MR. GLADSTONE'S BIOGRAPHER.
NO one will be surprised that Mr. Gladstone's children should have asked Mr. Morley to write their father's Life. In his later years no one probably saw more of him, or knew him more intimately, and undoubtedly no one has the ordinary qualifications for the task in greater perfection. In the first place, Mr. Morley may be trusted to do what biographers not seldom fail in. He will make the book attractive. He did this even with Cobden, where the subject was very much less manageable, and if be succeeded in that case he is not likely to fail in the case of Mr. Gladstone. It may be thought, indeed, that with such a wonderful career to narrate any writer would make a book readable. But experience points the other way. The difference between one biography and another lies far more in the teller of the story than in the story itself. Letters and journals may have attractions, but even letters and journals have to be pieced together by narrative, and if when he comes to that narrative the reader begins to skip, he soon finds that this is a process which when once begun is not always confined to the con- necting links. Even men who have the faculty of writing have not always the power to keep it within bounds. There are writers, moreover, who make any Life to which they put their hand something of an autobiography. From both these weaknesses Mr. Morley is conspicuously free. We may be sure that he will say the right thing, and that he will say no more of the right thing than is necessary to his purpose.
An equally indispensable qualification is the gift of selecting the right materials. It is quite possible that a Life of Mr. Gladstone might be interesting in which there was, properly speaking, no selection at all, or, rather, none which was not prompted by the inevitable consideration of space. There is hardly any part of Mr. Gladstone's varied career which would not furnish material for a book which would find abundance of readers. But he who would worthily write the Life of a great man has to do more than make his book readable. He has to make it representa- tive. He has to decide what to put in and what to leave out, and his object in making the selection should be to bring together all that is most characteristic of his hero. 'There are. Lives in single small volumes that leave you with a distinct and lasting impression of the men about whom they are written. There are Lives in many volumes which leave you with a sense that after all your trouble you are no nearer a clear conception of the man about whom you have been reading than you were when you began. Mr. Morley will not deceive us in this way. He will select from the vast mass of available material precisely that which most marks off his hero from other men. The need for such an exercise of choice will be immense. The length of Mr. Gladstone's life, the great part he played in public affairs, the multiplicity of his intellectual interests,—all suggest a corresponding length and fullness of treatment. It is the fault of modern historians that they write as much about years as their predecessors wrote about centuries, and the biographer of Mr. Gladstone might well be tempted to yield to a similar weakness. The whole history of two generations lies spread out before him, and every incident in it of any importance is associated with the man whose Life he has to write. To resist this temptation he must have a quality of reserve and reticence which is not invariably found in men of letters. Now the task has been entrusted 'to Mr. Morley we may at all events be reassured on this point. He will not give us successive bundles of Mr. Gladstone's letters, with one bundle united to another by a superfluous summary of the contents.
Yet when these considerations have been fully allowed for, there remains a sense of incongruity of which it is hard to get wholly rid. No doubt Mr. Morley belonged to the same political party as Mr. Gladstone, and has sat in the same Cabinet with him. No doubt Mr. Gladstone was more in sympathy with Mr. Morley than with any other of his colleagues,—certainly upon the question of Home-rule, and probably upon many others. When so many Liberals are wavering and speculating how much of the Home-rule scheme it is possible to drop without losing the Nationalist vote, Mr. Morley has remained steadfast. What he was willing to give Ireland in 1886 or in 1892 he is willing to give her now. But though he is marked out in these respects for the work that has been entrusted to him, there are other aspects of Mr. Glad- stone's political course which will be less congenial to him, Mr. Morley, more than most men, has retained the convic- tions of his youth down to an age at which most of our leading politicians have been content to shed them. He has not begun life as a Tory, continued it as a Peelite, and ended it as a Liberal. This is what Mr. Gladstone did, and Mr. Morley will at all events be unable to describe his changes with that full measure of sympathy which only a consciousness of having shared them could ensure. He will welcome, no doubt, the steady progress from darkness to light, but we do not feel so sure as to his appreciations of those points in which Mr. Gladstone's earlier and later views were sometimes so strangely alike.
And if we feel a certain incongruity where politics are concerned, it is still more present where religion is con- cerned. Mr. Gladstone's creed was never a thing apart from his life ; it was always the most important factor in it. And it was a factor which never varied. What he was at his entry upon public life, that he was not only when he left it, but during the whole intermediate period. If any one doubts this they had better look at a little pamphlet entitled "Mr. Gladstone's Testimony to the Catholic Faith." It is a series of extracts from his writings and speeches, arranged under heads, and dated. Upon subject after subject Mr. Gladstone's words read as though they had all been written at the same time. Yet the dates show that they range over a period be- ginning in 1838 and ending in 1897. It will be difficult for Mr. Morley to deal with this side of his subject, and yet a Life of Mr. Gladstone in which it was not made prominent might be a history of his policy or of his studies, but it would not be a history of the man. On the other hand, there will be an interest of a very special kind in seeing how Mr. Morley will acquit himself in this part of his task. It will be the interest which always belongs to entire detachment. A High Church- man might be inclined to exaggerate some of Mr. Glad- stone's religious views, a Nonconformist would certainly be tempted to leave a great many of them undescribed, but Mr. Morley will survey the whole question with the im- partiality and the acuteness of a bystander who, while he is alive to all he sees, is not in the least carried away by it. Mr. Gladstone's Life would, under any circumstances, be awaited with eager expectation; but the fact that Mr. Morley is his biographer will make that expectation ten- fold keener.
Previous page
