foundations of human creeds. He was of too masculine and

energetic a cast of mind to feel mere shock as he listened to Huxley,

Tyndall, Clifford, Harrison, firmly arguing materialism or positivism or

agnosticism or other unhistoric forms. That his whole soul was

energetically oppugnant, I need not say. His reverence for freedom never

wavered. He wrote to an editor who had criticised his Liverpool address

(Jan. 3, 1873):—

In the interest of my address, I wish to say that not a word to my

knowledge fell from me limiting the range of free inquiry, nor

have I ever supposed St. Paul to say anything so silly as “Prove

all things: but some you must not prove.” Doubtless some obscurity

of mine, I know not what, has led to an error into which the able

writer of the article has fallen, not alone.

To the Duke of Argyll he wrote:—

_Dec. 28, ’72._—I have been touching upon deep and dangerous

subjects at Liverpool. Whether I went beyond my province many may

doubt. But of the extent of the mischief I do not doubt any more

than of its virulence. All that I hear from day to day convinces

me of the extension of this strange epidemic, for it is not,

considering how it comes, worthy of being called a rational or

scientific process. Be it however, what it may, we politicians are

children playing with toys in comparison to that great work of and

for manhood, which has to be done, and will yet be done, in

restoring belief.

Sir Robert Morier sent him from Munich Frohschammer’s reply to Strauss.

“If I understand him aright,” said Mr. Gladstone, “he is a Unitarian,

minus Miracle and Inspiration.” The whole book seemed to him able, honest,

and diligent:—

But, he adds, I am one of those who think the Christianity of

Frohschammer (as I have described it) is like a tall tree

scientifically prepared for the saw by the preliminary process,

well known to wood-cutters, of clearing away with the axe all

projecting roots, which as long as they remained rendered the

final operation impossible. This first process leaves the tree

standing in a very trim condition, much more mathematical in form,

as it is more near a cylinder, than in its native state. The

business of the saw, when the horse and the man arrive, is soon

accomplished.

To his article on ritualism he prefixed as motto two short lines of

Pindar, about days that are to come being wisest witnesses.(327) In spite

of retreat, it was impossible that he should forget the vast

responsibility imposed upon him, both by his gifts and by the popular

ascendency into which they had brought him. His was not the retreat of

self-indulgence, and the days that were to come speedily brought him

duties that were to bear him far into regions of storm and conflict now

unforeseen. Meanwhile, with occasional visits to Westminster, he lived

even and industrious days at Hawarden, felling trees, working at Greek

mythology and ethnology, delighting in the woods and glades of the park,

above all delighting in the tranquillity of his “temple of peace.” Besides

being the bookroom of a student, this was still a far-shining beacon in

the popular eye. If sages, scholars, heroes, saints, with time’s serene

and hallowed gravity looked upon him from their shelves, yet loud echoes

sounded in his ear from roaring surges of an outer world—from turbid ebb

and flow of all the struggle and clamorous hopes and half-blind mysterious

instincts of the nations.

Chapter III. The Octagon.

It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is

easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he

who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the

independence of solitude.—EMERSON.

Near the end of the eighties, Mr. Gladstone built for himself a fire-proof

room at the north-western corner of his temple of peace. In this

Octagon—“a necessity of my profession and history”—he stored the letters

and papers of his crowded lifetime. He estimated the “selected letters”

addressed to himself at sixty thousand, and the mass of other letters that

found their way into the Octagon without selection, along with more than a

score of large folios containing copies of his own to other people, run to

several tens of thousands more. There are between five and six hundred

holographs from the Queen, afterward designated by him in his will to be

an heirloom. “It may amuse you,” he told Lord Granville, who always wrote

the shortest letters that ever were known, “to learn that your letters to

me weigh fifteen pounds and a-half.” Probably no single human being ever

received sixty thousand letters worth keeping, and of these it is safe to

say that three-fourths of them might as well have been destroyed as soon

as read, including a certain portion that might just as well never have

been either written or read. This slightly improvident thrift recalls the

jealous persons who will not suffer the British Museum to burn its

rubbish, on the curious principle that what was never worth producing must

always be worth preserving.

(M168) As for Mr. Gladstone’s own share, he explains his case in what he

says (1865) to the widow of Mr. Cobden: “Of the kind of correspondence

properly called private and personal, I have none: indeed for many long

long years it has been out of my power, except in very few instances, to

keep up this kind of correspondence.” The exceptions are few indeed. Half

of the contents of this crowded little chamber are papers of

business,—nightly letters to the Queen, telling her what had gone on in

the House and what sort of figure had been cut by its debaters, reports of

meetings of the cabinet, memoranda for such meetings, notes for speeches,

endless correspondence with colleagues, and all the other operations

incident to the laborious machinery of government in the charge of a

master engineer. In this region of his true calling, all is order,

precision, persistency, and the firmness and ease of the strong. For many

years in that department all was action, strength, success. Church leaders

again contribute considerable piles, but these, too, mainly concern church

business for the hour, and the business has now even for adherents

naturally fallen out of memory. The more miscellaneous papers are

different. There a long and strange procession flits before our

eye—dreams, “little bustling passions,” trivialities, floating like a

myriad motes into the dim Octagon. We are reminded how vast a space in our

ever-dwindling days is consumed by social invitations and the discovery of

polite reasons for evading them. “Bona verba” is a significant docket

prompting the secretary’s reply. It is borne in upon us how grievously the

burden of man’s lot is aggravated by slovenly dates, illegible signatures,

and forgetfulness that writing is something meant to be read. There is a

mountain of letters from one correspondent so mercilessly written, that

the labour of decyphering them would hardly be justified, even if one

could hope to recover traces of the second decade of Livy or the missing

books of the _Annals_ of Tacitus. Foreign rulers, Indian potentates,

American citizens, all write to the most conspicuous Englishman of the

time. In an unformed hand a little princess thanks him for a photograph,

and says, “I am so glad to have seen you at Windsor, and will try and

remember you all my life.” There are bushels of letters whose writers “say

all that they conscientiously can” for applicants, nominees, and

candidates in every line where a minister is supposed to be able to lend a

helping hand if he likes. Actors send him boxes, queens of song press on

him lozenges infallible for the vocal cords, fine ladies dabbling in

Italian seek counsel, and not far off, what is more to the point, are

letters from young men thanking him for his generosity in aiding them to

go to Oxford with a view to taking orders. Charles Kean, a popular

tragedian of those times, and son of one more famous still, thanks Mr.

Gladstone for his speech at a complimentary dinner to him (March 1862),

and says how proud he is to remember that they were boys at Eton together.

Then there are the erudite but unfruitful correspondents, with the

melancholy docket, “_Learning thrown away_”; and charming professors of

poetry—as though the alto should insist on singing the basso

part—impressively assure him how dreadfully uneasy they are about the

weakness of our army, and how horribly low upon the security of our Indian

Empire.

(M169) Some have said that to peruse the papers of a prime minister must

lower one’s view of human nature. Perhaps this may partly depend upon the

prime minister, partly on the height of our expectations from our

fellow-creatures. If such a survey is in any degree depressing, there can

be no reason why it should be more so than any other large inspection of

human life. In the Octagon as in any similar repository we come upon

plenty of baffled hopes, chagrin in finding a career really ended, absurd

over-estimates of self, over-estimates of the good chances of the world,

vexation of those who have chosen the wrong path at the unfair good luck

of those who have chosen the right. We may smile, but surely in

good-natured sympathy, at the zeal of poor ladies for a post for husbands

of unrecognised merit, or at the importunity of younger sons with large

families but inadequate means. Harmless things of this sort need not turn

us into satirists or cynics.

All the riddles of the great public world are there—why one man becomes

prime minister, while another who ran him close at school and college ends

with a pension from the civil list; why the same stable and same pedigree

produce a Derby winner and the poor cab-hack; why one falls back almost

from the start, while another runs famously until the corner, and then his

vaulting ambition dwindles to any place of “moderate work and decent

emolument”; how new competitors swim into the field of vision; how suns

rise and set with no return, and vanish as if they had never been suns but

only ghosts or bubbles; how in these time-worn papers, successive

generations of active men run chequered courses, group following group,

names blazing into the fame of a day, then like the spangles of a rocket

expiring. Men write accepting posts, all excitement, full of hope and

assurance of good work, and then we remember how quickly clouds came and

the office ended in failure and torment. In the next pigeon-hole just in

the same way is the radiant author’s gift of his book that after all fell

still-born. One need not be prime minister to know the eternal tale of the

vanity of human wishes, or how men move,

Thundering like ramping hosts of warrior horse

To throw that faint thin line upon the shore.(328)

Nor are things all one way. If we find Mr. Gladstone writing to the Queen

of “the excellent parliamentary opening” of this man or that, who made the

worst possible parliamentary close, there is the set-off of dull unmarked

beginnings to careers that proved brilliant or weighty. If there are a

thousand absurdities in the form of claims for place and honours and steps

in the peerage, all the way up the ladder, from a branch post-office to

the coveted blue riband of the garter, “with no infernal nonsense of merit

about it,” there are, on the other hand, not a few modest and considerate

refusals, and we who have reasonable views of human nature, may set in the

balance against a score of the begging tribe, the man of just pride who

will not exchange his earldom for a marquisate, and the honest peer who to

the proffer of the garter says, with gratitude evidently sincere, “I

regret, however, that I cannot conscientiously accept an honour which is

beyond my deserts.” Then the Octagon contains abundant material for any

student of the lessons of a parliamentary crisis, though perhaps the

student knew before how even goodish people begin to waver in great

causes, when they first seriously suspect the horrid truth that they may

not after all be in a majority. Many squibs, caricatures, and malicious

diatribes, dated in Mr. Gladstone’s own hand, find shelter. But then

compensation for faintheartedness or spite abounds in the letters of the

staunch. And these not from the party politicians merely. Mr. Gladstone

stirred different and deeper waters. The famous fighting bishop,

Phillpotts of Exeter, then drawing on towards ninety and the realms of

silence, writes to him on the Christmas Day of 1863: “A Christian

statesman is a rare object of reverence and honour. Such I entirely

believe are you. I often remember the early days of my first intercourse

with you. Your high principles gave an early dignity to your youth, and

promised the splendid earthly career which you are fulfilling. I shall not

live to witness that fulfilment.” A whole generation later, General Booth

wrote: “Throughout the world no people will pray more fervently and

believingly for your continued life and happiness than the officers and

soldiers of the salvation army.” Here is Mr. Spurgeon, the most popular

and effective of the nonconforming preachers and workers of the time,

writing:—

I felt ready to weep when you were treated with so much contumely

by your opponent in your former struggle; and yet I rejoiced that

you were educating this nation to believe in conscience and

truth.... I wish I could brush away the gadflies, but I suppose by

this time you have been stung so often that the system has become

invulnerable.... You are loved by hosts of us as intensely as you

are hated by certain of the savage party.

And when Mr. Gladstone was to visit Spurgeon’s tabernacle (Jan. 1882):—

I feel like a boy who is to preach with his father to listen to

him. I shall try not to know that you are there at all, but just

preach to my poor people the simple word which has held them by

their thousands these twenty-eight years. You do not know how

those of us regard you, who feel it a joy to live when a premier

believes in righteousness. We believe in no man’s infallibility,

but _it is restful to be sure of one man’s integrity_.

That admirable sentence marks the secret.

All the religious agitations of the time come before us. Eminent foreign

converts from the Roman church still find comfort in warning this most

unshaken of believers against “a superficial and sceptical liberalism.”

Others, again, condemned for heresy hail him as “dear and illustrious

master”—with no cordial response, we may surmise. Relying on Mr.

Gladstone’s character for human-heartedness and love of justice, people

submit to him some of the hard domestic problems then and so often forced

upon the world by the quarrels of the churches. One lady lays before him

(1879) with superabundant detail a case where guardians insisted on the

child of a mixed marriage being brought up as a protestant, against the

fervid wishes of the surviving parent, a catholic. Mr. Gladstone masters

the circumstances, forms his judgment, elaborates it in a closely argued

memorandum, and does not evade the responsibility of advising. In another

of these instances the tragedy is reversed; the horrid oppression is

perpetrated on the protestant mother by the catholic father, and here too

it is Mr. Gladstone to whom the sufferer appeals for intercession.

His correspondents have not always so much substance in them. One lady of

evangelical strain, well known in her time, writes to him about turbulence

in Ireland on the last day of 1880. The private secretary dockets: “Wishes

you a blessed new year; but goes on in a very impertinent strain

attributing your ‘inaction’ in Ireland to unprincipled colleagues, and to

want of heavenly guidance. Encloses suggestions for prayer.” In such

instances, even when the appeal came near to raving, Mr. Gladstone

whenever he thought the writer’s motives sincere, seems to have replied

with patience, and at a length very different from the pithy brevity of

the Iron Duke upon the like occasions. Sometimes we may assume that the

secretary’s phlegmatic docket sufficed, as on an epistle thus described:

“1. Sends review in —— on his book. 2. Would like you to read —— and ——

(his poems). 3. Will send you soon his prose on ——. 4. Hopes you will not

overwork yourself. 5. His children call you St. William.” Sometimes we

know not whether it is simplicity or irony that inspires the grave

politeness of his replies. He seems to be in all sincerity surprised at

the view taken by somebody “of the reluctance of public men to hold

interviews for unexplained and indefinite purposes, and their preference

for written communications.” Somebody writes a pamphlet on points of the

ministerial policy, and suggests that each member of the government might

order and distribute a competent number of copies. Mr. Gladstone

immediately indicates two serious difficulties, first that the ministers

would then make themselves responsible for the writer’s opinion in detail

no less than in mass, and second their intervention would greatly detract

from its weight. Even importunity for a subscription never makes him curt:

“I am sure you will not misconstrue me, when I beg respectfully to state

that your efforts will stand better without my personal co-operation.”

(M170) The correspondence is polyglot. In one little bundle, Cavour writes

in Italian and French; the Archbishop of Cephalonia congratulates him in

Greek on the first Irish Land bill; and in the same tongue the Archbishop

of Chios gives him a book on the union of the Armenian with the Anatolian

communion; Huber regales him with the luxury of German _cursivschrift_.

The archimandrite Myrianthes forwards him objects from the Holy Land. The

patriarch of Constantinople (1896) sends greetings and blessings, and

testifies to the bonds of fellowship between the eastern and anglican

churches undisturbed since the days of Cyril Lukaris. Dupanloup, the

famous Bishop of Orleans (1869), applauds the plan of _Juventus Mundi_,

its grandeur, its beauty, its moral elevation; and proceeds to ask how he

can procure copies of the articles on _Ecce Homo_, as to which his

curiosity has been aroused. A couple of notes (1864 and 1871) from

Garibaldi, the great revolutionist, are neighbours to letters (1851-74)

from Guizot, the great conservative. Three or four lines in French from

Garibaldi were given to Mr. Gladstone the day before leaving Cliveden and

England (April 24, 1864): “In leaving you pray accept a word of

recognition for all the kindness you have heaped upon me, and for the

generous interest you have at all times shown for the cause of my

country.—Your devoted G. GARIBALDI.” The other shorter still (1871) begs

him to do something for a French refugee. Minghetti, Ricasoli, and others

of that celebrated group commemorate his faithful and effective good will

to Italy. Daniel Manin the Venetian thanks him in admirable English for

some books, as well as for his energetic and courageous act in drawing a

perfidious king (Naples) before the bar of public opinion. Manzoni gives

to a friend a letter of introduction (1845), and with Italian warmth of

phrase expresses his lively recollection of the day on which he made Mr.

Gladstone’s acquaintance, and the admiration with which his name is

followed. Mérimée, the polished and fastidious genius, presents to him a

French consul at Corfu (1858) who in his quality of philhellene and

hellenist desires ardently to make the acquaintance of Homer’s learned and

eloquent commentator. Lesseps, whose hand gave so tremendous and

impressive a turn to forces, policies, currents of trade, promises (1870)

to keep an appointment, when he will have the double honour of being

presented to the Princess Louise by a man so universally respected for the

high services he has rendered to the Queen, to his country, and to the

progress of the world.

If the language is polyglot, the topics are encyclopædic. Bishops send him

their charges; if a divine translates a hymn, he submits it; if he hits

upon an argument on the mysteries of the faith, or the vexed themes of

theological debate, he despatches pages and pages to Hawarden, and

receives page upon page in reply. Young authors, and especially young

authoresses pestered him to review their books, though his patience and

good nature make ’pester’ seem an inapplicable word. A Scotch professor

for some reason or another copies out and forwards to him one of Goethe’s

reflections and maxims:—

How may a man attain to self-knowledge? By Contemplation?

certainly not: but by Action. Try to do your Duty and you will

find what you are fit for. But what is your Duty? The Demand of

the Hour.

As if of all men then living on our planet, Mr. Gladstone were not he to

whom such counsel was most superfluous. He replies (Oct. 9, 1880), “I feel

the immense, the overmastering power of Goethe, but with such limited

knowledge as I have of his works, I am unable to answer the question

whether he has or has not been an evil genius of humanity.”

(M171) In 1839 Spedding, the Baconian, to whom years later the prime

minister proposed that he should fill the chair of history at Cambridge,

wrote to him that John Sterling, of whom Mr. Gladstone already knew

something, was prevented by health from living in London, and so by way of

meeting his friends on his occasional visits, had proposed that certain of

them should agree to dine together cheaply once a month at some stated

place. As yet Sterling had only spoken to Carlyle, John Mill, Maurice, and

Bingham Baring. “I hope,” says Spedding, “that your devotion to the more

general interests of mankind will not prevent your assisting in this

little job.” Mr. Gladstone seems not to have assisted, though his friend

Bishop Wilberforce did, and fell into some hot water in consequence. A

veteran and proclaimed freethinker sets out to Mr. Gladstone his own

recognition of what ought to be a truism, that he is for every man being

faithful to his faith; that his aggressive denial of the inspiration of

the Bible did not prevent him from sending a copy in large type to his old

mother to read when her eyes were dim; that he respected consolations

congenial to the conscience. “I hope,” he says to Mr. Gladstone, “there is

a future life, and if so, my not being sure of it will not prevent it, and

I know of no better way of deserving it than by conscious service of

humanity. The Universe never filled me with such wonder and awe as when I

knew I could not account for it. _I admit ignorance is a privation. But to

submit not to know where knowledge is withheld, seems but one of the

sacrifices that reverence for truth imposes on us._” The same

correspondent speaks (1881) of “the noble toleration which you have

personally shown me, notwithstanding what you must think seriously

erroneous views of mine, and upon which I do not keep silence.” Mr.

Gladstone had written to him six years before (1875): “Differing from you,

I do not believe that secular motives are adequate either to propel or to

restrain the children of our race, but I earnestly desire to hear the

other side, and I appreciate the advantage of having it stated by sincere

and high-minded men.” There is a letter too from the son of another

conspicuous preacher of negation, replying to some words of Mr. Gladstone

which he took to be disparaging of his parent, and begging him, “a

lifelong idealist yourself,” to think more worthily and sympathetically of

one whom if he had known he would have appreciated and admired.

A considerable correspondence is here from the learned Bishop Stubbs

(1888) on the character of Bishop Fisher of Rochester, the fellow-sufferer

of More; on the Convocation Act of 1531 and the other Convocation Acts of

Elizabeth; on Father Walsh’s letters, and other matters of the sixteenth

century. In fact, it is safe to assume that Mr. Gladstone has always some

ecclesiastical, historical, theological controversy running alongside of

the political and party business of the day. Nobody that ever lived tried

to ride so many horses abreast. Another prelate puts a point that is worth

remembering by every English school of foreign policy. “In 1879,” writes

Bishop Creighton (Feb. 15, 1887), “when foreign affairs were much before

the public, I suggested to a publisher a series of books dealing quite

shortly and clearly with the political history and constitution of the

chief states of Europe from 1815. I designed them for popular instruction,

thinking it of great importance that people in general should know what

they were talking about, when they spoke of France or Russia.... The

result of my attempt was to convince me that our ignorance of the last

sixty years is colossal.”

Lord Stanhope has been reading (1858) the “Tusculan Questions,” and

confides to Mr. Gladstone’s sympathetic ear Cicero’s shockingly faulty

recollection of Homer,—mistaking Euryclea for Anticlea, the nurse for the

mother, and giving to Polyphemus a speech that Polyphemus never spoke. A

bishop says Macaulay told him that one of the most eloquent passages in

the English language is in Barrow’s Seventy-Fifth Sermon, on the

Nativity—“Let us consider that the Nativity doth import the completion of

many ancient promises....”(329) Letters abound and over-abound on that

most movable of topics—“the present state of the Homeric controversy.”

Scott, the lexicographer, sends him Greek epigrams on events too fugitive

to be now worth recalling—discusses Homeric points, and while not

surrendering at discretion, admits them worthy of much consideration.

There are many pages from Thirlwall, that great scholar and enlightened

man, upon points of Homeric ethnology, Homeric geography, and such

questions as whether a line in the _Iliad_ (xiv. 321) makes the mother of

Minos to be a Phœnician damsel or the daughter of Phœnix, or whether it is

possible to attach a meaning to ἐννέωρος that would represent Minos as

beginning his reign when nine years old—a thing, the grave bishop adds,

even more strange than the passion of Dante for Beatrice at the same age.

(M172) Huxley sends him titles of books on the origin of the domestic

horse; Sir Joseph Hooker supplies figures of the girth of giant trees; the

number of annual rings in a fallen stump which would seem to give it 6420

years; tells him how the wood of another was as sound after 380 years as

if just felled. Somebody else interests him in Helmholtz’s experiments on

the progression of the vibrations of the true vowel sounds. Letters pass

between him and Darwin (1879) on colours and names for colours. Darwin

suggests the question whether savages have names for shades of colours: “I

should expect that they have not, and this would be remarkable, for the

Indians of Chili and Tierra del Fuego have names for every slight

promontory and hill to a marvellous degree.” Mr. Gladstone proposes to

nominate him a trustee of the British Museum (April 1881), and Darwin

replies, “I would gladly have accepted, had my strength been sufficient

for anything like regular attendance at the meetings.” Professor Owen

thanks him for the honour of Knight of the Bath, and expresses his true

sense of the aid and encouragement that he has uniformly received from Mr.

Gladstone throughout the course of the labours from which he is now

retiring.

He corresponds with a learned French statesman, not on the insoluble

Newfoundland problem, turning so much on the nice issue whether a lobster

is a fish, and not on the vexed Egyptian question, but on the curious

prohibition of pork as an article of food—a strange contradiction between

the probable practice of the Phœnicians and that of the Jews, perpetuated

in our times through all Mussulman countries, and a prohibition not to be

explained on sanitary grounds, because to the present day Christians in

the East all indulge in pork and are none the worse for it. A young member

of parliament one night fell into conversation with him, as a branch from

the subject of the eating of bovine flesh by the Greeks, on the eating of

horseflesh, and the next day writes to mention to him that at a council in

785 with the Bishop of Ostia as president, it was decreed, “Many among you

eat horses, which is not done by any Christians in the East: avoid this;”

and he asks Mr. Gladstone whether he believed that by reason of the high

estimation in which the Greeks held the horse, they abstained from his

flesh. Mr. Gladstone (August 1889) replies that while on his guard against

speaking with confidence about the historic period, he thought he was safe

in saying that the Greeks did not eat the horse in the heroic period, and

he refers to passages in this book and the other. “It was only a

conjecture, however, on my part that the near relation of the horse to

human feeling and life may probably have been the cause that prevented the

consumption of horse-flesh.” In a further letter he refers his

correspondent to the closing part of the _Englishman in Paris_ for some

curious particulars on hippophagy. Then he seems to have interested

himself in a delicate question as to the personal claims of Socrates in

the light of a moral reformer, and the sage’s accommodation of moral

sentiment to certain existing fashions in Athenian manners. But as I have

not his side of the correspondence, I can only guess that his point was

the inferiority of the moral ideals of Socrates to those of Christ.

Gustave d’Eichthal, one of the celebrated group of Saint-Simonians who

mingled so much of what was chimerical with much that was practical and

fruitful, draws the attention of Mr. Gladstone, statesman, philosopher,

and hellenist, to writings of his own on the practical use of Greek, as

destined to be the great national language of humanity, perhaps even

within the space of two or three generations. Guizot begs him to accept

his book on Peel; and thanking him for his article on the “Royal

Supremacy” (Feb. 9, 1864), says further what must have given Mr. Gladstone

lively satisfaction:—

Like you, I could wish that the anglican church had more

independence and self-government; but such as it is, and taking

all its history into account, I believe that of all the Christian

churches, it is that in which the spiritual régime is best

reconciled with the political, and the rights of divine tradition

with those of human liberty.... I shall probably send you in the

course of this year some meditations on the essence and history of

the Christian religion. Europe is in an anti-Christian crisis; and

having come near the term of life, I have it much at heart to mark

my place in this struggle.

(M173) For some reason Henry Taylor encloses him (April 5, 1837) “a letter

written by Southey the other day to _a wild girl_ who sent him some

rhapsodies of her writing, and told him she should be in an agony till she

should receive his opinion of them.” This recalls a curious literary

incident, for the “wild girl” was Charlotte Brontë, and Southey warned her

that “literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life and ought not to

be,” and yet his letter was both sensible and kind, though as time showed

it was a bad shot.(330) Thackeray has been asked to breakfast but “I only

got your note at 2 o’clock this afternoon, when the tea would have been

quite cold; and next Thursday am engaged to lecture at Exeter, so that I

can’t hope to breakfast with you. I shall be absent from town some three

weeks, and hope Mrs. Gladstone will permit me to come to see her on my

return.” Froude, who was often at his breakfasts, gives him a book (year

doubtful): “I took the liberty of sending it you merely as an expression

of the respect and admiration that I have felt towards you for many

years,”—sentiments that hardly stood the wear and tear of time and

circumstance.

In 1850 what Macaulay styles a most absurd committee was appointed to

devise inscriptions for medals to be given to the exhibitors at the great

world-show of next year. Its members were, besides Macaulay himself and

Gladstone, Milman, Liddell, Lyttelton, Charles Merivale. Milman bethought

him of looking into Claudian, and sent to Mr. Gladstone three or four

alternative lines fished out from the last of the poets of Roman paganism.

Macaulay had another idea;—

MY DEAR GLADSTONE,—I am afraid that we must wait till Thursday. I

do not much, like taking words from a passage certainly obscure

and probably corrupt. Could we not do better ourselves? I have

made no Latin verses these many years. But I will venture. I send

you three attempts:—

Pulcher et ille labor, pulchros ornare labores.

Pulchrum etiam, pulchros palma donare labores.

Pulchrum etiam, pulchris meritam decernere palmam.

You will easily make better. If we can produce a tolerable line

among us, we may pretend, as Lardner did, that it is in

Haphorstrus or Masenius.—Yours ever, T. B. MACAULAY.

Francis Newman, the cardinal’s high-minded and accomplished brother,

writes to Mr. Gladstone (1878) in a strain of exalted recognition of his

services to the nation, and quotes (a little oddly perhaps) the beautiful

lines in Euripides, foretelling the approaching triumph of Dionysus over

his mortal foe.(331)

The poets are not absent. Wordsworth, as we have already seen (i. p. 269

_n._), sends to him at the board of trade his remonstrance and his sonnet

on the railway into Windermere. Tennyson addresses to him for his personal

behoof the sonnet upon the Redistribution bill of 1884—

“Steersman, be not precipitate in thine act

Of steering ...”

and on a sheet of note-paper at a later date when Irish self-government

was the theme, he copies the Greek lines from Pindar, “how easy a thing it

is even for men of light weight to shake a state, how hard to build it up

again.”(332) Rogers (1844) insists that, “if one may judge from

experience, perhaps the best vehicle in our language for a translator of

verse is prose. He who doubts it has only to open his Bible.... Who could

wish the stories of Joseph and of Ruth to be otherwise than they are? Or

who but would rejoice if the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_ were so translated?

I once asked Porson to attempt it, and he seemed to like the idea, but

said that it would be a labour of ten or twelve years.”

(M174) There was one true poet, and not only a poet but a man, as we now

see, with far truer insight into the intellectual needs of his countrymen

than any other writer of the closing quarter of the century, who is

sometimes supposed to have been overlooked by Mr. Gladstone. And here in

the Octagon is Matthew Arnold’s letter soliciting his recommendation

(1867) for the strictly prosaic post of librarian of the House of Commons,

which happily he did not obtain. The year before, Arnold had wished to be

made a commissioner under the Endowed Schools Act, but a lawyer was

rightly thought necessary by Lord Russell or his advisers, and there is no

good reason to suppose that Mr. Gladstone meddled either way. He was

responsible in 1882 for a third disappointment, but here again it has been

truly said that to appoint to the charity commission a man of sixty, who

had no intimate knowledge of charity law, and who had recently in his

articles irritated all the nonconformists in England by his ironical

references to dissent and dissenters, would not have been conducive to the

efficient transaction of public business. A year later Mr. Gladstone

proffered him, and his friends made him accept, a civil list pension of

two hundred and fifty pounds a year, “in public recognition of service to

the poetry and literature of England.” Arnold in a letter here tries to

soften Mr. Gladstone’s heart on the subject of copyright, on which, as I

often made bold to tell him, he held some rather flagrant heresies. Here

the poet begs the minister to consider whether an English author ought not

to have property in his work for a longer time than he has now. “For many

books the sale begins late, the author has to create, as Wordsworth said,

the taste by which he is to be enjoyed. Such an author is surely the very

man one would wish to protect.” I fear he made no convert.

Another poet, with no eye on patronage or pension, hopes to be permitted

to say (1869), “how very many of your countrymen whom you have forgotten

or never saw, follow your noble and courageous development of legislation

with the same personal devotion, gratitude, and gladness that I feel.”

Then five years later he still assures him that among men of letters he

may have antagonists but he cannot have enemies—rather a fine distinction,

with painfully little truth in it as things happened.

To Miss Martineau, who had done hard work in more than one good cause, he

proposes a pension, which she honourably declines: “The work of my busy

years has supplied the needs of a quiet old age. On the former occasions

of my declining a pension I was poor, and it was a case of scruple

(possibly cowardice). Now I have a competence, and there would be no

excuse for my touching the public money. You will need no assurance that I

am as grateful for your considerate offer, as if it had relieved me of a

wearing anxiety.”

In 1885 he wrote to Mr. Watts, the illustrious painter, to request, with

the sanction of the Queen, that he would allow himself to be enrolled

among the baronets of the United Kingdom. “It gives me lively pleasure,”

he said, “to have the means of thus doing honour to art in the person of

so distinguished a representative of the noble pursuit.” Mr. Watts, in

words that I am permitted to transcribe, declined; as he did also a second

time in 1894 when the proposal was repeated.

While I feel very strongly, and acknowledge with sincere

gratitude, that you have honoured in my person, making me a sort

of standard bearer, the pursuit of art for its own sake, and have

so afforded an enduring encouragement to those who, like myself,

may be willing to relinquish many good and tangible things for

purposes believed to be good, but not likely to meet with general

sympathy, still, I feel it would be something like a real disgrace

to accept for work merely attempted, reward and payment only due

to work achieved.... I should have the ghost of the Lycian chief

reproaching me in my dreams! Also the objects to which I wish to

dedicate the rest of my life will best be carried out in quiet and

obscurity, so please do not be vexed with me if I again beg

respectfully and gratefully to decline.... Sarpedon’s words(333)

always ring in my ears, and so I think you will understand the

things I cannot attempt to say.... I am so far from undervaluing

distinctions that I should like to be a Duke, and deserve the

title.... Still, it is true that, living mainly in a world of my

own, my views are narrowed (I hope I may also say simplified),

till a sense of the four great conditions which to my mind

comprise all that can be demonstrated of our existence, Life and

Death, Light and Darkness, so dominate my mental vision that they

almost become material entities and take material forms, dwarfing

and casting into shadow ordinary considerations. Over the two

first, human efforts broadly speaking avail nothing; but we have

it in our power to modify the two last (of course I include in the

terms all that belongs to good and bad, beauty and ugliness).

Labouring by the side of the poet and the statesman, the artist

may deal with those great issues, and here I think the art of

England has been at fault.... Your overestimate of my work has

hastened the execution of an intention I have long had, and which

indeed amounts to retirement from the ranks of professional men. I

have concluded, dating from June, to undertake no portraits and

accept no commissions, but, contented with the little I have to

live upon, work only with the idea of making my efforts worthy, at

least as efforts, of the nation’s acceptance alike before and

after my death.

“You have adopted a resolution,” said Mr. Gladstone in his reply, “of the

kind that makes the nineteenth century stare or blink, as those blink who

stand in a great brightness and have not eyes for it. The course that you

purpose is indeed a self-denying, an unworldly, and a noble one.”

(M175) One packet touches a matter that at the moment did Mr. Gladstone

some harm in the judgment of men whose good opinion was worth having. In

1873 John Stuart Mill died, and a public memorial was proposed. Mr.

Gladstone intimated that he was willing to co-operate. Then a liberal

clergyman attacked the obituary notice in the _Times_ as too frigid, and

the author of the notice retorted by tales of Mill’s early views on the

question of population. He was well acquainted with Mr. Gladstone, and set

busily to work to persuade him that Mill in his book on political economy

advocated obnoxious checks, that he was vaguely associated with American

publications on the matter, and that he did not believe in God, which was

not to the point. Mr. Gladstone passed on this tissue of innuendo to the

Duke of Argyll. The Duke reported that he had consulted men thoroughly

conversant both with Mill and his writings; that he was assured no passage

could bear the construction imputed, and that the places which he had

himself looked into, clearly referred to prudential restraints on

marriage. Certainly a school of social economy that deals only with

foreign exchanges and rent and values and the virtues of direct taxes and

indirect, and draws the curtain around the question of population, must be

a singularly shallow affair. The Duke of Argyll manfully brushed wasps

aside, and sent his subscription. So did men as orthodox as Lord

Salisbury, and as cautious as Lord Derby. Mr. Gladstone on the other hand

wrote to the promoters of the memorial: “In my view this painful

controversy still exists. I feel that it is not possible for me, situated

as I am at the present time, to decide it or to examine it with a view to

decision. The only course open to me is to do no act involving a judgment

either way, and, therefore, while I desire to avoid any public step

whatever, I withdraw from co-operation, and request that my name may be no

further mentioned.” Unfortunately, the withdrawal of such a name could not

be other than a public step. To say, moreover, that the controversy still

existed, was to go a longish way in public opinion towards deciding it.

The curious thing is that Mr. Gladstone had known Mill so well—his

singleminded love of truth, his humanity, his passion for justice—as to

call him by the excellent name of “the Saint of Rationalism.” A saint of

any sort is surely uncommon enough in our fallen world, to claim an equity

that is not refused to sinners. Yet fifteen years later he wrote a letter

doing Mill more justice. “Of all the motives, stings, and stimulants,” he

wrote, “that reach men through their egoism in parliament, no part could

move or even touch him. His conduct and his language were in this respect

a sermon. Again, though he was a philosopher he was not, I think, a man of

crotchets. He had the good sense and practical tact of politics, together

with the high independent thought of a recluse.”(334)

A learned Unitarian (Beard) sends him a volume of Hibbert lectures. “All

systems,” Mr. Gladstone writes in acknowledging it, “have their _slang_,

but what I find in almost every page of your book is that you have none.”

He complains, however, of finding Augustine put into a leash with Luther

and Calvin. “Augustine’s doctrine of human nature is substantially that of

Bishop Butler; and he converted me about forty-five years ago to Butler’s

doctrine.” Of far earlier date than this (1839) is an interesting letter

from Montalembert:—

_London, July 4, 1839._—It seems to me that amidst many

_dissentimens_, and although you pass generally in this country

for an enemy to my faith and my church, there is a link between

us; since admitting every superiority of talent and influence on

your side, we stand on the same ground in public life—that of the

inalienable rights of spiritual power. I have, therefore, received

your book with gratitude, and read it with the sincerest interest.

I now take the liberty of offering you a portion of the work I

have published, not on matter of actual controversy, but on an

unknown and delightful subject of religious history. If you ever

find leisure enough to throw a glance on the _History of St.

Elizabeth_, and more particularly on the _Introduction_, which is

a rapid _résumé_ of the thirteenth century, you will perhaps gain

some slight information on what the Rev. Hugh McNeile so

appropriately called “the filth and falsehood of the middle ages,”

in his splendid speech on church extension, at Freemasons’ Hall a

few days ago. And allow me to add, my dear sir, with the utter

frankness which I cannot divest myself of, that what you seem to

me to stand the most in need of at present, is a deeper and more

original knowledge of the laws and events of Catholic Europe.

Then come others, recalling illustrious names and famous events in English

history. There are a dozen letters of business (1837-1846) from the Duke

of Wellington. The reader may be curious to see the earliest communication

between two such men—

_London, Nov. 27, 1837._—I have by accident mislaid the petition

from the Cape of Good Hope, if it was ever sent me. But I shall be

happy to see you and converse with you upon the subject; and

consider whether it is desirable or possible that I can bring the

subject before the consideration of the House of Lords at the same

time that you will in the H. of C. I would propose to you to come

here, or that I should go to you to-morrow, Tuesday, at any hour

you will name.—I have the honour to be, dear sir, your most

faithful, humble servant,

WELLINGTON.(335)

Once he uses his well-known laconic style—

_Strathfieldsaye, January 3, 1842._—F. M. the Duke of Wellington

presents his compliments to Mr. Gladstone. He has received Mr.

Gladstone’s letter of the 1st inst. He begs leave to decline to

interfere in any manner in the matter to which Mr. Gladstone’s

letter refers.

What the matter was we cannot tell; but we may guess that it was perhaps

less tersely propounded. The rest touch military affairs in the colonies,

and are now of no concern.

Here we have a last vision of one of the forlorn shadows of ruined power:—

_Chislehurst, le 5 Juillet, 1871._—Monsieur le Ministre, j’ai reçu

la copie du nouveau Ballot bill que votre excellence a bien voulu

m’envoyer et je profite de cette occasion pour vous dire combien

je suis touché des marques d’attention que je reçois en

Angleterre. Je vous prie de recevoir l’assurance de mes sentimens

de haute estime.

NAPOLÉON.

Notes from and to his illustrious adversary in the stirring arena of

public life are not without a delicate accent of pathos and sincerity. The

first was on some occasion of Mrs. Disraeli’s illness,(336) the second on

her death:—

_Nov. 20, 1867._—I was incapable yesterday of expressing to you

how much I appreciate your considerate sympathy. My wife had

always a strong personal regard for you, and being of a vivid and

original character, she could comprehend and value your great

gifts and qualities. There is a ray of hope under this roof since

the last four and twenty hours: round your hearth, I trust, health

and happiness will be ever present.—Yours sincerely, B. DISRAELI.

Six years later when Lady Beaconsfield died, Mr. Gladstone wrote (Jan. 19,

1873):—

DEAR MR. DISRAELI,—My reluctance to intrude on the sacredness and

freshness of your sorrow may now, I think, properly give way to a

yet stronger reluctance to forego adding our small but very

sincere tribute of sympathy to those abundant manifestations of it

which have been yielded in so many forms. You and I were, as I

believe, married in the same year. It has been permitted to both

of us to enjoy a priceless boon through a third of a century.

Spared myself the blow which has fallen on you, I can form some

conception of what it must have been and must be. I do not presume

to offer you the consolation which you will seek from another and

higher quarter. I offer only the assurance which all who know you,

and all who knew Lady Beaconsfield, and especially those among

them who like myself enjoyed for a length of time her marked,

though unmerited regard, may perhaps tender without impropriety,

the assurance that in this trying hour they feel deeply for you

and with you.—Believe me, sincerely yours,

W. E. GLADSTONE.

_Hughenden Manor, Jan. 24, 1873._—DEAR MR. GLADSTONE,—I am much

touched by your kind words in my great sorrow. I trust, I

earnestly trust, that you may be spared a similar affliction.

Marriage is the greatest earthly happiness, when founded on

complete sympathy. That hallowed lot was mine, and for a moiety of

my existence; and I know it is yours.—With sincere regard, D.

A last note, with the quavering pen-strokes of old age (Nov. 6, 1888),

comes from the hand, soon to grow cold, of one who had led so strange a

revolution, and had stood for so much in the movement of things that to

Mr. Gladstone were supreme:—

It is a great kindness and compliment your wishing to see me. I

have known and admired you so long. But I cannot write nor talk

nor walk, and hope you will take my blessing, which I give from my

heart.—Yours most truly, JOHN H. CARD. NEWMAN.

So the perpetual whirl of life revolves, “by nature an unmanageable

sight,” but—

Not wholly so to him who looks

In steadiness; who hath among least things

An under-sense of greatest; sees the parts

As parts, but with a feeling of the whole.(337)

Such steadiness, such under-sense and feeling of the whole, was Mr.

Gladstone’s gift and inspiration, never expending itself in pensive

musings upon the vain ambitions, illusions, cheats, regrets of human

life—such moods of half-morbid moralising were not in his temperament—but

ever stirring him to duty and manful hope, to intrepid self-denial and

iron effort.

Chapter IV. Eastern Question Once More. (1876-1877)

The dead have been awakened—shall I sleep?

The world’s at war with tyrants—shall I crouch?

The harvest’s ripe—and shall I pause to reap?

I slumber not—the thorn is in my couch:

Each day a trumpet soundeth in mine ear,

Its echo in my heart.

—BRYON.

I

Preserved in the Octagon is a large packet of notes on “Future

Retribution,” and on them is the docket, “_From this I was called away to

write on Bulgaria._” In the spring of 1876 the Turkish volcano had burst

into flame. Of the Crimean war the reader has already seen enough and too

much.(338) Its successes, in Mr. Gladstone’s words, by a vast expenditure

of French and English life and treasure, gave to Turkey, for the first

time perhaps in her bloodstained history, twenty years of a repose not

disturbed either by herself or by any foreign power. As Cobden and Bright

had foreseen, as even many European statesmen who approved the war on

grounds of their own had foreseen, Turkish engagements were broken, for

this solid reason if for no other that Turkey had not in the resources of

her barbaric polity the means to keep them.

Fierce revolt against intolerable misrule slowly blazed up in Bosnia and

Herzegovina, and a rising in Bulgaria, not dangerous in itself, was put

down by Turkish troops despatched for the purpose from Constantinople,

with deeds described by the British agent who investigated them on the

spot, as the most heinous crimes that had stained the history of the

century. The consuls of France and Germany at Salonica were murdered by

the Turkish mob. Servia and Montenegro were in arms. Moved by these

symptoms of a vast conflagration, the three imperial courts of Russia,

Austria, and Germany agreed upon an instrument imposing on the Turk

certain reforms, to be carried out under European supervision. To this

instrument, known as the Berlin memorandum, England, along with France and

Italy, was invited to adhere (May 13). The two other Powers assented, but

Mr. Disraeli and his cabinet refused,—a proceeding that, along with more

positive acts, was taken by the Turk and other people to assure the moral

support of Great Britain to the Ottoman, and probably to threaten military

support against the Russian.

(M176) This rejection of the Berlin memorandum in May marked the first

decisive moment in British policy. The withdrawal of England from the

concert of Europe, the lurid glare of the atrocities in Bulgaria, and his

abiding sense of the responsibility imposed upon us by the Crimean war and

all its attendant obligations, were the three main elements in the mighty

storm that now agitated Mr. Gladstone’s breast. Perhaps his sympathies

with the Eastern church had their share. In a fragment of reminiscence

twenty years after, he says:—

When, in 1876, the eastern question was forced forward by the

disturbances in the Turkish empire, and especially by the cruel

outrages in Bulgaria, I shrank naturally but perhaps unduly from

recognising the claim they made upon me individually. I hoped that

the ministers would recognise the moral obligations to the subject

races of the east, which we had in honour contracted as parties to

the Crimean war and to the peace of Paris in 1856. I was slow to

observe the real leanings of the prime minister, his strong

sympathy with the Turk, and his mastery in his own cabinet. I

suffered others, Forster in particular, to go far ahead of me. At

the close of the session [1876] a debate was raised upon the

subject, and I had at length been compelled to perceive that the

old idol was still to be worshipped at Constantinople, and that,

as the only person surviving in the House of Commons who had been

responsible for the Crimean war and the breaking of the bulwark

raised by the treaty of Kainardji on behalf of the eastern

Christians, I could no longer remain indifferent. Consequently in

that debate Mr. Disraeli had to describe my speech as the only one

that had exhibited a real hostility to the policy of the

government. It was, however, at that time an opposition without

hope. I went into the country, and had mentally postponed all

further action to the opening of the next session, when I learned

from the announcement of a popular meeting to be held in Hyde Park

that the question was alive.(339) So I at once wrote and published

on the Bulgarian case. From that time forward, till the final

consummation in 1879-80, I made the eastern question the main

business of my life. I acted under a strong sense of individual

duty without a thought of leadership; nevertheless it made me

again leader whether I would or no. The nation nobly responded to

the call of justice, and recognised the brotherhood of man. But it

was the nation, not the classes. When, at the close of the session

of 1876, there was the usual dispersion in pursuit of recreation,

I thought the occasion was bad. It was good, for the nation did

not disperse and the human heart was beating. When the clubs

refilled in October, the Turkish cause began again to make head.

Then came a chequered period, and I do not recollect to have

received much assistance from the “front bench.” Even Granville

had been a little startled at my proceedings, and wished me to

leave out the “bag and baggage” from my pamphlet.

Before the end of the session of 1876 Mr. Disraeli quitted the House of

Commons and became the Earl of Beaconsfield. Lord Granville informed Mr.

Gladstone, on the authority of a high personage, that Disraeli had said to

the Queen he must resign; “that the peerage was then suggested; that at

first he said, ‘Yes, but accompanied with resignation,’ but was told that

in the present state of Europe that was impossible.” In reporting to Sir

Arthur Gordon, then abroad, what was not merely a piece of news but an

event, Mr. Gladstone says (Aug. 16):—

Disraeli assumes his earldom amidst loud acclaims. I had better be

mute about him and his influence generally, except as to a full

acknowledgment of his genius and his good points of character. His

government is supposed now to stand mainly upon its recent foreign

policy: the most selfish and least worthy I have ever known.

Whatever was open to any degree of exception in Palmerston, has

this year received a tenfold development in Disraeli. Derby’s

influence, I think, has been for good; but too little of it.

To the Duke of Argyll a couple of days before, he had written:—

I am entirely in harmony with you as to your view of the eastern

policy. It has been depressing and corrupting to the country; a

healthier air has been generated by indignation at the Bulgarian

massacres, which have thrown us back on our rather forgotten

humanity. I hope the subject will not slumber through the recess.

Dizzy’s speech (so I call him with all due respect to the peerage)

in the Turkish debate gave me a new light on his views. He is not

quite such a Turk as I had thought. What he hates is Christian

liberty and reconstruction. He supports old Turkey, thinking that

if vital improvements can be averted, it must break down; and his

fleet is at Besika Bay, I feel pretty sure, to be ready to lay

hold of Egypt as his share. So he may end as the Duke of Memphis

yet.

II

Then came the pamphlet. The story of this memorable publication is told in

the diary:—

_Aug. 28, 1876._—Church 8-½ A.M. Worked on a beginning for a

possible pamphlet on the Turkish question. I stupidly brought on

again my lumbago by physical exertion. Was obliged to put off my

pamphlet. Read _The Salvation of all Men_ ... 29.—Kept my bed

long. Wrote to Lord Granville, etc. ... and as a treat began

_Waverley_ once more. Lumbago bad. 30.—Much bed; forswear all

writing. Read St. Thomas Aquinas on the Soul.... _Waverley_. A

snug evening in the Temple of Peace. 31.—Kept my bed till four,

and made tolerable play in writing on Bulgarian horrors. _Sept.

1._—Wrote [16 letters]. Again worked hard in bed and sent off more

than half to the printers. Read _Waverley_. Short drive with C.

2.—This day I wrote again a good piece of the pamphlet in bed, but

improved considerably. Rose at four. Read _Waverley_ in the

evening. 3.—Hawarden Church 11 A.M. and 6-½ P.M. Wrote [16

letters]. Off at 10.15 P.M. for London. 4.—Reached 18 C.H.T. at

five in the morning by limited mail; bed till nine. Saw Lord

Granville, Mr. Delane, Sir A. Panizzi, Mr. Clowes, Messrs. Murray,

the American minister. In six or seven hours, principally at the

British Museum, I completed my MS., making all the needful

searches of papers and journals. Also worked on proof sheets.

_To Mrs. Gladstone._—We had an interesting little party at

Granville’s. I had a long talk with Delane. We, he and I, are much

of one mind in thinking the Turks must go out of Bulgaria, though

retaining a titular supremacy if they like. Between ourselves,

Granville a little hangs back from this, but he could not persuade

me to hold it back.

5.— ... Saw Lord Granville, Lord Hartington.... Finished the

correction of revises before one, discussing the text with Lord

Granville and making various alterations of phrase which he

recommended. At seven I received complete copies. We went to the

Haymarket theatre. Arranged my papers after this, and sent off

copies in various directions.

(M177) The pamphlet spread like fire.(340) Within three or four days of

its first appearance forty thousand copies had gone. It was instantly

followed up by a tremendous demonstration among his constituents. “Sept.

9, 1876.—Thought over my subject for Blackheath. Off at two. A very large

meeting. The most enthusiastic far that I ever saw. Spoke over an hour.”

This is his very prosaic story of the first of those huge and excited

multitudes of which for months and years to come he was to confront so

many. The pamphlet and the Blackheath speech were his rejoinder to the

light and callous tones of Mr. Disraeli, and the sceptical language of his

foreign secretary, “I have a strong suspicion,” he told the Duke of

Argyll, who was a fervent sympathiser, “that Dizzy’s crypto-Judaism has

had to do with his policy. The Jews of the east _bitterly_ hate the

Christians; who have not always used them well.” This suspicion was

constant. “Disraeli,” he said to Mr. Gladstone, “may be willing to risk

his government for his Judaic feeling,—the deepest and truest, now that

his wife has gone, in his whole mind.”

The tract beats with a sustained pulse and passion that recall Burke’s

letters on the _Regicide Peace_. The exhortation against moral complicity

with “the basest and blackest outrages upon record within the present

century, if not within the memory of man”; the branding of the Turkish

race as “the one great anti-human specimen of humanity”; the talk of “fell

satanic orgies”; the declaration that there was not a criminal in a

European gaol nor a cannibal in the South Sea Islands, whose indignation

would not rise at the recital of that which had been done, which remained

unavenged, which had left behind all the foul and all the fierce passions

that produced it, and might again spring up in another murderous harvest,

from the soil soaked and reeking with blood, and in the air tainted with

every imaginable deed of crime and shame,—all this vehemence was hailed

with eager acclamation by multitudes who felt all that he felt, and found

in his passionate invective words and a voice. Mr. Gladstone was not the

man, his readers and his public were not the men, for mere denunciation.

They found in him a policy. Indignation, he said in a thoroughly

characteristic sentence, indignation is froth, except as it leads to

action; mere remonstrance is mockery. There are states of affairs, he told

them, in which human sympathy refuses to be confined by the rules,

necessarily limited and conventional, of international law. Servia and

Montenegro in going to war against Turkey might plead human sympathies,

broad, deep, and legitimate, and that they committed no moral offence. The

policy of the British government was the _status quo_, “as you were.” This

meant the maintenance of Turkish executive authority. What was really

needed was the total withdrawal of the administrative rule of the Turk.

And here he used words that became very famous in the controversy:—

But I return to, and end with, that which is the omega as well as

the alpha of this great and most mournful case. An old servant of

the crown and state, I entreat my countrymen, upon whom far more

than perhaps any other people of Europe it depends, to require and

to insist that our government which has been working in one

direction shall work in the other, and shall apply all its vigour

to concur with the other states of Europe in obtaining the

extinction of the Turkish executive power in Bulgaria. Let the

Turks now carry away their abuses in the only possible manner,

namely by carrying off themselves. Their Zaptiehs and their

Mudirs, their Bimbashis and their Yuzbashis, their Kaimakams and

their Pashas, one and all, bag and baggage, shall I hope clear out

from the province they have desolated and profaned.

At Blackheath, under dripping rain clouds, he said the same, though with

the invective tempered. “You shall receive your regular tribute,” he said

in slow sentences to imaginary Ottomans, whom he seemed to hold before his

visual eye, “you shall retain your titular sovereignty, your empire shall

not be invaded, but never again as the years roll in their course, so far

as it is in our power to determine, never again shall the hand of violence

be raised by you, never again shall the flood-gates of lust be open to

you, never again shall the dire refinements of cruelty be devised by you

for the sake of making mankind miserable.”

Once again, it was not words that made the power of the orator, it was the

relation in purpose, feeling, and conviction between him and his audience.

He forced them into unity with himself by the vivid strength of his

resolution and imagination; he could not believe that his own power of

emotion was not theirs too:—

On Monday morning last between four and five o’clock, I was

rattling down from Euston station through the calm and silent

streets of London, when there was not a footfall to disturb them.

Every house looked so still, that it might well have been a

receptacle of the dead. But as I came through those long lines of

streets, I felt it to be an inspiring and a noble thought that in

every one of these houses there were intelligent human beings, my

fellow-countrymen, who when they woke would give many of their

earliest thoughts, aye and some of their most energetic actions,

to the terrors and sufferings of Bulgaria.

All this was the very spirit of Milton’s imperishable sonnet upon the late

Massacre in Piedmont; the spirit that made Cromwell say that the slaughter

in the Waldensian valleys “came as near to his heart as if his own nearest

and dearest had been concerned.”

(M178) Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, who had been one of the most

responsible promoters of the policy of the Crimean war, told Mr. Gladstone

of his own strong impression (Sept. 10), that the formidable crisis would

not have arisen, had England in the first instance taken part with the

other Powers. Not that he believed that Russia was always and fully

trustworthy, but she was so circumstanced then as to be open to the full

bearing of our moral influence. Six weeks later Lord Stratford again

expressed his unaltered opinion that if in the beginning England had taken

her place at the side of the three emperors, the cloud on the horizon

would never have swelled out into its present colossal proportions. “It

seems to me,” he said, “that Russia has been gradually drawn into a

position from which she can hardly retreat with credit.” “Whatever shades

of difference appear in our opinions,” he told Mr. Gladstone in September,

“may be traced in a great measure to your having made Bulgaria the main

object of your appeal, whereas the whole eastern question was my theme,

and the Bulgarian atrocities, execrable as they were, only a part of it.”

The truth was that in making the atrocious doings in Bulgaria the main

object of his appeal, Mr. Gladstone had both displayed a sure instinct as

to the most effective method of popular approach, and at the same time did

justice to his own burning and innate hatred of all cruelty and

oppression, whether in Bourbon or Bashi-Bazouk. Humanity was at the root

of the whole matter; and the keynote of this great crusade was the

association of humanity with a high policy worthy of the British name.

October was passed in a round of visits to great houses, the popular tide

in the north still appearing to rise around him. To Lord Granville he

writes:—

_Alnwick Castle, Oct. 3, 1876._—We have advanced thus far in a

northern and eastern tour, and we hope to be at Castle Howard on

Wednesday. I left home at this particular time partly with ideas

of health and relaxation, partly because I thought that being

everywhere and nowhere I should escape a little from the turmoil

of the time. Through Cheshire and Lancashire we accomplished the

first stage of our journey to Raby without witnessing any

particular indication of public sentiment; and this rather

encouraged our extending a little the circle of our visits, which

I am now half tempted to regret. For at every point I have had the

greatest difficulty in maintaining any show of privacy, and

avoiding strong manifestations. I never saw such keen exhibitions

of the popular feeling, appearing so to pervade all ranks and

places. A tory county member said to my wife two days ago, “If

there were a dissolution now, I should not get a vote.” This may

be in some degree peculiar to the northerners with their strong

character and deep emotions....

_Castle Howard, Oct. 7, 1876._—Before receiving your letter of the

5th, I had been driven to the conclusion that I must make a

further utterance, following the actual course of the

transactions. And upon the whole I adhere to this conclusion,

notwithstanding your opinion, to which I attach great weight.

There is a great difference in our situations, which I think

accounts for this difference of view. I found Ailesbury, of

course, full of friendship and loyalty to you, but disposed to

regret that you had not been able to see your way to a more

advanced and definite policy. I told him that I found no cause for

surprise in your reserve, and thought you held yourself in hand

for the purpose of holding your party in hand—a view which I think

he more or less embraced. Now, I have not your responsibilities to

the party, but I have for the moment more than your

responsibilities to the country, in this sense that I feel myself

compelled to advise from time to time upon the course of that

national movement which I have tried hard to evoke, and assist in

evoking. I regard myself as an outside workman, engaged in the

preparation of materials, which you and the party will probably

have to manipulate and then to build into a structure. For though

I do not wish to shut the door upon the government, I despair of

them, after so many invitations and so many refusals....

(M179) To Madame Novikoff, a Russian lady who at this time began to

exercise a marked influence upon the opinions of important men with much

influence on the opinions of many other people,(341) he indicated some

doubtful symptoms:—

_Hawarden, Oct. 17, 1876._—There is an undoubted and smart rally

on behalf of Turkey in the metropolitan press. It is in the main

representative of the ideas and opinions of what are called the

upper ten thousand. From this body there has never on any occasion

within my memory proceeded the impulse that has prompted, and

finally achieved, _any_ of the great measures which in the last

half century have contributed so much to the fame and happiness of

England. They did not emancipate the dissenters, Roman catholics,

and Jews. They did not reform the parliament. They did not

liberate the negro slave. They did not abolish the corn law. They

did not take the taxes off the press. They did not abolish the

Irish established church. They did not cheer on the work of

Italian freedom and reconstitution. Yet all these things have been

done; and done by other agencies than theirs, and despite their

opposition. When I speak of _them_, I speak of course of the

majority among them. Unhappily, the country is understood abroad

mainly through the metropolitan press.

He was no sooner back at Hawarden than he fell to work on subsidiary

branches of the question of questions.

_Oct. 22._—Worked hard and finished my paper on Russia in

Turkestan, and sent it off. Criminal justice on Sunday! But it is

for peace. 24.—To London. 27.—Up at 6. Went with Harry to Dover,

saw him off on board the packet and pier [on his way to India].

Drove over to Walmer, reviewed the place, saw Lord Granville and

Sir W. James. Returned to London, and at 9.30 to the Gaiety, saw a

miserable burlesque of which I had heard a most inviting but false

account. 28.—To Hawarden. 31.—Tennyson and H. T. came. _Nov.

1._—Tennyson read to us his _Harold_. It took near 2-½ hours. Walk

with him and a party. 2.—Read Bagehot on Lord Spencer’s

_Life_—very clever, very imperfect. Conversation with Tennyson on

future retribution and other matters of theology. He has not

thought, I conceive, systematically or thoroughly upon them, but

is much alarmed at the prospect of the loss of belief. He left us

at one. Walk and long conversation with Lord Acton, who seems in

opinion to go beyond Döllinger, though in certain things he stops

short of him. 8.—Read aloud the debate of the first _Iliad_ from

Pope. 9.—Read aloud my version of the Assembly—_Iliad_ i. 10.—Read

aloud Lord Derby’s and Cowper’s version of the Assembly. 14.—The

Olympian part of _Iliad_ I. in Pope’s version aloud, and then my

own. 17.—We went to Liverpool, where we attended the theatre to

see Pennington in _Hamlet_. It was really excellent. I never was

so well received in that town. 21.—Finished revision of my MS.,

“The Hellenic Factor in the Eastern Problem,” and sent it to

press.

III

At the Lord Mayor’s feast in November, the prime minister used menacing

language. The policy of England, he said, was peace, but no country was so

well prepared for war as ours. If England were to enter into a righteous

war, her resources were inexhaustible. “She is not a country that, when

she enters into a campaign, has to ask herself whether she can support a

second or a third campaign. She enters into a campaign which she will not

terminate till right is done.” This was a hardly veiled threat to Russia,

it was encouragement to Turkey, it was incitement to a war party in Great

Britain. “The provocation offered by Disraeli at the Guildhall,” wrote Mr.

Gladstone, “is almost incredible. Some new lights about his Judaic feeling

in which he is both consistent and conscientious have come in upon me.”

Still the general feeling was strongly adverse to any action on behalf of

Turkey. Mr. Gladstone eagerly noted even the most trivial incident that

pointed this way. “Yesterday night,” he wrote (Nov. 26), “in the tory town

of Liverpool, when Othello was being acted, and the words were reached

‘The Turks are drowned,’ the audience rose in enthusiasm and interrupted

the performance for some time with their cheering. These things are not

without meaning.” Men who commonly stood aside from political activity

were roused. “Mr. Carlyle,” says Mr. Ruskin, “Mr. Froude, and several

other men of creditable name gathered together at call of Mr. Gladstone as

for a great national need, together with other men of more retired

mind—Edward Burne-Jones for one, and myself for another.”

(M180) The reply to the Guildhall speech was a conference at St. James’s

Hall (Dec. 8), one of the most remarkable gatherings of representative men

of every type and from every part of the kingdom ever held in this

country. “I have most flourishing accounts of the progress of preparations

for the conference of which I have been a promoter from the beginning.

They urge me to speak on the 8th, but I should much prefer that others

should put themselves in the foreground.” Besides the eminent politicians,

great territorial magnates were there, and men of letters, and divines of

various churches, and men who had never been to a militant assembly in

their lives before,—all with a resolute purpose expressed by Mr.

Trevelyan, “No matter how the prime minister may finger the hilt of the

sword, the nation will take care that it never leaves the scabbard.” Mr.

Gladstone reached London a day or two before. On the 8th, he enters:—

8.—Made notes and extracts for speech. Attended the meetings at

St. James’s Hall, 12-1-½ and 4-8. Spoke (I fear) 1-½ hours with

some exertion, far from wholly to my satisfaction. The meetings

were great, notable, almost historical.

The day after this important and impressive gathering he was back

at Hawarden, busy at his article upon the life of the Prince

Consort. Then came Christmas day,—“The most solemn I have known

for long; I see that eastward sky of storm and of underlight!”

At a suggestion from the London foreign office, a conference of the great

Powers met at Constantinople in the middle of December. Lord Salisbury

went as the representative of England. To a correspondent Mr. Gladstone

spoke of this as an excellent selection:—

I think it right at once to give you my opinion of Lord Salisbury,

whom I know pretty well in private. He has little foreign or

eastern knowledge, and little craft; he is rough of tongue in

public debate, but a great gentleman in private society; he is

very remarkably clever, of unsure judgment, but is above anything

mean; has no Disraelite prejudices; keeps a conscience, and has

plenty of manhood and character. In a word the appointment of Lord

Salisbury to Constantinople is the best thing the government have

yet done in the eastern question.