ASPECTS OF MR. GLA.DSTONE'S LIFE AND MIND.
[To THE EDITOZ OF THE " SPECTATOR:] the very candid and suggestive article on Mr. Glad- stone in the Spectator of November 12th, you speak of his assigning to Goethe a place among the four great poets of the world. When speaking to me, he did this with some qualifi- cation. In my "Talks with Mr. Gladstone," p. 76, I mention that he said to me : "The three great poets of the world would, I think, generally be admitted to be Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare ; the Germans would add Goethe." In fact, he seemed a little doubtful about Goethe. Bat I agree with you in feeling "a mingled surprise and satisfaction" at his giving to Goethe even the honours of a proxim,e accessit ; I should naturally have suspected that his poetical judgment would have been warped by a sense of moral antipathy. My surprise, however, is lessened by the fact that he had not much moral sympathy with Shakespeare. While he, of coarse, included our great dramatist in the very first class, he yet censured him as "a worshipper of the Tudor despotism "; and on this and on other grounds he regarded him as ranking, as a moralist, absolutely far below Dante, and relatively, and by comparison with the standard of his age, as ranking even below Homer. Theologically as well as poetically, Shakespeare would, in his opinion, have been preferable to Goethe; but I suspect he would have held that, ethically, there was not much to choose between them.
The unlooked-for aspect of Mr. Gladstone's character—the "smiling toleration," as Goethe would have called it—to which I have adverted, may be farther illustrated by what my critic in the Times termed his "quasi-admiration for Napoleon," and by the friendly and sympathetic way in which he spoke to me of Disraeli. This latter sympathy of his was the more remarkable not merely because of the prolonged antagonism between himself and the Conservative chief, but also because of the severity with which he appears to have criticised some of the latter's sayings and doings. An authentic and characteristic example of that severity may be worth recording. Mr. Browning told my informant that he himself had been present at a Royal Academy dinner when Disraeli, as Premier, proposed the toast of the evening: The orator paid some truly Disraelitish compliments to the pictures hich he saw around. A few days later, meeting Browning in e street, he exclaimed, "That was a ghastly show the other „fling." Browning could not help reminding him that he ad expressed a very different opinion in his speech. A.13, Mr. Browning," replied Dizzy with a smile, you poets can never distinguish between poetry and act." Afterwards Browning rather imprudently men- pried the incident to Gladstone, expecting to divert un, but for all reply he heard a voice choked with in- gnation : "Do you call that amusing, Browning ? I call t devilish !" I am not aware that any part of the foregoing necdote has hitherto made its way into print, with the excep- on of Mr. Gladstone's uncompromising and, so to say, anging summing-up, which is reported without the context a Mr. Russell's very amusing volume of "Collections and ecollections."—I am, Sir, &c., LIONEL A. TOLLEMACHE.
Hotel d'Angleterre, Biarritz, November 14th.
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