Читать книгу The Life of William Ewart Gladstone - John Morley - Страница 49

We are not to think of him as prophet, seer, poet, founder of a system, or great born man of letters like Gibbon, Macaulay, Carlyle. Of these characters he was none, though he had warmth and height of genius to comprehend the value of them all, and—what was more curious—his oratory and his acts touched them and their work in such a way that men were always tempted to apply to him standards that belonged to them. His calling was a different one, and he was wont to appraise it lower. His field lay 'in working the institutions of his country.' Whether he would have played a part as splendid in the position of a high ruling ecclesiastic, if the times had allowed such a personage, we cannot tell; perhaps he had not 'imperious immobility' enough. Nor whether he would have made a judge of the loftier order; perhaps his mind was too addicted to subtle distinctions, and not likely to give a solid adherence to broad principles of law. A superb advocate? An evangelist, as irresistible as Wesley or as Whitefield? What matters it? All agree that more magnificent power of mind was never placed at the service of the British Senate.

His letters to his father from 1832 onwards show all the interest of a keen young member in his calling, though they contain few anecdotes, or tales, or vivid social traits. 'Of political gossip,' he admits to his father (1843), 'you always find me barren enough.' What comes out in all his letters to his kinsfolk is his unbounded willingness to take trouble in order to spare others. Even in prolonged and intricate money transactions, of which we shall see something latertransactions of all others the most apt to produce irritation—not an accent of impatience or dispute escapes him, though the guarded firmness of his language marks the steadfast self-control. We may say of Mr. Gladstone that nobody ever had less to repent of from that worst waste in human life that comes of unkindness. Kingsley noticed, with some wonder, how he never allowed the magnitude and multiplicity of his labours to excuse him from any of the minor charities and courtesies of life.

Active hatred of cruelty, injustice, and oppression is perhaps the main difference between a good man and a bad one; and here Mr. Gladstone was sublime. Yet though anger burned fiercely in him over wrong, nobody was more chary of passing moral censures. What he said of himself in 1842, when he was three and thirty, held good to the end:—

Nothing grows upon me so much with lengthening life as the sense of the difficulties, or rather the impossibilities, with which we are beset whenever we attempt to take to ourselves the functions of the Eternal Judge (except in reference to ourselves where judgment is committed to us), and to form any accurate idea of relative merit and demerit, good and evil, in actions. The shades of the rainbow are not so nice, and the sands of the sea-shore are not such a multitude, as are all the subtle, shifting, blending forms of thought and of circumstances that go to determine the character of us and of our acts. But there is One that seeth plainly and judgeth righteously.

HIS SILENCES

This was only one side of Mr. Gladstone's many silences. To talk of the silences of the most copious and incessant speaker and writer of his time may seem a paradox. Yet in this fluent orator, this untiring penman, this eager and most sociable talker at the dinner-table or on friendly walks, was a singular faculty of self-containment and reserve. Quick to notice, as he was, and acutely observant of much that might have been expected to escape him, he still kept as much locked up within as he so liberally gave out. Bulwer Lytton was at one time, as is well known, addicted to the study of mediæval magic, occult power, and the conjunctions of the heavenly bodies; and among other figures he one day amused himself by casting the horoscope of Mr. Gladstone (1860). To him the astrologer's son sent it. Like most of such things, the horoscope has one or two ingenious hits and a dozen nonsensical misses. But one curious sentence declares Mr. Gladstone to be 'at heart a solitary man.' Here I have often thought that the stars knew what they were about.

Whether Mr. Gladstone ever became what is called a good judge of men it would be hard to say. Such characters are not common even among parliamentary leaders. They do not always care to take the trouble. The name is too commonly reserved for those who think dubiously or downright ill of their fellow-creatures. Those who are accustomed to make most of knowing men, do their best to convince us that men are hardly worth knowing. This was not Mr. Gladstone's way. Like Lord Aberdeen, he had a marked habit of believing people; it was part of his simplicity. His life was a curious union of ceaseless contention and inviolable charity—a true charity, having nothing in common with a lazy spirit of unconcern. He knew men well enough, at least, to have found out that none gains such ascendency over them as he who appeals to what is the nobler part in human nature. Nestors of the whigs used to wonder how so much imagination, invention, courage, knowledge, diligence—all the qualities that seem to make an orator and a statesman—could be neutralised by the want of a sound overruling judgment. They said that Gladstone's faculties were like an army without a general, or a jury without guidance from the bench.120 Yet when the time came, this army without a general won the crowning victories of the epoch, and for twenty years the chief findings of this jury without a judge proved to be the verdicts of the nation.

It is not easy for those less extraordinarily constituted, to realise the vigour of soul that maintained an inner life in all its absorbing exaltation day after day, year after year, decade after decade, amid the ever-swelling rush of urgent secular affairs. Immersed in active responsibility for momentous secular things, he never lost the breath of what was to him a diviner aether. Habitually he strove for the lofty uplands where political and moral ideas meet. Even in those days he struck all who came into contact with him by a goodness and elevation that matched the activity and power of his mind. His political career might seem doubtful, but there was no doubt about the man. One of the most interesting of his notes about his own growth is this:—

There was a singular slowness in the development of my mind, so far as regarded its opening into the ordinary aptitudes of the man of the world. For years and years well into advanced middle life, I seem to have considered actions simply as they were in themselves, and did not take into account the way in which they would be taken and understood by others. I did not perceive that their natural or probable effect upon minds other than my own formed part of the considerations determining the propriety of each act in itself, and not unfrequently, at any rate in public life, supplied the decisive criterion to determine what ought and what ought not to be done. In truth the dominant tendencies of my mind were those of a recluse, and I might, in most respects with ease, have accommodated myself to the education of the cloister. All the mental apparatus requisite to constitute the 'public man' had to be purchased by a slow experience and inserted piecemeal into the composition of my character.

Lord Malmesbury describes himself in 1844 as curious to see Mr. Gladstone, 'for he is a man much spoken of as one who will come to the front.' He was greatly disappointed at his personal appearance, 'which is that of a Roman catholic ecclesiastic, but he is very agreeable.'121 Few men can have been more perplexed, and few perhaps more perplexing, as the social drama of the capital was in time unfolded to his gaze. There he beheld the glitter of rank and station, and palaces, and men and women bearing famous names; worlds within worlds, high diplomatic figures, the partisan leaders, the constant stream of agitated rumours about weighty affairs in England and Europe; the keen play of ambition, passions, interests, under easy manners and fugitive pleasantry; gross and sordid aims, as King Hudson was soon to find out, masked by exterior refinement; so much kindness with a free spice of criticism and touches of ill-nature; so much of the governing force of England still gathered into a few great houses, exclusive and full of pride, and yet, after the astounding discovery that in spite of the deluge of the Reform bill they were still alive as the directing class, always so open to political genius if likely to climb, and help them to climb, into political power. These were the last high days of the undisputed sway of territorial aristocracy in England. The artificial scene was gay and captivating; but much in it was well fitted to make serious people wonder. Queen Victoria was assuredly not of the harsh fibre of the misanthropist in Molière's fine comedy; yet she once said a strange and deep thing to an archbishop. 'As I get older,' she said, 'I cannot understand the world. I cannot comprehend its littlenesses. When I look at the frivolities and littlenesses, it seems to me as if they were all a little mad.'122

THE SOCIAL DRAMA

This was the stage on which Mr. Gladstone, with 'the dominant tendencies of a recluse' and a mind that might easily have been 'accommodated to the cloister,' came to play his part,—in which he was 'by a slow experience' to insert piecemeal the mental apparatus proper to the character of the public man. Yet it was not among the booths and merchandise and hubbub of Vanity Fair, it was among strata in the community but little recognised as yet, that he was to find the field and the sources of his highest power. His view of the secular world was never fastidious or unmanly. Looking back upon his long experience of it he wrote (1894):—

That political life considered as a profession has great dangers for the inner and true life of the human being, is too obvious. It has, however, some redeeming qualities. In the first place, I have never known, and can hardly conceive, a finer school of temper than the House of Commons. A lapse in this respect is on the instant an offence, a jar, a wound, to every member of the assembly; and it brings its own punishment on the instant, like the sins of the Jews under the old dispensation. Again, I think the imperious nature of the subjects, their weight and force, demanding the entire strength of a man and all his faculties, leave him no residue, at least for the time, to apply to self-regard; no more than there is for a swimmer swimming for his life. He must, too, in retrospect feel himself to be so very small in comparison with the themes and the interests of which he has to treat. It is a further advantage if his occupation be not mere debate, but debate ending in work. For in this way, whether the work be legislative or administrative, it is continually tested by results, and he is enabled to strip away his extravagant anticipations, his fallacious conceptions, to perceive his mistakes, and to reduce his estimates to the reality. No politician has any excuse for being vain.

Like the stoic emperor, Mr. Gladstone had in his heart the feeling that the man is a runaway who deserts the exercise of civil reason.