The Life of William Ewart Gladstone Volume III Part 43

t?? ?p? ??? ????s?? ???d?a, ?e?t? ?? ???a?

?? p?e????, ??e?? ???? ??af??te???.(296)

A more impressive epigram contains the same thought, where the old man, leaning on his staff, likens himself to the withered vine on its dry pole, and goes on to ask himself what advantage it would be to warm himself for three or four more years in the sun; and on that reflection without heroics put off his life, and changed his home to the greater company,

??? p?e???? ???e et???es???.

All the rest of the evening he kept us alive by a stock of infinite drolleries. A scene of a dish of over-boiled tea at West Calder after a meeting, would have made the fortune of a comedian.

I said that in the all-important quality of co-operation, -- was only good on condition of being in front. Mr. G. read him in the same sense.

Reminded of a mare he once had-admirable, provided you kept off spur, curb, or whip; show her one of these things, and she would do nothing. Mr.

G. more of a judge of men than is commonly thought.

Told us of a Chinese despatch which came under his notice when he was at the board of trade, and gave him food for reflection. A s.h.i.+p laden with grain came to Canton. The administrator wrote to the central government at Pekin to know whether the s.h.i.+p was to pay duty and land its cargo. The answer was to the effect that the central government of the Flowery Land was quite indifferent as a rule to the goings and comings of the Barbarians; whether they brought a cargo or brought no cargo was a thing of supreme unconcern. "But this cargo, you say, is food for the people.

There ought to be no obstacle to the entry of food for the people. So let it in. Your Younger Brother commends himself to you, etc. etc."

_Friday, Jan. 8._-A quiet evening. We were all rather piano at the end of an episode which had been thoroughly delightful. When Mr. G. bade me good-night, he said with real feeling, "More sorry than I can say that this is our last evening together at Biarritz." He is painfully grieved to lose the sound of the sea in his ears.

_Sat.u.r.day, Jan. 9._-Strolled about all the forenoon. "What a time of blessed composure it has been," said Mr. G. with a heavy sigh. The distant hills covered with snow, and the voice of the storm gradually swelling.

Still the savage fury of the sea was yet some hours off, so we had to leave Biarritz without the spectacle of Atlantic rage at its fiercest.

Found comfortable saloon awaiting us at Bayonne, and so under weeping skies we made our way to Pau. The landscape must be pretty, weather permitting. As it was, we saw but little. Mr. G. dozed and read Max Muller's book on Anthropological Religions.

Arrived at Pau towards 5.30; drenching rain: nothing to be seen.

At tea time, a good little discussion raised by a protest against Dante being praised for a complete survey of human nature and the many phases of human lot. Intensity he has, but insight over the whole field of character and life? Mr. G. did not make any stand against this, and made the curious admission that Dante was too optimist to be placed on a level with Shakespeare, or even with Homer.

Then we turned to lighter themes. He had once said to Henry Taylor, "I should have thought he was the sort of man to have a good strong grasp of a subject," speaking of Lord Grey, who had been one of Taylor's many chiefs at the Colonial Office. "I should have thought," replied Taylor slowly and with a dreamy look, "he was the sort of man to have a good strong _nip_ of a subject." Witty, and very applicable to many men.

Wordsworth once gave Mr. G. with much complacency, as an example of his own readiness and resource, this story. A man came up to him at Rydal and said, "Do you happen to have seen my wife." "Why," replied the Sage, "I did not know you had a wife!" This peculiarly modest attempt at pointed repartee much tickled Mr. G., as well it might.

_Tuesday, Jan. 12._-Mr. G. completely recovered from two days of indisposition. We had about an hour's talk on things in general, including policy in the approaching session. He did not expect a dissolution, at the same time a dissolution would not surprise him.

At noon they started for Perigord and Carca.s.sonne, Nismes, Arles, and so on to the Riviera full of kind things at our parting.

Chapter VII. The Fourth Administration. (1892-1894)

?? d? ?d? d?? ?? ?e?ea? e??p?? ?????p??

?f??a?, ?? ?? p??s?e? ?a t??fe? ?d? ?????t?

?? ???? ??a???, et? d? t??t?t??s?? ??a.s.se?.

_Iliad_, i. 250.

Two generations of mortal men had he already seen pa.s.s away, who with him of old had been born and bred in sacred Pylos, and among the third generation he held rule.

I

In 1892 the general election came, after a session that was not very long nor at all remarkable. Everybody knew that we should soon be dismissed, and everybody knew that the liberals would have a majority, but the size of it was beyond prognostication. Mr. Gladstone did not talk much about it, but in fact he reckoned on winning by eighty or a hundred. A leading liberal-unionist at whose table we met (May 24) gave us forty. That afternoon by the way the House had heard a speech of great power and splendour. An Irish tory peer in the gallery said afterwards, "That old hero of yours is a miracle. When he set off in that high pitch, I said that won't last. Yet he kept it up all through as grand as ever, and came in fresher and stronger than when he began." His sight failed him in reading an extract, and he asked me to read it for him, so he sat down amid sympathetic cheers while it was read out from the box.

After listening to a strong and undaunted reply from Mr. Balfour, he asked me to go with him into the tea-room; he was fresh, unperturbed, and in high spirits. He told me he had once sat at table with Lord Melbourne, but regretted that he had never known him. Said that of the sixty men or so who had been his colleagues in cabinet, the (M175) very easiest and most attractive was Clarendon. Constantly regretted that he had never met nor known Sir Walter Scott, as of course he might have done. Thought the effect of diplomacy to be bad on the character; to train yourself to practise the airs of genial friends.h.i.+p towards men from whom you are doing your best to hide yourself, and out of whom you are striving to worm that which they wish to conceal. Said that he was often asked for advice by young men as to objects of study. He bade them study and ponder, first, the history and working of freedom in America; second, the history of absolutism in France from Louis XIV. to the Revolution. It was suggested that if the great thing with the young is to attract them to fine types of character, the Huguenots had some grave, free, heroic figures, and in the eighteenth century Turgot was the one inspiring example: when Mill was in low spirits, he restored himself by Condorcet's life of Turgot. This reminded him that Canning had once praised Turgot in the House of Commons, though most likely n.o.body but himself knew anything at all about Turgot.

Talking of the great centuries, the thirteenth, and the sixteenth, and the seventeenth, Mr. Gladstone let drop what for him seems the remarkable judgment that "Man as a type has not improved since those great times; he is not so big, so grand, so heroic as he has been." This, the reader will agree, demands a good deal of consideration.

Then he began to talk about offices, in view of what were now pretty obvious possibilities. After discussing more important people, he asked whether, after a recent conversation, I had thought more of my own office, and I told him that I fancied like Regulus I had better go back to the Irish department. "Yes," he answered with a flash of his eye, "I think so.

The truth is that we're both chained to the oar; I am chained to the oar; you are chained."

II

The electoral period, when it arrived, he pa.s.sed once more at Dalmeny. In a conversation the morning after I was allowed to join him there, he seemed already to have a grand majority of three figures, to have kissed hands, and to be installed in Downing Street. This confidence was indispensable to him. At the end of his talk he went up to prepare some notes for the speech that he was to make in the afternoon at Glasgow. Just before the carriage came to take him to the train, I heard him calling from the library. In I went, and found him hurriedly thumbing the leaves of a Horace. "Tell me," he cried, "can you put your finger on the pa.s.sage about Castor and Pollux? I've just thought of something; Castor and Pollux will finish my speech at Glasgow." "Isn't it in the Third Book?" said I.

"No, no; I'm pretty sure it is in the First Book"-busily turning over the pages. "Ah, here it is," and then he read out the n.o.ble lines with animated modulation, shut the book with a bang, and rushed off exultant to the carriage. This became one of the finest of his perorations.(297) His delivery of it that afternoon, they said, was most majestic-the picture of the wreck, and then the calm that gradually brought down the towering billows to the surface of the deep, entrancing the audience like magic.

Then came a depressing week. The polls flowed in, all day long, day after day. The illusory hopes of many months faded into night. The three-figure majority by the end of the week had vanished so completely, that one wondered how it could ever have been thought of. On July 13 his own Midlothian poll was declared, and instead of his old majority of 4000, or the 3000 on which he counted, he was only in by 690. His chagrin was undoubtedly intense, for he had put forth every atom of his strength in the campaign. But with that splendid suppression of vexation which is one of the good lessons that men learn in public life, he put a brave face on it, was perfectly cheery all through the luncheon, and afterwards took me to the music-room, where instead of constructing a triumphant cabinet with a majority of a hundred, he had to try to adjust an Irish policy to a parliament with hardly a majority at all. These topics exhausted, with a curiously quiet gravity of tone he told me (M176) that cataract had formed over one eye, that its sight was gone, and that in the other eye he was infested with a white speck. "One white speck," he said, almost laughing, "I can do with, but if the one becomes many, it will be a bad business.

They tell me that perhaps the fresh air of Braemar will do me good." To Braemar the ever loyal Mr. Armitstead piloted them, in company with Lord Acton of whose society Mr. Gladstone could never have too much.

III

It has sometimes been made a matter of blame by friends no less than foes, that he should have undertaken the task of government, depending on a majority not large enough to coerce the House of Lords. One or two short observations on this would seem to be enough. How could he refuse to try to work his Irish policy through parliament, after the bulk of the Irish members had quitted their own leader four years before in absolute reliance on the sincerity and good faith of Mr. Gladstone and his party?

After all the confidence that Ireland had shown in him at the end of 1890, how could he in honour throw up the attempt that had been the only object of his public life since 1886? To do this would have been to justify indeed the embittered warnings of Mr. Parnell in his most reckless hour.

How could either refusal of office or the postponement of an Irish bill after taking office, be made intelligible in Ireland itself? Again, the path of honour in Ireland was equally the path of honour and of safety in Great Britain. Were British liberals, who had given him a majority, partly from disgust at Irish coercion, partly from faith that he could produce a working plan of Irish government, and partly from hopes of reforms of their own-were they to learn that their leaders could do nothing for any of their special objects?

Mr. Gladstone found some consolation in a precedent. In 1835, he argued, "the Melbourne government came in with a British minority, swelled into a majority hardly touching thirty by the O'Connell contingent of forty. And they staid in for six years and a half, the longest lived government since Lord Liverpool's.(298) But the Irish were under the command of a master; and Ireland, scarcely beginning her political life, had to be content with small mercies. Lastly, that government was rather slack, and on this ground perhaps could not well be taken as a pattern." In the present case, the att.i.tude of the Parnellite group who continued the schism that began in the events of the winter of 1890, was not likely to prove a grave difficulty in parliament, and in fact it did not. The mischief here was in the effect of Irish feuds upon public opinion in the country. As Mr.

Gladstone put it in the course of a letter that he had occasion to write to me (November 26, 1892):-

Until the schism arose, we had every prospect of a majority approaching those of 1868 and 1880. With the death of Mr. Parnell it was supposed that it must perforce close. But this expectation has been disappointed. The existence and working of it have to no small extent puzzled and bewildered the English people. They cannot comprehend how a quarrel, to them utterly unintelligible (some even think it discreditable), should be allowed to divide the host in the face of the enemy; and their unity and zeal have been deadened in proportion. Herein we see the main cause why our majority is not more than double what it actually numbers, and the difference between these two scales of majority represents, as I apprehend, the difference between power to carry the bill as the Church and Land bills were carried into law, and the default of such power. The main mischief has already been done; but it receives additional confirmation with the lapse of every week or month.

In forming his fourth administration Mr. Gladstone found one or two obstacles on which he had not reckoned, and perhaps could not have been expected to reckon. By that forbearance of which he was a master, they were in good time surmounted. New men, of a promise soon amply fulfilled, were taken in, including, to Mr. Gladstone's own particular satisfaction, the son of the oldest (M177) of all the surviving friends of his youth, Sir Thomas Acland.(299)

Mr. Gladstone remained as head of the government for a year and a few months (Aug. 1892 to March 3, 1894). In that time several decisions of pith and moment were taken, one measure of high importance became law, operations began against the Welsh establishment, but far the most conspicuous biographic element of this short period was his own incomparable display of power of every kind in carrying the new bill for the better government of Ireland through the House of Commons.

In foreign affairs it was impossible that he should forget the case of Egypt. Lord Salisbury in 1887 had pressed forward an arrangement by which the British occupation was under definite conditions and at a definite date to come to an end. If this convention had been accepted by the Sultan, the British troops would probably have been home by the time of the change of government in this country. French diplomacy, however, at Constantinople, working as it might seem against its own professed aims, hindered the ratification of the convention, and Lord Salisbury's policy was frustrated. Negotiations did not entirely drop, and they had not pa.s.sed out of existence when Lord Salisbury resigned. In the autumn of 1892 the French amba.s.sador addressed a friendly inquiry to the new government as to the reception likely to be given to overtures for re-opening the negotiations. The answer was that if France had suggestions to offer, they would be received in the same friendly spirit in which they were tendered. When any communications were received, Mr. Gladstone said in the House of Commons, there would be no indisposition on our part to extend to them our friendly consideration. Of all this nothing came. A rather serious ministerial crisis in Egypt in January 1893, followed by a ministerial crisis in Paris in April, arrested whatever projects of negotiation France may have entertained.(300)