Born, in Liverpool, 29 Dec. 1809. At Eton, 1821–27; Matric. Ch. Ch., Oxford, 23 Jan. 1828. Student, 1829–39; B.A., 1832; M.A., 1834; Hon. Student, 1867; Hon. D.C.L., 5 July 1848; Hon. Fellow All Souls’ Coll., 1858. M.P. for Newark, 1832–45. Student at Lincoln’s Inn, 25 Jan. 1833. Junior Lord of Treasury, Dec. 1834; Under Sec. for Colonies, Jan. to April, 1835. Married Catherine Glynne, 25 July 1839. Privy Councillor, 1841. Vice-President of Board of Trade, Sept. 1841 to May 1843; President, May 1843 to Feb. 1845. Master of Mint, Sept. 1841 to Feb. 1845. Sec. of State for Colonies, Dec. 1845 to July 1846. M.P. for Oxford Univ., 1847; re-elected, 1852–65. Chancellor of Exchequer, Dec. 1852 to Feb. 1855. Lord High Commissioner to Ionian Islands, winter 1858–59. Chancellor of Exchequer, June 1859 to July 1866. Lord Rector Edinburgh Univ., 1859–65. M.P. for South Lancashire, 1865–68; for Greenwich, 1868–74; re-elected 1874–80. Premier and First Lord of Treasury, Dec. 1868 to Feb. 1874; Chancellor of Exchequer, Aug. 1873 to Feb. 1874. Resigned Leadership of Liberal Party, Jan. 1875. Visit to Ireland, Oct. to Nov. 1877; received Freedom of City of Dublin. Lord Rector of Glasgow Univ., Nov. 1877. M.P. for Midlothian, 1880. Premier and Chancellor of Exchequer, April 1880 to Dec. 1882; Premier and First Lord of Treasury, Dec. 1882 to June 1885. Premier and Lord Privy Seal, Feb. to July, 1886. Premier, First Lord of Treasury and Lord Privy Seal, Aug. 1892 to March 1894. Romanes Lecturer, Oxford, Oct. 1892. Freedom of City of Liverpool, 3 Dec. 1892. Retired from public life, March 1894. Works: [exclusive of political speeches, addresses, and pamphlets]: “The State in its relations with the Church,” 1838; “Church Principles considered in their results,” 1840; “Manual of Prayers from the Liturgy,” 1845; “On the place of Homer in Classical Education,” 1857; “Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age” (3 vols.), 1858; “‘Ecce Homo,’” 1868; “A Chapter of Autobiography,” 1868; “Juventus Mundi,” 1869; “The Vatican Decrees,” 1874; “Vaticanism,” 1875; “Rome and the Newest Fashions in Religion” (a reprint of the two preceding, with “Speeches of the Pope”), 1875; “The Church of England and Ritualism” (from “Contemporary Rev.”), 1876; “Homeric Synchronism,” 1876; “Homer,” 1878; “Gleanings of Past Years” (7 vols.), 1879; “Landmarks of Homeric Study,” 1890; “The Impregnable Rock of Holy Scripture” (from “Good Words”), 1890; “An Introduction to the People’s Bible History,” 1895; “Studies Subsidiary to the Works of Bishop Butler,” 1896; “On the Condition of Man in a Future Life,” pt. I., 1896. He has translated: Farini’s “The Roman State from 1815 to 1850,” 1851; the “Odes” of Horace, 1894; and edited: Bishop Butler’s “Works,” 1896.
Personal
I was out all yesterday evening with Gladstone, who is one of the cleverest and most sensible people I ever met with.
William Gladstone is at home now, and last Tuesday I and one of the other boys were invited to breakfast with him; so we went, had breakfast in grand style, went into the garden and devoured strawberries, which were there in great abundance, unchained the great Newfoundland, and swam him in the pond; we walked about the garden, went into the house and saw beautiful pictures of Shakespeare’s plays, and came away at twelve o’clock. It was very good fun, and I don’t think I was very shy, for I talked to William Gladstone almost all the time about all sorts of things. He is so very good-natured, and I like him very much. He talked a great deal about Eton, and said that it was a very good place for those who liked boating and Latin verses. I think from what he said, I might get to like it…. He was very good-natured to us all the time, and lent me books to read when we went away.
The man that took me most was the youngest Gladstone of Liverpool—I am sure, a very superior person.
A young man of unblemished character, and of distinguished parliamentary talents, the rising hope of those stern and unbending Tories, who follow, reluctantly and mutinously, a leader, whose experience and eloquence are indispensable to them, but whose cautious temper and moderate opinions they abhor. It would not be at all strange if Mr. Gladstone were one of the most unpopular men in England. But we believe that we do him no more than justice when we say, that his abilities and his demeanour have obtained for him the respect and good will of all parties.
He has a face like a lion’s; his head is small above it, though the forehead is broad and massive—something like Trajan’s in its proportion to the features. Character, far more than intellect, strikes me in his physiognomy, and there is a remarkable duplicity of expression—iron, vice-like resolution combined with a subtle, mobile ingenuousness.
Gladstone, en route homewards, called on Monday, and sate a long time talking, principally waiting for Madame Bunsen, his old friend, whom it was his one chance of seeing, as he had to leave for Paris the next day. Talk copious, ingenious, but of no worth or sincerity—pictures, literature, finance, prosperities, greatness of outlook for Italy, &c.—a man ponderous, copious, of evident faculty, but all gone irrecoverably into House of Commons shape—man once of some wisdom or possibility of it, but now possessed by the Prince, or many Princes, of the Power of the Air. Tragic to me rather, and far from enviable; from whom one felt oneself divided by abysmal chasms and immeasurabilities. He went next morning; but it seems, by the journals, will find his M. Fould, &c., suddenly thrown out by some jerk of their inscrutable Copper Captain, and unable to do the honors of Paris in the way they wished.
Mr. Gladstone’s nature is essentially moral; the categories to which he refers all things are those of good and evil. And his extreme seriousness, though it excludes extravagance, does not exclude enthusiasm. Mr. Gladstone brings the fervor of faith into every cause that he espouses. He is also essentially a believer; he has the noble sides of the character—its sincerity, its straight-forwardness, its ardor. He has also its defects; his gravity lacks humor, his solidity becomes stiffness, his intelligence—gifted as it is with the most varied aptitudes, served by prodigious activity and capacity for work, able to descend from the general direction of an empire to the technical details of a bill or the complicated schedules of a budget—his intelligence has more breadth than suppleness. His reasonings are abstract because he occupies himself rather with principles than with facts; his judgments absolute because he takes every truth at the same valuation—that of an article of religion.
My father and I met the Gladstones at Chester. Thence to Barrow we had a triumphal progress, crowds shouting “Gladstone” at every station. At Barrow we embarked on a tug for the “Pembroke Castle,” and left our native land in a tumult of acclaim! Thousands of people lining the shore, and cheering for “Gladstone” and “Tennyson.”… It seemed to me that, in the conversations between my father and Gladstone, my father was logical and brilliant in his talk, made his points clearly, and every word and phrase of his, as in his poems and plays, bore directly on the subject under discussion; that Gladstone took longer to go from point to point, and wrapt up his argument in analogies which he thoroughly thrashed out before he returned to his thesis. What struck me most in Gladstone’s expression of his thoughts was his eagerness, and mastery of words, coupled with a self-control and a gentle persuasiveness; and a certain persistence in dwelling on those topics which he had himself started for discussion. Yet, like my father, he was always most anxious to learn from anyone whom he thought better informed than himself on the matter in hand…. Both men were as jovial together as boys out for a holiday.
His features are almost as familiar to me as my own, for a photograph of him in his library has long stood on my revolving bookcase, with a large lens before it.
I do not believe I ever saw a more magnificent human face than that of Mr. Gladstone after he had grown old. Of course, the eyes were always superb. Many a stranger, looking at Gladstone for the first time, saw the eyes, and only the eyes, and could think for the moment of nothing else. Age never dimmed the fire of those eyes.
For my part I am disposed to fix upon the Bradlaugh debates as the epoch upon which the future historian will dwell with fullest appreciation. There were connected with it circumstances almost terrible in their intensity and pathos. Mr. Gladstone’s speeches, his writings—as finally illustrated in that noble document, his last will and testament—and above all, his daily life, testified to his devotional habits of mind, the spirituality of his character.
Mr. Gladstone was a man of prayer. Through and through Mr. Gladstone was intensely religious. His mind was capacious, his learning was large, his eloquence was unsurpassed; yet he would never have been the man he was but for his steadfast and glowing faith in God.
Standing upon the summit of the Alpine mountain, the traveler looks into sunny Italy or the German forest, toward the vineyard of France or the far-off plains of Austria. And Mr. Gladstone stands forth like some sun-crowned mountain-peak, supremely great in every side of his character and career. He was a scholar, and with Homer lingered long before the gates of Troy, or with Pericles and Plato sauntered through the groves of Athens. He was an author, and the mere titles of his speeches and books fill twenty pages in the catalogue of libraries. He was an orator, and his eloquence was such that oft it seemed to his rapt listeners as if Apollo had come again—the music of the morning breathing from his lips. He was a statesman, and the reforms he proposed and the laws he created are milestones measuring the progress of the English people. Above all, he was a Christian gentleman, for religion goes with the name of Gladstone as poetry with the name of Burns or Browning, as war with Wellington or Washington.
Mr. Gladstone’s liberality, little heard of, while never exceeding the bounds of his income, was very great, and was curiously accompanied by his love of small economies—his determination to have the proper discount taken off the price of his second-hand books, his horror of a wasted half-sheet of note-paper, which almost equalled his detestation of a wasted minute; for his arrangement of every hour of the day, and for the occupation of that hour, was extraordinary. There was never in his busy life an idle dawdle by the fire after luncheon, or a doze over a novel before dinner. Sauntering, as Lord Rosebery said, was an impossibility to him—mentally or physically; a walk meant four miles an hour sharp, and I remember his regretting the day when he could only go up the Duke of York’s steps two at a time. When about to travel he would carefully pack his own despatch-box, so that the book or paper he was reading was uppermost and ready at a moment’s notice to his hand.
I have often heard Gladstone both in Parliament and on the platform; but I doubt if he quite equalled Bright in majestic imagery as an orator, or, in convincing logic and unanswerable facts, quite equalled Richard Cobden. Gladstone, of course, was immensely superior to both of them in range of experience, in constructive power, and in the management of men. As I frequently met Mr. Gladstone in society, both in and out of office, and at times have stayed for days with him in a country house, I had abundant opportunity to observe his extraordinary versatility and the range of his reading, the rapidity with which he was wont to master intricate detail, his consummate command of every resource, and his beautiful courtesy of nature and considerate forbearance with all men. If I were asked to pick out the three personal characteristics in which Mr. Gladstone surpassed all the eminent men of his time, I should choose the following out of his great union of diverse qualities. With a fiery spirit at bottom and a singularly masterful nature, he had a strange power of curbing himself at need and keeping a cool head in the exuberance of his own oratory. Next, it was almost impossible to find any topic or incident into which he could not fling himself with interest and master it with rapidity. Lastly, of all men involved in a multitude of distracting cares, he had the most marvellous faculty of keeping his mind concentrated on the immediate point in hand.
At Cortina, too, I saw again Gladstone…. The old man was full of physical and mental energy, and we had several moderate climbs in the mountains of the vicinity…. Gladstone was a good walker, and talked by the way,—which not all good walkers can do,—but I do not remember his ever talking of himself; and in this he was like Ruskin,—he assumed himself as an element in the situation, and thought no more about it; never in our conversations obtruding his views as of more importance than the conversation demanded, and never opinionated, not even dogmatic, but always inquiring, and more desirous of hearing of the things that had interested him than of expressing his own views about them.
Gladstone, though not tall, was above the middle height, broad-shouldered, but otherwise slight in figure, and muscular, with no superfluous flesh. He was gifted with an abundance of physical strength, and enjoyed throughout his life remarkably good health. His hair, in his youth and the prime of his manhood, was black. His complexion was pale, almost pallid, and an artist compared it with alabaster. His eyes were large, lustrous, and piercing; not quite black, but resembling agate in colour. His face, always handsome, acquired in old age an expression of singular dignity, majesty, and power. His voice, naturally musical and melodious, gained by practice an almost unexampled range of compass and variety. Scarcely any building was too large for it to fill, and at a meeting in the open air it could be heard by many thousands with perfect ease. Yet he could modulate it at will, and even sink it to a whisper without ceasing to be audible. There were traces in its tone of his Lancashire origin, especially in the pronunciation of the word “sir,” which he had so often to employ. But its marvellous richness always fell pleasantly on the ear. His manners were courteous, even ceremonious, and to women habitually deferential. He was a great stickler for social precedence, and would not go out of the room before a peer of his own creation. Bishops, and, indeed, all clergymen, he treated with peculiar respect. His temper, though quick, and, as he said himself, “vulnerable,” was in private life almost invariably under perfect control.
Gladstone’s rooms were on Canterbury Quadrangle. If his life in those rooms had been less studious and more playful, if he had stolen knockers and frozen out Dons, instead of devoting himself to the classics and to winning a Double First, he might have proved a more amusing figure in these records; but he would hardly have proved so useful and so distinguished a figure in the history of his country and of the world.
Oratory
Saturday, October 27. “Whether the deposition of Richard II. was justifiable or not.” Jelf opened: not a good speech. Doyle spoke extempore, made several mistakes, which were corrected by Jelf. Gladstone spoke well. The Whigs were regularly floored; only four Whigs to eleven Tories, but they very nearly kept up with them in coughing and Hear, hears. Adjourned to Monday, after 4. Monday, 29.—Gladstone finished his speech, and ended with a great deal of flattery of Doyle, saying that he was sure he would have courage enough to own that he was wrong. It succeeded. Doyle rose amidst reiterated cheers to own that he was convinced by the arguments of the other side. He had determined before to answer them and cut up Gladstone. December 1.—Debate, “Whether the Peerage Bill of 1719 was calculated to be beneficial or not.” Thanks voted to Doyle and Gladstone; the latter spoke very well: will be a great loss to the Society.
The debate had been opened, and Gladstone soon rose, the person I had mainly come to hear. He spoke about three quarters of an hour, and was much cheered. His manner is perfectly natural, almost conversational, and he never hesitates for the right word, or fails to have the most lucid and becoming arrangement of his argument. If anything, he lacked force. But his manner was so gentlemanlike, and so thoroughly appropriate to a great deliberative body, that I could not help sighing to think we have so little like it in our legislatures.
Mr. Gladstone does not possess the physical attributes of the popular orator. He has rather a recluse-like air; and, like his rival, Disraeli, seems to be possessed by an abstraction of thought from which he with difficulty rouses himself. His voice is clear and musical, but wanting in tone and volume: it sounds somewhat like a voice clearly heard afar off. His countenance is that of a student,—pale and intellectual; his eye is of remarkable depth, and might almost be described as fascinating. Like Disraeli, he wants dignity of gait, and slouches somewhat. But in the House of Commons, personal short-comings such as these are thought lightly of.
It is needless to say that Mr. Gladstone is a great orator. Oratory is one of the pursuits as to which there is no error: the criterion is ready. Did the audience feel? Were they excited? Did they cheer? These questions, and others such as these, can be answered without a mistake. A man who can move the House of Commons—still, after many changes, the most severe audience in the world—must be a great orator; the most sincere admirers and the most eager depredators of Mr. Gladstone are agreed on this point, and it is almost the only point on which they are agreed.
A sophistical rhetorician, inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity, and gifted with an egotistical imagination that can at all times command an interminable and inconsistent series of arguments to malign an opponent and to glorify himself.
His choice of language was unbounded. It has been said of Lord Holland and his illustrious son, Charles James Fox, that from the very wealth of their vocabulary there arose a tendency to hesitation. But the wealth of the vocabulary which was at Mr. Gladstone’s command never produced that effect. His flow of words was not that of the mountain-stream, which comes tumbling down helter-skelter. It was that of the river with an immense volume of water, whose downward course is as regular as it is stately. He never gabbled. He never drawled…. He was a living thesaurus or “Gradus,” containing synonym after synonym, and it was this extraordinary wealth of words which laid him open to the charge, not without reason, of being verbose. Mr. Gladstone’s sentences were often very long, and one sometimes wondered how he would ever extricate himself from the maze of words. But there was nothing faulty in the construction of a sentence. There were parentheses, and occasionally even parentheses within parentheses; but no sentence was ever ungrammatical or unfinished.
We have the memory of a matchless individuality, an oratory which has never been surpassed in our time, never perhaps been equalled in all its forms and varieties, and which, perhaps, will stand unrivalled in the history of eloquence since the great Athenian models existed.
Few men have had so many faces, and the wonderful play of his features contributed very largely to the effectiveness of his speaking. It was a countenance eminently fitted to express enthusiasm, pathos, profound melancholy, commanding power and lofty disdain; there were moments when it could take an expression of intense cunning, and it often darkened into a scowl of passionate anger. In repose it did not seem to me good. With its tightly compressed lips and fierce, abstracted gaze it seemed to express not only extreme determination, but also great vindictiveness, a quality, indeed, by no means wanting in his nature, though it was, I think, more frequently directed against classes or parties than against individuals. He had a wonderful eye—a bird-of-prey eye—fierce, luminous and restless. “When he differed from you,” a great friend and admirer of his once said to me, “there were moments when he would give you a glance as if he would stab you to the heart.” There was something, indeed, in his eye in which more than one experienced judge saw dangerous symptoms of possible insanity.
If Mr. Gladstone be judged by the impression he made on his own time, his place will be high in the front rank. His speeches were neither so concisely telling as Mr. Bright’s nor so finished in diction; but no other man among his contemporaries—neither Lord Derby nor Mr. Lowe, nor Lord Beaconsfield, nor Lord Cairns, nor Bishop Wilberforce, nor Bishop Magee—taken all around, could be ranked beside him. And he rose superior to Mr. Bright himself in readiness, in variety of knowledge, in persuasive ingenuity. Mr. Bright spoke seldom and required time for preparation. Admirable in the breadth and force with which he set forth his own position, or denounced that of his adversaries, he was not equally qualified for instructing nor equally apt at persuading. Mr. Gladstone could both instruct and persuade, could stimulate his friends and demolish his opponents, and could do all these things at an hour’s notice, so vast and well ordered was the arsenal of his mind. Pitt was superb in an expository or argumental speech, but his stately periods lacked variety. Fox, incomparable in reply, was hesitating and confused when he had to state his case in cold blood. Mr. Gladstone showed as much fire in winding up a debate as skill in opening it. His oratory had, indeed, two faults. It wanted concentration, and it wanted definition. There were too many words, and the conclusion was sometimes left vague because the arguments had been too nicely balanced.
Statesman
There is but one statesman of the present day in whom I feel entire confidence, and with whom I cordially agree, and that statesman is Mr. Gladstone. I look upon him as the representative of the party, scarcely developed as yet, though secretly forming and strengthening, which will stand by all that is dear and sacred in my estimation, in the struggle which I believe will come ere very long between good and evil, order and disorder, the Church and the world, and I see a very small band collecting round him, and ready to fight manfully under his leading.
I write to you from a feeling of anxiety. You will see what is being said here by public men who speak on your question, and most of all, and worst of all, by your old acquaintance and friend Mr. Gladstone. He has made a vile speech at Newcastle, full of insulting pity for the North, and of praise and support for the South. He is unstable as water in some things. He is for union and freedom in Italy, and for disunion and bondage in America. A handful of Italians in prison in Naples, without formal trial, shocked his soul so much that he wrote a pamphlet, and has made many speeches upon it; but he has no word of sympathy or of hope for the four millions of the bondsmen of the South! I have known for months past that he talked of a European remonstrance, or mediation, or recognition, or some mischief of that kind; but I did not expect that he would step out openly as the defender and eulogist of Jeff. Davis and his fellow-conspirators against God and man. He has spoken, as you will see by the time you receive this; and what he has said will encourage the friends of the South here to increased exertions to promote something hostile to your government and people.
British statesmen, forgetting for the moment moral distinctions, forgetting God who will not be forgotten, gravely announce that our cause must fail…. Opinions are allies more potent than subsidies…. Nothing is more clear than that whoever assumes to play prophet becomes pledged in character and pretension to sustain his prophecy.
If he was famous for the splendor of his eloquence, for his unaffected piety, and for his blameless life, he was celebrated far and wide for a more than common liveliness of conscience. He had once imagined it to be his duty to quit a Government, and to burst through strong ties of friendship and gratitude, by reason of a thin shade of difference on the subject of white or brown sugar. It was believed that, if he were to commit even a little sin, or to imagine an evil thought, he would instantly arraign himself before the dread tribunal which awaited him within his own bosom; and that, his intellect being subtle and microscopic, and delighting in casuistry and exaggeration, he would be likely to give his soul a very harsh trial, and treat himself as a great criminal for faults too minute to be visible to the naked eyes of laymen. His friends lived in dread of his virtues as tending to make him whimsical and unstable, and the practical politicians, perceiving that he was not to be depended upon for party purposes, and was bent upon none but lofty objects, used to look upon him as dangerous—used to call him behind his back a good man—a good man in the worst sense of the term.
Although the Prime Minister of England is always writing letters and making speeches, he seems ever to send forth an “uncertain sound.” If a member of Parliament announces himself a republican, Mr. Gladstone takes the earliest opportunity of describing him as a “fellow-worker” in public life. If an inconsiderate multitude calls for the abolition or reform of the House of Lords, Mr. Gladstone says that is no easy task, and that he must think once or twice, or perhaps even thrice, before he can undertake it. If your neighbor, the member for Bradford, Mr. Miall, brings forward a motion in the House of Commons for the severance of Church and state, Mr. Gladstone assures Mr. Miall with the utmost courtesy that he believes the opinion of the House of Commons is against him; but that if Mr. Miall wishes to influence the House of Commons he must address the public out of doors.
I sometimes think that great men are like great mountains, and that we do not appreciate their magnitude while we are still close to them. You have to go to a distance to see which peak it is that towers above its fellows; and it may be that we shall have to put between us and Mr. Gladstone a space of time before we shall know how much greater he has been than any of his competitors for fame and power. I am certain that justice will be done to him in the future, and I am not less certain that there will be a signal condemnation of the men who, moved by the motives of party spite, in their eagerness for office, have not hesitated to load with insult and indignity the greatest statesman of our times; we have not allowed even his age which should have commanded their reverence, or his experience which entitles him to their respect, or his high personal character or his long services to his Queen and to his country, to shield him from the vulgar affronts and the lying accusations of which he has nightly been made the subject in the House of Commons. He, with his great magnanimity, can afford to forget and forgive these things. Those whom he has served so long it behooves to remember them, to resent them, and to punish them.
The elections are raging still, and I find myself quoted on both sides. I made an epigram (extempore) one day on the G. O. M., and repeated it to Lord Acton.
| His greatness not so much in Genius lies | |
| As in adroitness, when occasions rise, | |
| Lifelong convictions to extemporize. |
Mr. Gladstone was always great enough to meet the buffetings of adverse fortune with a calm heart and a smiling countenance…. As one looks back now upon the character of the greatest Parliamentarian the House of Commons has ever known, the features which seem to stand out in the strongest relief are his undying enthusiasm, his indomitable courage in conflict, whether the tide was with him or against him, his intensely religious spirit, and that all-pervading faith in and love of his fellow-creatures which, more perhaps than any other quality, made him the master of so many hearts and the victor in so many fights.
A good, great, learned, eloquent statesman, William Ewart Gladstone towers in moral grandeur above his fellows like a mountain peak above the foothills, and the far-surrounding plain.
Church and State, 1838
Inscribed to the University of Oxford; tried, and not found wanting, through the vicissitudes of a thousand years; in the belief that she is providentially designed to be a fountain of blessings, spiritual, social, and intellectual to this and to other countries, to the present and future times; and in the hope that the temper of these pages may be found not alien from her own.
She is a noble vessel, freighted with the riches of a true wisdom, directed by a spirit of pure and fervent piety, furnished out with knowledge and a practical experience. May God’s blessing be with her, and may she so sail upon the troubled and uncertain sea of men’s opinions, that through her we may in some degree be brought on our voyage towards “the haven where we would be.”
Gladstone’s book has disappointed me more than I like to confess, but he seems to be an excellent and really wise man.
I quite agree with you in my admiration of its spirit throughout; I also like the substance of about half of it; the rest of course appears to be erroneous. But it must be good to have a public man writing on such a subject, and it delights me to have a good protest against that wretched doctrine of Warburton’s, that the State has only to look after body and goods.
Mr. Gladstone seems to us to be, in many respects, exceedingly well qualified for philosophical investigation. His mind is of large grasp; nor is he deficient in dialectical skill. But he does not give his intellect fair play. There is no want of light, but a great want of what Bacon would have called dry light. Whatever Mr. Gladstone sees is refracted and distorted by a false medium of passions and prejudices. His style bears a remarkable analogy to his mode of thinking, and indeed exercises great influence on his mode of thinking. His rhetoric, though often good of its kind, darkens and perplexes the logic which it should illustrate. Half his acuteness and diligence, with a barren imagination and a scanty vocabulary, would have saved him from almost all his mistakes. He has one gift most dangerous to a speculator,—a vast command of a kind of language, grave and majestic, but of vague and uncertain import,—of a kind of language which affects us much in the same way in which the lofty diction of the chorus of Clouds affected the simple-hearted Athenian.
One day in the year 1839 a party of guests were assembled at Sir Robert Peel’s house at Drayton Manor, when a servant brought into the room a new book which had just been received. The great statesman took it up, turned over its pages for a few moments with a somewhat contemptuous air, and then flung it into the fire, saying as he did so, “Confound that young fellow; if he goes on writing stuff of this sort he’ll ruin his future. Why can’t he stick to politics?” The book in question was called “The State considered in its Relations with the Church,” and the “young fellow” who roused the irritation of Sir Robert Peel, was the eminent man whose name I have placed at the head of this chapter. This little anecdote, which I repeat on the authority of an eye-witness of the scene, is worth recalling, because it shows that just forty years ago Mr. Gladstone’s illustrious political friend and patron was making the same complaint regarding him as that which one hears to-day from many of his professed admirers.
The Treatise on State and Church, on which Gladstone exhibits so much learning, to me is heavy, vague, hazy, and hard to read. The subject, however, has but little interest to an American, and is doubtless much more highly appreciated by English students, especially those of the great Universities whom it more directly concerns. It is the argument of a young Oxford scholar for the maintenance of a Church establishment; is full of ecclesiastical lore, assuming that one of the chief ends of government is the propagation of religious truth,—a ground utterly untenable according to the universal opinion of people in this country, whether churchmen or laymen, Catholic or Protestant, Conservative or Liberal.
It created a great sensation at the time, all the greater because Macaulay attacked it in one of his famous essays. Except as an illustration of Mr. Gladstone’s intellectual development and his way of thinking on religious questions, a way which has never since materially altered, the book has little interest for the world just now. It effected nothing in the progress of human thought; it neither advanced nor retarded anything; but it gives us in the cleverest style an understanding of Mr. Gladstone’s peculiar views…. The book and its whole history are interesting if only as an illustration of Mr. Gladstone’s insatiable ardor for intellectual work of various kinds. He was always looking out for new and different fields of labor. Goethe was not content to be a poet and a novelist, but he must also be a naturalist and a pioneer of the theory of evolution. Gladstone was not content with being an orator and a statesman, he must also be a theologian, a reverent critic of Homer and Dante, and a translator of Horace.
Studies on Homer
I am reading, too, Gladstone’s “Homer,” it is very direct and plain-sailing, and in that respect is an agreeable contrast to German annotation. The working out of his theory about Danaans, Achæans, Argives, and Hellenes was to me satisfactory; but at the end he goes off all at once out of his depth into general ethnology. Gladstone’s uncompromising belief in Homer and the heroes, as real people, gives the book a solidity and substance which is acceptable.
Gladstone has lately published a marvellous book on Homer, in three thick volumes. There is a volume on the mythology, in which he traces a large part of the Greek mythology to traditions from the patriarchs, to whom he moreover assumes that Christianity was in some way revealed by anticipation. Hence he finds the doctrine of the Trinity in Homer, and holds that Latona is compounded of Eve and the Virgin Mary. It seems to me a réchauffée of old Jacob Bryant.
These three volumes of Mr. Gladstone’s form a great, but a very unequal work. They would be a worthy fruit of a life spent in learned retirement. As the work of one of our first orators and statesmen, they are altogether wonderful…. Perhaps his familiarity with the purest and most ennobling source of inspiration may have had some effect in adorning Mr. Gladstone’s political oratory with more than one of its noblest features. He is not unlike the Achilleus of his own story…. What strikes one more than anything throughout Mr. Gladstone’s volumes is the intense earnestness, the loftiness of moral purpose, which breathes in every page. He has not taken up Homer as a plaything, nor even as a mere literary enjoyment. To him the study of the Prince of Poets is clearly a means by which himself and other men may be made wiser and better…. Not the least, to our mind, of Mr. Gladstone’s services to Homer is his defence of the ninth book of the Iliad. In his section “Aoidos” he has thoroughly overthrown Mr. Grote’s idea of an Achilleid developed into an Iliad, and he has fully vindicated the plot of the poem in its received form…. The freshest and most genial tribute to ancient literature which has been paid even by an age rich in such offerings.
I looked at Gladstone’s book “Homeric Synchronism”—it is very disappointing. So great a man, so imperfect a scholar! He has no idea how shaky the ground is on which he takes his stand. The reading of those ethnic names in the hieroglyphic inscriptions varies with every year and with every scholar. I do not blame them—their studies are and must be tentative, and they are working in the right direction. But the use which Gladstone makes of their labours is to me really painful, all the more so, because it is cleverly done, and I believe bona fide.
One would suppose, in looking over these volumes, [On Homer] that the distinguished premier had abandoned the arts of statesmanship for the vocation of a professor of Greek. From the beginning to the end of these three huge octavos, the author’s familiarity with the minute details of Greek learning is curiously obvious. To the historical student the third volume is the only one to be of special interest. Of this volume the first chapter, that on the Politics of the Homeric Age, will amply reward the student’s examination. In other respects the work is chiefly technical.
General
Had he been a writer and nothing else, he would have been famous and powerful by his pen. He might, however, have failed to secure a place in the front rank. His style was forcible, copious, rich with various knowledge, warm with the ardor of his nature. But it had three serious defects. It was diffuse, apt to pursue a topic into detail when these might have been left to the reader’s own reflection. It was redundant, employing more words than were needed to convey the substance. It was unchastened, indulging too freely in tropes and metaphors, in quotations and adapted phrases even when the quotation added nothing to the sense, but was due merely to some association in his own mind. Thus it seldom reached a high level of purity and grace, and though one might excuse its faults as natural to the work of a swift and busy man, they were sufficient to prevent readers from deriving much pleasure from the mere form and dress of his thoughts.
Mr. Gladstone hurriedly passed Mr. Disraeli on the stairs of the House of Commons. The observant Jew said under his breath, referring to Mr. Gladstone in his rush to the House, “Ardent creature!” That was the man in two words! That was the man both as a politician and as a scholar. When I read his Homer I feel that he longs to be in the House of Commons, and that his Homeric work is merely recreative and interstitial…. Mr. Gladstone does, indeed, acknowledge in the third volume and last page of his Homer that “to pass from the study of Homer to the ordinary business of the world is to step out of a palace of enchantment into the cold grey light of a Polar day.” No doubt of it; yet it would be a larger and better defended palace than any that has yet been built that would keep Mr. Gladstone out of the “cold grey light” of the House of Commons. I do not wonder at his partiality for Homer, because Homer was the poet of action. Where so much is said about battles and races, cities and politics, Mr. Gladstone was sure to be at home. I have read all his criticism, and I have been amazed at the number and variety of his allusions and quotations within the whole range of classical learning; yet I never could get away from the impression that he was very anxious to see how things were going on at the House, and that he would have no hesitation, had circumstances suggested or permitted it, to make an election speech on the steepest slopes of Olympus.
It is characteristic of Gladstone’s mental energy and versatility that on the very day of his retirement he completed his translation of Horace’s “Odes.” Among the many attempts to perform an apparently impossible task, Gladstone’s holds a high place. It is scholarly, lucid, and dignified. If it wants the lightness and ease which are part of Horace’s inimitable charm it shows a perfect appreciation of an author whose ideas, tastes, and thoughts were removed by an infinite distance from those of the translator.
What were his achievements? He covered the whole field; nothing was too great, nothing too small for him. He was a financial Nasmyth Hammer, which, with equal facility and equal precision, could revolutionize a Tariff or modify the duty on Dice. His wonderful genius enabled him to make Finance popular; to be understanded of the People. He taught the Country to appreciate its importance. His work was based on the solid rock of a substantial annual Surplus, and on the less easily secured foundation of strict Economy. The Customs Tariff was completely and finally purged. The remaining duties on food were repealed. Commercial relations with other countries were extended. The last remaining Excise duties, other than those on Intoxicants, were abolished.
When all is said, however, Mr. Gladstone’s place is not in literary or critical history, but elsewhere. His style is sometimes called Johnsonian, but surely without good ground. Johnson was not involved, and he was clear, and neither of these things can always be said of Mr. Gladstone. Some critic charged him in 1840 with “prolix clearness.” The old charge, says Mr. Gladstone upon this, was “obscure compression. I do not doubt that both may be true, and the former may have been the result of a well-meant effort to escape from the latter.” He was fond of abstract words, or the nearer to abstract the better, and the more general the better. One effect of this was undoubtedly to give an indirect, almost a shifty, air that exasperated plain people. Why does he beat about the bush they asked; why cannot he say what he means?… His critical essays on Tennyson and Macaulay are excellent. They are acute, discriminating, generous. His estimate of Macaulay, apart from a piece of polemical church history at the end, is perhaps the best we have.
