delivered on such an occasion could not comprehend the impression it had
made on the listeners. “What was there in it so to stir you?” they
asked. They had not seen the glance and the gestures; they had not heard
the vibrating voice rise to an organ peal of triumph or sink to a whisper
of entreaty. Mr. Gladstone’s voice was naturally one of great richness
and resonance. It was a fine singing voice, and a pleasant voice to
listen to in conversation, not the less pleasant for having a slight
trace of Liverpool accent clinging to it. But what struck one in
listening to his speeches was not so much the quality of the vocal chords
as the skill with which they were managed. He had the same gift of
sympathetic expression, of throwing his feeling into his voice, and using
its modulations to accompany and convey every shade of meaning, that a
great composer has when he puts music to a poem, or a great executant
when he renders at once the composer’s and the poet’s thought. And just
as great singers or violinists enjoy the practice of their art, so it was
a delight to him to put forth this faculty of expression—perhaps an
unconscious, yet an intense delight; as appeared from this also, that
whenever his voice failed him (which sometimes befell in later years) his
words came less easily, and even the chariot of his argument seemed to
drive heavily. That the voice should so seldom have failed him was
wonderful. When he had passed his seventy-fifth year, it became sensibly
inferior in volume and depth of tone. But its strength, variety, and
delicacy remained. In April, 1886, he being then seventy-seven, it held
out during a speech of nearly four hours in length. In February, 1890,
it enabled him to deliver with extraordinary effect an eminently solemn
and pathetic appeal. In March, 1895, those who listened to it the last
time it was heard in Parliament—they were comparatively few, for the
secret of his impending resignation had been well kept—recognized in it
all the old charm. But perhaps the most curious instance of the power it
could exert is to be found in a speech made in 1883, during one of the
tiresome debates occasioned by the refusal of the Tory party and of some
timorous Liberals to allow Mr. Bradlaugh to be sworn as a member of the
House of Commons. This speech produced a profound impression on those
who heard it, an impression which its perusal to-day fails to explain.
That impression was chiefly due to the grave and reverent tone in which
he delivered some sentences stating the view that it is not our belief in
the bare existence of a Deity, but the realizing of him as being also a
Providence ruling the world, that is of moral value and significance, and
was due in particular to the lofty dignity with which he declaimed six
lines of Lucretius, setting forth the Epicurean view of the gods as
unconcerned with mankind. There were probably not ten men in the House
of Commons who could follow the sense of the lines so as to appreciate
their bearing on his argument. But these stately and sonorous
hexameters—hexameters that seemed to have lived on through nineteen
centuries to find their application from the lips of an orator to-day;
the sense of remoteness in the strange language and the far-off heathen
origin; the deep and moving note in the speaker’s voice, thrilled the
imagination of the audience and held it spellbound, lifting for a moment
the whole subject of debate into a region far above party conflicts.
Spoken by any one else, the passage culminating in these Lucretian lines
might have produced little effect. It was the voice and manner, above
all the voice, with its marvelous modulations, that made the speech
majestic.
Yet one must not forget to add that with him, as with some other famous
statesmen, the impression made by a speech was in a measure due to the
admiring curiosity and wonder which his personality inspired. He was so
much the most interesting human being in the House of Commons that, when
he withdrew, many members said that the place had lost half its
attraction for them, and that the chamber seemed empty because he was not
in it. Plenty of able men remained. But even the ablest seemed
ordinary, perhaps even commonplace, when compared with the figure that
had vanished, a figure in whom were combined, as in no other man of his
time, an unrivaled experience, an extraordinary activity and versatility
of intellect, a fervid imagination, and an indomitable will.
V
ORIGINALITY AND INDEPENDENCE
THOUGH Mr. Gladstone’s oratory was a main source of his power, both in
Parliament and over the people, the effort of his enemies to represent
him as a mere rhetorician will seem absurd to the historian who reviews
his whole career. The mere rhetorician adorns and popularizes the ideas
which have originated with others, he advocates policies which others
have devised; he follows and expresses the sentiments which already
prevail in his party. He may help to destroy; he does not construct.
Mr. Gladstone was himself a source of new ideas and new policies; he
evoked new sentiments or turned sentiments into new channels. He was a
constructive statesman not less conspicuously than Pitt, Canning, and
Peel. If the memory of his oratorical triumphs were to pass completely
away, he would deserve to be remembered in respect of the mark he left
upon the British statute-book and of the changes he wrought both in the
constitution of his country and in her European policy. To describe the
acts he carried would almost be to write the history of recent British
legislation; to pass a judgment upon their merits would be foreign to the
scope of this sketch: it is only to three remarkable groups of measures
that reference can here be made.
The first of these three groups includes the financial reforms embodied
in a series of fourteen budgets between the years 1853 and 1882, the most
famous of which were the budgets of 1853 and 1860. In the former Mr.
Gladstone continued the work begun by Peel by reducing and simplifying
the customs duties. The deficiency in revenue thus caused was supplied
by the enactment of less oppressive imposts, and particularly by
resettling the income tax, and by the introduction of a succession duty
on real estate. The preparation and passing of this very technical and
intricate Succession Duty Act was a most laborious enterprise, of which
Mr. Gladstone used to speak as the severest mental strain he had ever
undergone.
Καρτίοστην δὴ τήν γε μάχην φάατω δύμεναι ἀνδρῶν.
The budget of 1860, among other changes, abolished the paper duty, an
immense service to the press, which excited the hostility of the House of
Lords. They threw out the measure, but in the following year Mr.
Gladstone forced them to submit. His achievements in the field of
finance equal, if they do not surpass, those of Peel, and are not
tarnished, as in the case of Pitt, by the recollection of burdensome
wars. To no minister can so large a share in promoting the commercial
and industrial prosperity of modern England, and in the reduction of her
national debt, be ascribed.
The second group includes the two great parliamentary reform bills of
1866 and 1884 and the Redistribution Bill of 1885. The first of these
was defeated in the House of Commons, but it led to the passing next year
of an even more comprehensive bill—a bill which, though passed by Mr.
Disraeli, was to some extent dictated by Mr. Gladstone, as leader of the
opposition. Of these three statutes taken together, it may be said that
they have turned Britain into a democratic country, changing the
character of her government almost as profoundly as did the Reform Act of
1832.
The third group consists of a series of Irish measures, beginning with
the Church Disestablishment Act of 1869, and including the Land Act of
1870, the University Education Bill of 1873 (defeated in the House of
Commons), the Land Act of 1881, and the home-rule bills of 1886 and 1893.
All these were in a special manner Mr. Gladstone’s handiwork, prepared as
well as brought in and advocated by him. All were highly complicated,
and of one—the Land Act of 1881, which it took three months to carry
through the House of Commons—it was said that so great was its intricacy
that only three men understood it—Mr. Gladstone himself, his
Attorney-General for Ireland, and Mr. T. M. Healy. So far from shrinking
from, he seemed to revel in, the toil of mastering an infinitude of
technical details. Yet neither did he want boldness and largeness of
conception. The Home-Rule Bill of 1886 was nothing less than a new
constitution for Ireland, and in all but one of its most essential
features had been practically worked out by himself more than four months
before it was presented to Parliament.
Of the other important measures passed while he was prime minister, two
deserve special mention, the Education Act of 1870 and the
Local-Government Act of 1894. Neither of these, however, was directly
his work, though he took a leading part in piloting the former through
the House of Commons.
His action in the field of foreign policy, though it was felt only at
intervals, was on several occasions momentous, and has left abiding
results in European history. In 1851, he being then still a Tory, his
powerful pamphlet against the Bourbon government of Naples, and the
sympathy he subsequently avowed with the national movement in Italy, gave
that movement a new standing in Europe by powerfully recommending it to
English opinion. In 1870 the prompt action of his government, in
concluding a treaty for the neutrality of Belgium on the outbreak of the
war between France and Germany, saved Belgium from being drawn into the
strife. In 1871, by concluding the treaty of Washington, which provided
for the settlement of the _Alabama_ claims, he not only asserted a
principle of the utmost value, but delivered England from what would have
been, in case of her being at war with any European power, a danger fatal
to her ocean commerce. And, in 1876, the vigorous attack he made on the
Turks after the Bulgarian massacre roused an intense feeling in England,
so turned the current of opinion that Disraeli’s ministry were forced to
leave the Sultan to his fate, and thus became the cause of the
deliverance of Bulgaria, Eastern Rumelia, Bosnia, and Thessaly from
Mussulman tyranny. Few English statesmen have equally earned the
gratitude of the oppressed.
Nothing lay nearer to his heart than the protection of the Eastern
Christians. His sense of personal duty to them was partly due to the
feeling that the Crimean War had prolonged the rule of the Turk, and had
thus imposed a special responsibility on Britain, and on the statesmen
who formed the cabinet which undertook that war. Twenty years after the
agitation of 1876, and when he had finally retired from Parliament and
political life, the massacres perpetrated by the Sultan on his Armenian
subjects brought him once more into the field, and his last speech in
public (delivered at Liverpool in the autumn of 1896) was a powerful
argument in favor of British intervention to rescue the Eastern
Christians. In the following spring he followed this up by a spirited
pamphlet on behalf of the freedom of Crete. In neither of these two
cases did success crown his efforts, for the government, commanding a
large majority in Parliament, pursued the course it had already entered
on. Many poignant regrets were expressed in England that Mr. Gladstone
was no longer able to take practical action in the cause of humanity; yet
it was a consolation to have the assurance that his sympathies with that
cause had been nowise dulled by age and physical infirmity.
That he was right in the view he took of the Turks and British policy in
1876–78 has been now virtually admitted even by his opponents. That he
was also right in 1896 and 1897, when urging action to protect the
Eastern Christians, will probably be admitted ten years hence, when
partizan passion has cooled. In both cases it was not merely religious
sympathy, but also a far-sighted view of policy that governed his
judgment. The only charge that can fairly be brought against his conduct
in foreign, and especially in Eastern, affairs is, that he did not keep a
sufficiently watchful eye upon them at all times, but frequently allowed
himself to be so engrossed by British domestic questions as to lose the
opportunity which his tenure of power from time to time gave him of
averting approaching dangers. Those who know how tremendous is the
strain which the headship of a cabinet and the leadership of the House of
Commons impose will understand, though they will not cease to regret,
this omission.
Such a record is the best proof of the capacity for initiative which
belonged to him and in which men of high oratorical gifts have often been
wanting. In the Neapolitan case, in the _Alabama_ case, in the Bulgarian
case, no less than in the adoption of the policy of a separate
legislature and executive for Ireland, he acted from his own convictions,
with no suggestion of encouragement from his party; and in the last
instances—those of Ireland and of Bulgaria—he took a course which seemed
to the English political world so novel and even startling that no
ordinary statesman would have ventured on it.
His courage was indeed one of the most striking parts of his character.
It was not the rashness of an impetuous nature, for, impetuous as he was
when stirred by some sudden excitement, he was wary and cautious whenever
he took a deliberate survey of the conditions that surrounded him. It
was the proud self-confidence of a strong character, which was willing to
risk fame and fortune in pursuing a course it had once resolved upon; a
character which had faith in its own conclusions, and in the success of a
cause consecrated by principle; a character which obstacles did not
affright or deter, but rather roused to a higher combative energy. Few
English statesmen have done anything so bold as was Mr. Gladstone’s
declaration for Irish home rule in 1886. He took not only his political
power but the fame and credit of his whole past life in his hand when he
set out on this new journey at seventy-seven years of age; for it was
quite possible that the great bulk of his party might refuse to follow
him, and he be left exposed to derision as the chief of an insignificant
group. It turned out that the great bulk of the party did follow him,
though many of the most influential and socially important refused to do
so. But neither Mr. Gladstone nor any one else could have foretold this
when his intentions were first announced.
Two faults natural to a strong man and an excitable man were commonly
charged on him—an overbearing disposition and an irritable temper.
Neither charge was well founded. Masterful he certainly was, both in
speech and in action. His ardent manner, the intensity of his look, the
dialectical vigor with which he pressed an argument, were apt to awe
people who knew him but slightly, and make them abandon resistance even
when they were unconvinced. A gifted though somewhat erratic politician
used to tell how he once fared when he had risen in the House of Commons
to censure some act of the ministry. “I had not gone on three minutes
when Gladstone turned round and gazed at me so that I had to sit down in
the middle of a sentence. I could not help it. There was no standing
his eye.” But he neither meant nor wished to beat down his opponents by
mere authority. One of the ablest of his private secretaries, who knew
him as few people did, once observed: “When you are arguing with Mr.
Gladstone, you must never let him think he has convinced you unless you
are really convinced. Persist in repeating your view, and if you are
unable to cope with him in skill of fence, say bluntly that for all his
ingenuity and authority you think he is wrong, and you retain your own
opinion. If he respects you as a man who knows something of the subject,
he will be impressed by your opinion, and it will afterward have due
weight with him.” In his own cabinet he was willing to listen patiently
to everybody’s views, and, indeed, in the judgment of some of his
colleagues, was not, at least in his later years, sufficiently strenuous
in asserting and holding to his own. It is no secret that some of the
most important decisions of the ministry of 1880–85 were taken against
his judgment, though when they had been adopted he, of course, defended
them in Parliament as if they had received his individual approval. Nor,
although he was extremely resolute and tenacious, did he bear malice
against those who foiled his plans. He would exert his full force to get
his own way, but if he could not get it, he accepted the position with
dignity and good temper. He was too proud to be vindictive, too
completely master of himself to be betrayed, even when excited, into
angry words. Whether he was unforgiving and overmindful of injuries, it
was less easy to determine, but those who had watched him most closely
held that mere opposition or even insult did not leave a permanent sting,
and that the only thing he could not forget or forgive was faithlessness
or disloyalty. Like his favorite poet, he put the _traditori_ in the
lowest pit, although, like all practical statesmen, he often found
himself obliged to work with those whom he distrusted. His attitude
toward his two chief opponents well illustrates this feature of his
character. He heartily despised Disraeli, not because Disraeli had been
in the habit of attacking him, as one could easily perceive from the way
he talked of those attacks, but because he thought Disraeli habitually
untruthful, and considered him to have behaved with incomparable meanness
to Peel. Yet he never attacked Disraeli personally, as Disraeli often
attacked him. There was another of his opponents of whom he entertained
an especially bad opinion, but no one could have told from his speeches
what that opinion was. For Lord Salisbury he seemed to have no dislike
at all, though Lord Salisbury had more than once insulted him. On one
occasion (in 1890) he remarked to a colleague who had said something
about the prime minister’s offensive language: “I have never felt angry
at what Salisbury has said about me. His mother was very kind to me when
I was quite a young man, and I remember Salisbury as a little fellow in a
red frock rolling about on the ottoman.” His leniency toward another
violent tongue which frequently assailed him, that of Lord Randolph
Churchill, was not less noteworthy.
That his temper was naturally hot, no one who looked at him could doubt.
But he had it in such tight control, and it was so free from anything
acrid or malignant, that it had become a good temper, worthy of a large
and strong nature. With whatever vehemence he might express himself,
there was nothing wounding or humiliating to others in this vehemence,
the proof of which might be found in the fact that those younger men who
had to deal with him were never afraid of a sharp answer or an impatient
repulse. A distinguished man (the late Lord Chief Justice Coleridge),
some ten years his junior, used to say that he had never feared but two
persons, Mr. Gladstone and Cardinal Newman; but it was awe of their
character that inspired this fear, for no one could cite an instance in
which either of them had forgotten his dignity or been betrayed into a
discourteous word. Of Mr. Gladstone especially it might be said that he
was cast in too large a mold to have the pettiness of ruffled vanity or
to abuse his predominance by treating any one else as an inferior. His
manners were the manners of the old time, easy but stately. Like his
oratory, they were in what Matthew Arnold used to call the grand style;
and the contrast in this respect between him and most of those who
crossed swords with him in literary or theological controversy was
apparent. His intellectual generosity was a part of the same largeness
of nature. He always cordially acknowledged his indebtedness to those
who helped him in any piece of work; received their suggestions candidly,
even when opposed to his own preconceived notions; did not hesitate to
own a mistake if he had made one. Those who have abundant mental
resources, and have conquered fame, can doubtless afford to be generous.
Julius Cæsar was, and George Washington, and so, in a different sphere,
were Newton and Darwin. But the instances to the contrary are so
numerous that one may say of magnanimity that it is among the rarest as
well as the finest ornaments of character.
The essential dignity of his nature was never better seen than during the
last few years of his life, after he had retired (in 1894) from
Parliament and public life. He indulged in no vain regrets, nor was
there any foundation for the rumors, so often circulated, that he thought
of reëntering the arena of strife. He spoke with no bitterness of those
who had opposed, and sometimes foiled, him in the past. He gave vent to
no disparaging criticisms on those who from time to time filled the place
that had been his in the government of the country or the leadership of
his party. Although his opinion on current questions was frequently
solicited, he scarcely ever allowed it to be known, and never himself
addressed the nation, except (as already mentioned) on behalf of what he
deemed a sacred cause, altogether above party—the discharge by Britain of
her duty to the victims of the Turk. As soon as an operation for
cataract had enabled him to read or write for seven hours a day, he
devoted himself with his old ardor to the preparation of an edition of
Bishop Butler’s works, resumed his multifarious reading, and filled up
the interstices of his working-time with studies on Homer which he had
been previously unable to complete. No trace of the moroseness of old
age appeared in his manners or his conversation, nor did he, though
profoundly grieved at some of the events which he witnessed, and owning
himself disappointed at the slow advance made by some causes dear to him,
appear less hopeful than in earlier days of the general progress of the
world, or less confident in the beneficent power of freedom to promote
the happiness of his country. The stately simplicity which had been the
note of his private life seemed more beautiful than ever in this quiet
evening of a long and sultry day. His intellectual powers were
unimpaired, his thirst for knowledge undiminished. But a placid
stillness had fallen upon him and his household; and in seeing the tide
of his life begin slowly to ebb, one thought of the lines of his
illustrious contemporary and friend:
such a tide as moving seems asleep,
Too full for sound or foam,
When that which drew from out the boundless deep
Turns again home.
VI
SOCIAL QUALITIES
ADDING these charms of manner to a memory of extraordinary strength and
quickness and to an amazing vivacity and variety of mental force, any one
can understand how fascinating Mr. Gladstone was in society. He enjoyed
it to the last, talking as earnestly and joyously at eighty-five as he
had done at twenty on every topic that came up, and exerting himself with
equal zest, whether his interlocutor was an arch-bishop or a young
curate. Though his party used to think that he overvalued the political
influence of the great Whig houses and gave them more than their fair
share of honors and appointments, no one was personally more free from
that taint of snobbishness which is so frequently charged upon
Englishmen. He gave the best he had to everybody alike, paying to men of
learning and letters a respect which they seldom receive from English
politicians or social magnates. And although he was scrupulously
observant of all the rules of precedence and conventions of social life,
it was easy to see that neither rank nor wealth had that importance in
his eyes which the latter, especially nowadays, commands in London.
Dispensing titles and decorations with a liberal hand, his pride always
refused such so-called honors for himself. When Mr. Disraeli became Earl
of Beaconsfield, his smile had a touch of contempt in it as he observed,
“I cannot forgive him for not having made himself a duke.”
It was often said of him that he lacked humor; but this was only so far
true that he was apt to throw into small matters a force and moral
earnestness which ordinary people thought needless, and to treat
seriously opponents whom a little light sarcasm would have better reduced
to their insignificance. In private he was wont both to tell and enjoy
good stories; while in Parliament, though his tone was generally earnest,
he would occasionally display such effective powers of banter and
ridicule as to make people wonder why they were so rarely put forth. A
great deal of what passes in London for humor is mere cynicism, and he
hated cynicism so heartily as to dislike even humor when it had a touch
of cynical flavor. Wit he enjoyed, but did not produce. The turn of his
mind was not to brevity and point and condensation. He sometimes struck
off a telling phrase, but never polished an epigram. His conversation
was luminous rather than sparkling; you were interested and instructed
while you listened, but the words seldom dwelt in your memory.