Читать книгу The Life of William Ewart Gladstone - John Morley - Страница 95

This chapter naturally closes with what was to Mr. Gladstone one of the dire catastrophies of his life. With growing dismay he had seen Manning drawing steadily towards the edge of the cataract. When he took the ominous step of quitting his charge at Lavington, Mr. Gladstone wrote to him from Naples (January 26, 1851): 'Without description from you, I can too well comprehend what you have suffered.... Such griefs ought to be sacred to all men, they must be sacred to me, even did they not touch me sharply with a reflected sorrow. You can do nothing that does not reach me, considering how long you have been a large part both of my actual life and of my hopes and reckonings. Should you do the act which I pray God with my whole soul you may not do, it will not break, however it may impair or strain, the bonds between us.' 'If you go over,' he says, in another letter of the same month, 'I should earnestly pray that you might not be as others who have gone before you, but might carry with you a larger heart and mind, able to raise and keep you above that slavery to a system, that exaggeration of its forms, that disposition to rivet every shackle tighter and to stretch every breach wider, which makes me mournfully feel that the men who have gone from the church of England after being reared in her and by her, are far more keen, and I must add, far more cruel adversaries to her, than were the mass of those whom they joined.'

In the case of Hope there had been for some considerable time a lingering sense of change. 'My affection for him, during these later years before his change, was I may almost say intense: there was hardly anything I think which he could have asked me to do, and which I would not have done. But as I saw more and more through the dim light what was to happen, it became more and more like the affection felt for one departed.' Hope, he says, was not one of those shallow souls who think that such a relation can continue after its daily bread has been taken away. At the end of March he enters in his diary: 'Wrote a paper on Manning's question and gave it him. He smote me to the ground by announcing with suppressed emotion that he is now upon the brink, and Hope too. Such terrible blows not only overset and oppress but, I fear, demoralise me.' On the same day in April 1851, Manning and Hope were received together into the Roman church. Political separations, though these too have their pangs, must have seemed to Mr. Gladstone trivial indeed, after the tragic severance of such a fellowship as this had been.

MANNING AND HOPE GO OVER

'They were my two props,' he wrote in his diary the next day. 'Their going may be to me a sign that my work is gone with them.... One blessing I have: total freedom from doubts. These dismal events have smitten, but not shaken.' The day after that, he made a codicil to his will striking out Hope as executor, and substituting Northcote. Friendship did not die, but only lived 'as it lives between those who inhabit separate worlds.' Communication was not severed; social intercourse was not avoided; and both on occasions in life, the passing by of which, as Hope-Scott said, would be a loss to friendship, and on smaller opportunities, they corresponded in terms of the old affection. Quis desiderio is Mr. Gladstone's docket on one of Hope's letters, and in another (1858) Hope communicates in words of tender feeling the loss of his wife, and the consolatory teachings of the faith that she, like himself, had embraced; and he recalls to Mr. Gladstone that the root of their friendship which struck the deepest was fed by a common interest in religion.239

In Manning's case the wound cut deeper, and for many years the estrangement was complete.240 To Wilberforce, the archdeacon, Mr. Gladstone wrote (April 11, 1851):—

I do indeed feel the loss of Manning, if and as far as I am capable of feeling anything. It comes to me cumulated, and doubled, with that of James Hope. Nothing like it can ever happen to me again. Arrived now at middle life, I never can form I suppose with any other two men the habits of communication, counsel, and dependence, in which I have now for from fifteen to eighteen years lived with them both.... My intellect does deliberately reject the grounds on which Manning has proceeded. Indeed they are such as go far to destroy my confidence, which was once and far too long at the highest point, in the healthiness and soundness of his. To show that at any rate this is not from the mere change he has made, I may add, that my conversations with Hope have not left any corresponding impression upon my mind with regard to him.

A wider breach was this same year made in his inmost circle. In April of the year before a little daughter, between four and five years old, had died, and was buried at Fasque. The illness was long and painful, and Mr. Gladstone bore his part in the nursing and watching. He was tenderly fond of his little children, and the sorrow had a peculiar bitterness. It was the first time that death entered his married home.

When he returned to Fasque in the autumn he found that his father had taken 'a decided step, nay a stride, in old age'; not having lost any of his interest in politics, but grown quite mild. The old man was nearing his eighty-seventh year. 'The very wreck of his powerful and simple nature is full of grandeur.... Mischief is at work upon his brain—that indefatigable brain which has had to stand all the wear and pressure of his long life.' In the spring of 1851 he finds him 'very like a spent cannon-ball, with a great and sometimes almost frightful energy remaining in him: though weak in comparison with what he was, he hits a very hard knock to those who come across him.' When December came, the veteran was taken seriously ill, and the hope disappeared of seeing him even reach his eighty-seventh birthday (Dec. 11). On the 7th he died. As Mr. Gladstone wrote to Phillimore, 'though with little left either of sight or hearing, and only able to walk from one room to another or to his brougham for a short drive, though his memory was gone, his hold upon language even for common purposes imperfect, the reasoning power much decayed, and even his perception of personality rather indistinct, yet so much remained about him as one of the most manful, energetic, affectionate, and simple-hearted among human beings, that he still filled a great space to the eye, mind, and heart, and a great space is accordingly left void by his withdrawal.' 'The death of my father,' Mr. Gladstone wrote to his brother John, 'is the loss of a great object of love, and it is the shattering of a great bond of union. Among few families of five persons will be found differences of character and opinion to the same aggregate amount as among us. We cannot shut our eyes to this fact; by opening them, I think we may the better strive to prevent such differences from begetting estrangement.'