
* A Project Gutenberg Canada Ebook *

This ebook is made available at no cost and with very few
restrictions. These restrictions apply only if (1) you make
a change in the ebook (other than alteration for different
display devices), or (2) you are making commercial use of
the ebook. If either of these conditions applies, please
check gutenberg.ca/links/licence.html before proceeding.

This work is in the Canadian public domain, but may be
under copyright in some countries. If you live outside Canada,
check your country's copyright laws. IF THE BOOK IS UNDER
COPYRIGHT IN YOUR COUNTRY, DO NOT DOWNLOAD
OR REDISTRIBUTE THIS FILE.

Title: W. E. Gladstone
Author: Burdett, Osbert (1885-1936)
Date of first publication: 1927
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   London: Constable, 1927
   [first edition]
Date first posted: 12 November 2013
Date last updated: 12 November 2013
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #1126

This ebook was produced by Al Haines






  W. E. GLADSTONE


  _By_

  OSBERT BURDETT



  LONDON
  CONSTABLE & CO LTD




  _First published in 1927_


  PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY RICHARD CLAY & SONS, LIMITED,
  BUNGAY, SUFFOLK.




  _By the same Author_

  THE BEARDSLEY PERIOD

  WILLIAM BLAKE
  (_English Men of Letters_)

  THE IDEA OF COVENTRY PATMORE

  CRITICAL ESSAYS



{v}

NOTE

A partial portrait of Gladstone is all that has been attempted here.
Moving through nearly a century of public affairs, the man is blurred
by the events that immersed him, and to read the lives that have been
written is to become lost in a chronicle of domestic and foreign
politics.  Thus the task of Morley with but two thousand pages was, in
his _Life of William Ewart Gladstone_, to compile, to edit, to arrange.
The technical and detailed explanations necessarily overweight the
chronicle, and draw our attention away from the character and
personality of Gladstone himself.  We receive a mass of information
upon a hundred matters besides.  Morley was bound to chronicle an
unwieldy mass of material, to which Gladstone himself contributed
additional memoranda by the score.  The result has been to incline a
later generation to take Gladstone vaguely for granted, because the
approach to him is necessarily very slow.  He is encompassed with
general facts as with a bulwark, and hedged with historical matters as
with stiff robes.

Feeling this condition, however unavoidable in the official record of
such a public person, to be unfortunate for our understanding of his
human nature, the present writer has ventured to regard Morley as a
quarry, and to see if, from Morley's monumental record, with such
sidelights as could be gleaned from other memoirs and lives of the
period, there could be fashioned a less encumbered but more appreciable
portrait.  From the {vi} massive setting of events as much as possible
has been omitted, in order to fix upon the more revealing moments of
action, word and growth in Gladstone's life.  Where illuminating
glimpses of him could be gained from other sources, they have been
thankfully appropriated since, in a sense, the vastness of official
materials has hindered Gladstone from being known.  The public facts
which they recount may leave us as much at a distance as newspaper
references to the living.  As Morley himself remarked, posterity is
more interested in what Gladstone was than in what he did.  All my
materials I have taken, and from this handful of other men's clay a
profile in relief has shaped.  To use an adjective of Gladstonian
ambiguity, it is a partial portrait of a character.




CONTENTS


CHAP.

      NOTE
   I. HIS ORIGIN AND INNOCENCE
  II. THE GROWTH OF EXPERIENCE
 III. THE MIDDLE YEARS
  IV. IN AND OUT OF DOWNING STREET
   V. THE MORROW OF MIDLOTHIAN
  VI. HIS LAST CRUSADE
 VII. THE ABBEY
      SHORT BIBLIOGRAPHY
      INDEX




{1}

W. E. GLADSTONE




CHAPTER ONE

HIS ORIGIN AND INNOCENCE


I

At least as far south as Liverpool, and he was born there, Gladstone
claimed to be "purely and absolutely Scotch in every drop of blood" in
his veins.  He was still insisting on this point at the age of seventy
when receiving at Hawarden a deputation from his native town.  Perhaps
a Scotsman so complete as this could have been born safely anywhere;
nevertheless a good deal in his development is explained by his origin
and upbringing.

The name of the family, originally Gledstanes, was changed to Gladstone
by royal licence as late as 1835, during the lifetime of his father.
The licence legalised an apparently accomplished anglicism, and its
"sad lack of imagination," which his daughter lamented, lies on "his
father and grandfather."  It happens, moreover, though the pedigree of
the Gledstanes family has been traced to the remotest times, that we
need not here go more than two generations backward, for its early
glories suffered an eclipse till the family re-emerged into prosperity
with William Ewart's grandfather, who may be fitly called Gladstone the
first.  He laid the foundations of the modern family's fortune, marked
his undertaking by the change of name, and his successors {2} derived,
no doubt, from him the gifts of energy and enterprise in which they too
have been conspicuous.  This Thomas Gladstone had been a corn-merchant
of Leith and Liverpool.  To quote his famous grandson's words, "he was
a merchant in Scotch phrase; that is to say, a shopkeeper dealing in
corn and stores, and my father as a lad served in his shop.  But he
also sent a ship or ships to the Baltic."  His son, John Gladstone, the
statesman's father, who was made a baronet in 1845, left Leith for
Liverpool, where, beginning as a clerk, he became shortly a partner in
the firm of Corrie & Co.  When the partnership was dissolved some
sixteen years later, John Gladstone with his brother Robert formed a
new firm, the principal business of which was in the West Indies.
There John Gladstone held large sugar and coffee plantations, worked by
slaves, in Demerara.  On his death in 1851 he left, according to his
son, a fortune of "near 600,000."  The previous heads of the family
had often been responsible Elders of the kirk, and Gladstone's own
mother was a devout Evangelical.

The Gladstones had had issue in abundance: William Ewart's great
grandfather begot eleven children: his fourth son was blessed with
sixteen; and the grandfather's position enabled him to provide for his
seven surviving sons when the turn of each came to be started in
business.  This vigorous middle-class stock, pushing toward mercantile
prosperity, with Presbyterian seriousness and argute Scotch delight in
sermons and disputation, produced the future statesman, whose enormous
vitality, shrewd intelligence, debating skill, tireless energy, moral
fervour and almost perfect health, were but the prodigy of the fine
breed from which he sprang.  Such a stock has ever been stock for men
of genius, and, in this instance, it came to fruition when either side
of the Border was only beginning to be industrialised.  {3} Thus the
new opportunity of wealth coincided with natural stamina to produce a
combination of vigour, less possible to-day when city life has drained
the country of the stock we can least afford to lose, so that our
modern commercial magnates are, as a rule, of much poorer physique than
the Gladstones of the eighteenth century.

William Ewart Gladstone was born on December 29, 1809, it is said under
the sign of Capricorn.  The vigour, the impetuosity, the butting head,
the agile heels, the sure foothold on slippery places of the symbolic
Ram, no one would deny him.  In English ram is a better equivalent for
Capricorn than the astrologer's stricter he-goat.  It gives us the
fighting qualities, the flashing eye, the head strong in the horns.  He
arrived appropriately on the crest of the family's fortunes, so that he
could be well educated in England for the public career on which his
father's hopes were centred for him.

He made his first speech at the age of three.  The occasion was
political.  During Canning's first election in Liverpool Canning stayed
at John Gladstone's house.  On the day when a great dinner was being
given there, the child was taken to the dining-room, placed upon a
chair, and directed to say to the company: Ladies and Gentlemen.  He
was also taken to see Hannah More, who presented him with a copy of her
_Sacred Dramas_ and wrote his name in it.

Gladstone supposed his parents to have singled him out for these
attentions as a child possessing something worth seeing, but his own
marvellous memory throws no light on his inner development but this: He
recalled no propensity to mortal sin; none even to diligence,
earnestness or devotion, but these, doubtless, his mother was soon to
arouse.  He himself believed his inner life to have been "always
dubious, vacillating, and above all complex."  During a sermon in St.
George's, Liverpool, he remembers, perhaps for the only time in his
life, {4} turning quickly to his mother with the question: "When will
he have done?"  He remembers praying to be spared the loss of a tooth.
Otherwise his religious recollections are a blank, and he supposed his
development to have been unusually slow.

His earliest teacher was the clergyman appointed to the neighbouring
church built by his father at Seaforth in 1815, where with about a
dozen boys he was prepared for Eton.  At Seaforth he declared that he
showed "a priggish love of argument," possibly encouraged at home, for
his father, we are told, discussed every sort of question with his
children and would allow them to take nothing for granted.  Reasons
were expected even when someone said that he thought it would be a fine
or wet day.  If at Seaforth Vicarage he felt himself to have been under
no moral or personal influence, and to have shirked in consequence, yet
he taught in the Sunday School at Primrose Bridge.  Any lack of moral
influence at Seaforth was probably, though he does not say so, more
than made good at home.  The devoutness of his mother and the Socratic
teaching of his father would have seemed sufficient moral influences to
most boys.  The Seaforth Vicarage may have been a place of instinctive
moral relaxation.  As we shall see, his home standards survived even
the indifference of Eton.

He went there in 1821, when the ferocious Dr. Keate was headmaster, and
remained for six years, "the prettiest little boy that ever went to
Eton."[1]  There were floggings and fights, but two chief impressions
remained.  The teaching of classics, he said, was "simply splendid" in
its accuracy, but the "teaching of Christianity was so dead that it was
almost a wonder that its very forms had not been surrendered."  His
piety none the less survived this strain.  Stories were told in after
years of his refusal to drink to a coarse toast proposed by some
school-fellow, {5} of his defence of some persecuted pigs, of Bishop
Hamilton, then a boy, being "saved from worse things" than idleness by
coming to know Gladstone.  The few outlets that Eton did provide for
his fervour and activity, Gladstone used to the full.  He became joint
editor of the Eton Miscellany, and spoke regularly at the school
debates.  As he wrote many of his speeches and kept them, we can see
how little his manner changed in after years.  It was perfected rather
than altered.  That curiously impersonal, but fervid, manner of his was
his from the start.  While most able young men begin with revolutionary
notions and become later more sceptical of conventional methods of
reform, Gladstone began reverentially content with the existing order.
While, again, nearly all able youngsters, whatever their opinions,
begin in the exalted style and shed it gradually, Gladstone preserved
it to the last.  In his style, at least, he was always conservative.
The voice of his class was Gladstone's voice, the editorial "we" his
instinctive manner, righteous indignation, never personal wrath, the
appeal he used, and felt.  He believed undoubtedly that everyone held
their professions as sincerely as he did himself.  He had no
conception, at this age, that most people never dream of putting their
professions into practice, or that he would make them aghast if he or
any other respectable man expected them to do so.  So long as actions
and assumptions are kept peacefully apart, there is no confusion, but
once they start trespassing on one another's ground there is no telling
where the trouble will end.  To try to turn the world upside down has
been, very justly, the accusation against religious enthusiasts in all
ages.  Later experience, not critical observation, was to teach
Gladstone the painful truth of this.  The first period of his growth
ends with his recognition of it, at the age of thirty-one.  Perhaps he
never learnt it fully.  Using the word in no disparaging sense, he had
a {6} credulous rather than a critical mind.  In his boyhood and in his
youth he believed everything that he was told, literally.


[1] Sir Roderick Murchison, quoted by G. W. E. Russell.


At Eton he made friends with George Selwyn, Milnes Gaskell, and Arthur
Hallam, but the personal intimacy that there must have been in the last
particularly of these friendships, does not survive in his account of
them.  His fervour indeed dominated individuals as it was afterwards to
dominate the public, but in the same aloof way.  It is as if he
imported the amenities of public life into private intercourse.  He
loved boating and was already a great walker and an ardent politician
at school.

When he left Eton at Christmas 1827, he read with a clergyman, who
afterwards became a bishop, for six months.  In 1828 he went to Christ
Church, Oxford, where again he appeared to make lofty acquaintanceships
rather than friends.  After a walk with Anstice to Cuddesdon, there is
this significant note in Gladstone's diary: "O for a light from on
high!  I have no power, none, to discern the right path for myself."
It is a flash of self-criticism.  A man does not pray for the insight
he already possesses.  The unerring choice of the Holy Ghost is felt on
the instant it is made.  To the recipient, alone of lights this Light
is unmistakable.  There is more, beyond question, than inherited
Evangelical fervour in this revealing confession, perhaps the most
searching that its author ever made.  He knew the agonising truth, and
reacted to it in the way which history shows us by many similar
examples to be inevitable.

The eighteenth century Enthusiasts and Ranters, as they were called,
invariably began with a sense of their deficiency.  Being certain of
nothing but their own blindness, they were tormented with the fear of
sin.  They felt themselves to be sinful, and they prayed, therefore, to
be saved by a power from without.  With the {7} divine light withheld,
this needs must be the power of human example.  The mystics pass
through the Dark Night much later, as a rule nearer the middle than the
beginning of their lives.  The lightless turn obediently to Morality
for their guide, since morality is the customary standard of conduct, a
rule of convention which the man with an inner light regards with
indifference, for it is, at most, a superfluous prop to himself.  The
good man is freeborn because he is born good.  The lightless man, being
born blind, knows himself in need of leading-strings: the commandments
and conventions of Morality.  He worships them as the only light within
his reach, and may even go so far as to believe that there is no other
light than they.  His next step may be to persecute the few freeborn
who differ from him.  Gladstone never went to that extreme, for he
believed that there was a Light beyond his personal apprehension.  He
was even credulous of those who seemed to claim it, and was ready and
anxious to defer almost to anyone.  Intellectually he was a
humble-minded man, though the fervour of his obedience to adopted ideas
often disguised this from other people, especially when they were not
in agreement with him.  His fervour and dependence on external
guidance, outside practical affairs, made him a mystagogue, about as
far from a mystic as it is possible for a human being to be.  The above
entry in his diary gives the first significant clue to his character
and after career.

The rest of his Oxford days no more than illustrate the justness of it.

He was said to have known his Bible better than any undergraduate.  On
Sundays he sometimes heard as many as three sermons.  He haunted also
Dissenting chapels in his search for light.  He consulted a clergyman
on the advisability of holding prayer-meetings in his rooms.  He
recoiled from Archbishop Whately's {8} "anti-Sabbatical doctrine."
Another preacher moved him to expostulate on the "character and
doctrines of his sermon" in a letter that Gladstone left at the
clergyman's door.  He was accused of "ostentatious piety."  A writer in
1829 declared: "Gladstone has mixed himself up with the St. Mary Hall
and Oriel set, who are really, for the most part, only fit to live with
maiden aunts and to keep rabbits."  Alas! the Evangelical nature is
always subject to such misunderstandings as these.  If Gladstone had
known of them, he would not have minded.

His ardour was not exhausted in listening to others.  He founded an
essay club, called, after him, the WEG, where he contended, among other
things, that philosophy was higher than poetry, as a moralist would.
He also made one of his rare, right judgments in literature.  He said
that the poems of Tennyson showed considerable genius.

This eager undergraduate, if not at first, soon became a steady worker,
as his ambitions began to stir.  He entered twice for the Ireland
scholarship.  At his second attempt Gladstone was surprised to learn
from the examiner that, in a close decision, the prize had gone to one
who gave short and concise answers.  "Ours," he told his father, "were
long-winded."  Gladstone's own essay was marked "desultory beyond
belief."  An unillumined intelligence is apt to be vague.  He failed to
win the Newdigate with his poem on Richard C[oe]ur de Lion.  Whether as
a writer or a critic, his literary faculty was small from the beginning.

The copiousness which chilled the examiner in his written papers,
however, was far from a disadvantage at the Union, where Gladstone soon
began to be both heard and admired.  In time he became president.  It
was his first completed step in public life.  He found a larger
audience proportionally easier to address, and the {9} diffuseness of
speech more natural to him than the terse directness of good writing.
In debate, especially in the debating points that quell interrupters,
also in reply, verbal readiness is almost everything.  The orator was
finding his feet.  The speeches that he made are interesting for the
attitude which they reveal.  All, I think, support the positions in
which he was reared.  His familiar preceptors were accepted implicitly.
He was a trumpet in their hands: he did not criticise anything they had
told him.  One example may suffice us.  In a debate in favour of the
prompt emancipation of the West Indian slaves, he moved and carried an
amendment that "education of a religious kind was the first object of
legislation."  Being both lofty and inapt, it circumvented the issue
successfully.  It is as if we overheard his mother's fervour and his
father's commercial prudence merging to a single voice through the
young man.  As an echo he was magnificent, but the original murmurs
were theirs.  He initiated no ideas, but the ideas of others impelled
him to eager speech and impulsive action.  Since he had not critical
intelligence, it is to his honour that speech and action were never far
apart.  No one perhaps has ever combined so much talk with so great an
activity.

Active as he already was, he prays for the habit of steady application.
In his studies, speeches, church-going, his parties for wine and talk,
his long walks, his letters even, there is an air of suppressed
excitement.  Filled with moral enthusiasm and growing conscious of his
latent powers, he was also ambitious to excel in the public activities
of undergraduate life.  It was a new world, a larger world, than Eton
or home, and it led to one more wide than Oxford.  His eye became aware
of the political stirrings of the day.  His religious ardour made him
welcome Catholic Emancipation; his inherited conservatism to denounce
electoral reform.  It was with {10} a speech against the extension of
the franchise that he made his mark at the Union, a speech that
penetrated beyond its walls.  The coming Reform Bill was already
filling the propertied classes with fright, and the young man, very
naturally, had not yet developed his later sixth sense for rising
currents of public opinion.  Standing on the past, he found the
fearsome future still impalpable to him, though his leaping mind was
eventually to inhabit the political day after to-morrow.  For the
moment, like his worthy exemplars, he identified reform with revolution.

The animated debate in the Union at Oxford reflected the excitement
prevailing in the nation at large, and the youthful Gladstone's speech
of three-quarters of an hour electrified the house.  It also pleased
his father so much that he wanted to have it printed.  Thereupon,
Gladstone immediately wrote an anti-reform pamphlet, which even his
father thought was too extreme, and then hurried to London in order to
hear a debate, lasting five nights, in the House of Lords.  When the
Lords threw out the Reform Bill by a majority of forty-one, Gladstone's
comment was: "The consequences of the vote may be awful.  God avert
this!  But it was an honourable and manly decision, and so may God
avert them."  This was the first debate that Gladstone attended in
Parliament.

At this time too he conceived a vast work on Morals, Politics and
Education, the materials for which were to be gathered during the
progress of his life.  It was intended to be his bequest to posterity.
Morals still came first in his regard, and he was not content to
counsel us upon them.  He wished also for some personal work to do, and
discussed with his friend Hope-Scott a private plan for the benefit of
prostitutes.  In the odious euphemism of the day this was known as
rescue work for "fallen women."  The social outcast, leading the most
{11} precarious of lives, exercised an irresistible appeal to
Gladstone's charitable heart.  The call, to be up and doing, on behalf
of the forlorn was the form in which the appeal came to him.  A
crusader born out of due time, he responded instantly to romantic
causes.  At the moment, the established order seemed politically to be
one of these.  It loomed largely, calling for help; but there was also
the unheeded cry of erring sisters to which one's private ear might
well be open.  For the present, however, the ordeal of Final Schools
allowed no trespassing.

At the examination which followed on the heels of these excitements, an
amusing incident occurred.  After questioning Gladstone upon some point
of theology, the examiner said: "We will now leave that part of the
subject."  "No, sir," replied Gladstone, "if you please, we will not
leave it yet," and began ardently again.  No wonder that he received a
first class.  The wonder is that he also gained a first in mathematics,
for the subject was not then taught at Eton, and Gladstone had had to
rely entirely upon private study and his own brains.  This double first
was, then, a feat both of intelligence and industry.  It showed
steadfastness of purpose and pliability of mind: abilities promising
and even dangerous, coupled, as they were, to enthusiasm of feeling and
restless activity.  His prayers had been answered, and it was
impossible to say where his gifts would carry him in the end.  With
this achievement and the presidency of the Union behind him,
Gladstone's Oxford career was a complete success.  Combined activities
of this order at the University are an established preliminary to
public life, and, with his father's wealth to back him, nothing, unless
it were a young man's want of inclination, need now stand in his way.
He had qualified for a political career at Oxford, and even before he
left had made himself heard beyond the walls of the University.

{12}

During the year previous to his Final Schools, Gladstone had become
already distracted about his future.  "God direct me!  I am utterly
blind," he had confessed.  In this mood he wrote an inordinately long
letter to his father.  In vague and involved sentences he portrayed his
religious yearnings to forsake the callings of this dusty world and to
become a clergyman.  It is characteristic that he proposed to take Holy
Orders as much for public as for private reasons.  His fervour
instinctively aspired to the most exalted form of activity, but his
judicious eye was equally upon the world and pointed to the need of the
world to justify him.  How godless it was, how vast the opportunity,
how precise and sacred the Christian's trust!  The theme lent itself to
expansion, and then one's own unfitness needed, also, to be made
abundantly clear.  It produced this tremendous letter, in which the
natural, but unconscious, egoism of the youthful writer is transparent.
Indeed it is disarming, for he would be indeed a miserable creature who
did not remember to have written or contemplated some such letter at
Gladstone's age.  One does not need to be an experienced master of
novices to realise, however, that the vocation confessed by this letter
is not for Holy Orders.  In so far as such yearnings can be sifted from
the sands of emotion in which they lurk, they remain indeterminate.
They show a bias, not a direction.  They indicate no more than an
ardent temperament at a loss for employment, an active mind in search
of an aim, any aim so long as the youthful imagination can recognise
and respond to it.  This, the only positive inference, is accompanied
by one negative disclosure.  A good master of novices would infer that
the young writer is not destined for the contemplative life: the life
where silence is golden.  The verbal activity is profuse enough to show
that the youth will be a man of action; perhaps, if his bias holds, a
preacher; if not, a barrister possibly, {13} possibly a politician.
Words, whether spoken or penned, will play a large part in his
activity.  To-day, we should add to the list of his chances, that of a
leader-writer and journalist, but in 1831 journalism was not a calling.
Having no set qualifications, it cannot be a profession to-day even,
for a learned profession without learning is still unthinkable at
present.  We are not arguing backward in having drawn inferences like
these.  Gladstone's letter occupies several closely printed pages of an
appendix to Morley's first volume.  It is there to be read, and is
almost a classic document for the psychologist of adolescence to browse
on.

We find in it, then, a vocation to some form of public life, in which
lofty aspirations may be combined with secular, and probably prominent,
activity.  It shows a crusader who has yet to find his crusade, a
recruit embarrassed by the wealth of moral evils that invite his
attention.

Gladstone's father almost certainly understood William very well, but
his face may have been a study while he was reading his son's immense
letter.  Showing both tact and judgment in his much shorter reply, he
asked the young man to postpone his decision until he should have taken
his degree, and had returned from a trip to the Continent.  Obviously
so impressionable a nature ought to receive as many impressions as
possible before taking such a momentous decision as it proposed.  The
father's counsel had been asked, and that was sufficient grace for the
moment.  John Gladstone's tact was justified.  In reply to this advice,
the young man declared that his excitement had subsided, but that he
foresees a crisis in the history of mankind: upon the new principles
prevailing, the Established Church, and the whole foundations of
society, may vanish.  He must not be tied to any profession that will
not leave him free to enter the arena; but, wishing to fall in with his
father's {14} desires, he proposes to study constitutional law "with a
view ... to a subsequent experiment ... on public life."

This, no doubt, left Gladstone's father much relieved.  He had earned
the respite, and, doubtless with a lighter heart, continued this second
long letter to the end.  Substantially it ran as follows: Gladstone
wishes to be the humblest of those commissioned to set before the eyes
of man "the magnificence and the glory of Christian truth," especially
since his temperament is "so excitable" that it might yield to the
allurements of other matters.  These are indicated in his diary by a
note made after he had passed his examinations: "Politics are
fascinating to me, perhaps too fascinating."  In politics too, become
now so serious, the budding orator would be required to vent, as Burke,
as Canning had vented, the exalted aspirations of his heart.  He can
define his ambition only in these solemn words: "To work an energetic
work in this world," and by it, under God, "to grow into the image of
the Redeemer."



II

Such was Gladstone when the Oxford of his day had done with him.  He
had been prepared for a career.  Had he been prepared for the world in
which that career would be passed?  The Union is indeed a House of
Commons in miniature.  Is the House also the World within four walls?
If it were not, the higher education of Englishmen would have been
different, but in these days there is no telling what question will not
next be asked.  Suffice it to say that, when Gladstone left Oxford, so
absurd a question was inconceivable.  What other world but the House of
Commons could an English university prepare her sons to enter now that
the Church had been deprived of political power?  Politics had {15}
been a patrician preserve throughout the eighteenth century.  The
tradition of scholastic leisure for the aristocracy survived in the
memory of the Grand Tour, a prelude for the sons of commercial magnates
to the politics that would lead them, perhaps, into the aristocracy
itself at last.

His four months' trip to France and Italy, where he learned Italian,
were notable for two events in Gladstone's life.  At Rome and Naples
there dawned upon him, for the first time, the Latin conception of the
Church as a body and a teacher apart from the Bible.  Its ministry of
symbols and channels of grace, its historic line of teachers, its body
of doctrine, inspired him with his first vision of the Church
Corporate, as men had thought of her in the Middle Ages, when the
Patrimony of St. Peter was, like the Empire, an international Power.
Even now, Evangelical as he was by training, he scarcely seems to have
asked whether, if Church and Bible be set side by side, the Church is
not the author of the book.  His visit to Rome (and without such a
visit what European can hope to hold the roots of our past within his
mind, for its stones utter more than a library of learning?) made
Gladstone a churchman.  His idea of Christianity was transformed,
though his language kept its Evangelical tone as instinctively as his
voice kept the lingual burr of Scotland.  The effect of Rome was great
on Gladstone.  It made him reflect, and on the one path wherein he
found reflection not difficult.  What did churchmanship mean?  He
remembered Newman, who had become vicar of St. Mary's, Oxford, in 1828,
and in this very year, 1832, was to visit the Eternal City.  Had not
Newman, the impressive preacher, broken with the Evangelical view two
years before, while Gladstone was still up?  The kirk compares poorly
with the church to a man who has a passion for institutions.

These reflections were interrupted at Milan by a {16} mundane event
more startling, if less pregnant, than themselves.  This was no less
than an offer of the seat for the borough of Newark from the Duke of
Newcastle, the former foe of Gladstone's family idol, George Canning.
The offer was the reward of the speech at the Union which had first
made Gladstone known.  Though the duke's son had been one of
Gladstone's Oxford friends, it seemed at first "a stunning and
overpowering proposal."  Surprise and doubts, however, soon yielded to
his father's inclinations and his own.  It is interesting that
Gladstone did not enter political life, but was called to it.  In the
person of the Duke of Newcastle, the "light from on high" had come.
The double fitness of Gladstone to receive it was shown during the
election itself.

Newark was a nomination borough, and in his address to the nominal
electors Gladstone professed principles rather than a programme: to
resist change, to remedy evils by restoring general principles, in
particular the principle that government is a religious duty.  In
regard to slavery, then a ticklish question, the young candidate rested
its abstract lawfulness on the regulations of Scripture, regulations,
he explained, which took the institution for granted.  He argued on his
own behalf that moral must precede physical emancipation of the slaves.
He defended the union of Church and State, especially of the Irish
Church; he favoured the principle of allotments.  His only indiscretion
was to startle the duke by averring that labour should receive adequate
pay, "which, unhappily, among several classes of our population, is not
now the case."

It would be superficial to complain that almost everything else for
which he contended now he opposed later.  The consistency of Gladstone
is not to be measured by abstract logic.  Just because he had not a
logical mind, it was easy for him to explain away, though not to
explain, his political changes.  In this matter he was a {17} casuist
without a case, than which nothing is more delightful to an
argumentative mind.  His consistency was more real than any logic,
because it was temperamental, and therefore much more profound.  In the
depths of his own unconsciousness he knew that logical necessity is not
necessity at all.  His genius lay in not knowing consciously just this,
for it made him impervious to the intellectual criticism of men far
more intelligent than himself.  Their intelligence was no match for a
vital instinct like Gladstone's, for it is rarely intellect that makes
the genius.  It is always vitality, to which the intellect even of an
intellectual genius is never more than a convenient tool.  George Eliot
was much more intelligent than Charles Dickens, but, vital as she was,
she was not nearly so vital as he.  Genius is energy of life, and can
survive a considerable infusion of stupidity.  The consistency of
Gladstone, then, was a consistency of vital energy, which carried him
from enthusiasm to enthusiasm, from change to political change.

This made him far more disconcerting to his political rivals than
political logic, or even political principle.  He hardly understood
what political principle means, while he knew, without knowing how he
knew, what were the desires of the moment, and, much better than his
contemporaries, what were the immediate obstacles in their way.  His
emotions and enthusiasm were at the beck of every one of them, and thus
he was never at a loss like his opponents; on the contrary, he never
hesitated to claim almost divine sanction for whatever he proposed.
For the most part pygmies in vitality compared with Gladstone, they
were tied and bound by the chain of an artificial logic, the merest
gossamer to Gladstone, who simply walked through it, like a man.  Logic
to him, being superior to it, was literally a matter of words.  Having
a superabundance of words always at his command and increasingly
avoiding definite statements, he {18} beat the logicians at their own
game, in debate and controversy.  His explanations were an overwhelming
torrent, and as they did overwhelm, the question whether they were also
logically convincing shrank to an irrelevant trifle.  Beside this, he
was also extremely shrewd in practical and immediate matters.  As
practical in detail as he was hazy in idea, he relied upon a vital
enthusiasm to propel him onward, while he avoided pitfalls with the
canniest of care.  His want of inner light was compensated by his
enormous susceptibility to outside influences.  Thus he took the lead
by identifying himself, before anyone else, with the changes of opinion
around him.  In the strictest meaning of the word, therefore, he was
always morally in the right.  His enthusiasm was his own.  His ideas
invariably came from other people.  He originated nothing but his own
native energy, and his responsiveness to popular suggestion became
ultimately a reflex action, a sixth sense.  His emotional consistency
was, with the activity that it invariably dictated, with the practical
sagacity he partly inherited and partly acquired, the only consistence
he had.  It was so complete that he needed none other.  Indeed
intellectual consistency would have been a handicap.  Luckily there was
no alloy in his energetic ore.  His energy, in fact, served him better
than inner light serves far more intellectual men, for, unlike
intellect, it does not know doubt or hesitation.  It survives its
mistakes.  Its only law is to go forward.  Like life itself, it has no
end but to live more abundantly.  In political affairs it can increase
mischief or virtue according to the stimulus that it receives.  The
virtue of Gladstone was Gladstone's vitality, issuing through his lips
first of all, but the ends which it served are to be measured by our
judgment of the desires of his age.  These it reflected perfectly
through all their changes, the changes (that is to say) which came to
the surface of his time.  He was {19} incapable of comprehending the
deeper currents.  Opinions he understood: ideas never.  Darwin and
Huxley remained inexplicable to him, but, were he alive to-day, he
might be as popular an expounder of evolution, birth-control or
eugenics, as he was in his own time of electoral reform, economic
_laissez-faire_, or free trade.  The proof of this is that, in his own
lifetime, when there was no lead on these later matters, the bare
mention of such things would have scandalised him.  He would have been
at home in the ardent atmosphere that heralded the Revolution in
France, though whether he would have become its servant or its victim
it would be needless to inquire, and is impossible to decide.  When
strife passed beyond discussion, he tended to become helpless.
Whatever the popular movement was, he would have joined it.  That is
certainty enough.  Like the traditional huer at St. Ives, he watched
and waited for the tide.  Thus he was habitually the first person to
detect the incoming shoal, and was then all eagerness to net it.  His
fervour was not content, for long, to defend the things which are, to
dwell among forlorn hopes, or, like Parnell, to let hope itself create
a cause out of its ruin.  His fervour launched out to meet its kindred,
the fervour that was rising to meet him.

Having disposed of the bogey of consistency, which haunted Gladstone
from the time when even his speeches as an undergraduate at the Union
were examined to provide a repartee at his expense, till his
biographers continued to discuss the matter, let us return to Newark.
There his second hostages to political logic were unwittingly given.
After what has been said, we need waste no time upon them.  The vital
matter is this.  His strategy at the election was almost all that the
Duke of Newcastle and his father had a right to hope.  His tactics were
shown in his answer to a question.  "Are you the Duke of Newcastle's
nominee?" a heckler {20} inquired.  Gladstone was, but the election
might have seemed a farce had he admitted it.  He therefore asked Mr.
Gillson what he meant by the term.  The heckler incontinently replied:
"A man sent by the duke to be pushed down the electors' throats whether
they will or no."  "In that sense," the candidate answered, "I am not a
nominee.  I came to Newark on the invitation of the Red Club, than whom
none is more respectable and intelligent."  If the duke had had a
dreadful qualm about the soundness of his candidate's attitude to the
payment of labourers, the young hand had shown itself apt to deal with
a debating emergency as it arose.  Gladstone was, of course, elected at
the head of the poll, and six weeks later, in January 1833, sat as a
Member of the first Reformed Parliament.



III

It requires to-day a slight effort of imagination to recall the
condition of political and social life which Gladstone was entering, at
the early age of twenty-four.  We forget sometimes that the England of
the first Reformed Parliament was still, on the whole, the England of
the eighteenth century.  Electors were still wooed on a system that we
call corruption, and the morals of the reigning aristocracy were still
aristocratic, that is to say, not based on the middle-class assumptions
of a later day.  Middle-class morality necessarily seems ridiculous to
aristocrats, as aristocratic manners seem supercilious or immoral to
the middle classes.  Ideas of right and wrong vary, not only from
frontier to frontier, but from class to class.  Whichever stratum of
society happens to be at the top imposes its own standards and
complacently imagines that these are the immutable test of virtue.

The young Gladstone happened to enter public life {21} at the turn of
the tide, when, that is to say, the aristocracy was beginning to lose
political predominance, and, consequently, when both its political
practices and its moral code were becoming undermined by the habits and
standards of its successors.  Gladstone lived long enough in his nearly
ninety years to see the former ousted, but he was born early enough to
be aware of the change and to remember in his old age a time when a
different code was taken equally as a matter of course.  We must place
ourselves at his point of view, and become octogenarians of the
nineteenth century ourselves, if we are not to feel puzzled by some of
his later dilemmas, the dilemmas of an old gentleman who had a very
much longer memory than almost any of his contemporaries, a memory also
wholly beyond the range of the bulk of his popular audiences.
Gladstone himself had received the mental impress of the rising class
of which he was to become eventually the popular representative.  His
home seems to have been a pattern of its virtues.  Evangelicalism has
never been an aristocratic product because it is, characteristically,
provincial both in habitat and in ideas.  Bunyan himself spoke of the
"village" of Morality and contrasted it with the "city" of Destruction,
in which last, presumably, the men of Mayfair are to be found.  The
consequence was that, hardly had Gladstone taken his seat in the House,
when an elementary discovery scandalised him.

It was this.  The cost of the election proved to be twice as much as he
had anticipated, and he was horrified at the amount which had been
spent upon free meals and free drink.  It proved useless to remind him
that many of the voters could not be persuaded to poll without a
breakfast at the expense of their candidate, a breakfast at which beer
was enjoyed in hospitable draughts.  He declared that this "organised
drunkenness" was not a question of money, but a question of {22} right
and wrong.  No doubt the memory helped him to carry Sir Henry James'
Act of 1883 to reduce "corrupt practices" at elections.  Wiser, and a
little sad, for this was his first taste of disillusion, Gladstone
turned on his birthday, December 29, 1833, from this examination of
political morality (the immorality of another means the difference of
his habits from one's own) to glance at the condition of his own heart.
"I wish," he confided to his diary, "that I could hope my frame of mind
had been in any degree removed from earth and brought nearer to Heaven,
that the habit of my mind had been imbued with something of that spirit
which is not of this world."

He began to view his approaching social duties with some apprehension.
After due consideration, he resolved not to withdraw "from the
practices of my fellowmen except when they really involve an
encouragement of sin, in which case I do certainly rank races and
theatres."  He limited himself, therefore, for the present to concerts,
safer and, at their best, not far from semi-sacred ground.  Theatres
and races Gladstone could avoid if he chose, and to the end he never
crowned any of his four premierships by leading home a Derby winner or
so much as owning a single racehorse.  He could not avoid meetings and
personal intimacy with the men who rejoiced in such pursuits, who
regarded a racing-stable and a mistress as possessions to boast of, and
those who had them not as scarcely to be called gentlemen.  Was
Gladstone to refuse to work with a colleague because he had, perhaps,
been one of the bucks at Carlton House a few years before?  It would
have been manifestly impossible.  Your aristocrat, the typical
politician of that day, who had been brought up under the eye of the
Prince Regent, whose memory of the days of the dandies was a memory of
yesterday, has always been a man who rejoices in the strength of a
horse and delights in the limbs of beautiful women, who makes a
marriage for the {23} sake of the settlements, and makes love without
the consolations of the Church.  A very earnest man of Gladstone's type
deplores these tastes and the standard that is immensely proud of them,
but, if he was not to abandon a political career at the very start, he
had, in 1833, to accept them, at any rate for others.  This, then, is
the place to recall, though by anticipation, the habits that good
society took for granted in the Prime Ministers of Gladstone's early
political life.  Lord Melbourne was twice in the Divorce Court; Lord
Palmerston lived for years with the lady whom he eventually married.
Disraeli himself, happy and conjugal as his life was, could hardly have
taken the theological view of marriage if only because he must have
missed it so often in the social life in which he moved.  Fifty years
later, that is in 1885, we shall find it convenient to have recalled
the political and social atmosphere into which Gladstone was introduced
when he became, for the first time, a member of Parliament, and thus a
welcomed diner-out in Mayfair when William IV was king.  The moral
relaxation of Seaforth Vicarage was scarcely enough to have initiated
Gladstone into this life of pride and pleasure, wherein his
fellow-politicians sported as naturally as "troutlets in a pool."

For the moment, to have discovered how the cost of his recent election
had mounted was news enough.  The time had hardly come to swallow the
second pill.  Gladstone therefore contented himself with a further
experiment in journalism.  He let off his moral steam in a series of
articles for the _Liverpool Courier_.  In one of these he attributed
the fall of the Roman Republic to the practice of secret suffrage.  In
another he welcomed the statement that the condition of the West Indian
negro was paradise compared with that of the spinning-mill hands in
Lancashire.  This was a convenient argument to store against the day
when he might have to defend the conduct {24} of the West Indian
planters.  The comparison hardly led him, however, to become a second
Lord Shaftesbury; indeed his critics have been wont to declare that
official atrocities in remote lands moved him more quickly than the
industrial atrocities in his own country.  In the public memory of his
numerous crusades on behalf of oppressed persons, Naples, Bulgaria and
Ireland come to mind.  Shaftesbury complained that Gladstone opposed
industrial legislation for his own country.  Neither the curious eye,
as the old statutes of Henry VIII used to phrase it, of Ruskin the
ubiquitous, and Gladstone the Argus-eyed observer, can pounce on
everything at once.  Sin has the strangest power of escaping even
minute search.  Already, as this excursion into journalism proves,
activity was claiming the most of Gladstone's week.  The habit of
faithful attendance beneath the pulpit was not, however, abandoned when
he arrived in London.  On Sundays he continued to attend church
services regularly, and to be an assiduous listener to popular
preachers, while, in the intervals of his public devotions, he read to
himself many of Dr. Arnold's sermons aloud.  All this was at once a
dear solace and support, and what better preparation could there be for
his parliamentary duties in the rapidly approaching session?

The proposal of the Government for the gradual abolition of slavery
gave to the young Member his first chance of making himself heard in
the House of Commons.  The vigorous opposition of his father to this
proposal had made John Gladstone a target for the Abolitionists'
attack.  Lord Howick called the Gladstone manager a "murderer of
slaves," and declared that these were worked to death systematically in
the hope of increasing the crop.  The young Gladstone was thus called
upon to defend his own father, and if his filial piety had been less or
his father had not been a slave-owner he might have appeared earlier
upon the Abolitionist {25} side.  While admitting in the House that
regrettable cruelties had occurred, and favouring a gradual
emancipation, with full compensation to the slaveowners, Gladstone
forcibly reminded the House that we had dangerous occupations at home.
He also insisted, as before, that moral advancement must precede
physical freedom.  He went on to urge that the conditions of work upon
his father's estates were no worse than elsewhere, that, indeed, they
were better.  We need not pursue his persuasive arguments in detail.
The interesting thing is Gladstone's later comment on this speech.  For
it is his second flashlight of self-criticism.

The later comment begins by regretting the tone of this speech.  Having
expressed regret, it continues: "Of course allowance must be made for
the enormous and most blessed change of opinion, since that day, on the
subject."  Gladstone's temperamental test was the state of opinion
around him.  He had already confessed, as we saw, at Oxford, that he
had "no inner light."  What could he do, therefore, but reflect the
best opinion near at hand? and what better opinion could there be than
the opinions he had learned at home?  If his intellect was still imbued
with the ideas that it had learned at his mother's knee, if he
naturally wished to follow in the footsteps of his practical father,
who built five churches, was it not proper and inevitable that he
should still wait for his father's scruples against the abolition of
slavery to subside before venturing to entertain any opposite scruple
himself?  Those Evangelicals who have no "inner light" necessarily
venerate more fortunate persons, and the habits and opinions of the
illuminated, that is to say, the Morality of "their betters," become
their reflected ray.  Thus we find that the less inner light a man has,
meaning (to be precise) the less conscience he has, the more scrupulous
he is about Morality.  Morality is the conduct of our neighbours, {26}
and the views of a highly moral person, which Gladstone certainly was,
veer, in proportion to his scrupulosity, with the alterations in
Morality around him.

To call such a person a man with no conscience is not to condemn him,
for a conscience is a divine gift not bestowed on everyone.  The
majority consists of Moralists, good souls and bad souls, who do what
their neighbours do because their neighbours are doing it.  To abuse
them for this would be as cruel as to abuse a child for having been
born colour-blind, or left-handed.  The chief difference is that the
possession of a conscience, as Bunyan knew, is rare, while left-handers
are relatively common, so that a man without a conscience is in the
majority.  The confusion which occurs over contradictory but seemingly
kindred terms, conscience and morality (they are opposites), is a
modern one, and happens because modern people do not read their Bibles.
If they did, as has often been remarked, they would know that the word
Morality does not occur in Holy Scripture, which invites us to consider
Right and Wrong, Sin and Righteousness, but never Morality and
Immorality.  The word of God and the holiness of those whom He has
called is the example set before us in both Testaments: not the conduct
and habits of whoever, possibly the Philistines, happen to be living
over the way.  Thus Gladstone, being an honest man, was the first to
admit that his guide had to be some external human authority, and how
better could he prove his purity of intention than by acting as his
father desired?

Do not too hastily suppose that John Gladstone, therefore, stands in
need of a special apology.  On the contrary, though the Church may have
ever set her face against slavery, it was one of the foundational
institutions of the Roman ethics on which she had to build.  It was
expressly countenanced by Aristotle, who declared that certain men were
born slaves, and that a class of such {27} persons was necessary to
civilisation.  In the course of ages, and latterly in particular since
the day when Rousseau asserted that "men are born free," we have grown
shy of the word "slavery," but between theoretic servitude and complete
practical penuriousness there is not very much to choose, as the
unemployed or junior married clerk will tell you, except the hope, one
doubtful day, of escaping it.  To regard slavery, especially the
slavery of negroes, as a natural abomination in John Gladstone's time,
seemed to most people as fantastic a notion as the parallel theory of
to-day that it is abominable, in the idea of a few, not to pay the same
income to everyone, from a private to a Prime Minister.  The idea of
human equality was the paradox then.  The idea of economic equality is
the paradox now, and, if one ventured to infer anything from history,
the logical inference would be that economic equality might become
regarded as obviously the right opinion a century or so hence.  What
reason has anyone to suppose that John Gladstone should have been
specially reflective, or more bound than his commercial rivals to
consider the prejudices of the twentieth century?  He took the world as
he found it; he made a success of what he found, and that is
justification enough for most manufacturers.

The change that John Gladstone made, when he ceased to be a
Presbyterian in order to become a churchman, was not made entirely on
intellectual grounds.  Religious sects inevitably appropriate different
social classes, and a man who begins with a small and ends with a large
fortune, is naturally more aware of this fact than those with less
experience of different classes to guide them.  In short,
circumstances, which include opinion, were altering.  Father and son
were both conscious of the change, and the popular maxim, that
circumstances alter cases, is not popular only with politicians.  If
charity does begin at home (and if not where is its {28} origin?), John
Gladstone was bound to consider his own security first of all.  His
son, having declared for full compensation to the owners, had
theoretically taken that security for granted.  This said, he was free
to yield to the change of view more appropriate to his generation than
to his father's.  Nor was he in much difficulty over the readjustment
that would be necessary in his public speeches.  According to one of
his friendly biographers,[2] Gladstone had carried down from Oxford "a
tendency to distinguish with extreme precaution between statements
almost exactly similar."


[2] G. W. E. Russell.


We have examined these instances of Gladstone's budding controversies,
as we did earlier his inconsistency, because they crop up from time to
time all through his life, and it is simpler to have done with them on
their appearance, so that we need not dwell upon them serially.  A
cautious start may prove the quickest way of avoiding waste of time on
a long journey.  The modification of opinion, which the cautious but
impulsive mind of Gladstone underwent till the very end, would not have
been scrutinised more closely than its parallel in other politicians
had not his Evangelical fervour virtually claimed divine assent for
whatever he happened to be proposing.  He claimed it so often and so
regularly because he desired to have it, as other men have claimed a
divine parent or else a very remote ancestry because they have thought
it would be very nice if it were true.  Belief is a prop strong in
proportion to its superiority to rational proof; and the faith which
shuffles mountains as if they were a pack of cards is, in the last
analysis, self-confidence or faith in oneself, the ultimate source and
very well of human effort.  Almost all men, indeed, are vain of what
they do badly, not of what they do well.  Shakespeare was even vainer
of his middle-class parentage than of his poetry, and no doubt boasted
of it more in {29} private talk.  A boast, defined as a vain-glory,
leads us to suspect that it has little foundation in truth.  No one who
believed himself to be by birth an armigerous gentleman in
Shakespeare's time would have bothered so much as the alderman's son
about getting (or reviving) that coat of arms.  The same inference
applies to vaunts of divine sanction: the more frequently they are made
by a man, the likelier it is that he lives in want of this assurance.



IV

In the House of Commons the new Member attached himself to Sir Robert
Peel, the then leader of the Tory opposition.  Peel was favourably
disposed to his new recruit, and indeed both men were similar in type,
though not in character.  In passing we may note here that, except for
the session of 1846, when Gladstone was a Secretary of State without a
seat, and for the first session of 1847, Gladstone was continuously in
the House of Commons till he retired in 1894.  Sixty years in
Parliament, breathing the necessarily unrarefied air of any vast
assembly, is a prodigious period in a special atmosphere.  Whether or
not we agree with the abb Ernest Dimnet,[3] a shrewd observer, that
"politics have never been known to be morally improving," or with
Parnell, that no party (possibly no Member) can remain unaffected by
Westminster for more than ten years at longest, we shall probably agree
that an experience so long and peculiar is enough, by itself, to
explain some of the streaks in Gladstone's complex character.  It is
hard enough to maintain spiritual integrity in domestic life, but more
insidious and scarcely less searching is the test to character of
prominence in Parliament.


[3] _From a Paris Balcony_: the essay on M. Herriot.


During his first session, all that Gladstone advocated {30} or did
reflected faithfully the correct opinions of his corner in society.  He
supported the Union with Ireland, the Coercion Bill, the existing Corn
Laws, and a Bill against work on Sundays.  He opposed the admission of
Jews to Parliament, and of Dissenters to the Universities.  He opposed
the abolition of flogging (of which he had precious memories at Eton)
in the Services.  He opposed the extinction of sinecures (that last
hope for uncommercial ability) in the army and navy; the publication of
the division lists; the ballot.  He sat on the fence over Lord Ashley's
factory legislation--which may not have included the principle of a
living wage, his advocacy of which had made the Duke of Newcastle
shiver.  For Gladstone, the most real issue during this session was the
question of slavery, in which his piety and his family's interest were
involved.  As we have anticipated this issue, it may be dismissed with
the reminder that, while he defended his father, he wished devoutly for
emancipation in due course.  A conservative with qualms rather than a
liberal in the making, it was still uncertain in which direction he
would tend.

His diary confirms this hesitation.  On the 29th of December, 1833, his
twenty-fourth birthday, he is writing:


    Where is the _continuous_ work which ought to fill up the life of a
    Christian? ... I have been growing, that is certain; in good or
    evil?  Much fluctuation; often a supposed progress, terminating in
    finding myself at, or short of, the point which I deemed I had left
    behind me.  Business and political excitement a tremendous trial,
    not so much alleviating as dragging down the soul from that temper
    which is fit to inhale the air of heaven.



What delicious egoism is here; though we like to slur our admission
because we know that egoism, at least, is a youthful failing, and
universal; very far from being a Gladstonian one.  His bustling
vitality makes him {31} carry, as it were, the egoism of the world upon
his tall shoulders; and ambitious young men, turning the early pages of
Gladstone's diary, shrink, because it might be a page of their own.
Besides, the man who is not an egoist does not succeed in getting born,
and, far more than Rousseau, because Rousseau was not the "divinely
average" man, Gladstone has confessed the little sins of all the world.
If we recoil from his admissions, it is because we have written what we
have written too.

Observe, moreover, that this passage implies a prayer for work.
Gladstone, a man of energy, could pray, as all of us do, only for a
chance to exercise his own gifts.  It is true that he longed for
"light," but he never prayed for perspicacity, almost as if
intellectual penetration was a gift beyond his ken, for he aspired to
every gift within the range of his own consciousness.  This passage,
like the previously quoted ones, displays the palsy of a soul hungry
for its fit, but still unrecognised, employment.  It confesses a
natural fluctuation.  Once more we observe that he was never content or
sure, from himself.  He waited in doubt, like his duplicate the spider,
to perceive the handy twig sprouting from the body of some external
opinion before swinging himself toward it to find lodgment for his
gossamer.  His aspirations confess an inner emptiness, for you cannot
have the strength and want it too.  On the other hand, he was naturally
a fountain of fervour.  It was settable in motion, by an external hand.
The wonder is that, intellectual perception apart, he had received his
other gifts in such abundance.

Throughout his first session in Parliament, Gladstone became obscurely
aware of a puzzle hard to define to himself: the contrast between the
pious professions and the conventional practice of the world.  A
literal believer in all that he had been told, he could not conceive
that this disparity might be cherished as the Comforter in the hearts
of those about him.  He could {32} neither dream that they were
lip-servants to their ideals, nor doubt that their conduct, whatever it
might be, accorded with their ideal standard.  They were too much
respected, too dear, to suffer the disloyalty of criticism.  If they
said thus, it was true: if they did thus, it was right; for in such as
these had not righteousness and truth, on the admission of good
society, kissed each other?  Parliament was a place, more prominent,
but not therefore less exalted, than home.  It was the national centre
whence the influences of religion radiated to the white walls by the
sea of old England.  It would be a moral experience to participate in
the debates, to be intimate with the idealists who, sifted scrupulously
by our reformed Constitution, congregated there.  One would grow, one
might hope, more earnest, more gentlemanly, in such an assembly, and
feel, as one left its doors, as one had used to feel when returning
from the kirk.

This expectation, to which we cannot be too tender, did not wholly
allow, however, for the social revolution occurring.

The garish days of the Prince Regent were over; as George IV he had
followed his aged parent into the tomb; William IV, now in the fourth
year of his unvenerable reign, was hardly a strong prop even for a
corrupt tradition, and the world was indifferent whether he were its
prop or no.  Everything paled before the political event that had led
this first "Reformed Parliament" to be elected.  With the monopoly of
the aristocracy gone in 1832, by the arrival in power of the
middle-class industrialist, deriving from Puritans of the seventeenth
century, our present phase of industrial plutocracy began.  In
religious terms, a state of commercial Christianity was being
established at a progressive rate.  Gladstone, whose imagination was
more responsive than critical, dimly discerned the process of change
but scarcely accommodated the difference involved in it.  {33} On the
one hand, the aristocratic sanctions remained, as persisting examples.
On the other, a different theoretic basis of conduct, the middle-class
basis, the backwash, as it were, of the Republican wave from France was
gradually infesting speech and writing.  The former were more
traditional, more familiar, so that Gladstone was naturally drawn to
these, and they seemed at first to crown his belief that Government was
a religious duty.  It very nearly had been so in the presbyteries of
Scotland, and he was not prepared to find small countenance for the
provincial opinion in the capital.

A stranger to London, and inhaling with the clean lungs of a
country-bred boy the perceptible breeze of Reform which gave freshness
to Westminster, Gladstone found himself confronted with proposals,
often admirable but not advocated upon religious grounds.  Was it not
extraordinary that their strongest argument should be unused?  The
people whom he was beginning to meet about the House and in society
were a little cold, in speech that is.  He missed the note of
enthusiasm, yet it was far easier to suffer the scoffs of wretches, of
whom there were luckily but few, stridently declaring that the naming
of principles was the stock vocabulary of political rhetoric.  That
they spoke from tubs and at street corners proved the wisdom of our
Constitution in effectively excluding them from Parliament.  These
ranters were the cynics after all, and cynics in Parliament would be
preposterous intruders.  He had better words to listen to than theirs.
There was Edward Irving to hear at the new, if heretical, church in
Newman Street (since he was now excommunicate by the presbytery).
There were more orthodox preachers.  There were Dr. Arnold's sermons to
read aloud.  All these men agreed on the importance of earnestness and
principle.  His pre-eminence in both had led to Arnold's recent
promotion to Rugby School.  Irving, who entered no {34} house without
giving an apostolic benediction, if misguided, was free from any charge
of want of seriousness.  His explicit aim had been to teach
"imaginative men, and political men, and legal men, and scientific men
who bear the world in hand": a comprehensive audience.  This was
enough.  One must now study to apply one's principles; possibly, if it
must come to that, with a higher seriousness because one's colleagues
were men of action rather than of lofty thought.  These men, too, could
teach a man much.  One must learn their ropes, if only in order to
hitch them to the car of a prophet ascending.

Gladstone's early years in Parliament show the progress of this
apprenticeship.  The politician learns the mode of his calling, while
the enthusiast functions usefully overhead.  Once he shall have learnt
how to avoid collision between this fire above and this cloud on the
ground, his path will be plainer.  In the course of the following
sessions we shall watch how the accommodation proceeds.



V

In 1835 Lord Melbourne was dismissed by King William, and Sir Robert
Peel became Prime Minister.  Gladstone, who was returned for Newark
unopposed, was appointed a Junior Lord of the Treasury.  It was an
interesting moment politically.  After the passing of the Reform Bill,
conservative reaction became an acceptable attitude.  One accomplished
change was enough, and the process of digesting it should not be
disturbed.  Gladstone's address to his constituents had echoed Peel's,
that, while the reform of abuses was a sacred duty, innovation, as
such, could not now be entertained.  It was a time for sober
distractions, at the close of, happily uneventful, Parliamentary days.
At {35} dinner at Lord Lyndhurst's Gladstone met, for the first time,
the young author of _Vivian Grey_, but neither Disraeli nor Gladstone
seems to have made much impression upon each other that night.
Disraeli innocently declared that a tender swan stuffed with truffles
was the best company at the table.  The evidence of eye-witnesses is
notoriously weak.

At the end of January 1835, Peel sent for Gladstone to promote him to
the post of Under-secretary for the Colonies.  Reporting this
gratifying interview to his father, the young man said:


    I expressed ... my hesitation to form any opinion of my own
    competency for the office, and at the same time my general desire
    not to shrink from any responsibility that he might think proper to
    lay upon me.



Had the occasion been less important, even this "expression of
hesitation" (Gladstone might have reflected) was superfluous, since he
could not be judge in his own case; but how human it is to presume, on
these occasions, egoists as we are, we all know.  His new chief was
Lord Aberdeen.  At the age of twenty-five Gladstone was already in
office.

Alas! by April the new Government resigned, and of one of the adverse
divisions preceding its resignation, Gladstone wrote: "No more shameful
act, I think, has been done by a British House of Commons."  His
private feelings may be gleaned from a third of his rare revelations.
He wrote on March 31 in reference to a speech:


    I cannot help recording that this matter of speaking is really my
    strongest religious exercise.



Does the old Adam of Evangelical effusiveness escape in a gush of
sincerity here?  Who would have dared to assert such a theory of
Gladstone unless he had declared {36} his belief in its truth himself?
It is this, ever sought and sometimes rewarded, self-candour which
endears the great man to us all.  When it comes, it is disarming, and
the unusual brevity of these phrases raises them in our regard.
Gladstone was more accustomed to beat about the bush.  If _laborare est
orare_, then perhaps the highest oratory is, in the eighteenth-century
sense of the word, to orate?  It was a religious exercise to Gladstone.
He tells us so, for religious exercises are congenial to muscular
Christians, who are active believers in good works, and rarely separate
the ideas of religion and activity.

This release from a brief spell of office gave to Gladstone a momentary
leisure.  He continued to read sermons, political and historical books,
and from time to time he ventured on the secular classics of art.
Roscoe's life of Pope Leo X impressed Gladstone with a feeling that the
book "in some degree subdued the leaven of its author's Unitarianism,"
but when he had started to read Rousseau's _Confessions_ he was at a
loss whether to continue or to throw it on one side.

In September 1835, Gladstone lost his mother.  In what proved to be her
last illness he had read the Bible to her every day.  To his father he
continued to read Spenser's _Faery Queen_ and Shakespeare; while, on
Sundays, he would browse upon Anglican theologians and St. Augustine.
He wrote also, memoranda of his meetings in society and drafts on
"Hypocrisy and Worship," adding, "attempted to explain this to the
servants at night."  This seriousness does not exclude susceptibility
to fun, or smiles aroused by the foibles of members of his circle.
Should the unpublished letters of Gladstone appear, they may provide
the evidence for Gladstone's playfulness.

If his Sunday evenings were sometimes given to exposition for the
benefit of the servants, how did {37} Gladstone spend his secular
evenings?  He tells us that speaking in the House would occasionally
interfere with his night's rest, and notes the experience, saying: "How
useful to make us feel the habitual, and unremembered, blessing of
sound sleep."  Wordsworth, whom Gladstone was shortly to meet, in his
sonnets on Insomnia, spoke of "this tiresome night," and began a third
with the line:

  Fond words have oft been spoken to thee, Sleep!


The philosophic poet wanted Gladstone's piety, and perhaps suffered
more often than Gladstone from sleeplessness.

To dine out among keen conversationalists is public speaking in little,
should the diner be, like Gladstone, ready in inquiry, question and
retort, for we find this confession near by: a dinner with Henry Taylor
is not only "a keen intellectual exercise," but "a place of danger, as
it is exercise seen."  What zest and caution in these words!

In May Wordsworth came to breakfast with Gladstone, for breakfast, at
this time, was Gladstone's favourite form of hospitality at the Albany,
where his father's generosity had installed him.  The party sat till a
quarter to one, talking of Shelley and Tennyson, travelling and
copyright.  The subject of sleeplessness does not waylay the
breakfasters, though a discussion by the poet and the politician of
their common enemy would have been interesting.  Three weeks later
Wordsworth met Gladstone again at dinner, but no details survive of
their talk.  They had several meetings in Gladstone's rooms, and
Gladstone says he found intercourse with Wordsworth, "upon the whole,
extremely pleasing."  Gladstone was sorry to hear Sydney Smith say that
he did not see very much in Wordsworth, and defended the London sonnet
from Smith's charge of {38} being ridiculous.  One of these breakfast
scenes is worth transcribing.


    Wordsworth came in to breakfast the other day before his time.  I
    asked him to excuse me while I had my servant to prayers; but he
    expressed a hearty wish to be present, which was delightful.  He
    has laboured long; if for himself, yet more for men, and over all I
    trust for God....  We were agreed that a man's personal character
    ought to be the basis of his politics.




VI

At this time Gladstone himself wrote several sonnets, read steadily,
and occasionally spoke.  One of the occasions is still noteworthy.  A
certain candidate, suspected of unbelief, was asked if the report was
true.  He replied that the question of a person's religious beliefs was
one that no liberal-minded man ought to ask another.  The comment of
Gladstone was this question:


    Is it not a time for serious reflection among moderate-minded and
    candid men of all parties, when such a question was actually
    thought impertinent interference?  Surely they would say with him
    that men who have no belief in the divine revelation are not the
    men to govern this nation, be they whigs or radicals.



Two comments must be made on this.

Indifference to the Christian religion has become so common that a
remark of the kind may seem very out of date.  Just as Englishmen have
lost political passion because they have not been invaded within human
memory, so they have not now, unless latently among the minorities of
different faiths, religious passion.  So far as Christian formulas are
concerned, there seems less sign of religious passion than there was
one hundred years ago.  For the present, no Christian is in danger of
being burnt at Smithfield by his brother.  The "spread of religious
tolerance" is necessarily the "spread of indifference" too.  But change
belief in the Christian {39} verity to belief in Communism, and the
wooden stanchions of the stalls in Smithfield Market are sensibly
nearer firewood than they were.  Political passion and religious
passion, for a time, have languished: economic passion, the fury for or
against private property, is the ember glowing now.  If people will not
fight for a metaphysic, they will fight for a bank balance, for
way-leaves and royalties, the minimum wage, or an eight-hour day.  The
passion we are feeling on the subject of property is our equivalent to
the feeling upon religion in Gladstone's youth.  He would have been
shocked in this year, 1835, at the thought of admitting atheists to
Parliament.  Let the reader ask himself how he would feel if two "Reds"
seemed likely to be returned for the City at the next election.  Once
we of 1927 have thus put ourselves in the place of the Gladstone of
1837, his comment on the man who declined to state his attitude on
"divine revelation" is seen to be natural.  Would not most men in a
similar social position to-day repeat it, did some Parliamentary
candidate complain to some constituents that his opinion on the
validity of private property was one that "no liberal-minded man ought
to ask"?

The comment of Gladstone reflected the opinion of the majority of his
class when religious profession was general; as, in turn, his principle
of toleration on the Affirmation Bill of 1883 reflected the opinion of
other men who were ceasing to pretend "to believe."  We need not repeat
our examination of Gladstone's consistency.  The _Tracts for the Times_
had begun to appear in 1833, and I remember the surprise with which, at
the age of seventeen, I read, and transcribed from the pages of
Newman's _Apologia_, this:


    In one of my first sermons I said, I do not shrink from uttering my
    firm conviction that it would be a gain to this country were it
    vastly more superstitious, more bigoted, more gloomy, more fierce,
    in its religion than at present it shows itself to be.



{40}

Victoria was still on the throne.  One had but a glimmering then of the
truth now, by comparison with our present passions on a different order
of faith, clear enough.  Then, however, one did miss the historical
value of Newman's ensuing words:


    I added, of course, that it would be an absurdity to suppose such
    tempers of mind desirable in themselves.  The corrector of the
    Press bore these strong epithets till he got to "more fierce," and
    then he put in the margin a _query_.



That "corrector of the Press" was the shadow of a Victorian morrow,
with tip more extended along the ground than even Gladstone's, as yet.
Fierceness in religion was undergoing a temporary period of eclipse,
though the language of Gladstone's peers, in education and fortune and
home influences, was closely similar.  Let us not forget that both
Newman and Gladstone were accused of sophistry.  Read Manning, Hurrell
Froude even, Dr. Arnold, the contemporary body of successful and
earnest persons, not only on their common themes, and you will note an
assonance that seems remarkable.  Add Newman, Keble, Whately, the
wittiest of them, though hardly wittier than Florence Nightingale at
her best, the great Pusey also, in sum the names that thread the pages
of Newman's _Apologia pro Vita Sua_, and the family accent is
unescapable.

In this chorus, therefore, Gladstone's tone was not, at first,
distinguishable.  It struck the same note, and prolonged it, as the
novice at an organ will prolong the stop marked _vox humana_.  Whenever
we concern ourselves with a single member of the group, we need to
remember this if we would not exaggerate his value as a specimen of the
style.  Yet the dialect is so nearly identical that what seems, on
first acquaintance with the idiom, an earnestness peculiar to a single
soul is largely {41} a group-character.  Religion, at the end of the
eighteenth century, had taken refuge with the Evangelicals,
consequently the future Tractarians and their sympathisers had usually
nourished themselves in youth upon the style of the little Bethel and
the Beulah.  No doubt the twenty-twenties, a century hence, in any
words of our day then remembered, will trace a similar assonance.  Let
us beware of pluming ourselves on a distinction as unlikely as it is
impossible to apprehend, if it exists.  It is enough to admit that the
authorship of an unidentified sentence, belonging to some contemporary
of the young Gladstone, would become a nice question of attribution to
a present-day scholiast.



VII

Out of office, and being little active in Parliament though assiduous
there, Gladstone began to form his future habit of filling intervals by
writing a book.  The subject had been long, perhaps always, at the back
of his adolescent mind.  It was the due relation between Church and
State.  It had been his inner intention to make politics the
application of religion.  The House was a pastorate to him.  It was, as
he has told us, the place where he practised his religious exercises,
the congregation that he led, when he addressed it, in a kind of
extempore prayer.  In his first election address he had declared that
the cure for our evils was a return to the sound principles of
religion.  Was not his own principle, that government was a religious
duty, sound?  Must not all true Christians so regard it?  Did not they
profess so to do?  Was not he, who had no inner light, peculiarly
conscious of the need, and would not a book expounding this theme prove
to the world that energies, if untimely deprived of office, were still
busy with exalted ends?  Teeming with these thoughts, he {42} attended
the funeral of Lady Canning in Westminster Abbey, and confided to his
diary the hope, "May we live as by the side of a grave, and looking in."

The death of William IV, involving a dissolution of Parliament, plunged
Gladstone into a general election again.  The Tories insisted on
nominating him for Manchester, where he was rejected by the Whigs on
two grounds: of owing his wealth to slavery, and of wishing to subject
the poor negroes on his father's estates to the tenets of an
Established Church.  This did not matter, for he was returned without a
contest for Newark once more, with the added satisfaction that his
rising reputation was undisputed.

He confirmed it further by a speech in defence of the planters, whom he
represented upon a committee appointed to inquire into the working of
apprenticeship.  This system was attacked, especially in Jamaica, for
having proved even harsher than slavery to the slaves.  He still had to
trim in debate: to defend the conduct of the planters while declaring
now his belief that slavery was "evil and demoralising."  He discerned
that criticism no longer could be met by conferring benefits upon the
negroes, and he begged his father to let him see the plantations for
himself.  This the wary parent, perhaps knowing his son's excitability,
strenuously opposed, by "a prudent instinct."[4]  The father's prudence
might have had an untoward effect upon a less filially trustful young
man.  Gladstone still had implicit faith in the guidance of his elders.
How could he be a child of his father without being also a child of
light?


[4] Morley.


Moreover, he was being infected by the growing interest in national
education, convinced that, where a church was established, the State
should subsidise the teachers of the establishment only.  Touching
Ireland, he had said in 1835, "the Protestant faith is held good {43}
enough for us, and what is good enough for us is also good for the
population of Ireland."

It is not the fault of youth that it has so much to unlearn: the phrase
indeed is significant for a reason that has nothing to do with
statesmanship.  Observe: the statement is a syllogism, the first
premiss, perhaps preferably the middle term (that "the Protestant faith
exists in Ireland"), being an ellipsis (as taken for granted).
Verbally the logic is perfect, but unfortunately logical conclusions
are not vital conclusions.  Gladstone was still the dupe of words,
obsequious to formul.  In extenuation of a characteristic Scots
failing (for the Scots are contentious over words as we are contentious
over bats and balls, and each is but "a serious game" to the respective
nation), remember this: Like many of his contemporaries, he had no
conceptions at this time that Ireland was more than a name on the map
of the United Kingdom.  In this it was like Fasque, his family's
Scottish home.  That the Irish could conceive they were being taxed to
support heresy was past a joke.  Heresy was not a funny word, and to
level it at England was, at best, in doubtful taste.

Gladstone was now fully ripe to transfer his Evangelical fervour to the
Churchmanship into which his father had already bloomed.  Yet he was
prevented from taking any narrow view of orthodox claims by the
double-mindedness of one now adding the preservative of Westminster to
the milk of doctrine.  His views had developed, were still unfolding;
his eye was on the political sky, wary of necessity to the drift of
cloud lest it should be massing to a nimbus before morning.  How was he
to balance experience with idealism?  Obviously by supporting practical
proposals, in which he believed, in the language of enthusiasm, in
which he believed also.  The day was coming when he would be using the
language of strict orthodoxy for the contemplation of {44} measures,
even of disestablishment, that then made many incumbents shudder.



VIII

His book upon _The State in its Relations to the Church_, published in
1839, was his adolescent attempt to apply his Evangelical ideal to
politics.  It proved to be the parting of the ways.  The serpent of
practical policy had not yet insinuated its way into Gladstone's
innocent heart by the gate which is called Westminster.

When Gladstone found no response, even from friendly quarters, when he
discovered that a theocracy was not a practical political policy, he
dropped it at once.  The wavering inner light, fed by precept and
reading, still untrimmed by critical faculty, was about to be quenched
by practical experience.  No one can deny that Gladstone was capable of
learning, or that he learned by sight rather than by intuition; and his
consistency lay in using the same language for the new lesson as for
the old.

Gladstone properly took advantage of a prevailing current of opinion in
his first book.  The posthumous _Church and State_ of Coleridge had
been published in 1836, and William Palmer, of Worcester College,
Oxford, had issued his _Treatise on the Church of Christ_ in 1838, the
previous year.  In Gladstone's own words: "the primary idea of my early
politics was the Church.  With this was connected the idea of the
establishment, as being everything except essential."  He went abroad
while the book, with the aid of James Hope (Scott's) revisions, was
being printed; met Macaulay in Rome, received a letter from Dr. Wiseman
on the Missal, and attended innumerable sermons.

Roughly, the effect of Gladstone's book was to please churchmen and to
bore politicians.  After dining with {45} Sir Robert Peel, Gladstone
wrote: "Not a word from him, Stanley or Graham yet, even to acknowledge
my poor book; but no change of manner, certainly none in Peel or
Graham."  Gladstone consoled himself with the reflection that Peel was
"quite incapable of comprehending the movement in the Church, the
strength it would reach, and the exigencies it would entail," points on
which Gladstone himself was, perhaps, more clear than on matters of
doctrine.  This was his instinctive answer to the report that Ministers
wondered why anyone, with so fine "a career" opening before him, should
go out of his way to write books.  Almost immediately he made the
discovery that "there was no party, no individual person probably, in
the House of Commons, who was prepared to act on it.  I found myself
the last man on a sinking ship."  He simply could not see himself in
the part.  He was a man of action.

The way out of this dilemma was to dress the opposite and prevailing
opinion in language not dissimilar from his previous defence of the
establishment: "it was" (he wrote therefore in the retrospect) "really
a quickened conscience, in the country, that insisted on enlarging the
circle of State support."  Beset by doubt on many matters, Gladstone
was finely constant to the faith of his time, that, whatever else we
might disbelieve, we could not disbelieve in progress.

Meantime, however, against the indifference of Sir Robert Peel the
praise of John Keble could not weigh.  Perforce he abandoned his
desire, sprung from the "sanguine fervour" of a youth who had noted
"the many symptoms of revival and reform within" the Church's borders,
to create a theocracy in England; of a youth who "dreamed that she was
capable of recovering lost ground and of bringing back the nation to
unity in her communion."  All was not lost yet.  Could he not turn
entirely to the theorists, the little band which {46} alone had
welcomed him?  Gladstone therefore wrote _Church Principles_, which
fell flat.  His head was, like Scotland, too misty to handle theology
in an interesting way.  It required a debatable borderland between
theory and practice for his arguments to arouse men made uneasy lest
their pockets should be threatened by the application.  Expectation or
apprehensiveness concerning the politician ever provided the interest
taken in Gladstone's ideas.

Following the plan of disposing of recurring issues when they first
arise, we may attend to the first of Gladstone's fairly voluminous
writings.  The influences displayed by his books form an impressive
succession, but the style, like the man himself, did not change.  If he
began as a holy innocent, he ended as a holy elder, indeed the eldest
statesman of his time.  It was so also with his authorship.  Between
_The State and its Relations to the Church_ and _The Impregnable Rock
of Holy Scripture_ there were to be many pamphlets and books, the eight
volumes of _Gleanings from Past Years_ being, literally, no more than
gleanings.  For the present our purpose is with the first book, which
evoked a yet surviving criticism.

In his review, published in the _Edinburgh_, of the second edition of
_The State in its Relations with the Church_, Macaulay wrote:


    His rhetoric, though often good of its kind, darkens and perplexes
    the logic which it should illustrate.  Half his acuteness and
    diligence, with a barren imagination and a scanty vocabulary, would
    have saved him from almost all his mistakes.  He has one gift most
    dangerous to a speculator, a vast command of a kind of language,
    grave and majestic, but of a vague and uncertain import....  The
    foundations of his theory, which ought to be buttresses of adamant,
    are made out of flimsy materials which are fit only for perorations.



This is rather hard on perorations, but it was Macaulay's {47} way, and
his assertiveness has no illusion now for critical posterity.  The
intellects of Macaulay and of Gladstone were without subtilty, but
whereas Macaulay's was as hard as a nail, Gladstone's was as
unsubstantial as an eiderdown.  To watch Macaulay industriously
hammering his tintack into Gladstone's theological patchwork quilt is a
spectacle apt to become exhausting.  To read the one upon the other is
to read the new journalism upon the old.  The bright young man turns
upon his earnest colleague in this summary way:


    It is not unusual for a person who is eager to prove a particular
    proposition to assume a major of huge extent, which includes that
    particular proposition, without ever reflecting that it includes a
    great deal more.  The fatal facility with which Mr. Gladstone
    multiplies expressions stately and sonorous, but of indeterminate
    meaning, eminently qualifies him to practise this sleight on
    himself and his readers.  He lays down broad general principles
    about power, when the only power of which he is thinking is the
    power of Governments, and about conjoint action, when the only
    conjoint action of which he is thinking is the conjoint action of
    citizens in a State.

    He first resolves on his conclusion.  He then makes a major of most
    comprehensive dimensions, and, having satisfied himself that it
    contains his conclusion, never troubles himself about what else it
    may contain; and as soon as we examine it, we find that it contains
    an infinite number of conclusions, every one of which is a
    monstrous absurdity.



To give the devil his due, which is the duty of a Christian, this would
pass for a neat decipherment of Gladstone's mental method, did it not
overlook, of course, to some extent the earnest purpose, the cloud of
yearning feelings, to which the method was no more than a tool in
awkward hands.  By the simple process of deleting such abstract nouns
as Duty, Justice, Righteousness, of curtailing periphrases, of
condensing parenthetical qualifications, the bulk of Gladstone's
volumes would shrink to normal size.  This, however, could not be {48}
done without sacrificing their quality, which is none the less a
quality because it happens to be a quantitative one.  The play of words
is the thing; redundancy the virtue; fervour the element of the whole.
To bring the Gladstonean canon to an intellectual test is to make a
cardinal mistake, very unjust to the author.  Read so, the writings
would become almost a specific for yawning.  Indeed for Gladstone's
publications the term writings is a misnomer.  The author is orating
with his pen.  He opines: he does not think.  He is a fountain of
written speechifying.  He is his own stenographer.

To sound moral, to seem earnest, to indulge in sublime sentiments, to
produce a hortatory effect, in a word, to edify, was the peculiar gift
of Gladstone; but when the clear baritone voice and the graceful
pantomime of the speaker's gestures were wanting, when the pen detained
the attention that the charm of the voice relaxed, the substance
vanishes and the cloud of words condenses into a rain of ink that
chills the head of the reader.  He professed so much to rely upon
eternal truths that the ephemeral interest of his books seems their
reduction to "absurdity."

This seeming, however, is not all.  To edify was Gladstone's gift, and
his power in this kind must be related to the audience that admitted it
triumphantly.  His art, whether with voice or pen, was the art of
homily, not strictly of oratory, literature, or delivery of sermons.
The homily is distinct from each of these.  A sermon is a speech
addressed to an audience or congregation however intimate or small: a
homily, on the other hand, is an exhortation or moralising discourse
addressed to a _homilos_ or crowd, a throng, a multitude of hearers.
The distinction amounts to a specific difference.  Littlemore, "that
small grey church where the worshippers are few," was a proper spot for
sermons.  The floor of the House of Commons with men crowding between
the benches, {49} the still vaster arena of Blackheath where an
assembly of twenty thousand was to hang on Gladstone's words, was the
fit amphitheatre for a homily.  Would Newman have been equally moving,
had he ever inclined himself, to a large crowd?  Would Gladstone have
had a fair chance at Littlemore?  Such a question is invidious to both
men.  It is its own answer.

Macaulay makes two other criticisms that are worth remembering.  The
undergraduate said to have known his Bible better than any of his
fellow-pupils is convicted by Macaulay of error in the use of a
familiar text.  If this was the first public occasion when the
impregnable rock of Holy Scripture proved to be pregnable in
Gladstone's hands, let us remember how few adults even can distinguish
between the two versions of similar sayings in St. Matthew's and St.
Luke's Gospels.  The criticism, which touches us all in a very tender
spot, is interesting for another reason.  The learning of Gladstone
was, like his scholarship, an alluvial deposit rather than the bed-rock
that he and the wider public fancied each to be.  This fact may serve
to introduce perhaps the best general criticism in Macaulay's essay:
"When he says that he is where he was, he means only that he has moved
at the same rate with all around him."

The criticism proved to be prophetic, and the movement of Gladstone's
opinions, the shifting grounds of which he was aware, encouraged his
tendency to parenthesis and qualification.  There was more logic than
is usually admitted in his claim for verbal consistency.  His
qualifications allowed room for more interpretations than one, and he
was never more delighted than when he was referred to some previous
statement.  This, once his political nonage was passed, would always
bear scrutiny because he always shunned directly to commit himself.
The involutions of his parenthetical style made his remarks hard to
memorise accurately, and, again and {50} again, when some opponent rose
triumphantly in a newspaper or in debate to recall a former statement
now apparently being contradicted, he was convicted of having
overlooked a saving adjective or exempting clause.  The general drift
had been remembered, but the grammatical reading of the text often
allowed more inferences than one.  The meaning, at first and
afterwards, might indeed be doubtful: the formula could be defended
either way.  Bad phraseology, in the theological, literary, legal or
technical sense, ceases to be bad if it has been designed to be of
doubtful interpretation.  Gladstone made a crutch of his intellectual
crotchet, and, like all men clever enough so to do, was dangerous to
his opponents in proportion as they thought him therefore at their
mercy.  In self-defence he became an adept at this art, and was
eventually acclaimed a master of subtilty because he cultivated
indefiniteness.  It became impossible for him to make a direct
statement at last.

To-day, when politicians are at pains to arrange a dispute between two
sides opposed in principle to one another, the newspapers tell us that
the officials are busy trying "to find a formula."  The object of the
formula is to obtain a settlement that shall leave the insoluble issue
where it was.  To "find a formula" has become the official solution of
problems arising from collective bargaining both in trade and
diplomacy.  Its best disciple was Gladstone, the first of
parliamentarians to appeal to the mass of electors between election
times.

Finally, Macaulay made a certain diagnosis, also of value when we
reconsider the ideas that Gladstone imbibed during his youth, accepted
implicitly, and endeavoured to apply, or at least to preach, to the
world growing up with him.  "Mr. Gladstone's book" (Macaulay wrote) ...
"is the measure of what a man can do to be left behind by the world."
Since both men believed in progress, this verdict was severe, but it
was {51} certainly the verdict of the politicians.  Gladstone, a shrewd
judge of such opinion, promptly discarded his thesis.  It was part of
his humility not to be the last upholder of a losing cause.  In the
inimitable sincerity of his own words: "Providence directed that my
mind should find its food in other pastures than those in which my
youthfulness would have loved to seek it."  On consideration he sees
that between taking Holy Orders and a seat in the House there is little
difference, for "reflection shows me that a political position is
mainly valuable as instrumental for the good of the Church, and under
this rule every question becomes one of detail only."

"I wish you to know," he wrote to his brother-in-law in 1840, "the
state of total impotence to which I should be reduced if there were no
echo to the accents of my own voice."




{52}

CHAPTER II

THE GROWTH OF EXPERIENCE


I

The winter of 1838 Gladstone spent in Rome, where he joined Manning
after having met in Naples the widow and daughters of Sir Stephen
Richard Glynne of Hawarden, Flintshire.  Gladstone had first visited
Hawarden in 1835 and now became engaged to Catherine Glynne, sister and
in her issue heiress of Sir Stephen, the ninth and last baronet.
Gladstone proposed to her in the Colosseum, the largest amphitheatre in
the world, and her acceptance admitted him to membership of the
aristocracy.

They were married on July 25, 1839.  On the same day, Mary, the younger
sister, married Lord Lyttelton.  The two marriages were solemnised with
great rejoicings at Hawarden.  Gladstone's best man was Sir Francis
Doyle, Professor of Poetry at Oxford.  He commemorated the twofold
nuptials in a poem called the _Two Sister Brides_, in the course of
which Mrs. Gladstone was told to

  Covet not, then, the rest of those
    Who sleep through life unknown to fame;
  Fate grants not passionless repose
    To her who weds a glorious name.

As Gladstone had not yet reached his thirtieth birthday, and the term
was not incongruous, it is evident how welcome the union was to both
families.

{53}

A portrait of Catherine Gladstone at this time happily exists.  It
shows a delicate face, at once vivacious and tender, with liquid eyes,
a straight nose, a shapely forehead and waving hair.  The expression is
winning and affectionate, open and intelligent, and the picture is a
contrast to the somewhat theatrical portrait of her husband which
William Bradley painted about the same time.  Like many portraits of
its period, this last appears to represent a type or reputation rather
than a man.  The prominent nose is the chief feature of the face, and
there is, again typically, more effect than character in the
physiognomy.



II

Having married the heiress of Hawarden, Gladstone was naturally taking
a warm interest in the future home, a home which he was to preserve
amid many financial difficulties.  In 1809 the house was built of brick
before being enlarged and cased in stone "in the castellated style,"
when it became Hawarden Castle.  Sir Stephen Glynne further improved it
in 1831; the new block containing Gladstone's study was added in 1864.
This study contained three windows, two fireplaces, and three desks.
One of the desks was reserved for Gladstone's political, another for
his literary, papers.  The third was Mrs. Gladstone's.  Other treasures
in the room included busts of Homer, Canning, Cobden and Tennyson,
together with an axe from Nottingham remarkable for not being of the
American shape that Gladstone preferred.  When he brought his wife home
to his family, Gladstone learnt that his father intended to hand over
his plantations to his sons.  The estates were now freed from slaves,
for in 1837 a return, opposed by Gladstone, of the sums given in
compensation to {54} the slave-owners recorded that his father had
received 75,000.

Nevertheless Gladstone's marriage was to involve him indirectly in
financial worries.  His brother-in-law, Sir Stephen Glynne, owned a
farm of one hundred acres in Staffordshire, and the land was found to
be rich in coal and ironstone.  On his marriage Gladstone, through his
wife, was given a tenth share in the enterprise of developing this
property.  On the security of Hawarden much capital was sunk, and,
after the company became insolvent in 1847, Gladstone purchased the
concern.  This arrangement left Sir Stephen in legal occupation, but
with a sum of a quarter of a million hanging over Hawarden and himself.
To save the estate from being sold became the anxious desire of the
family, and in the prolonged struggle Gladstone took an arduous share.
With his father's help Gladstone purchased nearly half of the portion
of the estate that had inevitably to be sold.  This brought in 200,000
and kept half the land in the family, for Glynne's other brother-in-law
was helped to purchase the part that Gladstone could not take.  In 1852
the house was partly reopened, and in 1865 Gladstone purchased the
reversion for 57,000.

First and last Gladstone spent 267,000 on Hawarden, of which the
deaths of Stephen and Henry Glynne left him the owner in 1874.  He
promptly made it over to his eldest son, who agreed to leave the house
to Mrs. Gladstone for life, so that, with characteristic paradox, the
house most identified with Gladstone was occupied by another when he
controlled it or owned by someone else for most of the time when he was
there.  Gladstone seems to have managed the whole protracted business
with industry, skill and generosity.  This episode, to which he devoted
five years and then an overseeing eye, though hardly mentioned outside
the exhaustive official {55} biography, is highly characteristic.  As
an experience of business men and business matters, as an
apprenticeship to finance, it was invaluable.  Beside this, it brought
out the most authentic of Gladstone's abilities.  The more concrete and
immediate his task, the better he was equipped to perform it.  His
careful letters to his son, in which he aired his views on the duties
attaching to property and on the prestige still possessed by
territorial families over commercial fortunes, have a note of
conviction clearer than the note struck by abstract, moral or
imaginative themes.  The reality, as always, is less high-flown than
the phantasm, and to have saved Hawarden was a complicated and worthy
task on which any man might warm himself excusably.



III

Macaulay's familiar description of Gladstone as "the rising hope of
stern and unbending Tories," was justified in so far as his book on
Church and State had been much enjoyed at Oxford, to which "fountain of
blessings, spiritual, social and intellectual," it had been dedicated.
Eight years later the University was to elect him to represent it in
Parliament.  Meantime the session of 1840 showed Gladstone in one of
his characteristic dilemmas.

Certain Englishmen were smuggling opium into China in despite of
Chinese law, and when China (whose engagements were not kept) defended
herself, the British agent found excuse for attacking her.  Though
orders had been sent forbidding the protection of the smugglers,
England, once engaged, determined to push the struggle to victory.  The
result was that the wretched Chinese were forced to open four ports, to
pay an indemnity, and to cede Hong-Kong.  Having (he records)
previously asked whether speaking out would do any harm, {56} Gladstone
denounced our conduct, and then yielded to his colleagues in not
bringing forward a motion against the demand for compensation from
China.  His speech here proved to be his "strongest religious
exercise," and, if speech be rightly regarded as political activity,
his activity at any rate "could not do any harm."  If the speech of
denunciation be set against its foreseen nullity of effect, the balance
struck is almost perfect.  It would be easy, therefore, for a third
party to claim the net result of this activity for either side.  The
point for us to notice is that theoretical considerations prompted the
speech, practical considerations the withdrawal of his motion.  He was
growing.

  In words, as fashions, the same rule will hold,
  Alike fantastic if too new or old:
  Be not the first by whom the new are tried,
  Nor yet the last to lay the old aside.


Gladstone was throwing a bridge between remembered precept and observed
example, and his preceptors and exemplars were equally reverenced by
him.  As Pope remarked a little further on, "fools admire, but men of
sense approve."  It was "men of sense" with whom Gladstone was now
dealing.

There were still moments of relaxation.  In 1839 he had been reading
_Oliver Twist_ and _Nicholas Nickleby_.  He said of the latter: "The
tone is very human; it is most happy in touches of natural pathos.  No
church in the book, and the motives are not those of religion."
Dickens did not seem much use to an advocate of theocracy.  Of _Peter
Bell_, which Arnold had read with edification, Gladstone recorded that
he had been struck with "the depth of interest which is made to attach
to the humblest of quadrupeds."  Like all Gladstone's phrases, this is
worth pondering, for an "interest ... made to attach" to a donkey
implies that the donkey {57} itself is not interesting.  Yet an
Evangelical who had written verses might have remembered that this was
the creature upon which his Lord rode, and haply had been chosen just
because it was "the humblest of quadrupeds."  In great men
contradictions are the salt of character, and, provided that these are
not pressed unduly, bring them closer to ourselves.

Reading apart, Gladstone found "moral relaxation" in a journey to Eton,
there to examine for the Newcastle Scholarship.  He set a passage from
St. Augustine in the paper on divinity, and awarded the Newcastle medal
to Henry Fitzmaurice Hallam, the younger brother of his old friend.
His brother-in-law, Lord Lyttelton, was his fellow-examiner.  In the
autumn Gladstone joined James Hope (Scott) in a scheme for founding a
seminary in Scotland where the clergy might be trained, and the
children of the gentry educated, without recourse to Presbyterians.  In
1846, with his father's generous aid the seminary was opened at
Glenalmond.

This was one of the many schemes for charitable work on which Gladstone
and Hope frequently corresponded.  Gladstone's letters and his
endeavours to persuade Hope to unite with him in philanthropic activity
make interesting reading.

Despite political and domestic cares, Gladstone cherished his Sundays.
For example, on March 14, 1841, we read in his diary that he attended
the early service at St. James's, the afternoon service at St.
Margaret's, and then "wrote on Ephes. v. 1 and read it aloud to the
servants."  The following Sunday he chose 1 Thess. v. 17, and read it
aloud to the servants.  During the intervening week he had attended the
afternoon service at St. Paul's, and was affected by the contrast
between the serene cathedral and the commercial strife without its
walls.  In his diary he notes also: "no strokes from God, no
opportunity of pardoning others, for {58} none offend me."  The diary
of Mrs. Gladstone remarks: "engaged a cook, after a long conversation
on religious matters, chiefly between her and William."



IV

In a discussion on the fiscal system, Gladstone referred to the slave
trade.  He called it now "that monster which, while war, pestilence and
famine were slaying their thousands, slew from year to year with
unceasing operation its tens of thousands."  In spite of bringing up a
peer, whom Gladstone reported "to be in a state of total idiocy," and
"evidently in total unconsciousness of what was proceeding," the
Government was defeated, on Peel's motion of want of confidence, by a
majority of one.  A dissolution followed; Gladstone was returned for
Newark as a Protectionist.  The sad thing was that Sir Stephen Glynne
was not returned for Flintshire, but Cobden, for the first time, took
his seat in the House.

Peel appointed Gladstone to the vice-presidency of the Board of Trade,
an office which he combined with that of Master of the Mint.  He seems
to have hoped for the Irish secretaryship and a seat in the Cabinet,
and was inclined to wonder whether his dual post had not perhaps been
designed to keep him quiet.  His ecclesiastical writings and interests
had been thought mistakes by his political chief.  Gladstone,
therefore, thought it prudent to deny, in an inordinately long letter
to Peel, the newspaper report that he held Peel's opinions on Church
matters in reprobation.

England was now definitely, though scarcely consciously and officially,
committed to industrialism; and it fell to Peel's government of 1842 to
recognise the economic revolution.  In the following passage Lord
Morley depicts the situation:

{59}


    If you had to constitute new societies, Peel said to Croker, then
    you might on moral and social grounds prefer corn-fields to cotton
    factories, and you might like an agricultural population better
    than a manufacturing; as it was, the national lot was cast, and
    statesmen were powerless to turn back the tide.  The food of the
    people, their clothing, the raw material for their industry, their
    education, the conditions under which women and children were
    suffered to toil, markets for these products of loom and forge and
    furnace and mechanic's shop--these were slowly making their way
    into the central field of political vision, and taking the place of
    fantastic follies about foreign dynasties and the balance of power
    as the true business of the British Statesman.


Hitherto Peel had been a Protectionist, and Gladstone had therefore
followed suit, but the accumulated deficits and the prevailing distress
were causing an outcry, and even thought to demand a remedy.  The
popular spokesman of this bitterness of spirit was Ebenezer Elliott,
the Corn-law Rhymer.

Born in 1781 in Yorkshire, the son of a Calvinist iron merchant, who
was a stern radical, the little Ebenezer, a dunce to his schoolmasters,
worked for seven years from the age of sixteen in his father's foundry
for the Calvinistic wage of pocket-money.  Already rather a morbid
little boy, dazed with stifled longings, his starved imagination fed on
the sight of the wild-flowers that he met upon his country rambles, on
his rare holiday afternoons.  Indoors he browsed upon Milton and a few
poets of the eighteenth century which fell into his hands through some
books that a poor clergyman had chanced to bequeath to Mr. Elliott.
Ebenezer began to write verses; his first sonnet remains, with other
juvenile pieces; and these even, unripe as they are, showed that the
eager lad had the root of poetry in him.  Once his brief years of
popularity were over, Ebenezer Elliott fell into neglect again, except
by our anthologists.  He is rarely tedious, never unreadable, and there
is a glow of suppressed passion in his poetry which redeems the {60}
rhetoric to which his Muse was naturally akin.  On the loss of his
father's money and his wife's, through, he asserted, the Corn Laws, the
poet inevitably joined the Chartists, till, that is to say, they gave
up the demand for Repeal.  He was finally touched to poetry by his
political conviction, which came to him now in the guise almost of a
religious faith.  Indeed Calvinism has often produced admirable
agitators.

The _Corn-law Rhymes_, which appeared in 1831, ran into three editions
in the year of their publication, and for a time Ebenezer was also
meeting with success in the business that, on borrowed capital, he had
started in Sheffield after the death of his father.  In 1837, however,
he was almost ruined again, yet he managed to recover, and retired four
years later, to die in comparative peace, at Barnsley, in his native
county, in 1849.  He imputed the cause of all his family's misfortunes
to the Corn Laws, and his assault upon the "bread tax," together with
his private sufferings, championship of the poor in our industrial
towns, stainless sincerity, and moving rhythm created and, to those
with ears, maintains, his niche in English letters.  A writer praised
by Carlyle and by Walter Savage Landor is secure from the neglect of
lesser men, whose disregard is really a quaint compliment.  Robert
Southey, too, deserves to have recalled the friendly criticism that he
sent by letter to Elliott after having read the earliest of _Vernal
Walks_, addressed to Night, in 1831.  It seems to have been written at
the age of seventeen, that is, in 1798, in the manner of James Thomson.

The working men of Sheffield subscribed for a statue to Elliott, by
Neville Burhard, on which Walter Savage Landor composed the following,
among other eloquent, lines:

  Wisely, O Sheffield, wisely hast them done
  To place thy ELLIOTT on the plinth of fame.

{61}

  Three Elliotts have there been, three glorious men,
  Each in his generation....
  A third came calmly on and askt the rich
  To give laborious hunger daily bread....
  God heard; but they heard not.  God sent down bread;
  They took it, kept it all, and cried for more,
  Hollowing both hands to catch and clutch the crumbs.
  I may not live to hear another voice,
  Elliott, of power to penetrate as thine,
  Dense multitudes; another none may see,
  Leading the muses from unthrifty shades,
  To fields where corn gladdens the heart of man....

  But louder than the anvil rings the lyre;
      *      *      *      *      *
  Genius is tired in search of gratitude;
  Here they have met; may neither say farewell.


With the insight of his genius, Landor in one fine line conveys the
ringing heart of Elliott's poetry at its best.  The rhythm does seem to
be that of a hammer upon an anvil, and the finer lines to have been
written in the foundry where the boy found warmth, and the honour of
his metals, to set an example to the slum, called a town, of greed and
poverty in which his generation was bred.  His quality, of which his
popular appeal was the recognition, may still be felt in lines like
these, from "The Emigrant's Farewell":

  England, farewell! we quit thee--never more
  To drink thy dewy light, or hear the thrush
  Sing to thy fountain'd vales....
                                    In our prayers,
  If we forget our wrongers, may we be
  Vile as their virtues, hopeless as their heirs,
  And sires of sons whom scorn shall nickname theirs!--
  And to such wolves leave we our country?  Oh,
  The heart that quits thee, e'en in hope, despairs!

Another Corn-law rhyme is a virtual sonnet entitled "A Poet's Prayer":

{62}

  Almighty Father! let thy lowly child,
  Strong in his love of truth, be wisely bold--
  A patriot bard, by sycophants reviled,
  Let him live usefully, and not die old!
  Let poor men's children, pleased to read his lays,
  Love, for his sake, the scenes where he has been;
  And, when he ends his pilgrimage of days,
  Let him be buried where the grass is green;
  Where daisies, blooming earliest, linger late
  To hear the bee his noisy note prolong--
  There let him slumber, and in peace await
  The dawning morn, far from the sensual throng,
  Who scorn the windflower's blush, the redbreast's lonely song.

The line about the bee, and the charming final alexandrine, recall the
eighteenth century.  There is a short and eloquent poem, like a
so-called ode, upon "The Press," the rich rhythm of which has a certain
added flavour from the sincere but unintended note of its concluding
apostrophe.  How ironical it sounds to-day:

  O pallid Want!  O Labour stark!
  Behold, we bring the second ark!
        The Press! the Press! the Press!

Hopes were high then, because the chances for our millionaires lay
still hid in the distant future.  No one then foresaw that the popular
Press of a century later, in the firm grasp of a few colossally rich
men, would live up to its name very largely by suppressing information.
Devised by human cormorants for human gulls, popular papers of England
and America are exactly what we should expect from the conditions which
they reflect and their proprietors thrive upon.  We cannot blame
Ebenezer Elliott for not having divined that if the newspapers were
freed from the Paper Tax, the Second Ark, to which he compared the
Press, would be, as the Epistle to the Hebrews puts it, the "mediator
of a new covenant" very different from "my covenant of peace, {63} and
he shall have it, and his seed after him ... because he was zealous for
his God," as the Lord phrased it to Moses, with the original Ark in His
mind.

Another poem of Elliott's, called the "Triumph of Reform," is mainly
political in its challenge.  A better example of the same class is the
short lyric on the Revolution of 1832.  It is perhaps in "Reform" that
we come near the heart of Elliott's Corn-law rhyming:

  Too long endured, a power and will,
  That would be nought, or first in ill,
  Had wasted wealth, and palsied skill,
        And fed on toil-worn poverty.

  They call'd the poor a rope of sand;
  And, lo! no rich man's voice or hand
  Was raised, throughout the suffering land,
        Against their long iniquity.

      *      *      *      *      *

  They murder'd Hope, they fetter'd trade;
  The clouds to blood, the sun to shade,
  And every good that God had made
        They turned to bane and mockery.

      *      *      *      *      *

  A murmur from a trampled worm,
  A whisper in the cloudless storm--
  Yet these, even these, announced Reform;
        And Famine's scowl was prophecy!

      *      *      *      *      *

  O years of crime!  The great and true--
  The nobly wise--are still the few,
  Who bid Truth grow where Falsehood grew,
        And plant it for eternity!


If the voice of that which we now call Labour can be heard in the
sentiment that stars this poem with exclamation marks, there is a ring
in it, due not only to the measure, which reminds one of the cadence
that Rossetti was to use with fine effect too.  A single quotation more
must here suffice; it is taken from one of the Rhymes called "The
Recording Angel":

{64}

  King of Dear Corn!  Time hears with ceaseless groan,
    Time ever hears, sad names of hate and dread:
  But thou, thou only, of all monarchs known,
    Didst legislate _against_ thy People's bread!

This argument, however, burgeoned into two lyrics which are
irresistible in their own kind and degree:

  No toil in despair,
    No tyrant, no slave,
  No bread-tax is there,
    With a maw like the grave....

  And their mother, who sank
    Broken-hearted to rest;
  And the baby, that drank
    Till it froze on her breast;
  With tears, and with smiles,
    Are waiting for thee,
  In the beautiful isles
    Where the wrong'd are the free.

  Child, is thy father dead?
    Father is gone!
  Why did they tax his bread?
    God's will be done!
  Mother has sold her bed;
    Better to die than wed!
  Where shall she lay her head?
    Home we have none!

Hood, at his best, was a more ingenious master of rhyme, but, in his
poems of parallel appeal, was he more moving?

With the bitterness and distress of the recent Coal stoppage in mind,
we can well understand the feelings of Sir Robert Peel when poetry of
this sincerity, written too by a poor man, was eagerly sung, to the
familiar tunes for which Elliott composed his songs, by thousands of
his wretched fellow-countrymen.

The distress was undeniable, and Peel was in the most wretched of the
plights that can befall a politician, the occasion when something must
be done.  In order that {65} he might be free to reduce duties on food
and on raw materials, Peel proposed therefore to raise revenue by an
Income Tax.  At the Board of Trade the alert eyes of Gladstone were
beginning to be opened, in his own sphere, to the necessities of the
moment.  Unlike Peel, moreover, Gladstone was not forced to keep his
eye on the agricultural interest and the House of Lords.  Trade
necessarily dominated his horizon, and perhaps his susceptible mind
dimly responded to the political consequences of the coming change.
His queer sense of the morrow was roused from its lair.  We now see
what may have dawned on him, that free trade could not become a
workable policy in industrialised England unless and until the
extension of the franchise to holders of urban property accompanied it.
Obviously, if agriculture and the landed interest were to be sacrificed
to manufacture and industry, the agricultural voter must be securely
outvoted henceforth.  In political language this meant that the old
talk about liberty must be revived, even though, politically speaking,
this meant to the engineers of the new policy no more than a dressing
to disguise the shifting of political with economic power.

The threefold policy of Peel--the Corn Bill, the imposition of an
Income Tax, and the Reform of the tariff--left to Gladstone the third
and most laborious task.  The field was entirely new to him; there was
nothing in his education, save over the Hawarden affair, to fit him for
it; and it presents us with another of his engaging contradictions.  He
came reluctantly to finance, for (having no inner light) he was
inclined to speculation and moral fervour.  Yet events and the judgment
of posterity, where that has happened to be impartial, show that he had
next to none of intellect, whereas he was lucid and clear-headed over
business and figures, and astute, in his odd way, when dealing with men
whom he did not understand.  That he was self-deceived is not odd, {66}
nor that he succeeded in deceiving others.  His immense energy, the
most vital of his qualities, finely expressed in his vigorous physique,
found congenial scope in the flood of detail that the reform of the
tariff entailed.  He was copious in effort, inquisitive of detail,
ceaseless in pains, and his minute study of the import duties, with his
consequential recommendations for their reduction, was a more solid and
useful performance than either of his books.  He could opine, but he
could not speculate.  All his thoughts came to him at second hand.  He
never originated an idea in his life, or understood what an idea was,
but his vitality, and the restlessness that came from having no centre,
nourished by the school-mastering that he had received, led him to pour
out in speech and writing the effect of whatever mental stimulus
happened to have excited him at the moment.  Thus the more concrete his
task was, the better suited it was to Gladstone's ability.

He never complained of want of inner light when confronted with
business or financial details.  The man of activity was as precise as
the man of reflection was hazy, and he was at his best with dead
things, such as tariffs and figures.  He needed his antithesis to find
a form for his fluidity, as water does to display its resistance.  With
men, curiously enough, he was rarely at home or at ease.  He could not
bring himself into touch with other human beings.  The more he groped
anxiously in their direction the more they eluded him, as we can
conceive a river to grope disappointedly for some final form in the
sea.  The men whom he could not manage he could man[oe]uvre, and a
large part of this man[oe]uvring took the form of copious speech.  The
more at sea we are the longer are our explanations.  Lucidity is
difficult because it needs to be brief, and Gladstone, very wisely, was
terrified of brevity.  So well, however, did he acquit himself over the
preparation {67} of the new tariff that Sir Robert Peel wrote a letter
of congratulation to Gladstone's father.  In a reply, embarrassed by
paternal joy, the father remarked that he had already given two sons to
Parliament, and was waiting a favourable opportunity for his third, a
piece of family news that may have caused a smile to flicker across the
impassive face of the Prime Minister.

In 1843, and in reward for his services, Gladstone was promoted to
succeed his departmental chief as President of the Board of Trade, and
thus entered the Cabinet at the age of thirty-three, after less than
eleven years in Parliament.



V

Though now committed with Peel to Free Trade, Gladstone had to speak
warily, for a policy need not arouse the fears that the statement of a
far-reaching new principle awakens.  Morley quotes the anonymous remark
of someone that "Gladstone's arguments were in favour of Free Trade and
his parentheses of Protection."  He had been growing fast. He was
qualifying for popular statesmanship.

The first Cabinet attended by Gladstone was held on May 15, 1843.  It
was concerned with Irish Repeal meetings, and it was part of Peel's
policy to conciliate O'Connell.  With this object he proposed to
establish non-sectarian colleges in Ireland to placate Protestants, and
permanently to increase the grant to Maynooth, the training college for
Catholic priests, from 9,000 to 30,000 a year.  To understand what
followed it is necessary to recall the state of public opinion at the
time.  The Catholic Emancipation Act was fifteen years old, but
notwithstanding this, Peel himself feared that his proposal would be
fatal to his Government.  Gladstone also was perturbed: not because he
resented the {68} policy himself, but because it contradicted the chief
contention of his book, published six years before.  He thought that if
he went back, or, strictly, if he confessed to having gone back, on his
earlier opinion, he would seem unreliable to others: a fear that shows
fundamental weakness of mind, for only the dead, of whom many are
walking, do not modify opinion by experience.  Apparent consistency was
highly valued by Gladstone because, as he had not interior guidance,
the sustained support of other people was essential to his self-esteem.
We can change our opinions as St. Paul did without turning on those
from whom we have come to differ.  It is true that Gladstone had no
inclination to persecute; he was essentially a pacifist, hoping beyond
all things to find men in agreement with him.  Nevertheless his bogey
remained, and how was he to exorcise it?

Was he to admit that he had abandoned the principle on which he had
expended so much eloquence, and thus to risk offending those who
fancied such eloquence to be the sign of an exalted mind?  The dreadful
alternative was not so much to support a measure to which he privately
assented, or even to oppose a Government to which he was happy to
belong, dreadful as was this prospect for a young Cabinet Minister.
Lesser beings hardly realise how sacred to its holder is the portfolio
of office.  What would his father say?  What his wife?  What his
friends?  What his colleagues?  What would become of his "career"?  It
is impossible to sympathise too deeply with Gladstone at this trying
moment.  Like the natural politician that he was, he sought to "find a
formula."  If a middle way existed, it must lie clearly here.  The
formula should be verbally or apparently consistent with his previous
utterances and yet should leave him free to support the policy which
they had condemned.  He had been credited with a subtle mind, and he
perceived that the formula could not be {69} verbal.  The trouble was
that action, some action, with all its dreadful obviousness, was
required.  A speech would not meet the case.  Perhaps he recalled how
he had met a smaller difficulty over the affair in China.  Then an
action, foreseen to be of no effect, had saved him.  Could not he
devise some kindred action now?  The present difficulty was immensely
greater.  To seem consistent in principle, and yet to act against his
eloquent thesis, required more than sleight of hand.  To preserve his
reputation he needed some obvious sacrifice.  The martyr's is always a
sympathetic rle.  It is the eloquence of action.  Once discovering
that the latter was unavoidable, Gladstone hesitated no longer.  He
resigned his post, the political form of suicide, but, having resigned,
he supported the Government's proposal.

The grounds that he found for this shall be given in a moment.  The
interesting thing is that he could find no ground for the simple
admission that he had changed his mind.  Supposing that he had admitted
this, there would have been no reason, save the misconception to which
all candid minds are liable, for his resignation, and one cannot become
a politician and at the same time avoid all imputation of self-seeking.
It is the price that a man pays for adopting politics as a "career."
In an ethical sense, therefore, to have acted as he did and to have
retained office would have been a greater sacrifice than to have
resigned, for to the vulgar eye Gladstone thus would have sacrificed
nothing.  A sincere man is not swayed by considerations of popularity.
He does not make the opinion of the rabble the test of right and wrong
in his own decisions.  The popular value of a sacrifice that will seem
much to them is irrelevant to himself.  The ideas of expiation and of
sacrifice are superstitions to him.  He does not believe that suffering
is well pleasing to God, or that happiness and advantage must be "paid
for," and are paid for most effectively {70} when we deliberately
inflict blows upon ourselves.  The issue came to this: Should Gladstone
admit his previous thesis to have been mistaken and proceed openly in
that belief, whatever people thought of him; or should he put himself
right in _their_ eyes by inflicting on _himself_ a loss that would seem
to them, quite irrelevantly, to purchase him the right to forgo his
earlier opinions?  If he indulged their sentiments in this way, the act
would have an eloquence to them equivalent to the eloquence that they
had admired in the thesis that he was abandoning.  The rhetorical
consistency would be maintained, and that was what he most wanted.  The
sacrifice of office was as spectacular to the crowd of onlookers as his
glowing periods had been to readers of his book.  It provided the
continuity of emotion that Gladstone wanted _them_ to feel; it was
their sentimental equivalent for consistency.  As his own daughter,
Mrs. Drew, has put it:


    It would be rare nowadays to find a tenderness of conscience so
    acute as to cause a man to resign office on a measure with which he
    was really in sympathy.


The gesture, as the modern phrase goes, was perfect because it was
painful.  A man who voluntarily resigns office is the martyr of
politics: no cross nor crown (in the eyes of the crowd).

As Gladstone put it himself: "It is not profane if I now say, 'with a
great price obtained I this freedom.'"  After listening to Gladstone's
explanation in the debate on the Address the House of Commons became
restive.  To resign one's post for the sake of a reputation for
disinterestedness produced a disagreeable sensation in some of his
hearers.  To a few it seemed a kind of simony, to others disingenuous
or absurd.  Mr. Greville remarked: "Gladstone's explanation was
ludicrous.  Everybody said that he had only succeeded in showing {71}
that his resignation was quite uncalled for."  Most people thought that
to have resigned without opposing the measure was more equivocal than
to have supported the plan without resigning would have been; but then
they were forgetting the "gesture" of it.  What he had actually done
was to have discarded one principle because the opposite principle had
prevailed.  What could have been more politic?  The practical argument
was as simple as the moral proceeding was obscure.  If, he pointed out,
the State was to give a more indiscriminating support than previously
to various forms of religious education, it would be improper and
unjust to exclude the Church of Rome in Ireland from its benefits.



VI

Before he had decided to resign, however, a characteristic incident had
occurred.  Possibly because of the Maynooth proposal, Peel was
considering whether to renew official relations with the Vatican.  The
overtures would be made by indirect communication through the British
envoy at Naples or Florence.  When Gladstone learnt of the idea, his
imagination ran away with him.  He seized his pen and wrote to the
Prime Minister: "If you and Lord Aberdeen should think fit to appoint
me to Florence or Naples, and to employ me in any such communications
as those to which I have referred, I am at your disposal."  Nothing
came of the project, and the world was deprived of seeing Gladstone in
diplomatic dalliance with the Vatican, the still young theocrat
conducting negotiations with the oldest political organisation in the
world.  It would have been a centre of activity more congenial to his
enthusiastic Evangelicalism than the laborious Board of Trade; but
nowhere else than at the Board could he have been equally useful.

{72}

It was apparently his presumption in putting himself forward that
weighed later on his mind.  In 1894 he wrote:


    I have difficulty in conceiving by what obliquity of view I could
    have come to imagine that this was a rational or in any way
    excusable proposal; and this, although I vaguely think my friend
    James Hope had some hand in it, seems to show me now that there
    existed in my mind a strong element of fanaticism.  I believe that
    I left it to Sir Robert Peel to make me any answer or none as he
    might think fit; and he with great propriety chose the latter
    alternative.



Perhaps the tension under which he was labouring made him a hasty judge
of some chance word that Hope may easily have dropped in talk.  A new
post, particularly a post with an ecclesiastical tinge, would have been
very convenient at this moment.  No one can blame him for indulging the
hope of it, even if the chance led him to put himself forward
provisionally.  The step that was rebuffed is precisely the step which
makes us sympathise with him.  How agitated he was, not to speak of his
family, is abundantly on record.  "Nerves a little unruly between
(official) life and death."  He told Manning that parting with
colleagues feels "much like dying, more like it than if I were turning
my back altogether upon public life."  To confess such feelings to an
unsympathetic House must have been an ordeal.  The explanation for
which he was asked occupied an hour, and at the end of it all Cobden
exclaimed: "What a marvellous talent is this: here have I been sitting
listening with pleasure for an hour to his explanation, and yet I know
no more why he left the Government than before he began."  Perhaps this
made the eloquence more impressive.  It is distracting to learn that
the general verdict was "a piece of political prudery."  Political
prudery was not popular in the House of 1845, and scruples ill
understood are open to impatient expressions.  {73} On the second
reading of the Maynooth Bill, Gladstone voted for it.  He supported his
vote with these curious words:


    I am prepared, in opposition to what I believe to be the prevailing
    opinion, and in opposition to my own deeply cherished opinions, to
    give a deliberate, and even anxious, support to the measure.


The prevailing opinion to which he referred must have been apparent,
since Peel himself was dubious of the effect which the measure might
have on the administration of the day.  Yet wider considerations showed
some such step to be necessary.  It was desirable to placate O'Connell,
and this could not be accomplished without meeting the opposition of
O'Connell half-way.  Political necessity, as judged by a man with the
long experience of his chief, was the deciding fact to Gladstone.
Theoretical principles lay behind him: practical considerations lay
ahead.  He had crossed his Rubicon.  He was politically grown.  It
necessarily seemed an enormous step to him, yet he had the exaggerated
love of writing that marks the amateur of letters.  He could not
abandon his cloudy towers of theory without a heavy sigh.  On them as
on an altar he laid the sacrifice of his portfolio.

With the Maynooth affair the shadow of Ireland first rose upon
Gladstone's political horizon, and it happened that Gladstone proposed
that James Hope should accompany him on a walking tour in Ireland
itself.  Unfortunately the plan fell through.  How interesting it would
have been to see how far his quick susceptibility to political
oppression would have been aroused in that then remote corner of the
United Kingdom.  As it was, in the following December, "with a clear
conscience but a heavy heart," Gladstone accepted the post of Colonial
Secretary.  His seat at Newark therefore became vacant.  In spite of
having represented that {74} constituency for thirteen years, Gladstone
prudently refused to stand again.  A converted Free Trader could hardly
offer himself to an agricultural constituency, the member for which, in
truth if not in name, was the Duke of Newcastle's nominee.  Thus the
new Colonial Minister remained without a seat till the General Election
of 1847.

In the meantime Gladstone's father had become a baronet.  With a son in
the Cabinet and an hereditary title in the family, the Gladstone family
had arrived within a century of the re-foundation of its fortunes at
the fullness of success.  In wealth and dignity the Gladstones need now
fear no comparison that their ancestors, the Gledstanes, might make.




{75}

CHAPTER III

THE MIDDLE YEARS


I

With his retirement from the constituency of Newark, Gladstone entered
the middle period of his life.  His career on the prominence of the
Front Benches was assured, but there was still a doubt in his mind on
which side of the House he would permanently settle.  His sympathies
were "conservative" but his opinions were becoming "liberal."  He was a
Peelite, and beyond the shadow of the elderly Peel, which could not
shelter him for ever, it was becoming difficult to see and necessary to
prepare.  We have now to watch the oscillation before he himself became
the centre towards which others turned for leadership.  These
distracted years, full of experiment and episodes, have chiefly his
triumph as a financier to confirm his ability to lead.  For the rest
his adventurous energies reach out in many directions.  He himself was
uncertain what his future direction would be, but began to learn also
the value of excursions beyond Westminster.

In 1845 the Anti-Corn Law League, gaining adherents through the
eloquence of Mr. Charles Villiers, although the recent good harvests
had been making Protection less unpalatable, was nearing the victory of
its hopes.  On the other hand, the failure of the Irish potato crop
proved too severe a test for English statesmanship.  To relieve the
famine one duke recommended the poor to rely on {76} curry-powder as a
nutritious and satisfying food.  Another peer implored the Government
to promote the supply of salt fish and to appoint a day of public
prayer.  The council of the R.A.S., composed of the nobility and
squires, drew the attention of labourers to the sustenance of
thrice-boiled bones.  When Peel himself urged that all restrictions
upon imported food should be suspended, only three Cabinet Ministers
supported him.  In November Lord John Russell announced his conversion
to Free Trade.  Gladstone published a pamphlet on "Recent Commercial
Legislation," and, in 1846, the Corn Laws were finally repealed.

In the public mind these important events were somewhat blurred by the
news in 1845 that John Henry Newman had been received into the Church
of Rome, to which, we may note in passing, Gladstone's own sister had
retired three years before.  To the repeal of the Corn Laws Gladstone
had been converted by the pressure of immediate facts and by the
detailed study of our trade in relation to our revenue.  He could boast
that he had prepared the way, by having removed duties from four
hundred and thirty articles.  In the intellectual ferment that had
risen round the Tractarian controversy, and now culminated in the
explosion over the defection of Newman, he was naturally less definite.
A _via media_, the foundation of which might elude logical analysis but
whose practical working accorded with national sentiment, was indeed
the reflection of his own mind.  Nationalism has always been the
foundation of the religion of the English.  Even before the Reformation
we had been restive and rebellious sons, jealous of external
interference and unwilling to submit to appointments made from Rome.
Henry VIII, on his death-bed, believed himself a good Catholic and
supposed himself to be asserting no more independence than that which
Francis I had secured to the Gallican Church in 1516 by {77} the
Concordat of Bologna.  This intense national sentiment was an instinct
in Gladstone as in most of his fellow-countrymen.  Like the majority,
he welcomed the increasing sway of Catholic principles, as they were
called, in the Church of England, and, again like them, he could no
more imagine himself deserting the fabric of the Establishment by
passing over to Rome than he could imagine himself reverting to
Wesleyanism because the awakening in the Church of England had spread
undoubtedly from there.  English instinct, always aristocratic,
demanded independence at home, but liked that local independence to be,
in religious as in secular affairs, an ordered hierarchy.  While he
lamented Newman's departure, Gladstone tried to preserve the middle way
himself.  In this spirit he voted against the condemnation of W. G.
Ward and of Pusey at Oxford.  He declared the alleged "choice," between
an avowedly Protestant church and obedience to Rome, "miserable."  It
is delightful to see him for once choosing a middle course precisely
where the mass of his countrymen was choosing it.  He clung to this
course by the tendency also of his mind, as the majority did by
instinct.  Indifferent, since his time, as most Englishmen have come to
be to the Christian beliefs, there are still few, among sceptics even,
who would not be sorry if the Church of England dissolved into parties
and passed, as an entity, away.  The revision of the Prayer Book in our
own day and kindred controversies are deplored by average laymen
because they feel that the integrity of the English Church depends upon
not dragging deeply disputatious matters into light.  Any change that
is not formal or precise is tolerated; any deliberate alteration or
revision is deplored.  Nor is this attitude, characteristic of
Englishmen though it may be, peculiar to us.  The Latin Church herself,
while regarding her formulas sacrosanct, allows latitude of
interpretation; but among the Seven {78} Candlesticks the Church of
England burns with a Laodicean flame, and it remains to be seen whether
"the faithful and true witness, the Amen," will spue her out of his
mouth because she too is lukewarm.  Laodicea, like England, was a large
commercial and manufacturing centre, and have we not echoed her boast,
"I am rich, and increased in goods, and have need of nothing"?  In the
confidence of these things, at any rate, the Victorian Englishman was
reared, and a few years later it was to be publicly declared that "it
is the cheapness and abundance of our coal that has made us what we
are."  The departure of Newman was an affront to English nationalism,
and to that sentiment Gladstone responded.

In intellectual matters Gladstone was a weathercock, instinctively
answering to the way of the wind, and as such readily mistaken for the
wind's dictator by the crowd gazing upward from below.  He felt the
nation behind him when he wrote to Manning in 1850: "the faults and
virtues of England are alike against" the Church of Rome.  According to
his own idea he was still in public life for the service of the Church.
He foresaw the day when the State would cease to be Christian, and
regarded every step in that direction as a necessary, but disquieting,
recognition of the process.

In the General Election of 1847 Gladstone was returned as a Member for
Oxford University.  While his relations with the Oxford Movement were
debated freely, Liberals, churchmen, and moderates combined to give a
fair majority to him.  Both opponents and supporters had no difficulty
in finding that his political record failed to uphold, and triumphantly
upheld, the principles of the Church of England.  Gladstone was a more
ardent churchman than many of his supporters, but part of the truth was
that, as an active politician, he had to deal with facts and forces
which constituents in the seclusion of a cathedral city can ignore.
Since, however, clerical {79} Oxford was mainly and naturally bigoted,
it did not seem unlikely that the constituency would repent,
eventually, of its choice.  The Oxford voters wished events to stand
still, while the career of their Member depended on keeping even step
with them.  Oxford, of course, was the constituency nearest to
Gladstone's own heart.  He had dedicated his own first book to it.
With the calm of the cloister it combined the prestige of the world.
It was a place which abounded in abstract discussion, the home of the
lecture, the school of debate, the nursery of politicians.  Oxford in
his day was not unlike a cure of souls.  Before such an audience the
line between the speech and the sermon need not be arbitrarily drawn,
and religious matters were political matters in the University.

In the electoral controversy one amusing comment was made.  Gladstone
was charged with having argued that none need leave the Church of
England because it offered to its loyal members everything that might
be "enjoyed" in the Church of Rome.  The cream of the quip was not its
plausibility, but the contrast of its terse word with the verbal
festoons in which Gladstone draped a not dissimilar view.  If, for
classification, we must define religious bodies, the Church of England
would be described to a stranger rather as a reformed Catholic Church
than as a Protestant body, and it is hard to see why any Anglican need
object to such description.  The flavour of the joke was best
appreciated, of course, in a collegiate atmosphere, and on the
combination to be found there of Oxford die-hards and less elderly
Liberals Gladstone was carried to success.  He had the power of
attracting both sides, and it was not until each found that he was
identified with neither that both repudiated him.  His political hold
on Oxford was precarious, as was his intellectual hold on life.  For
the moment, however, he was happy and contented.

The revealing sentences in his address to the University {80} electors
are those in which he stated that he had abandoned his earlier advocacy
of the exclusive support of the Establishment by the State because it
had proved in vain; that he had yielded to the force of circumstances;
that he had surrendered his position because his principle was out of
date.  In other words, the arrow of his ardour was yet at the mercy of
the wind, and because he hardly dared to admit his inner want of
conviction, it was natural for him to proclaim divine the only call he
heard.  The _vox populi_ was indeed the divine voice to him.



II

With the fall of Peel in 1846 Gladstone had entered a period of
transition, and the dividing lines between the two political teams
became increasingly personal.  He was a Conservative free-trader with
Liberal leanings, and threatened to become no less an embarrassment to
others than to himself.  Under Lord John Russell the Whigs were in
power, and those Peelites who were asked to coalesce with them did not
do so.  Indeed since Free Trade, carried by Peel, was not a
Conservative party measure, the old labels were losing their meaning,
and the country was confronted with a family party of Front Benchers
uncertain on what questions they should differ.  The party system is
most systematic in the arrangements by which differences are mutually
agreed, and when the necessary division cannot be determined the real
covert coalition has to be confessed.  Then it becomes inconveniently
clear that Party is no more normal to politics than to municipal life.
In this interval Gladstone was largely occupied with the problem of
saving Hawarden from being sold, and in the spring of 1848 he was
enrolled a special constable during the Chartist riots.

The following year the wife of one of Gladstone's friends, who had been
travelling abroad, was thought to {81} be compromising her reputation.
There was a family council over what had best be done, and, after due
debate and many heart-searchings, Gladstone and Manning were appointed
ambassadors to persuade the lady to protect herself.  Manning could not
go, and we are left to imagine how Gladstone approached the lady and
how she received his overtures of help.  He left our shores "not
unhopeful," but discovered that he was too late.  The facts that he had
to report on his return led to a bill for divorce, introduced a little
later into the House of Lords.  Gladstone's evidence was invoked to
show that the friends of the lady had spared no pains to avoid the
rupture now demanded.  It is to be feared that Gladstone returned from
his long journey a sadder man, and at this time of day, when there are
no feelings to be hurt, it is difficult not to see in this one of his
Quixotically chivalrous enterprises.  With the vain boasting of a
Pelagian or the gloomy error of a supralapsarian Gladstone might have
been a persuasive reasoner.  He sunned himself in women's eyes and
found refreshment in their society, but with a woman whose feelings
were in opposition to the prevailing notions of duty Mr. Gladstone
perhaps might not have been the aptest of pleaders.  A woman whose
feelings were involved seems the one person who might be deaf to Mr.
Gladstone, charmed he never so wisely.  If the day comes when his
character attracts the playwright, one indispensable scene will be the
rescue by Gladstone of some unwilling Andromeda, a scene in which his
sense of propriety and her feelings are opposed.  If the shade of
Meredith could be induced to look obliquely on the twain, the rich
matter of such an interview would not be missed.  In the historic
episode that suggests this scene Gladstone arrived too late, but if
this fact were withheld by the lady till the curtain were falling it
certainly would not spoil the play.

With the death of Sir Robert Peel in 1850, a more {82} engaging if less
stolid Statesman emerged in the person of Lord Palmerston.  Peel and
Gladstone, by birth and by temperament, were both typical members of
the commercial middle classes.  Palmerston was as typical an English
aristocrat, to whom public business was one of a patrician's pleasures.
He had the secret of that genuine popularity which Gladstone only
seemed to win.  The one responded to a generous impulse in the spirited
half of the nation; the other knew how to intoxicate crowds.
Palmerston, a schoolboy to the last, had a sense of comedy and high
spirits.  He brought a spirit of slightly reckless sportsmanship into
the conduct even of foreign affairs.  Gladstone had the ardour of a
romantic hero uttering sublime platitudes on a quarterdeck at Drury
Lane.  If Palmerston was something of a holy terror, Gladstone was the
enthusiast at large.  The touch of superbity which led Palmerston
nearly to provoke a European war on behalf of a Jew who happened to be
a British subject, evoked a public response that Gladstone's moral
criticism could not quell.  When Palmerston declared that a British
subject, like a Roman citizen of old, could always feel, wherever he
might be, that the watchful eye and the strong arm of England would
protect him, Gladstone's reply that the test of foreign policy was not
success but righteousness seemed trite.  It sounded well on his
baritone, but the nation felt that something more definite was needed
for the conduct of foreign affairs.  In the matter of Don Pacifico's
expensive bed Palmerston had a poor case and a high hand, but a
spirited fellow is more moving to national pride than a homilist
however eloquent.  This speech of Gladstone's was the first in which he
touched foreign affairs, but the excitement that the incident aroused
quickly taught him that they were a political distraction not to be
neglected.  You could gain attention by their means that was invaluable
when home politics were {83} stagnant, and employ the public interest
which they excited to embarrass, and possibly to defeat, your political
opponents.  This was a lesson that Gladstone never forgot afterwards.

The death of Peel was expected by many to give to Gladstone the
leadership of the Conservative party.  It was plain to him, however,
that the elements of the party were coalesced rather than united,
beside which the prominent figure of Disraeli stood in the way.
Whatever group Disraeli chose would find Gladstone eventually in the
opposite camp.  He knew that he would not follow, and could not
permanently lead, that dazzling adventurer.  If the obstacle of
Disraeli were to be removed from Gladstone's path, Gladstone knew that
it must be by the foil of party opposition.  In Gladstone's moral nest
Disraeli would be a cuckoo, and, when he offered to combine, Gladstone
instinctively felt such help to be embarrassing.  Disraeli, for a time,
could probably have understudied and flattered anyone, as he flattered
later Queen Victoria.  Gladstone, equally histrionic, mistook his
attitudes for eternal truths, and was the first to be convinced by
them.  The actor lost, for the moment, in his part, and the artful
dodger, fully conscious of his audience, would dissolve any duet.
Already Peel is reported to have muttered: if Gladstone ever becomes
Prime Minister, nothing nearer than India will give Disraeli sufficient
elbow-room.  The Oriental and the Scotsman met, therefore, across the
floor of the House.

In this period of political transition, during the late 'forties,
Gladstone opposed marriage with a deceased wife's sister as being
"contrary to the law of God for three thousand years and upwards."  He
deprecated the appointment of a Commission to inquire into the
Universities on the ground that it would deter benefactors, and
declared, in the troubled year of 1848, that Free Trade was the best
guarantee for national stability.

{84}

To the dismay of his Oxford following, Gladstone, the memory of whose
book on _Church and State_ survived his recent recantation, voted in
1847 for the removal of political disabilities from the Jews.  He
repeated the argument that emancipation could not stop half-way, and
that the grant of the franchise and the magistracy must logically be
followed by admission to the House of Commons.

Gladstone's father was annoyed, and the piqued parent, whose son, he
once said, had never given a moment's pain to him, despatched the
following rebuke:


    There is a natural closeness in your disposition, with a reserve
    towards those who think they may have some claim to your
    confidence, probably increased by official habits, which it may
    perhaps in some cases be worth your inquiring into.


Sir John had thought that he should have received some notice of his
son's change of opinion before the indication given by his vote.  The
University at all events seemed to forgive its peccant Member, for he
received the degree of D.C.L. the following year, despite some
obstinate hissing from the gallery.

Dr. Hampden, who had been regarded as a heretic eleven years before,
was now revenged on being made a bishop by the Whig Government.  The
excitement aroused by his appointment was quickly followed by the
Gorham judgment, which is said to have occasioned almost as many
secessions from the Church of England as Newman's withdrawal.
Gladstone, of course, was deeply exercised.  The case was this.  A
bishop had refused to institute a clergyman on the ground that he
professed unsound doctrine on baptismal regeneration.  The clergyman
appealed against this refusal to the ecclesiastical Court of Arches.
He lost his case.  When he carried it, however, to the judicial
committee of the Privy Council, a majority, with the two Archbishops
{85} sitting as assessors, reversed the decision of the Court of
Arches.  Undismayed at this defeat, the bishop in his turn determined
to fight to a finish.  He resorted to Westminster Hall, tried every
device in the Courts of Queen's Bench, Exchequer and Common Pleas, and
even denounced the Archbishop himself, denying communion with him.  The
issue was this: should the High Church party have the power to expel
Evangelicals, and, if not, were matters of doctrine to be determined by
a secular court?

Like other churchmen, Gladstone was greatly perturbed.  He is said to
have declared that the Church must recover its lost prestige by some
overt act, and, then, to have refused to sign a declaration of protest
in the fear that such a signature might conflict with his Privy
Councillor's oath.  This he denied, and his admitted plea for delay may
have taken some other ground for hesitancy.  To the Rev. W. Maskell he
wrote: "I do not consider that the time for any enunciation of a
character pointing to ultimate issues will have arrived until after the
Gorham judgment shall have taken effect."  In other words, if the
judgment were swallowed, the nature of the court need not be
scrutinised too curiously.  The Church of England, like other cherished
English institutions, is a monument to evaded logical issues.  While it
exists and endures, what Englishman cares whether it has a logical
right to do so or not?  This, the effect of the judgment, was the real
point, though the logical point also required just so much attention as
it might need.  Gladstone therefore indited a letter to the Bishop of
London on the Ecclesiastical Supremacy.  The fact and the effect were
distinctions which he delighted to mark in all such controversies.

He looked within, and distinguished two characters in himself, "that of
a lay member of the Church, and that of a member of a sort of wreck of
a political party." {86} He must not sacrifice his party, he goes on,
until justice evidently cannot, _i.e._ will not, be done by the State
to the Church.  Her apparent defeat was, he added, a noble opportunity
for doing battle for the faith: to rise mysteriously through the
struggle into "something better than historical Anglicanism."  It was a
time to establish truth.  It was a time to display fervour.  It was an
opportunity for men of good-will, that phrase so dear to the
well-meaning and the puzzled!  His mind was like a saturated solution
that refuses to condense until some speck of solid matter is dropped
into it from without.  Only the immediate and the concrete could give
form to the cloudy vapours in that vacant and impressive skull.  It was
apparently Ireland that made religious matters real, because immediate,
to him.  He had already apostrophised her in one of his letters written
in 1845:


    Ireland, Ireland! that cloud in the Weft, that coming storm, the
    minister of God's retribution, upon cruel and inveterate and but
    half-atoned injustice!  Ireland forces upon us those great social
    and religious questions--God grant that we may have courage to look
    them in the face, and to work through them.  Were they over (he
    adds in one of his perennial suggestions of retirement), were the
    path of the Church clear before her ... joyfully would I retire
    from the barren, exhausting Strife of merely political contention.



Mrs. Gladstone was the recipient of this outburst.  A characteristic
passage follows, which gives another self-revelation of an
extraordinary man.


    As to ambition in its ordinary sense, we are spared the chief part
    of its temptations.  If it has a valuable reward upon earth over
    and above a good name, it is when a man is enabled to bequeath to
    his children a high place in the social system of his country.
    That cannot be our case.  The days are gone by when such a thing
    might have been possible.  To leave Willy a title ... without
    wealth ... would not, I think, be acting for him in a wise and
    loving spirit--assuming, which may be a vain assumption, that the
    alternative could ever be before us.



{87}

The qualified conclusion does not dim the value set upon social esteem,
the emblem of the middle class and of the moralist, who need the
support of others to sustain their self-respect.  The commercial
magnate has a regard for social pretension because this has come but
now within his reach.  He is still a little breathless at the end of
his long journey.

The confessedly secular State, which every non-sectarian concession was
manifesting, was robbing Gladstone of the theocratic ideal with which
his combination of Evangelical fervour and political ambition had
furnished him on his entry into public life.  The fading ideal and the
prevailing tendency were contradictory.  Since he could part neither
with fervour nor with the future, he began to idealise the tendency
under the names of religious freedom and progressive views.  In
idealising the new morality he was perfectly sincere, for morality (the
habits and standard of our neighbours) _is_ the religion of the middle
class.  He had its ambition to make the best of both worlds, and there
was no doubt about his success in this.  To assimilate it to
other-worldliness, the ideal of Duty is invented, and Duty is the
recognised excuse for whatever happens to be respectable.  Yet humanity
has a sound instinct that our actions should not need excuses, and that
the more exalted the excuse the more distasteful is it.  Thus unction
has an apologetic air which sometimes recoils on the head of those who
indulge in it.  It seems to be dragged in gratuitously, and, like all
apologies, infuses suspicions.  Gladstone's speeches were all
high-sounding, all explanatory, all hortative.  His life was one long
public apology, and this is why he gathered suspicion throughout his
long career.  He was simple-minded without being simple, for simplicity
is direct, and his changes are interesting because they were the
reflection of the changes in public opinion in his time.  As this
veered, he veered with it, and he is important because he was a
curiously complete {88} embodiment of middle-class prejudices
throughout his century.

In his development we trace the phases through which the now dominant
middle-class mind of his countrymen was passing.  We find it advocating
at one moment slavery, at another freedom, at one time Church and the
landed interest, at another toleration and commercial expansion, and
all are advocated at the call of Duty, the ideal given to whatever
public opinion happens to desire.  It is this which has made some aver
that Gladstone was a hypocrite, but a hypocrite is not one who is
self-deceived.  He was sincere in all his beliefs, if belief is the
proper word for ideas that have no inner prompting.  Our suspicion of
that character is not of its quality but of its kind.  A great man, we
feel, should be more than a mirror: not merely a school slate on which
others have scribbled with no authentic superscription of his own.
Moreover, indulge as we may in the vocabulary of unction, it is not,
really, popular in England.  The virus of Puritanism has gone far
enough to make us suppose that we ought to be uncomfortable, but we do
not like being uncomfortable and cannot stifle our recoil from those
who preach self-denial and wear long faces.  Earnestness and striving
are distasteful precisely because they have not the manner of ease.
The hero and the saint are known, like the athlete, by their apparently
effortless mastery.  To uphold the strainings of apprenticeship is to
forfeit the confidence of an alert audience.  The vital quality of
Gladstone, in his moral aspect, is the ready fervour, the joyous
physical energy, which he threw into all he said and did.

The secession of Manning and Hope-Scott on the same day in 1851 were
"terrible blows" to him.  "Their going," he wrote, "may be to me a sign
that my work is one with them," but he adds, "one blessing I have: {89}
total freedom from doubts.  These dismal events have smitten, but not
shaken."  In December of the same year Gladstone's father died, a few
days before his eighty-seventh birthday.



III

The revolutions of 1848 on the Continent had left Gladstone unaffected,
for he was not primarily interested in foreign affairs, and stability
at home was not seriously threatened by them.  In the autumn of 1850 he
went with his family to Naples, then the capital of the Kingdom of the
two Sicilies which formed part of the Austrian domination of Italy
since the Peace of 1815.  Reaction and absolutism had quelled the
rising of 1848, though Mazzini and Cavour were still occupied with
their respective schemes for a united Italy and the young revolutionary
movement.  Panizzi, when a refugee in this country, had told Gladstone
something of the latter, but the future Liberal statesman had little
natural bias to criticise the established order in any country.  He was
temperamentally conservative, and inclined to take an insular view of
foreign affairs.  His lively interest and natural impulsiveness,
however, were open to suggestion from immediate facts of any kind.
When, therefore, he met in Naples certain Italians interested in
political movements, and discovered that the sense of grievance was as
active and positive as the desire to maintain the existing dynasty, he
attended the State trials of Poerio, and was horrified to find the
counsel for the Crown giving perjured evidence unchallenged by the
officials of the court.

Poerio was sentenced to twenty-four years in irons, a punishment hardly
worse than the imprisonment inflicted for the unproved political
offences of other men.  With admirable promptitude Gladstone visited
the prisons {90} to discover their condition for himself.  He threw
himself into the investigation with characteristic ardour, as if, for
the time, there were no other interest in his life.  The gaols in which
these unfortunates were confined were filthy and diseased.  Some were
so loathsome that the doctors refused to visit their recesses.  The
physical condition of the prisons was the counterpart of the moral
corruption of the courts.  The constitution that King Ferdinand had
sworn to defend was everywhere violated.  The inhumanity that he was
witnessing left Gladstone deeply moved, but he did not make it the
excuse for his zeal for its amendment.  The moralist in the politician
comes out in his words:


    Even on the severity of the sentences I would not endeavour to fix
    attention so much as to draw it off from the great fact of
    illegality, which seems to me the foundation of the Neapolitan
    system; illegality, the fountain-head of cruelty and baseness and
    every other vice; illegality, which gives a bad conscience, creates
    fears.



It was the wary traveller and the practised hand which seized on the
technical flaw in procedure, a matter not easily open to denial; and,
no doubt, this was the point to urge upon the diplomatic world that
Gladstone was addressing through his, shortly to be published, letters
to Lord Aberdeen.  This may perhaps be regarded as the first of
Gladstone's spectacular crusades, the first at least on behalf of
oppressed nationalities.  It was also a display of his infectious
personal enthusiasm.

He began by suggesting friendly remonstrance through the other Cabinets
of Europe, but Palmerston, the terror of diplomacy and now in power,
was not the safest instrument though he might prove a very effective
one.  The alternative was a public exposure; and, if the Conservative
party in England could be identified with it, the absolutists at
Naples, according to Poerio, would tremble in their shoes, for they
relied upon Conservative {91} support in England to shield them, as it
were, in a common cause.

Full of his proposed crusade Gladstone returned to London, to secure
either the intervention of Lord Aberdeen or immediate publicity.  By
April 1851 Gladstone had prepared a full statement of his case.
Aberdeen, whose youth had involved him in responsibility for the
settlement of 1815, a settlement which seemed to the diplomatists the
only bulwark against the anarchy that had raised its threatening head
in 1848, moved cautiously.  After all, conservatism was a common cause
in all countries now, and for a Conservative Government to probe evils
in a friendly State was to invite inconvenient prying into grievances
in the United Kingdom.  At length he wrote to Vienna, and was told,
after due delay, that Gladstone's statement would be brought to the
notice of King Ferdinand.  The reply appealed to England to remember
that her own treatment of the Irish, the Ceylonese and the Ionians
should warn her to be careful not to countenance abroad bad men posing
as the martyrs of sacred Liberty.  It is one of the delicacies of the
situation that this letter from Prince Schwarzenberg, so long, so
carefully phrased, so judicious in tone, so mindful of the proprieties,
and respectful of abstract right, is not unworthy of Gladstone when
upon the defensive.

The difference to be observed is this.  Gladstone had the same ardour
in attack that the ordinary Minister has in defence, and when the
impulse descended upon him he would launch upon highly unofficial
activities that seemed almost scandalous in an established man of
affairs.  His impulsive nature transformed the expert official,
explaining inconvenient criticisms away, into a dangerous enthusiast,
who, sword in hand, used his official prestige to assault men in the
same position in other countries.  It was a ghastly and incredible
spectacle to his colleagues in foreign governments, comparable to a
distinguished {92} doctor who should harry the General Medical Council,
an Archbishop of York who should rend the province of Canterbury, a
Field-Marshal who should assault the Army Council, a Viceroy of Ireland
who should have espoused the Swarajists at the close of a Delhi Durbar.
On the defensive Gladstone had the histrionic power to seem guarding
the last ditch.  In the attack, like Shakespeare's king, he summoned
his supporters to the breach with the ardour of a romantic actor.  In
both rles he had the sincerity of a great player, wholly identified
for the time being with his part.

Gladstone did not enjoy evasiveness or delays for which he was not
himself responsible.  He talked widely of the subject that suffused his
mind, and, four months after his return from Naples, he published his
letter to Lord Aberdeen and enlarged his indictment in a second
document a fortnight later.  Consent had been assumed, and there was no
room for protest in the sensation that followed.  Translations were
multiplied, and Gladstone was overwhelmed with letters of thanks and
invited to become a member of the Society of the Friends of Italy.
Italian women composed odes in his honour.  The journalists echoed the
excitement, and the respected "Conservative" became the hero of the
"Liberal" newspapers.  Such gratuitous activity was astonishing in any
Front Bencher, and, as such, was more congenial to those outside
official circles than to the stately figureheads within.  Because his
party was the recognised supporter of established governments in
Europe, Conservatives everywhere were horrified, but their reproaches
lent force to exposures made by a man in general sympathy with them.

Lord Palmerston, who rather enjoyed an uproar, sent copies of
Gladstone's letter to our representatives at all the Courts of Europe
with instructions to present them to the Governments.  He further told
the Neapolitan envoy {93} that his "flimsy" reply was beneath contempt,
and that the exposure could be disregarded only at the peril of King
Ferdinand.  This, as Morley justly noted, was the sort of attitude that
conferred on Palmerston his authority in England and his dreaded
reputation abroad.  The immediate effect of the outcry at Naples was to
increase the rigour in the prisons, until fear of the indignation that
would be aroused if Poerio died, or should lose his reason while in
fetters, led King Ferdinand to commute the sentence on him to exile.
Thereupon Poerio and sixty-six other prisoners were despatched to
America.  If, then, the reforms produced by the intervention of
Gladstone were limited, it is hard to see what more he could have done.
When indeed the crash came, Ferdinand had no defenders, but till it
came his oppression continued with little check.  At all events, no
other politician upon holiday was capable of similar enthusiasm or
activity, and the effect that Gladstone's ardour produced was enormous.
It made him, for the first time, a public figure in European affairs.
It added to his stature and repute at home.  It made the public no less
curious than the political heads concerning his future.  It taught him,
indeed he could not miss, the political value in London of activities
that seemed as remote from the narrow world of Westminster and Mayfair
as the uttermost parts of the earth.  The political dark horse was
proved capable of bursting, without warning, from his stall, and
kicking his heels on the wide pastures of Europe.

The Russian war was to make it inconvenient to annoy Austria on Italy's
behalf, and at this time Gladstone, like most Englishmen, had little
idea beyond that of local grievances, and no vision of Italian unity,
though the expulsion of Austria was the political axiom of all shades
of Italian liberalism.  Morley reminds us, with devastating aptness,
that Gladstone's favourite author, Dante, {94} makes the moral plain.
It was characteristic of Gladstone to overlook the practical inference
from the poetry, but he did not miss another inference from the
existing state of affairs.  "I have learned," he wrote to Manning,
"that the temporal power of the Pope is ... gone....  God grant it may
be for good.  I desire it because I see plainly that justice requires
it."  Was this the Gladstonian way of prophesying that the event would
happen?  He did not discuss the question whether an international
hierarchy ought to have some territorial sovereignty, or apparently
infer that, in modern times and with modern armaments, such territory,
with its embarrassing political responsibilities, was as dust in the
balance compared to the guarantee of world-wide reverence for religious
Primacy.  Rome can never be an insulated centre.  It is more than the
see of St. Peter.  The capital of a united Italy must be centred there.

The position of the Papal States was too interesting to Gladstone for
him to remain at rest, and, in the absence of other activity, he
translated Farini's book on the Roman government from 1815-50, in order
to acquaint his countrymen with the latest phase of the Temporal Power.
His old bias towards theocracy here found an inviting field for study.
Here was a church and state in one, and what was his opinion of it?


    The covetous, domineering, implacable policy represented by the
    term Ultramontism ... an unceasing, covert, smouldering war against
    human freedom, even in its most modest and retiring forms of
    private life and individual conscience.


The bitterness of his denunciation is in the very vein of his recent
indictment of Neapolitan tyranny.

Both governments were supported by foreign bayonets.  Both systems were
antiquated and abused.  The Temporal Power, moreover, was still a bogey
to England, as became clear from the panic aroused in the autumn of
{95} 1850 when the Vatican, encouraged by the recent trickle of
prominent converts, restored the Catholic hierarchy to England.  The
news that Rome was dividing England into dioceses and giving
territorial titles to her bishops, that Cardinal Wiseman had been
appointed Archbishop of Westminster, created an outburst.  The cry No
Popery! spread even to pot-lids, and those who collect these lids, for
the sake of the coloured designs originally devised to ornament
receptacles for bear's grease, will recall that one of the best shows
Lord John Russell playing chess with his Holiness.  The Pope is
exclaiming, "Check to your Queen!"  "Pooh-pooh," John Bull retorts,
"your bishop is out of his place, man."

This repartee is a polite version of what the Premier, Lord John,
actually said in an excited letter to the Bishop of Durham.  A Bill
against ecclesiastical titles was hurriedly passed, to remain a dead
letter until Gladstone repealed it twenty years later.  Gladstone, need
one add, lamented the Papal proceeding, but opposed the Bill.  The
other opponents of the measure argued more logically that the Bill was
inconsistent with the toleration of the Roman Catholic religion.  They
also attributed the popular outcry to public impatience with the
Puseyites, though the great Pusey himself remained loyal to Canterbury
to the last.  English nationalism raised its sleepy head.  To tread on
the lion's tail is not permitted to the Pope in England.

If the whole question was good copy, or convenient humbug, to the
journalists, it gave to Gladstone an occasion for one of the historical
speeches in which he delighted.  He discoursed on Boniface VIII and
Honorius IX; he reminded the House that Catholic laymen preferred
diocesan bishops to Vicars Apostolic, and thus prepared the way for his
final criticism:


    Here, once for all, I enter my most solemn, earnest, and deliberate
    protest against all attempts to meet the spiritual {96} dangers of
    our Church by temporal legislation of a penal character.



The speech is a favourable specimen of Gladstone's oratory, and more
readable now than most of his utterances, which are more often
mentioned than quoted or read.  One of its passages runs as follows:


    Show, I beseech you--have the courage to show the Pope of Rome, and
    his cardinals, and his Church, that England too, as well as Rome,
    has her _semper eadem_; and that when she has adopted one principle
    of legislation (religious tolerance) which is declined to influence
    the national character, to draw the dividing lines of her policy
    for ages to come, and to affect the whole nature of her influence
    and her standing among the nations of the world--show that when she
    has done this slowly, and done it deliberately, she has done it
    once for all; and that she will then no more retrace her steps than
    the river that bathes this giant city can flow back upon its source.


Exuberant Gladstone's utterances were bound to be.  His eloquence was
Burke and water, but the use of _semper eadem_ has its note, if only
the diminishing note of an echo.  In Gladstone's style we observe what
Parliamentary oratory was becoming; the decadence of the grand manner,
the resonance of words becoming drained of the intellect that had once
given reality to them.  If we contrast it, in the permanent form that
is the abiding proof of great oratory, as distinguished from the
passing effect of its sound, with the varied rhetoric of Disraeli, the
biting directness of Parnell, the incisive play of Lord Randolph
Churchill, with the subdued loftiness of Lord Rosebery, even with the
sprightly sarcasm of Mr. Lloyd George, we see that it was becoming a
monotonous anachronism.  Between the old majesty of the earlier organ
music and the new terseness of strict prose, Gladstone's prolixity does
not survive the mellow baritone voice that died with him.  Oratory was
necessarily tardier than prose to mark the departure that the
pamphleteers of the late seventeenth century had led, and that {97} the
great Swift had brought to perfection.  Johnson and Gibbon, stately as
they were, began the declension, which only the genius of Burke, in his
magnificent reaction from the democratic faith of France, was able to
revive.  None of Gladstone's similes can compare with the metaphor in
which Burke likened the estates of the realm to Windsor, "girt with its
double belt of kindred and coeval towers."  The old oratory was
addressed primarily, if not exclusively, to the assembled House, in
days when the report of speeches seemed at first a breach of privilege.
The reporters' gallery extended the audience, and it was natural that
the first of modern statesmen to seek the following of the populace
should be pre-eminent in the qualities that are palpable to the crowd:
a fine voice, an oracular presence, a glowing eye, a copious rhetoric
that lulled criticism to sleep.  Gladstone was becoming a great
parliamentarian, and already in his day the machine of the assembly was
producing a form of oratory mainly directed to those beyond its walls,
because it was not expected or allowed to have effect on the voting
that it heralded.  The parliamentary orator is encouraged to be unreal,
and parliamentary language, as it is called, is in fact a legislative
patois.



IV

The first Derby administration was formed in 1852, and Gladstone has
described his situation in the retrospect: "The key to my position was
that my opinions went one way, my lingering sympathies another."
Conservative by leaning, Liberal in tendency, he was at home in neither
party, and as a surviving Peelite was not used to be left in the cold.
If Disraeli had not been a Conservative, the position of Gladstone
might have been even more unsettled than it was.  The minute and {98}
copious memoranda that he compiled and preserved throughout his long
life give little clue to the intricacies of his character.  His private
diaries seem designed for publication.  The personal note is rare.  He
resembles an outside that has no inside, as if his coat, to be always
presentable, had no lining or reverse.  For the moment he nursed a
political aloofness, till it could be seen whether conservative
liberalism or liberal conservatism was the likelier road.  As a Peelite
or third-party man, he felt that there was now no prospect for him.
The only third party at this time was the Irish, who were held in
derision at Westminster.  The initiative possessed by Gladstone was for
political escapades within, and not beyond, the existing playground of
practical politics.

In 1852, when there was no dividing issue, hesitation hovered round the
foregone question whether the Free Trade policy should be maintained.
Both sections were slightly ullaged, and needed to be fortified into
opposing teams by a spirited issue, which unfortunately did not exist.
At the election Gladstone was once more returned for Oxford, despite
the antagonism of those who objected to his attitude to the Jewish
question and to the Ecclesiastical Titles Bill.  Eclipsed by this fog
at Westminster, Gladstone was compared by Lord Malmesbury to a dark
horse.  He declared himself that the Liberal side of the Conservative
party rather than the Conservative side of the Liberal party appealed
to him.  All beyond was obscure.

Other politicians agreed that "Disraeli's leadership was the great
cause of Gladstone's reluctance to have anything to do with the
Government."  Disraeli's Budget evoked the criticism: "I am convinced"
(wrote Gladstone to his wife) "that Disraeli's is the least
Conservative Budget I have ever known."  He said too: "I have a long
speech fermenting in me, and I feel as a loaf might in the oven."  The
froth was gathering in {99} his head, and, set down to reply to
Disraeli, he found it "weary work sitting with a speech fermenting,"
until he was carried away by listening to Disraeli's speech himself.
He declared it afterwards to have been "as a whole grand, the most
powerful I ever heard from him," though "disgraced by shameless
personalities."  Gladstone began his reply by attacking them, and,
being satisfied with his speech, was "mortified" to find the following
morning only an abbreviated report in the newspaper.  "Such," he
confided to his wife, "is human nature, at least mine."  Consolation
was provided by an article describing the climax of the debate.  In
this "the redoubtable antagonists gathered up all their forces for the
final struggle, and encountered each other in mid-career."  Disraeli's
speech, said this descriptive reporter, was "pointed, bitter, telling,
keen in sarcasm, often cogent, in all ingenious and in some
convincing."  Gladstone's "was pitched in a high tone of moral feeling,
now rising to indignation, now sinking to remonstrance--which was
sustained throughout without flagging or effort."  The Ministry was
beaten by a score of votes; Lord Derby resigned, and party petulance
found its way into Gladstone's club.  The room in which he was sitting
was invaded by a knot of Tories who declared that he ought to be
pitched out of the window of the Carlton on to the steps of the Reform.
Their own gathering was a dinner-party at the Carlton to one of their
friends who had been accused of bribery at Derby.

The new coalition under Lord Aberdeen included thirty Peelites, who
received between them six Cabinet posts.  Gladstone became Chancellor
of the Exchequer.  The jealous comments aroused by this allotment led
Gladstone to retort: "If the Whigs had less than their due share, they
were an used-up, and so far discredited party ... whereas we, the
Peelites, had been for six {100} and a half years out of office, and
had upon us the glow of freshness."

Thus the critic of the late Budget was chosen to design its successor.
Palmerston was safely stalled in the quiet of the Home Office.
Gladstone's new appointment involved him in another election at Oxford,
where he was returned by the small majority of 124.  He was losing some
supporters because they disliked the politicians with whom he was now
associating.  His immediate pin-pricks, however, did not begin at
Oxford, to which he paid an enjoyable visit, but in Downing Street
itself, where he was taking over the Chancellor's official residence
from Disraeli.  The quaintly contrasted pair corresponded over the
official valuation of the furniture, over the transfer of the official
robe.  In the hope of calming his agitation, Gladstone drafted one of
his later letters on Sunday itself, while Disraeli begged him to
consult a third party "who is, at least, a man of the world."  Could
either correspondent have implied a more unjust reproach to the other?

Finance was to be the test of the new, as it had been the failure of
the former, administration.  By exchanging Protection for Free Trade,
precedents were out of date, and it seemed hazardous to alter or impose
new taxes upon industry.  The simple expedient of the Income Tax was
not yet normal.  Indeed a commission appointed in 1851 to examine the
impost had failed to produce so much as a report.  Many incomes are not
permanent, especially if they happen to be earned.  Are the
professional and the speculator to be treated as a pair?  Is the winner
of a State lottery or of the Calcutta sweepstake, the rigger of the
share-market, or the monopolist of a lucky hour, to be regarded by the
Exchequer on a parity with the playwright whose one success may be the
fortune of his working life, and, if not, how shall we discriminate
between them?  This is still a debated {101} issue, and the question
lay at the root of the Income Tax proposals.  Gladstone's principle was
that national expenditure must be estimated over a period of years, and
that we must assume this expenditure to be uniform during the period.
He began where he had left off when at the Board of Trade.  He reduced
and further simplified the tariff.  Then he renewed boldly the Income
Tax for seven years, on a sliding downward scale, with the inducement
that, at the end of that term, it might be repealed altogether.  To
balance this the legacy duty was extended from personal to real estate.
Landed property thus seemed to lose the last of its inherited
privileges.  With wonderful energy Gladstone worked at his novel and
complicated task.  Early and late he was occupied with calculations,
forecasts, and figures.  He found time also to give a Latin lesson
every day to one of his boys.

Rumours of the complexities that he was proposing were whispered
abroad, and the Prince Consort requested and received an hour's
explanation of the proposals.  Then Gladstone hurried to the Cabinet
and spent three hours explaining it to them.  Lord Aberdeen was
pleased.  "It is," he said, "as ingenious, as clear, and for the most
part as convincing, as anything I have ever heard."  On a later
occasion he remarked that Gladstone, unrivalled at proving a seeming
argument to be specious, was less happy at weighing one good argument
against another.  Perhaps this was an element in his persuasiveness,
the persuasiveness and the clarity that made the speech with which he
introduced his first Budget memorable.  It was an exposition which made
figures charming and calculations clear.  The combination of lucidity
and detail captivated his listeners.  Probably it was Gladstone at his
best, but it cannot be quoted because it is impossible to revive
interest in obsolete Exchequer figures.  Even a professional
accountant, {102} who looks forward to the preparation of his annual
balance sheet as lesser men to their summer holiday, might approach the
Budget of 1853 with languid feelings.  Between minute detail that is
lost in time, and exalted rhetoric not of the finest, the speeches of
Gladstone have become more threadbare than seemed possible to his
entranced hearers.  His first Budget speech was not only a personal
success; it was balm to his colleagues.  The Cabinet had had qualms.
They feared that the Budget proposals would antagonise the Irish,
alienate indeed, at some point, every section of a House in which their
majority was precarious.  Their apprehensions were forgotten on the
morrow.  The House in all its corners was impressed: much by the
eloquence of the speaker, perhaps more by the comprehensiveness of his
proposals.  The boldness of these gave a welcome lustre to the Cabinet;
congratulations descended like manna from the skies.  The Prince
Consort was moved to hope that Gladstone's "Christian humility will not
allow you to be dangerously elated."

Gladstone's first Budget was the making of his political reputation.
Cabinet status was his already, but now the leadership was plainly but
a matter of time, on whichever Front Bench he chose to seat himself.
Nothing he had said or done hitherto made an impression equal to his
first Budget.  Facts were his concern, and facts, for once, his
argument.

At this moment too a generally unsuspected side of his character was
now publicly revealed.  One night as the Chancellor of the Exchequer
was returning home from a late sitting in the House of Commons, a
prostitute accosted him.  He let her walk by his side and listened to
her talk.  Hardly had she departed when a man, who turned out to be a
clerk in the General Post Office, appeared, and recognising Gladstone
attempted to blackmail him.  Gladstone allowed him too to follow {103}
until a policeman came in sight, whereupon Gladstone gave the man in
charge.  In the police court on the following day Gladstone gave
evidence against the man, who was sent to gaol, and eventually wrote a
letter begging Gladstone to forgive him.  The proceedings revealed that
for years Gladstone had been in the habit of assisting such people, a
work abetted by his wife, to whose care he would sometimes entrust
them.  The incident, which was recalled in the _Daily Chronicle_ of May
20, 1898, and has been given in Mr. E. A. Pratt's little book on Mrs.
Gladstone, is an example of that personal charity which he and
Hope-Scott had discussed at Oxford, and to which Gladstone persuasively
returned in later letters to his friend.  Mrs. Gladstone and her
husband founded several institutions for prostitutes, and her homes
were, I believe, the first that allowed unmarried mothers to keep their
babies with them.  Those whose personal memories of London are longer
than my own declare that the number of these women was much more
conspicuous fifty years ago than now, and explain the matter by saying
that, before women were generally employed in business, the streets
were the only refuge for women thrown suddenly by misfortune upon their
own resources, while the wages which female workers received in the
occupations open to poor women were so wretched that they had to
supplement them, in the idiom of the time, by work upon their backs.
Gladstone was naturally a compassionate man; charity, to him, should
involve some more personal act than a gift of money, and the outcasts
appealed to a romantic strain in him which demanded some immediate
personal service.  Indeed they are said to have called him
Daddy-Do-Nothing among themselves.  Mrs. Gladstone also was a fountain
of private activities, and in the midst of her husband's affairs was
always reminding him of little commissions and private {104} purchases
for others that it is a marvel he had both patience and time to fulfil.
His enormous correspondence and the number of his famous postcards show
that no one was turned away without an answer, and the strain of
simplicity, which was as much a part of the man as his mystifications,
would lead him to be no less indulgent to petitions in the street.
Mrs. Gladstone was motherly to a very large number of friends and
acquaintances, and there can be no doubt that this work was common
ground to both.



V

He was now forty-four, and had spent twenty-one years in politics.  The
first of his thirteen Budgets raised him from one among Ministers to a
possible leader.  Already known to be a capable administrator and a
fountain of rhetoric, he was now claiming recognition as a statesman
capable of initiating policy, even in a vital and thorny branch of home
affairs.  He had helped to introduce Free Trade under other leaders.
He now proved himself the first to apply the principles of the new
finance to the needs alike of trade and of the Exchequer.  At a public
speech made soon after his introduction of the Budget, he unbosomed his
heart on the moral value of Free Trade, and prophesied that it would
bring the Powers into closer amity.  As we now know, the fight for new
markets and raw materials was to prove a potent cause of war and
imperial rivalries.  As if to remind the world that the millennium was
still tarrying, the Crimean War was about to begin.  Not only did this
war upset the hope of repealing the Income Tax by increasing the
national expenditure; it also proved how useful the tax and the Budget
were to provide the new revenue required.  The war, in fact, justified
the Budget's policy.

{105}

Turkey in Europe, that is to say, a Mahommedan Power governing
Christian peoples, was an inconvenience that might produce an explosion
at any time, for Constantinople under the Turks divided the European
Powers.  They neither liked Turkey to possess the city, nor would
stomach Russia in her stead.  Orthodox Russia and Catholic France were
at issue, in particular, over the custody of the Holy Places in
Jerusalem.  This arranged, another dispute rose over the Tsar's claim
to be the recognised Protector of all the Christian subjects of the
Porte.  The Sultan, encouraged by our ambassador, repudiated this,
whereupon the Tsar invaded the Danubian principalities.  He said that
he would hold them as a pledge, pending the fulfilment of his claim.
When the British fleet arrived to protect Turkish territory from
Russian attack, Turkey declared war on Russia, relying on England and
France to see her through.  The two Powers finally sent an ultimatum to
the Tsar which demanded his withdrawal from the Principalities.  On its
expiry, at the end of March 1854, the Crimean War began.

In this Gladstone played a minor part.  He said that we were defending
"the moral law of Europe" because the Tsar had invaded countries not
his own, inflicted wrong on Turkey, and, "what I feel much more, cruel
wrong on the wretched inhabitants of the Principalities."  As a Cabinet
Minister he shared a joint responsibility, but no more; and he did what
he could to divert from his political colleagues the charges of
mismanagement that this like every other war brought in its train.  If
he had not been a member of the Government, he might have opposed the
war, but public opinion, as usual, was bellicose, and easier to inflame
than to chill.

Gladstone, moreover, had been preoccupied with other matters.  The
controversy that the Tractarians had excited in Oxford had sharpened
party feeling in the {106} University.  One of the consequences was to
inspire a minority to move for a Royal Commission.  Thus in 1850, under
Lord John Russell, a body had been appointed to inquire into the
discipline and revenues of the University, and to report what action,
if any, Parliament should take to encourage religion and learning in
their sacred stronghold.  Gladstone, as Member for the University, was
at once involved, and, as yet, Oxford must have felt little qualm over
her representative.  After learning the state of opinion in both
parties at Oxford on the project, Gladstone rose in the House to
denounce the Royal Commission.  A Commission, he declared, was probably
illegal; it would dismay benefactors; self-government, even if abused,
was preferable to reform from without by Parliamentary interference.
The delegate had the stock objections at his fingers' ends; he
faithfully reflected his sources of opinion.  By a happy allusion, he
instanced Sir Robert Peel as answer enough to any doubter of the
sufficiency of Oxford teaching and Oxford example!  This plea was in
vain.  When Gladstone, like the University, was forced to yield, he
surrendered his political conservatism also.  At the moment he was only
determined to make any changes that could not be shunned as little
unpalatable as might be.

By the spring of 1852, and despite a petition to the Crown, the
Commission, conducted in every circumstance of difficulty, made its
report, and the report won Gladstone's admiration.  The illegal had
become the actual; the impossible the inevitable; the assumed
well-being of the University a body of fact from which no
impressionable reader could run away.  Probably the report was no less
an eye-opener to Gladstone than to others, but his eye devoured new
facts with the speed and sensitiveness of a negative in a camera.  He
embraced the evidence as ardently as he had originally denounced {107}
the Commission of Inquiry.  Moreover, though he represented the
University, as a working politician he knew better than the Oxford men
that the way to meet the report was less to oppose than to make the
best of it.  He urged his constituents to begin to reform themselves
before more drastic changes were pressed upon them.

The University was allowed a year to digest the recommendations, after
which the new Government under Lord Aberdeen would draft a Bill.  The
task fell to Gladstone himself, and he attacked it with characteristic
energy in the autumn of 1853.  While the minds of his colleagues were
filled with the spectres of Russia and Turkey, Gladstone's was
pullulating with academic proposals.  He corresponded at length with
everyone concerned, as who was not in Oxford, and preserved over five
hundred letters and documents touching his measure.  He saw that a
Liberal bias was the bend for the Conservatives to take, and in a
scriptural sentence he passed the hint to them:


    As one of your burgesses, I stand upon the line that divides Oxford
    from the outer world, and, as a sentinel, I cry out to tell what I
    see from that position.



Was it necessary to add that the defeat of this measure would mean
another more drastic than itself?

The principles of "reform" were little to the palate of many.  A no
less thorny problem was, who should carry them through?  When objectors
said that Oxford could enforce them better than any outsider, since
Parliament could not cope with the throng of societies and bodies
whereof Oxford is knit, Gladstone urged the appointment of an Executive
Commission with statutory powers.  It seems a sore rod for him to seek,
but none had had a better chance to learn the difficulties to be met,
and his immediate task always absorbed his energies.  {108} The Member
for Oxford had had to express the original indignation of his
supporters.  The member of a Government, in charge of a Bill, had to
make its effectiveness his first care.  The real objection to a
Statutory Commission was that it would be effective.  Thus Gladstone
passed insensibly from chief obstructor to chief reformer.  One of his
admirers, after listening to the "superb speech" that Gladstone made on
the second reading, said: "he vainly endeavoured to reconcile his
present with his former position."  As susceptible as a mirror to
external impressions, our doubt is not of his sincerity, but of
himself.  A mirror is at the mercy of its latest impression.  If
Gladstone gave some people the creeps, it was because he inspired them
with the nightmare that were, say, cannibalism showing signs of
revival, they could not be certain that he had any instinct in himself
against the practice.  Man might appear a sacred dish to him.  A
pamphlet entitled "The Argument from Theophagy" can be imagined.

The details of his measure have faded into the series of more recent
reforms.  Its main objects were to abolish sinecures, by which pensions
used to be dignified; to encourage competitive tests, to the impatience
of such survivors from the eighteenth century as the venerable Thomas
Love Peacock; to attach active duties to office-holders, and to
increase representation on the governing body.  The University was
sharply divided by the Bill.  To some it was the "greatest boon that
the University had ever received"; to others it was a deplorable
tyranny.  A petition against it, by passing Convocation with a majority
of two, defeated itself.  The tide of Gladstone's activity bore him to
the conclusion that "Oxford is far behind her duties or capabilities,
not because her working men work so little, but because so large a
proportion of her resources remains practically dormant, and her
present constitution is so ill-adapted {109} to developing her real but
latent powers."  Touching the Church and the clamour of Dissenters to
be admitted to the University, Gladstone laid down this principle:


    The whole teaching and governing function in the University and in
    the colleges, halls, and private halls should be retained, as now,
    in the Church of England, but everything outside the governing and
    teaching functions, whether in the way of degrees, honours or
    emoluments, should be left open.



It was not till seventeen years later that the Church test for college
fellowships was removed, though Gladstone's Bill removed it from
matriculation and the bachelor's degree.  This was already thought a
far-reaching step in Oxford, and left the disquieting question, how
much longer Gladstone could be allowed to represent the University in
Parliament.

At this date, too, the Civil Service, if hardly the Treasury and the
Foreign Office, was thrown open to competition, a parallel proceeding
that Gladstone necessarily approved.  The landed aristocracy, formally
displaced by the repeal of the Corn Laws, was now destined to lose the
patronage which it had acquired at the expense of the Crown.  The
middle classes, which were thriving in the turmoil of unrestricted
competition in industry, were now strong enough to replace patronage by
competition at the portals of Whitehall.  This change received a fillip
from the cry for administrative reform produced by the blunders
attending the Crimean War.  The immediate effect of the war at home was
to raise the Income Tax from seven pence in the pound to fourteen.  Its
second effect was to overthrow the Coalition, and the lesson was to
prove the soundness of Gladstone's financial imposts.



{110}

VI

In January 1855, on the first night of the assembled Parliament, Mr.
Roebuck gave notice of a motion to appoint a Committee of Inquiry into
the management of the war.  The same evening Lord Aberdeen, the Prime
Minister, was startled to receive Lord John Russell's resignation.
Next day, when the Cabinet met for anxious discussion, in spite of some
dissent wherein Gladstone joined, Aberdeen offered the resignations of
the entire Cabinet to the Queen.  She refused to accept them, as well
she might, considering the stampede, at a critical moment, that a
motion for inquiry had created.  The Cabinet therefore remained, and
Gladstone was put up to oppose the motion of Mr. Roebuck.  The reader
must not infer, however, that this was Gladstone's preliminary to
acceptance of the chairmanship of the proposed committee.  Beaten, in
spite of his eloquence, by more than two to one, the Government
immediately resigned.  After many discussions, Lord Palmerston formed a
Ministry which Gladstone joined, to retire almost immediately on
learning that the Committee of Inquiry was not to be resisted.  At the
time Gladstone was criticised severely for this resignation, but in the
retrospect his acceptance of office seems the obvious equivocation.
That those who had resigned rather than accept the investigation should
join the new Government committed to inquire into their conduct seems
odd; that Gladstone should have supposed that the new team could resist
the motion for inquiry that had placed them in office would seem hard
to credit.  But the political shiftings of Front Benchers are so much a
family arrangement that those in the thick of them are apt to forget
that their divisions may be taken seriously in the nation, especially
at the close of a mismanaged campaign.  With his customary minuteness
of detail, Gladstone recorded {111} in his diary the hesitations and
decisions in the course of which his brief association with this
Government of Palmerston occurred.

The popularity of Gladstone was somewhat blown upon by these events,
and he suffered a further rebuff when he joined the peace party before
Sebastopol was taken.  It was easy to exclaim that he had not left the
Government upon any issue of the war itself, and was turning
ungratefully on his recent associates.  Gladstone received this
execration with good-humour.  "It is hardly possible," he wrote to Lord
Aberdeen, "to believe one is not the greatest scoundrel on earth when
one is assured of it on all sides with such excellent authority."

He consoled his energy with a holiday in Wales, and spent much of his
time "with Homer and Homeric literature," in which, he added, "I am
immersed with great delight up to my ears; perhaps I should say out of
my depth."  The result, two years later, was his fantastic book.  He
was in Wales when Sebastopol was taken, and the Peace of Paris, 1856,
neutralised the Black Sea.  In politics, with a few Peelites, he
remained unattached; party divisions were not clear, and it was still a
question with whom he would ally himself.  At this interval of
political repose he turns his eye within:


    I have never known what tedium was, have always found time full of
    calls and duties, life charged with every kind of interest.  But
    now, when I look calmly around me, I see that these interests are
    for ever growing and grown too many and powerful, and that, were it
    to please God to call me, I might answer with reluctance.



The thought of his political ties, his Church interests, of "the new
and powerful hold" which literature had taken on his mind, of his
wife's family affairs, of his seven children, was disquieting.  It made
him realise {112} how many inducements he had to remain alive.  Their
number was depressing to an Evangelical.

After Disraeli and Gladstone had spoken in succession against the
Budget of 1857, and a General Election had confirmed Palmerston in
power and left Gladstone in his seat at Oxford, it seemed that he might
really join Derby and the Conservatives at last.  He still resolved,
however, to stand apart, though aware that the undefined position of
himself and his friends was irksome to the House and to the country.

When the Divorce Bill of 1857 was brought forward, he emerged into the
limelight once more.  In 1853 a Royal Commission had recommended
important changes in the means whereby marriages could be dissolved.  A
year later the Cabinet, to which Gladstone then belonged, had
introduced a Bill, on the lines of this report, which did not proceed
much further.  Moral questions were Gladstone's favourite
hunting-ground, and he opposed the destined change as he had opposed
the Deceased Wife's Sister's Bill in 1849.  We may recall that when the
Divorce Bill of 1857 was introduced into the House of Lords, the
Archbishop of Canterbury and nine bishops helped to pass it.  In the
Commons Gladstone was taunted with his previous silence.  As a man, he
thought divorce an evil: as a politician, he was ready, if the
principle were accepted, to consider how and on what grounds it might
be obtainable.  In point of fact, the principle was not at stake.
There had always been some means of dissolution, however costly,
tedious, and restricted to the rich these means might be.  It was this
underlying fact, no doubt, that defeated Gladstone and his
fellow-objectors.

Early in 1858 Lord Palmerston was defeated on a measure arising out of
a plot, hatched in London, to kill the French Emperor, and Lord Derby
became Prime Minister.  When he asked Gladstone to join his Cabinet,
Gladstone declined:

{113}


    In your party, reduced as it is at the present moment in numbers,
    there is a small but active section who avowedly regard me as the
    representative of the most dangerous ideas.



Bringing Derby no friends and upsetting some of his following,
Gladstone felt that he would aid neither the Premier nor himself.  On
the very day when he penned this opinion, he received the following
letter from John Bright:


    A Derby Government can only exist upon forbearance, and will only
    last till it is convenient for us and for the Whigs to overthrow
    it....  If you join Lord Derby, you link your fortunes with a
    constant minority, and with a party in the country which is every
    day lessening in numbers and in power.  If you remain on our side
    of the House, you are with the majority, and no Government can be
    formed without you....  I think I am not mistaken in the opinion I
    have formed of the direction in which your views have for some
    years been tending.  You know well enough the direction in which
    the opinions of the country are tending.



This letter was admirable in shrewdness, tact, and tone.  It disclosed
an astute perception of Gladstone's personal position without intrusive
interference.  The reply of Gladstone is characteristically vague.  Its
single direct statement, "before I received your letter yesterday
afternoon I had made my choice," can hardly be said to blurt out his
decision.

Perhaps the coaxing of John Bright was less decisive than a mysterious
allurement, which Gladstone declined, from the other side.  Moreover,
only by perching somewhere could he end the annoyance of lonely
dartings to and fro.  It was now 1858, and Lord Aberdeen's description
of him, two years previously, was still plausible:


    With an admitted superiority of character and intellectual power
    above every other Member, I fear you do not really possess the
    sympathy of the House at large, while you have incurred the strong
    dislike of a considerable portion of Lord Derby's followers.


Gladstone was publicly labelled a speculative creature, {114}
unpractical in party politics, the best orator but the weakest Member
in the House, "a Bedouin of Parliament," and so on.  The anglers were
showing irritation, and the most dexterous determined, or was bidden,
to show that there was no menace in _his_ cast.

Thus it was that a curious letter was one day delivered at Gladstone's
door.  "Mr. Disraeli to Mr. Gladstone: confidential"; thus, abruptly
and without preface, it began.


    I think it of such paramount importance to the public interests
    that you should assume at this time a commanding position in the
    administration of public affairs, that I feel it a solemn duty to
    lay before you some facts, that you may not decide under a
    misapprehension.

    Our mutual relations have formed the great difficulty in
    accomplishing a result which I have always anxiously desired....
    Thus you see, for more than eight years, instead of thrusting
    myself into the foremost place, I have been, at all times, actively
    prepared to make every sacrifice of self for the public good, which
    I have ever thought identical with your accepting office under a
    Conservative Government.  Don't you think the time has come when
    you might deign to be magnanimous? ...

    To be inactive now is, on your part, a great responsibility.  If
    you join Lord Derby's Cabinet, you will meet there some warm
    personal friends; all its members are your admirers.  You may place
    me in neither category, but in that, I assure you, you have ever
    been sadly mistaken.  The vacant post is, at this season, the most
    commanding in the Commonwealth; if it were not, whatever office you
    filled, your shining qualities would always render you supreme; and
    if party necessities retain me formally in the chief post, the
    sincere and delicate respect which I should always offer you ...
    would prevent your feeling my position as anything but a form....



Party necessities and the chief post: were not these the barely
conspicuous barbs on the bait that was cast so sympathetically? but
could even so great a fish really master his angler, in the end?  Mr.
Gladstone's discreet reply therefore ran as follows:

{115}


    My dear sir, the letter you have been so kind as to address to me
    will enable me, I trust, to remove from your mind some impressions
    with which you will not be sorry to part.  You have given me a
    narrative of your conduct since 1850 with reference to your
    position as leader of your party.  But I have never thought your
    retention of that office a matter of reproach to you....  You
    consider that the relations between yourself and me have proved the
    main barrier in the way of certain political arrangements.  Will
    you allow me to assure you that I have never in my life taken a
    decision which turned on those relations?

    You assure me that I have ever been mistaken in failing to place
    you among my friends or admirers.  Again I pray you let me say that
    I have never known you penurious in admiration towards anyone who
    had the slightest claim to it, and that at no period of my life,
    not even during the limited one when we were in sharp political
    conflict, have I either felt any enmity towards you, or believed
    that you felt any towards me....  Were I at this time to join any
    Government, I could not do it in virtue of party connections.  I
    must consider, therefore, what are the conditions which make
    harmonious and effective action in Cabinet possible--how largely
    old habits....



And so on till the end.

The Scotch salmon was not to be netted by the Jewish angler.  Gladstone
remained aloof, except to support the construction of the Suez Canal.
He met the argument, that it would place the new route to India at the
mercy of other nations, by observing that the canal must be under the
control of the strongest sea-power, which was England, and reminded his
hearers in the nation at large that it promised also wide opportunities
for traders.



VII

If he would not move from the middle of the political road, he was a
nuisance to be moved out of it by both teams.  The opportunity occurred
in 1858, and he was {116} suddenly invited to leave England as special
commissioner to the Ionian Islands in order to inquire into our
Protectorate there.  His political friends were dubious.  Some advised
him not to go.  His adventurous instincts urged him to accept, and his
recent studies reminded him that he would be following the footsteps of
Ulysses, footsteps, moreover, which would also lead him into the
dominion of the Greek or Orthodox Church.  He was to be away from
November 1858 till March 1859.  Would Ionia, like Naples, provide him
with a second foreign crusade?

By the treaty of Paris in 1815, the islands had been entrusted to us,
to keep them out of mischief.  They had received a nominal constitution
which placed them at the mercy of a resident High Commissioner, until
the reverberations of unrest in 1849 introduced certain more popular
changes.  The Italians formed the upper class.  Below, a swarm of
officials competed for the posts now determined by popular election.
As the bureaucracy grew in number, the public works established by the
British Government fell into decay; laws were ignored, taxes
uncollected; the revenue was in arrear, and the debt increased.
Discontent abounded, and there was an undisguised desire for union with
Greece.  The agrarian risings a few years before had been repressed
with cruelty.  The time was ripe for an inquiry, and the man to send so
far was conveniently obvious.

Gladstone had hardly started on his way when the newspapers printed a
recent dispatch which had been stolen from the Colonial Office.  This
advised the Government to hand over the seven islands to Greece: if not
seven, then five, and to convert the remaining pair, Corfu and Paxo,
into a British colony.  Thereupon Gladstone was popularly supposed to
have been appointed to carry out this policy.  The islanders were
naturally elated, and Gladstone, hearing of this publication in {117}
Vienna, had to reassure the Austrian Minister that annexation was no
part of his mission.

On arrival at Corfu, Gladstone was received with a salute of seventeen
guns and all ceremony by the resident Commissioner.  Deputations
hastened to present him with petitions for the Queen protesting against
annexation, and praying to be united with Greece.  After holding levees
and making speeches, Gladstone observed that our severities had done
our reputation much harm.  Had not, by the way, Prince Schwarzenberg
reminded us of them in reply to Gladstone's denunciation of misrule at
Naples?  He observed also that the conduct of Englishmen toward the
inhabitants and their religion was often contemptuous.  Forty years of
muddled administration had produced their inevitable fruits.  Another
shock had been the aspect of Corfu and Ithaca, which did not strengthen
his pious trust in Homer's knowledge of geography.  Disappointed but
undismayed, he danced at a ball given at Ithaca in his honour.  In
Cephalonia, where the disturbances had been ruthlessly crushed, his
carriage was crammed with protests against the Protectorate into which
he had come to inquire.  At Zante the islanders greeted him with shouts
of Philhellene.  At Athens he was found to be without credentials or
instructions, and learned that opinion was divided on the wisdom of
uniting the islands to Greece.

In these distractions we gain a glimpse of the man himself attending a
_Te Deum_ at Athens in honour of Victoria's birthday; visiting a mosque
at Sayada, which he was allowed to enter shod; listening to the call to
prayer, proclaimed two hours before the ordinary time; kissing the hand
of a bishop, to the ire of the anti-Puseyites at home; and occasioning
the rumour that he had attended the very Mass, somewhere or other.  In
other respects he created little stir, and corresponded freely with the
Colonial Secretary, Bulwer Lytton.  {118} From his coign in Whitehall,
Lytton dubiously remarked that demagogy would continue to be the most
fascinating of trades because it is animated by personal vanity, and
its venality is disguised, even from the demagogue himself, by the love
of country that often accompanies it.  With what relief the Colonial
Secretary must have turned, from the dismal prospect around him, to
Gladstone's copious letters from abroad!  Despite the publicity of his
official progress, the importance of his task, the beauty of the
scenery, the opportunity of visiting Homeric sites, the chance to enter
other than Anglican temples of worship, Gladstone confided to his diary
a melancholy emotion: "the whole impression is saddening; it is all
indolence, decay, stagnation; the image of God seems as if it were
nowhere.  But there is much of wild and picturesque."

He reported that the present Protectorate was bad for the Ionians and
for ourselves, yet he considered union with Greece undesirable for the
islanders.  He proposed to reform, and not to suppress, the
constitution: in other words, to convert a sham into a reality.  Since,
however, the Ionian Islanders were supposed to be free already, the
proposed concession of reforms was taken in bad part, and an
inconvenient definition of the meaning of the term Protector was
demanded.  Gladstone offered, if he seemed the right person, and if the
resident Commissioner would be in any case recalled, to introduce the
reforms himself, and to remain Commissioner for the limited time that
this work required.  The Government welcomed a plan that promised to
rid them of an irksome task, that kept him also abroad while connecting
him with them more closely.  It was Gladstone's first attempt to govern
men: to preside, instead of participating in an assembly; to manage
persons rather than figures.  He accepted the task.  It was then found
that acceptance of office vacated his seat at Oxford, and that he would
be {119} occupied at Corfu, and thus ineligible to stand for
re-election.  Various solutions were tried for this unwelcome
complication, which invited caricature and heartless jests.  He was
accused of supplanting his predecessor, and twitted with accepting a
fifth-rate post from Disraeli, who was said to wish to crown him king
at the remoteness of Corfu.  His very friends declared that he would
return shorn of his laurels.

Meanwhile a new Commissioner was appointed with an order to delegate to
Gladstone all his powers until his own arrival, so that Gladstone might
be deemed to hold, or not to hold, the office as convenience was best
served.  At the moment he was deemed to have vacated the post which had
cost him his seat, but was re-elected without opposition.  From the
pin-pricks of home politics Gladstone then turned to the local
Assembly, which was convoked in extraordinary session.

He invited the members to consider his proposals for reform, whereupon
they passed a resolution affirming their single and unanimous desire to
be united to Greece.  The resolution, of course, had been phrased in
Greek, and Gladstone, after scrutinising the formula with loving care,
pronounced that "will" must be interpreted "wish" because it ([Greek:
thlesis]) was not the word for will ([Greek: thlema]) used in the
Lord's Prayer.  Unfortunately the meaning of the Assembly was beyond so
nice a doubt; and, when they persisted, instead of accusing them of
violating the Constitution, dissolving them, and stopping their
salaries, Gladstone told them that they must express their wishes in a
petition to the Queen.  They did so with noise and alacrity, with
illuminations and _Te Deums_, activities wasted upon the Cabinet, for,
in Morley's words, "neither the English public nor the English
Parliament likes any policy that gives anything up."

After duly conveying the refusal of his country to these demands,
Gladstone adjured the Assembly to pronounce {120} on his proposals.
Once more they declined: some, because reform would make separation
more difficult: the rest, because it would place their perquisites in
jeopardy.  On this adverse vote the new Commissioner arrived, and
Gladstone accepted the defeat of his brief rule in the archipelago.
With characteristic philosophy, he said, without bitterness:


    The only real importance was to get the [proposals] out, in order
    to redeem the character, that is, to save the face, of England.



The publication of the stolen dispatch, he went on, had aroused hopes
and implied intentions that he could not now circumvent.  Within a few
years, in 1862, the "undesirable" wishes of the Ionians were realised.



VIII

With his mind full of liberal constitution-making, Gladstone returned
to England.  He found the Conservative Cabinet tinkering with
parliamentary reform, but did not take much part in the discussions
beyond defending nomination boroughs as nurseries for statesmen, and
speaking against a Whig amendment, which was carried.  Lord Derby
resigned, and after two years the ill-distributed parties probably
welcomed a dissolution.  The Government, however, improved its position
by thirty votes, to be once more shortly defeated.  Gladstone did not
speak on the motion of no confidence, but he followed Disraeli into the
lobby.  Thus the Derby Government fell, and Palmerston returned, with
Gladstone once again Chancellor of the Exchequer, after an interval of
four and a half years.

His acceptance of office was much criticised.  The supporter of Lord
Derby had entered the Cabinet of his successor, Lord Palmerston, a
statesman whom Gladstone {121} had frequently condemned.  To wonder at
this is to misunderstand party politics at moments when parties are
transparently names.  Most of the time party politics are a family pact
arranged by the Front Benches, enlivened, of course, with the
attachments and aversions that are the staple of family life.  Party
governments are personal coalitions in fact if not in name, except
when, at intervals, some genuine issue actively divides opinion.  There
were but two great issues in Gladstone's long life: the Corn Law
quarrel that was over, and the Irish quarrel still to come.  At the
present stage of his career the family party could find nothing to
differ about.  Consequently politicians grouped themselves round men
rather than policies; and, since politicians become interesting when
they stand for something, and dwindle in interest when they do not, the
groups were almost fortuitous and invariably shifting.  To relieve the
monotony, Ministries came and went, and the proposals for reform by the
Conservative party, which seemed to encroach on the Liberal programme,
were hardly more than a device to divide the Front Benches into
confronting teams once more.  All this was useless to Gladstone, whose
gift was to place his ardour and enthusiasm at the service of someone
else's ideas.  If there was nobody with any ideas, what could he do but
hesitate round the men who might be expected, politically, to have
them.  The Last Trump itself remains ineffective till it is seized and
blown.

He was inevitably weary of being a politician without a pitch:


    For thirteen years (he wrote to his fellow-member for Oxford), the
    middle space of life, I have been cast out of party connection,
    severed from my old party, and loath irrecoverably to join a new
    one.  So long have I adhered to the vague hope of a reconstruction
    that I have been left alone by every political friend with whom I
    have grown up.



{122}

After taking office and seeking re-election at Oxford, Gladstone was
opposed, but returned with a majority of under two hundred.  He had not
become a Liberal yet.  He had chosen between two leaders, and might
have joined either, but he could only take office under the one who was
in power.  Both men had wanted him.  Which would endure?  It was very
difficult.  In a sense, too, the entire portmanteau of beliefs with
which he had left the university and entered political life, Time had
overturned and emptied on the ground.  In Morley's opinion, "it was the
fates that befell his book, it was the Maynooth grant, and the Gorham
case, that swept away the foundations on which he had first built."  It
seemed sad, yet he needed not the intellect to tell him that his
energies were unimpaired.  These were, as they had always been, his
real resources, enabling him to accept and shed beliefs like skins
because his vitality lay in the very power to don and doff them.  He
was crying for something to do, that is, for some office to hold,
since, though he would spend holidays on a foreign crusade, on writing
a book, or governing a distant community, his home was the rostrum at
Westminster, and he had been below that rostrum for five weary years.

Was he drawing the moral from his chastening isolation when, in 1859,
as the first Lord Rector of Edinburgh University, he told his youthful
audience:


    He who does his acts in order that the echo of them may come back
    as a soft music in his ears plays false to his noble destiny as a
    Christian man...?




IX

By having voted with the previous Government Gladstone had done what
his Oxford constituents expected, and by taking office in the new he
told them that he was entitled not to be blamed, if only because
another {123} General Election was in prospect.  Nonetheless, and
whatever reasons he might give, his action identified him with the
Liberals, and he now had a seat in a Cabinet wherein Disraeli had no
inconvenient share.  He found a new recreation in negro melodies, which
Lord Malmesbury heard him sing "with the greatest spirit and
enjoyment."  Though he was understood to be fond of music, he came away
from a performance of Bach on a Good Friday feeling that, though it was
very beautiful, it was not what he would have chosen for that day.  His
main thought must have been directed to the coming Budget, always to
prove the event of the parliamentary year to him, and meantime he was
concerned over the growth of expenditure, not upon fortifications
alone.  To this last, Palmerston told the Queen, Gladstone gave
"ineffective opposition and ultimate acquiescence."

The Budget of 1859 had increased the Income Tax from fivepence to
ninepence in the pound, its highest figure in time of peace.  When
Disraeli made a motion to "trip me up," Gladstone remarked: "it was not
so that I used him.  I am afraid that the truce between us is over, and
that we shall have to pitch in as before."  Bright had been meditating
a commercial treaty with France, and in September 1859 Cobden came to
Hawarden to talk it over.  On his return he wrote: "Gladstone is really
almost the only Cabinet Minister of five years' standing who is not
afraid to let his heart guide his head a little at times."  Having
overcome resistance in the Cabinet, Gladstone reported to Cobden in
January,


    Criticism is busy: but the only thing really formidable is the
    unavowed but strong conflict with that passionate expectation of
    war, which no more bears disappointment than if it were hope or
    love.



The treaty involved further changes in the tariff; it also promised
expansion of trade and soothed {124} excitement on both sides of the
Channel--excitement aroused by our attitude to the French annexation of
Nice.  Out of all this the Budget of 1860 grew.  A fortunate lapse of
fixed charges released two millions which allowed the reductions of
duty required by the French treaty.  The most interesting of these
reductions, which benefited all countries besides France, were those on
wine and brandy.  Gladstone gave his name to a collar, a bag, a
four-wheeled carriage for two persons with a driver's seat and a
dickey, and to the cheaper claret that his reductions made possible.
Of these, who will deny that Gladstone claret was the most honourable
to him?  He also abolished the excise duty upon manufactured paper,
those "taxes upon knowledge" that the Corn-law Rhymer had deplored.
But if this, as he said, marked the zenith of Free Trade, it was also
the high-water mark of expenditure.  The new ironclads were more
costly, so was artillery, to mention only the most palpable items.
Gladstone foresaw a period of high charges, and the whole question
began to loom in the popular conciousness.  He had always a way of
attracting interest to his doings, an overflow of their immense
interest to himself, and by February 1860 excitement over approaching
Parliamentary reform was swallowed by eager concern in the coming
Budget and the commercial treaty.

At the beginning of the month Gladstone had slight congestion of the
lungs.  The introduction of the Budget had to be postponed for a week.
Excitement became suspense as the tensity of anticipation quickened.
The promised speech was one of his great performances and it lasted for
four hours.  A brief jotting in his diary records the tension:


    Spoke 5-9 without great exhaustion, aided by a great stock of egg
    and wine.  Thank God!  Home at 11.  This was the most arduous
    operation I have ever had in Parliament.


{125}

The allusion to egg and sherry refers to a famous mixture with which
Gladstone used to sustain himself.  "It was an odd thing," H. W. Lucy
has recorded, "to see Gladstone just now taking advantage of the pause
occasioned by the ringing cheers his eloquence drew forth to seize a
short, thick-set pomatum-pot, remove the cork, and proceed to refresh
himself...  [It was] oval in shape, four inches in height, and supplied
with an ill-fitting cork that baffled the frenzied efforts of the
orator to replace it."  The mixture was of Mrs. Gladstone's brewing,
and was more than once referred to by her husband in public letters and
remarks.  One is so characteristic that, though uttered in 1878, it
should be given here.


    When I have had very lengthened statements to make, I have used
    what is called egg-flip--a glass of sherry beaten up with an egg.
    I think it excellent, but I have much more faith in the egg than in
    the alcohol.



Who else would have sought to draw moral discrimination between the
ingredients of an egg-flip?  It was just this habit that made some
people distrustful of Gladstone, who often dragged in morality without
cause.  As the habit is Pecksniffian, people can hardly be blamed for
saying that Gladstone was a Pecksniff himself.  In small things as in
great he often missed the language of sincerity, though he was a
simple-minded man.  He never outgrew his Evangelical upbringing, and
the sentiments that he thought he ought to feel he expressed; he never
apparently questioned whether it was not a superfluous pretence to feel
them.  The result was a language of unction disagreeable to those who
have more respect for human nature.  It is time to admit that his
character was far more vital and personal than his terms.

The effect of this speech can be judged from a remark of the Prince
Consort to Baron Stockmar: "Gladstone is now the real leader of the
House, and works with an {126} energy and vigour almost incredible."
He was forced to do so because reaction soon made itself felt.  The
great man of the day became the popular suspect of the morrow as his
opponents recovered the presence of mind of which his oratory had
temporarily deprived them.  He resigned his membership of the Carlton
Club, another step towards Liberalism.  The success of his speech had
not placed his proposals out of danger, and Lord John Russell played
into hostile hands by introducing his Reform Bill on March 1, when
neither the treaty nor the Budget was secure.  The Paper Duty Bill only
passed the Commons by a narrow majority, and it was thrown out by the
Lords, an act that Gladstone declared to be an interference with the
Commons' control of finance.  This was another goad in the direction of
Liberalism.  It brought him support from the Radicals, and his share in
opening the way to cheap newspapers was one of the causes of his rapid
rise in popularity.  To the fury of his opponents and the delight of
his new friends he circumvented the Lords in the following year by
including all his taxes in a single Finance Bill, which the Upper House
therefore had to accept or reject at a stroke.  A contemporary
mentioned the "glow of pride" with which Gladstone was now regarded,
and described him without irony as "a transcendent mouthpiece of a
nation of shopkeepers."  He had an uphill fight for economy, and
remained unmoved by the scare of a war with France, yet when he left
the Exchequer in 1866, expenditure on the Services was less by two
millions than it had been on his arrival in 1859.  While he preached
economy on public platforms, his opponents denied that he was
economical himself.  His calculations were said to be delusive, and
Disraeli in 1862 called him the most profuse peace Minister we had had.
He himself admitted that the ease with which revenue could be raised by
the Income Tax encouraged expenditure, but {127} two matters to his
credit are not in dispute.  In 1861 he established the Post Office
Savings Bank, and three years later a means for obtaining small
annuities that should be safe to the purchaser and financially sound.
Both were of great service to the masses, who could neither plan nor
acquire such benefits for themselves.  The House of Commons was
indifferent to these changes; they were also distasteful to the banks
and insurance companies, which might have been expected to have
provided them themselves.  The Savings Bank, moreover, was a source of
revenue to the Exchequer, and thus helped to free it from dependence on
the City, which began to watch Gladstone with a jealous eye.  In
finance he came nearest to initiative, and we see him already "warming
the climate in which his projects throve."  In the spring of each year,
he afterwards confessed, "I begin to feel an itch to have the handling
of the Budget."

A characteristic fragment of his oratory occurs in his speech on the
Budget of 1866:


    We propose to reduce the duty on pepper.  The fate of pepper might
    well excite the commiseration of any humane man....  The present
    appears to be a good occasion when, without exciting feelings of
    jealousy in the agricultural or any other class of the community,
    we can afford to do justice to pepper.  The case is a hard one, and
    for this reason: all the spices and condiments in which the
    wealthier classes have an exclusive interest have been long ago set
    free from duty.  But pepper is a condiment common to all classes of
    the community; and, though I cannot say whether this is true or
    not, I am told that it is largely consumed in Ireland.



The characteristic caution displayed in this last sentence was carried
to its extreme limit in a speech that he made at Hawarden in 1884.  "It
is in everybody's power to rear poultry, and, if I may say so, from
eggs."

It is odd that the humane side of social legislation appealed to him
little unless it had some bearing on {128} finance.  Lord Shaftesbury,
the father of the Factory Acts, said:


    Gladstone ever voted in resistance to my efforts.  He gave no
    support to the Ten Hours Bill; he voted with Sir R. Peel to rescind
    the famous decision in favour of it.  He was the only Member who
    endeavoured to delay the Bill which delivered women and children
    from the mines and pits; and he never did say a word on behalf of
    the factory children until, when defending slavery in the West
    Indies, he taunted Buxton with indifference to slavery in England.



In regard to slavery he had pleaded the "blessed change of opinion"
which had helped to bring his conversion about.  There was no such
blessed change in regard to sweating at home.  Shaftesbury was almost
alone in his repudiation of it.  The contrast between the sensitive and
insensitive spot in Gladstone's sympathies needs no better
illustration, and such contradictions are the salt of human character.
He was hardly alive to issues that were not astir in many minds.



X

Perhaps it was a lingering trace of his early sympathy for the planters
that led him into an indiscreet remark in favour of the South during
the American Civil War of 1861.  By the autumn of the following year
the war had lasted eighteen months, and the blockade of the Southern
ports had stopped the export of cotton.  There was consequently
grievous distress in Lancashire, and Gladstone employed factory workers
from the cotton towns on improvements at Hawarden in order to give
relief to some of them.

In September 1862 he had one of the earliest of his triumphal
progresses.  The northern Liberals invited him to visit the Tyne and to
address them at a public dinner.  He received a regal reception.  Bells
were rung, {129} cannon fired, steamers followed him in procession to
the river mouth.  The workmen of the shipyards and factories, who had
shared in the abounding exports that followed the commercial treaty
with France, thronged the banks.  Gladstone was now a recognised
popular spokesman, with a following outside of Parliament that was
amazing his fellow-politicians.  One of these triumphal processions
lasted for six hours.  He says: "I made as many speeches as hours," and
this was but a single day's experience.  Nothing seemed to tire him,
and no wonder he had written in his diary on his fifty-first birthday:


    I cannot believe it.  I feel within me the rebellious unspoken
    word, I will not be old.


Two months before, he had fallen under the spell of Wilkie Collins:


    I did not get to the play last night from finding _The Woman in
    White_ so very interesting.  It has no dull parts, and is far
    better sustained than _Adam Bede_, though I don't know if it rises
    quite as high.  The character drawing is excellent.


His other recreations included enormous walks, of over twenty miles,
and in 1863 we have glimpses of him at Balmoral.


    So far as I can see, the form and mode of life here does not differ
    for visitors from Windsor.  All meals and rooms are separate, but
    sometimes, it appears, some are invited to dine with the Queen.
    The household circle is smaller here than at Windsor, and so less
    formal and dull....

    I do not think that Sunday is the best of days here.  I in vain
    inquired with care about Episcopal services; there did not seem to
    be one within fifteen miles, if indeed so near.  We had something
    between family prayer and a service in the dining-room at ten; it
    lasted about forty minutes....  You are better off at Penmaenmawr.

    The service at Ballater has made a great difference in favour of
    this Sunday.  It was celebrated in the Free Kirk schoolroom for
    girls!

    {130}

    Lady Churchill ... was very submissive at dinner in her manner to
    the Queen, and I told her it made me feel I had been so impudent.
    Only think of this: both through her and through General Grey it
    has come round to me that the Queen thinks she was too cheerful on
    the night I last dined.  This she feels a kind of sin.



He took long walks, climbed Lochnagar, and, if he "could not do all
that the others did in looking down the precipices," on one occasion he
walked a measured mile in twelve minutes, by the side of the Dee.



XI

Gladstone was now settled in office and evidently a predestined leader
in the Commons, but much as Dickens had crossed the seas to receive in
person the homage of American citizens, so Gladstone was carrying
political prestige beyond the accustomed circuit of Westminster; on
platforms throughout the country he was creating the same amazement and
sense of change.  If the audiences which danced delightedly to his
piping were to be admitted to the franchise, it seemed to many that a
new epoch was at hand.  The ideal of quantity on a new and vast scale
was being felt in many departments of life.  The prospect or
possibility that Parliament might cease to be the privileged arena of
political activity was exciting to many and disquieting to some.  The
enormous welcome given to Garibaldi and the public joy over the
unification of Italy roused a desire for liberalism at home, which took
the form of asking how much longer the vote should be limited to the
reforms of 1832.  The rising tide was in want of a leader who should
combine personal fervour with practical capacity.  The name of Whig,
once applied to a group of aristocratic houses, was now giving way to
the term Liberal, which implied a less exclusive choice.  The line
"genius {131} better is than birth" had occurred in one of the songs
sung in his honour when Gladstone had received his popular welcome on
the Tyne.  His own appeal to popular liking was varied and confused.
His pleas for peace and retrenchment were popular at Manchester,
however much the straitened city might deplore his neutrality over the
American Civil War.  His support of a united Italy pleased the Whigs,
Nonconformists and Churchmen were both drawn to him, workmen felt that
they had in him a friend.  The old fear of ideas connected with the
French Revolution was over, the Chartist agitation was giving way to a
desire for the vote.  The quiet in which the Lancashire men had endured
the recent distress was held or claimed to show capacity for
constitutional privileges.  In May 1864 Gladstone told the House of
Commons:


    Every man who is not presumably incapacitated by some consideration
    of personal unfitness or of political danger is morally entitled to
    come within the pale of the constitution.


This was altogether too much for Lord Palmerston and for many others as
well.  There was an outcry.  Gladstone was said to "minister aliments
to popular turbulence and vanity, to preach the divine right of
multitudes, to encourage, Minister of the Crown though he was, a
sweeping and levelling democracy."  Palmerston expressly objected.  "I
entirely deny that every sane and not disqualified man has a moral
right to the vote....  What every man and woman has a right to is to be
well governed and under just laws."  To his brother Gladstone wrote:


    I have been astounded to find it (my speech) the cause or occasion
    of such a row.  It would have been quite as intelligible to me had
    people said, "under the exceptions of personal unfitness and
    political danger you exclude or may exclude almost everybody."


{132} Palmerston had the better argument because he had the clearer
head, but it is amusing to see Gladstone criticising himself as others
often criticised him, for ambiguity.  Feeling had inspired his speech,
and feeling had interpreted it, but, as usual, his words and his
qualifications admitted equal emphasis and, not for the last time, he
rode the more convenient horse away.

This did not discourage his activity, however.  A month later the same
speech induced the voteless workmen of York to present him with an
address of congratulation.  They mentioned, among less definite
matters, his Post Office Savings Bank and his Government Annuities
Bill.  These excellent deeds gave a foundation to the set of speeches
that he delivered in Lancashire during the autumn of 1864.  He was
feeling the rising of the tide, and advanced himself, before others, to
meet it.  He spoke of working-class progress during the previous thirty
years.  Opening a park he enlarged on that "communion with nature"
which was now part of the life of the poorest citizen.  At Liverpool,
with the touch of a musician, he warned his eager audience against
"political lethargy."  He reminded them of the moral responsibility of
Imperial politics and referred openly, and for the first time, to
Ireland, where "the state of feeling was not for the honour and the
advantage of the United Kingdom."  "So ended" (in his own words) "in
peace an exhausting, flattering, I hope not intoxicating circuit....
Somewhat haunted by dreams of halls, and lines of people, and great
assemblies."  He had become the first popular hero of workaday
politics, and the success of his proceedings filled other politicians
with alarm.  When his brother-in-law reported their criticisms to him,
Gladstone replied: "Please to recollect that we have got to govern
millions of hard hands; that it must be done by force, fraud, or
good-will; that the latter has been tried, and is answering."  As
Bishop {133} Wilberforce put it, "Gladstone is certainly gaining power.
You hear now almost everyone say he must be the future Premier, and
such sayings tend greatly to accomplish themselves."

His friendly attitude to an old grievance about the burial of
Dissenters brought him into touch with the Nonconformists, and on one
occasion they sounded him on the question of laying the
foundation-stone of one of their chapels.  While he continued to oppose
Palmerston on the estimates, he was beginning to raise the question of
the disestablishment of the Irish Church.  In politics, however, one
cannot make new friends without risking the confidence of original
supporters, and after the dissolution of Parliament in the summer of
1865 he was defeated at Oxford.  This occurred partly through the
postal vote, which was largely that of elderly clergy to whom the very
word disestablishment was abhorrent.  He found consolation in a verse
from one of the lessons: "they shall fight against thee, but they shall
not prevail against thee, for I am with thee, saith the Lord."  The
last official tie with his early influences was now severed.
Politically he had outgrown the control of Oxford and of Westminster
and was looking to the people at large.  No longer a Tory or a
Churchman, he was revealed as a Gladstonian at last, and in the welcome
that awaited him lay the elements of a party that should seek its
inspiration from the man himself.



XII

Though he wrote in his diary that "a dear dream is dispelled," the
weight of Oxford opinion, which he was ceasing to represent, must have
already become an oppression to him.  He had been invited already to
stand for South Lancashire, and hurried off to Manchester and
Liverpool.  "At last, my friends," he began, "I am {134} come among
you, and I am come among you unmuzzled."  There is more relief than
regret in these words, apt as they also were to rouse enthusiasm.  When
Manning wrote in a letter: "you say truly that Oxford has failed to
enlarge itself to the progress of the country," and warned him not to
entangle himself in extremes, Gladstone replied: "in a cold or lukewarm
period everything which lives and moves is called extreme."  To another
old friend, the Bishop of Oxford, Gladstone wrote:


    There have been two great deaths or transmigrations of spirit in my
    political existence.  One very slow, the breaking of ties with my
    original party.  The other very short and sharp, the breaking of
    the tie with Oxford.



In October 1865 Lord Palmerston died, and Lord Russell became Prime
Minister with Gladstone once more at the Exchequer, and leader of the
House of Commons.  The obvious man for this position, Gladstone managed
to excite suspicions of exactly opposite kinds.  A politician declared
that Gladstone "would not perceive the difference between leading and
driving," while his brother-in-law reported grumbles from another
quarter: "There is an impression that you are absorbed in questions
about Homer and Greek words, about _Ecce Homo_ [which he had been
reviewing], that you are not reading the newspapers, or feeling the
pulse of followers.  The people don't understand it; they consider you
their own, as a husband claims a wife's devotion."  Church, the future
Dean of St. Paul's, noted that "they love him much less in the House
than they do out of doors"; and Jowett, the Master of Balliol, said:
"It is the first time that anyone of such great simplicity has been in
so exalted a station."  Gladstone himself bore out this description in
the sentence, "I have not refused to acknowledge and accept the signs
of the times."

{135}

These signs can be summarised in the word unrest, which was evident in
Gladstone's favourite spheres, the religious and the political.  In
1859 Darwin had published his _Origin of Species_.  Its effect was
enormous, and, though we are still living under its shadow, we hardly
realise the importance of the change.  In the ferment of opinion the
appearance of _Essays and Reviews_ during 1860 created grave disquiet,
and two of the clerical contributors to that book, who had questioned
the inspiration of the Bible and the doctrine of eternal punishment,
were haled into court.  The hostile verdict was reversed on appeal to
the Queen in Council, and thus confirmed the principle of the Gorham
judgment of ten years before.  Gladstone was moved to declare that the
spirit of this judgment "established, as far as a court can establish
it, a complete indifference between the Christian faith and the denial
of it."  Again, Dr. Colenso, Bishop of Natal, appealed successfully
against the sentence of deprivation passed upon him by his Metropolitan
at Cape Town for having published certain criticisms of the Scriptures.
Gladstone was watching the growth of unbelief and liberal theology with
apprehension.  He was never tempted to embrace it, but he was keenly
alive to its influence upon existing institutions and political
activity.  In various directions a liberalism was in the air, and
Gladstone, keenly sensitive to movements of opinion, was impelled to
become the parliamentary spokesman of it, theology apart.

Circumstances helped him by unexpectedly focussing the public eye upon
the franchise.  All the Front Benchers were more or less committed to
it, and the question really was, which group under which leader should
bring it about.  The rank and file were indifferent or opposed, and
this opposition as usual aroused Gladstone to activity.  When the
Reform Bill of 1866 was defeated, and Lord Russell resigned, Gladstone
uttered {136} his well-known saying: "Time is on our side.  You cannot
fight against the future."  With his responsive sense of the political
to-morrow, it is almost a statement of his political creed.  Once more
out of office, he felt the wrench again: "Finished in Downing Street;
left my keys behind me.  Somehow it makes a void."  This void he
invariably filled with propaganda of one kind or another, and the
dissolution itself provided the opportunity.  The working classes were
suddenly convinced that they were to be deprived of a promised
privilege, and, as the spokesman of their demand, they made Gladstone
the hero of the hour.  A crowd forced its way into Carlton House
Terrace and raised a cry for Gladstone and liberty.  They would not
understand that their idol was away, and in order to disperse them the
police advised his wife to appear upon the balcony.  This act annoyed
the journalists, who said that the women of his household had "courted
an ovation from persons of the lowest class."  The personal intercourse
of politicians with the general public was still an innovation; even
during elections Disraeli never stalked the country, and Gladstone was
already "at home" to crowds in a way that was astonishing and new.  He
did, however, decline to address a demonstration in Hyde Park, and
contented himself with the assertion that the resignation of the
Government was really a fresh step toward success.  "In the hour of
defeat I have the presentiment of victory."

During the recess, to avoid attending further celebrations, Gladstone
took his family to Rome.  The political pot was boiling of its own
accord, and nothing practical could be done by him until the opening of
Parliament.  At the same time he promised Lord Acton not to entangle
himself in Italian grievances.  "Nothing is more unlikely than that I
should meddle with the prisons or anything else of the kind."  Manning
was fully alive {137} to the propensities of the traveller, about whom
probably some uneasy curiosity was felt.  He assured the Vatican as far
as he could: "Gladstone does not come as an enemy, and may be made
friendly, or he might become on his return most dangerous."  In the
Holy City the visitor was discreetness itself.  He spent most of his
spare time listening to sermons by Italian priests and friars.  The
only echo of previous activity was a dinner given to him by members of
the Italian Parliament, at which his old friend Poerio made a moving
speech.  On his way home he stopped in Paris, attended the funeral of
Victor Cousin, and dined with the Emperor at the Tuileries.  His inner
eye was bent on the forthcoming session at Westminster.

His fears that the vote would be given grudgingly were unfounded.  The
agitations, the mass meetings, the street processions, culminating in a
riot that burst the railings in Hyde Park, were decisive arguments.
Household suffrage, like woman suffrage, was the reward of agitation
outside the House.  Nearly a million voters were added to the register.
As it was not then known how easily the electorate could be stampeded
in any direction by many cheap newspapers controlled by a few hands,
the dismay of the more conservative is as understandable as the false
hopes of their opponents.  In a political ode, clearly the product of
genuine feeling, Patmore spoke of the "orgies of the multitude, which
now begin."  Yet the real revolution had been economic; the political
was but the recognition of that change.  Even so, the Act of 1867 did
not wholly satisfy Gladstone.  Failing to carry some of his supporters
when moving an amendment to extend the Bill, he was so much
disappointed that he spoke of retiring to the back bench.  Looking back
on his life, he once claimed political insight into the state of public
opinion, and he was certainly right.  But there are more public
opinions than {138} one, and when he seemed to fail in this
discernment, it was because the determining political opinion had not
yet caught up with the movement of which he was himself aware.  His
audience was steadily expanding with his consciousness of its
existence.  His sense of it now spread beyond Oxford, beyond the House
of Commons.  The response to which he thrilled was become the almost
inarticulate movement of the masses, only limited by the political side
of their desires.  This was his real constituency.  In 1868 he wrote to
Lord Granville: "For seven years past I have been watching the sky with
a strong sense of the obligation to act with the first streak of dawn."

It was the same sense which led him, publicly and in advance of other
English politicians, to perceive that the Irish question was gathering
to an issue.  When the Fenian outbreaks spread to England in 1867 and
produced the armed rescue of two Irish prisoners from the Manchester
police and the explosion at Clerkenwell Prison, Gladstone said in
Parliament:


    The Fenian conspiracy has had an important influence with respect
    to Irish policy ... when these [recent] phenomena came home to the
    popular mind and produced that attitude of attention and
    preparedness on the part of the whole population of this country,


he was much criticised for the admission: by people, as he wittily put
it, "who cannot bear to hear what they cannot fail to see."  In 1869 he
declared that the state of Ireland was admitted by both parties to be
the question of the day.  In this he was slightly exaggerating.
Recognition was reluctant from first to last.

At Christmas 1867 Lord John Russell told Gladstone he did not intend to
take office again, and in February 1868 Disraeli succeeded Lord Derby
as Prime Minister.  A month later, on a motion by an Irish Member,
Gladstone said that the Church of Ireland as a Church in {139} alliance
with the State must cease to exist.  It is characteristic that he
should have approached the Irish question through an ecclesiastical
door.  Lord John's announcement left Gladstone the leader of the
Liberal party, though its strength could hardly be measured until the
next election should reveal the effect of the recent Reform Bill.
Gladstone followed his speech by framing three resolutions concerning
the Irish Church, and carried them against the Government.  The result
of the division was greeted with tremendous cheers.  He wrote to the
Duchess of Sutherland:


    This is a day of excitement--almost of exultation.  We have made a
    step, nay a stride, and this stride is on the pathway of justice
    and of peace, of national honour and renown.


To show the seriousness of his intentions, he at once introduced a Bill
to preclude any new appointments in the Irish Church.  This also passed
the House of Commons but was rejected by the Lords.

In the autumn Parliament was dissolved, and the issue before the
country was whether or not the Irish Church was to be disestablished.
During the election Gladstone published his _Chapter of Autobiography_
to explain how his change of view had come about.  It was just thirty
years since his first book had been issued.  The Irish Church
ministered to about one-eighth of the population among whom it was
State-supported, so the question at issue had not much to do with the
principle advocated in his earlier book.  Yet to most people the sacred
principle was the principle of establishment, and Gladstone's assault
on an enthroned injustice scandalised his friends and supporters in the
Church of England.  To them belief in God and belief in an
establishment were almost the same thing.  His treatise was welcomed by
the public, which appreciated his desire to take them into confidence
with himself.  The policy {140} that he now advocated was certainly
just and statesman-like, though no doubt its victory at the polls was
largely due to partisans who hated disestablishment as enviously as
most churchmen cherished it.  Gladstone himself was elected for
Greenwich after having been defeated in South Lancashire.  He was now,
with a majority of 112 in the House, the head of a new party with a
complicated measure to carry through.  Though not yet formally Prime
Minister, he must have felt that he had earned the crown of his
parliamentary career after thirty-five years in politics.




{141}

CHAPTER IV

IN AND OUT OF DOWNING STREET


I

On the afternoon of December 1, 1868, Gladstone was felling a tree at
Hawarden when a messenger arrived with a telegram from the Queen.
After reading the telegram he muttered, "Very significant," and
continued his work.  Then, resting on his axe, he turned to Mr. Evelyn
Ashley and said: "My mission is to pacify Ireland."  He did not speak
another word till the tree was down.  On his birthday a few weeks later
he wrote in his diary:


    This birthday opens my sixtieth year.  I descend the hill of life.
    It would be a truer figure to say that I ascend a steepening path
    with a burden ever gathering weight.  The Almighty seems to sustain
    and spare me for some purpose of His own, deeply unworthy as I know
    myself to be.  Glory be to His name.


With a powerful majority to sustain his own efforts, with a keen eye
for the "signs of the times," and above all a sense that he was
entrusted with a mission, Gladstone entered upon the most fruitful and
successful period of his career.  His energies indeed remained
undiminished to the last, but never again did they prove so successful
as during his first administration.  It is true that he had been
temperamentally more in accord with the serious and laborious Prince
Consort than he ever managed to become with the Queen, and Albert's
death in 1861 had {142} removed a potential ally.  Whether the Prince
too would have come to dread Gladstone's propensity for sweeping
change, or been equally convinced of the Divine approbation, is a
matter for conjecture.  Would there have been room for so energetic a
Minister and so personally active a Sovereign as the Prince was
becoming at the time of his death?  Many devoted friends as Gladstone
had among women, and charming as others found him in society, he was
never at ease in the royal presence.  His notion of deference was as
embarrassing to the crowned lady as her august station was to him.
With a masculine Sovereign he would have been more at his ease.  In all
forms, even in forms of speech, he was too formal to appear natural,
and the mode of address that was flattering to huge assemblies became
both stiff and constraining in private audience.  Except on the public
platform Gladstone always seemed a little out of place.  That he felt
this is obvious from his manner: not even in his diaries could he
contrive a personal or spontaneous note.

To carry through his policy of disestablishment he relied on
Nonconformists in England and Wales, Scottish Presbyterians and Irish
Roman Catholics.  Out of these elements a new party was forming under
Gladstone's leadership, and he began an ascendancy in the country that
was to last, with interruptions, for twenty-five years.  In 1869 the
majority for his Bill was 118, and thus introduced a new standard of
quantity.  The third reading was similarly triumphant.  The proceedings
in the Lords were more chequered, and were watched with anxious
interest by Gladstone's outside following.  A Roman Catholic bishop
offered Mass for Gladstone, and Mr. Spurgeon sent the assurance of his
prayers.


    I think (Gladstone wrote) in these and other prayers lies the
    secret of the strength of body which has been given me in unusual
    measure during this very trying year.


{143} Indeed his anxiety lest there should arise a conflict between the
two Houses was so great that he had to lie up and to interview his
colleagues from the sofa.  In September he was at Walmer Castle, where
Tait, the Archbishop of Canterbury, found him "lying in blankets on the
ramparts eating his dinner, still looking very ill.  He joined us at
night full of intelligence.  His fierce vigour all the better for being
a little tempered."  The passing of the Bill was a great triumph, and
whatever his opponents have said against the measure, none has denied
the skill with which it was carried through.  Disraeli's admirers have
professed to see in it no more than a counterstroke to the latter's
Reform Bill, and no doubt, if that had not been suddenly appropriated
and passed, reform would have been the issue of the election.  But it
is equally true that the Irish situation was becoming intolerable, and
that some attempt to deal with it could not much longer be delayed.
The Reform Bill itself made the Irish vote important; the Nationalist
Party was extended by its means, and to Gladstone's native energy each
question was one to be settled in order that another pressing matter
might be attacked.  He was essentially a man of action, and his
susceptibility to popular movements was precisely the quality that made
him disconcerting to friends and foes.  Of all Irish questions the
disestablishment of the minority Church was the least thorny, but, this
out of the way, he turned to the much more complicated and radical
problem of the land.

An agricultural nation cannot be governed successfully on the
assumptions that rule an industrial state.  The workman as a rule is
hired and not housed, and the value of his contribution is lost in the
finished product.  It is not so with a worker on the land.  The fields
that he has drained and fenced, the roads that he has made, are
permanent and visible improvements to his holding, {144} which may have
been in the same family for years.  Has he no permanent rights in
permanent improvements like these?  Is the landlord entitled to deprive
him of all the fruits of his labour by additions to the rent that will
leave him as badly off as before?  Can the landlord evict him if he
refuses to pay, and on the law of supply and demand let the holding to
the highest bidder?  The disorders and crimes produced by these
confiscations had already been made the subject of official inquiry in
1843.  Bills had been proposed and dropped in a House dominated by
landlords, whose legislation was entirely in favour of their own class.

In Ulster, however, custom, the natural law of agricultural
communities, had enforced a rent exclusive of tenants' improvements,
and secured to the tenant the right to transfer his lease to somebody
else.  The tenant was thus relatively protected.  Gladstone's Bill may
be roughly described as extending the benefits of custom to areas and
tenancies where it was disputed or absent.  The value of this measure
has been minimised in some Irish histories, but it was the foundation
of all that followed and began the beneficent revolution which
redistributed the land and eventually has made Southern Ireland a
country of peasant proprietors.



II

Gladstone's programme of reform was not confined to Ireland, and the
Queen was perhaps more harried under his premiership than at any period
of her reign.  Biographers of her and of Disraeli have told us how
Disraeli made complications easy by his rapid summaries and amusing
aphorisms, but the Queen, like many of her subjects, found Gladstone's
explanations even more puzzling than his proposals.  To her it seemed
that he would leave nothing alone.  He turned to education; {145} he
opened the Civil Service, except the Foreign Office, to competition; he
abolished purchase of commissions in the Army, and when Parliament
objected, he invoked the royal warrant to do so.  Worse than this, he
appeared to the Queen to attack the Prerogative itself when he removed
the Commander-in-Chief from the Horse Guards to Whitehall and placed
him directly under the control of the War Office and Parliament.

The Education Act of 1870 was partly the result of household suffrage.
It was said that "we must educate our masters," and the victories of
the North in America and of Prussia in the war with France were said to
have been won in elementary schools.  Gladstone's attitude was
characteristic.  He had "no fear of a secular system" of education; but
it was with great reluctance that he agreed to the abolition of
religious tests for Dissenters, who were admitted to degrees and
endowments at the Universities in 1871.  A necessary complement of the
extended franchise was the Act of 1870 which secured vote by secret
ballot.  Abstract reasons were supposed to be against secrecy, but
practical proofs of intimidation eventually prevailed.  Gladstone
himself was a lukewarm advocate of the change, and said
characteristically:


    I have at all times given my vote in favour of open voting, but I
    have done so before, and do so now, with an important reservation,
    namely, that whether by open voting or by whatsoever means free
    voting must be secured.


The Lords at first threw out the Bill on the ground that secret voting
would be fatal to the monarchy, which showed how little they believed
in popular loyalty.  Only in Ireland did the ballot make a real
difference, for by it the political power of the landlords was
overthrown.  The political future of the Nationalist party, which had
been made possible by the recent Reform Act, was now assured.

In the midst of this official activity Gladstone found {146} time to
keep his eye upon the intellectual ferment at home, which Darwin's book
had started among men of science and churchmen alike.  In 1869, and in
the hope of leading both to understand each other's position, James
Knowles, then editor of the _Contemporary Review_, founded the
Metaphysical Society.  It resembled the Church of England in two
respects.  It was composed of men of very diverse views, and the
majority of them were churchmen.  Manning, Gladstone and Huxley were
among the members.  It was in order to define his own intellectual
position that Huxley invented the term agnostic at this time.  He did
not merely mean to assert his ignorance on many matters of universal
interest upon which confident assertions had been made.  He also wished
to distinguish himself from those who claimed personal intuitive
knowledge, such as the Gnostics of old.  About this date he was asked
whether Gladstone was an expert in metaphysics.  "An expert in
metaphysics?" he replied.  "He does not know the meaning of the word."
Some years later Huxley said to a clergyman, "Do you still believe in
Gladstone? ... If working men were to-day to vote by a majority that
two and two make five, to-morrow Gladstone would believe it, and find
reasons for it that they had never dreamed of."  The effect of the
discussions at the Metaphysical Society on Gladstone was to make him at
last distinguish between the characters of men and their opinions.  He
had once thought this impossible, but he never solved the mystery, and
in his own political changes claimed verbal consistency to the end.  He
remarked to Dr. Temple, whom he made Bishop of Exeter, "The limit of
possible variation between character and opinion, and between character
and belief, is widening and will widen;" yet this was not, as it were,
to be admitted officially until the spectacular struggle over the
Bradlaugh case was fought and won.

{147}

In the autumn of 1871 Gladstone spent two days with Tennyson at the
house at Blackdown which James Knowles had built for the poet.
Tennyson read aloud "The Holy Grail," and found Gladstone "a very noble
fellow and perfectly unaffected."  His visitor was equally pleased:


    A very characteristic and delightful abode.  In Tennyson are
    singularly united true greatness, genuine simplicity, and some
    eccentricity.  But the latter is from habit and circumstance, the
    former is his nature.  His wife is excellent, and in her adaptation
    to him wonderful.



During this premiership he offered a peerage to Grote, and gave one to
the silent historian, Acton.  He wished to give some honour to Mill.
The first Jew to become a peer received it on Gladstone's
recommendation.  Now, for the first time, the years began to leave
their visible mark upon him, and Phillimore observed in 1873 that
Gladstone was looking well but much aged.  Troubles at home and abroad
began to multiply, and he was horrified to note the growing
unpopularity of the Queen.

For eleven years she had cherished her widow's weeds and her seclusion,
and in the face of her retirement the fall of the French emperor and
the establishment of a Republic in France produced a wave of republican
feeling in England.  It took the blunt form of asking what return the
nation gained from the great cost of the monarchy, and a pamphlet
entitled "What does she do with it?" attracted wide attention.  Mr.
Gladstone was forced to venture on "deferential exhortations," which
she began to resist and continued to dislike.  After 1872 the Queen's
reserve to him increased, and his sense of awe became oppressive.  He
was also alienating the support of more than one group of his mixed
following in his attempt to meet the claims of the Irish Catholics for
a Catholic University.  His speech of three hours {148} upon the Irish
University Bill threw the House into "a mesmeric trance," but the
opposition was not quelled and his proposals were defeated.

In the sphere of foreign policy his attitude was less spectacular than
Palmerston's, and the weariness which overtakes every administration
took the form of asserting that England was losing the position in
European councils that had been hers hitherto since the battle of
Waterloo.  The spectre of imperial France was replaced by the military
empire of Germany, and her sensational successes in the field since
1866 were as annoying to English pride as they were dangerous to all
her neighbours.  Beside Bismarck, Gladstone seemed ineffective to the
vulgar eye, and he was compared to his disadvantage with Palmerston.
To the same eye Gladstone seemed to deserve this condemnation when
Russia repudiated the limitation on her armaments in the Black Sea,
imposed by the Treaty of Paris in 1856, and when our dispute with the
United States over the damage caused to them during their civil war by
the _Alabama_, which had been allowed to sail from a British port, was
referred to arbitration and led to the imposition of heavy damages at
Geneva which we agreed to pay.  The vulgar notion that international
arbitration is humiliating to the side that makes a sacrifice shows
that nations are still in the tribal phase of public law, and it is to
Gladstone's honour that he carried the arbitration through.  As,
moreover, the principle of an international court for Great Powers was
new, the award becomes a definite achievement in foreign politics.  The
morality that he was accustomed to invoke for his proposals rings more
truly than it often did in his vindication of this settlement:


    I regard the fine imposed on this country as dust in the balance
    compared with the moral value of the example set when these two
    great nations of England and America ... went {149} in peace and
    concord before a judicial tribunal [rather than resort to war].


The Americans received a third of all they asked, and our insistence
that extraneous claims must be ignored was respected.  This arbitration
created an historic precedent for the conduct of the two nations that
remains worth more to both of them than any supposed identity of
origin, speech or ideals.  In foreign affairs it was Gladstone's
greatest achievement.

By the autumn of 1871 the decline of his popularity was marked, but one
of his most extraordinary speeches succeeded for a moment in restoring
it.  In his endeavours for economy he always cast a jealous eye upon
the Services, even apart from armaments.  Florence Nightingale
complained that the improved sanitation of barracks, on which she had
set Sidney Herbert to work, found obstacles in Mr. Gladstone's anxiety
to avoid expense.  The dockyard men, who were among his constituents at
Greenwich, were naturally furious at the discharges which followed the
Franco-Prussian war.  France having then to economise on her navy,
advantage was taken to follow suit at home.  It was, then, with murmurs
and hostility that Gladstone was received when he went down to
Blackheath to address the largest even of his enormous audiences in the
open air.  Once again the fine presence and the beautiful voice, which
carried over this vast multitude, worked like a charm.  Is there a
sharper test for an orator than to convert a murmuring crowd, a crowd
too of poor men, many of whom have been thrown out of work by the
speaker's policy?  The speech does not survive better than its fellows,
but the occasion and effect make it a crucial example of his oratory.
It was half an hour before he won a silent hearing; then the murmurs
died away, attention was riveted, and he ceased speaking after nearly
two hours in a tumult of applause.



{150}

III

There were pinpricks nearer home, and in the Commons he was guilty of
what are known as parliamentary blunders.  Their only interest now is
that attempts were made to found charges of favouritism upon them.  A
vacancy occurred upon the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, to
which four new judges were being added.  After offering the position to
judges who for various personal reasons declined, Gladstone, with the
approval of the Cabinet, made the Attorney-General a judge in order to
qualify him for the position.  The proceeding was resented, and the cry
raised that experience as well as status was required for the new post.
The House was excited and divided in mind, and Gladstone's speech only
secured a narrow majority of twenty-seven.  Had he not succeeded in
converting some hesitants to his side, he might have been defeated on
the division.  He created a worse impression by doing the same thing in
another form.  The living of Ewelme was vacant, and it could be given
only to a member of Convocation at Oxford.  A certain Mr. Harvey was on
the list for promotion, but he happened to be a Cambridge man.  Without
objection by the college, Mr. Gladstone made him, therefore, a member
of Oriel, and after six weeks' residence Mr. Harvey was admitted to
Convocation.  No one said a word until the appointment was criticised
in Parliament.  It was then suggested that the gentleman had been
appointed because Gladstone had known him in the past.  The proceeding
seemed arbitrary, and of course this is the kind of way in which
man[oe]uvring is done.  But Gladstone did not know the man, and, once
again, was technically qualifying someone in other ways eligible for
the post.  For almost all appointments there is some technicality to be
fulfilled, and the form which is a {151} formality to the patron is
easily magnified, even when innocent, into a private deal by those who
have other candidates for the position.  In regard to his own exercise
of patronage Gladstone once said that his family had "no special cause"
to thank him.  His second son, Stephen, was ordained in 1870 and became
eventually rector of Hawarden.  The parish was very large and the
stipend proportional, nominally 3,153 a year.  Appropriate as the
appointment was, Gladstone once declared: "the living is not in the
gift of the Crown.  I did not present him to the living or recommend
him to be presented."  If the living was in the gift of the lord of the
manor, and the manor in the family, what could be more traditional or
more human than that the rector should be related to the squire?  Other
things being equal, some advantage would be obvious, and in country
parishes, as in country estates, family ties are to the good.  His
fourth son, the present Viscount, was his father's private secretary,
later Financial Secretary to the War Office, and Home Secretary under
his father.  His eldest daughter married the headmaster of Wellington,
his second surviving daughter Mr. Drew, who was later rector of
Hawarden, and his youngest, unmarried, became Principal of Newnham.
His third son entered business, went to India, and married the daughter
of Lord Rendel.  The eldest son, after representing two constituencies,
withdrew altogether from political life.

It has been humorously suggested that Gladstone used his power of
patronage rather to rid himself of nuisances than to elevate his
private friends.  Writing of Gladstone's irresistible tendency to reply
to interrupters in the House, Henry Lucy recorded:


    This weakness, the more notable by reason of its contrast with the
    imperturbability of Mr. Disraeli, made the Parliamentary fortune of
    many men of varying ability.  When Sir W. Harcourt and Sir H. James
    sat together below the gangway in {152} the Parliament of 1868,
    they ... shrewdly recognised the pathway to promotion.  In the same
    way, though not in similar degree, Mr. Ashmead Bartlett and Mr.
    Warton profited by Mr. Gladstone's inability to control himself
    when, seated on either of the front benches, he followed the course
    of acrimonious debate.  Mr. Stanley Leighton, who at one time
    seemed in the running, lost his prize only because he had not
    staying power.  Mr. Warton, a vulgar boorish partisan, early
    discovered that he could "draw" Mr. Gladstone at pleasure....  To
    call "Oh, oh" and "Ah, ah" ... did not require much mental activity
    or seem to command prodigious recompense.  Yet it led Mr. Warton
    into a comfortable salaried office in the Antipodes.  Mr. Ashmead
    Bartlett did better still, a minor place in the Ministry, crowned
    by a knighthood, rewarded his patriotic endeavours.  Working in the
    same way, though on a higher level, Lord Randolph Churchill, Sir
    Henry Wolf and Sir John Gorst first brought themselves into notice.



It is also true that the Ministery was growing stale with time, and
Disraeli gave a vivid picture of its leaders and their worries.  In a
well-known speech he said:


    The stimulus is subsiding.  The paroxysms ended in prostration.
    Some took refuge in melancholy, and their eminent chief alternated
    between a menace and a sigh.  As I sat opposite the Treasury bench,
    the Ministers reminded me ... of a range of exhausted volcanoes.
    Not a flame flickers on a single pallid crest. But the situation is
    still dangerous.



This was in April 1872.  There were squabbles among some of Gladstone's
colleagues, and, comparing a pair of them to Moloch and Belial, he
complained that they would not co-operate in Pandemonium itself.  In
the Cabinet, as elsewhere, he combined extreme deference of manner with
tenacious advocacy of his own views.  His persuasiveness was more
overwhelming than the imperiousness of blunter men.  His absences were
grudged, and his relaxations suspected.  His colleagues would not let
him attend a funeral in Scotland on the eve of the Franco-Prussian war,
and he had to correct the public rumour that he began every day with a
reading {153} from Homer.  With the end of his Ministry in sight, he
thought once again of retiring, and found convenient precedents for so
doing in the thin record of most premiers after sixty years of age.  He
told the Queen that he did not intend to go into Opposition, and that,
if the Liberal party fell into fragments with the fall of the
Government, it would be the end of his political life.  A little later
he declared that the opposition about him could only be neutralised by
his perceiving "a special cause" to remain.  He loved power, but power
for a purpose.  He felt lonely and useless without a crusade.  To lead
the Opposition, unless the end of the ruling Ministry was in sight
through its indifference to some question that he himself perceived to
be the issue of the morrow, was not enough for him.  He was like a
soldier who sells out of the army in time of peace, but is never happy
unless rumours of war are in the air.

When the Irish helped to defeat the University Bill which had been
intended to satisfy them, Gladstone resigned.  Disraeli, however, was
in no hurry to succeed, so the pangs of the expiring Ministry were
further drawn out.  There is a note of weariness in Gladstone's comment:


    The Conservative party will never assume its natural position until
    Disraeli retires; and I sometimes think he and I might with
    advantage pair off together.



This consolation was to be denied him, however.  The bond of his party
was frayed in many places; there were irregularities at the Post
Office, and when he took over the Chancellorship of the Exchequer in
the reconstruction that ensued, the tiresome question was raised
whether he had not thereby vacated his seat.  A speech against
disestablishment chilled the Nonconformists, and, recalling the part
that their votes were to play later in his policy, it is interesting to
read that already he {154} "shunned the idea of entering into conflict
with them."  A Gladstonian sentence follows:


    A political severance, somewhat resembling in this a change of
    religion, should at most occur not more than once in life.



Gladstone was the muscular Christian of politics; speech remained a
"religious exercise" to him; and the widest pulpit in his day was the
House of Commons.  During the middle of the nineteenth century, indeed,
we witness what can only be called the apotheosis of Parliament.  Did
Gladstone's moral idiom, and political appeals to righteousness, bring
this about, or was he but a sign of the times?  Parliament was one of
several institutions to share this mysterious idealisation.  The throne
intoxicated Sir Theodore Martin; the British Constitution filled men
with uncritical awe.  People read debates in the columns of _The Times_
with an interest bordering on paralysis.  They received these
institutions in the spirit that overcame Mrs. Pumblechook so that she
could only murmur "O, thou!" when her future husband proposed.  Dr.
Arnold early attracted respectful notice for his "manner of awful
reverence when speaking of God or of the Scriptures."  Yet it is odd,
but true, that, in the beautiful words of the Prayer Book, a lively
faith does not march to such a tune, nor can all the earnestness and
achievements of these men entirely quell the suspicions aroused by
their intemperate expressions of piety.  Probably no one has ever loved
Parliament so sincerely as Gladstone, and to be there in relatively
idle opposition, for issues cannot be invented in a moment, was to be
placed almost in the position of a rector who is compelled to sit, as
one of the congregation, in the body of his own church.  He dissolved
on finance, but his promise to repeal the Income Tax, if returned to
power, looked too much like a desperate device to prove convincing.

{155}

The Conservatives were returned by a majority of forty-eight, and the
Irish Nationalists, numbering fifty-eight, now publicly emerged as Home
Rulers, a new independent party with an organisation of their own.  The
Queen, for the second time, offered Gladstone a peerage.  To his
brother he wrote: removal from office will be a very great change, "for
I do not intend to assume the general functions of leader of the
Opposition, and my great ambition or design will be to spend the
remainder of my days, if it please God, in tranquillity, and at any
rate in freedom from political strife."

It was the absence of any motive for activity that galled this vigorous
old gentleman of sixty-five.  Political repose was a kind of death to
him.  The formula he found for himself was therefore this: "I deeply
desired an interval between Parliament and the grave."  Yet was it not
still possible that something might happen in that interval?  He left a
door open; he "did not formally abdicate," lest a call should come to
him to arrest "some great evil or to procure for the nation some great
good."  The bare stage, which was enough for Disraeli, was not enough
for Gladstone if there was no crusading to be done.  Moreover,
according to his private secretary, Algernon West, a "dislike of daily
confronting Mr. Disraeli" from the Opposition side was in itself enough
to explain Gladstone's withdrawal.  He once went so far as to "damn"
Disraeli in the hearing of Mr. West himself.



IV

Parties, like governments, however, have to be carried on even in times
of tranquillity, and Gladstone's decision to exist but not to lead was
awkward for everyone but himself.  It promised him freedom without
party responsibility, and it placed any nominal successor on a {156}
perch from which the first stir of returning enthusiasm in the old man
would instantly unseat him.  Even his family, perhaps, found
Gladstone's self-chosen inactivity a little disappointing and perverse.
The family attitude is hinted in his private correspondence with his
wife:


    The anti-parliamentary reaction has been stronger with me even than
    I had anticipated.  I am as far as possible from feeling the want
    of the House of Commons.  I could cheerfully go there to do a work;
    but I hope and pray to be as little there as possible except for
    such an aim....  I am convinced that the welfare of mankind does
    not now depend on the State or the world of politics; the real
    battle is being fought in the world of thought, where a deadly
    attack is being made with great tenacity of purpose over a wide
    field, upon the greatest treasure of mankind, the belief in God and
    the Gospel of Christ.



Mrs. Gladstone, like most ardent and capable women, did not welcome
even a comparatively back seat.  To leave Downing Street from time to
time was unavoidable, but to desert the scene, perhaps to deny oneself,
quite needlessly, the chance of returning when the country came to its
senses again, that surely was almost a betrayal of trust.  She ventured
to press the claims of duty, to remind him how many hopes were centred
in his power for good.  It was not, of course, for her to pretend to
know best, but her anxiety that he should do the right might excuse her
bothering him.  He was gentle but inexorable to her pressure:


    I am indeed sorry that you and I have not been able to take the
    same view of this important subject, but you know that I am acting
    on convictions very long entertained, and will, I am sure, believe
    that I have probed myself deeply, and used all the means in my
    power to get at a right conclusion.  Nay, I think that you will be
    more reconciled when I tell you that Granville did not really see
    his way either to a nominal leadership, or to making any
    arrangement by which I could, after a short time, with some
    certainty have escaped.



There were other domestic changes that could not be {157} agreeable in
themselves.  He sold the home in Carlton House Terrace where they had
lived for twenty-eight years.  He sold his Wedgwood and his collection
of china.  The move to 73 Harley Street must have seemed the abdication
of ambition, and the plea of economy always is something of a pill.


    The truth (he wrote to his wife) is that innocently and from
    special causes we have on the whole been housed better than
    according to our circumstances.  All along Carlton House Terrace I
    think you would not find anyone with less than 20,000 a year, and
    most of them with much more.



He looked round on the chance of finding other excuses for political
inaction, and paid a visit to Sir Andrew Clark.  The doctor's entirely
encouraging report on his physical condition could not be gainsaid.
There was no extenuation for him there.  His health was alarmingly
good, and his colleagues knew it.  The volcano of his energies was very
far from being extinct, and Lord Granville at least was not going to
preside, in doubtful ease, upon its precarious crust.  The real pill
was for his political lieutenants.  Was ever a man so embarrassing to
his friends?  When one was not amazed at the tasks he was attempting,
one was harassed by uncertainty over the time and place of his return.
The most neutral of the epithets that rained upon him, even from
admirers, was incalculable.  Who should bear the the burden of
representing a jack-in-the-box, temporarily indeed withdrawn from view
but liable to pop up a disconcerting head without warning at almost any
moment?

His colleagues protested that he was offering them an impossible
position, and looked anxiously at one another, but for the post of
Jonah there were no willing volunteers.  To be condemned to be hanged
is bad enough, but to be reprieved on the understanding that {158}
strangulation is postponed is almost worse.  On the other hand, if
Gladstone would neither lead nor abdicate some solid figure-head had to
be found.  After Lord Granville's refusal, the thankless office was
pressed upon Lord Hartington, whose weighty qualifications were
two-fold.  Politically he would more than "do," and personally he was
inert, a man, that is to say, who would naturally prefer to be eclipsed
whenever a force and a moment appeared impetuous enough to supersede
him.  The backwaters suited his temperament, which had little stomach
for navigating storms.  Lord Hartington afterwards became famous for
yawning in the middle of one of his own speeches, and his yawn no doubt
lent weight to the gravity for which he was admired.  He was not so
obtuse as to miss the disabilities of his proposed position, and
Gladstone had to plead and encourage before his lethargy was overcome.
There were luckily certain arguments, plausible enough in the party's
present plight, against Gladstone's leadership just now.  If the county
Liberals were dismayed at their chief's withdrawal, and if "sunshine
had gone out of politics," as the phrase went, yet there were
dissenting followers, and others who regarded Gladstone with the
distrust which somewhere or other his personality invariably aroused.
Therefore it became possible to say that another, a more stolid, leader
would be an advantage, and for the present at least Gladstone promised
not to interfere.  Occasionally he would enter the House, remain for
half an hour, say nothing, and then glide like a silent but ominous
shadow out of doors.  Disraeli was enjoying his innings; the Opposition
was powerless, but the end was not yet.  Gladstone's eye took in the
situation, and then searched the horizon.  He would be here when he was
wanted, and he would wait.  Those followers of his who had insulted and
harassed him should learn in the wilderness of their own choosing to
what {159} they and the party were reduced when the chief to whom they
owed their self-importance stepped apart.



V

Withdrawal meant no more than another field of activity.  "There is
much to be done with the pen."  Had he not always turned to literature
when nothing more like action was on hand?  To-day, in particular, he
had a call to write.  His projects he confided to his diary:


    There is much to be done with the pen, all bearing much on high and
    sacred ends, for even Homeric Study, as I view it, is in this very
    sense of high importance; and what lies beyond this is concerned
    directly with the great subject of belief.



There was the Metaphysical Society to attend, a discussion to have with
Huxley on the immortality of the soul.  Debates on such questions as
these were not, unfortunately, confined to serious thinkers.  The
heretical inferences drawn from Darwin's book were bad enough, but more
popular and more disquieting were the doubts spread by Strauss's
volumes, which did not spare the fact of the Resurrection itself.  A
challenge become so public required an equally public reply, so while
Lord Hartington was stolidly leading the shrunken Liberals in the House
of Commons, Gladstone emerged at Liverpool and created much excitement
towards the end of 1872 by an address with Strauss's latest notions for
his theme.  From the seclusion of Hawarden he descried the "strange
epidemic" that was spreading, and the "temple of peace" from which he
emerged to combat its ravages became in turn a beacon of light and hope
in the public eye.  It was a comfort to many to know that the recluse
from politics was living in no idle {160} retirement, but was aware of
all that was passing in the outer world, and that in this time of doubt
and question his intellect was grappling with the enemies of all that
true Englishmen ought to hold dear.  He was hale enough, they read in
the papers, to continue to fell trees, and, if he worked at Greek
mythology, the educated could remember that Homer was a subject for
reverent study second only to the Bible itself.

Discussions of metaphysical or abstract questions were not, however,
the natural pasture of his mind.  It was the conduct based on them, or
the practical questions that their adoption or rejection involved, that
really roused his energies.  A matter had to touch the world of
immediate politics before it was properly within his grasp.  His
political sense was considerably more subtle than his intellectual
acumen, and he was somewhat at a loss amid movements of opinion which
left nothing immediate to be done.  The Syllabus of the Principal
Errors of our Age, issued by Pius IX in 1864, had, he noticed,
challenged modern society in the entire range of its ideas.  He had
foreseen the Papal reaction that was preparing.  The fate of the Papal
States, which had been lost and won in 1850, made the Pope more
determined to reassert his spiritual supremacy.  Having already in 1854
promulgated by bull the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, the Pope
now summoned an [OE]cumenical Council, which met at Rome at the end of
1869 to consider, and eventually to approve, the dogma of Papal
Infallibility.  Liberalism in the wide sense was being attacked anew,
and surely this might raise questions of conscience among Roman
Catholics in different countries, and in some emergency might even
raise problems of statesmanship.  In January 1870 Gladstone wrote:


    For the first time in my life I shall now be obliged to talk about
    popery; for it would be a scandal to call the religion they are
    manufacturing at Rome by the same name as that of {161} Pascal, or
    of Bossuet, or of Ganganelli.  The truth is that Ultramontanism is
    an anti-social power, and never has it more undisguisedly assumed
    that character than in the Syllabus.



When the minority at Rome withdrew from the Vatican Council, and the
definition of Infallibility was proclaimed by 533 to 2, Gladstone said
that the fanaticism of the Middle Ages was more sober.  As things fell,
war between France and Prussia was declared the very day after the
dogma of Infallibility had been promulgated, and the loss of the
temporal power which it hastened was, to the Pope himself, an almost
mortal blow.  The Vatican decrees were not accepted by Dr. Dllinger,
who was excommunicated, and, no doubt encouraged by a visit to him at
Munich in 1874, Gladstone himself determined to write upon the
question, though mainly confining himself to the political problem
which, he thought, the Decrees might raise among English Romanists at
home.  The _Vatican Decrees in their bearing on Civil Allegiance: a
Political Expostulation_, appeared in the autumn of 1874.  Nearly
150,000 copies were sold, and replies were made, among others, by
Newman.  Gladstone told Lord Granville that his main idea was "to place
impediments" in the way of the "party which means to have a war in
Europe for the restoration of the temporal power."  He also felt that
"the high place assigned to liberty in the counsels of Providence" was
endangered by the Decrees, and one cannot but wonder what would have
happened to his faith had he previously become a Roman Catholic.  Would
he have joined the Old Catholics in the interests of liberalism?

In 1873 a curious incident occurred.  A movement was on foot to raise a
public memorial to John Stuart Mill, whom Gladstone, from personal
acquaintance, had once called "the saint of rationalism."  Gladstone,
invited to subscribe to this memorial, declined on the dubious ground
that people could not agree whether Mill had {162} advocated birth
control or not.  The withdrawal of his name looked very much like
condemnation, and, as Morley remarks, decided the question for the
general public.  Since Gladstone had grown accustomed to distinguish
the character of men from their opinions, and since Mill's opinion on
this matter was not clear, it was not very generous to refuse him the
benefit of the doubt.  Should this doubt have weighed in Gladstone's
mind against the claims to public gratitude of the author of the essay
on _Liberty_?  His opinion on any topical question was of great
influence in his day, which made the politician in him careful; and
authors found that their fortunes were made if he could be induced to
review their books favourably.  Young writers of both sexes continually
pestered him with requests.  He replied to all gravely and often at
length, even when he was not to be drawn by their productions.  He must
also have made the fortunes of many magazines when his essays did not
run to complete pamphlets, and is said to have received larger fees
than any other contributor.  He took a certain interest in the earnings
of his pen, and once noted with satisfaction that he had made 1,000
from his writings in the preceding twelve months.  In 1874, when
ritualism was beginning to disturb the public mind, he gave his views
in one of these magazine articles.

The matter became political when Archbishop Tait introduced in this
year his Public Worship Bill, and the Government of Disraeli offered
facilities for putting down Mass in masquerade, as that
arch-masquerader termed it.  Gladstone returned to the House of Commons
to oppose the Bill, and immediately dominated the scene.  He defended
the use of moderate ritual, and startled Sir William Harcourt by
quoting the canonist Van Espen, and citing, later in the debate,
Ayliffe's _Parergon Juris Canonici Anglicani_.  In spite of his
researches, the Bill {163} was passed, to remain a dead letter.  He
answered his critics in another article entitled _Is the Church of
England worth Preserving?_ declaring that we must preserve it more by
moral forces than by penalising measures.  It was plain to any of his
party that he could resume the leadership whenever he chose, and that
whenever he should appear he would be personally irresistible.

None the less, even in 1868, Gladstone was far from being accepted as a
full member of the family party of aristocratic big Whigs and big
Tories who still regarded government as their inherited preserve.
Their attitude of reluctant respect for his personal predominance is
well preserved in a statement recorded by Sir Algernon West, who was
Gladstone's private secretary from 1868 to 1872: "If Mr. Gladstone
thinks [a Whig magnate is quoted] that he can lead the House of Commons
with the force of the millions without the goodwill of the ten thousand
he will find his mistake."  It is still the ten thousand, now of
industrialists and financiers, who control Parliament to-day.  From the
same source we learn that Gladstone was regarded as an outsider, and,
in the words of a Yorkshire squire, as "not having been bred in their
kennel."  West adds that Gladstone's famous Budget was said by an old
Whig to be "Oxford on the surface and Liverpool below."  The great
Parliamentarian, in his virtues and weaknesses, was a typical
middle-class product, and he seemed more because the magnates of
commerce, whose social conscience was uneasy, and therefore open to
suggestion, when they had any consciences at all, were invading the
peerage and politics, and, as it happened, represented mentally upon
the throne.  Provided that Gladstone ran along accustomed paths, he was
acceptable to the oligarchy, but they foresaw a time when his following
in the country at large might lead him to make proposals that they
would be determined to resist.  It would then appear {164} what were
the inevitable limits to be imposed on all popular initiative.  New
cries were inevitable in party politics from time to time, but there
was an unwritten understanding that the old order was not to be trifled
with at bottom.  It might always become necessary to remind Gladstone
that "outsiders" were only privileged so far.  Such people, when
successful, were liable to swollen heads, and the curious fact,
remained that physically Gladstone did require a larger hat every year,
and that its present size was bigger than any worn by more than two
established political leaders.



VI

If Gladstone had wished to forget his place and stature in the public
eye, he must have found it difficult, even in moments of political
retirement, from the daily reminders that he received by post alone.
Presents, advice, applications for assistance, assurances of trust,
news that he was regarded as a saint by the family of his
correspondent, daily piled themselves upon his desk.  In his "temple of
peace" they surrounded him.  Generous in money matters, he was a miser
of his papers.  Each had to be answered, filed and docketed, and stored
away.  Even so, it was possible that sufficient had not been preserved.
Past activities were open to misunderstanding, and what could be more
valuable than the record of the chief actor himself?  He therefore
added to the papers which he stored minute and elaborate memoranda of
his own.  With an egoism disarming in its ingenuousness, he preserved,
as far as possible, a written record of every moment in his life.
Everything must be made as easy as possible for the future biographer.
The same record must extend to everyone who came in contact with him.
When his baby girl died in 1850 at the age of four, his daughter {165}
tells us that Gladstone "put on paper a record of her little life."
When his sister, who had joined the Church of Rome, died at Cologne, he
wrote a memorandum on the evidence he found of the ultimate state of
her beliefs.  Even half-sheets of blank note-paper must not be wasted;
everything must be used and everything preserved.  The acquisitive
instinct, typical of the middle class, which leads some men to amass
property, others to form collections of manuscripts, books or pictures,
led Gladstone to accumulate papers concerning himself.

No doubt the itch for activity was responsible for a good deal of his
own writing.  It explains the answer which he dispatched to every
letter, the postcards that he sent in numbers, the innumerable letters
that he wrote to newspapers on every subject, from the value of
egg-flip to important questions of the day.  But it does not explain
the value that he set upon preserving every record.  He was perhaps one
of those unfortunate creatures who are not naturally at home in the
world, and increase with pathetic ardour every tie that binds their
memory to it.  "To live always on the brink of the grave and looking
in" might, as he had once phrased it after attending a funeral, be his
ideal of human duty, but resignation was easier if one left a record of
endeavour nearly full.  He had the evangelical's passion for funerals.
They were the human ceremony that carried on human importance for a
space beyond death, and added a new memory and a new tie to the
survivors.  A funeral gave even to the humblest some public importance,
and the occasion itself could be recorded as a public event after the
grave had closed.  To preserve the memorials of life was something won
from the dark enemy of mankind, and the fuller the record the greater
chance there was for the ego to linger with posterity.  Whatever duty
or resignation might enforce him to respect, there can be no doubt
that, to a man of {166} Gladstone's immense vitality, the thought of
death must have been unusually depressing.  Taking himself with extreme
seriousness, desiring above all things to pursue some high calling, and
to make the loftiest principles apply to every act of daily life, he
was somewhere conscious of an emptiness.  What was this mysterious void
that the utmost expenditure of energy could not remove?

Activity enabled one to forget while it lasted, but however occupied
the day, there was always some pause, a pause like a precipice, when
the inner void reappeared.  No inner light, no interior assurance!  Of
that lack from the first he had complained, and not even the invariable
practice of attending church twice every Sunday had supplied it.  There
was more than this to be done.  One could lead the responses; one could
read the lessons; one could thereby play an active part.  A part?  Was
it only a part, a visible rather than an intimate self-offering?
Identification with the object of worship was his desire, and this was
mysteriously denied to him.  In its absence, or incompleteness rather,
one could only fall back upon the support of one's fellows, and receive
from them the support withheld from on high.  Perhaps such questionings
themselves were sinful, a sign of incomplete surrender of the human
will.  One could escape them only by renewed endeavour, by still more
strenuous activity, and so the old man returned to his memoranda and
his papers, to build with them a buttress against the void yawning
within.  Sometimes he would look up, through the open window, or scan
his correspondence and the newspapers for the signs of political
change.  That fellow Disraeli would be sure to make a moral blunder one
of these days.



{167}

VII

In the absence of more promising questions, Gladstone began to consider
the subject of Future Retribution.  Morality was bound up with the
prospect of a terrible wrath to come, and surely the sceptics
themselves must be aware that the foundations of morality would be
sapped if this promise of retribution were neglected.  Did Disraeli
believe in it?  One could be far from sure, and England under his
leadership would be likely to commit or countenance some enormity.  It
was well to keep an eye on foreign policy, for Disraeli was flirting
with the idea of Imperialism, and Imperialism always meant making war
upon some people "rightly struggling to be free."

Once again victims of foreign oppression at last cried out for succour,
as the prisoners at Naples had done, in a former interlude, when there
was no Englishman to heed their cry but he.  This time it was in one of
the provinces of Turkey--Turkey ever countenanced by Disraeli because
she was more complacent than Russia to the Jews.  Pogroms are not a
Mahommedan amusement.  Moreover, now in 1876, Disraeli's Government in
due course was nearing its term, and public as well as moral reasons
must be found to prevent its re-election.  This Mahommedan Power had
slipped out of the general view since the Crimean War, when England and
France combined had secured to her twenty years of undisturbed external
freedom.  The way that she had spent this interval within her borders,
her treatment of her Christian subjects, was suddenly apparent to the
world when revolt occurred in Bosnia and Herzegovina.  The rising
spread to Bulgaria, and was repressed, according to a British agent on
the spot, with a cruelty that "stained the history of the century."
The gravity and {168} horror were brought directly to the attention of
the Powers when the French and German Consuls at Salonica were murdered
by the Turkish rabble, and Serbia and Montenegro took to arms.  Eastern
politics were clearly once more a peril to Europe, and the tension did
not lessen when Russia, Austria and Germany decided to impose reforms.
The other Powers could not be neglected, and England, France and Italy
were invited to support the plan.  When Disraeli's Cabinet refused, the
Turks hoped that they might find in Great Britain support, and perhaps
arms, against Russia.

If his race led Disraeli to sympathise with the Turk against Russia and
her Jewish pogroms, Gladstone was equally drawn to the country of
Eastern Christianity.  He remembered our obligations to the subject
races in the East, as they might be inferred from the Treaty of Paris.
As a statesman he was concerned at our apparent withdrawal from the
Concert of Europe, and his compassionate nature was stirred by the
reports of the atrocities that had occurred.  They had been, perhaps
were still being, inflicted too upon our fellow-Christians.  The moral
case for protest was clearly very strong.  Yet for the moment Gladstone
did not move.  What was Lord Hartington doing?  Would not that stolid
figure move when the moment, however delayed, was ripe?  Mr. Forster,
Gladstone noticed, was alive to the emergency.  "I suffered others," he
wrote in the retrospect, "Forster in particular, to go far ahead of
me."  Meantime the British public listened to reports and to denials,
to accusations and to charges of exaggeration, with British
bewilderment.  What was it that suddenly decided Mr. Gladstone to be up
and doing?  The explanation he has left on record himself:


    I went into the country, and had mentally postponed all further
    action till the opening of the next session, when I learnt from the
    announcement of a popular meeting to be held {169} in Hyde Park
    that the question was alive.  So at once I wrote and published on
    the Bulgarian case.  From that time onward till the final
    consummation in 1879-80, I made the Eastern Question the main
    business of my life.  I acted under a strong sense of individual
    duty without a thought of leadership; none the less it made me
    again leader whether I would or no.



The sincerity of this is unquestionable.  While Mr. Forster was the
first to move, it is Gladstone's movements that are remembered.  His
sixth sense, as we have called it, for a rising tide of feeling did not
fail him.  His strong sense of individual duty was quickened to
strenuous enterprise by the popular excitement of others.  He learnt,
from a popular meeting, that the question was alive!  The born
crusader's retreat was over.  An army was offered to his leadership,
and he was the only politician who fully recognised the popular call.
His instinct swept him forward.  The personal consequences to himself,
and to his party, were not to be weighed.  He was acting as a private
individual.  If he became more, it was because he was voicing the
feelings of his countrymen.  It was not his fault to be more energetic
than his colleagues.  Any ambition that he felt was but to voice the
wishes of the people.  Of the people, not the classes, we may observe.


    The nation nobly responded to the call of justice, and recognised
    the brotherhood of man.  But it was the nation, not the classes.
    When, at the close of the session of 1876, there was the usual
    dispersion in pursuit of recreation, I thought the occasion was
    bad.  It was good, for the nation did not disperse, and the human
    heart was still beating.  When the clubs refilled in October, the
    Turkish cause began again to make head.  Then came a chequered
    period, and I do not recollect to have received much assistance
    from the Front Bench.  Even Granville had been a little startled at
    my proceedings, and wished me to leave out the "bag and baggage"
    from my pamphlet.



This phrase, that the Turks should be made to clear out of Europe, with
their pashas and their muftis, bag {170} and baggage, is the single
phrase that Gladstone contributed to everyday speech.  Few men, writers
or speakers, contribute so much as one, but a single example from
Gladstone is niggardly compared to the extent, and immediate effect, of
his oratory.  It happens, incidentally, that Touchstone was the
original coiner of it.  Shakespeare makes him say: "Come, shepherd, let
us make an honourable retreat, though not with bag and baggage."  To
have eclipsed Shakespeare in the popular authorship of a phrase is more
than has been accomplished hitherto by Bacon himself.  Disraeli, the
dandy of words, who is credited with several phrases, was very unhappy
in his attempts to pour ridicule upon Gladstone's efforts at this time.
The first reports of the atrocities, which he dismissed as coffee-house
babble, were soon confirmed, and made him look foolish as a Minister.
His foreign policy was destined to become, through Gladstone's efforts,
the issue of the next election, and Gladstone's extraordinary tenacity
never slackened for the four intervening years.  Before we follow them,
let us recall that toward the end of the session Disraeli left the
Commons to take his seat as Earl of Beaconsfield in the House of Lords.
Gladstone wrote to the Duke of Argyll:


    Disraeli is not quite such a Turk as I thought ... and his fleet is
    at Besika Bay, I feel pretty sure, to be ready to lay hold of Egypt
    as his share; so he may end as Duke of Memphis yet.



Two things were clear: Disraeli was become an Imperialist, and neither
Disraeli nor Imperialism had any moral principles to recommend them.
Both were showy and selfish; both desired glittering earthly prizes for
themselves.  The brink of the grave attracted them not.

Once convinced that the Eastern Question was "alive" in the popular
mind, Gladstone did not lose a moment of the August holiday in
preparing his account of the atrocities and writing his indictment of
the {171} Government's foreign policy.  When Front Benchers were
looking forward to the twelfth and the gun-rooms of the country houses
were busy with insensitive sportsmen, he was to be found working away
at his brief in the Reading Room of the British Museum, where he
completed the draft that he had begun to compose while in bed.  _The
Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East_ was issued without
delay, and its effect reached even sportsmen at their shooting.  Within
three or four days of publication 40,000 copies were sold, and aroused
enthusiastic indignation in many parts of the country.  On September 9
there was an enormous demonstration at Blackheath, the first of many.
It only remained for Gladstone to fan the congenial flames.  He was
again the hero of the crowd, which anxiously awaited him to appear in
person on the platform.

In October he began to find an improvised platform wherever he was
recognised in public.  At Hawarden itself, where so many pilgrims came
to hear him read the lessons that in time they threatened to oust the
parishioners from the church, or in the park where he might be seen
felling a tree and perchance a chip be borne away by the daring
visitor, Gladstone was scarcely safe.  In October he started to pay
some country visits to "escape a little from the turmoil of our time."

The experiment proved a revelation.


    Through Cheshire and Lancashire (he wrote) we accomplished the
    first stage of our journey to Derby without any particular
    indication of public sentiment; and this rather encouraged our
    extending a little the circle of our visits, which I am now
    half-tempted to regret.  For at every part I have had the greatest
    difficulty in maintaining any show of privacy, and avoiding stray
    manifestations.  I never saw such keen exhibitions of the popular
    feeling, appearing so to pervade all ranks and places.  A Tory
    county Member said to my wife two days ago, "if there were a
    dissolution now, I should not get a vote."  This may be in some
    degree peculiar to the Northerners with their strong character and
    deep emotions.


{172} That character was Gladstone's own, and the eager crowds
recognised their spokesman, the man who could present public matters to
them in their own way, with solemn earnestness, moral appeal, and
emotional fervour, above all in a style approaching an eloquent sermon.
To them, as to his kindred, he was inevitably drawn.  Disraeli's wit
and sarcasm might be well enough at sophisticated Westminster, where
audiences met in the hope of being amused over affairs, but half the
country preferred edification to amusement, and did not like grave
public questions to be treated, still less to be dismissed, in a
flippant way.  We have already heard the opinion of the upper ten
thousand upon him.  Here is Gladstone's experience of them, as he put
it in a letter to that curious bird of passage, believed to be a
private emissary of the Tsar, Madame Novikoff:


    From this body (the upper ten thousand) there has never on any
    occasion within my memory proceeded the impulse that has prompted,
    and finally achieved, any of the great measures which in the last
    half-century have contributed so much to the fame and happiness of
    England.


Lord Hartington might be as English as an oak, and as steady as the
bench on which he sank, but neither he nor Lord Granville had ever
initiated anything: favourable specimens these, and trustworthy, of
course, but not inspiring.  To be dull and reliable at the same time is
the English taste in public men.  If Gladstone was too vital to be
dull, he was too imposing to be lively.  He was the epitome of all that
was serious in the middle class.  The combination of their attitude
with his physical qualities was irresistible.

Towards the end of October he returned to Hawarden, where Tennyson soon
joined him.  The poet read _Harold_, which occupied over two hours.
They discussed theology, but on the important question of retribution
the poet did not display much "spontaneous thought." {173} Gladstone
then turned again to the Eastern Question in a further pamphlet.  He
expected some reply from Disraeli, and at the Lord Mayor's banquet it
was made.  In some generalised remarks the Prime Minister "uttered a
hardly veiled threat to Russia," which Gladstone explained by his
"Judaic feeling, in which he is both consistent and conscientious."
This threat was not allowed to pass without protest, and a meeting of
all the eminent was called at St. James's Hall to make any declaration
of war impossible.  Gladstone, of course, attended, and must have
recorded the impression of his hearers when he described the
demonstration as "great, noble, and almost historical."  His
qualification would out even here!  Soon afterwards the Foreign Office
proposed a Conference at Constantinople, but it broke up with the
refusal of the Turks to the demands.

Clearly the agitation must be kept alive, for Disraeli's Government had
no real heart in the business.  How could they, if they had no moral
principles themselves?  Gladstone therefore produced yet another
pamphlet under the title of _Lessons in Massacre_, but the sale was
disappointing, not more than seven thousand.  Plainly his efforts were
indispensable, but it was possible that he had accomplished enough, if
far from all that he had hoped.  He could say that the Concert had been
restored, and, having been roused so far, the Government could hardly
go back.  How Gladstone appeared to the more educated of his admirers
is revealed in a passage that Morley quotes from the letters of J. R.
Green:


    The aspirations of nationalities after freedom and independence are
    real political forces; and it is just because Gladstone owns them
    as forces, and Disraeli disowns them, that the one has been on the
    right side and the other in the wrong in parallel questions such as
    the upbuilding of Germany or Italy.  I think it will be so in this
    upbuilding of the Sclav.



{174}

The delighted historian met his hero, and found "a modesty that touched
us more than all his power."  He met Darwin and Huxley in the autumn,
and their comments have survived.  Darwin found it wonderful that so
great a man should visit him.  Huxley said that "if you put Gladstone
in the middle of a moor, with nothing in the world but his shirt, you
could not prevent him from becoming anything he liked."  So far, he had
shaken the Government's popularity, and forced their foreign policy
into the public gaze.  Thus ended the first round after his partial
return to politics.



VIII

When Russia declared war on Turkey in the spring of 1877, it was
evident that any pretence of official indifference was at an end.
Excitement at last invaded Westminster; the question was alive, even
there.  Lord Hartington's strength could be no longer to sit still.
Those who wished to do so and those who did not threatened to split the
Liberal Party between them.  Such a split had been not improbable from
the first.  That at least could not be called Gladstone's doing, but he
increased embarrassment in his party by giving notice of resolutions
without delay.  The letters of approval that he received were not
arriving from politicians.  He felt his political loneliness, but he
would not fail the populace without.  Three days after war was
declared, that is to say, on April 27th, Gladstone's mind was made up:


    This day I took my decision, a severe one, in face of my not having
    a single approver in the upper official circle.  But had I in the
    first days of September asked the same body whether I ought to
    write my pamphlet, I believe the unanimous answer would have been
    No.


{175} In a House both impatient and hostile, for there were several
preliminary skirmishes, he rose at length, and his diary is terser than
usual:


    For over two hours I was assaulted from every quarter except the
    Opposition bench, which was virtually silent.  Such a sense of
    solitary struggle I never remember.  At last I rose on the main
    question nearly in despair as to the result, but resolved not to
    fail through want of effort.  I spoke two and a half hours, voice
    lasting well.  House subsequently came round, and at last was more
    than good.


Lord Balfour has called this speech unequalled in parliamentary
courage, skill, endurance and eloquence, and another listener declared
that at its close Gladstone looked like "an inspired man."  One of the
most admired passages ran as follows:


    There is now before the world a glorious prize.  A portion of those
    unhappy people are still as yet making an effort to retrieve what
    they have lost so long but have not ceased to love and desire.  I
    speak of those in Bosnia and Herzegovina.  Another portion--a band
    of heroes such as the world has rarely seen--stand on the rocks of
    Montenegro, and are ready now, as they have ever been during the
    four hundred years of their exile from their fertile plains, to
    sweep down from their fastnesses and meet the Turks at any odds for
    the re-establishment of justice and of peace in those countries....
    It is not yet too late, I say, to become competitors for that
    prize; but be assured that whether you mean to claim for yourselves
    even a single leaf in that immortal chaplet of renown; which will
    be the reward of true labour in that cause; or whether you turn
    your backs upon your duty, I believe, for one, that the knell of
    Turkish tyranny in these provinces has sounded.



Look for a moment at the last sentence.  It is seven lines long, and if
one reads it sympathetically, one can hear the orator pausing to take
breath.  Put yourself beside him in imagination, and you will
understand that, to those of his listeners critical enough to study the
speaker's technique, one of the pleasures of listening to {176}
Gladstone was to observe the resolution of sentences filled with
relative clauses and alternative propositions such as these.  By this
time, with his long practice, the coils seemed to unravel themselves of
their own volition, and the anticipated knot never occurred.  Behind it
all was the force of a man simple-minded enough to believe the truth of
what he said, and that is necessarily a rare simplicity in the House of
Commons.  On this occasion, in a full House, Gladstone's resolutions
were defeated by no more than 131.  The second round was finished, but
the forces of time, on which he generally relied, were marshalling
under his direction, if he could prevent them from dispersing before
the next election arrived.

Beaten in Parliament, therefore, Gladstone returned to the platform to
hold the Government up to odium in the provinces.  It was never very
difficult to coax him to speak, and the pilgrims now flocking to
Hawarden would sometimes bring an axe with them.  The old gentleman in
his shirt-sleeves in the park could not accept the present without a
few words of thanks in return.  If so, the burning theme would issue,
even in a few words, with the result that more pilgrims were encouraged
in the hope of further speeches.  His enthusiasm, at first infectious,
began to take even his admirers' breath away.  The pilgrims and their
reception became a regular chronicle in the newspapers.  A new
spectacle was added to English life, and, like most spectacles of the
kind, it threatened to become a bore to cooler people.  Was the man's
whole existence, they asked, to be lived in a blaze of publicity?
Could he not even go to church without attracting a crowd?  Was his
reading of the lessons to become one of the sights of England?  As a
hostile politician put it:


    There appear continually in the newspapers announcements with which
    the public have been for years familiar, to the effect that Mr.
    Gladstone went to "early morning {177} communion," that he "read
    the lessons" in a clear (or husky) voice, and that he made a point
    of walking to the church through the snow or rain.


After the felling of a tree, says the same writer, "chips were
sometimes served round by Mr. Herbert Gladstone."  It was certainly an
extraordinary atmosphere, more congenial to American notions than to
ours.  Reuter must have retained a correspondent at Hawarden, if Mr.
Gladstone's private devotions were "news items" of public interest.  If
not, how did they reach the newspapers?  If it is not suggested that
Gladstone sent them himself, it is also not suggested that he
discouraged them.  There are characters which thrive on boundless
exhibition; not deep, not reflective, naturally ambitious, and not
always without a sense of humour: actors and actresses, popular
preachers, dandies like Disraeli, wits like Wilde.  All these enjoy the
display of their persons, the gaze of the multitude, the paragraph in
print.  The exhibitionist is of many kinds.  From the physically
indecent to the egotistically vain, they take pleasure in making a
spectacle of themselves.  The latter, whose emotions may lead him to
confess his sins at revival meetings, or to publish his doubts or
scruples to the world, often takes himself extremely seriously, and
believes in lofty reasons for his acts.  He may set up as an example or
a warning.  He may need the countenance of others to maintain belief in
himself: his sincerest moments, his very inner life, may only be lived
upon the platform.  What privacy and "recollection" are to others,
publicity may give to him.  With the obvious exception of the man who
is locked up, most of these elements contributed to Gladstone's ardent
character.

The less inner light a vital being has, the more necessary will the
countenance of outer illumination be to him.  If he is a simple-minded
person as well, it will hardly occur to him that his behaviour seems
incongruous {178} to other people.  He will argue, with pained
surprise, that his is a good example, that the possibility of a crowd
of strangers does not free a man from the duty of going to church; and
when you tell him that the example can not be separated from its
surroundings, that literal rightness is never the criterion of good
taste, he will be puzzled, for his instinct is for public prayers, even
if confined to the family prayers in his own dining-room.  His belief
in communal activity is as far as he can reach by experience towards
the Communion of Saints.  Yet those whom we think of as having attained
to that mystery have been the solitaries of religion, and the lonely
voices of poetry.  That Gladstone was never for a moment idle shows
that the communion of contemplation was not possible for him.  He was
busy like Martha, and like Martha much troubled whenever he had to sit
still.  The bounds to his spiritual perception were as rigid as his
energies were full.  The energies provided a public spectacle.  The
limits prevented him from seeing that he was beginning to appear
absurd.  Had there been no display of public impatience, Gladstone
would not have been aware of anything excessive in all this.

After a sea-trip in one of Sir Donald Currie's steamers from London to
Dartmouth in July, and an Irish visit strictly confined to the Pale in
October, he experienced the fickleness of popularity.  In January 1878
the Russians reached the Sea of Marmora, entered Adrianople, and
created nervous excitement in England.  As the British fleet passed the
Dardanelles, jingoism raised its ugly head, and the apostle of a
righteous foreign policy became vulgarly transformed into an unpopular
pacifist.  An excited crowd made its way into Harley Street, broke
windows, and was only dispersed with the aid of two lines of mounted
police.  Gladstone remained unmoved in his opposition to a {179} war.
On the brink of hostilities, the fleet was halted, and a truce was
granted at Adrianople which led to the Treaty of San Stefano.  Turkey
recognised the independence of Montenegro, Serbia and Roumania, and
Bulgaria became a tributary Principality with a national militia and a
Christian government.  The European interests involved in these and
other changes, notably the plan whereby Russia received Bessarabia in
exchange, were admittedly to be settled by a European Conference, which
met at Berlin, from which Disraeli returned bringing "peace with
honour."  He did not accomplish this until he had called out the
reserves, brought troops from India, and, by one of many arrangements,
had taken over the island of Cyprus on the understanding that we would
protect Turkey from Russian aggression in Asia.  So far as Turkey in
Europe was concerned, she had virtually been made to quit it "bag and
baggage" after all.

Gladstone did not at all approve of the tortuous arrangements by which
this had been brought about, and regarded our acquisition of Cyprus as
the real object of the negotiations: a sop to Imperialist opinion, he
might have said, not differing much, in appearance, from the sop of the
abolished income tax which he had offered to the electors on the eve of
his party's defeat.  We undertook, he said, vast and indeterminate
obligations to Turkey in return for a territorial bribe, and the whole
thing was damaging to our reputation for justice in Europe.  The
arrangement was an "insane convention," bad in itself and in morality,
a criticism which led Disraeli to refer to "a sophistical rhetorician,
inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity."  In the popular
mind Cyprus wiped away the "humiliation" of Geneva, and an island in
the hand was worth any peaceful arbitration.  As soon as the House
rose, Gladstone wrote on _England's Mission_, and on other {180} more
or less kindred themes.  Such papers and addresses fill the _Gleanings
from Past Years_, which he first now collected from periodicals.  His
autumn was comparatively studious.  He worked at his _Homeric Primer_;
he started to rearrange his books, and found seven hundred volumes of
poetry among them.


    [He] read Maud once more, and aided by Doyle's criticism wrote my
    note of apology and partial retractation.  The fact is that I am
    wanting in that higher poetical sense which distinguishes the true
    artist.



The first and favourite of Millais' three portraits of Gladstone was
painted during the summer of 1879, and Gladstone left a note upon it:


    It was at his own suggestion, and for his own account, that he
    undertook to paint me, while I rather undertook to dissuade him
    from wasting his labour in an unpromising subject.



Convention demands that no Englishman should seem anxious to have his
portrait painted, yet few gifts are more popular than a presentation
portrait.  No man can profess to judge whether or no his face is
promising artistically, and there is no disgrace to feel curious about
the obvious feature that we never see.  Gladstone was conventional in
assuming reluctance, and equally conventional in sitting after all.  If
the second part of the convention is human and natural, the first part
is deemed meritorious.  In whatever age convention was nearer to human
feeling Gladstone would have appeared more sympathetic than in his day.
It is when he is least decorous, in his sudden enthusiasms, his ardent
oratory, his willingness to be human with the outcasts of the street,
the egoism that leavened his display of recreation and devotion, that
he becomes most nearly a man among men.  In many respects he was an
animated mask, a man who wished, without question, to be the embodiment
of everything considered correct.  Luckily he was {181} too explosive a
creature to become entirely what he desired, and the explosiveness that
disconcerted his contemporaries, not the formality in which this was
disguised, is the vital quality in his character.  Nothing so ardent
has ever been subdued to such a generalised shape, and how the new wine
contrived to lie contented in the old bottle is the paradox of his
queer personality.

His political view of his own nature, and his opinion of the state of
affairs at Westminster, are contained in two comments that he made at
the time.  When Ruskin visited Hawarden in the autumn of 1878,
Gladstone denied that he was "a leveller," and declared: "I am a firm
believer in the aristocratic principle--the rule of the best.  I am an
out-and-out inequalitarian," a statement which made Ruskin laugh.  Yet,
if the best be procurable under a system of universal suffrage,
Gladstone was right about himself; and who doubted the sufficiency of
the system since John Stuart Mill had expressly stated, in his famous
essay on the subject, that "from accumulated considerations ... it
follows that the ideal type of a perfect government must be
representative."  After studying the syllogism that led up to this
conclusion, there was plainly nothing more to be said.  Representative
government implied representative institutions, and the time had hardly
arrived to inquire whether in huge constituencies, electing by bare
majorities, the representative machinery does not defeat itself.  We
now know that the larger the community and the wider the electorate, of
less use is a vote to anyone.  Men gave the vote to women after they
had proved it valueless to themselves.  The advocates of proportional
representation or the second ballot will probably be indulged
eventually, but it still remains doubtful whether any system of voting
can be devised really representative of large communities, or with more
than nominal value as an index of popular consent.  How far, in the
autumn {182} of 1878, this consent was still with Disraeli became
uncertain to the wary watcher in Wales.  Madame Novikoff received a
letter which revealed Gladstone's preoccupation with the morrow:


    My opinion is that this Government is hastening to its doom....  It
    is not to be desired that this take place at once.  The people want
    a little more experience of Beaconsfield toryism.




IX

Five years had gone by, and the approach of the elections was
foreshadowed in an invitation which Gladstone received to stand for
Midlothian, the metropolitan county of Scotland.  It was a timely call,
for he had already decided not to offer himself to his constituents at
Greenwich again.  By this time publicity had attended him so long that
his halo threatened to become a ring about his neck.  If he could not
go to church as a private citizen, or walk unobserved in his own park,
any public decision of his became a matter for inflated discussion.  To
accept the invitation from Midlothian was, therefore, received by
opponents as "a monstrous piece of vanity," and by his admirers as the
timely return of the hero to his native heath.  What message should he
bring upon his lips?  To pulverise the Government was not enough.  Some
glimpse must be added of a Liberal promised land.

The wily old politician was in no doubt what tactics to pursue, or how
the enemy would attempt to evade his condemnation: as he wrote to Lord
Granville:


    For several reasons I should believe that they intend sailing on
    the quiet tack.  Having proved their spirit, they will now prove
    their moderation.  In other words, they want all the past
    proceedings to be in the main "Stale fish" at the elections.
    Except financial shuffling they will very likely {183} commit no
    new enormity before the election.  In my view that means that they
    will not supply any new matter of such severe condemnation as what
    they have already furnished.  Therefore my idea is that we should
    keep the old alive and warm.



He would forget nothing; the whole displeasing record was itching at
his fingers' ends.  After five years, discontent and blunders there
were bound to be, and he would remind the public of the excellent
reasons they had for their vague petulance.  With this invigorating
object he left Liverpool on November 24, 1879, accompanied by his wife
and daughter.  If the attention that he had aroused from the beacon
light of Hawarden had been misinterpreted, the enormous effect of his
personality should now be put in train.  The numbers that had flocked
to collect chips from his axe, and to hear him at the lectern, argued
that he would be waylaid as soon as he emerged to public view.  If this
prospect could not be hidden from his mind, even he must have been
startled by its inadequacy.  Hardly had he left his home when, in his
own words, a triumphal procession began.  The country was amazed at a
spectacle such as England had never seen before.  Not a monarch, not a
preacher, not a heroine, not a saint, had evoked anything resembling
Gladstone's popular reception.

Meanwhile another pilgrim, Charles Stewart Parnell, who had been
elected Member for Meath in 1876 and had sat for two years a silent
observer of parliamentary procedure, was on his way to America, where
his task was as difficult and his reception by the Clan-na-Gael as
dubious as Gladstone's was secure.  Yet in two months he had achieved
his object, and, hating the public platform and the making of speeches,
Parnell visited a city a day, was invited to address Congress and
reported that "the enthusiasm increases ... military guards and salvoes
of artillery salute our coming."  The man who {184} said "I hate public
assemblies, I dislike crowds," was preparing to meet the happy pilgrim
through Midlothian.  The astonishing diary of the latter is what we
have to follow here.  If one factor can be distinguished from another
in the whole pageant, then the memory of Gladstone's own speeches is
less remarkable than the enthusiasm which his presence aroused.

When the train paused at Carlisle, public addresses were presented, and
the pilgrim made his first speech.  Another opportunity occurred at
Hawick, and a third at Galashiels.  To the crowd that had collected,
sometimes after long journeys on foot from remote hamlets and distant
towns, he began to state his case against Disraeli's Government.  They
must not suppose that he was moved to this indictment by a measure or
two, however open to objection; it was a system of unrighteous
government that the election would sustain or condemn.  To himself it
did not occur that the natural person to raise the issue would be the
leader of the Liberal party, which he still refused to be officially.
In his own mysterious eye he was but an individual who, having
recognised the popular feeling against the Bulgarian atrocities, was
now continuing the protest against a government whose indifference to
them had corresponded with an unrighteous foreign policy in Egypt,
Afghanistan and South Africa.  No wonder politicians, even among
Liberal ranks, were exasperated at his spectacular proceedings.  Here
was a venerable man who would not lead his party, but was quite willing
to make leadership impossible for anyone else; an incalculable fountain
of activity owing no allegiance beyond the capricious enthusiasm of his
own mind.  Whatever his motive might be, no sooner did he start on one
of his progresses than Parliament was eclipsed; and the centre of
debate upon public affairs was transferred to railway stations and
public halls, where the enthusiasm was the {185} more dangerous because
it could lead to nothing but the embarrassment of the elected
representatives of the nation.  Whatever else this extraordinary being
might accomplish, his personal ascendancy grew from day to day.

The three speeches that he had delivered during his journey of nine
hours to Edinburgh were but the prelude to the demonstration that
greeted him at night.  The impressive space of Princes Street was
crammed with a vast multitude, recruited then or during the ensuing
fortnight by pilgrims from the Hebrides and the loneliest corners of
Scotland.  It seemed as if a displacement of population were taking
place, and that Dalmeny, where he lodged, was become the Mecca of
multitudes.  At the end of his journey, unaffected by fatigue, he wrote
in his diary: "I have never gone through a more extraordinary day."

He had been seen but not heard by this throng, and it was chiefly to
hear him that they had journeyed.  The question then arose, what hall
was vast enough to accommodate a city? and it proved unanswerable.  A
building designed to hold six thousand received forty thousand
applications for admission.  All that could be done was for Mr.
Gladstone to speak in as many places as possible, with intervals only
for his conveyance and for meals.  The energy that he retained on the
eve of his seventieth birthday proved equal to this task, and his voice
was no less reliable.  Indeed an irreverent person declared that its
endurance was "a danger to the commonwealth."  The record of a single
day must suffice to indicate his occupations.  On December 5th he began
with a breakfast party.  After this he retired to make notes for the
inaugural Address which, as Lord Rector of Glasgow University, he was
to deliver at midday.  At the ensuing luncheon he spoke again, and the
function lasted till four.  Before six he reappeared {186} and made a
political speech to six thousand.  The speech lasted for an hour and a
half.  This done, he went off to dine before arriving at the City Hall,
where an immense audience was assembled to hear him.  He calls this,
however, "an overpowering day."  The students he delighted with an
academic discourse, the merchants in the Corn Exchange with "formidable
statistics," the mass of his hearers with a political exhortation, to
which an added piquancy was given by thrusts at a well-known antagonist
easily recognised but scarcely named.

Only one of these speeches is now resurrected, that delivered at
Edinburgh the day after he had set forth, at the opening of the
Midlothian campaign.  To say that it does not survive the test of
reading is, with an important qualification, to admit the quality of
his homilies.  To his presence, his voice, his transparent fervour, he
now added the impressiveness of age, of years too passed almost
uninterruptedly under the eyes of his fellow-countrymen.  They came
desiring to be impressed, and Gladstone represented to them everything
that was impressive: his mien, his manner, his sentiments, his
experience, his position, his vocation for public affairs, his
education, his wealth.  His personal power of emphasising all this by
his beautiful voice and personal vigour was an entrancing spectacle
which made no unexpected demand upon his hearers, but was rather an
idealised image of themselves.  There was no reason, in the nature of
things, save that he was pre-eminent in qualities common to the whole
middle class, why each man among them should not achieve similar
eminence.  The bare sight of him was a flattery to his audience, for he
was the realisation of all that they held in esteem, the living proof
that their ideal was not only majestic but obtainable.  Whose
sentiments were more lofty, whose career more successful, whose
capacity better proved, whose fame, even beyond our shores, more
undeniable?  {187} Beside being an effective statesman, he was
understood to be a man of thought also, and his thoughts and feelings
and prejudices conflicted at no vital point with theirs.  Such
advantages as he had had in youth were not those of a privileged class
as privilege had been understood hitherto.  If he had enjoyed the best
education, he had made the most of it, and had won the highest honours
at the University.  Since he became a man he had made his own way.
That was a fact which they richly appreciated.  It kept him, even when
he had become their Prime Minister, one of themselves, and their world
was one in which a man who did not make his own way was punished by
failure, perhaps by the workhouse.  Commercial competition knows no
mercy.  It was a strife in which self-reliance and industry were the
only ultimate securities in the welter of effort, which balanced the
gross gains of success by the chance of bankruptcy.

The attitude to life that this social confusion engendered had already
produced, if late in the day, its written gospel a quarter of a century
before.  Then another north countryman, Samuel Smiles, had published
his _Self-Help_, a book more successful even than George Eliot's
novels.  It thus became the first of a series of evangels on Character,
Thrift, Duty, and the lives of eminent industrialists in whom these
virtues were to be found.  The Gladstones had been magnates of
Liverpool, and had produced a son who brought these desirable qualities
into the exalted field of politics.  Now this industrial world was
still so new to human experience that it had no intellectual or humane
traditions either in theory or in civic life.  It was, and remains, to
put it mildly, an entirely secular existence.  All energy was absorbed
in the struggle for material success, and such emotional needs as were
left unexhausted turned for satisfaction to civic banquets, chapel or
church.  The latter alone had survived from the humaner society that
{188} had perished.  They were, however, like an organism which has
lost the use of its limbs.  The industrial world acknowledged on
Sundays, at places of worship, the graces that attend a more abundant
life than it lived during the rest of the week; but the contradiction
between the moral theory and the moral practice was a fact, and a fact,
to those who paused to remark it, that seemed inevitable, and even
salutary, to the successful.  The effect of this contradiction
paralysed such reflective power as remained unabsorbed by business in
Gladstone's hearers.  Their critical faculty was blunted by it.  Facts
stared them in the face, and the facts were overwhelming.  Consequently
ideas dwindled to the pale reflections of themselves in such copy-book
maxims or sentiments from hymns as might not irk the active life, in
competition with one's fellows, which was the imperious reality of
existence.  Self-help, character, duty, the whole activity of conduct,
at last was coming to monopolise their limited capacity for reflection,
criticism, thought.

All these ideals Gladstone accepted and exemplified.  Religion had
shrunk for many to expression of faith in a Book, a Book about which
active inquiry was unseemly; and more than respectful attention to it
when read aloud by an appointed person at an appointed time was in
doubtful taste.  With this for their intellectual background, his
public audiences met to hear Gladstone, assured of the fare that he
would offer them, and they were never disappointed.  Public affairs,
the public platform, when such a man was the speaker, had all the
dignity of a pulpit with the added interest of a sermon on affairs.
Politics, being the most exalted form of public struggle, was the
revered sphere of conduct in the minds of men for whom struggle was the
necessity and fulfilment of life.  To be pre-eminent in this was to
become their hero, their own hero in a sense which an {189}
aristocratic Prime Minister, for all his wonder, could never be.  In
other words, the eloquence of Gladstone could hardly have enthralled
vast audiences so completely if its substance had been capable of
surviving.  A critical or original strain in it would have disturbed
their attention.  This desired to be soothed by the superlative echo of
itself.  He was the greatest common measure of their intelligence, and
the highest multiple of their vitality.  A style less impersonal than
his own would have been as disturbing as an individual note in a
leading article.  The editorial "we" flatters the newspaper-reader,
because he is exalted by a plural which is the imaginary multiplication
of a narrow self.  If we care to consider Gladstone's writings, we
shall find that, from his earliest days, and before he became a
practised orator, the plural style and the literal sentiment were
instinctively his.  He remains a dull orator on paper, because the
wonderful voice, and its topical message, were, from the beginning, the
superlative echo of the crowd.  Apart from his voice, the individuality
of his speeches resided in the unique power of a single man to embrace
and give back of his own volition the sentiments and energies of a
multitude.  The generalisation was consummated in an individual.  The
rule thus issued with the wonder of a perfect representation, and, the
voice apart, nothing but his representativeness is astonishing in his
words.  Gladstone was an extraordinary being because he was the
consummate expression of his type and age.  A living Average Man would
be inconceivable, as an entity, were it not the prodigy of Gladstone to
have made the abstraction a single and expansive fact.

A being so vital but so generalised carried all before him through his
overwhelming fortnight in Midlothian, which ended, literally for once,
in a regal departure from Glasgow.  This was on December 8, 1879, and
three {190} weeks later, on the evening before his birthday, he looks
back on his career:


    And now I am writing in the last minutes of the seventh decade of
    my life.  This closing is a great event....  For the last three and
    a half years I have been passing thro' a political experience which
    is, I believe, without example in Parliamentary history.  I profess
    to believe it has been an occasion when the battle to be fought was
    a battle of justice, honour, freedom, law, all in their first
    elements from the very root, and all on a gigantic scale.  The word
    spoken was a word for millions, and for millions who themselves
    cannot speak.  If I really believe in this, then I should regard my
    having been morally forced into this work as a great and high
    election of God.  And certainly I cannot but believe that He has
    given me special gifts of strength on the late occasion, especially
    in Scotland.  Three things I would ask of God over and above all
    the bounty which surrounds me.

    This first, that I may escape into retirement.

    This second, that I may speedily be enabled to divest myself of
    everything resembling wealth.

    And the third--if I may--that when God calls me He may call me
    speedily.  To die in church appears to be a great euthanasia, but
    not at a time to disturb the worshippers.



He goes on, "such are some of an old man's thoughts, in whom there is
still something that consents not to be old."  How touchingly sincere
he was!  How very little he understood himself!  But how poor too would
be an interpretation that sees no more than the irony of the contrast.
If this page from the diary of his age be compared with the enormous
letter that he wrote to his father from Oxford, the letter in which he
pleaded to be allowed to answer the call of the Church and be ordained,
we observe a remarkable similarity.  The old man, for all his
experience and intense desire to see aright, knows himself no better
than before.  There is the same excellent intention, the same ardour,
the same egoism, the same humble-mindedness, the same curious ignorance
of himself; for death as in life the same desire for a public
connection with the Church.  To die in {191} church is a public act,
even if one dies in an interval between the services, and to die there
is an euthanasia, because one dies in a sacred building with,
therefore, such exterior support as the surroundings of an official
institution may afford.  Almost everyone desires to die at home; but
was not an august public building the spiritual home of him who had
confessed on the verge of manhood that, in himself, he was "utterly
blind"?  The wish that he might "escape into retirement" is a curious
wish to crown the end of a triumphal campaign for turning the existing
Government out of office.  But he had a departmental mind; each of his
moods absorbed him severally.  If the promise of Midlothian were
fulfilled, it would force, by his efforts of yesterday, the political
leadership upon himself.  The wish that he be "speedily enabled to
divest himself of everything resembling worldly wealth," understandable
in so far that he had already made over Hawarden Castle to his son
subject to his wife's occupation during life, is a way of verbally
reconciling the Christian monastic ideal with the use and enjoyment of
a background necessary to the public work that called him.  It is
possible enough that he had no passion for accumulating other property
except papers referring to himself, yet he could not be both poor and
political.  He did not die a poor man.  These papers themselves were so
multitudinous that in the very year beginning after the above words
were written, he added to Hawarden a special fire-proof, octagon room
to lodge them in permanent safety.

This was the celebrated Octagon, built at the north-west corner of his
"temple of peace."  He estimated, Morley tells us, the "selected
letters" addressed to himself at 60,000, and, his official biographer
goes on, "the rest, with his copies of his own to other people, run to
several tens of thousands more."  Poor Morley's comment was: "probably
no single human being ever {192} received 60,000 letters worth keeping,
and of these it is safe to say that three-quarters of them might as
well have been destroyed as soon as read, including a certain portion
that might just as well have been neither written nor read."  Besides
this accumulated correspondence there were Gladstone's own innumerable
and lengthy memoranda, covering the smallest as the major doings of his
and his family's life.  Morley estimates that a quarter of a million
papers passed his hands, a mass almost impossible for one biographer to
have digested.  Now this was the species of property that Gladstone
particularly prized, and it did not occur to him that the vanity of
human possessions is nowhere more ostensible.  It was indeed that
vanity, using the word in its various shades of meaning, for which he
prized them: they were the most personal, and the most public, property
he possessed.  The vaster the surviving evidence of his activity, the
greater the hope of filling the void round which his ego revolved.  His
copious flow of act and word resembled a whirlpool in which the greater
the flow of water the hollower is the centre of its circle.  That inner
void which distinguished him from his fellows he was desperately
anxious to fill, but by the very law of its nature the more energy a
whirlpool expends the more rounded is its inner emptiness.  The
insufficiency of good works and of activity to satisfy the soul which
is not content with natural existence, is exquisitely indicated by
Gladstone's character.  The more he did, the less satisfied he was, and
he had not Florence Nightingale's occasional glimpses of the richness
of passivity and contemplation.  In the theological classification,
where a mine of psychological truths is to be found, Gladstone was
neither a once- nor twice-born man.  He was spiritually a perhapser.
To borrow an admirable paradox, he was "an egoist without an ego."  He
resembled a circle of immense activity without a centre.  The more
{193} he strained to discover that centre, for a vacancy is contrary to
nature, the wider his circumference grew.  He was a centrifugal force
passionately desirous of reversing a tendency the true direction of
which he felt but never understood.  This was the pathos of his
position, that he was drawn to dominate others because he could not
fill his inner self.  The more he tried to serve them, the greater his
predominance became, and without belittling his achievements it is
nevertheless true that he accomplished nothing comparable for human
wonder to the pinnacle that he personally reached.  At one moment he
thought that God had blessed his efforts, at another he was amazed by
his prestige.  The certainty that he could not find was the peace of
knowing God to be within him.  The desire, but not the Comforter, was
in his heart.



X

On his return from Midlothian, however, he was not given much time for
reflection, but was soon writing to his son:


    They are beginning to ask who is to succeed if Beaconsfield is
    displaced.  Voices are coming up here and there, some of them very
    confident, that the people will call for me.  Nothing, however, but
    a very general and nearly unanimous call from the Liberals, with
    the approbation of a sort of national will, could bring this demand
    to a form in which it could or ought to be obeyed.  The reasons
    against my coming forward are of immense force; those against my
    indicating any shadow of desire or willingness to come forward are
    conclusive.



While he must have known himself the indispensable alternative to
Disraeli, he had admitted when he went into "retirement" that he had
not an easy course to steer.  At the same time he was anxious to be
completely fair to Hartington and to Granville.  The real embarrassment
remained with them.  He left on careful {194} record his determination
to respect their nominal leadership of the party.  Would the rank and
file and the populace insist on Gladstone's return to power?  The
answer seemed obvious, but Granville and Hartington were to be the
judges.  It would be easy here again to argue that Gladstone had, from
whatever motives or none, man[oe]uvred them into a position which gave
the predominance to himself.  His verbal respect was perfect, but what
had his activities been?  His private conduct here resembled the
qualifications that accompanied his statements; his activities the
Statements themselves.  To those who would justify him the evidence is
ready, but so is the evidence of his previous acts.  The decisive fact,
which governs both, however, is that he had not taken the field over
Bulgaria or scoured Midlothian only from personal ambition or from
motives of personal aggrandisement.  The latter was the effect rather
than the cause of his campaigns.  If he must be charged with
selfishness, which is not the same as self-seeking, the charge would
lie against his withdrawal.  It would rest on his refusal to bear the
burden of Opposition, to meet Disraeli from the inferior side, and to
continue in spite of some disaffection of his party.  These decisions
can hardly be defended on impersonal grounds.  His return can, even if
the opportunity to do so with _rclame_ was the reward of his previous
tactics.  The weakness that leads most men to shrink from great
responsibility led Gladstone to shrink from the disagreeable burden of
party leadership, below Disraeli, in the House of Commons.  Without the
assurance of active sympathy beyond or within his party the horrid
inner void tormented him, and he could escape it only by activity, and
in company with supporters not for the moment available.  The
countenance of others was a necessity for his nature, and his weakness
was betrayed whenever this was denied.

{195}

A thankless task to Gladstone was one which did not promise deferred
popular support, so he had turned his back on the Commons, and left
Hartington and Granville to keep the disunited Liberals together as
well as they could.  He knew very well that they received thereby a
claim to scrupulous consideration, though a finer scrupulosity, a
richer nature, might have preferred to spare them the thanklessness
rather than to defer to a nominal leadership that his recent activities
had made it impossible for them to maintain.  The revelation of a man's
character is more important than any opinion we may form of its
weaknesses.  At the moment he was anxious above all to respect the
formalities of his "retirement," yet, as we shall see in a moment, at
the crucial minute he rejected a personal sacrifice that would have
given to his leaders the substance of the position that was theirs.  It
was they, he insisted, who should relieve him of embarrassment at the
start:


    My ears are shut against all the world, except it were Granville
    and Hartington....  Were they to speak now, and as I have defined
    above, I should then say, let us have nothing more than a formula,
    and let the substance of it be that by the nature of things no man
    in my position could make beforehand an absolute renunciation, and
    that the leadership in the next Parliament must, like everything
    else, be considered in connexion with what may appear at the
    dissolution to be the sense of the country, but that my action
    individually has been and will continue to be that of a follower of
    Lord Granville and Lord Hartington.



The position of these two gentlemen was certainly embarrassing.
Notwithstanding the Midlothian campaign, and the popular enthusiasm in
the north, they knew, like everyone else, that, in some mysterious way,
the personality of Gladstone continued to arouse persistent antagonism.
If he filled crowds with adulation, distrust was still excited by his
name in many hearts.  At this very moment it lived in the breasts of
Liberals {196} even.  It was not certain, even now, that his detractors
were negligible, until his return to London, where he addressed two
enthusiastic gatherings, showed that the disaffected were few.

Parliament was dissolved on March 8, 1880, and Disraeli tried to make
the English hatred of Home Rule the issue of the election.  Gladstone
made a royal progress to Edinburgh, and was returned for the
constituency of Midlothian, despite the creation of "faggot" votes
against which he had protested in his original opening speech in the
autumn.  It is interesting to read that these votes, given to those for
whom houses were run up in the constituency, were not, according to Mr.
R. H. Gretton, neglected by Gladstone's supporters, but, in the
excitement of a contest, the candidate is often in the dark over the
precise stones which have been turned by his agent and organisers.  His
own triumph and that of the Liberals was complete.  They had a majority
of 107 over the Conservatives, and of 42 over the Conservatives and the
Irish added together.  The new Premier, whoever he might prove, would
be apparently irresistible in Parliament.

As soon as the results were known, Gladstone wrote to the Duke of
Argyll:


    All our heads are still in a whirl from the great events of the
    last fortnight, which have given joy, I am convinced, to the large
    majority of the civilised world.  The downfall of Beaconsfieldism
    is like the vanishing of some vast magnificent castle in an Italian
    romance.  It is too big, however, to be taken in all at once....
    But the outlook is tremendous!  The gradual unravelling of the
    tangled knots of the foreign and Indian policy will indeed be a
    task for skilled and strong hands, if they can be found.



If they can be found!  The two peers were summoned by the Queen, only
too anxious to admit their claims, and not too anxious to substitute
Gladstone for {197} dear Lord Beaconsfield as her adviser.  The
unfortunate gentlemen could not comply.  If they did, what was to
happen to Mr. Gladstone?  The Queen must have been even more eager than
her subjects to know this.  She was not left in doubt for long.  Let us
share her suspense by following Gladstone's diary.  On the day after
the declaration of the poll in his constituency, Gladstone with his
wife and daughter hurried home.  At Hawarden the results elsewhere made
thrilling news:


    7th.  The triumph grows and grows.  To God be the praise.

    9th.  Wolverton ... threatens a request from Granville and
    Hartington.  Again I am stunned, but God will provide.

    12th.  Wrote some Memoranda of names applicable to this occasion.

    13th.  Read _Guy Mannering_, and that most heavenly poet, George
    Herbert.

    19th.  Reluctant good-bye before 1.  London 6.30.

    20th.  This blank day is, I think, probably due to the Queen's
    hesitation or reluctance, which the Ministers have to find means
    for [overcoming].


There were comings and goings in the clubs and political offices.  The
Liberal majority and even his opponents agreed that, if Gladstone would
not really retire, it was better that he should be active openly.  What
place in the Ministry would he accept?  On that point at least he would
not yield.  The Queen's hesitation and reluctance were at last
overpowered when she learnt that Gladstone refused to serve in any
capacity except that of Prime Minister.

The leader of the Opposition to Disraeli, having now fulfilled his
function, could secure the essential services of Gladstone in the
Cabinet on these terms alone.  God had "provided," and every scruple,
except one, had held Gladstone back.




{198}

CHAPTER V

THE MORROW OF MIDLOTHIAN


I

When Gladstone went down to the House of Commons on May 20, 1880, the
enthusiasm of the crowd which awaited him in Palace Yard seemed to be
the first-fruits of his great victory.  Accustomed as he now was to
ovations of this kind, he was not insensible to its meaning.  In a
characteristic fragment he says:


    It almost overpowered me, as I thought by what deep and hidden
    agencies I have been brought back into the midst of the vortex of
    political action and contention....  Looking calmly on this course
    of experience, I do believe that the Almighty has employed me for
    His purposes in a manner larger and more special than before, and
    has strengthened me and led me on accordingly, though I must not
    forget the admirable saying of Hooker, that even ministers of good
    things are like torches, a light to others, waste and destruction
    to themselves.


Reflection was soon to show, if it had not shown already, that the
complications of Gladstone's recent tackings were by no means at an end
with his electoral success and resumption of leadership.  Though it was
true that his parliamentary rival, Disraeli, was no longer a
disagreeable presence in the Commons, which he had left for the House
of Lords in 1876, his policy remained "a tangle" not quickly or easily
to be unravelled.  The legacy of Beaconsfieldism had to be liquidated
before Gladstonian principles could be replaced, and {199} as the
legacy concerned chiefly complex questions of foreign policy, it is
very hard, in this phase of Gladstone's life, not to lose the man in
the mass of European and international foreign politics.  Gladstone had
quitted political life at a time when restiveness had become apparent
in his own party.  His "retirement" none the less had filled many
Liberals with dismay; his sudden and unofficial resumption of activity
made confusion worse confounded, and whatever the elections might have
shown, it remained to be proved how far his personal ascendancy would
be reflected even on his own side in the Commons.  He could not return
as if nothing had happened in the interval.  It could not be as if he
had never left, and his conduct in having gone, in having led an
unofficial campaign when out of responsibility, and in having resumed
the leadership, did not set a good example of party discipline.  If he
had been content to shoulder the burden of Opposition to Disraeli, in
that dusty strife he might have earned a confidence in his party that
he had deliberately endangered.  The party would have been inclined to
obey in the moment of victory the leader who had still led through long
and unprofitable days.  He had chosen to disappear, and to appeal over
their heads to platform audiences.  He had temporarily exchanged a
parliamentary for a popular ascendancy.  How far would he be able to
recover the control in the Commons that he had found too burdensome to
keep?

It was at least an open question, and restiveness immediately
reappeared.  Indeed one of the earliest impressions of the Speaker was
unfavourable to the apparently resistless old man.  The Liberal party
seemed to the Chair "not only strong, but determined to have their own
way in spite of Mr. Gladstone.  He has a difficult team to drive."  An
added complication, for which he was not responsible, was a little
group of four, {200} headed by Lord Randolph Churchill, which emerged
during the session of 1880, and was to cause much annoyance to everyone
except themselves.  The kind of criticism which Gladstone was to
receive at their hands was new to his experience, and the style which
lent point to the attack was a new style in parliamentary speaking.  It
really marks the end of Gladstone's oratorical epoch, and reflected
more aptly than his own the popular presentment of subjects and
personalities which he had done so much to inaugurate.  The 'eighties
too were the period of what was called the new journalism, and we see
how the same levity that was to enliven at its best, and at worst to
cheapen, popular discussion of public affairs, had its counterpart also
in debate.  Lord Randolph and Mr. Labouchere, a journalist himself,
were excellent exponents of the new manner, and though we shall be
anticipating, an example from the former's well-known speech of 1884 is
not only an admirable specimen of the new manner, but it crystallises
the reaction.  Gladstone's habit of publicity, as we have seen,
irritated and annoyed those who were not prostrated by him.


    The Prime Minister (said Lord Randolph) is the greatest living
    master of the art of personal political advertisement.  Holloway,
    Colman and Horniman are nothing compared with him.  Every act of
    his, whether it be for the purpose of health or of recreation or of
    religious devotion, is spread before the eyes of every man, woman
    and child in the United Kingdom on large and glaring placards....
    For the purpose of recreation he has selected the felling of trees.
    Every afternoon the whole world is invited to assist at the
    crashing fall of some beech or oak.  The forest laments that Mr.
    Gladstone may perspire, and full accounts of these proceedings are
    forwarded by special correspondents to every daily paper every
    recurring morning.  For the purpose of religious devotion the
    advertisements grow larger.  The parish church of Hawarden is
    insufficient to contain the thronging multitudes of fly-catchers
    who flock to hear Mr. Gladstone read {201} the lessons for the day,
    and the humble parishioners are banished to hospitable
    Nonconformist tabernacles in order that mankind may be present at
    the Prime Minister's rendering of Isaiah or Jeremiah or the Book of
    Job.



The peculiar note by which we recognise the knocking of the younger
generation is unmistakable in these words, and the sting, which was wit
to the juniors and bad taste to the seniors, then, as always, marked
the turn of a chapter.  The criticisms could not have been made except
from one detached from the ideal which had occasioned them, for ideals
of behaviour only seem ridiculous to those for whom they are out of
date.  With the collars and the bag and the four-wheeled carriage for
two hung between the driver's seat and a dickey, the Gladstonian
deportment in public was a convention passing away.  The day was not
far distant when the importance of being earnest should be the title of
one of the wittiest comedies in English.  Lord Randolph himself was a
young man of promise, heralding the new order, but he was not to live
long enough to dominate it.

Another of the restive ones was Mr. Joseph Chamberlain, who had begun
to make a name for himself in the active municipality of Birmingham,
and was to cause trouble by indiscretions much more blasphemous than
these.  He was understood, at this time, to be a Radical, and Mr.
Gladstone once defined a Radical as "a Liberal in earnest."  This might
be true with two provisos, to which, however, the young Chamberlain
paid little verbal heed.  The provisos were that the aristocrats must
never be twitted with laziness, and that not a word must be breathed
against even the largest unearned income.  When, therefore, Chamberlain
described the Lord Salisbury of his day as belonging to the class of
beings "who toil not, neither do they spin," who "levy an unearned
share on all that other men have {202} done," and, still speaking as a
Cabinet Minister, went on to ask the dangerous question: "What ransom
will property pay for the security it enjoys?" Mr. Gladstone was
seriously inconvenienced.  The Queen was perturbed, and wrote vehement
remonstrances, so that between the orchid of Birmingham and the
briar-rose of Windsor the Premier had uncomfortable hours.  His own
Cabinet was not too harmonious, nor particularly anxious to agree,
because it lacked, according to Morley, the binding dough of mediocrity.

Once more we must remind ourselves that Gladstone himself had set the
example of this platform discussion of questions not officially
engaging the Government of the day, but the idiom which he used was
less disturbing because in the conventional, if declining, canon of
taste.  Thus, in September of this year, 1880, he wrote to Lord
Rosebery:


    What is outside Parliament seems to me to be fast mounting, nay, to
    have already mounted, to an importance much exceeding what is
    inside....  I always admired Mr. Crete's saying that politics and
    theology were the only two great subjects.



Gladstonism was a blend of both, and if only his colleagues had been
content with the old gospel it would not have mattered much.  As
agriculture had been sacrificed to trade, the landed interests to
middle-class manufacturers, the pocket borough to a wide franchise
embracing most of the teeming population of the towns, so, in their
turn, questions of a livable existence for the multitude of
wage-earners, in other words, some redistribution of property, were
demanding political attention.  It was on this congenial field that
Chamberlain was welcomed by his audiences.  As he was a Cabinet
Minister, he was understood to be setting the pace for Gladstone, much
as Gladstone, during his {203} "retirement," had set the pace for his
nominal chief, the official leader of the Opposition, a few years
before.  The embarrassment thus created quickly led the Duke of Argyll
to resign, and after the fall of Gladstone's Government in 1885 he gave
an excellent summary of the position:


    From the moment our Government was fairly on the way I saw and felt
    that speeches _outside_ were allowed to affect opinion, and
    politically to commit the Cabinet in a direction which was not
    determined by you deliberately, or by the Government as a whole,
    but by the audacity ... of our new associates....  Your amiability
    to your colleagues ... has enabled men playing their own game ...
    to take out of your hands the _formation_ of opinion.



His amiability was carried so far that he is said to have counted heads
on disputed points in the Cabinet itself.  If opinion was divided
within, were not the prospects of the apparently invincible Government
dubious when difficult questions in the Commons should present
themselves?  Had they but known, those outsiders who thought that
Gladstone's personal ascendancy in the country deserved a nemesis,
would have found it here.  The malice of fate, with infernal cunning,
was harassing Gladstone just where he was most tender, by personal
contentions, and unreliability in the House.  Ministers would absent
themselves from divisions, or abstain from voting, or even move
amendments against the proposals of their leaders, and the first two
months were a time of agitation for the Government whips.  On one
motion indeed the Prime Minister found himself voting in the minority.
Gladstone himself was extremely patient and forbearing, but
persuasiveness, which may be effective with a crowd, was not enough in
Cabinet or Parliament.  He could manage mobs better than men.  The note
of authority was too faint.



{204}

II

Thus hampered, the tangle of foreign affairs left by Beaconsfield
awaited unravelment.  The death of the Prince Imperial in Zululand,
followed by the defeat of Gladstone's proposal for the vote of a
memorial to him, was not an auspicious introduction to these affairs.
Then the whole party suffered a shock when the expectation that Sir
Bartle Frere would be recalled from South Africa was disappointed.  He
was a favourite with the Queen, and Gladstone's attitude was only
maintained against remonstrances with the utmost difficulty.  Once in
office, he was as assiduous as ever, but the strain of controlling an
unruly following was revealed during the summer, when with ungrateful
dismay it became known that he was ill.  As soon as he was convalescent
he went for a cruise in the _Grantully Castle_, and returned just in
time to deliver a speech on the Eastern Question before the session
ended early in September.

We must now turn to the tangle that awaited him in Afghanistan, South
Africa, Montenegro, Egypt, the Soudan, before we see him in the
immediate trouble of the Bradlaugh case and under the heavy cloud of
Ireland, the last of his great crusades.  So that he may not be lost in
a mass of historical events, each will be confined as far as possible
to his immediate share in the handling of their difficulties.

Though Gladstone's father was untouched by the idea, his own youth
belonged to the generation in which liberty was a lively political
creed, and he was only a little late in embracing it.  Thus in foreign
politics his essential attitude was one of sympathy for peoples
"rightly struggling to be free," and he was not of those who took it
for a truism that to be free meant to be incorporated in the British
Empire.  He held that we were bound to safeguard our existing
possessions, giving {205} to them as much local self-government as
possible, but he was without the desire for expansion or aggrandisement
in foreign policy, and had viewed with misgiving the new Imperialism
which had lent a gilt and glamour to the activities of Beaconsfield.  A
particularly dangerous corner has always been the North-West Frontier
of India, with the dubious buffer of Afghanistan between Russia and
ourselves.  There the old cautious policy had been abandoned; an
English agent had been placed at Cabul, and his violent death there had
been followed by the annexation of Candahar; this might easily occasion
further trouble.  Here the recent forward policy was definitely
reversed.  Gladstone, for once in agreement with his colleagues,
determined to evacuate the place, and, though the Lords gave an adverse
vote to the decision, it was carried in the Commons.  Aggressive
Imperialism received a set-back.

In South Africa matters were unfortunately incapable of such a simple
solution as this.  Sir Bartle Frere has already been mentioned, and he
was responsible for the Zulu war, which Gladstone had condemned in his
Midlothian speeches.  The party held that it was pledged to his recall,
and apart from the Queen, who would hardly have been permitted to
overrule Gladstone's own feelings, Gladstone's reasons for not
recalling Frere are worth examination.  The policy of Gladstone was one
of confederation, towards which it was thought that the Parliament at
the Cape was moving, and the idea was to retain Frere until this was
realised.  When this hope was disappointed Frere was recalled, as
early, in fact, as July 1880.  On taking office the situation that
Gladstone found was briefly this: In 1877, through fear that a recent
success of the natives against the Boers of the Transvaal would lead to
a general upheaval, the sovereignty of the Queen had been proclaimed,
on the express assumption, which was speedily disproved, that {206} the
Boers desired to become British subjects.  An Assembly and other
legislative privileges were promised, but Kruger came to England to
protest on behalf of the Boers.  Despite this, in 1879 Sir Garnet
Wolseley, the Administrator of the Transvaal, announced that the
country must remain permanently part of the Queen's dominions.
Gladstone was averse to annexation here, as he had been to that of
Candahar, but was cautious in his words.  Yet, on taking office, he was
advised that the situation was improving, and that the Transvaal Boers
might accept the accomplished fact as the Boers at the Cape had done.
The Cabinet were urged to make a definite announcement of their policy,
and eventually, in spite of some of Gladstone's previous utterances,
endorsed the policy of the late Government.  The angry Boers persuaded
the Cape Parliament against confederation; disturbances occurred, and a
general revolt followed.  At the end of January 1881 the British
received their first check, and certain overtures might have led to a
settlement if only the British had not moved to occupy Majuba Hill.
From this we were promptly driven with heavy loss.  The sensation and
dismay produced at home raised the question whether negotiations were
to be cancelled.  As a matter of fact agreement to a meeting was on its
way at the time of the provocative assault on Majuba.  This may serve
as a general indication of the confusion on the spot which accorded so
ill with the policy of Gladstone's Government.  Sir Evelyn Wood, now in
command, recommended military action, but was forbidden to take the
offensive.  The tangle of cross purposes and divided counsels can be
gauged from the fact that some military authorities favoured further
fighting in order that our soldiers might learn confidence in the
breech-loading rifle that had been lately introduced!  The Boers
dispersed, and a joint commission was refused to them.  {207} A
convention made at Pretoria in 1881, which recognised the
semi-independence of the Transvaal, was followed by another in 1884
which restored the former title of the South African Republic.  The
Government was thus attacked for not having prevented the rising, and
for having yielded to force what had been refused to muddled
negotiations.  All through Gladstone was on the side of agreement, but
he was badly served on the spot, where nervousness led to provocative
action, and mischance played a certain part.  Such failure as occurred
was rather due to the agents of the home executive than to Gladstone
himself.  He showed courage in persisting throughout the muddle to
restrict the mischief and the bloodshed as far as he could in the
presence of a bewildered and impatient House and country.

The fortune which had proved malign for his policy in South Africa was
amusingly indulgent to him over the unfulfilled clauses in the Treaty
of Berlin which affected Greece, Montenegro and Turkey.  The Sultan was
nodding at the critical moment and, by a lucky misunderstanding of the
circumstances, gave way.  Both these smaller states were entitled by
the Treaty to some extension of territory, and Gladstone's policy was
to bring pressure upon Turkey by the joint action of the Powers.  He
proposed a common demonstration off the coast of Albania on behalf of
Montenegro; and when Austria and Germany virtually backed out, to send
the joint fleet to Smyrna in order to take from Turkey the customs
duties of that port, which were too valuable for her to lose.  The
proposal came from us, but the Sultan, in ignorance that the other
Powers were not likely to agree, gave way.  Montenegro, to whom
Gladstone had made a burning reference in his Midlothian speeches,
received Dulcigno, and Greece was almost restored to her Homeric size.
With pardonable satisfaction, Gladstone remarked:

{208}


    The whole of this extraordinary _volte-face_ has been effected
    within six days; and it was entirely due not to a threat of
    coercion from Europe, but to the knowledge that Great Britain had
    asked Europe to coerce.



This distinction is characteristic, but he had proceeded by agreement,
and had proved what partial agreement, in a lucky moment, could gain in
foreign affairs.  There, as at home, he abhorred domination, and placed
persuasiveness and joint action at the basis of his policy.

Another branch of the ubiquitous Eastern Question concerned Egypt,
where, at first, all seemed to be well.  On this Gladstone had indulged
in what proved to be a remarkable prophecy as far back as 1877.  In the
August number of the _Nineteenth Century_ he had then written:


    Our first site in Egypt, be it by larceny or be it by emption, will
    be the almost certain egg of a North African empire, that will grow
    and grow ... till we finally join hands across the equator with
    Natal and Cape Town, to say nothing of the Transvaal and the Orange
    River on the south, or of Abyssinia or Zanzibar to be swallowed by
    way of viaticum on our journey.



Here, again, he inherited a situation that pointed to the path which he
did not wish to tread.  France and England in 1879 had imposed two
controllers upon Egypt, and thus brought what Gladstone described as
foreign intervention into the midst of that country.  Then came
Beaconsfield's purchase of the Suez Canal shares, which sealed our
interest, a purchase which Gladstone, ever cautious of future
entanglements, had deemed "hazardous and ill-advised."  Egypt had
administrative independence under the Sultan, whose viceroy was the
Khedive, and the whole position was obviously unsatisfactory and
unstable.

When the leaders of the latter's army, whose grievances were neglected,
revolted under Arabi in January 1881, and the disorders spread to the
civil population {209} and led to the appearance of a Nationalist party
in the Chamber, the Sultan saw a chance of diplomatically reasserting
his shadowy authority.  This complexity of events brought France and
England into the matter.  France was opposed to Turkish interferences,
and the Sultan, to whom the Cabinet looked as the least objectionable
source of restored order, had been made odious to English opinion by
the hero of Midlothian himself.  Under the momentary ascendancy of
Gambetta at the end of 1881, the French view prevailed, and some common
action between the two controlling European Powers was vaguely agreed
to.  The effect of their Joint Note was to make the Khedive appear the
creature of France and England; he was encouraged to oppose reforms;
and everyone else, the Sultan, the Nationalists, and the other Powers,
were exasperated.  The army became the master of the Government, and
the sending of an Anglo-French fleet to Alexandria was followed by the
bombardment of the forts which commanded it by the British ships only.

Before this happened Gladstone had sought in vain the co-operation of
the Powers, and now declared that Egypt must be rescued from anarchy by
us alone, if such co-operation was impossible.  France was more afraid
of Germany than of Gladstone, and therefore was unwilling to send
troops to Egypt.  The Cabinet therefore sent Wolseley to Egypt, and he
defeated Arabi at Tel-el-Kebir in September 1882.  The bombardment of
Alexandria lost Bright to Gladstone, who laboured in vain to persuade
him that a situation of force had been created by Arabi which only
force could meet, and that the pillage which followed was due to the
same cause.  Gladstone added that none of the Powers had disapproved,
and that the blow struck at violence had "greatly advanced the Egyptian
question towards a permanent and peaceful solution."  It also advanced
{210} the English occupation of Egypt and prepared the tragic episode
of Gordon.  To this, pursuing the foreign difficulties of Gladstone's
Government to their end, we may now turn, since it is impossible to
follow a series of different entanglements, as they appeared,
simultaneously.  We have seen enough to show that Gladstone did not
disapprove of force when all other means had failed him, and he even
took a severe view of Arabi's claim to clemency when his fate came to
be discussed.  He was tried for rebellion and sentenced to death, but
the sentence was commuted to banishment to Ceylon.

Once in Egypt the theoretical choice between annexation and withdrawal
hardly existed, and yet annexation was not desired by the Cabinet or
public opinion.  A military victory seemed, for once, to arouse small
enthusiasm at home, and the nation had not forgotten its repudiation of
expansion at the time of the defeat of Beaconsfield.  Endless and
intricate negotiations culminated in the London Convention of 1885, by
which the financial complexities were settled by European agreement.
The margin of empire remains, however, as intractable as the desire of
a man to own all land adjacent to his own, and now that we were planted
in Egypt, trouble occurred on its southern border, the Soudan.

Four years before the London Convention was signed, in 1881, a
self-proclaimed Mahdi, or Moslem Messiah, appeared in that distracted
country.  It had been, of course, atrociously misgoverned by Egyptian
pashas, and Gladstone was once more confronted with a people "rightly
struggling to be free."  Egypt could not plunder her dependency for
ever without having to pay the penalty.  Troops were sent to Khartoum,
and their success encouraged an advance which the Cabinet ought to have
forbidden, and would have done but for a wish not to interfere with the
authority of the Egyptian Government.  Our status and responsibility
{211} were so ill defined that the Cabinet, as in South Africa, was
once more at the mercy of a distant administration, which in turn was
weak before the opinions of its soldiers on the spot.  The advancing
general and his forces were completely defeated by the dervishes, who
under the Mahdi now threatened Khartoum.  The remedy seemed to be to
evacuate the Soudan, but this meant the difficult task of extricating
the Egyptian garrisons.  To this end the Cabinet, with Gladstone
dissenting, decided to send a force to Suakin, the eastern port of the
Soudan on the Red Sea, yet despite much bloodshed the Mahdi was as
triumphant as ever.  This was early in 1883, and our failure produced
the inevitable wave of excited criticism.  It was at last decided to
send General Gordon with express instructions to complete the
withdrawal of the Egyptian garrisons from the Soudan as quickly as
possible.  His personal influence was thought capable of persuading the
tribes to allow the garrison at Khartoum to depart, and to let him
conduct the other garrisons to safety.

For such a difficult and delicate task plainly much depended upon the
character of our emissary, and events proved that Gordon was too
wayward a person to send.  The first mistake had been to allow Hicks to
advance beyond Khartoum into Kordofan.  The second was to rely on
Gordon sticking to the letter of his instructions.  An incalculable
creature, he was wayward and impulsive; and his personal heroism and
mysticism were more likely to create trouble than to lay it.  His
instructions were to "consider and report on the best mode of effecting
the evacuation" of the Soudan, a mission extended at Cairo to carrying
it out himself.  Some of his instructions, added to in Egypt, were
loosely worded, and when he arrived he found that evacuation was
entangled with other questions.  Discovering that he was not welcomed
at Khartoum, he suddenly decided that the Mahdi must be {212} smashed,
and that the British must control the Soudanese administration, which
should be placed under Zobeir as their governor-general.  He was
concerned with the fate of the outlying garrisons and proposed to
undertake to relieve them by military force.  When this change of
policy was known in London, Gladstone was anxious for Gordon's recall.
After many heart-searchings the sending of Zobeir was refused, and the
refusal was made certain when Gordon revealed his plan to a newspaper
correspondent.  The result was that public opinion made the appointment
of that "slave-holder" impossible.  If Gordon's idea was to force the
Government to do what he wanted, he miscalculated badly.  Meantime the
Mahdi's forces surrounded Khartoum, and within a month of Gordon's
arrival its line of communications was cut.

Gladstone's summary of these events is quoted by Morley as follows:


    When Gordon left this country and when he arrived in Egypt, he
    declared it to be, and I have not the smallest doubt that it was--a
    fixed portion of his policy that no British force should be
    employed in aid of his mission.



Then came his assertion that we should have to smash up the Mahdi,
lastly the declaration that to leave the outlying garrisons to their
fate would be an "indelible disgrace."  Mr. Lytton Strachey says that
Gladstone read this message for the first time in a newspaper while on
a visit to a country house, and then goes on to quote from an unnamed
observer the following description of the scene:


    He took up the paper; his eye instantly fell on the telegram, and
    he read it through.  As he read, his face hardened and whitened,
    the eyes burned as I have seen them once or twice in the House of
    Commons when he was angered--burned with a deep fire, as if they
    would have consumed the sheet on which Gordon's message was
    printed, or as if {213} Gordon's words had burnt into his soul,
    which was looking out in wrath and flame.  He said not a word.  For
    perhaps two or three minutes he sat still, his face all the while
    like the face you may read of in Milton--like none other I ever
    saw.  Then he rose without a word, and was seen no more that
    morning.



It is an unforgettable description, one in which a certain mood or
aspect of Gladstone's physiognomy is imprinted on the reader's eyes.
One is glad to have it, because a few observers, though a minority,
have recorded something sinister in his expression.  Some, at least of
the later portraits, bear this out, particularly perhaps the one by
Millais at Christchurch, Oxford.  In her life of her husband Mrs.
Charles Stewart Parnell closed the opening volume with this visual
memory:


    Always as I stood face to face with this Grand Old Man on leaving,
    and looked into his slate-coloured eyes, so like those of an eagle,
    I experienced a sudden uneasy feeling, in spite of his gracious
    courtesy, of how like to a beautiful bird of prey this old man was:
    with the piercing cruel eyes belying the tender courteous smile....



Gladstone's impressive face was one of his many ambiguities.  The
contradiction, which was part of his strange character, lurking in his
expression gave there too an excuse for the diverse feelings and
estimates that he inspired.  To refuse to surrender to either of the
extreme views concerning him is to keep closer to the truth.  That
face, in which a radiant light could be blent so mysteriously with the
expression "you may read of in Milton," masked, at this moment, the
belief that though Gordon might be hemmed in, he was not surrounded,
the contrasting terms passing over the situation like sunlight and
cloud over a hillside.  Not through Gordon's pressure would Gladstone
budge.

Gordon's view was that "if you do not send Zobeir, you have no chance
of getting the garrisons away." {214} If there was no chance of his
mission being successful, what was Gordon's next move to be?  The
centre of interest now shifted from the garrisons to Gordon himself.
Was the rescuer to be rescued?  The initiative was supposed to lie with
him, the man on the spot, and there was now no news concerning him.  No
one wanted to send a relief expedition to Khartoum if it could be
avoided, and in the absence of definite news it was not certain, in
spite of growing public concern for the fate of Gordon, that it could
not.  In these doubts and hesitations the spring and summer of 1884
drifted along.  At last, in the beginning of August, a vote of credit
for an expedition was demanded.  In August Lord Wolseley was given the
command, and on September 9th he arrived at Cairo.  On that very
evening one of Gordon's steamers, taking advantage of the rising Nile,
with the English and French Consul and Gordon's own second in command
on board, set out for Egypt.  He could have joined them, but he chose
to remain.  Even so, Fate had a trick in store, as if she would not be
cheated of her tragedy.  The ship struck a rock, and the Consul and
Colonel Stewart were murdered; the official papers also fell into the
Mahdi's hands.  They revealed the precarious condition of Khartoum, and
the Mahdi decided to wait no longer.  On January the 28th, 1885, the
expedition at last arrived, to find that Khartoum had fallen two days
before.

The news of Gordon's death produced a terrible outcry in England.
Gordon, who had been a hero, was proclaimed a martyr, and Gladstone
became the public villain of the piece.  He is never more interesting
than in these recurring, if short-lived, moments of public odium or
unpopularity.  If he had refused, as he suspected, to allow his hand to
be forced before, he would refuse now.  So far from bowing to popular
clamour, he confronted it.  He would not make the failure of {215} the
relief expedition an excuse for proceeding to punish the false Mahdi
and to conquer the Soudan.  Luckily a cloud on the Afghan frontier
called for the withdrawal of Wolseley and his forces from Egypt.  Mr.
Gladstone stood firm.  His original policy of abandoning the Soudan was
not to be deflected by unforeseen circumstances and popular passion.
His judgment, here at least, was not influenced by the personal
unpopularity that it created.

His mature opinion of the whole matter was as follows:


    Gordon was a hero, and a hero of heroes; but we ought to have known
    that a hero of heroes is not the proper person to give effect at a
    distant point, and in most difficult circumstances, to the views of
    ordinary men.  It was unfortunate that he should claim the hero's
    privilege by turning upside down and inside out every idea and
    intention with which he had left England, and for which he had
    obtained our approval....  My own opinion is that it is harder to
    justify our doing so much to rescue him, than our not doing more.
    Had the party reached Khartoum in time, he would not have come away
    (as I suppose), and the dilemma would have arisen in another form.



The tangle of cross purposes is too apparent to cover any of the
protagonists in the famous and debated story with praise or blame.
Every time we read it we feel that all are caught in a web stronger
than themselves.  It is this sense of the inevitable that makes the
tragedy a lively issue still.



III

The above bird's-eye view of foreign affairs might seem to have
provided ample worries enough for a harassed administration, but
fortune was equally unkind at home, where a press of difficulties could
not be palliated by calling them a legacy from Beaconsfield.  {216}
Before turning to these embarrassments we may notice a gleam of light
at the Exchequer, where, once again, Gladstone devised an admirable
Budget.  He put heart into his colleagues by a speech which delighted
the House, and more particularly by finding a way of repealing the malt
duty, irksome to farmers and apparently beyond the skill of the
Conservatives to remove.  Gladstone changed the malt tax into a duty on
beer, the finished product.  He also reduced the duties on light wines,
and safeguarded the Exchequer by adding a penny to the income tax.  He
wove all these dry proposals into "an animated narrative" with his
accustomed skill and enthusiasm.

The domestic storm which arose lasted for five years.  It touched one
of those questions bordering upon religion and liberty which might seem
specially fitted for Gladstone to solve; and, had he not had a
recalcitrant and prejudiced House of Commons to handle, he would soon
have solved it himself.  The new Member for Northampton was Charles
Bradlaugh, who had been making himself difficult, and therefore
unpopular, in a variety of ways.  He was a secularist, a free-thinker,
a republican.  He had attacked the House of Brunswick (Windsor) without
attracting much attention, but he created much noise by republishing,
in the interest of liberty of discussion, an American pamphlet on birth
control, called the _Fruits of Philosophy_, the original printer of
which had been prosecuted for indecency, but lightly sentenced.  For
coming to the vindication of free speech in this way, Bradlaugh and his
friend Mrs. Besant were the heroes, and the victims, of a scandal, only
escaping a heavy sentence by a technicality which saved them on appeal.
Bradlaugh had several times figured in the courts, where his opinions
were held, unfairly, to disqualify him from taking the oath and to
justify juries in refusing him protection for attacks that {217} might
be made on his character.  Indeed, his refusal to take the oath in
court had led to the law of 1869, which entitled a witness to affirm in
place of it.

On his election to the Parliament of 1880, Bradlaugh was anxious to
carry the principle that he had established into the House of Commons.
Instead of taking the oath of allegiance, without which he could not
occupy his seat, he claimed the right to affirm under the Parliamentary
Oaths Act.  A select committee was appointed, and the claim, by a
majority of one, refused.  The violent prejudice aroused against
Bradlaugh is apparent from the fact that, when he now said that he was
ready to swear, this was refused also.  The disgraceful attempts, of
which this was the first, to deprive a duly elected Member of his seat
are too tedious to relate except in so far as they reveal Gladstone's
own position.  They show him now converted to the view, which he had
once repudiated (p. 38), that disbelief in revealed religion should not
disqualify a man for election to Parliament.  His immediate business
was to extricate the House from the discreditable morass into which its
vindictiveness had thrown it.  Gladstone wrote to the Queen that his
"own view is that the House has no jurisdiction for the purpose of
excluding any one willing to qualify when he has been duly elected."
When the House decided by a majority that Bradlaugh should neither be
allowed to affirm nor to swear, because he was a declared atheist,
Gladstone reported that the "ecstatic transport exceeded anything"
which he remembered to have witnessed.  It showed, he added dryly, the
unfitness of the House for the office it had chosen to assume.  Morley
also finds in it "the first stroke of revenge for Midlothian."
Bradlaugh reappeared at the bar, asked to be heard, and challenged the
legality of the decision, a challenge which Gladstone, in rather
ambiguous words, endorsed to the Queen.  Bradlaugh's {218} speech, of
course, made no difference to the excited Members, and Bradlaugh was
removed by the Serjeant-at-Arms.  He returned, and was again removed by
force.  When someone then moved that Bradlaugh should be committed,
Gladstone refused to advise, but declined to object to the proposal.
In fact he supported it with his vote, to the annoyance of the Speaker,
who virtually held that what he supported it was due to his position to
have proposed.

The only solution was to prepare an Affirmation Bill, but the temper of
the House did not desire a solution.  On the contrary, it desired to
victimise Bradlaugh and to embarrass Gladstone in every way.  Party
feeling was pleased to hear him christened a "patron of blasphemy."
Not till 1883 was an Affirmation Bill introduced with a serious chance
of acceptance, and then it was defeated by a majority of three.
Nonconformists, those historic champions of the right of private
judgment, were among the majority.  Throughout this Parliament the
electors of Northampton were denied their representative, but when he
reappeared after the election of 1885 to take the oath, the Speaker
refused any interference, and in 1888 Bradlaugh himself attained his
end with the passing of an Affirmation Act.  On his death-bed in 1891
the House repented, too late for him to know, and expunged from its
records the resolution that had been passed with ecstasy ten years
before.

From Gladstone's own speeches throughout these troubled years we may
glean a few sentences which show how far he had travelled from the
narrow tenets of his youth.


    I have no fear of Atheism in this House (he said when moving the
    Bill of 1883).  Truth is the expression of the Divine mind ... and
    we may be sure that a firm and courageous application of every
    principle of equity and of justice is the best method we can adopt
    for the preservation and influence of Truth.


{219}

This, we may note in passing, is an ethical rather than an intellectual
principle, very characteristic of a man who was taught by circumstances
rather than by insight to believe in toleration, and to believe in it
rather because the absence of toleration creates impossible situations
than because the principle of toleration is excellent in itself.  His
inspiration was to overcome difficulties, to satisfy unmistakable
aspirations, to meet troubles as they arose.  The stubborn facts were
recognised by this eager, active nature more quickly than by most
Englishmen.  He had a genuine love of accommodating differences.  It
was from facts and public movements that he learned.  Ideas to the last
rarely penetrated his mind until they created movements of practical
bearing.  Then, with his natural fervour, he would appeal to high
principles in support of their satisfaction, and the principles of
liberty and of justice suited him best because both are elastic, and
themselves come into view most clearly in the sphere of immediate
affairs.  The bias is sufficient for a statesman, and if, unlike most
able men, he began by being conservative, his distinction lies in not
allowing his first ardour for his adopted principles to fade, but in
maintaining, and indeed increasing, its vigour as he grew older.



IV

Whatever his difficulties in Parliament might be, his public following
continued to idolise him.  He succeeded in convincing his audiences in
the country that, however puzzled they might sometimes be at his
proceedings, and however little they might be able to follow his
reasonings, yet in some mysterious manner he was on their side, and,
unlike other official persons, was not an aloof being, but one of
themselves set in a lofty place.  Thus his previous ovations were
repeated when {220} he visited Leeds in October 1881 to return thanks
for his success in the General Election.  Threatened with four days of
continuous effort, he pleaded only that no progress through the streets
should precede any mass meeting:


    I see no difficulty but one--a procession through the principal
    thoroughfares is one of the most exhausting processes I know as a
    preliminary to addressing a mass meeting.  A mass meeting requires
    the physical powers to be in their best and freshest state, as far
    as anything can be fresh in a man near seventy-two....  It would
    certainly be most desirable to have the mass meeting first, and
    then I have not any fear at all of the procession through whatever
    thoroughfares you think fit.



Four days later he repeats his request, explaining:


    I should be very sorry to put aside any of the opportunities of
    vision at Leeds which the public may care to use.



The number of addresses presented must have been too numerous to be
read, and one wonders whether a public luncheon may not prove almost as
ill a prelude to a mass meeting as a public progress through the
streets.  At the mass meeting he addressed an audience of twenty-five
thousand, and his days ended with torch-light processions, public
dinners and a final departure by night.  It was on this occasion that
he coined one of his few familiar phrases, a vaguely ominous, if
intangible, threat to Parnell, who was applying test cases to the new
Land Act, that "the resources of civilisation against its enemies are
not yet exhausted."  We all know how dear vague phrases are to
politicians, to journalists, and to the audiences to whom they are
addressed, but Gladstone's reputation for resource and for mystery gave
a histrionic value to this expression which probably impressed
everybody except the coolest of men, Parnell himself.  The relations of
Gladstone to Parnell and to Ireland deserve a chapter to themselves.
{221} They were the last, most difficult, and most honourable of
Gladstone's crusades, which extended beyond the five years of his
second premiership, and indeed terminated only with his final
retirement from the political scene.  Before glancing at this historic
page, let us turn to more personal events.  They include his political
jubilee and a northern cruise on which Tennyson accompanied him.

In December 1882, the month in which he was born, and at the age of
seventy-three, he completed fifty years of parliamentary life.  His
opinions indeed had changed, but on the whole we may say that there had
been more expansion than development.  He had begun by appealing to
principles, and his first political principle had been to identify
reform with revolution.  In this he was echoing the opinions of his
preceptors in his family, in the Church, at Oxford.  His entry into
politics at Westminster had brought him under the influence of no new
theory, but of undeniable political facts.  One of these facts was the
movement for reform.  It was the practical application of the faith in
liberty that lay at the basis of all the political movements of the
nineteenth century.  His instinct for accommodating differences, his
keen eye for tendencies that would not be denied, quickly convinced him
that these tendencies, when duly presented, must be respected.  He
needed, therefore, a larger principle to include them in his own
ideals.  Just as he had believed implicitly whatever he was told
authoritatively in his youth, so later the evidence of his eyes
convinced him.  That which theoretic argument in favour of liberty had
failed to impress upon his mind, the facts of immediate experience
proved conclusively.  From facts he was always ready and eager to
learn, and the popular demands in which they generally came to him
gradually received the idealisation originally represented for him by
ecclesiastical teaching.  He was {222} a minister still: not in Holy
Orders, but as spokesman and representative of popular movements, and
the recognition which his political jubilee received showed that he was
so regarded in many countries besides England.  A subscription was
raised in Athens to place a statue of him in the city, and the Greeks
also made him a splendid personal gift.  He had become, among living
statesmen, an international symbol for Europe, and in his seventies he
seemed to be still in the plenitude of his powers.  Just because his
vitality was extraordinary, in one or two practical matters he was
beyond, instead of abreast of, the political trend of his time.  The
most significant instance of this so far, had been his settlement of
the Alabama claims by arbitration.  If he had reorganised the tariff to
suit the inevitable victory of free trade, he had also at the Exchequer
laid the basis of future financial policy, and some of his achievements
for civil administration are now only obscured because they are taken
as a matter of course.  So much industry and fervour promised no term
beyond his natural powers, and already in his seventies he appeared to
be younger than his political contemporaries.  The Queen, nervously
anxious that his activities might be curtailed (she had been disturbed
to learn that he had contemplated another visit to Midlothian, which
Sir Andrew Clark came to her rescue by forbidding), hoped that he would
accept a peerage.  He was not to be tempted.  The House of Commons was
his arena and his home.  For a rest he spent the first month of 1883 at
Cannes, and soon after his return was invited to Sandringham, where
"the Prince bade me read the lessons."  His constant self-deception,
that he wanted to retire, persisted to the end, and we find him now
writing to Manning: "I trust it may not be long ere I escape into some
position better suited to declining years."  The explanation is
familiar.  He was in the {223} thick of those personal questions that
harassed him, including Cabinet reconstruction and the utterances of
Chamberlain that gave offence at Court.  We are reminded of his
difficulties in his confession to Lord Granville:


    Every extravagance of this kind puts weapons into the hands of
    opponents, and weakens the authority of Government, which is hardly
    ever too strong, and is often too weak already.



Many personal embarrassments with the Queen, with the House of Lords,
with colleagues, not to mention the Irish Members, made the year 1883
an exhausting one for him.  In September, therefore, he went for a
northern cruise on the _Pembroke Castle_, as Sir Donald Currie's guest.
The account of his journey is contained in three letters to the Queen,
to whom he had to apologise for a breach of etiquette:


    Mr. Gladstone presents his humble duty to your Majesty, and has to
    offer his humble apology for not having sought from your Majesty
    the usual gracious permission before setting foot on a foreign
    shore.



He had intended to visit only the Western Isles, but the ship seemed so
seaworthy that the party, of whom Tennyson was one, decided to cross
the North Sea and to run over to Christiansand and Copenhagen.  It was
a brief trip, but something occurred even more exciting than the bevy
of royalties who were entertained at Copenhagen, where Tennyson read
some of his poems aloud to them.  We have a glimpse of the affair from
the point of view of Tennyson's son, in his life of his father:


    Mr. Gladstone caught sight of me reading by the bulwarks of the
    _Pembroke Castle_ one day, and beckoned me to walk with him.  He
    said that literature was one of the noblest callings he knew, that
    he honoured my father greatly, and {224} that for the sake of
    literature he would like to offer him a distinction from the
    Queen--about which he had been in correspondence with Lord
    Granville--a barony.  "Do you think that your father would accept
    it?"  I replied that the offer was so startling that I did not know
    how he would take it, but I thought that he might accept it for the
    sake of literature (remembering how various literary men had cried
    "shame upon him" when he did not take the baronetcy offered three
    successive times).  The only difficulty in Gladstone's mind was
    that my father might insist on wearing his wideawake in the House
    of Lords.



The difficulty of the wideawake was overcome, and no objection arose
from Tennyson's pipe, despite Gladstone's undying horror of tobacco.
He expected his private secretaries, if they smoked themselves, to
change their clothes before they entered his presence.  Even
distinguished visitors to Hawarden are said to have made conditions, or
to have smoked clandestinely in their bedrooms like boys at school.
After accepting a royal invitation to dine at Fredensborg, Gladstone
reported to the Queen that he found there:


    the entire circle of illustrious personages who have been gathered
    for some time in a family party, with a very few exceptions.  The
    singularly domestic character of this remarkable assemblage, and
    the affectionate intimacy which appeared to pervade it made an
    impression on him....  Nor must Mr. Gladstone allow himself to omit
    another striking feature of the remarkable picture, in the
    unrestrained and unbounded happiness of the royal children,
    nineteen in number, who appeared like a single family under a
    single roof.



The crowned heads of Russia, Denmark and Greece all visited the vessel.
In reply to the King of Denmark's toast of his health, Gladstone
observed that "perhaps the most vigorous and remarkable portion of the
British nation" had been drawn from Scandinavian countries.  After
luncheon Tennyson read two of his poems, with the royal children
"clustering round the doors."

On his return Gladstone thanked the Queen for {225} "'giving him full
credit for not having reflected at the time' when he decided, as your
Majesty believes, to extend his recent cruise to Norway and Denmark."
It is amusing to see him, in this small matter, spinning his habitual
web of explanation, and pointing out that he had, in the course of his
trip, extended his views rather than his voyage, and pleading guilty
only to not having foreseen everything which had occurred.  He denies
the report in certain foreign newspapers that there had been any
discussion of public affairs, and is consoled to find that suspicion in
England had been confined to two secondary journals which have never
found "in any act of his anything but guilt and folly."  On the voyage
out they had landed at Kirkwall, where Gladstone proposed the health of
Tennyson.  After remarking that their careers had been contemporaneous,
he went on to say that the work of the poet would prove more enduring
than his own:


    We public men play a part which places us much in view of our
    countrymen, but the words which we speak have wings and fly away
    and disappear....  The Poet Laureate has written his own song on
    the hearts of his countrymen that can never die.


The humorous reflection that "fame has no present and popularity no
future" is hardly true of either man.  No statesman has been more
personally successful than Gladstone, and Tennyson was the most
successful of our fine poets.  The office of Laureate perhaps will
never again be so appropriately filled.  Tennyson's verse on official
occasions is the masterpiece of its difficult kind, and if his success
was necessarily due rather to the quality that belonged to his age than
to the virtue which was above it, still, as poet and as Laureate,
Tennyson's position is secure.  Gladstone worked in much more
perishable material, and if he is finally remembered as a prodigy of
energy rather than for any special {226} distinction of mind, of who
else can it be said that a century of political life was garnered and
expressed in a single career and public character?



V

One final matter of domestic importance was the question of extending
the borough franchise of 1867 to country householders, and Gladstone
knew that his term of office could not be allowed to expire without
taking virtually the final step towards manhood suffrage.  It is always
the last move that a Government makes, if only because it is the
natural precursor to a General Election.  The Bill that became an Act
in 1885 is important to Gladstone's story, not because of the bitter
controversy over the redistribution of seats that accompanied it, but
because it provided the means whereby the national voice of Ireland
could be unmistakably heard, and so gave to Gladstone his overwhelming
argument in favour of the Irish proposals.  The Opposition, virtually
the House of Lords, which twice rejected the measure in spite of the
technically unanimous consent of the Lower House, feared that if the
new franchise was granted without a redistribution of seats, the
Conservative party would be condemned indefinitely to a minority.
Gladstone held that the two changes should indeed arrive together, but
that if the two Bills were presented simultaneously the franchise would
be defeated.  The difficulty between the two Houses was so great that,
if the possibility of a creation of peers was to be avoided, it became
necessary for Gladstone to secure every vote in the Lords that was open
to his persuasiveness.  He approached the Archbishop of Canterbury; he
even wrote to Tennyson: "You are the only peer, so far as I know,
associated with Liberal ideas or the Liberal party, who hesitates to
vote against Lord Salisbury." {227} With tireless patience and
tenacity, and with his usual endeavours to be accommodating without
sacrificing anything essential, Gladstone declared himself ready to
produce his redistribution scheme once the passage of the Franchise
Bill was guaranteed.  As a last resort, the chiefs of both parties met
privately to discuss the official scheme before it was introduced into
the House, a very unusual proceeding, needless to say.  These
discussions produced at last a settlement, and the new Reform Bill
added about a million and a quarter voters to the register in England,
and nearly half a million Irishmen.

Parnell told his countrymen that the Nationalists and the Irish in
England now had the power of determining at the next General Election
whether the Liberals or the Tories should return to power.  This
influence, he added, had secured the inclusion of Ireland in the
Franchise Bill, and he prophesied, with calm assurance, that his party
would come back ninety strong.  The important fact was that, whether
the Irish Members rose to ninety or remained at seventy-five, they held
the balance, and that balance made him indifferent which English party
was in office.  The power that he could throw into the scale would
suffice to defeat any Government which denied the Irish claims.  The
endeavour to satisfy them is the last, most chequered, and dramatic
chapter in Gladstone's extraordinary career.



VI

Before we look backward and forward into this tremendous story, we must
follow the fortunes of Gladstone's second administration to its end,
and confine ourselves to the strenuous year that preceded the
elections.  At the close of 1884 he had been sleeping badly.  This rare
visitation invariably pointed to harassed days.  {228} There is a touch
of pathos in his birthday note: "a little woodcraft for helping sleep,"
and on New Year's Eve, "only an hour and a half of sleep, which will
hardly do to work upon."  The approaching elections were disturbing
because they raised once more the inevitable possibility of his
retirement, and the immediate prospect of a split in his party, which
that retirement was held certain to foreshadow.  Yet few welcomed the
withdrawal of Gladstone's experienced and restraining hand at the
moment when the extension of the franchise held unforeseeable
possibilities.  Conservative-minded people were apprehensive, the rest
excited, and the presence of Gladstone, even should he be left in
opposition, was regarded as a valuable bridge over the currents of
change.  The few months that remained before the fall of the Government
included the news of the fall of Khartoum, which was nearly fatal, for
the Government escaped a vote of censure by the bare majority of
fourteen.  Gladstone determined to remain, despite a divided Cabinet,
until the Redistribution Bill was passed.  The condition of affairs in
the Cabinet itself may be judged from one of his comments: "A very fair
Cabinet to-day--only three resignations."  As he wrote to his wife:


    All the later history of this ministry, which is now entering on
    its sixth year, has been a wild romance of politics, with a
    continual succession of hairbreadth escapes and strange accidents
    pressing upon one another, and it is only from the number of
    dangers we have passed through already that one can be bold enough
    to hope we may pass also through what yet remain....  Russia and
    Ireland are the two great dangers remaining.



The Russian danger in Afghanistan passed, and on the evening of the
following day, which happened to be a Sunday, Gladstone dined at
Marlborough House, which, though otherwise charming, he found {229}
"un-Sundaylike and unrestful."  Ireland was quieter.  One could hardly
say more.

In August 1885 the Crimes Act was to expire, and with a General
Election in sight, it became a matter of party interest whether or not
it should be renewed.  In May Gladstone proposed to renew certain of
its clauses.  Thereupon it was obvious that Parnell's support might be
gained and the elections won if the Conservatives offered to drop
coercion.  Without official information upon the actual condition of
affairs in Ireland, they could hardly promise this, but they went as
far as they could and allowed their attitude to be known.  The Liberals
were divided on the question of coercion.  Some favoured an increased
degree of local self-government, others the creation of a central board
with administrative functions for the whole country.  Gladstone
preserved a memorandum of his own attitude at this time:


    I looked upon the extension of a strong measure of local government
    like this to Ireland, now that the question is effectually revived
    by the Crimes Act, as invaluable itself, and as the only hopeful
    means of securing Crown and State from an ignominious surrender in
    the next Parliament after a mischievous and painful struggle.



He goes on to say that he did not contemplate opening the Irish
question in connexion with his resignation, should he resign.  "It
would come antecedently to any parliamentary treatment of that
problem."  If the Cabinet was then broken up, he felt, as he looked
round upon the virtual settlement of the Russian and Egyptian
difficulties, that "it would leave behind it an excellent record at
home and abroad."

Despite the approval of Parnell, the plan for a central board failed to
carry the whole Cabinet.  Gladstone was disappointed, and his comment
was: "Ah, they will rue this day"; and again, "Within six years, if it
{230} please God to spare their lives, they will be repenting in
sackcloth and ashes."  Refusing to be depressed, Gladstone spent
Whitsun at Hawarden, and found refreshment in _Cooper on the
Atonement_, some congenial visitors, and other books.  On June 4, 1885,
he returned to London, and four days later the Irish Nationalists
combined with the Conservatives to defeat the Government upon the
Budget proposals.  This new alliance showed that Parnell's already
quoted words were true, and that, having failed in spite of Gladstone
to gain what he wanted from the Liberals, he now proposed to put the
Tories to the test, by placing them immediately under an obligation to
him.

So ended the long struggle against unsuspected difficulties which
filled these five precarious years.  Even apart from Ireland, they were
perhaps the most exacting of Gladstone's political life.  After
accepting his resignation, the Queen offered him an earldom, adding
that while the country would "doubtless" be pleased, she believed "that
it would be beneficial to his health--no longer exposing him to the
pressure from without, for more active work than he ought to
undertake."  She went on:


    Only the other day--without reference to the present events--the
    Queen mentioned to Mrs. Gladstone at Windsor the advantage to Mr.
    Gladstone's health of a removal from one House to the other, in
    which she seemed to agree.  The Queen trusts, therefore, that Mr.
    Gladstone will accept the offer of an earldom, which would be very
    gratifying to her.


He replied that, while he prized every word of her letter, he ought not
to accept, and that any services he could yet render would be greater
in the Commons than the Lords.  "It has never formed part of his views
to enter that historic chamber."  He coveted rather "that interval
between an active career and death, which the profession of politics
has always seemed to {231} him especially to require."  To Lord
Granville he is more personal.


    I send you herewith a letter from the Queen which moves and almost
    upsets me.  It must have cost her much to write, and it is really a
    pearl of great price.



Gladstone, more than most people who do not take a courtier's view of
life, must have felt the lack of intimacy between himself and his
sovereign.  Perhaps, after all, it did _not_ cost her much to offer the
customary recognition that would incidentally curtail his future
activities in politics.  That he felt otherwise, however, is the last
pin-prick of his second term of office.  We have now to go back to the
part of Ireland in these years, that we may trace without interruption
the last of Gladstone's crusades.  It involved an effort in which even
changes of government were but episodes.  It was his one domestic
struggle that deserves the name of drama.  It is perhaps the only one
which the future cannot help following with unabated interest, though
the prime hero is not Gladstone but Parnell, the most arresting
political personality of the century.




{232}

CHAPTER VI

HIS LAST CRUSADE


I

The election which had followed the Midlothian campaign had not turned,
as we have seen, upon Irish affairs, and it is not really necessary to
examine Gladstone's previous utterances in order to determine precisely
when and why he became convinced that the settlement of the Irish
claims was both just and inevitable.  Once again it was the facts of
the situation that taught him, and English politicians have never had a
sterner schoolmaster than Parnell.  The distinction of Gladstone is to
have been the first responsible English politician to admit the facts,
and to refuse to pretend any longer to ignore them.  He never had
axiomatic objections to permanent settlements of burning controversies.
He was not a man who would shut his eyes to a situation, and our
treatment of Ireland in the past would seem to exalt this into an
English characteristic.  He was thus alone, and in the position of
having to fight against his own side.  There was no popularity to be
won in England by meeting Irish aspirations.  Here he was
unquestionably disinterested, and he was carried forward by his innate
desire to clear difficulties out of the way, and to overtake arrears
rather than to make innovations.  He could admit movements beyond the
Channel.

There was no reference to Ireland in the Queen's Speech, and Gladstone
thought that the Church Act of {233} 1869 and the Land Act of 1870 had
settled the question.  He and the country were soon undeceived.
Distress in Ireland, in circumstances which could not have been
foreseen, were leading to the wanton eviction of many tenants, and to
the defeat of the objects of the Act of 1870 itself.  A Bill to
compensate evicted tenants, on certain conditions, was passed by the
Commons but rejected by the House of Lords.  In one of his innumerable
memoranda Gladstone wrote:


    The rapid and vast extension of agrarian disturbance followed, as
    was to be expected, this wild excess of landlordism, and the Irish
    Government proceeded to warn the Cabinet that coercive legislation
    would be necessary.  Forster allowed himself to be persuaded by the
    governmental agents in Ireland that the root of the evil lay within
    small compass....  I must say I never fell into this extraordinary
    illusion of Forster's about his "village ruffian."



Gladstone was anxious that there should be an attempt to try the
ordinary law before seeking special powers, and was opposed to the
suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act.  He did not like the imprisonment
of men before they had been tried.  In these early days of his
Government, however, he was much occupied with foreign affairs, and he
gave way upon both points for fear of breaking up his new Government,
the first duty and "special commission" of which was to reconstruct the
foreign policy of the country.  Meantime, after the rejection of the
Compensation for Disturbance Bill, the condition of Ireland became
alarming.  Evictions were followed by riots, and any who dared to
accept the farms of evicted tenants were attacked, their cattle maimed,
and their ricks set on fire.  Parnell declared that the Land League
must give the protection which the Government had failed to supply, and
in one of those cool, direct speeches, which make exciting reading even
to-day, he said:

{234}


    Depend upon it that the measure of the Land Bill next session will
    be the measure of your activity and energy this winter.  It will be
    the measure of your determination not to pay unjust rents; it will
    be the measure of your determination to keep a firm grip on your
    homesteads....  Now what are you to do to a tenant who bids for a
    farm from which his neighbour has been evicted?  I think I heard
    somebody say, Shoot him! but I wish to point out to you a very much
    better way.  When a man takes a farm from which another has been
    evicted, you must show him on the roadside when you meet him, you
    must show him in the Streets of the town, you must show him at the
    shop counter, you must show him in the fair and in the
    market-place, and even in the house of worship, by leaving him
    severely alone, by putting him into a moral Coventry, by isolating
    him from his kind as if he were a leper of old, you must show him
    your detestation of the crime he has committed and you may depend
    upon it that there will be no man ... to transgress your unwritten
    code of laws.



In this speech the policy was launched which gave the word boycott to
the language.  With the wonderful faculty of the Irish for acting
together, Captain Boycott was the first of a line of victims to the
triumphant policy of Parnell.  It reminds us that the real difficulty
was the virtual expropriation of the peasants from the land by a system
of law devised by the landlords for their own benefit, and that the
political movement for Home Rule, though reasonable in itself, became
the extension of agrarian hatred to landlords who were also political
masters.  There were two strands to a common aspiration, but the land
was the question of the hour.  Gladstone was placed in the difficulty
of having to devise a new Land Bill while meeting the immediate
disturbances with a renewed resort to coercion.



II

With this harassing prospect the session of 1881 opened, and Parnell's
answer to coercion was to bring {235} obstruction into full play.  Mr.
Forster's Bill, summarised by Morley as enabling the Viceroy to lock up
anybody he pleased, gave the Irish Members the excuse to make
parliamentary business impossible.  By a continuous sitting of
twenty-four hours Gladstone tried to force the measure through.  The
Speaker felt that it rested with him to extricate the House from the
defeat of its wishes by a minority, and offered to closure discussion
of his own authority.  After an all-night sitting the inexhaustible
Biggar was still on his feet when the Speaker returned to take the
place of his deputy and put the question.  It was the climax of the
debate, and the Irish retired under protest on the second division.  By
this means Westminster was forcibly reminded of the happenings beyond
the Irish Sea, where during the previous year over ten thousand tenants
had been evicted.  The evicting landlords found graves dug before their
doors when they crossed their own thresholds in the morning.  In a
word, coercion was the only alternative to the refusal of the House of
Lords to grant any concessions to the peasantry.

It is remarkable that, even before this manifestation of Irish power to
impede English legislation, in fact in the previous autumn, Parnell was
under no illusion over the permanence of his tactics or the
independence of his party.  As the most detached observer that the
House has numbered among its active Members, Parnell's opinion of the
atmosphere of Westminster is worth recording.  From time to time the
doubt that he expressed revives, and its force is not confined to the
minority of Irishmen whom he was contemplating.  On receiving the
freedom of Limerick he told his audience:


    I am not one of those who believe in the permanence of an Irish
    party in the English Parliament.  I feel convinced that, sooner or
    later, the influence which every English Government has at its
    command--the powerful and demoralising {236} influence--sooner or
    later will sap the best party you can return to the House of
    Commons....  But I think it possible to maintain the independence
    of our party by great exertions ... while we are making a short,
    sharp, and I trust decisive, struggle for the restoration of our
    legislative independence.



Gladstone believed in the parliamentary atmosphere which Parnell
distrusted, and the contrast between the two men is too distinct to be
emphasised.  A piquancy is added to their struggle from the fact that
the cool, imperturbable Parnell represented Ireland with what
Englishmen believe to be English qualities, while the eloquent master
of persuasive rhetoric was not the Irish but the Englishman.  Though
Parnell could not prevent the passing of a Coercion Bill, he fulfilled
his determination that the struggle against it should be "such as never
has been seen within the walls of Parliament."  If, for example, the
Speaker had closed the debate on Wednesday morning, the Irish succeeded
in spending the whole of the rest of the day till the adjournment
discussing the question that he should search for precedents to justify
what he had done.

The result of this was to lead Gladstone to propose certain changes in
procedure which would render the repetition of these tactics
impossible.  Thereupon Mr. Parnell rose in a scene of indescribable
uproar to move that the right hon. member be no longer heard.  The
comedy of the situation, for the terms of the motion were inconceivable
to the House and to the country, is obvious, and Parnell and thirty-two
Irish Members were suspended before Gladstone was allowed to speak.
Despite the revised procedure, the Coercion Bill was not passed until
March 2, and though Kilmainham Gaol became full of Land Leaguers, the
agitation did not cease.



{237}

III

The next step was to introduce a Land Bill, and if it was not received
in a spirit of conciliation, it was admitted by Irishmen themselves to
be "a sweeping measure of reform."  Gladstone himself called it "the
most difficult measure he had ever known to come under the detailed
consideration of a Cabinet."  It removed the exceptions and limitations
which had robbed the Act of 1870 of its effect.  Land courts were
formed to fix rents, and the right of the tenant to dispose of the
good-will of his holding was secured to him.  The principal demands of
the Land League were granted.  It was the reward of agitation.  As
Gladstone said in 1893, "without the Land League the Act of 1881 would
not now be on the Statute Book."

Parnell, convinced that the Bill was safe, was anxious not to be
responsible for it, and advised his followers not to vote for the
second reading, though some of them were carried away by feelings of
gratitude.  In committee, therefore, whenever the Bill was in danger,
Parnell came to the Government's support.  Whenever it was safe, he
suggested improvements.  Gladstone must have watched these
parliamentary tactics with eager interest, for they showed a mastery as
unmistakable as it was different from his own.  If Parnell forced his
hand by means of the Land League, and kept the same pressure on the
land courts by discouraging the tenants from recourse to them until
certain test cases had been submitted, yet it is also true that
Gladstone was the sole responsible English statesman who desired to see
existing abuses settled equitably.  He had to deal also with English
opinion; he too was ultimately dependent upon it, and he cannot be
blamed for making English opinion the limit of reforms that it was
possible for him to {238} propose.  It should be enough to recall that
the Land Act of 1881 is one of the two or three measures which have
been regarded as Gladstone's best achievements of statesmanship.  Yet
its embodiment of fair rent, fixity of tenure, and free disposal--the
Three F's--had seemed incredible to him when recommended by the
Bessborough commission a few months before.

It was on October 7, 1881, that Gladstone, as we saw, threatened
Parnell with "the resources of civilisation," and Parnell's reply,
characteristically defiant, is interesting for a certain familiar
criticism that it contains.  After describing Gladstone, in one of his
few personalities, as "this pretending champion of the rights of every
other nation except those of the Irish nation," Parnell continued:


    He says the late Isaac Butt was a most estimable man and a true
    patriot.  When we in Ireland were following Isaac Butt into the
    lobbies, endeavouring to obtain the very Act which William Ewart
    Gladstone, having stolen the idea from Isaac Butt, passed last
    session, William Ewart Gladstone and his ex-Government officials
    were following Sir Stafford Northcote and Benjamin Disraeli into
    the other lobby.



While it is extraordinary that Gladstone had no immediate insight into
rights or principles, though apparently preoccupied with nothing else,
it is no less extraordinary that he was quicker than any of his
countrymen to accept unpalatable facts, and, having learnt from them,
to work harder and more tenaciously than his colleagues to convince his
countrymen of the remedy.  Difficulties for Gladstone existed to be
solved, though he needed jogging to become aware of their existence.
Indeed it may be said that the combination of Parnell, that relentless
goad, and Gladstone, that indefatigible steer, was the only one
imaginable to settle the Irish question in a nineteenth-century English
Parliament.

Parnell anticipated arrest after making this speech.  {239} When asked
who would take his place, if this happened, he replied in one of those
terse phrases that are still moving for their point, "Captain Moonlight
will take my place."  He meant that, after all, he was the brake that
held back disorder, and his phrase is worth quoting as the shortest
instance of an electric force of words that belies Morley's distinction
between the immediate effects of oratory and the abiding effect of
literature.  Parnell and Gladstone were both almost worshipped by their
audiences, yet the speeches of Parnell still made excellent reading.
There is a grip upon reality about them which is as effective now as it
was at the moment when he spoke.  From Kilmainham Gaol he sent this
message:


    I shall take it as evidence that the people of the country did not
    do their duty if I am speedily released.



Gladstone was answered.

This was in the autumn of 1881, and by the following April Gladstone's
own attitude was as follows.  In a letter to Forster he wrote:


    In truth I should say (differing perhaps from many) that for the
    Ireland of to-day the first question is the rectification of the
    relations between landlord and tenant, which happily is going on;
    the next is to relieve Great Britain from the enormous weight of
    the government of Ireland unaided by the people, and from the
    hopeless contradiction in which we stand while we give a
    parliamentary representation, hardly effective for anything but
    mischief, without the local institutions of self-government which
    it presupposes, and on which alone it can have a sound and healthy
    basis.



He had advanced far, but in the meantime, as the prisoner had
predicted, Captain Moonlight at large was more dangerous than the
Parnell whose place he had taken.  In despair, Gladstone appealed to
Newman on the chance that the Pope might be able to intervene.  Nothing
came of the Errington mission, as it was called, except that to the
Irish it seemed a backstairs attempt {240} which they much resented.
The matter is only interesting as showing how warily, as Newman had
remarked, the Pope must proceed in political affairs which affect
others besides the priests.

From this just quoted letter to Forster another sentence must be
detached to show an unusually clear example of development on
Gladstone's part.  Speaking of local self-government for Ireland,
Gladstone said:


    If we must postpone the question till the state of the country is
    more fit for it, I should answer that the least danger is in going
    forward at once.  It is liberty alone which fits men for liberty.
    This proposition, like every other in politics, has its bounds; but
    it is far safer than the counter-doctrine, wait till they are fit.



He had not thought so in his youth when he declared that moral must
precede the physical emancipation of the slaves, but experience had
enlightened him.  The problem was how to apply this principle to the
present state of Ireland.  Since the last Coercion Act and the
imprisonment of Parnell, conditions in Ireland were worse than before.
Statistics showed that murders and crimes had either doubled or
trebled.  Parnell was in gaol, but what was to be done?  The failure of
the repressive policy was hopeless.  Gladstone had resorted to coercion
with dislike, and had acted on the advice of the Irish executive.
Since the policy must be altered, he could not but think of Parnell.
Even the Conservatives declared that "the present measures of coercion
have entirely failed to restore order."  It seemed to some of the
Irishmen that the Conservatives were going to pose as the friends of
their country at Gladstone's expense.  From Parnell's point of view
there was a risk that the country would soon pass beyond his control.
His active control became, therefore, a matter of concern to both
nations.  He and Gladstone were thinking of each other.  Released on
parole to visit his sister, whose son {241} was dying in Paris, Parnell
saw Captain O'Shea, who was in touch with the Government, and told him
that the present anarchy was due to the numerous small tenants who,
unable to pay their rents, were intimidating the richer ones; and that,
while the eviction of the former would intensify crime, an Arrears
Bill, to relieve those who could not pay, would tranquillise the
country.  Parnell held that if the arrears question were settled, as he
proposed, he and his colleagues would be able to check further
outrages.  It is true that, if set at liberty, they would be better
able to control events, but the position of the imprisoned leaders was
never discussed, nor were they concerned with anything but to explain
to the Government how to relieve the appalling situation in Ireland.

Rumours of these exchanges spread abroad, and, not liking the
proposals, Lord Cowper resigned the Viceroyalty and Mr. Forster the
Chief Secretaryship.  Parnell was released.  There has been a tiresome
discussion whether there was a Kilmainham treaty or not.  Gladstone
strenuously denied it.  Negotiations there certainly were, but there
was no consideration.  Parnell volunteered the opinion that, if a
satisfactory Arrears Bill was introduced, the country would be
tranquillised and he would be in a position to slow down agitation.  In
this he was stating a fact rather than laying down a condition, but his
release gave colour to the suggestion, which he and Gladstone both
denied, truly enough, in Parliament, that his release was part of an
arrangement.  Further colour was given to the fiction because it was
over Parnell's release that Forster had resigned.  Everyone recognised
that Parnell was a controlling influence, and his release was only a
matter of time.  Coming when it did, however, and followed as it was by
Forster's resignation, it looked like part of a bargain, and this it
certainly was not.



{242}

IV

To fill the vacant offices Gladstone chose Lord Frederick Cavendish,
who had married one of Mrs. Gladstone's nieces, for the
Chief-Secretaryship, and Lord Spencer for the new Viceroy.  On the
evening of his arrival, Lord Frederick Cavendish and Mr. Burke, the
Under-Secretary, were murdered in Phoenix Park by a group of assassins.
They called themselves the Invincibles, and had sprung up under
Forster's administration.  Mr. Burke was their object, and Lord
Frederick, who was an innocent stranger, was murdered by mistake.  They
did not know who he was.  The horror that the crime occasioned was felt
throughout Ireland as well.  Not only was Gladstone stunned by the
news, but so was Parnell.  "How can I," he cried, "carry on a public
agitation if I am stabbed in the back in this way?"  It arrested the
new policy of conciliation at the moment of its birth.  Parnell offered
to resign his seat, a proposal Gladstone refused to entertain, though
he said that he was deeply sensible of the honourable motives which had
prompted the proposal.  Gladstone wrote to Lord Granville: "If Parnell
goes, no restraining influence will remain."  Meantime English opinion
demanded a new Coercion Act, which was shortly passed in 1882.  The
Irish did what they could to oppose the measure, but they could not
disguise that the Phoenix Park murders had weakened their hands.
Parnell was sympathetic to Gladstone himself:


    We have been contending against the right hon. gentleman for two
    years.  We have found him to be a great man and a strong man.  I
    even think it is no dishonour to admit that we should not wish to
    be fought again in the same way by anybody in the future.  I regret
    that the event in the Phoenix Park has prevented him continuing the
    course of conciliation that we had expected from him.  I regret
    that owing to the exigencies {243} of his party, of his position in
    the country, he has felt himself compelled to turn from that course
    of conciliation and concession into the horrible path of coercion.



After eighteen Irish Members had been suspended, they retired,
protesting that important parts of the measure, having been passed in
their enforced absence, the new law would be devoid of moral force.
Gladstone immediately brought in an Arrears Bill, which practically
embodied the suggestions made by Parnell himself in Kilmainham.  He was
thereupon true to his word.  With the question of arrears settled, he
proceeded to suppress the Ladies' Land League, which had been extremely
active during his imprisonment, and generally to secure such quiet in
the country as would fulfil his intentions and prepare the way for a
new move at a more seasonable time.  In October 1882 the National
League was formed, which made political agitation for Home Rule, and
not the land, its principal concern.

The next event of importance was the Reform Act of 1884, which extended
household suffrage to Ireland.  Mr. Gladstone's difficult part in
conducting this measure through both Houses we have already seen.  The
electorate of Ireland was trebled, and if some thought that the new Act
would make Ireland Liberal they were rudely undeceived.  With the help
of the Irish vote the Conservatives returned to power, and Lord
Salisbury became Prime Minister in 1885.  The idea perhaps was that the
Conservatives would do something which, having made the question of
Home Rule an English party matter, in time would encourage Gladstone
and the Liberals to do more.  Parnell once said to his biographer, Mr.
R. Barry O'Brien: "You do not know what it is to fight Mr. Gladstone.
I am no match for him.  I could not explain to you what it is to have
to fight him, I know it.  I have fought him, and am ready to fight him
again; but he knows more moves on the board than {244} I do."  He
thought Gladstone the most useful ally that he could have in England,
but he also thought that the Liberals were less likely than the
Conservatives to conduct a Home Rule Bill through the House of Lords.
By exercising relentless pressure upon both the English parties,
Parnell believed that in the end Gladstone would take the lead.  In the
meantime, therefore, he had to set the pace for him by proving the
influence of the Irish vote at Gladstone's expense.

The first-fruits of this punishment of the Liberals and instalment of
the Conservatives were promising.  Lord Carnarvon, the new Viceroy,
announced the abandonment of coercion and his intention to rule by the
customary law.  Other Conservatives, including Lord Salisbury and Lord
Randolph Churchill, struck the same note so forcibly that the rank and
file of the party and its papers were shocked.  The conciliation of
Parnell seemed to them to be going too far.  It was the Conservatives
now who were pledging themselves to an alternative policy.  After
practically forty years of misgovernment by exceptional legislation,
Ireland was surely entitled to a change.  Coercion was thus described
as the Liberal policy, and the impression made by the change of front
was stronger on no one than Gladstone himself.  Did it not now seem
that _both_ the English parties might combine for the solution of the
Irish question?  In the elections the voice of united Ireland had been
unmistakably pronounced.  This was the deciding factor to Gladstone,
who looked forward hopefully to the future.

Parnell's motion for an inquiry into certain capital convictions
carried out under Lord Spencer was received sympathetically.  Indeed
some of the speeches condemning the policy of the late Government were
so strong that they produced remonstrances, and it was not difficult
even for Conservatives to argue that Ministers were {245} acting
against their known convictions for party reasons.  It was at least a
complete somersault.  Gladstone's view of it must be given in his own
words:


    Within the last two or three weeks (he wrote to Lord Derby) the
    situation has undergone important changes.  I am not fully
    informed, but what I know looks as if the Irish party, so called in
    Parliament, excited by the high biddings of Lord Randolph, had
    changed what was undoubtedly Parnell's ground until within a very
    short time back.  It is now said that a central board will not
    suffice, and that there must be a parliament.  This, I suppose, may
    mean the repeal of the Act of Union, or may mean an
    Austro-Hungarian scheme, or may mean that Ireland is to be like a
    great colony such as Canada.  Of all or any of these schemes I will
    now only say that, of course, they constitute an entirely new point
    of departure....



He followed this up by writing to Granville:


    For my own part I have seen my way pretty well as to the
    particulars of the minor and rejected plan, but the idea of the
    wider one puzzles me much.  At the same time, _if_ the election
    gives a return of a decisive character, the sooner the subject is
    dealt with the better.



This was in August 1885.  The wary old statesman was watching the
shifting sands of opinion to see if it might not now be possible to
build on them an Irish parliamentary house.  Parnell was the reality
close at hand, and it remained to be seen whether the ministerialists
on both sides were not going in advance of the country, and whether
their followers would remain docile to leadership of this kind.  It may
still be said that Gladstone was almost the only responsible English
statesman who took the Irish question seriously, and desired that it
should be settled permanently.  It was old and thorny, and English
affairs could not wait for ever for their turn.

Two days after the above note was written, Gladstone, whose throat was
proving troublesome, joined Sir Thomas and Lady Brassey on a cruise to
Norway, during {246} which he astonished the party by a walk of
eighteen miles.  Though now past his seventy-fifth birthday, no one who
saw Mr. Gladstone, Lady Brassey recorded, "could feel much anxiety on
the score of the failure of his strength."  He meditated on spiritual
matters, and began to draft notes for his next election address to
Midlothian.  The draft, completed after his return and in view of the
approaching dissolution, was "written with my best care to avoid
treading on the toes of either the right or the left wing."  Has anyone
else so combined the art of ambiguity in expression with the same
practical power of carrying matters through?  On this occasion he was
discursive to an extreme even for him, and many fell into the
temptation of judging the result without weighing the innumerable
qualifications.  To write papers incapable of exact summary, and too
long to remember, was Gladstone's way of reserving his freedom.  The
final emphasis of meaning would only fall upon the right clause when
all the practical circumstances were known.  His sincerity lay in the
tenacity with which, through devious expressions and in doubtful
circumstances, he pursued his way towards the best solution available
at the moment.  His material was the changing current of opinion, and
his object was to devise a policy which should satisfy Ireland without
dividing the Liberals at his back.  If he was trying to unite
incompatibles, it was his fate and not his fault.  The sincerity of his
attempt was the one permanent fact upon which Parnell could now rely in
English politics.  The following words, written to Lord Granville early
in October 1885, are surely convincing and characteristic:


    I remain at present in the leadership of the party, first with a
    view to the election, and secondly with a view to being, by a bare
    possibility, of use afterwards in the Irish question if it should
    take a favourable turn, but [not] ... should the question be merely
    one of Liberal _v._ Conservative, and not {247} one of commanding
    imperial necessity, such as that of the Irish Government may come
    to be after the dissolution.



The attempted settlement of the Irish question, but nothing less, would
encourage Gladstone to take office.  This put the party, in the person
of Lord Granville, in a dilemma.  As long as Gladstone was available he
was the indispensable leader, but his insistence on a Home Rule policy
made the indispensable a possible source of disunion.  After a visit
from Chamberlain to Hawarden matters seemed brighter, and agreement
with that decided gentleman within reach.  Of this conversation
Gladstone wrote to Lord Granville:


    I told him ... that if a big Irish question should arise, and arise
    in such a form as to promise a possibility of settlement, that
    would be a crisis with a beginning and an end, and perhaps one in
    which from age and circumstances I might be able to supply aid and
    service such as could not be exactly had without me.



He would not remain for other questions or for party reasons, least of
all as a nominal head.  Certainly if the last of his crusades could be
carried to success, it would be an appropriate end to his career, the
most appropriate imaginable.  Can we infer that, this achieved, he
would really have retired at last?  It is unusually rash to prophesy,
at any time of Gladstone's life, of the fulfilment of this recurrent,
pious aspiration.  But we are safe in assuming that the settlement of
an outstanding difficulty was the strongest of motives with him, and
that, if it could be gained, at his time of life he might conceivably
withdraw, provided that no fresh incentive should appeal to his
energies.  At the moment his venerable age might lend to him an
authority unique for his cherished purpose, and there was the added
thought that his power to exert it was matched against time.



{248}

V

Gladstone's attitude, of course, was not the only factor in a
mysterious situation.  With the approval of Lord Salisbury, Lord
Carnarvon, the sympathetic Viceroy, had had a conversation with
Parnell, which Parnell left "believing that I was in complete accord
with him regarding the main outlines of a settlement conferring a
legislature upon Ireland."  Parnell naturally inferred that such a
conversation could not have been held unless the Government was also
favourable.  In the controversy that followed, Carnarvon, in effect,
denied no more than having stated that the Conservatives intended, if
they were returned after the election, to create an Irish Parliament.
To surmise something of the kind was surely but to believe that the
recent alliance between the Irish and the Conservatives was bearing
fruit.  It is true that this was a larger expectation than Parnell had
expressed before, but then his power had grown in the meantime, and his
party would certainly be stronger after the approaching election.  He
was setting one English party in the scales against the other.  He was
bidding high.  In thinking of the value of the Irish vote to either, he
must presume that the English leaders knew how far opinion in this
country would support them.  It was not for him to worry whether they
were thinking too little of their followers and too much of him.  His
business was to keep them strictly to the level by insisting upon the
utmost value for his support.

When Parnell's attitude was known, the division in the ranks of the
Liberals began to appear.  The explicit demand led Lord Hartington to
reject it, and Chamberlain to go back on his words.  He had compared
the administration of Dublin Castle to "that with which Russia governs
Poland, or that which prevailed in Venice {249} under Austrian rule."
That was in June 1885.  In August Parnell had spoken.  In September
Chamberlain had replied: "If these are the terms on which Mr. Parnell's
support is to be obtained, I will not enter into the compact."  It is
hardly to be wondered that Parnell put no faith in English professions,
and maintained to the last his attitude that the English would give
what they could be made to give and no more.  Mr. Gladstone, aware of
these contradictions in the men behind him, remained.  He was naturally
wary and non-committal, seeking, as his custom was, for words that
should imply the greatest common measure of agreement and committing
himself as little as possible beyond.  The wish of his colleague, Mr.
Childers, to announce to his electors a virtual scheme of Home Rule
seemed to Gladstone "a great step in advance," but he begged his
adherent not to go beyond a readiness to consider an Irish Parliament
for Irish purposes.  In September, therefore, he made a speech, saying:


    I believe history and posterity will consign to disgrace the name
    and memory of every man, be he who he may, and on whichever side of
    the Channel he may dwell, that, having the power to aid in an
    equitable settlement between Ireland and Great Britain, shall use
    that power not to aid, but to prevent or to retard it.



Here we see him at his work of education, implying the solution that he
did not state, and using moral pleas to persuade his readers that it
was the right one.  A little later, in November 1885, with an emphasis
that had been slowly gathering in the meantime, he told his
constituents in Midlothian that "it will be a vital danger to the
country and to the empire if, at a time when a demand from Ireland for
larger powers of self-government is to be dealt with, there is not in
Parliament a party totally independent of the Irish vote."  He pleaded
for an independent majority of Liberals.  The worst, because {250} the
most unreliable, prospect was one in which the Irish should still hold
the balance.  It would allow no margin, and give every opportunity to
hesitants and to intrigue.

Parnell had tried to draw Mr. Gladstone into stating his plan, but he
was too wary, finding the convenient excuse that it was not the
province of an Opposition leader to produce such schemes.  This enabled
him to place the onus on the Conservative Government, which he was
afraid would simply make a point of opposing anything that came
personally from himself.  Lord Salisbury, on his side, was hardly more
committal in the usual idiom of ministers, though it is possible to
find contradictory passages in his speeches, because he had not
Gladstone's mastery of elusiveness.  It is given to few men to make no
definite statements at all.  With Gladstone's latest utterance before
him Parnell, deeming it to be inexcusable hedging, decided to throw the
Irish vote on the Conservative side.  If he could maintain them, the
feebler party, in office, he could expect from them the better terms.
So he argued, forgetting perhaps that the Liberal party was not united
on the Irish question, and that every Liberal seat lost by the
opposition of Irish voters must divide them more and make Ireland an
odious word to them.

Parnell's refusal to give either party any rope at all cost Gladstone
about twenty seats at the election.  Parnell was inclined to blame
himself later for his decision, which, events were to prove, overlooked
the fact that it was not Mr. Gladstone who remained unconverted but his
colleagues.  How could the doubters adopt the cause of an Irish party
which voted against their own members at a critical time?  But how
could Gladstone be explicit, and how could Parnell be sure that he
would go as far as he dared?  The issue of the election turned upon
this miserable balance of considerations, which reveal humanity
confronted by difficulties that only {251} omniscience could solve.  We
may wish that Gladstone had been a shade more explicit, and Parnell a
shade more patient.  We can sympathise with both.  It is not so easy to
sympathise with Lord Salisbury, who, more definite in words than
Gladstone, was really trifling with the issue more than he.



VI

In October Gladstone was at home, reading and writing on exalted
themes.  In November he was in Midlothian, and was received once more
with vast enthusiasm in Edinburgh.  The result of the election was to
give to the Liberals a majority of 82 over the Conservatives, while
Parnell came back with 86.  He still held the balance, but he had made
an enemy of many Liberals on the way, and had shown Lord Salisbury that
his aid was worth little to the Conservative party.  He had also shown
that he and his party did represent an overwhelming national demand.
Out of 89 contests the Nationalists had won 85, and their majorities
left the Tories nowhere.  Not a single Liberal in Ireland was returned.
Ireland had spoken with as nearly unanimous a voice as a nation can
speak.

This to Mr. Gladstone was the vital fact of the election.  He comes
before us as a statesman nowhere more clearly than here.  He did not
want to make the Irish settlement a party question.  He had offered,
and was to offer again, to put no hindrances in the way of the
Conservatives if they would deal with it.  During the autumn he had
also tried to educate the country by encouraging an Irish writer to
publish two articles: on "Irish Wrongs and English Remedies," which
appeared in November, and another on "A Federal Union with Ireland,"
which appeared in January 1886.  {252} He neglected none of his
characteristic arts of persuasion, and if, in the light of subsequent
history, we question the tactics of the Irish and the Liberal leaders,
we are asking them to be other than themselves.

The alliance between the Conservatives and the Irish left the former in
power, with a nominal surplus, despite the result of the elections, and
until Parliament should reassemble no one knew what the position really
was.  On December 10 Gladstone was endeavouring to persuade the
Conservative Government to take up the Irish question, and offering
informally his co-operation in such a plan.  Salisbury had good party
reasons for hesitation, and the difference between him and Gladstone
was that he could not see the matter in any other light.  Uncertainty
and excitement were turned into commotion when Gladstone's silence led
to rumours in the papers purporting to contain his scheme, the
establishment of an Irish Parliament.  Gladstone's son was in London.
There he formed the opinion that, unless some pronouncement was made,
the Liberal party would be split.  He therefore gave in an interview
his idea of his father's opinions to a journalist who declared that the
party needed a lead.  Into the announcement the words a Parliament in
Dublin crept.  Gladstone explained in a telegram that the statement was
unauthorised, and "not an accurate representation of my views, but, I
presume, a speculation upon them."  The result of this well-intentional
effort was unfortunate.  It was a premature announcement, at a time
when Gladstone held silence to be golden, and in truth his precise
scheme had not yet formed in his mind.  His denial was not satisfactory
to the public, for it was a moment when ambiguity was of no avail.  It
also forced him into utterance at the moment when he held that the
Government was the authority to speak.  We may perhaps note in passing
that there is no hint that Gladstone showed any sign of resentment.  If
his magnanimity {253} to individuals is ever questioned, surely we may
quote this instance in reply.

The ensuing mischief was revealed when Lord Hartington publicly
declared that he had received no proposals of Liberal policy for
meeting the Irish demand, and that he stuck to what he had said during
the elections.  It meant that he and his Liberal followers would resist
any new policy in Ireland.  Chamberlain said that the Irish claim was
now unmistakable, and that "we ourselves by our public declarations and
by our Liberal principles are pledged to acknowledge the justice of
this claim."  He added that it was for Parnell to "settle accounts with
his new friends....  If he finds that he has been deceived, he will
approach the Liberal party in a spirit of reason and conciliation."
The idea of leaving the Conservative minority in power till they had
satisfied Parnell was not agreeable to the new Liberal Members of
Parliament.  Gladstone received many letters of protest against any
such course.  What, then, was he to do?  In a private memorandum to
Lord Granville, written at the end of December, the farthest point to
which he would go was this:


    If from any cause the alliance of the Tories and the Nationalists
    which did exist, and presumably does exist, should be known to be
    dissolved, I do not see how it is possible for what would then be
    the Liberal majority to shrink from the duty appertaining to it as
    such, and to leave the business of government to the 250 men whom
    it was elected to oppose....  The case supposed is, the motion
    made--carried--Ministers resign--Queen sends for me.  Might I go so
    far as to say, I should only accept the trust if assured of the
    adequate, that is, of the general support of the party to a plan of
    duly guarded home rule?  If that support were withheld it would be
    my duty to stand aside.



At the end of the same month Parnell decided that there was nothing to
hope from the Conservatives now that his aid had only reduced the
number of Liberals at {254} the elections.  The reason why Gladstone
was so anxious not to be drawn is clear from Parnell's remark:
"Whatever chance there was [of the Conservatives acting] disappeared
when the seemingly authoritative statements of Mr. Gladstone's
intention to deal with the question were published."  Yet the Liberals
were identified with coercion in the Irish mind, and therefore for the
moment he left the Conservatives in office.  Yet only a combination of
the Irish and the Liberals would give either a majority.

The interval before the meeting of Parliament on January 12, 1886, was
spent by Gladstone at Hawarden in many matters of personal interest.
His second daughter became engaged; he felled trees, he attended church
punctually; he wrote many letters, and prepared an article on Huxley
for publication; he read Dicey and Maine, and among other light volumes
Rider Haggard's _King Solomon's Mines_.  He made extracts from Burke,
whom he found "sometimes almost divine."  He renewed friendly
correspondence with Manning.  On his birthday seven hundred letters and
parcels arrived.


    It was a day for intense thankfulness, but, alas, not for
    recollection and detachment.  When will that day come?  Until then,
    why string together the commonplaces and generalities of great
    things, really unfelt?



In all this pressure upon him, which included the weight of the Irish
question, what beyond immediate circumstances had he time to feel, or
was he constitutionally capable of feeling?  He is certain, he says, of
a keen and deep desire to be extricated from the life of contention,
but was not the life of contention for political aims his truly inward
life?  He would change indeed from political to literary activity, but
he could not sit still, could not even walk slowly, or saunter, or
climb steps less than two at a time.  A Martha aspiring in {255}
himself to be a Mary is the shortest accurate description of this
veteran at the beginning of his seventy-seventh year.

A few days after Parliament assembled, Hartington told Gladstone that
he was determined to maintain the union; "that is, [so Gladstone
understood the phrase] to proclaim a policy of absolute resistance
without examination to the demand made by Ireland through five-sixths
of her Members.  That is, to play the Tory game with a vengeance.  They
are now, most rashly not to say more, working the Irish question to
split the Liberal party."

This naturally seemed to Gladstone to make his own position impossible,
first by hindering him from working for a settlement, and secondly by
assuring the party split which he had done everything to avoid.  In
Parliament itself the speech from the throne hinted at the revival of
coercion and referred to the legislative union of the two countries.
By the middle of the month it was known that Lord Carnarvon and the
Chief Secretary had resigned.  Mr. Gladstone's refusal to commit
himself was interpreted to mean sympathy for the Irish claim, and there
was no demur to be heard from the benches behind him.  This led the
Conservative leaders to regard the Irish claim as a Liberal party
question.  As the recent alliance with the Nationalists had done their
party little good, they were ready enough to repudiate it now.

On January 26, therefore, the Government announced a Bill for the
suppression of the National League, to be followed by another Land Bill
on the lines of the Ashbourne Act of the previous year.  The effect on
Parnell was to describe this as "an unscrupulous _volte-face_ by the
Tory party when they found that our vote was not numerous enough to
keep them in office."  That party policy, when pursued to the neglect
of grave national {256} interests, leads to these disgraces, one cannot
but agree.  The objection to the Conservatives over their treatment of
the Irish at this time was and remains this: they treated a subject
nation as a pawn in party man[oe]uvres.  Parnell's reply was not long
delayed.  The Irish supported an amendment to the Address, and the
Government was defeated by 79.



VII

Gladstone protested against the proposed resort to coercion, which
seemed to him a miserable answer to the unanimous declaration that
Ireland had practically made at the polls.  If Lord Carnarvon had
nothing to hope from the Tories, no one else could hope at all.
Gladstone therefore welcomed the first chance of turning out the
Government.  When he told Harcourt of his intention, and was met with
the question, Are you ready to proceed without either Hartington or
Chamberlain?  Gladstone replied, Yes.


    I believe it was in my mind to say, if I did not actually say it,
    that I was prepared to go forward without anybody.  That is to say,
    without any known and positive assurance of support.  This was one
    of the great imperial occasions which call for such resolutions.



If we remember that, though this passage was retrospective, yet that
Gladstone when he wrote it was not speaking from the vantage of
success, that indeed he died long before this, the most exacting of his
crusades, was within sight of accomplishment, there is something moving
in these words.  The circumstance just stated enables us for once to
stand in his shoes, and to feel the call as he felt it.

Who will deny that this was an occasion when he was bigger than the men
about him because he was prepared, alone if need be in the effective
sense, to undertake a task {257} that promised nothing to the party
man, though glory to the statesman who would accept it.  In spite of
the high-sounding appeals that were so impressive in his day and have
become so tedious in ours, there were occasions, and this was one, when
the generous and lofty impulse that he named undoubtedly possessed him.
The risk now is that they may be overlooked in the monotony of moral
tone with which he was over-familiar.

The Government resigned, and on February 1, 1886, Gladstone for the
third time became Prime Minister.  How many of his colleagues, whether
Ministers or not, could he carry with him on this dangerous voyage?
Hartington not, and Chamberlain probably not, for the latter was in
favour of a large measure of local self-government for Ireland, whereas
Gladstone had been led by Parnell to desire an Irish Parliament for
Irish affairs.  He also wanted to exclude the Irish Members from
Westminster, as did Parnell, to mark the independence of the Irish
Parliament.  Chamberlain wanted to retain them, and, if necessary, on
this point Parnell was willing to yield.  Apart from these two, we must
remember that, while 18 Liberals had voted with the late Government on
the crucial amendment, 76 Liberals were away.  No more than 257 had,
apart from the Nationalists, helped to throw the Government out.
Morley and Lord Spencer were with him, but the prevailing opinion was
that, without Chamberlain, Gladstone would not be able to carry Home
Rule.  Of the new Cabinet Chamberlain was from the first a reluctant
member.  Still, in spite of difficulties, it was formed, and Gladstone
wrote to one of his sons that, on the whole, he was satisfied with its
composition.  "Yet," he added, "short as the Salisbury Government has
been, it would not at all surprise me if this were to be shorter still,
such are the difficulties that bristle round the Irish question.  But
the great thing is to be right; and as far as matters have {258} yet
advanced I see no reason to be apprehensive in this capital respect."

There was little or no time for delay, and on April 8th Gladstone moved
the first reading of his Home Rule Bill.  It proposed an Irish
Parliament and an Irish executive for Irish affairs, reserving to the
Crown imperial matters of defence, foreign policy, trade and the post
office.  The Dublin police for two years, and the constabulary for an
indefinite time were likewise excluded, though a concession altered
this.  The Irish Members were also excluded from Westminster.  A Land
Bill accompanied the measure, which was read a first time without a
division, though Chamberlain objected to the provisos that the Irish
Parliament should be forbidden to touch such questions as, for example,
religious endowment, or customs and excise.  Both measures have been
summed up as giving to Ireland an Irish Parliament and a peasant
proprietary.

Mr. Chamberlain and Mr. Trevelyan soon resigned, and were followed by
others outside the Cabinet.  Parnell and Morley had many discussions,
especially on finance, for if the Irish were not to control the customs
Parnell thought their contribution to Imperial expenditure should be,
not a fifteenth, but a twentieth part.  On the day of the introduction
of the Bill Gladstone wrote in his diary:


    Extraordinary scenes outside the House and in.  My speech, which I
    have sometimes thought could never end, lasted nearly three and a
    half hours.  Voice and strength and freedom were granted to me in a
    degree beyond what I could have hoped.  But many a prayer had gone
    up for me, and not, I believe, in vain.



It was an assembly, we are told, such as no Minister had ever before
addressed in the historic chamber, and the packed audience began to
arrive at cockcrow.  Every motive, including curiosity, was present to
see {259} and hear what the famous orator would unfold.  It was a
wonderful day for the Irishmen and for the imperturbable leader who had
achieved his impossible promise of hearing his country's claim
supported by the most venerable English statesman living.  Gladstone's
speech was persuasive and explanatory; only the speaker's animation and
personal qualities of voice and eye added a glow of fire.  On the
second reading it was Lord Hartington who moved the rejection of the
Bill.  While the discussion lasted from May 10th to June 7th, Gladstone
did his utmost to conciliate the dissentients, and implored them to
accept the principle of the measure since he was willing to reconsider
every point besides.  Since the Irish landlords offered no welcome to
the Land Bill, which proposed to buy them out, Gladstone was ready to
sacrifice it.  On that evening Parnell made a conciliatory speech, in
which, however, he told the House that the rejection of the Bill would
lead to renewed disturbance in Ireland which even the most drastic
coercion, already a proved failure, could not quell.  He hoped that the
division would show that "England and her Parliament, in this
nineteenth century, were wise enough, brave enough, and generous enough
to close the strife of centuries, and to give peace and prosperity to
suffering Ireland."

The tension in the House was reflected to an extraordinary degree
elsewhere, at least in London.  The provinces were less excitable, as
they often are, but London hostesses did not know whom they could dare
to ask to dinner, and Gladstone was in the same difficulty over his
annual dinner on the royal birthday.  There were virtually no
aristocratic Whigs left in his party, and if his seceding colleagues
had declined, as he half expected, to attend, the Prince of Wales might
have been aghast at the people who were not there to meet him.  It
became a question whether to hide or retain a {260} portrait of
Gladstone if one happened to have one in the house.  It was a bad time
to stand for election to any club.  People who drifted through Mayfair
dining-rooms and country houses suddenly found that invitations ceased,
and that they were left dinnerless on weekdays and homeless at
week-ends.  In this turmoil of feeling, execration, excitement and
lobbying, Gladstone remained firm.  He had encouragement from the
confines if he had little near at hand.  Though some Liberals seceded,
the party associations held firm.  We need not further follow the
see-saw of chances and opinion.  The issue was virtually certain when
Gladstone, very pale but in his finest form, made his last speech.  We
have glanced at Parnell's concluding words: here are Gladstone's:


    Ireland stands at your bar expectant, hopeful, almost suppliant.
    You have been asked to-night to abide by the traditions of which
    you are the heirs.  What traditions?  By the Irish traditions.  No,
    they are a sad exception to the glory of our country.  What we want
    to do is to stand by the traditions of which we are the heirs in
    all matters except our relations with Ireland.  She asks also a
    boon for the future.  Think, I beseech you, think well, think
    wisely, think, not for the moment, but for the years that are to
    come, before you reject this Bill.



The Bill was rejected, in a full House, by 30 votes, and the majority
included 93 Liberals in opposition.  Gladstone, we are told, for the
first time seemed bent under his load, but his tenacity, his patience,
his spirit even, were unexhausted.  He decided, not to resign, but to
dissolve and appeal to the country.



VIII

It was almost like another Midlothian campaign, except that, this time,
far more was at stake than the personality and fervour of a man on the
rebound from a {261} self-exile from Parliament.  All issues were not
now subsumed in the person of an eloquent and incalculable pleader.  He
was now the pleader of a domestic national cause, and that live reality
set him off better than the customary festoons which accompanied
whatever, small or political, matter might engage him.  Parnell had won
Gladstone: Gladstone had almost won a party.  It was now for Gladstone
to induce England to return that party to power.  Hitherto Parnell had
neglected most of the English constituencies in the belief that the
English would only listen to an Englishman, and that it was for him to
bring that Englishman to the scratch.  Having performed this miracle,
he consented to address some English meetings.  Meantime Gladstone went
to Edinburgh on June 17, and met "wonderful demonstrations all along
the road."  He indulged them with little wayside speeches in his now
familiar manner.  Despite the tone of the newspapers, he found the
feeling in Edinburgh "truly wonderful."  On the 22nd he was at Glasgow
and addressed a meeting there.  From Glasgow to Hawarden more speeches
by the way: "the whole scene a triumph.  God help us, His poor
creatures."  In a few days he was at Manchester: "great meeting in the
Free Trade Hall.  Strain excessive.  Five miles through the streets to
Mr. Agnew's; a wonderful spectacle half the way."  The suffocating heat
of this meeting was almost too much for his endurance, but a
characteristic spurt of energy carried him through.  The tour ended
with a culminating address at Liverpool:


    Worked up the Irish question for my last function.  Seven or eight
    hours of processional uproar, and a speech of an hour and forty
    minutes to five or six thousand people in Hengler's Circus.  Few
    buildings give so noble a presentation of an audience.  Once more
    my voice held out in a wonderful manner.  I went in bitterness, in
    the heat of my spirit, but the hand of the Lord was strong upon me.



{262}

What amazing activity for a man of over seventy-six!  Parnell could
have had no better canvasser, for Gladstone was now an institution,
almost the walking embodiment of the Constitution itself, and the
measure of his influence is the measure of one man's power to persuade
an at bottom indifferent people.  This indifference is shown by the
fact that even now, after all these years, the Irish claim seemed
surprising and strange to the average voter in the country.  It may be
remarked that the English have been governed aristocratically or by an
oligarchy for so long that they have no political initiative in them.
They look for guidance to accredited leaders, and the whole of
Gladstone's strength at the moment lay precisely in this fact.

He had to create in England the very support to which he was appealing,
for the unsurpassed testimony of Ireland at the previous election was
lost on a nation with no political initiative themselves.  Mr.
Gladstone had the unique gift of representing to his audiences the
popular movement which he purported to be aiding.  He spoke with a _vox
populi_, and the people were persuaded that their own voice was
speaking through him.  In principle, therefore, from this point of
view, he was a national Illusion, and this was his last and finest
attempt to make it a reality in the minds of his hearers.  Here,
however, he touched upon their sense of property, of property in a
subject nation; for when we say that England has no political sense, we
mean that she has no faculty for recognising that instinct in others
when it conflicts with her possessive ideas.  Gladstone's present plea
was to cost them an interference and a supremacy that they valued.  He
was, in fact, appealing to their genuine disinterestedness for the
first time.  Sympathy with Bulgaria was easy, because Bulgaria was
remote, and the burden of reparation was not to lie upon our own
shoulders.  But Ireland was "ours."  Mr. Gladstone's {263} influence,
potent though it was, here was matching itself, at last, against the
British sense of property.

To him all things were possible, except inactivity.  When, therefore,
the Queen renewed her expressions of distaste for his campaigning
outside the bounds of his constituency, and he had long become a public
figure that seemed to overshadow the throne with welcomes and
processions that made her rare appearances look official merely,
Gladstone was not content with quoting precedents:


    Your Majesty will be the first to perceive that, even if it had
    been possible for him to decline this great contest, it was not
    possible for him, having entered upon it, to conduct it in a
    half-hearted manner, or to omit the use of any means requisite in
    order to place (what he thinks) the true issue before the country.



Such energy is magnificent, and the word is more justified of this than
of parallel examples in his past, because here the matter of his
crusade was entirely worthy of it.

Before the end of July, 1886, the result of the elections was known.
The Conservatives had a majority of 118, and the Liberals had lost over
40 seats.  The dissentient Liberals, among the majority, were almost
exactly the number which had previously abstained.  Scotland and Wales
approved the Liberal policy, and when the total votes were compared,
"in contested constituencies the Liberals of the main body were only
76,000 behind the forces of Tories and seceders combined."  Surely
there was character no less than computation in Gladstone's utterance:


    There is nothing in the recent defeat to abate the hopes or to
    modify the anticipations of those who desire to meet the wants and
    wishes of Ireland.



The veteran was unquenchable to the last.



{264}

IX

Gladstone resigned immediately, and in August 1886, Lord Salisbury was
Prime Minister once more; after but six months in Opposition.  At his
farewell audience of the Queen, worth remembering for the future ahead,
Gladstone came away with the following reflection:


    The conversation of my closing audience on Friday was a singular
    one, when regarded as the probable last word with the sovereign
    after fifty-five years of political life, and a good quarter of a
    century's service rendered to her in office.  The Queen was in good
    spirits; her manners altogether pleasant.  She made me sit at once.
    Asked after my wife as we began, and sent a kind message to her as
    we ended.  About me personally, I think, her single remark was that
    I should require some rest....  The rest of the conversation, not a
    very long one, was filled up with nothings.  It is rather
    melancholy.  But on neither side, given the conditions, could it
    well be helped.



The Queen was "in good spirits," and remarked that he would "require
some rest."  Her mood and her remark were not, perhaps, inseparable.
Recognition could hardly be smaller after fifty-five years.  Yet at
this meeting the two Englands that make up the nation confronted each
other, and of the two, Property was personified upon the throne.  They
could never have an understanding sympathy, despite the reverence of
Gladstone, and what does property reverence except itself?

The momentous efforts for the moment were over, and relaxation came in
the congenial company of Dllinger and Acton abroad.  Dllinger was
hale at eighty-seven, and read a pamphlet on Ireland called "The
History of an Idea, and the Lesson of the Elections," which Gladstone
had found time to write before his Continental holiday began.

A new Land Bill, to abate the judicial rents which a fall in prices
made the tenants unable to pay, was quickly {265} introduced by Parnell
into the new Parliament, and Gladstone was in his place to make a
speech upon it.  Then he retired to Hawarden, where he re-read the
_Iliad_, wrote on Homer and on the second _Locksley Hall_, taking a
more optimistic view of the "sixty years after" than the poet, who was
denouncing "the troughs of Zolaism" and all the exposure of industrial
society that literature was now bringing into view.  Gladstone
remembered the improvements, not the new squalor out of which they had
come.  His eye was for a situation, not an epoch.  This and his concern
with _Robert Elsmere_ need hardly be dwelt upon.  Intellectually he
never grew.  His interest in these works is mentioned only to show that
his energies were, even in this interlude, as effusive as ever.

The Land Bill was rejected, and the disturbances which Parnell had
prophesied upon this rejection recurred.  When the demands of the
tenants for a reduction of rents were refused, and evictions were
threatened, the Plan of Campaign began.  A fair rent was to be offered
by the tenant; if it was rejected, the money was to be placed in the
bank by a district committee, with whom the landlord would have to
deal.  If he would not come to terms, the money was to be used to fight
him and for the benefit of the evicted tenant.  It was not Parnell's
plan, and it was devised by others when he was ill.  He was not
available, besides wishing to give precedence to the political over the
agrarian question.  With the fall in the price of produce the judicial
rents fixed four years before had become rack rents.  The landlords
were implacable, however; a perpetual Coercion Act was passed;
Hicks-Beach retired, to be succeeded by Mr. A. J. Balfour as Irish
Secretary.  Mr. Balfour, as he then was, applied a policy of rigour,
with results that were a hideous repetition of the past.

An attempt to reunite the Liberal party by a round {266} table
conference failed, and of the Plan of Campaign Gladstone said:


    We all know that such (illegal) devices are the certain result of
    misgovernment.  I feel its authors are not one-tenth part so
    blameable as the Government, whose contemptuous refusal of what
    they have now [1887] granted was the parent and source of the
    mischief.



A Commission had reported in the interval that, in effect, the tenants
could not pay, and that this explained the agitation.  "No agrarian
movement in Ireland," according to Morley, "was ever so unstained by
crime."  The Commission reported to the Government the very facts that
they had refused to believe before, and this led to the passing of an
Act affirming the policy previously repudiated.  Despite the opposition
of the landlords, Salisbury gave way because he feared that Ulster
would join the Nationalists if he did not.  Those who follow the
contradictions and alternations of the Government during this year of
refusal and capitulation have little indeed to boast of English
statesmanship.  It bore out, alas, every charge that Parnell had
brought against us.  Force was the only argument we would admit against
ourselves.

All this brought the Liberals and the Nationalists closer together, and
gave frightful meaning to Gladstone's calm summary of events.  Speaking
in 1887, he said:


    I ventured to state in 1886 that we had arrived at the point..
    where two roads parted; one of them the road that marked the
    endeavour to govern Ireland according to its constitutionally
    expressed wishes; the other the road principally marked by
    ultra-constitutional measures, growing more and more pronounced in
    character.



It was now proved that if effective conciliation were rejected,
coercion was the only alternative, and that {267} meant, as Parliament
had learnt, a Perpetual Coercion Act.  Ireland was to be governed by
coercion, which might be momentarily relaxed, and at any moment
revived, at the caprice of the executive.  That any man should build a
reputation of statesmanship on this foundation is not a fact of which
Englishmen can be proud.  The bankruptcy of the Government was further
shown by a drastic resort to the closure.  The executive had to make
itself irresponsible in England as well.  Gladstone was content to
leave the Government entire responsibility for this, and the majority
of Liberals did not join in the division.  Finally, the Liberals
retired and the Irish watched, as spectators, from the galleries.  It
seemed as if the pretence of parliamentary government was at an end.

While Mr. Balfour was defending his policy of repression with the
detachment of a man to whom its rigours do not apply, steps were taken
to enlighten opinion in England of what was happening.  Coercion became
the dividing line between political parties.  By thus entering the
consecrated sphere of English strife, coercion became at last a vivid
and appalling reality to the public.  English people even took the
unprecedented step of visiting Ireland, in order to see for themselves
how the island was faring under English rule.  It was an undiscovered
country to most of them, and a dark continent to the audiences which
they addressed upon their return.  These were moved to pity and
indignation, which spread the doubt whether such proceedings would be
tolerated for an instant in this country.  The one man who was now free
from any taint of approval or co-operation in these doings was
Gladstone.  Was it possible that his proposals had been dismissed too
lightly after all?

The Irish question was becoming alive in English feeling, and the wary
observer of a former tendency over the Bulgarian sufferings waited for
his chance to fan the {268} flame of recoil.  With his peculiar
instinct for the appropriate incident he fixed upon the uproar at
Michelstown, a miserable affair in which an old man was shot and two
others died from police bullets.  On an immediate and unscrutinised
report Mr. Balfour promptly decided that the police were in no way to
blame, and when the inquest was found to be irregular (it had returned
a verdict of wilful murder), a public inquiry was refused.  The
incredible attitude of the executive must be read in detail to be
appreciated, and these details are too perfunctory to need recall.  It
is enough to say that the effect was to stir indignation in England
itself.

It is worth noticing, in passing, that when this state of affairs led
the Pope to send an investigator to Ireland, and the conclusion of the
Congregation at Rome was embodied in a rescript which condemned the
Plan of Campaign and commented upon the circumstances, the Irish
refused to let anyone else become the judge of the facts.  They took
the attitude that the Vatican was being made use of by its enemies and
those of Ireland, and repudiated interference in political as distinct,
from spiritual matters.  The bishops had to explain that the Pope was
not condemning the Nationalist movement, and his Holiness protested
that he had been misunderstood.  It is an interesting reminder that
Home Rule and Rome rule are not to be confused.

The Nationalists were now commonly heard upon Liberal platforms, and
Gladstone's name was becoming popular in Ireland.  Parnell alone
rigidly preserved his independence.  When asked his opinion of
Gladstone, he replied: "I think of Mr. Gladstone and the English people
what I have always thought of them.  They will do what we can make them
do."

Gladstone himself was losing no opportunity.  In the summer of 1887 he
made a wonderful tour of South Wales, where enormous crowds sacrificed
their day's {269} work and wages in order to gain a sight of him.  He
told a friend:


    They made this demonstration in order to secure firstly and mainly
    justice to Catholic Ireland.  It is not after all a bad country in
    which such things take place.



Of course he was too modest here, and it is a small example of his
manner of sacrificing to a correct attitude the simpler truth about his
personal magnetism.  On that magnetism, however, his public hopes were
resting.  He was the cause, which people flocked to see and to hear.
The traditional manifestations greeted him: On June 2nd,


    a tumultuous but interesting journey to Swansea.  Half a dozen
    speeches on the way.  June 4th.  Twelve to four-thirty the
    astonishing procession.  Sixty thousand!  Then spoke for near an
    hour.  Dinner at eight, near a hundred, arrangements perfect.
    Spoke for nearly another hour.



The next day was Sunday, when he heard two sermons, the one "notable"
and the other "good."  On Monday he received the freedom of the Welsh
city.  On Tuesday he was off to London with "processions, hustles and
speeches" at Newport and Cardiff.  He summed up the tour as really a
"progress, and an extraordinary one."

He spent the last month of the year quietly at Florence, after activity
both at Birmingham and in the House.  Regarding his speech at
Birmingham, Morley says:


    The sight of the vast meeting was appalling, from fifteen to
    seventeen thousand people.  He spoke with great vigour and freedom;
    the fine passages probably heard all over; many other passages
    certainly not heard, but his gesture so strong and varied as to be
    almost as interesting as the words would have been.  The speech
    lasted an hour and fifty minutes; and he was not at all exhausted
    when he sat down.  The scene at the close was absolutely
    indescribable and incomparable, overwhelming like the sea.




{270}

X

The reception of the Nationalists on English platforms did nothing to
lessen the English fear and detestation of Parnell, and a very ugly
expression of it soon engaged Mr. Gladstone and the country.  _The
Times_ published a series of articles on "Parnellism and Crime," which
sought to make the hated statesman responsible, and concluded with the
"facsimile" letter from Parnell, which proved to be a forgery, as we
all know.  The disgraceful document appeared on April 18, 1887.  It
purported to be an excuse for having condemned the Phoenix Park murders
in public, though the writer thought that one victim met with his
deserts.  This was the crown upon a mass of innuendo and implied
suggestion which the publication of the "facsimile" showed the paper
afraid to state but ready to believe.

Parnell described the letter as an audacious and unblushing
fabrication, but the House could not believe that _The Times_ would
stoop to publish a document which it had not verified beyond a doubt.
Lord Salisbury was equally credulous, and taunted Gladstone for
co-operating with a man "tainted with the strong presumption of
conniving at assassination."  Parnell decided not to bring his
libellers into court.  Opinion in London could not be trusted to secure
an unprejudiced verdict.  The same, in the opposite sense, applied to
opinion in Ireland, where a verdict for Parnell would not condemn _The
Times_ in English eyes.  The fatuous notion that respectable
institutions are infallible survived Parnell's denial.  The series of
articles continued.  Then another Irish Member sued the paper, which
replied that the articles were not directed at him.  The jury agreed,
but counsel for the paper, the Attorney-General, dragged up again the
charges against Parnell, declared that the statements {271} published
were true and the signature genuine, so at last Parnell was driven to
expose the forgery.

He invited the House to appoint a Select Committee to investigate the
authenticity of the letter.  This was refused by the Government, which
offered to appoint a Special Commission of three judges to investigate
every charge made.  In other words, the specific and definite charge
against one man was to be a minor part of an investigation into an
entire agitation, which, without discussion, Parnell was invited to
accept or to refuse.  Thus the political leaders were to be placed in
the dock with the authors of agrarian crimes, and specific charges
against the former were to be lost in an investigation affecting
countless other people.  The constitutional remedy of a Select
Committee was denied and an arbitrary expedient devised, for a much
more extensive purpose, to replace it.  The first reading of the Bill
to appoint the Commission was passed without debate, and its spokesman
did "not anticipate being able to make provision for a debate on the
second reading"!  While some Liberals were anxious not to let the first
reading pass without opposition, Gladstone finally held that a wrong
method of inquiry was better than none.  At Parnell's request the
second reading was not opposed, and when the committee stage was
reached and Members began to be aware of the enormity that they were
asked to sanction, the most drastic closure was invoked in order that
no amendments might be moved.  Gladstone called the proceedings the
most extraordinary he had known.

The judges sat on September 17, 1888, and did not finally rise until
fifteen months later.  In Morley's summary, "for the first time in
England since the Great Rebellion, men were practically put upon their
trial on a political charge, without giving them the protection of a
jury.  For the first time in that period judges were to find a verdict
upon the facts of a crime."  An entire {272} national revolutionary
movement was placed under the review of a tribunal appointed by its
political opponents, without reference to its political leaders either
in its procedure, powers or scope.  The circumstances which occasioned
it, and the motives which prompted the agitation, were ruled out,
because there was no jury to be affected by them.  The crucial issue of
the forged letter was relegated to the background, and the court did
not arrive at it until February 1889.  The manager of the paper said
that he accepted the genuineness of the letters--there were three lots
in all--apart from their handwriting because they were the kind of
letters that he thought Parnell would write.  He explained that he had
professionally chosen the moment to publish them, or rather the
"facsimile," on the morning when the second reading of the Coercion
Bill was due.  He had paid some 2,500 for them, and had made no
investigation into their source.

Thus the reputation of a paper, built on a century of responsibility
and experience, can be sacrificed in a moment.  There is no doubt that
the exposure of this forgery struck a blow to the credit of English
journalism from which it has never fully recovered.  The unfortunate
Pigott, who broke down, confessed, and then committed suicide, was a
victim to a weak character and to wretched circumstances, as he
pitifully stated himself.  With his end were involved what had been a
great name in British journalism and a humiliating rebuff to the
Government as well.  The Liberal opposition were heartened.  Gladstone
was much encouraged despite his indignation at the atrocious treatment
of Parnell.

When the Commission's report came before the House for discussion,
Gladstone moved an amendment to the proposal to adopt it.  He said that
the House should record its reprobation of the false charges, its
regret at the wrong suffered, and went on to remind Members {273} that
some of the opinions in the report, from the nature of the case, could
not be judicial findings.  Some of the events were ten years old;
responsible Ministers had taken different views of some of them, and
finally the judges had rightly declared that not all the essential
evidence could come before them.  The general public wanted little
reminder of that.  They had lately been instructed upon the
circumstances of Ireland.  The report recoiled upon the heads of those
who had manufactured the Commission.  The calumnies ended by producing
sympathy for the victims, and opinion became readier to consider
impartially the Irish case.

In Italy at the end of the year Gladstone took a holiday, and found
difficulty in not engaging himself in the country's affairs.  He found
himself "hardly regarded as a foreigner."  He wrote an article on the
"Triple Alliance and Italy's Place in it."  He read about the Old
Testament and the Jews, which led him to "the parallel question" of
Homer.  He excuses himself for having delayed writing to Acton by
saying that "every year brings me, as I reckon, from three to five
thousand new correspondents."  In the same letter he went on:


    Among other things I wish to make some sort of record of my life.
    You say truly it has been very full.  I add fearfully full.  But it
    has been in a most remarkable degree the reverse of self-guided and
    self-suggested, with reference, I mean, to all its best known aims.
    Under this surface, and in its daily habit, no doubt it has been
    selfish enough.  Whether anything of this kind will ever come off
    is most doubtful.  Until I am released from politics by the
    solution of the Irish problem I cannot even survey the field.



He also planned "something of which a library would be the nucleus.  I
incline to begin with a temporary building here."

Among the few remarks of Gladstone about himself, this statement that
he is remarkable for the external {274} guidance and suggestion which
brought his characteristic energies into play is one of the most
revealing.  On the mountain of his innumerable memoranda, which read so
often like editorial statements composed by someone else, we find here
and there a gleam of true self-knowledge.  He was beating perpetually
about the bush because the shy bird that was his soul revealed itself
so seldom.  Nothing is so inexhaustible as energy which is not insight,
and of the critical faculty for other than practical matters he had
very little.  The fountain rises higher and higher in its attempt to
return to its source.  His vitality was uniquely his own.  Its
direction was determined by his surroundings.  It is as the embodiment
of the public life of his age that he is interesting, and so we are
always losing the man in the stream of events in which he acted.  He
brought the same enthusiasm and industry to them all, and it was not
until he found in Ireland a national movement worthy of the extent of
his own sympathies and powers that he and the right cause for which he
was always searching found a match in one another.  National employment
was the object of his life, and for most of it he had perforce to be
content with national business.  In his eightieth year we see him
unwilling to be "released from politics" until a solution for the Irish
nation had been found.

In 1889 he celebrated the fiftieth year of his marriage, which was as
fortunate, as characteristic, as appropriate, as it could well be.
Mrs. Gladstone herself was a centre, almost an institution, of
activities, and in her sphere the same copiousness and abundance
displayed itself.  Husband and wife were both abounding, and the only
thing that seems to have tried her was her husband's occasional
retirement from political affairs.  It is tempting to imagine her
watching the revival of his energies, and foreseeing, perhaps more
quickly than himself, that, wherever they started, they must return to
Downing {275} Street in the end.  The public acclamation in which the
latter half of his public life was mainly passed must have become for
her the only proper setting for her husband, and the family can hardly
have escaped the popular idealism which at length surrounded them.  In
the odour of general acclamation, the feeling of being a holy family
could not well have been escaped, and the assurance that the reputation
was deserved must have produced a glow of exalted satisfaction.  It was
a strange atmosphere in which to exist, and then one shook it off by a
quick return to the busy hive of domestic and charitable duties.  In
this providential order, within and without, as one passed from
Westminster to Hawarden, from reclamation to entertaining, it must have
been a blessing even to breathe.  Everywhere was fullness and
abundance; every moment some delightful duty to perform.  Mrs.
Gladstone's last words were: "I must not be late for church."

The entertaining at Hawarden in 1889 included a visit from Parnell.  He
spent a night there, and Gladstone found him "certainly one of the very
best people to deal with that I have ever known.  Took him to the old
castle.  He seems to notice and appreciate everything."  One of the
things that he had noticed appeared at dinner.  He was sitting next to
Miss Gladstone, who happened to ask: "Who is the greatest actor you
have ever seen, Mr. Parnell?"  Parnell replied: "Your father,
undoubtedly," much to her delight.  Early in 1890 Gladstone spent a
week at All Souls, of which he was an honorary fellow.  He found the
living very good, and the conversation "that of men with work to do."
He gave a "kind of Homeric lecture" to members of the Union, and wrote
home that the object of his visit was to make himself as safe as might
be in the articles that were subsequently published under the name of
_The Impregnable Rock of Holy Scripture_.



{276}

XI

After the intense excitement created by the report of the Special
Commission, the apology of _The Times_, the confession and suicide of
Pigott, there was a brief lull.  Parnell had triumphed over his
enemies, and in all their encounters his enemies had come off worst.
Eyes were now turned upon the Irish leader, and thoughts of the next
election were filling men's minds.  The visit of Parnell to Hawarden
was evidence that the two men without whom Home Rule could not be wrung
from England were substantially in accord, and the solution of the
Irish question seemed nearer.  Even Unionists themselves publicly
admitted that their recent system had not only failed but was a
discredit to their party, and this was an argument that no one could
misunderstand.  The Government majority was falling steadily to nearly
half what it had been, and in by-elections the Liberals had won eight
seats.  Of these the last was won, for the first time, from the
Conservatives by a Liberal candidate who made the choice between
coercion and conciliation expressly his plea.

Those who read the signs of the times could only draw the conclusion
that for the undefeated Irish leader only one fence remained, and few
doubted that he would take it with Gladstone's aid at the next
election.  Time, however, had one more surprise in store, which was
sprung on December 28, 1889, when Captain O'Shea filed a petition for
divorce, with Parnell cited as the co-respondent.  Parnell refused to
fight the case and, according to his future wife, said to her at the
time: "No, Queenie.  What's the use? ... We have been longing for this
freedom all these years, and now you are afraid!"  His attitude was so
characteristic that we may quote a few words more from him.

{277}


    Put away all fear and regret for my public life.  I have given, and
    will give, Ireland what is in me to give.  That I have vowed to
    her, but my private life shall never belong to any country, but to
    one woman.  There will be a howl, but it will be the howling of
    hypocrites; not altogether, for some of these Irish fools are
    genuine in their belief that forms and creeds can govern life and
    men; perhaps they are right so far as they can experience life.
    But I am not as they, for they are among the world's children.  I
    am a man, and I have told these children what they want, and they
    clamour for it.  If they will let me, I will get it for them.  But
    if they turn from me, my Queen, it matters not at all in the end.



He was a strong man, and a fatalist who, in public or private, neither
hoped nor despaired, but decided his course and matched himself against
the facts in front of him.  As such, his composure remained
impenetrable.  Compared with Parnell, Gladstone seems an eager child.

Gladstone, of course, was immediately concerned with the effects that
the news would produce upon public opinion, for that was the material
in which he dealt.  "I suppose," he said, "it will end the career of a
man in many respects invaluable."  On November 15, 1890, after a dull
session, the case began, and on the 17th the petitioner was granted a
decree nisi.  Undefended cases are happily short, and between the two
hearings a Sunday had intervened.  It was already clear what the issue
would be on Sunday morning, when Gladstone wrote to Morley as follows:


    It is, after all, a thunder-clap about Parnell.  Will he ask for
    the Chiltern Hundreds?  He cannot continue to lead?  [This
    question-mark is highly characteristic.]  The Pope has now clearly
    got a commandment under which to pull him up.  It surely cannot
    always have been thus; for he represented his diocese in the Church
    synod.



Could the contrast between the two men be better seen than in their
respective attitudes and expressions?  Shift the subject to politics,
and it is manifest that one {278} type can only govern the other by
brute force.  In a week's time Parliament would meet, and while
Gladstone was anxiously waiting to see what the effect would be upon
the leadership of the Nationalist party, Parnell was as
characteristically indifferent.  A new difficulty had come into his
path.  He would meet it as he had met others, without acknowledging
that it had the smallest claim to moral respect.  The day after the
decision of the court, Gladstone wrote to Morley:


    I think it plain that we have nothing to say and nothing to do in
    the matter.  The party is as distinct from us as that of Smith or
    Hartington.  I own to some surprise at the apparent facility with
    which the R. C. bishops and clergy appear to take the continued
    leadership for granted, but they may have tried the ground and
    found it would not bear.  It is the Irish Parliamentary party, and
    that alone, to which we have to look.



The tactics of Gladstone at this time have been sometimes questioned;
but without prejudice to his conduct as a matter of political tactics,
let us look at the situation for a moment in a more personal light.  We
have seen the young moralist grow, and followed the splendid fruits of
his susceptibility to outside influences.  We see him now, politics
first, watching the effect on public opinion of a certain moral matter.
There is no indication that he gave of personal opinion himself one way
or the other, but his private feeling would be silent before the
attitude adopted by the world.  This is perhaps the most prominent and
direct instance of the special quality of his mind, a pliancy of
feeling, and absence of personal assertion upon the rides of human
conduct, compensated indeed by the fervour of his obedience to external
influence.  Once he was told what attitude to take by the feelings of
his fellow-men, he threw the energy of a Titan into the line that he
adopted from them.  Of inner light himself he confessed to having none,
and it is this {279} lack which makes it difficult to accept him as a
hero.  The saint and the hero initiate as well as serve.  Their fine
conduct is the fruit of exceptionally fine character, and that
character cannot be called exceptionally fine which owes all its motive
force to other people.  Gladstone is interesting because his enormous
lack was balanced by an altogether extraordinary degree of the
secondary qualities of genius.  If the superabundance of these
secondary gifts could compensate for the want of its primary virtue, he
would be the type of all others to prove it.  But the secondary, even
in excess, can never match with the first, and this is the lesson to be
learnt from the extraordinary personality of Gladstone.  In this matter
of Parnell, of course, his long memory could recall a time when our
aristocratic statesmen, as was mentioned on an earlier page, survived
divorce, because divorce was one of the privileges of their order.
Times had changed, but we cannot expect Gladstone in his old age to
have forgotten the memories of his youth.  It is not necessary to find
excuses for his adjustment or to rebut the charge that he was
hypocritical in this matter.  A hypocrite is a man who publicly behaves
in a manner discountenanced by his private conduct or opinions.  But
Gladstone had hardly more private opinions than the nymph Echo, and as
conduct is even more imitative than opinion, and he invariably followed
the best-accredited guides of his class and upbringing, we may believe
that he was, if possible, even more correct in his behaviour than in
his ideas.  His personal contribution was a vitality remarkable in
itself and indeed astonishing in a man who was in most other respects
so ordinary.  He would be charitable and compassionate to women from
whom most respectable persons turn anxiously away, especially when they
have the additional excuse of considering the risks to their public
position.  The strain of simplicity in Gladstone's character made him
{280} sometimes exquisitely blind to the reality of these risks, but he
was unconventional only in his pursuit of certain virtues.  He was
really prepared to do what everyone held to be right, and that does
look to most of us a terrifying form of originality.  The distrust that
he always aroused was due partly to his incalculability, for none knew
what he would be after next, partly to a constitutional ambiguity of
phrase which he was forced to cultivate to safeguard himself against
the charge of contradiction, partly to a moral idiom which he dragged
in whether the subject required it or not.  Incapable of directness,
because his intellect was not clear in intellectual things, he used the
language of sophistry without being a sophist.  Incapable of religious
insight, he used a high-sounding style.  Because he desired the insight
that was not in him, he imitated to the best of his ability the
language of those whom he believed to possess what he lacked.  Thus, if
he had been a hypocrite, he would have spoken as he did, but the style
was not the man except in so far as the man, like the style, was an
honest attempt at imitation.  He took his cue from others, but once
started, ran like an express train.  Parnell was incomprehensible to
him because Parnell was not only the engine but the engine-driver.

For some reason that has never been explained, these islands received a
deeper impress than any other part of Europe from the Puritans and the
Reformation.  The sense of sin is now an English characteristic to an
extent that would be incredible to the Englishmen of Shakespeare's
time.  Reactions there may be which delight the anti-puritans, but the
anti-Puritans are often but rebellious Puritans themselves.  So matters
which raise the question of degrees of sinfulness, and of the
appropriate penalty, which is the one delight that the sinful man
indulges without any misgiving, excite almost a {281} superstitious
interest in England.[1]  They are given a false importance which
bewilders the rest of Europe, and this importance is never stronger
than when some public figure is involved.  Those who held that a man
who had been living in Parnell's way was not a statesman who could be
relied on, forgot that he had been living in this way for half of the
fifteen years in which he had had to be reckoned with at all.  Three
days after the result of the suit was known a great meeting in Dublin
passed off without a murmur of disparagement, but on the same day
another great meeting was held at Sheffield by members of the Liberal
party.  Morley was there, with the following guidance from Gladstone in
his pocket:


[1] Gladstone once said: "The sense of sin is the great want in modern
life; it is wanting in our sermons, wanting everywhere": quoted by
Tollemache.



    Your appeal as to your meeting of to-morrow gives matter for
    thought.  I feel (1) that the Irish have abstractedly [note the
    adverb] a right to decide the question; (2) that on account of
    Parnell's enormous services--he has done for Home Rule something
    like what Cobden did for free trade, set the argument on its
    legs--they are in a position of immense difficulty; (3) that we,
    the Liberal party as a whole, and especially we its leaders, have
    for the moment nothing to say to it, that we must be passive, must
    wait and watch.  But I again and again say to myself, I mean in the
    interior and silent forum, "It'll nay dee."  I should not be
    surprised if there were to be rather painful manifestations in the
    House on Tuesday.  It is yet to be seen what our Nonconformist
    friends, such as ---- or such as ---- will say....  If I recollect
    aright, Southey's _Life of Nelson_ was in my early days published
    and circulated by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge.
    It would be curious to look back upon it and see how the biographer
    treats his narrative at the tender points.



If the reader has come with patience thus far, he will probably agree
that nothing that Gladstone ever wrote is more perfectly in character
than this letter.  No other {282} quite gives to us that exquisite
sense of rightness which we feel when, say, a dialogue of Balzac
unfolds itself upon the page, and every fresh sentence, though beyond
our own imagining, adds another morsel to our taste of the speaker's
character.  Morley was clearly briefed to savour the sense of this
meeting, and to do nothing to commit either himself or his leader or
the party till the precious information had been won.  For the moment
Gladstone himself was impatiently expected to denounce the offender.
From the outside this is what simple souls would naturally fancy he
would do, for who was not the champion of Morality if not the Grand Old
Man himself?  It is always amusing to see Gladstone misunderstanded of
the pious, and for a while to watch their irritation at his plausible
explanations.  Among other things they forgot the bare possibility that
Parnell himself might resign, and so for once, as a matter of good
taste, accept the ruling of the English conscience, a local affair of
incalculable reverence to themselves.  In this matter the temptation to
quote Gladstone is greater than usual, for he is so true to himself in
every word.  Once more:


    I determined to watch the state of feeling in this country.  I made
    no public declaration, but the country made up its mind.



We have never waited more eagerly for an echo than Gladstone was now
waiting for the cry that he would repeat.  His daily post was like the
vibrations travelling between the public and his ear.  It was a crucial
moment when he was able to write: "All my correspondents are in
unison."  At the Sheffield meeting, beside what else he heard, Morley
learned from the Liberal agent that "three of our candidates had bolted
already."  Politically speaking, what more was to be said? but again
Parnell was still the silent and incalculable.  It is to Gladstone's
{283} credit that he steadfastly declined to express any opinion save
upon the political situation as it now stood.  To carry Home Rule,
three factors were necessary in combination: Parnell, Gladstone, and
the majority of the voters.  No two, at this moment, were enough, and
the laboriously coached voter was, at the moment, the decisive man.
Parnell, impenitent because he was innocent in his own eyes,
disregarded the fellow.  Gladstone did not, and it might have been in
vain if he had.  The interesting question was, not what Gladstone would
say, for his "correspondents were in unison," but how he would say it,
and how soon.

Before the Liberal meeting at Sheffield, the Irish, represented by the
National League, as we have seen, had decided to support Parnell, in
spite of the suit, with acclamation.  Gladstone arrived in London on
November 24, 1890, and held a conference with Morley, fresh from
Sheffield, and other Liberal Front Benchers.  The Irish party did not
meet in London till the following afternoon, the day on which
Parliament met.  The upshot of this conference between the Liberal
leaders was that Gladstone was convinced that his party would lose the
General Election if Parnell continued to lead the Nationalists.  The
conviction was embodied in a letter from Gladstone to Morley, which
Morley was to communicate to Parnell.  Mr. Justin McCarthy was
similarly informed, with the same unstated object.  But before the
afternoon meeting of the Irish Nationalists, Parnell, as often
happened, could not be found.  When he entered Committee Room 15 he was
received enthusiastically, and looked, said an Irishman afterwards, "as
if we had committed adultery with his wife."  He was re-elected
chairman amid cheers, and thanked the party for the latest proof of
their confidence in him.  It was a fine proof, for they were unanimous.
They did not know of Gladstone's letter.  Did Parnell?  According to
Morley, {284} McCarthy, who was present, told Parnell of Gladstone's
conviction just before the meeting began.  Mr. Barry O'Brien, Parnell's
biographer, does not tell us, but he quotes some words of McCarthy
which imply, if anything, that he did not speak to Parnell about it.
We learn that Gladstone talked with McCarthy, who told Mr. O'Brien as
follows:


    Gladstone said that the Liberals might lose the General Election if
    Parnell remained leader of the Irish party.  He did not ask that
    Parnell should resign.  He did not show me any letter.  He did not
    at our meeting ask me to convey anything to Parnell, and besides, I
    should not have done so at his bidding.  It was a matter for us to
    settle without the interference of Mr. Gladstone or any Englishman.



This certainly looks as if Mr. McCarthy kept his conversation to
himself.  Morley says, however: "the Irish Member who had seen Mr.
Gladstone the previous evening, at the last moment was able to deliver
the message that had been confided to him.  Mr. Parnell replied that he
should stand to his guns."  Morley's suggestion is that Parnell
purposely kept in the background in order that he might be re-elected
chairman before the news of Gladstone's attitude was known to his
party.  When Gladstone arrived at the House, and Morley then told him
that Parnell would not budge, and presumably that he had been
re-elected, Gladstone "stood at the table, dumb for some instants,
looking at me as if he could not believe what I had said.  Then he
burst out that we must publish at once his letter to me; at once, that
very afternoon.  I said, ''Tis too late now.'  'Oh, no,' said he, 'the
_Pall Mall_ will bring it out in a special edition.'"  Gladstone added
that Parnell must be told of this plan, and when Morley had informed
him, Parnell remarked: "Yes," amicably, as if it were no particular
concern of his.  "I think Mr. Gladstone will be quite right to do this;
it will put him straight {285} with his party."  There was no flaw in
his courage.  The crucial words of Gladstone's famous letter were as
follows:


    "While clinging to the hope of a communication from Mr. Parnell,"
    and "viewing the arrangements for the commencement of the session
    to-morrow," my conclusion is that "not withstanding the splendid
    services rendered by Mr. Parnell to his country, his continuance at
    the present moment in the leadership would be productive of
    consequences disastrous in the highest degree to the cause of
    Ireland.

    "I think I may be warranted in asking you so far to expand the
    conclusion I have given above as to add that the continuance I
    speak of would not only place many hearty and effective friends of
    the Irish cause in a position of great embarrassment, but would
    render my retention of the leadership of the Liberal party, based
    as it has mainly been upon the presentation of the Irish cause,
    almost a nullity."



Whatever the last sentence meant about Gladstone, and it is one of his
ingenious ambiguities, it meant that Parnell must go, and the
publication of the letter, in Morley's words, made it "a humiliating
public ultimatum."  Still the threat was there; and the intention to
publish it, if necessary, and its publication, were both Gladstone's.
Morley thinks, perhaps truly, that had the Nationalists known of the
letter, they would not have re-elected Parnell.  If so, then the odium
would have rested upon them and not on Gladstone, an arrangement that
would have suited Gladstone perfectly.  The Irishmen would have been
his agents, but their controller would have been himself.  If Parnell
kept them in ignorance, is it not likely that he was very well aware of
this, and is it not certain that he would never endure it?  If his men
were to desert their leader at Gladstone's command, the Irish nation at
least should know who had caused them to do so, and Gladstone should
not be allowed to let it be assumed that the Nationalists were acting
of their own freewill.  Parnell, if he kept back {286} the letter,
defeated this covert influence, and Gladstone countered by publishing
it instantly.  Thus Parnell won the first move, and Gladstone the
second, in a duel which, ultimately, did neither statesman good.  I
fancy that the bitter words in Parnell's subsequent and shortly
published manifesto reveal, what Morley misses, Parnell's keen
resentment at the plan which he spoilt.

News that a letter of Gladstone's about Parnell was being published ran
through the House like fire, and its contents were known there before
it appeared in print the next morning.  It was a crucial moment for the
Irishmen.  The choice for them was to lie between Parnell and
Gladstone, and Gladstone had told them to choose.  "I thought,"
Gladstone recorded, "that it would be best that (Parnell) should be
impelled to withdraw, but by an influence conveyed to him, at least,
from within the limits of his own party."  It seems to me that
Gladstone need not have uttered his threat of retiring, for so the
phrase about nullity was generally construed, and that had not the
clause containing it been added, he had said enough to put himself
right with his party and to justify the party to itself.  To say that
Parnell was for the moment politically impossible would have been
enough: to imply that Gladstone would himself retire if Parnell
remained was a term of dictation that does not seem to have been
essential.  One may say this because it is certain that this threat
would have "nullified" the rest of the letter for Parnell, to whom it
was actually directed.  One cannot say that the omission of the clause
would have led Parnell to show the letter to his party before they met,
but it is arguable.  The letter, having failed to make Parnell retire,
split the Irish party into two after it was published, and this added a
new confusion that Gladstone could not have desired and probably did
not foresee.  Presumably Gladstone wanted them, if Parnell stood firm,
to reject him all but {287} unanimously, and therefore inserted his
threat.  He miscalculated the force of Parnell, just as Parnell
miscalculated, or rather was indifferent to, the panic of public
opinion.  He thought he could reunite his Irish followers in five
years, but he died before the first was over.  The original source of
the whole trouble lay, of course, with Parnell himself: the prejudice
against him may have been absurd, but he knew its force, and public and
private crusades against prevailing opinions cannot be carried on with
success at the same time.  None the less all Gladstone accomplished was
to divide the Irish party, and all that Parnell accomplished was a
refusal to accept English dictation, and his own death.  It is far from
certain, however, that even Parnell's retirement would have been more
than a flattery to English sentiment, or would really have made a
decisive difference at the next elections.  If Home Rule was
indefinitely to be postponed by the divorce case, then we may
sympathise with Parnell in refusing to accept a public verdict, plus
English dictation, both of which he had repudiated in private conduct
and in political life.  After all, in the end Home Rule was only won
after civil war, and at any previous time almost anything startling
would have been excuse enough to postpone it.

Parnell replied to Gladstone's letter with a manifesto to the Irish
people which "will enable you to understand the measure of the loss
with which you are threatened unless you consent to throw me to the
English wolves now howling for my destruction."  He said, in effect,
that the substance of Gladstone's proposals, as gathered by himself
during his visit to Hawarden, was unsatisfactory; and that, if he was
to be expelled from politics, the Irish at least should see that they
were gaining solid value for his loss.  When the Nationalists met again
to reconsider their position, after the publication of the letter, and
the manifesto, Parnell proffered them the same {288} advice.
Gladstone, of course, refused to be drawn, and on December 6th Parnell
was left with twenty-six followers, while forty-four, who preferred to
pin their hopes to obedience to Gladstone, withdrew.

Two elections followed, one in Ireland, the other here.  In Ireland the
Parnellite was defeated, and in England the Liberal vote declined.
Gladstone appeared to be astonished that Parnell had any followers at
all, and thought outrageous Morley's suggestion that, in Parnell's
opinion, the General Election might be lost by the Liberals whether he
retired or not.  Morley found the old man looking like the Ancient of
Days, but after many busy hours he was found at the theatre, and "as he
drove away the crowd cheered him with cries of 'Bravo, don't you mind
Parnell!'" for political war was now declared between them.  We are
told that even now Gladstone was unshaken by this disappointment, but
he told Acton, "the blow to me is very heavy--the heaviest I ever have
received.  It is a great and high call to work by faith and not by
sight."  The defeat of Parnell's candidate at the Kilkenny election was
now to make Gladstone say in a letter: "I would rather see Ireland
disunited than see it Parnellite."  One cannot help wondering if this
would have been his opinion if Parnell's candidate had been returned.
For the moment he inclined to "some affirmative legislation" to rally
the Liberals and encourage the liberal-minded Irish Members.  Three
elections in Ireland, however, were three defeats for Parnell, and in
less than twelve months from the split in his ranks, on October 6,
1891, at the age of forty-five, he was dead.



{289}

XII

While the Irish strife was raging and Parnell wearing himself out,
there was a lull in England.  In the summer Gladstone lost his eldest
son in the prime of his life after a lingering illness.  The blow was
sharp, but "setting this apart, there is nothing lacking to us in
consolations human or divine.  I can only wish that I may become less
unworthy to have been his father."  After a visit to Scotland Gladstone
attended the annual meeting of the Liberal organisation at Newcastle,
the scene of his amazing tour in 1862, and here, as a supplement and
change to the eternal Irish preoccupation, was born the set of
proposals, nursed by the Fabians, to be known in time as the Newcastle
programme.  After this Gladstone, now nearly eighty-two, visited
Biarritz, where he spent Christmas of 1891, with Morley and Mr.
Armitstead.

The General Election, the prospect of which had influenced so many of
the preceding events, occurred in 1892.  We are told that Gladstone
expected a majority of nearly a hundred, and Morley remarks that this
mood of confidence was "indispensable to him."  On July 13, 1892, the
result in his own constituency of Midlothian was known.  His majority
had shrunk from several thousand to less than seven hundred votes.  He
felt this keenly, for he had spared no effort in the contest despite
his years, and the question was what Irish policy could be devised for
at best an evidently narrow majority.  His eyesight too had been giving
him trouble, and now a cataract had formed.  Time would not wait for
the benefit of Ireland, and Gladstone attributed to the Irish quarrel
the bewilderment in English minds.  A month after the death of Parnell,
that is to say, in November 1891, Gladstone put the position to Morley
as follows:


    Herein [the division among the Irish] we see the main cause why our
    majority is not more than double what it actually {290} numbers,
    and the difference between these two scales of majority represents,
    as I apprehend, the difference between power to carry the Bill as
    the Church and Land Bills were carried into law, and the default of
    such power.  The main mischief has already been done; but it
    receives additional confirmation with the lapse of every week or
    month.



In August 1892 Gladstone again became Prime Minister for his fourth and
final time.  He was in office for eighteen months with abated powers,
not only from defects in his sight and hearing.  In February 1893 the
Home Rule Bill was introduced.  On the disputed point of the retention
or otherwise of Irish representatives at Westminster, it was now
decided to retain eighty members with the right to vote only upon any
Irish questions that might arise, but this again had to be modified.
In the conduit of the measure, especially on the committee stage,
Gladstone seemed as vigorous and resourceful at eighty-four as he had
been a generation earlier.  It was the spectacle of his exhaustless
energy which lent excitement to a subject that, in spite of the feeling
it was bound to arouse, had begun to grow wearisome.  He changed one
concession that looked like defeat into an alteration which he
persuaded his hearers was no less proper than inevitable.  As a
parliamentary display his handling of this awkward moment was thought,
even by the oldest hands, to have been unsurpassed.  He was so
expansive that the very wealth of his resources gave new occasions for
discussion, and, because also of obstruction, the progress of the
measure was slow.  Despite universal fatigue the committee stage was
prolonged for over sixty sittings.  The Bill passed its second reading,
in a full house, by a majority of forty-three and the third reading by
thirty-four.  In the Lords it was thrown out by an overwhelming
majority.  A similar fate, though in the form of crucial amendments,
befell the Government's other measures concerning employers' liability
{291} and the setting up of elective councils for certain parochial
work.

At the beginning of 1894, soon after his eighty-fourth birthday, the
session over, Gladstone went once more to Biarritz.  As usual he looked
ahead, and thought that the House of Lords, which was standing in the
way of a crusade that he had carried to success in the Commons, was now
open to legitimate attack.  He proposed to dissolve Parliament, and
appeal to the country on this issue, but his colleagues were averse and
he reluctantly gave way.  It is possible that, had he been younger, he
might have pressed his point with success.  If so, the campaign he
would have led can be imagined, and the renewed disapproval of the
Queen.

What then should he do next?  His sight and hearing were hardly equal
to the demands of the House of Commons.  He still seemed an
indispensable institution to his party, and, so long as he was not an
invalid, to himself.  His age and deafness led to the appointment of
Sir Algernon West as Gladstone's political attendant.  At this date
West sadly compared Gladstone to King Lear, and had to observe some
almost frenzied exhibitions.  The personnel of the Cabinet was not
harmonious.  At the beginning of 1894, West wrote: "we never had to
deal with an old man before."  Again, three weeks later: "We went over
the old and new stories again and again.  How terribly sad it all is!
We must try and get him to go, on the grounds of his failing eyesight,
at the end of this session--that is the best solution of a miserable
state of affairs."  His physical and nervous condition was not fully
realised by himself.  Thus something more was required before
retirement became inevitable.  The added argument was found in the
naval estimates, which, unlike his colleagues, Gladstone thought
excessive for the time.  His counter-argument to West is pathetic: "The
plan is mad; and who are they who propose it?  Men who {292} were not
born when I had been in public life for years."  The time had come when
such an argument had ceased to be valid.  The old passion for economy,
whether objectors thought it effective or not, survived; besides in his
own backward-looking words,


    "I have come to be considered not only an English but a European
    statesman.  My name stands in Europe as a symbol of the policy of
    peace, moderation, and non-aggression.  What would be said of my
    active participation in a policy that will be taken as plunging
    England into a whirlpool of militarism?"



To the last, what would be said was a vital consideration to Gladstone,
though, when he had occasion to explain misunderstandings, he was never
at a loss to show how unfounded they were.  On economy, for example, he
admitted that at least four times he had to make extraordinary
provisions, but he justified them, as everyone would, by reference to
special emergencies.

The one emergency he could not meet was old age.



XIII

From Biarritz the rumour spread that he intended to resign upon his
return, and he contradicted the rumour with his customary verbal
evasiveness.  When he was back in London in February, his colleagues,
says Morley, begged him to remain.  To retain or to part with him
became equally embarrassing.  A Liberal party without Gladstone was as
inconceivable during his lifetime as the parallel concept that
Victoria's reign would ever end.  On February 27, 1894, Gladstone told
Morley that he would send in his resignation two days after the
prorogation speech was made, at or after the council to be held on the
ensuing Saturday.  At an audience of the Queen beforehand he told her
what she must expect.  He {293} also wrote a letter to the Prince of
Wales in which he said:


    The devotion of an old man is little worth; but if at any time
    there be the smallest service which by information or suggestion
    your Royal Highness may believe me capable of rendering, I shall
    remain as much at your command as if I had continued to be an
    active servant of the Queen.



His last Cabinet council took place on March 1st, when he received
calmly "words undeservedly kind," as he told the Queen, "of
acknowledgment and farewell."  Before he rose he almost whispered "God
bless you all," and went quietly out of the room.  On the same
afternoon he launched a vigorous attack upon the House of Lords, but no
one realised that they were listening to his last speech in the House
of Commons.  To the last thinking of the morrow of affairs, he declared
that the question once raised between the Houses "must go forward to an
issue."  When the matter was ended he left the chamber which he had
been addressing almost without interruption for sixty-one years.  It
was a characteristic exit, forward-looking like its chief actor, and a
better memorial of his activity within the walls of Westminster than
any grand farewell.

One hope he nursed still, but that depended upon the watcher at
Windsor.  He hoped that she would seek his advice as to his successor,
and his hope led him to believe that he was right.  On the following
day he was dining at the Castle, when his last audience would take
place.  He talked with Ponsonby, the private secretary, who was anxious
to hear Gladstone's views.  This was not exactly what Gladstone would
have chosen, and his old caution and tenacity were aroused.  He
replied, therefore, with a proviso:


    All my thoughts ... were absolutely at the command of the Queen.
    And I should be equally at his command, if he inquired of me from
    her and in her name; but that {294} wise my lips must be sealed.  I
    knew from him that he was in search of information to report to the
    Queen, but this was a totally different matter.



It was discouraging, but perhaps could be explained, thus:


    I received various messages as to the time when I was to see the
    Queen, and when it would be most convenient to me.  I interpret
    this variety as showing that she was nervous.



The hour was eventually fixed, after the council was over and before
luncheon.  "I carried with me a box containing my resignation, and, the
council being over, handed it to her immediately....  She asked whether
she ought then to read it."  He replied that this was not necessary.
Then the central moment came.  What would she say, and how would she
phrase her acknowledgment of a retiring statesman who had served her
for half a century?  It was awkward for both of them, and Gladstone's
suspense can be felt.


    When I came into the room and came near to take the seat she has
    now for some time courteously commanded, I did think that she was
    going to "break down."  If I was not mistaken, at any rate she
    rallied herself as I thought, by a prompt effort, and remained
    collected and at her ease.  Then came the conversation, which may
    be called neither here nor there.



"There was not one syllable on the past."  There was even "no touch on
the subject of the last Ponsonby conversation."  Moreover, before he
left, he "saw no sign of embarrassment or preoccupation."  The Queen
was thinking of herself, and he of her in relation to his career.  To
the last the gulf of temperament between the odd pair was unbridgable,
and she had not imagination enough to understand how much the occasion
was meaning to him.  The man who had the appropriate and sonorous word
for every occasion was confronted with a sovereign who, on this day of
days to him, was dumb.  That he {295} had deceived himself about her
suppressed emotion at the beginning of their interview seems probable
from the subsequent letter that Gladstone received.  The Queen deemed
that his letter of resignation required, not only personal acceptance,
but an answer.


    She therefore writes these few lines to say that she thinks that
    after so many years of arduous labour and responsibility he is
    right in wishing to be relieved at his age of these arduous duties.
    And she trusts that he will be able to enjoy peace and quiet with
    his excellent and devoted wife in health and happiness, and that
    his eyesight may improve.



The Queen's "perfect manners," to which Gladstone had often testified,
were not accompanied by a vivid imagination, and the tone of her
leave-taking would have been perfectly appropriate to a man about to
take a brief cruise.  Gladstone's painful sense of her inadequacy
appears in a last letter to Ponsonby:


    The first entrance of a man to Windsor Castle in a responsible
    character is a great event in his life; and his last departure from
    it is not less moving.  But in and during the process which led up
    to this transaction on Saturday, my action has been in the
    strictest sense sole, and it has required me in circumstances
    partly known to harden my heart into a flint.



He had failed to carry Home Rule, though he had brought it through the
Commons.  The Queen had taken leave of her old Minister without any
outward sign of appreciation or regret.  A great occasion in his life,
for his enormous and active career had given to him no reason for
diminishing the seriousness with which he had regarded himself from the
first, had been allowed to pass as a "mere nothing."  It was probably
the keenest disappointment of his career.  The defeat of his last
crusade had not been due to any want of effort on his own part, but in
the matter of the royal farewell the emotional support to which he had
inevitably looked {296} forward, as a man and as a statesman, with the
peculiar sense of what was due to every occasion, had not been
forthcoming.  It left him in the helpless position of a famous actor
whose partner spoils his exit from a great scene.




{297}

CHAPTER VII

THE ABBEY

Four years of life remained to him, and slowly, one by one, time and
health loosened his hold upon this world.  A year passed before he
severed his political connection with Midlothian, and during that year
his eyesight grew painfully worse.  He spent the leisure, which he had
often contemplated but which seemed so unnatural when it came,
gathering up the fragments of the past: as if to recollect was to
prolong the life that was virtually over.  He found in this leisure no
cause for petulance, but "excellent opportunities for brief or
ejaculatory prayer."  One could still write, still compile memoranda of
doubtful points possibly yet in need of elucidation.  It was the one
form of activity that was left, and without activity, whatever he might
say, his life was empty and meaningless.  He could not bear repose, or
to be alone with himself.  Surely by this mode of recollection and
compilation something might be preserved from the jaws of Time, for the
tragedy of a life of action is that it consists of memories which are
fleeting.  One could follow and check every step, not now of a changing
political situation, but of the waning of one's own powers.  One could
note the falling off in that correspondence, which had been a burden
too precious not to be missed.  It was a wistful change to listen to a
reader, to confine one's attendance at church to the mid-day communion,
to be visited by doctors instead of politicians, to have a nurse in
place of a private secretary at one's side.

{298}

These changes brought a new stage of existence to which he was not
"thoroughly accustomed" in a few months.  Nevertheless, he protested
that he was content with his retirement and "cast no longing, lingering
look behind."  The protest is in character, but so is the absence of
self-knowledge that it masked.  Some difficulties could be overcome by
rearrangements, and when he was forbidden to rise in time to attend the
daily morning service, "two" evening services, one at five and one at
seven, "afford me a limited consolation."  He was dismayed by having to
take drives, but once, even now, succeeded in walking more than two
miles "by a little."  Luckily, the letters that arrived at Hawarden
were still sufficient to seem a weight.  He compared himself to a
soldier on parade awaiting orders, feeling "no desire to go," but no
reluctance.  To the very last he was tenacious of his life.  Some
authorship and editing remained to him, and it is curious to learn that
when he was engaged upon his edition of Bishop Butler, his traditional
anchor, "organic evolution," now seemed to him "a Butlerish idea."  The
notion of evolution, he discovered, was "without doubt deeply ingrained
in Butler," and the bishop seemed to entertain the possibility of
animals elevating to a higher state, and in the conception of evolution
itself Gladstone discerned no right "to say that the small increments
effected by the divine workman are not as truly special as the large."
This was his nearest approach to mental accommodation with a later
idea.  As Mr. Tollemache puts it, "he caught the evolutionary
contagion.  He became so far a _philosophe malgr lui_ that he more or
less levelled up the chief religions as an alternative to levelling
them down....  He essayed to hear and at last imagined that he really
heard, the far-off echo of a revelation in Homer."

The library in his village was successfully established in 1896, and
the subject of religious reunion again {299} occupied him.  There were
more _Gleanings_ to be collected, and the past seemed to return when
fresh Turkish misdeeds occured in Armenia and led him to protest at one
last public meeting more.  Only strength was wanting to prevent him
from starting on another campaign, and the Queen probably read of this
meeting with an uneasy, if momentary, shiver.

On his eighty-seventh birthday he had lived beyond his father's age by
four months, and he was now the longest-lived member of a very
long-lived family.  Lord Stratford, he noted, when he was a
nonagenarian, had told him that such a great age was "not a blessing."
He does not give us his own view, but is content to remark, I do not
enter on "interior matters.  It is so easy to write, but to write
honestly nearly impossible."

The long diary ends on the page that contains these words, and of
Gladstone's formal writings it may be said that it would do him less
than justice to examine them critically.  The verbal style does indeed
resemble that which he used in his public speeches, but there is no
personal revelation to compensate for the want of those physical
virtues of voice, of look, of gesture which the most observant of his
critics agreed were the life and the soul of Gladstone's oratory.  On
paper he is hardly readable to-day, and every element in his style, its
impersonality, its ambiguity, its qualifications, its exalted and
conventional note, which has necessarily passed with the age to which
it was peculiar, is suggested in those extracts from speech, letter or
diary that, with the aid of his several biographers, we have been able
to give.  As a man of letters, the style of Gladstone is as dead as the
dust upon his volumes.  His quality is heightened by the admission, for
it lay in the marvellous voice, and that voice was a magnificent echo.
It needed, and had the fate to find, the one period and the one chamber
in which it could ring with complete effect, for Gladstone would {300}
not have been the great success he was had he not happened to be alive
in the palmiest day of Parliament.  The example of the French
Revolution had given a new sanction to the arts of persuasion and
debate in the one European country that had escaped the revolutionary
movement.  These arts, the seemly alternative to bloodshed and
disorder, were devoutly pursued by the newly arisen middle classes, a
portion of the community always keenly imitative, and outwardly more
solemn than the aristocratic politicians whom they were actively
replacing.  They further brought with them a solemn moral ideal which
received a religious tone because at the beginning of the century
formal religion was alive among the Evangelicals and nowhere else.  All
these characteristics were found in the Gladstone family, and he
emerged into public life at the moment when the appropriate audience
was awaiting him.  Economic and political changes completed the
transformation of society which made him the most typical public figure
of his age.  The time, and the place, and the man appeared
simultaneously together.

With his splendid physical endowment, his wealth of energy and abundant
means, he was, on the shifting surface of our polity, what Victoria was
upon the throne, the constitutional voice, as she the settled emblem,
of British government.  But if his ideas were all inherited and few, he
held them earnestly, and his belief in accord was real enough to carry
him at times beyond other politicians, so that the settlement of the
Alabama claim by arbitration, and the adoption of the Irish cause, on
the ground of constitutional justice, made him stride beyond his
political peers and represent, justly, to innumerable ordinary men and
women, the practical application of principles which others in his
position thought chimerical in politics.  Living an active life through
several generations, he continued to voice {301} successive political
aspirations as they arose.  He disguised the changes in his attitude by
a tone of unction and an art of qualification which seemed hypocritical
and sophistical to those who, pursuing different policies, had not the
clue.[1]  The nineteenth century's ideal of political speech and
deportment was embodied to an extraordinary degree in one man, and,
just in so far as he was extraordinarily true to type and time, he is
liable to decline in interest to-day when his age is over.


[1] Cf. Jowett's remark: "Gladstone is not dishonest; but it is natural
that people who do not understand him should think him dishonest."


Such a pilgrimage could have only one culmination, and when he began to
be a victim to much pain the end was sensibly near.  His old resort to
sunshine in the south failed, and he was carried home from Cannes to
Bournemouth on what proved to be a stage of his last journey.  There,
in March 1898, he was told that he could not recover, and he left for
Hawarden knowing that he had but a few weeks to live.  In May it became
a matter of days, and on May 19, 1898, he died.

In both Houses of Parliament an address was presented to the Queen,
praying that Gladstone should be buried in the Abbey, and the speeches
then made properly remarked the prestige that he had added to the
assembly of which he was the most venerable member.  All who believed
in Parliament were aware of their tremendous debt, for representative
institutions could hardly lose their hold upon public respect when
conducted after the public manner of Mr. Gladstone.  He belonged to the
world of contemporary statesmen, and his death was felt in many of the
nations.  On Wednesday, May 25th, the body was brought from Hawarden to
Westminster Hall, where it lay in state for two days before the State
funeral on Saturday.  Every rank and class of person was represented in
the multitude that thronged that Hall.  {302} The famous voice was
silent, but the famous audience still attended him.  They, at least,
were not unmindful of his reputation and his past.  He had no doubt
himself that he had lived through a great period, and the people had no
doubt that he was a great man.  His last word, expressing with masterly
obliqueness the wish that the Abbey fulfilled, was respected two years
later when the body of his wife was laid in the Abbey tomb.  It is so
perfectly in character that it must not be passed over.


    I wish to be buried where my wife may also lie.



His ambition for both of them was realised.  The pair of pious pilgrims
had reached Westminster Abbey at last.  Thus the public figure, who was
a prodigy if not a genius, was laid with his wife to rest in the
Collegiate Church of St. Peter, where the shades of dead statesmen,
soldiers and poets are gathered, in a building which represents to the
people who mourn them a parliament of the great spirits of the past.
In this shadowy Assembly we leave him, to rest, as he had liked to
live, in the countenance and the company of a throng.




THE END




{303}

SHORT BIBLIOGRAPHY


_The Life of William Ewart Gladstone_.  By John Morley.  1903.

_Catherine Gladstone_.  By Edwin A. Pratt.  1898.

_Catherine Gladstone_.  By her daughter, Mary Drew.  1919.

_Mr. Gladstone_.  By H. W. Lucy.  1895.

_My Memory of Gladstone_.  By Goldwin Smith.  1904.

_Talks with Mr. Gladstone_.  By Hon. Lionel A. Tollemache.  1898.

_A Modern History of the English People_: 1880-1898.  By R. H. Gretton.
1913.

_Mr. Gladstone: a Study_.  By Louis J. Jennings, M.P.  1887.

_Recollections_.  By Sir Algernon West, K.C.B.  1899.

_T. H. Huxley_.  By Leonard Huxley.  1900.

_Alfred, Lord Tennyson_: A Memoir by his son.  1897.

_London Letters_.  By George W. Smalley.  1890.

_The Life of Parnell_.  By R. Barry O'Brien.  1910.

_Charles Stewart Parnell_.  By Katherine O'Shea (Mrs. Parnell).  1914.

_Life of Gladstone_.  By Herbert Paul.  1901.

_Right Hon. W. E. Gladstone_.  By G. W. E. Russell.  1891.

_Macaulay's Essays_.

_The Religious Life of Gladstone_.  By D. C. Lathbury.  1910.

_Eminent Victorians_, and _Queen Victoria_.  By Lytton Strachey.  1918
and 1921.

The books by Mr. Russell and Mr. Paul are political; Lucy's is the best
and liveliest of the shorter lives; Tollemache summarises Gladstone's
religious view of Homer; Jennings' is a hostile contemporary account.




{305}

INDEX


  Aberdeen, Lord, 35, 71, 90, 91, 101, 113
  _Alabama_, 148
  Ambiguity, 123
  Anstice, Mr., 6
  Argyll, Duke of, 203
  Arnold, Dr., 24, 33
  Axes, 53, 141, 176, 183


  Balfour, Lord, 175, 265
  Balmoral, 129, 130
  Blackheath, 149
  Board of Trade, 58, 65, 67, 71
  Bones, thrice-boiled, 76
  Boycott, Capt., 234
  Bradlaugh, Charles, 216-18
  Bright, John, 115, 123
  Bulgaria, 167-71
  Burke, Edmund, 97


  Canning, George, 3
  Capricorn, 3
  Carnarvon, Lord, 244, 248, 255, 256
  Cavendish, Lord Frederick, 242
  China, 55
  Churchill, Lord Randolph, 200
  _Church Principles_, 46
  Cobden, Richard, 58, 72, 123
  Colenso, Dr., 135
  Communism, 39
  Consistency, 16-18
  Consort, Prince, 102, 125
  Corn Laws, 60, 76
  Crimean War, 105
  Curry powder, 78


  Daddy-Do-Nothing, 103
  Dante, 93
  Darwin, Charles, 19
  Diaries, 98
  Dickens, Charles, 56
  Disestablishment, 139, 153
  Disraeli, Benjamin, 35, 83, 97, 98, 99, 100, 114-15, 152, 153, 170, 179
  Demerara, 2
  Don Pacifico, 82
  Doyle, Sir Francis, 52
  Drew, Mrs., 70
  Drew, Rev. Harry, 151


  Egg-flip, 125
  Elliott, Ebenezer, 59-64
  Enthusiasts, 6, 7
  Eton College, 4-6, 57
  Euthanasia, 190-91
  Ewelme, 150
  Exhibition, public, 177


  Frere, Sir Bartle, 204, 205
  Funerals, 42


  Gladstone, adjective, 124
  Gladstone, Sir John, 2, 3, 12, 13, 24, 26, 27, 28, 42, 53, 74, 84
  Gladstone, Mrs., 52, 53, 54, 58, 86, 103, 156, 274-5
  Gladstone, Robert, 2
  Gladstone, William Ewart, _passim_.
  _Gleanings from Past Years_, 46
  Gledstanes, 1, 74
  Glynne, Catharine, 52.  See Mrs. Gladstone.
  Glynne, Sir Richard Stephen, 52, 53, 54, 58
  Gorham Judgment, the, 84-5
  Granville, Lord, 157, 194
  Grave, the, 42
  Green, J. R., 173, 174
  Gretton, Mr. R. H., 196


  Hamilton, Bishop, 5
  Hartington, Lord, 158, 193, 194, 253, 255, 256
  Hawarden, 52, 53-5, 80
  Homer, 111, 298
  Homily, the, 48
  Hood, Thomas, 64
  Hope-Scott, James, 10, 44, 57, 72, 73, 88
  Hostesses, London, 259
  Huxley, Thomas, Henry, 19, 146, 159, 174


  Ireland, 30, 42, 43, 73, 141, 226, 229, 232-90
  Ireland Scholarship, the, 8
  Irving, Edward, 33, 34
  Italy, 15


  Jowett, Benjamin, 134, 301 _n_.


  Keate, Dr., 4
  Kilmainham, 241
  Knowles, James, 146


  _Life of Nelson_, Robert Southey's, 281


  Macaulay, Lord, 46-50, 55
  Magnanimity, 254
  Malmesbury, Lord, 98, 123
  Manning, Cardinal, 72, 81, 88, 136
  Martha, 178, 254
  McCarthy, Mr. Justin, 283, 284
  Metaphysical Society, the, 146, 159
  Midlothian, 182-190
  Mill, John Stuart, 161, 181
  Millais, Sir John, 180
  "Moonlight, Captain," 239
  Morality, 25, 26
  More, Hannah, 3
  Morley, Lord, 58, 67, 119, 191, 192, 212, 217, 257, 288, 269, 283, 284


  Negro Melodies, 123
  Newark, 16, 34, 58, 73, 75
  Newcastle, Duke of, 16, 19, 30
  Newman, Cardinal, 15, 19, 40, 76, 78, 239


  O'Brien, Mr. R. Barry, 243
  Octagon, the, 191-2
  Oxford University, 6-14, 55, 78, 79, 84, 106, 108, 122, 133


  Palmerston, Lord, 82, 90, 110, 123, 131
  Papal States, the, 94
  Parnell, Charles Stewart, 29, 183, 220, 227, 229, 230, 234, 235, 238,
      243, 268, 275, 288
  Parnellism, 270-3
  Parnell, Mrs. 213, 276-7
  Patronage, 151
  Peel, Sir Robert, 29, 45, 58, 59, 64, 65, 67, 75, 76, 80, 81, 206
  Physiognomy, 213
  Piety, 8
  Plan of Campaign, the, 265, 266, 268
  Poerio, 89, 90, 93, 137
  Pope, Alexander, 56
  Pot-lids, 95
  Primrose Bridge, 4
  Progresses, 128, 133, 171, 183-6, 220, 261, 267-8
  Property, 39
  Prostitutes, 10, 11, 103
  Public Opinion, 137
  Puritanism, 280
  Pusey, Edward Bouverie, 77, 95


  Queen Victoria, 142, 144, 147, 222, 223, 230, 231, 263, 264, 293-6


  _Robert Elsmere_, 265
  Rome, 15
  Rome rule, 268
  Roscoe, William, 56
  Rousseau, J. J., 31, 36
  Ruskin, John, 181
  Russell, Lord John, 80, 95, 106, 138


  Schwarzenberg, Prince, 94, 117
  Seaforth Vicarage, 4
  Self-criticisms, 6, 12, 14, 35, 51, 111, 190, 273
  _Self-Help_, 187
  Sermons, 3, 7
  Servants, 36, 57, 58
  Shaftesbury, Lord, 24, 128
  Slavery, 2, 9, 24-26, 30, 42, 54, 58, 128
  Sleep, 37, 228
  Smiles, Samuel, 187
  Sophistry, 40
  _State in its Relations to the Church, The_, 44-49
  Style, 5, 48, 96, 175, 189, 299


  Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 147, 172, 221, 223, 225, 226
  Tobacco, 224
  Tollemache, Hon. Lionel, 281 _n_, 298
  Tree felling, 141, 177
  Turkey, 105


  Walks, 6, 129, 130
  WEG, the, 8
  West, Sir Algernon, 155, 163, 291
  Whately, Archbishop, 7
  Wiseman, Cardinal, 95
  Wordsworth, William, 37-38






[End of W. E. Gladstone, by Osbert Burdett]
