The Life of William Ewart Gladstone Volume III Part 30

The sum of the matter seems to be that upon the whole, and in a degree, we who lived fifty, sixty, seventy years back, and are living now, have lived into a gentler time; that the public conscience has grown more tender, as indeed was very needful; and that in matters of practice, at sight of evils formerly regarded with indifference or even connivance, it now not only winces but rebels; that upon the whole the race has been reaping, and not scattering; earning and not wasting; and that without its being said that the old Prophet is wrong, it may be said that the young Prophet was unquestionably right.

Here is the way in which a man of n.o.ble heart and high vision as of a circling eagle, transcends his individual chagrins. All this optimism was the natural vein of a statesman who had lived a long life of effort in persuading opinion in so many regions, in overcoming difficulty upon difficulty, in content with a small reform where men would not let him achieve a great one, in patching where he could not build anew, in unquenchable faith, hope, patience, endeavour. Mr. Gladstone knew as well as Tennyson that "every blessing has its drawbacks, and every age its dangers"; he was as sensitive as Tennyson or Ruskin or any of them, to the implacable tragedy of industrial civilisation-the city children "blackening soul and sense in city slime," progress halting on palsied feet "among the glooming alleys," crime and hunger casting maidens on the street, and all the other recesses of human life depicted by the poetic prophet in his sombre hours. But the triumphs of the past inspired confidence in victories for the future, and meanwhile he thought it well to remind Englishmen that "their country is still young as well as old, and that in these latest days it has not been unworthy of itself."(216)

On his birthday he enters in his diary:-

_Dec. 29, 1886._-This day in its outer experience recalls the Scotch usage which would say, "terrible pleasant." In spite of the ruin of telegraph wires by snow, my letters and postal arrivals of to-day have much exceeded those of last year. Even my share of the reading was very heavy. The day was gone before it seemed to have begun, all amidst stir and festivity. The estimate was nine hundred arrivals. O for a birthday of recollection. It is long since I have had one. There is so much to say on the soul's history, but bracing is necessary to say it, as it is for reading Dante. It has been a year of shock and strain. I think a year of some progress; but of greater absorption in interests which, though profoundly human, are quite off the line of an old man's direct preparation for pa.s.sing the River of Death. I have not had a chance given me of creeping from this whirlpool, for I cannot abandon a cause which is so evidently that of my fellow-men, and in which a particular part seems to be a.s.signed to me. Therefore am I not disturbed "though the hills be carried into the middle of the sea."

III

_To Lord Acton._

_Hawarden, Jan. 13, 1887._-It is with much pleasure that I read your estimate of Chamberlain. His character is remarkable, as are in a very high degree his talents. It is one of my common sayings that to me characters of the political cla.s.s are the most mysterious of all I meet, so that I am obliged to travel the road of life surrounded by an immense number of judgments more or less in suspense, and getting on for practical purposes as well as I can.

I have with a clear mind and conscience not only a.s.sented to but promoted the present conferences, and I had laboured in that sense long before Mr. Chamberlain made his speech at Birmingham. It will surprise as well as grieve me if they do harm; if indeed they do not do some little good. Large and final arrangements, it would be rash I think to expect.

The tide is flowing, though perhaps not rapidly, in our favour.

Without our lifting a finger, a crumbling process has begun in both the opposite parties. "In quietness and in confidence shall be your strength" is a blessed maxim, often applicable to temporals as well as spirituals. I have indeed one temptation to haste, namely, that the hour may come for me to say farewell and claim my retirement; but inasmuch as I remain _in situ_ for the Irish question only, I cannot be so foolish as to allow myself to ruin by precipitancy my own purpose. Though I am writing a paper on the Irish question for Mr. Knowles, it is no trumpet-blast, but is meant to fill and turn to account a season of comparative quietude.

The death of Iddesleigh has shocked and saddened us all. He was full of excellent qualities, but had not the backbone and strength of fibre necessary to restore the tone of a party demoralised by his former leader. In gentleness, temper, sacrifice of himself to the common purpose of his friends, knowledge, quickness of perception, general integrity of intention, freedom from personal aims, he was admirable.... I have been constantly struggling to vindicate a portion of my time for the pursuits I want to follow, but with very little success indeed. Some rudiments of Olympian religion have partially taken shape. I have a paper ready for Knowles probably in his March number on the Poseidon of Homer, a most curious and exotic personage.... Williams and Norgate got me the books I wanted, but alack for the time to read them! In addition to want of time, I have to deplore my slowness in reading, declining sight, and declining memory; all very serious affairs for one who has such singular reason to be thankful as to general health and strength.

I wish I could acknowledge duly or pay even in part your unsparing, untiring kindness in the discharge of your engagements as "Cook." Come early to England-and stay long. We will try what we can to bind you.

A few months later, he added to his multifarious exercises in criticism and controversy, a performance that attracted especial attention.(217) "Mamma and I," he wrote to Mrs. Drew, "are each of us still separately engaged in a death-grapple with _Robert Elsmere_. I complained of some of the novels you gave me to read as too stiff, but they are nothing to this.

It is wholly out of the common order. At present I regard with doubt and dread the idea of doing anything on it, but cannot yet be sure whether your observations will be verified or not. In any case it is a tremendous book." And on April 1 (1888), he wrote, "By hard work I have finished and am correcting my article on _Robert Elsmere_. It is rather stiff work. I have had two letters from her. She is much to be liked personally, but is a fruit, I think, of what must be called Arnoldism."

_To Lord Acton._

_Aston Clinton, Tring, Easter Day, April 1, '88._-I do not like to let too long a time elapse without some note of intercourse, even though that season approaches which brings you back to the sh.o.r.es of your country. Were you here I should have much to say on many things; but I will now speak, or first speak, of what is uppermost, and would, if a mind is like a portmanteau, be taken or tumble out first.

You perhaps have not heard of _Robert Elsmere_, for I find without surprise, that it makes its way slowly into public notice. It is not far from twice the length of an ordinary novel; and the labour and effort of reading it all, I should say, sixfold; while one could no more stop in it than in reading Thucydides. The idea of the book, perhaps of the writer, appears to be a movement of retreat from Christianity upon Theism: a Theism with a Christ glorified, always in the human sense, but beyond the ordinary measure. It is worked out through the medium of a being-one ought to say a character, but I withhold the word, for there is no sufficient substratum of character to uphold the qualities-gifted with much intellectual subtlety and readiness, and almost every conceivable moral excellence. He finds vent in an energetic attempt to carry his new gospel among the skilled artisans of London, whom the writer apparently considers as supplying the _norm_ for all right human judgment. He has extraordinary success, establishes a new church under the name of the new Christian brotherhood, kills himself with overwork, but leaves his project flouris.h.i.+ng in a certain "Elgood Street." It is in fact (like the Salvation Army), a new Kirche der Zukunft.

I am always inclined to consider this Theism as among the least defensible of the positions alternative to Christianity. Robert Elsmere who has been a parish clergyman, is upset entirely, as it appears, by the difficulty of accepting miracles, and by the suggestion that the existing Christianity grew up in an age specially predisposed to them.

I want as usual to betray you into helping the lame dog over the stile; and I should like to know whether you would think me violently wrong in holding that the period of the Advent was a period when the appet.i.te for, or disposition to, the supernatural was declining and decaying; that in the region of human thought, speculation was strong and scepticism advancing; that if our Lord were a mere man, armed only with human means, His whereabouts was in this and many other ways misplaced by Providence; that the gospels and the New Testament must have much else besides miracle torn out of them, in order to get us down to the _caput mortuum_ of Elgood Street. This very remarkable work is in effect identical with the poor, thin, ineffectual production published with some arrogance by the Duke of Somerset, which found a quack remedy for difficulties in what he considered the impregnable citadel of belief in G.o.d.

Knowles has brought this book before me, and being as strong as it is strange, it cannot perish still-born. I am tossed about with doubt as to writing upon it.

_To Lord Acton._

_Oxford, April 8, '88._-I am grateful for your most interesting letter, which contains very valuable warnings. On the other side is copied what I have written on two of the points raised by the book. Have I said too much of the Academy? I have spoken only of the first century. You refer to (apparently) about 250 A.D. as a time of great progress? But I was astonished on first reading the census of Christian clergy in Rome _temp._ St. Cyprian, it was so slender. I am not certain, but does not Beugnot estimate the Christians, before Constantine's conversion, in the west at one-tenth of the population? Mrs. T. Arnold died yesterday here.

Mrs. Ward had been summoned and she is coming to see me this evening. It is a very singular phase of the controversy which she has opened. When do you _repatriate_?

I am afraid that my kindness to the Positivists amounts only to a comparative approval of their not dropping the great human tradition out of view; _plus_ a very high appreciation of the personal qualities of our friend --.

_To Lord Acton._

_Dollis Hill, May 13, '88._-Your last letter was one of extreme interest. It raised such a mult.i.tude of points, after your perusal of my article on R. Elsmere, as to stimulate in the highest degree my curiosity to know how far you would carry into propositions, the ideas which you for the most part obliquely put forward. I gave the letter to Mary, who paid us a flying visit in London, that she might take it to Hawarden for full digestion. For myself I feed upon the hope that when (when ?) you come back to England we may go over the points, and I may reap further benefits from your knowledge. I will not now attempt anything of the kind. But I will say this generally, that I am not so much oppressed as you appear to be, with the notion that great difficulties have been imported by the researches of scientists into the religious and theological argument. As respects cosmogony and _geogony_, the Scripture has, I think, taken much benefit from them. Whatever be the date of the early books, Pentateuch or Hexateuch in their present _edition_, the a.s.syriological investigations seem to me to have fortified and accredited their substance by producing similar traditions in variant forms inferior to the Mosaic forms, and tending to throw them back to a higher antiquity, a fountainhead nearer the source. Then there is the great chapter of the Dispersal: which Renan (I think) treats as exhibiting the marvellous genius (!) of the Jews. As to unbroken sequences in the physical order, they do not trouble me, because we have to do not with the natural but the moral order, and over this science, or as I call it natural science, does not wave her sceptre. It is no small matter, again (if so it be, as I suppose), that, after warring for a century against miracle as unsustained by experience, the a.s.sailants should now have to abandon that ground, stand only upon sequence, and controvert the great facts of the New Testament only by raising to an extravagant and unnatural height the demands made under the law of testimony in order to [justify] a rational belief. One admission has to be made, that death did not come into the world by sin, namely the sin of Adam, and this sits inconveniently by the declaration of Saint Paul.

Mrs. Ward wrote to thank me for the tone of my article. Her first intention was to make some reply in the _Nineteenth Century_ itself. It appears that -- advised her not to do it. But Knowles told me that he was labouring to bring her up to the scratch again. There, I said, you show the cloven foot; you want to keep the _Nineteenth Century_ pot boiling.

I own that your reasons for not being in England did not appear to me cogent, but it would be impertinent to make myself a judge of them. The worst of it was that you did not name _any_ date. But I must a.s.sume that you are coming; and surely the time cannot now be far. Among other things, I want to speak with you about French novels, a subject on which there has for me been quite recently cast a most lurid light.

Acton's letters in reply may have convinced Mr. Gladstone that there were depths in this supreme controversy that he had hardly sounded; and adversaria that he might have mocked from a professor of the school or schools of unbelief, he could not in his inner mind make light of, when coming from the pen of a catholic believer. Before and after the article on _Robert Elsmere_ appeared, Acton, the student with his vast historic knowledge and his deep penetrating gaze, warned the impa.s.sioned critic of some historic point overstated or understated, some dangerous breach left all unguarded, some lack of nicety in definition. Acton's letters will one day see the light, and the reader may then know how candidly Mr. Gladstone was admonished as to the excess of his description of the moral action of Christianity; as to the risk of sending modern questions to ancient answers, for the apologists of an age can only meet the difficulties of their age; that there are leaps and bounds in the history of thought; how well did Newman once say that in theology you have to meet questions that the Fathers could hardly have been made to understand; how if you go to St. Thomas or Leibnitz or Paley for rescue from Hegel or Haeckel your apologetics will be a record of disaster. You insist broadly, says Acton, on belief in the divine nature of Christ as the soul, substance, and creative force of Christian religion; you a.s.sign to it very much of the good the church has done; all this with little or no qualification or drawback from the other side:-

Enter Martineau or Stephen or -- (unattached), and loq.:-Is this the final judgment of the chief of liberals? the pontiff of a church whose fathers are the later Milton and the later Penn, Locke, Bayle, Toland, Franklin, Turgot, Adam Smith, Was.h.i.+ngton, Jefferson, Bentham, Dugald Stewart, Romilly, Tocqueville, Channing, Macaulay, Mill? These men and others like them disbelieved that doctrine established freedom, and they undid the work of orthodox Christianity, they swept away that appalling edifice of intolerance, tyranny, cruelty, which believers in Christ built up to perpetuate their belief.

The philosophy of liberal history, Acton proceeds, which has to acknowledge the invaluable services of early Christianity, feels the anti-liberal and anti-social action of later Christianity, before the rise of the sects that rejected, some of them the divinity of Christ; others, the inst.i.tutions of the church erected upon it. Liberalism if it admits these things as indifferent, surrenders its own _raison d'etre_, and ceases to strive for an ethical cause. If the doctrine of Torquemada make us condone his morality, there can be no public right and no wrong, no political sin, no secular cause to die for. So it might be said that-

You do not work really from the principle of liberalism, but from the cognate, though distinct principles of democracy, nationality, progress, etc. To some extent, I fear, you will estrange valued friends, not a.s.suredly by any expression of theological belief, but by seeming to ignore the great central problem of Christian politics. If I had to put my own doubts, instead of the average liberal's, I should state the case in other words, but not altogether differently.(218)

Chapter II. The Alternative Policy In Act. (1886-1888)

Those who come over hither to us from England, and some weak people among ourselves, whenever in discourse we make mention of liberty and property, shake their heads, and tell us that "Ireland is a depending kingdom," as if they would seem by this phrase to intend, that the people of Ireland are in some state of slavery or dependence different from those of England.-JONATHAN SWIFT.

I

In the ministry that succeeded Mr. Gladstone in 1886, Sir Michael Hicks Beach undertook for the second time the office of Irish secretary, while Lord Randolph Churchill filled his place at the exchequer and as leader of the House. The new Irish policy was to open with the despatch of a distinguished soldier to put down moonlighters in Kerry; the creation of one royal commission under Lord Cowper, to inquire into land rents and land purchase; and another to inquire into the country's material resources. The two commissions were well-established ways of marking time.

As for Irish industries and Irish resources, a committee of the House of Commons had made a report in a blue book of a thousand pages only a year before. On Irish land there had been a grand commission in 1880, and a committee of the House of Lords in 1882-3. The latest Purchase Act was hardly yet a year old. Then to commission a general to hunt down little handfuls of peasants who with blackened faces and rude firearms crept stealthily in the dead of night round lonely cabins in the remote hillsides and glens of Kerry, was hardly more sensible than it would be to send a squadron of life-guards to catch pickpockets in a London slum.

A question that exercised Mr. Gladstone at least as sharply as the proceedings of ministers, was the att.i.tude (M129) to be taken by those who had quitted him, ejected him in the short parliament of 1886, and fought the election against him. We have seen how much controversy arose long years before as to the question whereabouts in the House of Commons the Peelites should take their seats.(219) The same perplexity now confronted the liberals who did not agree with Mr. Gladstone upon Irish government.

Lord Hartington wrote to him, and here is his reply:-

_August 2, 1886._-I fully appreciate the feeling which has prompted your letter, and I admit the reality of the difficulties you describe. It is also clear, I think, that so far as t.i.tle to places on the front opposition bench is concerned, your right to them is identical with ours. I am afraid, however, that I cannot materially contribute to relieve you from embarra.s.sment. The choice of a seat is more or less the choice of a symbol; and I have no such acquaintance with your political views and intentions, as could alone enable me to judge what materials I have before me for making an answer to your inquiry. For my own part, I earnestly desire, subject to the paramount exigencies of the Irish question, to promote in every way the reunion of the liberal party; a desire in which I earnestly trust that you partic.i.p.ate. And I certainly could not directly or indirectly dissuade you from any step which you may be inclined to take, and which may appear to you to have a tendency in any measure to promote that end.

A singular event occurred at the end of the year (1886), that produced an important change in the relations of this group of liberals to the government that they had placed and maintained in power. Lord Randolph, the young minister who with such extraordinary rapidity had risen to ascendency in the councils of the government, suddenly in a fatal moment of miscalculation or caprice resigned (Dec. 23). Political suicide is not easy to a man with energy and resolution, but this was one of the rare cases. In a situation so strangely unstable and irregular, with an administration resting on the support of a section sitting on benches opposite, and still declaring every day that they adhered to old liberal principles and had no wish to sever old party ties, the withdrawal of Lord Randolph Churchill created boundless perturbation. It was one of those exquisite moments in which excited politicians enjoy the ineffable sensation that the end of the world has come. Everything seemed possible.

Lord Hartington was summoned from the sh.o.r.es of the Mediterranean, but being by temperament incredulous of all vast elemental convulsions, he took his time. On his return he declined Lord Salisbury's offer to make way for him as head of the government. The glitter of the prize might have tempted a man of schoolboy ambition, but Lord Hartington was too experienced in affairs not to know that to be head of a group that held the balance was, under such equivocal circ.u.mstances, far the more substantial and commanding position of the two. Mr. Goschen's case was different, and by taking the vacant post at the exchequer he saved the prime minister from the necessity of going back under Lord Randolph's yoke. As it happened, all this gave a shake to both of the unionist wings.

The ominous clouds of coercion were sailing slowly but discernibly along the horizon, and this made men in the unionist camp still more restless and uneasy. Mr. Chamberlain, on the very day of the announcement of the Churchill resignation, had made a speech that was taken to hold out an olive branch to his old friends. Sir William Harcourt, ever holding stoutly in fair weather and in foul to the party s.h.i.+p, thought the break-up of a great political combination to be so immense an evil, as to call for almost any sacrifices to prevent it. He instantly wrote to Birmingham to express his desire to co-operate in re-union, and in the course of a few days five members of the original liberal cabinet of 1886 met at his house in what was known as the Round Table Conference.(220)