BOOKS.
MR. MORLEY'S LIFE OF GLADSTONE.* [CONCLUDING NOTICE.1
4' MILLAIS has now painted two portraits of Mr. Gladstone," said Jowett when the well-known Christ Church portrait appeared in the Royal Academy. "One's like a rational Christian, the other's like a man possessed." The criticism is exaggerated, as indeed are the portraits, one making him too quiet, the other too fiery—both are given in these volumes, and the reader can, to some extent, judge for himself—but it points to a contrast which is indeed striking between the two presentments by one artist, but which was still more striking as it was found in the original. For found it was. We spoke in our first notice of the duality in Mr. Gladstone's character. Another artist noted it in a different way and at a different hour. As he lay in death, his friend Sir William Richmond, who made, as will be remembered, at the time some very remarkable sketches, pointed out that in one aspect he looked like a warrior, in another like a saint or father of the Church. This contradiction was ever present. Mr. Gladstone the fighter on the floor of the House of Commons, and the recluse in the Temple of Peace; the friend of Newman and Pusey and Dollinger and Acton, and the colleague of Palmerston and Parnell; Mr. Gladstone the "hammer of the Infidel" at Blackheath and in Midlothian, and Mr. Gladstone reading the lessons in Hawarden Church,—they seemed like two different men. And such, indeed, he was,—two, nay, ever so many different men in one.
It was this that made him so surprising, so provokingly surprising. There was always the difficulty, as it was so wittily put by Mr. Labouchere—who, by the way, is never mentioned in all these two thousand pages—of keeping Mr. Gladstone a Gladstonian,—keeping him consistent, that is, to any preconceived opinion of what he ought to be. He was always breaking out in new directions, displaying fresh facets. Much as he did and said, he was unexhausted and inexhaustible. He interested numberless persons, and was interested in an im- mense variety of topics. His very appearance, as Mr. Morley's admirable sketches and touches, no less than the painted portraits and photographs, show, was most varied. It would be hardly fair to call him a moral chameleon, for that implies too much a want of settled character. But he was extra- ordinarily susceptible and sensitive of his environment.
What, hereafter men will ask, was he like ? In his youth he was pale and pensive, studious and abstracted-looking. "Lord Malmesbury was disappointed," we read, "with his personal appearance, which he described as that of a Roman ecclesiastic." "But," he adds, "he is very agreeable " ; and on that point all are agreed. "Both a clever and an amiable man," Macaulay found him as they walked and talked together at Rome on Christmas Eve, after Macaulay had reviewed the book on Church and State. It was only gradually that he developed that appearance which was so well known, and which Mr. Morley has described so deftly. "The falcon's eye, with strange imperious flash, features mobile and expressive, with lively play, and a great actor's command of gesture, bold, sweeping, naturaL" Mr. Morley is struck, as all must have been, with his enormous physical energy. This was compatible, as it not seldom is, with a good deal of depression, and even illness, at many times of his life. He was overdone when he was reading for his Schools at Oxford, and the doctor had to give him draughts to quiet his excitement; and he thought himself, as Mr. Morley says, "strange as it now sounds, rather below than above par for -such exertions." More than once he was seriously ill, and on one or two occasions was unable to be present at important meetings of his Cabinet. This Life disposes of not a few fallacies, notably of the calumny that he went to the play on the night when General Gordon's death became known. Amongst others, it disposes of the fiction that he could always command sleep, and was never kept awake by fatigue or excitement. It was only when he became really old that he
• The Life of WiLI,ain Ewart Gladstone, By J -1m Morley. 3 vols. London : Macmillan and Co. E.e3 2s. net.]
seemed, as is sometimes the case, to outgrow susceptibility, and become impervious to fatigue. But all through his life he had, on the whole, wonderful strength and health, and could say at eighty-five that he had, he believed, taken more physic in that year than in all the previous years of his life. He certainly "lived while he lived," and enjoyed existence as he deserved to do. He was happy in his home, but it was a happiness that he fully earned. Nothing could be more delightful than his relations with his father and mother, and he certainly fulfilled what is called the "First Commandment with promise." One of the most striking and pleasant revelations of this book is the greatness of the debt that he owed to his father, whose striking portrait Mr. Morley very appropriately places at the opening of the first volume. To be the son of a man of business, successful in a large way, shrewd and ambitious, but with ambitions that neither competed nor clashed with those of his son ; to have in this way ample means, yet without the dangers which often accompany ample means,—was an immense advantage to the future statesman. It is significant, and not un- important to his career, that he set up when he began married life in Carlton House Terrace, and lived in that region, "which is to the Metropolis," as Mr. Morley says, "what Delphi was to the habitable earth," for more than thirty years. It was his father who gave him this start; his father who sent him to Eton and Christ Church, advantages which Disraeli, as appears again and again in his novels, always coveted ; his father who made him work at Oxford and encouraged him at the Union, and who when he wrote, just before his degree, the wonderful and deeply characteristic letter proposing to give up a worldly career and take Holy Orders, tendered. what was probably the best, and certainly the kindest, advice that could be given. Their relations, indeed, were ideal; nor is it to be wondered at, when we read what they were to each other, that the son should have called the father "the most interesting old man I have ever known," or that his eyes should have filled with tears as he spoke of him in his family, and exclaimed : "None but his children can know what torrents of tenderness flowed from his heart?' But his devotion to his mother was no less active. When the family were in London, and he, a young man, was in the first intoxicating flush of his wonderful career, he never, we read, "allowed any other engagement to interrupt his sedulous attendance on her every day, reading the Bible to her, and telling the news about levees and drawing-rooms, a great dinner at Sir Robert Peel's, and all the rest of his business and recreation."
The same was the case with all his other domestic relation- ships. His marriage, a real help to him from a worldly point of view, was, as every one knows, from the unworldly, ideal. Nothing could more touchingly and nobly illustrate this than the letters which he interchanged with Disraeli in 1873, when Lady Beaconsfield died. "You and I," he wrote, "were, ail believe, married in the same year. It has been permitted to both of us to enjoy a priceless boon through a third of a century. Spared myself the blow which has fallen on you, I can form some conception of what it must have been and must be." Mr. Disraeli replied :—" I trust, I earnestly trust, you may be spared a similar affliction. Marriage is the greatest earthly happiness when founded on complete sympathy. That. hallowed lot was mine, and for a moiety of my existence, and. I know it is yours."
An ideal husband, he would seem to have been, also, an ideal father. He was tenderly fond, says Mr. Morley, of his little children, "and his love only grew with their growth." Iras memorandum of advice to his son on his going up to Oxford is a model, and may be commended to all fathers, and still more to all sons. His intimate friendships were pethaps not many. It may be that, as Mr. Morley says, he was "at heart a solitary man." Are not most great men, especially great public men, so ? What is certain is that he was too busy and. too much preoccupied to make in mature life many friend- ships for pure friendship's sake. Eton gave him a goodly crop to start life with,—Bishop Selwyn and Sir Franais Doyle, Dean Wellesley, James Milnes Gaskell, Lord Blachford, the Denison)), Lord Elgin, and Lord Lincoln, and, above all, that rare spirit "only shown to earth," Arthur Hallam. Oxford added the Harrovians, Sir Thomas Acland and Cardinal Manning ; and also Sidney Herbert, Bishop Hamilton, Sir R.
Phillimore, and F. D. Maurice. The changes and chances of life brought these at times nearer or drew them further apart, but they remained in some sort his friends till death. His rela- tions with Manning, both his comparative estrangement and his reconciliation, are touching, and many will remember the striking comparison which Manning instituted between his own policy and GladstAme's piety. Hallam introduced him to an exact contemporary whom, with the same prescience that foresaw in Gladstone at Bton the leading orator of the day, he described as "promising fair to be the great poet of their generation,"—Alfred Tennyson. No introduction, no sequel, could have been happier. One of the pleasantest little episodes in these volumes is the description of the visit to Aldworth in 1871, and it is rendered still more pleasant, as well as amusing, if we turn to and compare Tennyson's parallel account. Gladstone found in Tennyson, "singularly united, true greatness, genuine simplicity, and some eccen- tricity." The poet describes the statesman as "a man of versatile mind and great impulsiveness," but also "a very noble fellow, and perfectly unaffected." And each thought the other had found the ideal wife for hi e unusual individuality, as was indeed true. Few pieces of Gladstone's literary criticism are better than his article on Tennyson, except the one which Mr. Morley rightly selects as the best of all, that on Leopardi. And few scenes or speeches are more charming than the scene and speech when orator and poet visited Ultima Thule together, and were both admitted to the freedom of Kirkwall, and the orator returned thanks for both.
The feelings and admiration for him of another eminent poet of the time, Mr. Browning, are described by Mr. Morley in a very striking passage to which many will turn, heightened by the pathos of reluctant severance. Matthew Arnold as a prose-writer he found fault with, not altogether unfairly. "His patronage of a Christianity fashioned by himself," he said, "is to me more offensive and trying than rank unbelief." But he surprised Mr. Morley by knowing well and greatly admiring his poem on his father, the well-known "Rugby Chapel." He was, it need not be said, particularly fond of poetry, and, like many eloquent and lettered men, wrote verse with ease, though Mr. Morley does not quote the couplets, once famous, about the Straits of Malacca. His own prose output was very large. Few things are more impressive than to run through the excellent chronological table appended to these volumes and to note the range and quantity of the memo- randa in italics of his literary productions. Articles on Lach- mann's Iliad, on "Presbytery" and on "Royal Supremacy," on " Leopardi " and " Farini," on "The Declining Efficiency of Parliament"—this in 18.56—on Nelda : a Romance, on Ecce Homo, on Miss Yonge's Life of Bishop Patteson ; and in later days on "Dawn of Creation," "The Proem to Genesis," "The Elizabethan Settlement," Robert Elsmere, "Marie Bashkirtseff,"—these are only some of the items which follow hard upon each other in crowding succession, to say nothing of the solid books on the Church and on Homer, the various translations, and the innumerable pamphlets.
Well might it be said, "I wish I knew as much about any subject as Mr. Gladstone does about every subject." One limitation he had, as Mr. Morley notes. For some reason or other he was not interested in Natural Science, nor much, apparently, excepting when they touched him on other grounds, in scientific men. As to this Mr. Morley is very honest, and has described with faithful vividness the scene of the visit to Darwin at Down, when Mr. Gladstone, evidently quite unconscious that the old naturalist was "from that quiet Kentish village shaking the world," and thinking only of other convulsions, declaimed unceasingly about the Bulgarian atrocities, and Darwin, after listening with good-natured- enjoyment, said simply," What an honour that so great a man should come to visit me." It is only fair, however, to say that Gladstone personally appreciated the great natural philosopher highly, and wanted to make him a Trustee of the British Museum.
But we must conclude this notice, and indeed our whole review of these notable volumes. Both the life itself and its record, regarded as a piece of literature, are alike without parallel, and it is hard to do justice to either within available limits of time and space. Yet, after all, it will be best achieved if we have either provoked or persuaded our readers to attempt the task of judging them for themselves.
Previous page
