The Life of William Ewart Gladstone Volume III Part 39

A few more sentences will end this chapter in Mr. Gladstone's life. As we have seen, an election took place in the closing days of December 1890.

Mr. Parnell flung himself into the contest with frantic activity. A fierce conflict ended in the defeat of his candidate by nearly two to one.(281) Three months later a contest occurred in Sligo. Here again, though he had strained every nerve in the interval as well as in the immediate struggle, his candidate was beaten.(282) Another three months, then a third election at Carlow,-with the same result, the rejection of Mr. Parnell's man by a majority of much more than two to one.(283) It was in vain that his adherents denounced those who had left him as mutineers and helots, and exalted him as "truer than Tone, abler than Grattan, greater than O'Connell, full of love for Ireland as Thomas Davis himself." On the other side, he encountered antagonism in every key, from pathetic remonstrance or earnest reprobation, down to an unsparing fury that savoured (M161) of the ruthless factions of the Seine. In America almost every name of consideration was hostile.

Yet undaunted by repulse upon repulse, he tore over from England to Ireland and back again, week after week and month after month, hoa.r.s.e and haggard, seamed by sombre pa.s.sions, waving the shreds of a tattered flag.

Ireland must have been a h.e.l.l on earth to him. To those Englishmen who could not forget that they had for so long been his fellow-workers, though they were now the mark of his attack, these were dark and desolating days.

No more lamentable chapter is to be found in all the demented scroll of aimless and untoward things, that seem as if they made up the history of Ireland. It was not for very long. The last speech that Mr. Parnell ever made in England was at Newcastle-on-Tyne in July 1891, when he told the old story about the liberal leaders, of whom he said that there was but one whom he trusted. A few weeks later, not much more than ten months after the miserable act had opened, the Veiled Shadow stole upon the scene, and the world learned that Parnell was no more.(284)

Chapter VI. Biarritz. (1891-1892)

Omnium autem ineptiarum, quae sunt innumerabiles, haud sciam an nulla sit major, quam, ut illi solent, quocunque in loco, quoscunque inter homines visum est, de rebus aut difficillimis aut non necessariis argutissime disputare.-CICERO.

Of all the numberless sorts of bad taste and want of tact, perhaps the worst is to insist, no matter where you are or with whom you are, on arguing about the hardest subjects to the full pitch of elaboration and detail.

I

We have seen how in 1889 Mr. and Mrs. Gladstone celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of one of the most devoted and successful marriages that ever was made, and the unbroken felicity of their home. In 1891, after the shadows of approaching calamity had for many months hung doubtfully over them, a heavy blow fell, and their eldest son died. Not deeply concerned in ordinary politics, he was a man of many virtues and some admirable gifts; he was an accomplished musician, and I have seen letters of his to his father, marked by a rare delicacy of feeling and true power of expression. "I had known him for nearly thirty years," one friend wrote, "and there was no man, until his long illness, who had changed so little, or retained so long the best qualities of youth, and my first thought was that the greater the loss to you, the greater would be the consolation."

To Archbishop Benson, Mr. Gladstone wrote (July 6):-

It is now forty-six years since we lost a child,(285) and he who has now pa.s.sed away from our eyes, leaves to us only blessed recollections. I suppose all feel that those deaths which reverse the order of nature have a sharpness of their own. But setting this apart, there is nothing lacking to us in consolations human or divine. I can only wish that I may become less unworthy to have been his father.

To me he wrote (July 10):-

We feel deeply the kindness and tenderness of your letter. It supplies one more link in a long chain of recollection which I deeply prize. Yes, ours is a tribulation, and a sore one, but yet we feel we ought to find ourselves carried out of ourselves by sympathy with the wife whose n.o.ble and absorbing devotion had become like an entire life of itself, and who is now face to face with the void. The grief of children too, which pa.s.ses, is very sharp while it remains. The case has been very remarkable. Though with abatement of some powers, my son has not been without many among the signs and comforts of health during a period of nearly two and a half years. All this time the terrible enemy was lodged in the royal seat, and only his healthy and unyielding const.i.tution kept it at defiance, and maintained his mental and inward life intact.... And most largely has human, as well as divine compa.s.sion, flowed in upon us, from none more conspicuously than from yourself, whom we hope to count among near friends for the short remainder of our lives.

To another correspondent who did not share his own religious beliefs, he said (July 5):-

When I received your last kind note, I fully intended to write to you with freedom on the subject of _The Agnostic Island_. But since then I have been at close quarters, so to speak, with the dispensations of G.o.d, for yesterday morning my dearly beloved eldest son was taken from the sight of our eyes. At this moment of bleeding hearts, I will only say what I hope you will in consideration of the motives take without offence, namely this: I would from the bottom of my heart that whenever the hour of bereavement shall befall you or those whom you love, you and they may enjoy the immeasurable consolation of believing, with all the mind and all the heart, that the beloved one is gone into eternal rest, and that those who remain behind may through the same mighty Deliverer hope at their appointed time to rejoin him.

All this language on the great occasions of human life was not with him the tone of convention. Whatever the synthesis, as they call it,-whatever the form, whatever the creed and faith may be, he was one of that high and favoured household who, in Emerson's n.o.ble phrase, "live from a great depth of being."

Earlier in the year Lord Granville, who so long had been his best friend, died. The loss by his death was severe. As Acton, who knew of their relations well and from within, wrote to Mr. Gladstone (April 1):-

There was an admirable fitness in your union, and I had been able to watch how it became closer and easier, in spite of so much to separate you, in mental habits, in early affinities, and even in the form of fundamental convictions, since he came home from your budget, overwhelmed, thirty-eight years ago. I saw all the connections which had their root in social habit fade before the one which took its rise from public life and proved more firm and more enduring than the rest.

II

In September he paid a visit to his relatives at Fasque, and thence he went to Glenalmond-spots that in his tenacious memory must have awakened hosts of old and dear a.s.sociations. On October 1, he found himself after a long and busy day, at Newcastle-on-Tyne, where he had never stayed since his too memorable visit in 1862.(286) Since the defeat of the Irish policy in 1886, he had attended the annual meeting of the chief liberal organisation at Nottingham (1887), Birmingham (1888), and Manchester (1889). This year it was the turn of Newcastle. On October 2, he gave his blessing to various measures that afterwards came to be known as the Newcastle programme. After the shock caused by the Irish quarrel, every politician knew that it would be necessary to balance home rule by reforms expected in England and Scotland. No liberal, whatever his particular shade, thought that it would be either honourable or practical to throw the Irish policy overboard, and if there (M162) were any who thought such a course honourable, they knew it would not be safe. The principle and expediency of home rule had taken a much deeper root in the party than it suited some of the tr.i.m.m.i.n.g tribe later to admit. On the other hand, after five years of pretty exclusive devotion to the Irish case, to pa.s.s by the British case and its various demands for an indefinite time longer, would have been absurd.

III

In the eighties Mr. Gladstone grew into close friends.h.i.+p with one who had for many years been his faithful supporter in the House of Commons as member for Dundee. n.o.body ever showed him devotion more considerate, loyal, and unselfish than did Mr. Armitstead, from about the close of the parliament of 1880 down to the end of this story.(287) In the middle of December 1891 Mr. Armitstead planned a foreign trip for his hero, and persuaded me to join. Biarritz was to be our destination, and the expedition proved a wonderful success. Some notes of mine, though intended only for domestic consumption, may help to bring Mr. Gladstone in his easiest moods before the reader's eye. No new ideas struck fire, no particular contribution was made to grand themes. But a great statesman on a holiday may be forgiven for not trying to discover brand-new keys to philosophy, history, and "all the mythologies." As a sketch from life of the veteran's buoyancy, vigour, genial freshness of heart and brain, after four-score strenuous years, these few pages may be found of interest.

We left Paris at nine in the morning (Dec. 16), and were listening to the swell of the mighty Bay resounding under our windows at Biarritz soon after midnight.

The long day's journey left no signs of fatigue on either Mr. or Mrs.

Gladstone, and his only regret was that we had not come straight through instead of staying a night in Paris. I'm always for going straight on, he said. For some odd reason in spite of the late hour he was full of stories of American humour, which he told with extraordinary verve and enjoyment.

I contributed one that amused him much, of the Bostonian who, having read Shakespeare for the first time, observed, "I call that a very clever book.

Now, I don't suppose there are twenty men in Boston to-day who could have written that book!"

_Thursday, Dec. 17._-Splendid morning for making acquaintance with a new place. Saw the western spur of the Pyrenees falling down to the Bida.s.soa and the first glimpse of the giant wall, beyond which, according to Michelet, Africa begins, and our first glimpse of Spain.

After breakfast we all sallied forth to look into the shops and to see the lie of the land. Mr. G. as interested as a child in all the objects in the shops-many of them showing that we are not far from Spain. The consul very polite, showed us about, and told us the hundred trifles that bring a place really into one's mind. Nothing is like a first morning's stroll in a foreign town. By afternoon the spell dissolves, and the mood comes of Dante's lines, "_Era gia l'ora_," etc.(288)

Some mention was made of Charles Austin, the famous lawyer: it brought up the case of men who are suddenly torn from lives of great activity to complete idleness.

_Mr. G._-I don't know how to reconcile it with what I've always regarded as the foundation of character-Bishop Butler's view of habit. How comes it that during the hundreds of years in which priests and fellows of Eton College have retired from hard work to college livings and leisure, not one of them has ever done anything whatever for either scholars.h.i.+p or divinity-not one?

Mr. G. did not know Mazzini, but Armellini, another of the Roman triumvirs, taught him Italian in 1832. (M163) I spoke a word for Gambetta, but he would not have it. "Gambetta was _autoritaire_; I do not feel as if he were a true liberal in the old and best sense. I cannot forget how hostile he was to the movement for freedom in the Balkans."

Said he only once saw Lord Liverpool. He went to call on Canning at Glos'ter House (close to our Glos'ter Road Station), and there through a gla.s.s door he saw Canning and Lord Liverpool talking together.

_Peel._-Had a good deal of temper; not hot; but perhaps sulky. Not a farsighted man, but fairly clear-sighted. "I called upon him after the election in 1847. The Janissaries, as Bentinck called us, that is the men who had stood by Peel, had been 110 before the election; we came back only 50. Peel said to me that what he looked forward to was a long and fierce struggle on behalf of protection. I must say I thought this foolish. If Bentinck had lived, with his strong will and dogged industry, there might have been a wide rally for protection, but everybody knew that Dizzy did not care a straw about it, and Derby had not constancy and force enough."

Mr. G. said Disraeli's performances against Peel were quite as wonderful as report makes them. Peel altogether helpless in reply. Dealt with them with a kind of "righteous dulness." The Protectionist secession due to three men: Derby contributed prestige; Bentinck backbone; and Dizzy parliamentary brains.

The golden age of administrative reform was from 1832 to the Crimean War; Peel was always keenly interested in the progress of these reforms.

_Northcote._-"He was my private secretary; and one of the very best imaginable; pliant, ready, diligent, quick, acute, with plenty of humour, and a temper simply perfect. But as a leader, I think ill of him; you had a conversation; he saw the reason of your case; and when he left, you supposed all was right. But at the second interview, you always found that he had been unable to persuade his friends. What could be weaker than his conduct on the Bradlaugh affair! You could not wonder that the rank and file of his men should be caught by the proposition that an atheist ought not to sit in parliament. But what is a leader good for, if he dare not tell his party that in a matter like this they are wrong, and of course n.o.body knew better than N. that they were wrong. A clever, quick man with fine temper. By the way, how is it that we have no word, no respectable word, for backbone?"

_J. M._-Character?

_Mr. G._-Well, character; yes; but that's vague. It means will, I suppose.

(I ought to have thought of Novalis's well-known definition of character as "a completely fas.h.i.+oned will.")

_J. M._-Our inferiority to the Greeks in discriminations of language shown by our lack of precise equivalents for f????s??, s?f?a, s?f??s???, etc., of which we used to hear so much when coached in the _Ethics_.