BOOKS.

MR. MORLEY'S LIFE OF GLADSTONE.* [SECOND NOTICE.]

IN the opening page of his introduction Mr. Morley himself points out two of the difficulties which specially belong to such a task as he is undertaking. The first is the difficulty of writing such a biography at all so soon after the death of the subject, while the "ashes of controversy are still hot," while we "still stand so near to the events." The difficulty of attaining either real impartiality or true proportion is indeed great; but the second difficulty, that of drawing the line between history and biography, is greater still. With the first he has succeeded in grappling very well; with the second he has made a manful, nay, a noble, effort to grapple, but it remains insuperable. It is soon, but not too soon, to write biography. It is too soon to write history. If, as we hold, Mr. Morley's Gladstone is less fair than his Cromwell, of which mention was made last week, it is because

the historic view of Cromwell is attainable, while the historic view of Mr. Gladstone is not yet attainable. What, it is often asked, will be the verdict of history upon Mr. Gladstone ? What did he actually achieve which will live, and in virtue of which he himself will live in history P What are his most memorable political acts, his most salient characteristics ? How far does this new presentment enable us to answer these questions ? The first it can, for the reasons given above, enable us to answer only to a very limited degree. For the verdict of history we must await the due time of history. As to the second, it gives us more help. In an autobiographic note, as we read, undated, but written near the end of his days, Mr. Gladstone writes :— "I am by no means sure, upon a calm review, that Providence has endowed me with anything that can be called a striking gift. But if there be such a thing entrusted to me it has been shown at certain political junctures in what may be termed appreciation of the general situation and its results. To make good the idea this must not be considered as the simple acceptance of public opinion, founded upon the discernment that it has risen to a certain height needful for a given work, like a tide. It is an insight into the facts of particular eras and their relation one to another which generates in the mind a conviction that the materials exist for forming a public opinion and for directing it to a particular end. There are four occasions of my life with respect to which I think these considerations may be applicable. They are these :—(1) The renewal of the Income Tax in 1853 ;

(2) the proposal of religious equality for Ireland, 1868 PP

Here Mr. Morley makes a pause and says :—

" The remaining two will appear in good time. It is easy to label this with the ill-favoured name of opportunist. Yet if an opportunist be defined as a statesman who declines to attempt to do a thing until he believes that it can really be done, what is this but to call him a man of common sense ? "

The remaining two occasions alluded to by Mr. Gladstone, when they do appear, are found to be the introduction of Home-rule and the attempt, defeated by, in Mr. Morley's own words, "the hopelessly adverse reply of his colleagues," to dissolve upon the question of the powers and position of the House of Lords in January, 1894, a few months after that Chamber had so decisively rejected the Home-rule Bill.

To know the season when to take Occasion by the hand and make

The bounds of freedom wider yet,"—

this, as the great poet of his age had sung nearly half-a- century earlier, is indeed one of the greatest qualities of a statesman. To strike when the iron is hot is, in homelier language, the secret of much success. "Concentration," as was said last week, is what Mr. Gladstone claimed as the chief secret of his own achievements. To know when the iron was hot, and to strike hard when he did strike : these, then, were the arts to which he laid claim. Did he possess them P Of his financial ability there will be no doubt. The "triumph of 1853," as Mr. Morley calls it, was the prelude of many memorable Budget triumphs, and if other Chancellors of the Exchequer succeeded nearly as well after him, it was because he had shown them the way.

But the Irish Church Bill, on which so much eulogy is often bestowed, it seems difficult to regard now as an achieve- ment of such immense magnitude as it appeared to men in the heat of the fray. The Irish Church had really no great

• The No of William Swart Gladstone. By John Morley. 3 vols. London : Macmillan and Co. RS 8r. net.]

strength. It was not ancient. It was not popular. It was recruited from outside, and could point to few great sons, few great works of its own. In its own country it was notoriously without friends; and the bulk of the English people knew little and cared less about it. The triumph was, in truth, a victory over a very strong position, but over a very weak enemy. As to Home-rule, Mr. Morley claims that here again Mr. Gladstone was right, and cites as proof the " real progress that he made up to the catastrophe at the end of 1890." But the way in which the verdict of the House of Lords was received in the country, as well as by Mr. Glad- stone's own colleagues, is at least a very strong answer in the negative direction.

That Mr. Gladstone had, indeed, a remarkable power of discerning when the iron could be heated may be allowed, but rather on the strength of other instances than these four.

That he had unrivalled powers of blowing the bellows and heating the metal by his own blows, all will concede. This is really half his greatness. Mr. Morley gives us another list of Mr. Gladstone's own compilation. " Ruminating in the late evening of his life," he says, "over his legislative work, Mr.

Gladstone wrote : Selecting the larger measures, and looking only to achieved results, I should take the following beads,— (1) the Tariffs, 1842-60; (2) Oxford University Act ; (3) Post

Office Savings Banks; (4) Irish Church Disestablishment; (5) Irish Land Acts ; (6) Franchise Acts.' " This excludes, he adds, the last of all his efforts,—the Irish Government Bill. These, then, are the achievements by which Mr. Gladstone wished his fame to stand or fall. Two questions suggest them- selves. Are they great and are they his own P With some of them we have dealt already. The " Tariffs " undoubtedly, taken as a whole, include a great series of great measures, but the earlier steps and the idees mores he would have been the last to withdraw from the credit either of Sir Robert Peel or the Corn.-law pioneers. It is the immense develop- ment which he gave to their beginnings which is his own. When the situation was created he showed abundant genius in meeting its requirements. Of this the second instance, that of the Oxford University Act, is, as we read it in these pages, an even more striking example. Mr. Gladstone was averse to the measure, even more averse than appears on the face of Mr. Morley's narrative. He spoke strongly, almost bitterly, against it. Here he certainly was no opportunist, and he failed to perceive the popular feeling in its favour. But when he was brought to consider it on its own merits, when the case, excellently prepared by the Oxford reformers, was laid before him, his sense of justice and that "instinct for improvement "—which, as Mill remarked, " was incarnate in him "—carried the day, and he became an ideal instrument for conducting it safely through the House.

As to the Post Office Savings Banks Act, here indeed was a measure not heroic but better than heroic, and for its passing Mr. Gladstone deserves, and will long deserve, a silent grati- tude better than any plaudits of multitudes. The Irish Land Acts were larger achievements still and more his own, but, as Mr. Morley seems to admit, they were only partial and pro- visional measures, great in their tendency and significance rather than in themselves. So again with the Franchise Acts, the magnitude of the achievement lay rather in the resource and energy with which they were carried than in any origin- ality of conception. And for their actual " piloting," as in that of the Irish Church Bill, as is now generally known and appears in Mr. Morley's pages, the Queen deserves no small measure of gratitude.

Mr. Morley resents, and naturally, the view that Mr. Glad- stone was, in "the ill-favoured sense," an opportunist. But was he not an opportunist in another ? " For my part," Mr. Gladstone said, "I have not been so happy at any time of my life as to be able sufficiently to adjust the proper conditions of handling any difficult question until the question itself was at the door." This is a very natural attitude in a busy mane especially a politician. But it may be questioned whether Mr. Gladstone ought not to have combated it more. He rather aggravated it by his general habit. He spoke of his own life as " having been passed in unintermittent hurry." It is true that his biographer contends that "this does not mean and has nothing to do with haste in forming pregnant resolves." But others have held, and will after reading this story of his life continue to hold, a different opinion, the opinion that,

especially in later years, he did not give himself sufficient time to think beforehand what was likely to arise or how to meet it. This record shows too much of " drift," too little of prevision and provision. Notably would this seem to have been so in the case of many of those affairs which damaged Mr. Gladstone more than any others, alike with his own friends and with his foes,—the Education Bill and the Bradlaugh brawl, the affair of Gordon and the Soudan, and the affair of the Transvaal. With regard to his Irish policy, the chief fault to be found is that he only once in the whole of his long life and career, whether in office or out of office, visited the country for which he undertook such stupendous responsibilities, and that then, as Mr. Morley says with evident regret, he did not go beyond a "very decidedly English Pale, and of the multitude of strange things distinctively Irish he had little chance of seeing much."

No; Mr. Morley is right. Mr. Gladstone's greatness con- sists not so much in "what he did" as in "what he was." He was immersed in " working the institutions of his country," and in modifying them so that he could work them better.

His legislation was like his oratory,—its merit did not consist in purple patches, but in sustained effort and work-day achievement. His speeches are mostly not literature. They will not live, like those of Burke or Bright, in collections of "elegant extracts." But they gained their end. Great among orators, among debaters he was consummate. So he has left behind him certain definite large measures, but what is larger, a huge volume of detailed service, in the course of which he gave a new set to men's thoughts and aspirations. He was a great "liberator." He was born into a narrow time when pent-up forces were struggling for expansion and threatening to explode. He was brought up to the belief

that they must be restrained; he learned that they must be freed. " I can truly put," he said to Mr. Morley, " all the change that has come into my politics into a sentence. I was brought up to distrust and to dislike liberty, I learned to believe in it. That is the key to all my changes." And so, indeed, it was. It is at once his great glory and his limitation. It made him individualist rather than collectivist, greater in destruction than in construction. One of the oddest and greatest, as he himself with much magnanimity calls it, "the most singular and palpable ,errors he ever made, and the least excusable," was due to this cause, his declaration that " Jefferson Davis had made a nation," and his suggestion that it should be recognised. It is argued that he did not sympathise with the South; but he himself wrote that he did, not indeed more, but also not less, than with the North. He thought they both had equal rights to be free and to be nations. And beyond the nation he did not go. It is not fair, as Mr. Morley points out, to say that he aimed at getting rid of the Colonies. As early as 1852 he made a speech on the New Zealand Bill which was certainly far in advance of the ideas of that day. But of the Colonial Empire as a greater whole more favourable to freedom than the nation it cannot be said that these volumes show him to have thought. If he, however, had not in the largest sense a creative policy, he imported into politics noble ideas with which all policy, to be enduring, must square. He had, as he claimed for himself, "uprightness of intention." He was, as Lord Salisbury said of him, " a great Christian statesman." He carried conscience into the political arena. His scruples began with his first days in the House, notably in the first Opium War. It is true that his conscience led him into sad dilemmas ; and not all Mr. Morley's tact can reconcile us to his strangely worldly, we had almost said cynical, attitude toward public crime in Ireland, or private delinquency in Mr. Parnell. But Mr. Morley may rightly claim for him that his career was, beyond even the measure of very great careers, not only large but lofty; and that even in the turbid medium of politics, where, as he said so pathetically himself, " ideals are never realised," his own achievement to no small extent belied this melancholy aphorism ; while for the rest his unrealised ideals had for mankind that potency which ideals and noble ideals, realised or not, possess, and possess as nothing else does.

It will remain next week to attempt the easier and more grateful task of showing what in his more private life was the man whose public appearance and action were so momentous and memorable.