The Life of William Ewart Gladstone Volume II Part 51

_November 14._-Worked on articles for reprint. Reperusal of Patteson moves me unto tears.(355) What a height he reached! What he did for G.o.d 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 pa.s.sable 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 pa.s.sion 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 n.o.ble 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 pa.s.sage:-

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 prompt.i.tude, and the nation having narrowly escaped one war, found itself involved in two. The peril of a conflict in Europe had hardly pa.s.sed, 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.

Chapter VI. Midlothian. (1879)

?d? a??a??? ????.

t? d???? ???st?, ? se ????t? ??p??.

aeSCH. _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 const.i.tuency. 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 a.s.senting. 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 canva.s.sers 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 const.i.tuency 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 a.s.sume 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 circ.u.mspection. 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 const.i.tuency 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 un.o.bjectionable 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 f.a.ggot 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 f.a.ggots 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 a.s.sembled, 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 Galas.h.i.+els he found a great mult.i.tude, 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 mult.i.tude, 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 s.p.a.ce 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 a.s.sociated 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 mult.i.tudes 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 const.i.tution, 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 pa.s.sages 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 pa.s.sages 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 pa.s.sages 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 n.o.ble 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-wors.h.i.+p, for it is the reverence which each man ought to feel for the nature that G.o.d 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 mult.i.tude of uninstructed numerical adhesions, or upon the integrity of inst.i.tutions 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 a.s.sumptions; compel it to expound its formulae; 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 a.s.sault, 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 princ.i.p.al, 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 a.s.sure 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 a.s.sembled 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 a.n.a.lyse, if one were in a.n.a.lytic 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 fas.h.i.+on 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 pa.s.sionate 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 statesmans.h.i.+p, 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.