MR. GLADSTONE
It was in the nature of things that the majestic and challenging
personality of Mr. Gladstone should evoke such variety of worship and
censure that even to-day, after all has been written concerning him, the
plain seeker after truth is not a little perplexed.
For he knows the man was great, and even very great, and that not merely
in the sense of filling a great place over a great space of time; there
was something above and beyond all that. Mr. Gladstone was more than the
sum of all that Mr. Gladstone ever said or did; he had that rare quality,
undefined because indefinable, which compels a homage of the spirit
even when the intellect is in vehement opposition. Four only of Mr.
Gladstone’s greater contemporaries seem to have been wholly insensible
to this influence. Whenever he was in question, Mr. Disraeli retained
the fixed sneer of a Mephistopheles; Lord Salisbury gazed on him with
as little emotion as a colossal Buddha or a landscape; Lord Randolph
Churchill pursued him with the catcalls of a Gavroche; Mr. Parnell
watched him with the cool and scientific detachment of an entomologist
studying a beetle or some other creature with which he has nothing but
life in common. But such complete freedom from the spell cast by the
great Liberal statesman was rare. Others, though they said many bitter
and many mocking things about him, never succeeded in hiding from the
world, or even from themselves, the extent to which he really impressed
them. It was curious, and a little touching, to note how in the heat of
the Irish debates Mr. Balfour would, on the smallest intimation that Mr.
Gladstone’s feelings had been seriously hurt by some shaft of ridicule,
turn from irony to almost filial solicitude. Mr. Chamberlain, whose moral
and intellectual colour scheme ran less to nuance and art tint, showed
with a difference, but not the less sincerely, the extent to which his
old chief still remained an element in his life. After 1886 he seldom
spoke about Mr. Gladstone without a curious kind of anger; the object was
probably less Mr. Gladstone than himself, for being in this case unable
completely to live up to his favourite philosophy of wasting no time in
regretting “either mishaps or mistakes.” As to others still in the train
of Mr. Gladstone, his influence was extraordinary. It was assuredly no
small man, or great man in the smaller way, who could inspire in Lord
Rosebery, himself gifted with a manner that struck terror into those he
wished to keep at a distance, the sort of reverence Tom Brown felt for
Dr. Arnold. It was a very extraordinary man indeed who, himself of the
strictest sect of the Pharisees, could bend the knees of so complacent a
Sadducee and so lukewarm a hero-worshipper as John Morley. But perhaps
the most remarkable case of all was that of Sir William Harcourt, who,
never loved, and perhaps never really loving, was tamed into a submissive
loyalty scarcely congruous with his proud and difficult temperament.
Of the human greatness of Mr. Gladstone, then, there can be no question.
But when we come to deal with his statesmanship, the clouds of incense
sent up by various groups of worshippers conceal more than is revealed by
the light of their pious candles. The more simple school of devotees, who
scouted the possibility that Mr. Gladstone could in any circumstances
be wrong, has naturally shrunk since his death; but those who would
discriminate are divided into many sects. There is one which admires
him as an inspired financier, but censures his foreign policy; there is
another which venerates him mainly as the pacific idealist, the enemy
of the Turkish and other tyrannies, and the friend of small peoples
“struggling rightly to be free”; some point approvingly to his essential
conservatism; others laud him, on the ground of his “trust in the people,
tempered by prudence,” as a great democrat; still others admire chiefly
his marvellous command of the technique of Parliamentary Government. In
short, Mr. Gladstone is revered by all kinds of incompatible people on
all kinds of incompatible grounds. But, of all tributes paid to him,
the quaintest, I imagine, is that I heard from the lips of a Japanese
professor in the late Nineties. He belonged to a school, then rather
influential, with an enthusiasm for a sort of atheistic Christianity.
People were beginning to talk about horseless carriages and wireless
telegraphy. These eminent Orientals desired a Godless Religion and a
Creedless Faith. They rejected all Christian dogma as a superstition not
less fantastic than the wildest perversion of Taoism. They held that
Darwin and Herbert Spencer had between them solved the whole riddle of
the universe. They took, indeed, ground not very dissimilar to that now
occupied by certain dignitaries of the Church. But they recommended, on
what they considered practical grounds, the adoption of Christianity
(carefully deprived of everything conflicting with the scientific notions
of the time) as the State religion of the Japanese Empire. In the first
place such a conversion, it was held, would remove one great obstacle to
the full admission of Japan to the comity of European nations; in the
second, it would provide the lower classes with a moral standard and
motive superior to anything afforded by the Eastern religions in their
decline.
Now it so happened that Mr. Gladstone, when eighty-five or so, was
mentioned in the Japanese papers as having spent five hours of a Good
Friday in public worship. For this he was praised, on grounds not a
little singular, by the curious Evangelist I have mentioned. It was
impossible, said the professor, for a man of such brilliant intellect
to have any real belief in the religion he professed. Mr. Gladstone, of
course, was in his heart of hearts as little a Christian as Professor
Huxley. But, while Professor Huxley viewed great questions only from the
standpoint of a scientist, Mr. Gladstone was a great practical statesman,
who recognised that the vulgar could only be kept in their places by due
awe of the supernatural. Therefore, like a true patriot, he endured at
his great age this serious fatigue (to say nothing of this unutterable
boredom) in order that he might give an example to the masses. This
(the professor proceeded) was the true source of England’s greatness;
her public men, instead of spending their spare time in frivolity, kept
ever in mind the necessity of preserving appearances in the presence of
the proletariat; and the quiet and law-abiding character of the British
people was their exceeding great reward.
It was no use arguing with this learned Japanese; indeed, he was a man so
illustrious that disputation with him, on the part of a nobody, seemed to
savour of presumption. But I remembered enough of the spectacle of Mr.
Gladstone at public worship (during one of his many visits to Brighton
at the time of his last Premiership) to be very cautious ever afterwards
in attempting to classify the motives of a foreigner. For, if there was
one man in England for whom religion was a reality, it was Mr. Gladstone.
And if there was one man in England incapable of the altruistic hypocrisy
imputed to him it was again Mr. Gladstone. He was even destitute of that
knack of saying pleasant insincerities which is generally reckoned as
very little of a sin and very much of a social asset. Witness that old
story of Disraeli and the pictures. Someone told Mr. Gladstone with great
glee how Disraeli went to some picture show, and delighted the artists
by most lavish praise. This work showed sublime genius; that recalled
the grace of Gainsborough; this the sombre power of Caravaggio; that the
splendid colour of Titian; that the severe purity of outline of Mantegna.
And then, when Disraeli was well clear of the men he had flattered into
frantic worship of him, he murmured to a friend: “What an ordeal; such
fearful daubs I never saw!” To this story Mr. Gladstone listened with
a steadily increasing frown, and at the end of it he struck the table
emphatically with his fist. “I call that—_devilish_,” was his comment.
It was, probably, this massive seriousness—deriving from his intense
sense of the eternal—that was the secret of Mr. Gladstone’s power over
nearly all who came into close touch with him. It is not quite true that
he altogether lacked a sense of humour. In a certain vein he could be
playful and even jocose, and, though he was generally wanting in the
compression which belongs to true wit, witty things occasionally escaped
him. But all this was by the way, as incidental as the play of sunlight
on a rock or the laughter on the surface of the deep sea; he might, in an
off moment, play with an idea in much the same spirit that he took his
backgammon with Mr. Armistead, but such concessions to the mood of the
moment only threw into sharper relief the intense earnestness which was
the basis of his character.
Every virtue has its characteristic dangers, and if Mr. Gladstone’s
solemn belief in himself and his mission gave him immense power over
others it also led to one side of himself exercising too much power
over the other. His intellect was often unduly dominated by his
prepossessions; from first to last he seldom saw things in a dry light.
In his youth Macaulay noted a characteristic which endured throughout
life—content with insecure foundations for an argument, he relied too
much for victory on his splendid power of impressive rhetoric. He was not
the less governed by prejudice because his prejudice might at one time
be different from, and even contradictory to, his prejudice at another.
Had Mr. Gladstone been a duller man, his temper would have ended by
enfeebling the mind which it constantly reduced to subjection. But in his
case a mentality already almost preternaturally active was still further
stimulated by the necessity of justifying his temper. It was driven to a
kind of jesuitry through the despotic conscientiousness of its master.
Mr. Gladstone was incapable of consciously deceiving others; he did
sometimes unconsciously deceive himself, and others through himself.
On certain questions, like finance, which he could treat objectively,
his reason had full play; on others his judgment was always liable to
subjective disturbance. Where a broad and definite moral issue existed
that judgment seldom went astray, but on whole classes of questions
more or less indifferent he was governed by the same sort of likes and
dislikes which determine a rich man’s wine cellar or picture collection.
Thus half his mistakes in regard to Egypt were due to nothing more than
want of interest. He was bored with Egypt, and intrigued with other
things. Ireland, also, at first bored him; it was to him, as to so many
of the Liberals, a tiresome irrelevancy breaking in on the set programme.
For some time he felt towards the Irish members as a whist-player might
towards some noisy person who insisted that there must be no more
whist until everybody in the room had exhausted the possibilities of
“tiddleywinks.” But when at last he found that “tiddleywinks” was only
a slang name for Irish auction bridge, and that Irish auction bridge
was vastly more exciting than any whist, he quickly discovered that the
enunciation of a Home Rule policy was what Mr. Balfour called “a moral
imperative of the most binding kind.”
This would seem a flippant explanation of a conversion in which Mr.
Gladstone renewed his political youth. It is not meant as a flippancy.
Most assuredly Mr. Gladstone did not consciously, as some very great
opponents maintained at the time, reach his Home Rule position by the
road of sordid or ignoble considerations. But his mind was one equally
prone to innovation and to routine; it ran in grooves, but had no
difficulty, when impelled by any sufficiently powerful stimulus, in
jumping from one groove to another. There is a kind of roundabout on
which the horses (running on rigidly prescribed lines) seem at one
moment to be going straight to a certain point, and then suddenly turn,
to the bewilderment of their riders, in a direction exactly opposite.
Mr. Gladstone made such a swerve, and it was not surprising that there
were tumbles, or that, while he was eloquently explaining that the
change of course was natural and necessary, less agile characters were
mainly swearing over bumps and bruises. He himself was probably not even
conscious that the change was great. For Mr. Gladstone had a way of
making himself at once at home in a new situation. He was like a man who
often changes his house, but always carries with him the old furniture
and—if possible—the old servants. The chief trouble in this case was that
some of the household staff declined to join in the new move; otherwise
Erin Mansions was not very different from Coercion Row. There was point,
if there was also rudeness, in Lord Randolph’s gibe of “the old man in
a hurry.” But the hurry was chiefly in the matter of settling down in
the new quarters. Once settled Mr. Gladstone never again moved. Under
all the superficial bustle of his last Premiership there was essential
immobility; what he had become in 1885 he remained till the end.
Of the “rapid splendours” of that last Home Rule fight Lord Morley
has discoursed eloquently. It was a wonderful affair, and a most
pathetic one. The eloquence which had dazzled two generations had lost
little or nothing of its magnificence. The wizardry of Mr. Gladstone’s
manipulations of stubborn material still extorted the admiration of
those who had known him a quarter of a century before. Half blind, very
deaf, dependent on majorities that sometimes sank to eight or ten, faced
with the certainty of rejection by the Lords, and the equal certainty
that their action would be approved by the country, the old hero never
faltered. It was a marvellous and inspiring example of the triumph of
a sense of public duty over all the disabilities of age and infirmity.
But through the whole splendid performance ran the note of tragedy. Mr.
Gladstone knew the thing could not be done by him. He must have more
than suspected what was to come when he was gone. The portent of the
Newcastle programme could no more have been lost on him than the waning
enthusiasm of many of his supporters for the cause of Home Rule. But for
the faith which had always sustained him, this last fight must have been
sad indeed. “But,” says Lord Morley, speaking of a visit just before
Mr. Gladstone’s last appearance in the House of Commons, “there the old
fellow was, doing what old fellows have done for long ages on a Sunday
afternoon, reading a big Bible.” The same witness speaks of a “sudden
solemnity” during the discussion of an intricate point in the Home Rule
Bill, when Mr. Gladstone turned to him with “Take it from me, that to
endure trampling on with patience and self-control is no bad element in
the preparation of a man for walking firmly and successfully in the path
of great public duty. Be sure that discipline is full of blessings.”
Then, a moment later, he added, “When it’s all over, you and I must have
our controversy out about Horace. I cannot put him as high as you do.”
After all, no man is to be pitied who could bear the weight of
eighty-four years in a spirit at once so humanly gallant and so
Christianly resigned.