Transcribed from the 1919 The Century Co. edition by David Price, email
ccx074@pglaf.org
[Picture: William Ewart Gladstone]
WILLIAM
EWART
GLADSTONE
[Picture: Decorative graphic]
HIS CHARACTERISTICS
AS MAN AND STATEMAN
BY
JAMES BRYCE
AUTHOR OF “THE AMERICAN COMMONWEALTH,”
“TRANSCAUCASIA AND ARARAT,” “THE
HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE,” “IMPRES-
SIONS OF SOUTH AFRICA.”
[Picture: Decorative graphic]
NEW YORK
THE CENTURY CO.
1919
* * * * *
Copyright, 1898, by
The Evening Post Publishing Company.
Copyright 1898, by
THE CENTURY CO.
* * * * *
CONTENTS
PAGE
I. INTRODUCTION 1
II. EARLY INFLUENCES 5
III. PARLIAMENTARIAN 18
IV. ORATOR 39
V. ORIGINALITY AND INDEPENDENCE 56
VI. SOCIAL QUALITIES 76
VII. AUTHORSHIP 81
VIII. RELIGIOUS CHARACTER 94
I
INTRODUCTION
NO man has lived in our times of whom it is so hard to speak in a concise
and summary fashion as Mr. Gladstone. For forty years he was so closely
associated with the public affairs of his country that the record of his
parliamentary life comes near to being an outline of English politics.
His activity spread itself out over many fields. He was the author of
several learned and thoughtful books, and of a multitude of articles upon
all sorts of subjects. He showed himself as eagerly interested in
matters of classical scholarship and Christian doctrine and
ecclesiastical history as in questions of national finance and foreign
policy. No account of him could be complete without reviewing his
actions and estimating the results of his work in all these directions.
But the difficulty of describing and judging him goes deeper. His was a
singularly complex nature, a character hard to unravel. His
individuality was extremely strong; all that he said or did bore its
impress. Yet it was an individuality so far from being self-consistent
as sometimes to seem a bundle of opposite qualities capriciously united
in a single person. He might with equal truth be called, and he has been
in fact called, a conservative and a revolutionary. He was dangerously
impulsive, and had frequently to suffer from his impulsiveness; yet he
was also not merely wary and cautious, but so astute as to have been
accused of craft and dissimulation. So great was his respect for
authority and tradition that he clung to views regarding the unity of
Homer and the historical claims of Christian sacerdotalism which the
majority of competent specialists have now rejected. So bold was he in
practical matters that he transformed the British constitution, changed
the course of English policy in the Orient, destroyed an established
church in one part of the United Kingdom, and committed himself to the
destruction of two established churches in two other parts. He came near
to being a Roman Catholic in his religious opinions, yet was for twenty
years the darling leader of the English Protestant Nonconformists and the
Scotch Presbyterians. No one who knew him intimately doubted his
conscientious sincerity and earnestness, yet four fifths of the English
upper classes were in his later years wont to regard him as a
self-interested schemer who would sacrifice his country to his lust for
power. Though he loved general principles, and often soared out of the
sight of his audience when discussing them, he generally ended by
deciding upon points of detail the question at issue. He was at
different times of his life the defender and the assailant of the same
institutions, yet he scarcely seemed inconsistent in doing opposite
things, because his method and his arguments preserved the same type and
color throughout. Any one who had at the beginning of his career
discerned in him the capacity for such strange diversities and
contradictions would probably have predicted that they must wreck it by
making his purposes weak and his course erratic. Such a prediction would
have proved true of any one with less firmness of will and less intensity
of temper. It was the persistent heat and vehemence of his character,
the sustained passion which he threw into the pursuit of the object on
which he was for the moment bent, that fused these dissimilar qualities
and made them appear to contribute to and to increase the total force
which he exerted.
II
EARLY INFLUENCES
THE circumstances of Mr. Gladstone’s political career help to explain,
or, at any rate, will furnish occasion for the attempt to explain, this
complexity and variety of character. But before we come to his manhood
it is convenient to advert to three conditions whose influence on him has
been profound: the first his Scottish blood, the second his Oxford
education, the third his apprenticeship to public life under Sir Robert
Peel.
Theories of character based on race differences are dangerous, because
they are so easy to form and so hard to test. Still, no one denies that
there are qualities and tendencies generally found in the minds of men of
certain stocks, just as there are peculiarities in their faces or in
their speech. Mr. Gladstone was born and brought up in Liverpool, and
always retained a touch of Lancashire accent. But, as he was fond of
saying, every drop of blood in his veins was Scotch. His father was a
Lowland Scot from the neighborhood of Biggar, in the Upper Ward of
Lanarkshire, where the old yeoman’s dwelling of Gledstanes—“the kite’s
rock”—may still be seen. His mother was of Highland extraction, by name
Robertson, from Dingwall, in Ross-shire. Thus he was not only a Scot,
but a Scot with a strong infusion of the Celtic element, the element
whence the Scotch derive most of what distinguishes them from the
English. The Scot is more excitable, more easily brought to a glow of
passion, more apt to be eagerly absorbed in one thing at a time. He is
also more fond of abstract intellectual effort. It is not merely that
the taste for metaphysical theology is commoner in Scotland than in
England, but that the Scotch have a stronger relish for general
principles. They like to set out by ascertaining and defining such
principles, and then to pursue a series of logical deductions from them.
They are, therefore, somewhat bolder reasoners than the English, less
content to remain in the region of concrete facts, more eager to hasten
on to the process of working out a body of speculative doctrines. The
Englishman is apt to plume himself on being right in spite of logic; the
Scotchman delights to think that it is through logic he has reached his
conclusions, and that he can by logic defend them. These are qualities
which Mr. Gladstone drew from his Scottish blood. He had a keen
enjoyment of the processes of dialectic. He loved to get hold of an
abstract principle and to derive all sorts of conclusions from it. He
was wont to begin the discussion of a question by laying down two or
three sweeping propositions covering the subject as a whole, and would
then proceed to draw from these others which he could apply to the
particular matter in hand. His well-stored memory and boundless
ingenuity made this finding of such general propositions so easy a task
that a method in itself agreeable sometimes appeared to be carried to
excess. He frequently arrived at conclusions which the judgment of the
sober auditor did not approve, because, although they seemed to have been
legitimately deduced from the general principles just enunciated, they
were somehow at variance with the plain teaching of the facts. At such
moments one felt that the man who was charming but perplexing Englishmen
by his subtlety and ingenuity was not himself an Englishman in mental
quality, but had the love for abstractions and refinements and
dialectical analysis which characterizes the Scotch intellect. He had
also a large measure of that warmth and vehemence, called in the
sixteenth century the _perfervidum ingenium Scotorum_, which belong to
the Scottish temperament, and particularly to the Celtic Scot. He
kindled quickly, and when kindled, he shot forth a strong and brilliant
flame. To any one with less power of self-control such intensity of
emotion as he frequently showed would have been dangerous; nor did this
excitability fail, even with him, to prompt words and acts which a cooler
judgment would have disapproved. But it gave that spontaneity which was
one of the charms of his nature; it produced that impression of profound
earnestness and of resistless force which raised him out of the rank of
ordinary statesmen. The tide of emotion swelling fast and full seemed to
turn the whole rushing stream of intellectual effort into whatever
channel lay at the moment nearest.
With these Scottish qualities, Mr. Gladstone was brought up at school and
college among Englishmen, and received at Oxford, then lately awakened
from a long torpor, a bias and tendency which never thereafter ceased to
affect him. The so-called “Oxford Movement,” which afterward obtained
the name of Tractarianism and carried Dr. Newman, together with other
less famous leaders, on to Rome, had not yet, in 1831, when Mr. Gladstone
won his degree with double first-class honors, taken visible shape, or
become, so to speak, conscious of its own purposes. But its doctrinal
views, its peculiar vein of religious sentiment, its respect for
antiquity and tradition, its proneness to casuistry, its taste for
symbolism, were already potent influences working on the more susceptible
of the younger minds. On Mr. Gladstone they told with full force. He
became, and never ceased to be, not merely a High-churchman, but what may
be called an Anglo-Catholic, in his theology, deferential not only to
ecclesiastical tradition, but to the living voice of the visible church,
respecting the priesthood as the recipients (if duly ordained) of a
special grace and peculiar powers, attaching great importance to the
sacraments, feeling himself nearer to the Church of Rome, despite what he
deemed her corruptions, than to any of the non-episcopal Protestant
churches. Henceforth his interests in life were as much ecclesiastical
as political. For a time he desired to be ordained a clergyman. Had
this wish been carried out, it can scarcely be doubted that he would
eventually have become the leading figure in the Church of England and
have sensibly affected her recent history. The later stages in his
career drew him away from the main current of political opinion within
that church. He who had been the strongest advocate of established
churches came to be the leading agent in the disestablishment of the
Protestant Episcopal Church in Ireland, and a supporter of the policy of
disestablishment in Scotland and in Wales. But the color which these
Oxford years gave to his mind and thoughts was never obliterated. They
widened the range of his interests and deepened his moral zeal and
religious earnestness. But at the same time they confirmed his natural
bent toward over-subtle distinctions and fine-drawn reasonings, and they
put him somewhat out of sympathy not only with the attitude of the
average Englishman, who is essentially a Protestant,—that is to say,
averse to sacerdotalism, and suspicious of any other religious authority
than that of the Bible and the individual conscience,—but also with two
of the strongest influences of our time, the influence of the sciences of
nature, and the influence of historical criticism. Mr. Gladstone, though
too wise to rail at science, as many religious men did till within the
last few years, could never quite reconcile himself either to the
conclusions of geology and zoology regarding the history of the physical
world and the animals which inhabit it, or to the modern methods of
critical inquiry as applied to Scripture and to ancient literature
generally. The training which Oxford then gave, stimulating as it was,
and free from the modern error of over specialization, was defective in
omitting the experimental sciences, and in laying undue stress upon the
study of language. A proneness to dwell on verbal distinctions and to
trust overmuch to the analysis of terms as a means of reaching the truth
of things is noticeable in many eminent Oxford writers of that and the
next succeeding generation—some of them, like the illustrious F. D.
Maurice, far removed from Dr. Newman and Mr. Gladstone in theological
opinion.
When the brilliant young Oxonian entered the House of Commons at the age
of twenty-three, Sir Robert Peel was leading the Tory party with an
authority and ability rarely surpassed in parliamentary annals. Within
two years the young man was admitted into the short-lived Tory ministry
of 1834, and soon proved himself an active and promising lieutenant of
the experienced chief. Peel was an eminently wary and cautious man,
alive to the necessity of watching the signs of the times, of studying
and interpreting the changeful phases of public opinion. His habit was
to keep his own counsel, and even when he perceived that the policy he
had hitherto followed would need to be modified, to continue to use
guarded language and refuse to commit himself to change till he perceived
that the fitting moment had arrived. He was, moreover, a master of
detail, slow to propound a plan until he had seen how its outlines were
to be filled up by appropriate devices for carrying it out in practice.
These qualities and habits of the minister profoundly affected his gifted
disciple. They became part of the texture of his own political
character, and in his case, as in that of Peel, they sometimes brought
censure upon him, as having withheld too long from the public views or
purposes which he thought it unwise to disclose till effect could
promptly be given to them. Such reserve, such a guarded attitude and
conservative attachment to existing institutions, were not altogether
natural to Mr. Gladstone’s mind, and the contrast between them and some
of his other qualities, like the contrast which ultimately appeared
between his sacerdotal tendencies and his political liberalism,
contributed to make his character perplexing and to expose his conduct to
the charge of inconsistency. Inconsistent, in the ordinary sense of the
word, he was not, much less changeable. He was really, in the main
features of his political convictions and the main habits of his mind,
one of the most tenacious and persistent of men. But there were always
at work in him two tendencies. One was the speculative desire to probe
everything to the bottom, to try it by the light of general principles
and logic, and where it failed to stand this test, to reject it. The
other was the sense of the complexity of existing social and political
arrangements, and of the risk of disturbing any one part of them unless
the time had arrived for resettling other parts also. Every statesman
feels both these sides to every concrete question of reform. No one has
set them forth more cogently, and in particular no one has more earnestly
dwelt on the necessity for the latter, than the most profound thinker
among English statesmen, Edmund Burke. Mr. Gladstone, however, felt and
stated them with quite unusual force, and when he stated the one side,
people forgot that there was another which would be no less vividly
present to him at some other moment. He was not only, like all
successful parliamentarians, necessarily something of an opportunist,
though perhaps less so than his master Peel, but was moved by emotion
more than most statesmen, and certainly more than Peel. The relative
strength with which the need for comprehensive reform or the need for
watchful conservatism presented itself to his mind depended largely upon
the weight which his emotions cast into one or the other scale, and this
element made it difficult to forecast his probable action. Thus his
political character was the result of influences differing widely in
their origin—influences, moreover, which it was hard for ordinary
observers to appreciate.
III
PARLIAMENTARIAN
MR. GLADSTONE sat for sixty-three years in Parliament, and for more than
twenty-six years was the leader of his party, and therefore the central
figure of English politics. As has been said, he began as a high Tory,
remained about fifteen years in that camp, was then led by the split
between Peel and the protectionists to take up an intermediate position,
and finally was forced to cast in his lot with the Liberals, for in
England, as in America, third parties seldom endure. No parliamentary
career in English annals is comparable to his for its length and variety;
and of those who saw its close in the House of Commons, there was only
one man, Mr. Villiers (who died in January, 1898), who could remember its
beginning. He had been opposed in 1833 to men who might have been his
grandfathers; he was opposed in 1893 to men who might have been his
grandchildren. In a sketch like this, it is impossible to describe or
comment on the events of such a life. All that can be done is to
indicate the more salient characteristics which a study of his career as
a statesman and a parliamentarian sets before us.
The most remarkable of these characteristics is the sustained freshness,
openness, eagerness of mind, which he preserved down to the end of his
life. Most of us, just as we make few intimate friends, so we form few
new opinions after thirty-five. Intellectual curiosity may remain fresh
and strong even after fifty, but its range steadily narrows as one
abandons the hope of attaining any thorough knowledge of subjects other
than those which make the main business of one’s life. One cannot follow
the progress of all the new ideas that are set afloat in the world. One
cannot be always examining the foundations of one’s political or
religious beliefs. Repeated disappointments and disillusionments make a
man expect less from changes the older he grows; and mere indolence adds
its influence in deterring us from entering upon new enterprises. None
of these causes seemed to affect Mr. Gladstone. He was as much excited
over a new book (such as Cardinal Manning’s Life) at eighty-six as when
at fourteen he insisted on compelling little Arthur Stanley (afterward
Dean of Westminster, and then aged nine) to procure Gray’s poems, which
he had just perused himself. His reading covered almost the whole field
of literature, except physical and mathematical science. While
frequently declaring that he must confine his political thinking and
leadership to a few subjects, he was so observant of the movements of
opinion that the course of talk brought up scarcely any topic in which he
did not seem to know what was the latest thing that had been said or
done. Neither the lassitude nor the prejudices common in old age
prevented him from giving a fair consideration to any new doctrines. But
though his intellect was restlessly at work, and though his eager
curiosity disposed him to relish novelties, except in theology, that
bottom rock in his mind of caution and reserve, which has already been
referred to, made him refuse to part with old views even when he was
beginning to accept new ones. He allowed both to “lie on the table”
together, and while declaring his mind to be open to conviction, he felt
it safer to speak and act on the old lines till the process of conviction
had been completed. It took fourteen years, from 1846 to 1860, to carry
him from the Conservative into the Liberal camp. It took five stormy
years to bring him round to Irish home rule, though his mind was
constantly occupied with the subject from 1880 to 1885, and those who
watched him closely saw that the process had advanced some considerable
way even in 1881. And as regards ecclesiastical establishments, having
written a book in 1838 as a warm advocate of state churches, it was not
till 1867 that he adopted the policy of disestablishment for Ireland, not
till 1890 that he declared himself ready to apply it in Wales and
Scotland also.
Both these qualities—his disposition to revise his opinions in the light
of new arguments and changing conditions, and the reticence he maintained
till the process of revision had been completed—exposed him to
misconstruction. Commonplace men, unwont to give serious scrutiny to
their opinions, ascribed his changes to self-interest, or at best
regarded them as the index of an unstable mind. Dull men could not
understand why he should have forborne to set forth all that was passing
in his mind, and saw little difference between reticence and dishonesty.
Much of the suspicion and even fear with which he was regarded,
especially after 1885, arose from the idea that it was impossible to
predict what he would do next, and how far his openness of mind would
carry him. In so far as they tended to shake public confidence, these
characteristics injured him in his statesman’s work, but the loss was far
outweighed by the gain. In a country where opinion is active and
changeful, where the economic conditions that legislation has to deal
with are in a state of perpetual flux, where the balance of power between
the upper and middle and poorer classes has been swiftly altering during
the last sixty years, no statesman can continue to serve the public if he
adheres obstinately to the views with which he started in life. He
must—unless, of course, he stands aloof in permanent opposition—either
submit to advocate measures he secretly mislikes, or else must keep
himself always ready to learn from events, and to reconsider his opinions
in the light of emergent tendencies and insistent facts. Mr. Gladstone’s
pride as well as his conscience forbade the former alternative; it was
fortunate that the inexhaustible activity of his intellect made the
latter natural to him. He was accustomed to say that the great mistake
of his earlier views had been in not sufficiently recognizing the worth
and power of liberty, and the tendency which things have to work out for
good when left to themselves. The application of this principle gave
room for many developments, and many developments there were. He may
have wanted that prescience which is, after integrity, the highest gift
of a statesman, but which is almost impossible to a man so pressed by the
constant and engrossing occupations of an English minister that he cannot
find time for the patient study and thought from which alone sound
forecasts can issue. But he had the next best quality, that of always
learning from the events which passed under his eyes.
With this singular openness and flexibility of mind, there went a not
less remarkable ingenuity and resourcefulness. His mind was fertile in
expedients, and still more fertile in reasonings by which to recommend
the expedients. This gift was often dangerous, for he was apt to be
carried away by the dexterity of his own dialectic, and to think schemes
substantially good in whose support he could muster so formidable an
array of arguments. He never seemed to be at a loss, in public or
private, for a criticism, or for an answer to the criticisms of others.
If his power of adapting his own mind to the minds of those whom he had
to convince had been equal to the skill and swiftness with which he
accumulated a mass of matter persuasive to those who looked at things in
his own way, no one would have exercised so complete a control over the
political opinion of his time. But his mind had not this power of
adaptation. It moved on its own lines—peculiar lines, which were often
misconceived, even by those who sought to follow him most loyally. Thus
it happened that he was blamed for two opposite faults. Some, pointing
to the fact that he had frequently altered his views, denounced him as a
demagogue profuse of promises, ready to propose whatever he thought
likely to catch the people’s ear. Others complained that there was no
knowing where to have him; that he had an erratic mind, whose currents
ran underground and came to the surface in unexpected places; that he did
not consult his party, but followed his own predilections; that his
guidance was unsafe because his decisions were unpredictable. Both these
views were unfair, yet the latter came nearer to the truth than the
former. No great popular leader had in him less of the true ring of the
demagogue. He saw, of course, that a statesman cannot oppose the popular
will beyond a certain point, and may have to humor it in order that he
may direct it. Now and then, in his later days, he so far yielded to his
party advisers as to express his approval of proposals for which he cared
little personally. But he was too self-absorbed, too eagerly interested
in the ideas that suited his own cast of thought, to be able to watch and
gage the tendencies of the multitude. On several occasions he announced
a policy which startled people and gave a new turn to the course of
events. But in none of these instances, and certainly not in the three
most remarkable,—his declarations against the Irish church establishment
in 1868, against the Turks and the traditional English policy of
supporting them in 1876, and in favor of Irish home rule in 1886,—did any
popular demand suggest his pronouncement. It was the masses who took
their view from him, not he who took his mandate from the masses. In all
of these instances he was at the time in opposition, and was accused of
having made this new departure for the sake of recovering power. In the
two former he prevailed, and was ultimately admitted, by his more candid
adversaries, to have counseled wisely. In all of them he may, perhaps,
be censured for not having sooner perceived, or at any rate for not
having sooner announced, the need for reform. But it was very
characteristic of him not to give the full strength of his mind to a
question till he felt that it pressed for a solution. Those who
discussed politics with him were scarcely more struck by the range of his
vision and his power of correlating principles and details than by his
unwillingness to commit himself on matters whose decision he could
postpone. Reticence and caution were sometimes carried too far, not
merely because they exposed him to misconstruction, but because they
withheld from his party the guidance it needed. This was true in all the
three instances just mentioned; and in the last of them his reticence
probably contributed to the separation from him of some of his former
colleagues. Nor did he always rightly divine the popular mind. Absorbed
in his own financial views, he omitted to note the change that had been
in progress between 1862 and 1874, and thus his proposal in the latter
year to extinguish the income tax fell completely flat. He often failed
to perceive how much the credit of his party was suffering from the
belief, quite groundless so far as he personally was concerned, that his
government was indifferent to what are called Imperial interests, the
interests of England outside England. But he always thought for himself,
and never stooped to flatter the prejudices or inflame the passions of
any class in the community.
Though the power of reading the signs of the times and moving the mind of
the nation as a whole may be now more essential to an English statesman
than the skill which manages a legislature or holds together a cabinet,
that skill counts for much, and must continue to do so while the House of
Commons remains the supreme governing authority of the country. A man
can hardly reach high place, and certainly cannot retain high place,
without possessing this kind of art. Mr. Gladstone was at one time
thought to want it. In 1864, when Lord Palmerston’s end was evidently
near and Mr. Gladstone had shown himself the most brilliant and capable
man among the Liberal ministers in the House of Common’s, people
speculated about the succession to the headship of the party; and the
wiseacres of the day were never tired of repeating that Mr. Gladstone
could not possibly lead the House of Commons. He wanted tact (they
said), he was too excitable, too impulsive, too much absorbed in his own
ideas, too unversed in the arts by which individuals are conciliated.
But when, after twenty-five years of his unquestioned reign, the time for
his own departure drew nigh, men asked how the Liberal party in the House
of Commons would ever hold together after it had lost a leader of such
consummate capacity. Seldom has a prediction been more utterly falsified
than that of the Whig critics of 1864. They had grown so accustomed to
Palmerston’s way of handling the House as to forget that a man might
succeed by quite different methods. And they forgot also that a man may
have many defects and yet in spite of them be incomparably the fittest
for a great place.
Mr. Gladstone had the defects that were ascribed to him. His
impulsiveness sometimes betrayed him into declarations which a cooler man
would have abstained from. The second reading of the Irish Home-Rule
Bill of 1886 would probably have been carried had he not been goaded by
his opponents into words which seemed to recall or modify the concessions
he had announced at a meeting of the Liberal party held just before.
More than once precious time was wasted in useless debates because his
antagonists, knowing his excitable temper, brought on discussions with
the sole object of annoying him and drawing from him some hasty
deliverance. Nor was he an adept, like Disraeli and Sir John A.
Macdonald, in the management of individuals. He had a contempt for the
meaner side of human nature which made him refuse to play upon it. He
had comparatively little sympathy with many of the pursuits which attract
ordinary men; and he was too constantly engrossed by the subjects of
enterprises which specially appealed to him to have leisure for the
lighter but often very important devices of political strategy. A
trifling anecdote, which was told in London about twenty-five years ago,
may illustrate this characteristic. Mr. Delane, then editor of the
“Times,” had been invited to meet the prime minister at a moment when the
support of the “Times” would have been specially valuable to the Liberal
government. Instead of using the opportunity to set forth his policy and
invite an opinion on it, Mr. Gladstone talked the whole time of dinner
upon the question of the exhaustion of the English coal-beds, to the
surprise of the company and the unconcealed annoyance of the powerful
guest. It was the subject then uppermost in his mind, and he either did
not think of winning Mr. Delane or disdained to do so. In the House of
Commons he was entirely free from airs, or, indeed, from any sort of
assumption of superiority. The youngest member might accost him in the
lobby and be listened to with perfect courtesy. But he seldom addressed
any one outside his own very small group of friends, and more than once
made enemies by omitting to notice and show some attention to members of
his party who, having been eminent in their own towns, expected to be
made much of when they entered Parliament. Having himself plenty of
pride and comparatively little vanity, he never realized the extent to
which, and the cheapness with which, men can be captured and used through
their vanity. And his mind, flexible as it was in seizing new points of
view and devising expedients to meet new circumstances, did not easily
enter into the characters of other men. Ideas and causes interested him
more than personal traits did; his sympathy was keener and stronger for
the sufferings of nations or masses of men than with the fortunes of a
particular person. With all his accessibility and immensely wide circle
of acquaintances, he was at bottom a man chary of real friendship, while
the circle of his intimates became constantly smaller with advancing
years.
So it befell that though his popularity among the general body of his
adherents went on increasing, and the admiration of his parliamentary
followers remained undiminished, he had few intimate friends, few men in
the House of Commons who linked him to the party at large and rendered to
him those confidential personal services which count for much in keeping
a party in hearty accord and enabling the commander to gage the sentiment
of his troops. Thus adherents were lost who turned into dangerous
foes—lost for the want not so much of tact as of a sense for the need and
use of tact in humoring and managing men.
If, however, we speak of parliamentary strategy in its larger sense, as
covering familiarity with parliamentary forms and usages, the powers of
seizing a parliamentary situation and knowing how to deal with it, the
art of guiding a debate and choosing the right moment for reserve and for
openness, for a dignified retreat, for a watchful defense, for a sudden
rattling charge upon the enemy, no one had a fuller mastery of it. His
recollection of precedents was unrivaled, for it began in 1833 with the
first reformed Parliament, and it seemed as fresh for those remote days
as for last month. He enjoyed combat for its own sake, not so much from
any inborn pugnacity, for he was not disputatious in ordinary
conversation, as because it called out his fighting force and stimulated
his whole nature. “I am never nervous in reply,” he once said, “though I
am sometimes nervous in opening a debate.” And although his impetuosity
sometimes betrayed him into imprudence when he was taken unawares, no one
could be more wary or guarded when a crisis arrived whose gravity he had
foreseen. In the summer of 1881 the House of Lords made some amendments
to the Irish Land Bill which were deemed ruinous to the working of the
measure, and therewith to the prospects of the pacification of Ireland.
A conflict was expected which might have strained the fabric of the
constitution. The excitement which quickly arose in Parliament spread to
the whole nation. Mr. Gladstone alone remained calm and confident. He
devised a series of compromises, which he advocated in conciliatory
speeches. He so played his game that by a few minor concessions he
secured nearly all of the points he cared for, and, while sparing the
dignity of the Lords, steered his bill triumphantly out of the breakers
which had threatened to engulf it. Very different was his ordinary
demeanor in debate when he was off his guard. Observers have often
described how his face and gestures while he sat in the House of Commons
listening to an opponent would express all the emotions that crossed his
mind; with what eagerness he would follow every sentence, sometimes
contradicting half aloud, sometimes turning to his next neighbor to
express his displeasure at the groundless allegations or fallacious
arguments he was listening to, till at last he would spring to his feet
and deliver a passionate reply. His warmth would often be in excess of
what the occasion required, and quite disproportioned to the importance
of his antagonist. It was in fact the unimportance of the occasion that
made him thus yield to his feeling. As soon as he saw that bad weather
was coming, and that careful seamanship was wanted, his coolness
returned, his language became guarded and careful, and passion, though it
might increase the force of his oratory, never made him deviate a hand’s
breadth from the course he had chosen.
IV
ORATOR
OF that oratory, something must now be said. By it he rose to fame and
power, as, indeed, by it most English statesmen have risen, save those to
whom wealth and rank and family connections have given a sort of
presumptive claim to high office, like the Cavendishes and the Russells,
the Cecils and the Bentincks. And for many years, during which Mr.
Gladstone was distrusted as a statesman because, while he had ceased to
be a Tory, he had not fully become a Liberal, his eloquence was the main,
one might almost say the sole, source of his influence. Oratory was a
power in English politics even a century and a half ago, as the career of
the elder Pitt shows. But within the last fifty years, years which have
seen the power of rank and family connections decline, it has continued
to be essential to the highest success although much less cultivated as a
fine art, and brings a man quickly to the front, though it will not keep
him there should he prove to want the other branches of statesmanlike
capacity.
The permanent reputation of an orator depends upon two things, the
witness of contemporaries to the impression produced upon them, and the
written or printed—we may, perhaps, be soon able to say the
phonographed—record of his speeches. Few are the famous speakers who
would be famous if they were tried by this latter test alone, and Mr.
Gladstone was not one of them. It is only by a rare combination of gifts
that one who speaks with so much readiness, force, and brilliance as to
charm his listeners is also able to deliver such valuable thoughts in
such choice words that posterity will read them as literature. Some few
of the ancient orators did this; but we seldom know how far those of
their speeches which have been preserved are the speeches which they
actually delivered. Among moderns, some French preachers, Edmund Burke,
Macaulay, and Daniel Webster are perhaps the only speakers whose
discourses have passed into classics and find new generations of readers.
Twenty years hence Mr. Gladstone’s will not be read, except, of course,
by historians. They are too long, too diffuse, too minute in their
handling of details, too elaborately qualified in their enunciation of
general principles. They contain few epigrams and few of those weighty
thoughts put into telling phrases which the Greeks called γνῶμαι. The
style, in short, is not sufficiently rich or finished to give a perpetual
interest to matters whose practical importance has vanished. The same
oblivion has overtaken all but a very few of the best things of Grattan,
Pitt, Canning, Plunket, Brougham, Peel, Bright. It may, indeed, be
said—and the examples of Burke and Macaulay show that this is no
paradox—that the speakers whom posterity most enjoys are rarely those who
most affected the audiences that listened to them.
If, on the other hand, Mr. Gladstone be judged by the impression he made
on his own time, his place will be high in the front rank. His speeches
were neither so concisely telling as Mr. Bright’s nor so finished in
diction; but no other man among his contemporaries—neither Lord Derby nor
Mr. Lowe nor Mr. Disraeli nor Bishop Wilberforce nor Bishop
Magee—deserved comparison with him. And he rose superior to Mr. Bright
himself in readiness, in variety of knowledge, in persuasive ingenuity.
Mr. Bright required time for preparation, and was always more successful
in alarming his adversaries and stimulating his friends than in either
instructing or convincing anybody. Mr. Gladstone could do all these four
things, and could do them at an hour’s notice, so vast and well ordered
was the arsenal of his mind.
His oratory had many conspicuous merits. There was a lively imagination,
which enabled him to relieve even dull matter by pleasing figures,
together with a large command of quotations and illustrations. There
were remarkable powers of sarcasm—powers, however, which he rarely used,
preferring the summer lightning of banter to the thunderbolt of
invective. There was admirable lucidity and accuracy in exposition.
There was great skill in the disposition and marshaling of his arguments,
and finally—a gift now almost lost in England—there was a wonderful
variety and grace of appropriate gesture. But above and beyond
everything else which enthralled the listener, there were four qualities,
two specially conspicuous in the substance of his eloquence—inventiveness
and elevation; two not less remarkable in his manner—force in the
delivery, expressive modulation in the voice.
Of the swift resourcefulness of his mind, something has been said
already. In debate it shone out with the strongest ray. His readiness,
not only at catching a point, but at making the most of it on a moment’s
notice, was amazing. Some one would lean over the back of the bench he
sat on and show a paper or whisper a sentence to him. Apprehending its
bearings at a glance, he would take the bare fact and so shape and
develop it, like a potter molding a bowl on the wheel out of a lump of
clay, that it grew into a cogent argument or a happy illustration under
the eye of the audience, and seemed all the more telling because it had
not been originally a part of his case. Even in the last two years of
his parliamentary life, when his sight had so failed that he read
nothing, printed or written, except what it was absolutely necessary to
read, and when his deafness had so increased that he did not hear half of
what was said in debate, it was sufficient for a colleague to whisper a
few words to him, explaining how the matter at issue stood, and he would
rise to his feet and extemporize a long and ingenious argument, or
perhaps retreat with dexterous grace from a position which the course of
the discussion or the private warning of the “whips” had shown to be
untenable. No one ever saw him at a loss either to meet a new point
raised by an adversary or to make the most of an unexpected incident.
Sometimes he would amuse himself by drawing a cheer or a contradiction
from his opponents, and would then suddenly turn round and use this hasty
expression of their opinion as the basis for a fresh argument of his own.
In this particular kind of debating power, for the display of which the
House of Commons—an assembly of moderate size, which knows all its
leading figures familiarly—is an apt theater, he has been seldom rivaled
and never surpassed. Its only weakness sprang from its superabundance.
He was sometimes so intent on refuting the particular adversaries opposed
to him, and persuading the particular audience before him, that he forgot
to address his reasonings to the public beyond the House, and make them
equally applicable and equally convincing to the readers of next morning.
As dignity is one of the rarest qualities in literature, so elevation is
one of the rarest in oratory. It is a quality easier to feel than to
describe or analyze. We may call it a power of ennobling ordinary things
by showing their relation to great things, of pouring high emotions round
them, of bringing the worthier motives of human conduct to bear upon
them, of touching them with the light of poetry. Ambitious writers and
speakers incessantly strain after effects of this kind; but they are
effects which study and straining do not enable a man to attain. Vainly
do most of us flap our wings in the effort to soar; if we rise from the
ground it is because some unusually strong or deep burst of feeling makes
us for the moment better than ourselves. In Mr. Gladstone the capacity
for feeling was at all times so strong, the susceptibility of the
imagination so keen, that he soared without effort. His vision seemed to
take in the whole landscape. The points actually in question might be
small, but the principles involved were to him far-reaching. The
contests of to-day seemed to interest him because their effect would be
felt in a still distant future. There are rhetoricians skilful in
playing by words and manner on every chord of human nature, rhetoricians
who move you indeed, and may even carry you away for the moment, but
whose sincerity you nevertheless doubt, because the sense of spontaneity
is lacking. Mr. Gladstone was not of these. He never seemed to be
forcing an effect or assuming a sentiment. To listen to him was to feel
convinced of his own conviction and of the reality of the warmth with
which he expressed it. Nor was this due to the perfection of his
rhetorical art. He really did feel what he expressed. Sometimes, of
course, like all statesmen, he had to maintain a cause whose weakness he
knew, as, for instance, when it became necessary to defend the blunder of
a colleague. But even in such cases he did not simulate feeling, but
reserved his earnestness for those parts of the case on which it could be
honestly expended. As this was true of the imaginative and emotional
side of his eloquence altogether, so was it especially true of his
unequaled power of lifting a subject from the level on which other
speakers had treated it into the purer air of permanent principle,
perhaps even of moral sublimity.
The note of genuineness and spontaneity which marked the substance of his
speeches was no less conspicuous in their delivery. Nothing could be
more easy and graceful than his manner on ordinary occasions. His
expository discourses, such as those with which he introduced a
complicated bill or unfolded a financial statement, were models of their
kind, not only for lucidity, but for the pleasant smoothness, equally
free from monotony and from abruptness, with which the stream of speech
flowed from his lips. The task was performed so well that people thought
it an easy task till they saw how immeasurably inferior were the
performances of two subsequent chancellors of the exchequer so able in
their respective ways as Mr. Lowe and Mr. Goschen. But when an occasion
arrived which quickened men’s pulses, and particularly when some sudden
storm burst on the House of Commons, a place where the waves rise as fast
as in a mountain lake under a squall rushing down a glen, the vehemence
of his feeling found expression in the fire of his eye and the resistless
strength of his words. His utterance did not grow swifter, nor did the
key of his voice rise, as passion raises and sharpens it in most men.
But the measured force with which every sentence was launched, like a
shell hurtling through the air, the concentrated intensity of his look,
as he defied antagonists in front and swept his glance over the ranks of
his supporters around and behind him, had a startling and thrilling power
which no other Englishman could exert, and which no Englishman had
exerted since the days of Pitt and Fox. The whole proud, bold, ardent
nature of the man seemed to flash out, and one almost forgot what the
lips said in admiration of the towering personality.