The Life of William Ewart Gladstone Volume II Part 45

That the pamphlet should create intense excitement, was inevitable from the place of the writer in the public eye, from the extraordinary vehemence of the attack, and above all from the unquenchable fascination of the topic. Whether the excitement in the country was more than superficial; whether most readers fathomed the deep issues as they stood, not between catholic and protestant, but between catholic and catholic within the fold; whether in fastening upon the civil allegiance of English Romanists Mr. Gladstone took the true point against Vaticanism-these are questions that we need not here discuss. The central proposition made a cruel dilemma for a large cla.s.s of the subjects of the Queen; for the choice a.s.signed to them by a.s.suming stringent logic was between being bad citizens if they submitted to the decree of papal infallibility, and bad catholics if they did not. Protestant logicians wrote to Mr. Gladstone that if his contention were good, we ought now to repeal catholic emanc.i.p.ation and again clap on the fetters. Syllogisms in action are but stupid things after all, unless they are checked by a tincture of what seems paradox.(321) Apart from the particular issue in his Vatican pamphlet, Mr. Gladstone believed himself to be but following his own main track in life and thought in his a.s.sault upon "a policy which declines to acknowledge the high place a.s.signed to liberty in the counsels of Providence, and which upon the pretext of the abuse that like every other good she suffers, expels her from its system."

Among the names that he was never willing to discuss with me-Machiavelli, for instance-was Joseph de Maistre, the hardiest, most adventurous, most ingenious, and incisive of all the speculative champions of European reaction.(322) In the pages of de Maistre he might have found the reasoned base on which the ultramontane creed may be supposed to rest. He would have found liberty depicted less as a blessing than a scourge; even Bossuet denounced as a heretic with dubious chances of salvation, for his struggle on behalf of a national church against Roman centralisation; the old Greeks held up to odium as a race of talkers, frivolous, light, and born incorrigible dividers. In dealing with de Maistre, Mr. Gladstone would have had a foeman worthier of his powerful steel than the authors of the Syllabus, Schema, Postulatum, and all the rest of what he called the Vaticanism of 1870. But here, as always, he was man of action, and wrote for a specific though perhaps a fugitive purpose.

VI

(M166) At the end of the year the total number printed of the tract was 145,000, and of these 120,000 were in a people's edition. "My pamphlet,"

he tells Lacaita, "has brought upon me such a ma.s.s of work as I can hardly cope with, and I am compelled to do all things as succinctly as possible, though my work is with little intermission from morning till night. I agree with you that the pamphlet in the main tells its own story; and I am glad there is no need to select in a hurry some one to write on the difference between papism and Catholicism.... There is no doubt that the discussion opens, _i.e._ makes a breach in the walls of the papal theology, and it ought to be turned to account. But I shall have enough to do with all my hands, if I am to work properly through the task I have undertaken. Not, I trust, for long, for I think another pamphlet should suffice to end it on my side. But I am vexed that Manning (as if he had been pulled up at Rome), after having announced his formal reply six weeks ago, hangs fire and now talks of delaying it." The result, he a.s.sures Lord Granville (Nov. 25), "must be injurious to the pestilent opinions that have so grievously obtained the upper hand in that church, and to the party which _means_ to have a war in Europe for the restoration of the temporal power. To place impediments in their way has been my princ.i.p.al purpose."

He told Acton (Dec. 18), "When you were putting in caveats and warnings, you did not say to me, 'Now mind, this affair will absorb some, perhaps many, months of your life.' It has been so up to the present moment, and it evidently will be so for some time." With Acton he carried on elaborate correspondence upon some of the questions raised by the Syllabus, notably on the effect of the pope's disciplinary judgment on anglican marriages, converting them into relations that were not marriage at all. He fears that he has conceded too much to the papal party in not treating the Syllabus as _ex cathedra_; in allowing that the popes had been apt to claim dogmatic infallibility for wellnigh a thousand years; as to the ec.u.menicity of the Vatican council. Among other matters he was reading "the curious volumes of _Discorsi di Pio IX._, published at Rome, and he might find it his duty to write collaterally upon them." This duty he performed with much fidelity in the _Quarterly Review_ for January 1875.

He is active in interest about translations; keen to enlist auxiliaries in every camp and all countries; delighted with all utterances from Italy or elsewhere that make in his direction, even noting with satisfaction that the agnostic Huxley was warm in approval. "I pa.s.s my days and nights," he tells the Duke of Argyll (Dec. 19), "in the Vatican. Already the pope has given me two months of incessant correspondence and other hard work, and it may very well last two more. Nor is this work pleasant; but I am as far as possible from repenting of it, as no one else to whom the public would listen saved me the trouble. It is full of intense interest. Every post brings a ma.s.s of general reading, writing, or both. Forty covers of one kind or another to-day, and all my time is absorbed. But the subject is well worth the pains." The Italians, Lord Granville told him, "generally approved, but were puzzled why you should have thought it necessary."

Retorts and replies arose in swarms, including one from Manning and another from Newman. He was accused by some of introducing a Bismarckian _Kulturkampf_ into England, of seeking to recover his lost popularity by pandering to no-popery, of disregarding the best interests of the country for the sake of his own restoration to power.(323)

I have now finished reading-he said at the beginning of February-the 20th reply to my pamphlet, They cover 1000 pages. And I am hard at work preparing mine with a good conscience and I think a good argument. Manning has been, I think, as civil as he could. _Feb. 5._-All this morning I have had to spend in hunting up one important statement of Manning's which I am almost convinced is a gross mis-statement.... _Feb. 6._-Manning in his 200 pages has not, I venture to say, made a single point against me. But I shall have to show up his quotations very seriously. We have exchanged one or two friendly notes. 8.-Worked on Vaticanism nearly all day and (an exception to my rule) late at night.

14.-Eight hours' work on my proof sheets. 15.-Went through Acton's corrections and notes on my proofs. 19.-Worked much in evening on finishing up my tract, Dr. Dollinger's final criticisms having arrived. He thinks highly of the work, which he observes will cut deeper than the former one, and be more difficult to deal with. By midnight I had the revises ready with the corrections.

20.-Inserted one or two references and wrote "Press" on the 2nd revises. May the power and blessing of G.o.d go with the work.

The second tract was more pungent than the first, and it gave pleasure to an important minister abroad who had now entangled himself by Falk laws and otherwise in a quarrel with the papacy. "I have had a letter of thanks," Mr. Gladstone writes to Hawarden (March 6), "from Bismarck. This pamphlet is stouter, sharper, and cheaper than the last, but is only in its eleventh thousand, I believe." Among others who replied to _Vaticanism_ was Dr. Newman; he appended a new postscript of four-and-twenty pages to his former answer to the first of Mr. Gladstone's pamphlets. Its tone is courteous and argumentative-far too much so to please the ultras who had the pope's ear-and without the wild hitting that Mr. Gladstone found in Manning.

Newman wrote to thank him (Jan. 17, 1875) for a letter that he described as "forbearing and generous." "It has been a great grief to me," said Newman, "to have had to write against one whose career I have followed from first to last with so much (I may say) loyal interest and admiration.

I had known about you from others, and had looked at you with kindly curiosity, before you came up to Christ Church, and from the time that you were launched into public life, you have retained a hold on my thoughts and on my grat.i.tude by the various marks of attention which every now and then you have shown me, when you had an opportunity, and I could not fancy my ever standing towards you in any other relation than that which had lasted so long. What a fate it is, that now when so memorable a career has reached its formal termination [retirement from leadership], I should be the man, on the very day on which it closed, to present to you amid the many expressions of public sympathy which it elicits, a controversial pamphlet as my offering." But he could not help writing it, he was called upon from such various quarters; and his conscience told him that he who had been in great measure the cause of so many becoming catholics, had no right to leave them in the lurch, when charges were made against them as serious as unexpected. "I do not think," he concluded, "I ever can be sorry for what I have done, but I never can cease to be sorry for the necessity of doing it."

VII

(M167) This fierce controversial episode was enough to show that the habit and temperament of action still followed him in the midst of all his purposes of retreat. Withdrawal from parliamentary leadership was accompanied by other steps, apparently all making in the same direction.

He sold the house in Carlton House Terrace, where he had pa.s.sed eight-and-twenty years of work and power and varied sociability. "I had grown to the house," he says (April 15), "having lived more time in it than in any other since I was born, and mainly by reason of all that was done in it." To Mrs. Gladstone he wrote (Feb. 28):-

I do not wonder that you feel parting from the house will be a blow and a pang. It is nothing less than this to me, but it must be faced and you will face it gallantly. So much has occurred there; and thus it is leaving not the house only but the neighbourhood, where I have been with you for more than thirty-five years, and altogether nearly forty. The truth is that innocently and from special causes we have on the whole been housed better than according to our circ.u.mstances. All along Carlton House Terrace I think you would not find any one with less than 20,000 a year, and most of them with, much more.

He sold his collection of china and his Wedgwood ware.(324) He despatched his books to Hawarden. He can hardly have resolved on retirement that should be effective and complete, or else he must have arranged to quit the House of Commons. In his diary he entered (March 30, 1875):-

Views about the future and remaining section of my life. In outline they are undefined but in substance definite. The main point is this: that setting aside exceptional circ.u.mstances which would have to provide for themselves, my prospective work is not parliamentary. My ties will be slight to an a.s.sembly with whose tendencies I am little in harmony at the present time; nor can I flatter myself that what is called the public out of doors is more sympathetic. But there is much to be done with the pen, all bearing much on high and sacred ends, for even Homeric study as I view it, is in this very sense of high importance; and what lies beyond this is concerned directly with the great subject of belief.

To Mrs. Gladstone he wrote (May 19, 1875): "I am feeling as it were my way towards the purposes of the rest of my life. It will I dare say clear by degrees. For the general business of the country, my ideas and temper are thoroughly out of harmony with the ideas and temper of the day, especially as they are represented in London."

The movement of negation had been in full swing for a dozen years before the force and weight of it had, amid the stress and absorption of daily business, reached his inner mind. In May 1872, in a speech as member of the council of King's College-"averse from, and little used to platform speaking," as he described himself to Manning-he used some strong language about those who promulgate as science what is not science and as religion what is not religion; but he took care to sever himself from the recent Roman decrees, which "seemed much to resemble the proclamation of a perpetual war against the progress and the movement of the human mind."(325) In December 1872, he caused a marked sensation by an address at Liverpool, in which he spoke of Strauss's book on _New and Old Belief_.(326) He had become a member of the metaphysical society, where eminent representatives of every faith and of no faith discussed every aspect of the foundations of human creeds. He was of too masculine and energetic a cast of mind to feel mere shock as he listened to Huxley, Tyndall, Clifford, Harrison, firmly arguing materialism or positivism or agnosticism or other unhistoric forms. That his whole soul was energetically oppugnant, I need not say. His reverence for freedom never wavered. He wrote to an editor who had criticised his Liverpool address (Jan. 3, 1873):-

In the interest of my address, I wish to say that not a word to my knowledge fell from me limiting the range of free inquiry, nor have I ever supposed St. Paul to say anything so silly as "Prove all things: but some you must not prove." Doubtless some obscurity of mine, I know not what, has led to an error into which the able writer of the article has fallen, not alone.

To the Duke of Argyll he wrote:-

_Dec. 28, '72._-I have been touching upon deep and dangerous subjects at Liverpool. Whether I went beyond my province many may doubt. But of the extent of the mischief I do not doubt any more than of its virulence. All that I hear from day to day convinces me of the extension of this strange epidemic, for it is not, considering how it comes, worthy of being called a rational or scientific process. Be it however, what it may, we politicians are children playing with toys in comparison to that great work of and for manhood, which has to be done, and will yet be done, in restoring belief.

Sir Robert Morier sent him from Munich Frohschammer's reply to Strauss.

"If I understand him aright," said Mr. Gladstone, "he is a Unitarian, minus Miracle and Inspiration." The whole book seemed to him able, honest, and diligent:-

But, he adds, I am one of those who think the Christianity of Frohschammer (as I have described it) is like a tall tree scientifically prepared for the saw by the preliminary process, well known to wood-cutters, of clearing away with the axe all projecting roots, which as long as they remained rendered the final operation impossible. This first process leaves the tree standing in a very trim condition, much more mathematical in form, as it is more near a cylinder, than in its native state. The business of the saw, when the horse and the man arrive, is soon accomplished.

To his article on ritualism he prefixed as motto two short lines of Pindar, about days that are to come being wisest witnesses.(327) In spite of retreat, it was impossible that he should forget the vast responsibility imposed upon him, both by his gifts and by the popular ascendency into which they had brought him. His was not the retreat of self-indulgence, and the days that were to come speedily brought him duties that were to bear him far into regions of storm and conflict now unforeseen. Meanwhile, with occasional visits to Westminster, he lived even and industrious days at Hawarden, felling trees, working at Greek mythology and ethnology, delighting in the woods and glades of the park, above all delighting in the tranquillity of his "temple of peace." Besides being the bookroom of a student, this was still a far-shining beacon in the popular eye. If sages, scholars, heroes, saints, with time's serene and hallowed gravity looked upon him from their shelves, yet loud echoes sounded in his ear from roaring surges of an outer world-from turbid ebb and flow of all the struggle and clamorous hopes and half-blind mysterious instincts of the nations.

Chapter III. The Octagon.

It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.-EMERSON.

Near the end of the eighties, Mr. Gladstone built for himself a fire-proof room at the north-western corner of his temple of peace. In this Octagon-"a necessity of my profession and history"-he stored the letters and papers of his crowded lifetime. He estimated the "selected letters"

addressed to himself at sixty thousand, and the ma.s.s of other letters that found their way into the Octagon without selection, along with more than a score of large folios containing copies of his own to other people, run to several tens of thousands more. There are between five and six hundred holographs from the Queen, afterward designated by him in his will to be an heirloom. "It may amuse you," he told Lord Granville, who always wrote the shortest letters that ever were known, "to learn that your letters to me weigh fifteen pounds and a-half." Probably no single human being ever received sixty thousand letters worth keeping, and of these it is safe to say that three-fourths of them might as well have been destroyed as soon as read, including a certain portion that might just as well never have been either written or read. This slightly improvident thrift recalls the jealous persons who will not suffer the British Museum to burn its rubbish, on the curious principle that what was never worth producing must always be worth preserving.

(M168) As for Mr. Gladstone's own share, he explains his case in what he says (1865) to the widow of Mr. Cobden: "Of the kind of correspondence properly called private and personal, I have none: indeed for many long long years it has been out of my power, except in very few instances, to keep up this kind of correspondence." The exceptions are few indeed. Half of the contents of this crowded little chamber are papers of business,-nightly letters to the Queen, telling her what had gone on in the House and what sort of figure had been cut by its debaters, reports of meetings of the cabinet, memoranda for such meetings, notes for speeches, endless correspondence with colleagues, and all the other operations incident to the laborious machinery of government in the charge of a master engineer. In this region of his true calling, all is order, precision, persistency, and the firmness and ease of the strong. For many years in that department all was action, strength, success. Church leaders again contribute considerable piles, but these, too, mainly concern church business for the hour, and the business has now even for adherents naturally fallen out of memory. The more miscellaneous papers are different. There a long and strange procession flits before our eye-dreams, "little bustling pa.s.sions," trivialities, floating like a myriad motes into the dim Octagon. We are reminded how vast a s.p.a.ce in our ever-dwindling days is consumed by social invitations and the discovery of polite reasons for evading them. "Bona verba" is a significant docket prompting the secretary's reply. It is borne in upon us how grievously the burden of man's lot is aggravated by slovenly dates, illegible signatures, and forgetfulness that writing is something meant to be read. There is a mountain of letters from one correspondent so mercilessly written, that the labour of decyphering them would hardly be justified, even if one could hope to recover traces of the second decade of Livy or the missing books of the _Annals_ of Tacitus. Foreign rulers, Indian potentates, American citizens, all write to the most conspicuous Englishman of the time. In an unformed hand a little princess thanks him for a photograph, and says, "I am so glad to have seen you at Windsor, and will try and remember you all my life." There are bushels of letters whose writers "say all that they conscientiously can" for applicants, nominees, and candidates in every line where a minister is supposed to be able to lend a helping hand if he likes. Actors send him boxes, queens of song press on him lozenges infallible for the vocal cords, fine ladies dabbling in Italian seek counsel, and not far off, what is more to the point, are letters from young men thanking him for his generosity in aiding them to go to Oxford with a view to taking orders. Charles Kean, a popular tragedian of those times, and son of one more famous still, thanks Mr.

Gladstone for his speech at a complimentary dinner to him (March 1862), and says how proud he is to remember that they were boys at Eton together.

Then there are the erudite but unfruitful correspondents, with the melancholy docket, "_Learning thrown away_"; and charming professors of poetry-as though the alto should insist on singing the ba.s.so part-impressively a.s.sure him how dreadfully uneasy they are about the weakness of our army, and how horribly low upon the security of our Indian Empire.

(M169) Some have said that to peruse the papers of a prime minister must lower one's view of human nature. Perhaps this may partly depend upon the prime minister, partly on the height of our expectations from our fellow-creatures. If such a survey is in any degree depressing, there can be no reason why it should be more so than any other large inspection of human life. In the Octagon as in any similar repository we come upon plenty of baffled hopes, chagrin in finding a career really ended, absurd over-estimates of self, over-estimates of the good chances of the world, vexation of those who have chosen the wrong path at the unfair good luck of those who have chosen the right. We may smile, but surely in good-natured sympathy, at the zeal of poor ladies for a post for husbands of unrecognised merit, or at the importunity of younger sons with large families but inadequate means. Harmless things of this sort need not turn us into satirists or cynics.

All the riddles of the great public world are there-why one man becomes prime minister, while another who ran him close at school and college ends with a pension from the civil list; why the same stable and same pedigree produce a Derby winner and the poor cab-hack; why one falls back almost from the start, while another runs famously until the corner, and then his vaulting ambition dwindles to any place of "moderate work and decent emolument"; how new compet.i.tors swim into the field of vision; how suns rise and set with no return, and vanish as if they had never been suns but only ghosts or bubbles; how in these time-worn papers, successive generations of active men run chequered courses, group following group, names blazing into the fame of a day, then like the spangles of a rocket expiring. Men write accepting posts, all excitement, full of hope and a.s.surance of good work, and then we remember how quickly clouds came and the office ended in failure and torment. In the next pigeon-hole just in the same way is the radiant author's gift of his book that after all fell still-born. One need not be prime minister to know the eternal tale of the vanity of human wishes, or how men move,

Thundering like ramping hosts of warrior horse To throw that faint thin line upon the sh.o.r.e.(328)

Nor are things all one way. If we find Mr. Gladstone writing to the Queen of "the excellent parliamentary opening" of this man or that, who made the worst possible parliamentary close, there is the set-off of dull unmarked beginnings to careers that proved brilliant or weighty. If there are a thousand absurdities in the form of claims for place and honours and steps in the peerage, all the way up the ladder, from a branch post-office to the coveted blue riband of the garter, "with no infernal nonsense of merit about it," there are, on the other hand, not a few modest and considerate refusals, and we who have reasonable views of human nature, may set in the balance against a score of the begging tribe, the man of just pride who will not exchange his earldom for a marquisate, and the honest peer who to the proffer of the garter says, with grat.i.tude evidently sincere, "I regret, however, that I cannot conscientiously accept an honour which is beyond my deserts." Then the Octagon contains abundant material for any student of the lessons of a parliamentary crisis, though perhaps the student knew before how even goodish people begin to waver in great causes, when they first seriously suspect the horrid truth that they may not after all be in a majority. Many squibs, caricatures, and malicious diatribes, dated in Mr. Gladstone's own hand, find shelter. But then compensation for faintheartedness or spite abounds in the letters of the staunch. And these not from the party politicians merely. Mr. Gladstone stirred different and deeper waters. The famous fighting bishop, Phillpotts of Exeter, then drawing on towards ninety and the realms of silence, writes to him on the Christmas Day of 1863: "A Christian statesman is a rare object of reverence and honour. Such I entirely believe are you. I often remember the early days of my first intercourse with you. Your high principles gave an early dignity to your youth, and promised the splendid earthly career which you are fulfilling. I shall not live to witness that fulfilment." A whole generation later, General Booth wrote: "Throughout the world no people will pray more fervently and believingly for your continued life and happiness than the officers and soldiers of the salvation army." Here is Mr. Spurgeon, the most popular and effective of the nonconforming preachers and workers of the time, writing:-

I felt ready to weep when you were treated with so much contumely by your opponent in your former struggle; and yet I rejoiced that you were educating this nation to believe in conscience and truth.... I wish I could brush away the gadflies, but I suppose by this time you have been stung so often that the system has become invulnerable.... You are loved by hosts of us as intensely as you are hated by certain of the savage party.

And when Mr. Gladstone was to visit Spurgeon's tabernacle (Jan. 1882):-