Rufus Taylor Gladstone

“ Gladstone humbly placed his firm reliance, begging that He will remember to His great servant how ardently he loved his fellow men, without distinction of race, while he lived among them, and how mightily he labored for their good. ”

“ Disraeli and Palmerston by shrewdness and force of character, Canning and Derby by brilliant oratorical gifts, Russell and Aberdeen by earnest devotion to public service, were all commanding figures in their day, whose claims to the chieftainship of a party and of a government were generally admitted. Gladstone, the most versatile genius of them all, had abilities second to none; but his place in history will for long be a subject of acute controversy. He stands too close to our own time to be fairly judged. ”

“ Whatever else may be said for them, it is certain, we think, that they are not hastily formed, for in his reading, as in all else, he is strictly methodical.’ This point is well made by a contributor to the Young Man, in a long and interesting article. ‘Mr. Gladstone,’ he says, ‘cannot read hastily, nor has he ever acquired the fine art of skipping. But he is not slow to discover whether the book is worth reading, and if not, after a few pages it is cast on one side, though, as a general rule, his judgment is lenient.’ In the ‘Autobiography of Sir Henry Taylor’ this is further illustrated. ”

“ Gladstone has been like a sun which, sinking slowly, has grown larger as he sank, and filled the sky with radiance even while he trembled on the verge of the horizon. There were able men, and famous men, but there was no one comparable to him in power and fame and honor. Now he is gone. The piercing eye is dim, and the mellow voice is silent, and the light has died out of the sky. ”

“ When he first appeared in the office, Henry Taylor said, 'I rather like Gladstone, but he is said to have more of the devil in him than appears.' A few weeks were enough to show him that 'Gladstone was far the most considerable of the rising generation, having besides his abilities an excellent disposition and great strength of character.' James Stephen thought well of him, but doubted if he had pugnacity enough for public life. ”

“ Gladstone has manners but no small talk. He is so consumed by zeal for great subjects that he leaves out of account the possibility that they may not interest other people. He pays to every one, and not least to ladies, the compliment of assuming that they are on his own intellectual level, engrossed in the subjects which engross him, and furnished with at least as much information as will enable them to follow and to understand him. Hence the genesis of that absurd story about his demeanour to the Queen. ”

“ I had no misadventure in reporting this memorable speech. It was the first occasion on which I had ever heard Mr. Gladstone speak, and it is even fresher in my recollection than my last sight of him shortly before his death. I can recall his tall, upright figure, the handsome, open countenance, as mobile as an actor's, the flashing eye that in moments of passion lit up so wonderfully, the crop of waving brown-black hair. I have seldom seen a finer-looking man. ”

“ Twice have all the resources of his genius, all the machinery of his party, been called into requisition to bring about a final settlement of the Irish Land question, and yet the [Pg 548] work is still to be done. The explanation is not far to seek. Mr. Gladstone's passionate recklessness committed him in 1867 to an enterprise, the magnitude of which excited his vanity, the actual nature of which he only dimly perceived. ”

“ Almost anybody who only knew the two men vaguely and by rumor, would be likely to assume that the style of the classical Gladstone was stately, calm, and regular; that of the popular orator and democrat, impetuous, rugged, and vehement. Now, the great characteristic of Gladstone, after his fluency, is his impetuosity; that of Bright is his magnificent composure and self-control. Intensity is his great peculiarity. He never foams or froths or bellows, or wildly gesticulates. The heat of his oratorical passion is a white heat which consumes without flash or smoke or sputter. ”

“ As the most conspicuous seceder from the Tory camp, he became the special object of antipathy to the Carlton Club, which was fond of speaking of him as insane. A member of the Carlton was reported to have said to a member of the Reform Club, “I am much better off for a leader than you are, my leader is only an unscrupulous intriguer; [18] yours is a dangerous lunatic.” The story was current that Gladstone had bought the whole contents of a toyshop and ordered them to be sent to his house. ”

“ It is hard to say little, and painful to speak plainly. I immensely admire very much in Mr. Gladstone; so do you: of possible leaders he is the best—at present! and it is a bitter disappointment to find him a reed that pierces the hand when one leans on it. I fear you will not like me to say, what I say with pain, that only in European affairs do I find him commendable. In regard to our unjust wars he has simply betrayed and deluded the electors who enthusiastically aided him to power.... He has gone wholly wrong towards Ireland, equally as towards Afghanistan, India, and South Africa.... ”

“ Those who know the abundance of their resources, and have conquered fame, can doubtless afford to be generous. Julius Cæsar was, and George Washington, and so, in a different sphere, were Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin. But the instances to the contrary are so numerous that one may say of magnanimity that it is among the rarest as well as the finest ornaments of character.
The essential dignity of Mr. Gladstone’s nature was never better seen than during the last few years of his life, after he had finally retired (in 1894) from public life. ”

“ No English statesman has been more fervently adored or more intensely hated than Gladstone. While his political admirers were extolling him to sympathetic crowds as equal or superior to the most illustrious of the human race, he was being accused in anonymous letters of the foulest crimes. Even his religion was set down in some quarters as the basest hypocrisy. But his personal enemies, as distinguished from his political opponents, were men who did not know him. ”

“ Young men felt old beside him. And to the last no generous cause, no suffering people, appealed to him in vain, and that glorious voice which had so often inspirited the friends of freedom and guided them to victory was to the last at the service of the weak and the oppressed of whatever race or nation. Mr. Gladstone was the greatest Englishman of his time.
He loved his own people as much as any Englishman that ever lived. But through communion with the hearts of his own people he acquired that wider and greater gift—the power of understanding and sympathizing with other peoples. ”

“ Gladstone asserts that his old chief was always ready to stand in the post of difficulty, and possessed an inexhaustible sympathy with human suffering.
It is at least certain that Lord John Russell served England—the country whose freedom, he once declared, he ‘worshipped’—with unwearied devotion, with a high sense of honour, with a courage which never faltered, with an integrity which has never been impeached. He followed duty to the utmost verge of life, and—full himself of moral susceptibility—he reverenced the conscience of every man. ”

“ In the high tide of agitation for reform the whigs gave the duke a beating, and brought their man to the top of the poll, a tory being his colleague. Handley, the tory, on our present occasion seemed safe, and the fight lay between Mr. Gladstone and Sergeant Wilde, the sitting whig, a lawyer of merit and eminence, who eighteen years later went to the woolsack as Lord Truro. Reform at Newark was already on the ebb. Mr. Gladstone, though mocked as a mere schoolboy, and fiercely assailed as a slavery man, exhibited from the first hour of the fight tremendous gifts of speech and skill of fence. ”

“ The ancients said that the poet is born and the orator is made. It appears to me that a man stands but little chance of oratorical triumphs who is not gifted by nature with a musical voice and a sympathetic electrical force which no effort can acquire.
On the 29th of January, 1833, at the age of twenty-four, Gladstone entered upon his memorable parliamentary career, during the ministry of Lord Grey; and his maiden speech--fluent, modest, and earnest--was in the course of the debate on the proposed abolition of slavery in the British colonies. ”

“ It is a great evil. To say nothing of its effect upon the passions of the audience, it wears out the statesman; it deprives him, in the intervals of Parliament, of leisure for study and reflection; worst of all, it tempts him imprudently to commit himself.
In the case of armed intervention in Egypt, Gladstone seemed to swerve from his usual fidelity to a policy of moderation and peace. It lost him Bright, to whom as he advanced in Liberalism he had been drawing closer, [53] and who had been induced to take office in his Government. ”

“ It is a curious fact that for nearly forty years no intrigues were more active, and no jealousies more bitter, than those which had relation to Mr. Gladstone himself. There was always someone ready to intrigue against him. There were always those who thought that, if only he could be got out of the way, there might possibly be room for themselves upon the top of the mountain. ”

“ The Prince wants to beat the French, and so does Corporal John. If we stand by each other we shall most likely beat them. If we send all the Papists and Dutch away, Tallard will have every man of us.” Mr. Gladstone himself, we imagine, would admit that our honest grenadier would have the best of the argument; and if so, what follows? Even this; that all Mr. Gladstone’s general principles about power, and responsibility, and personality, and conjoint action, must be given up, and that, if his theory is to stand at all, it must stand on some other foundation. ”

“ Is this to solicit, to persuade, to submit religion to the free choice of man? Would a fine of a thousand pounds, would imprisonment in Newgate for six months, under circumstances not disgraceful, give Mr Gladstone the pain which he would feel, if he were to be told that he was to be dealt with in the way in which he would himself deal with more than one half of his countrymen?
We are not at all surprised to find such inconsistency even in a man of Mr. Gladstone’s talents. The truth is, that every man is, to a great extent, the creature of the age. ”

“ Once again Gladstone was seated on the summit of power, and with every prospect of a long-continued reign. Although an old man, his vigor of mind and body had not abated. He was never stronger, apparently, than when he was past seventy years of age. At no previous period of his life was his fame so extended or his moral influence so great. Certainly no man in England was more revered than he or more richly deserved his honors. ”

“ Any smaller man must have been intoxicated by the knowledge of the feeling he had thus aroused. It says much for Mr. Gladstone that, so far from showing any signs of intoxication or personal exultation, from first to last he seemed to regard his hold upon the masses of the people simply as one of the assets in the cause of which he had made himself the champion.
After I had finished my lecture in the Albert Hall a young man, then unknown to me, and who was described as an Oxford don, was called upon to address the meeting. ”

“ Ward was condemned at Oxford for his book, ‘The Ideal of a Christian Church,’ Mr. Gladstone was one of the non-placets. In a letter to his friend Bishop Wilberforce in 1844, Mr. Gladstone writes: ‘I rejoice to see that you are on the whole hopeful. For my part, I heartily go along with you. The fabric consolidates itself more and more, even while the earthquake rocks it; for, with a thousand drawbacks and deductions, love grows warmer and larger, truth firmer among us. ”

“ To such a length does he carry this that at a picnic to a favourite Welsh mountain he has been seen to fling himself on the heather, and bury himself in some pamphlet upon a question of the day, until called to lighter things by those who were responsible for the provision basket. His grand maxim is never to be doing nothing.
‘Although Mr. Gladstone’s daily routine is familiar to some, yet many inaccurate accounts have been circulated from time to time. In bed about twelve, he sleeps like a child until called in the morning. ”

“ Earl Russell never disavowed Gladstone, although Lord Palmerston and Sir George Cornewall Lewis instantly did so. As far as a curious student could penetrate the mystery, Gladstone exactly expressed Earl Russell's intent.
As political education, this lesson was to be crucial; it would decide the law of life. All these gentlemen were superlatively honorable; if one could not believe them, Truth in politics might be ignored as a delusion. ”

“ The Whig critics of 1864 had grown so accustomed to Palmerston’s way of handling the House as to forget that a man might succeed by quite different methods, and that defects, serious in themselves, may be outweighed by transcendent merits.
Mr. Gladstone had the defects ascribed to him. His impulsiveness sometimes betrayed him into declarations which a cooler reflection would have dissuaded. ”

“ Because of his delight in all that was formal and arranged he objected to the public quotation of private conversation even after death, and this scruple helped his refusal. Perhaps this dreaming was made a necessity by his artificial life, yet before that life began he wrote from Oxford to his Tory but flattered family, that as he stood mounted upon a library ladder in his rooms taking a book from a shelf, Gladstone, about to pass the open door on his way upstairs to some college authority, had stopped, hesitated, come into the room and there spent an hour of talk. ”