The Real Gladstone Part 13

In her 'Memories of Old Friends' Miss Caroline Fox tells us she asked Carlyle, 'Is not Gladstone a man of principle?' 'I did hope well of him once,' replied Carlyle, 'in 1867, and so did John Stirling, though I heard he was a Puseyite and so forth . . . and so I hoped something might come of him; but now he has been declaring that England is in such a wonderfully prosperous state-meaning that it has plenty of money in its breeches pockets and plenty of beef in its great ugly belly. But that is not the prosperity we want, and so I say to him: "You are not the lifegiver to England. I go my way; you go yours."' Mr. Froude, in his 'Oceana,' testifies to Mr. Gladstone's unpopularity in the Colonies. At Melbourne, at the time of the Gordon catastrophe, he writes: 'They did not love him before, and had been at a loss to understand the influence which he had so long exercised. His mighty popularity must, they thought, now be at an end. It could not survive a wound so deadly in his country's reputation. They were deceived, it seems,' adds Mr. Froude, speaking for them and himself. 'Yet perhaps they were forming an opinion prematurely which will hereafter be the verdict of mankind. He, after all, is personally responsible more than any other man for the helpless condition into which the executive administration of the English empire seems to have fallen.' 'Oceana' was published in 1886.

'Gladstone,' writes Professor Fawcett, 'made the speech of the evening.

He is a fine speaker. He never hesitates, and his action and manner are admirable. In fact, in this respect he resembles Bright, but is far inferior to Bright, in my opinion, in not condensing his matter. Again, Gladstone is too subtle.' On more than one occasion Fawcett seems to have doubted the judgment of his leader.

Sir E. Watkin writes: 'Sir John A. Macdonald, then Mr. Macdonald, was once taken by me under the gallery, by special order of the Speaker, to hear a great speech of Mr. Gladstone, whom he had not heard before. When we went away I said: "Well, what do you think of him?" He replied: "He is a great rhetorician, but he is not an orator."

About twenty years ago Mr. Gladstone's future career as a Minister was predicted with singular accuracy by a very acute observer of men and things, who had held almost every possible office, from that of Ministerial Whip to Chancellor of the Exchequer and Secretary of State.

Observing from the Peers' Gallery Mr. Gladstone's mismanagement of public business when he led the House of Commons in Lord Russell's short-lived second Administration, he said, in effect: 'We are coming to new times.

Mr. Gladstone cannot manage the House of Commons as other Ministers have done, in the usual way, but he can force great measures through by bringing the pressure of outside opinion to bear upon it. This,' he added, 'is the way in which Mr. Gladstone will maintain himself in power.

We shall have one violent proposal after another, as the means by which Mr. Gladstone may gain or keep office.'

Mr. John Morley writes: 'He sometimes shows a singular difficulty in apprehending what will be the average judgment even on ordinary proceedings. He showed this in the mistake concerning Sir Robert Collier's hardly more than colourable qualification to be made a member of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. He showed it again in a blunder of much the same kind-the special pleader's kind-in the appointment to the Ewelme Rectory of a clergyman who could only by a strained interpretation of the usual rule be regarded as eligible. He showed it more than ever in his attempt to interpret away Lord (then Mr.) Odo Russell's meaning in the language addressed by him in 1870 to Prince Bismarck on the subject of Russia's action concerning the Black Sea clause of the Treaty of Paris, and averring the necessity-England's necessity-for going to war with Russia with or without allies. His hasty resignation of the leadership of the Liberal party in 1874 was a still more important ill.u.s.tration of his rather erratic judgment. The latest instance of it is his letter to Count Carophyl, which shows at the same time, we think, a singularly just appreciation of the diplomatic concessions he had gained, and a singularly inadequate one as to the importance of a proud and lofty tone as one who writes as a spokesman of a great people.'

Mr. Spurgeon, writing to a Cardiff Liberal who opposes Mr. Gladstone's Irish policy, says:

'As to Ireland, I am altogether at one with you; especially I feel the wrong proposed to be done to our Ulster brethren. What have they done to be thus cast off? The whole scheme is as full of dangers and absurdities as if it came from a madman, yet I am sure Mr. Gladstone is only doing justice, and acting for the good of all. I consider him to be making one of those mistakes which can only be made by great and well-meaning men.'

In a further deliverance on the question, 'in answer to many friends,'

and expressing himself as sorry to say what he does, liking to agree with Mr. Gladstone, Mr. Spurgeon says:

'We feel bound to express our great regret that the great Liberal leader should have introduced his Irish Bills. We cannot see what our Ulster brethren have done that they should be cast off. They are in great dismay at the prospect of legislative separation from England, and we do not wonder. They have been ever our loyal friends, and ought not to be sacrificed. Surely something can be done for Ireland less ruinous than that which is proposed. The method of pacification now put forward seems to us to be full of difficulties, absurdities, and unworkable proposals.

It is well meant, but even the best and greatest may err. We cannot look forward with any complacency to Ulster Loyalists abandoned, and an established Irish Catholic Church, and yet they are by no means the greatest evils which we foresee in the near future, should the suggested policy ever become fact.'

There was a brief intercourse between the two, creditable to each. In 1838 Macaulay writes: 'I found Gladstone in the throng, and I accosted him, as we had never been introduced to each other. He received my advances with very great _empress.e.m.e.nt_ indeed, and we had a good deal of pleasant chat.'

In 1839 appeared the celebrated work on 'The State in its Relations to the Church.' Macaulay bought it, read it, and wrote to Jeffery: 'The Lord hath delivered him into our hands. I see my way to a popular and at the same time gentleman-like critique.' Again: 'I do think I have disposed of all Gladstone's theories unanswerably, and that there is not a line of the paper even so strict a judge as Sir Robert Inglis would quarrel with as at all indecorous.' Again Macaulay says: 'I have received a letter from Mr. Gladstone, who in generous terms acknowledged, with some reservations, the fairness of the article. "In whatever you write," continues Gladstone, "you can hardly hope for the privilege of most anonymous productions; but if it had been possible not to recognise, I should have questioned your authorship in this particular case, because the candour and single-mindedness which it exhibits are, in one who has long been connected in the most distinguished manner with a political party, so rare as to be almost incredible. . . . In these lacerating times one clings to everything of personal kindness, and husbands it for the future; and if you will allow me, I shall earnestly desire to carry with me such a recollection of your mode of dealing with a subject on which the attainment of truth, we shall agree, materially depends on the temperament in which the search for it is inst.i.tuted and conducted."'

'How much,' writes Macaulay's biographer, 'this letter pleased Macaulay is evident by the fact of his having kept it unburned, a compliment which, except in this single instance, he never paid to any of his correspondents.' 'I have seldom,' he writes, in reply to Mr. Gladstone, 'been more gratified than by the very kind note which I have just received from you. Your book itself, and everything that I have heard about you-though almost all my information came, I must say, to the honour of our troubled times, from people very strongly opposed to you in politics-led me to regard you with respect and goodwill.' Again Macaulay wrote: 'I have no idea that he will ever acquire the reputation of a great statesman. His views are not sufficiently profound or enlarged for that.'

In 1853 Mrs. Beecher-Stowe, the far-famed author of 'Uncle Tom's Cabin,'

was in London, and dined with Mr. Gladstone at the Duke of Argyll's. She writes: 'He is one of the ablest and best men in the kingdom. It is a commentary on his character that, although one of the highest of the High Church, we have never heard him spoken of among the Dissenters otherwise than as an excellent and highly-conscientious man. For a gentleman who has attained such celebrity, both in politics and theology, he looks remarkably young. He is tall, with dark hair and eyes, a thoughtful, serious cast of countenance, and is easy and agreeable in conversation.'

When the Commercial Treaty with France was being discussed, Cobden wrote: 'Gladstone is really almost the only Cabinet Minister of five years'

standing who is not afraid to let his heart guide his head a little at times.' In 1860 Cobden wrote to Bright: 'I have told you before that Gladstone shows much heart in this business. . . . He has a strong aversion to the waste of money on our armaments. He has no cla.s.s feeling about the services. It is a pity that you cannot avoid hurting his feelings by such sallies. . . . He has more in common with you and me than any other man of his power in Britain.' Again: 'I agree with you that Gladstone overworks himself. But I suspect that he has a conscience, which is at times a troublesome partner for a Cabinet Minister. I make allowances for him, for I have never yet been able to define to my own satisfaction how far a man with a view to utility ought to allow himself to be merged in a body of men called a Government, or how far he should preserve his individuality.' In 1862 Mr. Cobden writes: 'Then Gladstone lends his genius to all sorts of expenditure which he disapproves, and devises schemes for raising money which n.o.body else would think of.' Cobden's last reference to Gladstone seems to have been at the time of the Danish War, when he once more laments the fact that Palmerston was still Premier and able to use all parties for his ends. Cobden writes: 'With Gladstone and Gibson for his colleagues, and with a tacit connivance from a section of the Tories, there can be no honesty in our party life.'

In an 'Essay on the British Parliament' a writer gives the prize of eloquence to Mr. Gladstone. It is, as he truly says, 'Eclipse first, and the rest nowhere.'

'Mr. Gladstone is an appreciated man, but he is not understood. Why not?

The first duty of a pretty woman, it has been said, is to let everyone know that she is pretty. Extending that kind of code to the other s.e.x, it is surely the first duty of an intellectual man to be intelligible.

In this age there is more of the suspicion that Mr. Gladstone is Talleyrandizing, and using his copious vocabulary for the concealment of thought. . . . He sees so much to say on all sides that he never clearly defines on which side lies the preponderating reasoning. He sums up controversies, rather than ranges himself in them. Debate is with him pure debate-a division appears, in his apprehension, rather to disfigure the proceedings. . . . If Premier himself, he could ally himself on one hand with Mr. Milner Gibson, and on the other with Mr. Spencer Walpole.

He is the _juste milieu_ of the day, and, biding his time, he offers to his contingent supporters "chameleon's diet-eating the air promise-crammed.'"-'Political Portraits,' by E. M. Whittey, published in 1851, p. 226.

Mr. Hill, in his 'Political Portraits,' writes: 'If Mr. Gladstone has to make up his mind while he is on his legs whether he will or will not answer a delicate question, he will express himself somewhat after this fashion: "The honourable gentleman, in the exercise of that discretion which I should be the last to deny to any member of this House, least of all to one so justly ent.i.tled to respect as my hon. friend, both on account of his high personal character and his long Parliamentary experience, has asked me whether the Government intend to bring in a Bill for the establishment of secular education in Ireland. Now, the discretion which I freely concede to the hon. gentleman in regard to the proposal of this question, I must, as a member of the Government, reserve to myself in considering whether or how I shall answer the question. I have to consider it not only in itself, but in regard to the time at which it is put, and the circ.u.mstances which surround the topic." Mr.

Gladstone then, perhaps, will say, what Lord Palmerston and Lord Russell would have said in a single sentence, that he must decline to answer it.'

Count Beust said: 'Independently of the demerits and dangers of Mr.

Gladstone's Home Rule scheme, he has, to my mind, little or no excuse for introducing it, and the parallel he draws between it and the dual system I inaugurated is utterly fallacious. Agrarian agitation is the plea which he uses for giving the Irish people a separate Parliament. I believe that the agrarian system in Ireland has for centuries been a bad one, and the land legislation of 1881-whatever people may think of it from a moral point of view-will unquestionably bring about good results.

But how these results are to be beneficially increased by giving Ireland a separate Parliament, and handing over its government to the avowed enemies of England, I cannot see, for one of its first acts would be to pa.s.s laws-virtually decrees of expulsion-against the landlords, to banish capital from the land, and materially to aggravate the general condition of the peasantry. As an old statesman, I should consider that the establishment of an Irish Parliament, raising, as it unquestionably would, aspirations on the part of the people to free themselves from the English yoke, and increasing the power of political agitators, is fraught with the gravest danger to England. I cannot understand Mr. Gladstone quoting Austria-Hungary as an example, for, independently of the great dissimilarity between the two systems, Mr. Gladstone forgets the condition of Austria when the Hungarian Parliament was established.

Austria had been beaten after a short but most disastrous war; Prussia had forbidden her any further interference in German affairs; the country was almost in a state of latent revolution; and an outbreak in Hungary, promoted by foreign agents and foreign gold, with Klapka doing Count Bismarck's bidding, was in the highest degree probable, and would, had it occurred, have led to almost overwhelming disaster. Knowing this, I felt bound to advise the Emperor to accede to the views of the Deak party, securing the solidarity of the empire by the guarantees afforded through the systems of delegations and joint budget. Mr. Gladstone cannot urge upon your House of Commons the same reasons for granting Home Rule to Ireland. England has not been, and I trust never will be, beaten as Austria had been beaten. No foreign foe has been dictating terms at the gates of London. No revolution is latent, and, a point also worthy of consideration, the population of Ireland is only about five millions, including those Protestants who are against the Home Rule scheme, as compared with what I should think was the wish of the great majority of the thirty millions composing the population of Great Britain; whereas the area of Hungary is greater than that of Austria proper, and its population is nearly one-half of the total population of the empire.'

Well might Count Beust ask: 'How can Mr. Gladstone use my dualistic system as a precedent for his scheme of Home Rule?'

Mr. Joseph Cowen said: 'The super-subtlety of his intellect, his faculty for hair-splitting, and his love of party warfare, create distrust, and generate that strong sense of resentment which exists towards him amongst a numerous section of the community. If he were not so subtle he would be more successful. A plain straight man like Lord Hartington, or Lord John Russell, or Sir Stafford Northcote, impresses the average Englishman more favourably than a curiously acute one like the Prime Minister. The popular impression-that he is an austere purist, and would not resort to any of the tricks or wriggles that characterize ordinary party leaders-is altogether a mistake. Those who are brought in contact with the Legislature know that he can resort to any of the devices of partizanship as readily as men who are popularly accounted his inferiors. It is this many-sidedness that leads to the different estimates that are formed of him. He cannot but have felt very keenly the death of Gordon, and the ma.s.sacre that ensued on the fall of Khartoum; yet I believe it is true that he went to the Criterion that night to see a very second-rate comedy. Ordinary persons having the responsibility that he had would not have been able to attend a theatre at such a time. The other day he laboured to impress the House of Commons with the extreme gravity of the position of affairs with Russia, and shortly after he went to see Miss Anderson play in "Pygmalion and Galatea." These sudden changes from seriousness to seeming frivolity foster that sense of distrust which a large number of sober Englishmen feel towards him. They cannot understand how a man engaged in such grave and weighty transactions can feel them very acutely when he can so easily throw them on one side and ignore the responsibilities they entail.'

'What a wonderful fellow Gladstone is, after all!' said Mr. Disraeli one day to McCullagh Torrens. 'He had a dreadful pa.s.sage, I hear, coming back from Ireland, and the moment he got on sh.o.r.e he began to make a speech to the Welshmen, telling them that they were all right, and to keep so.'

'What an ardent creature!' he exclaimed as Mr. Gladstone rushed past them to vote on another occasion when a division had been called for.

Under the date of June 8, 1885, Sir Stafford Northcote writes: 'The great debate came off to-night. . . . The result, a majority of twelve against Government, took the House greatly by surprise, though we ourselves had reckoned on a victory by three or four votes. About forty of the Parnellites went with us. The excitement on the declaration of the numbers was very great, and displayed itself rather indecorously.

Randolph Churchill jumped upon his seat and stood waving his pocket-handkerchief and shouting; Walter left the House with Algernon West, and said something about this being a curious end of Gladstone's career. West said: "Oh, this won't be the end now; you will see him come out more energetic than ever."' Sir Stafford Northcote, it may be stated, seems at times to have been a good deal bothered by Mr.

Gladstone. 'The most incredulous man I ever met!' he writes in his diary; 'keeps on shaking his head whenever I refer to him.' Again he writes: 'Gladstone had been dining out to meet the auth.o.r.ess of "Sister Dora"-Miss Lonsdale-who was very much alarmed by the rapidity and variety of his questions.' Again we find him complaining of Gladstone's habit of speaking late into the dinner-hour, so that his opponent must either speak to empty benches or forego the advantage of replying on the instant. After this, we must admit Mr. Gladstone's description of himself on one occasion as an 'old Parliamentary hand.'

'Mr. Gladstone Close at Hand' is the t.i.tle of Dr. Parker's article of gossip about Mr. Gladstone in the _New Review_. Once during his last Premiership Dr. Parker had the honour of breakfasting with Mr. Gladstone in Downing Street. After the meal Mr. Gladstone took down a book and read aloud an account of the circ.u.mstances under which Ireland was united to Great Britain. The account was so pathetic that the reader broke down and sobbed like a child. The ex-Premier permitted himself to be interviewed by means of a written catechism Dr. Parker sent him, and the answers are given in the article. Perhaps the way in which some of the questions are ingeniously not answered is as instructive as the direct replies to others. Asked whether, in his opinion, the Church of England had a firmer hold upon the people than ever it had, he said the Church suffered much from the general decline of what is called the prestige of churches, but had gained much from the transformation of the clergy. He does not believe in the interchange of pulpits. 'With all respect for those clergymen who are willing to preach in Nonconformist pulpits, I must say,' he replied, 'they do not seem to form a proper conception of their own Church.'

Dr. Parker, not content with prose, broke out on one occasion into song, as follows:

'An old Parliamentary Hand, Bearing an axe and raising a shield, Suspended the play with ominous words, "Mine is the Bill that holds the field."'

Lord Hatherley wrote in 1855: 'There is but one man of genius in the House, I think-Gladstone.'

Professor Tyndall wrote in a letter to the _Times_: 'Nature, which has so richly endowed him in many ways, has denied him the faculty of discerning the defeat which, even in the springtide of power and in the flush of victory, he has over and over again gratuitously wooed. In fact, he thinks too highly of himself and too meanly of his followers. Like Napoleon's generals, they are to him mere mud, to be shaped and moulded according to his imperial will. The dissatisfaction arising from his conduct is not a thing of yesterday. G.o.d, as Mahomed says, has made men to be men-not foxes and wolves; and the love of truth and abhorrence of untruth inherent in the healthy British character have gradually opened the eyes of Mr. Gladstone's most able and most independent supporters to his misdeeds. His errors of judgment, his political dishonesty, his impulsiveness and pa.s.sion, so often invoked for purposes both ungenerous and unwise, his tampering for party ends with the sustaining bulwarks of the State, his cruel indifference to the fate of men far n.o.bler than himself who had trustfully accepted from him tasks the faithful prosecution of which led them to a doom which he might have averted, but did not avert, the voice of many a brother's blood crying from the ground, had already shaken the faith of honest Liberals in their idol, when his flagitious Irish policy put an end to their forbearance and caused them to fling abroad the banner of revolt. The cream of the Liberal party have been the seceders here; the men who above all others adorned the Liberal ranks have been the first to renounce the heresies of their recreant leader. A former worshipper of the ex-Prime Minister said to me some time ago: "Never in the history of England was there such a consensus of intellect arrayed against a statesman as that now arrayed against Mr. Gladstone. What a fall!" . . . I see with concern letters from Liberal Unionists in the _Times_ which seem to indicate that the writers only deem it necessary for Mr. Gladstone to declare his abandonment of Home Rule to make all right again with the Liberals. But who is to guarantee Mr. Gladstone's good faith in this matter? He apostatized, for party purposes, when he became a Home Ruler, and he will apostatize again whenever it suits his ambition to do so. I should not be surprised if, some fine day, he took those simple Unionists at their word and made the required declaration. But could we be sure of him afterwards? For years, according to his own confession, he nourished in the dark corners of his mind this fungus of Home Rule, while to all his friends he seemed earnestly bent on extirpating it. A man of this stamp has no claim to the trust or credence of Liberal Unionists.'

Writing in 1879, Princ.i.p.al Tulloch says: 'I bought the _Observer_ on my way back, and read Gladstone's philippic against the Government. What a man he is! What avenging and concentrated pa.s.sion and power of hatred at the age of seventy! If he gets back to power, he will certainly play the devil with something.'

Dr. Talmage, who visited Mr. Gladstone at Hawarden a year or two since, sailed from Liverpool on the following day on his return to America.

While in the Holy Land he secured a large stone from Calvary, which is intended to form the corner-stone of his proposed new church in Brooklyn.

Dr. Talmage, who was interviewed after his visit to Hawarden, said he found Mr. Gladstone hale and hearty, and he ran up and down the hills like a boy. The ex-Premier was sanguine that his Home Rule scheme would succeed. Dr. Talmage asked if his faith in Christianity had wavered in his old age. Mr. Gladstone answered: 'The longer I live, the stronger grows my faith in G.o.d, and my only hope for the world is that the human race will be brought more into contact with Divine revelation.'

Mr. Mozley writes in his 'Reminiscences': 'As for Mr. Gladstone, I have for many years seldom thought of him without being reminded of the terrible lines in which Horace describes one of the attendants of that fickle G.o.ddess whom he believed to be the arbiter of civil strife. Often have I felt that I would rather grow cabbage, like Cincinnatus, than be the public executioner of usurpations, monopolies, and other abuses.

But, after indulging in the sentiment, I have swelled the triumph of justice, peace, and public good. I have generally been so unfortunate in the use of my electoral privileges that I have come to think them hardly worth the fuss made about them; but the most unfortunate use I ever made of them-so I felt at the time-was when I went up to Oxford to vote for Mr. Gladstone, and he was actually elected. It was some excuse for this ridiculous inconsistency that I scarcely ever looked into Mr. Gladstone's weekly organ-of course, he had not a weekly organ in any other sense than he had a tail to his coat-without seeing some very offensive and utterly untrue allusion to myself. . . . But now, what is the singular good fortune or providential protection I began with? Simply this: I never in all my life once saw Mr. Gladstone, from the morning I met him in Hurdis Lushington's room, three or four days after his arrival from Eton, till he was so good as to ask me to breakfast in June, 1882, and kindly suggest an alteration in my book. On the former occasion he had all the purple bloom and freshness of boyhood and the glow of generous emotion.'

Mr. Samuel Morley, M.P., wrote: 'I regard Mr. Gladstone as the greatest, purest, and ablest statesman of the present age, and of all ages or of any age. How great the sympathy during his recent illness throughout the whole civilized world! With what? Not with Mr. Gladstone as M.P. for Midlothian; not with Gladstone as Premier or statesman; but simply with Gladstone as the embodiment of the highest and purest aspirations of that patriotism which desires the best of all good things for the greatest number of our own fellow-countrymen, and that the countrymen of all other countries may partake in these good things also. His life, his health, his genius, his power, and influence are of more consequence to the country than all or any of the most pressing questions now before Parliament.'

No one, as was to be expected, has been more variously or idiotically censured or blamed than Mr. Gladstone. Considerable ingenuity has been displayed by more than one pious clergyman to show that he is the beast of Revelation. In the opinion of one of them-the Rev. Canon Crosthwaite, of Kildare-beheading is too good for Mr. Gladstone. He has 'bamboozled the House of Commons, and has persuaded it to rob G.o.d and put His patrimony into the Treasury of England. Ess.e.x lost his head for only talking to O'Neal across the river. What does not Mr. Gladstone deserve,' asks the Canon, in the _National Review_, 'for trafficking with Irish rebels and betraying to them all the rights of the British Crown?

Yet this spoiler of the Church is allowed to read lessons.' Another reverend, possibly a Dissenter, wrote to Mr. Gladstone to suggest that he would add to the services he has rendered religion by conducting a series of services in the Agricultural Hall. In reply, declining the suggestion, Mr. Gladstone wrote: 'It would expose me, with justice, to that charge of ostentation which some think already attaches to me.'

Actually a reverend gentleman compiled, under the head of 'Musical Evenings with the Great and Good,' a service of song. The directions are to open with the hymn, 'Hark, my soul! it is the Lord.' A footnote informs us that 'this hymn of Cowper's has been translated by Mr.

Gladstone into Italian.' The direct bearing of these facts is not at once apparent, but possibly enlightenment may arrive during the 'Prayer'

which is to follow. The first verse of the next hymn runs:

'Sing we a song of praise to-day For battles fought and victories won, For strength vouchsafed upon our way, And n.o.ble work our cause has done; For joy that cometh after tears, And harvests reaped for fifty years.'

Later on a kind of parenthetic observation runs, that 'Oxford is an ancient seat of learning, and may be the fountain of intellectual light; but it has ever been the home of political darkness and the defender of exclusive privilege.' As Mr. Gladstone's earlier political career is very sweepingly condemned, and the evil influences of the University deplored, it is to be presumed that the half-century of harvest is a small stretch of the exuberant poetic licence that Mr. Thoseby permits himself occasionally. Personal encouragement to Mr. Gladstone, however, is not wanting, and he is told to

'Hold on, my brother, hold on!

Hold on till the prize is won, Hold on to the plough, And weary not now, For the work is well-nigh done.'

A subsequent song informs him positively that