III. The Octagon…

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 mass 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 passions,” trivialities, floating like a myriad motes into the dim Octagon. We are reminded how vast a space 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 basso part—impressively assure 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 competitors 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 assurance 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 shore.(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 gratitude 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):—

I feel like a boy who is to preach with his father to listen to him. I shall try not to know that you are there at all, but just preach to my poor people the simple word which has held them by their thousands these twenty-eight years. You do not know how those of us regard you, who feel it a joy to live when a premier believes in righteousness. We believe in no man’s infallibility, but it is restful to be sure of one man’s integrity.

That admirable sentence marks the secret.

All the religious agitations of the time come before us. Eminent foreign converts from the Roman church still find comfort in warning this most unshaken of believers against “a superficial and sceptical liberalism.” Others, again, condemned for heresy hail him as “dear and illustrious master”—with no cordial response, we may surmise. Relying on Mr. Gladstone’s character for human-heartedness and love of justice, people submit to him some of the hard domestic problems then and so often forced upon the world by the quarrels of the churches. One lady lays before him (1879) with superabundant detail a case where guardians insisted on the child of a mixed marriage being brought up as a protestant, against the fervid wishes of the surviving parent, a catholic. Mr. Gladstone masters the circumstances, forms his judgment, elaborates it in a closely argued memorandum, and does not evade the responsibility of advising. In another of these instances the tragedy is reversed; the horrid oppression is perpetrated on the protestant mother by the catholic father, and here too it is Mr. Gladstone to whom the sufferer appeals for intercession.

His correspondents have not always so much substance in them. One lady of evangelical strain, well known in her time, writes to him about turbulence in Ireland on the last day of 1880. The private secretary dockets: “Wishes you a blessed new year; but goes on in a very impertinent strain attributing your ‘inaction’ in Ireland to unprincipled colleagues, and to want of heavenly guidance. Encloses suggestions for prayer.” In such instances, even when the appeal came near to raving, Mr. Gladstone whenever he thought the writer’s motives sincere, seems to have replied with patience, and at a length very different from the pithy brevity of the Iron Duke upon the like occasions. Sometimes we may assume that the secretary’s phlegmatic docket sufficed, as on an epistle thus described: “1. Sends review in —— on his book. 2. Would like you to read —— and —— (his poems). 3. Will send you soon his prose on ——. 4. Hopes you will not overwork yourself. 5. His children call you St. William.” Sometimes we know not whether it is simplicity or irony that inspires the grave politeness of his replies. He seems to be in all sincerity surprised at the view taken by somebody “of the reluctance of public men to hold interviews for unexplained and indefinite purposes, and their preference for written communications.” Somebody writes a pamphlet on points of the ministerial policy, and suggests that each member of the government might order and distribute a competent number of copies. Mr. Gladstone immediately indicates two serious difficulties, first that the ministers would then make themselves responsible for the writer’s opinion in detail no less than in mass, and second their intervention would greatly detract from its weight. Even importunity for a subscription never makes him curt: “I am sure you will not misconstrue me, when I beg respectfully to state that your efforts will stand better without my personal co-operation.”

(M170) The correspondence is polyglot. In one little bundle, Cavour writes in Italian and French; the Archbishop of Cephalonia congratulates him in Greek on the first Irish Land bill; and in the same tongue the Archbishop of Chios gives him a book on the union of the Armenian with the Anatolian communion; Huber regales him with the luxury of German cursivschrift. The archimandrite Myrianthes forwards him objects from the Holy Land. The patriarch of Constantinople (1896) sends greetings and blessings, and testifies to the bonds of fellowship between the eastern and anglican churches undisturbed since the days of Cyril Lukaris. Dupanloup, the famous Bishop of Orleans (1869), applauds the plan of Juventus Mundi, its grandeur, its beauty, its moral elevation; and proceeds to ask how he can procure copies of the articles on Ecce Homo, as to which his curiosity has been aroused. A couple of notes (1864 and 1871) from Garibaldi, the great revolutionist, are neighbours to letters (1851-74) from Guizot, the great conservative. Three or four lines in French from Garibaldi were given to Mr. Gladstone the day before leaving Cliveden and England (April 24, 1864): “In leaving you pray accept a word of recognition for all the kindness you have heaped upon me, and for the generous interest you have at all times shown for the cause of my country.—Your devoted G. GARIBALDI.” The other shorter still (1871) begs him to do something for a French refugee. Minghetti, Ricasoli, and others of that celebrated group commemorate his faithful and effective good will to Italy. Daniel Manin the Venetian thanks him in admirable English for some books, as well as for his energetic and courageous act in drawing a perfidious king (Naples) before the bar of public opinion. Manzoni gives to a friend a letter of introduction (1845), and with Italian warmth of phrase expresses his lively recollection of the day on which he made Mr. Gladstone’s acquaintance, and the admiration with which his name is followed. Mérimée, the polished and fastidious genius, presents to him a French consul at Corfu (1858) who in his quality of philhellene and hellenist desires ardently to make the acquaintance of Homer’s learned and eloquent commentator. Lesseps, whose hand gave so tremendous and impressive a turn to forces, policies, currents of trade, promises (1870) to keep an appointment, when he will have the double honour of being presented to the Princess Louise by a man so universally respected for the high services he has rendered to the Queen, to his country, and to the progress of the world.

If the language is polyglot, the topics are encyclopædic. Bishops send him their charges; if a divine translates a hymn, he submits it; if he hits upon an argument on the mysteries of the faith, or the vexed themes of theological debate, he despatches pages and pages to Hawarden, and receives page upon page in reply. Young authors, and especially young authoresses pestered him to review their books, though his patience and good nature make ’pester’ seem an inapplicable word. A Scotch professor for some reason or another copies out and forwards to him one of Goethe’s reflections and maxims:—

How may a man attain to self-knowledge? By Contemplation? certainly not: but by Action. Try to do your Duty and you will find what you are fit for. But what is your Duty? The Demand of the Hour.

As if of all men then living on our planet, Mr. Gladstone were not he to whom such counsel was most superfluous. He replies (Oct. 9, 1880), “I feel the immense, the overmastering power of Goethe, but with such limited knowledge as I have of his works, I am unable to answer the question whether he has or has not been an evil genius of humanity.”

(M171) In 1839 Spedding, the Baconian, to whom years later the prime minister proposed that he should fill the chair of history at Cambridge, wrote to him that John Sterling, of whom Mr. Gladstone already knew something, was prevented by health from living in London, and so by way of meeting his friends on his occasional visits, had proposed that certain of them should agree to dine together cheaply once a month at some stated place. As yet Sterling had only spoken to Carlyle, John Mill, Maurice, and Bingham Baring. “I hope,” says Spedding, “that your devotion to the more general interests of mankind will not prevent your assisting in this little job.” Mr. Gladstone seems not to have assisted, though his friend Bishop Wilberforce did, and fell into some hot water in consequence. A veteran and proclaimed freethinker sets out to Mr. Gladstone his own recognition of what ought to be a truism, that he is for every man being faithful to his faith; that his aggressive denial of the inspiration of the Bible did not prevent him from sending a copy in large type to his old mother to read when her eyes were dim; that he respected consolations congenial to the conscience. “I hope,” he says to Mr. Gladstone, “there is a future life, and if so, my not being sure of it will not prevent it, and I know of no better way of deserving it than by conscious service of humanity. The Universe never filled me with such wonder and awe as when I knew I could not account for it. I admit ignorance is a privation. But to submit not to know where knowledge is withheld, seems but one of the sacrifices that reverence for truth imposes on us.” The same correspondent speaks (1881) of “the noble toleration which you have personally shown me, notwithstanding what you must think seriously erroneous views of mine, and upon which I do not keep silence.” Mr. Gladstone had written to him six years before (1875): “Differing from you, I do not believe that secular motives are adequate either to propel or to restrain the children of our race, but I earnestly desire to hear the other side, and I appreciate the advantage of having it stated by sincere and high-minded men.” There is a letter too from the son of another conspicuous preacher of negation, replying to some words of Mr. Gladstone which he took to be disparaging of his parent, and begging him, “a lifelong idealist yourself,” to think more worthily and sympathetically of one whom if he had known he would have appreciated and admired.

A considerable correspondence is here from the learned Bishop Stubbs (1888) on the character of Bishop Fisher of Rochester, the fellow-sufferer of More; on the Convocation Act of 1531 and the other Convocation Acts of Elizabeth; on Father Walsh’s letters, and other matters of the sixteenth century. In fact, it is safe to assume that Mr. Gladstone has always some ecclesiastical, historical, theological controversy running alongside of the political and party business of the day. Nobody that ever lived tried to ride so many horses abreast. Another prelate puts a point that is worth remembering by every English school of foreign policy. “In 1879,” writes Bishop Creighton (Feb. 15, 1887), “when foreign affairs were much before the public, I suggested to a publisher a series of books dealing quite shortly and clearly with the political history and constitution of the chief states of Europe from 1815. I designed them for popular instruction, thinking it of great importance that people in general should know what they were talking about, when they spoke of France or Russia.... The result of my attempt was to convince me that our ignorance of the last sixty years is colossal.”

Lord Stanhope has been reading (1858) the “Tusculan Questions,” and confides to Mr. Gladstone’s sympathetic ear Cicero’s shockingly faulty recollection of Homer,—mistaking Euryclea for Anticlea, the nurse for the mother, and giving to Polyphemus a speech that Polyphemus never spoke. A bishop says Macaulay told him that one of the most eloquent passages in the English language is in Barrow’s Seventy-Fifth Sermon, on the Nativity—“Let us consider that the Nativity doth import the completion of many ancient promises....”(329) Letters abound and over-abound on that most movable of topics—“the present state of the Homeric controversy.” Scott, the lexicographer, sends him Greek epigrams on events too fugitive to be now worth recalling—discusses Homeric points, and while not surrendering at discretion, admits them worthy of much consideration. There are many pages from Thirlwall, that great scholar and enlightened man, upon points of Homeric ethnology, Homeric geography, and such questions as whether a line in the Iliad (xiv. 321) makes the mother of Minos to be a Phœnician damsel or the daughter of Phœnix, or whether it is possible to attach a meaning to ἐννέωρος that would represent Minos as beginning his reign when nine years old—a thing, the grave bishop adds, even more strange than the passion of Dante for Beatrice at the same age.

(M172) Huxley sends him titles of books on the origin of the domestic horse; Sir Joseph Hooker supplies figures of the girth of giant trees; the number of annual rings in a fallen stump which would seem to give it 6420 years; tells him how the wood of another was as sound after 380 years as if just felled. Somebody else interests him in Helmholtz’s experiments on the progression of the vibrations of the true vowel sounds. Letters pass between him and Darwin (1879) on colours and names for colours. Darwin suggests the question whether savages have names for shades of colours: “I should expect that they have not, and this would be remarkable, for the Indians of Chili and Tierra del Fuego have names for every slight promontory and hill to a marvellous degree.” Mr. Gladstone proposes to nominate him a trustee of the British Museum (April 1881), and Darwin replies, “I would gladly have accepted, had my strength been sufficient for anything like regular attendance at the meetings.” Professor Owen thanks him for the honour of Knight of the Bath, and expresses his true sense of the aid and encouragement that he has uniformly received from Mr. Gladstone throughout the course of the labours from which he is now retiring.

He corresponds with a learned French statesman, not on the insoluble Newfoundland problem, turning so much on the nice issue whether a lobster is a fish, and not on the vexed Egyptian question, but on the curious prohibition of pork as an article of food—a strange contradiction between the probable practice of the Phœnicians and that of the Jews, perpetuated in our times through all Mussulman countries, and a prohibition not to be explained on sanitary grounds, because to the present day Christians in the East all indulge in pork and are none the worse for it. A young member of parliament one night fell into conversation with him, as a branch from the subject of the eating of bovine flesh by the Greeks, on the eating of horseflesh, and the next day writes to mention to him that at a council in 785 with the Bishop of Ostia as president, it was decreed, “Many among you eat horses, which is not done by any Christians in the East: avoid this;” and he asks Mr. Gladstone whether he believed that by reason of the high estimation in which the Greeks held the horse, they abstained from his flesh. Mr. Gladstone (August 1889) replies that while on his guard against speaking with confidence about the historic period, he thought he was safe in saying that the Greeks did not eat the horse in the heroic period, and he refers to passages in this book and the other. “It was only a conjecture, however, on my part that the near relation of the horse to human feeling and life may probably have been the cause that prevented the consumption of horse-flesh.” In a further letter he refers his correspondent to the closing part of the Englishman in Paris for some curious particulars on hippophagy. Then he seems to have interested himself in a delicate question as to the personal claims of Socrates in the light of a moral reformer, and the sage’s accommodation of moral sentiment to certain existing fashions in Athenian manners. But as I have not his side of the correspondence, I can only guess that his point was the inferiority of the moral ideals of Socrates to those of Christ. Gustave d’Eichthal, one of the celebrated group of Saint-Simonians who mingled so much of what was chimerical with much that was practical and fruitful, draws the attention of Mr. Gladstone, statesman, philosopher, and hellenist, to writings of his own on the practical use of Greek, as destined to be the great national language of humanity, perhaps even within the space of two or three generations. Guizot begs him to accept his book on Peel; and thanking him for his article on the “Royal Supremacy” (Feb. 9, 1864), says further what must have given Mr. Gladstone lively satisfaction:—

Like you, I could wish that the anglican church had more independence and self-government; but such as it is, and taking all its history into account, I believe that of all the Christian churches, it is that in which the spiritual régime is best reconciled with the political, and the rights of divine tradition with those of human liberty.... I shall probably send you in the course of this year some meditations on the essence and history of the Christian religion. Europe is in an anti-Christian crisis; and having come near the term of life, I have it much at heart to mark my place in this struggle.

(M173) For some reason Henry Taylor encloses him (April 5, 1837) “a letter written by Southey the other day to a wild girl who sent him some rhapsodies of her writing, and told him she should be in an agony till she should receive his opinion of them.” This recalls a curious literary incident, for the “wild girl” was Charlotte Brontë, and Southey warned her that “literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life and ought not to be,” and yet his letter was both sensible and kind, though as time showed it was a bad shot.(330) Thackeray has been asked to breakfast but “I only got your note at 2 o’clock this afternoon, when the tea would have been quite cold; and next Thursday am engaged to lecture at Exeter, so that I can’t hope to breakfast with you. I shall be absent from town some three weeks, and hope Mrs. Gladstone will permit me to come to see her on my return.” Froude, who was often at his breakfasts, gives him a book (year doubtful): “I took the liberty of sending it you merely as an expression of the respect and admiration that I have felt towards you for many years,”—sentiments that hardly stood the wear and tear of time and circumstance.

In 1850 what Macaulay styles a most absurd committee was appointed to devise inscriptions for medals to be given to the exhibitors at the great world-show of next year. Its members were, besides Macaulay himself and Gladstone, Milman, Liddell, Lyttelton, Charles Merivale. Milman bethought him of looking into Claudian, and sent to Mr. Gladstone three or four alternative lines fished out from the last of the poets of Roman paganism. Macaulay had another idea;—

MY DEAR GLADSTONE,—I am afraid that we must wait till Thursday. I do not much, like taking words from a passage certainly obscure and probably corrupt. Could we not do better ourselves? I have made no Latin verses these many years. But I will venture. I send you three attempts:—

Pulcher et ille labor, pulchros ornare labores. Pulchrum etiam, pulchros palma donare labores. Pulchrum etiam, pulchris meritam decernere palmam.

You will easily make better. If we can produce a tolerable line among us, we may pretend, as Lardner did, that it is in Haphorstrus or Masenius.—Yours ever, T. B. MACAULAY.

Francis Newman, the cardinal’s high-minded and accomplished brother, writes to Mr. Gladstone (1878) in a strain of exalted recognition of his services to the nation, and quotes (a little oddly perhaps) the beautiful lines in Euripides, foretelling the approaching triumph of Dionysus over his mortal foe.(331)

The poets are not absent. Wordsworth, as we have already seen (i. p. 269 n.), sends to him at the board of trade his remonstrance and his sonnet on the railway into Windermere. Tennyson addresses to him for his personal behoof the sonnet upon the Redistribution bill of 1884—

“Steersman, be not precipitate in thine act Of steering ...”

and on a sheet of note-paper at a later date when Irish self-government was the theme, he copies the Greek lines from Pindar, “how easy a thing it is even for men of light weight to shake a state, how hard to build it up again.”(332) Rogers (1844) insists that, “if one may judge from experience, perhaps the best vehicle in our language for a translator of verse is prose. He who doubts it has only to open his Bible.... Who could wish the stories of Joseph and of Ruth to be otherwise than they are? Or who but would rejoice if the Iliad and the Odyssey were so translated? I once asked Porson to attempt it, and he seemed to like the idea, but said that it would be a labour of ten or twelve years.”

(M174) There was one true poet, and not only a poet but a man, as we now see, with far truer insight into the intellectual needs of his countrymen than any other writer of the closing quarter of the century, who is sometimes supposed to have been overlooked by Mr. Gladstone. And here in the Octagon is Matthew Arnold’s letter soliciting his recommendation (1867) for the strictly prosaic post of librarian of the House of Commons, which happily he did not obtain. The year before, Arnold had wished to be made a commissioner under the Endowed Schools Act, but a lawyer was rightly thought necessary by Lord Russell or his advisers, and there is no good reason to suppose that Mr. Gladstone meddled either way. He was responsible in 1882 for a third disappointment, but here again it has been truly said that to appoint to the charity commission a man of sixty, who had no intimate knowledge of charity law, and who had recently in his articles irritated all the nonconformists in England by his ironical references to dissent and dissenters, would not have been conducive to the efficient transaction of public business. A year later Mr. Gladstone proffered him, and his friends made him accept, a civil list pension of two hundred and fifty pounds a year, “in public recognition of service to the poetry and literature of England.” Arnold in a letter here tries to soften Mr. Gladstone’s heart on the subject of copyright, on which, as I often made bold to tell him, he held some rather flagrant heresies. Here the poet begs the minister to consider whether an English author ought not to have property in his work for a longer time than he has now. “For many books the sale begins late, the author has to create, as Wordsworth said, the taste by which he is to be enjoyed. Such an author is surely the very man one would wish to protect.” I fear he made no convert.

Another poet, with no eye on patronage or pension, hopes to be permitted to say (1869), “how very many of your countrymen whom you have forgotten or never saw, follow your noble and courageous development of legislation with the same personal devotion, gratitude, and gladness that I feel.” Then five years later he still assures him that among men of letters he may have antagonists but he cannot have enemies—rather a fine distinction, with painfully little truth in it as things happened.

To Miss Martineau, who had done hard work in more than one good cause, he proposes a pension, which she honourably declines: “The work of my busy years has supplied the needs of a quiet old age. On the former occasions of my declining a pension I was poor, and it was a case of scruple (possibly cowardice). Now I have a competence, and there would be no excuse for my touching the public money. You will need no assurance that I am as grateful for your considerate offer, as if it had relieved me of a wearing anxiety.”

In 1885 he wrote to Mr. Watts, the illustrious painter, to request, with the sanction of the Queen, that he would allow himself to be enrolled among the baronets of the United Kingdom. “It gives me lively pleasure,” he said, “to have the means of thus doing honour to art in the person of so distinguished a representative of the noble pursuit.” Mr. Watts, in words that I am permitted to transcribe, declined; as he did also a second time in 1894 when the proposal was repeated.

While I feel very strongly, and acknowledge with sincere gratitude, that you have honoured in my person, making me a sort of standard bearer, the pursuit of art for its own sake, and have so afforded an enduring encouragement to those who, like myself, may be willing to relinquish many good and tangible things for purposes believed to be good, but not likely to meet with general sympathy, still, I feel it would be something like a real disgrace to accept for work merely attempted, reward and payment only due to work achieved.... I should have the ghost of the Lycian chief reproaching me in my dreams! Also the objects to which I wish to dedicate the rest of my life will best be carried out in quiet and obscurity, so please do not be vexed with me if I again beg respectfully and gratefully to decline.... Sarpedon’s words(333) always ring in my ears, and so I think you will understand the things I cannot attempt to say.... I am so far from undervaluing distinctions that I should like to be a Duke, and deserve the title.... Still, it is true that, living mainly in a world of my own, my views are narrowed (I hope I may also say simplified), till a sense of the four great conditions which to my mind comprise all that can be demonstrated of our existence, Life and Death, Light and Darkness, so dominate my mental vision that they almost become material entities and take material forms, dwarfing and casting into shadow ordinary considerations. Over the two first, human efforts broadly speaking avail nothing; but we have it in our power to modify the two last (of course I include in the terms all that belongs to good and bad, beauty and ugliness). Labouring by the side of the poet and the statesman, the artist may deal with those great issues, and here I think the art of England has been at fault.... Your overestimate of my work has hastened the execution of an intention I have long had, and which indeed amounts to retirement from the ranks of professional men. I have concluded, dating from June, to undertake no portraits and accept no commissions, but, contented with the little I have to live upon, work only with the idea of making my efforts worthy, at least as efforts, of the nation’s acceptance alike before and after my death.

“You have adopted a resolution,” said Mr. Gladstone in his reply, “of the kind that makes the nineteenth century stare or blink, as those blink who stand in a great brightness and have not eyes for it. The course that you purpose is indeed a self-denying, an unworldly, and a noble one.”

(M175) One packet touches a matter that at the moment did Mr. Gladstone some harm in the judgment of men whose good opinion was worth having. In 1873 John Stuart Mill died, and a public memorial was proposed. Mr. Gladstone intimated that he was willing to co-operate. Then a liberal clergyman attacked the obituary notice in the Times as too frigid, and the author of the notice retorted by tales of Mill’s early views on the question of population. He was well acquainted with Mr. Gladstone, and set busily to work to persuade him that Mill in his book on political economy advocated obnoxious checks, that he was vaguely associated with American publications on the matter, and that he did not believe in God, which was not to the point. Mr. Gladstone passed on this tissue of innuendo to the Duke of Argyll. The Duke reported that he had consulted men thoroughly conversant both with Mill and his writings; that he was assured no passage could bear the construction imputed, and that the places which he had himself looked into, clearly referred to prudential restraints on marriage. Certainly a school of social economy that deals only with foreign exchanges and rent and values and the virtues of direct taxes and indirect, and draws the curtain around the question of population, must be a singularly shallow affair. The Duke of Argyll manfully brushed wasps aside, and sent his subscription. So did men as orthodox as Lord Salisbury, and as cautious as Lord Derby. Mr. Gladstone on the other hand wrote to the promoters of the memorial: “In my view this painful controversy still exists. I feel that it is not possible for me, situated as I am at the present time, to decide it or to examine it with a view to decision. The only course open to me is to do no act involving a judgment either way, and, therefore, while I desire to avoid any public step whatever, I withdraw from co-operation, and request that my name may be no further mentioned.” Unfortunately, the withdrawal of such a name could not be other than a public step. To say, moreover, that the controversy still existed, was to go a longish way in public opinion towards deciding it. The curious thing is that Mr. Gladstone had known Mill so well—his singleminded love of truth, his humanity, his passion for justice—as to call him by the excellent name of “the Saint of Rationalism.” A saint of any sort is surely uncommon enough in our fallen world, to claim an equity that is not refused to sinners. Yet fifteen years later he wrote a letter doing Mill more justice. “Of all the motives, stings, and stimulants,” he wrote, “that reach men through their egoism in parliament, no part could move or even touch him. His conduct and his language were in this respect a sermon. Again, though he was a philosopher he was not, I think, a man of crotchets. He had the good sense and practical tact of politics, together with the high independent thought of a recluse.”(334)

A learned Unitarian (Beard) sends him a volume of Hibbert lectures. “All systems,” Mr. Gladstone writes in acknowledging it, “have their slang, but what I find in almost every page of your book is that you have none.” He complains, however, of finding Augustine put into a leash with Luther and Calvin. “Augustine’s doctrine of human nature is substantially that of Bishop Butler; and he converted me about forty-five years ago to Butler’s doctrine.” Of far earlier date than this (1839) is an interesting letter from Montalembert:—

London, July 4, 1839.—It seems to me that amidst many dissentimens, and although you pass generally in this country for an enemy to my faith and my church, there is a link between us; since admitting every superiority of talent and influence on your side, we stand on the same ground in public life—that of the inalienable rights of spiritual power. I have, therefore, received your book with gratitude, and read it with the sincerest interest. I now take the liberty of offering you a portion of the work I have published, not on matter of actual controversy, but on an unknown and delightful subject of religious history. If you ever find leisure enough to throw a glance on the History of St. Elizabeth, and more particularly on the Introduction, which is a rapid résumé of the thirteenth century, you will perhaps gain some slight information on what the Rev. Hugh McNeile so appropriately called “the filth and falsehood of the middle ages,” in his splendid speech on church extension, at Freemasons’ Hall a few days ago. And allow me to add, my dear sir, with the utter frankness which I cannot divest myself of, that what you seem to me to stand the most in need of at present, is a deeper and more original knowledge of the laws and events of Catholic Europe.

Then come others, recalling illustrious names and famous events in English history. There are a dozen letters of business (1837-1846) from the Duke of Wellington. The reader may be curious to see the earliest communication between two such men—

London, Nov. 27, 1837.—I have by accident mislaid the petition from the Cape of Good Hope, if it was ever sent me. But I shall be happy to see you and converse with you upon the subject; and consider whether it is desirable or possible that I can bring the subject before the consideration of the House of Lords at the same time that you will in the H. of C. I would propose to you to come here, or that I should go to you to-morrow, Tuesday, at any hour you will name.—I have the honour to be, dear sir, your most faithful, humble servant,

WELLINGTON.(335)

Once he uses his well-known laconic style—

Strathfieldsaye, January 3, 1842.—F. M. the Duke of Wellington presents his compliments to Mr. Gladstone. He has received Mr. Gladstone’s letter of the 1st inst. He begs leave to decline to interfere in any manner in the matter to which Mr. Gladstone’s letter refers.

What the matter was we cannot tell; but we may guess that it was perhaps less tersely propounded. The rest touch military affairs in the colonies, and are now of no concern.

Here we have a last vision of one of the forlorn shadows of ruined power:—

Chislehurst, le 5 Juillet, 1871.—Monsieur le Ministre, j’ai reçu la copie du nouveau Ballot bill que votre excellence a bien voulu m’envoyer et je profite de cette occasion pour vous dire combien je suis touché des marques d’attention que je reçois en Angleterre. Je vous prie de recevoir l’assurance de mes sentimens de haute estime.

NAPOLÉON.

Notes from and to his illustrious adversary in the stirring arena of public life are not without a delicate accent of pathos and sincerity. The first was on some occasion of Mrs. Disraeli’s illness,(336) the second on her death:—

Nov. 20, 1867.—I was incapable yesterday of expressing to you how much I appreciate your considerate sympathy. My wife had always a strong personal regard for you, and being of a vivid and original character, she could comprehend and value your great gifts and qualities. There is a ray of hope under this roof since the last four and twenty hours: round your hearth, I trust, health and happiness will be ever present.—Yours sincerely, B. DISRAELI.

Six years later when Lady Beaconsfield died, Mr. Gladstone wrote (Jan. 19, 1873):—

DEAR MR. DISRAELI,—My reluctance to intrude on the sacredness and freshness of your sorrow may now, I think, properly give way to a yet stronger reluctance to forego adding our small but very sincere tribute of sympathy to those abundant manifestations of it which have been yielded in so many forms. You and I were, as I believe, married in the same year. It has been permitted to both of us to enjoy a priceless boon through a third of a century. Spared myself the blow which has fallen on you, I can form some conception of what it must have been and must be. I do not presume to offer you the consolation which you will seek from another and higher quarter. I offer only the assurance which all who know you, and all who knew Lady Beaconsfield, and especially those among them who like myself enjoyed for a length of time her marked, though unmerited regard, may perhaps tender without impropriety, the assurance that in this trying hour they feel deeply for you and with you.—Believe me, sincerely yours,

W. E. GLADSTONE.

Hughenden Manor, Jan. 24, 1873.—DEAR MR. GLADSTONE,—I am much touched by your kind words in my great sorrow. I trust, I earnestly trust, that you may be spared a similar affliction. Marriage is the greatest earthly happiness, when founded on complete sympathy. That hallowed lot was mine, and for a moiety of my existence; and I know it is yours.—With sincere regard, D.

A last note, with the quavering pen-strokes of old age (Nov. 6, 1888), comes from the hand, soon to grow cold, of one who had led so strange a revolution, and had stood for so much in the movement of things that to Mr. Gladstone were supreme:—

It is a great kindness and compliment your wishing to see me. I have known and admired you so long. But I cannot write nor talk nor walk, and hope you will take my blessing, which I give from my heart.—Yours most truly, JOHN H. CARD. NEWMAN.

So the perpetual whirl of life revolves, “by nature an unmanageable sight,” but—

Not wholly so to him who looks In steadiness; who hath among least things An under-sense of greatest; sees the parts As parts, but with a feeling of the whole.(337)

Such steadiness, such under-sense and feeling of the whole, was Mr. Gladstone’s gift and inspiration, never expending itself in pensive musings upon the vain ambitions, illusions, cheats, regrets of human life—such moods of half-morbid moralising were not in his temperament—but ever stirring him to duty and manful hope, to intrepid self-denial and iron effort.

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IV. Eastern Question Once More. (1876-1877)

The dead have been awakened—shall I sleep? The world’s at war with tyrants—shall I crouch? The harvest’s ripe—and shall I pause to reap? I slumber not—the thorn is in my couch: Each day a trumpet soundeth in mine ear, Its echo in my heart.

—BRYON.

I

Preserved in the Octagon is a large packet of notes on “Future Retribution,” and on them is the docket, “From this I was called away to write on Bulgaria.” In the spring of 1876 the Turkish volcano had burst into flame. Of the Crimean war the reader has already seen enough and too much.(338) Its successes, in Mr. Gladstone’s words, by a vast expenditure of French and English life and treasure, gave to Turkey, for the first time perhaps in her bloodstained history, twenty years of a repose not disturbed either by herself or by any foreign power. As Cobden and Bright had foreseen, as even many European statesmen who approved the war on grounds of their own had foreseen, Turkish engagements were broken, for this solid reason if for no other that Turkey had not in the resources of her barbaric polity the means to keep them.

Fierce revolt against intolerable misrule slowly blazed up in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and a rising in Bulgaria, not dangerous in itself, was put down by Turkish troops despatched for the purpose from Constantinople, with deeds described by the British agent who investigated them on the spot, as the most heinous crimes that had stained the history of the century. The consuls of France and Germany at Salonica were murdered by the Turkish mob. Servia and Montenegro were in arms. Moved by these symptoms of a vast conflagration, the three imperial courts of Russia, Austria, and Germany agreed upon an instrument imposing on the Turk certain reforms, to be carried out under European supervision. To this instrument, known as the Berlin memorandum, England, along with France and Italy, was invited to adhere (May 13). The two other Powers assented, but Mr. Disraeli and his cabinet refused,—a proceeding that, along with more positive acts, was taken by the Turk and other people to assure the moral support of Great Britain to the Ottoman, and probably to threaten military support against the Russian.

(M176) This rejection of the Berlin memorandum in May marked the first decisive moment in British policy. The withdrawal of England from the concert of Europe, the lurid glare of the atrocities in Bulgaria, and his abiding sense of the responsibility imposed upon us by the Crimean war and all its attendant obligations, were the three main elements in the mighty storm that now agitated Mr. Gladstone’s breast. Perhaps his sympathies with the Eastern church had their share. In a fragment of reminiscence twenty years after, he says:—

When, in 1876, the eastern question was forced forward by the disturbances in the Turkish empire, and especially by the cruel outrages in Bulgaria, I shrank naturally but perhaps unduly from recognising the claim they made upon me individually. I hoped that the ministers would recognise the moral obligations to the subject races of the east, which we had in honour contracted as parties to the Crimean war and to the peace of Paris in 1856. I was slow to observe the real leanings of the prime minister, his strong sympathy with the Turk, and his mastery in his own cabinet. I suffered others, Forster in particular, to go far ahead of me. At the close of the session [1876] a debate was raised upon the subject, and I had at length been compelled to perceive that the old idol was still to be worshipped at Constantinople, and that, as the only person surviving in the House of Commons who had been responsible for the Crimean war and the breaking of the bulwark raised by the treaty of Kainardji on behalf of the eastern Christians, I could no longer remain indifferent. Consequently in that debate Mr. Disraeli had to describe my speech as the only one that had exhibited a real hostility to the policy of the government. It was, however, at that time an opposition without hope. I went into the country, and had mentally postponed all further action to the opening of the next session, when I learned from the announcement of a popular meeting to be held in Hyde Park that the question was alive.(339) So I at once wrote and published on the Bulgarian case. From that time forward, till the final consummation in 1879-80, I made the eastern question the main business of my life. I acted under a strong sense of individual duty without a thought of leadership; nevertheless it made me again leader whether I would or no. The nation nobly responded to the call of justice, and recognised the brotherhood of man. But it was the nation, not the classes. When, at the close of the session of 1876, there was the usual dispersion in pursuit of recreation, I thought the occasion was bad. It was good, for the nation did not disperse and the human heart was beating. When the clubs refilled in October, the Turkish cause began again to make head. Then came a chequered period, and I do not recollect to have received much assistance from the “front bench.” Even Granville had been a little startled at my proceedings, and wished me to leave out the “bag and baggage” from my pamphlet.

Before the end of the session of 1876 Mr. Disraeli quitted the House of Commons and became the Earl of Beaconsfield. Lord Granville informed Mr. Gladstone, on the authority of a high personage, that Disraeli had said to the Queen he must resign; “that the peerage was then suggested; that at first he said, ‘Yes, but accompanied with resignation,’ but was told that in the present state of Europe that was impossible.” In reporting to Sir Arthur Gordon, then abroad, what was not merely a piece of news but an event, Mr. Gladstone says (Aug. 16):—

Disraeli assumes his earldom amidst loud acclaims. I had better be mute about him and his influence generally, except as to a full acknowledgment of his genius and his good points of character. His government is supposed now to stand mainly upon its recent foreign policy: the most selfish and least worthy I have ever known. Whatever was open to any degree of exception in Palmerston, has this year received a tenfold development in Disraeli. Derby’s influence, I think, has been for good; but too little of it.

To the Duke of Argyll a couple of days before, he had written:—

I am entirely in harmony with you as to your view of the eastern policy. It has been depressing and corrupting to the country; a healthier air has been generated by indignation at the Bulgarian massacres, which have thrown us back on our rather forgotten humanity. I hope the subject will not slumber through the recess. Dizzy’s speech (so I call him with all due respect to the peerage) in the Turkish debate gave me a new light on his views. He is not quite such a Turk as I had thought. What he hates is Christian liberty and reconstruction. He supports old Turkey, thinking that if vital improvements can be averted, it must break down; and his fleet is at Besika Bay, I feel pretty sure, to be ready to lay hold of Egypt as his share. So he may end as the Duke of Memphis yet.

II

Then came the pamphlet. The story of this memorable publication is told in the diary:—

Aug. 28, 1876.—Church 8-½ A.M. Worked on a beginning for a possible pamphlet on the Turkish question. I stupidly brought on again my lumbago by physical exertion. Was obliged to put off my pamphlet. Read The Salvation of all Men ... 29.—Kept my bed long. Wrote to Lord Granville, etc. ... and as a treat began Waverley once more. Lumbago bad. 30.—Much bed; forswear all writing. Read St. Thomas Aquinas on the Soul.... Waverley. A snug evening in the Temple of Peace. 31.—Kept my bed till four, and made tolerable play in writing on Bulgarian horrors. Sept. 1.—Wrote [16 letters]. Again worked hard in bed and sent off more than half to the printers. Read Waverley. Short drive with C. 2.—This day I wrote again a good piece of the pamphlet in bed, but improved considerably. Rose at four. Read Waverley in the evening. 3.—Hawarden Church 11 A.M. and 6-½ P.M. Wrote [16 letters]. Off at 10.15 P.M. for London. 4.—Reached 18 C.H.T. at five in the morning by limited mail; bed till nine. Saw Lord Granville, Mr. Delane, Sir A. Panizzi, Mr. Clowes, Messrs. Murray, the American minister. In six or seven hours, principally at the British Museum, I completed my MS., making all the needful searches of papers and journals. Also worked on proof sheets.

To Mrs. Gladstone.—We had an interesting little party at Granville’s. I had a long talk with Delane. We, he and I, are much of one mind in thinking the Turks must go out of Bulgaria, though retaining a titular supremacy if they like. Between ourselves, Granville a little hangs back from this, but he could not persuade me to hold it back.

5.— ... Saw Lord Granville, Lord Hartington.... Finished the correction of revises before one, discussing the text with Lord Granville and making various alterations of phrase which he recommended. At seven I received complete copies. We went to the Haymarket theatre. Arranged my papers after this, and sent off copies in various directions.

(M177) The pamphlet spread like fire.(340) Within three or four days of its first appearance forty thousand copies had gone. It was instantly followed up by a tremendous demonstration among his constituents. “Sept. 9, 1876.—Thought over my subject for Blackheath. Off at two. A very large meeting. The most enthusiastic far that I ever saw. Spoke over an hour.” This is his very prosaic story of the first of those huge and excited multitudes of which for months and years to come he was to confront so many. The pamphlet and the Blackheath speech were his rejoinder to the light and callous tones of Mr. Disraeli, and the sceptical language of his foreign secretary, “I have a strong suspicion,” he told the Duke of Argyll, who was a fervent sympathiser, “that Dizzy’s crypto-Judaism has had to do with his policy. The Jews of the east bitterly hate the Christians; who have not always used them well.” This suspicion was constant. “Disraeli,” he said to Mr. Gladstone, “may be willing to risk his government for his Judaic feeling,—the deepest and truest, now that his wife has gone, in his whole mind.”

The tract beats with a sustained pulse and passion that recall Burke’s letters on the Regicide Peace. The exhortation against moral complicity with “the basest and blackest outrages upon record within the present century, if not within the memory of man”; the branding of the Turkish race as “the one great anti-human specimen of humanity”; the talk of “fell satanic orgies”; the declaration that there was not a criminal in a European gaol nor a cannibal in the South Sea Islands, whose indignation would not rise at the recital of that which had been done, which remained unavenged, which had left behind all the foul and all the fierce passions that produced it, and might again spring up in another murderous harvest, from the soil soaked and reeking with blood, and in the air tainted with every imaginable deed of crime and shame,—all this vehemence was hailed with eager acclamation by multitudes who felt all that he felt, and found in his passionate invective words and a voice. Mr. Gladstone was not the man, his readers and his public were not the men, for mere denunciation. They found in him a policy. Indignation, he said in a thoroughly characteristic sentence, indignation is froth, except as it leads to action; mere remonstrance is mockery. There are states of affairs, he told them, in which human sympathy refuses to be confined by the rules, necessarily limited and conventional, of international law. Servia and Montenegro in going to war against Turkey might plead human sympathies, broad, deep, and legitimate, and that they committed no moral offence. The policy of the British government was the status quo, “as you were.” This meant the maintenance of Turkish executive authority. What was really needed was the total withdrawal of the administrative rule of the Turk. And here he used words that became very famous in the controversy:—

But I return to, and end with, that which is the omega as well as the alpha of this great and most mournful case. An old servant of the crown and state, I entreat my countrymen, upon whom far more than perhaps any other people of Europe it depends, to require and to insist that our government which has been working in one direction shall work in the other, and shall apply all its vigour to concur with the other states of Europe in obtaining the extinction of the Turkish executive power in Bulgaria. Let the Turks now carry away their abuses in the only possible manner, namely by carrying off themselves. Their Zaptiehs and their Mudirs, their Bimbashis and their Yuzbashis, their Kaimakams and their Pashas, one and all, bag and baggage, shall I hope clear out from the province they have desolated and profaned.

At Blackheath, under dripping rain clouds, he said the same, though with the invective tempered. “You shall receive your regular tribute,” he said in slow sentences to imaginary Ottomans, whom he seemed to hold before his visual eye, “you shall retain your titular sovereignty, your empire shall not be invaded, but never again as the years roll in their course, so far as it is in our power to determine, never again shall the hand of violence be raised by you, never again shall the flood-gates of lust be open to you, never again shall the dire refinements of cruelty be devised by you for the sake of making mankind miserable.”

Once again, it was not words that made the power of the orator, it was the relation in purpose, feeling, and conviction between him and his audience. He forced them into unity with himself by the vivid strength of his resolution and imagination; he could not believe that his own power of emotion was not theirs too:—

On Monday morning last between four and five o’clock, I was rattling down from Euston station through the calm and silent streets of London, when there was not a footfall to disturb them. Every house looked so still, that it might well have been a receptacle of the dead. But as I came through those long lines of streets, I felt it to be an inspiring and a noble thought that in every one of these houses there were intelligent human beings, my fellow-countrymen, who when they woke would give many of their earliest thoughts, aye and some of their most energetic actions, to the terrors and sufferings of Bulgaria.

All this was the very spirit of Milton’s imperishable sonnet upon the late Massacre in Piedmont; the spirit that made Cromwell say that the slaughter in the Waldensian valleys “came as near to his heart as if his own nearest and dearest had been concerned.”

(M178) Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, who had been one of the most responsible promoters of the policy of the Crimean war, told Mr. Gladstone of his own strong impression (Sept. 10), that the formidable crisis would not have arisen, had England in the first instance taken part with the other Powers. Not that he believed that Russia was always and fully trustworthy, but she was so circumstanced then as to be open to the full bearing of our moral influence. Six weeks later Lord Stratford again expressed his unaltered opinion that if in the beginning England had taken her place at the side of the three emperors, the cloud on the horizon would never have swelled out into its present colossal proportions. “It seems to me,” he said, “that Russia has been gradually drawn into a position from which she can hardly retreat with credit.” “Whatever shades of difference appear in our opinions,” he told Mr. Gladstone in September, “may be traced in a great measure to your having made Bulgaria the main object of your appeal, whereas the whole eastern question was my theme, and the Bulgarian atrocities, execrable as they were, only a part of it.” The truth was that in making the atrocious doings in Bulgaria the main object of his appeal, Mr. Gladstone had both displayed a sure instinct as to the most effective method of popular approach, and at the same time did justice to his own burning and innate hatred of all cruelty and oppression, whether in Bourbon or Bashi-Bazouk. Humanity was at the root of the whole matter; and the keynote of this great crusade was the association of humanity with a high policy worthy of the British name.

October was passed in a round of visits to great houses, the popular tide in the north still appearing to rise around him. To Lord Granville he writes:—

Alnwick Castle, Oct. 3, 1876.—We have advanced thus far in a northern and eastern tour, and we hope to be at Castle Howard on Wednesday. I left home at this particular time partly with ideas of health and relaxation, partly because I thought that being everywhere and nowhere I should escape a little from the turmoil of the time. Through Cheshire and Lancashire we accomplished the first stage of our journey to Raby without witnessing any particular indication of public sentiment; and this rather encouraged our extending a little the circle of our visits, which I am now half tempted to regret. For at every point I have had the greatest difficulty in maintaining any show of privacy, and avoiding strong manifestations. I never saw such keen exhibitions of the popular feeling, appearing so to pervade all ranks and places. A tory county member said to my wife two days ago, “If there were a dissolution now, I should not get a vote.” This may be in some degree peculiar to the northerners with their strong character and deep emotions....

Castle Howard, Oct. 7, 1876.—Before receiving your letter of the 5th, I had been driven to the conclusion that I must make a further utterance, following the actual course of the transactions. And upon the whole I adhere to this conclusion, notwithstanding your opinion, to which I attach great weight. There is a great difference in our situations, which I think accounts for this difference of view. I found Ailesbury, of course, full of friendship and loyalty to you, but disposed to regret that you had not been able to see your way to a more advanced and definite policy. I told him that I found no cause for surprise in your reserve, and thought you held yourself in hand for the purpose of holding your party in hand—a view which I think he more or less embraced. Now, I have not your responsibilities to the party, but I have for the moment more than your responsibilities to the country, in this sense that I feel myself compelled to advise from time to time upon the course of that national movement which I have tried hard to evoke, and assist in evoking. I regard myself as an outside workman, engaged in the preparation of materials, which you and the party will probably have to manipulate and then to build into a structure. For though I do not wish to shut the door upon the government, I despair of them, after so many invitations and so many refusals....

(M179) To Madame Novikoff, a Russian lady who at this time began to exercise a marked influence upon the opinions of important men with much influence on the opinions of many other people,(341) he indicated some doubtful symptoms:—

Hawarden, Oct. 17, 1876.—There is an undoubted and smart rally on behalf of Turkey in the metropolitan press. It is in the main representative of the ideas and opinions of what are called the upper ten thousand. From this body there has never on any occasion within my memory proceeded the impulse that has prompted, and finally achieved, any of the great measures which in the last half century have contributed so much to the fame and happiness of England. They did not emancipate the dissenters, Roman catholics, and Jews. They did not reform the parliament. They did not liberate the negro slave. They did not abolish the corn law. They did not take the taxes off the press. They did not abolish the Irish established church. They did not cheer on the work of Italian freedom and reconstitution. Yet all these things have been done; and done by other agencies than theirs, and despite their opposition. When I speak of them, I speak of course of the majority among them. Unhappily, the country is understood abroad mainly through the metropolitan press.

He was no sooner back at Hawarden than he fell to work on subsidiary branches of the question of questions.

Oct. 22.—Worked hard and finished my paper on Russia in Turkestan, and sent it off. Criminal justice on Sunday! But it is for peace. 24.—To London. 27.—Up at 6. Went with Harry to Dover, saw him off on board the packet and pier [on his way to India]. Drove over to Walmer, reviewed the place, saw Lord Granville and Sir W. James. Returned to London, and at 9.30 to the Gaiety, saw a miserable burlesque of which I had heard a most inviting but false account. 28.—To Hawarden. 31.—Tennyson and H. T. came. Nov. 1.—Tennyson read to us his Harold. It took near 2-½ hours. Walk with him and a party. 2.—Read Bagehot on Lord Spencer’s Life—very clever, very imperfect. Conversation with Tennyson on future retribution and other matters of theology. He has not thought, I conceive, systematically or thoroughly upon them, but is much alarmed at the prospect of the loss of belief. He left us at one. Walk and long conversation with Lord Acton, who seems in opinion to go beyond Döllinger, though in certain things he stops short of him. 8.—Read aloud the debate of the first Iliad from Pope. 9.—Read aloud my version of the Assembly—Iliad i. 10.—Read aloud Lord Derby’s and Cowper’s version of the Assembly. 14.—The Olympian part of Iliad I. in Pope’s version aloud, and then my own. 17.—We went to Liverpool, where we attended the theatre to see Pennington in Hamlet. It was really excellent. I never was so well received in that town. 21.—Finished revision of my MS., “The Hellenic Factor in the Eastern Problem,” and sent it to press.

III

At the Lord Mayor’s feast in November, the prime minister used menacing language. The policy of England, he said, was peace, but no country was so well prepared for war as ours. If England were to enter into a righteous war, her resources were inexhaustible. “She is not a country that, when she enters into a campaign, has to ask herself whether she can support a second or a third campaign. She enters into a campaign which she will not terminate till right is done.” This was a hardly veiled threat to Russia, it was encouragement to Turkey, it was incitement to a war party in Great Britain. “The provocation offered by Disraeli at the Guildhall,” wrote Mr. Gladstone, “is almost incredible. Some new lights about his Judaic feeling in which he is both consistent and conscientious have come in upon me.”

Still the general feeling was strongly adverse to any action on behalf of Turkey. Mr. Gladstone eagerly noted even the most trivial incident that pointed this way. “Yesterday night,” he wrote (Nov. 26), “in the tory town of Liverpool, when Othello was being acted, and the words were reached ‘The Turks are drowned,’ the audience rose in enthusiasm and interrupted the performance for some time with their cheering. These things are not without meaning.” Men who commonly stood aside from political activity were roused. “Mr. Carlyle,” says Mr. Ruskin, “Mr. Froude, and several other men of creditable name gathered together at call of Mr. Gladstone as for a great national need, together with other men of more retired mind—Edward Burne-Jones for one, and myself for another.”

(M180) The reply to the Guildhall speech was a conference at St. James’s Hall (Dec. 8), one of the most remarkable gatherings of representative men of every type and from every part of the kingdom ever held in this country. “I have most flourishing accounts of the progress of preparations for the conference of which I have been a promoter from the beginning. They urge me to speak on the 8th, but I should much prefer that others should put themselves in the foreground.” Besides the eminent politicians, great territorial magnates were there, and men of letters, and divines of various churches, and men who had never been to a militant assembly in their lives before,—all with a resolute purpose expressed by Mr. Trevelyan, “No matter how the prime minister may finger the hilt of the sword, the nation will take care that it never leaves the scabbard.” Mr. Gladstone reached London a day or two before. On the 8th, he enters:—

8.—Made notes and extracts for speech. Attended the meetings at St. James’s Hall, 12-1-½ and 4-8. Spoke (I fear) 1-½ hours with some exertion, far from wholly to my satisfaction. The meetings were great, notable, almost historical.

The day after this important and impressive gathering he was back at Hawarden, busy at his article upon the life of the Prince Consort. Then came Christmas day,—“The most solemn I have known for long; I see that eastward sky of storm and of underlight!”

At a suggestion from the London foreign office, a conference of the great Powers met at Constantinople in the middle of December. Lord Salisbury went as the representative of England. To a correspondent Mr. Gladstone spoke of this as an excellent selection:—

I think it right at once to give you my opinion of Lord Salisbury, whom I know pretty well in private. He has little foreign or eastern knowledge, and little craft; he is rough of tongue in public debate, but a great gentleman in private society; he is very remarkably clever, of unsure judgment, but is above anything mean; has no Disraelite prejudices; keeps a conscience, and has plenty of manhood and character. In a word the appointment of Lord Salisbury to Constantinople is the best thing the government have yet done in the eastern question.

As the conference met, so it ran a usual course, and then vanished. The Powers were in complete accord as to the demands that were to be made upon Turkey for the protection of the unfortunate Christian rayahs. The Turk in just confidence that he should find a friend, rejected them, and the envoys departed to their homes. Mr. Gladstone, however, found comfort in the thought that by the agitation two points had been gained: the re-establishment of the European concert, and extrication from a disgraceful position of virtual complicity with Turkey.

In the spring of 1877 he wrote a second pamphlet,(342) because a speech in the House could not contain detail enough, and because parliamentary tradition almost compelled a suspension of discussion while ministers were supposed to be engaged in concert with other Powers in devising a practical answer to Russian inquiry. He found that it “produced no great impression,” the sale not going beyond six or seven thousand copies. Still, the gala remained from the proceeding in the autumn, that the government dared not say they had nothing to do with the condition of the Christian rayahs of Turkey, and any idea of going to war for Turkey was out of the question.

Public feeling had waxed very hot, yet without any clear precision of opinion or purpose on the side opposed to Mr. Gladstone’s policy of emancipation. Dean Church (Dec. 1876) describes how “everybody was very savage with everybody about Turks and Russians: I think I never remember such an awkward time for meeting people (until you know you are on the same side) except at the height of the Tractarian row.”(343)

(M181) A little later we have one of the best pictures of him that I know, from the warm and vivid hand of J. R. Green, the historian:—

Feb. 21, 1877.—Last night I met Gladstone—it will always be a memorable night to me; Stubbs was there, and Goldwin Smith, and Humphry Sandwith, and Mackenzie Wallace, whose great book on Russia is making such a stir, besides a few other nice people; but one forgets everything in Gladstone himself, in his perfect naturalness and grace of manner, his charming abandon of conversation, his unaffected modesty, his warm ardour for all that is noble and good. I felt so proud of my leader—the chief I have always clung to through good report and ill report—because, wise or unwise as he might seem in this or that, he was always noble of soul. He was very pleasant to me, and talked of the new historic school he hoped we were building up as enlisting his warmest sympathy. I wish you could have seen with what a glow he spoke of the Montenegrins and their struggle for freedom; how he called on us who wrote history to write what we could of that long fight for liberty! And all through the evening not a word to recall his greatness amongst us, simple, natural, an equal among his equals, listening to every one, drawing out every one, with a force and a modesty that touched us more than all his power.

In another letter, says the same ardent man, “I begin to see that there may be a truer wisdom in the ‘humanitarianism’ of Gladstone than in the purely political views of Disraeli. The sympathies of peoples with peoples, the sense of a common humanity between nations, the aspirations of nationalities after freedom and independence, are real political forces; and it is just because Gladstone owns them as forces, and Disraeli disowns them, that the one has been on the right side, and the other on the wrong in parallel questions such as the upbuilding of Germany or Italy. I think it will be so in this upbuilding of the Sclave.”(344)

It was my own good fortune to pass two days with him at this moment at High Elms. Huxley and Playfair were of the party. Mr. Gladstone had with him the printer’s proofs of his second pamphlet, and was in full glow against Turkish terrorism and its abettors. This strong obsession could not be concealed, nor was there any reason why it should be; it made no difference in his ready courtesy and kindness of demeanour, his willingness to enter into other people’s topics, his pliant force and alacrity of mind. On the Sunday afternoon Sir John Lubbock, our host, took us all up to the hilltop whence in his quiet Kentish village Darwin was shaking the world. The illustrious pair, born in the same year, had never met before. Mr. Gladstone as soon as seated took Darwin’s interest in lessons of massacre for granted, and launched forth his thunderbolts with unexhausted zest. His great, wise, simple, and truth-loving listener, then, I think, busy on digestive powers of the drosera in his green-house, was intensely delighted. When we broke up, watching Mr. Gladstone’s erect alert figure as he walked away, Darwin, shading his eyes with his hand against the evening rays, said to me in unaffected satisfaction, “What an honour that such a great man should come to visit me!” Too absorbed in his own overwhelming conflict with the powers of evil, Mr. Gladstone makes no mention of his afternoon call, and only says of the two days that “he found a notable party, and made interesting conversation,” and that he “could not help liking” one of the company, then a stranger to him. In his absence at church, we were talking of the qualities that send men forward and keep them back. “I should like to know,” cried Huxley, “what would keep such a man as that back,” pointing to where Mr. Gladstone had been sitting; “why, put him in the middle of a moor, with nothing in the world but his shirt, and you could not prevent him from being anything he liked.” And Huxley was as far as possible from being a Gladstonian.

IV

(M182) Events meanwhile had moved. The failure of the conference in December, and the futility of an instrument known as the London protocol devised in March, led up to a declaration of war by Russia against Turkey in April. We now come to an episode in this controversy, that excited lively passions at the moment, and subjected Mr. Gladstone’s relation to his party to a strain that would have been profoundly painful, if his heroic intensity had not for the time taken him beyond the region of pain and pleasure.

To Lord Granville. 73 Harley Street, April 23, 1877.—The protocol, the refusal of Turkey, the insistence of Russia, have been followed to-night by the announcement that the Russian Chargé has suspended relations with Turkey. Is not the moment now come for raising the rather stiff question whether a policy, or a substantive motion, is to be submitted to parliament? I hold back from a conclusion as long as I can, that I may benefit by the views of others. But it is perfectly plain that Salisbury is at a discount, and that the government grow more Turkish every day; reasonably plain that some grave arguments against moving have now lost their force. My own inclination is towards a series of resolutions with such points as are rudely indicated on the enclosed scrap. Please to let me have it again at some time; I have no copy.

To the Duke of Argyll. April 26, 1877.—I have drawn some resolutions of which I intend to give notice to-day unless the leaders will move. If they will move, though they may say much less, I can support them and express my fuller ideas in a speech. I cannot leave my bed, but notice will be given in my name.

From the Diary. April 27, 1877.—Ill in the night; kept my bed. Saw Dr. Clark twice. Saw Mr. Goschen, Lord Wolverton, Mr. Bright, Lord Frederick Cavendish. This day I took my decision, a severe one, in face of my not having a single approver in the upper official circle. But had I in the first days of September asked the same body whether I ought to write my pamphlet, I believe the unanimous answer would have been No. Arranged for the first (general) notice to be given, in my absence.

The resolutions were five in number, and the pith of them was, first, an expression of complaint against the Porte; second, a declaration that, in the absence of guarantees on behalf of the subject populations, the Porte had lost all claim to support, moral or material; third, a desire that British influence should be employed on behalf of local liberty and self-government in the disturbed provinces; fourth, this influence to be addressed to promoting the concert of the Powers in exacting from the Porte such changes as they might deem to be necessary for humanity and justice; fifth, an address to the crown accordingly. On the expediency of these resolutions, at a moment when a war with many complexities had just broken out, opinion in the party was divided. The official liberals and their special adherents doubted. The radicals below the gangway, headed by Mr. Chamberlain and Sir Charles Dilke, supported the resolutions with enthusiasm. Adverse notices of the previous question were put upon the paper. Lord Granville wrote to Mr. Gladstone (May 2) that his colleagues on the front opposition bench had met, and were still of opinion, “that it was not opportune at this moment to move resolutions, and thought that the least antagonistic course as regarded you would be to vote for one of the motions announced for the previous question.” To the Duke of Argyll Mr. Gladstone wrote on the 4th:—

Our friends of the late cabinet have fallen into a sad series of errors, some of which I fear will be greatly resented in the country. To meet on Wednesday; to use the private pressure which is being used, as I am told, against the resolutions; and above all to have announced the result of the meeting in the papers of yesterday; these form a combination, in my opinion, deplorable and almost incredible. I shall do all in my power to avert consequences, but my difficulties are greatly increased.

It looked as if a mortal split within the party were inevitable.

From the Diary. May 5.—The post brought me near 140 letters to-day which took some hours to examine, but they are most remarkable. Saw Lord Granville with Lord Wolverton. They opened the means of bridging over the chasm inadvertently made; and I readily went into the scheme. It was carried through by Granville at a meeting of his friends after the Academy dinner, and he came to me at Wolverton’s with Hartington to make known the result and consider some details of execution. What they ask of me is really, from my point of view, little more than nominal. They have in truth been awakened as from a slumber by the extraordinary demonstrations in the country. 3—4-½ attended the Academy exhibition. 6-½-10-1/4 at the dinner; spoke for literature! My reception surprised me, it was so good.

(M183) What was asked was that he should consent to an amended form of his second resolution, declaring more simply and categorically that the Turk, by his misgovernment, had lost his claims. As to the other resolutions, according to a common usage, it was at his choice to accept a division on the first or first two, and not divide upon the rest. His speech, of course, would cover the ground of all the resolutions. This reduction was, as he truly said, “little more than nominal.” A friendly question was to be put when the time came, and in reply he would state how things stood.

The critical day arrived, and not often has parliamentary excitement been so high. It was a battle of high national and even European policy, for England was now at the front; it was a battle between two sections of a party; it was the ordeal of a man admitted to be the greatest in the House, and perhaps some of the onlookers felt much like the curious Florentines, as they wondered what would happen to Savonarola and the monks in the great Trial by Fire.

From the Diary. May 7.—This day came in about 100 meetings and say 200 letters or 250. Worked hard upon the blue book, and references and notes for speech. House at 4-1/4. For over two hours I was assaulted from every quarter, except the opposition bench, which was virtually silent. Such a sense of solitary struggle I never remember. At last I rose on the main question nearly in despair as to the result; but resolved at least not to fail through want of effort. I spoke 2-½ hours, voice lasting well. House gradually came round and at the last was more than good. It was over at 9.30. Never did I feel weaker and more wormlike. Dinner at Sir W. James’s and H. of C. again 10-3/4-12-3/4. 8.—I am the spoiled child of sleep. This night was an exception.

The scene began with the question as preconcerted, put by Mr. Trevelyan. Such moves never fail to provoke some measure of mockery, and this time both regular opponents and opponents in more or less disguise thought that they had got the monarch of the forest down. The situation was one that opened the way for Mr. Gladstone’s love of over-precision, and his various explanations prolonged the wrangle. It lasted until the dinner-hour. “While many members,” says one observer, “were streaming out to dine and those who remained looked dejectedly at their watches, Mr. Gladstone, who is sixty-eight years of age, sprang again to his feet, and without any sign of diminished spirit delivered a noble speech lasting two hours and a half. It was perhaps the greatest triumph of irrepressible moral and physical vitality over depressing conditions that was ever won in the House of Commons.”(345)

The record of a distinguished eyewitness, himself one day to be prime minister, ought not to be omitted:—

There was one of those preliminary parliamentary debates—or series of debates—which preceded the main business of the evening. In this Mr. Gladstone had to speak not once or twice, but several times, and it was not until hour after hour had passed in this preliminary skirmish in a House hostile, impatient, and utterly wearied, that he got up to present his case with that conviction that he was right, which was his great strength as a speaker in and out of the House. I never shall forget the impression that speech left on my mind. As a mere feat of physical endurance it was almost unsurpassed; as a feat of parliamentary courage, parliamentary skill, parliamentary endurance, and parliamentary eloquence, I believe it will always be unequalled.(346)

As he drew to his close, he looked according to Mr. Forster, “like an inspired man,” and I have heard many hearers of cool temperament declare the passage about the Montenegrins and onwards, to have been the most thrilling deliverance that could ever be conceived. Here is this noble peroration:—

Sir, there were other days when England was the hope of freedom. Wherever in the world a high aspiration was entertained, or a noble blow was struck, it was to England that the eyes of the oppressed were always turned—to this favourite, this darling home of so much privilege and so much happiness, where the people that had built up a noble edifice for themselves would, it was well known, be ready to do what in them lay to secure the benefit of the same inestimable boon for others. You talk to me of the established tradition and policy in regard to Turkey. I appeal to an established tradition older, wider, nobler far—a tradition not which disregards British interests, but which teaches you to seek the promotion of these interests in obeying the dictates of honour and justice. And, sir, what is to be the end of this? Are we to dress up the fantastic ideas some people entertain about this policy and that policy in the garb of British interests, and then, with a new and base idolatry, fall down and worship them? Or are we to look, not at the sentiment, but at the hard facts of the case, which Lord Derby told us fifteen years ago—viz., that it is the populations of those countries that will ultimately possess them—that will ultimately determine their abiding condition? It is to this fact, this law, that we should look. There is now before the world a glorious prize. A portion of those unhappy people are still as yet making an effort to retrieve what they have lost so long, but have not ceased to love and to desire. I speak of those in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Another portion—a band of heroes such as the world has rarely seen—stand on the rocks of Montenegro, and are ready now, as they have ever been during the 400 years of their exile from their fertile plains, to sweep down from their fastnesses and meet the Turks at any odds for the re-establishment of justice and of peace in those countries. Another portion still, the 5,000,000 of Bulgarians, cowed and beaten down to the ground, hardly venturing to look upwards, even to their Father in heaven, have extended their hands to you; they have sent you their petition, they have prayed for your help and protection. They have told you that they do not seek alliance with Russia, or with any foreign power, but that they seek to be delivered from an intolerable burden of woe and shame. That burden of woe and shame—the greatest that exists on God’s earth—is one that we thought united Europe was about to remove; but to removing which, for the present, you seem to have no efficacious means of offering even the smallest practical contribution. But, sir, the removal of that load of woe and shame is a great and noble prize. It is a prize well worth competing for. It is not yet too late to try to win it. I believe there are men in the cabinet who would try to win it, if they were free to act on their own beliefs and aspirations. It is not yet too late, I say, to become competitors for that prize; but be assured that whether you mean to claim for yourselves even a single leaf in that immortal chaplet of renown, which will be the reward of true labour in that cause, or whether you turn your backs upon that cause and upon your own duty, I believe, for one, that the knell of Turkish tyranny in these provinces has sounded. So far as human eye can judge, it is about to be destroyed. The destruction may not come in the way or by the means that we should choose; but come this boon from what hands it may, it will be a noble boon, and as a noble boon will gladly be accepted by Christendom and the world.

V

The division, after a debate that lasted five days, resulted in 354 for ministers, against 223 for Mr. Gladstone.

Of course if you had gone on alone, Lord Granville told him, you would only have had either more or less than half the liberal party. If Hartington had moved the first two resolutions, the government would certainly have had some 160 or 170 majority. All the malcontents behind the opposition front benches were obliged to vote on Monday, in consequence of having so vigorously preached allegiance during the previous ten days. As it is, the party voted pretty well.

(M184) “The assumed laughter of the conservatives,” he adds, “showed their vexation, and some of the radicals showed their cards—that it is not the eastern question, but the hopes of breaking up the party that really excites them.” The radicals on their part were extremely sore at the withdrawal of the resolutions. “Your goodness,” wrote their leading man to Mr. Gladstone the following day, “has been abused in the interests of a section of the party who deserve least at your hands. The current report in the lobbies last night, spread by these gentlemen, and easily believed by their friends, was that you had ‘caved in.’ ” Could he not take some further opportunity of showing that he had not abandoned the policy of joint intervention, and that the liberal party in the country had no reason to regret that they rose almost as one man to his call?

At first it was thought that the discussion had done good by impressing the government with the desire of the country, if not for coercion at least for real neutrality, and that Lord Beaconsfield had submitted to the better influences in the cabinet. It soon appeared that this had not happened. “The fidelity of the party,” said Lord Granville, “and the large majority have given Beaconsfield the lead, of which he has not been slow to avail himself. It is very serious.” The war in the Balkans went on; the Turks fought with valour and constancy: sufferings on both sides were frightful. In England the sympathy with the miserable victims of Turkish misrule became modified by the re-awakened jealousy of Russian power. Mr. Gladstone held his ground with invincible tenacity against all comers. He took his share in such parliamentary operations as were possible, but these operations were necessarily fruitless, and the platform now for the first time became the effective field for moving national opinion.

Great parties of tourists from the northern and midland towns began to make it a fashion to go on high pilgrimage to Hawarden, where besides a fine park they saw the most interesting man in the country, and had a good chance of hearing an eloquent speech, or watching a tree fall under the stroke of his vigorous arm. If they brought him the tribute of a casket or an axe or some cunning walking-stick, he was obliged to thank them, and if he opened his lips to thank them, the all-engrossing theme was sure to well up. Some of these earnest utterances jarred even on his admirers in the press and out of it. Just so would critics in colleges and cathedral closes have found Wesley and Whitefield in their evangelising mission north, south, east, and west, excessive, exaggerated, indiscreet, and deficient in good taste. They could not understand how one supposed to be so knowing in all the manœuvres of parliament and party, was at the same time so naïf. This curious simplicity in fact marked him in all the movements into which he put his heart. Like every other grand missionary—the abolitionist, the gospel missionary, the free trader, the peace man, the temperance man—he could not believe that the truths, arguments, and appeals, of which he was the bearer, could fail to strike in all who heard them the same fire that blazed in bosoms fervid as his own.

He went to Birmingham and was received with tumultuous acclamations by many tens of thousands:—

May 31.—[Hawarden.] Off before 11. Reached Birmingham at 3-1/4. A triumphal reception. Dinner at Mr. Chamberlain’s. Meeting 7 to 9-½, half occupied by my speech. A most intelligent and duly appreciative audience—but they were 25,000 and the building I think of no acoustic merits, so that the strain was excessive. A supper followed. June 1.—Breakfast party 9.30. Much conversation on the Birmingham school board system. Off at 10.45 to Enfield factory, which consumed the forenoon in a most interesting survey with Colonel Dickson and his assistants. Then to the fine (qy. overfine?) board school, where addresses were presented and I spoke over half an hour on politics. After luncheon to the town hall; address from the corporation, made a municipal speech of say 20 minutes. A good deal of movement in the streets with us even to-day. Thence to the Oratory and sat with Dr. Newman.(347) Saw Mr. Chamberlain’s very pleasing children. Then to the dinner, spoke again. To Hagley at 11.5.

Well was, it said of this visit by Dale, that strenuous whole-hearted man, “Forsaken or but feebly supported by many of those with whom he had shared many glorious conflicts, and who owed to him their place and fame, his courage remained undaunted, and his enthusiasm for righteousness and freedom unquenched.”

Mr. Gladstone described, the general situation in a letter to a correspondent out of England:—

I cannot say much for the conduct of the Powers. That of the pope and his court has been vile; Manning and most part of Ireland have followed suit; France and Germany are thinking of themselves and one another; and Italy, for fear of the pope, is obliged to look very much to Germany. Austria is to some extent in a false position. For us there is no excuse: there was no difficulty whatever in our doing our duty. I have said in parliament, and I deeply feel, it is the most deplorable chapter of our foreign policy since the peace of 1815. The good cause has been further weakened by the bad conduct, in varying degrees, of many races, Magyars and Jews above all. You see I cannot help filling up my paper with this subject.

In July he made a pleasure trip in one of Sir Donald Currie’s steamers, from London to Dartmouth. “We set out at 10.20,” he says, “for the docks. Started in the Dublin Castle at noon. We spent the night at the Nore, good weather, kind reception, splendid fare. The Cape deputies came with us as far as Gravesend.” Among these deputies was Mr. Kruger.

In October he paid his first and only visit to Ireland. It lasted little more than three weeks, and did not extend beyond a very decidedly English Pale. He stayed in great houses, was feasted by the provost of Trinity, in spite of disestablishment, and he had a friendly conversation with Cardinal Cullen, in spite of Vaticanism. “You know, Mr. Gladstone,” said the Cardinal, “we could have given you a warmer reception if it had not been for certain pamphlets which we in Ireland did not like very well.” He received the freedom of the city of Dublin, broke bread with the Duke of Marlborough at the vice-regal lodge, admired the picturesque site of the castle at Kilkenny, enjoyed sympathetic talks with host and hostess at Abbeyleix, and delighted in the curious antiquities and exquisite natural beauties of the county of Wicklow. Of the multitudes of strange things distinctively Irish, he had little chance of seeing much.

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V. A Tumultuous Year. (1878)

On these great questions, which cut so deep into heart and mind, the importance of taking what they think the best course for the question will often seem, even to those who have the most just sense of party obligation, a higher duty than that of party allegiance.—GLADSTONE (to Granville, 1878).

I

Of 1878 Mr. Gladstone spoke as “a tumultuous year.” In January, after a fierce struggle of five months in the Balkan passes, the Russian forces overcame the Turkish defence, and by the end of January had entered Adrianople and reached the Sea of Marmora. Here at San Stefano a treaty of peace was made at the beginning of March. The last word of the eastern question, as Lord Derby said in those days, is this: Who is to have Constantinople? No great Power would be willing to see it in the hands of any other great Power, no small Power could hold it at all, and as for joint occupation, all such expedients were both dangerous and doubtful.(348) This last word now seemed to be writing itself in capital letters. Russia sent the treaty to the Powers, with the admission that portions of it affecting the general interests of Europe could not be regarded as definitive without general concurrence. A treaty between Russian and Turk within the zone of Constantinople and almost in sight of St. Sophia, opened a new and startling vista to English politicians. Powerful journalists, supposed to be much in the confidence of ministers, declared that if peace were ultimately concluded on anything like the terms proposed, then beyond all doubt the outworks of our empire were gone, and speedy ruin must begin. About such a situation there had been but one opinion among our statesmen for many generations. Until Mr. Gladstone, “all men held that such a state of things [as the Russians at Constantinople] would bring the British empire face to face with ruin.”(349)

(M185) Before the treaty of San Stefano, an angry panic broke out in parts of England. None of the stated terms of British neutrality were violated either by the treaty or its preliminaries, but even when no Russian force was within forty miles of Constantinople, the cabinet asked for a vote of six millions (January), and a few days later the British fleet passed the Dardanelles. Two years earlier, Mr. Gladstone had wished that the fleet should go to Constantinople as a coercive demonstration against the Porte; now, in 1878, the despatch of the fleet was a demonstration against Russia, who had done alone the work of emancipation that in Mr. Gladstone’s view should have been done, and might have been done without war by that concert of the Powers from which England had drawn back. The concert of the Powers that our withdrawal had paralysed would have revived quickly enough, if either Austria or Germany had believed that the Czar really meant to seize Constantinople. “I have done my best,” wrote Mr. Gladstone to a friend, “against the vote of six millions; a foolish and mischievous proposition. The liberal leaders have, mistakenly as I think, shrunk at the last moment from voting. But my opinion is that the liberal party in general are firmly opposed to the vote as a silly, misleading, and mischievous measure.” He both spoke and voted. The opinion of his adherents was that his words, notwithstanding his vote, were calculated to do more to throw oil on the troubled waters, than either the words or the abstention of the official leader.

The appearance of the British fleet with the nominal object of protecting life and property at Constantinople, was immediately followed by the advance of Russian troops thirty miles nearer to Constantinople with the same laudable object. The London cabinet only grew the wilder in its Projects, among them being a secret expedition of Indian troops to seize Cyprus and Alexandretta, with the idea that it would be fairer to the Turk not to ask his leave. Two ministers resigned in succession, rather than follow Lord Beaconsfield further in designs of this species.(350)

“It is a bitter disappointment,” Mr. Gladstone wrote to Madame Novikoff, “to find the conclusion of one war, for which there was a weighty cause, followed by the threat of another, for which there is no adequate cause at all, and which will be an act of utter wickedness—if it comes to pass, which God forbid—on one side or on both. That unhappy subject of the bit of Bessarabia,(351) on which I have given you my mind with great freedom (for otherwise what is the use of my writing at all?) threatens to be in part the pretext and in part the cause of enormous mischief, and in my opinion to mar and taint at a particular point the immense glory which Russia had acquired, already complete in a military sense, and waiting to be consummated in a moral sense too.”

Public men do not withstand war fevers without discomfort, as Bright had found in the streets of Manchester when he condemned the Crimean war. One or two odious and unusual incidents now happened to Mr. Gladstone:—

Feb. 24.—Between four and six, three parties of the populace arrived here, the first with cheers, the two others hostile. Windows were broken and much hooting. The last detachment was only kept away by mounted police in line across the street both ways. This is not very sabbatical. There is strange work behind the curtain, if one could only get at it. The instigators are those really guilty; no one can wonder at the tools.

One Sunday afternoon a little later (March 4):—

Another gathering of people was held off by the police. I walked down with C., and as a large crowd gathered, though in the main friendly, we went into Dr. Clark’s, and then in a hansom off the ground.

Stories were put about that Lord Beaconsfield reported the names of dissentient colleagues to the Queen. Dining with Sir Robert Phillimore (Jan. 17), Mr. Gladstone—

was emphatic and decided in his opinion that if the premier mentioned to the Queen any of his colleagues who had opposed him in the cabinet, he was guilty of great baseness and perfidy. Gladstone said he had copies of 250 letters written by him to the Queen, in none of which could a reference be found to the opinion of his colleagues expressed in cabinet.

On the same occasion, by the way, Sir Robert notes: “Gladstone was careful to restrain the expression of his private feelings about Lord Beaconsfield, as he generally is.”

II

(M186) In the summer the famous congress assembled at Berlin (June 13 to July 13), with Lord Beaconsfield and Lord Salisbury as the representatives of Great Britain, to sanction, reject, or modify the treaty of San Stefano. Before the congress met, the country received a shock that made men stagger. While in London it was impossible to attempt to hold a meeting in favour of peace, and even in the northern towns such meetings were almost at the mercy of anybody who might choose to start a jingo chorus; while the war party exulted in the thought that military preparations were going on apace, and that the bear would soon be rent by the lion; a document was one afternoon betrayed to the public, from which the astounding fact appeared that England and Russia had already entered into a secret agreement, by which the treaty of San Stefano was in substance to be ratified, with the single essential exception that the southern portion of Bulgaria was to be severed from the northern. The treaty of Berlin became in fact an extensive partition of the Turkish empire, and the virtual ratification of the policy of bag and baggage. The Schouvaloff memorandum was not the only surprise. Besides the secret agreement with Russia, the British government had made a secret convention with Turkey. By this convention England undertook to defend Turkey against Russian aggression in Asia, though concessions were made to Russia that rendered Asiatic Turkey indefensible; and Turkey was to carry out reforms which all sensible men knew to be wholly beyond her power. In payment for this bargain, the Sultan allowed England to occupy and administer Cyprus.

At the end of the session Mr. Gladstone wound up his labours in parliament with an extraordinarily powerful survey of all these great transactions. Its range, compass, and grasp are only matched by the simplicity and lucidity of his penetrating examination. It was on July 30:—

Finished the protocols and worked up the whole subject. It loomed very large and disturbed my sleep unusually. H. of C. Spoke 2-½ hours. I was in body much below par, but put on the steam perforce. It ought to have been far better. The speech exhausted me a good deal, as I was and am below par.

He sketched, in terse outline, the results of the treaty—the independence of Roumania, Servia, and Montenegro; the virtual independence of northern Bulgaria; the creation in southern Bulgaria (under the name of Eastern Roumelia) of local autonomy, which must soon grow into something more. Bosnia and Herzegovina, though Mr. Gladstone would have hoped for their freedom from external control, had been handed over to Austria, but they were at any rate free from the Ottoman. The cardinal fact was that eleven millions of people formerly under Turkish rule, absolute or modified, were entirely exempted from the yoke. “Taking the whole of the provisions of the treaty of Berlin together, I most thankfully and joyfully acknowledge that great results have been achieved in the diminution of human misery and towards the establishment of human happiness and prosperity in the East.” A great work of emancipation had been achieved for the Slavs of the Turkish empire. He deplored that equal regard had not been paid to the case of the Hellenes in Thessaly and Epirus, though even in 1862, Palmerston and Russell were in favour of procuring the cession of Thessaly and Epirus to Greece. As for the baffling of Russian intrigue, it was true that the Bulgaria of Berlin was reduced from the Bulgaria of San Stefano, but this only furnished new incentives and new occasions for intrigue.(352) Macedonia and Armenia were left over.

(M187) On the conduct of the two British plenipotentiaries at Berlin he spoke without undue heat, but with a weight that impressed even adverse hearers:—

I say, sir, that in this congress of the great Powers, the voice of England has not been heard in unison with the institutions, the history, and the character of England. On every question that arose, and that became a subject of serious contest in the congress, or that could lead to any important practical result, a voice has been heard from Lord Beaconsfield and Lord Salisbury which sounded in the tones of Metternich, and not in the tones of Mr. Canning, or of Lord Palmerston, or of Lord Russell. I do not mean that the British government ought to have gone to the congress determined to insist upon the unqualified prevalence of what I may call British ideas. They were bound to act in consonance with the general views of Europe. But within the limits of fair differences of opinion, which will always be found to arise on such occasions, I do affirm that it was their part to take the side of liberty; and I do also affirm that as a matter of fact they took the side of servitude.

The agreement with Russia had in truth constantly tied their hands. For instance, Lord Beaconsfield and Lord Salisbury might make to Russia as many eloquent speeches as they liked against the restoration of Bessarabia, but everybody in the room knew that the British government had taken the lead in virtually assuring Russia that she had only to hold to her point and Bessarabia should again be hers. Most effective of all was his exposure of the convention with Turkey, a proceeding by which we had undertaken, behind the back of Europe and against the treaty of Paris, to establish a sole protectorate in Asiatic Turkey.(353) We had made a contract of such impossible scope as to bind us to manage the reform of the judicature, the police, the finances, the civil service of Turkey, and the stoppage of the sources of corruption at Constantinople. The load, if we took it seriously, was tremendous; if we did not take it seriously, then what was the whole story of the reform of Asiatic Turkey, but a blind to excuse the acquisition of Cyprus? This great presentation of a broad and reasoned case contained a passage near its close, that had in it the kernel of Mr. Gladstone’s policy in the whole controversy that was now drawing to an end:—

I think we have lost greatly by the conclusion of this convention; I think we have lost very greatly indeed the sympathy and respect of the nations of Europe. I do not expect or believe that we shall fall into that sort of contempt which follows upon weakness. I think it to be one of the most threadbare of all the weapons of party warfare when we hear, as we sometimes hear, on the accession of a new government, that before its accession the government of England had been despised all over the world, and that now on the contrary she has risen in the general estimation, and holds her proper place in the councils of nations. This England of ours is not so poor and so weak a thing as to depend upon the reputation of this or that administration; and the world knows pretty well of what stuff she is made.... Now, I am desirous that the standard of our material strength shall be highly and justly estimated by the other nations of Christendom; but I believe it to be of still more vital consequence that we should stand high in their estimation as the lovers of truth, of honour, and of openness in all our proceedings, as those who know how to cast aside the motives of a narrow selfishness, and give scope to considerations of broad and lofty principle. I value our insular position, but I dread the day when we shall be reduced to a moral insularity.... The proceedings have all along been associated with a profession as to certain British interests, which although I believe them to be perfectly fictitious and imaginary, have yet been pursued with as much zeal and eagerness as if they had been the most vital realities in the world. This setting up of our own interests, out of place, in an exaggerated form, beyond their proper sphere, and not merely the setting up of such interests, but the mode in which they have been pursued, has greatly diminished, not, as I have said, the regard for our material strength, but the estimation of our moral standard of action, and consequently our moral position in the world.

(M188) Lord Beaconsfield lost some of his composure when Mr. Gladstone called the agreement between England and Turkey an insane convention. “I would put this issue,” he said, “to an intelligent English jury: Which do you believe most likely to enter into an insane convention? A body of English gentlemen, honoured by the favour of their sovereign and the confidence of their fellow-subjects, managing your affairs for five years—I hope with prudence, and not altogether without success—or a sophistical rhetorician, inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity,”(354)—and so forth, in a strain of unusual commonness, little befitting either Disraeli’s genius or his dignity. Mr. Gladstone’s speech three days later was as free from all the excesses so violently described, as any speech that was ever made at Westminster.

No speech, however, at this moment was able to reduce the general popularity of ministers, and it was the common talk at the moment that if Lord Beaconsfield had only chosen to dissolve, his majority would have been safe. Writing an article on “England’s Mission” as soon as the House was up, Mr. Gladstone grappled energetically with some of the impressions on which this popularity was founded. The Pall Mall Gazette had set out these impressions with its usual vigour. As Mr. Gladstone’s reply traverses much of the ground on which we have been treading, I may as well transcribe it:—

The liberals, according to that ably written newspaper, have now imbibed as a permanent sentiment a “distaste for national greatness.” This distaste is now grown into matter of principle. “The disgust at these principles of action ever grew in depth and extent,” so that in the Danish, the American, and the Franco-German wars, there was “an increasing portion of the nation ready to engage in the struggle on almost any side,” as a protest against the position that it was bound not to engage in it at all! The climax of the whole matter was reached when the result of the Alabama treaty displayed to the world an England overreached, overruled, and apologetic. It certainly requires the astounding suppositions, and the gross ignorance of facts, which the journalist with much truth recites, to explain the manner in which for some time past pure rhodomontade has not only done the work of reasoning, but has been accepted as a cover for constant miscarriage and defeat; and doctrines of national self-interest and self-assertion as supreme laws have been set up, which, if unhappily they harden into “permanent sentiment” and “matter of principle,” will destroy all the rising hopes of a true public law for Christendom, and will substitute for it what is no better than the Communism of Paris enlarged and exalted into a guide of international relations. It is perhaps unreasonable to expect that minds in the condition of the “increasing portion” should on any terms accept an appeal to history. But, for the sake of others, not yet so completely emancipated from the yoke of facts, I simply ask at what date it was that the liberal administrations of this country adopted the “permanent sentiment” and the “matter of principle” which have been their ruin? Not in 1859-60, when they energetically supported the redemption and union of Italy. Not in 1861, when, on the occurrence of the Trent affair, they at a few days’ notice despatched ten thousand men to Halifax. Not when, in concert with Europe, they compelled the sultan to cut off the head of his tyrannical pasha, and to establish a government in the Lebanon not dependent for its vital breath on Constantinople. Not when in 1863 they invited France to join in an ultimatum to the German Powers, and to defend Denmark with us against the intrigues which Germany was carrying on under the plea of the Duke of Augustenburg’s title to the Duchies; and when they were told by Louis Napoleon in reply that that might be a great British interest, but that it had no significance for France. Not when in 1870 they formed in a few days their double treaty for the defence of Belgium. Does, then, the whole indictment rest on this—that, in conformity with the solemn declaration of the European Powers at Paris in 1856, they cured a deep-seated quarrel with America by submitting to the risk of a very unjust award at Geneva; and reconciled a sister nation, and effected a real forward step in the march, of civilisation at about half the cost which the present administration has recently incurred (but without paying it) in agitating and disturbing Europe? Or is it that during all those years, and many more years before them, while liberty and public law were supported, and British honour vindicated, territorial cupidity was not inflamed by the deeds or words of statesmen, British interests were not set up as “the first and great commandment,” and it was thought better to consolidate a still undeveloped empire, which might well satisfy every ambition, as it assuredly taxes to the utmost every faculty.

III

(M189) Though this was a “tumultuous year,” he noted with some complacency that the work of his pen produced a thousand pounds. He laboured hard at his Homeric primer, “just contriving to squeeze the completion of it into the Easter recess”; wrote articles on the “Peace to Come,” on the “Paths of Honour and of Shame,” on the Abbé Martin, on “England’s Mission,” on “Electoral Statistics,” the “Friends and Foes of Russia,” and other matters. He finished a paper on Iris, “a charming little subject, and for once I am a little pleased with my work.” He toiled diligently at a collection of old articles, which he christened Gleanings:—

November 14.—Worked on articles for reprint. Reperusal of Patteson moves me unto tears.(355) What a height he reached! What he did for God and the church. Praise to the Highest in the height! 21.—This morning the rain on the trees was wonderful and lovely. When it fell under the trees in the afternoon it was like snow or small icicles an inch deep. 25.—Read Maud once more, and, aided by Doyle’s criticism, wrote my note of apology and partial retractation.(356) The fact is I am wanting in that higher poetical sense, which distinguishes the true artist.

Again and again he gives himself the delightful refreshment of arranging his books. He finds that he has 700 volumes of English poetry. “After 30 hours my library is now in a passable state, and I enjoy, in Ruskin’s words, ‘the complacency of possession and the pleasantness of order.’ ” He sat to Millais in the summer for what was to be the most popular of his portraits. “July 5.—Went with C. to examine the Millais portrait, surely a very fine work. 6—Sat once more to Millais, whose ardour and energy about his picture inspire a strong sympathy.” On Good Friday he hears Bach’s passion music, “most beautiful, yet not what I like for to-day.” In the afternoon: “We drove down to Pembroke Lodge. For a few minutes saw Lord Russell at his desire—a noble wreck. He recognised us and overflowed with feeling.”

In December the Argylls and Mr. Ruskin came to Hawarden:—

Dec. 12.—Mr. Ruskin’s health better, and no diminution of charm. 14.—Mr. Ruskin at dinner developed his political opinions. They aim at the restoration of the Judaic system, and exhibit a mixture of virtuous absolutism and Christian socialism. All in his charming and modest manner.

From a pleasing account of Ruskin at Hawarden privately printed, we may take one passage:—

Something like a little amicable duel took place at one time between Ruskin and Mr. G., when Ruskin directly attacked his host as a “leveller.” “You see you think one man is as good as another and all men equally competent to judge aright on political questions; whereas I am a believer in an aristocracy.” And straight came the answer from Mr. Gladstone, “Oh dear, no! I am nothing of the sort. I am a firm believer in the aristocratic principle—the rule of the best. I am an out-and-out inequalitarian,” a confession which Ruskin treated with intense delight, clapping his hands triumphantly.

The true question against Ruskin’s and Carlyle’s school was how you are to get the rule of the best. Mr. Gladstone thought that freedom was the answer; what path the others would have us tread, neither Ruskin nor his stormy teacher ever intelligibly told us.

IV

Writing on November 1 to Madame Novikoff, Mr. Gladstone said:—

Nov. 1, ’78.—My opinion is that this government is moving to its doom, and I hope the day of Lord Granville’s succession to it may be within a twelvemonth. It is not to be desired that this should take place at once. The people want a little more experience of Beaconsfield toryism.

Unfortunately this experience, whatever be the precise name for it, now came with disastrous promptitude, and the nation having narrowly escaped one war, found itself involved in two. The peril of a conflict in Europe had hardly passed, before the country found itself committed to an attack for which the government themselves censured their high-handed agent, upon the fiercest of the savage tribes of South Africa. A more formidable surprise was the announcement that, by a headlong reversal of accepted Indian policy, war had been declared against the Ameer of Afghanistan.

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VI. Midlothian. (1879)

μηδὲ μαλθακὸς γένῃ. τί δρᾴς? ἀνίστω, μή σε νικάτω κόπος.

ÆSCH. Eum., 74-128.

Turn not faint of heart. What doest thou? Let not weariness overcome thee.

I

(M190) After the general election of 1874, Mr. Gladstone resolved not again to offer himself as candidate for Greenwich, and in 1878 he formally declined an invitation from the liberals in that constituency. At the end of the year it was intimated to him that he might have a safe seat in the city of Edinburgh without a contest. In January 1879, more ambitious counsels prevailed, and it was resolved by the liberal committee of Midlothian, with Lord Rosebery in the front, and amid infinite resolution, enthusiasm, and solid sense of responsibility, that Mr. Gladstone should be invited to contest the metropolitan county of Scotland. Mr. Adam, the Scotch whip, entered into the design, Lord Wolverton approved, and Lord Granville sent Adam a letter assenting. The sitting member was Lord Dalkeith, eldest son of that Duke of Buccleuch who had been Mr. Gladstone’s colleague in Peel’s cabinet nearly forty years before, and who had left it in the memorable December of 1845. Parties had always been closely balanced, although the tories had held their own pretty firmly, and only two contests had been fought for forty years. The Midlothian tory was described to Mr. Gladstone as of the hardest and narrowest type, and the battle was therefore sure to be fierce. Some of the voters, however, told the canvassers that they would no longer support ministers. “If the government continues much longer,” they said, “the whole nation will be in the poorhouse.” The delight of the constituency was intense at the prospect of having for their champion one whom they described as the greatest living Scotchman, and Adam (January 10, 1879) predicted a majority of two hundred. Mr. Gladstone rapidly, but not without deliberation, entered into the project. “I am now only anxious,” he wrote to Mr. Adam (January 11), “under your advice and Wolverton’s, about making the ground sure before the plunge is taken; after it is taken, you may depend on me.” On the same day he wrote to Lord Granville:—

I believe you have been cognizant of the proceedings about the county of Midlothian, which are now beginning to bear a practical aspect. Generally, when one knows the tree is a large tree, yet on coming close up to the trunk it looks twice as large as it did before. So it is with this election. If it goes on, it will gather into itself a great deal of force and heat, and will be very prominent. Thus far I am not sure whether I have put the matter pointedly before you, or have been content to assume your approval of what I found Adam pressing strongly upon me. It will be a tooth and nail affair.

Lord Granville replied, that he was doing a “very plucky and public-spirited thing.” “Your friends,” he said, “must begin working the coach at once, but I should think you had better not appear too early in the field. Act Louis XIV.” “Having received your approval,” Mr. Gladstone told Lord Granville, “I wrote on the same day to Adam accordingly.” He then went into details with his usual care and circumspection. When the public were made aware of what was on foot, the general interest became hardly less lively all over the island than it was in the constituency itself. It was observed at the time how impossible many people seemed to find it to treat anything done by Mr. Gladstone as natural and reasonable. Nothing would appear to be a more simple and unobjectionable act than his compliance with the request of the electors of Midlothian, yet “he was attacked as if he were guilty of some monstrous piece of vanity and eccentricity.”(357) Relentless opponents amused themselves by saying that “Mr. Gladstone lives personally in Wales and intends to live politically in Scotland; and his most fervently held opinions, like the Celtic population of the island, have very much followed the same line of withdrawal.”

Mr. Gladstone described the general outlook in a letter to his son Henry in India (May 16):—

The government declines, but no one can say at what rate. Elections are tolerably satisfactory to us—not, I think, more. A sure though evil instinct has guided them in choosing rather to demoralise our finance, than to pay their way by imposing taxes, but I do not see how they are long to escape this difficulty.... Our people look forward comfortably to the election. The government people say they will not have it this year. But if we come to the conclusion that we ought to have it, I am by no means sure but that though a minority, we can force it by putting our men into the field, and making it too uncomfortable for them to continue twelve or fifteen months in hot water. I am safe in Midlothian, unless they contrive a further and larger number of faggot votes.

Adam looked forward with alarm to the mischief that might be done if the general election were to be protracted beyond the autumn of 1880. “In order to neutralise the present majority,” he told Mr. Gladstone, “they will have to create faggots to a disgraceful extent, but they are not troubled by scruples of conscience.” The charity that thinketh no evil is perhaps less liberally given to party whips than even to other politicians.

Apart from Midlothian Mr. Adam, in January 1879, said to Mr. Gladstone that the liberals were helpless even in the best agricultural counties of England; that he saw no hope of improvement; they had neither candidates nor organisation in most of them, and there was no means that he knew of (and he had done all that he could) to wake them up. By November 1879, he reported that he had been carefully over the list, taking a very moderate calculation of the chances at the coming election; and he believed they ought to have a majority of 20 to 30, independent of home rulers. Mr. Gladstone wrote to Lord Granville:—

Aug. 6, ’79.—Salisbury’s speech indicates, and for several reasons I should believe, that they intend sailing on the quiet tack. Having proved their spirit, they will now show their moderation. In other words they want all the past proceedings to be in the main “stale fish” at the elections. Except financial shuffling they will very likely commit no new enormity before the election. In my view that means they will not supply any new matter of such severe condemnation as what they have already furnished. Therefore, my idea is, we should keep the old alive and warm. This is the meaning of my suggestion as to autumn work, rather than that I expect a dissolution. It seems to me good policy to join on the proceedings of 1876-9 by a continuous process to the dissolution. Should this happen, which I think likely enough about March, there will have been no opportunity immediately before it of stirring the country. I will not say our defeat in 1874 was owing to the want of such an opportunity, but it was certainly, I think, much aggravated by that want.

II

(M191) It was on November 24 that Mr. Gladstone soon after eight in the morning quitted Liverpool for Edinburgh, accompanied by his wife and Miss Gladstone. “The journey from Liverpool,” he enters, “was really more like a triumphal procession.” Nothing like it had ever been seen before in England. Statesmen had enjoyed great popular receptions before, and there had been plenty of cheering and bell-ringing and torchlight in individual places before. On this journey of a bleak winter day, it seemed as if the whole countryside were up. The stations where the train stopped were crowded, thousands flocked from neighbouring towns and villages to main centres on the line of route, and even at wayside spots hundreds assembled, merely to catch a glimpse of the express as it dashed through. At Carlisle they presented addresses, and the traveller made his first speech, declaring that never before in the eleven elections in which he had taken part, were the interests of the country so deeply at stake. He spoke again with the same moral at Hawick. At Galashiels he found a great multitude, with an address and a gift of the cloth they manufactured. With bare head in the raw air, he listened to their address, and made his speech; he told them that he had come down expressly to raise effectually before the people of the country the question in what manner they wished to be governed; it was not this measure or that, it was a system of government to be upheld or overthrown. When he reached Edinburgh after nine hours of it, the night had fallen upon the most picturesque street in all our island, but its whole length was crowded as it has never been crowded before or since by a dense multitude, transported with delight that their hero was at last among them. Lord Rosebery, who was to be his host, quickly drove with him amidst tumults of enthusiasm all along the road to the hospitable shades of Dalmeny. “I have never,” Mr. Gladstone says in his diary, “gone through a more extraordinary day.”

All that followed in a week of meetings and speeches was to match. People came from the Hebrides to hear Mr. Gladstone speak. Where there were six thousand seats, the applications were forty or fifty thousand. The weather was bitter and the hills were covered with snow, but this made no difference in cavalcades, processions, and the rest of the outdoor demonstrations. Over what a space had democracy travelled, and what a transition for its champion of the hour, since the days half a century back when the Christ Church undergraduate, the disciple of Burke and Canning, had ridden in anti-reform processions, been hustled by reform mobs, and had prayed for the blessing of heaven on the House of Lords for their honourable and manly decision in throwing out the bill. Yet the warmest opponent of popular government, even the Duke of Buccleuch himself, might have found some balm for this extraordinary display of popular feeling, in the thought that it was a tribute to the most splendid political career of that generation; splendid in gifts and splendid in service, and that it was repaid, moreover, with none of the flattery associated with the name of demagogue. Mr. Gladstone’s counsels may have been wise or unwise, but the only flattery in the Midlothian speeches was the manly flattery contained in the fact that he took care to address all these multitudes of weavers, farmers, villagers, artisans, just as he would have addressed the House of Commons,—with the same breadth and accuracy of knowledge, the same sincerity of interest, the same scruple in right reasoning, and the same appeal to the gravity and responsibility of public life. An aristocratic minister, speaking at Edinburgh soon after, estimated the number of words in Mr. Gladstone’s Midlothian speeches in 1879 at 85,840, and declared that his verbosity had become “a positive danger to the commonwealth.” Tory critics solemnly declared that such performances were an innovation on the constitution, and aggravated the evil tendencies of democracy.(358) Talk of this kind did not really impose for an instant on any man or woman of common sense.

(M192) Oratory ever since the days of Socrates, and perhaps long before, has been suspected as one of the black arts; and both at the time and afterwards Mr. Gladstone’s speeches in his first Midlothian campaign were disparaged, as I have just said, as sentiment rather than politics, as sophistry not sound reason, as illusory enchantment not solid and subsisting truth. We are challenged to show passages destined to immortality. With all admiration for the effulgent catalogue of British orators, and not forgetting Pitt on the slave trade, or Fox on the Westminster scrutiny, or Sheridan on the begums of Oude, or Plunket on the catholic question, or Grattan, or Canning, or Brougham, we may perhaps ask whether all the passages that have arrived at this degree of fame and grandeur, with the exception of Burke, may not be comprised in an extremely slender volume. The statesman who makes or dominates a crisis, who has to rouse and mould the mind of senate or nation, has something else to think about than the production of literary masterpieces. The great political speech, which for that matter is a sort of drama, is not made by passages for elegant extract or anthologies, but by personality, movement, climax, spectacle, and the action of the time. All these elements Midlothian witnessed to perfection.

It was my fortune to be present at one whole day of these performances. “An overpowering day,” Mr. Gladstone calls it in his diary (December 5, 1879). “After a breakfast-party,” he says, “I put my notes in order for the afternoon. At twelve delivered the inaugural address as lord rector of the university” [Glasgow]. This discourse lasted an hour and a half, and themes, familiar but never outworn nor extinct, were handled with vigour, energy, and onward flow that made them sound as good as novel, and even where they did not instruct or did not edify, the noble music pleased. The great salient feature of the age was described as on its material side the constant discovery of the secrets of nature, and the progressive subjugation of her forces to the purposes and will of man. On the moral side, if these conquests had done much for industry, they had done more for capital; if much for labour, more for luxury; they had variously and vastly multiplied the stimulants to gain, the avenues of excitement, the solicitations to pleasure. The universities were in some sort to check all this; the habits of mind formed by universities are founded in sobriety and tranquillity; they help to settle the spirit of a man firmly upon the centre of gravity; they tend to self-command, self-government, and that genuine self-respect which has in it nothing of mere self-worship, for it is the reverence which each man ought to feel for the nature that God has given him, and for the laws of that nature. Then came an appeal, into which the speaker’s whole heart was thrown, for the intellectual dignity of the Christian ministry. If argument failed to the great Christian tradition, he would set small value on the multitude of uninstructed numerical adhesions, or upon the integrity of institutions and the unbroken continuity of rite. “Thought,” he exclaimed,—“thought is the citadel.” There is a steeplechase philosophy in vogue—sometimes specialism making short cuts to the honours of universal knowledge; sometimes by the strangest of solecisms, the knowledge of external nature being thought to convey a supreme capacity for judging within the sphere of moral action and of moral needs. The thing to do is to put scepticism on its trial, and rigorously to cross-examine it: allow none of its assumptions; compel it to expound its formulæ; do not let it move a step except with proof in its hand; bring it front to front with history; even demand that it shall show the positive elements with which it proposes to replace the mainstays it seems bent on withdrawing from the fabric of modern society. The present assault, far from being destined to final triumph, is a sign of a mental movement, unsteady, though of extreme rapidity, but destined, perhaps, to elevate and strengthen the religion that it sought to overthrow. “In the meantime,” he said, in closing this branch of his address, “I would recommend to you as guides in this controversy, truth, charity, diligence, and reverence, which indeed may be called the four cardinal virtues of all controversies, be they what they may.” This was followed by an ever-salutary reminder that man is the crown of the visible creation, and that studies upon man—studies in the largest sense of humanity, studies conversant with his nature, his works, his duties and his destinies—these are the highest of all studies. As the human form is the groundwork of the highest training in art, so those mental pursuits are the highest which have man, considered at large, for their object. Some excellent admonitions upon history and a simple, moving benediction, brought the oration to an end.

Blue caps as well as red cheered fervently at the close, and some even of those who had no direct interest in the main topics, and were not much or not at all refreshed by his treatment of them, yet confessed themselves sorry when the stream of fascinating melody ceased to flow. Then followed luncheon in the university hall, where the principal, in proposing the lord rector’s health, expressed the hope that he had not grudged the time given to the serene, if dull, seclusion of academic things. “I only quarrel with your word dull,” said Mr. Gladstone in reply. “Let me assure you, gentlemen, nothing is so dull as political agitation.” By this time it was four o’clock. Before six he was at St. Andrew’s Hall, confronting an audience of some six thousand persons, as eager to hear as he was eager to speak; and not many minutes had elapsed before they were as much aflame as he, with the enormities of the Anglo-Turkish convention, the spurious harbour in Cyprus, the wrongful laws about the press in India, the heavy and unjust charges thrown upon the peoples of India, the baseless quarrel picked with Shere Ali in Afghanistan, the record of ten thousand Zulus slain for no other offence than their attempt to defend against our artillery with their naked bodies their hearths and homes.

Once mentioning a well-known member of parliament who always showed fine mettle on the platform, Mr. Gladstone said of him in a homely image, that he never saw a man who could so quickly make the kettle boil. This was certainly his own art here. For an hour and a half thus he held them, with the irresistible spell of what is in truth the groundwork of every political orator’s strongest appeal—from Athenians down to Girondins, from Pericles to Webster, from Cicero to Gambetta—appeal to public law and civil right and the conscience of a free and high-minded people. This high-wrought achievement over, he was carried off to dine, and that same night he wound up what a man of seventy hard-spent years might well call “an overpowering day,” by one more address to an immense audience assembled by the Glasgow corporation in the city hall, to whom he expressed his satisfaction at the proof given by his reception in Glasgow that day, that her citizens had seen no reason to repent the kindness which had conferred the freedom of their city upon him fourteen years before.

(M193) The audience in St. Andrew’s Hall at Glasgow was, we may presume, like his audiences elsewhere, and the sources of his overwhelming power were not hard to analyse, if one were in analytic humour. For one thing, the speeches were rallying battle-cries, not sermons, and everybody knew the great invisible antagonist with whom the orator before them was with all his might contending. It was a gleaming array of the political facts of a political indictment, not an aerial fabric of moral abstractions. Nor, again, had the fashion in which Mr. Gladstone seized opinion and feeling and personal allegiance in Scotland, anything in common with the violent if splendid improvisations that made O’Connell the idol and the master of passionate Ireland. One of the most telling speeches of them all was the exposure of the government finance in the Edinburgh corn-exchange, where for an hour and a half or more, he held to his figures of surplus and deficit, of the yield of bushels to the acre in good seasons and bad, of the burden of the income-tax, of the comparative burden per head of new financial systems and old, with all the rigour of an expert accountant. He enveloped the whole with a playful irony, such as a good-humoured master uses to the work of clumsy apprentices, but of the paraphernalia of rhetoric there is not a period nor a sentence nor a phrase. Fire is suppressed. So far from being saturated with colour, the hue is almost drab. Yet his audience were interested and delighted, and not for a moment did he lose hold,—not even, as one observer puts it, “in the midst of his most formidable statistics, nor at any point in the labyrinthine evolution of his longest sentences.”

Let the conclusion be good or let it be bad, all was in groundwork and in essence strictly on the plane and in the tongue of statesmanship, and conformable to Don Pedro’s rule, “What need the bridge much broader than the flood?”(359) It was Demosthenes, not Isocrates. It was the orator of concrete detail, of inductive instances, of energetic and immediate object; the orator confidently and by sure touch startling into watchfulness the whole spirit of civil duty in a man; elastic and supple, pressing fact and figure with a fervid insistence that was known from his career and character to be neither forced nor feigned, but to be himself. In a word, it was a man—a man impressing himself upon the kindled throngs by the breadth of his survey of great affairs of life and nations, by the depth of his vision, by the power of his stroke. Physical resources had much to do with the effect; his overflowing vivacity, the fine voice and flashing eye and a whole frame in free, ceaseless, natural and spontaneous motion. So he bore his hearers through long chains of strenuous periods, calling up by the marvellous transformations of his mien a strange succession of images—as as if he were now a keen hunter, now some eager bird of prey, now a charioteer of fiery steeds kept well in hand, and now and again we seemed to hear the pity or dark wrath of a prophet, with the mighty rushing wind and the fire running along the ground.

All this was Mr. Gladstone in Midlothian. To think of the campaign without the scene, is as who should read a play by candle-light among the ghosts of an empty theatre. When the climax came, it was found that Mr. Gladstone’s tremendous projectiles had pounded the ministerial citadel to the ground, and that he had a nation at his back. What had been vague misgiving about Lord Beaconsfield grew into sharp certainty; shadows of doubt upon policy at Constantinople or Cabul or the Cape, became substantive condemnation; uneasiness as to the national finances turned to active resentment; and above all, the people of this realm, who are a people with rather more than their share of conscience at bottom, were led to consider whether when all is said, there is not still a difference between right and wrong even in the relations of states and the problems of empire. It was this last trait that made the atmosphere in which both speaker and his hearers drew their inspiration. It may be true, if we will, that, as a great critic sardonically hints, “eloquence, without being precisely a defect, is one of the worst dangers that can beset a man.”(360) Yet after all, to disparage eloquence is to depreciate mankind; and when men say that Mr. Gladstone and Midlothian were no better than a resplendent mistake, they forget how many objects of our reverence stand condemned by implication in their verdict; they have not thought out how many of the faiths and principles that have been the brightest lamps in the track of human advance they are extinguishing by the same unkind and freezing breath. One should take care lest in quenching the spirit of Midlothian, we leave sovereign mastery of the world to Machiavelli.

I need not here go through the long list of topics. As an attack upon ministers Mr. Gladstone made out the upshot to be finance in confusion, legislation in arrear, honour compromised by breach of public law, Russia aggrandized and yet estranged, Turkey befriended, as they say, but sinking every year, Europe restless and disturbed; in Africa the memory of enormous bloodshed in Zululand, and the invasion of a free people in the Transvaal; Afghanistan broken; India thrown back. He disclaimed all fellowship with those who believe that the present state of society permits us to make any vow of universal peace, and of renouncing in all cases the policy of war. He enumerated the six principles that he thought to be the right principles for us: to foster the strength of the empire by just laws and by economy; to seek to preserve the world’s peace; to strive to the uttermost to cultivate and maintain the principle of concert in Europe; to avoid needless and entangling engagements; to see that our foreign policy shall be inspired by such love of freedom as had marked Canning, Palmerston, Russell; to acknowledge the equal right of all nations. He denounced “the policy of denying to others the rights that we claim ourselves” as untrue, arrogant, and dangerous. The revival of the analogy of imperial Rome for the guidance of British policy he held up as fundamentally unsound and practically ruinous. For have not modern times established a sisterhood of nations, equal, independent, each of them built up under the legitimate defence which public law affords to every nation living within its own borders, and seeking to perform its own affairs? He insisted that we should ever “remember the rights of the savage, as we call him.” “Remember,” he exclaimed, “that the sanctity of life in the hill villages of Afghanistan, among the winter snows, is as inviolable in the eye of Almighty God as can be your own. Remember that He who has united you as human beings in the same flesh and blood, has bound you by the law of mutual love; that that mutual love is not limited by the shores of this island, is not limited by the boundaries of Christian civilisation; that it passes over the whole surface of the earth, and embraces the meanest along with the greatest in its unmeasured scope.”

It was this free movement and pure air that gave to the campaign its marking character. The campaign had a soul in it. Men were recalled to moral forces that they had forgotten. In his last speech at Edinburgh, Mr. Gladstone’s closing words were these:—

I am sustained and encouraged, and I may almost say driven on in public life, by the sentiment believed and entertained by me most sincerely, whether erroneously or not, that the principles at issue are much broader than those of ordinary contention.... I humbly ask for confidence when I state my own belief that the objects we have in view at the present time are objects connected with the welfare of mankind upon the widest scale.... Whatever we may say amidst the clash of arms and amidst the din of preparation for warfare in time of peace—amidst all this yet there is going on a profound mysterious movement, that, whether we will or not, is bringing the nations of the civilised world, as well as the uncivilised, morally as well as physically nearer to one another, and making them more and more responsible before God for one another’s welfare.... I do most heartily thank you for having given me the credit of being actuated by the desire to consider in public transactions the wider interests of mankind, and I venture to assure you that so far as my objects and intentions are concerned, objects of that nature, and nothing meaner or narrower, will ever be taken as the pole-star of my life.

III

(M194) Two days after a departure from Glasgow which he calls royal, the unwearied warrior made his way through scenes of endless stir all along the journey, back to his temple of peace at Hawarden (December 8). There he at once resumed his habits of daily industry, revising proofs of speeches “reaching 255 pages!” placing books and reading them—Catullus, Hodgson’s Turgot, somebody on Colour Sense, somebody else on Indian finance, Jenkins on Atheism, Bunbury’s Geography—and so forth. Also, “wrote on mythology and on economics; together rather too much. I am not very fit for composition after 5 P.M.” Meanwhile Christmas arrived, and then the eve of his birthday, with its reflections—reflections of one—

“Who though thus endued as with a sense And faculty for storm and turbulence Is yet a Soul whose master-bias leans ... Where what he most doth value must be won.”

December 28. ... And now I am writing in the last minutes of the seventh decade of my life. This closing is a great event. The days of our life are three score years and ten. It is hardly possible that I should complete another decade. How much or how little of this will God give me for the purposes dear to my heart? Ah! what need have I of what I may term spiritual leisure, to be out of the dust and heat and blast and strain, before I pass into the unseen world. But perhaps this is a form of self-love. For the last three and a half years I have been passing through a political experience which is, I believe, without example in our parliamentary history. I profess to believe it has been an occasion when the battle to be fought was a battle of justice, humanity, freedom, law, all in their first elements from the very root, and all on a gigantic scale. The word spoken was a word for millions, and for millions who for themselves cannot speak. If I really believe this, then I should regard my having been morally forced into this work as a great and high election of God. And certainly I cannot but believe that He has given me special gifts of strength on the late occasion, especially in Scotland.... Three things I would ask of God over and above all the bounty which surrounds me. This first, that I may escape into retirement. This second, that I may speedily be enabled to divest myself of everything resembling wealth. And the third—if I may—that when God calls me He may call me speedily. To die in church appears to be a great euthanasia, but not at a time to disturb worshippers. Such are some of an old man’s thoughts, in whom there is still something that consents not to be old.

Among the other books that he had been reading was the biography of one of the closest of his friends, and in the last hours of this annus mirabilis he writes:—

Read the Life of Bishop Wilberforce. It is indeed an edifying book. I knew him, admired him, loved him living. But the laying out of his full character from early days onwards tells me much I did not know, and lifts upwards my conception of him both in greatness and in goodness.

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VII. The Eve Of The Battle. (1879)

Perhaps no man has ever had a mighty influence over his fellows without having the innate need to dominate, and this need usually becomes the more imperious in proportion as the complications of life make Self inseparable from a purpose which is not selfish.—GEORGE ELIOT.

I

It is interesting to get what light we may on Mr. Gladstone’s frame of mind between his first astounding triumph in Midlothian and the crowning mercy of the general election. In October he had written to his son Henry in India as to the probable date of the dissolution, that the government had in his opinion “to choose between a minor or a less smashing defeat now, or probably a more smashing one after the disclosure and real presentation of their most discreditable finance, which can hardly be delayed beyond the spring.” They had a chance of better trade, but the likelihood also of worse revenue. The great reason against dissolution was that they were in possession, and every day’s delay was another day’s exercise of power. He then proceeds to mention his personal position:—

They are beginning to ask who is to succeed if Beaconsfield is displaced. Voices are coming up here and there, some of them very confident, that the people will call for me. Nothing, however, but a very general, a nearly unanimous, call from the liberals, with the appearance of a sort of national will, could bring this demand to a form in which it could or ought to be obeyed. The reasons against my coming forward are of immense force; those against my indicating any shadow of desire or willingness to come forward are conclusive. Nor do I at present see any indication of a state of things which would bring it about.

(M195) Before leaving Dalmeny at the end of his campaign, Mr. Gladstone wrote a letter to Mr. Bright, a copy of which, along with the reply, and two letters from Lord Wolverton, he left tied up in a separate packet.

To Mr. Bright.

Nov. 28, 1879.—You will probably recollect that during your last visit to Hawarden you suggested to me in a walk the expectation or the possibility that when the return of liberals to power seemed probable, there might be a popular call for my resuming the leadership of the party, and that I stated to you what I believed, and you I think admitted, to be the reasons against it. These, if I remember right, were four, and I attached to them differing degrees of weight.

The first was that my health and strength would be unequal to the strain at my time of life.

The second, that the work to be done was so formidable that hardly any amount of courage availed to look it in the face.

The third, weightier than these, was that a liberal government under me would be the object from the first of an amount and kind of hostility, such as materially to prejudice its acts and weaken or, in given circumstances, neutralise its power for good.

The fourth, that I was absolutely precluded under present circumstances, being bound by the clearest considerations of honour and duty to render a loyal allegiance to Granville as leader of the party, and to Hartington as leader in the Commons, and was entirely disabled from so much as entertaining any proposition that could directly or indirectly tend to their displacement.

There is a fifth consideration that now presses me, of which the grounds had hardly emerged in regard to myself personally at the time when we conversed together. Nothing could be so painful, I may almost say so odious to me, as to force myself, or to be forced, upon the Queen, under circumstances where the choice of another from the ranks of the same party would save her from being placed in a difficulty of that peculiar kind. This, it may be said, belongs to the same category as my first and second objections; but there it is.

The enthusiasm of Scotland is something wonderful. As to the county of Midlothian, I doubt whether the well-informed tories themselves in the least expect to win. We go to Taymouth on Monday. I hope you are well and hearty and see cause to be contented with the progress of opinion. The more I think about the matter, the more strange and mysterious does it seem to me that any party in this free nation should be found to sanction and uphold policy and proceedings like those of the last two years in particular. I have written this because I am desirous you should have clearly before you the matter of my conversation with you, and the means of verifying it.

Mr. Bright to Mr. Gladstone.

Rochdale, Dec. 12, 1879.—Perhaps I ought to have written to you sooner to acknowledge the receipt of your letter of the 28th ult., but I preferred to let you get home before I wrote, and I was in truth rather puzzled as to what I ought to say.

You, with sufficient accuracy, describe the purport of your remarks during our conversation when I was with you a year ago. I saw the difficulty, then in the future, now perhaps near upon us. But it is one in which nothing can be done, and “a masterly inactivity” seems the only wise course. If a break-up of the present concern comes, the Queen will be advised to send, for Granville or Hartington. The one sent for will accept and attempt to form a government, or he may have grave doubts, and say that you are the only man, etc.; he will consult the other, and will consult you. Meantime there may be a “pronouncement” on the part of the people, through the press and public meetings, which will have a sudden effect on negotiations and on the views of the Queen, and may decide the question. If such a time should come, then you will have to say what is possible, and I hope you will be able to decide rightly, and with reference solely to the interests of the country and the service you owe to the crown as representing the nation. You will act with a most strict honour to Granville and Hartington, as I believe they will act to you. If, as I hope for and believe, no selfish ambition will come in to make mischief, the question will be determined in such a manner as to content all honest men, and what is best for all will be done. I am often asked as to the future. I reply only so as to say nothing to add to the evident difficulty of the situation.

Your Scotch expedition has been one of discovery and of conquest. The tory press and partizans are evidently astonished at it. The government speakers have no new defence, and they want the past to be forgotten. Mr. Smith, first lord, I see, entirely rejoices in what has been done in South Africa, though “a few lives” have been lost by it. This official life seems sorely to demoralise some homely and decent people. I am fairly well so far during the winter, but I seem feeble when I compare myself with your activity and power.... We are to have meetings in Birmingham during January. I should prefer the quiet of obscurity to these meetings. I hope Mrs. Gladstone and your daughter have enjoyed their Scotch trip and are well after it.

Five days later came Lord Wolverton’s report of the state of feeling on these delicate topics in high places in London. He had seen Lord Granville on the evening of the 16th:—

To most affectionate inquiries as to your health and powers, I gave a most satisfactory account, and the conversation then went to the question as to the effect which your recent triumphant progress in Midlothian and the North had produced upon your mind. I frankly said that you had in my opinion not anticipated such a marked expression of public feeling, and that it had doubtless tended to lead your mind to the consideration of the position of the party, and to the fact that public opinion might call upon you to an extent which no one could have looked for. I then (with anxiety to convey what I know to be your desire) most earnestly impressed upon Lord Granville that you had upon every occasion when the subject was alluded to, prefaced all you had to say with the strongest expressions of loyalty to Hartington and himself. That I felt convinced that nothing would induce you to encourage, or to even listen to, any attempt which others might make to disturb the existing state of things as to the leadership, unless the wish was very clearly expressed to you by Hartington and himself, and you would demand full proof that their interests and that of the party strongly pointed to the reconsideration of your own position. I need hardly say that, though I felt it my duty to take care that I did not understate your feelings, it was not necessary to reassure Granville upon that point.

The conversation then went to the state of the party and its present position. I learnt that a private meeting had been held at Devonshire House in the morning. I believe Hartington, Granville, Cardwell, Adam, and Harcourt were present. My impression is that the advice Adam gave as to the elections, was that “union in the party at this moment would not be promoted by a change of front.” I do not mean to say that the question of leadership was actually discussed, but I suspect the conversation turned somewhat upon the point which you place “third” in your letter to Bright. To sum it all up, I do not think you will at present be troubled by any application to you from Granville and Hartington.(361)

The third point in the letter to Mr. Bright was the question whether a liberal government under Mr. Gladstone would not be exposed to a special degree of hostility, due to the peculiar antagonism that his personality excited. In a later letter (December 20), Wolverton tells Mr. Gladstone that in the conversation of the 16th, “Lord Granville raised the point you made your third in your note to Bright, and that he did converse upon at some length, evidently having real fears that many of our weak-kneed ones would feel some alarm if Hartington went from the front now, and that the tories would intensify this to the uttermost. I think this was all.” Another sentence indicates Lord Wolverton’s own view:—

Lord Granville is not sanguine as to the future. As you know, he is always inclined to “temporise”; this is his line now, and he is perhaps right. You know my fear was that without your name in front, the battle at the election would be fought at a great disadvantage. But I see the immense difficulty of a change of front now, even if they desired it and you consented to it. This you also feel, I know.

To all this Mr. Gladstone replied to Wolverton as follows:—

Hawarden, December 18, 1879.—I thank you much for your letter. What you report yourself to have said is quite satisfactory to me. If Granville said more than you had mentioned, anything that fell from him would be acceptable to me. When I saw your envelope, I felt a dread lest the contents should be more substantive; a relief came on reading them. But these communications are useful, as they give distinctness to ideas, and through ideas to intentions. I may state mine as follows: 1. My ears are shut against all the world, except it were Granville and Hartington. 2. And even to them unless they spoke together, and in clear and decisive language. 3. They are the judges whether to speak, as well as when to speak. But as an individual, I am of opinion that there is not a case for their speaking now. 4. Were they to speak now, and as I have defined above, I should then say let us have nothing more than a formula, and let the substance of it be that by the nature of things no man in my position could make beforehand an absolute renunciation, and that the leadership in the next parliament must, like everything else, be considered in connection with what may appear at the dissolution to be the sense of the country, but that my action individually has been and will continue to be that of a follower of Lord Granville and Lord Hartington. One thing I would ask of you as a fast friend. If you think that in anything I fall short by omission or commission of perfect loyalty as a member of the party, I beg you to tell me.

II

As usual with him, these grave political preoccupations were not engrossing, but only a part of the day’s task. He carried on a pretty profuse correspondence, he worked hard on his favourite diversion of arranging books and papers, he gave much thought and time to estate matters with his eldest son, with him too he felled now a chestnut, now a sycamore; he corrected the proofs of his speeches and wrote an article for Mr. Knowles; he read books and articles about Eleusis, and the Hebrew migration from Egypt, and the Olympian system, and Newman on the Eirenicon, and Westcott on St. John, and somebody else upon St. Thomas Aquinas. For two or three days he was partially disabled by “a low face-ache: the reaction after heavy pressure, under which I received from the mercy of God such remarkable support.” In the middle of January alarming accounts came from his sister Helen, who lay dying at Cologne. Thither he sped with his eldest brother and his sister-in-law. They found life fast ebbing, and four days after their arrival the end came, in the midst of pious exercises and affectionate care. They were satisfied that she had been “freely restored to the unity of spirit and the bond of peace,” and had died not in the actual Roman communion. A few days after his return home he records: “Wrote a long memorandum of the evidence in regard to dear Helen’s religious profession.” The remains they bore to Fasque, and by the end of the month he was again at Hawarden, once more at work with his eldest son upon the “accumulated disorder,” and the rest of the round of his familiar employments. Among other things he read Cowper’s Task—“the fifth book very noble in its moral strain”; and another entry will interest many,—“Feb. 15.—Read the biography of noble Dora Pattison. How by reflex action it stings.... Yet even to her (like Bishop Butler), death was terrible.” “He was haunted,” he writes, “with recollections of Sister Dora.” Then after a Sunday passed in church exercises, and “skimming many theological books,” on February 23 he “left Hawarden with a heavy heart.”

He quickly found himself in the London whirlpool, attending conclaves of his political friends, dining out, seeing Irving in the Merchant of Venice (“his best, I think”), speaking once or twice in the House, and twice at London meetings in St. Pancras and Marylebone, where the popular enthusiasm made even his most hardened critics begin to suspect that the tide had really turned since the days when the Londoners mobbed him in the street and broke his windows.

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VIII. The Fall Of Lord Beaconsfield. (1880)

In causa facili cuivis licet esse disertum, Et minimae vires frangere quassa valent; Subruere est arces et stantia moenia virtus.

—Ov. Trist., iii. XI. 21.

In an easy case any man can plead, and against shattered walls the puniest strength prevails; ’tis the overthrow of standing towers and frowning ramparts that tests manhood.

I

At last one day (March 8) when Mr. Gladstone was “writing a little on Homer,” he heard the fated news that the dissolution was announced. Lord Beaconsfield published the famous letter to the lord lieutenant of Ireland, and in deep accents and sonorous sentences endeavoured to make home rule the issue of the election. Shrewd politicians, with time to reflect, found it not easy to divine why the government had chosen the particular moment. It might be, as some supposed, that they thought the opposition had lately got into bad odour with the country by coquetting with home rulers, as shown by the elections at Liverpool and Southwark. But, in fact, little importance was to be attached to these two defeats of the opposition, for Liverpool had always been conservative, and Southwark was thoroughly disorganised by liberal divisions. “The general opinion seems to be,” says Speaker Brand (Mar. 15), “that the opposition may gain slightly at the general election, but not to an extent to break down altogether the conservative majority.”

In what was in effect his election address, Lord Beaconsfield warned the country that a danger, in its ultimate results scarcely less disastrous than pestilence and famine, distracted Ireland. A portion of its population was endeavouring to sever the constitutional tie that united it to Great Britain in that bond which was favourable to the power and prosperity of both. “It is to be hoped,” he went on, “that all men of light and leading will resist this destructive doctrine. The strength of this action depends on the unity of feeling which should pervade the United Kingdom and its widespread dependencies. The first duty of an English minister should be to consolidate that co-operation which renders irresistible the community educated, as our own, in an equal love of liberty and law. And yet there are some who challenge the expediency of the imperial character of this realm. Having attempted and failed to enfeeble our colonies by their policy of decomposition, they may perhaps now recognise in the disintegration of the United Kingdom, a mode which will not only accomplish, but precipitate their purpose.... Rarely in this century has there been an occasion more critical. The power of England and the peace of Europe will largely depend upon the verdict of the country.... Peace rests on the presence, not to say the ascendency of England in the councils of Europe. Even at this moment the doubt supposed to be inseparable from popular elections, if it does not diminish, certainly arrests her influence, and is a main reason for not delaying an appeal to the national voice.”

To this manifesto Mr. Gladstone, with his usual long pains in the drafting of such pieces, prepared his counterblast. He went with direct force to what Lord Beaconsfield had striven to make the centre of his appeal:—

In the electioneering address which the prime minister has issued, an attempt is made to work upon your fears by dark allusions to the repeal of the union and the abandonment of the colonies. Gentlemen, those who endangered the union with Ireland were the party that maintained there an alien church, an unjust land law, and franchises inferior to our own; and the true supporters of the union are those who firmly uphold the supreme authority of parliament, but exercise that authority to bind the three nations by the indissoluble tie of liberal and equal laws. As to the colonies, liberal administrations set free their trade with all the world, gave them popular and responsible government, undertook to defend Canada with the whole strength of the empire, and organised the great scheme for uniting the several settlements of British North America into one dominion, to which, when we quitted office in 1866, it only remained for our successors to ask the ready assent of parliament. It is by these measures that the colonies have been bound in affection to the empire, and the authors of them can afford to smile at baseless insinuations. Gentlemen, the true purpose of these terrifying insinuations is to hide from view the acts of the ministry, and their effect upon the character and condition, of the country.

To those ministerial misdeeds he proceeded to draw the attention of the electors, though he declared with threescore years and ten upon his head, how irksome he felt the task. “At home,” he said, “the ministers have neglected legislation, aggravated the public distress by continual shocks to confidence which is the life of enterprise, augmented the public expenditure and taxation for purposes not merely unnecessary but mischievous, and plunged the finances, which were handed over to them in a state of singular prosperity, into a series of deficits unexampled in modern times.” After shooting this heavy bolt he looked abroad. “Abroad they have strained, if they have not endangered, the prerogative by gross misuse, and have weakened the empire by needless wars, unprofitable extensions, and unwise engagements, and have dishonoured it in the eyes of Europe by filching the island of Cyprus from the Porte under a treaty clause distinctly concluded in violation of the treaty of Paris, which formed part of the international law of Christendom.” As to the domestic legislation of the future, it was in the election address of the prime minister a perfect blank. It was true that in default of reform in this kingdom, the nation was promised the advantages of “presence, not to say ascendency,” in the councils of Europe.

There is indeed, he said, an ascendency in European councils to which Great Britain might reasonably aspire, by steadily sustaining the character of a Power no less just than strong; attached to liberty and law, jealous of peace, and therefore opposed to intrigue and aggrandizement, from whatever quarter they may come; jealous of honour, and therefore averse to the clandestine engagements which have marked our two latest years. To attain a moral and envied ascendency such as this, is indeed a noble object for any minister or any empire.

II

Mr. Gladstone wrote to Lord Acton on March 14:—

On Tuesday I am to set out for Midlothian and my last general election. My general elections have been 1832, 1835, 1837, 1841, 1847, 1852, 1857, 1859, 1865, 1874, and now 1880—what a list! I believe that among the official men of this century I am now beaten only by Lord Palmerston in the length of my career in the House of Commons. A clear answer from the nation, a clear answer in the right sense, and a decisive accession of the liberal party to power without me, this is what I hope and pray. I think that the experts and the party generally are pretty sanguine. None doubt that the government are to lose; a few doubt whether they will be weaker than liberals and home rulers; very many whether weaker than liberals alone. All agree that Scotland will do its duty.

On the morning of the 16th, Mr. Gladstone started. Hundreds of people grew to thousands long before his train left King’s Cross, and all the way to Edinburgh he found the same vivid interest and acclamation on the east coast that had greeted him in November on the west. At Grantham the mayor and a crowd estimated by nimble statisticians at two thousand, awaited him at the station; at York the lord mayor and six thousand; at Newcastle-on-Tyne too many thousands to count. The little addresses made at these stopping-places were described as a sort of table of contents of the more elaborate speeches to be delivered in Midlothian itself. As he crossed the Tweed the fervour did not cool, and when at last he reached Edinburgh, he encountered a scene almost as wonderful as that which had met him four months before.

Again he was the guest at Dalmeny, and again he renewed his prodigious exertions amid a vehemence of admiration and delight that became more intense as the days passed. Here is an entry or two from the diary:—

Travelled forty miles and delivered three speeches of forty-five or fifty minutes each, at Juniper Green, Colinton, and Mid Calder. Enthusiasm unabated.... Corrected and despatched proofs of Religion, Achaian and Semitic. Mar. 21, Palm Sunday.—Drove to Edinburgh cathedral; service 11-1-½. Free St. George’s in the afternoon. Walked out seven miles with Lord Rosebery. 22.—To Edinburgh (after working as usual on my papers) at 1.15. Short complimentary address at liberal club. Then to George Street and on to the city election committee; short speech. Then by train to Gilmerton; spoke forty-five or fifty minutes; next after tea to Loanhead, and after more tea, spoke again for some time on Russian aggrandizement. Everywhere the greatest enthusiasm. Mr. C[owan] gave me interesting details about Magyar and Bohemian students. Back to Dalmeny at 7.20.

And so day after day did panting time toil after him in vain. Many of us have known long spells of hard electioneering—but not in one’s seventy-first year, with every single word as it fell into print on the morrow watched with the lynx eyes of party scrutiny, and all loaded with the heaviest personal responsibility.

(M196) On March 24 the parliament was dissolved. On March 30 the first elections took place, and the first pollings on the day following. From the early returns it was pretty evident that the liberals would have a majority. On the first day they made a net gain of fifteen seats in sixty-nine constituencies. By the end of the fourth day a total net gain of fifty seats was recorded. The ministerial majority was already gone. The county elections brought new surprises, and by the end of the second week the liberal gains were reckoned at ninety-nine.

Mr. Gladstone’s fortnight of discourse ended on the 2nd of April. “So,” he records, “ends the second series of the speeches in which I have hammered with all my poor might at the fabric of the present tory power. April 3.—Cut down a Spanish chestnut in Dalmeny Park by order. The day was quiet, but my papers and letters and the incoming news made it busy. It seemed as if the arm of the Lord had bared itself for work that He has made His own. 4.—A lull in election news, but the reflections on what has passed are overpowering.” Here are his closing words, and they are not without historic import:—

The great trial, gentlemen, proceeds. You have great forces arrayed against you. I say “You”; if you will permit me to identify myself with you, I will say, We have great forces arrayed against us, and apparently we cannot make our appeal to the aristocracy, excepting that which must never be forgotten, the distinguished and enlightened minority of that body of able, energetic, patriotic, liberal-minded men, whose feelings are with those of the people, and who decorate and dignify their rank by their strong sympathy with the entire community. With that exception, in all the classes of which I speak, I am sorry to say we cannot reckon upon what is called the landed interest, we cannot reckon upon the clergy of the established church either in England or in Scotland, subject again and always in each case to the most noble exceptions—exceptions, I trust, likely to enlarge and multiply from day to day. On none of these can we place our trust. We cannot reckon on the wealth of the country, nor upon the rank of the country, nor upon the influence which rank and wealth usually bring. In the main these powers are against us, for wherever there is a close corporation, wherever there is a spirit of organised monopoly, wherever there is a narrow and sectional interest apart from that of the country, and desiring to be set up above the interest of the public, there, gentlemen, we, the liberal party, have no friendship and no tolerance to expect. Above all these, and behind all these, there is something greater than these—there is the nation itself. This great trial is now proceeding before the nation. The nation is a power hard to rouse, but when roused, harder still and more hopeless to resist.... I figure to myself those who have constituted the majority of the late House of Commons as the persons arraigned, and the constituencies of the country as those who are called together in the solemn order of the constitution to hear the evidence, and to pronounce the verdict. That evidence has been pretty largely given. That verdict we await. We have none of the forms of a judicial trial. There are no peers in Westminster Hall, there are no judges on the woolsack; but if we concentrate our minds upon the truth of the case as apart from its mere exterior, it is a grander and a more august spectacle than was ever exhibited either in Westminster Hall or in the House of Lords. For a nation, called to undertake a great and responsible duty,—a duty which is to tell, as we are informed from high authority, on the peace of Europe and on the destinies of England,—has found its interests mismanaged, its honour tarnished, and its strength burdened and weakened by needless, mischievous, unauthorised, and unprofitable engagements, and it has resolved that this state of things shall cease, and that right and justice shall be done.(362)

(M197) Mr. Gladstone was already member for Leeds. So far back as the March of 1878 Sir James Kitson had written to ask him to become a candidate for the great city of the West Siding, but Mr. Gladstone declined the proposal. Then a deputation came to him in Harley Street, and he made them a speech on the Eastern question, but avoided any reference to the subject which they had come to handle. The stout Yorkshiremen were not to be baffled, and Mr. Gladstone, nominated without action of his own, was now returned by the unprecedented vote of 24,622.(363) He was right in calling the Leeds election “one of the most conspicuous and imposing victories ever won for the liberal cause.”(364) Still public interest was concentrated upon Midlothian, and the might with which he prevailed over men’s minds there, was admitted by his foes to be the most impressive tribute ever paid to political man and his vast powers as orator and popular leader. In Midlothian the crusade had been opened, and in Midlothian its triumph was sealed.

The poll was declared in Edinburgh soon after seven on the evening of April 5, and a few minutes later the result, amid every demonstration of extravagant delight from the triumphant multitude as they rushed away from the courthouse, was made known to Mr. Gladstone at a house in George Street taken by Lord Rosebery for the occasion. A couple of candles were brought from the dining-table and held on each side of him, so that his face might be seen, as from the balcony he spoke a few words of thanks.(365) “Drove into Edinburgh about four,” Mr. Gladstone records. “At 7.20 Mr. Reid brought the figures of the poll—Gladstone, 1579; Dalkeith, 1368; quite satisfactory. Soon after, 15,000 people being gathered in George Street, I spoke very shortly from the windows, and Rosebery followed, excellently well. Home about 10. Wonderful and nothing less has been the disposing guiding hand of God in all this matter.” The majority was not of great dimensions, but it was adequate and sufficient, and the victory was celebrated half through the night with bonfires, illuminations, fireworks, and all the other fashions of signifying public joy, throughout Scotland and the north of England. The astrologers, meteorologists, and prognosticators of Pall Mall and Fleet Street felt that this time at least they had not rightly plumbed the depths of the democratic seas.

Lord Beaconsfield was staying alone at that time in the historic halls of Hatfield, their master being then abroad. There, hour by hour and day after day, news of the long train of disasters reached him. From one in confidential relations with him, and who saw much of him at this moment, I have heard that the fallen minister, who had counted on a very different result, now faced the ruin of his government, the end of his career, and the overwhelming triumph of his antagonist, with an unclouded serenity and a greatness of mind, worthy of a man who had known high fortunes and filled to the full the measure of his gifts and his ambitions.

III

(M198) Some writers complained that the language of Midlothian was as solemn as if the verdict of the country were about to settle the issues of the battle of Armageddon. It was not exactly the battle of Armageddon, but the election of 1880 was, at any rate, one of the most remarkable in party history. For one thing, activity was unprecedented, and Mr. Gladstone’s fiery spirit seemed to have spread over the country. A list prepared by the liberal whips, and preserved by Mr. Gladstone, describes the new parliament as composed of 347 liberals, 240 conservatives, and 65 nationalists. Looking at the divisions of the three kingdoms, we find England and Wales contributing 282 liberals against 207 tories; Scotland 52 liberals against 8 tories; and Ireland, 13 liberals against 25 tories. The Irish nationalists were of two shades: 35 followers of Mr. Parnell, 26 moderate home rulers who followed Mr. Shaw, and 4 dubious. In England and Wales therefore the liberal majority was 75, and in Scotland it was 44. Turning to electoral aspects with special social significance, we note that of the county constituencies 63 sent liberal members as against 124 tories. In the metropolis, as a whole, the government gained one seat and lost four, with the result that London was represented in the new parliament by 8 tories and 14 liberals. One victory of real importance was won by the government, for they beat the liberal by two to one in the City of London, the heart and centre of many of those powerful influences that Mr. Gladstone had described in his last speech in the Midlothian election as determined foes from whom the liberal party had no tolerance to expect. “The tory party,” Mr. Gladstone noted, “has never had a majority on any one of its own four dissolutions—1852, 1859, 1868, 1880.”

Mr. Gladstone to Lord Rosebery.

Hawarden, April 10, 1880.—... I should like to write about these marvellous events, but how can I? The romance of politics which befel my old age in Scotland, has spread over the whole land. You remember perhaps my series of fractions, comparing daily the net gains with the gross returns. The first day began with 1/13 or thereabouts. It had got to 1/10 or 1/9 when we left you. It is now 1/6. How idle to talk about the caprice of household suffrage; the counties have given quite as remarkable results as the boroughs. I was stunned at the end of the first night; and I am still out of breath from the endeavour to keep up with the rapidity of events. I suppose the conservative Scotch will fill the first class compartment, or nearly so, but no more. Wales, I beg you to observe, has not (as I think) been behind Scotland in her achievements. Most of the wretched percentage of compensation on “tory gains” on the general list is wretched in quality as well as quantity, and consists of the district places. To scarcely one of these gains can they point with any keen satisfaction. As to Midlothian the moral effect, before and after, has I think surpassed all our hopes. The feeling until it was over (since which there has justly been a centring of thought on E. Lancashire) was so fastened on it, that it was almost like one of the occasions of old when the issue of battle was referred to single combat. The great merit of it I apprehend lay in the original conception, which I take to have been yours, and to overshadow even your operations towards the direct production of the result. But one thing it cannot overshadow in my mind: the sense of the inexpressible aid and comfort derived day by day from your considerate ever-watchful care and tact. [Latin not to be identified.] Let me apply these same words (calling on you for a translation if needful) to Lady Rosebery. I should feel profoundly ashamed of the burdens we brought you, had I not seen how truly they were borne in the spirit, which alone makes all burdens light. It is a very pleasant subject of reflection to me that the riveting effect of companionship in a struggle like this, does not pass away with the struggle itself but abides.

Our stratagem for a quiet exit was on the whole successful. At Carlisle there was perfect quiet. At most of the few places where the train stopped there were a score or two of people and no more. At Hawarden, arriving between 9 and 10 A.M., we cheated the triumphal preparations; but made amends by carrying them over to Herbert the following day. We now become eager for the East Worcestershire election and are sanguine about my son’s return. At Warrington we got over the three hours wonderfully, and succeeded in sleeping, though not exactly μαλθακῶς κατακείμενος through a succession of the most violent and unearthly noises, banging, crashing, roaring, squealing, that a railway station traversed by innumerable goods’ trains can supply..... I will not trouble you with, more words of thanks, I feel them so poor and idle.

Two days later Mr. Gladstone wrote to the Duke of Argyll:—

April 12, 1880.—All our heads are still in a whirl from the great events of the last fortnight, which have given joy, I am convinced, to the large majority of the civilised world. The downfall of Beaconsfieldism is like the vanishing of some vast magnificent castle in an Italian romance. It is too big, however, to be all taken in at once. Meantime, while I inwardly rejoice, I am against all outward signs, beyond such as are purely local, of exultation, for they are not chivalrous, and they would tend to barbarise political warfare. We may be well content to thank God in silence. But the outlook is tremendous! The gradual unravelling of the tangled knots of the foreign and Indian policy will indeed be a task for skilled and strong hands, if they can be found; and these can hardly be found such as the case requires.

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IX. The Second Ministry. (1880)

There is indeed one great and critical act, the responsibility for which falls momentarily or provisionally on the Sovereign: it is the dismissal of an existing Ministry, and the appointment of a new one. This act is usually performed with the aid drawn from authentic manifestations of public opinion, mostly such as are obtained through the votes or conduct of the House of Commons.—GLADSTONE.

The day after the declaration of the poll in Midlothian, Mr. Gladstone and his wife and daughter quitted Dalmeny, and made their way homewards, as we have just seen.

April 6.—A heavy day with post, incessant telegrams, and preparations for departure. We drove, however, to Linlithgow, saw the beautiful church and fine old castle, and I made a short non-polemical speech to the people.... Careful concealment of the plans of departure until well on in the evening. Left this most hospitable of all houses at 8.30, and got into the 9.25, escaping by secrecy all demonstration except from some 200 who seemed to gather on the instant. Travelled all night, and had time to ruminate on the great hand of God, so evidently displayed.

April 7, Wed.—After three hours of successful sleep amid frightful unearthly noises at Warrington, we went off to Chester and Hawarden, saluted enthusiastically, but escaping all crowds.... Set to work at once on a mass of letters and papers.... The day occupied with papers, letters, and telegrams, and reading my Vatican tracts.... The triumph grows and grows; to God be the praise.

April 9.—Letters passed 100. April 10, Sat.—Church, 8-½ A.M. Wrote to ... Postal arrivals, 140; terrible! Wolverton arrived to dinner, and I spent the evening in full conversation with him. He threatens a request from Granville and Hartington. Again, I am stunned, but God will provide.

April 11, Sun.—Church, 8-½ A.M., Holy Communion; 11 A.M. Wrote etc. Read Gospel for the 19th Century. Examined liturgical books. Further conversation with Wolverton on the London reception, on Leeds, and on the great matter of all. April 12.—Wolverton went off in the morning, and is to see Granville and Hartington to-day. Read Brugsch’s Hist. Egypt. Guy Mannering. Wrote some memoranda of names applicable to this occasion. Hard day. But all are pretty hard in this my “retirement.” April 13.—Began tentatively an anonymous letter on the Conservative Collapse,(366) really drawn forth by the letter of Lord Bath.... Read Guy Mannering and that most heavenly man George Herbert.... April 16.—Mr. Bright came over from Llandudno, and we spent nearly all the time in conversing on the situation. He is most kind and satisfactory. April 17.—Finished my letter and revision of it. Cut down a sycamore with W. H. G. April 18, Sun.—Holy Communion 8 A.M.; morning service and evening. Wrote to [17 letters]. Read Divine Veracity or Divine Justice, Caird on the Philosophy of Religion. April 19.—A reluctant goodbye before 1. London at 6.30. A secret journey, but people gathered at Chester station and Euston. I vaguely feel that this journey is a plunge out of an atmosphere of peace into an element of disturbance. May He who has of late so wonderfully guided, guide me still in the critical days about to come. April 20.—This blank day is, I think, probably due to the Queen’s hesitation or reluctance, which the ministers have to find means of [covering].

One joyous element in these days at Hawarden was the arrival first of the youngest son of the house, then of the eldest, the latter of them having won a seat in Worcestershire, and the former having failed in Middlesex, after a display of qualities that delighted his family and friends much more than mere victory could have done. “About one,” Mr. Gladstone marks on the 8th, “Herbert entered in triumph. We were there, and could not but be much moved.” And on the 14th, “Willy made his triumphal entry at four, and delivered a very good speech. Neville Lyttelton, too, spoke well from the carriage.” As Lord Acton wrote to Miss Gladstone about Middlesex, “The picture of the young, untried son bursting into sudden popularity, and turning men’s thoughts from the absorbing exploits of his father, adds an affecting domestic feature to that great biography. That meeting at Hawarden, after such a revolution and such a growth, is a thing I cannot think of without emotion.” A little later, when Mr. Gladstone’s option of Midlothian left the Leeds seat vacant, his son was elected without opposition to fill it. Mr. Gladstone’s letters on this operation, which had its delicacies, are an excellent example of his habits of careful and attentive judgment in handling even secondary affairs.

II

(M199) From the moment when it became clear that Lord Beaconsfield would be swept out of office, it was just as clear to sensible men that only one successor was possible. It was Mr. Gladstone, as everybody knew and said, who had led and inspired the assault. A cabinet without him would hold its councils without the most important of the influences on which it depended. If the majorities that carried the election could have been consulted on the choice of a minister, nobody doubted upon whom with unanimity their choice would fall. Even those who most detested the result, even those who held that a load of anxiety would be lifted from the bosoms of many liberals of official rank if they were to hear of Mr. Gladstone’s definite retirement from public life, still pronounced that it was Mr. Gladstone’s majority, and that was what the contributors to that majority intended to vote for was, above all else, his return to office and his supremacy in national affairs. If he would not lay down his power, such persons said, it was best for everybody that he should exercise it openly, regularly, and responsibly as head of the government.(367) The very fact that he had ceased to be the leader of the opposition five years before, was turned into an argument for his responsibility now; for it was his individual freedom that had enabled him to put forth all his strength, without any of that management and reserve that would have been needed in one who was titular leader of a party, as well as real leader of the nation. The victory would have been shorn of half its glory if any other chief had been given to the party. In short, no minister, not Pitt in 1784, nor Grey in 1831, nor Peel ten years later, nor Palmerston in 1855, was ever summoned by more direct and personal acclaim. Whatever liberty of choice the theory of our constitution assigned to the Queen, in practice this choice did not now exist. It was true that in the first of his Midlothian speeches Mr. Gladstone had used these words, “I hope the verdict of the country will give to Lord Granville and Lord Hartington the responsible charge of its affairs.”(368) But events had wrought a surprise, and transformed the situation.

Some, indeed, there were whom a vision of another kind possessed; a vision of the moral grandeur that would attend his retirement after putting Apollyon and his legions to flight, and planting his own hosts in triumph in the full measure of their predominance. Some who loved him, might still regretfully cherish for him this heroic dream. Retirement might indeed have silenced evil tongues; it would have spared him the toils of many turbid and tempestuous years. But public life is no idyll. Mr. Gladstone had put himself, by exertions designed for public objects, into a position from which retreat to private ease would have been neither unselfish nor honourable. Is it not an obvious test of true greatness in a statesman, that he shall hold popularity, credit, ascendency and power such as Mr. Gladstone now commanded, as a treasure to be employed with regal profusion for the common good, not guarded in a miser’s strong-box? For this outlay of popularity the coming years were to provide Mr. Gladstone with occasions only too ample.

If retreat was impossible, then all the rest was inevitable. And it is easy to guess the course of his ruminations between his return from Midlothian and his arrival in Harley Street. Mr. Gladstone himself, looking back seventeen years after, upon his refusal in 1880 to serve in a place below the first, wrote: “I conceive that I was plainly right in declining it, for had I acted otherwise, I should have placed the facts of the case in conflict with its rights, and with the just expectations of the country. Besides, as the head of a five years’ ministry, and as still in full activity, I should have been strangely placed as the subordinate of one twenty years my junior, and comparatively little tested in public life.”

As the diary records, on Monday, April 12, Lord Wolverton left Hawarden, and was to see the two liberal leaders the same day. He did so, and reported briefly to his chief at night:—

I hope the Plimsoll matter(369) is at an end. The clubs to-night think that Lord Beaconsfield will meet parliament, and that when the time comes, if asked, he will advise that Hartington should be sent for. I do not believe either. I have seen Lord Granville and Hartington; both came here upon my arrival, and Adam with them. Lord Granville hopes you may be in London on Friday. I told him I thought you would be. He has gone to Walmer, and will come up on Friday. He has a good deal to think of in the meantime as to “the position of the party.” I need not say more than this, as it embraces the whole question, which he now quite appreciates.... Nothing could be more cordial and kind than Granville and Hartington, but I hardly think till to-day they quite realised the position, which I confess seems to me as clear as the sun at noon. They will neither of them speak to any one till Friday, when Lord Granville hopes to see you. Adam is much pleased with your kind note to him. He has gone home till Friday. It is well to be away just now, for the gossip and questioning is unbearable.

Acknowledging this on the following day (April 13), Mr. Gladstone says to Lord Wolverton:—

The claim, so to speak, of Granville and Hartington, or rather, I should say, of Granville with Hartington as against me, or rather as compared with me, is complete. My labours as an individual cannot set me up as a Pretender. Moreover, if they should on surveying their position see fit to apply to me, there is only one form and ground of application, so far as I see, which could be seriously entertained by me, namely, their conviction that on the ground of public policy, all things considered, it was best in the actual position of affairs that I should come out. It cannot be made a matter of ceremonial, as by gentlemen waiving a precedence, or a matter of feeling, as by men of high and delicate honour determined to throw their bias against themselves. They have no right to throw their bias against themselves—they have no right to look at anything but public policy; and this I am sure will be their conviction. Nothing else can possibly absolve them from their presumptive obligation as standing at the head of the party which for the time represents the country.

As a matter of fact, I find no evidence that the two leaders ever did express a conviction that public policy required that he should stand forth as a pretender for the post of prime minister. On the contrary, when Lord Wolverton says that they “did not quite realise the position” on the 12th, this can only mean that they hardly felt that conviction about the requirements of public policy, which Mr. Gladstone demanded as the foundation of his own decision.

III

The last meeting of the outgoing cabinet was held on April 21. What next took place has been described by Mr. Gladstone himself in memoranda written during the days on which the events occurred.

Interview with Lord Hartington.

April 22, 1880. At 7 P.M. Hartington came to see me at Wolverton’s house and reported on his journey to Windsor.

The Queen stood with her back to the window—which used not to be her custom. On the whole I gathered that her manner was more or less embarrassed but towards him not otherwise than gracious and confiding. She told him that she desired him to form an administration, and pressed upon him strongly his duty to assist her as a responsible leader of the party now in a large majority. I could not find that she expressed clearly her reason for appealing to him as a responsible leader of the party, and yet going past the leader of the party, namely Granville, whom no one except himself has a title to displace. She however indicated to him her confidence in his moderation, the phrase under which he is daily commended in the Daily Telegraph, at this moment I think, Beaconsfield’s personal organ and the recipient of his inspirations. By this moderation, the Queen intimated that Hartington was distinguished from Granville as well as from me.

Hartington, in reply to her Majesty, made becoming acknowledgments, and proceeded to say that he did not think a government could be satisfactorily formed without me; he had not had any direct communication with me; but he had reason to believe that I would not take any office or post in the government except that of first minister. Under those circumstances he advised her Majesty to place the matter in my hands. The Queen continued to urge upon him the obligations arising out of his position, and desired him to ascertain whether he was right in his belief that I would not act in a ministry unless as first minister. This, he said, is a question which I should not have put to you, except when desired by the Queen.

I said her Majesty was quite justified, I thought, in requiring positive information, and he, therefore, in putting the question to me. Of my action he was already in substantial possession, as it had been read to him (he had told me) by Wolverton. I am not asked, I said, for reasons, but only for Aye or No, and consequently I have only to say that I adhere to my reply as you have already conveyed it to the Queen.

In making such a reply, it was my duty to add that in case a government should be formed by him, or by Granville with him, whom the Queen seemed to me wrongly to have passed by—it was to Granville that I had resigned my trust, and he, Hartington, was subsequently elected by the party to the leadership in the House of Commons—my duty would be plain. It would be to give them all the support in my power, both negatively, as by absence or non-interference, and positively. Promises of this kind, I said, stood on slippery ground, and must always be understood with the limits which might be prescribed by conviction. I referred to the extreme caution, almost costiveness, of Peel’s replies to Lord Russell, when he was endeavouring to form a government in December 1845 for the purpose of carrying the repeal of the Corn Law. In this case, however, I felt a tolerable degree of confidence, because I was not aware of any substantive divergence of ideas between us, and I had observed with great satisfaction, when his address to North-East Lancashire came into my hands, after the writing but before the publication of mine to Midlothian, that they were in marked accordance as to opinions, if not as to form and tone, and I did not alter a word. In the case of the first Palmerston government I had certainly been thrown into rather sharp opposition after I quitted it, but this was mainly due to finance. I had not approved of the finance of Sir George Lewis, highly as I estimated his judgment in general politics; and it was in some ways a relief to me, when we had become colleagues in the second Palmerston government, to find that he did not approve of mine. However, I could only make such a declaration as the nature of the case allowed.

He received all this without comment, and said his conversation with her Majesty had ended as it began, each party adhering to the ground originally taken up. He had not altered his advice, but had come under her Majesty’s command to learn my intentions, which he was to make known to her Majesty returning to Windsor this day at one.

He asked me what I thought of the doctrine of obligation so much pressed upon him by the Queen. I said that in my opinion the case was clear enough. Her Majesty had not always acted on the rule of sending for the leader of the opposition. Palmerston was the known and recognised leader of the opposition in 1859, but the Queen sent for Granville. The leader, if sent for, was in my opinion bound either to serve himself, or to point out some other course to her Majesty which he might deem to be more for the public advantage. And if that course should fail in consequence of the refusal of the person pointed out, the leader of the party could not leave her Majesty unprovided with a government, but would be bound in loyalty to undertake the task.

I did not indicate, nor did he ask, what I should do if sent for. He did not indicate, nor did I ask, what he should do if the Queen continued to press him to go on, in spite of his advice to her to move in another direction.—April 23, 1880.

A barren controversy was afterwards raised on the question whether at this exciting moment Lord Hartington tried to form a government. What he did, according to the memorandum, was to advise the Queen to send for Mr. Gladstone, on the ground of his belief that Mr. Gladstone would join no government of which he was not the head. The Queen then urged him to make sure of this, before she would acquiesce in his refusal to undertake the commission. The Queen, as Mr. Gladstone says, had a right to require positive information, and Lord Hartington had a right, and it was even his duty, to procure this information for her, and to put the direct question to Mr. Gladstone, whether he would or would not act in an administration of which he was not the head. He went back to Windsor, not in the position of a statesman who has tried to form a government and failed, but in the position of one who had refused a task because he knew all along that failure was certain, and now brought proof positive that his refusal was right.(370)

What happened next was easy to foresee:—

Interview with Lord Granville and Lord Hartington.

April 23, 1880.—Soon after half-past three to-day, Lord Granville and Lord Hartington arrived from Windsor at my house, and signified to me the Queen’s command that I should repair to Windsor, where she would see me at half-past six.

The purport of Lord Hartington’s conversation with me yesterday had been signified. They had jointly advised thereupon that I should be sent for with a view to the formation of a government, and her Majesty desired Lord Granville would convey to me the message. I did not understand that there had been any lengthened audience, or any reference to details.

Receiving this intimation, I read to them an extract from an article in the Daily News of yesterday,(371) descriptive of their position relatively to me, and of mine to them, and said that, letting drop the epithets, so I understood the matter. I presumed, therefore, that under the circumstances as they were established before their audience, they had unitedly advised the sovereign that it was most for the public advantage to send for me. To this they assented. I expressed, a little later, my sense of the high honour and patriotism with which they had acted; said that I had endeavoured to fulfil my own duty, but was aware I might be subject to severe criticism for my resignation of the leadership five years ago, which I had forced upon them; but I did it believing in good faith that we were to have quiet times, and for the first years, 1875 and 1876, and to the end of the session I had acted in a manner conformable to that resignation, and had only been driven from my corner by compulsion. They made no reply, but Granville had previously told me he was perfectly satisfied as to my communications with him.

I at once asked whether I might reckon, as I hoped, on their co-operation in the government. Both assented. Granville agreed to take the foreign office, but modestly and not as of right. I proposed the India office as next, and as very near in weight, and perhaps the most difficult of all at this time, to Hartington, which he desired time to consider. I named Childers as the most proper person for the war office. As I had to prepare for Windsor, our interview was not very long; and they agreed to come again after dinner.

We spoke of the governor-generalship, at least I spoke to Granville who stayed a little after Hartington, and I said Goschen’s position as to the franchise would prevent his being in the cabinet now, but he should be in great employ. Granville had had the lead in the conversation, and said the Queen requested him to carry the message to me.

Audience at Windsor.

Windsor Castle, April 23, 1880.—At 6.50 I went to the Queen, who received me with perfect courtesy, from which she never deviates. Her Majesty presumed I was in possession of the purport of her communications with Lord Granville and with Lord Hartington, and wished to know, as the administration of Lord Beaconsfield had been “turned out,” whether I was prepared to form a government. She thought she had acted constitutionally in sending for the recognised leaders of the party, and referring the matter to them in the first instance. I said that if I might presume to speak, nothing could in my views be more correct than her Majesty’s view that the application should be so made (I did not refer to the case as between Lord Granville and Lord Hartington), and that it would have been an error to pass them by and refer to me. They had stood, I said, between me and the position of a candidate for office, and it was only their advising her Majesty to lay her commands upon me, which could warrant my thinking of it after all that had occurred. But since they had given this advice, it was not consistent with my duty to shrink from any responsibility which I had incurred, and I was aware that I had incurred a very great responsibility. I therefore humbly accepted her Majesty’s commission.

Her Majesty wished to know, in order that she might acquaint Lord Beaconsfield, whether I could undertake to form a government, or whether I only meant that I would make the attempt. I said I had obtained the co-operation of Lord Granville and Lord Hartington, and that my knowledge and belief as to prevailing dispositions would, I think, warrant me in undertaking to form a government, it being her Majesty’s pleasure. I had ascertained that Lord Granville would be willing to accept the foreign office; and I had also to say that the same considerations which made it my duty to accept office, seemed also to make it my duty to submit myself to her Majesty’s pleasure for the office of chancellor of the exchequer together with that of first lord of the treasury.

She asked if I had thought of any one for the war office, which was very important. The report of the Commission would show that Lord Cardwell’s system of short service had entirely broken down, and that a change must be made at any rate as regarded the non-commissioned officers. Lord Hartington had assured her that no one was committed to the system except Lord Cardwell, and he was very unwell and hardly able to act. Lord Hartington knew the war office, and she thought would make a good war minister. I said that it seemed to me in the present state of the country the first object was to provide for the difficulties of statesmanship, and then to deal with those of administration. The greatest of all these difficulties, I thought, centred in the India office, and I was very much inclined to think Lord Hartington would be eminently qualified to deal with them, and would thereby take a place in the government suitable to his position and his probable future.

She asked, to whom, then, did I think of entrusting the war office? [Resumed this afternoon, April 24.](372) I said Mr. Childers occurred to me as an administrator of eminent capacity and conciliatory in his modes of action; his mind would be open on the grave subjects treated by the Commission, which did not appear to me to be even for Lord Cardwell matters of committal, but simply of public policy to be determined by public advantage. She thought that Mr. Childers had not been popular at the admiralty, and that it was desirable the secretary for war should be liked by the army. I said that there was an occurrence towards the close of his term which placed him in a difficult position, but relied on his care and discretion. (She did not press the point, but is evidently under strong professional bias.)

She spoke of the chancellorship, and I named Lord Selborne.

She referred to general action and hoped it would be conciliatory. I said that every one who had served the crown for even a much smaller term of years than I had the good or ill fortune to reckon, would know well that an incoming government must recognise existing engagements, and must take up, irrespective of its preferences, whatever was required by the character and honour of the country. I referred to the case of Scinde and Sir R. Peel’s cabinet in 1843; which she recognised as if it had been recently before her.

She said, “I must be frank with you, Mr. Gladstone, and must fairly say that there have been some expressions”—I think she said some little things, which had caused her concern or pain. I said that her Majesty’s frankness, so well known, was a main ground of the entire reliance of her ministers upon her. That I was conscious of having incurred a great responsibility, and felt the difficulty which arises when great issues are raised, and a man can only act and speak upon the best lights he possesses, aware all the time that he may be in error. That I had undoubtedly used a mode of speech and language different in some degree from what I should have employed, had I been the leader of a party or a candidate for office. Then as regarded conciliation, in my opinion the occasion for what I had described had wholly passed away, and that so far as I was concerned, it was my hope that her Majesty would not find anything to disapprove in my general tone; that my desire and effort would be to diminish, her cares, in any case not to aggravate them; that, however, considering my years, I could only look to a short term of active exertion and a personal retirement comparatively early. With regard to the freedom of language I had admitted, she said with some good-natured archness, “But you will have to bear the consequences,” to which I entirely assented. She seemed to me, if I may so say, “natural under effort.” All things considered, I was much pleased. I ended by kissing her Majesty’s hand.

IV

(M200) The usual embarrassments in building a government filled many days with unintermittent labour of a kind that, like Peel, Mr. Gladstone found intensely harassing, though interesting. The duty of leaving out old colleagues can hardly have been other than painful, but Mr. Gladstone was a man of business, and lie reckoned on a proper stoicism in the victims of public necessity. To one of them he wrote, “While I am the oldest man of my political generation, I have been brought by the seeming force of exceptional circumstances to undertake a task requiring less of years and more of vigour than my accumulating store of the one and waning residue of the other, and I shall be a solecism in the government which I have undertaken to form. I do not feel able to ask you to resume the toils of office,” etc., but would like to name him the recipient for a signal mark of honour. “I have not the least right to be disappointed when you select younger men for your colleagues,” the cheerful man replied. Not all were so easily satisfied. “It is cruel to make a disqualification for others out of an infirmity of my own,” Mr. Gladstone wrote to the oldest of his comrades in the Peelite days, but—et cetera, et cetera, and he would be glad to offer his old ally the red riband of the Bath when one should be vacant. The peer to whom this letter with its dubious solatium was addressed, showed his chagrin by a reply of a single sentence: that he did not wish to leave the letter unanswered, lest it should seem to admit that he was in a state of health which he did not feel to be the case; the red riband was not even declined. One admirable man with intrepid naïveté proposed himself for the cabinet, but was not admitted; another no less admirable was pressed to enter, but felt that he could be more useful as an independent member, and declined—an honourable transaction repeated by the same person on more than one occasion later. To one excellent member of his former cabinet, the prime minister proposed the chairmanship of committee, and it was with some tartness refused. Another equally excellent member of the old administration he endeavoured to plant out in the viceregal lodge at Dublin, without the cabinet, but in vain. To a third he proposed the Indian vice-royalty, and received an answer that left him “stunned and out of breath.” As the hours passed and office after office was filled up, curiosity grew vivacious as to the fate appointed for the younger generation of radicals. The great posts had gone to patrician whigs, just as if Mr. Gladstone had been a Grey or a Russell. As we have seen, he had secured Lord Granville and Lord Hartington before he went to Windsor, and on the evening of his return, the first person to whom he applied was Lord Derby, one of the most sagacious men of his day, but a great territorial noble and a very recent convert. He declined office on the ground that if a man changes his party connection, he is bound to give proof that he wishes the change from no merely personal motive, and that he is not a gainer by it.

Mr. Bright had joined, it was true, and Mr. Forster, but Bright the new radicals honoured and revered without any longer following, and with Forster they had quarrelled violently upon education, nor was the quarrel ever healed. One astute adviser, well acquainted with the feeling and expectations of the left wing, now discovered to his horror that Mr. Gladstone was not in the least alive to the importance of the leaders of the radical section, and had never dreamed of them for his cabinet. His view seems to have been something of this kind, “You have been saved from whig triumph in the person of Lord Hartington; now that you have got me to keep the balance, I must have a whig cabinet.” He was, moreover, still addicted to what he called Peel’s rule against admitting anybody straight into the cabinet without having held previous office. At last he sent for Sir Charles Dilke. To his extreme amazement Sir Charles refused to serve, unless either himself or Mr. Chamberlain were in the cabinet; the prime minister might make his choice between them; then the other would accept a subordinate post. Mr. Gladstone discoursed severely on this unprecedented enormity, and the case was adjourned. Mr. Bright was desired to interfere, but the pair remained inexorable. In the end the lot fell on Mr. Chamberlain. “Your political opinions,” Mr. Gladstone wrote to him (April 27), “may on some points go rather beyond what I may call the general measure of the government, but I hope and believe that there can be no practical impediment on this score to your acceptance of my proposal.” So Mr. Chamberlain took office at the board of trade, where Mr. Gladstone himself had begun his effective career in administration nearly forty years before; and his confederate went as under-secretary to the foreign office. At that time the general feeling was that Sir Charles Dilke, long in parliament and a man of conspicuous mark within its walls, was rather badly used, and that Mr. Gladstone ought to have included both. All this was the ominous prelude of a voyage that was to be made through many storms.(373)

One incident of these labours of construction may illustrate Mr. Gladstone’s curious susceptibility in certain kinds of personal contest. He proposed that Mr. Lowe should be made a viscount, while the Queen thought that a barony would meet the claim. For once it broke the prime minister’s sleep; he got up in the middle of the night and dashed off a letter to Windsor. The letter written, the minister went to bed again, and was in an instant sound asleep.

“The new parliament,” he told his old friend at school and college, Sir Francis Doyle (May 10), “will be tested by its acts. It will not draw its inspiration from me. No doubt it will make changes that will be denounced as revolutionary, and then recognised as innocent and even good. But I expect it to act in the main on well-tried and established lines, and do much for the people and little to disquiet my growing years, or even yours.” All fell out strangely otherwise, and disquiet marked this second administration from its beginning to its end. To lay all the blame on a prime minister or his cabinet for this, is like blaming the navigator for wild weather. In spite of storm and flood, great things were done; deep, notable, and abiding results ensued. The procedure of parliament underwent a profound revolution. So too did our electoral system in all its aspects. New lines of cleavage showed themselves in the divisions of political party. A not unimportant episode occurred in the chapter of religious toleration. The Irish peasant, after suffering centuries of oppression and tyrannic wrong, at last got the charter of his liberation. In a more distant region, as if to illustrate the power of events against the will of a statesman and the contemporary opinion of a nation, England for good or evil found herself planted in the valley of the Nile, and became a land-power on the Mediterranean.

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