Chapter X. Final.

Chapter X. Final.Anybody can see the host of general and speculative questions raised by a career so extraordinary. How would his fame have stood if his political life had ended in 1854, or 1874, or 1881, or 1885? What light does it shed upon the working of the parliamentary system; on the weakness and strength of popular government; on the good and bad of political party; on the superiority of rule by cabinet or by an elected president; on the relations of opinion to law? Here is material for a volume of disquisition, and nobody can ever discuss such speculations without reference to power as it was exercised by Mr. Gladstone. Those thronged halls, those vast progresses, those strenuous orations—what did they amount to? Did they mean a real moulding of opinion, an actual impression, whether by argument or temper or personality or all three, on the minds of hearers? Or was it no more than the same kind of interest that takes men to stage-plays with a favourite performer? This could hardly be, for his hearers gave him long spells of power and a practical authority that was unique and supreme. What thoughts does his career suggest on the relations of Christianity to patriotism, or to empire, or to what has been called neo-paganism? How many points arise as to the dependence of ethics on dogma? These are deep and living and perhaps burning issues, not to be discussed at the end of what the reader may well have found a long journey. They offer themselves for his independent consideration.IMr. Gladstone's own summary of the period in which he[pg 535]His Summary Of The Periodhad been so conspicuous a figure was this, when for him the drama was at an end:—Of his own career, he says, it is a career certainly chargeable with many errors of judgment, but I hope on the whole, governed at least by uprightness of intention and by a desire to learn. The personal aspect may now readily be dismissed as it concerns the past. But the public aspect of the period which closes for me with the fourteen years (so I love to reckon them) of my formal connection with Midlothian is too important to pass without a word. I consider it as beginning with the Reform Act of Lord Grey's government. That great Act was for England improvement and extension, for Scotland it was political birth, the beginning of a duty and a power, neither of which had attached to the Scottish nation in the preceding period. I rejoice to think how the solemnity of that duty has been recognised, and how that power has been used. The three-score years offer us the pictures of what the historian will recognise as a great legislative and administrative period—perhaps, on the whole, the greatest in our annals. It has been predominantly a history of emancipation—that is of enabling man to do his work of emancipation, political, economical, social, moral, intellectual. Not numerous merely, but almost numberless, have been the causes brought to issue, and in every one of them I rejoice to think that, so far as my knowledge goes, Scotland has done battle for the right.Another period has opened and is opening still—a period possibly of yet greater moral dangers, certainly a great ordeal for those classes which are now becoming largely conscious of power, and never heretofore subject to its deteriorating influences. These have been confined in their actions to the classes above them, because they were its sole possessors. Now is the time for the true friend of his country to remind the masses that their present political elevation is owing to no principles less broad and noble than these—the love of liberty, of liberty for all without distinction of class, creed or country, and the resolute preference of the interests of the whole to any interest, be it what it may, of a narrower scope.315A year later, in bidding farewell to his constituents“with[pg 536]sentiments of gratitude and attachment that can never be effaced,”he proceeds:—Though in regard to public affairs many things are disputable, there are some which belong to history and which have passed out of the region of contention. It is, for example as I conceive, beyond question that the century now expiring has exhibited since the close of its first quarter a period of unexampled activity both in legislative and administrative changes; that these changes, taken in the mass, have been in the direction of true and most beneficial progress; that both the conditions and the franchises of the people have made in relation to the former state of things, an extraordinary advance; that of these reforms an overwhelming proportion have been effected by direct action of the liberal party, or of statesmen such as Peel and Canning, ready to meet odium or to forfeit power for the public good; and that in every one of the fifteen parliaments the people of Scotland have decisively expressed their convictions in favour of this wise, temperate, and in every way remarkable policy.316To charge him with habitually rousing popular forces into dangerous excitement, is to ignore or misread his action in some of the most critical of his movements.“Here is a man,”said Huxley,“with the greatest intellect in Europe, and yet he debases it by simply following majorities and the crowd.”He was called a mere mirror of the passing humours and intellectual confusions of the popular mind. He had nothing, said his detractors, but a sort of clever pilot's eye for winds and currents, and the rising of the tide to the exact height that would float him and his cargo over the bar. All this is the exact opposite of the truth. What he thought was that the statesman's gift consisted in insight into the facts of a particular era, disclosing the existence of material for forming public opinion and directing public opinion to a given purpose. In every one of his achievements of high mark—even in his last marked failure of achievement—he expressly formed, or endeavoured to form and create, the public opinion upon which he knew that in the last resort he must depend.[pg 537]Leader, Not FollowerWe have seen the triumph of 1853.317Did he, in renewing the most hated of taxes, run about anxiously feeling the pulse of public opinion? On the contrary, he grappled with the facts with infinite labour—and half his genius was labour—he built up a great plan; he carried it to the cabinet; they warned him that the House of Commons would be against him; the officials of the treasury told him the Bank would be against him; that a strong press of commercial interests would be against him. Like the bold and sinewy athlete that he always was, he stood to his plan; he carried the cabinet; he persuaded the House of Commons; he vanquished the Bank and the hostile interests; and in the words of Sir Stafford Northcote, he changed and turned for many years to come, a current of public opinion that seemed far too powerful for any minister to resist. In the tempestuous discussions during the seventies on the policy of this country in respect of the Christian races of the Balkan Peninsula, he with his own voice created, moulded, inspired, and kindled with resistless flame the whole of the public opinion that eventually guided the policy of the nation with such admirable effect both for its own fame, and for the good of the world. Take again the Land Act of 1881, in some ways the most deep-reaching of all his legislative achievements. Here he had no flowing tide, every current was against him. He carried his scheme against the ignorance of the country, against the prejudice of the country, and against the standing prejudices of both branches of the legislature, who were steeped from the crown of the head to the sole of the foot in the strictest doctrines of contract.Then his passion for economy, his ceaseless war against public profusion, his insistence upon rigorous keeping of the national accounts—in this great department of affairs he led and did not follow. In no sphere of his activities was he more strenuous, and in no sphere, as he must well have known, was he less likely to win popularity. For democracy is spendthrift; if, to be sure, we may not say that most forms of government are apt to be the same.In a survey of Mr. Gladstone's performances, some would[pg 538]place this of which I have last spoken, as foremost among his services to the country. Others would call him greatest in the associated service of a skilful handling and adjustment of the burden of taxation; or the strengthening of the foundations of national prosperity and well-being by his reformation of the tariff. Yet others again choose to remember him for his share in guiding the successive extensions of popular power, and simplifying and purifying electoral machinery. Irishmen at least, and others so far as they are able to comprehend the history and vile wrongs and sharp needs of Ireland, will have no doubt what rank in legislation they will assign to the establishment of religious equality and agrarian justice in that portion of the realm. Not a few will count first the vigour with which he repaired what had been an erroneous judgment of his own and of vast hosts of his countrymen, by his courage in carrying through the submission of the Alabama claims to arbitration. Still more, looking from west to east, in this comparison among his achievements, will judge alike in its result and in the effort that produced it, nothing equal to the valour and insight with which he burst the chains of a mischievous and degrading policy as to the Ottoman empire. When we look at this exploit, how in face of an opponent of genius and authority and a tenacity not inferior to his own, in face of strongly rooted tradition on behalf of the Turk, and an easily roused antipathy against the Russian, by his own energy and strength of arm he wrested the rudder from the hand of the helmsman and put about the course of the ship, and held England back from the enormity of trying to keep several millions of men and women under the yoke of barbaric oppression and misrule,—we may say that this great feat alone was fame enough for one statesman. Let us make what choice we will of this or that particular achievement, how splendid a list it is of benefits conferred and public work effectually performed. Was he a good parliamentary tactician, they ask? Was his eye sure, his hand firm, his measurement of forces, distances, and possibilities of change in wind and tide accurate? Did he usually hit the proper moment for a magisterial intervention? Experts did not[pg 539]Achievements Comparedalways agree on his quality as tactician. At least he was pilot enough to bring many valuable cargoes safely home.He was one of the three statesmen in the House of Commons of his own generation who had the gift of large and spacious conception of the place and power of England in the world, and of the policies by which she could maintain it. Cobden and Disraeli were the other two. Wide as the poles asunder in genius, in character, and in the mark they made upon the nation, yet each of these three was capable of wide surveys from high eminence. But Mr. Gladstone's performances in the sphere of active government were beyond comparison.Again he was often harshly judged by that tenacious class who insist that if a general principle be sound, there can never be a reason why it should not be applied forthwith, and that a rule subject to exceptions is not worth calling a rule; and the worst of it is that these people are mostly the salt of the earth. In their impatient moments they dismissed him as an opportunist, but whenever there was a chance of getting anything done, they mostly found that he was the only man with courage and resolution enough to attempt to do it. In thinking about him we have constantly to remember, as Sir George Lewis said, that government is a very rough affair at best, a huge rough machine, not the delicate springs, wheels, and balances of a chronometer, and those concerned in working it have to be satisfied with what is far below the best.“Men have no business to talk of disenchantment,”Mr. Gladstone said;“ideals are never realised.”That is no reason, he meant, why men should not persist and toil and hope, and this is plainly the true temper for the politician. Yet he did not feed upon illusions.“The history of nations,”he wrote in 1876,“is a melancholy chapter; that is, the history of governments is one of the most immoral parts of human history.”IIIt might well be said that Mr. Gladstone took too little, rather than too much trouble to be popular. His religious conservatism puzzled and irritated those who admired and[pg 540]shared his political liberalism, just as churchmen watched with uneasiness and suspicion his radical alliances. Neither those who were churchmen first, nor those whose interests were keenest in politics, could comprehend the union of what seemed incompatibles, and because they could not comprehend they sometimes in their shallower humours doubted his sincerity. Mr. Gladstone was never, after say 1850, really afraid of disestablishment; on the contrary he was much more afraid of the perils of establishment for the integrity of the faith. Yet political disestablishers often doubted him, because they had not logic enough to see that a man may be a fervent believer in anglican institutions and what he thinks catholic tradition, and yet be as ready as Cavour for the principle of free church in free state.It is curious that some of the things that made men suspicious, were in fact the liveliest tokens of his sincerity and simplicity. With all his power of political imagination, yet his mind was an intensely literal mind. He did not look at an act or a decision from the point of view at which it might be regarded by other people. Ewelme, the mission to the Ionian Islands, the royal warrant, the affair of the judicial committee, vaticanism, and all the other things that gave offence, and stirred misgivings even in friends, showed that the very last question he ever asked himself was how his action would look; what construction might be put upon it, or even would pretty certainly be put upon it; whom it would encourage, whom it would estrange, whom it would perplex. Is the given end right, he seemed to ask; what are the surest means; are the means as right as the end, as right as they are sure? But right—on strict and literal construction. What he sometimes forgot was that in political action, construction is part of the act, nay, may even be its most important part.318The more you make of his errors, the more is the need to explain his vast renown, the long reign of his authority, the substance and reality of his powers. We call men great for many reasons apart from service wrought or eminence of intellect or even from force and depth of character. To[pg 541]Attitude To Church Partieshave taken a leading part in transactions of decisive moment; to have proved himself able to meet demands on which high issues hung; to combine intellectual qualities, though moderate yet adequate and sufficient, with the moral qualities needed for the given circumstance—with daring, circumspection, energy, intrepid initiative; to have fallen in with one of those occasions in the world that impart their own greatness even to a mediocre actor, and surround his name with a halo not radiating from within but shed upon him from without—in all these and many other ways men come to be counted great. Mr. Gladstone belongs to the rarer class who acquired authority and fame by transcendent qualities of genius within, in half independence of any occasions beyond those they create for themselves.IIIOf his attitude in respect of church parties, it is not for me to speak. He has himself described at least one aspect of it in a letter to an inquirer, which would be a very noble piece by whomsoever written, and in the name of whatsoever creed or no-creed, whether Christian or Rationalist or Nathan the Wise Jew's creed. It was addressed to a clergyman who seems to have asked of what section Mr. Gladstone considered himself an adherent:—Feb. 4, 1865.—It is impossible to misinterpret either the intention or the terms of your letter; and I thank you for it sincerely. But I cannot answer the question which you put to me, and I think I can even satisfy you that with my convictions I should do wrong in replying to it in any manner. Whatever reason I may have for being painfully and daily conscious of every kind of unworthiness, yet I am sufficiently aware of the dignity of religious belief to have been throughout a political life, now in its thirty-third year, steadily resolved never by my own voluntary act to make it the subject of any compact or assurance with a view to a political object. You think (and pray do not suppose I make this matter of complaint) that I have been associated with one party in the church of England, and that I may now lean rather towards another.... There is no one about whom information[pg 542]can be more easily had than myself. I have had and have friends of many colours, churchmen high and low, presbyterians, Greeks, Roman catholics, dissenters, who can speak abundantly, though perhaps not very well of me. And further, as member for the university, I have honestly endeavoured at all times to put my constituents in possession of all I could convey to them that could be considered as in the nature of a fact, by answering as explicitly as I was able all questions relating to the matters, and they are numerous enough, on which I have had to act or speak. Perhaps I shall surprise you by what I have yet further to say. I have never by any conscious act yielded my allegiance to any person or party in matters of religion. You and others may have called me (without the least offence) a churchman of some particular kind, and I have more than once seen announced in print my own secession from the church of England. These things I have not commonly contradicted, for the atmosphere of religious controversy and contradiction is as odious as the atmosphere of mental freedom is precious, to me; and I have feared to lose the one and be drawn into the other, by heat and bitterness creeping into the mind. If another chooses to call himself, or to call me, a member of this or that party, I am not to complain. But I respectfully claim the right not to call myself so, and on this claim, I have I believe acted throughout my life, without a single exception; and I feel that were I to waive it, I should at once put in hazard that allegiance to Truth, which is at once the supreme duty and the supreme joy of life. I have only to add the expression of my hope that in what I have said there is nothing to hurt or to offend you; and, if there be, very heartily to wish it unsaid.Yet there was never the shadow of mistake about his own fervent faith. As he said to another correspondent:—Feb. 5, 1876.—I am in principle a strong denominationalist.“One fold and one shepherd”was the note of early Christendom. The shepherd is still one and knows his sheep; but the folds are many; and, without condemning any others, I am of opinion that it is best for us all that we should all of us be jealous for the honour of whatever we have and hold as positive truth, appertaining to the Divine Word and the foundation and history of[pg 543]the Christian community. I admit that this question becomes one of circumstance and degree, but I take it as I find it defined for myself by and in my own position.IVOf Mr. Gladstone as orator and improvisatore, enough has been said and seen. Besides being orator and statesman he was scholar and critic. Perhaps scholar in his interests, not in abiding contribution. The most copious of his productions in this delightful but arduous field was the three large volumes onHomer and the Homeric Age, given to the world in 1858. Into what has been well called the whirlpool of Homeric controversies, the reader shall not here be dragged. Mr. Gladstone himself gave them the go-by, with an indifference and disdain such as might have been well enough in the economic field if exhibited towards a protectionist farmer, or a partisan of retaliatory duties on manufactured goods, but that were hardly to the point in dealing with profound and original critics. What he too contemptuously dismissed as Homeric“bubble-schemes,”were in truth centres of scientific illumination. At the end of the eighteenth century Wolf's famousProlegomenaappeared, in which he advanced the theory that Homer was no single poet, nor a name for two poets, nor an individual at all; theIliadandOdysseywere collections of independent lays, folk-lore and folk-songs connected by a common set of themes, and edited, redacted, or compacted about the middle of the sixth century before Christ. A learned man of our own day has said that F. A. Wolf ought to be counted one of the half dozen writers that within the last three centuries have most influenced thought. This would bring Wolf into line with Descartes, Newton, Locke, Kant, Rousseau, or whatever other five master-spirits of thought from then to now the judicious reader may select. The present writer has assuredly no competence to assign Wolf's place in the history of modern criticism, but straying aside for a season from the green pastures of Hansard, and turning over again the slim volume of a hundred and fifty pages in which Wolf discusses his theme, one may easily discern a fountain of[pg 544]broad streams of modern thought (apart from the particular thesis) that to Mr. Gladstone, by the force of all his education and his deepest prepossessions, were in the highest degree chimerical and dangerous.He once wrote to Lord Acton (1889) about the Old Testament and Mosaic legislation:—Now I think that the most important parts of the argument have in a great degree a solid standing ground apart from the destructive criticism on dates and on the text: and I am sufficiently aware of my own rawness and ignorance in the matter not to allow myself to judge definitely, or condemn. I feel also that I have a prepossession derived from the criticisms in the case of Homer. Of them I have a very bad opinion, not only in themselves, but as to the levity, precipitancy, and shallowness of mind which they display; and here I do venture to speak, because I believe myself to have done a great deal more than any of the destructives in the examination of the text, which is the true source of the materials of judgment. They are a soulless lot; but there was a time when they had possession of the public ear as much I suppose as the Old Testament destructives now have, within their own precinct. It is only the constructive part of their work on which I feel tempted to judge; and I must own that it seems to me sadly wanting in the elements of rational probability.This unpromising method is sufficiently set out when he says:“I find in the plot of theIliadenough of beauty, order, and structure, not merely to sustain the supposition of its own unity, but to bear an independent testimony, should it be still needed, to the existence of a personal and individual Homer as its author.”319From such a method no permanent contribution could come.Yet scholars allow that Mr. Gladstone in these three volumes, as well as inJuventus Mundiand hisHomeric Primer, has added not a little to our scientific knowledge of the Homeric poems,320by his extraordinary mastery of the text, the result of unwearied and prolonged industry, aided[pg 545]On Homerby a memory both tenacious and ready. Taking his own point of view, moreover, anybody who wishes to have his feeling about theIliadandOdysseyas delightful poetry refreshed and quickened, will find inspiring elements in the profusion, the eager array of Homer's own lines, the diligent exploration of aspects and bearings hitherto unthought of. The“theo-mythology”is commonly judged fantastic, and has been compared by sage critics to Warburton'sDivine Legation—the same comprehensive general reading, the same heroic industry in marshalling the particulars of proof, the same dialectical strength of arm, and all brought to prove an unsound proposition.321Yet the comprehensive reading and the particulars of proof are by no means without an interest of their own, whatever we may think of the proposition; and here, as in all his literary writing distinguished from polemics, he abounds in the ethical elements. Here perhaps more than anywhere else he impresses us by his love of beauty in all its aspects and relations, in the human form, in landscape, in the affections, in animals, including above all else that sense of beauty which made his Greeks take it as one of the names for nobility in conduct. Conington, one of the finest of scholars, then lecturing at Oxford on Latin poets and deep in his own Virgilian studies, which afterwards bore such admirable fruit, writes at length (Feb. 14, 1857) to say how grateful he is to Mr. Gladstone for the care with which he has pursued into details a view of Virgil that they hold substantially in common, and proceeds with care and point to analyse the quality of the Roman poet's art, as some years later he defended against Munro the questionable proposition of the superiority in poetic style of the graceful, melodious, and pathetic Virgil to Lucretius's mighty muse.No field has been more industriously worked for the last forty years than this of the relations of paganism to the historic religion that followed it in Europe. The knowledge and the speculations into which Mr. Gladstone was thus initiated in the sixties may now seem crude enough; but he deserves some credit in English, though not in view of[pg 546]German, speculation for an early perception of an unfamiliar region of comparative science, whence many a product most unwelcome to him and alien to his own beliefs has been since extracted. When all is said, however, Mr. Gladstone's place is not in literary or critical history, but elsewhere.His style is sometimes called Johnsonian, but surely without good ground. Johnson was not involved and he was clear, and neither of these things can always be said of Mr. Gladstone. Some critic charged him in 1840 with“prolix clearness.”The old charge, says Mr. Gladstone upon this, was“obscure compression. I do not doubt that both may be true, and the former may have been the result of a well-meant effort to escape from the latter.”He was fond of abstract words, or the nearer to abstract the better, and the more general the better. One effect of this was undoubtedly to give an indirect, almost a shifty, air that exasperated plain people. Why does he beat about the bush, they asked; why cannot he say what he means? A reader might have to think twice or thrice or twenty times before he could be sure that he interpreted correctly. But then people are so apt to think once, or half of once; to take the meaning that suits their own wish or purpose best, and then to treat that as the only meaning. Hence their perplexity and wrath when they found that other doors were open, and they thought a mistake due to their own hurry was the result of a juggler's trick. On the other hand a good writer takes all the pains he can to keep his reader out of such scrapes.His critical essays on Tennyson and Macaulay are excellent. They are acute, discriminating, generous. His estimate of Macaulay, apart from a piece of polemical church history at the end, is perhaps the best we have.“You make a very just remark,”said Acton to him,“that Macaulay was afraid of contradicting his former self, and remembered all he had written since 1825. At that time his mind was formed, and so it remained. What literary influences acted on the formation of his political opinions, what were his religious sympathies, and what is his exact place among historians, you have rather avoided discussing. There is still something[pg 547]to say on these points.”To Tennyson Mr. Gladstone believed himself to have been unjust, especially in the passages ofMauddevoted to the war-frenzy, and when he came to reprint the article he admitted that he had not sufficiently remembered that he was dealing with a dramatic and imaginative composition.322As he frankly said of himself, he was not strong in the faculties of the artist, but perhaps Tennyson himself in these passages was prompted much more by politics than by art. Of this piece of retractation the poet truly said,“Nobody but a noble-minded man would have done that.”323Mr. Gladstone would most likely have chosen to call his words a qualification rather than a recantation. In either case, it does not affect passages that give the finest expression to one of the very deepest convictions of his life,—that war, whatever else we may choose to say of it, is no antidote for Mammon-worship and can never be a cure for moral evils:—It is, indeed, true that peace has its moral perils and temptations for degenerate man, as has every other blessing, without exception, that he can receive from the hand of God. It is moreover not less true that, amidst the clash of arms, the noblest forms of character may be reared, and the highest acts of duty done; that these great and precious results may be due to war as their cause; and that one high form of sentiment in particular, the love of country, receives a powerful and general stimulus from the bloody strife. But this is as the furious cruelty of Pharaoh made place for the benign virtue of his daughter; as the butchering sentence of Herod raised without doubt many a mother's love into heroic sublimity; as plague, as famine, as fire, as flood, as every curse and every scourge that is wielded by an angry Providence for the chastisement of man, is an appointed instrument for tempering human souls in the seven-times heated furnace of affliction, up to the standard of angelic and archangelic virtue.War, indeed, has the property of exciting much generous and noble feeling on a large scale; but with this special recommendation it has, in its modern forms especially, peculiar and unequalled evils. As it has a wider sweep of desolating power than the rest,[pg 548]so it has the peculiar quality that it is more susceptible of being decked in gaudy trappings, and of fascinating the imagination of those whose proud and angry passions it inflames. But it is, on this very account, a perilous delusion to teach that war is a cure for moral evil, in any other sense than as the sister tribulations are. The eulogies of the frantic hero inMaud, however, deviate into grosser folly. It is natural that such vagaries should overlook the fixed laws of Providence. Under these laws the mass of mankind is composed of men, women, and children who can but just ward off hunger, cold, and nakedness; whose whole ideas of Mammon-worship are comprised in the search for their daily food, clothing, shelter, fuel; whom any casualty reduces to positive want; and whose already low estate is yet further lowered and ground down, when“the blood-red blossom of war flames with its heart of fire.”...Still war had, in times now gone by, ennobling elements and tendencies of the less sordid kind. But one inevitable characteristic of modern war is, that it is associated throughout, in all particulars, with a vast and most irregular formation of commercial enterprise. There is no incentive to Mammon-worship so remarkable as that which it affords. The political economy of war is now one of its most commanding aspects. Every farthing, with the smallest exceptions conceivable, of the scores or hundreds of millions which a war may cost, goes directly, and very violently, to stimulate production, though it is intended ultimately for waste or for destruction. Even apart from the fact that war suspends,ipso facto, every rule of public thrift, and tends to sap honesty itself in the use of the public treasure for which it makes such unbounded calls, it therefore is the greatest feeder of that lust of gold which we are told is the essence of commerce, though we had hoped it was only its occasional besetting sin. It is, however, more than this; for the regular commerce of peace is tameness itself compared with the gambling spirit which war, through the rapid shiftings and high prices which it brings, always introduces into trade. In its moral operation it more resembles, perhaps the finding of a new gold-field, than anything else.More remarkable than either of these two is his piece on Leopardi (1850), the Italian poet, whose philosophy and[pg 549]Leopardi Translationsframe of mind, said Mr. Gladstone,“present more than any other that we know, more even than that of Shelley, the character of unrelieved, unredeemed desolation—the very qualities in it which attract pitying sympathy, depriving it of all seductive power.”It is curious that he should have selected one whose life lay along a course like Leopardi's for commemoration, as a man who in almost every branch of mental exertion seems to have had the capacity for attaining, and generally at a single bound, the very highest excellence.“There are many things,”he adds,“in which Christians would do well to follow him: in the warmth of his attachments; in the moderation of his wants; in his noble freedom from the love of money; in his all-conquering assiduity.”324Perhaps the most remarkable sentence of all is this:“... what is not needful, and is commonly wrong, namely, is to pass a judgment on our fellow-creatures. Never let it be forgotten that there is scarcely a single moral action of a single man of which other men can have such a knowledge, in its ultimate grounds, its surrounding incidents, and the real determining causes of its merits, as to warrant their pronouncing a conclusive judgment upon it.”The translation of poetry into poetry, as Coleridge said, is difficult because the translator must give brilliancy without the warmth of original conception, from which such brilliancy would follow of its own accord. But we must not judge Mr. Gladstone's translation either of Horace's odes or of detached pieces from Greek or Italian, as we should judge the professed man of letters or poet like Coleridge himself. His pieces are the diversions of the man of affairs, with educated tastes and interest in good literature. Perhaps the best single piece is his really noble rendering of Manzoni's noble ode on the death of Napoleon; for instance:—From Alp to farthest Pyramid,From Rhine to Mansanar,How sure his lightning's flash foretoldHis thunderbolts of war!To Don from Scilla's height they roar,From North to Southern shore.[pg 550]And this was glory? After-men,Judge the dark problem. LowWe to the Mighty Maker bendThe while, Who planned to showWhat vaster mould Creative WillWith him could fill.As on the shipwrecked marinerThe weltering wave's descent—The wave, o'er which, a moment since,For distant shores he bentAnd bent in vain, his eager eye;So on that stricken headCame whelming down the mighty Past.How often did his penEssay to tell the wondrous taleFor after times and men,And o'er the lines that could not dieHis hand lay dead.How often, as the listless dayIn silence died away,He stood with lightning eye deprest,And arms across his breast,And bygone years, in rushing train,Smote on his soul amain:The breezy tents he seemed to see,And the battering cannon's course,And the flashing of the infantry,And the torrent of the horse,And, obeyed as soon as heard,Th' ecstatic word.Always let us remember that his literary life was part of the rest of his life, as literature ought to be. He was no mere reader of many books, used to relieve the strain of mental anxiety or to slake the thirst of literary or intellectual curiosity. Reading with him in the days of his full vigour was a habitual communing with the master spirits of mankind, as a vivifying and nourishing part of life. As we have seen, he would not read Dante in the session, nor unless he could have a large draught. Here as elsewhere in the ordering of his days he was methodical, systematic, full.[pg 551]VA Golden LampThough man of action, yet Mr. Gladstone too has a place by character and influences among what we may call the abstract, moral, spiritual forces that stamped the realm of Britain in his age. In a new time, marked in an incomparable degree by the progress of science and invention, by vast mechanical, industrial, and commercial development, he accepted it all, he adjusted his statesmanship to it all, nay, he revelled in it all, as tending to ameliorate the lot of the“mass of men, women, and children who can just ward off hunger, cold, and nakedness.”He did not rail at his age, he strove to help it. Following Walpole and Cobden and Peel in the policies of peace, he knew how to augment the material resources on which our people depend. When was Britain stronger, richer, more honoured among the nations—I do not say always among the diplomatic chanceries and governments—than in the years when Mr. Gladstone was at the zenith of his authority among us? When were her armed forces by sea and land more adequate for defence of every interest? When was her material resource sounder? When was her moral credit higher? Besides all this, he upheld a golden lamp.The unending revolutions of the world are for ever bringing old phases uppermost again. Events from season to season are taken to teach sinister lessons, that the Real is the only Rational, force is the test of right and wrong, the state has nothing to do with restraints of morals, the ruler is emancipated. Speculations in physical science were distorted for alien purposes, and survival of the fittest was taken to give brutality a more decent name. Even new conceptions and systems of history may be twisted into release of statesmen from the conscience of Bishop Butler's plain man. This gospel it was Mr. Gladstone's felicity to hold at bay. Without bringing back the cosmopolitanism of the eighteenth century, without sharing all the idealisms of the middle of the nineteenth, he resisted with his whole might the odious contention that moral progress in the relations of nations and states to one another is an illusion and a dream.[pg 552]This vein perhaps brings us too near to the regions of dissertation. Let us rather leave off with thoughts and memories of one who was a vivid example of public duty and of private faithfulness; of a long career that with every circumstance of splendour, amid all the mire and all the poisons of the world, lighted up in practice even for those who have none of his genius and none of his power his own precept,“Be inspired with the belief that life is a great and noble calling; not a mean and grovelling thing, that we are to shuffle through as we can, but an elevated and lofty destiny.”

Chapter X. Final.Anybody can see the host of general and speculative questions raised by a career so extraordinary. How would his fame have stood if his political life had ended in 1854, or 1874, or 1881, or 1885? What light does it shed upon the working of the parliamentary system; on the weakness and strength of popular government; on the good and bad of political party; on the superiority of rule by cabinet or by an elected president; on the relations of opinion to law? Here is material for a volume of disquisition, and nobody can ever discuss such speculations without reference to power as it was exercised by Mr. Gladstone. Those thronged halls, those vast progresses, those strenuous orations—what did they amount to? Did they mean a real moulding of opinion, an actual impression, whether by argument or temper or personality or all three, on the minds of hearers? Or was it no more than the same kind of interest that takes men to stage-plays with a favourite performer? This could hardly be, for his hearers gave him long spells of power and a practical authority that was unique and supreme. What thoughts does his career suggest on the relations of Christianity to patriotism, or to empire, or to what has been called neo-paganism? How many points arise as to the dependence of ethics on dogma? These are deep and living and perhaps burning issues, not to be discussed at the end of what the reader may well have found a long journey. They offer themselves for his independent consideration.IMr. Gladstone's own summary of the period in which he[pg 535]His Summary Of The Periodhad been so conspicuous a figure was this, when for him the drama was at an end:—Of his own career, he says, it is a career certainly chargeable with many errors of judgment, but I hope on the whole, governed at least by uprightness of intention and by a desire to learn. The personal aspect may now readily be dismissed as it concerns the past. But the public aspect of the period which closes for me with the fourteen years (so I love to reckon them) of my formal connection with Midlothian is too important to pass without a word. I consider it as beginning with the Reform Act of Lord Grey's government. That great Act was for England improvement and extension, for Scotland it was political birth, the beginning of a duty and a power, neither of which had attached to the Scottish nation in the preceding period. I rejoice to think how the solemnity of that duty has been recognised, and how that power has been used. The three-score years offer us the pictures of what the historian will recognise as a great legislative and administrative period—perhaps, on the whole, the greatest in our annals. It has been predominantly a history of emancipation—that is of enabling man to do his work of emancipation, political, economical, social, moral, intellectual. Not numerous merely, but almost numberless, have been the causes brought to issue, and in every one of them I rejoice to think that, so far as my knowledge goes, Scotland has done battle for the right.Another period has opened and is opening still—a period possibly of yet greater moral dangers, certainly a great ordeal for those classes which are now becoming largely conscious of power, and never heretofore subject to its deteriorating influences. These have been confined in their actions to the classes above them, because they were its sole possessors. Now is the time for the true friend of his country to remind the masses that their present political elevation is owing to no principles less broad and noble than these—the love of liberty, of liberty for all without distinction of class, creed or country, and the resolute preference of the interests of the whole to any interest, be it what it may, of a narrower scope.315A year later, in bidding farewell to his constituents“with[pg 536]sentiments of gratitude and attachment that can never be effaced,”he proceeds:—Though in regard to public affairs many things are disputable, there are some which belong to history and which have passed out of the region of contention. It is, for example as I conceive, beyond question that the century now expiring has exhibited since the close of its first quarter a period of unexampled activity both in legislative and administrative changes; that these changes, taken in the mass, have been in the direction of true and most beneficial progress; that both the conditions and the franchises of the people have made in relation to the former state of things, an extraordinary advance; that of these reforms an overwhelming proportion have been effected by direct action of the liberal party, or of statesmen such as Peel and Canning, ready to meet odium or to forfeit power for the public good; and that in every one of the fifteen parliaments the people of Scotland have decisively expressed their convictions in favour of this wise, temperate, and in every way remarkable policy.316To charge him with habitually rousing popular forces into dangerous excitement, is to ignore or misread his action in some of the most critical of his movements.“Here is a man,”said Huxley,“with the greatest intellect in Europe, and yet he debases it by simply following majorities and the crowd.”He was called a mere mirror of the passing humours and intellectual confusions of the popular mind. He had nothing, said his detractors, but a sort of clever pilot's eye for winds and currents, and the rising of the tide to the exact height that would float him and his cargo over the bar. All this is the exact opposite of the truth. What he thought was that the statesman's gift consisted in insight into the facts of a particular era, disclosing the existence of material for forming public opinion and directing public opinion to a given purpose. In every one of his achievements of high mark—even in his last marked failure of achievement—he expressly formed, or endeavoured to form and create, the public opinion upon which he knew that in the last resort he must depend.[pg 537]Leader, Not FollowerWe have seen the triumph of 1853.317Did he, in renewing the most hated of taxes, run about anxiously feeling the pulse of public opinion? On the contrary, he grappled with the facts with infinite labour—and half his genius was labour—he built up a great plan; he carried it to the cabinet; they warned him that the House of Commons would be against him; the officials of the treasury told him the Bank would be against him; that a strong press of commercial interests would be against him. Like the bold and sinewy athlete that he always was, he stood to his plan; he carried the cabinet; he persuaded the House of Commons; he vanquished the Bank and the hostile interests; and in the words of Sir Stafford Northcote, he changed and turned for many years to come, a current of public opinion that seemed far too powerful for any minister to resist. In the tempestuous discussions during the seventies on the policy of this country in respect of the Christian races of the Balkan Peninsula, he with his own voice created, moulded, inspired, and kindled with resistless flame the whole of the public opinion that eventually guided the policy of the nation with such admirable effect both for its own fame, and for the good of the world. Take again the Land Act of 1881, in some ways the most deep-reaching of all his legislative achievements. Here he had no flowing tide, every current was against him. He carried his scheme against the ignorance of the country, against the prejudice of the country, and against the standing prejudices of both branches of the legislature, who were steeped from the crown of the head to the sole of the foot in the strictest doctrines of contract.Then his passion for economy, his ceaseless war against public profusion, his insistence upon rigorous keeping of the national accounts—in this great department of affairs he led and did not follow. In no sphere of his activities was he more strenuous, and in no sphere, as he must well have known, was he less likely to win popularity. For democracy is spendthrift; if, to be sure, we may not say that most forms of government are apt to be the same.In a survey of Mr. Gladstone's performances, some would[pg 538]place this of which I have last spoken, as foremost among his services to the country. Others would call him greatest in the associated service of a skilful handling and adjustment of the burden of taxation; or the strengthening of the foundations of national prosperity and well-being by his reformation of the tariff. Yet others again choose to remember him for his share in guiding the successive extensions of popular power, and simplifying and purifying electoral machinery. Irishmen at least, and others so far as they are able to comprehend the history and vile wrongs and sharp needs of Ireland, will have no doubt what rank in legislation they will assign to the establishment of religious equality and agrarian justice in that portion of the realm. Not a few will count first the vigour with which he repaired what had been an erroneous judgment of his own and of vast hosts of his countrymen, by his courage in carrying through the submission of the Alabama claims to arbitration. Still more, looking from west to east, in this comparison among his achievements, will judge alike in its result and in the effort that produced it, nothing equal to the valour and insight with which he burst the chains of a mischievous and degrading policy as to the Ottoman empire. When we look at this exploit, how in face of an opponent of genius and authority and a tenacity not inferior to his own, in face of strongly rooted tradition on behalf of the Turk, and an easily roused antipathy against the Russian, by his own energy and strength of arm he wrested the rudder from the hand of the helmsman and put about the course of the ship, and held England back from the enormity of trying to keep several millions of men and women under the yoke of barbaric oppression and misrule,—we may say that this great feat alone was fame enough for one statesman. Let us make what choice we will of this or that particular achievement, how splendid a list it is of benefits conferred and public work effectually performed. Was he a good parliamentary tactician, they ask? Was his eye sure, his hand firm, his measurement of forces, distances, and possibilities of change in wind and tide accurate? Did he usually hit the proper moment for a magisterial intervention? Experts did not[pg 539]Achievements Comparedalways agree on his quality as tactician. At least he was pilot enough to bring many valuable cargoes safely home.He was one of the three statesmen in the House of Commons of his own generation who had the gift of large and spacious conception of the place and power of England in the world, and of the policies by which she could maintain it. Cobden and Disraeli were the other two. Wide as the poles asunder in genius, in character, and in the mark they made upon the nation, yet each of these three was capable of wide surveys from high eminence. But Mr. Gladstone's performances in the sphere of active government were beyond comparison.Again he was often harshly judged by that tenacious class who insist that if a general principle be sound, there can never be a reason why it should not be applied forthwith, and that a rule subject to exceptions is not worth calling a rule; and the worst of it is that these people are mostly the salt of the earth. In their impatient moments they dismissed him as an opportunist, but whenever there was a chance of getting anything done, they mostly found that he was the only man with courage and resolution enough to attempt to do it. In thinking about him we have constantly to remember, as Sir George Lewis said, that government is a very rough affair at best, a huge rough machine, not the delicate springs, wheels, and balances of a chronometer, and those concerned in working it have to be satisfied with what is far below the best.“Men have no business to talk of disenchantment,”Mr. Gladstone said;“ideals are never realised.”That is no reason, he meant, why men should not persist and toil and hope, and this is plainly the true temper for the politician. Yet he did not feed upon illusions.“The history of nations,”he wrote in 1876,“is a melancholy chapter; that is, the history of governments is one of the most immoral parts of human history.”IIIt might well be said that Mr. Gladstone took too little, rather than too much trouble to be popular. His religious conservatism puzzled and irritated those who admired and[pg 540]shared his political liberalism, just as churchmen watched with uneasiness and suspicion his radical alliances. Neither those who were churchmen first, nor those whose interests were keenest in politics, could comprehend the union of what seemed incompatibles, and because they could not comprehend they sometimes in their shallower humours doubted his sincerity. Mr. Gladstone was never, after say 1850, really afraid of disestablishment; on the contrary he was much more afraid of the perils of establishment for the integrity of the faith. Yet political disestablishers often doubted him, because they had not logic enough to see that a man may be a fervent believer in anglican institutions and what he thinks catholic tradition, and yet be as ready as Cavour for the principle of free church in free state.It is curious that some of the things that made men suspicious, were in fact the liveliest tokens of his sincerity and simplicity. With all his power of political imagination, yet his mind was an intensely literal mind. He did not look at an act or a decision from the point of view at which it might be regarded by other people. Ewelme, the mission to the Ionian Islands, the royal warrant, the affair of the judicial committee, vaticanism, and all the other things that gave offence, and stirred misgivings even in friends, showed that the very last question he ever asked himself was how his action would look; what construction might be put upon it, or even would pretty certainly be put upon it; whom it would encourage, whom it would estrange, whom it would perplex. Is the given end right, he seemed to ask; what are the surest means; are the means as right as the end, as right as they are sure? But right—on strict and literal construction. What he sometimes forgot was that in political action, construction is part of the act, nay, may even be its most important part.318The more you make of his errors, the more is the need to explain his vast renown, the long reign of his authority, the substance and reality of his powers. We call men great for many reasons apart from service wrought or eminence of intellect or even from force and depth of character. To[pg 541]Attitude To Church Partieshave taken a leading part in transactions of decisive moment; to have proved himself able to meet demands on which high issues hung; to combine intellectual qualities, though moderate yet adequate and sufficient, with the moral qualities needed for the given circumstance—with daring, circumspection, energy, intrepid initiative; to have fallen in with one of those occasions in the world that impart their own greatness even to a mediocre actor, and surround his name with a halo not radiating from within but shed upon him from without—in all these and many other ways men come to be counted great. Mr. Gladstone belongs to the rarer class who acquired authority and fame by transcendent qualities of genius within, in half independence of any occasions beyond those they create for themselves.IIIOf his attitude in respect of church parties, it is not for me to speak. He has himself described at least one aspect of it in a letter to an inquirer, which would be a very noble piece by whomsoever written, and in the name of whatsoever creed or no-creed, whether Christian or Rationalist or Nathan the Wise Jew's creed. It was addressed to a clergyman who seems to have asked of what section Mr. Gladstone considered himself an adherent:—Feb. 4, 1865.—It is impossible to misinterpret either the intention or the terms of your letter; and I thank you for it sincerely. But I cannot answer the question which you put to me, and I think I can even satisfy you that with my convictions I should do wrong in replying to it in any manner. Whatever reason I may have for being painfully and daily conscious of every kind of unworthiness, yet I am sufficiently aware of the dignity of religious belief to have been throughout a political life, now in its thirty-third year, steadily resolved never by my own voluntary act to make it the subject of any compact or assurance with a view to a political object. You think (and pray do not suppose I make this matter of complaint) that I have been associated with one party in the church of England, and that I may now lean rather towards another.... There is no one about whom information[pg 542]can be more easily had than myself. I have had and have friends of many colours, churchmen high and low, presbyterians, Greeks, Roman catholics, dissenters, who can speak abundantly, though perhaps not very well of me. And further, as member for the university, I have honestly endeavoured at all times to put my constituents in possession of all I could convey to them that could be considered as in the nature of a fact, by answering as explicitly as I was able all questions relating to the matters, and they are numerous enough, on which I have had to act or speak. Perhaps I shall surprise you by what I have yet further to say. I have never by any conscious act yielded my allegiance to any person or party in matters of religion. You and others may have called me (without the least offence) a churchman of some particular kind, and I have more than once seen announced in print my own secession from the church of England. These things I have not commonly contradicted, for the atmosphere of religious controversy and contradiction is as odious as the atmosphere of mental freedom is precious, to me; and I have feared to lose the one and be drawn into the other, by heat and bitterness creeping into the mind. If another chooses to call himself, or to call me, a member of this or that party, I am not to complain. But I respectfully claim the right not to call myself so, and on this claim, I have I believe acted throughout my life, without a single exception; and I feel that were I to waive it, I should at once put in hazard that allegiance to Truth, which is at once the supreme duty and the supreme joy of life. I have only to add the expression of my hope that in what I have said there is nothing to hurt or to offend you; and, if there be, very heartily to wish it unsaid.Yet there was never the shadow of mistake about his own fervent faith. As he said to another correspondent:—Feb. 5, 1876.—I am in principle a strong denominationalist.“One fold and one shepherd”was the note of early Christendom. The shepherd is still one and knows his sheep; but the folds are many; and, without condemning any others, I am of opinion that it is best for us all that we should all of us be jealous for the honour of whatever we have and hold as positive truth, appertaining to the Divine Word and the foundation and history of[pg 543]the Christian community. I admit that this question becomes one of circumstance and degree, but I take it as I find it defined for myself by and in my own position.IVOf Mr. Gladstone as orator and improvisatore, enough has been said and seen. Besides being orator and statesman he was scholar and critic. Perhaps scholar in his interests, not in abiding contribution. The most copious of his productions in this delightful but arduous field was the three large volumes onHomer and the Homeric Age, given to the world in 1858. Into what has been well called the whirlpool of Homeric controversies, the reader shall not here be dragged. Mr. Gladstone himself gave them the go-by, with an indifference and disdain such as might have been well enough in the economic field if exhibited towards a protectionist farmer, or a partisan of retaliatory duties on manufactured goods, but that were hardly to the point in dealing with profound and original critics. What he too contemptuously dismissed as Homeric“bubble-schemes,”were in truth centres of scientific illumination. At the end of the eighteenth century Wolf's famousProlegomenaappeared, in which he advanced the theory that Homer was no single poet, nor a name for two poets, nor an individual at all; theIliadandOdysseywere collections of independent lays, folk-lore and folk-songs connected by a common set of themes, and edited, redacted, or compacted about the middle of the sixth century before Christ. A learned man of our own day has said that F. A. Wolf ought to be counted one of the half dozen writers that within the last three centuries have most influenced thought. This would bring Wolf into line with Descartes, Newton, Locke, Kant, Rousseau, or whatever other five master-spirits of thought from then to now the judicious reader may select. The present writer has assuredly no competence to assign Wolf's place in the history of modern criticism, but straying aside for a season from the green pastures of Hansard, and turning over again the slim volume of a hundred and fifty pages in which Wolf discusses his theme, one may easily discern a fountain of[pg 544]broad streams of modern thought (apart from the particular thesis) that to Mr. Gladstone, by the force of all his education and his deepest prepossessions, were in the highest degree chimerical and dangerous.He once wrote to Lord Acton (1889) about the Old Testament and Mosaic legislation:—Now I think that the most important parts of the argument have in a great degree a solid standing ground apart from the destructive criticism on dates and on the text: and I am sufficiently aware of my own rawness and ignorance in the matter not to allow myself to judge definitely, or condemn. I feel also that I have a prepossession derived from the criticisms in the case of Homer. Of them I have a very bad opinion, not only in themselves, but as to the levity, precipitancy, and shallowness of mind which they display; and here I do venture to speak, because I believe myself to have done a great deal more than any of the destructives in the examination of the text, which is the true source of the materials of judgment. They are a soulless lot; but there was a time when they had possession of the public ear as much I suppose as the Old Testament destructives now have, within their own precinct. It is only the constructive part of their work on which I feel tempted to judge; and I must own that it seems to me sadly wanting in the elements of rational probability.This unpromising method is sufficiently set out when he says:“I find in the plot of theIliadenough of beauty, order, and structure, not merely to sustain the supposition of its own unity, but to bear an independent testimony, should it be still needed, to the existence of a personal and individual Homer as its author.”319From such a method no permanent contribution could come.Yet scholars allow that Mr. Gladstone in these three volumes, as well as inJuventus Mundiand hisHomeric Primer, has added not a little to our scientific knowledge of the Homeric poems,320by his extraordinary mastery of the text, the result of unwearied and prolonged industry, aided[pg 545]On Homerby a memory both tenacious and ready. Taking his own point of view, moreover, anybody who wishes to have his feeling about theIliadandOdysseyas delightful poetry refreshed and quickened, will find inspiring elements in the profusion, the eager array of Homer's own lines, the diligent exploration of aspects and bearings hitherto unthought of. The“theo-mythology”is commonly judged fantastic, and has been compared by sage critics to Warburton'sDivine Legation—the same comprehensive general reading, the same heroic industry in marshalling the particulars of proof, the same dialectical strength of arm, and all brought to prove an unsound proposition.321Yet the comprehensive reading and the particulars of proof are by no means without an interest of their own, whatever we may think of the proposition; and here, as in all his literary writing distinguished from polemics, he abounds in the ethical elements. Here perhaps more than anywhere else he impresses us by his love of beauty in all its aspects and relations, in the human form, in landscape, in the affections, in animals, including above all else that sense of beauty which made his Greeks take it as one of the names for nobility in conduct. Conington, one of the finest of scholars, then lecturing at Oxford on Latin poets and deep in his own Virgilian studies, which afterwards bore such admirable fruit, writes at length (Feb. 14, 1857) to say how grateful he is to Mr. Gladstone for the care with which he has pursued into details a view of Virgil that they hold substantially in common, and proceeds with care and point to analyse the quality of the Roman poet's art, as some years later he defended against Munro the questionable proposition of the superiority in poetic style of the graceful, melodious, and pathetic Virgil to Lucretius's mighty muse.No field has been more industriously worked for the last forty years than this of the relations of paganism to the historic religion that followed it in Europe. The knowledge and the speculations into which Mr. Gladstone was thus initiated in the sixties may now seem crude enough; but he deserves some credit in English, though not in view of[pg 546]German, speculation for an early perception of an unfamiliar region of comparative science, whence many a product most unwelcome to him and alien to his own beliefs has been since extracted. When all is said, however, Mr. Gladstone's place is not in literary or critical history, but elsewhere.His style is sometimes called Johnsonian, but surely without good ground. Johnson was not involved and he was clear, and neither of these things can always be said of Mr. Gladstone. Some critic charged him in 1840 with“prolix clearness.”The old charge, says Mr. Gladstone upon this, was“obscure compression. I do not doubt that both may be true, and the former may have been the result of a well-meant effort to escape from the latter.”He was fond of abstract words, or the nearer to abstract the better, and the more general the better. One effect of this was undoubtedly to give an indirect, almost a shifty, air that exasperated plain people. Why does he beat about the bush, they asked; why cannot he say what he means? A reader might have to think twice or thrice or twenty times before he could be sure that he interpreted correctly. But then people are so apt to think once, or half of once; to take the meaning that suits their own wish or purpose best, and then to treat that as the only meaning. Hence their perplexity and wrath when they found that other doors were open, and they thought a mistake due to their own hurry was the result of a juggler's trick. On the other hand a good writer takes all the pains he can to keep his reader out of such scrapes.His critical essays on Tennyson and Macaulay are excellent. They are acute, discriminating, generous. His estimate of Macaulay, apart from a piece of polemical church history at the end, is perhaps the best we have.“You make a very just remark,”said Acton to him,“that Macaulay was afraid of contradicting his former self, and remembered all he had written since 1825. At that time his mind was formed, and so it remained. What literary influences acted on the formation of his political opinions, what were his religious sympathies, and what is his exact place among historians, you have rather avoided discussing. There is still something[pg 547]to say on these points.”To Tennyson Mr. Gladstone believed himself to have been unjust, especially in the passages ofMauddevoted to the war-frenzy, and when he came to reprint the article he admitted that he had not sufficiently remembered that he was dealing with a dramatic and imaginative composition.322As he frankly said of himself, he was not strong in the faculties of the artist, but perhaps Tennyson himself in these passages was prompted much more by politics than by art. Of this piece of retractation the poet truly said,“Nobody but a noble-minded man would have done that.”323Mr. Gladstone would most likely have chosen to call his words a qualification rather than a recantation. In either case, it does not affect passages that give the finest expression to one of the very deepest convictions of his life,—that war, whatever else we may choose to say of it, is no antidote for Mammon-worship and can never be a cure for moral evils:—It is, indeed, true that peace has its moral perils and temptations for degenerate man, as has every other blessing, without exception, that he can receive from the hand of God. It is moreover not less true that, amidst the clash of arms, the noblest forms of character may be reared, and the highest acts of duty done; that these great and precious results may be due to war as their cause; and that one high form of sentiment in particular, the love of country, receives a powerful and general stimulus from the bloody strife. But this is as the furious cruelty of Pharaoh made place for the benign virtue of his daughter; as the butchering sentence of Herod raised without doubt many a mother's love into heroic sublimity; as plague, as famine, as fire, as flood, as every curse and every scourge that is wielded by an angry Providence for the chastisement of man, is an appointed instrument for tempering human souls in the seven-times heated furnace of affliction, up to the standard of angelic and archangelic virtue.War, indeed, has the property of exciting much generous and noble feeling on a large scale; but with this special recommendation it has, in its modern forms especially, peculiar and unequalled evils. As it has a wider sweep of desolating power than the rest,[pg 548]so it has the peculiar quality that it is more susceptible of being decked in gaudy trappings, and of fascinating the imagination of those whose proud and angry passions it inflames. But it is, on this very account, a perilous delusion to teach that war is a cure for moral evil, in any other sense than as the sister tribulations are. The eulogies of the frantic hero inMaud, however, deviate into grosser folly. It is natural that such vagaries should overlook the fixed laws of Providence. Under these laws the mass of mankind is composed of men, women, and children who can but just ward off hunger, cold, and nakedness; whose whole ideas of Mammon-worship are comprised in the search for their daily food, clothing, shelter, fuel; whom any casualty reduces to positive want; and whose already low estate is yet further lowered and ground down, when“the blood-red blossom of war flames with its heart of fire.”...Still war had, in times now gone by, ennobling elements and tendencies of the less sordid kind. But one inevitable characteristic of modern war is, that it is associated throughout, in all particulars, with a vast and most irregular formation of commercial enterprise. There is no incentive to Mammon-worship so remarkable as that which it affords. The political economy of war is now one of its most commanding aspects. Every farthing, with the smallest exceptions conceivable, of the scores or hundreds of millions which a war may cost, goes directly, and very violently, to stimulate production, though it is intended ultimately for waste or for destruction. Even apart from the fact that war suspends,ipso facto, every rule of public thrift, and tends to sap honesty itself in the use of the public treasure for which it makes such unbounded calls, it therefore is the greatest feeder of that lust of gold which we are told is the essence of commerce, though we had hoped it was only its occasional besetting sin. It is, however, more than this; for the regular commerce of peace is tameness itself compared with the gambling spirit which war, through the rapid shiftings and high prices which it brings, always introduces into trade. In its moral operation it more resembles, perhaps the finding of a new gold-field, than anything else.More remarkable than either of these two is his piece on Leopardi (1850), the Italian poet, whose philosophy and[pg 549]Leopardi Translationsframe of mind, said Mr. Gladstone,“present more than any other that we know, more even than that of Shelley, the character of unrelieved, unredeemed desolation—the very qualities in it which attract pitying sympathy, depriving it of all seductive power.”It is curious that he should have selected one whose life lay along a course like Leopardi's for commemoration, as a man who in almost every branch of mental exertion seems to have had the capacity for attaining, and generally at a single bound, the very highest excellence.“There are many things,”he adds,“in which Christians would do well to follow him: in the warmth of his attachments; in the moderation of his wants; in his noble freedom from the love of money; in his all-conquering assiduity.”324Perhaps the most remarkable sentence of all is this:“... what is not needful, and is commonly wrong, namely, is to pass a judgment on our fellow-creatures. Never let it be forgotten that there is scarcely a single moral action of a single man of which other men can have such a knowledge, in its ultimate grounds, its surrounding incidents, and the real determining causes of its merits, as to warrant their pronouncing a conclusive judgment upon it.”The translation of poetry into poetry, as Coleridge said, is difficult because the translator must give brilliancy without the warmth of original conception, from which such brilliancy would follow of its own accord. But we must not judge Mr. Gladstone's translation either of Horace's odes or of detached pieces from Greek or Italian, as we should judge the professed man of letters or poet like Coleridge himself. His pieces are the diversions of the man of affairs, with educated tastes and interest in good literature. Perhaps the best single piece is his really noble rendering of Manzoni's noble ode on the death of Napoleon; for instance:—From Alp to farthest Pyramid,From Rhine to Mansanar,How sure his lightning's flash foretoldHis thunderbolts of war!To Don from Scilla's height they roar,From North to Southern shore.[pg 550]And this was glory? After-men,Judge the dark problem. LowWe to the Mighty Maker bendThe while, Who planned to showWhat vaster mould Creative WillWith him could fill.As on the shipwrecked marinerThe weltering wave's descent—The wave, o'er which, a moment since,For distant shores he bentAnd bent in vain, his eager eye;So on that stricken headCame whelming down the mighty Past.How often did his penEssay to tell the wondrous taleFor after times and men,And o'er the lines that could not dieHis hand lay dead.How often, as the listless dayIn silence died away,He stood with lightning eye deprest,And arms across his breast,And bygone years, in rushing train,Smote on his soul amain:The breezy tents he seemed to see,And the battering cannon's course,And the flashing of the infantry,And the torrent of the horse,And, obeyed as soon as heard,Th' ecstatic word.Always let us remember that his literary life was part of the rest of his life, as literature ought to be. He was no mere reader of many books, used to relieve the strain of mental anxiety or to slake the thirst of literary or intellectual curiosity. Reading with him in the days of his full vigour was a habitual communing with the master spirits of mankind, as a vivifying and nourishing part of life. As we have seen, he would not read Dante in the session, nor unless he could have a large draught. Here as elsewhere in the ordering of his days he was methodical, systematic, full.[pg 551]VA Golden LampThough man of action, yet Mr. Gladstone too has a place by character and influences among what we may call the abstract, moral, spiritual forces that stamped the realm of Britain in his age. In a new time, marked in an incomparable degree by the progress of science and invention, by vast mechanical, industrial, and commercial development, he accepted it all, he adjusted his statesmanship to it all, nay, he revelled in it all, as tending to ameliorate the lot of the“mass of men, women, and children who can just ward off hunger, cold, and nakedness.”He did not rail at his age, he strove to help it. Following Walpole and Cobden and Peel in the policies of peace, he knew how to augment the material resources on which our people depend. When was Britain stronger, richer, more honoured among the nations—I do not say always among the diplomatic chanceries and governments—than in the years when Mr. Gladstone was at the zenith of his authority among us? When were her armed forces by sea and land more adequate for defence of every interest? When was her material resource sounder? When was her moral credit higher? Besides all this, he upheld a golden lamp.The unending revolutions of the world are for ever bringing old phases uppermost again. Events from season to season are taken to teach sinister lessons, that the Real is the only Rational, force is the test of right and wrong, the state has nothing to do with restraints of morals, the ruler is emancipated. Speculations in physical science were distorted for alien purposes, and survival of the fittest was taken to give brutality a more decent name. Even new conceptions and systems of history may be twisted into release of statesmen from the conscience of Bishop Butler's plain man. This gospel it was Mr. Gladstone's felicity to hold at bay. Without bringing back the cosmopolitanism of the eighteenth century, without sharing all the idealisms of the middle of the nineteenth, he resisted with his whole might the odious contention that moral progress in the relations of nations and states to one another is an illusion and a dream.[pg 552]This vein perhaps brings us too near to the regions of dissertation. Let us rather leave off with thoughts and memories of one who was a vivid example of public duty and of private faithfulness; of a long career that with every circumstance of splendour, amid all the mire and all the poisons of the world, lighted up in practice even for those who have none of his genius and none of his power his own precept,“Be inspired with the belief that life is a great and noble calling; not a mean and grovelling thing, that we are to shuffle through as we can, but an elevated and lofty destiny.”

Chapter X. Final.Anybody can see the host of general and speculative questions raised by a career so extraordinary. How would his fame have stood if his political life had ended in 1854, or 1874, or 1881, or 1885? What light does it shed upon the working of the parliamentary system; on the weakness and strength of popular government; on the good and bad of political party; on the superiority of rule by cabinet or by an elected president; on the relations of opinion to law? Here is material for a volume of disquisition, and nobody can ever discuss such speculations without reference to power as it was exercised by Mr. Gladstone. Those thronged halls, those vast progresses, those strenuous orations—what did they amount to? Did they mean a real moulding of opinion, an actual impression, whether by argument or temper or personality or all three, on the minds of hearers? Or was it no more than the same kind of interest that takes men to stage-plays with a favourite performer? This could hardly be, for his hearers gave him long spells of power and a practical authority that was unique and supreme. What thoughts does his career suggest on the relations of Christianity to patriotism, or to empire, or to what has been called neo-paganism? How many points arise as to the dependence of ethics on dogma? These are deep and living and perhaps burning issues, not to be discussed at the end of what the reader may well have found a long journey. They offer themselves for his independent consideration.IMr. Gladstone's own summary of the period in which he[pg 535]His Summary Of The Periodhad been so conspicuous a figure was this, when for him the drama was at an end:—Of his own career, he says, it is a career certainly chargeable with many errors of judgment, but I hope on the whole, governed at least by uprightness of intention and by a desire to learn. The personal aspect may now readily be dismissed as it concerns the past. But the public aspect of the period which closes for me with the fourteen years (so I love to reckon them) of my formal connection with Midlothian is too important to pass without a word. I consider it as beginning with the Reform Act of Lord Grey's government. That great Act was for England improvement and extension, for Scotland it was political birth, the beginning of a duty and a power, neither of which had attached to the Scottish nation in the preceding period. I rejoice to think how the solemnity of that duty has been recognised, and how that power has been used. The three-score years offer us the pictures of what the historian will recognise as a great legislative and administrative period—perhaps, on the whole, the greatest in our annals. It has been predominantly a history of emancipation—that is of enabling man to do his work of emancipation, political, economical, social, moral, intellectual. Not numerous merely, but almost numberless, have been the causes brought to issue, and in every one of them I rejoice to think that, so far as my knowledge goes, Scotland has done battle for the right.Another period has opened and is opening still—a period possibly of yet greater moral dangers, certainly a great ordeal for those classes which are now becoming largely conscious of power, and never heretofore subject to its deteriorating influences. These have been confined in their actions to the classes above them, because they were its sole possessors. Now is the time for the true friend of his country to remind the masses that their present political elevation is owing to no principles less broad and noble than these—the love of liberty, of liberty for all without distinction of class, creed or country, and the resolute preference of the interests of the whole to any interest, be it what it may, of a narrower scope.315A year later, in bidding farewell to his constituents“with[pg 536]sentiments of gratitude and attachment that can never be effaced,”he proceeds:—Though in regard to public affairs many things are disputable, there are some which belong to history and which have passed out of the region of contention. It is, for example as I conceive, beyond question that the century now expiring has exhibited since the close of its first quarter a period of unexampled activity both in legislative and administrative changes; that these changes, taken in the mass, have been in the direction of true and most beneficial progress; that both the conditions and the franchises of the people have made in relation to the former state of things, an extraordinary advance; that of these reforms an overwhelming proportion have been effected by direct action of the liberal party, or of statesmen such as Peel and Canning, ready to meet odium or to forfeit power for the public good; and that in every one of the fifteen parliaments the people of Scotland have decisively expressed their convictions in favour of this wise, temperate, and in every way remarkable policy.316To charge him with habitually rousing popular forces into dangerous excitement, is to ignore or misread his action in some of the most critical of his movements.“Here is a man,”said Huxley,“with the greatest intellect in Europe, and yet he debases it by simply following majorities and the crowd.”He was called a mere mirror of the passing humours and intellectual confusions of the popular mind. He had nothing, said his detractors, but a sort of clever pilot's eye for winds and currents, and the rising of the tide to the exact height that would float him and his cargo over the bar. All this is the exact opposite of the truth. What he thought was that the statesman's gift consisted in insight into the facts of a particular era, disclosing the existence of material for forming public opinion and directing public opinion to a given purpose. In every one of his achievements of high mark—even in his last marked failure of achievement—he expressly formed, or endeavoured to form and create, the public opinion upon which he knew that in the last resort he must depend.[pg 537]Leader, Not FollowerWe have seen the triumph of 1853.317Did he, in renewing the most hated of taxes, run about anxiously feeling the pulse of public opinion? On the contrary, he grappled with the facts with infinite labour—and half his genius was labour—he built up a great plan; he carried it to the cabinet; they warned him that the House of Commons would be against him; the officials of the treasury told him the Bank would be against him; that a strong press of commercial interests would be against him. Like the bold and sinewy athlete that he always was, he stood to his plan; he carried the cabinet; he persuaded the House of Commons; he vanquished the Bank and the hostile interests; and in the words of Sir Stafford Northcote, he changed and turned for many years to come, a current of public opinion that seemed far too powerful for any minister to resist. In the tempestuous discussions during the seventies on the policy of this country in respect of the Christian races of the Balkan Peninsula, he with his own voice created, moulded, inspired, and kindled with resistless flame the whole of the public opinion that eventually guided the policy of the nation with such admirable effect both for its own fame, and for the good of the world. Take again the Land Act of 1881, in some ways the most deep-reaching of all his legislative achievements. Here he had no flowing tide, every current was against him. He carried his scheme against the ignorance of the country, against the prejudice of the country, and against the standing prejudices of both branches of the legislature, who were steeped from the crown of the head to the sole of the foot in the strictest doctrines of contract.Then his passion for economy, his ceaseless war against public profusion, his insistence upon rigorous keeping of the national accounts—in this great department of affairs he led and did not follow. In no sphere of his activities was he more strenuous, and in no sphere, as he must well have known, was he less likely to win popularity. For democracy is spendthrift; if, to be sure, we may not say that most forms of government are apt to be the same.In a survey of Mr. Gladstone's performances, some would[pg 538]place this of which I have last spoken, as foremost among his services to the country. Others would call him greatest in the associated service of a skilful handling and adjustment of the burden of taxation; or the strengthening of the foundations of national prosperity and well-being by his reformation of the tariff. Yet others again choose to remember him for his share in guiding the successive extensions of popular power, and simplifying and purifying electoral machinery. Irishmen at least, and others so far as they are able to comprehend the history and vile wrongs and sharp needs of Ireland, will have no doubt what rank in legislation they will assign to the establishment of religious equality and agrarian justice in that portion of the realm. Not a few will count first the vigour with which he repaired what had been an erroneous judgment of his own and of vast hosts of his countrymen, by his courage in carrying through the submission of the Alabama claims to arbitration. Still more, looking from west to east, in this comparison among his achievements, will judge alike in its result and in the effort that produced it, nothing equal to the valour and insight with which he burst the chains of a mischievous and degrading policy as to the Ottoman empire. When we look at this exploit, how in face of an opponent of genius and authority and a tenacity not inferior to his own, in face of strongly rooted tradition on behalf of the Turk, and an easily roused antipathy against the Russian, by his own energy and strength of arm he wrested the rudder from the hand of the helmsman and put about the course of the ship, and held England back from the enormity of trying to keep several millions of men and women under the yoke of barbaric oppression and misrule,—we may say that this great feat alone was fame enough for one statesman. Let us make what choice we will of this or that particular achievement, how splendid a list it is of benefits conferred and public work effectually performed. Was he a good parliamentary tactician, they ask? Was his eye sure, his hand firm, his measurement of forces, distances, and possibilities of change in wind and tide accurate? Did he usually hit the proper moment for a magisterial intervention? Experts did not[pg 539]Achievements Comparedalways agree on his quality as tactician. At least he was pilot enough to bring many valuable cargoes safely home.He was one of the three statesmen in the House of Commons of his own generation who had the gift of large and spacious conception of the place and power of England in the world, and of the policies by which she could maintain it. Cobden and Disraeli were the other two. Wide as the poles asunder in genius, in character, and in the mark they made upon the nation, yet each of these three was capable of wide surveys from high eminence. But Mr. Gladstone's performances in the sphere of active government were beyond comparison.Again he was often harshly judged by that tenacious class who insist that if a general principle be sound, there can never be a reason why it should not be applied forthwith, and that a rule subject to exceptions is not worth calling a rule; and the worst of it is that these people are mostly the salt of the earth. In their impatient moments they dismissed him as an opportunist, but whenever there was a chance of getting anything done, they mostly found that he was the only man with courage and resolution enough to attempt to do it. In thinking about him we have constantly to remember, as Sir George Lewis said, that government is a very rough affair at best, a huge rough machine, not the delicate springs, wheels, and balances of a chronometer, and those concerned in working it have to be satisfied with what is far below the best.“Men have no business to talk of disenchantment,”Mr. Gladstone said;“ideals are never realised.”That is no reason, he meant, why men should not persist and toil and hope, and this is plainly the true temper for the politician. Yet he did not feed upon illusions.“The history of nations,”he wrote in 1876,“is a melancholy chapter; that is, the history of governments is one of the most immoral parts of human history.”IIIt might well be said that Mr. Gladstone took too little, rather than too much trouble to be popular. His religious conservatism puzzled and irritated those who admired and[pg 540]shared his political liberalism, just as churchmen watched with uneasiness and suspicion his radical alliances. Neither those who were churchmen first, nor those whose interests were keenest in politics, could comprehend the union of what seemed incompatibles, and because they could not comprehend they sometimes in their shallower humours doubted his sincerity. Mr. Gladstone was never, after say 1850, really afraid of disestablishment; on the contrary he was much more afraid of the perils of establishment for the integrity of the faith. Yet political disestablishers often doubted him, because they had not logic enough to see that a man may be a fervent believer in anglican institutions and what he thinks catholic tradition, and yet be as ready as Cavour for the principle of free church in free state.It is curious that some of the things that made men suspicious, were in fact the liveliest tokens of his sincerity and simplicity. With all his power of political imagination, yet his mind was an intensely literal mind. He did not look at an act or a decision from the point of view at which it might be regarded by other people. Ewelme, the mission to the Ionian Islands, the royal warrant, the affair of the judicial committee, vaticanism, and all the other things that gave offence, and stirred misgivings even in friends, showed that the very last question he ever asked himself was how his action would look; what construction might be put upon it, or even would pretty certainly be put upon it; whom it would encourage, whom it would estrange, whom it would perplex. Is the given end right, he seemed to ask; what are the surest means; are the means as right as the end, as right as they are sure? But right—on strict and literal construction. What he sometimes forgot was that in political action, construction is part of the act, nay, may even be its most important part.318The more you make of his errors, the more is the need to explain his vast renown, the long reign of his authority, the substance and reality of his powers. We call men great for many reasons apart from service wrought or eminence of intellect or even from force and depth of character. To[pg 541]Attitude To Church Partieshave taken a leading part in transactions of decisive moment; to have proved himself able to meet demands on which high issues hung; to combine intellectual qualities, though moderate yet adequate and sufficient, with the moral qualities needed for the given circumstance—with daring, circumspection, energy, intrepid initiative; to have fallen in with one of those occasions in the world that impart their own greatness even to a mediocre actor, and surround his name with a halo not radiating from within but shed upon him from without—in all these and many other ways men come to be counted great. Mr. Gladstone belongs to the rarer class who acquired authority and fame by transcendent qualities of genius within, in half independence of any occasions beyond those they create for themselves.IIIOf his attitude in respect of church parties, it is not for me to speak. He has himself described at least one aspect of it in a letter to an inquirer, which would be a very noble piece by whomsoever written, and in the name of whatsoever creed or no-creed, whether Christian or Rationalist or Nathan the Wise Jew's creed. It was addressed to a clergyman who seems to have asked of what section Mr. Gladstone considered himself an adherent:—Feb. 4, 1865.—It is impossible to misinterpret either the intention or the terms of your letter; and I thank you for it sincerely. But I cannot answer the question which you put to me, and I think I can even satisfy you that with my convictions I should do wrong in replying to it in any manner. Whatever reason I may have for being painfully and daily conscious of every kind of unworthiness, yet I am sufficiently aware of the dignity of religious belief to have been throughout a political life, now in its thirty-third year, steadily resolved never by my own voluntary act to make it the subject of any compact or assurance with a view to a political object. You think (and pray do not suppose I make this matter of complaint) that I have been associated with one party in the church of England, and that I may now lean rather towards another.... There is no one about whom information[pg 542]can be more easily had than myself. I have had and have friends of many colours, churchmen high and low, presbyterians, Greeks, Roman catholics, dissenters, who can speak abundantly, though perhaps not very well of me. And further, as member for the university, I have honestly endeavoured at all times to put my constituents in possession of all I could convey to them that could be considered as in the nature of a fact, by answering as explicitly as I was able all questions relating to the matters, and they are numerous enough, on which I have had to act or speak. Perhaps I shall surprise you by what I have yet further to say. I have never by any conscious act yielded my allegiance to any person or party in matters of religion. You and others may have called me (without the least offence) a churchman of some particular kind, and I have more than once seen announced in print my own secession from the church of England. These things I have not commonly contradicted, for the atmosphere of religious controversy and contradiction is as odious as the atmosphere of mental freedom is precious, to me; and I have feared to lose the one and be drawn into the other, by heat and bitterness creeping into the mind. If another chooses to call himself, or to call me, a member of this or that party, I am not to complain. But I respectfully claim the right not to call myself so, and on this claim, I have I believe acted throughout my life, without a single exception; and I feel that were I to waive it, I should at once put in hazard that allegiance to Truth, which is at once the supreme duty and the supreme joy of life. I have only to add the expression of my hope that in what I have said there is nothing to hurt or to offend you; and, if there be, very heartily to wish it unsaid.Yet there was never the shadow of mistake about his own fervent faith. As he said to another correspondent:—Feb. 5, 1876.—I am in principle a strong denominationalist.“One fold and one shepherd”was the note of early Christendom. The shepherd is still one and knows his sheep; but the folds are many; and, without condemning any others, I am of opinion that it is best for us all that we should all of us be jealous for the honour of whatever we have and hold as positive truth, appertaining to the Divine Word and the foundation and history of[pg 543]the Christian community. I admit that this question becomes one of circumstance and degree, but I take it as I find it defined for myself by and in my own position.IVOf Mr. Gladstone as orator and improvisatore, enough has been said and seen. Besides being orator and statesman he was scholar and critic. Perhaps scholar in his interests, not in abiding contribution. The most copious of his productions in this delightful but arduous field was the three large volumes onHomer and the Homeric Age, given to the world in 1858. Into what has been well called the whirlpool of Homeric controversies, the reader shall not here be dragged. Mr. Gladstone himself gave them the go-by, with an indifference and disdain such as might have been well enough in the economic field if exhibited towards a protectionist farmer, or a partisan of retaliatory duties on manufactured goods, but that were hardly to the point in dealing with profound and original critics. What he too contemptuously dismissed as Homeric“bubble-schemes,”were in truth centres of scientific illumination. At the end of the eighteenth century Wolf's famousProlegomenaappeared, in which he advanced the theory that Homer was no single poet, nor a name for two poets, nor an individual at all; theIliadandOdysseywere collections of independent lays, folk-lore and folk-songs connected by a common set of themes, and edited, redacted, or compacted about the middle of the sixth century before Christ. A learned man of our own day has said that F. A. Wolf ought to be counted one of the half dozen writers that within the last three centuries have most influenced thought. This would bring Wolf into line with Descartes, Newton, Locke, Kant, Rousseau, or whatever other five master-spirits of thought from then to now the judicious reader may select. The present writer has assuredly no competence to assign Wolf's place in the history of modern criticism, but straying aside for a season from the green pastures of Hansard, and turning over again the slim volume of a hundred and fifty pages in which Wolf discusses his theme, one may easily discern a fountain of[pg 544]broad streams of modern thought (apart from the particular thesis) that to Mr. Gladstone, by the force of all his education and his deepest prepossessions, were in the highest degree chimerical and dangerous.He once wrote to Lord Acton (1889) about the Old Testament and Mosaic legislation:—Now I think that the most important parts of the argument have in a great degree a solid standing ground apart from the destructive criticism on dates and on the text: and I am sufficiently aware of my own rawness and ignorance in the matter not to allow myself to judge definitely, or condemn. I feel also that I have a prepossession derived from the criticisms in the case of Homer. Of them I have a very bad opinion, not only in themselves, but as to the levity, precipitancy, and shallowness of mind which they display; and here I do venture to speak, because I believe myself to have done a great deal more than any of the destructives in the examination of the text, which is the true source of the materials of judgment. They are a soulless lot; but there was a time when they had possession of the public ear as much I suppose as the Old Testament destructives now have, within their own precinct. It is only the constructive part of their work on which I feel tempted to judge; and I must own that it seems to me sadly wanting in the elements of rational probability.This unpromising method is sufficiently set out when he says:“I find in the plot of theIliadenough of beauty, order, and structure, not merely to sustain the supposition of its own unity, but to bear an independent testimony, should it be still needed, to the existence of a personal and individual Homer as its author.”319From such a method no permanent contribution could come.Yet scholars allow that Mr. Gladstone in these three volumes, as well as inJuventus Mundiand hisHomeric Primer, has added not a little to our scientific knowledge of the Homeric poems,320by his extraordinary mastery of the text, the result of unwearied and prolonged industry, aided[pg 545]On Homerby a memory both tenacious and ready. Taking his own point of view, moreover, anybody who wishes to have his feeling about theIliadandOdysseyas delightful poetry refreshed and quickened, will find inspiring elements in the profusion, the eager array of Homer's own lines, the diligent exploration of aspects and bearings hitherto unthought of. The“theo-mythology”is commonly judged fantastic, and has been compared by sage critics to Warburton'sDivine Legation—the same comprehensive general reading, the same heroic industry in marshalling the particulars of proof, the same dialectical strength of arm, and all brought to prove an unsound proposition.321Yet the comprehensive reading and the particulars of proof are by no means without an interest of their own, whatever we may think of the proposition; and here, as in all his literary writing distinguished from polemics, he abounds in the ethical elements. Here perhaps more than anywhere else he impresses us by his love of beauty in all its aspects and relations, in the human form, in landscape, in the affections, in animals, including above all else that sense of beauty which made his Greeks take it as one of the names for nobility in conduct. Conington, one of the finest of scholars, then lecturing at Oxford on Latin poets and deep in his own Virgilian studies, which afterwards bore such admirable fruit, writes at length (Feb. 14, 1857) to say how grateful he is to Mr. Gladstone for the care with which he has pursued into details a view of Virgil that they hold substantially in common, and proceeds with care and point to analyse the quality of the Roman poet's art, as some years later he defended against Munro the questionable proposition of the superiority in poetic style of the graceful, melodious, and pathetic Virgil to Lucretius's mighty muse.No field has been more industriously worked for the last forty years than this of the relations of paganism to the historic religion that followed it in Europe. The knowledge and the speculations into which Mr. Gladstone was thus initiated in the sixties may now seem crude enough; but he deserves some credit in English, though not in view of[pg 546]German, speculation for an early perception of an unfamiliar region of comparative science, whence many a product most unwelcome to him and alien to his own beliefs has been since extracted. When all is said, however, Mr. Gladstone's place is not in literary or critical history, but elsewhere.His style is sometimes called Johnsonian, but surely without good ground. Johnson was not involved and he was clear, and neither of these things can always be said of Mr. Gladstone. Some critic charged him in 1840 with“prolix clearness.”The old charge, says Mr. Gladstone upon this, was“obscure compression. I do not doubt that both may be true, and the former may have been the result of a well-meant effort to escape from the latter.”He was fond of abstract words, or the nearer to abstract the better, and the more general the better. One effect of this was undoubtedly to give an indirect, almost a shifty, air that exasperated plain people. Why does he beat about the bush, they asked; why cannot he say what he means? A reader might have to think twice or thrice or twenty times before he could be sure that he interpreted correctly. But then people are so apt to think once, or half of once; to take the meaning that suits their own wish or purpose best, and then to treat that as the only meaning. Hence their perplexity and wrath when they found that other doors were open, and they thought a mistake due to their own hurry was the result of a juggler's trick. On the other hand a good writer takes all the pains he can to keep his reader out of such scrapes.His critical essays on Tennyson and Macaulay are excellent. They are acute, discriminating, generous. His estimate of Macaulay, apart from a piece of polemical church history at the end, is perhaps the best we have.“You make a very just remark,”said Acton to him,“that Macaulay was afraid of contradicting his former self, and remembered all he had written since 1825. At that time his mind was formed, and so it remained. What literary influences acted on the formation of his political opinions, what were his religious sympathies, and what is his exact place among historians, you have rather avoided discussing. There is still something[pg 547]to say on these points.”To Tennyson Mr. Gladstone believed himself to have been unjust, especially in the passages ofMauddevoted to the war-frenzy, and when he came to reprint the article he admitted that he had not sufficiently remembered that he was dealing with a dramatic and imaginative composition.322As he frankly said of himself, he was not strong in the faculties of the artist, but perhaps Tennyson himself in these passages was prompted much more by politics than by art. Of this piece of retractation the poet truly said,“Nobody but a noble-minded man would have done that.”323Mr. Gladstone would most likely have chosen to call his words a qualification rather than a recantation. In either case, it does not affect passages that give the finest expression to one of the very deepest convictions of his life,—that war, whatever else we may choose to say of it, is no antidote for Mammon-worship and can never be a cure for moral evils:—It is, indeed, true that peace has its moral perils and temptations for degenerate man, as has every other blessing, without exception, that he can receive from the hand of God. It is moreover not less true that, amidst the clash of arms, the noblest forms of character may be reared, and the highest acts of duty done; that these great and precious results may be due to war as their cause; and that one high form of sentiment in particular, the love of country, receives a powerful and general stimulus from the bloody strife. But this is as the furious cruelty of Pharaoh made place for the benign virtue of his daughter; as the butchering sentence of Herod raised without doubt many a mother's love into heroic sublimity; as plague, as famine, as fire, as flood, as every curse and every scourge that is wielded by an angry Providence for the chastisement of man, is an appointed instrument for tempering human souls in the seven-times heated furnace of affliction, up to the standard of angelic and archangelic virtue.War, indeed, has the property of exciting much generous and noble feeling on a large scale; but with this special recommendation it has, in its modern forms especially, peculiar and unequalled evils. As it has a wider sweep of desolating power than the rest,[pg 548]so it has the peculiar quality that it is more susceptible of being decked in gaudy trappings, and of fascinating the imagination of those whose proud and angry passions it inflames. But it is, on this very account, a perilous delusion to teach that war is a cure for moral evil, in any other sense than as the sister tribulations are. The eulogies of the frantic hero inMaud, however, deviate into grosser folly. It is natural that such vagaries should overlook the fixed laws of Providence. Under these laws the mass of mankind is composed of men, women, and children who can but just ward off hunger, cold, and nakedness; whose whole ideas of Mammon-worship are comprised in the search for their daily food, clothing, shelter, fuel; whom any casualty reduces to positive want; and whose already low estate is yet further lowered and ground down, when“the blood-red blossom of war flames with its heart of fire.”...Still war had, in times now gone by, ennobling elements and tendencies of the less sordid kind. But one inevitable characteristic of modern war is, that it is associated throughout, in all particulars, with a vast and most irregular formation of commercial enterprise. There is no incentive to Mammon-worship so remarkable as that which it affords. The political economy of war is now one of its most commanding aspects. Every farthing, with the smallest exceptions conceivable, of the scores or hundreds of millions which a war may cost, goes directly, and very violently, to stimulate production, though it is intended ultimately for waste or for destruction. Even apart from the fact that war suspends,ipso facto, every rule of public thrift, and tends to sap honesty itself in the use of the public treasure for which it makes such unbounded calls, it therefore is the greatest feeder of that lust of gold which we are told is the essence of commerce, though we had hoped it was only its occasional besetting sin. It is, however, more than this; for the regular commerce of peace is tameness itself compared with the gambling spirit which war, through the rapid shiftings and high prices which it brings, always introduces into trade. In its moral operation it more resembles, perhaps the finding of a new gold-field, than anything else.More remarkable than either of these two is his piece on Leopardi (1850), the Italian poet, whose philosophy and[pg 549]Leopardi Translationsframe of mind, said Mr. Gladstone,“present more than any other that we know, more even than that of Shelley, the character of unrelieved, unredeemed desolation—the very qualities in it which attract pitying sympathy, depriving it of all seductive power.”It is curious that he should have selected one whose life lay along a course like Leopardi's for commemoration, as a man who in almost every branch of mental exertion seems to have had the capacity for attaining, and generally at a single bound, the very highest excellence.“There are many things,”he adds,“in which Christians would do well to follow him: in the warmth of his attachments; in the moderation of his wants; in his noble freedom from the love of money; in his all-conquering assiduity.”324Perhaps the most remarkable sentence of all is this:“... what is not needful, and is commonly wrong, namely, is to pass a judgment on our fellow-creatures. Never let it be forgotten that there is scarcely a single moral action of a single man of which other men can have such a knowledge, in its ultimate grounds, its surrounding incidents, and the real determining causes of its merits, as to warrant their pronouncing a conclusive judgment upon it.”The translation of poetry into poetry, as Coleridge said, is difficult because the translator must give brilliancy without the warmth of original conception, from which such brilliancy would follow of its own accord. But we must not judge Mr. Gladstone's translation either of Horace's odes or of detached pieces from Greek or Italian, as we should judge the professed man of letters or poet like Coleridge himself. His pieces are the diversions of the man of affairs, with educated tastes and interest in good literature. Perhaps the best single piece is his really noble rendering of Manzoni's noble ode on the death of Napoleon; for instance:—From Alp to farthest Pyramid,From Rhine to Mansanar,How sure his lightning's flash foretoldHis thunderbolts of war!To Don from Scilla's height they roar,From North to Southern shore.[pg 550]And this was glory? After-men,Judge the dark problem. LowWe to the Mighty Maker bendThe while, Who planned to showWhat vaster mould Creative WillWith him could fill.As on the shipwrecked marinerThe weltering wave's descent—The wave, o'er which, a moment since,For distant shores he bentAnd bent in vain, his eager eye;So on that stricken headCame whelming down the mighty Past.How often did his penEssay to tell the wondrous taleFor after times and men,And o'er the lines that could not dieHis hand lay dead.How often, as the listless dayIn silence died away,He stood with lightning eye deprest,And arms across his breast,And bygone years, in rushing train,Smote on his soul amain:The breezy tents he seemed to see,And the battering cannon's course,And the flashing of the infantry,And the torrent of the horse,And, obeyed as soon as heard,Th' ecstatic word.Always let us remember that his literary life was part of the rest of his life, as literature ought to be. He was no mere reader of many books, used to relieve the strain of mental anxiety or to slake the thirst of literary or intellectual curiosity. Reading with him in the days of his full vigour was a habitual communing with the master spirits of mankind, as a vivifying and nourishing part of life. As we have seen, he would not read Dante in the session, nor unless he could have a large draught. Here as elsewhere in the ordering of his days he was methodical, systematic, full.[pg 551]VA Golden LampThough man of action, yet Mr. Gladstone too has a place by character and influences among what we may call the abstract, moral, spiritual forces that stamped the realm of Britain in his age. In a new time, marked in an incomparable degree by the progress of science and invention, by vast mechanical, industrial, and commercial development, he accepted it all, he adjusted his statesmanship to it all, nay, he revelled in it all, as tending to ameliorate the lot of the“mass of men, women, and children who can just ward off hunger, cold, and nakedness.”He did not rail at his age, he strove to help it. Following Walpole and Cobden and Peel in the policies of peace, he knew how to augment the material resources on which our people depend. When was Britain stronger, richer, more honoured among the nations—I do not say always among the diplomatic chanceries and governments—than in the years when Mr. Gladstone was at the zenith of his authority among us? When were her armed forces by sea and land more adequate for defence of every interest? When was her material resource sounder? When was her moral credit higher? Besides all this, he upheld a golden lamp.The unending revolutions of the world are for ever bringing old phases uppermost again. Events from season to season are taken to teach sinister lessons, that the Real is the only Rational, force is the test of right and wrong, the state has nothing to do with restraints of morals, the ruler is emancipated. Speculations in physical science were distorted for alien purposes, and survival of the fittest was taken to give brutality a more decent name. Even new conceptions and systems of history may be twisted into release of statesmen from the conscience of Bishop Butler's plain man. This gospel it was Mr. Gladstone's felicity to hold at bay. Without bringing back the cosmopolitanism of the eighteenth century, without sharing all the idealisms of the middle of the nineteenth, he resisted with his whole might the odious contention that moral progress in the relations of nations and states to one another is an illusion and a dream.[pg 552]This vein perhaps brings us too near to the regions of dissertation. Let us rather leave off with thoughts and memories of one who was a vivid example of public duty and of private faithfulness; of a long career that with every circumstance of splendour, amid all the mire and all the poisons of the world, lighted up in practice even for those who have none of his genius and none of his power his own precept,“Be inspired with the belief that life is a great and noble calling; not a mean and grovelling thing, that we are to shuffle through as we can, but an elevated and lofty destiny.”

Chapter X. Final.Anybody can see the host of general and speculative questions raised by a career so extraordinary. How would his fame have stood if his political life had ended in 1854, or 1874, or 1881, or 1885? What light does it shed upon the working of the parliamentary system; on the weakness and strength of popular government; on the good and bad of political party; on the superiority of rule by cabinet or by an elected president; on the relations of opinion to law? Here is material for a volume of disquisition, and nobody can ever discuss such speculations without reference to power as it was exercised by Mr. Gladstone. Those thronged halls, those vast progresses, those strenuous orations—what did they amount to? Did they mean a real moulding of opinion, an actual impression, whether by argument or temper or personality or all three, on the minds of hearers? Or was it no more than the same kind of interest that takes men to stage-plays with a favourite performer? This could hardly be, for his hearers gave him long spells of power and a practical authority that was unique and supreme. What thoughts does his career suggest on the relations of Christianity to patriotism, or to empire, or to what has been called neo-paganism? How many points arise as to the dependence of ethics on dogma? These are deep and living and perhaps burning issues, not to be discussed at the end of what the reader may well have found a long journey. They offer themselves for his independent consideration.IMr. Gladstone's own summary of the period in which he[pg 535]His Summary Of The Periodhad been so conspicuous a figure was this, when for him the drama was at an end:—Of his own career, he says, it is a career certainly chargeable with many errors of judgment, but I hope on the whole, governed at least by uprightness of intention and by a desire to learn. The personal aspect may now readily be dismissed as it concerns the past. But the public aspect of the period which closes for me with the fourteen years (so I love to reckon them) of my formal connection with Midlothian is too important to pass without a word. I consider it as beginning with the Reform Act of Lord Grey's government. That great Act was for England improvement and extension, for Scotland it was political birth, the beginning of a duty and a power, neither of which had attached to the Scottish nation in the preceding period. I rejoice to think how the solemnity of that duty has been recognised, and how that power has been used. The three-score years offer us the pictures of what the historian will recognise as a great legislative and administrative period—perhaps, on the whole, the greatest in our annals. It has been predominantly a history of emancipation—that is of enabling man to do his work of emancipation, political, economical, social, moral, intellectual. Not numerous merely, but almost numberless, have been the causes brought to issue, and in every one of them I rejoice to think that, so far as my knowledge goes, Scotland has done battle for the right.Another period has opened and is opening still—a period possibly of yet greater moral dangers, certainly a great ordeal for those classes which are now becoming largely conscious of power, and never heretofore subject to its deteriorating influences. These have been confined in their actions to the classes above them, because they were its sole possessors. Now is the time for the true friend of his country to remind the masses that their present political elevation is owing to no principles less broad and noble than these—the love of liberty, of liberty for all without distinction of class, creed or country, and the resolute preference of the interests of the whole to any interest, be it what it may, of a narrower scope.315A year later, in bidding farewell to his constituents“with[pg 536]sentiments of gratitude and attachment that can never be effaced,”he proceeds:—Though in regard to public affairs many things are disputable, there are some which belong to history and which have passed out of the region of contention. It is, for example as I conceive, beyond question that the century now expiring has exhibited since the close of its first quarter a period of unexampled activity both in legislative and administrative changes; that these changes, taken in the mass, have been in the direction of true and most beneficial progress; that both the conditions and the franchises of the people have made in relation to the former state of things, an extraordinary advance; that of these reforms an overwhelming proportion have been effected by direct action of the liberal party, or of statesmen such as Peel and Canning, ready to meet odium or to forfeit power for the public good; and that in every one of the fifteen parliaments the people of Scotland have decisively expressed their convictions in favour of this wise, temperate, and in every way remarkable policy.316To charge him with habitually rousing popular forces into dangerous excitement, is to ignore or misread his action in some of the most critical of his movements.“Here is a man,”said Huxley,“with the greatest intellect in Europe, and yet he debases it by simply following majorities and the crowd.”He was called a mere mirror of the passing humours and intellectual confusions of the popular mind. He had nothing, said his detractors, but a sort of clever pilot's eye for winds and currents, and the rising of the tide to the exact height that would float him and his cargo over the bar. All this is the exact opposite of the truth. What he thought was that the statesman's gift consisted in insight into the facts of a particular era, disclosing the existence of material for forming public opinion and directing public opinion to a given purpose. In every one of his achievements of high mark—even in his last marked failure of achievement—he expressly formed, or endeavoured to form and create, the public opinion upon which he knew that in the last resort he must depend.[pg 537]Leader, Not FollowerWe have seen the triumph of 1853.317Did he, in renewing the most hated of taxes, run about anxiously feeling the pulse of public opinion? On the contrary, he grappled with the facts with infinite labour—and half his genius was labour—he built up a great plan; he carried it to the cabinet; they warned him that the House of Commons would be against him; the officials of the treasury told him the Bank would be against him; that a strong press of commercial interests would be against him. Like the bold and sinewy athlete that he always was, he stood to his plan; he carried the cabinet; he persuaded the House of Commons; he vanquished the Bank and the hostile interests; and in the words of Sir Stafford Northcote, he changed and turned for many years to come, a current of public opinion that seemed far too powerful for any minister to resist. In the tempestuous discussions during the seventies on the policy of this country in respect of the Christian races of the Balkan Peninsula, he with his own voice created, moulded, inspired, and kindled with resistless flame the whole of the public opinion that eventually guided the policy of the nation with such admirable effect both for its own fame, and for the good of the world. Take again the Land Act of 1881, in some ways the most deep-reaching of all his legislative achievements. Here he had no flowing tide, every current was against him. He carried his scheme against the ignorance of the country, against the prejudice of the country, and against the standing prejudices of both branches of the legislature, who were steeped from the crown of the head to the sole of the foot in the strictest doctrines of contract.Then his passion for economy, his ceaseless war against public profusion, his insistence upon rigorous keeping of the national accounts—in this great department of affairs he led and did not follow. In no sphere of his activities was he more strenuous, and in no sphere, as he must well have known, was he less likely to win popularity. For democracy is spendthrift; if, to be sure, we may not say that most forms of government are apt to be the same.In a survey of Mr. Gladstone's performances, some would[pg 538]place this of which I have last spoken, as foremost among his services to the country. Others would call him greatest in the associated service of a skilful handling and adjustment of the burden of taxation; or the strengthening of the foundations of national prosperity and well-being by his reformation of the tariff. Yet others again choose to remember him for his share in guiding the successive extensions of popular power, and simplifying and purifying electoral machinery. Irishmen at least, and others so far as they are able to comprehend the history and vile wrongs and sharp needs of Ireland, will have no doubt what rank in legislation they will assign to the establishment of religious equality and agrarian justice in that portion of the realm. Not a few will count first the vigour with which he repaired what had been an erroneous judgment of his own and of vast hosts of his countrymen, by his courage in carrying through the submission of the Alabama claims to arbitration. Still more, looking from west to east, in this comparison among his achievements, will judge alike in its result and in the effort that produced it, nothing equal to the valour and insight with which he burst the chains of a mischievous and degrading policy as to the Ottoman empire. When we look at this exploit, how in face of an opponent of genius and authority and a tenacity not inferior to his own, in face of strongly rooted tradition on behalf of the Turk, and an easily roused antipathy against the Russian, by his own energy and strength of arm he wrested the rudder from the hand of the helmsman and put about the course of the ship, and held England back from the enormity of trying to keep several millions of men and women under the yoke of barbaric oppression and misrule,—we may say that this great feat alone was fame enough for one statesman. Let us make what choice we will of this or that particular achievement, how splendid a list it is of benefits conferred and public work effectually performed. Was he a good parliamentary tactician, they ask? Was his eye sure, his hand firm, his measurement of forces, distances, and possibilities of change in wind and tide accurate? Did he usually hit the proper moment for a magisterial intervention? Experts did not[pg 539]Achievements Comparedalways agree on his quality as tactician. At least he was pilot enough to bring many valuable cargoes safely home.He was one of the three statesmen in the House of Commons of his own generation who had the gift of large and spacious conception of the place and power of England in the world, and of the policies by which she could maintain it. Cobden and Disraeli were the other two. Wide as the poles asunder in genius, in character, and in the mark they made upon the nation, yet each of these three was capable of wide surveys from high eminence. But Mr. Gladstone's performances in the sphere of active government were beyond comparison.Again he was often harshly judged by that tenacious class who insist that if a general principle be sound, there can never be a reason why it should not be applied forthwith, and that a rule subject to exceptions is not worth calling a rule; and the worst of it is that these people are mostly the salt of the earth. In their impatient moments they dismissed him as an opportunist, but whenever there was a chance of getting anything done, they mostly found that he was the only man with courage and resolution enough to attempt to do it. In thinking about him we have constantly to remember, as Sir George Lewis said, that government is a very rough affair at best, a huge rough machine, not the delicate springs, wheels, and balances of a chronometer, and those concerned in working it have to be satisfied with what is far below the best.“Men have no business to talk of disenchantment,”Mr. Gladstone said;“ideals are never realised.”That is no reason, he meant, why men should not persist and toil and hope, and this is plainly the true temper for the politician. Yet he did not feed upon illusions.“The history of nations,”he wrote in 1876,“is a melancholy chapter; that is, the history of governments is one of the most immoral parts of human history.”IIIt might well be said that Mr. Gladstone took too little, rather than too much trouble to be popular. His religious conservatism puzzled and irritated those who admired and[pg 540]shared his political liberalism, just as churchmen watched with uneasiness and suspicion his radical alliances. Neither those who were churchmen first, nor those whose interests were keenest in politics, could comprehend the union of what seemed incompatibles, and because they could not comprehend they sometimes in their shallower humours doubted his sincerity. Mr. Gladstone was never, after say 1850, really afraid of disestablishment; on the contrary he was much more afraid of the perils of establishment for the integrity of the faith. Yet political disestablishers often doubted him, because they had not logic enough to see that a man may be a fervent believer in anglican institutions and what he thinks catholic tradition, and yet be as ready as Cavour for the principle of free church in free state.It is curious that some of the things that made men suspicious, were in fact the liveliest tokens of his sincerity and simplicity. With all his power of political imagination, yet his mind was an intensely literal mind. He did not look at an act or a decision from the point of view at which it might be regarded by other people. Ewelme, the mission to the Ionian Islands, the royal warrant, the affair of the judicial committee, vaticanism, and all the other things that gave offence, and stirred misgivings even in friends, showed that the very last question he ever asked himself was how his action would look; what construction might be put upon it, or even would pretty certainly be put upon it; whom it would encourage, whom it would estrange, whom it would perplex. Is the given end right, he seemed to ask; what are the surest means; are the means as right as the end, as right as they are sure? But right—on strict and literal construction. What he sometimes forgot was that in political action, construction is part of the act, nay, may even be its most important part.318The more you make of his errors, the more is the need to explain his vast renown, the long reign of his authority, the substance and reality of his powers. We call men great for many reasons apart from service wrought or eminence of intellect or even from force and depth of character. To[pg 541]Attitude To Church Partieshave taken a leading part in transactions of decisive moment; to have proved himself able to meet demands on which high issues hung; to combine intellectual qualities, though moderate yet adequate and sufficient, with the moral qualities needed for the given circumstance—with daring, circumspection, energy, intrepid initiative; to have fallen in with one of those occasions in the world that impart their own greatness even to a mediocre actor, and surround his name with a halo not radiating from within but shed upon him from without—in all these and many other ways men come to be counted great. Mr. Gladstone belongs to the rarer class who acquired authority and fame by transcendent qualities of genius within, in half independence of any occasions beyond those they create for themselves.IIIOf his attitude in respect of church parties, it is not for me to speak. He has himself described at least one aspect of it in a letter to an inquirer, which would be a very noble piece by whomsoever written, and in the name of whatsoever creed or no-creed, whether Christian or Rationalist or Nathan the Wise Jew's creed. It was addressed to a clergyman who seems to have asked of what section Mr. Gladstone considered himself an adherent:—Feb. 4, 1865.—It is impossible to misinterpret either the intention or the terms of your letter; and I thank you for it sincerely. But I cannot answer the question which you put to me, and I think I can even satisfy you that with my convictions I should do wrong in replying to it in any manner. Whatever reason I may have for being painfully and daily conscious of every kind of unworthiness, yet I am sufficiently aware of the dignity of religious belief to have been throughout a political life, now in its thirty-third year, steadily resolved never by my own voluntary act to make it the subject of any compact or assurance with a view to a political object. You think (and pray do not suppose I make this matter of complaint) that I have been associated with one party in the church of England, and that I may now lean rather towards another.... There is no one about whom information[pg 542]can be more easily had than myself. I have had and have friends of many colours, churchmen high and low, presbyterians, Greeks, Roman catholics, dissenters, who can speak abundantly, though perhaps not very well of me. And further, as member for the university, I have honestly endeavoured at all times to put my constituents in possession of all I could convey to them that could be considered as in the nature of a fact, by answering as explicitly as I was able all questions relating to the matters, and they are numerous enough, on which I have had to act or speak. Perhaps I shall surprise you by what I have yet further to say. I have never by any conscious act yielded my allegiance to any person or party in matters of religion. You and others may have called me (without the least offence) a churchman of some particular kind, and I have more than once seen announced in print my own secession from the church of England. These things I have not commonly contradicted, for the atmosphere of religious controversy and contradiction is as odious as the atmosphere of mental freedom is precious, to me; and I have feared to lose the one and be drawn into the other, by heat and bitterness creeping into the mind. If another chooses to call himself, or to call me, a member of this or that party, I am not to complain. But I respectfully claim the right not to call myself so, and on this claim, I have I believe acted throughout my life, without a single exception; and I feel that were I to waive it, I should at once put in hazard that allegiance to Truth, which is at once the supreme duty and the supreme joy of life. I have only to add the expression of my hope that in what I have said there is nothing to hurt or to offend you; and, if there be, very heartily to wish it unsaid.Yet there was never the shadow of mistake about his own fervent faith. As he said to another correspondent:—Feb. 5, 1876.—I am in principle a strong denominationalist.“One fold and one shepherd”was the note of early Christendom. The shepherd is still one and knows his sheep; but the folds are many; and, without condemning any others, I am of opinion that it is best for us all that we should all of us be jealous for the honour of whatever we have and hold as positive truth, appertaining to the Divine Word and the foundation and history of[pg 543]the Christian community. I admit that this question becomes one of circumstance and degree, but I take it as I find it defined for myself by and in my own position.IVOf Mr. Gladstone as orator and improvisatore, enough has been said and seen. Besides being orator and statesman he was scholar and critic. Perhaps scholar in his interests, not in abiding contribution. The most copious of his productions in this delightful but arduous field was the three large volumes onHomer and the Homeric Age, given to the world in 1858. Into what has been well called the whirlpool of Homeric controversies, the reader shall not here be dragged. Mr. Gladstone himself gave them the go-by, with an indifference and disdain such as might have been well enough in the economic field if exhibited towards a protectionist farmer, or a partisan of retaliatory duties on manufactured goods, but that were hardly to the point in dealing with profound and original critics. What he too contemptuously dismissed as Homeric“bubble-schemes,”were in truth centres of scientific illumination. At the end of the eighteenth century Wolf's famousProlegomenaappeared, in which he advanced the theory that Homer was no single poet, nor a name for two poets, nor an individual at all; theIliadandOdysseywere collections of independent lays, folk-lore and folk-songs connected by a common set of themes, and edited, redacted, or compacted about the middle of the sixth century before Christ. A learned man of our own day has said that F. A. Wolf ought to be counted one of the half dozen writers that within the last three centuries have most influenced thought. This would bring Wolf into line with Descartes, Newton, Locke, Kant, Rousseau, or whatever other five master-spirits of thought from then to now the judicious reader may select. The present writer has assuredly no competence to assign Wolf's place in the history of modern criticism, but straying aside for a season from the green pastures of Hansard, and turning over again the slim volume of a hundred and fifty pages in which Wolf discusses his theme, one may easily discern a fountain of[pg 544]broad streams of modern thought (apart from the particular thesis) that to Mr. Gladstone, by the force of all his education and his deepest prepossessions, were in the highest degree chimerical and dangerous.He once wrote to Lord Acton (1889) about the Old Testament and Mosaic legislation:—Now I think that the most important parts of the argument have in a great degree a solid standing ground apart from the destructive criticism on dates and on the text: and I am sufficiently aware of my own rawness and ignorance in the matter not to allow myself to judge definitely, or condemn. I feel also that I have a prepossession derived from the criticisms in the case of Homer. Of them I have a very bad opinion, not only in themselves, but as to the levity, precipitancy, and shallowness of mind which they display; and here I do venture to speak, because I believe myself to have done a great deal more than any of the destructives in the examination of the text, which is the true source of the materials of judgment. They are a soulless lot; but there was a time when they had possession of the public ear as much I suppose as the Old Testament destructives now have, within their own precinct. It is only the constructive part of their work on which I feel tempted to judge; and I must own that it seems to me sadly wanting in the elements of rational probability.This unpromising method is sufficiently set out when he says:“I find in the plot of theIliadenough of beauty, order, and structure, not merely to sustain the supposition of its own unity, but to bear an independent testimony, should it be still needed, to the existence of a personal and individual Homer as its author.”319From such a method no permanent contribution could come.Yet scholars allow that Mr. Gladstone in these three volumes, as well as inJuventus Mundiand hisHomeric Primer, has added not a little to our scientific knowledge of the Homeric poems,320by his extraordinary mastery of the text, the result of unwearied and prolonged industry, aided[pg 545]On Homerby a memory both tenacious and ready. Taking his own point of view, moreover, anybody who wishes to have his feeling about theIliadandOdysseyas delightful poetry refreshed and quickened, will find inspiring elements in the profusion, the eager array of Homer's own lines, the diligent exploration of aspects and bearings hitherto unthought of. The“theo-mythology”is commonly judged fantastic, and has been compared by sage critics to Warburton'sDivine Legation—the same comprehensive general reading, the same heroic industry in marshalling the particulars of proof, the same dialectical strength of arm, and all brought to prove an unsound proposition.321Yet the comprehensive reading and the particulars of proof are by no means without an interest of their own, whatever we may think of the proposition; and here, as in all his literary writing distinguished from polemics, he abounds in the ethical elements. Here perhaps more than anywhere else he impresses us by his love of beauty in all its aspects and relations, in the human form, in landscape, in the affections, in animals, including above all else that sense of beauty which made his Greeks take it as one of the names for nobility in conduct. Conington, one of the finest of scholars, then lecturing at Oxford on Latin poets and deep in his own Virgilian studies, which afterwards bore such admirable fruit, writes at length (Feb. 14, 1857) to say how grateful he is to Mr. Gladstone for the care with which he has pursued into details a view of Virgil that they hold substantially in common, and proceeds with care and point to analyse the quality of the Roman poet's art, as some years later he defended against Munro the questionable proposition of the superiority in poetic style of the graceful, melodious, and pathetic Virgil to Lucretius's mighty muse.No field has been more industriously worked for the last forty years than this of the relations of paganism to the historic religion that followed it in Europe. The knowledge and the speculations into which Mr. Gladstone was thus initiated in the sixties may now seem crude enough; but he deserves some credit in English, though not in view of[pg 546]German, speculation for an early perception of an unfamiliar region of comparative science, whence many a product most unwelcome to him and alien to his own beliefs has been since extracted. When all is said, however, Mr. Gladstone's place is not in literary or critical history, but elsewhere.His style is sometimes called Johnsonian, but surely without good ground. Johnson was not involved and he was clear, and neither of these things can always be said of Mr. Gladstone. Some critic charged him in 1840 with“prolix clearness.”The old charge, says Mr. Gladstone upon this, was“obscure compression. I do not doubt that both may be true, and the former may have been the result of a well-meant effort to escape from the latter.”He was fond of abstract words, or the nearer to abstract the better, and the more general the better. One effect of this was undoubtedly to give an indirect, almost a shifty, air that exasperated plain people. Why does he beat about the bush, they asked; why cannot he say what he means? A reader might have to think twice or thrice or twenty times before he could be sure that he interpreted correctly. But then people are so apt to think once, or half of once; to take the meaning that suits their own wish or purpose best, and then to treat that as the only meaning. Hence their perplexity and wrath when they found that other doors were open, and they thought a mistake due to their own hurry was the result of a juggler's trick. On the other hand a good writer takes all the pains he can to keep his reader out of such scrapes.His critical essays on Tennyson and Macaulay are excellent. They are acute, discriminating, generous. His estimate of Macaulay, apart from a piece of polemical church history at the end, is perhaps the best we have.“You make a very just remark,”said Acton to him,“that Macaulay was afraid of contradicting his former self, and remembered all he had written since 1825. At that time his mind was formed, and so it remained. What literary influences acted on the formation of his political opinions, what were his religious sympathies, and what is his exact place among historians, you have rather avoided discussing. There is still something[pg 547]to say on these points.”To Tennyson Mr. Gladstone believed himself to have been unjust, especially in the passages ofMauddevoted to the war-frenzy, and when he came to reprint the article he admitted that he had not sufficiently remembered that he was dealing with a dramatic and imaginative composition.322As he frankly said of himself, he was not strong in the faculties of the artist, but perhaps Tennyson himself in these passages was prompted much more by politics than by art. Of this piece of retractation the poet truly said,“Nobody but a noble-minded man would have done that.”323Mr. Gladstone would most likely have chosen to call his words a qualification rather than a recantation. In either case, it does not affect passages that give the finest expression to one of the very deepest convictions of his life,—that war, whatever else we may choose to say of it, is no antidote for Mammon-worship and can never be a cure for moral evils:—It is, indeed, true that peace has its moral perils and temptations for degenerate man, as has every other blessing, without exception, that he can receive from the hand of God. It is moreover not less true that, amidst the clash of arms, the noblest forms of character may be reared, and the highest acts of duty done; that these great and precious results may be due to war as their cause; and that one high form of sentiment in particular, the love of country, receives a powerful and general stimulus from the bloody strife. But this is as the furious cruelty of Pharaoh made place for the benign virtue of his daughter; as the butchering sentence of Herod raised without doubt many a mother's love into heroic sublimity; as plague, as famine, as fire, as flood, as every curse and every scourge that is wielded by an angry Providence for the chastisement of man, is an appointed instrument for tempering human souls in the seven-times heated furnace of affliction, up to the standard of angelic and archangelic virtue.War, indeed, has the property of exciting much generous and noble feeling on a large scale; but with this special recommendation it has, in its modern forms especially, peculiar and unequalled evils. As it has a wider sweep of desolating power than the rest,[pg 548]so it has the peculiar quality that it is more susceptible of being decked in gaudy trappings, and of fascinating the imagination of those whose proud and angry passions it inflames. But it is, on this very account, a perilous delusion to teach that war is a cure for moral evil, in any other sense than as the sister tribulations are. The eulogies of the frantic hero inMaud, however, deviate into grosser folly. It is natural that such vagaries should overlook the fixed laws of Providence. Under these laws the mass of mankind is composed of men, women, and children who can but just ward off hunger, cold, and nakedness; whose whole ideas of Mammon-worship are comprised in the search for their daily food, clothing, shelter, fuel; whom any casualty reduces to positive want; and whose already low estate is yet further lowered and ground down, when“the blood-red blossom of war flames with its heart of fire.”...Still war had, in times now gone by, ennobling elements and tendencies of the less sordid kind. But one inevitable characteristic of modern war is, that it is associated throughout, in all particulars, with a vast and most irregular formation of commercial enterprise. There is no incentive to Mammon-worship so remarkable as that which it affords. The political economy of war is now one of its most commanding aspects. Every farthing, with the smallest exceptions conceivable, of the scores or hundreds of millions which a war may cost, goes directly, and very violently, to stimulate production, though it is intended ultimately for waste or for destruction. Even apart from the fact that war suspends,ipso facto, every rule of public thrift, and tends to sap honesty itself in the use of the public treasure for which it makes such unbounded calls, it therefore is the greatest feeder of that lust of gold which we are told is the essence of commerce, though we had hoped it was only its occasional besetting sin. It is, however, more than this; for the regular commerce of peace is tameness itself compared with the gambling spirit which war, through the rapid shiftings and high prices which it brings, always introduces into trade. In its moral operation it more resembles, perhaps the finding of a new gold-field, than anything else.More remarkable than either of these two is his piece on Leopardi (1850), the Italian poet, whose philosophy and[pg 549]Leopardi Translationsframe of mind, said Mr. Gladstone,“present more than any other that we know, more even than that of Shelley, the character of unrelieved, unredeemed desolation—the very qualities in it which attract pitying sympathy, depriving it of all seductive power.”It is curious that he should have selected one whose life lay along a course like Leopardi's for commemoration, as a man who in almost every branch of mental exertion seems to have had the capacity for attaining, and generally at a single bound, the very highest excellence.“There are many things,”he adds,“in which Christians would do well to follow him: in the warmth of his attachments; in the moderation of his wants; in his noble freedom from the love of money; in his all-conquering assiduity.”324Perhaps the most remarkable sentence of all is this:“... what is not needful, and is commonly wrong, namely, is to pass a judgment on our fellow-creatures. Never let it be forgotten that there is scarcely a single moral action of a single man of which other men can have such a knowledge, in its ultimate grounds, its surrounding incidents, and the real determining causes of its merits, as to warrant their pronouncing a conclusive judgment upon it.”The translation of poetry into poetry, as Coleridge said, is difficult because the translator must give brilliancy without the warmth of original conception, from which such brilliancy would follow of its own accord. But we must not judge Mr. Gladstone's translation either of Horace's odes or of detached pieces from Greek or Italian, as we should judge the professed man of letters or poet like Coleridge himself. His pieces are the diversions of the man of affairs, with educated tastes and interest in good literature. Perhaps the best single piece is his really noble rendering of Manzoni's noble ode on the death of Napoleon; for instance:—From Alp to farthest Pyramid,From Rhine to Mansanar,How sure his lightning's flash foretoldHis thunderbolts of war!To Don from Scilla's height they roar,From North to Southern shore.[pg 550]And this was glory? After-men,Judge the dark problem. LowWe to the Mighty Maker bendThe while, Who planned to showWhat vaster mould Creative WillWith him could fill.As on the shipwrecked marinerThe weltering wave's descent—The wave, o'er which, a moment since,For distant shores he bentAnd bent in vain, his eager eye;So on that stricken headCame whelming down the mighty Past.How often did his penEssay to tell the wondrous taleFor after times and men,And o'er the lines that could not dieHis hand lay dead.How often, as the listless dayIn silence died away,He stood with lightning eye deprest,And arms across his breast,And bygone years, in rushing train,Smote on his soul amain:The breezy tents he seemed to see,And the battering cannon's course,And the flashing of the infantry,And the torrent of the horse,And, obeyed as soon as heard,Th' ecstatic word.Always let us remember that his literary life was part of the rest of his life, as literature ought to be. He was no mere reader of many books, used to relieve the strain of mental anxiety or to slake the thirst of literary or intellectual curiosity. Reading with him in the days of his full vigour was a habitual communing with the master spirits of mankind, as a vivifying and nourishing part of life. As we have seen, he would not read Dante in the session, nor unless he could have a large draught. Here as elsewhere in the ordering of his days he was methodical, systematic, full.[pg 551]VA Golden LampThough man of action, yet Mr. Gladstone too has a place by character and influences among what we may call the abstract, moral, spiritual forces that stamped the realm of Britain in his age. In a new time, marked in an incomparable degree by the progress of science and invention, by vast mechanical, industrial, and commercial development, he accepted it all, he adjusted his statesmanship to it all, nay, he revelled in it all, as tending to ameliorate the lot of the“mass of men, women, and children who can just ward off hunger, cold, and nakedness.”He did not rail at his age, he strove to help it. Following Walpole and Cobden and Peel in the policies of peace, he knew how to augment the material resources on which our people depend. When was Britain stronger, richer, more honoured among the nations—I do not say always among the diplomatic chanceries and governments—than in the years when Mr. Gladstone was at the zenith of his authority among us? When were her armed forces by sea and land more adequate for defence of every interest? When was her material resource sounder? When was her moral credit higher? Besides all this, he upheld a golden lamp.The unending revolutions of the world are for ever bringing old phases uppermost again. Events from season to season are taken to teach sinister lessons, that the Real is the only Rational, force is the test of right and wrong, the state has nothing to do with restraints of morals, the ruler is emancipated. Speculations in physical science were distorted for alien purposes, and survival of the fittest was taken to give brutality a more decent name. Even new conceptions and systems of history may be twisted into release of statesmen from the conscience of Bishop Butler's plain man. This gospel it was Mr. Gladstone's felicity to hold at bay. Without bringing back the cosmopolitanism of the eighteenth century, without sharing all the idealisms of the middle of the nineteenth, he resisted with his whole might the odious contention that moral progress in the relations of nations and states to one another is an illusion and a dream.[pg 552]This vein perhaps brings us too near to the regions of dissertation. Let us rather leave off with thoughts and memories of one who was a vivid example of public duty and of private faithfulness; of a long career that with every circumstance of splendour, amid all the mire and all the poisons of the world, lighted up in practice even for those who have none of his genius and none of his power his own precept,“Be inspired with the belief that life is a great and noble calling; not a mean and grovelling thing, that we are to shuffle through as we can, but an elevated and lofty destiny.”

Anybody can see the host of general and speculative questions raised by a career so extraordinary. How would his fame have stood if his political life had ended in 1854, or 1874, or 1881, or 1885? What light does it shed upon the working of the parliamentary system; on the weakness and strength of popular government; on the good and bad of political party; on the superiority of rule by cabinet or by an elected president; on the relations of opinion to law? Here is material for a volume of disquisition, and nobody can ever discuss such speculations without reference to power as it was exercised by Mr. Gladstone. Those thronged halls, those vast progresses, those strenuous orations—what did they amount to? Did they mean a real moulding of opinion, an actual impression, whether by argument or temper or personality or all three, on the minds of hearers? Or was it no more than the same kind of interest that takes men to stage-plays with a favourite performer? This could hardly be, for his hearers gave him long spells of power and a practical authority that was unique and supreme. What thoughts does his career suggest on the relations of Christianity to patriotism, or to empire, or to what has been called neo-paganism? How many points arise as to the dependence of ethics on dogma? These are deep and living and perhaps burning issues, not to be discussed at the end of what the reader may well have found a long journey. They offer themselves for his independent consideration.

IMr. Gladstone's own summary of the period in which he[pg 535]His Summary Of The Periodhad been so conspicuous a figure was this, when for him the drama was at an end:—Of his own career, he says, it is a career certainly chargeable with many errors of judgment, but I hope on the whole, governed at least by uprightness of intention and by a desire to learn. The personal aspect may now readily be dismissed as it concerns the past. But the public aspect of the period which closes for me with the fourteen years (so I love to reckon them) of my formal connection with Midlothian is too important to pass without a word. I consider it as beginning with the Reform Act of Lord Grey's government. That great Act was for England improvement and extension, for Scotland it was political birth, the beginning of a duty and a power, neither of which had attached to the Scottish nation in the preceding period. I rejoice to think how the solemnity of that duty has been recognised, and how that power has been used. The three-score years offer us the pictures of what the historian will recognise as a great legislative and administrative period—perhaps, on the whole, the greatest in our annals. It has been predominantly a history of emancipation—that is of enabling man to do his work of emancipation, political, economical, social, moral, intellectual. Not numerous merely, but almost numberless, have been the causes brought to issue, and in every one of them I rejoice to think that, so far as my knowledge goes, Scotland has done battle for the right.Another period has opened and is opening still—a period possibly of yet greater moral dangers, certainly a great ordeal for those classes which are now becoming largely conscious of power, and never heretofore subject to its deteriorating influences. These have been confined in their actions to the classes above them, because they were its sole possessors. Now is the time for the true friend of his country to remind the masses that their present political elevation is owing to no principles less broad and noble than these—the love of liberty, of liberty for all without distinction of class, creed or country, and the resolute preference of the interests of the whole to any interest, be it what it may, of a narrower scope.315A year later, in bidding farewell to his constituents“with[pg 536]sentiments of gratitude and attachment that can never be effaced,”he proceeds:—Though in regard to public affairs many things are disputable, there are some which belong to history and which have passed out of the region of contention. It is, for example as I conceive, beyond question that the century now expiring has exhibited since the close of its first quarter a period of unexampled activity both in legislative and administrative changes; that these changes, taken in the mass, have been in the direction of true and most beneficial progress; that both the conditions and the franchises of the people have made in relation to the former state of things, an extraordinary advance; that of these reforms an overwhelming proportion have been effected by direct action of the liberal party, or of statesmen such as Peel and Canning, ready to meet odium or to forfeit power for the public good; and that in every one of the fifteen parliaments the people of Scotland have decisively expressed their convictions in favour of this wise, temperate, and in every way remarkable policy.316To charge him with habitually rousing popular forces into dangerous excitement, is to ignore or misread his action in some of the most critical of his movements.“Here is a man,”said Huxley,“with the greatest intellect in Europe, and yet he debases it by simply following majorities and the crowd.”He was called a mere mirror of the passing humours and intellectual confusions of the popular mind. He had nothing, said his detractors, but a sort of clever pilot's eye for winds and currents, and the rising of the tide to the exact height that would float him and his cargo over the bar. All this is the exact opposite of the truth. What he thought was that the statesman's gift consisted in insight into the facts of a particular era, disclosing the existence of material for forming public opinion and directing public opinion to a given purpose. In every one of his achievements of high mark—even in his last marked failure of achievement—he expressly formed, or endeavoured to form and create, the public opinion upon which he knew that in the last resort he must depend.[pg 537]Leader, Not FollowerWe have seen the triumph of 1853.317Did he, in renewing the most hated of taxes, run about anxiously feeling the pulse of public opinion? On the contrary, he grappled with the facts with infinite labour—and half his genius was labour—he built up a great plan; he carried it to the cabinet; they warned him that the House of Commons would be against him; the officials of the treasury told him the Bank would be against him; that a strong press of commercial interests would be against him. Like the bold and sinewy athlete that he always was, he stood to his plan; he carried the cabinet; he persuaded the House of Commons; he vanquished the Bank and the hostile interests; and in the words of Sir Stafford Northcote, he changed and turned for many years to come, a current of public opinion that seemed far too powerful for any minister to resist. In the tempestuous discussions during the seventies on the policy of this country in respect of the Christian races of the Balkan Peninsula, he with his own voice created, moulded, inspired, and kindled with resistless flame the whole of the public opinion that eventually guided the policy of the nation with such admirable effect both for its own fame, and for the good of the world. Take again the Land Act of 1881, in some ways the most deep-reaching of all his legislative achievements. Here he had no flowing tide, every current was against him. He carried his scheme against the ignorance of the country, against the prejudice of the country, and against the standing prejudices of both branches of the legislature, who were steeped from the crown of the head to the sole of the foot in the strictest doctrines of contract.Then his passion for economy, his ceaseless war against public profusion, his insistence upon rigorous keeping of the national accounts—in this great department of affairs he led and did not follow. In no sphere of his activities was he more strenuous, and in no sphere, as he must well have known, was he less likely to win popularity. For democracy is spendthrift; if, to be sure, we may not say that most forms of government are apt to be the same.In a survey of Mr. Gladstone's performances, some would[pg 538]place this of which I have last spoken, as foremost among his services to the country. Others would call him greatest in the associated service of a skilful handling and adjustment of the burden of taxation; or the strengthening of the foundations of national prosperity and well-being by his reformation of the tariff. Yet others again choose to remember him for his share in guiding the successive extensions of popular power, and simplifying and purifying electoral machinery. Irishmen at least, and others so far as they are able to comprehend the history and vile wrongs and sharp needs of Ireland, will have no doubt what rank in legislation they will assign to the establishment of religious equality and agrarian justice in that portion of the realm. Not a few will count first the vigour with which he repaired what had been an erroneous judgment of his own and of vast hosts of his countrymen, by his courage in carrying through the submission of the Alabama claims to arbitration. Still more, looking from west to east, in this comparison among his achievements, will judge alike in its result and in the effort that produced it, nothing equal to the valour and insight with which he burst the chains of a mischievous and degrading policy as to the Ottoman empire. When we look at this exploit, how in face of an opponent of genius and authority and a tenacity not inferior to his own, in face of strongly rooted tradition on behalf of the Turk, and an easily roused antipathy against the Russian, by his own energy and strength of arm he wrested the rudder from the hand of the helmsman and put about the course of the ship, and held England back from the enormity of trying to keep several millions of men and women under the yoke of barbaric oppression and misrule,—we may say that this great feat alone was fame enough for one statesman. Let us make what choice we will of this or that particular achievement, how splendid a list it is of benefits conferred and public work effectually performed. Was he a good parliamentary tactician, they ask? Was his eye sure, his hand firm, his measurement of forces, distances, and possibilities of change in wind and tide accurate? Did he usually hit the proper moment for a magisterial intervention? Experts did not[pg 539]Achievements Comparedalways agree on his quality as tactician. At least he was pilot enough to bring many valuable cargoes safely home.He was one of the three statesmen in the House of Commons of his own generation who had the gift of large and spacious conception of the place and power of England in the world, and of the policies by which she could maintain it. Cobden and Disraeli were the other two. Wide as the poles asunder in genius, in character, and in the mark they made upon the nation, yet each of these three was capable of wide surveys from high eminence. But Mr. Gladstone's performances in the sphere of active government were beyond comparison.Again he was often harshly judged by that tenacious class who insist that if a general principle be sound, there can never be a reason why it should not be applied forthwith, and that a rule subject to exceptions is not worth calling a rule; and the worst of it is that these people are mostly the salt of the earth. In their impatient moments they dismissed him as an opportunist, but whenever there was a chance of getting anything done, they mostly found that he was the only man with courage and resolution enough to attempt to do it. In thinking about him we have constantly to remember, as Sir George Lewis said, that government is a very rough affair at best, a huge rough machine, not the delicate springs, wheels, and balances of a chronometer, and those concerned in working it have to be satisfied with what is far below the best.“Men have no business to talk of disenchantment,”Mr. Gladstone said;“ideals are never realised.”That is no reason, he meant, why men should not persist and toil and hope, and this is plainly the true temper for the politician. Yet he did not feed upon illusions.“The history of nations,”he wrote in 1876,“is a melancholy chapter; that is, the history of governments is one of the most immoral parts of human history.”

Mr. Gladstone's own summary of the period in which he[pg 535]

His Summary Of The Period

His Summary Of The Period

had been so conspicuous a figure was this, when for him the drama was at an end:—

Of his own career, he says, it is a career certainly chargeable with many errors of judgment, but I hope on the whole, governed at least by uprightness of intention and by a desire to learn. The personal aspect may now readily be dismissed as it concerns the past. But the public aspect of the period which closes for me with the fourteen years (so I love to reckon them) of my formal connection with Midlothian is too important to pass without a word. I consider it as beginning with the Reform Act of Lord Grey's government. That great Act was for England improvement and extension, for Scotland it was political birth, the beginning of a duty and a power, neither of which had attached to the Scottish nation in the preceding period. I rejoice to think how the solemnity of that duty has been recognised, and how that power has been used. The three-score years offer us the pictures of what the historian will recognise as a great legislative and administrative period—perhaps, on the whole, the greatest in our annals. It has been predominantly a history of emancipation—that is of enabling man to do his work of emancipation, political, economical, social, moral, intellectual. Not numerous merely, but almost numberless, have been the causes brought to issue, and in every one of them I rejoice to think that, so far as my knowledge goes, Scotland has done battle for the right.Another period has opened and is opening still—a period possibly of yet greater moral dangers, certainly a great ordeal for those classes which are now becoming largely conscious of power, and never heretofore subject to its deteriorating influences. These have been confined in their actions to the classes above them, because they were its sole possessors. Now is the time for the true friend of his country to remind the masses that their present political elevation is owing to no principles less broad and noble than these—the love of liberty, of liberty for all without distinction of class, creed or country, and the resolute preference of the interests of the whole to any interest, be it what it may, of a narrower scope.315

Of his own career, he says, it is a career certainly chargeable with many errors of judgment, but I hope on the whole, governed at least by uprightness of intention and by a desire to learn. The personal aspect may now readily be dismissed as it concerns the past. But the public aspect of the period which closes for me with the fourteen years (so I love to reckon them) of my formal connection with Midlothian is too important to pass without a word. I consider it as beginning with the Reform Act of Lord Grey's government. That great Act was for England improvement and extension, for Scotland it was political birth, the beginning of a duty and a power, neither of which had attached to the Scottish nation in the preceding period. I rejoice to think how the solemnity of that duty has been recognised, and how that power has been used. The three-score years offer us the pictures of what the historian will recognise as a great legislative and administrative period—perhaps, on the whole, the greatest in our annals. It has been predominantly a history of emancipation—that is of enabling man to do his work of emancipation, political, economical, social, moral, intellectual. Not numerous merely, but almost numberless, have been the causes brought to issue, and in every one of them I rejoice to think that, so far as my knowledge goes, Scotland has done battle for the right.

Another period has opened and is opening still—a period possibly of yet greater moral dangers, certainly a great ordeal for those classes which are now becoming largely conscious of power, and never heretofore subject to its deteriorating influences. These have been confined in their actions to the classes above them, because they were its sole possessors. Now is the time for the true friend of his country to remind the masses that their present political elevation is owing to no principles less broad and noble than these—the love of liberty, of liberty for all without distinction of class, creed or country, and the resolute preference of the interests of the whole to any interest, be it what it may, of a narrower scope.315

A year later, in bidding farewell to his constituents“with[pg 536]sentiments of gratitude and attachment that can never be effaced,”he proceeds:—

Though in regard to public affairs many things are disputable, there are some which belong to history and which have passed out of the region of contention. It is, for example as I conceive, beyond question that the century now expiring has exhibited since the close of its first quarter a period of unexampled activity both in legislative and administrative changes; that these changes, taken in the mass, have been in the direction of true and most beneficial progress; that both the conditions and the franchises of the people have made in relation to the former state of things, an extraordinary advance; that of these reforms an overwhelming proportion have been effected by direct action of the liberal party, or of statesmen such as Peel and Canning, ready to meet odium or to forfeit power for the public good; and that in every one of the fifteen parliaments the people of Scotland have decisively expressed their convictions in favour of this wise, temperate, and in every way remarkable policy.316

To charge him with habitually rousing popular forces into dangerous excitement, is to ignore or misread his action in some of the most critical of his movements.“Here is a man,”said Huxley,“with the greatest intellect in Europe, and yet he debases it by simply following majorities and the crowd.”He was called a mere mirror of the passing humours and intellectual confusions of the popular mind. He had nothing, said his detractors, but a sort of clever pilot's eye for winds and currents, and the rising of the tide to the exact height that would float him and his cargo over the bar. All this is the exact opposite of the truth. What he thought was that the statesman's gift consisted in insight into the facts of a particular era, disclosing the existence of material for forming public opinion and directing public opinion to a given purpose. In every one of his achievements of high mark—even in his last marked failure of achievement—he expressly formed, or endeavoured to form and create, the public opinion upon which he knew that in the last resort he must depend.

Leader, Not Follower

Leader, Not Follower

We have seen the triumph of 1853.317Did he, in renewing the most hated of taxes, run about anxiously feeling the pulse of public opinion? On the contrary, he grappled with the facts with infinite labour—and half his genius was labour—he built up a great plan; he carried it to the cabinet; they warned him that the House of Commons would be against him; the officials of the treasury told him the Bank would be against him; that a strong press of commercial interests would be against him. Like the bold and sinewy athlete that he always was, he stood to his plan; he carried the cabinet; he persuaded the House of Commons; he vanquished the Bank and the hostile interests; and in the words of Sir Stafford Northcote, he changed and turned for many years to come, a current of public opinion that seemed far too powerful for any minister to resist. In the tempestuous discussions during the seventies on the policy of this country in respect of the Christian races of the Balkan Peninsula, he with his own voice created, moulded, inspired, and kindled with resistless flame the whole of the public opinion that eventually guided the policy of the nation with such admirable effect both for its own fame, and for the good of the world. Take again the Land Act of 1881, in some ways the most deep-reaching of all his legislative achievements. Here he had no flowing tide, every current was against him. He carried his scheme against the ignorance of the country, against the prejudice of the country, and against the standing prejudices of both branches of the legislature, who were steeped from the crown of the head to the sole of the foot in the strictest doctrines of contract.

Then his passion for economy, his ceaseless war against public profusion, his insistence upon rigorous keeping of the national accounts—in this great department of affairs he led and did not follow. In no sphere of his activities was he more strenuous, and in no sphere, as he must well have known, was he less likely to win popularity. For democracy is spendthrift; if, to be sure, we may not say that most forms of government are apt to be the same.

In a survey of Mr. Gladstone's performances, some would[pg 538]place this of which I have last spoken, as foremost among his services to the country. Others would call him greatest in the associated service of a skilful handling and adjustment of the burden of taxation; or the strengthening of the foundations of national prosperity and well-being by his reformation of the tariff. Yet others again choose to remember him for his share in guiding the successive extensions of popular power, and simplifying and purifying electoral machinery. Irishmen at least, and others so far as they are able to comprehend the history and vile wrongs and sharp needs of Ireland, will have no doubt what rank in legislation they will assign to the establishment of religious equality and agrarian justice in that portion of the realm. Not a few will count first the vigour with which he repaired what had been an erroneous judgment of his own and of vast hosts of his countrymen, by his courage in carrying through the submission of the Alabama claims to arbitration. Still more, looking from west to east, in this comparison among his achievements, will judge alike in its result and in the effort that produced it, nothing equal to the valour and insight with which he burst the chains of a mischievous and degrading policy as to the Ottoman empire. When we look at this exploit, how in face of an opponent of genius and authority and a tenacity not inferior to his own, in face of strongly rooted tradition on behalf of the Turk, and an easily roused antipathy against the Russian, by his own energy and strength of arm he wrested the rudder from the hand of the helmsman and put about the course of the ship, and held England back from the enormity of trying to keep several millions of men and women under the yoke of barbaric oppression and misrule,—we may say that this great feat alone was fame enough for one statesman. Let us make what choice we will of this or that particular achievement, how splendid a list it is of benefits conferred and public work effectually performed. Was he a good parliamentary tactician, they ask? Was his eye sure, his hand firm, his measurement of forces, distances, and possibilities of change in wind and tide accurate? Did he usually hit the proper moment for a magisterial intervention? Experts did not[pg 539]

Achievements Compared

Achievements Compared

always agree on his quality as tactician. At least he was pilot enough to bring many valuable cargoes safely home.

He was one of the three statesmen in the House of Commons of his own generation who had the gift of large and spacious conception of the place and power of England in the world, and of the policies by which she could maintain it. Cobden and Disraeli were the other two. Wide as the poles asunder in genius, in character, and in the mark they made upon the nation, yet each of these three was capable of wide surveys from high eminence. But Mr. Gladstone's performances in the sphere of active government were beyond comparison.

Again he was often harshly judged by that tenacious class who insist that if a general principle be sound, there can never be a reason why it should not be applied forthwith, and that a rule subject to exceptions is not worth calling a rule; and the worst of it is that these people are mostly the salt of the earth. In their impatient moments they dismissed him as an opportunist, but whenever there was a chance of getting anything done, they mostly found that he was the only man with courage and resolution enough to attempt to do it. In thinking about him we have constantly to remember, as Sir George Lewis said, that government is a very rough affair at best, a huge rough machine, not the delicate springs, wheels, and balances of a chronometer, and those concerned in working it have to be satisfied with what is far below the best.“Men have no business to talk of disenchantment,”Mr. Gladstone said;“ideals are never realised.”That is no reason, he meant, why men should not persist and toil and hope, and this is plainly the true temper for the politician. Yet he did not feed upon illusions.“The history of nations,”he wrote in 1876,“is a melancholy chapter; that is, the history of governments is one of the most immoral parts of human history.”

IIIt might well be said that Mr. Gladstone took too little, rather than too much trouble to be popular. His religious conservatism puzzled and irritated those who admired and[pg 540]shared his political liberalism, just as churchmen watched with uneasiness and suspicion his radical alliances. Neither those who were churchmen first, nor those whose interests were keenest in politics, could comprehend the union of what seemed incompatibles, and because they could not comprehend they sometimes in their shallower humours doubted his sincerity. Mr. Gladstone was never, after say 1850, really afraid of disestablishment; on the contrary he was much more afraid of the perils of establishment for the integrity of the faith. Yet political disestablishers often doubted him, because they had not logic enough to see that a man may be a fervent believer in anglican institutions and what he thinks catholic tradition, and yet be as ready as Cavour for the principle of free church in free state.It is curious that some of the things that made men suspicious, were in fact the liveliest tokens of his sincerity and simplicity. With all his power of political imagination, yet his mind was an intensely literal mind. He did not look at an act or a decision from the point of view at which it might be regarded by other people. Ewelme, the mission to the Ionian Islands, the royal warrant, the affair of the judicial committee, vaticanism, and all the other things that gave offence, and stirred misgivings even in friends, showed that the very last question he ever asked himself was how his action would look; what construction might be put upon it, or even would pretty certainly be put upon it; whom it would encourage, whom it would estrange, whom it would perplex. Is the given end right, he seemed to ask; what are the surest means; are the means as right as the end, as right as they are sure? But right—on strict and literal construction. What he sometimes forgot was that in political action, construction is part of the act, nay, may even be its most important part.318The more you make of his errors, the more is the need to explain his vast renown, the long reign of his authority, the substance and reality of his powers. We call men great for many reasons apart from service wrought or eminence of intellect or even from force and depth of character. To[pg 541]Attitude To Church Partieshave taken a leading part in transactions of decisive moment; to have proved himself able to meet demands on which high issues hung; to combine intellectual qualities, though moderate yet adequate and sufficient, with the moral qualities needed for the given circumstance—with daring, circumspection, energy, intrepid initiative; to have fallen in with one of those occasions in the world that impart their own greatness even to a mediocre actor, and surround his name with a halo not radiating from within but shed upon him from without—in all these and many other ways men come to be counted great. Mr. Gladstone belongs to the rarer class who acquired authority and fame by transcendent qualities of genius within, in half independence of any occasions beyond those they create for themselves.

It might well be said that Mr. Gladstone took too little, rather than too much trouble to be popular. His religious conservatism puzzled and irritated those who admired and[pg 540]shared his political liberalism, just as churchmen watched with uneasiness and suspicion his radical alliances. Neither those who were churchmen first, nor those whose interests were keenest in politics, could comprehend the union of what seemed incompatibles, and because they could not comprehend they sometimes in their shallower humours doubted his sincerity. Mr. Gladstone was never, after say 1850, really afraid of disestablishment; on the contrary he was much more afraid of the perils of establishment for the integrity of the faith. Yet political disestablishers often doubted him, because they had not logic enough to see that a man may be a fervent believer in anglican institutions and what he thinks catholic tradition, and yet be as ready as Cavour for the principle of free church in free state.

It is curious that some of the things that made men suspicious, were in fact the liveliest tokens of his sincerity and simplicity. With all his power of political imagination, yet his mind was an intensely literal mind. He did not look at an act or a decision from the point of view at which it might be regarded by other people. Ewelme, the mission to the Ionian Islands, the royal warrant, the affair of the judicial committee, vaticanism, and all the other things that gave offence, and stirred misgivings even in friends, showed that the very last question he ever asked himself was how his action would look; what construction might be put upon it, or even would pretty certainly be put upon it; whom it would encourage, whom it would estrange, whom it would perplex. Is the given end right, he seemed to ask; what are the surest means; are the means as right as the end, as right as they are sure? But right—on strict and literal construction. What he sometimes forgot was that in political action, construction is part of the act, nay, may even be its most important part.318

The more you make of his errors, the more is the need to explain his vast renown, the long reign of his authority, the substance and reality of his powers. We call men great for many reasons apart from service wrought or eminence of intellect or even from force and depth of character. To[pg 541]

Attitude To Church Parties

Attitude To Church Parties

have taken a leading part in transactions of decisive moment; to have proved himself able to meet demands on which high issues hung; to combine intellectual qualities, though moderate yet adequate and sufficient, with the moral qualities needed for the given circumstance—with daring, circumspection, energy, intrepid initiative; to have fallen in with one of those occasions in the world that impart their own greatness even to a mediocre actor, and surround his name with a halo not radiating from within but shed upon him from without—in all these and many other ways men come to be counted great. Mr. Gladstone belongs to the rarer class who acquired authority and fame by transcendent qualities of genius within, in half independence of any occasions beyond those they create for themselves.

IIIOf his attitude in respect of church parties, it is not for me to speak. He has himself described at least one aspect of it in a letter to an inquirer, which would be a very noble piece by whomsoever written, and in the name of whatsoever creed or no-creed, whether Christian or Rationalist or Nathan the Wise Jew's creed. It was addressed to a clergyman who seems to have asked of what section Mr. Gladstone considered himself an adherent:—Feb. 4, 1865.—It is impossible to misinterpret either the intention or the terms of your letter; and I thank you for it sincerely. But I cannot answer the question which you put to me, and I think I can even satisfy you that with my convictions I should do wrong in replying to it in any manner. Whatever reason I may have for being painfully and daily conscious of every kind of unworthiness, yet I am sufficiently aware of the dignity of religious belief to have been throughout a political life, now in its thirty-third year, steadily resolved never by my own voluntary act to make it the subject of any compact or assurance with a view to a political object. You think (and pray do not suppose I make this matter of complaint) that I have been associated with one party in the church of England, and that I may now lean rather towards another.... There is no one about whom information[pg 542]can be more easily had than myself. I have had and have friends of many colours, churchmen high and low, presbyterians, Greeks, Roman catholics, dissenters, who can speak abundantly, though perhaps not very well of me. And further, as member for the university, I have honestly endeavoured at all times to put my constituents in possession of all I could convey to them that could be considered as in the nature of a fact, by answering as explicitly as I was able all questions relating to the matters, and they are numerous enough, on which I have had to act or speak. Perhaps I shall surprise you by what I have yet further to say. I have never by any conscious act yielded my allegiance to any person or party in matters of religion. You and others may have called me (without the least offence) a churchman of some particular kind, and I have more than once seen announced in print my own secession from the church of England. These things I have not commonly contradicted, for the atmosphere of religious controversy and contradiction is as odious as the atmosphere of mental freedom is precious, to me; and I have feared to lose the one and be drawn into the other, by heat and bitterness creeping into the mind. If another chooses to call himself, or to call me, a member of this or that party, I am not to complain. But I respectfully claim the right not to call myself so, and on this claim, I have I believe acted throughout my life, without a single exception; and I feel that were I to waive it, I should at once put in hazard that allegiance to Truth, which is at once the supreme duty and the supreme joy of life. I have only to add the expression of my hope that in what I have said there is nothing to hurt or to offend you; and, if there be, very heartily to wish it unsaid.Yet there was never the shadow of mistake about his own fervent faith. As he said to another correspondent:—Feb. 5, 1876.—I am in principle a strong denominationalist.“One fold and one shepherd”was the note of early Christendom. The shepherd is still one and knows his sheep; but the folds are many; and, without condemning any others, I am of opinion that it is best for us all that we should all of us be jealous for the honour of whatever we have and hold as positive truth, appertaining to the Divine Word and the foundation and history of[pg 543]the Christian community. I admit that this question becomes one of circumstance and degree, but I take it as I find it defined for myself by and in my own position.

Of his attitude in respect of church parties, it is not for me to speak. He has himself described at least one aspect of it in a letter to an inquirer, which would be a very noble piece by whomsoever written, and in the name of whatsoever creed or no-creed, whether Christian or Rationalist or Nathan the Wise Jew's creed. It was addressed to a clergyman who seems to have asked of what section Mr. Gladstone considered himself an adherent:—

Feb. 4, 1865.—It is impossible to misinterpret either the intention or the terms of your letter; and I thank you for it sincerely. But I cannot answer the question which you put to me, and I think I can even satisfy you that with my convictions I should do wrong in replying to it in any manner. Whatever reason I may have for being painfully and daily conscious of every kind of unworthiness, yet I am sufficiently aware of the dignity of religious belief to have been throughout a political life, now in its thirty-third year, steadily resolved never by my own voluntary act to make it the subject of any compact or assurance with a view to a political object. You think (and pray do not suppose I make this matter of complaint) that I have been associated with one party in the church of England, and that I may now lean rather towards another.... There is no one about whom information[pg 542]can be more easily had than myself. I have had and have friends of many colours, churchmen high and low, presbyterians, Greeks, Roman catholics, dissenters, who can speak abundantly, though perhaps not very well of me. And further, as member for the university, I have honestly endeavoured at all times to put my constituents in possession of all I could convey to them that could be considered as in the nature of a fact, by answering as explicitly as I was able all questions relating to the matters, and they are numerous enough, on which I have had to act or speak. Perhaps I shall surprise you by what I have yet further to say. I have never by any conscious act yielded my allegiance to any person or party in matters of religion. You and others may have called me (without the least offence) a churchman of some particular kind, and I have more than once seen announced in print my own secession from the church of England. These things I have not commonly contradicted, for the atmosphere of religious controversy and contradiction is as odious as the atmosphere of mental freedom is precious, to me; and I have feared to lose the one and be drawn into the other, by heat and bitterness creeping into the mind. If another chooses to call himself, or to call me, a member of this or that party, I am not to complain. But I respectfully claim the right not to call myself so, and on this claim, I have I believe acted throughout my life, without a single exception; and I feel that were I to waive it, I should at once put in hazard that allegiance to Truth, which is at once the supreme duty and the supreme joy of life. I have only to add the expression of my hope that in what I have said there is nothing to hurt or to offend you; and, if there be, very heartily to wish it unsaid.

Yet there was never the shadow of mistake about his own fervent faith. As he said to another correspondent:—

Feb. 5, 1876.—I am in principle a strong denominationalist.“One fold and one shepherd”was the note of early Christendom. The shepherd is still one and knows his sheep; but the folds are many; and, without condemning any others, I am of opinion that it is best for us all that we should all of us be jealous for the honour of whatever we have and hold as positive truth, appertaining to the Divine Word and the foundation and history of[pg 543]the Christian community. I admit that this question becomes one of circumstance and degree, but I take it as I find it defined for myself by and in my own position.

IVOf Mr. Gladstone as orator and improvisatore, enough has been said and seen. Besides being orator and statesman he was scholar and critic. Perhaps scholar in his interests, not in abiding contribution. The most copious of his productions in this delightful but arduous field was the three large volumes onHomer and the Homeric Age, given to the world in 1858. Into what has been well called the whirlpool of Homeric controversies, the reader shall not here be dragged. Mr. Gladstone himself gave them the go-by, with an indifference and disdain such as might have been well enough in the economic field if exhibited towards a protectionist farmer, or a partisan of retaliatory duties on manufactured goods, but that were hardly to the point in dealing with profound and original critics. What he too contemptuously dismissed as Homeric“bubble-schemes,”were in truth centres of scientific illumination. At the end of the eighteenth century Wolf's famousProlegomenaappeared, in which he advanced the theory that Homer was no single poet, nor a name for two poets, nor an individual at all; theIliadandOdysseywere collections of independent lays, folk-lore and folk-songs connected by a common set of themes, and edited, redacted, or compacted about the middle of the sixth century before Christ. A learned man of our own day has said that F. A. Wolf ought to be counted one of the half dozen writers that within the last three centuries have most influenced thought. This would bring Wolf into line with Descartes, Newton, Locke, Kant, Rousseau, or whatever other five master-spirits of thought from then to now the judicious reader may select. The present writer has assuredly no competence to assign Wolf's place in the history of modern criticism, but straying aside for a season from the green pastures of Hansard, and turning over again the slim volume of a hundred and fifty pages in which Wolf discusses his theme, one may easily discern a fountain of[pg 544]broad streams of modern thought (apart from the particular thesis) that to Mr. Gladstone, by the force of all his education and his deepest prepossessions, were in the highest degree chimerical and dangerous.He once wrote to Lord Acton (1889) about the Old Testament and Mosaic legislation:—Now I think that the most important parts of the argument have in a great degree a solid standing ground apart from the destructive criticism on dates and on the text: and I am sufficiently aware of my own rawness and ignorance in the matter not to allow myself to judge definitely, or condemn. I feel also that I have a prepossession derived from the criticisms in the case of Homer. Of them I have a very bad opinion, not only in themselves, but as to the levity, precipitancy, and shallowness of mind which they display; and here I do venture to speak, because I believe myself to have done a great deal more than any of the destructives in the examination of the text, which is the true source of the materials of judgment. They are a soulless lot; but there was a time when they had possession of the public ear as much I suppose as the Old Testament destructives now have, within their own precinct. It is only the constructive part of their work on which I feel tempted to judge; and I must own that it seems to me sadly wanting in the elements of rational probability.This unpromising method is sufficiently set out when he says:“I find in the plot of theIliadenough of beauty, order, and structure, not merely to sustain the supposition of its own unity, but to bear an independent testimony, should it be still needed, to the existence of a personal and individual Homer as its author.”319From such a method no permanent contribution could come.Yet scholars allow that Mr. Gladstone in these three volumes, as well as inJuventus Mundiand hisHomeric Primer, has added not a little to our scientific knowledge of the Homeric poems,320by his extraordinary mastery of the text, the result of unwearied and prolonged industry, aided[pg 545]On Homerby a memory both tenacious and ready. Taking his own point of view, moreover, anybody who wishes to have his feeling about theIliadandOdysseyas delightful poetry refreshed and quickened, will find inspiring elements in the profusion, the eager array of Homer's own lines, the diligent exploration of aspects and bearings hitherto unthought of. The“theo-mythology”is commonly judged fantastic, and has been compared by sage critics to Warburton'sDivine Legation—the same comprehensive general reading, the same heroic industry in marshalling the particulars of proof, the same dialectical strength of arm, and all brought to prove an unsound proposition.321Yet the comprehensive reading and the particulars of proof are by no means without an interest of their own, whatever we may think of the proposition; and here, as in all his literary writing distinguished from polemics, he abounds in the ethical elements. Here perhaps more than anywhere else he impresses us by his love of beauty in all its aspects and relations, in the human form, in landscape, in the affections, in animals, including above all else that sense of beauty which made his Greeks take it as one of the names for nobility in conduct. Conington, one of the finest of scholars, then lecturing at Oxford on Latin poets and deep in his own Virgilian studies, which afterwards bore such admirable fruit, writes at length (Feb. 14, 1857) to say how grateful he is to Mr. Gladstone for the care with which he has pursued into details a view of Virgil that they hold substantially in common, and proceeds with care and point to analyse the quality of the Roman poet's art, as some years later he defended against Munro the questionable proposition of the superiority in poetic style of the graceful, melodious, and pathetic Virgil to Lucretius's mighty muse.No field has been more industriously worked for the last forty years than this of the relations of paganism to the historic religion that followed it in Europe. The knowledge and the speculations into which Mr. Gladstone was thus initiated in the sixties may now seem crude enough; but he deserves some credit in English, though not in view of[pg 546]German, speculation for an early perception of an unfamiliar region of comparative science, whence many a product most unwelcome to him and alien to his own beliefs has been since extracted. When all is said, however, Mr. Gladstone's place is not in literary or critical history, but elsewhere.His style is sometimes called Johnsonian, but surely without good ground. Johnson was not involved and he was clear, and neither of these things can always be said of Mr. Gladstone. Some critic charged him in 1840 with“prolix clearness.”The old charge, says Mr. Gladstone upon this, was“obscure compression. I do not doubt that both may be true, and the former may have been the result of a well-meant effort to escape from the latter.”He was fond of abstract words, or the nearer to abstract the better, and the more general the better. One effect of this was undoubtedly to give an indirect, almost a shifty, air that exasperated plain people. Why does he beat about the bush, they asked; why cannot he say what he means? A reader might have to think twice or thrice or twenty times before he could be sure that he interpreted correctly. But then people are so apt to think once, or half of once; to take the meaning that suits their own wish or purpose best, and then to treat that as the only meaning. Hence their perplexity and wrath when they found that other doors were open, and they thought a mistake due to their own hurry was the result of a juggler's trick. On the other hand a good writer takes all the pains he can to keep his reader out of such scrapes.His critical essays on Tennyson and Macaulay are excellent. They are acute, discriminating, generous. His estimate of Macaulay, apart from a piece of polemical church history at the end, is perhaps the best we have.“You make a very just remark,”said Acton to him,“that Macaulay was afraid of contradicting his former self, and remembered all he had written since 1825. At that time his mind was formed, and so it remained. What literary influences acted on the formation of his political opinions, what were his religious sympathies, and what is his exact place among historians, you have rather avoided discussing. There is still something[pg 547]to say on these points.”To Tennyson Mr. Gladstone believed himself to have been unjust, especially in the passages ofMauddevoted to the war-frenzy, and when he came to reprint the article he admitted that he had not sufficiently remembered that he was dealing with a dramatic and imaginative composition.322As he frankly said of himself, he was not strong in the faculties of the artist, but perhaps Tennyson himself in these passages was prompted much more by politics than by art. Of this piece of retractation the poet truly said,“Nobody but a noble-minded man would have done that.”323Mr. Gladstone would most likely have chosen to call his words a qualification rather than a recantation. In either case, it does not affect passages that give the finest expression to one of the very deepest convictions of his life,—that war, whatever else we may choose to say of it, is no antidote for Mammon-worship and can never be a cure for moral evils:—It is, indeed, true that peace has its moral perils and temptations for degenerate man, as has every other blessing, without exception, that he can receive from the hand of God. It is moreover not less true that, amidst the clash of arms, the noblest forms of character may be reared, and the highest acts of duty done; that these great and precious results may be due to war as their cause; and that one high form of sentiment in particular, the love of country, receives a powerful and general stimulus from the bloody strife. But this is as the furious cruelty of Pharaoh made place for the benign virtue of his daughter; as the butchering sentence of Herod raised without doubt many a mother's love into heroic sublimity; as plague, as famine, as fire, as flood, as every curse and every scourge that is wielded by an angry Providence for the chastisement of man, is an appointed instrument for tempering human souls in the seven-times heated furnace of affliction, up to the standard of angelic and archangelic virtue.War, indeed, has the property of exciting much generous and noble feeling on a large scale; but with this special recommendation it has, in its modern forms especially, peculiar and unequalled evils. As it has a wider sweep of desolating power than the rest,[pg 548]so it has the peculiar quality that it is more susceptible of being decked in gaudy trappings, and of fascinating the imagination of those whose proud and angry passions it inflames. But it is, on this very account, a perilous delusion to teach that war is a cure for moral evil, in any other sense than as the sister tribulations are. The eulogies of the frantic hero inMaud, however, deviate into grosser folly. It is natural that such vagaries should overlook the fixed laws of Providence. Under these laws the mass of mankind is composed of men, women, and children who can but just ward off hunger, cold, and nakedness; whose whole ideas of Mammon-worship are comprised in the search for their daily food, clothing, shelter, fuel; whom any casualty reduces to positive want; and whose already low estate is yet further lowered and ground down, when“the blood-red blossom of war flames with its heart of fire.”...Still war had, in times now gone by, ennobling elements and tendencies of the less sordid kind. But one inevitable characteristic of modern war is, that it is associated throughout, in all particulars, with a vast and most irregular formation of commercial enterprise. There is no incentive to Mammon-worship so remarkable as that which it affords. The political economy of war is now one of its most commanding aspects. Every farthing, with the smallest exceptions conceivable, of the scores or hundreds of millions which a war may cost, goes directly, and very violently, to stimulate production, though it is intended ultimately for waste or for destruction. Even apart from the fact that war suspends,ipso facto, every rule of public thrift, and tends to sap honesty itself in the use of the public treasure for which it makes such unbounded calls, it therefore is the greatest feeder of that lust of gold which we are told is the essence of commerce, though we had hoped it was only its occasional besetting sin. It is, however, more than this; for the regular commerce of peace is tameness itself compared with the gambling spirit which war, through the rapid shiftings and high prices which it brings, always introduces into trade. In its moral operation it more resembles, perhaps the finding of a new gold-field, than anything else.More remarkable than either of these two is his piece on Leopardi (1850), the Italian poet, whose philosophy and[pg 549]Leopardi Translationsframe of mind, said Mr. Gladstone,“present more than any other that we know, more even than that of Shelley, the character of unrelieved, unredeemed desolation—the very qualities in it which attract pitying sympathy, depriving it of all seductive power.”It is curious that he should have selected one whose life lay along a course like Leopardi's for commemoration, as a man who in almost every branch of mental exertion seems to have had the capacity for attaining, and generally at a single bound, the very highest excellence.“There are many things,”he adds,“in which Christians would do well to follow him: in the warmth of his attachments; in the moderation of his wants; in his noble freedom from the love of money; in his all-conquering assiduity.”324Perhaps the most remarkable sentence of all is this:“... what is not needful, and is commonly wrong, namely, is to pass a judgment on our fellow-creatures. Never let it be forgotten that there is scarcely a single moral action of a single man of which other men can have such a knowledge, in its ultimate grounds, its surrounding incidents, and the real determining causes of its merits, as to warrant their pronouncing a conclusive judgment upon it.”The translation of poetry into poetry, as Coleridge said, is difficult because the translator must give brilliancy without the warmth of original conception, from which such brilliancy would follow of its own accord. But we must not judge Mr. Gladstone's translation either of Horace's odes or of detached pieces from Greek or Italian, as we should judge the professed man of letters or poet like Coleridge himself. His pieces are the diversions of the man of affairs, with educated tastes and interest in good literature. Perhaps the best single piece is his really noble rendering of Manzoni's noble ode on the death of Napoleon; for instance:—From Alp to farthest Pyramid,From Rhine to Mansanar,How sure his lightning's flash foretoldHis thunderbolts of war!To Don from Scilla's height they roar,From North to Southern shore.[pg 550]And this was glory? After-men,Judge the dark problem. LowWe to the Mighty Maker bendThe while, Who planned to showWhat vaster mould Creative WillWith him could fill.As on the shipwrecked marinerThe weltering wave's descent—The wave, o'er which, a moment since,For distant shores he bentAnd bent in vain, his eager eye;So on that stricken headCame whelming down the mighty Past.How often did his penEssay to tell the wondrous taleFor after times and men,And o'er the lines that could not dieHis hand lay dead.How often, as the listless dayIn silence died away,He stood with lightning eye deprest,And arms across his breast,And bygone years, in rushing train,Smote on his soul amain:The breezy tents he seemed to see,And the battering cannon's course,And the flashing of the infantry,And the torrent of the horse,And, obeyed as soon as heard,Th' ecstatic word.Always let us remember that his literary life was part of the rest of his life, as literature ought to be. He was no mere reader of many books, used to relieve the strain of mental anxiety or to slake the thirst of literary or intellectual curiosity. Reading with him in the days of his full vigour was a habitual communing with the master spirits of mankind, as a vivifying and nourishing part of life. As we have seen, he would not read Dante in the session, nor unless he could have a large draught. Here as elsewhere in the ordering of his days he was methodical, systematic, full.

Of Mr. Gladstone as orator and improvisatore, enough has been said and seen. Besides being orator and statesman he was scholar and critic. Perhaps scholar in his interests, not in abiding contribution. The most copious of his productions in this delightful but arduous field was the three large volumes onHomer and the Homeric Age, given to the world in 1858. Into what has been well called the whirlpool of Homeric controversies, the reader shall not here be dragged. Mr. Gladstone himself gave them the go-by, with an indifference and disdain such as might have been well enough in the economic field if exhibited towards a protectionist farmer, or a partisan of retaliatory duties on manufactured goods, but that were hardly to the point in dealing with profound and original critics. What he too contemptuously dismissed as Homeric“bubble-schemes,”were in truth centres of scientific illumination. At the end of the eighteenth century Wolf's famousProlegomenaappeared, in which he advanced the theory that Homer was no single poet, nor a name for two poets, nor an individual at all; theIliadandOdysseywere collections of independent lays, folk-lore and folk-songs connected by a common set of themes, and edited, redacted, or compacted about the middle of the sixth century before Christ. A learned man of our own day has said that F. A. Wolf ought to be counted one of the half dozen writers that within the last three centuries have most influenced thought. This would bring Wolf into line with Descartes, Newton, Locke, Kant, Rousseau, or whatever other five master-spirits of thought from then to now the judicious reader may select. The present writer has assuredly no competence to assign Wolf's place in the history of modern criticism, but straying aside for a season from the green pastures of Hansard, and turning over again the slim volume of a hundred and fifty pages in which Wolf discusses his theme, one may easily discern a fountain of[pg 544]broad streams of modern thought (apart from the particular thesis) that to Mr. Gladstone, by the force of all his education and his deepest prepossessions, were in the highest degree chimerical and dangerous.

He once wrote to Lord Acton (1889) about the Old Testament and Mosaic legislation:—

Now I think that the most important parts of the argument have in a great degree a solid standing ground apart from the destructive criticism on dates and on the text: and I am sufficiently aware of my own rawness and ignorance in the matter not to allow myself to judge definitely, or condemn. I feel also that I have a prepossession derived from the criticisms in the case of Homer. Of them I have a very bad opinion, not only in themselves, but as to the levity, precipitancy, and shallowness of mind which they display; and here I do venture to speak, because I believe myself to have done a great deal more than any of the destructives in the examination of the text, which is the true source of the materials of judgment. They are a soulless lot; but there was a time when they had possession of the public ear as much I suppose as the Old Testament destructives now have, within their own precinct. It is only the constructive part of their work on which I feel tempted to judge; and I must own that it seems to me sadly wanting in the elements of rational probability.

This unpromising method is sufficiently set out when he says:“I find in the plot of theIliadenough of beauty, order, and structure, not merely to sustain the supposition of its own unity, but to bear an independent testimony, should it be still needed, to the existence of a personal and individual Homer as its author.”319From such a method no permanent contribution could come.

Yet scholars allow that Mr. Gladstone in these three volumes, as well as inJuventus Mundiand hisHomeric Primer, has added not a little to our scientific knowledge of the Homeric poems,320by his extraordinary mastery of the text, the result of unwearied and prolonged industry, aided[pg 545]

On Homer

On Homer

by a memory both tenacious and ready. Taking his own point of view, moreover, anybody who wishes to have his feeling about theIliadandOdysseyas delightful poetry refreshed and quickened, will find inspiring elements in the profusion, the eager array of Homer's own lines, the diligent exploration of aspects and bearings hitherto unthought of. The“theo-mythology”is commonly judged fantastic, and has been compared by sage critics to Warburton'sDivine Legation—the same comprehensive general reading, the same heroic industry in marshalling the particulars of proof, the same dialectical strength of arm, and all brought to prove an unsound proposition.321Yet the comprehensive reading and the particulars of proof are by no means without an interest of their own, whatever we may think of the proposition; and here, as in all his literary writing distinguished from polemics, he abounds in the ethical elements. Here perhaps more than anywhere else he impresses us by his love of beauty in all its aspects and relations, in the human form, in landscape, in the affections, in animals, including above all else that sense of beauty which made his Greeks take it as one of the names for nobility in conduct. Conington, one of the finest of scholars, then lecturing at Oxford on Latin poets and deep in his own Virgilian studies, which afterwards bore such admirable fruit, writes at length (Feb. 14, 1857) to say how grateful he is to Mr. Gladstone for the care with which he has pursued into details a view of Virgil that they hold substantially in common, and proceeds with care and point to analyse the quality of the Roman poet's art, as some years later he defended against Munro the questionable proposition of the superiority in poetic style of the graceful, melodious, and pathetic Virgil to Lucretius's mighty muse.

No field has been more industriously worked for the last forty years than this of the relations of paganism to the historic religion that followed it in Europe. The knowledge and the speculations into which Mr. Gladstone was thus initiated in the sixties may now seem crude enough; but he deserves some credit in English, though not in view of[pg 546]German, speculation for an early perception of an unfamiliar region of comparative science, whence many a product most unwelcome to him and alien to his own beliefs has been since extracted. When all is said, however, Mr. Gladstone's place is not in literary or critical history, but elsewhere.

His style is sometimes called Johnsonian, but surely without good ground. Johnson was not involved and he was clear, and neither of these things can always be said of Mr. Gladstone. Some critic charged him in 1840 with“prolix clearness.”The old charge, says Mr. Gladstone upon this, was“obscure compression. I do not doubt that both may be true, and the former may have been the result of a well-meant effort to escape from the latter.”He was fond of abstract words, or the nearer to abstract the better, and the more general the better. One effect of this was undoubtedly to give an indirect, almost a shifty, air that exasperated plain people. Why does he beat about the bush, they asked; why cannot he say what he means? A reader might have to think twice or thrice or twenty times before he could be sure that he interpreted correctly. But then people are so apt to think once, or half of once; to take the meaning that suits their own wish or purpose best, and then to treat that as the only meaning. Hence their perplexity and wrath when they found that other doors were open, and they thought a mistake due to their own hurry was the result of a juggler's trick. On the other hand a good writer takes all the pains he can to keep his reader out of such scrapes.

His critical essays on Tennyson and Macaulay are excellent. They are acute, discriminating, generous. His estimate of Macaulay, apart from a piece of polemical church history at the end, is perhaps the best we have.“You make a very just remark,”said Acton to him,“that Macaulay was afraid of contradicting his former self, and remembered all he had written since 1825. At that time his mind was formed, and so it remained. What literary influences acted on the formation of his political opinions, what were his religious sympathies, and what is his exact place among historians, you have rather avoided discussing. There is still something[pg 547]to say on these points.”To Tennyson Mr. Gladstone believed himself to have been unjust, especially in the passages ofMauddevoted to the war-frenzy, and when he came to reprint the article he admitted that he had not sufficiently remembered that he was dealing with a dramatic and imaginative composition.322As he frankly said of himself, he was not strong in the faculties of the artist, but perhaps Tennyson himself in these passages was prompted much more by politics than by art. Of this piece of retractation the poet truly said,“Nobody but a noble-minded man would have done that.”323Mr. Gladstone would most likely have chosen to call his words a qualification rather than a recantation. In either case, it does not affect passages that give the finest expression to one of the very deepest convictions of his life,—that war, whatever else we may choose to say of it, is no antidote for Mammon-worship and can never be a cure for moral evils:—

It is, indeed, true that peace has its moral perils and temptations for degenerate man, as has every other blessing, without exception, that he can receive from the hand of God. It is moreover not less true that, amidst the clash of arms, the noblest forms of character may be reared, and the highest acts of duty done; that these great and precious results may be due to war as their cause; and that one high form of sentiment in particular, the love of country, receives a powerful and general stimulus from the bloody strife. But this is as the furious cruelty of Pharaoh made place for the benign virtue of his daughter; as the butchering sentence of Herod raised without doubt many a mother's love into heroic sublimity; as plague, as famine, as fire, as flood, as every curse and every scourge that is wielded by an angry Providence for the chastisement of man, is an appointed instrument for tempering human souls in the seven-times heated furnace of affliction, up to the standard of angelic and archangelic virtue.War, indeed, has the property of exciting much generous and noble feeling on a large scale; but with this special recommendation it has, in its modern forms especially, peculiar and unequalled evils. As it has a wider sweep of desolating power than the rest,[pg 548]so it has the peculiar quality that it is more susceptible of being decked in gaudy trappings, and of fascinating the imagination of those whose proud and angry passions it inflames. But it is, on this very account, a perilous delusion to teach that war is a cure for moral evil, in any other sense than as the sister tribulations are. The eulogies of the frantic hero inMaud, however, deviate into grosser folly. It is natural that such vagaries should overlook the fixed laws of Providence. Under these laws the mass of mankind is composed of men, women, and children who can but just ward off hunger, cold, and nakedness; whose whole ideas of Mammon-worship are comprised in the search for their daily food, clothing, shelter, fuel; whom any casualty reduces to positive want; and whose already low estate is yet further lowered and ground down, when“the blood-red blossom of war flames with its heart of fire.”...Still war had, in times now gone by, ennobling elements and tendencies of the less sordid kind. But one inevitable characteristic of modern war is, that it is associated throughout, in all particulars, with a vast and most irregular formation of commercial enterprise. There is no incentive to Mammon-worship so remarkable as that which it affords. The political economy of war is now one of its most commanding aspects. Every farthing, with the smallest exceptions conceivable, of the scores or hundreds of millions which a war may cost, goes directly, and very violently, to stimulate production, though it is intended ultimately for waste or for destruction. Even apart from the fact that war suspends,ipso facto, every rule of public thrift, and tends to sap honesty itself in the use of the public treasure for which it makes such unbounded calls, it therefore is the greatest feeder of that lust of gold which we are told is the essence of commerce, though we had hoped it was only its occasional besetting sin. It is, however, more than this; for the regular commerce of peace is tameness itself compared with the gambling spirit which war, through the rapid shiftings and high prices which it brings, always introduces into trade. In its moral operation it more resembles, perhaps the finding of a new gold-field, than anything else.

It is, indeed, true that peace has its moral perils and temptations for degenerate man, as has every other blessing, without exception, that he can receive from the hand of God. It is moreover not less true that, amidst the clash of arms, the noblest forms of character may be reared, and the highest acts of duty done; that these great and precious results may be due to war as their cause; and that one high form of sentiment in particular, the love of country, receives a powerful and general stimulus from the bloody strife. But this is as the furious cruelty of Pharaoh made place for the benign virtue of his daughter; as the butchering sentence of Herod raised without doubt many a mother's love into heroic sublimity; as plague, as famine, as fire, as flood, as every curse and every scourge that is wielded by an angry Providence for the chastisement of man, is an appointed instrument for tempering human souls in the seven-times heated furnace of affliction, up to the standard of angelic and archangelic virtue.

War, indeed, has the property of exciting much generous and noble feeling on a large scale; but with this special recommendation it has, in its modern forms especially, peculiar and unequalled evils. As it has a wider sweep of desolating power than the rest,[pg 548]so it has the peculiar quality that it is more susceptible of being decked in gaudy trappings, and of fascinating the imagination of those whose proud and angry passions it inflames. But it is, on this very account, a perilous delusion to teach that war is a cure for moral evil, in any other sense than as the sister tribulations are. The eulogies of the frantic hero inMaud, however, deviate into grosser folly. It is natural that such vagaries should overlook the fixed laws of Providence. Under these laws the mass of mankind is composed of men, women, and children who can but just ward off hunger, cold, and nakedness; whose whole ideas of Mammon-worship are comprised in the search for their daily food, clothing, shelter, fuel; whom any casualty reduces to positive want; and whose already low estate is yet further lowered and ground down, when“the blood-red blossom of war flames with its heart of fire.”...

Still war had, in times now gone by, ennobling elements and tendencies of the less sordid kind. But one inevitable characteristic of modern war is, that it is associated throughout, in all particulars, with a vast and most irregular formation of commercial enterprise. There is no incentive to Mammon-worship so remarkable as that which it affords. The political economy of war is now one of its most commanding aspects. Every farthing, with the smallest exceptions conceivable, of the scores or hundreds of millions which a war may cost, goes directly, and very violently, to stimulate production, though it is intended ultimately for waste or for destruction. Even apart from the fact that war suspends,ipso facto, every rule of public thrift, and tends to sap honesty itself in the use of the public treasure for which it makes such unbounded calls, it therefore is the greatest feeder of that lust of gold which we are told is the essence of commerce, though we had hoped it was only its occasional besetting sin. It is, however, more than this; for the regular commerce of peace is tameness itself compared with the gambling spirit which war, through the rapid shiftings and high prices which it brings, always introduces into trade. In its moral operation it more resembles, perhaps the finding of a new gold-field, than anything else.

More remarkable than either of these two is his piece on Leopardi (1850), the Italian poet, whose philosophy and[pg 549]

Leopardi Translations

Leopardi Translations

frame of mind, said Mr. Gladstone,“present more than any other that we know, more even than that of Shelley, the character of unrelieved, unredeemed desolation—the very qualities in it which attract pitying sympathy, depriving it of all seductive power.”It is curious that he should have selected one whose life lay along a course like Leopardi's for commemoration, as a man who in almost every branch of mental exertion seems to have had the capacity for attaining, and generally at a single bound, the very highest excellence.“There are many things,”he adds,“in which Christians would do well to follow him: in the warmth of his attachments; in the moderation of his wants; in his noble freedom from the love of money; in his all-conquering assiduity.”324Perhaps the most remarkable sentence of all is this:“... what is not needful, and is commonly wrong, namely, is to pass a judgment on our fellow-creatures. Never let it be forgotten that there is scarcely a single moral action of a single man of which other men can have such a knowledge, in its ultimate grounds, its surrounding incidents, and the real determining causes of its merits, as to warrant their pronouncing a conclusive judgment upon it.”

The translation of poetry into poetry, as Coleridge said, is difficult because the translator must give brilliancy without the warmth of original conception, from which such brilliancy would follow of its own accord. But we must not judge Mr. Gladstone's translation either of Horace's odes or of detached pieces from Greek or Italian, as we should judge the professed man of letters or poet like Coleridge himself. His pieces are the diversions of the man of affairs, with educated tastes and interest in good literature. Perhaps the best single piece is his really noble rendering of Manzoni's noble ode on the death of Napoleon; for instance:—

From Alp to farthest Pyramid,From Rhine to Mansanar,How sure his lightning's flash foretoldHis thunderbolts of war!To Don from Scilla's height they roar,From North to Southern shore.[pg 550]And this was glory? After-men,Judge the dark problem. LowWe to the Mighty Maker bendThe while, Who planned to showWhat vaster mould Creative WillWith him could fill.As on the shipwrecked marinerThe weltering wave's descent—The wave, o'er which, a moment since,For distant shores he bentAnd bent in vain, his eager eye;So on that stricken headCame whelming down the mighty Past.How often did his penEssay to tell the wondrous taleFor after times and men,And o'er the lines that could not dieHis hand lay dead.How often, as the listless dayIn silence died away,He stood with lightning eye deprest,And arms across his breast,And bygone years, in rushing train,Smote on his soul amain:The breezy tents he seemed to see,And the battering cannon's course,And the flashing of the infantry,And the torrent of the horse,And, obeyed as soon as heard,Th' ecstatic word.

From Alp to farthest Pyramid,From Rhine to Mansanar,How sure his lightning's flash foretoldHis thunderbolts of war!To Don from Scilla's height they roar,From North to Southern shore.[pg 550]And this was glory? After-men,Judge the dark problem. LowWe to the Mighty Maker bendThe while, Who planned to showWhat vaster mould Creative WillWith him could fill.

From Alp to farthest Pyramid,

From Rhine to Mansanar,

How sure his lightning's flash foretold

His thunderbolts of war!

To Don from Scilla's height they roar,

From North to Southern shore.

And this was glory? After-men,

Judge the dark problem. Low

We to the Mighty Maker bend

The while, Who planned to show

What vaster mould Creative Will

With him could fill.

As on the shipwrecked marinerThe weltering wave's descent—The wave, o'er which, a moment since,For distant shores he bentAnd bent in vain, his eager eye;So on that stricken headCame whelming down the mighty Past.How often did his penEssay to tell the wondrous taleFor after times and men,And o'er the lines that could not dieHis hand lay dead.

As on the shipwrecked mariner

The weltering wave's descent—

The wave, o'er which, a moment since,

For distant shores he bent

And bent in vain, his eager eye;

So on that stricken head

Came whelming down the mighty Past.

How often did his pen

Essay to tell the wondrous tale

For after times and men,

And o'er the lines that could not die

His hand lay dead.

How often, as the listless dayIn silence died away,He stood with lightning eye deprest,And arms across his breast,And bygone years, in rushing train,Smote on his soul amain:The breezy tents he seemed to see,And the battering cannon's course,And the flashing of the infantry,And the torrent of the horse,And, obeyed as soon as heard,Th' ecstatic word.

How often, as the listless day

In silence died away,

He stood with lightning eye deprest,

And arms across his breast,

And bygone years, in rushing train,

Smote on his soul amain:

The breezy tents he seemed to see,

And the battering cannon's course,

And the flashing of the infantry,

And the torrent of the horse,

And, obeyed as soon as heard,

Th' ecstatic word.

Always let us remember that his literary life was part of the rest of his life, as literature ought to be. He was no mere reader of many books, used to relieve the strain of mental anxiety or to slake the thirst of literary or intellectual curiosity. Reading with him in the days of his full vigour was a habitual communing with the master spirits of mankind, as a vivifying and nourishing part of life. As we have seen, he would not read Dante in the session, nor unless he could have a large draught. Here as elsewhere in the ordering of his days he was methodical, systematic, full.

VA Golden LampThough man of action, yet Mr. Gladstone too has a place by character and influences among what we may call the abstract, moral, spiritual forces that stamped the realm of Britain in his age. In a new time, marked in an incomparable degree by the progress of science and invention, by vast mechanical, industrial, and commercial development, he accepted it all, he adjusted his statesmanship to it all, nay, he revelled in it all, as tending to ameliorate the lot of the“mass of men, women, and children who can just ward off hunger, cold, and nakedness.”He did not rail at his age, he strove to help it. Following Walpole and Cobden and Peel in the policies of peace, he knew how to augment the material resources on which our people depend. When was Britain stronger, richer, more honoured among the nations—I do not say always among the diplomatic chanceries and governments—than in the years when Mr. Gladstone was at the zenith of his authority among us? When were her armed forces by sea and land more adequate for defence of every interest? When was her material resource sounder? When was her moral credit higher? Besides all this, he upheld a golden lamp.The unending revolutions of the world are for ever bringing old phases uppermost again. Events from season to season are taken to teach sinister lessons, that the Real is the only Rational, force is the test of right and wrong, the state has nothing to do with restraints of morals, the ruler is emancipated. Speculations in physical science were distorted for alien purposes, and survival of the fittest was taken to give brutality a more decent name. Even new conceptions and systems of history may be twisted into release of statesmen from the conscience of Bishop Butler's plain man. This gospel it was Mr. Gladstone's felicity to hold at bay. Without bringing back the cosmopolitanism of the eighteenth century, without sharing all the idealisms of the middle of the nineteenth, he resisted with his whole might the odious contention that moral progress in the relations of nations and states to one another is an illusion and a dream.[pg 552]This vein perhaps brings us too near to the regions of dissertation. Let us rather leave off with thoughts and memories of one who was a vivid example of public duty and of private faithfulness; of a long career that with every circumstance of splendour, amid all the mire and all the poisons of the world, lighted up in practice even for those who have none of his genius and none of his power his own precept,“Be inspired with the belief that life is a great and noble calling; not a mean and grovelling thing, that we are to shuffle through as we can, but an elevated and lofty destiny.”

A Golden Lamp

A Golden Lamp

Though man of action, yet Mr. Gladstone too has a place by character and influences among what we may call the abstract, moral, spiritual forces that stamped the realm of Britain in his age. In a new time, marked in an incomparable degree by the progress of science and invention, by vast mechanical, industrial, and commercial development, he accepted it all, he adjusted his statesmanship to it all, nay, he revelled in it all, as tending to ameliorate the lot of the“mass of men, women, and children who can just ward off hunger, cold, and nakedness.”He did not rail at his age, he strove to help it. Following Walpole and Cobden and Peel in the policies of peace, he knew how to augment the material resources on which our people depend. When was Britain stronger, richer, more honoured among the nations—I do not say always among the diplomatic chanceries and governments—than in the years when Mr. Gladstone was at the zenith of his authority among us? When were her armed forces by sea and land more adequate for defence of every interest? When was her material resource sounder? When was her moral credit higher? Besides all this, he upheld a golden lamp.

The unending revolutions of the world are for ever bringing old phases uppermost again. Events from season to season are taken to teach sinister lessons, that the Real is the only Rational, force is the test of right and wrong, the state has nothing to do with restraints of morals, the ruler is emancipated. Speculations in physical science were distorted for alien purposes, and survival of the fittest was taken to give brutality a more decent name. Even new conceptions and systems of history may be twisted into release of statesmen from the conscience of Bishop Butler's plain man. This gospel it was Mr. Gladstone's felicity to hold at bay. Without bringing back the cosmopolitanism of the eighteenth century, without sharing all the idealisms of the middle of the nineteenth, he resisted with his whole might the odious contention that moral progress in the relations of nations and states to one another is an illusion and a dream.

This vein perhaps brings us too near to the regions of dissertation. Let us rather leave off with thoughts and memories of one who was a vivid example of public duty and of private faithfulness; of a long career that with every circumstance of splendour, amid all the mire and all the poisons of the world, lighted up in practice even for those who have none of his genius and none of his power his own precept,“Be inspired with the belief that life is a great and noble calling; not a mean and grovelling thing, that we are to shuffle through as we can, but an elevated and lofty destiny.”

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