The Real Gladstone: An Anecdotal Biography

‘“Of Achilles, son of Peleus,   How the deadly wrath arose!How the hosts of the Achaians   Rued it with ten thousand woes!”

Written and read in this way, it has a sort of ballad air. If I am wrong, correct me. Perhaps I have been too long accustomed to the iambic measure with variations, as best suited to English heroic poetry, to be able to form a correct opinion. As an example of trochaic lines, there are several in Dryden’s “Alexander’s Feast”:

‘“Bacchus, ever fair and young,

Drunken joys did first ordain,” etc.’

Mr. Gladstone thought so highly of this criticism that he wrote back asking permission to print it in a contemplated preface to his translation. ‘It is not,’ he said, ‘from a mere wish to parade you as my correspondent, though this wish may have its share. Your observation on my metre, which has great force, cuts, I think, deep into the matter – into the principles of Homeric translation. So pray let me have your permission.’

As an illustration of Mr. Gladstone’s skill as a translator, let me add some verses from his version of the ‘Hecuba’ of Euripides, seven pages of which appeared in the Contemporary Review a few years since, though the translation was made in his Eton days:

‘Antistrophe I‘’Twas dead of night, and silence deepBuried all in dewy sleep,For feast, and dance, and slaughter done,Soft slumber’s season had begun.The lyre was hushed, the altar cold,   The sword, the lance, all bloodless lay;My husband, softly resting, told   The toils and dangers of the day:No longer watching for the foeSworn to lay proud Ilion low.‘Strophe II‘I strove my flowing hair to bindWith many a festal chaplet twin’d;The mirror’s rays of glittering hueBetrayed me to my virgin view,Hast’ning to rest – Then peal’d on highO’er Ilion’s walls the victor’s cry;Troy heard the shout that sounded then,   “Dash’d down the turrets of the foe,Shall sons of Greece again, again   To home, and rest, and glory go.”’

In 1892 appeared ‘An Academic Sketch’ by the Right Hon. W. E. Gladstone, M.P., being the Romanes Lecture delivered in the Sheldon Theatre, Oxford. Whilst it did not detract from, it scarcely added to, Mr. Gladstone’s reputation. It was, in fact, a speech somewhat of the after-dinner type. All the world knew that the Oxford of the past was a theme on which he could pleasantly dilate.

In 1894 there appeared from Mr. Gladstone’s pen an article in the Nineteenth Century on the ‘Atonement,’ occasioned by the study of Mrs. Besant’s ‘Autobiography.’ He says of her: ‘Mrs. Besant passes from her earliest to her latest stage of thought as lightly as a swallow skims the surface of the lawn, and with just as little effort to ascertain what lies beneath it. Her several schemes of belief or non-belief appear to have been entertained one after another with the same undoubting confidence, until the junctures successively arrived for their not regretful, but rather contemptuous, rejection. They are nowhere based upon reasoning, but on the authority of Mrs. Besant.’ The special proposition which Mr. Gladstone examines is one of four, the difficulties of which led Mrs. Besant to reject Christianity – the nature of the atonement of Christ. In dealing with this topic, Mr. Gladstone, after condemning the crude utterances of some theologians and preachers, by whom the New Testament doctrine has been travestied and misconceived, lays down what he conceives to be the true teaching. ‘What is here enacted in the kingdom of grace only repeats a phenomenon with which we are perfectly familiar in the natural and social order of the world, where the good, at the expense of pain endured by them, procure benefits for the unworthy.’

In the same year appeared Mr. Gladstone’s Horace. It was on the whole a failure. A critic writes: ‘The uncouth diction, obscurity of expression of the rendering, are patent evidences of the translator’s being ill at ease under the restraint of narrow bounds of rhyme and metre.’ The same writer observes: ‘Mr. Gladstone’s translation of the Odes of Horace will escape oblivion. Historians will remember it as they remember the hexameters of Cicero, the verses with which Frederick the Great pestered Voltaire, and the daily poems Warren Hastings used to read at his breakfast-table.’ An ingenious contributor to Blackwood, on the publication of the book, contributed a letter from ‘Horace in the Shades,’ intimating that he had nothing to do with the matter. It is to be questioned whether worse verses were ever written than the following in the ‘Horace’:

‘No; me the feast the war employsOf maids (their nails well clipt) with boys,Me fancy free; or something warm,My playful use does no one harm.’

Again,

‘Then shalt thou with flagrant passion   Like the beasts be torn,And with fire of cankered entrails   Thou shalt grieve forlorn.’

Or,

‘The Furies grant in war no scant;   Devouring seas o’er sailors roll;Young funerals hold their place with old;   Proserpine spares no breathing soul.’

Thus is the death of Cleopatra recorded:

‘Bold to survey with eye serene,The void that had her palace been;She lodged the vipers in her skinWhere best to drink the poison in.’

When ‘Ecce Homo’ appeared – a book which dear Lord Shaftesbury, Exeter Hall applauding, described as the worst book ever vomited out of the jaws of hell – Mr. Gladstone, in an article in Good Words, gave in his adherence to the book. He described the author as at once passing into the presence of Jesus of Nazareth, and then, without any foregone conclusion, either of submission or dissent, giving that heed to the acts and words of the unfriended teacher which the truest Jews did when those words were spoken and those acts done.

Mr. Gladstone found time, amid his preoccupations, to write a long article for the English Historical Review on the last portion of the ‘Greville Memoirs,’ chiefly justifying the action of the parties with which he was associated at the time of the ‘death and obsequies of Protection,’ in 1852, and during the Crimean War. Mr. Gladstone traverses Mr. Greville’s statement that in 1852 the Peelites were indisposed to join the Whigs, under the delusive belief that they could form a Government of their own. He can say positively that, with the single exception of the Duke of Newcastle, none of the party entertained this belief. ‘They knew that dichotomy, and not trichotomy, was for our times the law of the nation’s life.’ Their sympathies in regard to economy and peace lay rather with one of the Liberal wings than with the main body. In some cases they were divided between their Liberal opinions and their Conservative traditions and associations. For many a man to leave the party in which he was brought up is like the stroke of a sword dividing bone and marrow. But the intermediate position is essentially a false position, and nothing can long disguise its falseness. The right hon. gentleman confesses that he himself frankly stated to Lord Derby that the Peelites were a public nuisance, for while rapid migrations from camp to camp may be less creditable, slow ones not only are more painful, but are attended with protracted public inconvenience. The lessons of this political drama, he says – and the statement is significant at the present time – are of the present and the future. It entails a heavy responsibility to embark political parties in controversies certain to end in defeat where there is a silent sense of what is coming – a latent intention to accept defeat – and where the postponement of the final issue means only the enhancement of the price to be paid at the close. Mr. Gladstone deprecates the tone generally assumed in speaking of the Crimean War. He denies the assumptions that we drifted into that war; that the Cabinet of the day was in continual conflict with itself at the various stages of the negotiations; and that if it had adopted a bolder course at an earlier stage the Emperor Nicholas would have succumbed. The first of these assertions he characterizes as untrue, the second as ridiculous, and the third as speculative and highly improbable. Lord Clarendon did say that we drifted into war; but his meaning was simply that the time of war had not come, but the time of measures for averting it had expired; and Lord Clarendon, not less expressively than truly, said that, while the intermediate days were gliding by, we were drifting into war. ‘But the fable is brazen-fronted, and, like Pope Joan, still holds her place.’ As regards the Cabinet, Mr. Gladstone has witnessed much more sharp or warm argument in almost every other of the seven Cabinets to which he has had the honour to belong. In regard to the assumption that the war was not justifiable, he makes the ‘inconvenient admission’ that those who approved of the war at the time approved of it on very different grounds. Some favoured it as an Arthurian enterprise, the general defence of the weak against the strong; some because they had faith in the restorative energies of Turkey, if time were obtained by warding off the foe; some thought the power of Russia was exorbitant, and dangerous to Europe and to England. This last was the sentiment which most captivated the popular imagination. ‘It was feeling, and not argument, that raised the Crimean War into popularity.’ It is feeling, Mr. Gladstone thinks, which has plunged it into the abyss of odium. The war proceeded, as he conceives, upon a more just and noble idea expressed by Lord Russell when, on the outbreak of hostilities, he denounced the Emperor Nicholas as ‘the wanton disturber of the peace of Europe.’ The policy which led to the war was a European protest against the wrongdoing of a single State. His belief is that, compared with most wars, the war of 1854–56 will hold in history no dishonourable place. For its policy must be regarded à parte ante. He confesses, however, that the result of the war was exceedingly unsatisfactory.

The May number of the Nineteenth Century, 1887, contained an article by Mr. Gladstone reviewing the fifth and sixth volumes of Mr. Lecky’s ‘History of England in the Eighteenth Century.’ Towards the conclusion of the article Mr. Gladstone quotes the following sentence:

‘Mr. Lecky writes as follows: “We have seen a Minister going to the country on the promise that if he was returned to office he would abolish the principal direct tax paid by the class which was then predominant in the constituencies.”’

This sentence refers, of course, to Mr. Gladstone’s promise in his election address in 1874 to repeal the income tax. Mr. Gladstone replies that Mr. Lecky seems to be unaware that it is the practice of candidates for a seat in Parliament to announce to those whose votes they desire their views on political questions, either pending, proximate, or sometimes remote. He proceeds:

‘The accusing sentence is inaccurately written. In January, 1874, the date to which it refers, there was no question of returning to office. I addressed a constituency as Minister, and in a double capacity as Chancellor of the Exchequer and as head of the Administration, proposed to repeal the income tax. But it is also untruly written. It is untrue that the payers of income tax were then the predominant class in the constituencies. In Ireland, the payers of income tax had ceased, since the ballot was introduced, to rule elections. In England and Scotland, a very large majority of members were returned by the towns. In the towns, then as now, household suffrage was in full force, and the voters were as a body more independent of the wealthy than are the rural population. The repeal of the income tax, whether proper or improper in itself, was not then a thing improper in respect of the persons to whom it was announced.

‘It has been held by some that there should never be an appeal to the people by a Ministry on the subject of taxation. But why not? The rights of the people in respect to taxation are older, higher, clearer, than in respect to any other subject of government. Now, appeals on many such subjects have been properly made – on Reform in 1831; on the China War in 1857; on the Irish Church in 1868; on Home Rule in 1886; lastly, in 1852, by the Tories, whose creed Mr. Lecky appears in other matters to have adopted, on the finance proper to be proposed by Mr. Disraeli after, and in connection with, the repeal of the Corn Law.

‘Undoubtedly, although right in principle, such appeals and promises are eminently liable to abuse. But there is one touchstone by which the peccant element in them may be at once detected. If the promise launches into the far future, it may straightway be condemned. If, on the other hand, it is one certain to be tested within a few weeks, the case is different. A Minister casually pitchforked, so to speak, into office, and living from hand to mouth, might be tempted to a desperate venture. But can Mr. Lecky suppose that the Ministry of 1868–74, which had outlived the ordinary term, and (may it be said?) had made its mark in history, would thus have gambled with false coin, and have sought to add so ignobly, and with such compromise of character, a respite almost infinitesimal to its duration?

‘Was the engagement to the repeal of the income tax one either obligatory or proper in itself? Was the time well chosen? Was the proposer morally bound to the proposal? I will answer “Yes” to all these questions, and I will prove my affirmative, though my short recital will lead Mr. Lecky, if he reads it, into a field of contemporary history which it is quite plain that he has never traversed.’

In 1895 it was announced that Mr. Gladstone had written a book on ‘The Psalter, according to the Prayer-book Version.’ It was commenced by Mr. Gladstone many years before, but it was not till his retirement from office that he found time to finish it. He also compiled a Concordance, and added a series of notes on the Psalter. In the same year the address on the Armenian question, which was delivered by Mr. Gladstone at Chester, was republished in pamphlet form by Mr. Fisher Unwin.

I may not omit to refer to Mr. Gladstone’s utterance on the first chapter of Genesis – that sublime exordium to the Bible – that its truth is in all respects as fresh to-day as it was in the hour of its first enunciation, and that it links the Church of Adam, Abraham, and Moses in living fellowship and unity to the Church of to-day.

In 1894 Mr. Gladstone republished certain papers, which had already appeared in various periodicals, under the title of ‘Studies Subsidiary to the Works of Bishop Butler.’ He ridicules critics such as Matthew Arnold, who held that the ‘Analogy’ is dead, with the eighteenth-century Deism it opposed. He labours to show that it is as applicable to the religious problems of to-day as to those a hundred years old. The ‘Analogy,’ he holds, is one of the finest of intellectual disciplines. In the study of Butler’s works the student finds himself in an intellectual palæstra, where his best exertions are required thoroughly to grapple with his teacher. Mainly, education is a process of wrestling, and it is best to wrestle with the highest masters. The chapters on the Censors of Butler shows all the ex-Premier’s skill at fence. On the subject of the Theology of Butler, Mr. Gladstone attributes his habit of drawing it straight from the Scriptures, with little reference to authorities, as due to his Nonconformist education. In reply to the charges that the ‘Analogy’ tended to Romanism, he asks for a single known case where the study of Butler had led to Rome. The chapter on the influence of Butler is of great interest. In his second part Mr. Gladstone is occupied largely with an elaborate discussion, on the lines laid down by Butler, on the future life, and the condition of man therein. He is especially severe on the Universalists. He regards a period of future discipline for imperfect natures, ‘not without an admixture of salutary and accepted grace,’ as in accord with both faith and reason. The remaining chapters on Determinism, Teleology, Miracle, and Probability are the toughest in the whole book, and are as hard to understand as Butler himself. On miracles Mr. Gladstone follows the orthodox lines.

Mr. Gladstone’s latest utterances on the subject of Christianity appeared in 1895. He pleads for an eternity of punishment. His latest article on the subject appeared in the American Pictorial Bible. The following passage, in which he surveys the world, is worth reprinting: ‘The Christian religion,’ he says, ‘is for mankind the greatest of all phenomena. It is the dominant religion of the inhabitants of this planet in at least two important respects. It commands the largest number of professing adherents. If we estimate the population of the globe at 1,400,000,000 – and some would state it at a higher figure – between 400 and 500 of these, or one-third of the whole, are professing Christians; and at every point of the circuit the question is not one of losing ground, but of gaining it. The fallacy which accepted the vast population of China as Buddhists in the mass has been exploded, and it is plain that no other religion approaches the numerical strength of Christianity – doubtful, indeed, if there be any other which reaches one-half of it. The second of the particulars now under view is perhaps more important. Christianity is the religion in the command of whose professors is lodged a proportion of power far exceeding its superiority of numbers, and this power is both moral and material. In the area of controversy it can be said to have hardly an antagonist. Force, secular or physical, is accumulated in the hands of Christians in a proportion almost overwhelming, and the accumulation of influence is not less remarkable than that of force. This is not surprising, for all the elements of influence have their home within the Christian precinct. The art, the literature, the systematic industry, invention, and commerce – in one word, the forces of the world are almost wholly Christian. In Christendom alone there seems to be an inexhaustible energy of world-wide expansion.’

In conclusion, we give a couple of extracts from Mr. Gladstone’s more recent articles of universal interest. In one he makes a noble contribution to the praise of books. ‘Books are,’ he says, ‘the voices of the dead. They are a main instrument of communion with the vast human procession of the other world. They are the allies of the thought of men. They are in a certain sense at enmity with the world. Their work is, at least, in the two higher compartments of our threefold life. In a room well filled with them no one has felt or can feel solitary. Second to none, as friends to the individual, they are first and foremost among the compages, the bonds and rivets of the race.’ But books want housing and arranging, and they are multiplying so rapidly that they threaten to get beyond all control. In an article in the Nineteenth Century, from which we quote the above, Mr. Gladstone, with a light-hearted relish of the subject it is pleasant to see, gives some of his ideas on the subject of arrangement.

Another extract will give us his ideas of the Jews. He thinks that the purport of the Old Testament can be best summed up in the words that it is a history of sin and redemption. After explaining that the narrative of the Fall is in accordance with the laws of a grand and comprehensive philosophy, and that the objections taken to it are the product of narrower and shallower modes of thought, he proceeds, passing by the story of the Deluge and the dispersion, to consider the selection of Abraham. ‘Why,’ he asks, ‘were the Jews selected as the chosen people of God?’ Not, he thinks, because of their moral superiority. He contrasts the Jewish ethics and those of the Greeks, considerably to the detriment of the former, and then sums up the matter as follows: ‘Enough has perhaps been said to show that we cannot claim as a thing demonstrable a great moral superiority for the Hebrew line generally over the whole of the historically known contemporary races. I, nevertheless, cannot but believe that there was an interior circle, known to us by its fruits in the Psalter and the prophetic books, of morality and sanctity altogether superior to what was to be found elsewhere, and due rather to the pre-Mosaic than to the Mosaic religion of the race. But it remains to answer with reverence the question, Why, if not for a distinctly superior morality, nor as a full religious provision for the whole wants of man, why was the race chosen as a race to receive the promises, to guard the oracles, and to fulfil the hopes of the great Redemption?

‘The answer may, I believe, be conveyed in moderate compass. The design of the Almighty, as we everywhere find, was to prepare the human race, by a varied and a prolonged education, for the arrival of the great Redemption. The immediate purposes of the Abrahamic selection may have been to appoint, for the task of preserving in the world the fundamental bases of religion, a race which possessed qualifications for that end decisively surpassing those of all other races. We may easily indicate two of these fundamental bases. The first was the belief in one God. The second was the knowledge that the race had departed from His laws – without which knowledge how should they welcome a Deliverer whose object it was to bring them back? It may be stated with confidence that among the dominant races of the world the belief in one God was speedily destroyed by polytheism, and the idea of sin faded gradually but utterly away. Is it audacious to say that what was wanted was a race so endowed with the qualities of masculine tenacity and persistency, as to hold over these all-important truths until that fulness of time when, by and with them, the complete design of the Almighty would be revealed to the world? A long experience of trials beyond all example has proved since the Advent how the Jews, in this one essential quality, have surpassed every other people upon earth. A marvellous and glorious experience has shown how among their ancestors before the Advent were kept alive and in full vigour the doctrine of belief in one God and the true idea of sin. These our Lord found ready to His hand, essential preconditions of His teaching. And in the exhibition of this great and unparalleled result of a most elaborate and peculiar discipline we may perhaps recognise, sufficiently for the present purpose, the office and work of the Old Testament.’

In another article Mr. Gladstone objects to Universalism as a contradiction of Divine utterance. He writes: ‘To presume on overriding the express declarations of the Lord Himself delivered upon His own authority, is surely to break up revealed religion in its very ground-work, and to substitute for it a flimsy speculation spun like a spider’s web by the private spirit, and as little capable as that web of bearing the strain by which the false is to be severed from the true.’ Speaking of the theory which denies future punishment, he says: ‘What is this but to emasculate all the sanctions of religion, and to give wickedness, already under a too feeble restraint, a new range of license?’

It is vain to seek to chronicle Mr. Gladstone’s publications. Even at the time of his last illness he was said to have been engaged in a work on the Fathers. His writings fill six columns in the library catalogue of the British Museum.

CHAPTER XIV

ANECDOTAL AND CHARACTERISTIC

No one has been the subject of so much small talk as Mr. Gladstone. He has been a fortune to the men who think it creditable to write gossip and twaddle for newspapers in London or the provinces. In 1881 all England was interested, or supposed to be so, in the tale of his hat. A writer says: ‘The House of Commons has not had such a laugh for years as it had to-day over Mr. Gladstone and his hat. Mr. Gladstone is singular among members in never bringing a hat into the assembly. He would not wear it when his head was broken, but preferred a skull-cap. But it is the rule that after a division is called nobody shall address the Speaker standing, or with his head uncovered. To-day Mr. Gladstone wished to say something after the division-bell had rung, but no sooner did he open his mouth than the whole House yelled for him to observe the law. He sought for a hat, but could find none, the House still roaring at him. At length one of his colleagues got hold of Sir Farrer Herschell’s hat and put it on him. Now, Sir Farrer is a small man among small men, and he has a small head for a small man. Mr. Gladstone, if not exactly a giant, has the head of one. Imagine him, then, with Sir Farrer’s hat upon his head. A mountain crowned by a molehill could not have looked more ridiculous. The House laughed and roared at Mr. Gladstone, and Mr. Gladstone laughed at himself. Everybody voted this the sublimest spectacle of the session.’ Alas! Mr. Gladstone too often lent himself in Parliament to being exhibited. To draw Gladstone was at one time a favourite sport among the young men of the Opposition. Nothing was easier. You had only to get up and misquote Mr. Gladstone, and the fiery old man was on his legs in an instant.