Tennyson was not seen much in the village, but he often walked to the bay. Here is my first glimpse of him: a tall man looking like a cloaked brigand; his head was swallowed by a great hat, soft and black, and he was pointing with a stick.
"Making yourself at home here, aren't you?" he was understood to say in something between a rumble and growl.
An artist friend of mine was seated on a sketching stool at the iron gate, making a study of the "bit of Italy." Before the stool was an easel, a palette, and a box of water colours. Tennyson, who was near-sighted, saw at first only the seated figure on the camp stool, leaning back against the open gate and gazing at the unique view.
"Very much at home," continued the poet.
The right-of-way was for walking only, not for sitting in chairs and encumbering the earth with easels and general impedimenta of the fine arts. My friend, who was a stranger in the land, had probably not thought of this, and, having a sudden consciousness of intrusion, whispered to me, around the hedge:
"Tennyson! O Lord!"
The great man drew nearer, and then, taking in the situation, said:
"Ah, painting! Brothers in art. Good morning!"
This was perhaps tender treatment as compared with what we had heard a pair of strangers might have expected. But my friend, although flurried because Jove had passed, remained at work. I forget, though, whether the sketch was ever completed.I was curious enough, however, to pass on, by a detour, in the hope of seeing Jove on his homeward stroll. But he had vanished, and there were no thunderings, near or far.
Mrs. Cameron and her household, after years at enlivening and photographing Freshwater, returned to Ceylon. The departure was an occasion for a liberal distribution of photographs among the inhabitants of the West Wight; and where there was a souvenir to be given or a tip to be left, mounted portraits of celebrities, or of models dressed as characters in fiction or poetry, were handed out. Thus it happened that many of the pleasant lodging-houses in the vicinity became galleries of Cameron art.
"Ideal" Ward had built a country mansion within a mile of Farringford. It was called Weston Manor. The eminent Catholic scholar and writer was, of course, a friend of Tennyson. And the two would dispute, of course, about religion, or, rather, about theology, without the slightest effect upon each other's opinions. The house is still in the possession of the Ward family, but is not occupied by them. For some years the private chaplain at Weston Manor was Father Peter Haythornthwaite, a most agreeable and hard-working man. Father Peter, as they called him in the island, was also a friend of Tennyson and frequently a companion of his walks. He told me an amusing story connected with his first dinner at Farringford. Tennyson had an Irish maid, Mary by name. The family were very fond of her; her devotion to them was equalled only by her zeal in serving them, which she wouldsometimes do in a domineering, if loyal manner, to which the poet bowed submissively. Tennyson disliked formality and stiffness, and was uncomfortable in a dress suit and starched shirt. Dressing for dinner he avoided whenever he could. Mary had laid out his most ceremonious clothes.
"Put them away," said he. "I 'll not wear them!"
Mary insisted.
"Now, I see," said Tennyson. "I am to wear them for that priest, eh?"
"Plaze, sir!"
"Will he come in his altar robes and stole?"
"The saints forbid!" said she.
"If they forbid him, why should they compel me?" he asked.
"It 's I, yer Honour, that tell ye, for the sake of the house! And he 's a man of God."
"I could n't resist that, could I?" the poet asked of Father Peter. "And so," said he, "I dressed."
At the table one evening, Tennyson, being in a humorous mood, composed rhyming epitaphs upon every name that occurred to him.
"What would you say of me?" asked Father Peter.
Instantly this couplet rolled from the lips of the host:
"Here lies P. Haythornthwaite,Human by nature, Roman by fate."
A letter of Mrs. Cameron's came under my observation one day, and I was permitted to make a note from it. "Tennyson," she wrote, "was very violent with the girls on the subject of the rage forautographs. He said he believed every crime and every vice in the world was connected with the passion for autographs and anecdotes and records; that the desiring of anecdotes and acquaintance with the lives of great men was treating them like pigs to be ripped open for the public; and that he knew he himself should be ripped open like a pig; that he thanked God Almighty with his whole heart and soul that he knew nothing, and would know nothing, of Jane Austen; and that there were no letters preserved, either of Shakespeare's, or of Jane Austen's; and that they had not been ripped open like pigs. Then he said that the post for two days had brought him no letters, and that he thought there was a sort of syncope in the world as to him and his fame."
That last touch is delicious. Tennyson did not like to be ignored. He was proud, and justly proud, of his fame. Sir Edwin Arnold said: "Tennyson had a noble vanity, a proud pleasure in the very notoriety which brought strangers peeping and stealing about his gates." Perhaps so, but it was a case of "It needs be that offences come, but woe be to him through whom the offence cometh." He hated to have tributes thrust upon him; he hated intrusions upon his privacy, and had suffered too much from that sort of thing at Farringford when summer visitors overran Freshwater. He liked to be recognised along the country roads; he liked to have people lift their hats to him; he liked to know that his work meant something to the passer by. But he shunned the merely curious stranger.
And so it was natural enough that he should have built a summer home on the mainland, Aldworth, where there was no summer resort and no plague of the curious. His friend, James Knowles, of theNineteenth Century, designed the house, and there Tennyson passed many happy summers and autumns. And there, on a moonlit night in the autumn of 1892, he died. Whether he loved Farringford more, or Aldworth more, I do not know. But probably he was as much attached to one as to the other, for each had its special associations.
The Tennysonian cloak, the Tennysonian hat, the rolling collar, and the touzled beard and hair were not unique. There lived at one time in Freshwater a brother of the poet. He resembled the poet and dressed like him. At the same time there was another resident of the place who not only resembled Lord Tennyson but "got himself up" in close imitation of his dress and manner. He was a warm admirer of Tennyson, and was immensely flattered to be mistaken for him by strangers. Small boys of the neighbourhood learned speedily to extract penny tips from this adoring person by pretending to mistake him for their celebrated townsman. On the whole it was rather a good thing to have three figures in the place, any one of which might be looked upon or followed by the summer visitor as the famous poet. It might be puzzling if the stranger met two or three Tennysons in a mile, but two of them could easily divert attention from the third, who was skilled in avoiding strangers.
There was an aged man who had been a gardenerat Farringford and was living on a little pension from that quarter. One morning he heard that the Poet Laureate had died. Meeting Father Peter in the road he expressed his grief that "his pore ludship have passed away." Then, with much concern for the succession, he asked:
"D'ye think likely Mr. Hallam will follow his father's business?"
Father Peter thought it quite unlikely.
"Ah," said the pensioner, much relieved. "I think nowt on 't, nowt!"
I have seen Farringford described as "a beautifully wooded gentleman's park." It must, at least, be acknowledged that if the gentleman were not beautifully wooded, he lived there, and that he lived a beautiful and serene life, a noble life, adding greatly to the fame of England, and no less to the human lot. Forty of his eighty-three years were Farringford years. Never was poet more happily placed than in this earthly paradise. Every circumstance of loyalty and love, of understanding and devotion, surrounded him here and at Aldworth. And never had genius a more devoted aid than Tennyson had in his son Hallam, the present Lord Tennyson, shield and buckler to his father and to his gentle mother, the dear lady who seemed like a spirit held on earth only by the devotion of husband and son. A family life richer and more tender one does not know among all the lives that one has seen, or ever heard of. To write more about it now would be impious.
Shortly after Tennyson had been buried in WestminsterAbbey, on an October day in 1892, a committee of his neighbours in Freshwater was formed for the purpose of erecting some memorial in the rural region where half his life had been passed. The memorial was meant to be a local and neighbourly undertaking, and it was thought, naturally enough, that it might be carried out in the form of a monument, tablet, or window, in the village church. But a more fitting idea was adopted.
There stood on the summit of the High Down, "Tennyson's Down" as it is more generally known, a great beacon of heavy, blackened timber surmounted by a cresset, in which, on old nights, long ago, fire had blazed when alarms were signalled from hill to hill along the coast. This beacon had been taken over by the Lighthouse Board and had served through decades as a mark for navigation for the endless processions of ships passing up and down the English Channel and through the Solent by the Needles. Six or seven hundred feet above the sea, and near the edge of a long white cliff, it was easily seen by navigators bound inward or outward. For forty years Tennyson had made it a point of call in his almost daily walks. The committee believed that in the place of the old wooden structure a granite shaft could be erected, serving at once as a memorial to Tennyson and a beacon to seamen.
The Reverend Doctor Merriman, Rector of Freshwater, Colonel Crozier, Doctor Hollis, and others, invited me to join the committee, and I did so, suggesting that Americans would wish to share inerecting the proposed memorial, but that it would be scarcely possible for them to participate were the object undertaken purely as a village or neighbourhood tribute. The broader suggestion was adopted. A Celtic cross in Cornish granite was designed by Mr. J. L. Pearson, of the Royal Academy, and the Brethren of Trinity House (the Lighthouse Board) consented to preserve it in perpetuity if the committee would provide for its erection. I communicated with my old friend, Mrs. James T. Fields of Boston, the widow of Tennyson's American publisher, and she brought together an American committee for the purpose of coöperating with the one in Freshwater. Doctor Oliver Wendell Holmes became her first associate and the first American subscriber. The daughters of Longfellow and Lowell were members of the American committee, and so were Mrs. Agassiz, Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, Mrs. Margaret Deland, Miss Sarah Orne Jewett, Professor Charles Eliot Norton, Mr. Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Mr. H. O. Houghton, Mr. George H. Mifflin, and others. Several American newspapers courteously drew attention to the proposed memorial, and Mr. George W. Smalley made an appeal through the New York Tribune, as I did through other papers. Subscriptions were purposely confined to small amounts so that the humblest lover of Tennyson could contribute his mite. I remember that among the first to come were twenty-five cents "from a bricklayer", and "a dollar from a proof reader."
The cross was erected and now, a quarter of a century later, it shows scarcely a sign of weather,though it fronts the sun, and the storms beat upon it, seven hundred feet above the sea. It bears this inscription:
IN MEMORYOF ALFREDLORD TENNYSONTHIS CROSS ISRAISED A BEACONTO SAILORS BYTHE PEOPLE OFFRESHWATER ANDOTHER FRIENDSIN ENGLANDAND AMERICA
Cliff-erosion causes the precipitous brink to creep slowly toward the cross. By or before the middle of the present century it may become necessary to remove the Beacon Cross some yards to the north.
It was, I think, on the day of Tennyson's burial that the following letter appeared in theTimes, over the signature P.L.I.
"Perhaps the following anecdotes may be of interest, related as they were in a paper read privately by the late James T. Fields, in 1872, during my stay in Boston.
"Mr. Fields said that while staying with the poet at Farringford, Tennyson said at midnight, 'Fields, let 's take a walk!' It was a dark and wild night, the sea breaking at the foot of the cliffs. Knowing the dangers of the place and his near-sightedness, I feared for his safety; however, he trudged on through the thick grass with his stick, I also using the one he had lent me on setting out.
"Presently he dropped on hands and knees in the grass. Alarmed I asked, 'What is the matter?' He answered in a strong, Lincolnshire accent, 'Violets, man, violets! Get thee down and have a smell; it will make thee sleep the better!' He had detected them by his acute sense of smell, aided by his strong love of nature. I dropped down, and the sense of the ridiculous struck me forcibly,—in such a position at midnight lying in the thick grass. He joined in my laughter, and we started for home.
"He was egotistical to an extreme, but it was superb, and deeply impressed one. An old lady once, sitting next to Tennyson while some of his poems were being read, exclaimed, 'Oh! how exquisite!' 'I should say it was,' replied the poet. At another time he said no one could read 'Maud' but himself. 'Fields, come and see me, and I will give you "Maud" so that you will never forget it.' This was perfectly true. I felt I could have listened to him forever, and would go any distance to hear it as he gave it."
There was much more to the same purpose. But Mr. Fields, like several others who have written about Tennyson, may have over-emphasised the poet's "egotism." Tennyson was an absolutely honest man. He said what he thought. If another said that his work was "exquisite" or "superb", or this, or that, he would not affect a self-depreciation which he did not feel. That would have been dishonest. If the work were fine, he knew it and said so. If it were over-praised, he said that too. He was not imposed upon by flattery, and he hated that and detected it easily enough. The "violet" incident above has been quoted frequently. It is quoted here because Mr. Fields was mistaken about"the thick grass." That does not grow on the down. Besides the furze bushes, there is only close-cropped turf. If he walked through "thick grass" it may have been on the way to and from the down, perhaps, by the way of Maiden's Croft. And on the down the poet would have been in no peril through his short-sightedness. He was a countryman, and knew every inch of the way. A countryman can tell by the slope of the ground, by "the lie of the land" under his feet, whether or not the down is leading him astray. If he is sure-footed, far sight will not help him much in the dark. But Fields, although a kindly soul, was a publisher, and he might easily have felt "ridiculous" when kneeling at the feet of a poet.
A diligent antiquary lived at Freshwater in Tennyson's time. He lived in Easton Cottage, nearly opposite the road-end of Tennyson's Lane. His name was Robert Walker, and he was well advanced in age. When I knew him, in the nineties, he was very deaf, so that talking with him was tiresome. But he had interesting talk to give, even if he received none in return. He had been a dealer in antiques, I forget where, but I remember that he told me he had made and lost two fortunes, and was sheltering his last years under the shreds of the second. He told me, too, that he had been offered the curatorship of a well-known museum, but had declined, preferring retirement in Freshwater. I have a vague recollection of being shown the correspondence. But, at any rate, the old man promised to confer new fame on Freshwater by proving that ithad very ancient fame, indeed, as a harbourage and stage in the overland route to the tin mines of Cornwall in the time of the Phoenicians!
His argument was something like this: In the obscure past there were Phoenicians. So much we grant. They conducted with the world at large, or with as much of it as was then known, a trade in tin. Strabo tells us so. Whence came their tin? From Cornwall. And how did they get to Cornwall? By the Isle of Wight, which seems a roundabout way, but was not so. The "ships" of the Phoenicians "were little more than open boats, partly decked, and liable to be swamped by the dash of the waves over their sides and prows. They were propelled by rowers, numbering from thirty to fifty; if wind served they stepped a single mast and hoisted a single sail." They avoided the heavy seas of the Bay of Biscay, and came by the rivers of France. Up from the Mediterranean they would proceed by the Rhone to where Lyons is now. There they would leave their vessels. From there overland to the Seine, where they had another fleet awaiting them. Then down the Seine to where Havre, or Barfleur, or Cherbourg stand now, and thence across the Channel to the Isle of Wight, the nearest front of barbarian England.
Freshwater was then an island. It is almost an island now. The little tidal river, Yar, rises within a few yards of the Channel and flows north, to the Solent. In those days there was probably no beach at Freshwater Bay; the present beach was formed after modern man had constructed a causewaythere. In those days the waters of the Channel flowed into the Yar, making a shallow estuary sufficient for an anchorage, where the Phoenician craft could lie while their adventurous crews were following the Cornish trail, a feat easily performed, because, in those days, the Isle of Wight was doubtless joined to the mainland at Hurst Castle. If it were not it should have been, in order to add interest to the story.
About the beginning of the eighteen-nineties workmen were widening and lowering the road which skirts Farringford and the Briary, and gives an entrance to the rear of Weston Manor. They dug so closely into a Weston hedge that, in going below the subsoil of it, they discovered the remains of ancient structures containing pottery, ash, charcoal, lime, enamelled bricks, and so on. Walker declared the remains were Phoenician, and the site that of a crematorium and a pottery. He cited evidence which I have not space to record. Being an antiquary he turned on other antiquaries. He wrote a pamphlet. The Antiquary magazine took up the case and cited similar discoveries, undoubtedly Phoenician, in South Devon. Warm arguments for and against the Phoenician theory were thrown back and forth. And Freshwater laughed. It was sure, and is sure still, that the anti-Phoenicians had the best of it, and Neighbour Walker the worst of it. A neighbour would have the worst of it, of course. But Walker persuaded the Ward of the time (Granville) to preserve the discoveries and to erect above them two protecting domes of concrete.Walker, I think, had the best of it, for if he could not prove the remains to have been Phoenician, his adversaries could not prove them to have been anything else. The antiquary is dead, and the local cabmen point, with the scorn of their calling, to "Walker's Pups" in the hedgerow as you drive to Totland or Alum Bay.
Local prophets, here as elsewhere, may prophesy without excess of honour. Tennyson himself used to tell an anecdote which had the run of the village:
"There 's Farringford," said a cabman to a visiting "fare."
"Ah!" responded the latter, "a great man lives there."
"D' ye call him great?" retorted cabby. "He only keeps one man, andhedon't sleep in the house!"
Just as I reach this point in this chapter, there comes to me, in Hampshire, the news of Lady Ritchie's death. This means the breaking of almost the last link of that old Island circle. And it means the vanishing from life of one of the sweetest and dearest old ladies I have ever known. She was Thackeray's eldest daughter.
When my wife and I left the Island, late in 1918, Lady Ritchie was one of the last friends we saw. She came to our gate to say good-bye. She was then over eighty-one. How many of my friends are more than eighty! The most active youth is ninety-three! He also is an Isle of Wighter. Lady Ritchie was an Isle of Wighter half of every year. She had first visited Freshwater with her fatherwhen she was a child, and her association with it had never ceased since then. For many years past she had a little house there. "The Porch" it was called. The colder half of the year she lived in London, in St. Leonard's Terrace, Chelsea; the warmer half at "The Porch." In 1918, when Chelsea Hospital, the home of the red-coated Old Pensioners, was bombed by German aircraft, she had a narrow escape. Her house faces the hospital grounds, and every window pane in the front was shattered. She was sitting in her drawing-room at the time, but was unhurt by the flying glass and unruffled by the flashing and crashing all about her. She was then approaching her eighty-first birthday. But ladies of eighty-one, however unconquerable, do not go through such an experience without nerve strain. When I saw her again, a few weeks later, she, for the first time, seemed conscious that age was advancing upon her. The pleasant little gatherings became fewer; she was much fatigued after them. But her spirits were as high as ever, and her thought as kindly.
When the United States entered the war, she came to me with a jubilant letter from an old friend of hers in New York. Her friend had written, "I rejoice that you and I are now fighting together, side by side."
"Yes, yes," said Lady Ritchie, reading the letter to me, "think of it! Two old ladies of eighty fighting shoulder to shoulder!" And straightway she made a little American flag which she hung at "The Porch" door, alongside a Union Jack.
She was, I think, the last of that once considerable group whose members always addressed, and alluded to, the first Lord Tennyson as "Alfred." And she was as full of stories of him as an egg is of meat. The last time we passed Farringford together, she said:
"I like to think of the expression on Alfred's face when he was told that a new boy-in-buttons, a country lad whom he had just taken into service, answered the doorbell one day, and saw a tall, sedate gentleman standing there.
"'Tell your master that the Prince Consort has called,' he said to the boy.
"'Oh, crickey!' exclaimed the youngster, who fled to the innermost parts of the house.
"Somehow, I forget how, the message was conveyed to Alfred, who found the Prince waiting at the door, still laughing at the boy's consternation. The Island life was fairly simple in those days."
And what is left of that old life is gracious, kindly, hospitable. In no place in any part of the earth have I met with greater kindliness than in Freshwater. That is why I am fond of the West Wight and have been there so often. I wonder if ever I shall go there again. Once I crossed the Atlantic to go there and only there. And now, to-day that gracious lady of the old time has gone, never to return. How kindly she was, and gentle! What sweet dignity and thoughtfulness, a manner that was not put on and off like a gown. It was innate. There are few left in the world like that dear lady. The present generation calls them old-fashioned.Theirs was indeed an old fashion, and the world is poorer because it does not know how to match it. Their spirit was not the spirit of the age as we see it at the dawn of the third decade of the Twentieth Century. Farewell, dear lady, you were Thackeray's finest work!
The enthusiasms and antagonisms set alight by Mr. Gladstone in his long career flame now, a generation after his death, quite as fiercely as they did before the Great War. Not that he was a warlike man, except upon the hustings and in the House. You would think that everybody could see now that Gladstone was right about the Turks. But Woodrow Wilson and the ex-Kaiser have not seen so much. They were on the side of the Turks and Bulgarians. Wilson was so much on their side that he would not fight them, and by his abstention contributed to the situation which made the Armenian massacres a continuous entertainment for Berlin, and isolated Russia from her Allies. And there is Ireland, of course, Ireland with De Valera instead of with Parnell. And there is Egypt. And there is India. All of these synonymes for trouble, and debates in the House. All these troubles to be healed by talk. But there is no one now who talks so well as Mr. Gladstone.
When Gladstone died, men did not agree about what he had done in his more than sixty years of public life,—done, that is, for the United Kingdomand the Empire. They do not agree now. What was the outstanding achievement of his life, the thing, above all, by which posterity will remember him? Was it his devotion to the freedom of human kind? Perhaps. But the main question is so difficult to answer that I shall not attempt the task, not merely because it is difficult, but mainly because it is not my intention to tread the mazes of British politics.
The Nineteenth Century, the despised Victorian Age, if you please, was an age of great men. Some of them seem smaller now than they did before July, 1914. Bismarck, for example. Bismarck was a liar. Gladstone was not. And yet he had a theological mind. Gladstone's stature has not diminished with the shrinking process of time. But will it diminish? Who can tell? The world salutes his integrity. Does it salute for integrity and courage any political personage of to-day?
The world was taught, generation after generation, that the emergency produces the man. The year 1914 and its six successors brought emergency to every country, such emergency as no country had ever known before. But the emergencies did not produce the political men. Only France produced the political man. Without him, German intrigue would have overrun the world, even after the Germans fled from France and Belgium and the East. We would have been smothered by words and machinations, as northern France and Belgium had been smothered by the Teutonic cloud-bursts. But there was Clémenceau,—Clémenceau who had appointed Foch.
These two men and the Allied commanders brought victory to civilisation. If the politicians do not destroy the work and plans, the "peace" they are making now will endure for a while. If the politicians, toying with their new doll, the League of Nations, keep their heads in the clouds, I believe they will come crashing to earth within ten years, frightened and amazed by a greater and longer war than has yet been known. They sowed its seeds in the Armistice and at Versailles. And later when, month after month, they changed their plans from day to day.
It is sometimes unwise to avoid digressions. No apology is made, or considered necessary, for this one.
I was speaking of Mr. Gladstone. It was my privilege to see him and hear him frequently during twenty years. Perhaps it was due to some defect of nature that I was never much influenced politically by him. His eloquence was anything you may choose to imagine it, and you would have admired it, if you could dissociate from it the involved phrases, the delicate adjustments, the hair-split meanings which might balance any interpretation that might be put upon them, the contradictions, the finely-spun arguments which, woven into the texture of his speeches, would enmesh the unwary,—you would have admired it hugely if you could have dissociated these things from it. His majorities probably did not make the effort. He had the magic of making them forget.
He could be, and was, eloquent on any subject,and, for that reason, he could and did unsettle many minds on many themes. He was a word-spinner of extraordinary skill and charm, and he made multitudes think they had opinions of their own when their opinions were what he had taught them. That is one of the gifts of leadership. And it was a special privilege of Mr. Gladstone's leadership of democracy that he remained an aristocrat by habit and inclination. Morley's "Life" of him contains this passage from a privately printed account of Ruskin at Hawarden:
"Something like a little amicable duel took place at one time between Ruskin and Mr. G. when Ruskin directly attacked his host as a 'leveller.' 'You seeyouthink one man is as good as another, and all men equally competent to judge aright on political questions; whereas I am a believer in an aristocracy.' And straight came the answer from Mr. Gladstone, 'Oh dear, no! I am nothing of the sort. I am a firm believer in the aristocratic principle—the rule of the best. I am an out-and-outinequalitarian,' a confession which Ruskin treated with intense delight, clapping his hands triumphantly."
Eloquence has not been rated modestly among the arts during some thousands of years. Whether it has done more for the advancement or the retardation of man may be a subject for dispute. That it has done both is unquestioned by those who talk less than they think. It is a useful accomplishment when the object is to get a body of men to think and act in unison; it is equally useful in promoting disunion. It is therefore of most service to politiciansand preachers, the aim of these gentlemen being to promote unity for their own causes by promoting disaffection in and with all other causes. Of all the statesmen of the nineteenth century, Mr. Gladstone was preëminent in the promotion of disaffection. I do not know that he uprooted anything that deserved to remain among the habits or institutions of mankind; I do not know that he preserved anything that should have been cast upon the dust heap; I do not know that he originated anything; but I always think of him as a great opportunist who was sometimes on the right side, and quite as likely to be on the wrong. But he differed from other conspicuous opportunists in this: he always wrestled with the devil of unbelief. Before adopting a policy he would ask himself, "Is this right?" If he adopted it, you would know that he was convinced of the righteousness of his cause. That he had converted himself, convinced himself by his own eloquence, did not make his conviction less sure, but made it perhaps, more clinching because he had talked himself into belief. His eloquence, therefore, had effect upon himself no less than upon others, as Lord Beaconsfield more than implied when, in a political speech at Knightsbridge, in 1878, he alluded to Mr. Gladstone as "a sophistical rhetorician, inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity."
If Mr. Gladstone has been credited too much and too often with all the qualities of a saint, it was, perhaps, because his opponents were always ready to attribute to him the traits of a devil. In our later time there has been no such adulation and nosuch hatred as were poured upon him. And I take it that these excesses were due to his absorption in things, or subjects, rather than to interest in men. Individuals did not interest him; causes did. The cause, whatever it might be, filled the universe. He could not see men, the people were so conspicuous.
It may have been a fault, it was certainly a characteristic, that when he had once resolved, he expected his followers to exchange, as quickly as himself, old ways of thought for new. It did not occur to him until after the event that he had struck not only the wrong but the unpopular note in the American Civil War. He saw the thing in one way only, and he was immensely surprised when he learned that there was another side to the question, and that it was taken by the country most concerned. But he did what he could and subsequently made a long and almost abject confession of error, which might have shaken, if it did not, the general appreciation of his powers of judgment. It will be said there was the case of Ireland. To be sure there was the case of Ireland. It is always with Britain, even if the Irish are not,—as in the war against Germany. But Mr. Gladstone understood Ireland and the Irish as little as,—well, as little as the Americans understand them. Lord Salisbury, on a certain occasion, said that he (Salisbury) had never seen Mr. Parnell. Almost any one, then, might have repeated to him the famous injunction of Oxenstiern: "Go forth, my son, and see with how little wisdom the world is governed."
Lord Salisbury did not know Parnell by sight, andhe gave Heligoland to the Kaiser. Neither Parnell nor Heligoland were important enough in his opinion to justify even visual acquaintance. The world has suffered for his superior neglect in one particular, perhaps in both. But if he, or if Gladstone, or if Gladstone and Salisbury had foreseen what would happen, the world might not have acted any more wisely than it did. It is always too late to be wise. Nobody would have believed the oracles; the truth was in opposition to the world's inclinations. It is usually so. And that is why great men are shunted to the wrong tracks, and so are "great" men only for their age and hour; it is why prophets are stoned, and mediocrities arise and talk, prevailing by sound. Nowadays the eminence of men is fixed by their capacity for catching votes and the commotion they make in doing so.
I thought Mr. Gladstone a vindictive old gentleman. It was not the fashion to think of him in that way. You were supposed to insist upon his more saintly qualities, but there is some difficulty in associating attributes of saintship with eminent politicians during their lifetime, and at the same moment keeping your face straight. The Roman Church, in its sagacity, defers consideration of saintship until long after the decease of the candidates for canonisation. Some centuries, indeed, are required before the purely human element in man may be superseded by the purely divine, even in cases where the voting majority is heavy.
If Mr. Gladstone were not vindictive, I do not see how he contrived so successfully to give thatcharacter to his countenance when he was not speaking. One does not say when his countenance was in repose. Repose was unacquainted with his countenance, or with any part of him. The energy which fully charged his body flowed through his mind in a restless and surging torrent. And if he were vindictive, I do not see anything strange, or much that is derogatory in that. A leader of politics must be genuine, or fall far short of greatness. His opponents cannot be opposed to him merely in a parliamentary sense. They may be as genuine as he, but if he hates their acts as evil in nature and result, he cannot in honesty refrain from distrusting the men who lead and inspire the acts, though he may pretend as much as he pleases to do otherwise. His indignation against men and measures does not cease with the adjournment of the House, or with the close of an electioneering campaign, unless he is a hypocrite. And if he fail to pursue his public enemy for the purpose of making him ineffective for public harm, does he not give a too generous interpretation to public duty? That a man is to be hated only at certain hours, or when he says certain things, is conceivable only by the tolerant mass which must usually be told what to think, and which, nine times out of ten, can be relied upon to think to order, especially on party matters. A political party, in any country, is not intended for thinking purposes, but, like an army, is for fighting purposes. If it's in, it fights to stay in; if it's out, it fights to get in. It uses speeches and programmes as military leaders use smoke-screens and gas-discharges,to obscure the real operations and confound the enemy. In the last century we had not learned, although we may have suspected, that the world must be made safe for hypocrisy. It remained for the twentieth century to announce this.
A journalist who gets below the surface of things cannot remain a party man, for the more useful he is to one party the less useful he is to journalism. Sooner or later, and usually sooner than later, he must come up against the barbed wire which divides proprietary or editorial interests from the area of his own convictions. Perhaps the latter are less important than they seem. But they may be more important. At any rate, like Touchstone's Audrey, they are his, and if he has a conscience, which is to be presumed, a conflict between his pen and his principles is bound to occur, unless his chief, or his employer, is a paragon of courage.
"I can't afford the truth, as you call it," said an editor-proprietor one day,—it was over an article about Gladstone. "I must go with my public." He went with it, but his contributor did not. The latter was given the choice of resigning or writing. He did both. He wrote his resignation. How Mr. Gladstone heard of this I do not know, but hear of it he did. It was to his interest to side with the editor, as he did politically, but he met later the contumacious subordinate and said that he was glad to see a junior who stood by his principles and knew how to do so.
"If I have any advantage over others," said the G.O.M., "it is the advantage of a long experiencewhich has taught me to value the quality that Cromwell attributed to his soldiers. Oliver said, 'They make some conscience of what they do.' If we are not ruled by conscience, we are in anarchy. Good conscience makes for fair fighting in politics or war."
"Yes, but, Mr. Gladstone, if the opponentdoes n'tfight fairly?"
"'Bear it that the opposed must beware of thee!'"
That is well as far as it goes. But we do not "fight by the book of arithmetic." Did "the opposed" in Mr. Gladstone's wars beware of him, or of his England? One does not seem to recall their wariness. Not even the Mahdi's. Gordon fought with the front door open, so to speak. Gladstone did not then "make the opposed beware" of his administration,i.e.England, for the time being. And there were other cases. Is it only one's own side that must beware of a policy of dilly-dally? The "ecstatic madman", as Lord Acton, in one of his letters, called Gordon, gave the world furiously to think. But Gladstone knew what Gordon was when he sent him out. And it is more difficult now than it was then to relieve the venerable statesman of responsibility. Gladstone hated war. But his hatred of it did not make war any the less inevitable or less necessary. The enemy rejoiced because the G.O.M. hated war. Let the Pacifists note!
Of the many times when I saw Gladstone at close range, I recall at the moment a night at the Lyceum while Irving was playing "The Merchant of Venice." From my seat it was easily possible to observe theGrand Old Man in his stall. The eagle eyes had always fascinated me. It was as interesting to watch his terrific face as to watch Irving. "Terrific" is not too strong a word. Gladstone's face during the Tubal scene reflected every emotion of vengeance that forced itself from Shylock's soul, and during the Trial scene he glared at Antonio with inquisitorial ferocity while Shylock whetted his knife. It would be the usual and conventional thing to describe this as a tribute to Irving's acting, and in support of this to quote Gladstone's appreciation of that distinguished man, "Shylock is his best, I think"—but the spectator at a play, if we may take Hamlet's word for it, is readier to show sympathy with the victim than with the tormentor; and it was not until after Shylock had whetted his blade that he became changed from the victorious torturer to the abjectly tortured man. Up to that point Gladstone's face expressed demoniacal glee; after it he did not appear to be interested. The psychologists and the partisans may quarrel over this as they please. I think that non-partisans who had much opportunity to study the old parliamentarian's face at close range, amid varying conditions, will not quarrel over this interpretation, or with the adjective employed.
Take another and a very different instance, when Gladstone was the central figure of a moving scene. It was a Liberal Conference at Manchester, in December, 1889. Gladstone had been ill. The press had reported him seriously ill. It was unlikely, the papers said, that he could again address a publicmeeting, unlikely that he would reappear in the political field. But he appeared at Manchester, and his appearance drew the attention of all Liberal Britain, and a good share of its representative men in person. The immense hall was packed. The seats had been removed from the floor to make room for a greater throng than could otherwise gather. So close was the pressure that it was impossible to move one's arms, even to raise them. The audience worked itself, or rather was worked, to a high pitch of enthusiasm by a skilful organist who played upon them with patriotic songs and Scottish, Welsh, and English ballads. When the kettle was boiling merrily over this fire, and the lid rattling up and down, an old, grey head, world-famous, was seen rising through the platform-crowd, and the alert and venerable figure which carried it moved quickly to the front against a whirlwind of cheers. The roar was like that of a gale-driven sea beating against cliffs. It did not cease until its idol had raised his hand for silence. When it had ceased he sat down, and the chairman called the meeting to order.
A few minutes later, the chairman called upon Mr. Gladstone to speak. The G.O.M. rose to another outburst of welcome, and, upon obtaining silence, said: "Mr. Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen." And then the storm of cheering broke anew. It continued for a quarter of an hour, gaining constantly in force and volume. It was taken up in the crowded streets. It was a tempest of sound, within, without. The five words had started an avalanche! When had those five words, or any five, unloosedsuch clamour? The voice that uttered them had boomed through the great hall like the discharges of big guns. The deep, strong tones, the alertness of motion, the flash of the eagle eyes, said to the assemblage more than the words. Eighty years? Yes, but eighty years young, with health, vigour, fighting power undiminished. The audience could not restrain its joy. Roar upon roar succeeded, wave upon wave of emotion rolled over the crowd; it was a demonstration of thanksgiving, of congratulation, of delight. I have never seen or heard its equal in all the pageants, conventions, progresses, demonstrations of popular enthusiasm that I have witnessed in many parts of the world. Above them all this stands alone, unique in fervour and significance.
"Standing as I do on the verge of four score years"—was the note to which the audience again responded. The shouting was a personal tribute, not merely a political one. I cannot remember what the G.O.M. said in his speech, but I remember that there was scarcely anything of a specific character concerning political measures or men. Gladstone was keeping his powder dry. He dealt in generalities. He was always at his best when so dealing. He lifted his themes to an exalted pitch and did not wreck himself on details.
It was only his greyness that acknowledged age. His voice was as deep and rich as ever it had been, his bearing as alert, his movements as graceful. He seemed to say, "It is impossible to grow old, but, as I cannot live forever, let us get on with the work inhand." His capacity for believing that the moon is made of green cheese, and, what was more important, of making others believe it, was boundless. What was the spell he cast upon his hearers? Even when he was in Opposition, perhaps because of that, for he was best then, the House of Commons would be crowded when he spoke. I have seen him at such a time switch on his green-cheese oratory and hold the House for an hour or two, tense, expectant, submissive under the spell. When he finished, great cheering would rise from both sides,—from his followers because they were charmed, or overwhelmed, and, being of his party, believed in the green-cheese theory and were ready to eat the cheese; from his opponents because they too were charmed, or all but overwhelmed, and for the moment forgot that fealty to their own party should have left the other side of the House to do the cheering. If a vote could have been taken when Gladstone ended his speech, the House would have been unanimous for cheese. But parliamentary procedure permits, or compels, a leading opponent to reply, and the reply broke the spell and recalled several hundred Britons to their partisan duties.
It was always amusing to watch Gladstone's face when he came before an enthusiastic audience either in the outer world or within the House of Commons. As the cheers of welcome increased, he would look about him in a puzzled way, as if he were wondering what caused the demonstration, as if he were asking himself, "What have I done to be dragged from obscurity?" It has often been said that "he couldhave been a great actor." But he was one. It has also been said that he would have been a great archbishop. But archbishops in his time led such tame lives that Mr. Gladstone would have been discontented with the episcopal lot. It is easy, though, to imagine him cursing magnificently with bell, book, and candle. He was a great performer.
His detachments were even more remarkable than the attachments of other men. No subject absorbed him save when he was working on it. That is another way of saying that his power of concentration was absolutely under control at all times. He would turn from the subject which he had dropped for the day to another subject which he would work at for half an hour, or six weeks, or six years, or a lifetime, and give all his energies to the task in hand, and yet be ready to concentrate at a minute's notice on whatever might turn up. They say he had no sense of humour. Perhaps they mean that he was not witty. Perhaps he did n't appreciate jokes. It is not always easy to know what "they" mean by a sense of humour. I have known Gladstone to keep the House of Commons laughing for a quarter of an hour by sheer exercise of the comic spirit, although it must be said that he did not often exercise this. But when he did it, there was purpose in it. The tragedy, that is to say, the serious business of the hour, was to follow. Seeing Gladstone in his great moments was like seeing Edwin Booth as Richelieu; you had similar thrills, smiles, and satisfaction.
Very few persons outside his family knew him really well, no matter how long they might havebeen associated with him in public work. All the men who knew him that I knew agreed in one thing, however much they disagreed in others,—he had the spirit and the manner of command. A public gathering, a cabinet council, a dinner party were equally his. It will be remembered that he addressed Queen Victoria as if she were a public meeting, and she did n't like it. But that illustrates what I mean when saying that he was not interested in persons but in causes, or subjects; he was not interested in a dinner party but in what he had to tell it. The other guests—his hosts, too—might have been disembodied spirits, but it was he who would "communicate" with them, not they with him. He would detach himself from them as easily as from politics.
He made his own "atmosphere", and it was often far removed from politics. Thus, at the approach of the political crisis of 1886, just before the House was to vote on his first Home Rule Bill, he was staying with his wife at Lord Aberdeen's house at Dollis Hill. A friend of mine, not a political personage, was of the house party, and he told me how the G.O.M. would drive out from town alone, after dark, in an open carriage, and forget the fate of governments, especially his own, although that fate was to be decided within a few hours.
Entering the drawing-room, he said, "While driving out here from the House last evening I counted twenty-eight omnibuses going in one direction. To-day being Saturday, I thought the number would be larger than that, and I estimated thirty-five. Icounted thirty-six." And then he discoursed on the increasing business of passenger transportation in the metropolis. Not a word about politics.
On the following afternoon (Sunday) the members of the Cabinet and other prominent partisans went out to Dollis Hill for an informal consultation with the Prime Minister. They were uneasy in their minds. The vote would be taken next day, and they might find themselves out of office,—as indeed they did for the six years following. The afternoon being fine, they walked in the garden and discussed the perils of the situation, and waited for Mr. Gladstone to summon them, or to come and join them. They continued to walk and wait. But Mr. Gladstone did not appear, nor did he summon any one. But the Secretary for Ireland thought that he might be engaged with the Secretary for Foreign Affairs, and the Home Secretary thought that he might be with the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Still Gladstone did not send word, and the political mountains waited for Mahomet. Concluding that the old gentleman was fatigued and had gone to his room for a nap, they began to retreat homeward. They left singly, and by twos and threes, after some hours of vain waiting. By and by the Gladstones appeared and told their host that they had had "a charming afternoon." They had strolled to the garden gate and had stopped to look at the view. The country road enticed them. They came to a pretty church, and as service was about to begin, they entered and remained for the benediction. They had returned slowly, but highly edified. The next day Gladstonemet his foes and was cast into the cold shades of opposition. Doubtless he had expected this, but, doubtless, he had not expected to be cast so deep,—six years' deep.
I remember what a former ally of his had said to me just before the Manchester Conference: "No, I am not going to Manchester. I don't agree with Gladstone's Irish policy, but I know that if I were to go to Manchester I would shout with the rest." Those were days when the world had sunk far into the morasses of parliamentary talk. All things were to be settled by talking and voting and pious intentions. A complacent faith in Democracy was to save the world, if, indeed, the world were not already saved by it. In English-speaking countries it had become little short of dishonourable to praise naval and military valour; and reliance upon force as the defence of a nation was thought to be unchristian. Democracy was to be shielded by its own virtue. We have heard that since the Great War, too. It is the old story of an old dream. Envy, hatred, and malice had departed from the world. There would be no more cause for great wars. The era of perpetual peace was about to dawn. Nations were to put their trust in a parliamentary God, a Deity of Congresses. When every one voted, there would be a new heaven on a new earth. The credulous invented a new kind of treason of which any one was accused when he expressed, publicly, doubts of the sanity of a democracy which could not see that the voter unprepared to defend his "sacred vote" by arms was risking his privilege, his goods, his kith andkin, was imperilling his right to live as a freeman. He had put his faith in words. Mr. Gladstone was the nineteenth century's greatest conjuror with words. But he was incapable of demanding, as Woodrow Wilson did, that a nation should be "neutral in thought", while freedom, the very right to think, was being beaten down. Gladstone would not have blundered like that, you say. But it was not a blunder, it was a crime.