BOOKS.

11R. GLADSTONE : A STUDY• Mr. Gladstone : a Study ! Mr. Jennings might just as well call Mr. Foote's attack upon Christianity a " study " of that religion,

or Victor Hugo's Napoleon the Little a study of the late Emperor of the French. There is no trace of a " study " about the book,—

except, indeed, of a study to exclude everything which can do credit to Mr. Gladstone, and insist on everything which may be regarded as damaging to him. It is not a study of the statesman in any sense of the word. It is a careful study of those elements, and those only, in the statesman's career which are susceptible of an evil interpretation. The Member for Stockport does not appear to know what political fair-play means. His book is fall of the moat unmannerly imputations.

Take for example, the following opening of the chapter called " Characteristics :"—

" What are commonly called the ' characteristics' of a public man are always observed with interest by the people, who have a natural wish to see how the chief performers look and act when they are off the stage. English statesmen, down to the time of Mr. Gladstone, have never been nudely solicitous to satisfy this form of curiosity. Most of them were rejoiced to withdraw, as soon as their duties were discharged, into the privacy of home. They were not nem:domed, in those comparatively primitive times, to regard themselves as part of an exhibition which was always open to the sight-seer. Sir Robert Peel held much aloof even from his personal friends ; and although Lord Palmerston was a man of sociable disposition, the inter- viewer' was by no means invited to live in his house. Very few persons were able to boast of thorough intimacy with Lord Beacons- field at any time of his life. Mr. Gladstone will leave a very different example for the benefit of posterity. Publicity is to him as the breath of life. Even his pleasures and recreations appear to become tedious and insipid unless he can indulge in them before a multitude of gazers. When he goes into his library, somebody follows to see what are the books he has condescended to read. There must be a public ceremonial whenever he takes up his devastating axe, that sinister emblem of his character and life. This peculiar disposition is manifested even in affairs of the highest moment. There is a memorable passage which speaks of those who 'love to pray standing in the synagogues, and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men.' Mr. Gladstone is not one of the class to which the • Kr. Gladstone : a Study. By Linn. J. Jennings, M.P. Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons. warning applies ; but be realises with almost painful vividness that he lives in an advertising age. It cannot be without his consent that there appear continually in the papers announcements with which the public have been for years familiar, to the effect that Mr. Glad- stone went to early morning communion,' that ho ' read the lessons' in a clear (or husky) voice, and that he made a point of walking to the church through the snow or rain. Nor can it be with- out his knowledge that gaping crowds are drawn from neighbouring towns to see and hear him perform his self-allotted task."

Where Mr. Jennings says that " Mr. Gladstone is not one of the class to which the warning applies," he would have done better to say at once and openly what he endeavours to force upon the reader's mind by the whole drift of this passage,—that in the writer's opinion Mr. Gladstone is one of the class to which the warning applies. The reference to the Pharisees, and the qualifying words which follow Mr. Jennings's significant "bat," show as plainly ae words can show what the drift is, and that the disclaiming words are to be taken in the same sense in which Parnellite withdrawals of words of disrespect are to be taken, when the Speaker informs the utterere that unless withdrawn they will involve their suspension from the service of the House. The book contains a great number of these insinuations. For instance, Mr. Jennings gives us a very hostile portrait of Lord Palmerston in a Quarterly article which he attributes to Mr. Gladstone, and then goes on :—" Mr. Glad- stone was not yet satisfied with the picture of the Prime Minister who had committed the offence of accepting his resig- nation with too great alacrity," and proceeds to quote further strictures. Again, after quoting from another Quarterly article, attributed to the same authorship, the remark that Lord Palmer- ston reminded the reviewer " of the strange antithesis in some words of Rousseau, who says of a particular personage,`ce n'dtait assur4ment pas on homme sans m6rite, quoique ce fat nu grand vilain,"' Mr. Jennings goes on :—" In 1859, Lord Palmer- ston's sun, which had set for ever" [according to the Quarterly Review]," rose again, and in forming a new Ministry the grand vilain' was adroit enough to offer Mr. Gladstone his old post of Chancellor of the Exchequer. From that time, Lord Palmer- ston had no more extravagant admirer than Mr. Gladstone." Mr. Jennings gives not the slightest evidence of this, except that after Lord Palmerston's death, above six years later, Mr. Gladstone expressed the feeling of the House and the country concerning him, in language coloured by that admiration and regret which were almost universal at the close of Lord Palmer- ston's great political career, and of which the Leader of the House of Commons is regarded as the official exponent. Moreover, in quoting this speech of Mr. Gladstone e, Mr. Jennings carefully omits the words by which Mr. Gladstone indicated that there had been elements in Lord Palmerston's career of which he could not have spoken in praise :—" While, Sir, I think the House will agree with me, that it is desirable to avoid all doubtful ground, I yet presume to say," &c. Indeed, the whole account of Mr. Gladstone's relation to Lord Palmerston is in the highest degree nricandid. Mr. Jennings gives no hint of the vehement conflict with Lord Palmerston on the Divorce Act, in which Mr. Gladstone represented no popular cause, but the cause as he believed of purity and domestic happiness. Yet it was this in great measure which no embittered Mr. Gladstone at that period against Lord Palmerston. And, again, while Mr. Jennings dwells on the sympathy with which Mr. Glad- stone regarded the Conservative views on reform in the year 1858, and the extreme dislike which ho felt for Lord Palmer- ston's hectoring foreign policy, he conceals altogether the true reason which ultimately brought Mr. Gladstone into alliance with Lord Palmerston. He gives us ta believe, in the sentence quoted above, that Mr. Gladstone's acceptance of office under Lord Palmerston in 1859 was due to nothing nobler than a desire for office. The truth, as every one who has given any " study " to Mr. Gleditone's life must know perfectly well, is that in 1859 Lord Palmerston had taken up heartily the policy of aiding Italy to recover her independence ; that this was a design which Mr. Gladstone had passionately at heart; that when the Government of 1859 was formed, the Emperor of the French was just opening hie Italian campaign ; that Mr. Gladstone was eager beyond measure to strengthen the hands of France in her undertaking, and to prevent her from doing what she was but too well inclined to do,—to take back with one hand half at least of what she gave with the other ; and that these were the considerations which drew Mr. Glad- stone and Lord Palmerston into a community of policy into which on other grounds it would not have been possible for them to enter. The Government of Lord Derby, on the other hand, was decidedly Austrian in its bias, and would have thrown difficulties in the way of the liberties of Italy such as Mr. Gladstone would most earnestly have disapproved. This is, as Mr. Jennings's " study " must have told him, the true ex- planation of Mr. Gladstone's enlisting under Lord Palmerston's banner in 1859 ; but of this not a word escapes the author of this very candid study. Indeed, except the remark, "He has sympathised with Italy, but he made no sacrifice for Italy, and was called upon to make none," there is not an allusion to what Mr. Gladstone did for Italy in the whole volume. Yet it was he who first raised the Neapolitan question ; and he did as much to support Cavour, and to foil the Emperor of the French in his attempt to leave Italy half-emancipated, as Lord Russell or Lord Palmerston. Again, Mr. Jennings, who is hardy enough to challenge Mr. Gladstone's admirers to find " a spot upon the whole map' on which ' they can lay their fingers,' and say, There Mr. Gladstone did good, " coolly ignores the surrender of the Ionian Islands to Greece, the gain of Thessaly for Greece, the rescue of Bnlgaria from Turkey, and the actual execution of the Treaty of Berlin as regards Montenegro, all of them special consequences of Mr. Gladstone's policy; and so much so, indeed, that it is quite possible that but for him, none of these consequences might yet have been secured. Indeed, so far as regards the Ionian Islands, Thessaly, and Montenegro, this is hardly disputable, though Mr. Jennings's " study " of Mr. Gladstone's career has not discovered it. Again, what are we to say of the candour of such a passage as the following?— " In 1866 Mr. Gladstone was Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Leader of the House of Commons, in an Administration which resolutely declined to consider the question of Irish Disestabliehrnent. He refused to hold out the least hope or encouragement to those who represented the existence of the Irish Church as an injustice which ought to be redressed. The question, he declared in 1865, was • remote, and apparently out of all bearing upon the practical politics of the day.' As for himself, he 'scarcely expected ever to be called on to share in sash a measure: But circumstanoes marched 011 rapidly. In 1865 he was rejected by Oxford University, and found himself, as he expressed it, nnmuziled '—that is, free to declare his real opinions. Lord Palmerston was still living, and vain would have been the attempt to lead or drive him into the arms of Irish agitators. In 1866 Mr. Gladstone fell back upon the old contrivance, a Reform Bill. Bat he was defeated on Lord Dunkellin's amendment, which proposed to substitute rating for the rental franchise; and in 1867 Lord Derby came into office, and Mr. Disraeli settled the Reform question on a basis which obviously could not be disturbed for some years. The ' die' was now finally cast. All further hope of superseding Mr. Disraeli in the Conservative Party had to be abandoned. Reform was no longer available as a Liberal weapon. There was a large, chaotic vote ready to be won over by any one who was prepared to take a bold line on the question of Disestablishment. The Noncon- formists, the Catholics, the Irish Party, and the Radicals, might all be brought to act together in an assault upon the Irish Church. Mr. Gladstone's lifelong convictions on the subject of Church Establish- ments began to fall to pieces concurrently with the discovery that Reform was, for some time to come, a broken reed, and that Die. establishment was ' in the air,' or to use his own somewhat unguarded words, speaking of the year 1865, `the wind was gradually veering to that quarter.'"

" Mr. Gladstone's lifelong convictions on the subject of Church Establishments began to fall to pieces concurrently with the discovery that Reform was, for some time to come, a broken reed." Note the word "began." Mr. Tan- nings knows, for he has told us, that in 1865 Mr. Gladstone was rejected for the University of Oxford, though he takes good care not to tell us why. He even gives the impression that Mr. Gladstone had in that year specially discouraged the notion of disestablishing the Irish Church, though the fact was that he was rejected for the University of Oxford expressly, and probably solely, because he had declared that he could no longer defend that Establishment, and that if the question ever became a practical one (which he did not then expect it to become in his own lifetime), be mustvote for an Irish Church Disestablishment. Nevertheless, Mr. Jennings ventures to assures that Mr. Glad- tdone's " lifelong convictions on Church Establishments began to fall to pieces " concurrently with a discovery, made two years later, that he could no longer find an agitator's weapon in Reform. This is not the sort of "study " which is calculated to improve the tone of political criticism.

Unfortunately, the same sort of insinuations are repeated again and again. We are told that Mr. Gladstone saw that the Crimean War was getting unpopular, and that "at the right moment he resigned." We believe that no one who remembers the story of that war would agree that it did become unpopular in England, though the administrative conduct

of the war was very unpopular. Mr. Gladstone incurred far more most successful sifting and weighing of all the many cares of

unpopularity by resigning than he would have incurred by

remaining. Even Lord Palmerston's terms of peace in 1856 were by no means popular. They were thought fir too easy.

Once more, we are told, with regard to Mr. Gladstone's un- fortunate Home-rule proposals :-

"Nothing had changed in 1886 except Mr. Gladstone's position. He was out of office instead of being in it ; that was all the difference, and it was much. The men whom he denounced in 1881 were still pursuing the same design, without any attempt at concealment. But they held the balance of power in the House of Commons. Mr. Gladstone therefore proposed to make them masters of Ireland."

We believe that Mr. Gladstone made a most serious mistake in statesmanship in 1886. Bat it is a gratuitous imputation of base motives to say that he did it to gain popularity. He had the greatest of positions if he had adhered resolutely to the policy of settling the agrarian question in Ireland, and discouraging all tampering with the Union. But he had persuaded himself that the Irish Party would ruin Par- liament if no concession were made, and farther, that Mr. Parnell might be suddenly transformed into a patriotic statesman, if he were allowed to gain his heart's desire for Ireland. Both judg- ments seem to us founded on the illusions of a temperament which has always been too sanguine ; but to talk of Mr. Glad- stone's gaining popularity by what he did, is putting it in the very opposite light to that in which he must have regarded it. He risked everything, he lost enormously in England, and gained nothing in Ireland that could in any sense compensate him. But Mr. Jennings, who is determined to make his study a study in the blackest possible pigments, can never find an action of Mr. Gladstone's that is not in the lowest sense selfish.

The " study " of Mr. Gladstone's financial policy is like all the rest of the book, though perhaps a little more absurd. While insisting, for instance, on what Mr. Gladstone sacrificed for the sake of the Commercial Treaty with France, Mr. Jennings quite forgets to say a word of what he gained for England and France by it, or to let his readers know that, in point of fact, the com- merce between England and France in any large sense was created by that Treaty. Of this considerable element in the policy, either Mr. Jennings is ignorant, or he does not think it important enough as bearing on the character of Mr. Glad- stone's policy, to mention the matter at all.

We cannot leave this book without remarking that it seems to us extremely improper to quote a number of anonymous articles the authorship of which Mr. Jennings may or may not have the right to attribute to Mr. Gladstone, without Mr. Gladstone's per- mission, and without giving any evidence as to the sources of his knowledge. We have little doubt that most of the Quarterly Review articles quoted were in some sense Mr. Gladstone's, though it is quite possible that the then editor of that Review- may be more or less responsible for many of the passages. But be that as it may, it is quite contrary to a most just rule of propriety to use a personal knowledge of the authorship of such articles without the permission of both writer and publisher; and Mr. Jennings does not pretend to assert that he has obtained either the one or the other.

A true "study" of Mr. Gladstone would be a very different affair indeed from that of this swollen party pamphlet, which pieces so neatly together only the convenient facts, and fills up the interstices with discrediting insinuations. Such a stay would be much more difficult to achieve, much more complex in its elements, much more fascinating in its paradoxes, than that of the Member for Stockport, and it would be, moreover, what this book certainly is not, a study worthy of a great theme. It would show us a mind of singular charm, singular grasp, and singular sensitiveness to the prevailing• influence of the moment, whenever that influence had in it any rich promise of good, or anything that a sanguine temperament could credit with rich promise of good. It would show a nature open to the influence of the finer and more spiritual elements of civilisation, and extremely unwilling to appeal to the arbitrament of force,—so much so as to ignore

the immediate prospect of having, to face that appeal till it was too late to avert appeal to its harsh decisions. It would show a mind fall of enthusiasm for great causes that were anything but favoured by the world, and when that enthu- siasm was disappointed, more disposed to distrust the method of its own advocacy, and to take the same cause up again from some other side, than to throw the blame of the failure on the ingratitude of men. It would show a nature too much occupied with the leading interest of the time for the

State, too hopeful for shrewdness, too simple for the ready sus- picions by which men of the world are so often guarded from error, too elastic to profit belly by the significance of failure. Bat, above all, it would show a nature intrinsically noble, sincere with all its subtlety, humble with all its eagerness and confidence, always leaning to the cause which seemed most in need of help, though too often disposed, in rendering aid, to trust implicitly to the judgment of advisers on whom it was a serious blunder to rely.