The Life of William Ewart Gladstone Volume I Part 5

Mathematical lecture. _Aeneid._ Juvenal and Persius. _Ethics_, five books. Prideaux (a part of, for Herodotus). Themistocles Greciae valedicturus [I suppose a verse composition]. Something in divinity. Mathematical lecture. Breakfast with Gaskell, who had the Merton men. Papers. _Edinburgh Review_ on Southey's _Colloquies_ [Macaulay's]. _Ethics._ A wretched day. G.o.d forgive idleness. Note to Bible.

_May 13._--Wrote to my mother. At debate (Union). Elected secretary. Papers. _British Critic_ on _History of the Jews_ [by Newman on Milman]. Herodotus, _Ethics_. Butler and a.n.a.lysis.

Papers, Virgil, Herodotus. Juvenal. Mathematics and lecture. Walk with Anstice. Ethics, finished book 4.

_May 25._--Finished Porteus's _Evidences_. Got up a few hard pa.s.sages. a.n.a.lysis of Porteus. Sundry matters in divinity.

Themistocles. Sat with Biscoe talking. Walk with Canning and Gaskell. Wine and tea. Wrote to Mr. G. [his father]. Papers.

_June 13. Sunday._--Chapel morning and evening. Thomas a Kempis.

Erskine's _Evidence_. Tea with Mayow and Cole. Walked with Maurice to hear Mr. Porter, a wild but splendid preacher.

_June 14._--Gave a large wine party. Divinity lecture. Mathematics.

Wrote three long letters. Herodotus, began book 4. Prideaux.

Newspapers, etc. Thomas a Kempis.

_June 15._--Another wine party. _Ethics_, Herodotus. A little Juvenal. Papers. Hallam's poetry. Lecture on Herodotus. Phillimore got the verse prize.

_June 16._--Divinity lecture. Herodotus. Papers. Out at wine. A little Plato.

_June 17._--_Ethics_ and lecture. Herodotus. T. a Kempis. Wine with Gaskell.

_June 18._--Breakfast with Gaskell. T. a Kempis. Divinity lecture.

Herodotus. Wrote on Philosophy _versus_ Poetry. A little Persius.

Wine with Buller and Tupper.

_June 25._--_Ethics_. Collections 9-3. Among other things wrote a long paper on religions of Egypt, Persia, Babylon; and on the Satirists. Finished packing books and clothes. Left Oxford between 5-6, and walked fifteen miles towards Leamington. Then obliged to put in, being caught by a thunderstorm. Comfortably off in a country inn at Steeple Aston. Read and spouted some _Prometheus Vinctus_ there.

_June 26._--Started before 7. Walked eight miles to Banbury.

Breakfast there, and walked on twenty-two to Leamington. Arrived at three and changed. Gaskell came in the evening. _Life of Ma.s.singer_.

_July 6._ _Cuddesdon_.--Up soon after 6. Began my Harmony of Greek Testament. Differential calculus, etc. Mathematics good while, but in a rambling way. Began _Odyssey_. Papers. Walk with Anstice and Hamilton. Turned a little bit of Livy into Greek. Conversation on ethics and metaphysics at night.

_July 8._--Greek Testament. Bible with Anstice. Mathematics, long but did little. Translated some _Phaedo_. Butler. Construed some Thucydides at night. Making hay, etc., with S., H., and A. Great fun. Sh.e.l.ley.

_July 10._--Greek Testament. Lightfoot. Butler, and writing a marginal a.n.a.lysis. Old Testament with Anstice and a discussion on early history. Mathematics. Cricket with H. and A. A conversation of two hours at night with A. on religion till past 12. Thucydides, etc. I cannot get anything done, though I seem to be employed a good while. Short's sermon.

_July 11._--Church and Sunday-school teaching, morning and evening. The children miserably deluded. Barrow. Short. Walked with S.

_September 4._--Same as yesterday. _Paradise Lost._ Dined with the bishop. Cards at night. I like them not, for they excite and keep me awake. Construing Sophocles.

_September 18._--Went down early to Wheatley for letters. It is indeed true [the death of Huskisson], and he, poor man, was in his last agonies when I was playing cards on Wednesday night. When shall we learn wisdom? Not that I see folly in the fact of playing cards, but it is too often accompanied by a dissipated spirit.

He did not escape the usual sensations of the desultory when fate forces them to wear the collar. 'In fact, at times I find it very irksome, and my having the inclination to view it in that light is to me the surest demonstration that my mind was in great want of some discipline, and some regular exertion, for hitherto I have read by fits and starts and just as it pleased me. I hope that this vacation [summer of 1830] will confer on me one benefit more important than any having reference merely to my cla.s.s--I mean the habit of steady application and strict economy of time.'

CORRESPONDENCE WITH HALLAM

Among the recorded fragmentary items of 1830, by the way, he read Mill's celebrated essay on Coleridge, which, when it was republished a generation later along with the companion essay on Bentham, made so strong an impression on the Oxford of my day. He kept up a correspondence with Hallam, now at Cambridge, and an extract from one of Hallam's letters may show something of the writer, as of the friend for whose sympathising mind it was intended:--

Academical honours would be less than nothing to me were it not for my father's wishes, and even these are moderate on the subject. If it please G.o.d that I make the name I bear honoured in a second generation, it will be by inward power which is its own reward; if it please Him not, I hope to go down to the grave unrepining, for I have lived and loved and been loved; and what will be the momentary pangs of an atomic existence when the scheme of that providential love which pervades, sustains, quickens this boundless universe shall at the last day be unfolded and adored? The great truth which, when we are rightly impressed with it, will liberate mankind is that no man has a right to isolate himself, because every man is a particle of a marvellous whole; that when he suffers, since it is for the good of that whole, he, the particle, has no right to complain; and in the long run, that which is the good of all will abundantly manifest itself to be the good of each. Other belief consists not with theism. This is its centre. Let me quote to their purpose the words of my favourite poet; it will do us good to hear his voice, though but for a moment:--

'One adequate support For the calamities of mortal life Exists--one only: an a.s.sured belief That the procession of our fate, howe'er Sad or disturbed, is ordered by a Being Of infinite benevolence and power, Whose everlasting purposes embrace All accidents, converting them to good.'[49]

Hallam's father, in that memoir so just and tender which, he prefixes to his son's literary remains, remarks that all his son's talk about this old desperate riddle of the origin and significance of evil, like the talk of Leibnitz about it, resolved itself into an unproved a.s.sumption of the necessity of evil. In truth there is little sign that either Arthur Hallam or Gladstone had in him the making of the patient and methodical thinker in the high abstract sphere. They were both of them cast in another mould. But the efficacy of human relations.h.i.+ps springs from a thousand subtler and more mysterious sources than either patience or method in our thinking. Such marked efficacy was there in the friends.h.i.+p of these two, both of them living under pure skies, but one of the pair endowed besides with 'the thews that throw the world.'

Whether in Gladstone's diary or in his letters, in the midst of Herodotus and Butler and Aristotle and the rest of the time-worn sages, we are curiously conscious of the presence of a spirit of action, affairs, excitement. It is not the born scholar eager in search of knowledge for its own sake; there is little of Milton's 'quiet air of delightful studies;' and none of Pascal's 'labouring for truth with many a heavy sigh.' The end of it all is, as Aristotle said it should be, not knowing but doing:--honourable desire of success, satisfaction of the hopes of friends, a general literary appet.i.te, conscious preparation for private and public duty in the world, a steady progression out of the shallows into the depths, a gaze beyond garden and cloister, _in agmen, in pulverem, in clamorem_, to the dust and burning sun and shouting of the days of conflict.

IV

In September 1829, as we have seen, Huskisson had disappeared. Thomas Gladstone was in the train drawn by the _Dart_ that ran over the statesman and killed him.

Poor Huskisson, he writes to William Gladstone, the great promoter of the railroad, has fallen a victim to its opening!... As soon as I heard that Huskisson had been run over, I ran and found him on the ground close to the duke's [Wellington] car, his legs apparently both broken (though only one was), the ground covered with blood, his eyes open, but death written in his face. When they raised him a little he said, 'Leave me, let me die.' 'G.o.d forgive me, I am a dead man.' 'I can never stand this.'... On Tuesday he made a speech in the Exchange reading room, when he said he hoped long to represent them. He said, too, that day, that we were sure of a fine day, for the duke would have his old luck. Talked jokingly, too, of insuring his life for the ride.

And he notes, as others did, the extraordinary circ.u.mstance that of half a million of people on the line of road the victim should be the duke's great opponent, thus carried off suddenly before his eyes.

There was some question of Mr. John Gladstone taking Huskisson's place as one of the members for Liverpool, but he did not covet it. He foresaw too many local jealousies, his deafness would be sadly against him, he was nearly sixty-five, and he felt himself too old to face the turmoil.

He looked upon the Wellington government as the only government possible, though as a friend of Canning he freely recognised its defects, the self-will of the duke, and the parcel of mediocrities and drones with whom, excepting Peel, he had filled his cabinet. His view of the state of parties in the autumn of 1830 is clear and succinct enough to deserve reproduction. 'Huskisson's death,' he writes to his son at Christ Church (October 29, 1830), 'was a great gain to the duke, for he was the most formidable thorn to p.r.i.c.k him in the parliament. Of those who acted with Huskisson, none have knowledge or experience sufficient to enable them to do so. As for the whigs, they can all talk and make speeches, but they are not men of business. The ultra-tories are too contemptible and wanting in talent to be thought of. The radicals cannot be trusted, for they would soon pull down the venerable fabric of our const.i.tution. The liberals or independents must at least generally side with the duke; they are likely to meet each other half way.'

THE REFORM BILL

In less than a week after this acute survey the duke made his stalwart declaration in the House of Lords against all parliamentary reform. 'I have not said too much, have I?' he asked of Lord Aberdeen on sitting down. 'You'll hear of it,' was Aberdeen's reply. 'You've announced the fall of your government, that's all,' said another. In a fortnight (November 18) the duke was out, Lord Grey was in, and the country was gradually plunged into a determined struggle for the amendment of its const.i.tution.

Mr. Gladstone, as a resolute Canningite, was as fiercely hostile to the second and mightier innovation as he had been eager for the relief of the catholics, and it was in connection with the Reform bill that he first made a public mark. The reader will recall the stages of that event; how the bill was read a second time in the Commons by a majority of one on March 22nd, 1831; how, after a defeat by a majority of eight on a motion of going into committee, Lord Grey dissolved; how the country, shaken to its depths, gave the reformers such undreamed of strength, that on July 8th the second reading of the bill was carried by a hundred and thirty-six; how on October 8th the Lords rejected it by forty-one, and what violent commotions that deed provoked; how a third bill was brought in (December 12th, 1831) and pa.s.sed through the Commons (March 23rd, 1832); how the Lords were still refractory; what a lacerating ministerial crisis ensued; and how at last, in June, the bill, which was to work the miracle of a millennium, actually became the law of the land. Not even the pressure of preparation for the coming ordeal of the examination schools could restrain the activity and zeal of our Oxonian. Canning had denounced parliamentary reform at Liverpool in 1820; and afterwards had declared in the House of Commons that if anybody asked him what he meant to do on the subject, he would oppose reform to the end of his life, under whatever shape it might appear.

Canning's disciple at Christ Church was as vehement as the master.[50]

To a friend he wrote in 1865:--

I think that Oxford teaching had in our day an anti-popular tendency. I must add that it was not owing to the books, but rather to the way in which they were handled: and further, that it tended still more strongly in my opinion to make the love of truth paramount over all other motives in the mind, and thus that it supplied an antidote for whatever it had of bane. The Reform bill frightened me in 1831, and drove me off my natural and previous bias. Burke and Canning misled many on that subject, and they misled me.

While staying at Leamington, whither his family constantly went in order to be under the medical care of the famous Jephson, Mr. Gladstone went to a reform meeting at Warwick, of which he wrote a contemptuous account in a letter to the _Standard_ (April 7). The gentry present were few, the n.o.bility none, the clergy one only, while 'the mob beneath the grand stand was Athenian in its levity, in its recklessness, in its gaping expectancy, in its self-love and self-conceit--in everything but its acuteness.' 'If, sir, the n.o.bility, the gentry, the clergy are to be alarmed, overawed, or smothered by the expression of popular opinion such as this, and if no great statesman be raised up in our hour of need to undeceive this unhappy mult.i.tude, now eagerly rus.h.i.+ng or heedlessly sauntering along the pathway of revolution, as an ox goeth to the slaughter or a fool to the correction of the stocks, what is it but a symptom as infallible as it is appalling, that the day of our greatness and stability is no more, and that the chill and damp of death are already creeping over England's glory.' These dolorous spectres haunted him incessantly, as they haunted so many who had not the sovereign excuse of youth, and his rhetoric was perfectly sincere. He felt bound to say that, as far as he could form an opinion, the ministry most richly deserved impeachment. Its great innovations and its small alike moved his indignation. When Brougham committed the enormity of hearing causes on Good Friday, Gladstone repeats with deep complacency a saying of Wetherell, that Brougham was the first judge who had done such a thing since Pontius Pilate.

OXFORD ELECTIONEERING

The undergraduates took their part in the humours of the great election, and Oxford turned out her chivalry gallantly to bring in the anti-reform candidate for the county to the nomination. 'I mounted the mare to join the anti-reform procession,' writes the impa.s.sioned student to his father, 'and we looked as well as we could do, considering that we were all covered with mud from head to foot. There was mob enough on both sides, but I must do them justice to say they were for the most part exceedingly good-humoured, and after we had dismounted, we went among them and elbowed one another and bawled and bellowed with the most perfect good temper. At the nomination in the town hall there was so much row raised that not one of the candidates could be heard.' The effect of these exercitations was a hoa.r.s.eness and cold, which did not, however, prevent the sufferer from taking his part in a mighty bonfire in Peckwater. On another day:--

I went with Denison and another man named Jeffreys between eleven and twelve. We began to talk to some men among Weyland's friends; they crowded round, and began to holloa at us, and were making a sort of ring round us preparatory to a desperate hustle, when lo!

up rushed a body of Norreys' men from St. Thomas's, broke their ranks, raised a shout, and rescued us in great style. I shall ever be grateful to the men of St. Thomas's. When we were talking, Jeffreys said something which made one man holloa, 'Oh, his father's a parson.' This happened to be true, and flabbergasted me, but he happily turned it by reminding them, that they were going to vote for Mr. Harcourt, son of the greatest parson in England but one (Archbishop of York). Afterwards they left me, and I pursued my work alone, conversed with a great number, shook hands with a fair proportion, made some laugh, and once very nearly got hustled when alone, but happily escaped. You would be beyond measure astonished how unanimous and how _strong_ is the feeling among the freeholders (who may be taken as a fair specimen of the generality of all counties) _against_ the catholic question. Reformers and anti-reformers were alike sensitive on that point and perfectly agreed. One man said to me, 'What, vote for Lord Norreys? Why, he voted against the country _both_ times, _for_ the Catholic bill and then against the Reform.' What would this atrocious ministry have said had the appeal to the voice of the people, which they now quote as their authority, been made in 1829? I held forth to a working man, possibly a forty-s.h.i.+lling freeholder, [he adds in a fragment of later years,] on the established text, reform was revolution. To corroborate my doctrine I said, 'Why, look at the revolutions in foreign countries,' meaning of course France and Belgium. The man looked hard at me and said these very words, 'd.a.m.n all foreign countries, what has old England to do with foreign countries?' This is not the only time that I have received an important lesson from a humble source.

SPEECH AT THE UNION

A more important scene which his own future eminence made in a sense historic, was a debate at the Union upon Reform in the same month, where his contribution (May 17th) struck all his hearers with amazement, so brilliant, so powerful, so incomparably splendid did it seem to their young eyes. His description of it to his brother (May 20th, 1831) is modest enough:--

I should really have been glad if your health had been such as to have permitted your visiting Oxford last week, so that you might have heard our debate, for certainly there had never been anything like it known here before and will scarcely be again. The discussion on the question that the ministers were incompetent to carry on the government of the country was of a miscellaneous character, and I moved what they called a 'rider' to the effect that the Reform bill threatened to change the form of the British government, and ultimately to break up the whole frame of society.

The debate altogether lasted three nights, and it closed then, partly because the _votes_ had got tired of dancing attendance, partly because the speakers of the revolutionary side were exhausted. There were eight or nine more on ours ready, and indeed anxious. As it was, there were I think fifteen speeches on our side and thirteen on theirs, or something of that kind. Every man spoke above his average, and many very far beyond it. They were generally short enough. Moncreiff, a long-winded Scotsman, spouted nearly an hour, and I was guilty of three-quarters. I remember at Eton (where we used, when I first went into the society, to speak from three to ten minutes) I thought it must be one of the finest things in the world to speak for three-quarters of an hour, and there was a legend circulated about an old member of the society's having done so, which used to make us all gape and stare. However, I fear it does not necessarily imply much more than length. Doyle spoke remarkably well, and made a violent attack on Mr. Canning's friends, which Gaskell did his best to answer, but very ineffectually from the nature of the case. We got a conversion speech from a Christ Church gentleman-commoner, named Alston, which produced an excellent effect, and the division was favourable beyond anything we had hoped--ninety-four to thirty-eight. We should have had larger numbers still had we divided on the first night. Great diligence was used by both parties in bringing men down, but the tactics on the whole were better on our side, and we had fewer truants in proportion to our numbers. England expects every man to do his duty; and ours, humble as it is, has been done in reference to this question. On Friday I wrote a letter to the _Standard_ giving an account of the division, which you will see in Sat.u.r.day's paper, if you think it worth while to refer to it. The way in which the present generation of undergraduates is divided on the question is quite remarkable.

The occasion was to prove a memorable one in his career, and a few more lines about it from his diary will not be considered superfluous:--

_May 16th._--Sleepy. Mathematics, few and shuffling, and lecture.

Read Canning's reform speeches at Liverpool and made extracts. Rode out. Debate, which was adjourned. I am to try my hand to-morrow. My thoughts were but ill-arranged, but I fear they will be no better then. Wine with Anstice. Singing. Tea with Lincoln.

_May 17th._--Ethics. Little mathematics. A good deal exhausted in forenoon from heat last night. Dined with White and had wine with him, also with young Acland. Cogitations on reform, etc. Difficult to _select_ matter for a speech, not to gather it. _Spoke at the adjourned debate for three-quarters of an hour_; immediately after Gaskell, who was preceded by Lincoln. Row afterwards and adjournment. Tea with Wordsworth.