Mobley's Gladstone

MOORE records in his Diary a breakfast at Jeffrey’s where Sydney Smith spoke of Sir T. Lawrence having bled to death owing to the ignorance of a servant in not properly adjusting the bandage : “ On my remarking the additional ill luck, after such a death, of falling into the hands of such a biographer as Campbell, he started up and exclaimed theatrically, ‘ Look to your bandages, all ye that have been blooded; there are biographers abroad! ’ ”

The modern biographer abroad, to say nothing of his lack of skill in dressing wounds, has torn open so many that one commonly experiences a certain involuntary trepidation on taking up a new Life. Nor does the fact that the biography is official necessarily relieve the apprehension. “ Literary executors,” said Coleridge, “ make sad work in general with their testators’ brains.” This was probably not a direct prophecy of Froude or Purcell. Even before their day, which Coleridge would have distinctly not rejoiced to see, lives had been taken under the guise of being written. That literary tragedy, however, no man need have feared to see repeated in John Morley’s biography of Gladstone.¹ It was certain in advance that nothing but poised judgment, measured estimate, and perfect taste, with fair though pungent phrase and characterization, should we get from the biographer of Cromwell and Cobden, the interpreter of Diderot and Voltaire and Rousseau, of Walpole and of Burke, and, latterly, the political orator whom the best of England hear gladly. His old chief never gave a better proof that, contrary to the general opinion, he was a good judge of men than in the choice of a literary executor. The appeal to Mr. Morley’s discretion, to speak for the moment of that quality alone, was of the slightest from the transparent openness of Gladstone’s manner of life. “Nobody ever had fewer secrets.” There were no pathological passages in his letters or journals of which to make a public clinic. Even the asterisks denoting omitted sentences in his correspondence, as printed, hide, Mr. Morley assures us, “ no piquant hit, no personality, no indiscretion.” There will be no place, then, for the future digger-up of the original manuscripts, on scandal bent. We have before us the “real” Gladstone, without that abused word at all possessing its now customary connotation of something derogatory or repellent.

One formidable difficulty obviously confronted Mr. Morley from the start. How was the biographer to disentangle the hero from the history of his time, of which he was so great a part ? The life could not be made intelligible apart from its political setting ; on the other hand, to make the latter stand out full and clear would be to run the risk of throwing the man himself too much into the shadow. It cannot be said that the bulky volumes wholly escape the double peril. It would be unfair to apply to them what has been said of Professor Masson’s Life and Times of Milton, — that the Times are to the Life as nine to one ; yet there is an undeniable impression, now and then, in this work of Mr. Morley’s, of the historian getting the better of the biographer. Even contemporary events in which Gladstone had but a minor rôle — such as the FrancoGerman war — are narrated in a way to come near falling between two stools. The history is scamped, the biography overweighted. In the case of such themes as Ireland, the Transvaal, Egypt, the struggle for Italian unity, the rescue of the bleeding provinces from the Turk, we may well admit the demand for full handling, since with them Gladstone had a militant and fiercely debated connection. Indeed, there is one theory of the function which Mr. Morley may have defined to himself that would justify all his historical longueurs. It is possible that he designed his great work, not precisely as a “ huge Whig tract ” of the Macaulay order, but as a conscious contribution to the propaganda of Liberalism, — using that word in no party sense, but as signifying the movement to enfranchise the spirit of mankind. The careful translation of all the citations from Greek, Latin, and even French and Italian, would look as if his volumes were sent out in the hope of being understanded of the common people. Their sale by popular subscription in England points the same way. If the actual aim were to make all plain to short memories and meagre reading, there is constructive excuse for pages which would otherwise be voted both superfluous and tedious.

Thirty years ago, John Morley as the biographer of William Ewart Gladstone would have seemed the most palpable misfit. Even to-day, many have had grave doubt on one point. Would not the Life reveal much less than perfect sympathy between writer and subject on the religious side ? How could an avowed agnostic, though of the most grave and weighty cast of mind, possibly hope to portray the ardent theologian, the convinced Churchman, the devout Christian believer, who, as Dean Church said of his personal knowledge of Gladstone, went from his knees to the business of the nation ? Mr. Gladstone himself, so Frederic Harrison reminds us, thought Morley’s Life of Cobden defective in religious appreciation. In his own case the difficulty would seem vastly greater. But it is vanquished ambulando. Frankly stating that he can only describe from the exterior Gladstone’s religious nature and activities, Mr. Morley at once rises to serene impartiality of spirit in saying: “ It was the affinity of great natures for great issues that made Mr. Gladstone from his earliest manhood onwards take and hold fast the affairs of the churches for the objects of his most absorbing interest. He was one and the same man, his genius was one. His persistent incursions all through his long life into the multifarious doings, not only of his own Anglican communion, but of the Latin church of the West, as well as of the motley Christendom of the East, puzzled and vexed political whippers-in, wire-pullers, newspaper editors, leaders, colleagues; they were the despair of party caucuses ; and they made the neutral man of the world smile, as eccentricities of genius and rather singularly chosen recreations. All this was, in truth, of the very essence of his character, the manifestation of its profound unity.” If that does not echo the emotional sympathy of a brother in the faith, it at least shows us the sound and fair critic. Mr. Morley, in reality, sets forth the churchly and the Christian side of Gladstone with satisfactory clearness, if not with all ecclesiastical amplitude. The most apprehensive Anglican must confess the picture to be faithful. Minuter traits are not overlooked. We are shown Gladstone’s Cromwellian habit of being greatly stayed by some verse of Scripture when going forth to oratorical slaughter. If anything is left out it is the laughter, or the mockery, which Mr. Gladstone’s consuming religious zeal so often provoked in the ungodly. Their gibes Mr. Morley passes by. Kinglake, for example, was only one of many to call Mr. Gladstone “ a good man in the worst sense of the term, conscientious with a disordered conscience.” And it was in an “Imaginary Conversation" between Madame Novikoff and Gortchakoff that the same brilliant but bitter writer conveyed wittily the general impression of the way in which Gladstone’s theological flank lay open to attack : —

“ Gortchakoff : How did you get hold of Gladstone ?

“ Madame Novikoff: Rien de plus simple. Four or five years ago I asked what was his weak point, and was told that he had two — ‘Effervescence’ and ‘ Theology.’ With that knowledge I found it all child’s play to manage him. I just sent him to Munich, and there boiled him up in a weak decoction of Filioque, then kept him ready for use, and impatiently awaited the moment when our plans for getting up the ‘ Bulgarian atrocities ’ should be mature,” etc.

Whatever might have been dreaded in regard to Mr. Morley’s painting of Gladstone the theologian, everybody must have recognized his peculiar advantage in describing Gladstone the statesman. It is the advantage of first-hand acquaintance with the matter. This enables him not only to understand, but to give those realistic touches of experience which we find, for example, in Condorcet’s Life of Turgot, Disraeli’s sketch of Bentinck, Rosebery’s Pitt, and Schurz’s Clay. Saturated for years in politics, himself active in the movements that he describes, an intimate of the men who made the history it is his task to write, Mr. Morley is able to light up his pages with many a flash of personal familiarity. Thus when the mysterious break-up of a certain Cabinet is under discussion, he turns this ray upon the problem, — “ Perhaps the Ministers had grown weary of each other.” That could have occurred to no one who had not himself kissed hands and held a portfolio. Even his journalistic years yield Mr. Morley something, as when, referring to an unhappy attempt to “ inspire ” a newspaper, he remarks : “ Unluckily, it would seem to need at least the genius of a Bismarck to perform with precision and success the delicate office of inspiring a modern oracle on the journalistic tripod.”

Mr. Morley is no idolizing biographer. His critic’s eye is not dazzled even by the splendid orb of Gladstone’s genius. He sees and points out the flecks in the brilliance. With resolute hand he unveils for us the deep mystery of Mr. Gladstone’s complex nature, — simply duplex, his enemies called it. This personal interest is, after all, the most compelling thing in the 1800 pages. Old political issues — Maynooth and the Gorham judgment, distribution bills and budgets, even Bulgaria and Irish Home Rule — seem far away and burned out compared with the perennial charm and vitality of a dominant human personality. In Gladstone there was as extraordinary a union of opposites as ever met in one breast. “ Ah,” said a disapproving old Whig, at the time of the 1860 budget, “ Oxford on the surface, but Liverpool below.” This was but one of the many phrases in which Gladstone’s remarkable dualism of character was bodied forth. He was at once the meticulous scholastic theologian, and the prodigious worker in the practical. This strange mingling of qualities, with its resultant perils, Mr. Morley puts fairly before us. A hair-splitting intellect yoked to immense moral enthusiasm was certain to lead its owner into awkward passages, and to lay him open to the charge of sophistry or insincerity. The subtly mediæval tinge of Mr. Gladstone’s mind was perceived with marvelous clarity of vision by Walter Bagehot, in that acute analysis of the man which he published as far back as 1860. “ His intellect is of a thoroughly scholastic kind. He can distinguish between any two propositions ; he never allowed, he could not allow, that any two were identical. If any one on either side of the House is bold enough to infer anything from anything, Mr. Gladstone is ready to deny that the inference is accurate — to suggest a distinction which he says is singularly important — to illustrate an apt subtlety which, in appearance at least, impairs the validity of the deduction. No schoolman could be readier at such work. . . . It must be pleasant to have an argumentative acuteness which is quite sure to extricate you, at least in appearance, from any intellectual scrape. But it is a dangerous weapon to use, and particularly dangerous to a very conscientious man. He will not use it unless he believes in its results ; but he will try to believe in its results, in order that he may use it.”

Mr. Morley practically acquiesces in this diagnosis. Indeed, confirmation of it rains upon any one who closely follows Gladstone’s career, and notes the impression he made upon different men. “ He perplexes his chief [Sir Robert Peel],” writes Lord Rosebery of Gladstone, in his little book on Peel, “who complains of sometimes finding great difficulty in exactly comprehending what he means.” This recalls a saying of the Pope : “ I like, but I do not understand, Mr. Gladstone.” It was a complaint which dogged Gladstone from his earliest to his latest years. In 1830 he wrote a long letter to his father urging that he be permitted to give his life to the Church. There were in it sentences of burning and martyr-like devotion, but alongside stand others which leave one uncertain what the youth really wanted. This “ vague and obscure ” letter is, observes Mr. Morley, “the first definite indication alike of the extraordinary intensity of his religious disposition, and of that double-mindedness, that division of sensibility between the demands of spiritual and of secular life, which remained throughout one of the marking traits of his career.” From this involved letter at twenty-one, down to his apparent but Orphic denial that he was to resign the premiership at eighty-five, — though he promptly did it, — Gladstone left behind him an enormous number of letters, articles, and speeches in which lurking qualifications, meaning everything to him, though unperceived by the general, lay as so many snares for the unwary, so many causes of wrath to the plain and blunt Englishman who blurts his whole mind out. No wonder that this trait “ sometimes amused friends, but always exasperated foes. . . . His adversary, as he strode confidently along the smooth grass, suddenly found himself treading on a serpent; he had overlooked a condition, a proviso, a word of hypothesis or contingency, that sprang from its ambush and brought his triumph to naught on the spot. If Mr. Gladstone had only taken as much trouble that his hearers should understand exactly what it was that he meant, as he took trouble afterwards to show that his meaning had been grossly misunderstood, all might have been well. As it was, he seemed to be completely satisfied if he could only show that two propositions, thought by plain men to be directly contradictory, were all the time capable on close construction of being presented in perfect harmony.”

Along with this tendency to “ overrefining in words, a disproportionate impressiveness in verbal shadings without real difference,” went an amazing combativeness. This is perhaps a part of the oratorical temperament. Fox was once reproached for disputing vehemently about a trifle. “ I must do so,” he said ; “ I can’t live without discussion.” To quote Bagehot again : “ Mr. Gladstone by nature, by vehement overruling nature, longs to pour forth his own belief ; he cannot rest till he has contradicted every one else.” This made the most peace-loving of statesmen the most pugnacious of debaters. “ He can bear a good deal about the politics of Europe ; but let a man question the fees on vatting, or the change in the game certificate, or the stamp on bills of lading — what melodious thunders of loquacious wrath ! The world, he hints, is likely to end at such observations.” Indeed, great as were Mr. Gladstone’s oratorical powers in exposition or persuasion, they never blazed so high as in rejoinder. “ He is terrible in the rebound,” testified Lord Aberdeen. This falls in with what Gladstone himself said, when asked if he were ever nervous about speaking. “ In opening, yes ; in reply, never.”

But this intense nature was not always in the white heat of mighty labor or closejoined debate. He had his lighter, playful side. The bow was sometimes unbent. His wonderful charm in undress conversation, his story-telling, his mimicry, his facile acting — to say nothing of his stores of out-of-the-way knowledge and exhaustless fund of reminiscence — built up a strong and enduring tradition of his fascinating personality in private life. But almost all of this part of Gladstone is left in the shadow by Mr. Morley. He asserts its existence, but he illustrates it only in the most meagre way. Presumably, authentic material was lacking. There was no Boswell by, unluckily. Mr. Morley prints twenty-five pages of his own notes of Gladstone’s conversation on successive days at Biarritz. It is bookish, glancing, rather superficial; little quotable, nowhere making a deep impression, though showing a great range of reading for a busy public man. In his letters Mr. Gladstone seems never to have overflowed in raillery or anecdote. All was intent on the matter in hand. It was as if the previous question were always on the point of being ordered. Even in the correspondence with his friend of many years, the Duchess of Sutherland, one finds little of that lightsome play of mind which an intellectual woman will call out of a man if he has it in him. This helps us to understand the Queen’s complaint that Gladstone always talked to her as if she were a public meeting. The net result is to make his letters uninteresting, except as fixing disputed dates and the true order of his unfolding policy; so that Mr. Morley was wise to publish but a few of the thousands that were turned over to him. Nor is Gladstone’s private diary richer in the asides and leisurely jottings of a full mind. It was strictly business, — a kind of skeleton agenda or adjudicata. It was a record, and records are not lively reading. And yet, and yet, we know that there was a Gladstone who could disarm and delight even his enemies by his bright bravura at dinner or reception ; who gave George Russell some of his best and wickedest stories, — even that one about the swearing Archbishop of Canterbury ; who pursued the oddest fads with enthusiasm, and took up with the wildest fashions in a spirit of hilarity. In Lord Malmesbury’s memoirs we find him writing in 1844 : “Met Mr. Gladstone, a man who is much spoken of as one who will come to the front. We were disappointed at his appearance, which is that of a Roman Catholic ecclesiastic.” But twenty years later the same nobleman wrote : “ Gladstone, who was always fond of music, is now quite enthusiastic about negro melodies, singing them with the greatest spirit and enjoyment, never leaving out a verse, and evidently preferring such as ‘ Camptown Races.’ ” Punch seized upon the contrast of monk and negro minstrel, and had its caricature of Mr. Gladstone in clerical black, his downcast eyes upon his breviary ; with a parallel portrait displaying him in the exaggerated dress of the end man, screaming, “Oh, do dah dey ! ” But no comic art, testifies an intimate of the family, “ could body forth a more amusing picture than the scene in real life when Mr. Gladstone, taking Mrs. Gladstone by the hand, would warble the song of the wandering fiddler : —

One can only sigh and wish that it had been in Mr. Morley’s power to give us more of this Gladstone. We moderns would not be so fastidious as Greville, who confided to his diary, in 1854, that he could not dispute Gladstone’s “ extraordinary capacity,” but noted that “ I was not prepared to hear the Chancellor of the Exchequer warble a sentimental ballad, accompanied by his wife.”

For so conspicuously marked and brilliant a young man, Mr. Gladstone’s political development was strangely slow. He signally defied the saying that the great driving impulses come to a man under thirty. Gladstone was fifty before it even became certain to which political party he was to belong. A disheartening list of reactionary measures had his early approval. But his sympathies broadened with time ; he burst through the hard casing of bis Oxford education, and began to be of Burke’s approved type of statesman, — one who, with a disposition to preserve, united the ability to improve. His improvements, no doubt, often looked like willful changes. It was said of him that he could let nothing alone — in flat defiance of Lord Melbourne’s counsel of political wisdom. “ Sir,” said an old distributer of revenue stamps, “ I must resign. My head is worn out. The Chancellor, sir, is imposing of things that I can’t understand.” Many others rebelled at Mr. Gladstone’s appalling industry of innovation. Yet one supreme test always differentiated him from the mere agitator. He was ever ready with his bill to enact his policy. His outcry was not the vague protest which aims at it knows not what. His grievances he stood ready to reduce to writing, and produced his remedy in the form of an act of Parliament. It was not his way to carry an election on blown promises, and then, when challenged on the score of fulfillment, to fall back with the audacious cynicism of a Disraeli upon the assertion that “ many things have happened ” since the pledge was made. “ Do you call that amusing ? ” he asked Browning, when the poet once told him of “ Dizzy’s ” latest duplicity; “ I call it devilish.” And through all the changes of front which he had to offer to a changing enemy, Gladstone held fast to some one principle which, to him at least, was vital. This is no place to review his Irish policy. Those who wish to must go to Mr. Morley. But one thing may be said. From the moment that Gladstone bent his mind to the discovery of a real cure for the chronic malady of Irish misgovernment, he clung to the central conception which he formed, through good report and through evil report. One dismal failure more, or a splendid posthumous success — and it is too soon to say which his Home Rule scheme will be rated by history — in his personal attitude throughout the great debate he seemed to be the visible realization of Coleridge’s prayer: “ How miserably imbecile and objectless has the English government of Ireland been for forty years past! Oh ! for a great man — but one really great man — who could feel the weight and the power of a principle, and unflinchingly put it into act! ”

But all Mr. Gladstone’s political principles were subsumed in one. “ Political life was only part of his religious life.” Mr. Morley writes : “ At nearly every page of Mr. Gladstone’s active career, the vital problem stares us in the face of the correspondence between the rule of private morals and of public. Is the rule one and the same for the individual and the state ? From his early years onwards, Mr. Gladstone’s whole language and the moods that it reproduces, — his vivid denunciations, his sanguine expectations, his rolling epithets, his aspects and appeals and points of view, — all take for granted that right and wrong depend on the same set of maxims in public life and in private. The puzzle will often greet us, and here it is enough to glance at it. In every statesman’s case it arises ; in Mr. Gladstone’s it is cardinal and fundamental.” It is, of course, easy for the closet moralist to maintain that the law of right conduct is for the politician exactly what it is for the man ; but for a leader of a great party in a democracy to assert it, and proudly to challenge the testing of his own political course through many years by this touchstone — that is another thing. It would be absurd to say that Mr. Gladstone always emerges triumphant from the ordeal. No intellect but one as subtle and refining as his own could make out a clear moral consistency in all the crises of his public career. He himself confesses to a certain opportunism. The difficulty of saying at a given moment just what is the greater good, he admits. But there lies the hidden rock for the Christian statesman. A little weak compromising to save the party, concealment or truckling for the sake of “the cause,” doubt whether the nation might not suffer more by your renouncing the devil, and being driven out of office for it, than by speaking him fair and staying in to compass your beneficent ends, — those are the nice distinctions which make political morality so dubious and controverted. That Gladstone never left a gap between his principles and his acts need not be contended. Mr. Morley defends no such thesis. But the principles were so high, and the approximation to them in practice so remarkable, — in the age of Bismarck, — that Gladstone was, in this respect, if not impeccable, at least first, and the rest nowhere, among the commanding public figures of his time.

This trait of a higher standard and a severer morality early impressed those who observed him narrowly. “ The only Cabinet Minister of five years’ standing,” wrote Cobden in 1859, “ who is not afraid to let his heart guide his head a little at times.” This was particularly the case in all matters affecting foreign relations. He was the most plain-spoken and fearless of diplomats. Every one recalls the lengths he went in denouncing the Austrian government during his Midlothian campaign. For this, when taking office again, he made an apology as Minister of the Crown ; as Gladstone the man, his opinions doubtless remained the same. “Gladstone,” wrote the Duke of Newcastle to Abraham Hayward in 1858, “is not a diplomat, and probably spoke in the salons of Count Beust very much what he felt about the tyrannies of Bomba, or those of some of our more intimate friends.” That early and chivalrous championing of the wretched in Naples marked a humane and lofty impulse which never ceased to vibrate under appeal. Gladstone left a mass of notes for a volume which he once contemplated on Future Retribution. The pages were found docketed : “ From this I was called away to write on Bulgaria.” The present scorching of sinners could not wait as well as the Day of Judgment. Mr. Gladstone had an extraordinary capacity for righteous indignation. What his flaming speech against giant injustice could do in the way of impressing the popular imagination, let his sweeping victory of 1880, in the teeth of the wisest political prophets, be the witness. And as the historian J. R. Green wrote to Humphry Ward : “ Let us never forget that the triumph is his. He and he only among the Liberals I met never despaired. He and he only foresaw what the verdict on this ‘ great trial ’ would be. When folk talk of ‘ cool-headed statesmen ’ and ‘ sentimental rhetoricians ’ again, I shall always call to mind that in taking stock of English opinion at this crisis the sentimental rhetorician was right and the cool-headed statesmen were wrong.” Mr. Morley quotes Green’s glowing tribute to the leader of whom he was so proud, — the man who “ was always noble of soul.” Mr. Gladstone had the power of thus impressing widely diverse natures. Large - fibred Spurgeon rivaled the finely grained Green in admiration. “ We believe,” he wrote, “ in no man’s infallibility, but it is restful to be sure of one man’s integrity.” “ That admirable sentence,” comments Mr. Morley. “ marks the secret.” No ordinary man could have so clasped to himself such differing supporters. At Oxford, he had Pusey’s vote, and he had Jowett’s.

Of this richly endowed and flashing nature, what was the master-passion ? Gladstone himself thought it was a love of human liberty. He worked out into it slowly. Oxford scholasticism and Oxford prejudice long smothered the sacred flame. But at last it burst out. Blazingbefore the eyes of all the world, it gave Gladstone his peculiar fame, — friend of humanity, enemy of all tyrants. An extract from his journal in 1879 lets us into his inner mind: “ I am writing in the last minutes of the seventh decade of my life. ... It is hardly possible that I should complete another decade.... For the last three and a half years I have been passing through a political experience which is, I believe, without example in our parliamentary history. I profess to believe it has been an occasion when the battle to be fought was a battle of justice, humanity, 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 for themselves cannot speak. If I really believe this, then I should regard my having been morally forced into this work as a great and high election of God. . . . Such are some of an old man’s thoughts, in whom there is still something that consents not to be old.” Nor did it for fifteen years thereafter. That frame of steel bore him later into still fiercer battles for the inarticulate oppressed. His intellect, with its wonderful strength and its almost equally wonderful weaknesses, — entirely dead, as it was, to the whole scientific movement of his age,—flamed high and steady for a decade and a half longer before the men who followed him, like another Dandolo, to a nobler fight; while over all, a pillar of cloud by day and fire by night, was that moral enthusiasm, that majestic rage for truth and right and justice which made Gladstone an inspiring leader not simply of a party, but of mankind.

Folio Ogden.