[pg 460]Chapter VI. Biarritz. (1891-1892)Omnium autem ineptiarum, quæ sunt innumerabiles, haud sciam an nulla sit major, quam, ut illi solent, quocunque in loco, quoscunque inter homines visum est, de rebus aut difficillimis aut non necessariis argutissime disputare.—Cicero.Of all the numberless sorts of bad taste and want of tact, perhaps the worst is to insist, no matter where you are or with whom you are, on arguing about the hardest subjects to the full pitch of elaboration and detail.IWe have seen how in 1889 Mr. and Mrs. Gladstone celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of one of the most devoted and successful marriages that ever was made, and the unbroken felicity of their home. In 1891, after the shadows of approaching calamity had for many months hung doubtfully over them, a heavy blow fell, and their eldest son died. Not deeply concerned in ordinary politics, he was a man of many virtues and some admirable gifts; he was an accomplished musician, and I have seen letters of his to his father, marked by a rare delicacy of feeling and true power of expression.“I had known him for nearly thirty years,”one friend wrote,“and there was no man, until his long illness, who had changed so little, or retained so long the best qualities of youth, and my first thought was that the greater the loss to you, the greater would be the consolation.”To Archbishop Benson, Mr. Gladstone wrote (July 6):—It is now forty-six years since we lost a child,285and he who has now passed away from our eyes, leaves to us only blessed recollections. I suppose all feel that those deaths which reverse the order of nature have a sharpness of their own. But setting[pg 461]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.To me he wrote (July 10):—We feel deeply the kindness and tenderness of your letter. It supplies one more link in a long chain of recollection which I deeply prize. Yes, ours is a tribulation, and a sore one, but yet we feel we ought to find ourselves carried out of ourselves by sympathy with the wife whose noble and absorbing devotion had become like an entire life of itself, and who is now face to face with the void. The grief of children too, which passes, is very sharp while it remains. The case has been very remarkable. Though with abatement of some powers, my son has not been without many among the signs and comforts of health during a period of nearly two and a half years. All this time the terrible enemy was lodged in the royal seat, and only his healthy and unyielding constitution kept it at defiance, and maintained his mental and inward life intact.... And most largely has human, as well as divine compassion, flowed in upon us, from none more conspicuously than from yourself, whom we hope to count among near friends for the short remainder of our lives.To another correspondent who did not share his own religious beliefs, he said (July 5):—When I received your last kind note, I fully intended to write to you with freedom on the subject ofThe Agnostic Island. But since then I have been at close quarters, so to speak, with the dispensations of God, for yesterday morning my dearly beloved eldest son was taken from the sight of our eyes. At this moment of bleeding hearts, I will only say what I hope you will in consideration of the motives take without offence, namely this: I would from the bottom of my heart that whenever the hour of bereavement shall befall you or those whom you love, you and they may enjoy the immeasurable consolation of believing, with all the mind and all the heart, that the beloved one is gone into eternal rest, and that those who remain behind may through the same mighty Deliverer hope at their appointed time to rejoin him.[pg 462]All this language on the great occasions of human life was not with him the tone of convention. Whatever the synthesis, as they call it,—whatever the form, whatever the creed and faith may be, he was one of that high and favoured household who, in Emerson's noble phrase,“live from a great depth of being.”Earlier in the year Lord Granville, who so long had been his best friend, died. The loss by his death was severe. As Acton, who knew of their relations well and from within, wrote to Mr. Gladstone (April 1):—There was an admirable fitness in your union, and I had been able to watch how it became closer and easier, in spite of so much to separate you, in mental habits, in early affinities, and even in the form of fundamental convictions, since he came home from your budget, overwhelmed, thirty-eight years ago. I saw all the connections which had their root in social habit fade before the one which took its rise from public life and proved more firm and more enduring than the rest.IIIn September he paid a visit to his relatives at Fasque, and thence he went to Glenalmond—spots that in his tenacious memory must have awakened hosts of old and dear associations. On October 1, he found himself after a long and busy day, at Newcastle-on-Tyne, where he had never stayed since his too memorable visit in 1862.286Since the defeat of the Irish policy in 1886, he had attended the annual meeting of the chief liberal organisation at Nottingham (1887), Birmingham (1888), and Manchester (1889). This year it was the turn of Newcastle. On October 2, he gave his blessing to various measures that afterwards came to be known as the Newcastle programme. After the shock caused by the Irish quarrel, every politician knew that it would be necessary to balance home rule by reforms expected in England and Scotland. No liberal, whatever his particular shade, thought that it would be either honourable or practical to throw the Irish policy overboard, and if there[pg 463]At Newcastlewere any who thought such a course honourable, they knew it would not be safe. The principle and expediency of home rule had taken a much deeper root in the party than it suited some of the trimming tribe later to admit. On the other hand, after five years of pretty exclusive devotion to the Irish case, to pass by the British case and its various demands for an indefinite time longer, would have been absurd.IIIIn the eighties Mr. Gladstone grew into close friendship with one who had for many years been his faithful supporter in the House of Commons as member for Dundee. Nobody ever showed him devotion more considerate, loyal, and unselfish than did Mr. Armitstead, from about the close of the parliament of 1880 down to the end of this story.287In the middle of December 1891 Mr. Armitstead planned a foreign trip for his hero, and persuaded me to join. Biarritz was to be our destination, and the expedition proved a wonderful success. Some notes of mine, though intended only for domestic consumption, may help to bring Mr. Gladstone in his easiest moods before the reader's eye. No new ideas struck fire, no particular contribution was made to grand themes. But a great statesman on a holiday may be forgiven for not trying to discover brand-new keys to philosophy, history, and“all the mythologies.”As a sketch from life of the veteran's buoyancy, vigour, genial freshness of heart and brain, after four-score strenuous years, these few pages may be found of interest.We left Paris at nine in the morning (Dec. 16), and were listening to the swell of the mighty Bay resounding under our windows at Biarritz soon after midnight.The long day's journey left no signs of fatigue on either Mr. or Mrs. Gladstone, and his only regret was that we had[pg 464]not come straight through instead of staying a night in Paris. I'm always for going straight on, he said. For some odd reason in spite of the late hour he was full of stories of American humour, which he told with extraordinary verve and enjoyment. I contributed one that amused him much, of the Bostonian who, having read Shakespeare for the first time, observed,“I call that a very clever book. Now, I don't suppose there are twenty men in Boston to-day who could have written that book!”Thursday, Dec. 17.—Splendid morning for making acquaintance with a new place. Saw the western spur of the Pyrenees falling down to the Bidassoa and the first glimpse of the giant wall, beyond which, according to Michelet, Africa begins, and our first glimpse of Spain.After breakfast we all sallied forth to look into the shops and to see the lie of the land. Mr. G. as interested as a child in all the objects in the shops—many of them showing that we are not far from Spain. The consul very polite, showed us about, and told us the hundred trifles that bring a place really into one's mind. Nothing is like a first morning's stroll in a foreign town. By afternoon the spell dissolves, and the mood comes of Dante's lines,“Era già l'ora,”etc.288Some mention was made of Charles Austin, the famous lawyer: it brought up the case of men who are suddenly torn from lives of great activity to complete idleness.Mr. G.—I don't know how to reconcile it with what I've always regarded as the foundation of character—Bishop Butler's view of habit. How comes it that during the hundreds of years in which priests and fellows of Eton College have retired from hard work to college livings and leisure, not one of them has ever done anything whatever for either scholarship or divinity—not one?Mr. G. did not know Mazzini, but Armellini, another of the Roman triumvirs, taught him Italian in 1832.[pg 465]Opinions On StatesmenI spoke a word for Gambetta, but he would not have it.“Gambetta wasautoritaire; I do not feel as if he were a true liberal in the old and best sense. I cannot forget how hostile he was to the movement for freedom in the Balkans.”Said he only once saw Lord Liverpool. He went to call on Canning at Glos'ter House (close to our Glos'ter Road Station), and there through a glass door he saw Canning and Lord Liverpool talking together.Peel.—Had a good deal of temper; not hot; but perhaps sulky. Not a farsighted man, but fairly clear-sighted.“I called upon him after the election in 1847. The Janissaries, as Bentinck called us, that is the men who had stood by Peel, had been 110 before the election; we came back only 50. Peel said to me that what he looked forward to was a long and fierce struggle on behalf of protection. I must say I thought this foolish. If Bentinck had lived, with his strong will and dogged industry, there might have been a wide rally for protection, but everybody knew that Dizzy did not care a straw about it, and Derby had not constancy and force enough.”Mr. G. said Disraeli's performances against Peel were quite as wonderful as report makes them. Peel altogether helpless in reply. Dealt with them with a kind of“righteous dulness.”The Protectionist secession due to three men: Derby contributed prestige; Bentinck backbone; and Dizzy parliamentary brains.The golden age of administrative reform was from 1832 to the Crimean War; Peel was always keenly interested in the progress of these reforms.Northcote.—“He was my private secretary; and one of the very best imaginable; pliant, ready, diligent, quick, acute, with plenty of humour, and a temper simply perfect. But as a leader, I think ill of him; you had a conversation; he saw the reason of your case; and when he left, you supposed all was right. But at the second interview, you always found that he had been unable to persuade his friends. What could be weaker than his conduct on the Bradlaugh affair! You could not wonder that the rank and file of his men should be caught by the proposition[pg 466]that an atheist ought not to sit in parliament. But what is a leader good for, if he dare not tell his party that in a matter like this they are wrong, and of course nobody knew better than N. that they were wrong. A clever, quick man with fine temper. By the way, how is it that we have no word, no respectable word, for backbone?”J. M.—Character?Mr. G.—Well, character; yes; but that's vague. It means will, I suppose. (I ought to have thought of Novalis's well-known definition of character as“a completely fashioned will.”)J. M.—Our inferiority to the Greeks in discriminations of language shown by our lack of precise equivalents for φρόνησις, σοφία, σωφροσύνη, etc., of which we used to hear so much when coached in theEthics.Mr. G. went on to argue that because the Greeks drew these fine distinctions in words, they were superior in conduct.“You cannot beat the Greeks in noble qualities.”Mr. G.—I admit there is no Greek word of good credit for the virtue of humility.J. M.—ταπεινότης? But that has an association of meanness.Mr. G.—Yes; a shabby sort of humility. Humility as a sovereign grace is the creation of Christianity.Friday, December 18.—Brilliant sunshine, but bitterly cold; an east wind blowing straight from the Maritime Alps. Walking, reading, talking. Mr. G. after breakfast took me into his room, where he is reading Heine, Butcher on Greek genius, and Marbot. Thought Thiers's well-known remark on Heine's death capital,—“To-day the wittiest Frenchman alive has died.”Mr. G.—We have talked about the best line in poetry, etc. How do you answer this question—Which century of English history produced the greatest men?J. M.—What do you say to the sixteenth?Mr. G.—Yes, I think so. Gardiner was a great man. Henryviii.was great. But bad. Poor Cranmer. Like Northcote, he'd no backbone. Do you remember Jeremy Collier's sentence about his bravery at the stake, which[pg 467]Table-TalkI count one of the grandest in English prose—“He seemed to repel the force of the fire and to overlook the torture, by strength of thought.”289Thucydides could not beat that.The old man twice declaimed the sentence with deep sonorous voice, and his usual incomparable modulation.Mr. G. talked of a certain General ——. He was thought to be a first-rate man; neglected nothing, looked to things himself, conceived admirable plans, and at last got an important command. Then to the universal surprise, nothing came of it; —— they said,“could do everything that a commander should do, except say,Quick march.”There are plenty of politicians of that stamp, but Mr. G. decidedly not one of them. I mentioned a farewell dinner given to —— in the spring, by some rich man or other. It cost £560 for forty-eight guests! Flowers alone £150. Mr. G. on this enormity, recalled a dinner to Talfourd about copyright at the old Clarendon Hotel in Bond Street, and the price was £2, 17s. 6d. a head. The old East India Company used to give dinners at a cost of seven guineas a head. He has a wonderfully lively interest for these matters, and his curiosity as to the prices of things in the shop-windows is inexhaustible. We got round to Goethe. Goethe, he said, never gave prominence to duty.J. M.—Surely, surely in that fine psalm of life,Das Göttliche?Mr. G.—Döllinger used to confront me with theIphigenieas a great drama of duty.He wished that I had known Döllinger—“a man thoroughly from beginning to end of his lifepurged of self.”Mistook the nature of the Irish questions, from the erroneous view that Irish Catholicism is ultramontane, which it certainly is not.Saturday, Dec. 19.—What is extraordinary is that all Mr. G.'s versatility, buoyancy, and the rest goes with the most profound accuracy and intense concentration when any point of public business[pg 468]is raised. Something was said of the salaries of bishops. He was ready in an instant with every figure and detail, and every circumstance of the history of the foundation of the Ecclesiastical Commission in 1835-6. Then hissavoir faireand wisdom of parliamentary conduct.“I always made it a rule in the H. of C. to allow nobody to suppose that I did not like him, and to say as little as I could to prevent anybody from liking me. Considering the intense friction and contention of public life, it is a saving of wear and tear that as many as possible even among opponents should think well of one.”Sunday, Dec. 20.—At table, a little discussion as to the happiness and misery of animal creation. Outside of man Mr. G. argued against Tennyson's description of Nature as red in tooth and claw. Apart from man, he said, and the action of man, sentient beings are happy and not miserable. But Fear? we said. No; they are unaware of impending doom; when hawk or kite pounces on its prey, the small bird has little or no apprehension; 'tis death, but death by appointed and unforeseen lot.J. M.—There is Hunger. Is not the probability that most creatures are always hungry, not excepting Man?To this he rather assented. Of course optimism like this is indispensable as the basis of natural theology.Talked to Mr. G. about Michelet's Tableau de la France, which I had just finished in vol. 2 of the history. A brilliant tour de force, but strains the relations of soil to character; compels words and facts to be the slaves of his phantasy; the modicum of reality overlaid with violent paradox and foregone conclusion. Mr. G. not very much interested—seems only to care for political and church history.Monday, Dec. 31.—Mr. G. did not appear at table to-day, suffering from a surfeit of wild strawberries the day before. But he dined in his dressing gown, and I had some chat with him in his room after lunch.Mr. G.—“'Tis a hard law of political things that if a man shows special competence in a department, that is the very thing most likely to keep him there, and prevent his promotion.”[pg 469]Table-TalkMr. G.—I consider Burke a tripartite man: America, France, Ireland—right as to two, wrong in one.J. M.—Must you not add home affairs and India? HisThoughts on the Discontentsis a masterpiece of civil wisdom, and the right defence in a great constitutional struggle. Then he gave fourteen years of industry to Warren Hastings, and teaching England the rights of the natives, princes and people, and her own duties. So he was right in four out of five.Mr. G.—Yes, yes—quite true. Those two ought to be added to my three. There is a saying of Burke's from which I must utterly dissent.“Property is sluggish and inert.”Quite the contrary. Property is vigilant, active, sleepless; if ever it seems to slumber, be sure that one eye is open.Marie Antoinette.I once read the three volumes of letters from Mercy d'Argenteau to Maria Theresa. He seems to have performed the duty imposed upon him with fidelity.J. M.—Don't you think the Empress comes out well in the correspondence?Mr. G.—Yes, she shows always judgment and sagacity.J. M.—Ah, but besides sagacity, worth and as much integrity as those slippery times allowed.Mr. G.—Yes (but rather reluctantly, I thought). As for Marie Antoinette, she was not a striking character in any senses she was horribly frivolous; and, I suppose, we must say she was, what shall I call it—a very considerable flirt?J. M.—The only case with real foundation seems to be that of thebeau Fersen, the Swedish secretary. He too came to as tragic an end as the Queen.Tuesday, Dec. 22.—Mr. G. still somewhat indisposed—but reading away all day long. Full of Marbot. Delighted with the story of the battle of Castiglione: how when Napoleon held a council of war, and they all said they were hemmed in, and that their only chance was to back out, Augereau roughly cried that they might all do what they liked, but he would attack the enemy cost what it might.“Exactly like a place in theIliad; when Agamemnon and the rest sit sorrowful in the assembly arguing that it was[pg 470]useless to withstand the sovereign will of Zeus, and that they had better flee into their ships, Diomed bursts out that whatever others think, in any event he and Sthenelus, his squire, will hold firm, and never desist from the onslaught until they have laid waste the walls of Troy.”290A large dose of Diomed in Mr. G. himself.Talk about the dangerous isolation in which the monarchy will find itself in England if the hereditary principle goes down in the House of Lords;“it will stand bare, naked, with no shelter or shield, only endured as the better of two evils.”“I once asked,”he said,“who besides myself in the party cares for the hereditary principle? The answer was, That perhaps —— cared for it!!”—naming a member of the party supposed to be rather sapient than sage.News in the paper that the Comte de Paris in his discouragement was about to renounce his claims, and break up his party. Somehow this brought us round to Tocqueville, of whom Mr. G. spoke as the nearest French approach to Burke.J. M.—But pale and without passion. Who was it that said of him that he was an aristocrat who accepted his defeat? That is, he knew democracy to be the conqueror, but he doubted how far it would be an improvement, he saw its perils, etc.Mr. G.—I have not much faith in these estimates, whether in favour of progress or against it. I don't believe in comparisons of age with age. How can a man strike a balance between one government and another? How can he place himself in such an attitude, and with such comprehensive sureness of vision, as to say that the thirteenth century was better or higher or worse or lower than the nineteenth?Thursday, Dec. 24.—At lunch we had the news of the Parnellite victory at Waterford. A disagreeable reverse for us. Mr. G. did not say many words about it, only that it would give heart to the mischief makers—only too certain. But we said no more about it. He and I took a walk on the sands in the afternoon, and had a curious talk (considering), about the prospects of the church of England. He was[pg 471]Ecclesiasticalanxious to know about my talk some time ago with the Bishop of —— whom I had met at a feast at Lincoln's Inn. I gave him as good an account as I could of what had passed. Mr. G. doubted that this prelate was fundamentally an Erastian, as Tait was. Mr. G. is eager to read the signs of the times as to the prospects of Anglican Christianity, to which his heart is given; and he fears the peril of Erastianism to the spiritual life of the church, which is naturally the only thing worth caring about. Hence, he talked with much interest of the question whether the clever fellows at Oxford and Cambridge now take orders. He wants to know what kind of defenders his church is likely to have in days to come. Said that for the first time interest has moved away both from politics and theology, towards the vague something which they call social reform; and he thinks they won't make much out of that in the way of permanent results. The establishment he considers safer than it has been for a long time.As to Welsh disestablishment, he said it was a pity that where the national sentiment was so unanimous as it was in Wales, the operation itself should not be as simple as in Scotland. In Scotland sentiment is not unanimous, but the operation is easy. In Wales sentiment is all one way, but the operation difficult—a good deal more difficult than people suppose, as they will find out when they come to tackle it.[Perhaps it may be mentioned here that, though we always talked freely and abundantly together upon ecclesiastical affairs and persons, we never once exchanged a word upon theology or religious creed, either at Biarritz or anywhere else.]Pitt.—A strong denunciation of Pitt for the French war. People don't realise what the French war meant. In 1812 wheat at Liverpool was 20s. (?) the imperial bushel of 65 pounds (?)! Think of that, when you bring it into figures of the cost of a loaf. And that was the time when Eaton, Eastnor, and other great palaces were built by the landlords out of the high rents which the war and war prices enabled them to exact.[pg 472]Wished we knew more of Melbourne. He was in many ways a very fine fellow.“In two of the most important of all the relations of a prime minister, he was perfect; I mean first, his relations to the Queen, second to his colleagues.”Somebody at dinner quoted a capital description of the perverse fashion of talking that prevailed at Oxford soon after my time, and prevails there now, I fancy—“hunting for epigrammatic ways of saying what you don't think.”—— was the father of this pestilent mode.Rather puzzled him by repeating a saying of mine that used to amuse Fitzjames Stephen, that Love of Truth is more often than we think only a fine name for Temper. I think Mr. G. has a thorough dislike for anything that has a cynical or sardonic flavour about it. I wish I had thought, by the way, of asking him what he had to say of that piece of Swift's, about all objects being insipid that do not come by delusion, and everything being shrunken as it appears in the glass of nature, so that if it were not for artificial mediums, refracted angles, false lights, varnish and tinsel, there would be pretty much of a level in the felicity of mortal man.Am always feeling how strong is his aversion to seeing more than he can help of what is sordid, mean, ignoble. He has not been in public life all these years without rubbing shoulders with plenty of baseness on every scale, and plenty of pettiness in every hue, but he has always kept his eyes well above it. Never was a man more wholly free of the starch of the censor, more ready to make allowance, nor more indulgent even; he enters into human nature in all its compass. But he won't linger a minute longer than he must in the dingy places of life and character.Christmas Day, 1891.—A divine day, brilliant sunshine, and mild spring air. Mr. G. heard what he called an admirable sermon from an English preacher,“with a great command of his art.”A quietish day, Mr. G. no doubt engaged in φρονεῖν τὰ ὅσια.Saturday, Dec. 26.—Once more a noble day. We started in a couple of carriages for the Négress station, a couple of miles away or more, I with the G.'s. Occasion produced the Greek epitaph of the nameless drowned sailor[pg 473]Fuentarabiawho wished for others kinder seas.291Mr. G. felt its pathos and its noble charm—so direct and simple, such benignity, such a good lesson to men to forget their own misdeeds and mischance, and to pray for the passer-by a happier star. He repaid me by two epigrams of a different vein, and one admirable translation into Greek, of Tennyson on Sir John Franklin, which I do not carry in my mind; another on a boisterous Eton fellow—Didactic, dry, declamatory, dull,The bursar —— bellows like a bull.Just in the tone of Greek epigram, a sort of point, but not too much point.Parliamentary Wit.—Thought Disraeli had never been surpassed, nor even equalled, in this line. He had a contest with General Grey, who stood upon the general merits of the whig government, after both Lord Grey and Stanley had left it. D. drew a picture of a circus man who advertised his show with its incomparable team of six grey horses. One died, he replaced it by a mule. Another died, and he put in a donkey, still he went on advertising his team of greys all the same. Canning's wit not to be found conspicuously in his speeches, but highly agreeable pleasantries, though many of them in a vein which would jar horribly on modern taste.Some English redcoats and a pack of hounds passed us as we neared the station. They saluted Mr. G. with a politeness that astonished him, but was pleasant. Took the train for Irun, the fields and mountain slopes delightful in the sun, and the sea on our right a superb blue such as we never see in English waters. At Irun we found carriages waiting to take us on to Fuentarabia. From the balcony of the church had a beautiful view over the scene of Wellington's operations when he crossed the Bidassoa, in the presence of the astonished Soult. A lovely picture, made none the worse by this excellent historic association. The[pg 474]alcalde was extremely polite and intelligent. The consul who was with us showed a board on the old tower, in whichvin some words wasb, and I noted that the alcalde spoke of Viarritz. I reminded Mr. G. of Scaliger's epigram—Haud temere antiquas mutat Vasconia voces,Cui nihil est alind vivere quam bibere.Pretty cold driving home, but Mr. G. seemed not to care. He found both the churches at St. Jean and at Fuentarabia very noteworthy, though the latter very popish, but both, he felt,“had a certain association with grandeur.”Sunday, Dec. 27.—After some quarter of an hour of travellers' topics, we plunged into one of the most interesting talks we have yet had.Aproposof I do not know what, Mr. G. said that he had not advised his son to enter public life.“No doubt there are some men to whom station, wealth, and family traditions make it a duty. But I have never advised any individual, as to whom I have been consulted, to enter the H. of C.”J. M.—But isn't that rather to encourage self-indulgence? Nobody who cares for ease or mental composure would seek public life?Mr. G.—Ah, I don't know that. Surely politics open up a great field for the natural man. Self-seeking, pride, domination, power—all these passions are gratified in politics.J. M.—You cannot be sure of achievement in politics, whether personal or public?Mr. G.—No; to use Bacon's pregnant phrase, they are too immersed in matter. Then as new matter, that is, new details and particulars, come into view, men change their judgment.J. M.—You have spoken just now of somebody as a thorough good tory. You know the saying that nobody is worth much who has not been a bit of a radical in his youth, and a bit of a tory in his fuller age.Mr. G.(laughing)—Ah, I'm afraid that hits me rather hard. But for myself, I think I can truly put up all the change that has come into my politics into a sentence; I[pg 475]Disenchantment A Mistakewas brought up to distrust and dislike liberty, I learned to believe in it. That is the key to all my changes.J. M.—According to my observation, the change in my own generation is different. They have ceased either to trust or to distrust liberty, and have come to the mind that it matters little either way. Men are disenchanted. They have got what they wanted in the days of their youth, yet what of it, they ask? France has thrown off the Empire, but the statesmen of the republic are not a great breed. Italy has gained her unity, yet unity has not been followed by thrift, wisdom, or large increase of public virtue or happiness. America has purged herself of slavery, yet life in America is material, prosaic,—so say some of her own rarest sons. Don't think that I say all these things. But I know able and high-minded men who suffer from this disenchantment.Mr. G.—Italy would have been very different if Cavour had only lived—and even Ricasoli. Men ought not to suffer from disenchantment. They ought to know thatideals in politics are never realised. And don't let us forget in eastern Europe the rescue in our time of some ten millions of men from the harrowing domination of the Turk. (On this he expatiated, and very justly, with much energy.)We turned to our own country. Here he insisted that democracy had certainly not saved us from a distinct decline in the standard of public men.... Look at the whole conduct of opposition from '80 to '85—every principle was flung overboard, if they could manufacture a combination against the government. For all this deterioration one man and one man alone is responsible, Disraeli. He is the grand corrupter. He it was who sowed the seed.J. M.—Ought not Palmerston to bear some share in this?Mr. G.—No, no; Pam. had many strong and liberal convictions. On one subject Dizzy had them too—the Jews. There he was much more than rational, he was fanatical. He said once that Providence would deal good or ill fortune to nations, according as they dealt well or ill by the Jews. I remember once sitting next to John Russell when D. was[pg 476]making a speech on Jewish emancipation.“Look at him,”said J. R.,“how manfully he sticks to it, tho' he knows that every word he says is gall and wormwood to every man who sits around him and behind him.”A curious irony, was it not, that it should have fallen to me to propose a motion for a memorial both to Pam. and Dizzy?A superb scene upon the ocean, with a grand wind from the west. Mr. G. and I walked on the shore; he has a passion for tumultuous seas. I have never seen such huge masses of water shattering themselves among the rocks.In the evening Mr. G. remarked on our debt to Macaulay, for guarding the purity of the English tongue. I recalled a favourite passage from Milton, that next to the man who gives wise and intrepid counsels of government, he places the man who cares for the purity of his mother tongue. Mr. G. liked this. Said he only knew Bright once slip into an error in this respect, when he used“transpire”for“happen.”Macaulay of good example also in rigorously abstaining from the inclusion of matter in footnotes. Hallam an offender in this respect. I pointed out that he offended in company with Gibbon.Monday, Dec. 28.—We had an animated hour at breakfast.Oxford and Cambridge.—Curious how, like two buckets, whenever one was up, the other was down. Cambridge has never produced four such men of action in successive ages as Wolsey, Laud, Wesley, and Newman.J. M.—In the region of thought Cambridge has produced the greatest of all names, Newton.Mr. G.—In the earlier times Oxford has it—with Wycliff, Occam, above all Roger Bacon. And then in the eighteenth century, Butler.J. M.—But why not Locke, too, in the century before?This brought on a tremendous tussle, for Mr. G. was of the same mind, and perhaps for the same sort of reason, as Joseph de Maistre, that contempt for Locke is the beginning of knowledge. All very well for De Maistre, but not for a man in line with European liberalism. I pressed the very obvious point that you must take into account not only a man's intellectual product or his general stature, but also[pg 477]Table-Talkhis influence as a historic force. From the point of view of influence Locke was the origin of the emancipatory movement of the eighteenth century abroad, and laid the philosophic foundations of liberalism in civil government at home. Mr. G. insisted on a passage of Hume's which he believed to be in the history, disparaging Locke as a metaphysical thinker.292“That may be,”said I,“though Hume in hisEssaysis not above paying many compliments to‘the great reasoner,’etc., to whom, for that matter, I fancy that he stood in pretty direct relation. But far be it from me to deny that Hume saw deeper than Locke into the metaphysical millstone. That is not the point. I'm only thinking of his historic place, and, after all, the history of philosophy is itself a philosophy.”To minds nursed in dogmatic schools, all this is both unpalatable and incredible.Somehow we slid into the freedom of the will and Jonathan Edwards. I told him that Mill had often told us how Edwards argued the necessarian or determinist case as keenly as any modern.Tuesday, Dec. 29.—Mr. G. 82 to-day. I gave him Mackail's Greek Epigrams, and if it affords him half as much pleasure as it has given me, he will be very grateful. Various people brought Mr. G. bouquets and addresses. Mr. G. went to church in the morning, and in the afternoon took a walk with me....Land Question.As you go through France you see the soil cultivated by the population. In our little dash into Spain the other day, we saw again the soil cultivated by the population. In England it is cultivated by the capitalist, for the farmer is capitalist. Some astonishing views recently propounded by D. of Argyll on this matter. Unearned increment—so terribly difficult to catch it. Perhaps best try to get at it through the death duties. Physical condition of our people—always a subject of great anxiety—their stature, colour, and so on. Feared the atmosphere of cotton factories, etc., very deleterious. As against bad air, I said, you must set good food; the Lancashire operative in decent times lives uncommonly well, as he deserves to do. He agreed there might be something in this.[pg 478]The day was humid and muggy, but the tumult of the sea was most majestic. Mr. G. delighted in it. He has a passion for the sound of the sea; would like to have it in his ear all day and all night. Again and again he recurred to this.After dinner, long talk about Mazzini, of whom Mr. G. thought poorly in comparison with Poerio and the others who for freedom sacrificed their lives. I stood up for Mazzini, as one of the most morally impressive men I had ever known, or that his age knew; he breathed a soul into democracy.Then we fell into a discussion as to the eastern and western churches. He thought the western popes by their proffered alliance with the mahometans, etc., had betrayed Christianity in the east. I offered De Maistre's view.Mr. G. strongly assented to old Chatham's dictum that vacancy is worse than even the most anxious work. He has less to reproach himself with than most men under that head.He repeated an observation that I have heard him make before, that he thought politicians are morerapidthan other people. I told him that Bowen once said to me on this that he did not agree; that he thought rapidity the mark of all successful men in the practical line of life, merchants and stockbrokers, etc.Wednesday, Dec. 30.—A very muggy day. A divine sunset, with the loveliest pink and opal tints in the sky. Mr. G. reading Gleig'sSubaltern. Not a very entertaining book in itself, but the incidents belong to Wellington's Pyrenean campaign, and, for my own part, I rather enjoyed it on the principle on which one likes readingRomolaat Florence,Transformationat Rome,Sylvia's Loversat Whitby, andHurrishon the northern edge of Clare.Thursday, Dec. 31.—Down to the pier, and found all the party watching the breakers, and superb they were. Mr. G. exulting in the huge force of the Atlantic swell and the beat of the rollers on the shore, like a Titanic pulse.After dinner Mr. G. raised the question of payment of members. He had been asked by somebody whether he meant at Newcastle to indicate that everybody should be paid, or only those who chose to take it or to ask[pg 479]Payment Of Membersfor it. He produced the same extraordinary plan as he had described to me on the morning of his Newcastle speech—i.e.that the Inland Revenue should ascertain from their own books the income of every M.P., and if they found any below the limit of exemption, should notify the same to the Speaker, and the Speaker should thereupon send to the said M.P. below the limit an annual cheque for, say, £300, the name to appear in an annual return to Parliament of all the M.P.'s in receipt of public money on any grounds whatever. I demurred to this altogether, as drawing an invidious distinction between paid and unpaid members; said it was idle to ignore the theory on which the demand for paid members is based, namely, that it is desirable in the public interest that poor men should have access to the H. of C.; and that the poor man should stand there on the same footing as anybody else.Friday, Jan. 1, 1892.—After breakfast Mrs. Gladstone came to my room and said how glad she was that I had not scrupled to put unpleasant points; that Mr. G. must not be shielded and sheltered as some great people are, who hear all the pleasant things and none of the unpleasant; that the perturbation from what is disagreeable only lasts an hour. I said I hoped that I was faithful with him, but of course I could not be always putting myself in an attitude of perpetual controversy. She said,“He is never made angry by what you say.”And so she went away, and —— and I had a good and most useful set-to about Irish finance.At luncheon Mr. G. asked what we had made out of our morning's work. When we told him he showed a good deal of impatience and vehemence, and, to my dismay, he came upon union finance and the general subject of the treatment of Ireland by England....In the afternoon we took a walk, he and I, afterwards joined by the rest. He was as delighted as ever with the swell of the waves, as they bounded over one another, with every variety of grace and tumultuous power. He wondered if we had not more and better words for the sea than the French—“breaker,”“billow,”“roller,”as against“flot,”“vague,”“onde,”“lame,”etc.[pg 480]At dinner he asked me whether I had made up my mind on the burning question of compulsory Greek for a university degree. I said, No, that as then advised I was half inclined to be against compulsory Greek, but it is so important that I would not decide before I was obliged.“So with me,”he said,“the question is one with many subtle and deep-reaching consequences.”He dwelt on the folly of striking Italian out of the course of modern education, thus cutting European history in two, and setting an artificial gulf between the ancient and modern worlds.Saturday, Jan. 2.—Superb morning, and all the better for being much cooler. At breakfast somebody started the idle topic of quill pens. When they came to the length of time that so-and-so made a quill serve,“De Retz,”said I,“made up his mind that Cardinal Chigi was a poor creature,maximus in minimis, because at their first interview Chigi boasted that he had used one pen for three years.”That recalled another saying of Retz's about Cromwell's famous dictum, that nobody goes so far as the man who does not know where he is going. Mr. G. gave his deep and eager Ah! to this. He could not recall that Cromwell had produced many dicta of such quality.“I don't love him, but he was a mighty big fellow. But he was intolerant. He was intolerant of the episcopalians.”Mr. G.—Do you know whom I find the most tolerant churchman of that time?Laud!Laud got Davenant made Bishop of Salisbury, and he zealously befriended Chillingworth and Hales. (There was some other case, which I forget.)The execution of Charles.—I told him of Gardiner's new volume which I had just been reading.“Charles,”he said,“was no doubt a dreadful liar; Cromwell perhaps did not always tell the truth; Elizabeth was a tremendous liar.”J. M.—Charles was not wholly inexcusable, being what he was, for thinking that he had a good game in his hands, by playing off the parliament against the army, etc.Mr. G.—There was less excuse for cutting off his head than in the case of poor Louisxvi., for Louis was the excuse for foreign invasion.[pg 481]At BayonneJ. M.—Could you call foreign invasion the intervention of the Scotch?Mr. G.—Well, not quite. I suppose it is certain that it was Cromwell who cut off Charles's head? Not one in a hundred in the nation desired it.J. M.—No, nor one in twenty in the parliament. But then, ninety-nine in a hundred in the army.In the afternoon we all drove towards Bayonne to watch the ships struggle over the bar at high water. As it happened we only saw one pass out, a countryman for Cardiff. A string of others were waiting to go, but a little steamer from Nantes came first, and having secured her station, found she had not force enough to make the bar, and the others remained swearing impatiently behind her. The Nantes steamer was like Ireland. The scene was very fresh and fine, and the cold most exhilarating after the mugginess of the last two or three days. Mr. G., who has a dizzy head, did not venture on the jetty, but watched things from the sands. He and I drove home together, at a good pace.“I am inclined,”he said laughingly,“to agree with Dr. Johnson that there is no pleasure greater than sitting behind four fast-going horses.”293Talking of Johnson generally,“I suppose we may take him as the best product of the eighteenth century.”Perhaps so, but is he its most characteristic product?Wellington.—Curious that there should be no general estimate of W.'s character; his character not merely as a general but as a man. No love of freedom. His sense of duty very strong, but military rather than civil.Montalembert.—Had often come into contact with him. A very amiable and attractive man. But less remarkable than Rio.Latin Poets.—Would you place Virgil first?J. M.—Oh, no, Lucretius much the first for the greatest and sublimest of poetic qualities. Mr. G. seemed to assent to this, though disposed to make a fight for the secondAeneidas equal to anything. He expressed his admiration for[pg 482]Catullus, and then he was strong that Horace would run anybody else very hard, breaking out with the lines about Regulus—“Atqui sciebat quæ sibi barbarusTortor pararet;”etc.294Blunders in Government.—How right Napoleon was when he said, reflecting on all the vast complexities of government, that the best to be said of a statesman is that he has avoided the biggest blunders.It is not easy to define the charm of these conversations. Is charm the right word? They are in the highest degree stimulating, bracing, widening. That is certain. I return to my room with the sensations of a man who has taken delightful exercise in fresh air. He is so wholly free from theergoteur. There's all the difference between theergoteurand the great debater. He fits his tone to the thing; he can be as playful as anybody. In truth I have many a time seen him in London and at Hawarden not far from trivial. But here at Biarritz all is appropriate, and though, as I say, he can be playful and gay as youth, he cannot resist rising in an instant to the general point of view—to grasp the elemental considerations of character, history, belief, conduct, affairs. There he is at home, there he is most himself. I never knew anybody less guilty of the tiresome sin of arguing for victory. It is not his knowledge that attracts; it is not his ethical tests and standards; it is not that dialectical strength of arm which, as Mark Pattison said of him, could twist a bar of iron to its purpose. It is the combination of these with elevation, with true sincerity, with extraordinary mental force.Sunday, Jan. 3.—Vauvenargues is right when he says that to carry through great undertakings, one must act as though one could never die. My wonderful companion is a wonderful illustration. He is like M. Angelo, who, just before he died on the very edge of ninety, made an allegorical figure, and inscribed upon it,ancora impara,“still learning.”At dinner he showed in full force.[pg 483]Table-TalkHeroes of the Old Testament.—He could not honestly say that he thought there was any figure in the O. T. comparable to the heroes of Homer. Moses was a fine fellow. But the others were of secondary quality—not great high personages, of commanding nature.Thinkers.—Rather an absurd word—to call a man a thinker (and he repeated the word with gay mockery in his tone). When did it come into use? Not until quite our own times, eh? I said, I believed both Hobbes and Locke spoke of thinkers, and was pretty sure thatpenseur, as inlibre penseur, had established itself in the last century. [Quite true; Voltaire used it, but it was not common.]Dr. Arnold.—A high, large, impressive figure—perhaps more important by his character and personality than his actual work. I mentioned M. A.'s poem on his father,Rugby Chapel, with admiration. Rather to my surprise, Mr. G. knew the poem well, and shared my admiration to the full. This brought us on to poetry generally, and he expatiated with much eloquence and sincerity for the rest of the talk. The wonderful continuity of fine poetry in England for five whole centuries, stretching from Chaucer to Tennyson, always a proof to his mind of the soundness, the sap, and the vitality of our nation and its character. What people, beginning with such a poet as Chaucer 500 years ago, could have burst forth into such astonishing production of poetry as marked the first quarter of the century, Byron, Wordsworth, Shelley, etc.J. M.—It is true that Germany has nothing, save Goethe, Schiller, Heine, that's her whole list. But I should say a word for the poetic movement in France: Hugo, Gautier, etc. Mr. G. evidently knew but little, or even nothing, of modern French poetry. He spoke up for Leopardi, on whom he had written an article first introducing him to the British public, ever so many years ago—in theQuarterly.Mr. G.—Wordsworth used occasionally to dine with me when I lived in the Albany. A most agreeable man. I always found him amiable, polite, and sympathetic. Only once did he jar upon me, when he spoke slightingly of Tennyson's first performance.[pg 484]J. M.—But he was not so wrong as he would be now. Tennyson's Juvenilia are terribly artificial.Mr. G.—Yes, perhaps. Tennyson has himself withdrawn some of them. I remember W., when he dined with me, used on leaving to change his silk stockings in the anteroom and put on grey worsted.J. M.—I once said to M. Arnold that I'd rather have been Wordsworth than anybody [not exactly a modest ambition]; and Arnold, who knew him well in the Grasmere country, said,“Oh no, you would not; you would wish you were dining with me at the Athenæum. He was too much of the peasant for you.”Mr. G.—No, I never felt that; I always thought him a polite and an amiable man.Mentioned Macaulay's strange judgment in a note in theHistory, that Dryden's famous lines,“... Fool'd with hope, men favour the deceit;Trust on, and think to-morrow will repay.To-morrow's falser than the former day;Lies worse, and while it says we shall be blestWith some new joys, cuts off what we possest.Strange cozenage!...”are as fine as any eight lines in Lucretius. Told him of an excellent remark of —— on this, that Dryden's passage wholly lacks the mystery and great superhuman air of Lucretius. Mr. G. warmly agreed.He regards it as a remarkable sign of the closeness of the church of England to the roots of life and feeling in the country, that so many clergymen should have written so much good poetry. Who, for instance? I asked. He named Heber, Moultrie, Newman (Dream of Gerontius), and Faber in at least one good poem,“The poor Labourer”(or some such title), Charles Tennyson. I doubt if this thesis has much body in it. He was for Shelley as the most musical of all our poets. I told him that I had once asked M. to get Tennyson to write an autograph line for a friend of mine, and Tennyson had sent this:—“Coldly on the dead volcano sleeps the gleam of dying day.”So I suppose the poet must think well of it himself. 'Tis[pg 485]Table-Talkfrom the secondLocksley Hall, and describes a man after passions have gone cool.Mr. G.—Yes, in melody, in the picturesque, and as apt simile, a fine line.Had been trying his hand at a translation of his favourite lines of Penelope about Odysseus. Said that, of course, you could translate similes and set passages, but to translate Homer as a whole, impossible. He was inclined, when all is said, to think Scott the nearest approach to a model.Monday, Jan. 4.—At luncheon, Mr. Gladstone recalled the well-known story of Talleyrand on the death of Napoleon. The news was brought when T. chanced to be dining with Wellington.“Quel événement!”they all cried.“Non, ce n'est pas un événement,”said Talleyrand,“c'est une nouvelle”—'Tis no event, 'tis a piece of news.“Imagine such a way,”said Mr. G.,“of taking the disappearance of that colossal man! Compare it with the opening of Manzoni's ode, which makes the whole earth stand still. Yet both points of view are right. In one sense, the giant's death was only news; in another, when we think of his history, it was enough to shake the world.”At the moment, he could not recall Manzoni's words, but at dinner he told me that he had succeeded in piecing them together, and after dinner he went to his room and wrote them down for me on a piece of paper. Curiously enough, he could not recall the passage in his own splendid translation.295Talk about handsome men of the past; Sidney Herbert one of the handsomest and most attractive. But the Duke of Hamilton bore away the palm, as glorious as a Greek god.“One day in Rotten Row, I said this to the Duchess of C. She set up James Hope-Scott against my Duke. No doubt he had an intellectual element which the Duke lacked.”Then we discussed the best-looking man in the H. of C. to-day....Duke of Wellington.—Somebody was expatiating on the incomparable position of the Duke; his popularity with kings, with nobles, with common people. Mr. G. remembered[pg 486]that immediately after the formation of Canning's government in 1827, when it was generally thought that he had been most unfairly and factiously treated (as Mr. G. still thinks, always saving Peel) by the Duke and his friends, the Duke made an expedition to the north of England, and had an overwhelming reception. Of course, he was then only twelve years from Waterloo, and yet only four or five years later he had to put up his iron shutters.Approved a remark that a friend of ours was not simple enough, not ready enough to take things as they come.Mr. G.—Unless a man has a considerable gift for taking things as they come, he may make up his mind that political life will be sheer torment to him. He must meet fortune in all its moods.Tuesday, Jan. 5.—After dinner to-day, Mr. G. extraordinarily gay. He had bought a present of silver for his wife. She tried to guess the price, and after the manner of wives in such a case, put the figure provokingly low. Mr. G. then put on the deprecating air of the tradesman with wounded feelings—and it was as capital fun as we could desire. That over, he fell to his backgammon with our host.Wednesday, Jan. 6.—Mrs. Gladstone eighty to-day! What a marvel....Léon Say called to see Mr. G. Long and most interesting conversation about all sorts of aspects of French politics, the concordat, the schools, and all the rest of it.He illustrated the ignorance of French peasantry as to current affairs. Thiers, long after he had become famous, went on a visit to his native region; and there met a friend of his youth.“Eh bien,”said his friend,“tu as fait ton chemin.”“Mais oui, j'ai fait un peu mon chemin. J'ai été ministre même.”“Ah, tiens! je ne savais pas que tu étais protestant.”I am constantly struck by his solicitude for the well-being and right doing of Oxford and Cambridge—“the two eyes of the country.”This connection between the higher education and the general movement of the national mind engages his profound attention, and no doubt deserves such attention[pg 487]Table-Talkin any statesman who looks beyond the mere surface problems of the day. To perceive the bearings of such matters as these, makes Mr. G. a statesman of the highest class, as distinguished from men of clever expedients.Mr. G. had been reading the Greek epigrams on religion in Mackail; quoted the last of them as illustrating the description of the dead as the inhabitants of the more populous world:—τῶν ἄπο κὴν ζωοῖσιν ἀκηδέα, κευτ᾽ ἄν ἵκηαιὲς πλεόνων, ἕξεις θυμὸν ἐλαφρότερον.296A more impressive epigram contains the same thought, where the old man, leaning on his staff, likens himself to the withered vine on its dry pole, and goes on to ask himself what advantage it would be to warm himself for three or four more years in the sun; and on that reflection without heroics put off his life, and changed his home to the greater company,κὴς πλεόνων ἦλθε μετοικεσίην.All the rest of the evening he kept us alive by a stock of infinite drolleries. A scene of a dish of over-boiled tea at West Calder after a meeting, would have made the fortune of a comedian.I said that in the all-important quality of co-operation, —— was only good on condition of being in front. Mr. G. read him in the same sense. Reminded of a mare he once had—admirable, provided you kept off spur, curb, or whip; show her one of these things, and she would do nothing. Mr. G. more of a judge of men than is commonly thought.Told us of a Chinese despatch which came under his notice when he was at the board of trade, and gave him food for reflection. A ship laden with grain came to Canton. The administrator wrote to the central government at Pekin to know whether the ship was to pay duty and land its cargo. The answer was to the effect that the central government of the Flowery Land was quite indifferent as a rule to the goings and comings of the Barbarians; whether they brought a cargo or brought no cargo was a thing of supreme unconcern.“But this cargo, you say, is food for the people. There ought to be[pg 488]no obstacle to the entry of food for the people. So let it in. Your Younger Brother commends himself to you, etc. etc.”Friday, Jan. 8.—A quiet evening. We were all rather piano at the end of an episode which had been thoroughly delightful. When Mr. G. bade me good-night, he said with real feeling,“More sorry than I can say that this is our last evening together at Biarritz.”He is painfully grieved to lose the sound of the sea in his ears.Saturday, Jan. 9.—Strolled about all the forenoon.“What a time of blessed composure it has been,”said Mr. G. with a heavy sigh. The distant hills covered with snow, and the voice of the storm gradually swelling. Still the savage fury of the sea was yet some hours off, so we had to leave Biarritz without the spectacle of Atlantic rage at its fiercest.Found comfortable saloon awaiting us at Bayonne, and so under weeping skies we made our way to Pau. The landscape must be pretty, weather permitting. As it was, we saw but little. Mr. G. dozed and read Max Müller's book on Anthropological Religions.Arrived at Pau towards 5.30; drenching rain: nothing to be seen.At tea time, a good little discussion raised by a protest against Dante being praised for a complete survey of human nature and the many phases of human lot. Intensity he has, but insight over the whole field of character and life? Mr. G. did not make any stand against this, and made the curious admission that Dante was too optimist to be placed on a level with Shakespeare, or even with Homer.Then we turned to lighter themes. He had once said to Henry Taylor,“I should have thought he was the sort of man to have a good strong grasp of a subject,”speaking of Lord Grey, who had been one of Taylor's many chiefs at the Colonial Office.“I should have thought,”replied Taylor slowly and with a dreamy look,“he was the sort of man to have a good strongnipof a subject.”Witty, and very applicable to many men.Wordsworth once gave Mr. G. with much complacency, as an example of his own readiness and resource, this story. A man came up to him at Rydal and said,“Do you happen[pg 489]to have seen my wife.”“Why,”replied the Sage,“I did not know you had a wife!”This peculiarly modest attempt at pointed repartee much tickled Mr. G., as well it might.Tuesday, Jan. 12.—Mr. G. completely recovered from two days of indisposition. We had about an hour's talk on things in general, including policy in the approaching session. He did not expect a dissolution, at the same time a dissolution would not surprise him.At noon they started for Périgord and Carcassonne, Nismes, Arles, and so on to the Riviera full of kind things at our parting.[pg 490]
[pg 460]Chapter VI. Biarritz. (1891-1892)Omnium autem ineptiarum, quæ sunt innumerabiles, haud sciam an nulla sit major, quam, ut illi solent, quocunque in loco, quoscunque inter homines visum est, de rebus aut difficillimis aut non necessariis argutissime disputare.—Cicero.Of all the numberless sorts of bad taste and want of tact, perhaps the worst is to insist, no matter where you are or with whom you are, on arguing about the hardest subjects to the full pitch of elaboration and detail.IWe have seen how in 1889 Mr. and Mrs. Gladstone celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of one of the most devoted and successful marriages that ever was made, and the unbroken felicity of their home. In 1891, after the shadows of approaching calamity had for many months hung doubtfully over them, a heavy blow fell, and their eldest son died. Not deeply concerned in ordinary politics, he was a man of many virtues and some admirable gifts; he was an accomplished musician, and I have seen letters of his to his father, marked by a rare delicacy of feeling and true power of expression.“I had known him for nearly thirty years,”one friend wrote,“and there was no man, until his long illness, who had changed so little, or retained so long the best qualities of youth, and my first thought was that the greater the loss to you, the greater would be the consolation.”To Archbishop Benson, Mr. Gladstone wrote (July 6):—It is now forty-six years since we lost a child,285and he who has now passed away from our eyes, leaves to us only blessed recollections. I suppose all feel that those deaths which reverse the order of nature have a sharpness of their own. But setting[pg 461]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.To me he wrote (July 10):—We feel deeply the kindness and tenderness of your letter. It supplies one more link in a long chain of recollection which I deeply prize. Yes, ours is a tribulation, and a sore one, but yet we feel we ought to find ourselves carried out of ourselves by sympathy with the wife whose noble and absorbing devotion had become like an entire life of itself, and who is now face to face with the void. The grief of children too, which passes, is very sharp while it remains. The case has been very remarkable. Though with abatement of some powers, my son has not been without many among the signs and comforts of health during a period of nearly two and a half years. All this time the terrible enemy was lodged in the royal seat, and only his healthy and unyielding constitution kept it at defiance, and maintained his mental and inward life intact.... And most largely has human, as well as divine compassion, flowed in upon us, from none more conspicuously than from yourself, whom we hope to count among near friends for the short remainder of our lives.To another correspondent who did not share his own religious beliefs, he said (July 5):—When I received your last kind note, I fully intended to write to you with freedom on the subject ofThe Agnostic Island. But since then I have been at close quarters, so to speak, with the dispensations of God, for yesterday morning my dearly beloved eldest son was taken from the sight of our eyes. At this moment of bleeding hearts, I will only say what I hope you will in consideration of the motives take without offence, namely this: I would from the bottom of my heart that whenever the hour of bereavement shall befall you or those whom you love, you and they may enjoy the immeasurable consolation of believing, with all the mind and all the heart, that the beloved one is gone into eternal rest, and that those who remain behind may through the same mighty Deliverer hope at their appointed time to rejoin him.[pg 462]All this language on the great occasions of human life was not with him the tone of convention. Whatever the synthesis, as they call it,—whatever the form, whatever the creed and faith may be, he was one of that high and favoured household who, in Emerson's noble phrase,“live from a great depth of being.”Earlier in the year Lord Granville, who so long had been his best friend, died. The loss by his death was severe. As Acton, who knew of their relations well and from within, wrote to Mr. Gladstone (April 1):—There was an admirable fitness in your union, and I had been able to watch how it became closer and easier, in spite of so much to separate you, in mental habits, in early affinities, and even in the form of fundamental convictions, since he came home from your budget, overwhelmed, thirty-eight years ago. I saw all the connections which had their root in social habit fade before the one which took its rise from public life and proved more firm and more enduring than the rest.IIIn September he paid a visit to his relatives at Fasque, and thence he went to Glenalmond—spots that in his tenacious memory must have awakened hosts of old and dear associations. On October 1, he found himself after a long and busy day, at Newcastle-on-Tyne, where he had never stayed since his too memorable visit in 1862.286Since the defeat of the Irish policy in 1886, he had attended the annual meeting of the chief liberal organisation at Nottingham (1887), Birmingham (1888), and Manchester (1889). This year it was the turn of Newcastle. On October 2, he gave his blessing to various measures that afterwards came to be known as the Newcastle programme. After the shock caused by the Irish quarrel, every politician knew that it would be necessary to balance home rule by reforms expected in England and Scotland. No liberal, whatever his particular shade, thought that it would be either honourable or practical to throw the Irish policy overboard, and if there[pg 463]At Newcastlewere any who thought such a course honourable, they knew it would not be safe. The principle and expediency of home rule had taken a much deeper root in the party than it suited some of the trimming tribe later to admit. On the other hand, after five years of pretty exclusive devotion to the Irish case, to pass by the British case and its various demands for an indefinite time longer, would have been absurd.IIIIn the eighties Mr. Gladstone grew into close friendship with one who had for many years been his faithful supporter in the House of Commons as member for Dundee. Nobody ever showed him devotion more considerate, loyal, and unselfish than did Mr. Armitstead, from about the close of the parliament of 1880 down to the end of this story.287In the middle of December 1891 Mr. Armitstead planned a foreign trip for his hero, and persuaded me to join. Biarritz was to be our destination, and the expedition proved a wonderful success. Some notes of mine, though intended only for domestic consumption, may help to bring Mr. Gladstone in his easiest moods before the reader's eye. No new ideas struck fire, no particular contribution was made to grand themes. But a great statesman on a holiday may be forgiven for not trying to discover brand-new keys to philosophy, history, and“all the mythologies.”As a sketch from life of the veteran's buoyancy, vigour, genial freshness of heart and brain, after four-score strenuous years, these few pages may be found of interest.We left Paris at nine in the morning (Dec. 16), and were listening to the swell of the mighty Bay resounding under our windows at Biarritz soon after midnight.The long day's journey left no signs of fatigue on either Mr. or Mrs. Gladstone, and his only regret was that we had[pg 464]not come straight through instead of staying a night in Paris. I'm always for going straight on, he said. For some odd reason in spite of the late hour he was full of stories of American humour, which he told with extraordinary verve and enjoyment. I contributed one that amused him much, of the Bostonian who, having read Shakespeare for the first time, observed,“I call that a very clever book. Now, I don't suppose there are twenty men in Boston to-day who could have written that book!”Thursday, Dec. 17.—Splendid morning for making acquaintance with a new place. Saw the western spur of the Pyrenees falling down to the Bidassoa and the first glimpse of the giant wall, beyond which, according to Michelet, Africa begins, and our first glimpse of Spain.After breakfast we all sallied forth to look into the shops and to see the lie of the land. Mr. G. as interested as a child in all the objects in the shops—many of them showing that we are not far from Spain. The consul very polite, showed us about, and told us the hundred trifles that bring a place really into one's mind. Nothing is like a first morning's stroll in a foreign town. By afternoon the spell dissolves, and the mood comes of Dante's lines,“Era già l'ora,”etc.288Some mention was made of Charles Austin, the famous lawyer: it brought up the case of men who are suddenly torn from lives of great activity to complete idleness.Mr. G.—I don't know how to reconcile it with what I've always regarded as the foundation of character—Bishop Butler's view of habit. How comes it that during the hundreds of years in which priests and fellows of Eton College have retired from hard work to college livings and leisure, not one of them has ever done anything whatever for either scholarship or divinity—not one?Mr. G. did not know Mazzini, but Armellini, another of the Roman triumvirs, taught him Italian in 1832.[pg 465]Opinions On StatesmenI spoke a word for Gambetta, but he would not have it.“Gambetta wasautoritaire; I do not feel as if he were a true liberal in the old and best sense. I cannot forget how hostile he was to the movement for freedom in the Balkans.”Said he only once saw Lord Liverpool. He went to call on Canning at Glos'ter House (close to our Glos'ter Road Station), and there through a glass door he saw Canning and Lord Liverpool talking together.Peel.—Had a good deal of temper; not hot; but perhaps sulky. Not a farsighted man, but fairly clear-sighted.“I called upon him after the election in 1847. The Janissaries, as Bentinck called us, that is the men who had stood by Peel, had been 110 before the election; we came back only 50. Peel said to me that what he looked forward to was a long and fierce struggle on behalf of protection. I must say I thought this foolish. If Bentinck had lived, with his strong will and dogged industry, there might have been a wide rally for protection, but everybody knew that Dizzy did not care a straw about it, and Derby had not constancy and force enough.”Mr. G. said Disraeli's performances against Peel were quite as wonderful as report makes them. Peel altogether helpless in reply. Dealt with them with a kind of“righteous dulness.”The Protectionist secession due to three men: Derby contributed prestige; Bentinck backbone; and Dizzy parliamentary brains.The golden age of administrative reform was from 1832 to the Crimean War; Peel was always keenly interested in the progress of these reforms.Northcote.—“He was my private secretary; and one of the very best imaginable; pliant, ready, diligent, quick, acute, with plenty of humour, and a temper simply perfect. But as a leader, I think ill of him; you had a conversation; he saw the reason of your case; and when he left, you supposed all was right. But at the second interview, you always found that he had been unable to persuade his friends. What could be weaker than his conduct on the Bradlaugh affair! You could not wonder that the rank and file of his men should be caught by the proposition[pg 466]that an atheist ought not to sit in parliament. But what is a leader good for, if he dare not tell his party that in a matter like this they are wrong, and of course nobody knew better than N. that they were wrong. A clever, quick man with fine temper. By the way, how is it that we have no word, no respectable word, for backbone?”J. M.—Character?Mr. G.—Well, character; yes; but that's vague. It means will, I suppose. (I ought to have thought of Novalis's well-known definition of character as“a completely fashioned will.”)J. M.—Our inferiority to the Greeks in discriminations of language shown by our lack of precise equivalents for φρόνησις, σοφία, σωφροσύνη, etc., of which we used to hear so much when coached in theEthics.Mr. G. went on to argue that because the Greeks drew these fine distinctions in words, they were superior in conduct.“You cannot beat the Greeks in noble qualities.”Mr. G.—I admit there is no Greek word of good credit for the virtue of humility.J. M.—ταπεινότης? But that has an association of meanness.Mr. G.—Yes; a shabby sort of humility. Humility as a sovereign grace is the creation of Christianity.Friday, December 18.—Brilliant sunshine, but bitterly cold; an east wind blowing straight from the Maritime Alps. Walking, reading, talking. Mr. G. after breakfast took me into his room, where he is reading Heine, Butcher on Greek genius, and Marbot. Thought Thiers's well-known remark on Heine's death capital,—“To-day the wittiest Frenchman alive has died.”Mr. G.—We have talked about the best line in poetry, etc. How do you answer this question—Which century of English history produced the greatest men?J. M.—What do you say to the sixteenth?Mr. G.—Yes, I think so. Gardiner was a great man. Henryviii.was great. But bad. Poor Cranmer. Like Northcote, he'd no backbone. Do you remember Jeremy Collier's sentence about his bravery at the stake, which[pg 467]Table-TalkI count one of the grandest in English prose—“He seemed to repel the force of the fire and to overlook the torture, by strength of thought.”289Thucydides could not beat that.The old man twice declaimed the sentence with deep sonorous voice, and his usual incomparable modulation.Mr. G. talked of a certain General ——. He was thought to be a first-rate man; neglected nothing, looked to things himself, conceived admirable plans, and at last got an important command. Then to the universal surprise, nothing came of it; —— they said,“could do everything that a commander should do, except say,Quick march.”There are plenty of politicians of that stamp, but Mr. G. decidedly not one of them. I mentioned a farewell dinner given to —— in the spring, by some rich man or other. It cost £560 for forty-eight guests! Flowers alone £150. Mr. G. on this enormity, recalled a dinner to Talfourd about copyright at the old Clarendon Hotel in Bond Street, and the price was £2, 17s. 6d. a head. The old East India Company used to give dinners at a cost of seven guineas a head. He has a wonderfully lively interest for these matters, and his curiosity as to the prices of things in the shop-windows is inexhaustible. We got round to Goethe. Goethe, he said, never gave prominence to duty.J. M.—Surely, surely in that fine psalm of life,Das Göttliche?Mr. G.—Döllinger used to confront me with theIphigenieas a great drama of duty.He wished that I had known Döllinger—“a man thoroughly from beginning to end of his lifepurged of self.”Mistook the nature of the Irish questions, from the erroneous view that Irish Catholicism is ultramontane, which it certainly is not.Saturday, Dec. 19.—What is extraordinary is that all Mr. G.'s versatility, buoyancy, and the rest goes with the most profound accuracy and intense concentration when any point of public business[pg 468]is raised. Something was said of the salaries of bishops. He was ready in an instant with every figure and detail, and every circumstance of the history of the foundation of the Ecclesiastical Commission in 1835-6. Then hissavoir faireand wisdom of parliamentary conduct.“I always made it a rule in the H. of C. to allow nobody to suppose that I did not like him, and to say as little as I could to prevent anybody from liking me. Considering the intense friction and contention of public life, it is a saving of wear and tear that as many as possible even among opponents should think well of one.”Sunday, Dec. 20.—At table, a little discussion as to the happiness and misery of animal creation. Outside of man Mr. G. argued against Tennyson's description of Nature as red in tooth and claw. Apart from man, he said, and the action of man, sentient beings are happy and not miserable. But Fear? we said. No; they are unaware of impending doom; when hawk or kite pounces on its prey, the small bird has little or no apprehension; 'tis death, but death by appointed and unforeseen lot.J. M.—There is Hunger. Is not the probability that most creatures are always hungry, not excepting Man?To this he rather assented. Of course optimism like this is indispensable as the basis of natural theology.Talked to Mr. G. about Michelet's Tableau de la France, which I had just finished in vol. 2 of the history. A brilliant tour de force, but strains the relations of soil to character; compels words and facts to be the slaves of his phantasy; the modicum of reality overlaid with violent paradox and foregone conclusion. Mr. G. not very much interested—seems only to care for political and church history.Monday, Dec. 31.—Mr. G. did not appear at table to-day, suffering from a surfeit of wild strawberries the day before. But he dined in his dressing gown, and I had some chat with him in his room after lunch.Mr. G.—“'Tis a hard law of political things that if a man shows special competence in a department, that is the very thing most likely to keep him there, and prevent his promotion.”[pg 469]Table-TalkMr. G.—I consider Burke a tripartite man: America, France, Ireland—right as to two, wrong in one.J. M.—Must you not add home affairs and India? HisThoughts on the Discontentsis a masterpiece of civil wisdom, and the right defence in a great constitutional struggle. Then he gave fourteen years of industry to Warren Hastings, and teaching England the rights of the natives, princes and people, and her own duties. So he was right in four out of five.Mr. G.—Yes, yes—quite true. Those two ought to be added to my three. There is a saying of Burke's from which I must utterly dissent.“Property is sluggish and inert.”Quite the contrary. Property is vigilant, active, sleepless; if ever it seems to slumber, be sure that one eye is open.Marie Antoinette.I once read the three volumes of letters from Mercy d'Argenteau to Maria Theresa. He seems to have performed the duty imposed upon him with fidelity.J. M.—Don't you think the Empress comes out well in the correspondence?Mr. G.—Yes, she shows always judgment and sagacity.J. M.—Ah, but besides sagacity, worth and as much integrity as those slippery times allowed.Mr. G.—Yes (but rather reluctantly, I thought). As for Marie Antoinette, she was not a striking character in any senses she was horribly frivolous; and, I suppose, we must say she was, what shall I call it—a very considerable flirt?J. M.—The only case with real foundation seems to be that of thebeau Fersen, the Swedish secretary. He too came to as tragic an end as the Queen.Tuesday, Dec. 22.—Mr. G. still somewhat indisposed—but reading away all day long. Full of Marbot. Delighted with the story of the battle of Castiglione: how when Napoleon held a council of war, and they all said they were hemmed in, and that their only chance was to back out, Augereau roughly cried that they might all do what they liked, but he would attack the enemy cost what it might.“Exactly like a place in theIliad; when Agamemnon and the rest sit sorrowful in the assembly arguing that it was[pg 470]useless to withstand the sovereign will of Zeus, and that they had better flee into their ships, Diomed bursts out that whatever others think, in any event he and Sthenelus, his squire, will hold firm, and never desist from the onslaught until they have laid waste the walls of Troy.”290A large dose of Diomed in Mr. G. himself.Talk about the dangerous isolation in which the monarchy will find itself in England if the hereditary principle goes down in the House of Lords;“it will stand bare, naked, with no shelter or shield, only endured as the better of two evils.”“I once asked,”he said,“who besides myself in the party cares for the hereditary principle? The answer was, That perhaps —— cared for it!!”—naming a member of the party supposed to be rather sapient than sage.News in the paper that the Comte de Paris in his discouragement was about to renounce his claims, and break up his party. Somehow this brought us round to Tocqueville, of whom Mr. G. spoke as the nearest French approach to Burke.J. M.—But pale and without passion. Who was it that said of him that he was an aristocrat who accepted his defeat? That is, he knew democracy to be the conqueror, but he doubted how far it would be an improvement, he saw its perils, etc.Mr. G.—I have not much faith in these estimates, whether in favour of progress or against it. I don't believe in comparisons of age with age. How can a man strike a balance between one government and another? How can he place himself in such an attitude, and with such comprehensive sureness of vision, as to say that the thirteenth century was better or higher or worse or lower than the nineteenth?Thursday, Dec. 24.—At lunch we had the news of the Parnellite victory at Waterford. A disagreeable reverse for us. Mr. G. did not say many words about it, only that it would give heart to the mischief makers—only too certain. But we said no more about it. He and I took a walk on the sands in the afternoon, and had a curious talk (considering), about the prospects of the church of England. He was[pg 471]Ecclesiasticalanxious to know about my talk some time ago with the Bishop of —— whom I had met at a feast at Lincoln's Inn. I gave him as good an account as I could of what had passed. Mr. G. doubted that this prelate was fundamentally an Erastian, as Tait was. Mr. G. is eager to read the signs of the times as to the prospects of Anglican Christianity, to which his heart is given; and he fears the peril of Erastianism to the spiritual life of the church, which is naturally the only thing worth caring about. Hence, he talked with much interest of the question whether the clever fellows at Oxford and Cambridge now take orders. He wants to know what kind of defenders his church is likely to have in days to come. Said that for the first time interest has moved away both from politics and theology, towards the vague something which they call social reform; and he thinks they won't make much out of that in the way of permanent results. The establishment he considers safer than it has been for a long time.As to Welsh disestablishment, he said it was a pity that where the national sentiment was so unanimous as it was in Wales, the operation itself should not be as simple as in Scotland. In Scotland sentiment is not unanimous, but the operation is easy. In Wales sentiment is all one way, but the operation difficult—a good deal more difficult than people suppose, as they will find out when they come to tackle it.[Perhaps it may be mentioned here that, though we always talked freely and abundantly together upon ecclesiastical affairs and persons, we never once exchanged a word upon theology or religious creed, either at Biarritz or anywhere else.]Pitt.—A strong denunciation of Pitt for the French war. People don't realise what the French war meant. In 1812 wheat at Liverpool was 20s. (?) the imperial bushel of 65 pounds (?)! Think of that, when you bring it into figures of the cost of a loaf. And that was the time when Eaton, Eastnor, and other great palaces were built by the landlords out of the high rents which the war and war prices enabled them to exact.[pg 472]Wished we knew more of Melbourne. He was in many ways a very fine fellow.“In two of the most important of all the relations of a prime minister, he was perfect; I mean first, his relations to the Queen, second to his colleagues.”Somebody at dinner quoted a capital description of the perverse fashion of talking that prevailed at Oxford soon after my time, and prevails there now, I fancy—“hunting for epigrammatic ways of saying what you don't think.”—— was the father of this pestilent mode.Rather puzzled him by repeating a saying of mine that used to amuse Fitzjames Stephen, that Love of Truth is more often than we think only a fine name for Temper. I think Mr. G. has a thorough dislike for anything that has a cynical or sardonic flavour about it. I wish I had thought, by the way, of asking him what he had to say of that piece of Swift's, about all objects being insipid that do not come by delusion, and everything being shrunken as it appears in the glass of nature, so that if it were not for artificial mediums, refracted angles, false lights, varnish and tinsel, there would be pretty much of a level in the felicity of mortal man.Am always feeling how strong is his aversion to seeing more than he can help of what is sordid, mean, ignoble. He has not been in public life all these years without rubbing shoulders with plenty of baseness on every scale, and plenty of pettiness in every hue, but he has always kept his eyes well above it. Never was a man more wholly free of the starch of the censor, more ready to make allowance, nor more indulgent even; he enters into human nature in all its compass. But he won't linger a minute longer than he must in the dingy places of life and character.Christmas Day, 1891.—A divine day, brilliant sunshine, and mild spring air. Mr. G. heard what he called an admirable sermon from an English preacher,“with a great command of his art.”A quietish day, Mr. G. no doubt engaged in φρονεῖν τὰ ὅσια.Saturday, Dec. 26.—Once more a noble day. We started in a couple of carriages for the Négress station, a couple of miles away or more, I with the G.'s. Occasion produced the Greek epitaph of the nameless drowned sailor[pg 473]Fuentarabiawho wished for others kinder seas.291Mr. G. felt its pathos and its noble charm—so direct and simple, such benignity, such a good lesson to men to forget their own misdeeds and mischance, and to pray for the passer-by a happier star. He repaid me by two epigrams of a different vein, and one admirable translation into Greek, of Tennyson on Sir John Franklin, which I do not carry in my mind; another on a boisterous Eton fellow—Didactic, dry, declamatory, dull,The bursar —— bellows like a bull.Just in the tone of Greek epigram, a sort of point, but not too much point.Parliamentary Wit.—Thought Disraeli had never been surpassed, nor even equalled, in this line. He had a contest with General Grey, who stood upon the general merits of the whig government, after both Lord Grey and Stanley had left it. D. drew a picture of a circus man who advertised his show with its incomparable team of six grey horses. One died, he replaced it by a mule. Another died, and he put in a donkey, still he went on advertising his team of greys all the same. Canning's wit not to be found conspicuously in his speeches, but highly agreeable pleasantries, though many of them in a vein which would jar horribly on modern taste.Some English redcoats and a pack of hounds passed us as we neared the station. They saluted Mr. G. with a politeness that astonished him, but was pleasant. Took the train for Irun, the fields and mountain slopes delightful in the sun, and the sea on our right a superb blue such as we never see in English waters. At Irun we found carriages waiting to take us on to Fuentarabia. From the balcony of the church had a beautiful view over the scene of Wellington's operations when he crossed the Bidassoa, in the presence of the astonished Soult. A lovely picture, made none the worse by this excellent historic association. The[pg 474]alcalde was extremely polite and intelligent. The consul who was with us showed a board on the old tower, in whichvin some words wasb, and I noted that the alcalde spoke of Viarritz. I reminded Mr. G. of Scaliger's epigram—Haud temere antiquas mutat Vasconia voces,Cui nihil est alind vivere quam bibere.Pretty cold driving home, but Mr. G. seemed not to care. He found both the churches at St. Jean and at Fuentarabia very noteworthy, though the latter very popish, but both, he felt,“had a certain association with grandeur.”Sunday, Dec. 27.—After some quarter of an hour of travellers' topics, we plunged into one of the most interesting talks we have yet had.Aproposof I do not know what, Mr. G. said that he had not advised his son to enter public life.“No doubt there are some men to whom station, wealth, and family traditions make it a duty. But I have never advised any individual, as to whom I have been consulted, to enter the H. of C.”J. M.—But isn't that rather to encourage self-indulgence? Nobody who cares for ease or mental composure would seek public life?Mr. G.—Ah, I don't know that. Surely politics open up a great field for the natural man. Self-seeking, pride, domination, power—all these passions are gratified in politics.J. M.—You cannot be sure of achievement in politics, whether personal or public?Mr. G.—No; to use Bacon's pregnant phrase, they are too immersed in matter. Then as new matter, that is, new details and particulars, come into view, men change their judgment.J. M.—You have spoken just now of somebody as a thorough good tory. You know the saying that nobody is worth much who has not been a bit of a radical in his youth, and a bit of a tory in his fuller age.Mr. G.(laughing)—Ah, I'm afraid that hits me rather hard. But for myself, I think I can truly put up all the change that has come into my politics into a sentence; I[pg 475]Disenchantment A Mistakewas brought up to distrust and dislike liberty, I learned to believe in it. That is the key to all my changes.J. M.—According to my observation, the change in my own generation is different. They have ceased either to trust or to distrust liberty, and have come to the mind that it matters little either way. Men are disenchanted. They have got what they wanted in the days of their youth, yet what of it, they ask? France has thrown off the Empire, but the statesmen of the republic are not a great breed. Italy has gained her unity, yet unity has not been followed by thrift, wisdom, or large increase of public virtue or happiness. America has purged herself of slavery, yet life in America is material, prosaic,—so say some of her own rarest sons. Don't think that I say all these things. But I know able and high-minded men who suffer from this disenchantment.Mr. G.—Italy would have been very different if Cavour had only lived—and even Ricasoli. Men ought not to suffer from disenchantment. They ought to know thatideals in politics are never realised. And don't let us forget in eastern Europe the rescue in our time of some ten millions of men from the harrowing domination of the Turk. (On this he expatiated, and very justly, with much energy.)We turned to our own country. Here he insisted that democracy had certainly not saved us from a distinct decline in the standard of public men.... Look at the whole conduct of opposition from '80 to '85—every principle was flung overboard, if they could manufacture a combination against the government. For all this deterioration one man and one man alone is responsible, Disraeli. He is the grand corrupter. He it was who sowed the seed.J. M.—Ought not Palmerston to bear some share in this?Mr. G.—No, no; Pam. had many strong and liberal convictions. On one subject Dizzy had them too—the Jews. There he was much more than rational, he was fanatical. He said once that Providence would deal good or ill fortune to nations, according as they dealt well or ill by the Jews. I remember once sitting next to John Russell when D. was[pg 476]making a speech on Jewish emancipation.“Look at him,”said J. R.,“how manfully he sticks to it, tho' he knows that every word he says is gall and wormwood to every man who sits around him and behind him.”A curious irony, was it not, that it should have fallen to me to propose a motion for a memorial both to Pam. and Dizzy?A superb scene upon the ocean, with a grand wind from the west. Mr. G. and I walked on the shore; he has a passion for tumultuous seas. I have never seen such huge masses of water shattering themselves among the rocks.In the evening Mr. G. remarked on our debt to Macaulay, for guarding the purity of the English tongue. I recalled a favourite passage from Milton, that next to the man who gives wise and intrepid counsels of government, he places the man who cares for the purity of his mother tongue. Mr. G. liked this. Said he only knew Bright once slip into an error in this respect, when he used“transpire”for“happen.”Macaulay of good example also in rigorously abstaining from the inclusion of matter in footnotes. Hallam an offender in this respect. I pointed out that he offended in company with Gibbon.Monday, Dec. 28.—We had an animated hour at breakfast.Oxford and Cambridge.—Curious how, like two buckets, whenever one was up, the other was down. Cambridge has never produced four such men of action in successive ages as Wolsey, Laud, Wesley, and Newman.J. M.—In the region of thought Cambridge has produced the greatest of all names, Newton.Mr. G.—In the earlier times Oxford has it—with Wycliff, Occam, above all Roger Bacon. And then in the eighteenth century, Butler.J. M.—But why not Locke, too, in the century before?This brought on a tremendous tussle, for Mr. G. was of the same mind, and perhaps for the same sort of reason, as Joseph de Maistre, that contempt for Locke is the beginning of knowledge. All very well for De Maistre, but not for a man in line with European liberalism. I pressed the very obvious point that you must take into account not only a man's intellectual product or his general stature, but also[pg 477]Table-Talkhis influence as a historic force. From the point of view of influence Locke was the origin of the emancipatory movement of the eighteenth century abroad, and laid the philosophic foundations of liberalism in civil government at home. Mr. G. insisted on a passage of Hume's which he believed to be in the history, disparaging Locke as a metaphysical thinker.292“That may be,”said I,“though Hume in hisEssaysis not above paying many compliments to‘the great reasoner,’etc., to whom, for that matter, I fancy that he stood in pretty direct relation. But far be it from me to deny that Hume saw deeper than Locke into the metaphysical millstone. That is not the point. I'm only thinking of his historic place, and, after all, the history of philosophy is itself a philosophy.”To minds nursed in dogmatic schools, all this is both unpalatable and incredible.Somehow we slid into the freedom of the will and Jonathan Edwards. I told him that Mill had often told us how Edwards argued the necessarian or determinist case as keenly as any modern.Tuesday, Dec. 29.—Mr. G. 82 to-day. I gave him Mackail's Greek Epigrams, and if it affords him half as much pleasure as it has given me, he will be very grateful. Various people brought Mr. G. bouquets and addresses. Mr. G. went to church in the morning, and in the afternoon took a walk with me....Land Question.As you go through France you see the soil cultivated by the population. In our little dash into Spain the other day, we saw again the soil cultivated by the population. In England it is cultivated by the capitalist, for the farmer is capitalist. Some astonishing views recently propounded by D. of Argyll on this matter. Unearned increment—so terribly difficult to catch it. Perhaps best try to get at it through the death duties. Physical condition of our people—always a subject of great anxiety—their stature, colour, and so on. Feared the atmosphere of cotton factories, etc., very deleterious. As against bad air, I said, you must set good food; the Lancashire operative in decent times lives uncommonly well, as he deserves to do. He agreed there might be something in this.[pg 478]The day was humid and muggy, but the tumult of the sea was most majestic. Mr. G. delighted in it. He has a passion for the sound of the sea; would like to have it in his ear all day and all night. Again and again he recurred to this.After dinner, long talk about Mazzini, of whom Mr. G. thought poorly in comparison with Poerio and the others who for freedom sacrificed their lives. I stood up for Mazzini, as one of the most morally impressive men I had ever known, or that his age knew; he breathed a soul into democracy.Then we fell into a discussion as to the eastern and western churches. He thought the western popes by their proffered alliance with the mahometans, etc., had betrayed Christianity in the east. I offered De Maistre's view.Mr. G. strongly assented to old Chatham's dictum that vacancy is worse than even the most anxious work. He has less to reproach himself with than most men under that head.He repeated an observation that I have heard him make before, that he thought politicians are morerapidthan other people. I told him that Bowen once said to me on this that he did not agree; that he thought rapidity the mark of all successful men in the practical line of life, merchants and stockbrokers, etc.Wednesday, Dec. 30.—A very muggy day. A divine sunset, with the loveliest pink and opal tints in the sky. Mr. G. reading Gleig'sSubaltern. Not a very entertaining book in itself, but the incidents belong to Wellington's Pyrenean campaign, and, for my own part, I rather enjoyed it on the principle on which one likes readingRomolaat Florence,Transformationat Rome,Sylvia's Loversat Whitby, andHurrishon the northern edge of Clare.Thursday, Dec. 31.—Down to the pier, and found all the party watching the breakers, and superb they were. Mr. G. exulting in the huge force of the Atlantic swell and the beat of the rollers on the shore, like a Titanic pulse.After dinner Mr. G. raised the question of payment of members. He had been asked by somebody whether he meant at Newcastle to indicate that everybody should be paid, or only those who chose to take it or to ask[pg 479]Payment Of Membersfor it. He produced the same extraordinary plan as he had described to me on the morning of his Newcastle speech—i.e.that the Inland Revenue should ascertain from their own books the income of every M.P., and if they found any below the limit of exemption, should notify the same to the Speaker, and the Speaker should thereupon send to the said M.P. below the limit an annual cheque for, say, £300, the name to appear in an annual return to Parliament of all the M.P.'s in receipt of public money on any grounds whatever. I demurred to this altogether, as drawing an invidious distinction between paid and unpaid members; said it was idle to ignore the theory on which the demand for paid members is based, namely, that it is desirable in the public interest that poor men should have access to the H. of C.; and that the poor man should stand there on the same footing as anybody else.Friday, Jan. 1, 1892.—After breakfast Mrs. Gladstone came to my room and said how glad she was that I had not scrupled to put unpleasant points; that Mr. G. must not be shielded and sheltered as some great people are, who hear all the pleasant things and none of the unpleasant; that the perturbation from what is disagreeable only lasts an hour. I said I hoped that I was faithful with him, but of course I could not be always putting myself in an attitude of perpetual controversy. She said,“He is never made angry by what you say.”And so she went away, and —— and I had a good and most useful set-to about Irish finance.At luncheon Mr. G. asked what we had made out of our morning's work. When we told him he showed a good deal of impatience and vehemence, and, to my dismay, he came upon union finance and the general subject of the treatment of Ireland by England....In the afternoon we took a walk, he and I, afterwards joined by the rest. He was as delighted as ever with the swell of the waves, as they bounded over one another, with every variety of grace and tumultuous power. He wondered if we had not more and better words for the sea than the French—“breaker,”“billow,”“roller,”as against“flot,”“vague,”“onde,”“lame,”etc.[pg 480]At dinner he asked me whether I had made up my mind on the burning question of compulsory Greek for a university degree. I said, No, that as then advised I was half inclined to be against compulsory Greek, but it is so important that I would not decide before I was obliged.“So with me,”he said,“the question is one with many subtle and deep-reaching consequences.”He dwelt on the folly of striking Italian out of the course of modern education, thus cutting European history in two, and setting an artificial gulf between the ancient and modern worlds.Saturday, Jan. 2.—Superb morning, and all the better for being much cooler. At breakfast somebody started the idle topic of quill pens. When they came to the length of time that so-and-so made a quill serve,“De Retz,”said I,“made up his mind that Cardinal Chigi was a poor creature,maximus in minimis, because at their first interview Chigi boasted that he had used one pen for three years.”That recalled another saying of Retz's about Cromwell's famous dictum, that nobody goes so far as the man who does not know where he is going. Mr. G. gave his deep and eager Ah! to this. He could not recall that Cromwell had produced many dicta of such quality.“I don't love him, but he was a mighty big fellow. But he was intolerant. He was intolerant of the episcopalians.”Mr. G.—Do you know whom I find the most tolerant churchman of that time?Laud!Laud got Davenant made Bishop of Salisbury, and he zealously befriended Chillingworth and Hales. (There was some other case, which I forget.)The execution of Charles.—I told him of Gardiner's new volume which I had just been reading.“Charles,”he said,“was no doubt a dreadful liar; Cromwell perhaps did not always tell the truth; Elizabeth was a tremendous liar.”J. M.—Charles was not wholly inexcusable, being what he was, for thinking that he had a good game in his hands, by playing off the parliament against the army, etc.Mr. G.—There was less excuse for cutting off his head than in the case of poor Louisxvi., for Louis was the excuse for foreign invasion.[pg 481]At BayonneJ. M.—Could you call foreign invasion the intervention of the Scotch?Mr. G.—Well, not quite. I suppose it is certain that it was Cromwell who cut off Charles's head? Not one in a hundred in the nation desired it.J. M.—No, nor one in twenty in the parliament. But then, ninety-nine in a hundred in the army.In the afternoon we all drove towards Bayonne to watch the ships struggle over the bar at high water. As it happened we only saw one pass out, a countryman for Cardiff. A string of others were waiting to go, but a little steamer from Nantes came first, and having secured her station, found she had not force enough to make the bar, and the others remained swearing impatiently behind her. The Nantes steamer was like Ireland. The scene was very fresh and fine, and the cold most exhilarating after the mugginess of the last two or three days. Mr. G., who has a dizzy head, did not venture on the jetty, but watched things from the sands. He and I drove home together, at a good pace.“I am inclined,”he said laughingly,“to agree with Dr. Johnson that there is no pleasure greater than sitting behind four fast-going horses.”293Talking of Johnson generally,“I suppose we may take him as the best product of the eighteenth century.”Perhaps so, but is he its most characteristic product?Wellington.—Curious that there should be no general estimate of W.'s character; his character not merely as a general but as a man. No love of freedom. His sense of duty very strong, but military rather than civil.Montalembert.—Had often come into contact with him. A very amiable and attractive man. But less remarkable than Rio.Latin Poets.—Would you place Virgil first?J. M.—Oh, no, Lucretius much the first for the greatest and sublimest of poetic qualities. Mr. G. seemed to assent to this, though disposed to make a fight for the secondAeneidas equal to anything. He expressed his admiration for[pg 482]Catullus, and then he was strong that Horace would run anybody else very hard, breaking out with the lines about Regulus—“Atqui sciebat quæ sibi barbarusTortor pararet;”etc.294Blunders in Government.—How right Napoleon was when he said, reflecting on all the vast complexities of government, that the best to be said of a statesman is that he has avoided the biggest blunders.It is not easy to define the charm of these conversations. Is charm the right word? They are in the highest degree stimulating, bracing, widening. That is certain. I return to my room with the sensations of a man who has taken delightful exercise in fresh air. He is so wholly free from theergoteur. There's all the difference between theergoteurand the great debater. He fits his tone to the thing; he can be as playful as anybody. In truth I have many a time seen him in London and at Hawarden not far from trivial. But here at Biarritz all is appropriate, and though, as I say, he can be playful and gay as youth, he cannot resist rising in an instant to the general point of view—to grasp the elemental considerations of character, history, belief, conduct, affairs. There he is at home, there he is most himself. I never knew anybody less guilty of the tiresome sin of arguing for victory. It is not his knowledge that attracts; it is not his ethical tests and standards; it is not that dialectical strength of arm which, as Mark Pattison said of him, could twist a bar of iron to its purpose. It is the combination of these with elevation, with true sincerity, with extraordinary mental force.Sunday, Jan. 3.—Vauvenargues is right when he says that to carry through great undertakings, one must act as though one could never die. My wonderful companion is a wonderful illustration. He is like M. Angelo, who, just before he died on the very edge of ninety, made an allegorical figure, and inscribed upon it,ancora impara,“still learning.”At dinner he showed in full force.[pg 483]Table-TalkHeroes of the Old Testament.—He could not honestly say that he thought there was any figure in the O. T. comparable to the heroes of Homer. Moses was a fine fellow. But the others were of secondary quality—not great high personages, of commanding nature.Thinkers.—Rather an absurd word—to call a man a thinker (and he repeated the word with gay mockery in his tone). When did it come into use? Not until quite our own times, eh? I said, I believed both Hobbes and Locke spoke of thinkers, and was pretty sure thatpenseur, as inlibre penseur, had established itself in the last century. [Quite true; Voltaire used it, but it was not common.]Dr. Arnold.—A high, large, impressive figure—perhaps more important by his character and personality than his actual work. I mentioned M. A.'s poem on his father,Rugby Chapel, with admiration. Rather to my surprise, Mr. G. knew the poem well, and shared my admiration to the full. This brought us on to poetry generally, and he expatiated with much eloquence and sincerity for the rest of the talk. The wonderful continuity of fine poetry in England for five whole centuries, stretching from Chaucer to Tennyson, always a proof to his mind of the soundness, the sap, and the vitality of our nation and its character. What people, beginning with such a poet as Chaucer 500 years ago, could have burst forth into such astonishing production of poetry as marked the first quarter of the century, Byron, Wordsworth, Shelley, etc.J. M.—It is true that Germany has nothing, save Goethe, Schiller, Heine, that's her whole list. But I should say a word for the poetic movement in France: Hugo, Gautier, etc. Mr. G. evidently knew but little, or even nothing, of modern French poetry. He spoke up for Leopardi, on whom he had written an article first introducing him to the British public, ever so many years ago—in theQuarterly.Mr. G.—Wordsworth used occasionally to dine with me when I lived in the Albany. A most agreeable man. I always found him amiable, polite, and sympathetic. Only once did he jar upon me, when he spoke slightingly of Tennyson's first performance.[pg 484]J. M.—But he was not so wrong as he would be now. Tennyson's Juvenilia are terribly artificial.Mr. G.—Yes, perhaps. Tennyson has himself withdrawn some of them. I remember W., when he dined with me, used on leaving to change his silk stockings in the anteroom and put on grey worsted.J. M.—I once said to M. Arnold that I'd rather have been Wordsworth than anybody [not exactly a modest ambition]; and Arnold, who knew him well in the Grasmere country, said,“Oh no, you would not; you would wish you were dining with me at the Athenæum. He was too much of the peasant for you.”Mr. G.—No, I never felt that; I always thought him a polite and an amiable man.Mentioned Macaulay's strange judgment in a note in theHistory, that Dryden's famous lines,“... Fool'd with hope, men favour the deceit;Trust on, and think to-morrow will repay.To-morrow's falser than the former day;Lies worse, and while it says we shall be blestWith some new joys, cuts off what we possest.Strange cozenage!...”are as fine as any eight lines in Lucretius. Told him of an excellent remark of —— on this, that Dryden's passage wholly lacks the mystery and great superhuman air of Lucretius. Mr. G. warmly agreed.He regards it as a remarkable sign of the closeness of the church of England to the roots of life and feeling in the country, that so many clergymen should have written so much good poetry. Who, for instance? I asked. He named Heber, Moultrie, Newman (Dream of Gerontius), and Faber in at least one good poem,“The poor Labourer”(or some such title), Charles Tennyson. I doubt if this thesis has much body in it. He was for Shelley as the most musical of all our poets. I told him that I had once asked M. to get Tennyson to write an autograph line for a friend of mine, and Tennyson had sent this:—“Coldly on the dead volcano sleeps the gleam of dying day.”So I suppose the poet must think well of it himself. 'Tis[pg 485]Table-Talkfrom the secondLocksley Hall, and describes a man after passions have gone cool.Mr. G.—Yes, in melody, in the picturesque, and as apt simile, a fine line.Had been trying his hand at a translation of his favourite lines of Penelope about Odysseus. Said that, of course, you could translate similes and set passages, but to translate Homer as a whole, impossible. He was inclined, when all is said, to think Scott the nearest approach to a model.Monday, Jan. 4.—At luncheon, Mr. Gladstone recalled the well-known story of Talleyrand on the death of Napoleon. The news was brought when T. chanced to be dining with Wellington.“Quel événement!”they all cried.“Non, ce n'est pas un événement,”said Talleyrand,“c'est une nouvelle”—'Tis no event, 'tis a piece of news.“Imagine such a way,”said Mr. G.,“of taking the disappearance of that colossal man! Compare it with the opening of Manzoni's ode, which makes the whole earth stand still. Yet both points of view are right. In one sense, the giant's death was only news; in another, when we think of his history, it was enough to shake the world.”At the moment, he could not recall Manzoni's words, but at dinner he told me that he had succeeded in piecing them together, and after dinner he went to his room and wrote them down for me on a piece of paper. Curiously enough, he could not recall the passage in his own splendid translation.295Talk about handsome men of the past; Sidney Herbert one of the handsomest and most attractive. But the Duke of Hamilton bore away the palm, as glorious as a Greek god.“One day in Rotten Row, I said this to the Duchess of C. She set up James Hope-Scott against my Duke. No doubt he had an intellectual element which the Duke lacked.”Then we discussed the best-looking man in the H. of C. to-day....Duke of Wellington.—Somebody was expatiating on the incomparable position of the Duke; his popularity with kings, with nobles, with common people. Mr. G. remembered[pg 486]that immediately after the formation of Canning's government in 1827, when it was generally thought that he had been most unfairly and factiously treated (as Mr. G. still thinks, always saving Peel) by the Duke and his friends, the Duke made an expedition to the north of England, and had an overwhelming reception. Of course, he was then only twelve years from Waterloo, and yet only four or five years later he had to put up his iron shutters.Approved a remark that a friend of ours was not simple enough, not ready enough to take things as they come.Mr. G.—Unless a man has a considerable gift for taking things as they come, he may make up his mind that political life will be sheer torment to him. He must meet fortune in all its moods.Tuesday, Jan. 5.—After dinner to-day, Mr. G. extraordinarily gay. He had bought a present of silver for his wife. She tried to guess the price, and after the manner of wives in such a case, put the figure provokingly low. Mr. G. then put on the deprecating air of the tradesman with wounded feelings—and it was as capital fun as we could desire. That over, he fell to his backgammon with our host.Wednesday, Jan. 6.—Mrs. Gladstone eighty to-day! What a marvel....Léon Say called to see Mr. G. Long and most interesting conversation about all sorts of aspects of French politics, the concordat, the schools, and all the rest of it.He illustrated the ignorance of French peasantry as to current affairs. Thiers, long after he had become famous, went on a visit to his native region; and there met a friend of his youth.“Eh bien,”said his friend,“tu as fait ton chemin.”“Mais oui, j'ai fait un peu mon chemin. J'ai été ministre même.”“Ah, tiens! je ne savais pas que tu étais protestant.”I am constantly struck by his solicitude for the well-being and right doing of Oxford and Cambridge—“the two eyes of the country.”This connection between the higher education and the general movement of the national mind engages his profound attention, and no doubt deserves such attention[pg 487]Table-Talkin any statesman who looks beyond the mere surface problems of the day. To perceive the bearings of such matters as these, makes Mr. G. a statesman of the highest class, as distinguished from men of clever expedients.Mr. G. had been reading the Greek epigrams on religion in Mackail; quoted the last of them as illustrating the description of the dead as the inhabitants of the more populous world:—τῶν ἄπο κὴν ζωοῖσιν ἀκηδέα, κευτ᾽ ἄν ἵκηαιὲς πλεόνων, ἕξεις θυμὸν ἐλαφρότερον.296A more impressive epigram contains the same thought, where the old man, leaning on his staff, likens himself to the withered vine on its dry pole, and goes on to ask himself what advantage it would be to warm himself for three or four more years in the sun; and on that reflection without heroics put off his life, and changed his home to the greater company,κὴς πλεόνων ἦλθε μετοικεσίην.All the rest of the evening he kept us alive by a stock of infinite drolleries. A scene of a dish of over-boiled tea at West Calder after a meeting, would have made the fortune of a comedian.I said that in the all-important quality of co-operation, —— was only good on condition of being in front. Mr. G. read him in the same sense. Reminded of a mare he once had—admirable, provided you kept off spur, curb, or whip; show her one of these things, and she would do nothing. Mr. G. more of a judge of men than is commonly thought.Told us of a Chinese despatch which came under his notice when he was at the board of trade, and gave him food for reflection. A ship laden with grain came to Canton. The administrator wrote to the central government at Pekin to know whether the ship was to pay duty and land its cargo. The answer was to the effect that the central government of the Flowery Land was quite indifferent as a rule to the goings and comings of the Barbarians; whether they brought a cargo or brought no cargo was a thing of supreme unconcern.“But this cargo, you say, is food for the people. There ought to be[pg 488]no obstacle to the entry of food for the people. So let it in. Your Younger Brother commends himself to you, etc. etc.”Friday, Jan. 8.—A quiet evening. We were all rather piano at the end of an episode which had been thoroughly delightful. When Mr. G. bade me good-night, he said with real feeling,“More sorry than I can say that this is our last evening together at Biarritz.”He is painfully grieved to lose the sound of the sea in his ears.Saturday, Jan. 9.—Strolled about all the forenoon.“What a time of blessed composure it has been,”said Mr. G. with a heavy sigh. The distant hills covered with snow, and the voice of the storm gradually swelling. Still the savage fury of the sea was yet some hours off, so we had to leave Biarritz without the spectacle of Atlantic rage at its fiercest.Found comfortable saloon awaiting us at Bayonne, and so under weeping skies we made our way to Pau. The landscape must be pretty, weather permitting. As it was, we saw but little. Mr. G. dozed and read Max Müller's book on Anthropological Religions.Arrived at Pau towards 5.30; drenching rain: nothing to be seen.At tea time, a good little discussion raised by a protest against Dante being praised for a complete survey of human nature and the many phases of human lot. Intensity he has, but insight over the whole field of character and life? Mr. G. did not make any stand against this, and made the curious admission that Dante was too optimist to be placed on a level with Shakespeare, or even with Homer.Then we turned to lighter themes. He had once said to Henry Taylor,“I should have thought he was the sort of man to have a good strong grasp of a subject,”speaking of Lord Grey, who had been one of Taylor's many chiefs at the Colonial Office.“I should have thought,”replied Taylor slowly and with a dreamy look,“he was the sort of man to have a good strongnipof a subject.”Witty, and very applicable to many men.Wordsworth once gave Mr. G. with much complacency, as an example of his own readiness and resource, this story. A man came up to him at Rydal and said,“Do you happen[pg 489]to have seen my wife.”“Why,”replied the Sage,“I did not know you had a wife!”This peculiarly modest attempt at pointed repartee much tickled Mr. G., as well it might.Tuesday, Jan. 12.—Mr. G. completely recovered from two days of indisposition. We had about an hour's talk on things in general, including policy in the approaching session. He did not expect a dissolution, at the same time a dissolution would not surprise him.At noon they started for Périgord and Carcassonne, Nismes, Arles, and so on to the Riviera full of kind things at our parting.[pg 490]
[pg 460]Chapter VI. Biarritz. (1891-1892)Omnium autem ineptiarum, quæ sunt innumerabiles, haud sciam an nulla sit major, quam, ut illi solent, quocunque in loco, quoscunque inter homines visum est, de rebus aut difficillimis aut non necessariis argutissime disputare.—Cicero.Of all the numberless sorts of bad taste and want of tact, perhaps the worst is to insist, no matter where you are or with whom you are, on arguing about the hardest subjects to the full pitch of elaboration and detail.IWe have seen how in 1889 Mr. and Mrs. Gladstone celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of one of the most devoted and successful marriages that ever was made, and the unbroken felicity of their home. In 1891, after the shadows of approaching calamity had for many months hung doubtfully over them, a heavy blow fell, and their eldest son died. Not deeply concerned in ordinary politics, he was a man of many virtues and some admirable gifts; he was an accomplished musician, and I have seen letters of his to his father, marked by a rare delicacy of feeling and true power of expression.“I had known him for nearly thirty years,”one friend wrote,“and there was no man, until his long illness, who had changed so little, or retained so long the best qualities of youth, and my first thought was that the greater the loss to you, the greater would be the consolation.”To Archbishop Benson, Mr. Gladstone wrote (July 6):—It is now forty-six years since we lost a child,285and he who has now passed away from our eyes, leaves to us only blessed recollections. I suppose all feel that those deaths which reverse the order of nature have a sharpness of their own. But setting[pg 461]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.To me he wrote (July 10):—We feel deeply the kindness and tenderness of your letter. It supplies one more link in a long chain of recollection which I deeply prize. Yes, ours is a tribulation, and a sore one, but yet we feel we ought to find ourselves carried out of ourselves by sympathy with the wife whose noble and absorbing devotion had become like an entire life of itself, and who is now face to face with the void. The grief of children too, which passes, is very sharp while it remains. The case has been very remarkable. Though with abatement of some powers, my son has not been without many among the signs and comforts of health during a period of nearly two and a half years. All this time the terrible enemy was lodged in the royal seat, and only his healthy and unyielding constitution kept it at defiance, and maintained his mental and inward life intact.... And most largely has human, as well as divine compassion, flowed in upon us, from none more conspicuously than from yourself, whom we hope to count among near friends for the short remainder of our lives.To another correspondent who did not share his own religious beliefs, he said (July 5):—When I received your last kind note, I fully intended to write to you with freedom on the subject ofThe Agnostic Island. But since then I have been at close quarters, so to speak, with the dispensations of God, for yesterday morning my dearly beloved eldest son was taken from the sight of our eyes. At this moment of bleeding hearts, I will only say what I hope you will in consideration of the motives take without offence, namely this: I would from the bottom of my heart that whenever the hour of bereavement shall befall you or those whom you love, you and they may enjoy the immeasurable consolation of believing, with all the mind and all the heart, that the beloved one is gone into eternal rest, and that those who remain behind may through the same mighty Deliverer hope at their appointed time to rejoin him.[pg 462]All this language on the great occasions of human life was not with him the tone of convention. Whatever the synthesis, as they call it,—whatever the form, whatever the creed and faith may be, he was one of that high and favoured household who, in Emerson's noble phrase,“live from a great depth of being.”Earlier in the year Lord Granville, who so long had been his best friend, died. The loss by his death was severe. As Acton, who knew of their relations well and from within, wrote to Mr. Gladstone (April 1):—There was an admirable fitness in your union, and I had been able to watch how it became closer and easier, in spite of so much to separate you, in mental habits, in early affinities, and even in the form of fundamental convictions, since he came home from your budget, overwhelmed, thirty-eight years ago. I saw all the connections which had their root in social habit fade before the one which took its rise from public life and proved more firm and more enduring than the rest.IIIn September he paid a visit to his relatives at Fasque, and thence he went to Glenalmond—spots that in his tenacious memory must have awakened hosts of old and dear associations. On October 1, he found himself after a long and busy day, at Newcastle-on-Tyne, where he had never stayed since his too memorable visit in 1862.286Since the defeat of the Irish policy in 1886, he had attended the annual meeting of the chief liberal organisation at Nottingham (1887), Birmingham (1888), and Manchester (1889). This year it was the turn of Newcastle. On October 2, he gave his blessing to various measures that afterwards came to be known as the Newcastle programme. After the shock caused by the Irish quarrel, every politician knew that it would be necessary to balance home rule by reforms expected in England and Scotland. No liberal, whatever his particular shade, thought that it would be either honourable or practical to throw the Irish policy overboard, and if there[pg 463]At Newcastlewere any who thought such a course honourable, they knew it would not be safe. The principle and expediency of home rule had taken a much deeper root in the party than it suited some of the trimming tribe later to admit. On the other hand, after five years of pretty exclusive devotion to the Irish case, to pass by the British case and its various demands for an indefinite time longer, would have been absurd.IIIIn the eighties Mr. Gladstone grew into close friendship with one who had for many years been his faithful supporter in the House of Commons as member for Dundee. Nobody ever showed him devotion more considerate, loyal, and unselfish than did Mr. Armitstead, from about the close of the parliament of 1880 down to the end of this story.287In the middle of December 1891 Mr. Armitstead planned a foreign trip for his hero, and persuaded me to join. Biarritz was to be our destination, and the expedition proved a wonderful success. Some notes of mine, though intended only for domestic consumption, may help to bring Mr. Gladstone in his easiest moods before the reader's eye. No new ideas struck fire, no particular contribution was made to grand themes. But a great statesman on a holiday may be forgiven for not trying to discover brand-new keys to philosophy, history, and“all the mythologies.”As a sketch from life of the veteran's buoyancy, vigour, genial freshness of heart and brain, after four-score strenuous years, these few pages may be found of interest.We left Paris at nine in the morning (Dec. 16), and were listening to the swell of the mighty Bay resounding under our windows at Biarritz soon after midnight.The long day's journey left no signs of fatigue on either Mr. or Mrs. Gladstone, and his only regret was that we had[pg 464]not come straight through instead of staying a night in Paris. I'm always for going straight on, he said. For some odd reason in spite of the late hour he was full of stories of American humour, which he told with extraordinary verve and enjoyment. I contributed one that amused him much, of the Bostonian who, having read Shakespeare for the first time, observed,“I call that a very clever book. Now, I don't suppose there are twenty men in Boston to-day who could have written that book!”Thursday, Dec. 17.—Splendid morning for making acquaintance with a new place. Saw the western spur of the Pyrenees falling down to the Bidassoa and the first glimpse of the giant wall, beyond which, according to Michelet, Africa begins, and our first glimpse of Spain.After breakfast we all sallied forth to look into the shops and to see the lie of the land. Mr. G. as interested as a child in all the objects in the shops—many of them showing that we are not far from Spain. The consul very polite, showed us about, and told us the hundred trifles that bring a place really into one's mind. Nothing is like a first morning's stroll in a foreign town. By afternoon the spell dissolves, and the mood comes of Dante's lines,“Era già l'ora,”etc.288Some mention was made of Charles Austin, the famous lawyer: it brought up the case of men who are suddenly torn from lives of great activity to complete idleness.Mr. G.—I don't know how to reconcile it with what I've always regarded as the foundation of character—Bishop Butler's view of habit. How comes it that during the hundreds of years in which priests and fellows of Eton College have retired from hard work to college livings and leisure, not one of them has ever done anything whatever for either scholarship or divinity—not one?Mr. G. did not know Mazzini, but Armellini, another of the Roman triumvirs, taught him Italian in 1832.[pg 465]Opinions On StatesmenI spoke a word for Gambetta, but he would not have it.“Gambetta wasautoritaire; I do not feel as if he were a true liberal in the old and best sense. I cannot forget how hostile he was to the movement for freedom in the Balkans.”Said he only once saw Lord Liverpool. He went to call on Canning at Glos'ter House (close to our Glos'ter Road Station), and there through a glass door he saw Canning and Lord Liverpool talking together.Peel.—Had a good deal of temper; not hot; but perhaps sulky. Not a farsighted man, but fairly clear-sighted.“I called upon him after the election in 1847. The Janissaries, as Bentinck called us, that is the men who had stood by Peel, had been 110 before the election; we came back only 50. Peel said to me that what he looked forward to was a long and fierce struggle on behalf of protection. I must say I thought this foolish. If Bentinck had lived, with his strong will and dogged industry, there might have been a wide rally for protection, but everybody knew that Dizzy did not care a straw about it, and Derby had not constancy and force enough.”Mr. G. said Disraeli's performances against Peel were quite as wonderful as report makes them. Peel altogether helpless in reply. Dealt with them with a kind of“righteous dulness.”The Protectionist secession due to three men: Derby contributed prestige; Bentinck backbone; and Dizzy parliamentary brains.The golden age of administrative reform was from 1832 to the Crimean War; Peel was always keenly interested in the progress of these reforms.Northcote.—“He was my private secretary; and one of the very best imaginable; pliant, ready, diligent, quick, acute, with plenty of humour, and a temper simply perfect. But as a leader, I think ill of him; you had a conversation; he saw the reason of your case; and when he left, you supposed all was right. But at the second interview, you always found that he had been unable to persuade his friends. What could be weaker than his conduct on the Bradlaugh affair! You could not wonder that the rank and file of his men should be caught by the proposition[pg 466]that an atheist ought not to sit in parliament. But what is a leader good for, if he dare not tell his party that in a matter like this they are wrong, and of course nobody knew better than N. that they were wrong. A clever, quick man with fine temper. By the way, how is it that we have no word, no respectable word, for backbone?”J. M.—Character?Mr. G.—Well, character; yes; but that's vague. It means will, I suppose. (I ought to have thought of Novalis's well-known definition of character as“a completely fashioned will.”)J. M.—Our inferiority to the Greeks in discriminations of language shown by our lack of precise equivalents for φρόνησις, σοφία, σωφροσύνη, etc., of which we used to hear so much when coached in theEthics.Mr. G. went on to argue that because the Greeks drew these fine distinctions in words, they were superior in conduct.“You cannot beat the Greeks in noble qualities.”Mr. G.—I admit there is no Greek word of good credit for the virtue of humility.J. M.—ταπεινότης? But that has an association of meanness.Mr. G.—Yes; a shabby sort of humility. Humility as a sovereign grace is the creation of Christianity.Friday, December 18.—Brilliant sunshine, but bitterly cold; an east wind blowing straight from the Maritime Alps. Walking, reading, talking. Mr. G. after breakfast took me into his room, where he is reading Heine, Butcher on Greek genius, and Marbot. Thought Thiers's well-known remark on Heine's death capital,—“To-day the wittiest Frenchman alive has died.”Mr. G.—We have talked about the best line in poetry, etc. How do you answer this question—Which century of English history produced the greatest men?J. M.—What do you say to the sixteenth?Mr. G.—Yes, I think so. Gardiner was a great man. Henryviii.was great. But bad. Poor Cranmer. Like Northcote, he'd no backbone. Do you remember Jeremy Collier's sentence about his bravery at the stake, which[pg 467]Table-TalkI count one of the grandest in English prose—“He seemed to repel the force of the fire and to overlook the torture, by strength of thought.”289Thucydides could not beat that.The old man twice declaimed the sentence with deep sonorous voice, and his usual incomparable modulation.Mr. G. talked of a certain General ——. He was thought to be a first-rate man; neglected nothing, looked to things himself, conceived admirable plans, and at last got an important command. Then to the universal surprise, nothing came of it; —— they said,“could do everything that a commander should do, except say,Quick march.”There are plenty of politicians of that stamp, but Mr. G. decidedly not one of them. I mentioned a farewell dinner given to —— in the spring, by some rich man or other. It cost £560 for forty-eight guests! Flowers alone £150. Mr. G. on this enormity, recalled a dinner to Talfourd about copyright at the old Clarendon Hotel in Bond Street, and the price was £2, 17s. 6d. a head. The old East India Company used to give dinners at a cost of seven guineas a head. He has a wonderfully lively interest for these matters, and his curiosity as to the prices of things in the shop-windows is inexhaustible. We got round to Goethe. Goethe, he said, never gave prominence to duty.J. M.—Surely, surely in that fine psalm of life,Das Göttliche?Mr. G.—Döllinger used to confront me with theIphigenieas a great drama of duty.He wished that I had known Döllinger—“a man thoroughly from beginning to end of his lifepurged of self.”Mistook the nature of the Irish questions, from the erroneous view that Irish Catholicism is ultramontane, which it certainly is not.Saturday, Dec. 19.—What is extraordinary is that all Mr. G.'s versatility, buoyancy, and the rest goes with the most profound accuracy and intense concentration when any point of public business[pg 468]is raised. Something was said of the salaries of bishops. He was ready in an instant with every figure and detail, and every circumstance of the history of the foundation of the Ecclesiastical Commission in 1835-6. Then hissavoir faireand wisdom of parliamentary conduct.“I always made it a rule in the H. of C. to allow nobody to suppose that I did not like him, and to say as little as I could to prevent anybody from liking me. Considering the intense friction and contention of public life, it is a saving of wear and tear that as many as possible even among opponents should think well of one.”Sunday, Dec. 20.—At table, a little discussion as to the happiness and misery of animal creation. Outside of man Mr. G. argued against Tennyson's description of Nature as red in tooth and claw. Apart from man, he said, and the action of man, sentient beings are happy and not miserable. But Fear? we said. No; they are unaware of impending doom; when hawk or kite pounces on its prey, the small bird has little or no apprehension; 'tis death, but death by appointed and unforeseen lot.J. M.—There is Hunger. Is not the probability that most creatures are always hungry, not excepting Man?To this he rather assented. Of course optimism like this is indispensable as the basis of natural theology.Talked to Mr. G. about Michelet's Tableau de la France, which I had just finished in vol. 2 of the history. A brilliant tour de force, but strains the relations of soil to character; compels words and facts to be the slaves of his phantasy; the modicum of reality overlaid with violent paradox and foregone conclusion. Mr. G. not very much interested—seems only to care for political and church history.Monday, Dec. 31.—Mr. G. did not appear at table to-day, suffering from a surfeit of wild strawberries the day before. But he dined in his dressing gown, and I had some chat with him in his room after lunch.Mr. G.—“'Tis a hard law of political things that if a man shows special competence in a department, that is the very thing most likely to keep him there, and prevent his promotion.”[pg 469]Table-TalkMr. G.—I consider Burke a tripartite man: America, France, Ireland—right as to two, wrong in one.J. M.—Must you not add home affairs and India? HisThoughts on the Discontentsis a masterpiece of civil wisdom, and the right defence in a great constitutional struggle. Then he gave fourteen years of industry to Warren Hastings, and teaching England the rights of the natives, princes and people, and her own duties. So he was right in four out of five.Mr. G.—Yes, yes—quite true. Those two ought to be added to my three. There is a saying of Burke's from which I must utterly dissent.“Property is sluggish and inert.”Quite the contrary. Property is vigilant, active, sleepless; if ever it seems to slumber, be sure that one eye is open.Marie Antoinette.I once read the three volumes of letters from Mercy d'Argenteau to Maria Theresa. He seems to have performed the duty imposed upon him with fidelity.J. M.—Don't you think the Empress comes out well in the correspondence?Mr. G.—Yes, she shows always judgment and sagacity.J. M.—Ah, but besides sagacity, worth and as much integrity as those slippery times allowed.Mr. G.—Yes (but rather reluctantly, I thought). As for Marie Antoinette, she was not a striking character in any senses she was horribly frivolous; and, I suppose, we must say she was, what shall I call it—a very considerable flirt?J. M.—The only case with real foundation seems to be that of thebeau Fersen, the Swedish secretary. He too came to as tragic an end as the Queen.Tuesday, Dec. 22.—Mr. G. still somewhat indisposed—but reading away all day long. Full of Marbot. Delighted with the story of the battle of Castiglione: how when Napoleon held a council of war, and they all said they were hemmed in, and that their only chance was to back out, Augereau roughly cried that they might all do what they liked, but he would attack the enemy cost what it might.“Exactly like a place in theIliad; when Agamemnon and the rest sit sorrowful in the assembly arguing that it was[pg 470]useless to withstand the sovereign will of Zeus, and that they had better flee into their ships, Diomed bursts out that whatever others think, in any event he and Sthenelus, his squire, will hold firm, and never desist from the onslaught until they have laid waste the walls of Troy.”290A large dose of Diomed in Mr. G. himself.Talk about the dangerous isolation in which the monarchy will find itself in England if the hereditary principle goes down in the House of Lords;“it will stand bare, naked, with no shelter or shield, only endured as the better of two evils.”“I once asked,”he said,“who besides myself in the party cares for the hereditary principle? The answer was, That perhaps —— cared for it!!”—naming a member of the party supposed to be rather sapient than sage.News in the paper that the Comte de Paris in his discouragement was about to renounce his claims, and break up his party. Somehow this brought us round to Tocqueville, of whom Mr. G. spoke as the nearest French approach to Burke.J. M.—But pale and without passion. Who was it that said of him that he was an aristocrat who accepted his defeat? That is, he knew democracy to be the conqueror, but he doubted how far it would be an improvement, he saw its perils, etc.Mr. G.—I have not much faith in these estimates, whether in favour of progress or against it. I don't believe in comparisons of age with age. How can a man strike a balance between one government and another? How can he place himself in such an attitude, and with such comprehensive sureness of vision, as to say that the thirteenth century was better or higher or worse or lower than the nineteenth?Thursday, Dec. 24.—At lunch we had the news of the Parnellite victory at Waterford. A disagreeable reverse for us. Mr. G. did not say many words about it, only that it would give heart to the mischief makers—only too certain. But we said no more about it. He and I took a walk on the sands in the afternoon, and had a curious talk (considering), about the prospects of the church of England. He was[pg 471]Ecclesiasticalanxious to know about my talk some time ago with the Bishop of —— whom I had met at a feast at Lincoln's Inn. I gave him as good an account as I could of what had passed. Mr. G. doubted that this prelate was fundamentally an Erastian, as Tait was. Mr. G. is eager to read the signs of the times as to the prospects of Anglican Christianity, to which his heart is given; and he fears the peril of Erastianism to the spiritual life of the church, which is naturally the only thing worth caring about. Hence, he talked with much interest of the question whether the clever fellows at Oxford and Cambridge now take orders. He wants to know what kind of defenders his church is likely to have in days to come. Said that for the first time interest has moved away both from politics and theology, towards the vague something which they call social reform; and he thinks they won't make much out of that in the way of permanent results. The establishment he considers safer than it has been for a long time.As to Welsh disestablishment, he said it was a pity that where the national sentiment was so unanimous as it was in Wales, the operation itself should not be as simple as in Scotland. In Scotland sentiment is not unanimous, but the operation is easy. In Wales sentiment is all one way, but the operation difficult—a good deal more difficult than people suppose, as they will find out when they come to tackle it.[Perhaps it may be mentioned here that, though we always talked freely and abundantly together upon ecclesiastical affairs and persons, we never once exchanged a word upon theology or religious creed, either at Biarritz or anywhere else.]Pitt.—A strong denunciation of Pitt for the French war. People don't realise what the French war meant. In 1812 wheat at Liverpool was 20s. (?) the imperial bushel of 65 pounds (?)! Think of that, when you bring it into figures of the cost of a loaf. And that was the time when Eaton, Eastnor, and other great palaces were built by the landlords out of the high rents which the war and war prices enabled them to exact.[pg 472]Wished we knew more of Melbourne. He was in many ways a very fine fellow.“In two of the most important of all the relations of a prime minister, he was perfect; I mean first, his relations to the Queen, second to his colleagues.”Somebody at dinner quoted a capital description of the perverse fashion of talking that prevailed at Oxford soon after my time, and prevails there now, I fancy—“hunting for epigrammatic ways of saying what you don't think.”—— was the father of this pestilent mode.Rather puzzled him by repeating a saying of mine that used to amuse Fitzjames Stephen, that Love of Truth is more often than we think only a fine name for Temper. I think Mr. G. has a thorough dislike for anything that has a cynical or sardonic flavour about it. I wish I had thought, by the way, of asking him what he had to say of that piece of Swift's, about all objects being insipid that do not come by delusion, and everything being shrunken as it appears in the glass of nature, so that if it were not for artificial mediums, refracted angles, false lights, varnish and tinsel, there would be pretty much of a level in the felicity of mortal man.Am always feeling how strong is his aversion to seeing more than he can help of what is sordid, mean, ignoble. He has not been in public life all these years without rubbing shoulders with plenty of baseness on every scale, and plenty of pettiness in every hue, but he has always kept his eyes well above it. Never was a man more wholly free of the starch of the censor, more ready to make allowance, nor more indulgent even; he enters into human nature in all its compass. But he won't linger a minute longer than he must in the dingy places of life and character.Christmas Day, 1891.—A divine day, brilliant sunshine, and mild spring air. Mr. G. heard what he called an admirable sermon from an English preacher,“with a great command of his art.”A quietish day, Mr. G. no doubt engaged in φρονεῖν τὰ ὅσια.Saturday, Dec. 26.—Once more a noble day. We started in a couple of carriages for the Négress station, a couple of miles away or more, I with the G.'s. Occasion produced the Greek epitaph of the nameless drowned sailor[pg 473]Fuentarabiawho wished for others kinder seas.291Mr. G. felt its pathos and its noble charm—so direct and simple, such benignity, such a good lesson to men to forget their own misdeeds and mischance, and to pray for the passer-by a happier star. He repaid me by two epigrams of a different vein, and one admirable translation into Greek, of Tennyson on Sir John Franklin, which I do not carry in my mind; another on a boisterous Eton fellow—Didactic, dry, declamatory, dull,The bursar —— bellows like a bull.Just in the tone of Greek epigram, a sort of point, but not too much point.Parliamentary Wit.—Thought Disraeli had never been surpassed, nor even equalled, in this line. He had a contest with General Grey, who stood upon the general merits of the whig government, after both Lord Grey and Stanley had left it. D. drew a picture of a circus man who advertised his show with its incomparable team of six grey horses. One died, he replaced it by a mule. Another died, and he put in a donkey, still he went on advertising his team of greys all the same. Canning's wit not to be found conspicuously in his speeches, but highly agreeable pleasantries, though many of them in a vein which would jar horribly on modern taste.Some English redcoats and a pack of hounds passed us as we neared the station. They saluted Mr. G. with a politeness that astonished him, but was pleasant. Took the train for Irun, the fields and mountain slopes delightful in the sun, and the sea on our right a superb blue such as we never see in English waters. At Irun we found carriages waiting to take us on to Fuentarabia. From the balcony of the church had a beautiful view over the scene of Wellington's operations when he crossed the Bidassoa, in the presence of the astonished Soult. A lovely picture, made none the worse by this excellent historic association. The[pg 474]alcalde was extremely polite and intelligent. The consul who was with us showed a board on the old tower, in whichvin some words wasb, and I noted that the alcalde spoke of Viarritz. I reminded Mr. G. of Scaliger's epigram—Haud temere antiquas mutat Vasconia voces,Cui nihil est alind vivere quam bibere.Pretty cold driving home, but Mr. G. seemed not to care. He found both the churches at St. Jean and at Fuentarabia very noteworthy, though the latter very popish, but both, he felt,“had a certain association with grandeur.”Sunday, Dec. 27.—After some quarter of an hour of travellers' topics, we plunged into one of the most interesting talks we have yet had.Aproposof I do not know what, Mr. G. said that he had not advised his son to enter public life.“No doubt there are some men to whom station, wealth, and family traditions make it a duty. But I have never advised any individual, as to whom I have been consulted, to enter the H. of C.”J. M.—But isn't that rather to encourage self-indulgence? Nobody who cares for ease or mental composure would seek public life?Mr. G.—Ah, I don't know that. Surely politics open up a great field for the natural man. Self-seeking, pride, domination, power—all these passions are gratified in politics.J. M.—You cannot be sure of achievement in politics, whether personal or public?Mr. G.—No; to use Bacon's pregnant phrase, they are too immersed in matter. Then as new matter, that is, new details and particulars, come into view, men change their judgment.J. M.—You have spoken just now of somebody as a thorough good tory. You know the saying that nobody is worth much who has not been a bit of a radical in his youth, and a bit of a tory in his fuller age.Mr. G.(laughing)—Ah, I'm afraid that hits me rather hard. But for myself, I think I can truly put up all the change that has come into my politics into a sentence; I[pg 475]Disenchantment A Mistakewas brought up to distrust and dislike liberty, I learned to believe in it. That is the key to all my changes.J. M.—According to my observation, the change in my own generation is different. They have ceased either to trust or to distrust liberty, and have come to the mind that it matters little either way. Men are disenchanted. They have got what they wanted in the days of their youth, yet what of it, they ask? France has thrown off the Empire, but the statesmen of the republic are not a great breed. Italy has gained her unity, yet unity has not been followed by thrift, wisdom, or large increase of public virtue or happiness. America has purged herself of slavery, yet life in America is material, prosaic,—so say some of her own rarest sons. Don't think that I say all these things. But I know able and high-minded men who suffer from this disenchantment.Mr. G.—Italy would have been very different if Cavour had only lived—and even Ricasoli. Men ought not to suffer from disenchantment. They ought to know thatideals in politics are never realised. And don't let us forget in eastern Europe the rescue in our time of some ten millions of men from the harrowing domination of the Turk. (On this he expatiated, and very justly, with much energy.)We turned to our own country. Here he insisted that democracy had certainly not saved us from a distinct decline in the standard of public men.... Look at the whole conduct of opposition from '80 to '85—every principle was flung overboard, if they could manufacture a combination against the government. For all this deterioration one man and one man alone is responsible, Disraeli. He is the grand corrupter. He it was who sowed the seed.J. M.—Ought not Palmerston to bear some share in this?Mr. G.—No, no; Pam. had many strong and liberal convictions. On one subject Dizzy had them too—the Jews. There he was much more than rational, he was fanatical. He said once that Providence would deal good or ill fortune to nations, according as they dealt well or ill by the Jews. I remember once sitting next to John Russell when D. was[pg 476]making a speech on Jewish emancipation.“Look at him,”said J. R.,“how manfully he sticks to it, tho' he knows that every word he says is gall and wormwood to every man who sits around him and behind him.”A curious irony, was it not, that it should have fallen to me to propose a motion for a memorial both to Pam. and Dizzy?A superb scene upon the ocean, with a grand wind from the west. Mr. G. and I walked on the shore; he has a passion for tumultuous seas. I have never seen such huge masses of water shattering themselves among the rocks.In the evening Mr. G. remarked on our debt to Macaulay, for guarding the purity of the English tongue. I recalled a favourite passage from Milton, that next to the man who gives wise and intrepid counsels of government, he places the man who cares for the purity of his mother tongue. Mr. G. liked this. Said he only knew Bright once slip into an error in this respect, when he used“transpire”for“happen.”Macaulay of good example also in rigorously abstaining from the inclusion of matter in footnotes. Hallam an offender in this respect. I pointed out that he offended in company with Gibbon.Monday, Dec. 28.—We had an animated hour at breakfast.Oxford and Cambridge.—Curious how, like two buckets, whenever one was up, the other was down. Cambridge has never produced four such men of action in successive ages as Wolsey, Laud, Wesley, and Newman.J. M.—In the region of thought Cambridge has produced the greatest of all names, Newton.Mr. G.—In the earlier times Oxford has it—with Wycliff, Occam, above all Roger Bacon. And then in the eighteenth century, Butler.J. M.—But why not Locke, too, in the century before?This brought on a tremendous tussle, for Mr. G. was of the same mind, and perhaps for the same sort of reason, as Joseph de Maistre, that contempt for Locke is the beginning of knowledge. All very well for De Maistre, but not for a man in line with European liberalism. I pressed the very obvious point that you must take into account not only a man's intellectual product or his general stature, but also[pg 477]Table-Talkhis influence as a historic force. From the point of view of influence Locke was the origin of the emancipatory movement of the eighteenth century abroad, and laid the philosophic foundations of liberalism in civil government at home. Mr. G. insisted on a passage of Hume's which he believed to be in the history, disparaging Locke as a metaphysical thinker.292“That may be,”said I,“though Hume in hisEssaysis not above paying many compliments to‘the great reasoner,’etc., to whom, for that matter, I fancy that he stood in pretty direct relation. But far be it from me to deny that Hume saw deeper than Locke into the metaphysical millstone. That is not the point. I'm only thinking of his historic place, and, after all, the history of philosophy is itself a philosophy.”To minds nursed in dogmatic schools, all this is both unpalatable and incredible.Somehow we slid into the freedom of the will and Jonathan Edwards. I told him that Mill had often told us how Edwards argued the necessarian or determinist case as keenly as any modern.Tuesday, Dec. 29.—Mr. G. 82 to-day. I gave him Mackail's Greek Epigrams, and if it affords him half as much pleasure as it has given me, he will be very grateful. Various people brought Mr. G. bouquets and addresses. Mr. G. went to church in the morning, and in the afternoon took a walk with me....Land Question.As you go through France you see the soil cultivated by the population. In our little dash into Spain the other day, we saw again the soil cultivated by the population. In England it is cultivated by the capitalist, for the farmer is capitalist. Some astonishing views recently propounded by D. of Argyll on this matter. Unearned increment—so terribly difficult to catch it. Perhaps best try to get at it through the death duties. Physical condition of our people—always a subject of great anxiety—their stature, colour, and so on. Feared the atmosphere of cotton factories, etc., very deleterious. As against bad air, I said, you must set good food; the Lancashire operative in decent times lives uncommonly well, as he deserves to do. He agreed there might be something in this.[pg 478]The day was humid and muggy, but the tumult of the sea was most majestic. Mr. G. delighted in it. He has a passion for the sound of the sea; would like to have it in his ear all day and all night. Again and again he recurred to this.After dinner, long talk about Mazzini, of whom Mr. G. thought poorly in comparison with Poerio and the others who for freedom sacrificed their lives. I stood up for Mazzini, as one of the most morally impressive men I had ever known, or that his age knew; he breathed a soul into democracy.Then we fell into a discussion as to the eastern and western churches. He thought the western popes by their proffered alliance with the mahometans, etc., had betrayed Christianity in the east. I offered De Maistre's view.Mr. G. strongly assented to old Chatham's dictum that vacancy is worse than even the most anxious work. He has less to reproach himself with than most men under that head.He repeated an observation that I have heard him make before, that he thought politicians are morerapidthan other people. I told him that Bowen once said to me on this that he did not agree; that he thought rapidity the mark of all successful men in the practical line of life, merchants and stockbrokers, etc.Wednesday, Dec. 30.—A very muggy day. A divine sunset, with the loveliest pink and opal tints in the sky. Mr. G. reading Gleig'sSubaltern. Not a very entertaining book in itself, but the incidents belong to Wellington's Pyrenean campaign, and, for my own part, I rather enjoyed it on the principle on which one likes readingRomolaat Florence,Transformationat Rome,Sylvia's Loversat Whitby, andHurrishon the northern edge of Clare.Thursday, Dec. 31.—Down to the pier, and found all the party watching the breakers, and superb they were. Mr. G. exulting in the huge force of the Atlantic swell and the beat of the rollers on the shore, like a Titanic pulse.After dinner Mr. G. raised the question of payment of members. He had been asked by somebody whether he meant at Newcastle to indicate that everybody should be paid, or only those who chose to take it or to ask[pg 479]Payment Of Membersfor it. He produced the same extraordinary plan as he had described to me on the morning of his Newcastle speech—i.e.that the Inland Revenue should ascertain from their own books the income of every M.P., and if they found any below the limit of exemption, should notify the same to the Speaker, and the Speaker should thereupon send to the said M.P. below the limit an annual cheque for, say, £300, the name to appear in an annual return to Parliament of all the M.P.'s in receipt of public money on any grounds whatever. I demurred to this altogether, as drawing an invidious distinction between paid and unpaid members; said it was idle to ignore the theory on which the demand for paid members is based, namely, that it is desirable in the public interest that poor men should have access to the H. of C.; and that the poor man should stand there on the same footing as anybody else.Friday, Jan. 1, 1892.—After breakfast Mrs. Gladstone came to my room and said how glad she was that I had not scrupled to put unpleasant points; that Mr. G. must not be shielded and sheltered as some great people are, who hear all the pleasant things and none of the unpleasant; that the perturbation from what is disagreeable only lasts an hour. I said I hoped that I was faithful with him, but of course I could not be always putting myself in an attitude of perpetual controversy. She said,“He is never made angry by what you say.”And so she went away, and —— and I had a good and most useful set-to about Irish finance.At luncheon Mr. G. asked what we had made out of our morning's work. When we told him he showed a good deal of impatience and vehemence, and, to my dismay, he came upon union finance and the general subject of the treatment of Ireland by England....In the afternoon we took a walk, he and I, afterwards joined by the rest. He was as delighted as ever with the swell of the waves, as they bounded over one another, with every variety of grace and tumultuous power. He wondered if we had not more and better words for the sea than the French—“breaker,”“billow,”“roller,”as against“flot,”“vague,”“onde,”“lame,”etc.[pg 480]At dinner he asked me whether I had made up my mind on the burning question of compulsory Greek for a university degree. I said, No, that as then advised I was half inclined to be against compulsory Greek, but it is so important that I would not decide before I was obliged.“So with me,”he said,“the question is one with many subtle and deep-reaching consequences.”He dwelt on the folly of striking Italian out of the course of modern education, thus cutting European history in two, and setting an artificial gulf between the ancient and modern worlds.Saturday, Jan. 2.—Superb morning, and all the better for being much cooler. At breakfast somebody started the idle topic of quill pens. When they came to the length of time that so-and-so made a quill serve,“De Retz,”said I,“made up his mind that Cardinal Chigi was a poor creature,maximus in minimis, because at their first interview Chigi boasted that he had used one pen for three years.”That recalled another saying of Retz's about Cromwell's famous dictum, that nobody goes so far as the man who does not know where he is going. Mr. G. gave his deep and eager Ah! to this. He could not recall that Cromwell had produced many dicta of such quality.“I don't love him, but he was a mighty big fellow. But he was intolerant. He was intolerant of the episcopalians.”Mr. G.—Do you know whom I find the most tolerant churchman of that time?Laud!Laud got Davenant made Bishop of Salisbury, and he zealously befriended Chillingworth and Hales. (There was some other case, which I forget.)The execution of Charles.—I told him of Gardiner's new volume which I had just been reading.“Charles,”he said,“was no doubt a dreadful liar; Cromwell perhaps did not always tell the truth; Elizabeth was a tremendous liar.”J. M.—Charles was not wholly inexcusable, being what he was, for thinking that he had a good game in his hands, by playing off the parliament against the army, etc.Mr. G.—There was less excuse for cutting off his head than in the case of poor Louisxvi., for Louis was the excuse for foreign invasion.[pg 481]At BayonneJ. M.—Could you call foreign invasion the intervention of the Scotch?Mr. G.—Well, not quite. I suppose it is certain that it was Cromwell who cut off Charles's head? Not one in a hundred in the nation desired it.J. M.—No, nor one in twenty in the parliament. But then, ninety-nine in a hundred in the army.In the afternoon we all drove towards Bayonne to watch the ships struggle over the bar at high water. As it happened we only saw one pass out, a countryman for Cardiff. A string of others were waiting to go, but a little steamer from Nantes came first, and having secured her station, found she had not force enough to make the bar, and the others remained swearing impatiently behind her. The Nantes steamer was like Ireland. The scene was very fresh and fine, and the cold most exhilarating after the mugginess of the last two or three days. Mr. G., who has a dizzy head, did not venture on the jetty, but watched things from the sands. He and I drove home together, at a good pace.“I am inclined,”he said laughingly,“to agree with Dr. Johnson that there is no pleasure greater than sitting behind four fast-going horses.”293Talking of Johnson generally,“I suppose we may take him as the best product of the eighteenth century.”Perhaps so, but is he its most characteristic product?Wellington.—Curious that there should be no general estimate of W.'s character; his character not merely as a general but as a man. No love of freedom. His sense of duty very strong, but military rather than civil.Montalembert.—Had often come into contact with him. A very amiable and attractive man. But less remarkable than Rio.Latin Poets.—Would you place Virgil first?J. M.—Oh, no, Lucretius much the first for the greatest and sublimest of poetic qualities. Mr. G. seemed to assent to this, though disposed to make a fight for the secondAeneidas equal to anything. He expressed his admiration for[pg 482]Catullus, and then he was strong that Horace would run anybody else very hard, breaking out with the lines about Regulus—“Atqui sciebat quæ sibi barbarusTortor pararet;”etc.294Blunders in Government.—How right Napoleon was when he said, reflecting on all the vast complexities of government, that the best to be said of a statesman is that he has avoided the biggest blunders.It is not easy to define the charm of these conversations. Is charm the right word? They are in the highest degree stimulating, bracing, widening. That is certain. I return to my room with the sensations of a man who has taken delightful exercise in fresh air. He is so wholly free from theergoteur. There's all the difference between theergoteurand the great debater. He fits his tone to the thing; he can be as playful as anybody. In truth I have many a time seen him in London and at Hawarden not far from trivial. But here at Biarritz all is appropriate, and though, as I say, he can be playful and gay as youth, he cannot resist rising in an instant to the general point of view—to grasp the elemental considerations of character, history, belief, conduct, affairs. There he is at home, there he is most himself. I never knew anybody less guilty of the tiresome sin of arguing for victory. It is not his knowledge that attracts; it is not his ethical tests and standards; it is not that dialectical strength of arm which, as Mark Pattison said of him, could twist a bar of iron to its purpose. It is the combination of these with elevation, with true sincerity, with extraordinary mental force.Sunday, Jan. 3.—Vauvenargues is right when he says that to carry through great undertakings, one must act as though one could never die. My wonderful companion is a wonderful illustration. He is like M. Angelo, who, just before he died on the very edge of ninety, made an allegorical figure, and inscribed upon it,ancora impara,“still learning.”At dinner he showed in full force.[pg 483]Table-TalkHeroes of the Old Testament.—He could not honestly say that he thought there was any figure in the O. T. comparable to the heroes of Homer. Moses was a fine fellow. But the others were of secondary quality—not great high personages, of commanding nature.Thinkers.—Rather an absurd word—to call a man a thinker (and he repeated the word with gay mockery in his tone). When did it come into use? Not until quite our own times, eh? I said, I believed both Hobbes and Locke spoke of thinkers, and was pretty sure thatpenseur, as inlibre penseur, had established itself in the last century. [Quite true; Voltaire used it, but it was not common.]Dr. Arnold.—A high, large, impressive figure—perhaps more important by his character and personality than his actual work. I mentioned M. A.'s poem on his father,Rugby Chapel, with admiration. Rather to my surprise, Mr. G. knew the poem well, and shared my admiration to the full. This brought us on to poetry generally, and he expatiated with much eloquence and sincerity for the rest of the talk. The wonderful continuity of fine poetry in England for five whole centuries, stretching from Chaucer to Tennyson, always a proof to his mind of the soundness, the sap, and the vitality of our nation and its character. What people, beginning with such a poet as Chaucer 500 years ago, could have burst forth into such astonishing production of poetry as marked the first quarter of the century, Byron, Wordsworth, Shelley, etc.J. M.—It is true that Germany has nothing, save Goethe, Schiller, Heine, that's her whole list. But I should say a word for the poetic movement in France: Hugo, Gautier, etc. Mr. G. evidently knew but little, or even nothing, of modern French poetry. He spoke up for Leopardi, on whom he had written an article first introducing him to the British public, ever so many years ago—in theQuarterly.Mr. G.—Wordsworth used occasionally to dine with me when I lived in the Albany. A most agreeable man. I always found him amiable, polite, and sympathetic. Only once did he jar upon me, when he spoke slightingly of Tennyson's first performance.[pg 484]J. M.—But he was not so wrong as he would be now. Tennyson's Juvenilia are terribly artificial.Mr. G.—Yes, perhaps. Tennyson has himself withdrawn some of them. I remember W., when he dined with me, used on leaving to change his silk stockings in the anteroom and put on grey worsted.J. M.—I once said to M. Arnold that I'd rather have been Wordsworth than anybody [not exactly a modest ambition]; and Arnold, who knew him well in the Grasmere country, said,“Oh no, you would not; you would wish you were dining with me at the Athenæum. He was too much of the peasant for you.”Mr. G.—No, I never felt that; I always thought him a polite and an amiable man.Mentioned Macaulay's strange judgment in a note in theHistory, that Dryden's famous lines,“... Fool'd with hope, men favour the deceit;Trust on, and think to-morrow will repay.To-morrow's falser than the former day;Lies worse, and while it says we shall be blestWith some new joys, cuts off what we possest.Strange cozenage!...”are as fine as any eight lines in Lucretius. Told him of an excellent remark of —— on this, that Dryden's passage wholly lacks the mystery and great superhuman air of Lucretius. Mr. G. warmly agreed.He regards it as a remarkable sign of the closeness of the church of England to the roots of life and feeling in the country, that so many clergymen should have written so much good poetry. Who, for instance? I asked. He named Heber, Moultrie, Newman (Dream of Gerontius), and Faber in at least one good poem,“The poor Labourer”(or some such title), Charles Tennyson. I doubt if this thesis has much body in it. He was for Shelley as the most musical of all our poets. I told him that I had once asked M. to get Tennyson to write an autograph line for a friend of mine, and Tennyson had sent this:—“Coldly on the dead volcano sleeps the gleam of dying day.”So I suppose the poet must think well of it himself. 'Tis[pg 485]Table-Talkfrom the secondLocksley Hall, and describes a man after passions have gone cool.Mr. G.—Yes, in melody, in the picturesque, and as apt simile, a fine line.Had been trying his hand at a translation of his favourite lines of Penelope about Odysseus. Said that, of course, you could translate similes and set passages, but to translate Homer as a whole, impossible. He was inclined, when all is said, to think Scott the nearest approach to a model.Monday, Jan. 4.—At luncheon, Mr. Gladstone recalled the well-known story of Talleyrand on the death of Napoleon. The news was brought when T. chanced to be dining with Wellington.“Quel événement!”they all cried.“Non, ce n'est pas un événement,”said Talleyrand,“c'est une nouvelle”—'Tis no event, 'tis a piece of news.“Imagine such a way,”said Mr. G.,“of taking the disappearance of that colossal man! Compare it with the opening of Manzoni's ode, which makes the whole earth stand still. Yet both points of view are right. In one sense, the giant's death was only news; in another, when we think of his history, it was enough to shake the world.”At the moment, he could not recall Manzoni's words, but at dinner he told me that he had succeeded in piecing them together, and after dinner he went to his room and wrote them down for me on a piece of paper. Curiously enough, he could not recall the passage in his own splendid translation.295Talk about handsome men of the past; Sidney Herbert one of the handsomest and most attractive. But the Duke of Hamilton bore away the palm, as glorious as a Greek god.“One day in Rotten Row, I said this to the Duchess of C. She set up James Hope-Scott against my Duke. No doubt he had an intellectual element which the Duke lacked.”Then we discussed the best-looking man in the H. of C. to-day....Duke of Wellington.—Somebody was expatiating on the incomparable position of the Duke; his popularity with kings, with nobles, with common people. Mr. G. remembered[pg 486]that immediately after the formation of Canning's government in 1827, when it was generally thought that he had been most unfairly and factiously treated (as Mr. G. still thinks, always saving Peel) by the Duke and his friends, the Duke made an expedition to the north of England, and had an overwhelming reception. Of course, he was then only twelve years from Waterloo, and yet only four or five years later he had to put up his iron shutters.Approved a remark that a friend of ours was not simple enough, not ready enough to take things as they come.Mr. G.—Unless a man has a considerable gift for taking things as they come, he may make up his mind that political life will be sheer torment to him. He must meet fortune in all its moods.Tuesday, Jan. 5.—After dinner to-day, Mr. G. extraordinarily gay. He had bought a present of silver for his wife. She tried to guess the price, and after the manner of wives in such a case, put the figure provokingly low. Mr. G. then put on the deprecating air of the tradesman with wounded feelings—and it was as capital fun as we could desire. That over, he fell to his backgammon with our host.Wednesday, Jan. 6.—Mrs. Gladstone eighty to-day! What a marvel....Léon Say called to see Mr. G. Long and most interesting conversation about all sorts of aspects of French politics, the concordat, the schools, and all the rest of it.He illustrated the ignorance of French peasantry as to current affairs. Thiers, long after he had become famous, went on a visit to his native region; and there met a friend of his youth.“Eh bien,”said his friend,“tu as fait ton chemin.”“Mais oui, j'ai fait un peu mon chemin. J'ai été ministre même.”“Ah, tiens! je ne savais pas que tu étais protestant.”I am constantly struck by his solicitude for the well-being and right doing of Oxford and Cambridge—“the two eyes of the country.”This connection between the higher education and the general movement of the national mind engages his profound attention, and no doubt deserves such attention[pg 487]Table-Talkin any statesman who looks beyond the mere surface problems of the day. To perceive the bearings of such matters as these, makes Mr. G. a statesman of the highest class, as distinguished from men of clever expedients.Mr. G. had been reading the Greek epigrams on religion in Mackail; quoted the last of them as illustrating the description of the dead as the inhabitants of the more populous world:—τῶν ἄπο κὴν ζωοῖσιν ἀκηδέα, κευτ᾽ ἄν ἵκηαιὲς πλεόνων, ἕξεις θυμὸν ἐλαφρότερον.296A more impressive epigram contains the same thought, where the old man, leaning on his staff, likens himself to the withered vine on its dry pole, and goes on to ask himself what advantage it would be to warm himself for three or four more years in the sun; and on that reflection without heroics put off his life, and changed his home to the greater company,κὴς πλεόνων ἦλθε μετοικεσίην.All the rest of the evening he kept us alive by a stock of infinite drolleries. A scene of a dish of over-boiled tea at West Calder after a meeting, would have made the fortune of a comedian.I said that in the all-important quality of co-operation, —— was only good on condition of being in front. Mr. G. read him in the same sense. Reminded of a mare he once had—admirable, provided you kept off spur, curb, or whip; show her one of these things, and she would do nothing. Mr. G. more of a judge of men than is commonly thought.Told us of a Chinese despatch which came under his notice when he was at the board of trade, and gave him food for reflection. A ship laden with grain came to Canton. The administrator wrote to the central government at Pekin to know whether the ship was to pay duty and land its cargo. The answer was to the effect that the central government of the Flowery Land was quite indifferent as a rule to the goings and comings of the Barbarians; whether they brought a cargo or brought no cargo was a thing of supreme unconcern.“But this cargo, you say, is food for the people. There ought to be[pg 488]no obstacle to the entry of food for the people. So let it in. Your Younger Brother commends himself to you, etc. etc.”Friday, Jan. 8.—A quiet evening. We were all rather piano at the end of an episode which had been thoroughly delightful. When Mr. G. bade me good-night, he said with real feeling,“More sorry than I can say that this is our last evening together at Biarritz.”He is painfully grieved to lose the sound of the sea in his ears.Saturday, Jan. 9.—Strolled about all the forenoon.“What a time of blessed composure it has been,”said Mr. G. with a heavy sigh. The distant hills covered with snow, and the voice of the storm gradually swelling. Still the savage fury of the sea was yet some hours off, so we had to leave Biarritz without the spectacle of Atlantic rage at its fiercest.Found comfortable saloon awaiting us at Bayonne, and so under weeping skies we made our way to Pau. The landscape must be pretty, weather permitting. As it was, we saw but little. Mr. G. dozed and read Max Müller's book on Anthropological Religions.Arrived at Pau towards 5.30; drenching rain: nothing to be seen.At tea time, a good little discussion raised by a protest against Dante being praised for a complete survey of human nature and the many phases of human lot. Intensity he has, but insight over the whole field of character and life? Mr. G. did not make any stand against this, and made the curious admission that Dante was too optimist to be placed on a level with Shakespeare, or even with Homer.Then we turned to lighter themes. He had once said to Henry Taylor,“I should have thought he was the sort of man to have a good strong grasp of a subject,”speaking of Lord Grey, who had been one of Taylor's many chiefs at the Colonial Office.“I should have thought,”replied Taylor slowly and with a dreamy look,“he was the sort of man to have a good strongnipof a subject.”Witty, and very applicable to many men.Wordsworth once gave Mr. G. with much complacency, as an example of his own readiness and resource, this story. A man came up to him at Rydal and said,“Do you happen[pg 489]to have seen my wife.”“Why,”replied the Sage,“I did not know you had a wife!”This peculiarly modest attempt at pointed repartee much tickled Mr. G., as well it might.Tuesday, Jan. 12.—Mr. G. completely recovered from two days of indisposition. We had about an hour's talk on things in general, including policy in the approaching session. He did not expect a dissolution, at the same time a dissolution would not surprise him.At noon they started for Périgord and Carcassonne, Nismes, Arles, and so on to the Riviera full of kind things at our parting.[pg 490]
Chapter VI. Biarritz. (1891-1892)Omnium autem ineptiarum, quæ sunt innumerabiles, haud sciam an nulla sit major, quam, ut illi solent, quocunque in loco, quoscunque inter homines visum est, de rebus aut difficillimis aut non necessariis argutissime disputare.—Cicero.Of all the numberless sorts of bad taste and want of tact, perhaps the worst is to insist, no matter where you are or with whom you are, on arguing about the hardest subjects to the full pitch of elaboration and detail.IWe have seen how in 1889 Mr. and Mrs. Gladstone celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of one of the most devoted and successful marriages that ever was made, and the unbroken felicity of their home. In 1891, after the shadows of approaching calamity had for many months hung doubtfully over them, a heavy blow fell, and their eldest son died. Not deeply concerned in ordinary politics, he was a man of many virtues and some admirable gifts; he was an accomplished musician, and I have seen letters of his to his father, marked by a rare delicacy of feeling and true power of expression.“I had known him for nearly thirty years,”one friend wrote,“and there was no man, until his long illness, who had changed so little, or retained so long the best qualities of youth, and my first thought was that the greater the loss to you, the greater would be the consolation.”To Archbishop Benson, Mr. Gladstone wrote (July 6):—It is now forty-six years since we lost a child,285and he who has now passed away from our eyes, leaves to us only blessed recollections. I suppose all feel that those deaths which reverse the order of nature have a sharpness of their own. But setting[pg 461]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.To me he wrote (July 10):—We feel deeply the kindness and tenderness of your letter. It supplies one more link in a long chain of recollection which I deeply prize. Yes, ours is a tribulation, and a sore one, but yet we feel we ought to find ourselves carried out of ourselves by sympathy with the wife whose noble and absorbing devotion had become like an entire life of itself, and who is now face to face with the void. The grief of children too, which passes, is very sharp while it remains. The case has been very remarkable. Though with abatement of some powers, my son has not been without many among the signs and comforts of health during a period of nearly two and a half years. All this time the terrible enemy was lodged in the royal seat, and only his healthy and unyielding constitution kept it at defiance, and maintained his mental and inward life intact.... And most largely has human, as well as divine compassion, flowed in upon us, from none more conspicuously than from yourself, whom we hope to count among near friends for the short remainder of our lives.To another correspondent who did not share his own religious beliefs, he said (July 5):—When I received your last kind note, I fully intended to write to you with freedom on the subject ofThe Agnostic Island. But since then I have been at close quarters, so to speak, with the dispensations of God, for yesterday morning my dearly beloved eldest son was taken from the sight of our eyes. At this moment of bleeding hearts, I will only say what I hope you will in consideration of the motives take without offence, namely this: I would from the bottom of my heart that whenever the hour of bereavement shall befall you or those whom you love, you and they may enjoy the immeasurable consolation of believing, with all the mind and all the heart, that the beloved one is gone into eternal rest, and that those who remain behind may through the same mighty Deliverer hope at their appointed time to rejoin him.[pg 462]All this language on the great occasions of human life was not with him the tone of convention. Whatever the synthesis, as they call it,—whatever the form, whatever the creed and faith may be, he was one of that high and favoured household who, in Emerson's noble phrase,“live from a great depth of being.”Earlier in the year Lord Granville, who so long had been his best friend, died. The loss by his death was severe. As Acton, who knew of their relations well and from within, wrote to Mr. Gladstone (April 1):—There was an admirable fitness in your union, and I had been able to watch how it became closer and easier, in spite of so much to separate you, in mental habits, in early affinities, and even in the form of fundamental convictions, since he came home from your budget, overwhelmed, thirty-eight years ago. I saw all the connections which had their root in social habit fade before the one which took its rise from public life and proved more firm and more enduring than the rest.IIIn September he paid a visit to his relatives at Fasque, and thence he went to Glenalmond—spots that in his tenacious memory must have awakened hosts of old and dear associations. On October 1, he found himself after a long and busy day, at Newcastle-on-Tyne, where he had never stayed since his too memorable visit in 1862.286Since the defeat of the Irish policy in 1886, he had attended the annual meeting of the chief liberal organisation at Nottingham (1887), Birmingham (1888), and Manchester (1889). This year it was the turn of Newcastle. On October 2, he gave his blessing to various measures that afterwards came to be known as the Newcastle programme. After the shock caused by the Irish quarrel, every politician knew that it would be necessary to balance home rule by reforms expected in England and Scotland. No liberal, whatever his particular shade, thought that it would be either honourable or practical to throw the Irish policy overboard, and if there[pg 463]At Newcastlewere any who thought such a course honourable, they knew it would not be safe. The principle and expediency of home rule had taken a much deeper root in the party than it suited some of the trimming tribe later to admit. On the other hand, after five years of pretty exclusive devotion to the Irish case, to pass by the British case and its various demands for an indefinite time longer, would have been absurd.IIIIn the eighties Mr. Gladstone grew into close friendship with one who had for many years been his faithful supporter in the House of Commons as member for Dundee. Nobody ever showed him devotion more considerate, loyal, and unselfish than did Mr. Armitstead, from about the close of the parliament of 1880 down to the end of this story.287In the middle of December 1891 Mr. Armitstead planned a foreign trip for his hero, and persuaded me to join. Biarritz was to be our destination, and the expedition proved a wonderful success. Some notes of mine, though intended only for domestic consumption, may help to bring Mr. Gladstone in his easiest moods before the reader's eye. No new ideas struck fire, no particular contribution was made to grand themes. But a great statesman on a holiday may be forgiven for not trying to discover brand-new keys to philosophy, history, and“all the mythologies.”As a sketch from life of the veteran's buoyancy, vigour, genial freshness of heart and brain, after four-score strenuous years, these few pages may be found of interest.We left Paris at nine in the morning (Dec. 16), and were listening to the swell of the mighty Bay resounding under our windows at Biarritz soon after midnight.The long day's journey left no signs of fatigue on either Mr. or Mrs. Gladstone, and his only regret was that we had[pg 464]not come straight through instead of staying a night in Paris. I'm always for going straight on, he said. For some odd reason in spite of the late hour he was full of stories of American humour, which he told with extraordinary verve and enjoyment. I contributed one that amused him much, of the Bostonian who, having read Shakespeare for the first time, observed,“I call that a very clever book. Now, I don't suppose there are twenty men in Boston to-day who could have written that book!”Thursday, Dec. 17.—Splendid morning for making acquaintance with a new place. Saw the western spur of the Pyrenees falling down to the Bidassoa and the first glimpse of the giant wall, beyond which, according to Michelet, Africa begins, and our first glimpse of Spain.After breakfast we all sallied forth to look into the shops and to see the lie of the land. Mr. G. as interested as a child in all the objects in the shops—many of them showing that we are not far from Spain. The consul very polite, showed us about, and told us the hundred trifles that bring a place really into one's mind. Nothing is like a first morning's stroll in a foreign town. By afternoon the spell dissolves, and the mood comes of Dante's lines,“Era già l'ora,”etc.288Some mention was made of Charles Austin, the famous lawyer: it brought up the case of men who are suddenly torn from lives of great activity to complete idleness.Mr. G.—I don't know how to reconcile it with what I've always regarded as the foundation of character—Bishop Butler's view of habit. How comes it that during the hundreds of years in which priests and fellows of Eton College have retired from hard work to college livings and leisure, not one of them has ever done anything whatever for either scholarship or divinity—not one?Mr. G. did not know Mazzini, but Armellini, another of the Roman triumvirs, taught him Italian in 1832.[pg 465]Opinions On StatesmenI spoke a word for Gambetta, but he would not have it.“Gambetta wasautoritaire; I do not feel as if he were a true liberal in the old and best sense. I cannot forget how hostile he was to the movement for freedom in the Balkans.”Said he only once saw Lord Liverpool. He went to call on Canning at Glos'ter House (close to our Glos'ter Road Station), and there through a glass door he saw Canning and Lord Liverpool talking together.Peel.—Had a good deal of temper; not hot; but perhaps sulky. Not a farsighted man, but fairly clear-sighted.“I called upon him after the election in 1847. The Janissaries, as Bentinck called us, that is the men who had stood by Peel, had been 110 before the election; we came back only 50. Peel said to me that what he looked forward to was a long and fierce struggle on behalf of protection. I must say I thought this foolish. If Bentinck had lived, with his strong will and dogged industry, there might have been a wide rally for protection, but everybody knew that Dizzy did not care a straw about it, and Derby had not constancy and force enough.”Mr. G. said Disraeli's performances against Peel were quite as wonderful as report makes them. Peel altogether helpless in reply. Dealt with them with a kind of“righteous dulness.”The Protectionist secession due to three men: Derby contributed prestige; Bentinck backbone; and Dizzy parliamentary brains.The golden age of administrative reform was from 1832 to the Crimean War; Peel was always keenly interested in the progress of these reforms.Northcote.—“He was my private secretary; and one of the very best imaginable; pliant, ready, diligent, quick, acute, with plenty of humour, and a temper simply perfect. But as a leader, I think ill of him; you had a conversation; he saw the reason of your case; and when he left, you supposed all was right. But at the second interview, you always found that he had been unable to persuade his friends. What could be weaker than his conduct on the Bradlaugh affair! You could not wonder that the rank and file of his men should be caught by the proposition[pg 466]that an atheist ought not to sit in parliament. But what is a leader good for, if he dare not tell his party that in a matter like this they are wrong, and of course nobody knew better than N. that they were wrong. A clever, quick man with fine temper. By the way, how is it that we have no word, no respectable word, for backbone?”J. M.—Character?Mr. G.—Well, character; yes; but that's vague. It means will, I suppose. (I ought to have thought of Novalis's well-known definition of character as“a completely fashioned will.”)J. M.—Our inferiority to the Greeks in discriminations of language shown by our lack of precise equivalents for φρόνησις, σοφία, σωφροσύνη, etc., of which we used to hear so much when coached in theEthics.Mr. G. went on to argue that because the Greeks drew these fine distinctions in words, they were superior in conduct.“You cannot beat the Greeks in noble qualities.”Mr. G.—I admit there is no Greek word of good credit for the virtue of humility.J. M.—ταπεινότης? But that has an association of meanness.Mr. G.—Yes; a shabby sort of humility. Humility as a sovereign grace is the creation of Christianity.Friday, December 18.—Brilliant sunshine, but bitterly cold; an east wind blowing straight from the Maritime Alps. Walking, reading, talking. Mr. G. after breakfast took me into his room, where he is reading Heine, Butcher on Greek genius, and Marbot. Thought Thiers's well-known remark on Heine's death capital,—“To-day the wittiest Frenchman alive has died.”Mr. G.—We have talked about the best line in poetry, etc. How do you answer this question—Which century of English history produced the greatest men?J. M.—What do you say to the sixteenth?Mr. G.—Yes, I think so. Gardiner was a great man. Henryviii.was great. But bad. Poor Cranmer. Like Northcote, he'd no backbone. Do you remember Jeremy Collier's sentence about his bravery at the stake, which[pg 467]Table-TalkI count one of the grandest in English prose—“He seemed to repel the force of the fire and to overlook the torture, by strength of thought.”289Thucydides could not beat that.The old man twice declaimed the sentence with deep sonorous voice, and his usual incomparable modulation.Mr. G. talked of a certain General ——. He was thought to be a first-rate man; neglected nothing, looked to things himself, conceived admirable plans, and at last got an important command. Then to the universal surprise, nothing came of it; —— they said,“could do everything that a commander should do, except say,Quick march.”There are plenty of politicians of that stamp, but Mr. G. decidedly not one of them. I mentioned a farewell dinner given to —— in the spring, by some rich man or other. It cost £560 for forty-eight guests! Flowers alone £150. Mr. G. on this enormity, recalled a dinner to Talfourd about copyright at the old Clarendon Hotel in Bond Street, and the price was £2, 17s. 6d. a head. The old East India Company used to give dinners at a cost of seven guineas a head. He has a wonderfully lively interest for these matters, and his curiosity as to the prices of things in the shop-windows is inexhaustible. We got round to Goethe. Goethe, he said, never gave prominence to duty.J. M.—Surely, surely in that fine psalm of life,Das Göttliche?Mr. G.—Döllinger used to confront me with theIphigenieas a great drama of duty.He wished that I had known Döllinger—“a man thoroughly from beginning to end of his lifepurged of self.”Mistook the nature of the Irish questions, from the erroneous view that Irish Catholicism is ultramontane, which it certainly is not.Saturday, Dec. 19.—What is extraordinary is that all Mr. G.'s versatility, buoyancy, and the rest goes with the most profound accuracy and intense concentration when any point of public business[pg 468]is raised. Something was said of the salaries of bishops. He was ready in an instant with every figure and detail, and every circumstance of the history of the foundation of the Ecclesiastical Commission in 1835-6. Then hissavoir faireand wisdom of parliamentary conduct.“I always made it a rule in the H. of C. to allow nobody to suppose that I did not like him, and to say as little as I could to prevent anybody from liking me. Considering the intense friction and contention of public life, it is a saving of wear and tear that as many as possible even among opponents should think well of one.”Sunday, Dec. 20.—At table, a little discussion as to the happiness and misery of animal creation. Outside of man Mr. G. argued against Tennyson's description of Nature as red in tooth and claw. Apart from man, he said, and the action of man, sentient beings are happy and not miserable. But Fear? we said. No; they are unaware of impending doom; when hawk or kite pounces on its prey, the small bird has little or no apprehension; 'tis death, but death by appointed and unforeseen lot.J. M.—There is Hunger. Is not the probability that most creatures are always hungry, not excepting Man?To this he rather assented. Of course optimism like this is indispensable as the basis of natural theology.Talked to Mr. G. about Michelet's Tableau de la France, which I had just finished in vol. 2 of the history. A brilliant tour de force, but strains the relations of soil to character; compels words and facts to be the slaves of his phantasy; the modicum of reality overlaid with violent paradox and foregone conclusion. Mr. G. not very much interested—seems only to care for political and church history.Monday, Dec. 31.—Mr. G. did not appear at table to-day, suffering from a surfeit of wild strawberries the day before. But he dined in his dressing gown, and I had some chat with him in his room after lunch.Mr. G.—“'Tis a hard law of political things that if a man shows special competence in a department, that is the very thing most likely to keep him there, and prevent his promotion.”[pg 469]Table-TalkMr. G.—I consider Burke a tripartite man: America, France, Ireland—right as to two, wrong in one.J. M.—Must you not add home affairs and India? HisThoughts on the Discontentsis a masterpiece of civil wisdom, and the right defence in a great constitutional struggle. Then he gave fourteen years of industry to Warren Hastings, and teaching England the rights of the natives, princes and people, and her own duties. So he was right in four out of five.Mr. G.—Yes, yes—quite true. Those two ought to be added to my three. There is a saying of Burke's from which I must utterly dissent.“Property is sluggish and inert.”Quite the contrary. Property is vigilant, active, sleepless; if ever it seems to slumber, be sure that one eye is open.Marie Antoinette.I once read the three volumes of letters from Mercy d'Argenteau to Maria Theresa. He seems to have performed the duty imposed upon him with fidelity.J. M.—Don't you think the Empress comes out well in the correspondence?Mr. G.—Yes, she shows always judgment and sagacity.J. M.—Ah, but besides sagacity, worth and as much integrity as those slippery times allowed.Mr. G.—Yes (but rather reluctantly, I thought). As for Marie Antoinette, she was not a striking character in any senses she was horribly frivolous; and, I suppose, we must say she was, what shall I call it—a very considerable flirt?J. M.—The only case with real foundation seems to be that of thebeau Fersen, the Swedish secretary. He too came to as tragic an end as the Queen.Tuesday, Dec. 22.—Mr. G. still somewhat indisposed—but reading away all day long. Full of Marbot. Delighted with the story of the battle of Castiglione: how when Napoleon held a council of war, and they all said they were hemmed in, and that their only chance was to back out, Augereau roughly cried that they might all do what they liked, but he would attack the enemy cost what it might.“Exactly like a place in theIliad; when Agamemnon and the rest sit sorrowful in the assembly arguing that it was[pg 470]useless to withstand the sovereign will of Zeus, and that they had better flee into their ships, Diomed bursts out that whatever others think, in any event he and Sthenelus, his squire, will hold firm, and never desist from the onslaught until they have laid waste the walls of Troy.”290A large dose of Diomed in Mr. G. himself.Talk about the dangerous isolation in which the monarchy will find itself in England if the hereditary principle goes down in the House of Lords;“it will stand bare, naked, with no shelter or shield, only endured as the better of two evils.”“I once asked,”he said,“who besides myself in the party cares for the hereditary principle? The answer was, That perhaps —— cared for it!!”—naming a member of the party supposed to be rather sapient than sage.News in the paper that the Comte de Paris in his discouragement was about to renounce his claims, and break up his party. Somehow this brought us round to Tocqueville, of whom Mr. G. spoke as the nearest French approach to Burke.J. M.—But pale and without passion. Who was it that said of him that he was an aristocrat who accepted his defeat? That is, he knew democracy to be the conqueror, but he doubted how far it would be an improvement, he saw its perils, etc.Mr. G.—I have not much faith in these estimates, whether in favour of progress or against it. I don't believe in comparisons of age with age. How can a man strike a balance between one government and another? How can he place himself in such an attitude, and with such comprehensive sureness of vision, as to say that the thirteenth century was better or higher or worse or lower than the nineteenth?Thursday, Dec. 24.—At lunch we had the news of the Parnellite victory at Waterford. A disagreeable reverse for us. Mr. G. did not say many words about it, only that it would give heart to the mischief makers—only too certain. But we said no more about it. He and I took a walk on the sands in the afternoon, and had a curious talk (considering), about the prospects of the church of England. He was[pg 471]Ecclesiasticalanxious to know about my talk some time ago with the Bishop of —— whom I had met at a feast at Lincoln's Inn. I gave him as good an account as I could of what had passed. Mr. G. doubted that this prelate was fundamentally an Erastian, as Tait was. Mr. G. is eager to read the signs of the times as to the prospects of Anglican Christianity, to which his heart is given; and he fears the peril of Erastianism to the spiritual life of the church, which is naturally the only thing worth caring about. Hence, he talked with much interest of the question whether the clever fellows at Oxford and Cambridge now take orders. He wants to know what kind of defenders his church is likely to have in days to come. Said that for the first time interest has moved away both from politics and theology, towards the vague something which they call social reform; and he thinks they won't make much out of that in the way of permanent results. The establishment he considers safer than it has been for a long time.As to Welsh disestablishment, he said it was a pity that where the national sentiment was so unanimous as it was in Wales, the operation itself should not be as simple as in Scotland. In Scotland sentiment is not unanimous, but the operation is easy. In Wales sentiment is all one way, but the operation difficult—a good deal more difficult than people suppose, as they will find out when they come to tackle it.[Perhaps it may be mentioned here that, though we always talked freely and abundantly together upon ecclesiastical affairs and persons, we never once exchanged a word upon theology or religious creed, either at Biarritz or anywhere else.]Pitt.—A strong denunciation of Pitt for the French war. People don't realise what the French war meant. In 1812 wheat at Liverpool was 20s. (?) the imperial bushel of 65 pounds (?)! Think of that, when you bring it into figures of the cost of a loaf. And that was the time when Eaton, Eastnor, and other great palaces were built by the landlords out of the high rents which the war and war prices enabled them to exact.[pg 472]Wished we knew more of Melbourne. He was in many ways a very fine fellow.“In two of the most important of all the relations of a prime minister, he was perfect; I mean first, his relations to the Queen, second to his colleagues.”Somebody at dinner quoted a capital description of the perverse fashion of talking that prevailed at Oxford soon after my time, and prevails there now, I fancy—“hunting for epigrammatic ways of saying what you don't think.”—— was the father of this pestilent mode.Rather puzzled him by repeating a saying of mine that used to amuse Fitzjames Stephen, that Love of Truth is more often than we think only a fine name for Temper. I think Mr. G. has a thorough dislike for anything that has a cynical or sardonic flavour about it. I wish I had thought, by the way, of asking him what he had to say of that piece of Swift's, about all objects being insipid that do not come by delusion, and everything being shrunken as it appears in the glass of nature, so that if it were not for artificial mediums, refracted angles, false lights, varnish and tinsel, there would be pretty much of a level in the felicity of mortal man.Am always feeling how strong is his aversion to seeing more than he can help of what is sordid, mean, ignoble. He has not been in public life all these years without rubbing shoulders with plenty of baseness on every scale, and plenty of pettiness in every hue, but he has always kept his eyes well above it. Never was a man more wholly free of the starch of the censor, more ready to make allowance, nor more indulgent even; he enters into human nature in all its compass. But he won't linger a minute longer than he must in the dingy places of life and character.Christmas Day, 1891.—A divine day, brilliant sunshine, and mild spring air. Mr. G. heard what he called an admirable sermon from an English preacher,“with a great command of his art.”A quietish day, Mr. G. no doubt engaged in φρονεῖν τὰ ὅσια.Saturday, Dec. 26.—Once more a noble day. We started in a couple of carriages for the Négress station, a couple of miles away or more, I with the G.'s. Occasion produced the Greek epitaph of the nameless drowned sailor[pg 473]Fuentarabiawho wished for others kinder seas.291Mr. G. felt its pathos and its noble charm—so direct and simple, such benignity, such a good lesson to men to forget their own misdeeds and mischance, and to pray for the passer-by a happier star. He repaid me by two epigrams of a different vein, and one admirable translation into Greek, of Tennyson on Sir John Franklin, which I do not carry in my mind; another on a boisterous Eton fellow—Didactic, dry, declamatory, dull,The bursar —— bellows like a bull.Just in the tone of Greek epigram, a sort of point, but not too much point.Parliamentary Wit.—Thought Disraeli had never been surpassed, nor even equalled, in this line. He had a contest with General Grey, who stood upon the general merits of the whig government, after both Lord Grey and Stanley had left it. D. drew a picture of a circus man who advertised his show with its incomparable team of six grey horses. One died, he replaced it by a mule. Another died, and he put in a donkey, still he went on advertising his team of greys all the same. Canning's wit not to be found conspicuously in his speeches, but highly agreeable pleasantries, though many of them in a vein which would jar horribly on modern taste.Some English redcoats and a pack of hounds passed us as we neared the station. They saluted Mr. G. with a politeness that astonished him, but was pleasant. Took the train for Irun, the fields and mountain slopes delightful in the sun, and the sea on our right a superb blue such as we never see in English waters. At Irun we found carriages waiting to take us on to Fuentarabia. From the balcony of the church had a beautiful view over the scene of Wellington's operations when he crossed the Bidassoa, in the presence of the astonished Soult. A lovely picture, made none the worse by this excellent historic association. The[pg 474]alcalde was extremely polite and intelligent. The consul who was with us showed a board on the old tower, in whichvin some words wasb, and I noted that the alcalde spoke of Viarritz. I reminded Mr. G. of Scaliger's epigram—Haud temere antiquas mutat Vasconia voces,Cui nihil est alind vivere quam bibere.Pretty cold driving home, but Mr. G. seemed not to care. He found both the churches at St. Jean and at Fuentarabia very noteworthy, though the latter very popish, but both, he felt,“had a certain association with grandeur.”Sunday, Dec. 27.—After some quarter of an hour of travellers' topics, we plunged into one of the most interesting talks we have yet had.Aproposof I do not know what, Mr. G. said that he had not advised his son to enter public life.“No doubt there are some men to whom station, wealth, and family traditions make it a duty. But I have never advised any individual, as to whom I have been consulted, to enter the H. of C.”J. M.—But isn't that rather to encourage self-indulgence? Nobody who cares for ease or mental composure would seek public life?Mr. G.—Ah, I don't know that. Surely politics open up a great field for the natural man. Self-seeking, pride, domination, power—all these passions are gratified in politics.J. M.—You cannot be sure of achievement in politics, whether personal or public?Mr. G.—No; to use Bacon's pregnant phrase, they are too immersed in matter. Then as new matter, that is, new details and particulars, come into view, men change their judgment.J. M.—You have spoken just now of somebody as a thorough good tory. You know the saying that nobody is worth much who has not been a bit of a radical in his youth, and a bit of a tory in his fuller age.Mr. G.(laughing)—Ah, I'm afraid that hits me rather hard. But for myself, I think I can truly put up all the change that has come into my politics into a sentence; I[pg 475]Disenchantment A Mistakewas brought up to distrust and dislike liberty, I learned to believe in it. That is the key to all my changes.J. M.—According to my observation, the change in my own generation is different. They have ceased either to trust or to distrust liberty, and have come to the mind that it matters little either way. Men are disenchanted. They have got what they wanted in the days of their youth, yet what of it, they ask? France has thrown off the Empire, but the statesmen of the republic are not a great breed. Italy has gained her unity, yet unity has not been followed by thrift, wisdom, or large increase of public virtue or happiness. America has purged herself of slavery, yet life in America is material, prosaic,—so say some of her own rarest sons. Don't think that I say all these things. But I know able and high-minded men who suffer from this disenchantment.Mr. G.—Italy would have been very different if Cavour had only lived—and even Ricasoli. Men ought not to suffer from disenchantment. They ought to know thatideals in politics are never realised. And don't let us forget in eastern Europe the rescue in our time of some ten millions of men from the harrowing domination of the Turk. (On this he expatiated, and very justly, with much energy.)We turned to our own country. Here he insisted that democracy had certainly not saved us from a distinct decline in the standard of public men.... Look at the whole conduct of opposition from '80 to '85—every principle was flung overboard, if they could manufacture a combination against the government. For all this deterioration one man and one man alone is responsible, Disraeli. He is the grand corrupter. He it was who sowed the seed.J. M.—Ought not Palmerston to bear some share in this?Mr. G.—No, no; Pam. had many strong and liberal convictions. On one subject Dizzy had them too—the Jews. There he was much more than rational, he was fanatical. He said once that Providence would deal good or ill fortune to nations, according as they dealt well or ill by the Jews. I remember once sitting next to John Russell when D. was[pg 476]making a speech on Jewish emancipation.“Look at him,”said J. R.,“how manfully he sticks to it, tho' he knows that every word he says is gall and wormwood to every man who sits around him and behind him.”A curious irony, was it not, that it should have fallen to me to propose a motion for a memorial both to Pam. and Dizzy?A superb scene upon the ocean, with a grand wind from the west. Mr. G. and I walked on the shore; he has a passion for tumultuous seas. I have never seen such huge masses of water shattering themselves among the rocks.In the evening Mr. G. remarked on our debt to Macaulay, for guarding the purity of the English tongue. I recalled a favourite passage from Milton, that next to the man who gives wise and intrepid counsels of government, he places the man who cares for the purity of his mother tongue. Mr. G. liked this. Said he only knew Bright once slip into an error in this respect, when he used“transpire”for“happen.”Macaulay of good example also in rigorously abstaining from the inclusion of matter in footnotes. Hallam an offender in this respect. I pointed out that he offended in company with Gibbon.Monday, Dec. 28.—We had an animated hour at breakfast.Oxford and Cambridge.—Curious how, like two buckets, whenever one was up, the other was down. Cambridge has never produced four such men of action in successive ages as Wolsey, Laud, Wesley, and Newman.J. M.—In the region of thought Cambridge has produced the greatest of all names, Newton.Mr. G.—In the earlier times Oxford has it—with Wycliff, Occam, above all Roger Bacon. And then in the eighteenth century, Butler.J. M.—But why not Locke, too, in the century before?This brought on a tremendous tussle, for Mr. G. was of the same mind, and perhaps for the same sort of reason, as Joseph de Maistre, that contempt for Locke is the beginning of knowledge. All very well for De Maistre, but not for a man in line with European liberalism. I pressed the very obvious point that you must take into account not only a man's intellectual product or his general stature, but also[pg 477]Table-Talkhis influence as a historic force. From the point of view of influence Locke was the origin of the emancipatory movement of the eighteenth century abroad, and laid the philosophic foundations of liberalism in civil government at home. Mr. G. insisted on a passage of Hume's which he believed to be in the history, disparaging Locke as a metaphysical thinker.292“That may be,”said I,“though Hume in hisEssaysis not above paying many compliments to‘the great reasoner,’etc., to whom, for that matter, I fancy that he stood in pretty direct relation. But far be it from me to deny that Hume saw deeper than Locke into the metaphysical millstone. That is not the point. I'm only thinking of his historic place, and, after all, the history of philosophy is itself a philosophy.”To minds nursed in dogmatic schools, all this is both unpalatable and incredible.Somehow we slid into the freedom of the will and Jonathan Edwards. I told him that Mill had often told us how Edwards argued the necessarian or determinist case as keenly as any modern.Tuesday, Dec. 29.—Mr. G. 82 to-day. I gave him Mackail's Greek Epigrams, and if it affords him half as much pleasure as it has given me, he will be very grateful. Various people brought Mr. G. bouquets and addresses. Mr. G. went to church in the morning, and in the afternoon took a walk with me....Land Question.As you go through France you see the soil cultivated by the population. In our little dash into Spain the other day, we saw again the soil cultivated by the population. In England it is cultivated by the capitalist, for the farmer is capitalist. Some astonishing views recently propounded by D. of Argyll on this matter. Unearned increment—so terribly difficult to catch it. Perhaps best try to get at it through the death duties. Physical condition of our people—always a subject of great anxiety—their stature, colour, and so on. Feared the atmosphere of cotton factories, etc., very deleterious. As against bad air, I said, you must set good food; the Lancashire operative in decent times lives uncommonly well, as he deserves to do. He agreed there might be something in this.[pg 478]The day was humid and muggy, but the tumult of the sea was most majestic. Mr. G. delighted in it. He has a passion for the sound of the sea; would like to have it in his ear all day and all night. Again and again he recurred to this.After dinner, long talk about Mazzini, of whom Mr. G. thought poorly in comparison with Poerio and the others who for freedom sacrificed their lives. I stood up for Mazzini, as one of the most morally impressive men I had ever known, or that his age knew; he breathed a soul into democracy.Then we fell into a discussion as to the eastern and western churches. He thought the western popes by their proffered alliance with the mahometans, etc., had betrayed Christianity in the east. I offered De Maistre's view.Mr. G. strongly assented to old Chatham's dictum that vacancy is worse than even the most anxious work. He has less to reproach himself with than most men under that head.He repeated an observation that I have heard him make before, that he thought politicians are morerapidthan other people. I told him that Bowen once said to me on this that he did not agree; that he thought rapidity the mark of all successful men in the practical line of life, merchants and stockbrokers, etc.Wednesday, Dec. 30.—A very muggy day. A divine sunset, with the loveliest pink and opal tints in the sky. Mr. G. reading Gleig'sSubaltern. Not a very entertaining book in itself, but the incidents belong to Wellington's Pyrenean campaign, and, for my own part, I rather enjoyed it on the principle on which one likes readingRomolaat Florence,Transformationat Rome,Sylvia's Loversat Whitby, andHurrishon the northern edge of Clare.Thursday, Dec. 31.—Down to the pier, and found all the party watching the breakers, and superb they were. Mr. G. exulting in the huge force of the Atlantic swell and the beat of the rollers on the shore, like a Titanic pulse.After dinner Mr. G. raised the question of payment of members. He had been asked by somebody whether he meant at Newcastle to indicate that everybody should be paid, or only those who chose to take it or to ask[pg 479]Payment Of Membersfor it. He produced the same extraordinary plan as he had described to me on the morning of his Newcastle speech—i.e.that the Inland Revenue should ascertain from their own books the income of every M.P., and if they found any below the limit of exemption, should notify the same to the Speaker, and the Speaker should thereupon send to the said M.P. below the limit an annual cheque for, say, £300, the name to appear in an annual return to Parliament of all the M.P.'s in receipt of public money on any grounds whatever. I demurred to this altogether, as drawing an invidious distinction between paid and unpaid members; said it was idle to ignore the theory on which the demand for paid members is based, namely, that it is desirable in the public interest that poor men should have access to the H. of C.; and that the poor man should stand there on the same footing as anybody else.Friday, Jan. 1, 1892.—After breakfast Mrs. Gladstone came to my room and said how glad she was that I had not scrupled to put unpleasant points; that Mr. G. must not be shielded and sheltered as some great people are, who hear all the pleasant things and none of the unpleasant; that the perturbation from what is disagreeable only lasts an hour. I said I hoped that I was faithful with him, but of course I could not be always putting myself in an attitude of perpetual controversy. She said,“He is never made angry by what you say.”And so she went away, and —— and I had a good and most useful set-to about Irish finance.At luncheon Mr. G. asked what we had made out of our morning's work. When we told him he showed a good deal of impatience and vehemence, and, to my dismay, he came upon union finance and the general subject of the treatment of Ireland by England....In the afternoon we took a walk, he and I, afterwards joined by the rest. He was as delighted as ever with the swell of the waves, as they bounded over one another, with every variety of grace and tumultuous power. He wondered if we had not more and better words for the sea than the French—“breaker,”“billow,”“roller,”as against“flot,”“vague,”“onde,”“lame,”etc.[pg 480]At dinner he asked me whether I had made up my mind on the burning question of compulsory Greek for a university degree. I said, No, that as then advised I was half inclined to be against compulsory Greek, but it is so important that I would not decide before I was obliged.“So with me,”he said,“the question is one with many subtle and deep-reaching consequences.”He dwelt on the folly of striking Italian out of the course of modern education, thus cutting European history in two, and setting an artificial gulf between the ancient and modern worlds.Saturday, Jan. 2.—Superb morning, and all the better for being much cooler. At breakfast somebody started the idle topic of quill pens. When they came to the length of time that so-and-so made a quill serve,“De Retz,”said I,“made up his mind that Cardinal Chigi was a poor creature,maximus in minimis, because at their first interview Chigi boasted that he had used one pen for three years.”That recalled another saying of Retz's about Cromwell's famous dictum, that nobody goes so far as the man who does not know where he is going. Mr. G. gave his deep and eager Ah! to this. He could not recall that Cromwell had produced many dicta of such quality.“I don't love him, but he was a mighty big fellow. But he was intolerant. He was intolerant of the episcopalians.”Mr. G.—Do you know whom I find the most tolerant churchman of that time?Laud!Laud got Davenant made Bishop of Salisbury, and he zealously befriended Chillingworth and Hales. (There was some other case, which I forget.)The execution of Charles.—I told him of Gardiner's new volume which I had just been reading.“Charles,”he said,“was no doubt a dreadful liar; Cromwell perhaps did not always tell the truth; Elizabeth was a tremendous liar.”J. M.—Charles was not wholly inexcusable, being what he was, for thinking that he had a good game in his hands, by playing off the parliament against the army, etc.Mr. G.—There was less excuse for cutting off his head than in the case of poor Louisxvi., for Louis was the excuse for foreign invasion.[pg 481]At BayonneJ. M.—Could you call foreign invasion the intervention of the Scotch?Mr. G.—Well, not quite. I suppose it is certain that it was Cromwell who cut off Charles's head? Not one in a hundred in the nation desired it.J. M.—No, nor one in twenty in the parliament. But then, ninety-nine in a hundred in the army.In the afternoon we all drove towards Bayonne to watch the ships struggle over the bar at high water. As it happened we only saw one pass out, a countryman for Cardiff. A string of others were waiting to go, but a little steamer from Nantes came first, and having secured her station, found she had not force enough to make the bar, and the others remained swearing impatiently behind her. The Nantes steamer was like Ireland. The scene was very fresh and fine, and the cold most exhilarating after the mugginess of the last two or three days. Mr. G., who has a dizzy head, did not venture on the jetty, but watched things from the sands. He and I drove home together, at a good pace.“I am inclined,”he said laughingly,“to agree with Dr. Johnson that there is no pleasure greater than sitting behind four fast-going horses.”293Talking of Johnson generally,“I suppose we may take him as the best product of the eighteenth century.”Perhaps so, but is he its most characteristic product?Wellington.—Curious that there should be no general estimate of W.'s character; his character not merely as a general but as a man. No love of freedom. His sense of duty very strong, but military rather than civil.Montalembert.—Had often come into contact with him. A very amiable and attractive man. But less remarkable than Rio.Latin Poets.—Would you place Virgil first?J. M.—Oh, no, Lucretius much the first for the greatest and sublimest of poetic qualities. Mr. G. seemed to assent to this, though disposed to make a fight for the secondAeneidas equal to anything. He expressed his admiration for[pg 482]Catullus, and then he was strong that Horace would run anybody else very hard, breaking out with the lines about Regulus—“Atqui sciebat quæ sibi barbarusTortor pararet;”etc.294Blunders in Government.—How right Napoleon was when he said, reflecting on all the vast complexities of government, that the best to be said of a statesman is that he has avoided the biggest blunders.It is not easy to define the charm of these conversations. Is charm the right word? They are in the highest degree stimulating, bracing, widening. That is certain. I return to my room with the sensations of a man who has taken delightful exercise in fresh air. He is so wholly free from theergoteur. There's all the difference between theergoteurand the great debater. He fits his tone to the thing; he can be as playful as anybody. In truth I have many a time seen him in London and at Hawarden not far from trivial. But here at Biarritz all is appropriate, and though, as I say, he can be playful and gay as youth, he cannot resist rising in an instant to the general point of view—to grasp the elemental considerations of character, history, belief, conduct, affairs. There he is at home, there he is most himself. I never knew anybody less guilty of the tiresome sin of arguing for victory. It is not his knowledge that attracts; it is not his ethical tests and standards; it is not that dialectical strength of arm which, as Mark Pattison said of him, could twist a bar of iron to its purpose. It is the combination of these with elevation, with true sincerity, with extraordinary mental force.Sunday, Jan. 3.—Vauvenargues is right when he says that to carry through great undertakings, one must act as though one could never die. My wonderful companion is a wonderful illustration. He is like M. Angelo, who, just before he died on the very edge of ninety, made an allegorical figure, and inscribed upon it,ancora impara,“still learning.”At dinner he showed in full force.[pg 483]Table-TalkHeroes of the Old Testament.—He could not honestly say that he thought there was any figure in the O. T. comparable to the heroes of Homer. Moses was a fine fellow. But the others were of secondary quality—not great high personages, of commanding nature.Thinkers.—Rather an absurd word—to call a man a thinker (and he repeated the word with gay mockery in his tone). When did it come into use? Not until quite our own times, eh? I said, I believed both Hobbes and Locke spoke of thinkers, and was pretty sure thatpenseur, as inlibre penseur, had established itself in the last century. [Quite true; Voltaire used it, but it was not common.]Dr. Arnold.—A high, large, impressive figure—perhaps more important by his character and personality than his actual work. I mentioned M. A.'s poem on his father,Rugby Chapel, with admiration. Rather to my surprise, Mr. G. knew the poem well, and shared my admiration to the full. This brought us on to poetry generally, and he expatiated with much eloquence and sincerity for the rest of the talk. The wonderful continuity of fine poetry in England for five whole centuries, stretching from Chaucer to Tennyson, always a proof to his mind of the soundness, the sap, and the vitality of our nation and its character. What people, beginning with such a poet as Chaucer 500 years ago, could have burst forth into such astonishing production of poetry as marked the first quarter of the century, Byron, Wordsworth, Shelley, etc.J. M.—It is true that Germany has nothing, save Goethe, Schiller, Heine, that's her whole list. But I should say a word for the poetic movement in France: Hugo, Gautier, etc. Mr. G. evidently knew but little, or even nothing, of modern French poetry. He spoke up for Leopardi, on whom he had written an article first introducing him to the British public, ever so many years ago—in theQuarterly.Mr. G.—Wordsworth used occasionally to dine with me when I lived in the Albany. A most agreeable man. I always found him amiable, polite, and sympathetic. Only once did he jar upon me, when he spoke slightingly of Tennyson's first performance.[pg 484]J. M.—But he was not so wrong as he would be now. Tennyson's Juvenilia are terribly artificial.Mr. G.—Yes, perhaps. Tennyson has himself withdrawn some of them. I remember W., when he dined with me, used on leaving to change his silk stockings in the anteroom and put on grey worsted.J. M.—I once said to M. Arnold that I'd rather have been Wordsworth than anybody [not exactly a modest ambition]; and Arnold, who knew him well in the Grasmere country, said,“Oh no, you would not; you would wish you were dining with me at the Athenæum. He was too much of the peasant for you.”Mr. G.—No, I never felt that; I always thought him a polite and an amiable man.Mentioned Macaulay's strange judgment in a note in theHistory, that Dryden's famous lines,“... Fool'd with hope, men favour the deceit;Trust on, and think to-morrow will repay.To-morrow's falser than the former day;Lies worse, and while it says we shall be blestWith some new joys, cuts off what we possest.Strange cozenage!...”are as fine as any eight lines in Lucretius. Told him of an excellent remark of —— on this, that Dryden's passage wholly lacks the mystery and great superhuman air of Lucretius. Mr. G. warmly agreed.He regards it as a remarkable sign of the closeness of the church of England to the roots of life and feeling in the country, that so many clergymen should have written so much good poetry. Who, for instance? I asked. He named Heber, Moultrie, Newman (Dream of Gerontius), and Faber in at least one good poem,“The poor Labourer”(or some such title), Charles Tennyson. I doubt if this thesis has much body in it. He was for Shelley as the most musical of all our poets. I told him that I had once asked M. to get Tennyson to write an autograph line for a friend of mine, and Tennyson had sent this:—“Coldly on the dead volcano sleeps the gleam of dying day.”So I suppose the poet must think well of it himself. 'Tis[pg 485]Table-Talkfrom the secondLocksley Hall, and describes a man after passions have gone cool.Mr. G.—Yes, in melody, in the picturesque, and as apt simile, a fine line.Had been trying his hand at a translation of his favourite lines of Penelope about Odysseus. Said that, of course, you could translate similes and set passages, but to translate Homer as a whole, impossible. He was inclined, when all is said, to think Scott the nearest approach to a model.Monday, Jan. 4.—At luncheon, Mr. Gladstone recalled the well-known story of Talleyrand on the death of Napoleon. The news was brought when T. chanced to be dining with Wellington.“Quel événement!”they all cried.“Non, ce n'est pas un événement,”said Talleyrand,“c'est une nouvelle”—'Tis no event, 'tis a piece of news.“Imagine such a way,”said Mr. G.,“of taking the disappearance of that colossal man! Compare it with the opening of Manzoni's ode, which makes the whole earth stand still. Yet both points of view are right. In one sense, the giant's death was only news; in another, when we think of his history, it was enough to shake the world.”At the moment, he could not recall Manzoni's words, but at dinner he told me that he had succeeded in piecing them together, and after dinner he went to his room and wrote them down for me on a piece of paper. Curiously enough, he could not recall the passage in his own splendid translation.295Talk about handsome men of the past; Sidney Herbert one of the handsomest and most attractive. But the Duke of Hamilton bore away the palm, as glorious as a Greek god.“One day in Rotten Row, I said this to the Duchess of C. She set up James Hope-Scott against my Duke. No doubt he had an intellectual element which the Duke lacked.”Then we discussed the best-looking man in the H. of C. to-day....Duke of Wellington.—Somebody was expatiating on the incomparable position of the Duke; his popularity with kings, with nobles, with common people. Mr. G. remembered[pg 486]that immediately after the formation of Canning's government in 1827, when it was generally thought that he had been most unfairly and factiously treated (as Mr. G. still thinks, always saving Peel) by the Duke and his friends, the Duke made an expedition to the north of England, and had an overwhelming reception. Of course, he was then only twelve years from Waterloo, and yet only four or five years later he had to put up his iron shutters.Approved a remark that a friend of ours was not simple enough, not ready enough to take things as they come.Mr. G.—Unless a man has a considerable gift for taking things as they come, he may make up his mind that political life will be sheer torment to him. He must meet fortune in all its moods.Tuesday, Jan. 5.—After dinner to-day, Mr. G. extraordinarily gay. He had bought a present of silver for his wife. She tried to guess the price, and after the manner of wives in such a case, put the figure provokingly low. Mr. G. then put on the deprecating air of the tradesman with wounded feelings—and it was as capital fun as we could desire. That over, he fell to his backgammon with our host.Wednesday, Jan. 6.—Mrs. Gladstone eighty to-day! What a marvel....Léon Say called to see Mr. G. Long and most interesting conversation about all sorts of aspects of French politics, the concordat, the schools, and all the rest of it.He illustrated the ignorance of French peasantry as to current affairs. Thiers, long after he had become famous, went on a visit to his native region; and there met a friend of his youth.“Eh bien,”said his friend,“tu as fait ton chemin.”“Mais oui, j'ai fait un peu mon chemin. J'ai été ministre même.”“Ah, tiens! je ne savais pas que tu étais protestant.”I am constantly struck by his solicitude for the well-being and right doing of Oxford and Cambridge—“the two eyes of the country.”This connection between the higher education and the general movement of the national mind engages his profound attention, and no doubt deserves such attention[pg 487]Table-Talkin any statesman who looks beyond the mere surface problems of the day. To perceive the bearings of such matters as these, makes Mr. G. a statesman of the highest class, as distinguished from men of clever expedients.Mr. G. had been reading the Greek epigrams on religion in Mackail; quoted the last of them as illustrating the description of the dead as the inhabitants of the more populous world:—τῶν ἄπο κὴν ζωοῖσιν ἀκηδέα, κευτ᾽ ἄν ἵκηαιὲς πλεόνων, ἕξεις θυμὸν ἐλαφρότερον.296A more impressive epigram contains the same thought, where the old man, leaning on his staff, likens himself to the withered vine on its dry pole, and goes on to ask himself what advantage it would be to warm himself for three or four more years in the sun; and on that reflection without heroics put off his life, and changed his home to the greater company,κὴς πλεόνων ἦλθε μετοικεσίην.All the rest of the evening he kept us alive by a stock of infinite drolleries. A scene of a dish of over-boiled tea at West Calder after a meeting, would have made the fortune of a comedian.I said that in the all-important quality of co-operation, —— was only good on condition of being in front. Mr. G. read him in the same sense. Reminded of a mare he once had—admirable, provided you kept off spur, curb, or whip; show her one of these things, and she would do nothing. Mr. G. more of a judge of men than is commonly thought.Told us of a Chinese despatch which came under his notice when he was at the board of trade, and gave him food for reflection. A ship laden with grain came to Canton. The administrator wrote to the central government at Pekin to know whether the ship was to pay duty and land its cargo. The answer was to the effect that the central government of the Flowery Land was quite indifferent as a rule to the goings and comings of the Barbarians; whether they brought a cargo or brought no cargo was a thing of supreme unconcern.“But this cargo, you say, is food for the people. There ought to be[pg 488]no obstacle to the entry of food for the people. So let it in. Your Younger Brother commends himself to you, etc. etc.”Friday, Jan. 8.—A quiet evening. We were all rather piano at the end of an episode which had been thoroughly delightful. When Mr. G. bade me good-night, he said with real feeling,“More sorry than I can say that this is our last evening together at Biarritz.”He is painfully grieved to lose the sound of the sea in his ears.Saturday, Jan. 9.—Strolled about all the forenoon.“What a time of blessed composure it has been,”said Mr. G. with a heavy sigh. The distant hills covered with snow, and the voice of the storm gradually swelling. Still the savage fury of the sea was yet some hours off, so we had to leave Biarritz without the spectacle of Atlantic rage at its fiercest.Found comfortable saloon awaiting us at Bayonne, and so under weeping skies we made our way to Pau. The landscape must be pretty, weather permitting. As it was, we saw but little. Mr. G. dozed and read Max Müller's book on Anthropological Religions.Arrived at Pau towards 5.30; drenching rain: nothing to be seen.At tea time, a good little discussion raised by a protest against Dante being praised for a complete survey of human nature and the many phases of human lot. Intensity he has, but insight over the whole field of character and life? Mr. G. did not make any stand against this, and made the curious admission that Dante was too optimist to be placed on a level with Shakespeare, or even with Homer.Then we turned to lighter themes. He had once said to Henry Taylor,“I should have thought he was the sort of man to have a good strong grasp of a subject,”speaking of Lord Grey, who had been one of Taylor's many chiefs at the Colonial Office.“I should have thought,”replied Taylor slowly and with a dreamy look,“he was the sort of man to have a good strongnipof a subject.”Witty, and very applicable to many men.Wordsworth once gave Mr. G. with much complacency, as an example of his own readiness and resource, this story. A man came up to him at Rydal and said,“Do you happen[pg 489]to have seen my wife.”“Why,”replied the Sage,“I did not know you had a wife!”This peculiarly modest attempt at pointed repartee much tickled Mr. G., as well it might.Tuesday, Jan. 12.—Mr. G. completely recovered from two days of indisposition. We had about an hour's talk on things in general, including policy in the approaching session. He did not expect a dissolution, at the same time a dissolution would not surprise him.At noon they started for Périgord and Carcassonne, Nismes, Arles, and so on to the Riviera full of kind things at our parting.
Omnium autem ineptiarum, quæ sunt innumerabiles, haud sciam an nulla sit major, quam, ut illi solent, quocunque in loco, quoscunque inter homines visum est, de rebus aut difficillimis aut non necessariis argutissime disputare.—Cicero.Of all the numberless sorts of bad taste and want of tact, perhaps the worst is to insist, no matter where you are or with whom you are, on arguing about the hardest subjects to the full pitch of elaboration and detail.
Omnium autem ineptiarum, quæ sunt innumerabiles, haud sciam an nulla sit major, quam, ut illi solent, quocunque in loco, quoscunque inter homines visum est, de rebus aut difficillimis aut non necessariis argutissime disputare.—Cicero.
Of all the numberless sorts of bad taste and want of tact, perhaps the worst is to insist, no matter where you are or with whom you are, on arguing about the hardest subjects to the full pitch of elaboration and detail.
IWe have seen how in 1889 Mr. and Mrs. Gladstone celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of one of the most devoted and successful marriages that ever was made, and the unbroken felicity of their home. In 1891, after the shadows of approaching calamity had for many months hung doubtfully over them, a heavy blow fell, and their eldest son died. Not deeply concerned in ordinary politics, he was a man of many virtues and some admirable gifts; he was an accomplished musician, and I have seen letters of his to his father, marked by a rare delicacy of feeling and true power of expression.“I had known him for nearly thirty years,”one friend wrote,“and there was no man, until his long illness, who had changed so little, or retained so long the best qualities of youth, and my first thought was that the greater the loss to you, the greater would be the consolation.”To Archbishop Benson, Mr. Gladstone wrote (July 6):—It is now forty-six years since we lost a child,285and he who has now passed away from our eyes, leaves to us only blessed recollections. I suppose all feel that those deaths which reverse the order of nature have a sharpness of their own. But setting[pg 461]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.To me he wrote (July 10):—We feel deeply the kindness and tenderness of your letter. It supplies one more link in a long chain of recollection which I deeply prize. Yes, ours is a tribulation, and a sore one, but yet we feel we ought to find ourselves carried out of ourselves by sympathy with the wife whose noble and absorbing devotion had become like an entire life of itself, and who is now face to face with the void. The grief of children too, which passes, is very sharp while it remains. The case has been very remarkable. Though with abatement of some powers, my son has not been without many among the signs and comforts of health during a period of nearly two and a half years. All this time the terrible enemy was lodged in the royal seat, and only his healthy and unyielding constitution kept it at defiance, and maintained his mental and inward life intact.... And most largely has human, as well as divine compassion, flowed in upon us, from none more conspicuously than from yourself, whom we hope to count among near friends for the short remainder of our lives.To another correspondent who did not share his own religious beliefs, he said (July 5):—When I received your last kind note, I fully intended to write to you with freedom on the subject ofThe Agnostic Island. But since then I have been at close quarters, so to speak, with the dispensations of God, for yesterday morning my dearly beloved eldest son was taken from the sight of our eyes. At this moment of bleeding hearts, I will only say what I hope you will in consideration of the motives take without offence, namely this: I would from the bottom of my heart that whenever the hour of bereavement shall befall you or those whom you love, you and they may enjoy the immeasurable consolation of believing, with all the mind and all the heart, that the beloved one is gone into eternal rest, and that those who remain behind may through the same mighty Deliverer hope at their appointed time to rejoin him.[pg 462]All this language on the great occasions of human life was not with him the tone of convention. Whatever the synthesis, as they call it,—whatever the form, whatever the creed and faith may be, he was one of that high and favoured household who, in Emerson's noble phrase,“live from a great depth of being.”Earlier in the year Lord Granville, who so long had been his best friend, died. The loss by his death was severe. As Acton, who knew of their relations well and from within, wrote to Mr. Gladstone (April 1):—There was an admirable fitness in your union, and I had been able to watch how it became closer and easier, in spite of so much to separate you, in mental habits, in early affinities, and even in the form of fundamental convictions, since he came home from your budget, overwhelmed, thirty-eight years ago. I saw all the connections which had their root in social habit fade before the one which took its rise from public life and proved more firm and more enduring than the rest.
We have seen how in 1889 Mr. and Mrs. Gladstone celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of one of the most devoted and successful marriages that ever was made, and the unbroken felicity of their home. In 1891, after the shadows of approaching calamity had for many months hung doubtfully over them, a heavy blow fell, and their eldest son died. Not deeply concerned in ordinary politics, he was a man of many virtues and some admirable gifts; he was an accomplished musician, and I have seen letters of his to his father, marked by a rare delicacy of feeling and true power of expression.“I had known him for nearly thirty years,”one friend wrote,“and there was no man, until his long illness, who had changed so little, or retained so long the best qualities of youth, and my first thought was that the greater the loss to you, the greater would be the consolation.”
To Archbishop Benson, Mr. Gladstone wrote (July 6):—
It is now forty-six years since we lost a child,285and he who has now passed away from our eyes, leaves to us only blessed recollections. I suppose all feel that those deaths which reverse the order of nature have a sharpness of their own. But setting[pg 461]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.
To me he wrote (July 10):—
We feel deeply the kindness and tenderness of your letter. It supplies one more link in a long chain of recollection which I deeply prize. Yes, ours is a tribulation, and a sore one, but yet we feel we ought to find ourselves carried out of ourselves by sympathy with the wife whose noble and absorbing devotion had become like an entire life of itself, and who is now face to face with the void. The grief of children too, which passes, is very sharp while it remains. The case has been very remarkable. Though with abatement of some powers, my son has not been without many among the signs and comforts of health during a period of nearly two and a half years. All this time the terrible enemy was lodged in the royal seat, and only his healthy and unyielding constitution kept it at defiance, and maintained his mental and inward life intact.... And most largely has human, as well as divine compassion, flowed in upon us, from none more conspicuously than from yourself, whom we hope to count among near friends for the short remainder of our lives.
To another correspondent who did not share his own religious beliefs, he said (July 5):—
When I received your last kind note, I fully intended to write to you with freedom on the subject ofThe Agnostic Island. But since then I have been at close quarters, so to speak, with the dispensations of God, for yesterday morning my dearly beloved eldest son was taken from the sight of our eyes. At this moment of bleeding hearts, I will only say what I hope you will in consideration of the motives take without offence, namely this: I would from the bottom of my heart that whenever the hour of bereavement shall befall you or those whom you love, you and they may enjoy the immeasurable consolation of believing, with all the mind and all the heart, that the beloved one is gone into eternal rest, and that those who remain behind may through the same mighty Deliverer hope at their appointed time to rejoin him.[pg 462]All this language on the great occasions of human life was not with him the tone of convention. Whatever the synthesis, as they call it,—whatever the form, whatever the creed and faith may be, he was one of that high and favoured household who, in Emerson's noble phrase,“live from a great depth of being.”
When I received your last kind note, I fully intended to write to you with freedom on the subject ofThe Agnostic Island. But since then I have been at close quarters, so to speak, with the dispensations of God, for yesterday morning my dearly beloved eldest son was taken from the sight of our eyes. At this moment of bleeding hearts, I will only say what I hope you will in consideration of the motives take without offence, namely this: I would from the bottom of my heart that whenever the hour of bereavement shall befall you or those whom you love, you and they may enjoy the immeasurable consolation of believing, with all the mind and all the heart, that the beloved one is gone into eternal rest, and that those who remain behind may through the same mighty Deliverer hope at their appointed time to rejoin him.
All this language on the great occasions of human life was not with him the tone of convention. Whatever the synthesis, as they call it,—whatever the form, whatever the creed and faith may be, he was one of that high and favoured household who, in Emerson's noble phrase,“live from a great depth of being.”
Earlier in the year Lord Granville, who so long had been his best friend, died. The loss by his death was severe. As Acton, who knew of their relations well and from within, wrote to Mr. Gladstone (April 1):—
There was an admirable fitness in your union, and I had been able to watch how it became closer and easier, in spite of so much to separate you, in mental habits, in early affinities, and even in the form of fundamental convictions, since he came home from your budget, overwhelmed, thirty-eight years ago. I saw all the connections which had their root in social habit fade before the one which took its rise from public life and proved more firm and more enduring than the rest.
IIIn September he paid a visit to his relatives at Fasque, and thence he went to Glenalmond—spots that in his tenacious memory must have awakened hosts of old and dear associations. On October 1, he found himself after a long and busy day, at Newcastle-on-Tyne, where he had never stayed since his too memorable visit in 1862.286Since the defeat of the Irish policy in 1886, he had attended the annual meeting of the chief liberal organisation at Nottingham (1887), Birmingham (1888), and Manchester (1889). This year it was the turn of Newcastle. On October 2, he gave his blessing to various measures that afterwards came to be known as the Newcastle programme. After the shock caused by the Irish quarrel, every politician knew that it would be necessary to balance home rule by reforms expected in England and Scotland. No liberal, whatever his particular shade, thought that it would be either honourable or practical to throw the Irish policy overboard, and if there[pg 463]At Newcastlewere any who thought such a course honourable, they knew it would not be safe. The principle and expediency of home rule had taken a much deeper root in the party than it suited some of the trimming tribe later to admit. On the other hand, after five years of pretty exclusive devotion to the Irish case, to pass by the British case and its various demands for an indefinite time longer, would have been absurd.
In September he paid a visit to his relatives at Fasque, and thence he went to Glenalmond—spots that in his tenacious memory must have awakened hosts of old and dear associations. On October 1, he found himself after a long and busy day, at Newcastle-on-Tyne, where he had never stayed since his too memorable visit in 1862.286Since the defeat of the Irish policy in 1886, he had attended the annual meeting of the chief liberal organisation at Nottingham (1887), Birmingham (1888), and Manchester (1889). This year it was the turn of Newcastle. On October 2, he gave his blessing to various measures that afterwards came to be known as the Newcastle programme. After the shock caused by the Irish quarrel, every politician knew that it would be necessary to balance home rule by reforms expected in England and Scotland. No liberal, whatever his particular shade, thought that it would be either honourable or practical to throw the Irish policy overboard, and if there[pg 463]
At Newcastle
At Newcastle
were any who thought such a course honourable, they knew it would not be safe. The principle and expediency of home rule had taken a much deeper root in the party than it suited some of the trimming tribe later to admit. On the other hand, after five years of pretty exclusive devotion to the Irish case, to pass by the British case and its various demands for an indefinite time longer, would have been absurd.
IIIIn the eighties Mr. Gladstone grew into close friendship with one who had for many years been his faithful supporter in the House of Commons as member for Dundee. Nobody ever showed him devotion more considerate, loyal, and unselfish than did Mr. Armitstead, from about the close of the parliament of 1880 down to the end of this story.287In the middle of December 1891 Mr. Armitstead planned a foreign trip for his hero, and persuaded me to join. Biarritz was to be our destination, and the expedition proved a wonderful success. Some notes of mine, though intended only for domestic consumption, may help to bring Mr. Gladstone in his easiest moods before the reader's eye. No new ideas struck fire, no particular contribution was made to grand themes. But a great statesman on a holiday may be forgiven for not trying to discover brand-new keys to philosophy, history, and“all the mythologies.”As a sketch from life of the veteran's buoyancy, vigour, genial freshness of heart and brain, after four-score strenuous years, these few pages may be found of interest.We left Paris at nine in the morning (Dec. 16), and were listening to the swell of the mighty Bay resounding under our windows at Biarritz soon after midnight.The long day's journey left no signs of fatigue on either Mr. or Mrs. Gladstone, and his only regret was that we had[pg 464]not come straight through instead of staying a night in Paris. I'm always for going straight on, he said. For some odd reason in spite of the late hour he was full of stories of American humour, which he told with extraordinary verve and enjoyment. I contributed one that amused him much, of the Bostonian who, having read Shakespeare for the first time, observed,“I call that a very clever book. Now, I don't suppose there are twenty men in Boston to-day who could have written that book!”Thursday, Dec. 17.—Splendid morning for making acquaintance with a new place. Saw the western spur of the Pyrenees falling down to the Bidassoa and the first glimpse of the giant wall, beyond which, according to Michelet, Africa begins, and our first glimpse of Spain.After breakfast we all sallied forth to look into the shops and to see the lie of the land. Mr. G. as interested as a child in all the objects in the shops—many of them showing that we are not far from Spain. The consul very polite, showed us about, and told us the hundred trifles that bring a place really into one's mind. Nothing is like a first morning's stroll in a foreign town. By afternoon the spell dissolves, and the mood comes of Dante's lines,“Era già l'ora,”etc.288Some mention was made of Charles Austin, the famous lawyer: it brought up the case of men who are suddenly torn from lives of great activity to complete idleness.Mr. G.—I don't know how to reconcile it with what I've always regarded as the foundation of character—Bishop Butler's view of habit. How comes it that during the hundreds of years in which priests and fellows of Eton College have retired from hard work to college livings and leisure, not one of them has ever done anything whatever for either scholarship or divinity—not one?Mr. G. did not know Mazzini, but Armellini, another of the Roman triumvirs, taught him Italian in 1832.[pg 465]Opinions On StatesmenI spoke a word for Gambetta, but he would not have it.“Gambetta wasautoritaire; I do not feel as if he were a true liberal in the old and best sense. I cannot forget how hostile he was to the movement for freedom in the Balkans.”Said he only once saw Lord Liverpool. He went to call on Canning at Glos'ter House (close to our Glos'ter Road Station), and there through a glass door he saw Canning and Lord Liverpool talking together.Peel.—Had a good deal of temper; not hot; but perhaps sulky. Not a farsighted man, but fairly clear-sighted.“I called upon him after the election in 1847. The Janissaries, as Bentinck called us, that is the men who had stood by Peel, had been 110 before the election; we came back only 50. Peel said to me that what he looked forward to was a long and fierce struggle on behalf of protection. I must say I thought this foolish. If Bentinck had lived, with his strong will and dogged industry, there might have been a wide rally for protection, but everybody knew that Dizzy did not care a straw about it, and Derby had not constancy and force enough.”Mr. G. said Disraeli's performances against Peel were quite as wonderful as report makes them. Peel altogether helpless in reply. Dealt with them with a kind of“righteous dulness.”The Protectionist secession due to three men: Derby contributed prestige; Bentinck backbone; and Dizzy parliamentary brains.The golden age of administrative reform was from 1832 to the Crimean War; Peel was always keenly interested in the progress of these reforms.Northcote.—“He was my private secretary; and one of the very best imaginable; pliant, ready, diligent, quick, acute, with plenty of humour, and a temper simply perfect. But as a leader, I think ill of him; you had a conversation; he saw the reason of your case; and when he left, you supposed all was right. But at the second interview, you always found that he had been unable to persuade his friends. What could be weaker than his conduct on the Bradlaugh affair! You could not wonder that the rank and file of his men should be caught by the proposition[pg 466]that an atheist ought not to sit in parliament. But what is a leader good for, if he dare not tell his party that in a matter like this they are wrong, and of course nobody knew better than N. that they were wrong. A clever, quick man with fine temper. By the way, how is it that we have no word, no respectable word, for backbone?”J. M.—Character?Mr. G.—Well, character; yes; but that's vague. It means will, I suppose. (I ought to have thought of Novalis's well-known definition of character as“a completely fashioned will.”)J. M.—Our inferiority to the Greeks in discriminations of language shown by our lack of precise equivalents for φρόνησις, σοφία, σωφροσύνη, etc., of which we used to hear so much when coached in theEthics.Mr. G. went on to argue that because the Greeks drew these fine distinctions in words, they were superior in conduct.“You cannot beat the Greeks in noble qualities.”Mr. G.—I admit there is no Greek word of good credit for the virtue of humility.J. M.—ταπεινότης? But that has an association of meanness.Mr. G.—Yes; a shabby sort of humility. Humility as a sovereign grace is the creation of Christianity.Friday, December 18.—Brilliant sunshine, but bitterly cold; an east wind blowing straight from the Maritime Alps. Walking, reading, talking. Mr. G. after breakfast took me into his room, where he is reading Heine, Butcher on Greek genius, and Marbot. Thought Thiers's well-known remark on Heine's death capital,—“To-day the wittiest Frenchman alive has died.”Mr. G.—We have talked about the best line in poetry, etc. How do you answer this question—Which century of English history produced the greatest men?J. M.—What do you say to the sixteenth?Mr. G.—Yes, I think so. Gardiner was a great man. Henryviii.was great. But bad. Poor Cranmer. Like Northcote, he'd no backbone. Do you remember Jeremy Collier's sentence about his bravery at the stake, which[pg 467]Table-TalkI count one of the grandest in English prose—“He seemed to repel the force of the fire and to overlook the torture, by strength of thought.”289Thucydides could not beat that.The old man twice declaimed the sentence with deep sonorous voice, and his usual incomparable modulation.Mr. G. talked of a certain General ——. He was thought to be a first-rate man; neglected nothing, looked to things himself, conceived admirable plans, and at last got an important command. Then to the universal surprise, nothing came of it; —— they said,“could do everything that a commander should do, except say,Quick march.”There are plenty of politicians of that stamp, but Mr. G. decidedly not one of them. I mentioned a farewell dinner given to —— in the spring, by some rich man or other. It cost £560 for forty-eight guests! Flowers alone £150. Mr. G. on this enormity, recalled a dinner to Talfourd about copyright at the old Clarendon Hotel in Bond Street, and the price was £2, 17s. 6d. a head. The old East India Company used to give dinners at a cost of seven guineas a head. He has a wonderfully lively interest for these matters, and his curiosity as to the prices of things in the shop-windows is inexhaustible. We got round to Goethe. Goethe, he said, never gave prominence to duty.J. M.—Surely, surely in that fine psalm of life,Das Göttliche?Mr. G.—Döllinger used to confront me with theIphigenieas a great drama of duty.He wished that I had known Döllinger—“a man thoroughly from beginning to end of his lifepurged of self.”Mistook the nature of the Irish questions, from the erroneous view that Irish Catholicism is ultramontane, which it certainly is not.Saturday, Dec. 19.—What is extraordinary is that all Mr. G.'s versatility, buoyancy, and the rest goes with the most profound accuracy and intense concentration when any point of public business[pg 468]is raised. Something was said of the salaries of bishops. He was ready in an instant with every figure and detail, and every circumstance of the history of the foundation of the Ecclesiastical Commission in 1835-6. Then hissavoir faireand wisdom of parliamentary conduct.“I always made it a rule in the H. of C. to allow nobody to suppose that I did not like him, and to say as little as I could to prevent anybody from liking me. Considering the intense friction and contention of public life, it is a saving of wear and tear that as many as possible even among opponents should think well of one.”Sunday, Dec. 20.—At table, a little discussion as to the happiness and misery of animal creation. Outside of man Mr. G. argued against Tennyson's description of Nature as red in tooth and claw. Apart from man, he said, and the action of man, sentient beings are happy and not miserable. But Fear? we said. No; they are unaware of impending doom; when hawk or kite pounces on its prey, the small bird has little or no apprehension; 'tis death, but death by appointed and unforeseen lot.J. M.—There is Hunger. Is not the probability that most creatures are always hungry, not excepting Man?To this he rather assented. Of course optimism like this is indispensable as the basis of natural theology.Talked to Mr. G. about Michelet's Tableau de la France, which I had just finished in vol. 2 of the history. A brilliant tour de force, but strains the relations of soil to character; compels words and facts to be the slaves of his phantasy; the modicum of reality overlaid with violent paradox and foregone conclusion. Mr. G. not very much interested—seems only to care for political and church history.Monday, Dec. 31.—Mr. G. did not appear at table to-day, suffering from a surfeit of wild strawberries the day before. But he dined in his dressing gown, and I had some chat with him in his room after lunch.Mr. G.—“'Tis a hard law of political things that if a man shows special competence in a department, that is the very thing most likely to keep him there, and prevent his promotion.”[pg 469]Table-TalkMr. G.—I consider Burke a tripartite man: America, France, Ireland—right as to two, wrong in one.J. M.—Must you not add home affairs and India? HisThoughts on the Discontentsis a masterpiece of civil wisdom, and the right defence in a great constitutional struggle. Then he gave fourteen years of industry to Warren Hastings, and teaching England the rights of the natives, princes and people, and her own duties. So he was right in four out of five.Mr. G.—Yes, yes—quite true. Those two ought to be added to my three. There is a saying of Burke's from which I must utterly dissent.“Property is sluggish and inert.”Quite the contrary. Property is vigilant, active, sleepless; if ever it seems to slumber, be sure that one eye is open.Marie Antoinette.I once read the three volumes of letters from Mercy d'Argenteau to Maria Theresa. He seems to have performed the duty imposed upon him with fidelity.J. M.—Don't you think the Empress comes out well in the correspondence?Mr. G.—Yes, she shows always judgment and sagacity.J. M.—Ah, but besides sagacity, worth and as much integrity as those slippery times allowed.Mr. G.—Yes (but rather reluctantly, I thought). As for Marie Antoinette, she was not a striking character in any senses she was horribly frivolous; and, I suppose, we must say she was, what shall I call it—a very considerable flirt?J. M.—The only case with real foundation seems to be that of thebeau Fersen, the Swedish secretary. He too came to as tragic an end as the Queen.Tuesday, Dec. 22.—Mr. G. still somewhat indisposed—but reading away all day long. Full of Marbot. Delighted with the story of the battle of Castiglione: how when Napoleon held a council of war, and they all said they were hemmed in, and that their only chance was to back out, Augereau roughly cried that they might all do what they liked, but he would attack the enemy cost what it might.“Exactly like a place in theIliad; when Agamemnon and the rest sit sorrowful in the assembly arguing that it was[pg 470]useless to withstand the sovereign will of Zeus, and that they had better flee into their ships, Diomed bursts out that whatever others think, in any event he and Sthenelus, his squire, will hold firm, and never desist from the onslaught until they have laid waste the walls of Troy.”290A large dose of Diomed in Mr. G. himself.Talk about the dangerous isolation in which the monarchy will find itself in England if the hereditary principle goes down in the House of Lords;“it will stand bare, naked, with no shelter or shield, only endured as the better of two evils.”“I once asked,”he said,“who besides myself in the party cares for the hereditary principle? The answer was, That perhaps —— cared for it!!”—naming a member of the party supposed to be rather sapient than sage.News in the paper that the Comte de Paris in his discouragement was about to renounce his claims, and break up his party. Somehow this brought us round to Tocqueville, of whom Mr. G. spoke as the nearest French approach to Burke.J. M.—But pale and without passion. Who was it that said of him that he was an aristocrat who accepted his defeat? That is, he knew democracy to be the conqueror, but he doubted how far it would be an improvement, he saw its perils, etc.Mr. G.—I have not much faith in these estimates, whether in favour of progress or against it. I don't believe in comparisons of age with age. How can a man strike a balance between one government and another? How can he place himself in such an attitude, and with such comprehensive sureness of vision, as to say that the thirteenth century was better or higher or worse or lower than the nineteenth?Thursday, Dec. 24.—At lunch we had the news of the Parnellite victory at Waterford. A disagreeable reverse for us. Mr. G. did not say many words about it, only that it would give heart to the mischief makers—only too certain. But we said no more about it. He and I took a walk on the sands in the afternoon, and had a curious talk (considering), about the prospects of the church of England. He was[pg 471]Ecclesiasticalanxious to know about my talk some time ago with the Bishop of —— whom I had met at a feast at Lincoln's Inn. I gave him as good an account as I could of what had passed. Mr. G. doubted that this prelate was fundamentally an Erastian, as Tait was. Mr. G. is eager to read the signs of the times as to the prospects of Anglican Christianity, to which his heart is given; and he fears the peril of Erastianism to the spiritual life of the church, which is naturally the only thing worth caring about. Hence, he talked with much interest of the question whether the clever fellows at Oxford and Cambridge now take orders. He wants to know what kind of defenders his church is likely to have in days to come. Said that for the first time interest has moved away both from politics and theology, towards the vague something which they call social reform; and he thinks they won't make much out of that in the way of permanent results. The establishment he considers safer than it has been for a long time.As to Welsh disestablishment, he said it was a pity that where the national sentiment was so unanimous as it was in Wales, the operation itself should not be as simple as in Scotland. In Scotland sentiment is not unanimous, but the operation is easy. In Wales sentiment is all one way, but the operation difficult—a good deal more difficult than people suppose, as they will find out when they come to tackle it.[Perhaps it may be mentioned here that, though we always talked freely and abundantly together upon ecclesiastical affairs and persons, we never once exchanged a word upon theology or religious creed, either at Biarritz or anywhere else.]Pitt.—A strong denunciation of Pitt for the French war. People don't realise what the French war meant. In 1812 wheat at Liverpool was 20s. (?) the imperial bushel of 65 pounds (?)! Think of that, when you bring it into figures of the cost of a loaf. And that was the time when Eaton, Eastnor, and other great palaces were built by the landlords out of the high rents which the war and war prices enabled them to exact.[pg 472]Wished we knew more of Melbourne. He was in many ways a very fine fellow.“In two of the most important of all the relations of a prime minister, he was perfect; I mean first, his relations to the Queen, second to his colleagues.”Somebody at dinner quoted a capital description of the perverse fashion of talking that prevailed at Oxford soon after my time, and prevails there now, I fancy—“hunting for epigrammatic ways of saying what you don't think.”—— was the father of this pestilent mode.Rather puzzled him by repeating a saying of mine that used to amuse Fitzjames Stephen, that Love of Truth is more often than we think only a fine name for Temper. I think Mr. G. has a thorough dislike for anything that has a cynical or sardonic flavour about it. I wish I had thought, by the way, of asking him what he had to say of that piece of Swift's, about all objects being insipid that do not come by delusion, and everything being shrunken as it appears in the glass of nature, so that if it were not for artificial mediums, refracted angles, false lights, varnish and tinsel, there would be pretty much of a level in the felicity of mortal man.Am always feeling how strong is his aversion to seeing more than he can help of what is sordid, mean, ignoble. He has not been in public life all these years without rubbing shoulders with plenty of baseness on every scale, and plenty of pettiness in every hue, but he has always kept his eyes well above it. Never was a man more wholly free of the starch of the censor, more ready to make allowance, nor more indulgent even; he enters into human nature in all its compass. But he won't linger a minute longer than he must in the dingy places of life and character.Christmas Day, 1891.—A divine day, brilliant sunshine, and mild spring air. Mr. G. heard what he called an admirable sermon from an English preacher,“with a great command of his art.”A quietish day, Mr. G. no doubt engaged in φρονεῖν τὰ ὅσια.Saturday, Dec. 26.—Once more a noble day. We started in a couple of carriages for the Négress station, a couple of miles away or more, I with the G.'s. Occasion produced the Greek epitaph of the nameless drowned sailor[pg 473]Fuentarabiawho wished for others kinder seas.291Mr. G. felt its pathos and its noble charm—so direct and simple, such benignity, such a good lesson to men to forget their own misdeeds and mischance, and to pray for the passer-by a happier star. He repaid me by two epigrams of a different vein, and one admirable translation into Greek, of Tennyson on Sir John Franklin, which I do not carry in my mind; another on a boisterous Eton fellow—Didactic, dry, declamatory, dull,The bursar —— bellows like a bull.Just in the tone of Greek epigram, a sort of point, but not too much point.Parliamentary Wit.—Thought Disraeli had never been surpassed, nor even equalled, in this line. He had a contest with General Grey, who stood upon the general merits of the whig government, after both Lord Grey and Stanley had left it. D. drew a picture of a circus man who advertised his show with its incomparable team of six grey horses. One died, he replaced it by a mule. Another died, and he put in a donkey, still he went on advertising his team of greys all the same. Canning's wit not to be found conspicuously in his speeches, but highly agreeable pleasantries, though many of them in a vein which would jar horribly on modern taste.Some English redcoats and a pack of hounds passed us as we neared the station. They saluted Mr. G. with a politeness that astonished him, but was pleasant. Took the train for Irun, the fields and mountain slopes delightful in the sun, and the sea on our right a superb blue such as we never see in English waters. At Irun we found carriages waiting to take us on to Fuentarabia. From the balcony of the church had a beautiful view over the scene of Wellington's operations when he crossed the Bidassoa, in the presence of the astonished Soult. A lovely picture, made none the worse by this excellent historic association. The[pg 474]alcalde was extremely polite and intelligent. The consul who was with us showed a board on the old tower, in whichvin some words wasb, and I noted that the alcalde spoke of Viarritz. I reminded Mr. G. of Scaliger's epigram—Haud temere antiquas mutat Vasconia voces,Cui nihil est alind vivere quam bibere.Pretty cold driving home, but Mr. G. seemed not to care. He found both the churches at St. Jean and at Fuentarabia very noteworthy, though the latter very popish, but both, he felt,“had a certain association with grandeur.”Sunday, Dec. 27.—After some quarter of an hour of travellers' topics, we plunged into one of the most interesting talks we have yet had.Aproposof I do not know what, Mr. G. said that he had not advised his son to enter public life.“No doubt there are some men to whom station, wealth, and family traditions make it a duty. But I have never advised any individual, as to whom I have been consulted, to enter the H. of C.”J. M.—But isn't that rather to encourage self-indulgence? Nobody who cares for ease or mental composure would seek public life?Mr. G.—Ah, I don't know that. Surely politics open up a great field for the natural man. Self-seeking, pride, domination, power—all these passions are gratified in politics.J. M.—You cannot be sure of achievement in politics, whether personal or public?Mr. G.—No; to use Bacon's pregnant phrase, they are too immersed in matter. Then as new matter, that is, new details and particulars, come into view, men change their judgment.J. M.—You have spoken just now of somebody as a thorough good tory. You know the saying that nobody is worth much who has not been a bit of a radical in his youth, and a bit of a tory in his fuller age.Mr. G.(laughing)—Ah, I'm afraid that hits me rather hard. But for myself, I think I can truly put up all the change that has come into my politics into a sentence; I[pg 475]Disenchantment A Mistakewas brought up to distrust and dislike liberty, I learned to believe in it. That is the key to all my changes.J. M.—According to my observation, the change in my own generation is different. They have ceased either to trust or to distrust liberty, and have come to the mind that it matters little either way. Men are disenchanted. They have got what they wanted in the days of their youth, yet what of it, they ask? France has thrown off the Empire, but the statesmen of the republic are not a great breed. Italy has gained her unity, yet unity has not been followed by thrift, wisdom, or large increase of public virtue or happiness. America has purged herself of slavery, yet life in America is material, prosaic,—so say some of her own rarest sons. Don't think that I say all these things. But I know able and high-minded men who suffer from this disenchantment.Mr. G.—Italy would have been very different if Cavour had only lived—and even Ricasoli. Men ought not to suffer from disenchantment. They ought to know thatideals in politics are never realised. And don't let us forget in eastern Europe the rescue in our time of some ten millions of men from the harrowing domination of the Turk. (On this he expatiated, and very justly, with much energy.)We turned to our own country. Here he insisted that democracy had certainly not saved us from a distinct decline in the standard of public men.... Look at the whole conduct of opposition from '80 to '85—every principle was flung overboard, if they could manufacture a combination against the government. For all this deterioration one man and one man alone is responsible, Disraeli. He is the grand corrupter. He it was who sowed the seed.J. M.—Ought not Palmerston to bear some share in this?Mr. G.—No, no; Pam. had many strong and liberal convictions. On one subject Dizzy had them too—the Jews. There he was much more than rational, he was fanatical. He said once that Providence would deal good or ill fortune to nations, according as they dealt well or ill by the Jews. I remember once sitting next to John Russell when D. was[pg 476]making a speech on Jewish emancipation.“Look at him,”said J. R.,“how manfully he sticks to it, tho' he knows that every word he says is gall and wormwood to every man who sits around him and behind him.”A curious irony, was it not, that it should have fallen to me to propose a motion for a memorial both to Pam. and Dizzy?A superb scene upon the ocean, with a grand wind from the west. Mr. G. and I walked on the shore; he has a passion for tumultuous seas. I have never seen such huge masses of water shattering themselves among the rocks.In the evening Mr. G. remarked on our debt to Macaulay, for guarding the purity of the English tongue. I recalled a favourite passage from Milton, that next to the man who gives wise and intrepid counsels of government, he places the man who cares for the purity of his mother tongue. Mr. G. liked this. Said he only knew Bright once slip into an error in this respect, when he used“transpire”for“happen.”Macaulay of good example also in rigorously abstaining from the inclusion of matter in footnotes. Hallam an offender in this respect. I pointed out that he offended in company with Gibbon.Monday, Dec. 28.—We had an animated hour at breakfast.Oxford and Cambridge.—Curious how, like two buckets, whenever one was up, the other was down. Cambridge has never produced four such men of action in successive ages as Wolsey, Laud, Wesley, and Newman.J. M.—In the region of thought Cambridge has produced the greatest of all names, Newton.Mr. G.—In the earlier times Oxford has it—with Wycliff, Occam, above all Roger Bacon. And then in the eighteenth century, Butler.J. M.—But why not Locke, too, in the century before?This brought on a tremendous tussle, for Mr. G. was of the same mind, and perhaps for the same sort of reason, as Joseph de Maistre, that contempt for Locke is the beginning of knowledge. All very well for De Maistre, but not for a man in line with European liberalism. I pressed the very obvious point that you must take into account not only a man's intellectual product or his general stature, but also[pg 477]Table-Talkhis influence as a historic force. From the point of view of influence Locke was the origin of the emancipatory movement of the eighteenth century abroad, and laid the philosophic foundations of liberalism in civil government at home. Mr. G. insisted on a passage of Hume's which he believed to be in the history, disparaging Locke as a metaphysical thinker.292“That may be,”said I,“though Hume in hisEssaysis not above paying many compliments to‘the great reasoner,’etc., to whom, for that matter, I fancy that he stood in pretty direct relation. But far be it from me to deny that Hume saw deeper than Locke into the metaphysical millstone. That is not the point. I'm only thinking of his historic place, and, after all, the history of philosophy is itself a philosophy.”To minds nursed in dogmatic schools, all this is both unpalatable and incredible.Somehow we slid into the freedom of the will and Jonathan Edwards. I told him that Mill had often told us how Edwards argued the necessarian or determinist case as keenly as any modern.Tuesday, Dec. 29.—Mr. G. 82 to-day. I gave him Mackail's Greek Epigrams, and if it affords him half as much pleasure as it has given me, he will be very grateful. Various people brought Mr. G. bouquets and addresses. Mr. G. went to church in the morning, and in the afternoon took a walk with me....Land Question.As you go through France you see the soil cultivated by the population. In our little dash into Spain the other day, we saw again the soil cultivated by the population. In England it is cultivated by the capitalist, for the farmer is capitalist. Some astonishing views recently propounded by D. of Argyll on this matter. Unearned increment—so terribly difficult to catch it. Perhaps best try to get at it through the death duties. Physical condition of our people—always a subject of great anxiety—their stature, colour, and so on. Feared the atmosphere of cotton factories, etc., very deleterious. As against bad air, I said, you must set good food; the Lancashire operative in decent times lives uncommonly well, as he deserves to do. He agreed there might be something in this.[pg 478]The day was humid and muggy, but the tumult of the sea was most majestic. Mr. G. delighted in it. He has a passion for the sound of the sea; would like to have it in his ear all day and all night. Again and again he recurred to this.After dinner, long talk about Mazzini, of whom Mr. G. thought poorly in comparison with Poerio and the others who for freedom sacrificed their lives. I stood up for Mazzini, as one of the most morally impressive men I had ever known, or that his age knew; he breathed a soul into democracy.Then we fell into a discussion as to the eastern and western churches. He thought the western popes by their proffered alliance with the mahometans, etc., had betrayed Christianity in the east. I offered De Maistre's view.Mr. G. strongly assented to old Chatham's dictum that vacancy is worse than even the most anxious work. He has less to reproach himself with than most men under that head.He repeated an observation that I have heard him make before, that he thought politicians are morerapidthan other people. I told him that Bowen once said to me on this that he did not agree; that he thought rapidity the mark of all successful men in the practical line of life, merchants and stockbrokers, etc.Wednesday, Dec. 30.—A very muggy day. A divine sunset, with the loveliest pink and opal tints in the sky. Mr. G. reading Gleig'sSubaltern. Not a very entertaining book in itself, but the incidents belong to Wellington's Pyrenean campaign, and, for my own part, I rather enjoyed it on the principle on which one likes readingRomolaat Florence,Transformationat Rome,Sylvia's Loversat Whitby, andHurrishon the northern edge of Clare.Thursday, Dec. 31.—Down to the pier, and found all the party watching the breakers, and superb they were. Mr. G. exulting in the huge force of the Atlantic swell and the beat of the rollers on the shore, like a Titanic pulse.After dinner Mr. G. raised the question of payment of members. He had been asked by somebody whether he meant at Newcastle to indicate that everybody should be paid, or only those who chose to take it or to ask[pg 479]Payment Of Membersfor it. He produced the same extraordinary plan as he had described to me on the morning of his Newcastle speech—i.e.that the Inland Revenue should ascertain from their own books the income of every M.P., and if they found any below the limit of exemption, should notify the same to the Speaker, and the Speaker should thereupon send to the said M.P. below the limit an annual cheque for, say, £300, the name to appear in an annual return to Parliament of all the M.P.'s in receipt of public money on any grounds whatever. I demurred to this altogether, as drawing an invidious distinction between paid and unpaid members; said it was idle to ignore the theory on which the demand for paid members is based, namely, that it is desirable in the public interest that poor men should have access to the H. of C.; and that the poor man should stand there on the same footing as anybody else.Friday, Jan. 1, 1892.—After breakfast Mrs. Gladstone came to my room and said how glad she was that I had not scrupled to put unpleasant points; that Mr. G. must not be shielded and sheltered as some great people are, who hear all the pleasant things and none of the unpleasant; that the perturbation from what is disagreeable only lasts an hour. I said I hoped that I was faithful with him, but of course I could not be always putting myself in an attitude of perpetual controversy. She said,“He is never made angry by what you say.”And so she went away, and —— and I had a good and most useful set-to about Irish finance.At luncheon Mr. G. asked what we had made out of our morning's work. When we told him he showed a good deal of impatience and vehemence, and, to my dismay, he came upon union finance and the general subject of the treatment of Ireland by England....In the afternoon we took a walk, he and I, afterwards joined by the rest. He was as delighted as ever with the swell of the waves, as they bounded over one another, with every variety of grace and tumultuous power. He wondered if we had not more and better words for the sea than the French—“breaker,”“billow,”“roller,”as against“flot,”“vague,”“onde,”“lame,”etc.[pg 480]At dinner he asked me whether I had made up my mind on the burning question of compulsory Greek for a university degree. I said, No, that as then advised I was half inclined to be against compulsory Greek, but it is so important that I would not decide before I was obliged.“So with me,”he said,“the question is one with many subtle and deep-reaching consequences.”He dwelt on the folly of striking Italian out of the course of modern education, thus cutting European history in two, and setting an artificial gulf between the ancient and modern worlds.Saturday, Jan. 2.—Superb morning, and all the better for being much cooler. At breakfast somebody started the idle topic of quill pens. When they came to the length of time that so-and-so made a quill serve,“De Retz,”said I,“made up his mind that Cardinal Chigi was a poor creature,maximus in minimis, because at their first interview Chigi boasted that he had used one pen for three years.”That recalled another saying of Retz's about Cromwell's famous dictum, that nobody goes so far as the man who does not know where he is going. Mr. G. gave his deep and eager Ah! to this. He could not recall that Cromwell had produced many dicta of such quality.“I don't love him, but he was a mighty big fellow. But he was intolerant. He was intolerant of the episcopalians.”Mr. G.—Do you know whom I find the most tolerant churchman of that time?Laud!Laud got Davenant made Bishop of Salisbury, and he zealously befriended Chillingworth and Hales. (There was some other case, which I forget.)The execution of Charles.—I told him of Gardiner's new volume which I had just been reading.“Charles,”he said,“was no doubt a dreadful liar; Cromwell perhaps did not always tell the truth; Elizabeth was a tremendous liar.”J. M.—Charles was not wholly inexcusable, being what he was, for thinking that he had a good game in his hands, by playing off the parliament against the army, etc.Mr. G.—There was less excuse for cutting off his head than in the case of poor Louisxvi., for Louis was the excuse for foreign invasion.[pg 481]At BayonneJ. M.—Could you call foreign invasion the intervention of the Scotch?Mr. G.—Well, not quite. I suppose it is certain that it was Cromwell who cut off Charles's head? Not one in a hundred in the nation desired it.J. M.—No, nor one in twenty in the parliament. But then, ninety-nine in a hundred in the army.In the afternoon we all drove towards Bayonne to watch the ships struggle over the bar at high water. As it happened we only saw one pass out, a countryman for Cardiff. A string of others were waiting to go, but a little steamer from Nantes came first, and having secured her station, found she had not force enough to make the bar, and the others remained swearing impatiently behind her. The Nantes steamer was like Ireland. The scene was very fresh and fine, and the cold most exhilarating after the mugginess of the last two or three days. Mr. G., who has a dizzy head, did not venture on the jetty, but watched things from the sands. He and I drove home together, at a good pace.“I am inclined,”he said laughingly,“to agree with Dr. Johnson that there is no pleasure greater than sitting behind four fast-going horses.”293Talking of Johnson generally,“I suppose we may take him as the best product of the eighteenth century.”Perhaps so, but is he its most characteristic product?Wellington.—Curious that there should be no general estimate of W.'s character; his character not merely as a general but as a man. No love of freedom. His sense of duty very strong, but military rather than civil.Montalembert.—Had often come into contact with him. A very amiable and attractive man. But less remarkable than Rio.Latin Poets.—Would you place Virgil first?J. M.—Oh, no, Lucretius much the first for the greatest and sublimest of poetic qualities. Mr. G. seemed to assent to this, though disposed to make a fight for the secondAeneidas equal to anything. He expressed his admiration for[pg 482]Catullus, and then he was strong that Horace would run anybody else very hard, breaking out with the lines about Regulus—“Atqui sciebat quæ sibi barbarusTortor pararet;”etc.294Blunders in Government.—How right Napoleon was when he said, reflecting on all the vast complexities of government, that the best to be said of a statesman is that he has avoided the biggest blunders.It is not easy to define the charm of these conversations. Is charm the right word? They are in the highest degree stimulating, bracing, widening. That is certain. I return to my room with the sensations of a man who has taken delightful exercise in fresh air. He is so wholly free from theergoteur. There's all the difference between theergoteurand the great debater. He fits his tone to the thing; he can be as playful as anybody. In truth I have many a time seen him in London and at Hawarden not far from trivial. But here at Biarritz all is appropriate, and though, as I say, he can be playful and gay as youth, he cannot resist rising in an instant to the general point of view—to grasp the elemental considerations of character, history, belief, conduct, affairs. There he is at home, there he is most himself. I never knew anybody less guilty of the tiresome sin of arguing for victory. It is not his knowledge that attracts; it is not his ethical tests and standards; it is not that dialectical strength of arm which, as Mark Pattison said of him, could twist a bar of iron to its purpose. It is the combination of these with elevation, with true sincerity, with extraordinary mental force.Sunday, Jan. 3.—Vauvenargues is right when he says that to carry through great undertakings, one must act as though one could never die. My wonderful companion is a wonderful illustration. He is like M. Angelo, who, just before he died on the very edge of ninety, made an allegorical figure, and inscribed upon it,ancora impara,“still learning.”At dinner he showed in full force.[pg 483]Table-TalkHeroes of the Old Testament.—He could not honestly say that he thought there was any figure in the O. T. comparable to the heroes of Homer. Moses was a fine fellow. But the others were of secondary quality—not great high personages, of commanding nature.Thinkers.—Rather an absurd word—to call a man a thinker (and he repeated the word with gay mockery in his tone). When did it come into use? Not until quite our own times, eh? I said, I believed both Hobbes and Locke spoke of thinkers, and was pretty sure thatpenseur, as inlibre penseur, had established itself in the last century. [Quite true; Voltaire used it, but it was not common.]Dr. Arnold.—A high, large, impressive figure—perhaps more important by his character and personality than his actual work. I mentioned M. A.'s poem on his father,Rugby Chapel, with admiration. Rather to my surprise, Mr. G. knew the poem well, and shared my admiration to the full. This brought us on to poetry generally, and he expatiated with much eloquence and sincerity for the rest of the talk. The wonderful continuity of fine poetry in England for five whole centuries, stretching from Chaucer to Tennyson, always a proof to his mind of the soundness, the sap, and the vitality of our nation and its character. What people, beginning with such a poet as Chaucer 500 years ago, could have burst forth into such astonishing production of poetry as marked the first quarter of the century, Byron, Wordsworth, Shelley, etc.J. M.—It is true that Germany has nothing, save Goethe, Schiller, Heine, that's her whole list. But I should say a word for the poetic movement in France: Hugo, Gautier, etc. Mr. G. evidently knew but little, or even nothing, of modern French poetry. He spoke up for Leopardi, on whom he had written an article first introducing him to the British public, ever so many years ago—in theQuarterly.Mr. G.—Wordsworth used occasionally to dine with me when I lived in the Albany. A most agreeable man. I always found him amiable, polite, and sympathetic. Only once did he jar upon me, when he spoke slightingly of Tennyson's first performance.[pg 484]J. M.—But he was not so wrong as he would be now. Tennyson's Juvenilia are terribly artificial.Mr. G.—Yes, perhaps. Tennyson has himself withdrawn some of them. I remember W., when he dined with me, used on leaving to change his silk stockings in the anteroom and put on grey worsted.J. M.—I once said to M. Arnold that I'd rather have been Wordsworth than anybody [not exactly a modest ambition]; and Arnold, who knew him well in the Grasmere country, said,“Oh no, you would not; you would wish you were dining with me at the Athenæum. He was too much of the peasant for you.”Mr. G.—No, I never felt that; I always thought him a polite and an amiable man.Mentioned Macaulay's strange judgment in a note in theHistory, that Dryden's famous lines,“... Fool'd with hope, men favour the deceit;Trust on, and think to-morrow will repay.To-morrow's falser than the former day;Lies worse, and while it says we shall be blestWith some new joys, cuts off what we possest.Strange cozenage!...”are as fine as any eight lines in Lucretius. Told him of an excellent remark of —— on this, that Dryden's passage wholly lacks the mystery and great superhuman air of Lucretius. Mr. G. warmly agreed.He regards it as a remarkable sign of the closeness of the church of England to the roots of life and feeling in the country, that so many clergymen should have written so much good poetry. Who, for instance? I asked. He named Heber, Moultrie, Newman (Dream of Gerontius), and Faber in at least one good poem,“The poor Labourer”(or some such title), Charles Tennyson. I doubt if this thesis has much body in it. He was for Shelley as the most musical of all our poets. I told him that I had once asked M. to get Tennyson to write an autograph line for a friend of mine, and Tennyson had sent this:—“Coldly on the dead volcano sleeps the gleam of dying day.”So I suppose the poet must think well of it himself. 'Tis[pg 485]Table-Talkfrom the secondLocksley Hall, and describes a man after passions have gone cool.Mr. G.—Yes, in melody, in the picturesque, and as apt simile, a fine line.Had been trying his hand at a translation of his favourite lines of Penelope about Odysseus. Said that, of course, you could translate similes and set passages, but to translate Homer as a whole, impossible. He was inclined, when all is said, to think Scott the nearest approach to a model.Monday, Jan. 4.—At luncheon, Mr. Gladstone recalled the well-known story of Talleyrand on the death of Napoleon. The news was brought when T. chanced to be dining with Wellington.“Quel événement!”they all cried.“Non, ce n'est pas un événement,”said Talleyrand,“c'est une nouvelle”—'Tis no event, 'tis a piece of news.“Imagine such a way,”said Mr. G.,“of taking the disappearance of that colossal man! Compare it with the opening of Manzoni's ode, which makes the whole earth stand still. Yet both points of view are right. In one sense, the giant's death was only news; in another, when we think of his history, it was enough to shake the world.”At the moment, he could not recall Manzoni's words, but at dinner he told me that he had succeeded in piecing them together, and after dinner he went to his room and wrote them down for me on a piece of paper. Curiously enough, he could not recall the passage in his own splendid translation.295Talk about handsome men of the past; Sidney Herbert one of the handsomest and most attractive. But the Duke of Hamilton bore away the palm, as glorious as a Greek god.“One day in Rotten Row, I said this to the Duchess of C. She set up James Hope-Scott against my Duke. No doubt he had an intellectual element which the Duke lacked.”Then we discussed the best-looking man in the H. of C. to-day....Duke of Wellington.—Somebody was expatiating on the incomparable position of the Duke; his popularity with kings, with nobles, with common people. Mr. G. remembered[pg 486]that immediately after the formation of Canning's government in 1827, when it was generally thought that he had been most unfairly and factiously treated (as Mr. G. still thinks, always saving Peel) by the Duke and his friends, the Duke made an expedition to the north of England, and had an overwhelming reception. Of course, he was then only twelve years from Waterloo, and yet only four or five years later he had to put up his iron shutters.Approved a remark that a friend of ours was not simple enough, not ready enough to take things as they come.Mr. G.—Unless a man has a considerable gift for taking things as they come, he may make up his mind that political life will be sheer torment to him. He must meet fortune in all its moods.Tuesday, Jan. 5.—After dinner to-day, Mr. G. extraordinarily gay. He had bought a present of silver for his wife. She tried to guess the price, and after the manner of wives in such a case, put the figure provokingly low. Mr. G. then put on the deprecating air of the tradesman with wounded feelings—and it was as capital fun as we could desire. That over, he fell to his backgammon with our host.Wednesday, Jan. 6.—Mrs. Gladstone eighty to-day! What a marvel....Léon Say called to see Mr. G. Long and most interesting conversation about all sorts of aspects of French politics, the concordat, the schools, and all the rest of it.He illustrated the ignorance of French peasantry as to current affairs. Thiers, long after he had become famous, went on a visit to his native region; and there met a friend of his youth.“Eh bien,”said his friend,“tu as fait ton chemin.”“Mais oui, j'ai fait un peu mon chemin. J'ai été ministre même.”“Ah, tiens! je ne savais pas que tu étais protestant.”I am constantly struck by his solicitude for the well-being and right doing of Oxford and Cambridge—“the two eyes of the country.”This connection between the higher education and the general movement of the national mind engages his profound attention, and no doubt deserves such attention[pg 487]Table-Talkin any statesman who looks beyond the mere surface problems of the day. To perceive the bearings of such matters as these, makes Mr. G. a statesman of the highest class, as distinguished from men of clever expedients.Mr. G. had been reading the Greek epigrams on religion in Mackail; quoted the last of them as illustrating the description of the dead as the inhabitants of the more populous world:—τῶν ἄπο κὴν ζωοῖσιν ἀκηδέα, κευτ᾽ ἄν ἵκηαιὲς πλεόνων, ἕξεις θυμὸν ἐλαφρότερον.296A more impressive epigram contains the same thought, where the old man, leaning on his staff, likens himself to the withered vine on its dry pole, and goes on to ask himself what advantage it would be to warm himself for three or four more years in the sun; and on that reflection without heroics put off his life, and changed his home to the greater company,κὴς πλεόνων ἦλθε μετοικεσίην.All the rest of the evening he kept us alive by a stock of infinite drolleries. A scene of a dish of over-boiled tea at West Calder after a meeting, would have made the fortune of a comedian.I said that in the all-important quality of co-operation, —— was only good on condition of being in front. Mr. G. read him in the same sense. Reminded of a mare he once had—admirable, provided you kept off spur, curb, or whip; show her one of these things, and she would do nothing. Mr. G. more of a judge of men than is commonly thought.Told us of a Chinese despatch which came under his notice when he was at the board of trade, and gave him food for reflection. A ship laden with grain came to Canton. The administrator wrote to the central government at Pekin to know whether the ship was to pay duty and land its cargo. The answer was to the effect that the central government of the Flowery Land was quite indifferent as a rule to the goings and comings of the Barbarians; whether they brought a cargo or brought no cargo was a thing of supreme unconcern.“But this cargo, you say, is food for the people. There ought to be[pg 488]no obstacle to the entry of food for the people. So let it in. Your Younger Brother commends himself to you, etc. etc.”Friday, Jan. 8.—A quiet evening. We were all rather piano at the end of an episode which had been thoroughly delightful. When Mr. G. bade me good-night, he said with real feeling,“More sorry than I can say that this is our last evening together at Biarritz.”He is painfully grieved to lose the sound of the sea in his ears.Saturday, Jan. 9.—Strolled about all the forenoon.“What a time of blessed composure it has been,”said Mr. G. with a heavy sigh. The distant hills covered with snow, and the voice of the storm gradually swelling. Still the savage fury of the sea was yet some hours off, so we had to leave Biarritz without the spectacle of Atlantic rage at its fiercest.Found comfortable saloon awaiting us at Bayonne, and so under weeping skies we made our way to Pau. The landscape must be pretty, weather permitting. As it was, we saw but little. Mr. G. dozed and read Max Müller's book on Anthropological Religions.Arrived at Pau towards 5.30; drenching rain: nothing to be seen.At tea time, a good little discussion raised by a protest against Dante being praised for a complete survey of human nature and the many phases of human lot. Intensity he has, but insight over the whole field of character and life? Mr. G. did not make any stand against this, and made the curious admission that Dante was too optimist to be placed on a level with Shakespeare, or even with Homer.Then we turned to lighter themes. He had once said to Henry Taylor,“I should have thought he was the sort of man to have a good strong grasp of a subject,”speaking of Lord Grey, who had been one of Taylor's many chiefs at the Colonial Office.“I should have thought,”replied Taylor slowly and with a dreamy look,“he was the sort of man to have a good strongnipof a subject.”Witty, and very applicable to many men.Wordsworth once gave Mr. G. with much complacency, as an example of his own readiness and resource, this story. A man came up to him at Rydal and said,“Do you happen[pg 489]to have seen my wife.”“Why,”replied the Sage,“I did not know you had a wife!”This peculiarly modest attempt at pointed repartee much tickled Mr. G., as well it might.Tuesday, Jan. 12.—Mr. G. completely recovered from two days of indisposition. We had about an hour's talk on things in general, including policy in the approaching session. He did not expect a dissolution, at the same time a dissolution would not surprise him.At noon they started for Périgord and Carcassonne, Nismes, Arles, and so on to the Riviera full of kind things at our parting.
In the eighties Mr. Gladstone grew into close friendship with one who had for many years been his faithful supporter in the House of Commons as member for Dundee. Nobody ever showed him devotion more considerate, loyal, and unselfish than did Mr. Armitstead, from about the close of the parliament of 1880 down to the end of this story.287In the middle of December 1891 Mr. Armitstead planned a foreign trip for his hero, and persuaded me to join. Biarritz was to be our destination, and the expedition proved a wonderful success. Some notes of mine, though intended only for domestic consumption, may help to bring Mr. Gladstone in his easiest moods before the reader's eye. No new ideas struck fire, no particular contribution was made to grand themes. But a great statesman on a holiday may be forgiven for not trying to discover brand-new keys to philosophy, history, and“all the mythologies.”As a sketch from life of the veteran's buoyancy, vigour, genial freshness of heart and brain, after four-score strenuous years, these few pages may be found of interest.
We left Paris at nine in the morning (Dec. 16), and were listening to the swell of the mighty Bay resounding under our windows at Biarritz soon after midnight.
The long day's journey left no signs of fatigue on either Mr. or Mrs. Gladstone, and his only regret was that we had[pg 464]not come straight through instead of staying a night in Paris. I'm always for going straight on, he said. For some odd reason in spite of the late hour he was full of stories of American humour, which he told with extraordinary verve and enjoyment. I contributed one that amused him much, of the Bostonian who, having read Shakespeare for the first time, observed,“I call that a very clever book. Now, I don't suppose there are twenty men in Boston to-day who could have written that book!”
Thursday, Dec. 17.—Splendid morning for making acquaintance with a new place. Saw the western spur of the Pyrenees falling down to the Bidassoa and the first glimpse of the giant wall, beyond which, according to Michelet, Africa begins, and our first glimpse of Spain.
After breakfast we all sallied forth to look into the shops and to see the lie of the land. Mr. G. as interested as a child in all the objects in the shops—many of them showing that we are not far from Spain. The consul very polite, showed us about, and told us the hundred trifles that bring a place really into one's mind. Nothing is like a first morning's stroll in a foreign town. By afternoon the spell dissolves, and the mood comes of Dante's lines,“Era già l'ora,”etc.288
Some mention was made of Charles Austin, the famous lawyer: it brought up the case of men who are suddenly torn from lives of great activity to complete idleness.
Mr. G.—I don't know how to reconcile it with what I've always regarded as the foundation of character—Bishop Butler's view of habit. How comes it that during the hundreds of years in which priests and fellows of Eton College have retired from hard work to college livings and leisure, not one of them has ever done anything whatever for either scholarship or divinity—not one?
Mr. G. did not know Mazzini, but Armellini, another of the Roman triumvirs, taught him Italian in 1832.[pg 465]
Opinions On Statesmen
Opinions On Statesmen
I spoke a word for Gambetta, but he would not have it.“Gambetta wasautoritaire; I do not feel as if he were a true liberal in the old and best sense. I cannot forget how hostile he was to the movement for freedom in the Balkans.”
Said he only once saw Lord Liverpool. He went to call on Canning at Glos'ter House (close to our Glos'ter Road Station), and there through a glass door he saw Canning and Lord Liverpool talking together.
Peel.—Had a good deal of temper; not hot; but perhaps sulky. Not a farsighted man, but fairly clear-sighted.“I called upon him after the election in 1847. The Janissaries, as Bentinck called us, that is the men who had stood by Peel, had been 110 before the election; we came back only 50. Peel said to me that what he looked forward to was a long and fierce struggle on behalf of protection. I must say I thought this foolish. If Bentinck had lived, with his strong will and dogged industry, there might have been a wide rally for protection, but everybody knew that Dizzy did not care a straw about it, and Derby had not constancy and force enough.”
Mr. G. said Disraeli's performances against Peel were quite as wonderful as report makes them. Peel altogether helpless in reply. Dealt with them with a kind of“righteous dulness.”The Protectionist secession due to three men: Derby contributed prestige; Bentinck backbone; and Dizzy parliamentary brains.
The golden age of administrative reform was from 1832 to the Crimean War; Peel was always keenly interested in the progress of these reforms.
Northcote.—“He was my private secretary; and one of the very best imaginable; pliant, ready, diligent, quick, acute, with plenty of humour, and a temper simply perfect. But as a leader, I think ill of him; you had a conversation; he saw the reason of your case; and when he left, you supposed all was right. But at the second interview, you always found that he had been unable to persuade his friends. What could be weaker than his conduct on the Bradlaugh affair! You could not wonder that the rank and file of his men should be caught by the proposition[pg 466]that an atheist ought not to sit in parliament. But what is a leader good for, if he dare not tell his party that in a matter like this they are wrong, and of course nobody knew better than N. that they were wrong. A clever, quick man with fine temper. By the way, how is it that we have no word, no respectable word, for backbone?”
J. M.—Character?
Mr. G.—Well, character; yes; but that's vague. It means will, I suppose. (I ought to have thought of Novalis's well-known definition of character as“a completely fashioned will.”)
J. M.—Our inferiority to the Greeks in discriminations of language shown by our lack of precise equivalents for φρόνησις, σοφία, σωφροσύνη, etc., of which we used to hear so much when coached in theEthics.
Mr. G. went on to argue that because the Greeks drew these fine distinctions in words, they were superior in conduct.“You cannot beat the Greeks in noble qualities.”
Mr. G.—I admit there is no Greek word of good credit for the virtue of humility.
J. M.—ταπεινότης? But that has an association of meanness.
Mr. G.—Yes; a shabby sort of humility. Humility as a sovereign grace is the creation of Christianity.
Friday, December 18.—Brilliant sunshine, but bitterly cold; an east wind blowing straight from the Maritime Alps. Walking, reading, talking. Mr. G. after breakfast took me into his room, where he is reading Heine, Butcher on Greek genius, and Marbot. Thought Thiers's well-known remark on Heine's death capital,—“To-day the wittiest Frenchman alive has died.”
Mr. G.—We have talked about the best line in poetry, etc. How do you answer this question—Which century of English history produced the greatest men?
J. M.—What do you say to the sixteenth?
Mr. G.—Yes, I think so. Gardiner was a great man. Henryviii.was great. But bad. Poor Cranmer. Like Northcote, he'd no backbone. Do you remember Jeremy Collier's sentence about his bravery at the stake, which[pg 467]
Table-Talk
Table-Talk
I count one of the grandest in English prose—“He seemed to repel the force of the fire and to overlook the torture, by strength of thought.”289Thucydides could not beat that.
The old man twice declaimed the sentence with deep sonorous voice, and his usual incomparable modulation.
Mr. G. talked of a certain General ——. He was thought to be a first-rate man; neglected nothing, looked to things himself, conceived admirable plans, and at last got an important command. Then to the universal surprise, nothing came of it; —— they said,“could do everything that a commander should do, except say,Quick march.”There are plenty of politicians of that stamp, but Mr. G. decidedly not one of them. I mentioned a farewell dinner given to —— in the spring, by some rich man or other. It cost £560 for forty-eight guests! Flowers alone £150. Mr. G. on this enormity, recalled a dinner to Talfourd about copyright at the old Clarendon Hotel in Bond Street, and the price was £2, 17s. 6d. a head. The old East India Company used to give dinners at a cost of seven guineas a head. He has a wonderfully lively interest for these matters, and his curiosity as to the prices of things in the shop-windows is inexhaustible. We got round to Goethe. Goethe, he said, never gave prominence to duty.
J. M.—Surely, surely in that fine psalm of life,Das Göttliche?
Mr. G.—Döllinger used to confront me with theIphigenieas a great drama of duty.
He wished that I had known Döllinger—“a man thoroughly from beginning to end of his lifepurged of self.”Mistook the nature of the Irish questions, from the erroneous view that Irish Catholicism is ultramontane, which it certainly is not.
Saturday, Dec. 19.—
What is extraordinary is that all Mr. G.'s versatility, buoyancy, and the rest goes with the most profound accuracy and intense concentration when any point of public business[pg 468]is raised. Something was said of the salaries of bishops. He was ready in an instant with every figure and detail, and every circumstance of the history of the foundation of the Ecclesiastical Commission in 1835-6. Then hissavoir faireand wisdom of parliamentary conduct.“I always made it a rule in the H. of C. to allow nobody to suppose that I did not like him, and to say as little as I could to prevent anybody from liking me. Considering the intense friction and contention of public life, it is a saving of wear and tear that as many as possible even among opponents should think well of one.”
Sunday, Dec. 20.—At table, a little discussion as to the happiness and misery of animal creation. Outside of man Mr. G. argued against Tennyson's description of Nature as red in tooth and claw. Apart from man, he said, and the action of man, sentient beings are happy and not miserable. But Fear? we said. No; they are unaware of impending doom; when hawk or kite pounces on its prey, the small bird has little or no apprehension; 'tis death, but death by appointed and unforeseen lot.
J. M.—There is Hunger. Is not the probability that most creatures are always hungry, not excepting Man?
To this he rather assented. Of course optimism like this is indispensable as the basis of natural theology.
Talked to Mr. G. about Michelet's Tableau de la France, which I had just finished in vol. 2 of the history. A brilliant tour de force, but strains the relations of soil to character; compels words and facts to be the slaves of his phantasy; the modicum of reality overlaid with violent paradox and foregone conclusion. Mr. G. not very much interested—seems only to care for political and church history.
Monday, Dec. 31.—Mr. G. did not appear at table to-day, suffering from a surfeit of wild strawberries the day before. But he dined in his dressing gown, and I had some chat with him in his room after lunch.
Mr. G.—“'Tis a hard law of political things that if a man shows special competence in a department, that is the very thing most likely to keep him there, and prevent his promotion.”
Table-Talk
Table-Talk
Mr. G.—I consider Burke a tripartite man: America, France, Ireland—right as to two, wrong in one.
J. M.—Must you not add home affairs and India? HisThoughts on the Discontentsis a masterpiece of civil wisdom, and the right defence in a great constitutional struggle. Then he gave fourteen years of industry to Warren Hastings, and teaching England the rights of the natives, princes and people, and her own duties. So he was right in four out of five.
Mr. G.—Yes, yes—quite true. Those two ought to be added to my three. There is a saying of Burke's from which I must utterly dissent.“Property is sluggish and inert.”Quite the contrary. Property is vigilant, active, sleepless; if ever it seems to slumber, be sure that one eye is open.
Marie Antoinette.I once read the three volumes of letters from Mercy d'Argenteau to Maria Theresa. He seems to have performed the duty imposed upon him with fidelity.
J. M.—Don't you think the Empress comes out well in the correspondence?
Mr. G.—Yes, she shows always judgment and sagacity.
J. M.—Ah, but besides sagacity, worth and as much integrity as those slippery times allowed.
Mr. G.—Yes (but rather reluctantly, I thought). As for Marie Antoinette, she was not a striking character in any senses she was horribly frivolous; and, I suppose, we must say she was, what shall I call it—a very considerable flirt?
J. M.—The only case with real foundation seems to be that of thebeau Fersen, the Swedish secretary. He too came to as tragic an end as the Queen.
Tuesday, Dec. 22.—Mr. G. still somewhat indisposed—but reading away all day long. Full of Marbot. Delighted with the story of the battle of Castiglione: how when Napoleon held a council of war, and they all said they were hemmed in, and that their only chance was to back out, Augereau roughly cried that they might all do what they liked, but he would attack the enemy cost what it might.“Exactly like a place in theIliad; when Agamemnon and the rest sit sorrowful in the assembly arguing that it was[pg 470]useless to withstand the sovereign will of Zeus, and that they had better flee into their ships, Diomed bursts out that whatever others think, in any event he and Sthenelus, his squire, will hold firm, and never desist from the onslaught until they have laid waste the walls of Troy.”290A large dose of Diomed in Mr. G. himself.
Talk about the dangerous isolation in which the monarchy will find itself in England if the hereditary principle goes down in the House of Lords;“it will stand bare, naked, with no shelter or shield, only endured as the better of two evils.”“I once asked,”he said,“who besides myself in the party cares for the hereditary principle? The answer was, That perhaps —— cared for it!!”—naming a member of the party supposed to be rather sapient than sage.
News in the paper that the Comte de Paris in his discouragement was about to renounce his claims, and break up his party. Somehow this brought us round to Tocqueville, of whom Mr. G. spoke as the nearest French approach to Burke.
J. M.—But pale and without passion. Who was it that said of him that he was an aristocrat who accepted his defeat? That is, he knew democracy to be the conqueror, but he doubted how far it would be an improvement, he saw its perils, etc.
Mr. G.—I have not much faith in these estimates, whether in favour of progress or against it. I don't believe in comparisons of age with age. How can a man strike a balance between one government and another? How can he place himself in such an attitude, and with such comprehensive sureness of vision, as to say that the thirteenth century was better or higher or worse or lower than the nineteenth?
Thursday, Dec. 24.—At lunch we had the news of the Parnellite victory at Waterford. A disagreeable reverse for us. Mr. G. did not say many words about it, only that it would give heart to the mischief makers—only too certain. But we said no more about it. He and I took a walk on the sands in the afternoon, and had a curious talk (considering), about the prospects of the church of England. He was[pg 471]
Ecclesiastical
Ecclesiastical
anxious to know about my talk some time ago with the Bishop of —— whom I had met at a feast at Lincoln's Inn. I gave him as good an account as I could of what had passed. Mr. G. doubted that this prelate was fundamentally an Erastian, as Tait was. Mr. G. is eager to read the signs of the times as to the prospects of Anglican Christianity, to which his heart is given; and he fears the peril of Erastianism to the spiritual life of the church, which is naturally the only thing worth caring about. Hence, he talked with much interest of the question whether the clever fellows at Oxford and Cambridge now take orders. He wants to know what kind of defenders his church is likely to have in days to come. Said that for the first time interest has moved away both from politics and theology, towards the vague something which they call social reform; and he thinks they won't make much out of that in the way of permanent results. The establishment he considers safer than it has been for a long time.
As to Welsh disestablishment, he said it was a pity that where the national sentiment was so unanimous as it was in Wales, the operation itself should not be as simple as in Scotland. In Scotland sentiment is not unanimous, but the operation is easy. In Wales sentiment is all one way, but the operation difficult—a good deal more difficult than people suppose, as they will find out when they come to tackle it.
[Perhaps it may be mentioned here that, though we always talked freely and abundantly together upon ecclesiastical affairs and persons, we never once exchanged a word upon theology or religious creed, either at Biarritz or anywhere else.]
Pitt.—A strong denunciation of Pitt for the French war. People don't realise what the French war meant. In 1812 wheat at Liverpool was 20s. (?) the imperial bushel of 65 pounds (?)! Think of that, when you bring it into figures of the cost of a loaf. And that was the time when Eaton, Eastnor, and other great palaces were built by the landlords out of the high rents which the war and war prices enabled them to exact.
Wished we knew more of Melbourne. He was in many ways a very fine fellow.“In two of the most important of all the relations of a prime minister, he was perfect; I mean first, his relations to the Queen, second to his colleagues.”
Somebody at dinner quoted a capital description of the perverse fashion of talking that prevailed at Oxford soon after my time, and prevails there now, I fancy—“hunting for epigrammatic ways of saying what you don't think.”—— was the father of this pestilent mode.
Rather puzzled him by repeating a saying of mine that used to amuse Fitzjames Stephen, that Love of Truth is more often than we think only a fine name for Temper. I think Mr. G. has a thorough dislike for anything that has a cynical or sardonic flavour about it. I wish I had thought, by the way, of asking him what he had to say of that piece of Swift's, about all objects being insipid that do not come by delusion, and everything being shrunken as it appears in the glass of nature, so that if it were not for artificial mediums, refracted angles, false lights, varnish and tinsel, there would be pretty much of a level in the felicity of mortal man.
Am always feeling how strong is his aversion to seeing more than he can help of what is sordid, mean, ignoble. He has not been in public life all these years without rubbing shoulders with plenty of baseness on every scale, and plenty of pettiness in every hue, but he has always kept his eyes well above it. Never was a man more wholly free of the starch of the censor, more ready to make allowance, nor more indulgent even; he enters into human nature in all its compass. But he won't linger a minute longer than he must in the dingy places of life and character.
Christmas Day, 1891.—A divine day, brilliant sunshine, and mild spring air. Mr. G. heard what he called an admirable sermon from an English preacher,“with a great command of his art.”A quietish day, Mr. G. no doubt engaged in φρονεῖν τὰ ὅσια.
Saturday, Dec. 26.—Once more a noble day. We started in a couple of carriages for the Négress station, a couple of miles away or more, I with the G.'s. Occasion produced the Greek epitaph of the nameless drowned sailor[pg 473]
Fuentarabia
Fuentarabia
who wished for others kinder seas.291Mr. G. felt its pathos and its noble charm—so direct and simple, such benignity, such a good lesson to men to forget their own misdeeds and mischance, and to pray for the passer-by a happier star. He repaid me by two epigrams of a different vein, and one admirable translation into Greek, of Tennyson on Sir John Franklin, which I do not carry in my mind; another on a boisterous Eton fellow—
Didactic, dry, declamatory, dull,The bursar —— bellows like a bull.
Didactic, dry, declamatory, dull,The bursar —— bellows like a bull.
Didactic, dry, declamatory, dull,
The bursar —— bellows like a bull.
Just in the tone of Greek epigram, a sort of point, but not too much point.
Parliamentary Wit.—Thought Disraeli had never been surpassed, nor even equalled, in this line. He had a contest with General Grey, who stood upon the general merits of the whig government, after both Lord Grey and Stanley had left it. D. drew a picture of a circus man who advertised his show with its incomparable team of six grey horses. One died, he replaced it by a mule. Another died, and he put in a donkey, still he went on advertising his team of greys all the same. Canning's wit not to be found conspicuously in his speeches, but highly agreeable pleasantries, though many of them in a vein which would jar horribly on modern taste.
Some English redcoats and a pack of hounds passed us as we neared the station. They saluted Mr. G. with a politeness that astonished him, but was pleasant. Took the train for Irun, the fields and mountain slopes delightful in the sun, and the sea on our right a superb blue such as we never see in English waters. At Irun we found carriages waiting to take us on to Fuentarabia. From the balcony of the church had a beautiful view over the scene of Wellington's operations when he crossed the Bidassoa, in the presence of the astonished Soult. A lovely picture, made none the worse by this excellent historic association. The[pg 474]alcalde was extremely polite and intelligent. The consul who was with us showed a board on the old tower, in whichvin some words wasb, and I noted that the alcalde spoke of Viarritz. I reminded Mr. G. of Scaliger's epigram—
Haud temere antiquas mutat Vasconia voces,Cui nihil est alind vivere quam bibere.
Haud temere antiquas mutat Vasconia voces,Cui nihil est alind vivere quam bibere.
Haud temere antiquas mutat Vasconia voces,
Cui nihil est alind vivere quam bibere.
Pretty cold driving home, but Mr. G. seemed not to care. He found both the churches at St. Jean and at Fuentarabia very noteworthy, though the latter very popish, but both, he felt,“had a certain association with grandeur.”
Sunday, Dec. 27.—After some quarter of an hour of travellers' topics, we plunged into one of the most interesting talks we have yet had.Aproposof I do not know what, Mr. G. said that he had not advised his son to enter public life.“No doubt there are some men to whom station, wealth, and family traditions make it a duty. But I have never advised any individual, as to whom I have been consulted, to enter the H. of C.”
J. M.—But isn't that rather to encourage self-indulgence? Nobody who cares for ease or mental composure would seek public life?
Mr. G.—Ah, I don't know that. Surely politics open up a great field for the natural man. Self-seeking, pride, domination, power—all these passions are gratified in politics.
J. M.—You cannot be sure of achievement in politics, whether personal or public?
Mr. G.—No; to use Bacon's pregnant phrase, they are too immersed in matter. Then as new matter, that is, new details and particulars, come into view, men change their judgment.
J. M.—You have spoken just now of somebody as a thorough good tory. You know the saying that nobody is worth much who has not been a bit of a radical in his youth, and a bit of a tory in his fuller age.
Mr. G.(laughing)—Ah, I'm afraid that hits me rather hard. But for myself, I think I can truly put up all the change that has come into my politics into a sentence; I[pg 475]
Disenchantment A Mistake
Disenchantment A Mistake
was brought up to distrust and dislike liberty, I learned to believe in it. That is the key to all my changes.
J. M.—According to my observation, the change in my own generation is different. They have ceased either to trust or to distrust liberty, and have come to the mind that it matters little either way. Men are disenchanted. They have got what they wanted in the days of their youth, yet what of it, they ask? France has thrown off the Empire, but the statesmen of the republic are not a great breed. Italy has gained her unity, yet unity has not been followed by thrift, wisdom, or large increase of public virtue or happiness. America has purged herself of slavery, yet life in America is material, prosaic,—so say some of her own rarest sons. Don't think that I say all these things. But I know able and high-minded men who suffer from this disenchantment.
Mr. G.—Italy would have been very different if Cavour had only lived—and even Ricasoli. Men ought not to suffer from disenchantment. They ought to know thatideals in politics are never realised. And don't let us forget in eastern Europe the rescue in our time of some ten millions of men from the harrowing domination of the Turk. (On this he expatiated, and very justly, with much energy.)
We turned to our own country. Here he insisted that democracy had certainly not saved us from a distinct decline in the standard of public men.... Look at the whole conduct of opposition from '80 to '85—every principle was flung overboard, if they could manufacture a combination against the government. For all this deterioration one man and one man alone is responsible, Disraeli. He is the grand corrupter. He it was who sowed the seed.
J. M.—Ought not Palmerston to bear some share in this?
Mr. G.—No, no; Pam. had many strong and liberal convictions. On one subject Dizzy had them too—the Jews. There he was much more than rational, he was fanatical. He said once that Providence would deal good or ill fortune to nations, according as they dealt well or ill by the Jews. I remember once sitting next to John Russell when D. was[pg 476]making a speech on Jewish emancipation.“Look at him,”said J. R.,“how manfully he sticks to it, tho' he knows that every word he says is gall and wormwood to every man who sits around him and behind him.”A curious irony, was it not, that it should have fallen to me to propose a motion for a memorial both to Pam. and Dizzy?
A superb scene upon the ocean, with a grand wind from the west. Mr. G. and I walked on the shore; he has a passion for tumultuous seas. I have never seen such huge masses of water shattering themselves among the rocks.
In the evening Mr. G. remarked on our debt to Macaulay, for guarding the purity of the English tongue. I recalled a favourite passage from Milton, that next to the man who gives wise and intrepid counsels of government, he places the man who cares for the purity of his mother tongue. Mr. G. liked this. Said he only knew Bright once slip into an error in this respect, when he used“transpire”for“happen.”Macaulay of good example also in rigorously abstaining from the inclusion of matter in footnotes. Hallam an offender in this respect. I pointed out that he offended in company with Gibbon.
Monday, Dec. 28.—We had an animated hour at breakfast.
Oxford and Cambridge.—Curious how, like two buckets, whenever one was up, the other was down. Cambridge has never produced four such men of action in successive ages as Wolsey, Laud, Wesley, and Newman.
J. M.—In the region of thought Cambridge has produced the greatest of all names, Newton.
Mr. G.—In the earlier times Oxford has it—with Wycliff, Occam, above all Roger Bacon. And then in the eighteenth century, Butler.
J. M.—But why not Locke, too, in the century before?
This brought on a tremendous tussle, for Mr. G. was of the same mind, and perhaps for the same sort of reason, as Joseph de Maistre, that contempt for Locke is the beginning of knowledge. All very well for De Maistre, but not for a man in line with European liberalism. I pressed the very obvious point that you must take into account not only a man's intellectual product or his general stature, but also[pg 477]
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his influence as a historic force. From the point of view of influence Locke was the origin of the emancipatory movement of the eighteenth century abroad, and laid the philosophic foundations of liberalism in civil government at home. Mr. G. insisted on a passage of Hume's which he believed to be in the history, disparaging Locke as a metaphysical thinker.292“That may be,”said I,“though Hume in hisEssaysis not above paying many compliments to‘the great reasoner,’etc., to whom, for that matter, I fancy that he stood in pretty direct relation. But far be it from me to deny that Hume saw deeper than Locke into the metaphysical millstone. That is not the point. I'm only thinking of his historic place, and, after all, the history of philosophy is itself a philosophy.”To minds nursed in dogmatic schools, all this is both unpalatable and incredible.
Somehow we slid into the freedom of the will and Jonathan Edwards. I told him that Mill had often told us how Edwards argued the necessarian or determinist case as keenly as any modern.
Tuesday, Dec. 29.—Mr. G. 82 to-day. I gave him Mackail's Greek Epigrams, and if it affords him half as much pleasure as it has given me, he will be very grateful. Various people brought Mr. G. bouquets and addresses. Mr. G. went to church in the morning, and in the afternoon took a walk with me....Land Question.As you go through France you see the soil cultivated by the population. In our little dash into Spain the other day, we saw again the soil cultivated by the population. In England it is cultivated by the capitalist, for the farmer is capitalist. Some astonishing views recently propounded by D. of Argyll on this matter. Unearned increment—so terribly difficult to catch it. Perhaps best try to get at it through the death duties. Physical condition of our people—always a subject of great anxiety—their stature, colour, and so on. Feared the atmosphere of cotton factories, etc., very deleterious. As against bad air, I said, you must set good food; the Lancashire operative in decent times lives uncommonly well, as he deserves to do. He agreed there might be something in this.
The day was humid and muggy, but the tumult of the sea was most majestic. Mr. G. delighted in it. He has a passion for the sound of the sea; would like to have it in his ear all day and all night. Again and again he recurred to this.
After dinner, long talk about Mazzini, of whom Mr. G. thought poorly in comparison with Poerio and the others who for freedom sacrificed their lives. I stood up for Mazzini, as one of the most morally impressive men I had ever known, or that his age knew; he breathed a soul into democracy.
Then we fell into a discussion as to the eastern and western churches. He thought the western popes by their proffered alliance with the mahometans, etc., had betrayed Christianity in the east. I offered De Maistre's view.
Mr. G. strongly assented to old Chatham's dictum that vacancy is worse than even the most anxious work. He has less to reproach himself with than most men under that head.
He repeated an observation that I have heard him make before, that he thought politicians are morerapidthan other people. I told him that Bowen once said to me on this that he did not agree; that he thought rapidity the mark of all successful men in the practical line of life, merchants and stockbrokers, etc.
Wednesday, Dec. 30.—A very muggy day. A divine sunset, with the loveliest pink and opal tints in the sky. Mr. G. reading Gleig'sSubaltern. Not a very entertaining book in itself, but the incidents belong to Wellington's Pyrenean campaign, and, for my own part, I rather enjoyed it on the principle on which one likes readingRomolaat Florence,Transformationat Rome,Sylvia's Loversat Whitby, andHurrishon the northern edge of Clare.
Thursday, Dec. 31.—Down to the pier, and found all the party watching the breakers, and superb they were. Mr. G. exulting in the huge force of the Atlantic swell and the beat of the rollers on the shore, like a Titanic pulse.
After dinner Mr. G. raised the question of payment of members. He had been asked by somebody whether he meant at Newcastle to indicate that everybody should be paid, or only those who chose to take it or to ask[pg 479]
Payment Of Members
Payment Of Members
for it. He produced the same extraordinary plan as he had described to me on the morning of his Newcastle speech—i.e.that the Inland Revenue should ascertain from their own books the income of every M.P., and if they found any below the limit of exemption, should notify the same to the Speaker, and the Speaker should thereupon send to the said M.P. below the limit an annual cheque for, say, £300, the name to appear in an annual return to Parliament of all the M.P.'s in receipt of public money on any grounds whatever. I demurred to this altogether, as drawing an invidious distinction between paid and unpaid members; said it was idle to ignore the theory on which the demand for paid members is based, namely, that it is desirable in the public interest that poor men should have access to the H. of C.; and that the poor man should stand there on the same footing as anybody else.
Friday, Jan. 1, 1892.—After breakfast Mrs. Gladstone came to my room and said how glad she was that I had not scrupled to put unpleasant points; that Mr. G. must not be shielded and sheltered as some great people are, who hear all the pleasant things and none of the unpleasant; that the perturbation from what is disagreeable only lasts an hour. I said I hoped that I was faithful with him, but of course I could not be always putting myself in an attitude of perpetual controversy. She said,“He is never made angry by what you say.”And so she went away, and —— and I had a good and most useful set-to about Irish finance.
At luncheon Mr. G. asked what we had made out of our morning's work. When we told him he showed a good deal of impatience and vehemence, and, to my dismay, he came upon union finance and the general subject of the treatment of Ireland by England....
In the afternoon we took a walk, he and I, afterwards joined by the rest. He was as delighted as ever with the swell of the waves, as they bounded over one another, with every variety of grace and tumultuous power. He wondered if we had not more and better words for the sea than the French—“breaker,”“billow,”“roller,”as against“flot,”“vague,”“onde,”“lame,”etc.
At dinner he asked me whether I had made up my mind on the burning question of compulsory Greek for a university degree. I said, No, that as then advised I was half inclined to be against compulsory Greek, but it is so important that I would not decide before I was obliged.“So with me,”he said,“the question is one with many subtle and deep-reaching consequences.”He dwelt on the folly of striking Italian out of the course of modern education, thus cutting European history in two, and setting an artificial gulf between the ancient and modern worlds.
Saturday, Jan. 2.—Superb morning, and all the better for being much cooler. At breakfast somebody started the idle topic of quill pens. When they came to the length of time that so-and-so made a quill serve,“De Retz,”said I,“made up his mind that Cardinal Chigi was a poor creature,maximus in minimis, because at their first interview Chigi boasted that he had used one pen for three years.”That recalled another saying of Retz's about Cromwell's famous dictum, that nobody goes so far as the man who does not know where he is going. Mr. G. gave his deep and eager Ah! to this. He could not recall that Cromwell had produced many dicta of such quality.“I don't love him, but he was a mighty big fellow. But he was intolerant. He was intolerant of the episcopalians.”
Mr. G.—Do you know whom I find the most tolerant churchman of that time?Laud!Laud got Davenant made Bishop of Salisbury, and he zealously befriended Chillingworth and Hales. (There was some other case, which I forget.)
The execution of Charles.—I told him of Gardiner's new volume which I had just been reading.“Charles,”he said,“was no doubt a dreadful liar; Cromwell perhaps did not always tell the truth; Elizabeth was a tremendous liar.”
J. M.—Charles was not wholly inexcusable, being what he was, for thinking that he had a good game in his hands, by playing off the parliament against the army, etc.
Mr. G.—There was less excuse for cutting off his head than in the case of poor Louisxvi., for Louis was the excuse for foreign invasion.
At Bayonne
At Bayonne
J. M.—Could you call foreign invasion the intervention of the Scotch?
Mr. G.—Well, not quite. I suppose it is certain that it was Cromwell who cut off Charles's head? Not one in a hundred in the nation desired it.
J. M.—No, nor one in twenty in the parliament. But then, ninety-nine in a hundred in the army.
In the afternoon we all drove towards Bayonne to watch the ships struggle over the bar at high water. As it happened we only saw one pass out, a countryman for Cardiff. A string of others were waiting to go, but a little steamer from Nantes came first, and having secured her station, found she had not force enough to make the bar, and the others remained swearing impatiently behind her. The Nantes steamer was like Ireland. The scene was very fresh and fine, and the cold most exhilarating after the mugginess of the last two or three days. Mr. G., who has a dizzy head, did not venture on the jetty, but watched things from the sands. He and I drove home together, at a good pace.“I am inclined,”he said laughingly,“to agree with Dr. Johnson that there is no pleasure greater than sitting behind four fast-going horses.”293Talking of Johnson generally,“I suppose we may take him as the best product of the eighteenth century.”Perhaps so, but is he its most characteristic product?
Wellington.—Curious that there should be no general estimate of W.'s character; his character not merely as a general but as a man. No love of freedom. His sense of duty very strong, but military rather than civil.
Montalembert.—Had often come into contact with him. A very amiable and attractive man. But less remarkable than Rio.
Latin Poets.—Would you place Virgil first?
J. M.—Oh, no, Lucretius much the first for the greatest and sublimest of poetic qualities. Mr. G. seemed to assent to this, though disposed to make a fight for the secondAeneidas equal to anything. He expressed his admiration for[pg 482]Catullus, and then he was strong that Horace would run anybody else very hard, breaking out with the lines about Regulus—
“Atqui sciebat quæ sibi barbarusTortor pararet;”etc.294
“Atqui sciebat quæ sibi barbarusTortor pararet;”etc.294
“Atqui sciebat quæ sibi barbarus
Tortor pararet;”etc.294
Blunders in Government.—How right Napoleon was when he said, reflecting on all the vast complexities of government, that the best to be said of a statesman is that he has avoided the biggest blunders.
It is not easy to define the charm of these conversations. Is charm the right word? They are in the highest degree stimulating, bracing, widening. That is certain. I return to my room with the sensations of a man who has taken delightful exercise in fresh air. He is so wholly free from theergoteur. There's all the difference between theergoteurand the great debater. He fits his tone to the thing; he can be as playful as anybody. In truth I have many a time seen him in London and at Hawarden not far from trivial. But here at Biarritz all is appropriate, and though, as I say, he can be playful and gay as youth, he cannot resist rising in an instant to the general point of view—to grasp the elemental considerations of character, history, belief, conduct, affairs. There he is at home, there he is most himself. I never knew anybody less guilty of the tiresome sin of arguing for victory. It is not his knowledge that attracts; it is not his ethical tests and standards; it is not that dialectical strength of arm which, as Mark Pattison said of him, could twist a bar of iron to its purpose. It is the combination of these with elevation, with true sincerity, with extraordinary mental force.
Sunday, Jan. 3.—Vauvenargues is right when he says that to carry through great undertakings, one must act as though one could never die. My wonderful companion is a wonderful illustration. He is like M. Angelo, who, just before he died on the very edge of ninety, made an allegorical figure, and inscribed upon it,ancora impara,“still learning.”
At dinner he showed in full force.
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Heroes of the Old Testament.—He could not honestly say that he thought there was any figure in the O. T. comparable to the heroes of Homer. Moses was a fine fellow. But the others were of secondary quality—not great high personages, of commanding nature.
Thinkers.—Rather an absurd word—to call a man a thinker (and he repeated the word with gay mockery in his tone). When did it come into use? Not until quite our own times, eh? I said, I believed both Hobbes and Locke spoke of thinkers, and was pretty sure thatpenseur, as inlibre penseur, had established itself in the last century. [Quite true; Voltaire used it, but it was not common.]
Dr. Arnold.—A high, large, impressive figure—perhaps more important by his character and personality than his actual work. I mentioned M. A.'s poem on his father,Rugby Chapel, with admiration. Rather to my surprise, Mr. G. knew the poem well, and shared my admiration to the full. This brought us on to poetry generally, and he expatiated with much eloquence and sincerity for the rest of the talk. The wonderful continuity of fine poetry in England for five whole centuries, stretching from Chaucer to Tennyson, always a proof to his mind of the soundness, the sap, and the vitality of our nation and its character. What people, beginning with such a poet as Chaucer 500 years ago, could have burst forth into such astonishing production of poetry as marked the first quarter of the century, Byron, Wordsworth, Shelley, etc.
J. M.—It is true that Germany has nothing, save Goethe, Schiller, Heine, that's her whole list. But I should say a word for the poetic movement in France: Hugo, Gautier, etc. Mr. G. evidently knew but little, or even nothing, of modern French poetry. He spoke up for Leopardi, on whom he had written an article first introducing him to the British public, ever so many years ago—in theQuarterly.
Mr. G.—Wordsworth used occasionally to dine with me when I lived in the Albany. A most agreeable man. I always found him amiable, polite, and sympathetic. Only once did he jar upon me, when he spoke slightingly of Tennyson's first performance.
J. M.—But he was not so wrong as he would be now. Tennyson's Juvenilia are terribly artificial.
Mr. G.—Yes, perhaps. Tennyson has himself withdrawn some of them. I remember W., when he dined with me, used on leaving to change his silk stockings in the anteroom and put on grey worsted.
J. M.—I once said to M. Arnold that I'd rather have been Wordsworth than anybody [not exactly a modest ambition]; and Arnold, who knew him well in the Grasmere country, said,“Oh no, you would not; you would wish you were dining with me at the Athenæum. He was too much of the peasant for you.”
Mr. G.—No, I never felt that; I always thought him a polite and an amiable man.
Mentioned Macaulay's strange judgment in a note in theHistory, that Dryden's famous lines,
“... Fool'd with hope, men favour the deceit;Trust on, and think to-morrow will repay.To-morrow's falser than the former day;Lies worse, and while it says we shall be blestWith some new joys, cuts off what we possest.Strange cozenage!...”
“... Fool'd with hope, men favour the deceit;Trust on, and think to-morrow will repay.To-morrow's falser than the former day;Lies worse, and while it says we shall be blestWith some new joys, cuts off what we possest.Strange cozenage!...”
“... Fool'd with hope, men favour the deceit;
Trust on, and think to-morrow will repay.
To-morrow's falser than the former day;
Lies worse, and while it says we shall be blest
With some new joys, cuts off what we possest.
Strange cozenage!...”
are as fine as any eight lines in Lucretius. Told him of an excellent remark of —— on this, that Dryden's passage wholly lacks the mystery and great superhuman air of Lucretius. Mr. G. warmly agreed.
He regards it as a remarkable sign of the closeness of the church of England to the roots of life and feeling in the country, that so many clergymen should have written so much good poetry. Who, for instance? I asked. He named Heber, Moultrie, Newman (Dream of Gerontius), and Faber in at least one good poem,“The poor Labourer”(or some such title), Charles Tennyson. I doubt if this thesis has much body in it. He was for Shelley as the most musical of all our poets. I told him that I had once asked M. to get Tennyson to write an autograph line for a friend of mine, and Tennyson had sent this:—
“Coldly on the dead volcano sleeps the gleam of dying day.”
“Coldly on the dead volcano sleeps the gleam of dying day.”
“Coldly on the dead volcano sleeps the gleam of dying day.”
So I suppose the poet must think well of it himself. 'Tis[pg 485]
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from the secondLocksley Hall, and describes a man after passions have gone cool.
Mr. G.—Yes, in melody, in the picturesque, and as apt simile, a fine line.
Had been trying his hand at a translation of his favourite lines of Penelope about Odysseus. Said that, of course, you could translate similes and set passages, but to translate Homer as a whole, impossible. He was inclined, when all is said, to think Scott the nearest approach to a model.
Monday, Jan. 4.—At luncheon, Mr. Gladstone recalled the well-known story of Talleyrand on the death of Napoleon. The news was brought when T. chanced to be dining with Wellington.“Quel événement!”they all cried.“Non, ce n'est pas un événement,”said Talleyrand,“c'est une nouvelle”—'Tis no event, 'tis a piece of news.“Imagine such a way,”said Mr. G.,“of taking the disappearance of that colossal man! Compare it with the opening of Manzoni's ode, which makes the whole earth stand still. Yet both points of view are right. In one sense, the giant's death was only news; in another, when we think of his history, it was enough to shake the world.”At the moment, he could not recall Manzoni's words, but at dinner he told me that he had succeeded in piecing them together, and after dinner he went to his room and wrote them down for me on a piece of paper. Curiously enough, he could not recall the passage in his own splendid translation.295
Talk about handsome men of the past; Sidney Herbert one of the handsomest and most attractive. But the Duke of Hamilton bore away the palm, as glorious as a Greek god.“One day in Rotten Row, I said this to the Duchess of C. She set up James Hope-Scott against my Duke. No doubt he had an intellectual element which the Duke lacked.”Then we discussed the best-looking man in the H. of C. to-day....
Duke of Wellington.—Somebody was expatiating on the incomparable position of the Duke; his popularity with kings, with nobles, with common people. Mr. G. remembered[pg 486]that immediately after the formation of Canning's government in 1827, when it was generally thought that he had been most unfairly and factiously treated (as Mr. G. still thinks, always saving Peel) by the Duke and his friends, the Duke made an expedition to the north of England, and had an overwhelming reception. Of course, he was then only twelve years from Waterloo, and yet only four or five years later he had to put up his iron shutters.
Approved a remark that a friend of ours was not simple enough, not ready enough to take things as they come.
Mr. G.—Unless a man has a considerable gift for taking things as they come, he may make up his mind that political life will be sheer torment to him. He must meet fortune in all its moods.
Tuesday, Jan. 5.—After dinner to-day, Mr. G. extraordinarily gay. He had bought a present of silver for his wife. She tried to guess the price, and after the manner of wives in such a case, put the figure provokingly low. Mr. G. then put on the deprecating air of the tradesman with wounded feelings—and it was as capital fun as we could desire. That over, he fell to his backgammon with our host.
Wednesday, Jan. 6.—Mrs. Gladstone eighty to-day! What a marvel....
Léon Say called to see Mr. G. Long and most interesting conversation about all sorts of aspects of French politics, the concordat, the schools, and all the rest of it.
He illustrated the ignorance of French peasantry as to current affairs. Thiers, long after he had become famous, went on a visit to his native region; and there met a friend of his youth.“Eh bien,”said his friend,“tu as fait ton chemin.”“Mais oui, j'ai fait un peu mon chemin. J'ai été ministre même.”“Ah, tiens! je ne savais pas que tu étais protestant.”
I am constantly struck by his solicitude for the well-being and right doing of Oxford and Cambridge—“the two eyes of the country.”This connection between the higher education and the general movement of the national mind engages his profound attention, and no doubt deserves such attention[pg 487]
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in any statesman who looks beyond the mere surface problems of the day. To perceive the bearings of such matters as these, makes Mr. G. a statesman of the highest class, as distinguished from men of clever expedients.
Mr. G. had been reading the Greek epigrams on religion in Mackail; quoted the last of them as illustrating the description of the dead as the inhabitants of the more populous world:—
τῶν ἄπο κὴν ζωοῖσιν ἀκηδέα, κευτ᾽ ἄν ἵκηαιὲς πλεόνων, ἕξεις θυμὸν ἐλαφρότερον.296
τῶν ἄπο κὴν ζωοῖσιν ἀκηδέα, κευτ᾽ ἄν ἵκηαιὲς πλεόνων, ἕξεις θυμὸν ἐλαφρότερον.296
τῶν ἄπο κὴν ζωοῖσιν ἀκηδέα, κευτ᾽ ἄν ἵκηαι
ὲς πλεόνων, ἕξεις θυμὸν ἐλαφρότερον.296
A more impressive epigram contains the same thought, where the old man, leaning on his staff, likens himself to the withered vine on its dry pole, and goes on to ask himself what advantage it would be to warm himself for three or four more years in the sun; and on that reflection without heroics put off his life, and changed his home to the greater company,
κὴς πλεόνων ἦλθε μετοικεσίην.
κὴς πλεόνων ἦλθε μετοικεσίην.
κὴς πλεόνων ἦλθε μετοικεσίην.
All the rest of the evening he kept us alive by a stock of infinite drolleries. A scene of a dish of over-boiled tea at West Calder after a meeting, would have made the fortune of a comedian.
I said that in the all-important quality of co-operation, —— was only good on condition of being in front. Mr. G. read him in the same sense. Reminded of a mare he once had—admirable, provided you kept off spur, curb, or whip; show her one of these things, and she would do nothing. Mr. G. more of a judge of men than is commonly thought.
Told us of a Chinese despatch which came under his notice when he was at the board of trade, and gave him food for reflection. A ship laden with grain came to Canton. The administrator wrote to the central government at Pekin to know whether the ship was to pay duty and land its cargo. The answer was to the effect that the central government of the Flowery Land was quite indifferent as a rule to the goings and comings of the Barbarians; whether they brought a cargo or brought no cargo was a thing of supreme unconcern.“But this cargo, you say, is food for the people. There ought to be[pg 488]no obstacle to the entry of food for the people. So let it in. Your Younger Brother commends himself to you, etc. etc.”
Friday, Jan. 8.—A quiet evening. We were all rather piano at the end of an episode which had been thoroughly delightful. When Mr. G. bade me good-night, he said with real feeling,“More sorry than I can say that this is our last evening together at Biarritz.”He is painfully grieved to lose the sound of the sea in his ears.
Saturday, Jan. 9.—Strolled about all the forenoon.“What a time of blessed composure it has been,”said Mr. G. with a heavy sigh. The distant hills covered with snow, and the voice of the storm gradually swelling. Still the savage fury of the sea was yet some hours off, so we had to leave Biarritz without the spectacle of Atlantic rage at its fiercest.
Found comfortable saloon awaiting us at Bayonne, and so under weeping skies we made our way to Pau. The landscape must be pretty, weather permitting. As it was, we saw but little. Mr. G. dozed and read Max Müller's book on Anthropological Religions.
Arrived at Pau towards 5.30; drenching rain: nothing to be seen.
At tea time, a good little discussion raised by a protest against Dante being praised for a complete survey of human nature and the many phases of human lot. Intensity he has, but insight over the whole field of character and life? Mr. G. did not make any stand against this, and made the curious admission that Dante was too optimist to be placed on a level with Shakespeare, or even with Homer.
Then we turned to lighter themes. He had once said to Henry Taylor,“I should have thought he was the sort of man to have a good strong grasp of a subject,”speaking of Lord Grey, who had been one of Taylor's many chiefs at the Colonial Office.“I should have thought,”replied Taylor slowly and with a dreamy look,“he was the sort of man to have a good strongnipof a subject.”Witty, and very applicable to many men.
Wordsworth once gave Mr. G. with much complacency, as an example of his own readiness and resource, this story. A man came up to him at Rydal and said,“Do you happen[pg 489]to have seen my wife.”“Why,”replied the Sage,“I did not know you had a wife!”This peculiarly modest attempt at pointed repartee much tickled Mr. G., as well it might.
Tuesday, Jan. 12.—Mr. G. completely recovered from two days of indisposition. We had about an hour's talk on things in general, including policy in the approaching session. He did not expect a dissolution, at the same time a dissolution would not surprise him.
At noon they started for Périgord and Carcassonne, Nismes, Arles, and so on to the Riviera full of kind things at our parting.