ads "t o11e 5 S I solation
HAMMOND.
BY J. L. " j FORSOOK all things for faith ; he has forsaken I his whole political past for Ireland. He is as isolated now as I was then. And this makes me turn to him. We are at last and at least agreed in this." So Manning wrote of Gladstone in 1887. Gladstone was then nearly 80 and old statesmen are often solitary, for the Roman curse Ultimus suorum moriatur has its bitterness in politics as in life. But the solitary statesman is generally isolated because he can no longer keep pace with the enthusiasms of others. He is :
" Like a lone Arab, old and blind Some caravan has left behind."
Gladstone was isolated in a different sense. He was not behind his age but ahead of it. His eighty years had not destroyed his illusions ; on the contrary they had encour- aged him to expect much more than he had expected in youth from man's sense of justice. Men often pass from generosity to prudence ; he had passed from prudence to generosity. If you looked for him in the desert you would find that he had left the caravan, hastening beyond it, shouting some splendid rhetoric to the dawn, while the people in the caravan were shaking their heads, and calling him, as the Queen and the Kaiser called him, a madman, though, fortunately for the world, pretty near his end.
It is interesting to turn from Manning's description which Mr. Francis Birrell puts at the head of his brilliant and illuminating study,* to a conversation quoted by Mr. Birrell, held when the Liberal party was breaking up over Home Rule. Somebody observed with glee that the old man was down at last. " On the con- trary," said Chamberlain, " you will never know how strong he is till he has parted from all his colleagues." To appreciate this discerning reply we must remember that Chamberlain who had seen Gladstone acting alone, in his onslaught on Disraeli's Eastern policy, had seen him at close quarters when acting with others in the series of blunders that had led to the tragedies of Majuba and Khartoum. The contrast between Gladstone alone and Gladstone in the Cabinet which struck Chamberlain stands out more and more as we look back over his life. For the distinguishing quality which gives him his special place in history was not his amazing power in debate, but his power of seeing and setting a political issue in a large Dantesque perspective of his own. If you study his speeches on any topic in foreign politics, you find that it was always his instinct to speak not as an English statesman responsible for British interests and British interests alone, but as a statesman in a world of States, with a common basis of history, law, and civilized obligation. To understand his career and the climax described by Manning we must see what became of this gift.
*Gladatane. By Francis Birrell. Great Lives. (Duckworth. 2s.y When Gladstone lost his seat for Oxford in 1865 he said he was unmuzzled. No doubt this was an important aspect of his change from the position of member for Oxford University to member- for South Lancashire. But it was not the most important aspect. Until this time, as Mr. Birrell points out, Gladstone had not often spoken at great meetings. When he took to the platform he made a discovery 'that affected his whole career. He was like an artist who. suddenly finds a medium that suits him perfectly. When he denounced the Naples prisons as a free-lance Conservative in 1850, he appealed to Conservative sentiment at home and abroad. Con- servatives stand for the existing order and if discredit falls on one GoVernment it falls on all. Conservatives at home made little response ; Conservatives abroad still less. Guizot said that the choice was between tyrants, and cut-throats ; he disliked tyrants but he disliked cut-throats more. Now this generalizing method of treating politics, which fell flat when tried on Con- servatives, swept England When tried on great popular audiences. That was what Gladstone found out in his campaign against Disraeli's Eastern policy, When. to his astonishment workmen and tradesmen listened in raptures to the most complicated historical passages and the most abstract arguments about the place of law and mutual obligation in- the lives of States.. Gladstone's critics would say that this discovery intoxicated him ; that it led to such indiscretions as his fatal purple passage about Austria, that it made him introduce into politics the spirit of commination, for which he paid the penalty in office, when Conservatives, smarting under his rhetoric, threw aside every restraint in their onslaught on his Govern. ment. This was the view of the Queen. But one thing is certain. It was from the time . of this discovery that Gladstone began to draw that distinction, between the classes and the masses which frightened the Queen and the Whigs. Experience, education, tradition, wealth, all the advantages of the possessing classes had left those classes, in the main, obstinately blind to the light by which he tried to lead them ; whereas miners, labourers, and other simple people had seen the. importance of law in the life of nations. That was how democracy loOked to him in the 'eighties. His critics say that when he found what a power he had on the platform he became a demagogue. A more charitable view would hold that when he found what truths people would take from him he became a democrat.
The reader who follows Mr. Birrell's vivid story to the end will be able to decide in what sense Cardinal Man- ning's words were true. If the interpretation offered in this article is correct, Gladstone did not forsake his whole political past., He brought to Ireland in 1886 the same outlook that he brought to Naples in. MO,: the same conception of politics as the application of certain large. views of civilization to special problems. Where he had changed was in his view of the popular judgement. " Born under the great shadow of Canning," he had held for the first half of his life the eighteenth-century view that the common man could not be expected to grasp large ideas. , In 1886 he had gone to the other extreme. Encouraged by the wild cheers of Bingley Hall, he believed that there was scarcely any limit to the popular capacity for noble feeling. In what sense was he isolated ? If you asked where stood Argyll, Hartington or Bright, vou would see that Gladstone was cut off from his oldest associates : cut off bitterly, for Argyll used language about him whose harshness he never forgot, and Bright kept to the last his tone of unrelenting rectitude. But there was a sense in which the word was wrong. If Gladstone had died in 1885 all history for good or evil would have been changed. Of no other man of his age could that have been said. When Manning wrote of his isolation, the mind of England, its conscience, its imagina- tion, its passions, its hopes and its fears, were all con centrated on a single problem drawn, driven and held there by the supreme power of this solitary man.
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