William Edward Gladstone

“ 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 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. ”

“ When Will Gladstone struck twenty-nine, there were few young men in England who occupied Page 166 a more enviable position. He had a beautiful home; sufficient, but not overwhelming, wealth; a property which gave full scope for all the gifts of management and administration which he might possess; the devoted love of his family, and the goodwill even of those who did not politically agree with him. His health, delicate in childhood, had improved with years. "While he never neglected his public duties, his natural, keen, healthy love of nature, sport, fun, humour, company, broke out abundantly. ”

“ I'm a doocid fine Cha-appie!" &c., &c.
"OVER THE HILLS AND FAR AWAY!"
[Mr. Gladstone has gone on a visit to Mr. George Armitstead, at Black Craig Castle, Perthshire. Mr. Henry Gladstone stated that the Prime Minister would receive no deputations, and that the holiday would be purely recuperative.]
Pensive Premier museth:—
Purely recuperative! Ah! precisely.
Leave me alone, and I shall manage nicely.
How the bees boom amidst the purple heather!
Better than Bowles and Bartley! (Yawn.) Wonder whether
They're "booming" still about Sir William's head ”

“ You may fight him as hard as you like, and when the fight is over you will find that it has left no rancour behind it."
This affection for Mr. Gladstone was a personal matter, quite independent of politics; but in political matters also they had much in common. "You know," wrote the Cardinal to Mrs. Gladstone on her Golden Wedding, "how nearly I have agreed in William's political career, especially in his Irish policy of the last twenty years." ”

“ The contests of to-day seemed to interest him because their effect would be felt in a still distant future. There are rhetoricians skilful in playing by words and manner on every chord of human nature, rhetoricians who move you indeed, and may even carry you away for the moment, but whose sincerity you nevertheless doubt, because the sense of spontaneity is lacking. Mr. Gladstone was not of these. He never seemed to be forcing an effect or assuming a sentiment. To listen to him was to feel convinced of his own conviction and of the reality of the warmth with which he expressed it. ”

“ Gladstone is able to unexpectedly justify himself when his friends are crying out in remonstrance; and it is, too, one of the peculiarities of this extraordinary portent of a man—extraordinary physically as much as mentally—that the more he works, the fresher and happier he seems to be. If you see him peculiarly light-hearted; if he be gesticulating with broad and generous sweep on the Treasury Bench; if he be whispering to Sir William Harcourt, and then talking almost aloud to Mr. ”

“ The unique feature of his career in a personal sense was his amazing popularity, the real affection with which every class in the great community of the British Isles regarded him. In the days of his unofficial labours as Prince of Wales, Lord Beaconsfield greatly esteemed him and Mr. Gladstone was "devotedly [Pg 421] attached" to him. At the latter's funeral the Prince went up to Mrs. Gladstone and in a spirit of spontaneous courtesy bent over her hand and kissed it with an air of sympathy so great as to be beyond the expression of words. ”

“ From a very tender age young Gladstone exhibited a wonderful aptitude for learning, and an almost superhuman industry, which age, instead of abating, seemingly increases. His daily autograph correspondence with high and low, rich and poor, conducted chiefly by the much-derided post-card, would afford ample employment for about six Somerset House clerks working at their usual pace. He possesses, I should say, without exception, the most omnivorous and untiring brain in England,—possibly in the whole world. No wonder that his course at Eton and at Oxford was marked by the highest distinction. ”

“ If flurry and apprehension penetrate Downing Street, nothing can sustain Mr. Gladstone better than your own serenity. Be true to him and to his cause even if these odious crimes continue, even when you feel that the harvest will not be reaped in his time. The mills of God grind slowly.
It is very easy to speak words of wisdom from a comfortable distance, when one sees no reality, no details, none of the effect on men's minds. What is glorious is the way in which Mr. Gladstone rides on the whirlwind. ”

“ Bunsen was exuberant; there was nobody, he said, with whom he so loved συμφιλοσοφεῖν καὶ συμφιλολογεῖν; people have too much to do about themselves to have time to seek truth on its own account; the greater, therefore, the merit of the writer who forces his age to decide, whether they will serve God or Baal. Gladstone is the first man in England as to intellectual power, he cried, and he has heard higher tones than any one else in this land. ”

“ We cannot tell how much of those seventy years of strenuous labour will live, or how far Gladstone will prove to have read aright the signs of the times, the tendencies of human thought, and the political forces of the world. But we, who were his followers and disciples, know perfectly well what we owe to him. If ever we should be tempted to despond about the possibilities of human nature and human life, we shall think of him and take courage. ”

“ Villiers as an eminent talker. I now turn to an eminent man who talks—Mr. Gladstone. [17] An absurd story has long been current among credulous people with rampant prejudices that Mr. Gladstone was habitually uncivil to the Queen. Now, it happens that Mr. Gladstone is the most courteous of mankind. His courtesy is one of his most engaging gifts, and accounts in no small degree for his power of attracting the regard of young men and undistinguished people generally. ”

“ It will do much to break them down. It will also strengthen the hands of a better and less obdurate class about the court. Even there all are not alike. I know it from observation. These ministers are the extremest of extremes. There are others who would willingly see more moderate means adopted.' On such grounds as these (I do not quote words) he strongly recommended me to act.
II
RETURN TO LONDON
Mr. Gladstone reached London on February 26. Phillimore met him at the station with Lord Stanley's letter, of which we shall hear in the next chapter, pressing him to enter the government. ”

“ I have concluded, dating from June, to undertake no portraits and accept no commissions, but, contented with the little I have to live upon, work only with the idea of making my efforts worthy, at least as efforts, of the nation's acceptance alike before and after my death. “You have adopted a resolution,” said Mr. Gladstone in his reply, “of the kind that makes the nineteenth century stare or blink, as those blink who stand in a great brightness and have not eyes for it. The course that you purpose is indeed a self-denying, an unworldly, and a noble one.” ”

“ Chapter I. Leadership And The General Election. (1885)
Our understanding of history is spoiled by our knowledge of the event.—Helps.
I Mr. Gladstone came back from his cruise in the Sunbeam at the beginning of September; leaving the yacht at Fort George and proceeding to Fasque to celebrate his elder brother's golden wedding. From Fasque he wrote to Lord Hartington (Sept. 3) : “I have returned to terra firma extremely well in general health, and with a better throat ”

“ We all know examples of men holding opinions with trenchancy, decision, and even a kind of fervour, and yet with no strong desire to spread them. Mr. Gladstone was at all times of very different temper; consumed with missionary energy and the fire of ardent propagandism.
LETTER FROM COBDEN
He laboured hard at the fourth edition of his book, sometimes getting eleven hours of work, 'a good day as times go,'—Montesquieu, Burke, Bacon, Clarendon, and others of the masters of civil and historic wisdom being laid under ample contribution. By Christmas he was at Hawarden. ”

“ Most people remember Gladstone as an old man. He reached the summit of his career when he had just struck seventy. After Easter, 1880, when he dethroned Lord Beaconsfield and formed his second Administration, the eighteen years of life that remained to him added nothing to his fame, and even in some respects detracted from it. Gradually he passed into the stage which was indicated by Labouchere's nickname of "The Grand Old Man" ”

“ Then to pretend that for sixty years, with [Pg 6] all 'the varying weather of the mind,' he traversed in every zone the restless ocean of a great nation's shifting and complex politics, without many a faulty tack and many a wrong reckoning, would indeed be idle. No such claim is set up by rational men for Pym, Cromwell, Walpole, Washington, or either Pitt. It is not set up for any of the three contemporaries of Mr. Gladstone whose names live with the three most momentous transactions of his age—Cavour, Lincoln, Bismarck. ”

“ He must—unless, of course, he stands aloof in permanent opposition—either submit to advocate measures he secretly mislikes, or else must keep himself always ready to learn from events, and to reconsider his opinions in the light of emergent tendencies and insistent facts. Mr. Gladstone’s pride as well as his conscience forbade the former alternative; it was fortunate that the inexhaustible activity of his intellect made the latter natural to him. ”

“ But he loved historical processes quite as much as historical results, and the hours which he spent in the House of Commons while the future leader of the Liberal party proved himself to be the economic successor of Walpole, Pitt, and Peel, fixed his political allegiance for the remainder of his life.
All the time that Mr. Gladstone was dazzling the country by the brilliance of his finance, and convincing practical men by the hard test of figures at the year's end, he had to fight his colleagues in the Cabinet as well as his opponents at St. ”

“ As at the first stage the Queen had moved for conciliatory courses, so now she again desired Archbishop Tait to communicate with the prime minister. To Mr. Gladstone himself she wrote from Balmoral (June 3) : “The Queen thanks Mr. Gladstone for his kind letter. She has invariably found him most ready to enter into her views and to understand her feelings.” The first question was whether the Lords should reject the bill on the second reading:—
It is eminently desirable, Mr. Gladstone wrote to the archbishop (June 4) , that the bill should be read a second time. ”

“ He was an idealist, yet always applying ideals to their purposes in act. Toil was his native element; and though he found himself possessed of many inborn gifts, he was never visited by the dream so fatal to many a well-laden argosy, that genius alone does all. There was nobody like him when it came to difficult business, for bending his whole strength to it, like a mighty archer stringing a stiff bow.
FORCE OF WILL AND POWER OR TOIL
Sir James Graham said of him in these years that Gladstone could do in four hours what it took any other man sixteen to do, and he worked sixteen hours a day. ”

“ On Saturday, May 28, the body was committed to the grave in Westminster Abbey. No sign of high honour was absent. The heir to the throne and his son were among those who bore the pall. So were the prime minister and the two leaders of the parties in both Houses. The other pall-bearers were Lord Rosebery who had succeeded him as prime minister, the Duke of Rutland who had half a century before been Mr. Gladstone's colleague at Newark, and Mr. Armitstead and Lord Rendel, who were his private friends. ”

“ The general election of 1880 reversed the verdict of 1874 with a decisiveness that fairly astonished all parties. In opposition, though no longer ostensible leader of the Liberal host, Mr. Gladstone had evinced a moral grandeur and an intellectual vigor never equalled by any British statesman; and on all hands he was felt to be the man of a very difficult situation, of which the end is not j-et. In proportion as he succeeds or fails will be the nation's gain or loss. ”

“ The nobler a soul is, the more objects of compassion it hath.
—Bacon.
I At the end of 1888 Mr. Gladstone with his wife and others of his house was carried off by Mr. Rendel's friendly care to Naples. Hereto, he told Lord Acton, “we have been induced by three circumstances. First, a warm invitation from the Dufferins to Rome; as to which, however, there are cons as well as pros, for a man who like me is neither Italian nor Curial in the view of present policies. ”

“ Itaque veræ amicitiæ difficillime reperiuntur in iis qui in honoribus reque publica versantur.—Cicero.
True friendships are hard to find among men who busy themselves about politics and office.
I Within a few months of one another, three of Mr. Gladstone's closest friends and allies were lost to him. Lord Aberdeen died at the end of 1860. The letter written by Mr. Gladstone to the son of his veteran chief is long, but it deserves reproduction.64 As a writer, though an alert and most strenuous disputant, he was apt to be diffuse and abstract. ”