in London, and a talker far more agreeable than either Carlyle or
Macaulay, inasmuch as he was no less ready to listen than to speak, and
never wearied the dinner-table by a monologue. His simplicity, his
spontaneity, his genial courtesy, as well as the vast fund of knowledge
and of personal recollections at his command, made him extremely popular
in society, so that his opponents used to say that it was dangerous to
meet him, because one might be forced to leave off hating him. He was,
perhaps, too prone to go on talking upon one subject which happened to
fill his mind at the moment; nor was it easy to divert his attention to
something else which others might deem more important. Those who stayed
with him in the same country house sometimes complained that the
perpetual display of force and eagerness fatigued them, as one tires of
watching the rush of Niagara. His guests, however, did not feel this,
for his own home life was quiet and smooth. He read and wrote a good
many hours daily, but never sat up late, almost always slept soundly,
never missed early morning service at the parish church, never seemed
oppressed or driven to strain his strength. With all his impetuosity, he
was remarkably regular, systematic, and deliberate in his habits and ways
of doing business. A swift reader and a surprisingly swift writer, he
was always occupied, and was skilful in using even the scraps and
fragments of his time. No pressure of work made him fussy or fidgety,
nor could any one remember to have seen him in a hurry.
VII
AUTHORSHIP
THE best proof of his swiftness, his industry, and his skill in
economizing time is to be found in the quantity of his literary work,
which, considering the abstruse nature of the subjects to which most of
it is related, would have been creditable to the diligence of a German
professor sitting alone in his study. As to the merits of the work there
has been some controversy. Mankind are slow to credit the same person
with eminence in various fields. When they read the prose of a great
poet, they try it by severer tests than would be applied to other
prose-writers. When a painter wins fame by his portraits or his
landscapes, they are apt to discourage any other kind of painting he may
attempt. So Mr. Gladstone’s reputation as an orator stood in his own
light when he appeared as an author. He was read with avidity by
thousands who would not have looked at the article or book had it borne
any other name; but he was judged by the standard, not of his finest
printed speeches, for his speeches were seldom models of composition, but
rather by that of the impression which his speeches made on those who
heard them. Since his warmest admirers could not claim for him as a
writer of prose any such pre-eminence as belonged to him as a speaker, it
followed that his written work was not duly appreciated. Had he been a
writer and nothing else, he would have been famous and powerful by his
pen.
He might, however, have failed to secure a place in the front rank. His
style was forcible, copious, rich with various knowledge, warm with the
ardor of his nature. But it had three serious defects. It was diffuse,
apt to pursue a topic into details, when these might have been left to
the reader’s own reflection. It was redundant, employing more words than
were needed to convey the substance. It was unchastened, indulging too
freely in tropes and metaphors, in quotations and adapted phrases even
when the quotation added nothing to the sense, but was due merely to some
association in his own mind. Thus it seldom reached a high level of
purity and grace, and though one might excuse its faults as natural to
the work of a swift and busy man, they were sufficient to prevent readers
from deriving much pleasure from the mere form and dress of his thoughts.
Nevertheless there are passages, and not a few passages, both in the
books and in the articles, of rare merit, among which may be cited (not
as exceptionally good, but as typical of his strong points) the striking
picture of his own youthful feeling toward the Church of England
contained in the “Chapter of Autobiography,” and the refined criticism of
“Robert Elsmere,” published in 1888. Almost the last thing he wrote, a
pamphlet on the Greek and Cretan question, published in the spring of
1897, has all the force and cogency of his best days. Two things were
never wanting to him: vigor of expression and an admirable command of
appropriate words.
His writings fall into three classes: political, theological, and
literary—the last including, and indeed chiefly consisting of, his books
and articles upon Homer and the Homeric question. All the political
writings, except his books on “The State in its Relations to the Church”
and “Church Principles Considered in their Results,” belong to the class
of occasional literature, being pamphlets or articles produced with a
view to some current crisis or controversy. They are valuable chiefly as
proceeding from one who bore a leading part in the affairs they relate
to, and as embodying vividly the opinions and aspirations of the moment,
less frequently in respect of permanent lessons of political wisdom, such
as one finds in Machiavelli or Tocqueville or Edmund Burke. Like Pitt
and Peel, Mr. Gladstone had a mind which, whatever its original
tendencies, had come to be rather practical than meditative. He was fond
of generalizations and principles, but they were always directly related
to the questions that came before him in actual politics; and the number
of general maxims or illuminative suggestions to be found in his writings
and speeches is not large in proportion to their sustained intellectual
vigor. Even Disraeli, though his views were often fanciful and his
epigrams often forced, gives us more frequently a brilliant (if only half
true) historical _aperçu_, or throws a flash of light into some corner of
human character. Of the theological essays, which are mainly apologetic
and concerned with the authenticity and authority of Scripture, it is
enough to say that they exhibit the same general characteristics as the
treatises dealing with Homer, which were the most serious piece of work
that proceeded from Mr. Gladstone’s pen. These Homeric treatises are in
one sense worthless, in another sense admirable. Those parts of them
which deal with early Greek mythology and religion, with Homeric
geography and genealogy, and in a less degree with the use of Homeric
epithets, have been condemned by the unanimous voice of scholars as
fantastic. The premises are assumed without sufficient investigation,
while the reasonings are fine-drawn and flimsy. Extraordinary ingenuity
is shown in piling up a lofty fabric, but the foundation is of sand, and
the edifice has hardly a solid wall or beam in it. A clever conjecture
is treated as a fact; an inference possible but represented as probable
is drawn from this conjecture; a second inference is based upon the
first; we are made to forget that the probability of this second is at
most only half the probability of the first; the process is continued in
the same way; and when the whole superstructure is complete, the reader
is provoked to perceive how much dialectical skill has been wasted upon a
series of hypotheses which a breath of common-sense criticism dissipates.
If one is asked to explain the weakness in this particular department of
so otherwise strong a mind, the answer would seem to be that the element
of fancifulness in Mr. Gladstone’s intellect, and his tendency to mistake
mere argumentation for verification, were checked in practical politics
by constant intercourse with friends and colleagues as well as by the
need of convincing visible audiences, while in theological or historical
inquiries his ingenuity roamed with a dangerous freedom over wide plains
where no obstacles checked its course. Something may also be due to the
fact that his philosophical and historical education was received at a
time when the modern critical spirit and the canons it recognizes had
scarcely begun to assert themselves at Oxford. Similar defects may be
discerned in other eminent writers of his own and preceding generations
of Oxford men, defects which persons of equal or even inferior power in
later generations would not display. In some of these, and particularly
in Cardinal Newman, the contrast between dialectical acumen, coupled with
surpassing rhetorical skill, and the vitiation of the argument by a want
of the critical faculty, is even more striking than in Mr. Gladstone’s
case; and the example of that illustrious man suggests that the dominance
of the theological view of literary and historical problems, a dominance
evident in Mr. Gladstone, counts for something in producing the
phenomenon noted.
With these deficiencies, Mr. Gladstone’s Homeric work had the great merit
of being based on a full and thorough knowledge of the Homeric text. He
had seen that Homer is not only a poet, but an “historical source” of the
highest value, a treasure-house of data for the study of early Greek life
and thought, an authority all the more trustworthy because an unconscious
authority, addressing not posterity but his own contemporaries. With
this thorough knowledge of the matter contained in the poems, Mr.
Gladstone was able to present many interesting and permanently valuable
pictures of the political and social life of Homeric Greece, while the
interspersed literary criticisms are often subtle and suggestive, erring,
when they do err, chiefly through what may be called the over-earnestness
of his mind. He sometimes takes the poet too seriously; he is apt to
read an ethical purpose into descriptive or dramatic touches which are
merely descriptive or dramatic. But he has for his author not only that
intense sympathy which is the best basis for criticism, but a real
justness of poetic taste which the learned and painstaking German
commentator frequently wants. That he was a sound and accurate scholar
in that somewhat narrow sense of the word which denotes a grammatical and
literary mastery of Greek and Latin, goes without saying. Men of his
generation were more apt to keep up their familiarity with the ancient
classics than is the present generation; and his habit of reading Greek
for the sake of his Homeric studies, and Latin for the sake of his
theological, made this familiarity more than usually thorough. Like most
Etonians, he loved and knew the poets by preference. Theology claimed a
place beside poetry; history came next, and was always a favorite branch
of study. It seemed odd that the constitutional history of England was
by no means one of his strong subjects, but the fact is that this was
preeminently a Whig subject, and Mr. Gladstone never was a Whig, never
learned to think upon the lines of the great Whigs of former days. His
knowledge was not, perhaps, very wide, but it was generally exact;
indeed, the accuracy with which he grasped facts that belonged to the
realm of history proper was sometimes in strange contrast to the fanciful
way in which he reasoned from them, or to the wildness of his conjectures
in the prehistoric region. For metaphysics strictly so called he had
apparently little turn—his reading did not go far beyond those companions
of his youth, Aristotle and Bishop Butler; and philosophical speculation
interested him only so far as it bore on Christian doctrine. Neither, in
spite of his eminence as a financier and an advocate of free trade, did
he show much taste for economic studies. On practical topics, such as
the working of protective tariffs, the abuse of charitable endowments,
the development of fruit-culture in England, the duty of liberal giving
by the rich, the utility of thrift among the poor, his remarks were
always full of point, clearness, and good sense, but he seldom launched
out into the wider sea of economic theory. He must have possessed
mathematical talent, for he took a first class in mathematics at Oxford,
at the same time as his first in classics, but it was a subject he soon
dropped. Regarding the sciences of nature, the sciences of experiment
and observation, he seemed to feel as little curiosity as any educated
man who notes the enormous part they play in the modern world can feel.
Sayings of his have been quoted which show that he imperfectly
comprehended the character of the evidence they rely upon and of the
methods they employ. On one occasion he astonished a dinner-table of
younger friends by refusing to accept some of the most certain
conclusions of modern geology. No doubt he belonged (as the famous Lord
Derby once said of himself) to a pre-scientific age; still, it was hard
to avoid thinking that he was unconsciously influenced by a belief that
such sciences as geology and biology, for instance, were being worked in
a sense hostile to revealed religion, and were therefore influences
threatening the moral welfare of mankind.
VIII
RELIGIOUS CHARACTER
OF all the things with which men are concerned, religion was that which
had the strongest hold upon his thoughts and feelings. He had desired,
when quitting the university, to become a clergyman, and it was only his
father’s opposition that made him abandon the idea. Never thereafter did
he cease to take the warmest and most constant interest in all the
ecclesiastical controversies that distracted the Established Church. He
was turned out of his seat for Oxford University by the country clergy,
who form the bulk of the voters. He incurred the bitter displeasure of
four fifths of the Anglican communion by disestablishing the Protestant
Episcopal Church in Ireland, and from 1868 to the end of his life found
nearly all the clerical force of the English establishment arrayed
against him, while his warmest support came from the Nonconformists of
England and the Presbyterians of Scotland. Yet nothing affected his
devotion to the church in which he had been brought up, nor to the body
of Anglo-Catholic doctrine he had imbibed as an undergraduate. After an
attack of influenza which had left him very weak in the spring of 1891,
he endangered his life by attending a meeting on behalf of the Colonial
Bishoprics Fund, for which he had spoken fifty years before. His
theological opinions tinged his views upon not a few political subjects.
They filled him with dislike of the legalization of marriage with a
deceased wife’s sister; they made him a vehement opponent of the bill
which established the English Divorce Court in 1857, and a watchfully
hostile critic of all divorce legislation in America afterward. Some of
his friends traced to the same cause his low estimate of German
literature and even his political aversion to the German Empire. He
could not forget that Germany had been the fountain of rationalism, while
German Evangelical Protestantism was more schismatic and further removed
from the medieval church than it pleased him to deem the Church of
England to be. He had an exceedingly high sense of the duty of purity of
life and of the sanctity of domestic relations, and his rigid ideas of
decorum inspired so much awe that it used to be said to a person who had
told an anecdote with ever so slight a tinge of impropriety, “How many
thousands of pounds would you take to tell that to Gladstone?” When
living in the country, it was his constant practice to attend daily
morning service in the parish church, and on Sunday to read in it the
lessons for the day; nor did he ever through his long career transgress
his rule against Sunday labor.
Religious feeling, coupled with a system of firm dogmatic beliefs, was
the mainspring of his whole career, a guiding light in perplexities, a
source of strength in adverse fortune, a consolation in sorrow, a beacon
of hope beyond the disappointments and shortcomings of life. He did not
make what is commonly called a profession of religion, and talked little
about it in general society, though always ready to plunge into a
magazine controversy when Christianity was assailed. But those who knew
him well knew that he was always referring current questions to, and
trying his own conduct by, a religious standard. He was a remarkable
example of the coexistence together with a Christian virtue of a quality
which theologians treat as a sin. He was an exceedingly proud man, yet
an exceedingly humble Christian. With a high regard for his own dignity
and a keen sensitiveness to any imputation on his honor, he was deeply
conscious of his imperfections in the eye of God, realizing the
sinfulness and feebleness of human nature with a medieval intensity. The
language of self-depreciation he was wont to use, though people often
thought it unreal, was the genuine expression of his sense of the
contrast between the religious ideal he set up and his own attainment.
And the tolerance which he extended to those who attacked him or who had
(as he thought) behaved ill in public life was largely due to this
pervading sense of the frailty of human character, and of the
inextricable mixture in conduct of good and bad motives. “It is always
best to take the charitable view,” he once observed in passing through
the division lobby, when a friend had quoted to him the saying of Dean
Church that Mark Pattison had painted himself too black in his
autobiography—“always best, especially in politics.”
This indulgent view, which seemed to develop in his later years, was the
more remarkable because his feelings were strong and his expressions
sometimes too vehement. There was nothing in it of the cynical “man of
the world” acceptance of a low standard as the only possible standard,
for his moral earnestness was as fervent at eighty-eight as it had been
at thirty. Although eminently accessible and open in the ordinary
converse of society, he was in reality a reserved man; not shy, stiff,
and externally cold, like Peel, nor always standing on a pedestal of
dignity, like the younger Pitt, but revealing his deepest thoughts only
to a very few intimate friends, and treating all others with a courteous
friendliness which, though it put them quickly at their ease, did not
encourage them to approach any nearer. Thus, while he was admired by the
mass of his followers, and beloved by the small inner group of family
friends, the great majority of his colleagues, official subordinates, and
political or ecclesiastical associates felt for him rather respect than
affection, and would have hesitated to give him any of friendship’s
confidences. It was regretfully observed that though he was kindly and
considerate, would acknowledge all good service, and gladly offer to a
junior an opportunity of distinction, he seldom seemed sufficiently
interested in any one of his disciples to treat him with special favor or
bestow those counsels which a young man so much prizes from his chief.
But for the warmth of his devotion to a few early friends and the
reverence he always paid to their memory, a reverence touchingly shown in
the article on Arthur Hallam which he published in 1898, sixty-five years
after Hallam’s death, there might have seemed to be a measure of truth in
the judgment that he cared less for men than for ideas and causes.
Those, however, who marked the pang which the departure to the Roman
Church of his friend Hope Scott caused him, those who in later days noted
the enthusiasm with which he would speak of Lord Althorp, his opponent,
and of Lord Aberdeen, his chief, dwelling upon the beautiful truthfulness
and uprightness of the former and the sweet amiability of the latter,
knew that the impression of detachment he gave wronged the sensibility of
his own heart. Of how few who have lived for more than sixty years in
the full sight of their countrymen, and have been as party leaders
exposed to angry and sometimes dishonest criticism, can it be said that
there stands on record against them no malignant word and no vindictive
act! This was due not perhaps entirely to natural sweetness of
disposition, but rather to self-control and to a certain largeness and
dignity of soul which would not condescend to anything mean or petty.
Nor should it be forgotten that the perfectly happy life which he led at
home, cared for in everything by a devoted wife, kept far from him those
domestic troubles which have soured the temper and embittered the
judgments of not a few famous men. Reviewing his whole career, and
summing up the impressions and recollections of those who knew him best,
this dignity is the feature which dwells most in the mind, as the outline
of some majestic Alp moves one from afar when all the lesser beauties of
glen and wood, of crag and glacier, have faded in the distance. As
elevation was the note of his oratory, so was magnanimity the note of his
character.
The favorite Greek maxim that no man can be called happy till his life is
ended must, in the case of statesmen, be extended to warn us from the
attempt to fix any one’s place in history till a generation has arisen to
whom he is a mere name, not a familiar figure to be loved, opposed, or
hated. Few reputations made in politics keep so far green and fresh that
men continue to read and write and speculate about the person when those
who can remember him living have departed. Out of all the men who have
played a leading part in English public life in the present century there
are but seven or eight—Pitt, Fox, Canning, Wellington, Peel, O’Connell,
Disraeli, perhaps Melbourne and Brougham—who still excite our curiosity.
The great poet or the great artist lives longer—indeed, he lives as long
as his books or his pictures; the statesman, like the musician or the
actor, begins to be forgotten so soon as his voice is still, unless he
has so dominated the men of his own time, and made himself a part of his
country’s history, that his personal character becomes a leading factor
in the course which events took. Tried by this test, Mr. Gladstone’s
fame seems destined to last. His eloquence will soon become merely a
tradition, for his printed speeches do not preserve its charm. His main
acts of policy, foreign and domestic, will have to be judged by their
still unborn consequences. If his books continue to be read, it will be
rather because they are his than in respect of any permanent contribution
they have made to knowledge. But whoever follows the annals of England
during the memorable years from 1843 to 1894 will meet his name on almost
every page, will feel how great must have been the force of an intellect
that could so interpenetrate the events of its time, and will seek to
know something of the wonderful figure that rose always conspicuous above
the struggling throng.
There is a passage in the “Odyssey” where the seer Theoclymenus, in
describing a vision of death, says: “The sun has perished out of heaven.”
To Englishmen, Mr. Gladstone has been like a sun which, sinking slowly,
has grown larger as he sank, and filled the sky with radiance even while
he trembled on the verge of the horizon. There were able men, and famous
men, but there was no one comparable to him in power and fame and honor.
Now he is gone. The piercing eye is dim, and the mellow voice is silent,
and the light has died out of the sky.