Studies in Contemporary Biography Part 11

His close study of Irish history, and his old faith in the principle of nationality, had made him a strenuous advocate of Home Rule for Ireland. But no one was farther than he from sharing the feelings of the American Irish towards England. He condemned the threats addressed in 1895 to Great Britain over the Venezuela question; and glad as he was to see that question settled by England's acceptance of an arbitration which she had previously denied the right of the United States to demand, he held that England must beware of yielding too readily to pressure from the United States, because such compliance would encourage that aggressive spirit in the latter whose consequences for both countries he feared. Never, perhaps, did he incur so much obloquy as in defending, almost single-handed, the British position in the Venezuelan affair. The attacks made all over the country on the _Evening Post_ were, he used to say, like storms of hail lashing against his windows. At the very end of his career, he resisted the war with Spain and the annexation of the Philippine Islands, deeming the acquisition of trans-Oceanic territories, inhabited by inferior races, a dangerous new departure, opposed to the traditions of the Fathers of the Republic, and inconsistent with the principles on which the Republic was founded. No public writer has left a more consistent record.

In private life Mr. G.o.dkin was a faithful friend and a charming companion, genial as well as witty, considerate of others, and liked no less than admired by his staff on the _Evening Post_, free from cynicism, and more indulgent in his views of human nature than might have been gathered from his public utterances. He never despaired of democratic government, yet his spirits had been damped by the faint fulfilment of those hopes for the progress of free nations, and especially of the United States, which had illumined his youth. The slow advance of economic truths, the evils produced by the increase of wealth, the growth of what he called "chromo-civilisation," the indifference of the rich and educated to politics, the want of nerve among politicians, the excitability of the ma.s.ses, the tenacity with which corruption and misgovernment held their ground, in spite of repeated exposures, in cities like New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago--all these things had so sunk into his soul that it became hard to induce him to look at the other side, and to appreciate the splendid recuperative forces which are at work in America. Thus his friends were driven to that melancholy form of comfort which consists in pointing out that other countries are no better. They argued that England in particular, to which he had continued to look as the home of political morality and enlightened State wisdom, was suffering from evils, not indeed the same as those which in his judgment afflicted America, but equally serious. They bade him remember that moral progress is not continuous, but subject to ebbs of reaction, and that America is a country of which one should never despair, because in it evils have often before worked out their cure. He did regretfully own, after his latest visits to Europe, that England had sadly declined from the England of his earlier days, and he admitted that the clouds under which his own path had latterly lain might after a time be scattered by a burst of sunshine; but his hopes for the near future of America were not brightened by these reflections. Sometimes he seemed to feel--though of his own work he never spoke--as though he had laboured in vain for forty years.

If he so thought, he did his work far less than justice. It had told powerfully upon the United States, and that in more than one way.

Though the circulation of the _Nation_ was never large, it was read by the two cla.s.ses which in America have most to do with forming political and economic opinion--I mean editors and University teachers. (The Universities and Colleges, be it remembered, are far more numerous, relatively to the population, in America than in England, and a more important factor in the thought of the country.) From the editors and the professors Mr. G.o.dkin's views filtered down into the educated cla.s.s generally, and affected its opinion. He instructed and stimulated the men who instructed and stimulated the rest of the people. To those young men in particular who thought about public affairs and were preparing themselves to serve their country, his articles were an inspiration. The great hope for American democracy to-day lies in the growing zeal and the ripened intelligence with which the generation now come to manhood has begun to throw itself into public work. Many influences have contributed to this result, and Mr. G.o.dkin's has been among the most potent.

Nor was his example less beneficial to the profession of journalism.

There has always been a profusion of talent in the American press, talent more alert and versatile than is to be found in the press of any European country. But in 1865 there were three things which the United States lacked. Literary criticism did not maintain a high standard, nor duly distinguish thorough from flashy or superficial performances. Party spirit was so strong and so pervasive that journalists were content to denounce or to extol, and seldom subjected the character of men or measures to a searching and impartial examination. There was too much sentimentalism in politics, with too little reference of current questions to underlying principles, too little effort to get down to what Americans call the "hard pan" of facts. In all these respects the last forty years have witnessed prodigious advances; and, so far as the press is concerned--for much has been due to the Universities and to the growth of a literary cla.s.s--Mr. G.o.dkin's writings largely contributed to the progress made.

His finished criticism, his exact method, his incisive handling of economic problems, his complete detachment from party, helped to form a new school of journalists, as the example he set of a serious and lofty conception of an editor's duties helped to add dignity to the position. He had not that disposition to enthrone the press which made a great English newspaper once claim for itself that it discharged in the modern world the functions of the mediaeval Church. But he brought to his work as an anonymous writer a sense of responsibility and a zeal for the welfare of his country which no minister of State could have surpa.s.sed.

His friends may sometimes have wished that he had more fully recognised the worth of sentiment as a motive power in politics, that he had more frequently tried to persuade as well as to convince, that he had given more credit for partial instalments of honest service and for a virtue less than perfect, that he had dealt more leniently with the faults of the good and the follies of the wise. Defects in these respects were the almost inevitable defects of his admirable qualities, of his pa.s.sion for truth, his hatred of wrong and injustice, his clear vision, his indomitable spirit.

The lesson of his editorial career is a lesson not for America only.

Among the dangers that beset democratic communities, none are greater than the efforts of wealth to control, not only electors and legislators, but also the organs of public opinion, and the disposition of statesmen and journalists to defer to and flatter the majority, adopting the sentiment dominant at the moment, and telling the people that its voice is the voice of G.o.d. Mr. G.o.dkin was not only inaccessible to the lures of wealth--the same may happily be still said of many of his craft-brethren--he was just as little accessible to the fear of popular displeasure. Nothing more incensed him than to see a statesman or an editor with his "ear to the ground"

(to use an American phrase), seeking to catch the sound of the coming crowd. To him, the less popular a view was, so much the more did it need to be well weighed and, if approved, to be strenuously and incessantly preached. Democracies will always have demagogues ready to feed their vanity and stir their pa.s.sions and exaggerate the feeling of the moment. What they need is men who will swim against the stream, will tell them their faults, will urge an argument all the more forcibly because it is unwelcome. Such an one was Edwin G.o.dkin. Since the death of Abraham Lincoln, America has been generally more influenced by her writers, preachers, and thinkers than by her statesmen. In the list of those who have during the last forty years influenced her for good and helped by their pens to make her history, a list ill.u.s.trated by such names as those of R. W. Emerson and Phillips Brooks and James Russell Lowell, his name will find its place and receive its well-earned meed of honour.

[58] The Tammany leaders had him repeatedly arrested, usually on Sunday mornings (that being the day on which it was least easy to find bail) for alleged criminal libels upon them. These prosecutions, threatened in the hope of intimidating him, never went further.

[59] A Mugwump is in the Algonquin tongue an aged chief or wise man, and the name was meant to ridicule the _ex cathedra_ manner ascribed to the _Evening Post_.

LORD ACTON

When Lord Acton died on 19th June 1902, at Tegern See in Bavaria, England lost the most truly cosmopolitan of her children, and Europe lost one who was, by universal consent, in the foremost rank of her men of learning. He belonged to an old Roman Catholic family of Shropshire, a branch of which had gone to Southern Italy, where his grandfather, General Acton, had been chief minister of the King of Naples in the great war, at the time when the Bourbon dynasty maintained itself in Sicily by the help of the British fleet, while all Italy lay under the heel of Napoleon. His father, Sir Ferdinand Acton, married a German lady, heiress of the ancient and famous house of Dalberg, one of the great families of the middle Rhineland; so John Edward Emerich Dalberg-Acton was born half a German, and connected by blood with the highest aristocracy of Germany. He was educated at Oscott, one of the two chief Roman Catholic colleges of England, under Dr. Wiseman, afterwards Archbishop of Westminster and Cardinal; but the most powerful influence on the development of his mind and principles came from that glory of Catholic learning, a beautiful soul as well as a capacious intellect, Dr. von Dollinger, with whom Acton studied during some years at Munich. He sat for a short time in the House of Commons as member for Carlow (1859); and was afterwards elected for Bridgnorth (1865), but lost his seat (which he had gained by one vote only) on a scrutiny. In those days it was not easy for a Roman Catholic to find an English const.i.tuency, so in 1869 Mr.

Gladstone procured his elevation to the peerage. He made a successful speech in the House of Lords in 1893, but took no prominent part in parliamentary life in either House, feeling himself too much of a student, and looking at current questions from a point of view unlike that of English politicians. Neither as a philosopher, nor as a historian, nor as a product of German training, could he find either Lords or Commons a congenial audience. When he was asked soon after he entered Parliament why he did not speak, he answered that he agreed with n.o.body and n.o.body agreed with him. But since he regarded politics as history in the course of making under his eyes, he continued to be all his life keenly interested in public affairs, watching and judging every move in the game. Mr. Gladstone, whose trusted friend he had been for many years, was believed to have on one occasion wished to place him in an important office; but political exigencies made this impossible, and the only public post he ever held was that of Lord-in-Waiting in the Ministry of 1892. In this capacity he was brought into frequent contact with Queen Victoria, who felt the warmest respect and admiration for him. He was one of the very few persons surrounding her who was familiar with most of the courts of Continental Europe, and could discuss with her from direct knowledge the men who figured in those courts. At Windsor he spent in the library of the Castle all the time during which he was not required to be in actual attendance on the Queen, a singular phenomenon among Lords-in-Waiting.

Unlike most English Roman Catholics, he was a strong Liberal, a Liberal of that orthodox type, individualist, free-trade, and peace-loving, which prevailed from 1846 till 1885. He was also a convinced Home Ruler, and had, indeed, adopted the principle of Home Rule for Ireland long before Mr. Gladstone himself was converted to it. His faith in that principle rested on the value he attached to self-government as a means of training and developing the political apt.i.tudes of a people, and to the recognition of national sentiment, which he held to be, like other natural forces, useful when guided but formidable when repressed. So too his Liberalism was based on the love of freedom for its own sake, joined to the conviction that freedom is the best foundation for the stability of a const.i.tution and the happiness of a people. Reliance on the power of freedom was, he used to say, one of the broadest of all the lessons he had learned from history. He applied it in ecclesiastical as well as in political affairs. At the time of the Vatican Council of 1870 he was, though a layman, prominent among those who const.i.tuted the opposition maintained by the Liberal section of the Roman Catholic Church to the affirmation of the dogma of papal infallibility. His full and accurate knowledge of ecclesiastical history was placed at the disposal of the prelates, such as Archbishop Dupanloup, Bishop Strossmayer, and Archbishop Conolly (of Halifax, Nova Scotia), who combated the Ultramontane party in the animated and protracted debates which illumined that OEc.u.menical Council. One, at least, of the treatises, and many of the letters in the press which the Council called forth were written either by him or from materials which he supplied, and he was recognised by the Ultramontanes, and in particular by Archbishop Manning, as being, along with Dollinger, the most formidable of their opponents behind the scenes. As every one knows, the Infallibilists triumphed, and the schism which led to the formation of the Old Catholic Church in Germany and Switzerland was the result. Dollinger was excommunicated; but against Lord Acton no action was taken, and he remained all his life a faithful member of the Roman communion, while adhering to the views he had advocated in 1870.

With this close hold upon practical life and this constant interest in the politics of the world, especially of England and the United States, no one could be less like that cloistered student who is commonly taken as the typical man of learning. But Lord Acton was a miracle of learning. Of the sciences of nature and their practical applications in the arts he had indeed no more knowledge than any cultivated man of the world is expected to possess. But of all the so-called "human subjects" his mastery was unequalled. Learning was the business of his life. He was gifted with a singularly tenacious memory. His industry was untiring. Wherever he was--in London, at Cannes in winter, at Tegern See in summer, at Windsor or Osborne with the Queen, latterly (till his health failed) at Cambridge during the University terms--he never worked less than eight hours a day. Yet, even after making every allowance for his memory and his industry, his friends stood amazed at the range and exactness of his knowledge. It was as various as it was profound, and much of it bore on recondite matters which few men study to-day. Though less minute where it touched the ancient and the early mediaeval world than as respected more recent times, it might be said to cover the whole field of history, both civil and ecclesiastical, and became wonderfully full and exact when it reached the Renaissance and Reformation periods. It included not only the older theology, but modern Biblical criticism.

It included metaphysics; and not only metaphysics in the more special sense, but the abstract side of economics and that philosophy of law on which the Germans set so much store. Most of the prominent figures who have during the last half-century led the march of inquiry in these subjects, men like Ranke and Fustel de Coulanges in history, Wilhelm Roscher in economic science, Adolf Harnack in theology, were his personal friends, and he could meet them as an equal on their own ground. On one occasion I had invited to meet him at dinner the late Dr. (afterwards Bishop) Creighton, who was then writing his _History of the Popes_, and the late Professor Robertson Smith, the most eminent Hebrew and Arabic scholar in Britain. The conversation turned first upon the times of Pope Leo the Tenth, and then upon recent controversies regarding the dates of the books of the Old Testament, and it soon appeared that Lord Acton knew as much about the former as Dr. Creighton, and as much about the latter as Robertson Smith. The const.i.tutional history of the United States is a topic far removed from those philosophical and ecclesiastical or theological lines of inquiry to which most of his time had been given; yet he knew it more thoroughly than any other living European, at least in England and France, for of the Germans I will not venture to speak, and he continued to read most of the books of importance dealing with it which from time to time were published. So, indeed, he kept abreast of nearly all the literature of possible utility bearing on history (especially ecclesiastical history) and political theory that appeared in Europe or America, reading much which his less diligent or less eager friends thought scarcely worthy of his perusal. And it need hardly be said that his friends found him an invaluable guide to the literature of any subject. In the sphere of history more especially, one might safely a.s.sume that a book which he did not know was not worth knowing, while he was often able to indicate, as being the right book to consult, some work of which the person who consulted him, albeit not unversed in the subject, had never heard. He had at one time four libraries, the largest at his family seat, Aldenham in Shropshire, others at Tegern See, at Cannes, and in London; and he could usually tell in which of these the particular book he named was to be found. Unlike most men who value their libraries, he was fond of lending books, and would sometimes put a friend to shame by asking some weeks afterwards what the latter thought of the volumes he had almost forced on the borrower, and which the borrower had not found time to read. After saying this, I need scarcely add that he was not a book collector in the usual sense of the word. He did not care for rare editions, and still less did he care about bindings.

His Aldenham library was itself a monument of learning and industry.[60]

In forming it he sought to bring together the books needed for tracing and elucidating the growth of formative ideas and of inst.i.tutions in the sphere of ecclesiastical and civil polity, and to attain this he made it include not only all the best treatises handling these large and complex subjects, but a ma.s.s of original records bearing as well on the local histories of the cities and provinces of such countries as Italy and France as on the general history of the great European States and of the Church. This magnificent design he accomplished by his own efforts before he was forty. What was still more surprising, he had found time to use the books. Nearly all of them show by notes pencilled or marks placed in them that he had read some part of them, and knew (so far as was needed for his purpose) their contents.

Vast as his stores of knowledge were, they were opened only to his few intimate friends. It was not merely that he, as Tennyson said of Edmund Lushington, "bore all that weight of learning lightly, like a flower." No one could have known in general society that he had any weight of learning to bear. He seemed to be merely a cultivated and agreeable man of the world, interested in letters and politics, but disposed rather to listen than to talk. He was sometimes enigmatic and "not incapable of casting a pearl of irony in the way of those who would mistake it for pebbly fact."[61] A great capacity for cynicism remained a capacity only, because joined to a greater reverence for virtue. In a large company he seldom put forth the fulness of his powers; it was in familiar converse with persons whose tastes resembled his own that the extraordinary finesse and polish of his mind revealed themselves. His critical taste was not only delicate, but exacting; his judgments leaned to the side of severity.

No one applied a more stringent moral standard to the conduct of men in public affairs, whether to-day or in past ages. He insisted upon this, in his inaugural lecture at Cambridge, as the historian's first duty. "It is," said he, "the office of historical science to maintain morality as the sole impartial criterion of men and things." When he came to estimate the value of literary work he seemed no less hard to satisfy. His ideal, both as respected thoroughness in substance and finish in form, was impossibly high, and he noted every failure to reach it. No one appreciated merit more cordially. No one spoke with warmer admiration of such distinguished historians and theologians as the men whom I have just named. But the precision of his thinking and the fastidiousness of his taste gave more than a tinge of austerity to his judgment. His opinions were peculiarly instructive and illuminative to Englishmen, because he was only half an Englishman in blood, less than half an Englishman in his training and mental habits. He was as much at home in Paris or Berlin or Rome as he was in London, speaking the four great languages with almost equal facility, and knowing the men who in each of these capitals were best worth knowing. He viewed our insular literature and politics with the detachment not only of a Roman Catholic among Protestants, of a pupil of Dollinger and Roscher among Oxford and Cambridge men, but also of a citizen of the world, whose mastery of history and philosophy had given him an unusually wide outlook over mankind at large.

His interest in the great things, so far from turning him away from the small things, seemed to quicken his sense of their significance.

It was a noteworthy feature of his view of history that he should have held that the explanation of most of what has pa.s.sed in the light is to be found in what has pa.s.sed in the dark. He was always hunting for the key to secret chambers, preferring to believe that the grand staircase is only for show, and meant to impose upon the mult.i.tude, while the real action goes on in hidden pa.s.sages behind. No one knew so much of the gossip of the past; no one was more intensely curious about the gossip of the present, though in his hands it ceased to be gossip and became unwritten history. One was sometimes disposed to wonder whether he did not think too much about the backstairs. But he had seen a great deal of history in the making.

The pa.s.sion for acquiring knowledge which his German education had fostered ended by becoming a snare to him, because it checked his productive powers. Not that learning burdened him, or clogged the soaring pinions of his mind. He was master of all he knew. But acquisition absorbed so much of his time that little was left for literary composition. (Dollinger saw the danger, for he observed that if Acton did not write a great book before he reached the age of forty, he would never do so.) It made him think that he could not write on a subject till he had read everything, or nearly everything, that others had written about it. It developed the habit of making extracts from the books he read, a habit which took the form of acc.u.mulating small slips of paper on which these extracts were written in his exquisitely neat and regular hand, the slips being arranged in cardboard boxes according to their subjects. He had hundreds of these boxes; and though much of their contents must no doubt be valuable, the time spent in distilling and bottling the essence of the books whence they came, might have been better spent in giving to the world the ideas which they had helped to evoke in his own mind. If one may take the quotations appended to his inaugural lecture as a sample of those he had collected, many of them were not exceptionally valuable, and did little more than show how the same idea, perhaps no recondite one, might be expressed in different words by different persons. When one read some article he had written, garnished and even overloaded with citations, one often felt that his own part was better, both in substance and in form, than the pa.s.sages which he had culled from his predecessors. It becomes daily more than ever true that the secret of historical composition is to know what to neglect, since in our time it has become impossible to exhaust the literature of most subjects, and, as respects the last two centuries, to exhaust even the original authorities. Yet how shall one know what to neglect without at least a glance of inspection? Acton was unwilling to neglect anything; and his ardour for completeness drew him into a policy fit only for one who could expect to live three lives of mortal men.

The love of knowledge grew upon him till it became a pa.s.sion of the intellect, a thirst like the thirst for water in a parching desert.

What he sought to know was not facts only, but facts in their relations to principles, facts so disposed and fitly joined together as to become the causeway over which the road to truth shall pa.s.s. For this purpose events were in his view not more important than the thoughts of men, because discursive and creative thought was to him the ruling factor in history. Hence books must be known--books of philosophic creation, books of philosophic reflection, no less than those which record what has happened. The danger of this conception is that everything men have said or written, as well as everything they have done, becomes a possibly significant fact; and thus the search for truth becomes endless because the materials are inexhaustible.

He expressed in striking words, prefixed to a list of books suggested for a young man's perusal, his view of the aim of a course of historical reading. It is "to give force and fulness and clearness and sincerity and independence and elevation and generosity and serenity to his mind, that he may know the method and law of the process by which error is conquered and truth is won, discerning knowledge from probability and prejudice from belief, that he may learn to master what he rejects as fully as what he adopts, that he may understand the origin as well as the strength and vitality of systems and the better motive of men who are wrong ... and to steel him against the charm of literary beauty and talent."[62]

Neither his pa.s.sion for facts nor his appreciation of style and form made him decline to the right hand or to the left from the true position of a historian. He set little store upon what is called literary excellence, and would often reply, when questioned as to the merits of some book bearing an eminent name, "You need not read it: it adds nothing to what we knew." He valued facts only so far as they went to establish a principle or explained the course of events. It was really not so much in the range of his knowledge as in the profundity and precision of his thought that his greatness lay.

His somewhat overstrained conscientiousness, coupled with the practically unattainable ideal of finish and form which he set before himself, made him less and less disposed to literary production. No man of first-rate powers has in our time left so little by which posterity may judge those powers. In his early life, when for a time he edited the _Home and Foreign Review_, and when he was connected with the _Rambler_ and the _North British Review_, he wrote frequently; and even between 1868 and 1890 he contributed to the press some few historical essays and a number of anonymous letters. But the aversion to creative work seemed to grow on him. About 1890 he so far yielded to the urgency of a few friends as to promise to reissue a number of his essays in a volume, but, after rewriting and polishing these essays during several years, he abandoned the scheme altogether.

In 1882 he had already drawn out a plan for a comprehensive history of Liberty. But this plan also he dropped, because the more he read with a view to undertaking it the more he wished to read, and the vaster did the enterprise seem to loom up before him. With him, as with many men who cherish high literary ideals, the Better proved to be the enemy of the Good.

Twenty years ago, late at night, in his library at Cannes, he expounded to me his view of how such a history of Liberty might be written, and in what wise it might be made the central thread of all history. He spoke for six or seven minutes only; but he spoke like a man inspired, seeming as if, from some mountain summit high in air, he saw beneath him the far-winding path of human progress from dim Cimmerian sh.o.r.es of prehistoric shadow into the fuller yet broken and fitful light of the modern time. The eloquence was splendid, but greater than the eloquence was the penetrating vision which discerned through all events and in all ages the play of those moral forces, now creating, now destroying, always trans.m.u.ting, which had moulded and remoulded inst.i.tutions, and had given to the human spirit its ceaselessly-changing forms of energy. It was as if the whole landscape of history had been suddenly lit up by a burst of sunlight. I have never heard from any other lips any discourse like this, nor from his did I ever hear the like again.

His style suffered in his later days from the abundance of the interspersed citations, and from the overfulness and subtlety of the thought, which occasionally led to obscurity. But when he handled a topic in which learning was not required, his style was clear, pointed and incisive, sometimes epigrammatic. Several years ago he wrote in a monthly magazine a short article upon a biography of one of his contemporaries which showed how admirable a master he was of polished diction and penetrating a.n.a.lysis, and made one wish that he had more frequently consented to dash off light work in a quick unstudied way.

To the work of a University professor he came too late to acquire the art of fluent and forcible oral discourse, nor was the character of his mind, with its striving after a flawless exact.i.tude of statement, altogether fitted for the function of presenting broad summaries of facts to a youthful audience. His predecessor in the Cambridge chair of history, Sir John Seeley, with less knowledge, less subtlety, and less originality, had in larger measure the gift of oral exposition and the power of putting points, whether by speech or by writing, in a clear and telling way. No one, indeed, since Macaulay has been a better point-putter than Seeley was. But Acton's lectures (read from MS.) were models of lucid and stately narrative informed by fulness of thought; and they were so delivered as to express the feeling which each event had evoked in his own mind. That sternness of character which revealed itself in his judgments of men and books never affected his relations to his pupils. Precious as his time was, he gave it generously, encouraging them to come to him for help and counsel. They were awed by the majesty of his learning. Said one of them to me, "When Lord Acton answers a question put to him, I feel as if I were looking at a pyramid. I see the point of it clear and sharp, but I see also the vast subjacent ma.s.s of solid knowledge." They perceived, moreover, that to him History and Philosophy were not two things but one, and perceived that of History as well as of divine Philosophy it may be said that she too is "charming, and musical as is Apollo's lute." Thus the impression produced in the University by the amplitude of Lord Acton's views, by the range of his learning, by the liberality of his spirit and his unfailing devotion to truth and to truth alone, was deep and fruitful.

When they wished that he had given to the world more of his wisdom, his friends did not undervalue a life which was in itself a rare and exquisite product of favouring nature and unwearied diligence. They only regretted that the influence of his ideas, of his methods, and of his spirit, had not been more widely diffused in an enduring form. It was as when a plant unknown elsewhere grows on some remote isle where ships seldom touch. Few see the beauty of the flower, and here death came before the seed could be gathered to be scattered in receptive soil.

To most men Lord Acton seemed reserved as well as remote, presenting a smooth and shining surface beneath which it was hard to penetrate. He avoided publicity and popularity with the tranquil dignity of one for whom the world of knowledge and speculation was more than sufficient.

But he was a loyal friend, affectionate to his intimates, gracious in his manners, blameless in all the relations of life. Comparatively few of his countrymen knew his name, and those who did thought of him chiefly as the confidant of Mr. Gladstone, and as the most remarkable instance of a sincere and steadfast Roman Catholic who was a Liberal alike in politics and in theology. But those who had been admitted to his friendship recognised him as one of the finest intelligences of his generation, an unsurpa.s.sed, and indeed a scarcely rivalled, master of every subject which he touched.

[60] This library, bought by Mr. Andrew Carnegie, was presented by him to Mr. John Morley, and by the latter to the University of Cambridge.

[61] The phrase is Professor Maitland's.

[62] I owe this quotation to a letter of Sir M. E. Grant Duff's published soon after Lord Acton's death.

WILLIAM EWART GLADSTONE

Of no man who has lived in our times is it so hard to speak in a concise and summary fashion as of Mr. Gladstone. For fifty years he was so closely a.s.sociated with the public affairs of his country that the record of his parliamentary life is virtually an outline of English political history during those years. His activity spread itself out over many fields. He was the author of several learned and thoughtful books, and of a mult.i.tude of articles upon all sorts of subjects. He showed himself as eagerly interested in matters of cla.s.sical scholarship and Christian doctrine and ecclesiastical history as in questions of national finance and foreign policy. No account of him could be complete without reviewing his actions and estimating the results of his work in all these directions.

But the difficulty of describing and judging him goes deeper. His was a singularly complex nature, whose threads it was hard to unravel.

His individuality was extremely strong. All that he said or did bore its impress. Yet it was an individuality so far from being self-consistent as sometimes to seem a bundle of opposite qualities capriciously united in a single person. He might with equal truth have been called, and he was in fact called, a conservative and a revolutionary. He was dangerously impulsive, and had frequently to suffer for his impulsiveness; yet he was also not merely prudent and cautious, but so astute as to have been accused of craft and dissimulation. So great was his respect for tradition that he clung to views regarding the authorship of the Homeric poems and the date of the books of the Old Testament which nearly all competent specialists have now rejected. So bold was he in practical matters that he carried through sweeping changes in the British const.i.tution, changed the course of English policy in the nearer East, overthrew an established church in one part of the United Kingdom, and committed himself in principle to the overthrow of two other established churches in other parts. He came near to being a Roman Catholic in his religious opinions, yet was for the last twenty years of his life the trusted leader of the English Protestant Nonconformists and the Scottish Presbyterians. No one who knew him intimately doubted his conscientious sincerity and earnestness, yet four-fifths of the English upper cla.s.ses were in his later years wont to regard him as a self-interested schemer who would sacrifice his country to his ambition. Though he loved general principles, and often soared out of the sight of his audience when discussing them, he generally ended by deciding upon points of detail the question at issue. He was at different times of his life the defender and the a.s.sailant of the same inst.i.tutions, yet scarcely seemed inconsistent in doing opposite things, because his methods and his arguments preserved the same type and colour throughout. Those who had at the beginning of his career discerned in him the capacity for such diversities and contradictions would probably have predicted that they must wreck it by making his purposes fluctuating and his course erratic. Such a prediction might have proved true of any one with less firmness of will and less intensity of temper. It was the persistent heat and vehemence of his character, the sustained pa.s.sion which he threw into the pursuit of the object on which he was for the moment bent, that fused these dissimilar qualities and made them appear to contribute to and increase the total force which he exerted.

The circ.u.mstances of Mr. Gladstone's political career help to explain, or, at any rate, will furnish occasion for the attempt to explain, this complexity and variety of character. But before I come to his manhood it is convenient to advert to three conditions whose influence on him was profound--the first his Scottish blood, the second his Oxford education, the third his apprenticeship to public life under Sir Robert Peel.

Theories of character based on race differences are dangerous, because they are as hard to test as they are easy to form. Still, we all know that there are specific qualities and tendencies usually found in the minds of men of certain stocks, just as there are peculiarities in their faces or in their speech. Mr. Gladstone was born and brought up in Liverpool, and always retained a touch of Lancashire accent. But, as he was fond of saying, every drop of blood in his veins was Scotch.

His father's family belonged to the Scottish Lowlands, and came from the neighbourhood of Biggar, in the Upper Ward of Lanarkshire, where the ruined walls of Gledstanes[63]--"the kite's rock"--may still be seen. His mother was of Highland extraction, by name Robertson, from Dingwall, in Ross-shire. Thus he was not only a Scot, but a Scot with a strong infusion of the Celtic element, the element whence the Scotch derive most of what distinguishes them from the northern English. The Scot is more excitable, more easily brought to a glow of pa.s.sion, more apt to be eagerly absorbed in one thing at a time. He is also more fond of exerting his intellect on abstractions. It is not merely that the taste for metaphysical theology is commoner in Scotland than in England, but that the Scotch have a stronger relish for general principles. They like to set out by ascertaining and defining such principles, and then to pursue a series of logical deductions from them. They are, therefore, bolder reasoners than the English, less content to remain in the region of concrete facts, more p.r.o.ne to throw themselves into the construction of a body of speculative doctrine.

The Englishman is apt to plume himself on being right in spite of logic; the Scotchman likes to think that it is through logic he has reached his results, and that he can by logic defend them. These are qualities which Mr. Gladstone drew from his Scottish blood. He had a keen enjoyment of the processes of dialectic. He loved to get hold of an abstract principle and to derive all sorts of conclusions from it.

He was wont to begin the discussion of a question by laying down two or three sweeping propositions covering the subject as a whole, and would then proceed to draw from these others which he could apply to the particular matter in hand. His well-stored memory and boundless ingenuity made the discovery of such general propositions so easy a task that a method in itself agreeable sometimes appeared to be carried to excess. He frequently arrived at conclusions which the judgment of the common-sense auditor did not approve, because, although they seemed to have been legitimately deduced from the general principles just enunciated, they were somehow at variance with the plain teaching of the facts. At such moments one felt that the man who was fascinating but perplexing Englishmen by his subtlety was not himself an Englishman in mental quality, but had the love for abstractions and refinements and dialectical a.n.a.lysis which characterises the Scotch intellect. He had also a large measure of that warmth and vehemence, called in the sixteenth century the _perfervidum ingenium Scotorum_, which belong to the Scottish temperament, and particularly to the Celtic Scot. He kindled quickly, and when kindled, he shot forth a strong and brilliant flame. To any one with less power of self-control such intensity of emotion as he frequently showed would have been dangerous; nor did this excitability fail, even with him, to prompt words and acts which a cooler judgment would have disapproved. But it gave that spontaneity which was one of the charms of his nature; it produced that impression of profound earnestness and of resistless force which raised him out of the rank of ordinary statesmen. The rush of emotion swelling fast and full seemed to turn the whole stream of intellectual effort into whatever channel lay at the moment nearest.

With these Scottish qualities, Mr. Gladstone was brought up at school and college (Eton and Christ Church) among Englishmen, and received at Oxford, then lately awakened from a long torpor, a bias and tendency which never thereafter ceased to affect him. The so-called "Oxford Movement," which afterwards obtained the name of Tractarianism and carried Newman and Manning, together with other less famous leaders, on to Rome, had not yet, in 1831, when Mr. Gladstone obtained his degree with double first-cla.s.s honours, taken visible shape, or become, so to speak, conscious of its own purposes. But its doctrinal views, its peculiar vein of religious sentiment, its respect for antiquity and tradition, its p.r.o.neness to casuistry, its taste for symbolism, were already in the air as influences working on the more susceptible of the younger minds. On Mr. Gladstone they told with full force. He became, and never ceased to be, not merely a High-churchman, but what may be called an Anglo-Catholic, in his theology, deferential not only to ecclesiastical tradition, but to the living voice of the Visible Church, revering the priesthood as the recipients (if duly ordained) of a special grace and peculiar powers, attaching great importance to the sacraments, feeling himself nearer to the Church of Rome, despite what he deemed her corruptions, than to any of the non-Episcopal Protestant churches. Henceforth his interests in life were as much ecclesiastical as political. For a time he desired to be ordained a clergyman. Had this wish, abandoned in deference to his father's advice, been carried out, he must eventually have become a leading figure in the Church of England and have sensibly affected her recent history. The later stages in his career drew him away from the main current of political opinion within that church. He who had been the strongest advocate of the principle of the State establishment of religion came to be the chief actor in the disestablishment of the Protestant Episcopal Church in Ireland, and a supporter of the policy of disestablishment in Scotland and in Wales. But the colour which these Oxford years gave to his mind and thoughts was never effaced.

While they widened the range of his interests and deepened his moral earnestness, they at the same time confirmed his natural bent toward over-subtle distinctions and fine-drawn reasonings, and put him out of sympathy not only with the att.i.tude of the average Englishman, who is essentially a Protestant--that is to say, averse to sacerdotalism, and suspicious of any other religious authority than that of the Bible and the individual conscience--but also with two of the strongest influences of our time, the influence of the sciences of nature, and the influence of historical criticism. Mr. Gladstone, though too wise to rail at science, as many religious men did till within the last few years, could never quite reconcile himself either to the conclusions of geology and zoology regarding the history of the physical world and the creatures which inhabit it, or to modern methods of critical inquiry as applied to Scripture and to ancient literature generally. The training which Oxford then gave, stimulating as it was, and free from the modern error of over-specialisation, was defective in omitting the experimental sciences, and in laying undue stress upon the study of language. A p.r.o.neness to dwell on verbal distinctions and to trust overmuch to the a.n.a.lysis of terms as a means of reaching the truth of things is noticeable in many eminent Oxford writers of that and the next succeeding generation--some of them, like the ill.u.s.trious F. D. Maurice, far removed from Cardinal Newman and Mr. Gladstone in theological opinion.

When, bringing with him a brilliant University reputation, he entered the House of Commons at the age of twenty-three, Sir Robert Peel was leading the Tory party with an authority and ability rarely surpa.s.sed in the annals of parliament. Within two years the young man was admitted into the short-lived Tory ministry of 1834, and soon proved himself a promising lieutenant of the experienced chief.

Peel was an eminently wary man, alive to the necessity of watching the signs of the times, of studying and interpreting the changeful phases of public opinion. Yet he always kept his own counsel. Even when he perceived that the policy he had hitherto followed would need to be modified, Peel continued to use guarded language and did not publicly commit himself to change till it was plain that the fitting moment had arrived. He was, moreover, a master of detail, slow to propound a plan until he had seen how its outlines were to be filled up by appropriate devices for carrying it out in practice.