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I

At least as far south as Liverpool, and he was born there, Gladstone claimed to be "purely and absolutely Scotch in every drop of blood" in his veins. He was still insisting on this point at the age of seventy when receiving at Hawarden a deputation from his native town. Perhaps a Scotsman so complete as this could have been born safely anywhere; nevertheless a good deal in his development is explained by his origin and upbringing.

The name of the family, originally Gledstanes, was changed to Gladstone by royal licence as late as 1835, during the lifetime of his father. The licence legalised an apparently accomplished anglicism, and its "sad lack of imagination," which his daughter lamented, lies on "his father and grandfather." It happens, moreover, though the pedigree of the Gledstanes family has been traced to the remotest times, that we need not here go more than two generations backward, for its early glories suffered an eclipse till the family re-emerged into prosperity with William Ewart's grandfather, who may be fitly called Gladstone the first. He laid the foundations of the modern family's fortune, marked his undertaking by the change of name, and his successors derived, no doubt, from him the gifts of energy and enterprise in which they too have been conspicuous. This Thomas Gladstone had been a corn-merchant of Leith and Liverpool. To quote his famous grandson's words, "he was a merchant in Scotch phrase; that is to say, a shopkeeper dealing in corn and stores, and my father as a lad served in his shop. But he also sent a ship or ships to the Baltic." His son, John Gladstone, the statesman's father, who was made a baronet in 1845, left Leith for Liverpool, where, beginning as a clerk, he became shortly a partner in the firm of Corrie & Co. When the partnership was dissolved some sixteen years later, John Gladstone with his brother Robert formed a new firm, the principal business of which was in the West Indies. There John Gladstone held large sugar and coffee plantations, worked by slaves, in Demerara. On his death in 1851 he left, according to his son, a fortune of "near £600,000." The previous heads of the family had often been responsible Elders of the kirk, and Gladstone's own mother was a devout Evangelical.

The Gladstones had had issue in abundance: William Ewart's great grandfather begot eleven children: his fourth son was blessed with sixteen; and the grandfather's position enabled him to provide for his seven surviving sons when the turn of each came to be started in business. This vigorous middle-class stock, pushing toward mercantile prosperity, with Presbyterian seriousness and argute Scotch delight in sermons and disputation, produced the future statesman, whose enormous vitality, shrewd intelligence, debating skill, tireless energy, moral fervour and almost perfect health, were but the prodigy of the fine breed from which he sprang. Such a stock has ever been stock for men of genius, and, in this instance, it came to fruition when either side of the Border was only beginning to be industrialised. Thus the new opportunity of wealth coincided with natural stamina to produce a combination of vigour, less possible to-day when city life has drained the country of the stock we can least afford to lose, so that our modern commercial magnates are, as a rule, of much poorer physique than the Gladstones of the eighteenth century.

William Ewart Gladstone was born on December 29, 1809, it is said under the sign of Capricorn. The vigour, the impetuosity, the butting head, the agile heels, the sure foothold on slippery places of the symbolic Ram, no one would deny him. In English ram is a better equivalent for Capricorn than the astrologer's stricter he-goat. It gives us the fighting qualities, the flashing eye, the head strong in the horns. He arrived appropriately on the crest of the family's fortunes, so that he could be well educated in England for the public career on which his father's hopes were centred for him.

He made his first speech at the age of three. The occasion was political. During Canning's first election in Liverpool Canning stayed at John Gladstone's house. On the day when a great dinner was being given there, the child was taken to the dining-room, placed upon a chair, and directed to say to the company: Ladies and Gentlemen. He was also taken to see Hannah More, who presented him with a copy of her Sacred Dramas and wrote his name in it.

Gladstone supposed his parents to have singled him out for these attentions as a child possessing something worth seeing, but his own marvellous memory throws no light on his inner development but this: He recalled no propensity to mortal sin; none even to diligence, earnestness or devotion, but these, doubtless, his mother was soon to arouse. He himself believed his inner life to have been "always dubious, vacillating, and above all complex." During a sermon in St. George's, Liverpool, he remembers, perhaps for the only time in his life, turning quickly to his mother with the question: "When will he have done?" He remembers praying to be spared the loss of a tooth. Otherwise his religious recollections are a blank, and he supposed his development to have been unusually slow.

His earliest teacher was the clergyman appointed to the neighbouring church built by his father at Seaforth in 1815, where with about a dozen boys he was prepared for Eton. At Seaforth he declared that he showed "a priggish love of argument," possibly encouraged at home, for his father, we are told, discussed every sort of question with his children and would allow them to take nothing for granted. Reasons were expected even when someone said that he thought it would be a fine or wet day. If at Seaforth Vicarage he felt himself to have been under no moral or personal influence, and to have shirked in consequence, yet he taught in the Sunday School at Primrose Bridge. Any lack of moral influence at Seaforth was probably, though he does not say so, more than made good at home. The devoutness of his mother and the Socratic teaching of his father would have seemed sufficient moral influences to most boys. The Seaforth Vicarage may have been a place of instinctive moral relaxation. As we shall see, his home standards survived even the indifference of Eton.

He went there in 1821, when the ferocious Dr. Keate was headmaster, and remained for six years, "the prettiest little boy that ever went to Eton."[1] There were floggings and fights, but two chief impressions remained. The teaching of classics, he said, was "simply splendid" in its accuracy, but the "teaching of Christianity was so dead that it was almost a wonder that its very forms had not been surrendered." His piety none the less survived this strain. Stories were told in after years of his refusal to drink to a coarse toast proposed by some school-fellow, of his defence of some persecuted pigs, of Bishop Hamilton, then a boy, being "saved from worse things" than idleness by coming to know Gladstone. The few outlets that Eton did provide for his fervour and activity, Gladstone used to the full. He became joint editor of the Eton Miscellany, and spoke regularly at the school debates. As he wrote many of his speeches and kept them, we can see how little his manner changed in after years. It was perfected rather than altered. That curiously impersonal, but fervid, manner of his was his from the start. While most able young men begin with revolutionary notions and become later more sceptical of conventional methods of reform, Gladstone began reverentially content with the existing order. While, again, nearly all able youngsters, whatever their opinions, begin in the exalted style and shed it gradually, Gladstone preserved it to the last. In his style, at least, he was always conservative. The voice of his class was Gladstone's voice, the editorial "we" his instinctive manner, righteous indignation, never personal wrath, the appeal he used, and felt. He believed undoubtedly that everyone held their professions as sincerely as he did himself. He had no conception, at this age, that most people never dream of putting their professions into practice, or that he would make them aghast if he or any other respectable man expected them to do so. So long as actions and assumptions are kept peacefully apart, there is no confusion, but once they start trespassing on one another's ground there is no telling where the trouble will end. To try to turn the world upside down has been, very justly, the accusation against religious enthusiasts in all ages. Later experience, not critical observation, was to teach Gladstone the painful truth of this. The first period of his growth ends with his recognition of it, at the age of thirty-one. Perhaps he never learnt it fully. Using the word in no disparaging sense, he had a credulous rather than a critical mind. In his boyhood and in his youth he believed everything that he was told, literally.

[1] Sir Roderick Murchison, quoted by G. W. E. Russell.

At Eton he made friends with George Selwyn, Milnes Gaskell, and Arthur Hallam, but the personal intimacy that there must have been in the last particularly of these friendships, does not survive in his account of them. His fervour indeed dominated individuals as it was afterwards to dominate the public, but in the same aloof way. It is as if he imported the amenities of public life into private intercourse. He loved boating and was already a great walker and an ardent politician at school.

When he left Eton at Christmas 1827, he read with a clergyman, who afterwards became a bishop, for six months. In 1828 he went to Christ Church, Oxford, where again he appeared to make lofty acquaintanceships rather than friends. After a walk with Anstice to Cuddesdon, there is this significant note in Gladstone's diary: "O for a light from on high! I have no power, none, to discern the right path for myself." It is a flash of self-criticism. A man does not pray for the insight he already possesses. The unerring choice of the Holy Ghost is felt on the instant it is made. To the recipient, alone of lights this Light is unmistakable. There is more, beyond question, than inherited Evangelical fervour in this revealing confession, perhaps the most searching that its author ever made. He knew the agonising truth, and reacted to it in the way which history shows us by many similar examples to be inevitable.

The eighteenth century Enthusiasts and Ranters, as they were called, invariably began with a sense of their deficiency. Being certain of nothing but their own blindness, they were tormented with the fear of sin. They felt themselves to be sinful, and they prayed, therefore, to be saved by a power from without. With the divine light withheld, this needs must be the power of human example. The mystics pass through the Dark Night much later, as a rule nearer the middle than the beginning of their lives. The lightless turn obediently to Morality for their guide, since morality is the customary standard of conduct, a rule of convention which the man with an inner light regards with indifference, for it is, at most, a superfluous prop to himself. The good man is freeborn because he is born good. The lightless man, being born blind, knows himself in need of leading-strings: the commandments and conventions of Morality. He worships them as the only light within his reach, and may even go so far as to believe that there is no other light than they. His next step may be to persecute the few freeborn who differ from him. Gladstone never went to that extreme, for he believed that there was a Light beyond his personal apprehension. He was even credulous of those who seemed to claim it, and was ready and anxious to defer almost to anyone. Intellectually he was a humble-minded man, though the fervour of his obedience to adopted ideas often disguised this from other people, especially when they were not in agreement with him. His fervour and dependence on external guidance, outside practical affairs, made him a mystagogue, about as far from a mystic as it is possible for a human being to be. The above entry in his diary gives the first significant clue to his character and after career.

The rest of his Oxford days no more than illustrate the justness of it.

He was said to have known his Bible better than any undergraduate. On Sundays he sometimes heard as many as three sermons. He haunted also Dissenting chapels in his search for light. He consulted a clergyman on the advisability of holding prayer-meetings in his rooms. He recoiled from Archbishop Whately's "anti-Sabbatical doctrine." Another preacher moved him to expostulate on the "character and doctrines of his sermon" in a letter that Gladstone left at the clergyman's door. He was accused of "ostentatious piety." A writer in 1829 declared: "Gladstone has mixed himself up with the St. Mary Hall and Oriel set, who are really, for the most part, only fit to live with maiden aunts and to keep rabbits." Alas! the Evangelical nature is always subject to such misunderstandings as these. If Gladstone had known of them, he would not have minded.

His ardour was not exhausted in listening to others. He founded an essay club, called, after him, the WEG, where he contended, among other things, that philosophy was higher than poetry, as a moralist would. He also made one of his rare, right judgments in literature. He said that the poems of Tennyson showed considerable genius.

This eager undergraduate, if not at first, soon became a steady worker, as his ambitions began to stir. He entered twice for the Ireland scholarship. At his second attempt Gladstone was surprised to learn from the examiner that, in a close decision, the prize had gone to one who gave short and concise answers. "Ours," he told his father, "were long-winded." Gladstone's own essay was marked "desultory beyond belief." An unillumined intelligence is apt to be vague. He failed to win the Newdigate with his poem on Richard Cœur de Lion. Whether as a writer or a critic, his literary faculty was small from the beginning.

The copiousness which chilled the examiner in his written papers, however, was far from a disadvantage at the Union, where Gladstone soon began to be both heard and admired. In time he became president. It was his first completed step in public life. He found a larger audience proportionally easier to address, and the diffuseness of speech more natural to him than the terse directness of good writing. In debate, especially in the debating points that quell interrupters, also in reply, verbal readiness is almost everything. The orator was finding his feet. The speeches that he made are interesting for the attitude which they reveal. All, I think, support the positions in which he was reared. His familiar preceptors were accepted implicitly. He was a trumpet in their hands: he did not criticise anything they had told him. One example may suffice us. In a debate in favour of the prompt emancipation of the West Indian slaves, he moved and carried an amendment that "education of a religious kind was the first object of legislation." Being both lofty and inapt, it circumvented the issue successfully. It is as if we overheard his mother's fervour and his father's commercial prudence merging to a single voice through the young man. As an echo he was magnificent, but the original murmurs were theirs. He initiated no ideas, but the ideas of others impelled him to eager speech and impulsive action. Since he had not critical intelligence, it is to his honour that speech and action were never far apart. No one perhaps has ever combined so much talk with so great an activity.

Active as he already was, he prays for the habit of steady application. In his studies, speeches, church-going, his parties for wine and talk, his long walks, his letters even, there is an air of suppressed excitement. Filled with moral enthusiasm and growing conscious of his latent powers, he was also ambitious to excel in the public activities of undergraduate life. It was a new world, a larger world, than Eton or home, and it led to one more wide than Oxford. His eye became aware of the political stirrings of the day. His religious ardour made him welcome Catholic Emancipation; his inherited conservatism to denounce electoral reform. It was with a speech against the extension of the franchise that he made his mark at the Union, a speech that penetrated beyond its walls. The coming Reform Bill was already filling the propertied classes with fright, and the young man, very naturally, had not yet developed his later sixth sense for rising currents of public opinion. Standing on the past, he found the fearsome future still impalpable to him, though his leaping mind was eventually to inhabit the political day after to-morrow. For the moment, like his worthy exemplars, he identified reform with revolution.

The animated debate in the Union at Oxford reflected the excitement prevailing in the nation at large, and the youthful Gladstone's speech of three-quarters of an hour electrified the house. It also pleased his father so much that he wanted to have it printed. Thereupon, Gladstone immediately wrote an anti-reform pamphlet, which even his father thought was too extreme, and then hurried to London in order to hear a debate, lasting five nights, in the House of Lords. When the Lords threw out the Reform Bill by a majority of forty-one, Gladstone's comment was: "The consequences of the vote may be awful. God avert this! But it was an honourable and manly decision, and so may God avert them." This was the first debate that Gladstone attended in Parliament.

At this time too he conceived a vast work on Morals, Politics and Education, the materials for which were to be gathered during the progress of his life. It was intended to be his bequest to posterity. Morals still came first in his regard, and he was not content to counsel us upon them. He wished also for some personal work to do, and discussed with his friend Hope-Scott a private plan for the benefit of prostitutes. In the odious euphemism of the day this was known as rescue work for "fallen women." The social outcast, leading the most precarious of lives, exercised an irresistible appeal to Gladstone's charitable heart. The call, to be up and doing, on behalf of the forlorn was the form in which the appeal came to him. A crusader born out of due time, he responded instantly to romantic causes. At the moment, the established order seemed politically to be one of these. It loomed largely, calling for help; but there was also the unheeded cry of erring sisters to which one's private ear might well be open. For the present, however, the ordeal of Final Schools allowed no trespassing.

At the examination which followed on the heels of these excitements, an amusing incident occurred. After questioning Gladstone upon some point of theology, the examiner said: "We will now leave that part of the subject." "No, sir," replied Gladstone, "if you please, we will not leave it yet," and began ardently again. No wonder that he received a first class. The wonder is that he also gained a first in mathematics, for the subject was not then taught at Eton, and Gladstone had had to rely entirely upon private study and his own brains. This double first was, then, a feat both of intelligence and industry. It showed steadfastness of purpose and pliability of mind: abilities promising and even dangerous, coupled, as they were, to enthusiasm of feeling and restless activity. His prayers had been answered, and it was impossible to say where his gifts would carry him in the end. With this achievement and the presidency of the Union behind him, Gladstone's Oxford career was a complete success. Combined activities of this order at the University are an established preliminary to public life, and, with his father's wealth to back him, nothing, unless it were a young man's want of inclination, need now stand in his way. He had qualified for a political career at Oxford, and even before he left had made himself heard beyond the walls of the University.

During the year previous to his Final Schools, Gladstone had become already distracted about his future. "God direct me! I am utterly blind," he had confessed. In this mood he wrote an inordinately long letter to his father. In vague and involved sentences he portrayed his religious yearnings to forsake the callings of this dusty world and to become a clergyman. It is characteristic that he proposed to take Holy Orders as much for public as for private reasons. His fervour instinctively aspired to the most exalted form of activity, but his judicious eye was equally upon the world and pointed to the need of the world to justify him. How godless it was, how vast the opportunity, how precise and sacred the Christian's trust! The theme lent itself to expansion, and then one's own unfitness needed, also, to be made abundantly clear. It produced this tremendous letter, in which the natural, but unconscious, egoism of the youthful writer is transparent. Indeed it is disarming, for he would be indeed a miserable creature who did not remember to have written or contemplated some such letter at Gladstone's age. One does not need to be an experienced master of novices to realise, however, that the vocation confessed by this letter is not for Holy Orders. In so far as such yearnings can be sifted from the sands of emotion in which they lurk, they remain indeterminate. They show a bias, not a direction. They indicate no more than an ardent temperament at a loss for employment, an active mind in search of an aim, any aim so long as the youthful imagination can recognise and respond to it. This, the only positive inference, is accompanied by one negative disclosure. A good master of novices would infer that the young writer is not destined for the contemplative life: the life where silence is golden. The verbal activity is profuse enough to show that the youth will be a man of action; perhaps, if his bias holds, a preacher; if not, a barrister possibly, possibly a politician. Words, whether spoken or penned, will play a large part in his activity. To-day, we should add to the list of his chances, that of a leader-writer and journalist, but in 1831 journalism was not a calling. Having no set qualifications, it cannot be a profession to-day even, for a learned profession without learning is still unthinkable at present. We are not arguing backward in having drawn inferences like these. Gladstone's letter occupies several closely printed pages of an appendix to Morley's first volume. It is there to be read, and is almost a classic document for the psychologist of adolescence to browse on.

We find in it, then, a vocation to some form of public life, in which lofty aspirations may be combined with secular, and probably prominent, activity. It shows a crusader who has yet to find his crusade, a recruit embarrassed by the wealth of moral evils that invite his attention.

Gladstone's father almost certainly understood William very well, but his face may have been a study while he was reading his son's immense letter. Showing both tact and judgment in his much shorter reply, he asked the young man to postpone his decision until he should have taken his degree, and had returned from a trip to the Continent. Obviously so impressionable a nature ought to receive as many impressions as possible before taking such a momentous decision as it proposed. The father's counsel had been asked, and that was sufficient grace for the moment. John Gladstone's tact was justified. In reply to this advice, the young man declared that his excitement had subsided, but that he foresees a crisis in the history of mankind: upon the new principles prevailing, the Established Church, and the whole foundations of society, may vanish. He must not be tied to any profession that will not leave him free to enter the arena; but, wishing to fall in with his father's desires, he proposes to study constitutional law "with a view ... to a subsequent experiment ... on public life."

This, no doubt, left Gladstone's father much relieved. He had earned the respite, and, doubtless with a lighter heart, continued this second long letter to the end. Substantially it ran as follows: Gladstone wishes to be the humblest of those commissioned to set before the eyes of man "the magnificence and the glory of Christian truth," especially since his temperament is "so excitable" that it might yield to the allurements of other matters. These are indicated in his diary by a note made after he had passed his examinations: "Politics are fascinating to me, perhaps too fascinating." In politics too, become now so serious, the budding orator would be required to vent, as Burke, as Canning had vented, the exalted aspirations of his heart. He can define his ambition only in these solemn words: "To work an energetic work in this world," and by it, under God, "to grow into the image of the Redeemer."

II

Such was Gladstone when the Oxford of his day had done with him. He had been prepared for a career. Had he been prepared for the world in which that career would be passed? The Union is indeed a House of Commons in miniature. Is the House also the World within four walls? If it were not, the higher education of Englishmen would have been different, but in these days there is no telling what question will not next be asked. Suffice it to say that, when Gladstone left Oxford, so absurd a question was inconceivable. What other world but the House of Commons could an English university prepare her sons to enter now that the Church had been deprived of political power? Politics had been a patrician preserve throughout the eighteenth century. The tradition of scholastic leisure for the aristocracy survived in the memory of the Grand Tour, a prelude for the sons of commercial magnates to the politics that would lead them, perhaps, into the aristocracy itself at last.

His four months' trip to France and Italy, where he learned Italian, were notable for two events in Gladstone's life. At Rome and Naples there dawned upon him, for the first time, the Latin conception of the Church as a body and a teacher apart from the Bible. Its ministry of symbols and channels of grace, its historic line of teachers, its body of doctrine, inspired him with his first vision of the Church Corporate, as men had thought of her in the Middle Ages, when the Patrimony of St. Peter was, like the Empire, an international Power. Even now, Evangelical as he was by training, he scarcely seems to have asked whether, if Church and Bible be set side by side, the Church is not the author of the book. His visit to Rome (and without such a visit what European can hope to hold the roots of our past within his mind, for its stones utter more than a library of learning?) made Gladstone a churchman. His idea of Christianity was transformed, though his language kept its Evangelical tone as instinctively as his voice kept the lingual burr of Scotland. The effect of Rome was great on Gladstone. It made him reflect, and on the one path wherein he found reflection not difficult. What did churchmanship mean? He remembered Newman, who had become vicar of St. Mary's, Oxford, in 1828, and in this very year, 1832, was to visit the Eternal City. Had not Newman, the impressive preacher, broken with the Evangelical view two years before, while Gladstone was still up? The kirk compares poorly with the church to a man who has a passion for institutions.

These reflections were interrupted at Milan by a mundane event more startling, if less pregnant, than themselves. This was no less than an offer of the seat for the borough of Newark from the Duke of Newcastle, the former foe of Gladstone's family idol, George Canning. The offer was the reward of the speech at the Union which had first made Gladstone known. Though the duke's son had been one of Gladstone's Oxford friends, it seemed at first "a stunning and overpowering proposal." Surprise and doubts, however, soon yielded to his father's inclinations and his own. It is interesting that Gladstone did not enter political life, but was called to it. In the person of the Duke of Newcastle, the "light from on high" had come. The double fitness of Gladstone to receive it was shown during the election itself.

Newark was a nomination borough, and in his address to the nominal electors Gladstone professed principles rather than a programme: to resist change, to remedy evils by restoring general principles, in particular the principle that government is a religious duty. In regard to slavery, then a ticklish question, the young candidate rested its abstract lawfulness on the regulations of Scripture, regulations, he explained, which took the institution for granted. He argued on his own behalf that moral must precede physical emancipation of the slaves. He defended the union of Church and State, especially of the Irish Church; he favoured the principle of allotments. His only indiscretion was to startle the duke by averring that labour should receive adequate pay, "which, unhappily, among several classes of our population, is not now the case."

It would be superficial to complain that almost everything else for which he contended now he opposed later. The consistency of Gladstone is not to be measured by abstract logic. Just because he had not a logical mind, it was easy for him to explain away, though not to explain, his political changes. In this matter he was a casuist without a case, than which nothing is more delightful to an argumentative mind. His consistency was more real than any logic, because it was temperamental, and therefore much more profound. In the depths of his own unconsciousness he knew that logical necessity is not necessity at all. His genius lay in not knowing consciously just this, for it made him impervious to the intellectual criticism of men far more intelligent than himself. Their intelligence was no match for a vital instinct like Gladstone's, for it is rarely intellect that makes the genius. It is always vitality, to which the intellect even of an intellectual genius is never more than a convenient tool. George Eliot was much more intelligent than Charles Dickens, but, vital as she was, she was not nearly so vital as he. Genius is energy of life, and can survive a considerable infusion of stupidity. The consistency of Gladstone, then, was a consistency of vital energy, which carried him from enthusiasm to enthusiasm, from change to political change.

This made him far more disconcerting to his political rivals than political logic, or even political principle. He hardly understood what political principle means, while he knew, without knowing how he knew, what were the desires of the moment, and, much better than his contemporaries, what were the immediate obstacles in their way. His emotions and enthusiasm were at the beck of every one of them, and thus he was never at a loss like his opponents; on the contrary, he never hesitated to claim almost divine sanction for whatever he proposed. For the most part pygmies in vitality compared with Gladstone, they were tied and bound by the chain of an artificial logic, the merest gossamer to Gladstone, who simply walked through it, like a man. Logic to him, being superior to it, was literally a matter of words. Having a superabundance of words always at his command and increasingly avoiding definite statements, he beat the logicians at their own game, in debate and controversy. His explanations were an overwhelming torrent, and as they did overwhelm, the question whether they were also logically convincing shrank to an irrelevant trifle. Beside this, he was also extremely shrewd in practical and immediate matters. As practical in detail as he was hazy in idea, he relied upon a vital enthusiasm to propel him onward, while he avoided pitfalls with the canniest of care. His want of inner light was compensated by his enormous susceptibility to outside influences. Thus he took the lead by identifying himself, before anyone else, with the changes of opinion around him. In the strictest meaning of the word, therefore, he was always morally in the right. His enthusiasm was his own. His ideas invariably came from other people. He originated nothing but his own native energy, and his responsiveness to popular suggestion became ultimately a reflex action, a sixth sense. His emotional consistency was, with the activity that it invariably dictated, with the practical sagacity he partly inherited and partly acquired, the only consistence he had. It was so complete that he needed none other. Indeed intellectual consistency would have been a handicap. Luckily there was no alloy in his energetic ore. His energy, in fact, served him better than inner light serves far more intellectual men, for, unlike intellect, it does not know doubt or hesitation. It survives its mistakes. Its only law is to go forward. Like life itself, it has no end but to live more abundantly. In political affairs it can increase mischief or virtue according to the stimulus that it receives. The virtue of Gladstone was Gladstone's vitality, issuing through his lips first of all, but the ends which it served are to be measured by our judgment of the desires of his age. These it reflected perfectly through all their changes, the changes (that is to say) which came to the surface of his time. He was incapable of comprehending the deeper currents. Opinions he understood: ideas never. Darwin and Huxley remained inexplicable to him, but, were he alive to-day, he might be as popular an expounder of evolution, birth-control or eugenics, as he was in his own time of electoral reform, economic laissez-faire, or free trade. The proof of this is that, in his own lifetime, when there was no lead on these later matters, the bare mention of such things would have scandalised him. He would have been at home in the ardent atmosphere that heralded the Revolution in France, though whether he would have become its servant or its victim it would be needless to inquire, and is impossible to decide. When strife passed beyond discussion, he tended to become helpless. Whatever the popular movement was, he would have joined it. That is certainty enough. Like the traditional huer at St. Ives, he watched and waited for the tide. Thus he was habitually the first person to detect the incoming shoal, and was then all eagerness to net it. His fervour was not content, for long, to defend the things which are, to dwell among forlorn hopes, or, like Parnell, to let hope itself create a cause out of its ruin. His fervour launched out to meet its kindred, the fervour that was rising to meet him.

Having disposed of the bogey of consistency, which haunted Gladstone from the time when even his speeches as an undergraduate at the Union were examined to provide a repartee at his expense, till his biographers continued to discuss the matter, let us return to Newark. There his second hostages to political logic were unwittingly given. After what has been said, we need waste no time upon them. The vital matter is this. His strategy at the election was almost all that the Duke of Newcastle and his father had a right to hope. His tactics were shown in his answer to a question. "Are you the Duke of Newcastle's nominee?" a heckler inquired. Gladstone was, but the election might have seemed a farce had he admitted it. He therefore asked Mr. Gillson what he meant by the term. The heckler incontinently replied: "A man sent by the duke to be pushed down the electors' throats whether they will or no." "In that sense," the candidate answered, "I am not a nominee. I came to Newark on the invitation of the Red Club, than whom none is more respectable and intelligent." If the duke had had a dreadful qualm about the soundness of his candidate's attitude to the payment of labourers, the young hand had shown itself apt to deal with a debating emergency as it arose. Gladstone was, of course, elected at the head of the poll, and six weeks later, in January 1833, sat as a Member of the first Reformed Parliament.

III

It requires to-day a slight effort of imagination to recall the condition of political and social life which Gladstone was entering, at the early age of twenty-four. We forget sometimes that the England of the first Reformed Parliament was still, on the whole, the England of the eighteenth century. Electors were still wooed on a system that we call corruption, and the morals of the reigning aristocracy were still aristocratic, that is to say, not based on the middle-class assumptions of a later day. Middle-class morality necessarily seems ridiculous to aristocrats, as aristocratic manners seem supercilious or immoral to the middle classes. Ideas of right and wrong vary, not only from frontier to frontier, but from class to class. Whichever stratum of society happens to be at the top imposes its own standards and complacently imagines that these are the immutable test of virtue.

The young Gladstone happened to enter public life at the turn of the tide, when, that is to say, the aristocracy was beginning to lose political predominance, and, consequently, when both its political practices and its moral code were becoming undermined by the habits and standards of its successors. Gladstone lived long enough in his nearly ninety years to see the former ousted, but he was born early enough to be aware of the change and to remember in his old age a time when a different code was taken equally as a matter of course. We must place ourselves at his point of view, and become octogenarians of the nineteenth century ourselves, if we are not to feel puzzled by some of his later dilemmas, the dilemmas of an old gentleman who had a very much longer memory than almost any of his contemporaries, a memory also wholly beyond the range of the bulk of his popular audiences. Gladstone himself had received the mental impress of the rising class of which he was to become eventually the popular representative. His home seems to have been a pattern of its virtues. Evangelicalism has never been an aristocratic product because it is, characteristically, provincial both in habitat and in ideas. Bunyan himself spoke of the "village" of Morality and contrasted it with the "city" of Destruction, in which last, presumably, the men of Mayfair are to be found. The consequence was that, hardly had Gladstone taken his seat in the House, when an elementary discovery scandalised him.

It was this. The cost of the election proved to be twice as much as he had anticipated, and he was horrified at the amount which had been spent upon free meals and free drink. It proved useless to remind him that many of the voters could not be persuaded to poll without a breakfast at the expense of their candidate, a breakfast at which beer was enjoyed in hospitable draughts. He declared that this "organised drunkenness" was not a question of money, but a question of right and wrong. No doubt the memory helped him to carry Sir Henry James' Act of 1883 to reduce "corrupt practices" at elections. Wiser, and a little sad, for this was his first taste of disillusion, Gladstone turned on his birthday, December 29, 1833, from this examination of political morality (the immorality of another means the difference of his habits from one's own) to glance at the condition of his own heart. "I wish," he confided to his diary, "that I could hope my frame of mind had been in any degree removed from earth and brought nearer to Heaven, that the habit of my mind had been imbued with something of that spirit which is not of this world."

He began to view his approaching social duties with some apprehension. After due consideration, he resolved not to withdraw "from the practices of my fellowmen except when they really involve an encouragement of sin, in which case I do certainly rank races and theatres." He limited himself, therefore, for the present to concerts, safer and, at their best, not far from semi-sacred ground. Theatres and races Gladstone could avoid if he chose, and to the end he never crowned any of his four premierships by leading home a Derby winner or so much as owning a single racehorse. He could not avoid meetings and personal intimacy with the men who rejoiced in such pursuits, who regarded a racing-stable and a mistress as possessions to boast of, and those who had them not as scarcely to be called gentlemen. Was Gladstone to refuse to work with a colleague because he had, perhaps, been one of the bucks at Carlton House a few years before? It would have been manifestly impossible. Your aristocrat, the typical politician of that day, who had been brought up under the eye of the Prince Regent, whose memory of the days of the dandies was a memory of yesterday, has always been a man who rejoices in the strength of a horse and delights in the limbs of beautiful women, who makes a marriage for the sake of the settlements, and makes love without the consolations of the Church. A very earnest man of Gladstone's type deplores these tastes and the standard that is immensely proud of them, but, if he was not to abandon a political career at the very start, he had, in 1833, to accept them, at any rate for others. This, then, is the place to recall, though by anticipation, the habits that good society took for granted in the Prime Ministers of Gladstone's early political life. Lord Melbourne was twice in the Divorce Court; Lord Palmerston lived for years with the lady whom he eventually married. Disraeli himself, happy and conjugal as his life was, could hardly have taken the theological view of marriage if only because he must have missed it so often in the social life in which he moved. Fifty years later, that is in 1885, we shall find it convenient to have recalled the political and social atmosphere into which Gladstone was introduced when he became, for the first time, a member of Parliament, and thus a welcomed diner-out in Mayfair when William IV was king. The moral relaxation of Seaforth Vicarage was scarcely enough to have initiated Gladstone into this life of pride and pleasure, wherein his fellow-politicians sported as naturally as "troutlets in a pool."

For the moment, to have discovered how the cost of his recent election had mounted was news enough. The time had hardly come to swallow the second pill. Gladstone therefore contented himself with a further experiment in journalism. He let off his moral steam in a series of articles for the Liverpool Courier. In one of these he attributed the fall of the Roman Republic to the practice of secret suffrage. In another he welcomed the statement that the condition of the West Indian negro was paradise compared with that of the spinning-mill hands in Lancashire. This was a convenient argument to store against the day when he might have to defend the conduct of the West Indian planters. The comparison hardly led him, however, to become a second Lord Shaftesbury; indeed his critics have been wont to declare that official atrocities in remote lands moved him more quickly than the industrial atrocities in his own country. In the public memory of his numerous crusades on behalf of oppressed persons, Naples, Bulgaria and Ireland come to mind. Shaftesbury complained that Gladstone opposed industrial legislation for his own country. Neither the curious eye, as the old statutes of Henry VIII used to phrase it, of Ruskin the ubiquitous, and Gladstone the Argus-eyed observer, can pounce on everything at once. Sin has the strangest power of escaping even minute search. Already, as this excursion into journalism proves, activity was claiming the most of Gladstone's week. The habit of faithful attendance beneath the pulpit was not, however, abandoned when he arrived in London. On Sundays he continued to attend church services regularly, and to be an assiduous listener to popular preachers, while, in the intervals of his public devotions, he read to himself many of Dr. Arnold's sermons aloud. All this was at once a dear solace and support, and what better preparation could there be for his parliamentary duties in the rapidly approaching session?

The proposal of the Government for the gradual abolition of slavery gave to the young Member his first chance of making himself heard in the House of Commons. The vigorous opposition of his father to this proposal had made John Gladstone a target for the Abolitionists' attack. Lord Howick called the Gladstone manager a "murderer of slaves," and declared that these were worked to death systematically in the hope of increasing the crop. The young Gladstone was thus called upon to defend his own father, and if his filial piety had been less or his father had not been a slave-owner he might have appeared earlier upon the Abolitionist side. While admitting in the House that regrettable cruelties had occurred, and favouring a gradual emancipation, with full compensation to the slaveowners, Gladstone forcibly reminded the House that we had dangerous occupations at home. He also insisted, as before, that moral advancement must precede physical freedom. He went on to urge that the conditions of work upon his father's estates were no worse than elsewhere, that, indeed, they were better. We need not pursue his persuasive arguments in detail. The interesting thing is Gladstone's later comment on this speech. For it is his second flashlight of self-criticism.

The later comment begins by regretting the tone of this speech. Having expressed regret, it continues: "Of course allowance must be made for the enormous and most blessed change of opinion, since that day, on the subject." Gladstone's temperamental test was the state of opinion around him. He had already confessed, as we saw, at Oxford, that he had "no inner light." What could he do, therefore, but reflect the best opinion near at hand? and what better opinion could there be than the opinions he had learned at home? If his intellect was still imbued with the ideas that it had learned at his mother's knee, if he naturally wished to follow in the footsteps of his practical father, who built five churches, was it not proper and inevitable that he should still wait for his father's scruples against the abolition of slavery to subside before venturing to entertain any opposite scruple himself? Those Evangelicals who have no "inner light" necessarily venerate more fortunate persons, and the habits and opinions of the illuminated, that is to say, the Morality of "their betters," become their reflected ray. Thus we find that the less inner light a man has, meaning (to be precise) the less conscience he has, the more scrupulous he is about Morality. Morality is the conduct of our neighbours, and the views of a highly moral person, which Gladstone certainly was, veer, in proportion to his scrupulosity, with the alterations in Morality around him.

To call such a person a man with no conscience is not to condemn him, for a conscience is a divine gift not bestowed on everyone. The majority consists of Moralists, good souls and bad souls, who do what their neighbours do because their neighbours are doing it. To abuse them for this would be as cruel as to abuse a child for having been born colour-blind, or left-handed. The chief difference is that the possession of a conscience, as Bunyan knew, is rare, while left-handers are relatively common, so that a man without a conscience is in the majority. The confusion which occurs over contradictory but seemingly kindred terms, conscience and morality (they are opposites), is a modern one, and happens because modern people do not read their Bibles. If they did, as has often been remarked, they would know that the word Morality does not occur in Holy Scripture, which invites us to consider Right and Wrong, Sin and Righteousness, but never Morality and Immorality. The word of God and the holiness of those whom He has called is the example set before us in both Testaments: not the conduct and habits of whoever, possibly the Philistines, happen to be living over the way. Thus Gladstone, being an honest man, was the first to admit that his guide had to be some external human authority, and how better could he prove his purity of intention than by acting as his father desired?

Do not too hastily suppose that John Gladstone, therefore, stands in need of a special apology. On the contrary, though the Church may have ever set her face against slavery, it was one of the foundational institutions of the Roman ethics on which she had to build. It was expressly countenanced by Aristotle, who declared that certain men were born slaves, and that a class of such persons was necessary to civilisation. In the course of ages, and latterly in particular since the day when Rousseau asserted that "men are born free," we have grown shy of the word "slavery," but between theoretic servitude and complete practical penuriousness there is not very much to choose, as the unemployed or junior married clerk will tell you, except the hope, one doubtful day, of escaping it. To regard slavery, especially the slavery of negroes, as a natural abomination in John Gladstone's time, seemed to most people as fantastic a notion as the parallel theory of to-day that it is abominable, in the idea of a few, not to pay the same income to everyone, from a private to a Prime Minister. The idea of human equality was the paradox then. The idea of economic equality is the paradox now, and, if one ventured to infer anything from history, the logical inference would be that economic equality might become regarded as obviously the right opinion a century or so hence. What reason has anyone to suppose that John Gladstone should have been specially reflective, or more bound than his commercial rivals to consider the prejudices of the twentieth century? He took the world as he found it; he made a success of what he found, and that is justification enough for most manufacturers.

The change that John Gladstone made, when he ceased to be a Presbyterian in order to become a churchman, was not made entirely on intellectual grounds. Religious sects inevitably appropriate different social classes, and a man who begins with a small and ends with a large fortune, is naturally more aware of this fact than those with less experience of different classes to guide them. In short, circumstances, which include opinion, were altering. Father and son were both conscious of the change, and the popular maxim, that circumstances alter cases, is not popular only with politicians. If charity does begin at home (and if not where is its origin?), John Gladstone was bound to consider his own security first of all. His son, having declared for full compensation to the owners, had theoretically taken that security for granted. This said, he was free to yield to the change of view more appropriate to his generation than to his father's. Nor was he in much difficulty over the readjustment that would be necessary in his public speeches. According to one of his friendly biographers,[2] Gladstone had carried down from Oxford "a tendency to distinguish with extreme precaution between statements almost exactly similar."

[2] G. W. E. Russell.

We have examined these instances of Gladstone's budding controversies, as we did earlier his inconsistency, because they crop up from time to time all through his life, and it is simpler to have done with them on their appearance, so that we need not dwell upon them serially. A cautious start may prove the quickest way of avoiding waste of time on a long journey. The modification of opinion, which the cautious but impulsive mind of Gladstone underwent till the very end, would not have been scrutinised more closely than its parallel in other politicians had not his Evangelical fervour virtually claimed divine assent for whatever he happened to be proposing. He claimed it so often and so regularly because he desired to have it, as other men have claimed a divine parent or else a very remote ancestry because they have thought it would be very nice if it were true. Belief is a prop strong in proportion to its superiority to rational proof; and the faith which shuffles mountains as if they were a pack of cards is, in the last analysis, self-confidence or faith in oneself, the ultimate source and very well of human effort. Almost all men, indeed, are vain of what they do badly, not of what they do well. Shakespeare was even vainer of his middle-class parentage than of his poetry, and no doubt boasted of it more in private talk. A boast, defined as a vain-glory, leads us to suspect that it has little foundation in truth. No one who believed himself to be by birth an armigerous gentleman in Shakespeare's time would have bothered so much as the alderman's son about getting (or reviving) that coat of arms. The same inference applies to vaunts of divine sanction: the more frequently they are made by a man, the likelier it is that he lives in want of this assurance.

IV

In the House of Commons the new Member attached himself to Sir Robert Peel, the then leader of the Tory opposition. Peel was favourably disposed to his new recruit, and indeed both men were similar in type, though not in character. In passing we may note here that, except for the session of 1846, when Gladstone was a Secretary of State without a seat, and for the first session of 1847, Gladstone was continuously in the House of Commons till he retired in 1894. Sixty years in Parliament, breathing the necessarily unrarefied air of any vast assembly, is a prodigious period in a special atmosphere. Whether or not we agree with the abbé Ernest Dimnet,[3] a shrewd observer, that "politics have never been known to be morally improving," or with Parnell, that no party (possibly no Member) can remain unaffected by Westminster for more than ten years at longest, we shall probably agree that an experience so long and peculiar is enough, by itself, to explain some of the streaks in Gladstone's complex character. It is hard enough to maintain spiritual integrity in domestic life, but more insidious and scarcely less searching is the test to character of prominence in Parliament.

[3] From a Paris Balcony: the essay on M. Herriot.

During his first session, all that Gladstone advocated or did reflected faithfully the correct opinions of his corner in society. He supported the Union with Ireland, the Coercion Bill, the existing Corn Laws, and a Bill against work on Sundays. He opposed the admission of Jews to Parliament, and of Dissenters to the Universities. He opposed the abolition of flogging (of which he had precious memories at Eton) in the Services. He opposed the extinction of sinecures (that last hope for uncommercial ability) in the army and navy; the publication of the division lists; the ballot. He sat on the fence over Lord Ashley's factory legislation—which may not have included the principle of a living wage, his advocacy of which had made the Duke of Newcastle shiver. For Gladstone, the most real issue during this session was the question of slavery, in which his piety and his family's interest were involved. As we have anticipated this issue, it may be dismissed with the reminder that, while he defended his father, he wished devoutly for emancipation in due course. A conservative with qualms rather than a liberal in the making, it was still uncertain in which direction he would tend.

His diary confirms this hesitation. On the 29th of December, 1833, his twenty-fourth birthday, he is writing:

Where is the continuous work which ought to fill up the life of a Christian? ... I have been growing, that is certain; in good or evil? Much fluctuation; often a supposed progress, terminating in finding myself at, or short of, the point which I deemed I had left behind me. Business and political excitement a tremendous trial, not so much alleviating as dragging down the soul from that temper which is fit to inhale the air of heaven.

What delicious egoism is here; though we like to slur our admission because we know that egoism, at least, is a youthful failing, and universal; very far from being a Gladstonian one. His bustling vitality makes him carry, as it were, the egoism of the world upon his tall shoulders; and ambitious young men, turning the early pages of Gladstone's diary, shrink, because it might be a page of their own. Besides, the man who is not an egoist does not succeed in getting born, and, far more than Rousseau, because Rousseau was not the "divinely average" man, Gladstone has confessed the little sins of all the world. If we recoil from his admissions, it is because we have written what we have written too.

Observe, moreover, that this passage implies a prayer for work. Gladstone, a man of energy, could pray, as all of us do, only for a chance to exercise his own gifts. It is true that he longed for "light," but he never prayed for perspicacity, almost as if intellectual penetration was a gift beyond his ken, for he aspired to every gift within the range of his own consciousness. This passage, like the previously quoted ones, displays the palsy of a soul hungry for its fit, but still unrecognised, employment. It confesses a natural fluctuation. Once more we observe that he was never content or sure, from himself. He waited in doubt, like his duplicate the spider, to perceive the handy twig sprouting from the body of some external opinion before swinging himself toward it to find lodgment for his gossamer. His aspirations confess an inner emptiness, for you cannot have the strength and want it too. On the other hand, he was naturally a fountain of fervour. It was settable in motion, by an external hand. The wonder is that, intellectual perception apart, he had received his other gifts in such abundance.

Throughout his first session in Parliament, Gladstone became obscurely aware of a puzzle hard to define to himself: the contrast between the pious professions and the conventional practice of the world. A literal believer in all that he had been told, he could not conceive that this disparity might be cherished as the Comforter in the hearts of those about him. He could neither dream that they were lip-servants to their ideals, nor doubt that their conduct, whatever it might be, accorded with their ideal standard. They were too much respected, too dear, to suffer the disloyalty of criticism. If they said thus, it was true: if they did thus, it was right; for in such as these had not righteousness and truth, on the admission of good society, kissed each other? Parliament was a place, more prominent, but not therefore less exalted, than home. It was the national centre whence the influences of religion radiated to the white walls by the sea of old England. It would be a moral experience to participate in the debates, to be intimate with the idealists who, sifted scrupulously by our reformed Constitution, congregated there. One would grow, one might hope, more earnest, more gentlemanly, in such an assembly, and feel, as one left its doors, as one had used to feel when returning from the kirk.

This expectation, to which we cannot be too tender, did not wholly allow, however, for the social revolution occurring.

The garish days of the Prince Regent were over; as George IV he had followed his aged parent into the tomb; William IV, now in the fourth year of his unvenerable reign, was hardly a strong prop even for a corrupt tradition, and the world was indifferent whether he were its prop or no. Everything paled before the political event that had led this first "Reformed Parliament" to be elected. With the monopoly of the aristocracy gone in 1832, by the arrival in power of the middle-class industrialist, deriving from Puritans of the seventeenth century, our present phase of industrial plutocracy began. In religious terms, a state of commercial Christianity was being established at a progressive rate. Gladstone, whose imagination was more responsive than critical, dimly discerned the process of change but scarcely accommodated the difference involved in it. On the one hand, the aristocratic sanctions remained, as persisting examples. On the other, a different theoretic basis of conduct, the middle-class basis, the backwash, as it were, of the Republican wave from France was gradually infesting speech and writing. The former were more traditional, more familiar, so that Gladstone was naturally drawn to these, and they seemed at first to crown his belief that Government was a religious duty. It very nearly had been so in the presbyteries of Scotland, and he was not prepared to find small countenance for the provincial opinion in the capital.

A stranger to London, and inhaling with the clean lungs of a country-bred boy the perceptible breeze of Reform which gave freshness to Westminster, Gladstone found himself confronted with proposals, often admirable but not advocated upon religious grounds. Was it not extraordinary that their strongest argument should be unused? The people whom he was beginning to meet about the House and in society were a little cold, in speech that is. He missed the note of enthusiasm, yet it was far easier to suffer the scoffs of wretches, of whom there were luckily but few, stridently declaring that the naming of principles was the stock vocabulary of political rhetoric. That they spoke from tubs and at street corners proved the wisdom of our Constitution in effectively excluding them from Parliament. These ranters were the cynics after all, and cynics in Parliament would be preposterous intruders. He had better words to listen to than theirs. There was Edward Irving to hear at the new, if heretical, church in Newman Street (since he was now excommunicate by the presbytery). There were more orthodox preachers. There were Dr. Arnold's sermons to read aloud. All these men agreed on the importance of earnestness and principle. His pre-eminence in both had led to Arnold's recent promotion to Rugby School. Irving, who entered no house without giving an apostolic benediction, if misguided, was free from any charge of want of seriousness. His explicit aim had been to teach "imaginative men, and political men, and legal men, and scientific men who bear the world in hand": a comprehensive audience. This was enough. One must now study to apply one's principles; possibly, if it must come to that, with a higher seriousness because one's colleagues were men of action rather than of lofty thought. These men, too, could teach a man much. One must learn their ropes, if only in order to hitch them to the car of a prophet ascending.

Gladstone's early years in Parliament show the progress of this apprenticeship. The politician learns the mode of his calling, while the enthusiast functions usefully overhead. Once he shall have learnt how to avoid collision between this fire above and this cloud on the ground, his path will be plainer. In the course of the following sessions we shall watch how the accommodation proceeds.

V

In 1835 Lord Melbourne was dismissed by King William, and Sir Robert Peel became Prime Minister. Gladstone, who was returned for Newark unopposed, was appointed a Junior Lord of the Treasury. It was an interesting moment politically. After the passing of the Reform Bill, conservative reaction became an acceptable attitude. One accomplished change was enough, and the process of digesting it should not be disturbed. Gladstone's address to his constituents had echoed Peel's, that, while the reform of abuses was a sacred duty, innovation, as such, could not now be entertained. It was a time for sober distractions, at the close of, happily uneventful, Parliamentary days. At dinner at Lord Lyndhurst's Gladstone met, for the first time, the young author of Vivian Grey, but neither Disraeli nor Gladstone seems to have made much impression upon each other that night. Disraeli innocently declared that a tender swan stuffed with truffles was the best company at the table. The evidence of eye-witnesses is notoriously weak.

At the end of January 1835, Peel sent for Gladstone to promote him to the post of Under-secretary for the Colonies. Reporting this gratifying interview to his father, the young man said:

I expressed ... my hesitation to form any opinion of my own competency for the office, and at the same time my general desire not to shrink from any responsibility that he might think proper to lay upon me.

Had the occasion been less important, even this "expression of hesitation" (Gladstone might have reflected) was superfluous, since he could not be judge in his own case; but how human it is to presume, on these occasions, egoists as we are, we all know. His new chief was Lord Aberdeen. At the age of twenty-five Gladstone was already in office.

Alas! by April the new Government resigned, and of one of the adverse divisions preceding its resignation, Gladstone wrote: "No more shameful act, I think, has been done by a British House of Commons." His private feelings may be gleaned from a third of his rare revelations. He wrote on March 31 in reference to a speech:

I cannot help recording that this matter of speaking is really my strongest religious exercise.

Does the old Adam of Evangelical effusiveness escape in a gush of sincerity here? Who would have dared to assert such a theory of Gladstone unless he had declared his belief in its truth himself? It is this, ever sought and sometimes rewarded, self-candour which endears the great man to us all. When it comes, it is disarming, and the unusual brevity of these phrases raises them in our regard. Gladstone was more accustomed to beat about the bush. If laborare est orare, then perhaps the highest oratory is, in the eighteenth-century sense of the word, to orate? It was a religious exercise to Gladstone. He tells us so, for religious exercises are congenial to muscular Christians, who are active believers in good works, and rarely separate the ideas of religion and activity.

This release from a brief spell of office gave to Gladstone a momentary leisure. He continued to read sermons, political and historical books, and from time to time he ventured on the secular classics of art. Roscoe's life of Pope Leo X impressed Gladstone with a feeling that the book "in some degree subdued the leaven of its author's Unitarianism," but when he had started to read Rousseau's Confessions he was at a loss whether to continue or to throw it on one side.

In September 1835, Gladstone lost his mother. In what proved to be her last illness he had read the Bible to her every day. To his father he continued to read Spenser's Faery Queen and Shakespeare; while, on Sundays, he would browse upon Anglican theologians and St. Augustine. He wrote also, memoranda of his meetings in society and drafts on "Hypocrisy and Worship," adding, "attempted to explain this to the servants at night." This seriousness does not exclude susceptibility to fun, or smiles aroused by the foibles of members of his circle. Should the unpublished letters of Gladstone appear, they may provide the evidence for Gladstone's playfulness.

If his Sunday evenings were sometimes given to exposition for the benefit of the servants, how did Gladstone spend his secular evenings? He tells us that speaking in the House would occasionally interfere with his night's rest, and notes the experience, saying: "How useful to make us feel the habitual, and unremembered, blessing of sound sleep." Wordsworth, whom Gladstone was shortly to meet, in his sonnets on Insomnia, spoke of "this tiresome night," and began a third with the line:

Fond words have oft been spoken to thee, Sleep!

The philosophic poet wanted Gladstone's piety, and perhaps suffered more often than Gladstone from sleeplessness.

To dine out among keen conversationalists is public speaking in little, should the diner be, like Gladstone, ready in inquiry, question and retort, for we find this confession near by: a dinner with Henry Taylor is not only "a keen intellectual exercise," but "a place of danger, as it is exercise seen." What zest and caution in these words!

In May Wordsworth came to breakfast with Gladstone, for breakfast, at this time, was Gladstone's favourite form of hospitality at the Albany, where his father's generosity had installed him. The party sat till a quarter to one, talking of Shelley and Tennyson, travelling and copyright. The subject of sleeplessness does not waylay the breakfasters, though a discussion by the poet and the politician of their common enemy would have been interesting. Three weeks later Wordsworth met Gladstone again at dinner, but no details survive of their talk. They had several meetings in Gladstone's rooms, and Gladstone says he found intercourse with Wordsworth, "upon the whole, extremely pleasing." Gladstone was sorry to hear Sydney Smith say that he did not see very much in Wordsworth, and defended the London sonnet from Smith's charge of being ridiculous. One of these breakfast scenes is worth transcribing.

Wordsworth came in to breakfast the other day before his time. I asked him to excuse me while I had my servant to prayers; but he expressed a hearty wish to be present, which was delightful. He has laboured long; if for himself, yet more for men, and over all I trust for God.... We were agreed that a man's personal character ought to be the basis of his politics.

VI

At this time Gladstone himself wrote several sonnets, read steadily, and occasionally spoke. One of the occasions is still noteworthy. A certain candidate, suspected of unbelief, was asked if the report was true. He replied that the question of a person's religious beliefs was one that no liberal-minded man ought to ask another. The comment of Gladstone was this question:

Is it not a time for serious reflection among moderate-minded and candid men of all parties, when such a question was actually thought impertinent interference? Surely they would say with him that men who have no belief in the divine revelation are not the men to govern this nation, be they whigs or radicals.

Two comments must be made on this.

Indifference to the Christian religion has become so common that a remark of the kind may seem very out of date. Just as Englishmen have lost political passion because they have not been invaded within human memory, so they have not now, unless latently among the minorities of different faiths, religious passion. So far as Christian formulas are concerned, there seems less sign of religious passion than there was one hundred years ago. For the present, no Christian is in danger of being burnt at Smithfield by his brother. The "spread of religious tolerance" is necessarily the "spread of indifference" too. But change belief in the Christian verity to belief in Communism, and the wooden stanchions of the stalls in Smithfield Market are sensibly nearer firewood than they were. Political passion and religious passion, for a time, have languished: economic passion, the fury for or against private property, is the ember glowing now. If people will not fight for a metaphysic, they will fight for a bank balance, for way-leaves and royalties, the minimum wage, or an eight-hour day. The passion we are feeling on the subject of property is our equivalent to the feeling upon religion in Gladstone's youth. He would have been shocked in this year, 1835, at the thought of admitting atheists to Parliament. Let the reader ask himself how he would feel if two "Reds" seemed likely to be returned for the City at the next election. Once we of 1927 have thus put ourselves in the place of the Gladstone of 1837, his comment on the man who declined to state his attitude on "divine revelation" is seen to be natural. Would not most men in a similar social position to-day repeat it, did some Parliamentary candidate complain to some constituents that his opinion on the validity of private property was one that "no liberal-minded man ought to ask"?

The comment of Gladstone reflected the opinion of the majority of his class when religious profession was general; as, in turn, his principle of toleration on the Affirmation Bill of 1883 reflected the opinion of other men who were ceasing to pretend "to believe." We need not repeat our examination of Gladstone's consistency. The Tracts for the Times had begun to appear in 1833, and I remember the surprise with which, at the age of seventeen, I read, and transcribed from the pages of Newman's Apologia, this:

In one of my first sermons I said, I do not shrink from uttering my firm conviction that it would be a gain to this country were it vastly more superstitious, more bigoted, more gloomy, more fierce, in its religion than at present it shows itself to be.

Victoria was still on the throne. One had but a glimmering then of the truth now, by comparison with our present passions on a different order of faith, clear enough. Then, however, one did miss the historical value of Newman's ensuing words:

I added, of course, that it would be an absurdity to suppose such tempers of mind desirable in themselves. The corrector of the Press bore these strong epithets till he got to "more fierce," and then he put in the margin a query.

That "corrector of the Press" was the shadow of a Victorian morrow, with tip more extended along the ground than even Gladstone's, as yet. Fierceness in religion was undergoing a temporary period of eclipse, though the language of Gladstone's peers, in education and fortune and home influences, was closely similar. Let us not forget that both Newman and Gladstone were accused of sophistry. Read Manning, Hurrell Froude even, Dr. Arnold, the contemporary body of successful and earnest persons, not only on their common themes, and you will note an assonance that seems remarkable. Add Newman, Keble, Whately, the wittiest of them, though hardly wittier than Florence Nightingale at her best, the great Pusey also, in sum the names that thread the pages of Newman's Apologia pro Vita Sua, and the family accent is unescapable.

In this chorus, therefore, Gladstone's tone was not, at first, distinguishable. It struck the same note, and prolonged it, as the novice at an organ will prolong the stop marked vox humana. Whenever we concern ourselves with a single member of the group, we need to remember this if we would not exaggerate his value as a specimen of the style. Yet the dialect is so nearly identical that what seems, on first acquaintance with the idiom, an earnestness peculiar to a single soul is largely a group-character. Religion, at the end of the eighteenth century, had taken refuge with the Evangelicals, consequently the future Tractarians and their sympathisers had usually nourished themselves in youth upon the style of the little Bethel and the Beulah. No doubt the twenty-twenties, a century hence, in any words of our day then remembered, will trace a similar assonance. Let us beware of pluming ourselves on a distinction as unlikely as it is impossible to apprehend, if it exists. It is enough to admit that the authorship of an unidentified sentence, belonging to some contemporary of the young Gladstone, would become a nice question of attribution to a present-day scholiast.

VII

Out of office, and being little active in Parliament though assiduous there, Gladstone began to form his future habit of filling intervals by writing a book. The subject had been long, perhaps always, at the back of his adolescent mind. It was the due relation between Church and State. It had been his inner intention to make politics the application of religion. The House was a pastorate to him. It was, as he has told us, the place where he practised his religious exercises, the congregation that he led, when he addressed it, in a kind of extempore prayer. In his first election address he had declared that the cure for our evils was a return to the sound principles of religion. Was not his own principle, that government was a religious duty, sound? Must not all true Christians so regard it? Did not they profess so to do? Was not he, who had no inner light, peculiarly conscious of the need, and would not a book expounding this theme prove to the world that energies, if untimely deprived of office, were still busy with exalted ends? Teeming with these thoughts, he attended the funeral of Lady Canning in Westminster Abbey, and confided to his diary the hope, "May we live as by the side of a grave, and looking in."

The death of William IV, involving a dissolution of Parliament, plunged Gladstone into a general election again. The Tories insisted on nominating him for Manchester, where he was rejected by the Whigs on two grounds: of owing his wealth to slavery, and of wishing to subject the poor negroes on his father's estates to the tenets of an Established Church. This did not matter, for he was returned without a contest for Newark once more, with the added satisfaction that his rising reputation was undisputed.

He confirmed it further by a speech in defence of the planters, whom he represented upon a committee appointed to inquire into the working of apprenticeship. This system was attacked, especially in Jamaica, for having proved even harsher than slavery to the slaves. He still had to trim in debate: to defend the conduct of the planters while declaring now his belief that slavery was "evil and demoralising." He discerned that criticism no longer could be met by conferring benefits upon the negroes, and he begged his father to let him see the plantations for himself. This the wary parent, perhaps knowing his son's excitability, strenuously opposed, by "a prudent instinct."[4] The father's prudence might have had an untoward effect upon a less filially trustful young man. Gladstone still had implicit faith in the guidance of his elders. How could he be a child of his father without being also a child of light?

[4] Morley.

Moreover, he was being infected by the growing interest in national education, convinced that, where a church was established, the State should subsidise the teachers of the establishment only. Touching Ireland, he had said in 1835, "the Protestant faith is held good enough for us, and what is good enough for us is also good for the population of Ireland."

It is not the fault of youth that it has so much to unlearn: the phrase indeed is significant for a reason that has nothing to do with statesmanship. Observe: the statement is a syllogism, the first premiss, perhaps preferably the middle term (that "the Protestant faith exists in Ireland"), being an ellipsis (as taken for granted). Verbally the logic is perfect, but unfortunately logical conclusions are not vital conclusions. Gladstone was still the dupe of words, obsequious to formulæ. In extenuation of a characteristic Scots failing (for the Scots are contentious over words as we are contentious over bats and balls, and each is but "a serious game" to the respective nation), remember this: Like many of his contemporaries, he had no conceptions at this time that Ireland was more than a name on the map of the United Kingdom. In this it was like Fasque, his family's Scottish home. That the Irish could conceive they were being taxed to support heresy was past a joke. Heresy was not a funny word, and to level it at England was, at best, in doubtful taste.

Gladstone was now fully ripe to transfer his Evangelical fervour to the Churchmanship into which his father had already bloomed. Yet he was prevented from taking any narrow view of orthodox claims by the double-mindedness of one now adding the preservative of Westminster to the milk of doctrine. His views had developed, were still unfolding; his eye was on the political sky, wary of necessity to the drift of cloud lest it should be massing to a nimbus before morning. How was he to balance experience with idealism? Obviously by supporting practical proposals, in which he believed, in the language of enthusiasm, in which he believed also. The day was coming when he would be using the language of strict orthodoxy for the contemplation of measures, even of disestablishment, that then made many incumbents shudder.

VIII

His book upon The State in its Relations to the Church, published in 1839, was his adolescent attempt to apply his Evangelical ideal to politics. It proved to be the parting of the ways. The serpent of practical policy had not yet insinuated its way into Gladstone's innocent heart by the gate which is called Westminster.

When Gladstone found no response, even from friendly quarters, when he discovered that a theocracy was not a practical political policy, he dropped it at once. The wavering inner light, fed by precept and reading, still untrimmed by critical faculty, was about to be quenched by practical experience. No one can deny that Gladstone was capable of learning, or that he learned by sight rather than by intuition; and his consistency lay in using the same language for the new lesson as for the old.

Gladstone properly took advantage of a prevailing current of opinion in his first book. The posthumous Church and State of Coleridge had been published in 1836, and William Palmer, of Worcester College, Oxford, had issued his Treatise on the Church of Christ in 1838, the previous year. In Gladstone's own words: "the primary idea of my early politics was the Church. With this was connected the idea of the establishment, as being everything except essential." He went abroad while the book, with the aid of James Hope (Scott's) revisions, was being printed; met Macaulay in Rome, received a letter from Dr. Wiseman on the Missal, and attended innumerable sermons.

Roughly, the effect of Gladstone's book was to please churchmen and to bore politicians. After dining with Sir Robert Peel, Gladstone wrote: "Not a word from him, Stanley or Graham yet, even to acknowledge my poor book; but no change of manner, certainly none in Peel or Graham." Gladstone consoled himself with the reflection that Peel was "quite incapable of comprehending the movement in the Church, the strength it would reach, and the exigencies it would entail," points on which Gladstone himself was, perhaps, more clear than on matters of doctrine. This was his instinctive answer to the report that Ministers wondered why anyone, with so fine "a career" opening before him, should go out of his way to write books. Almost immediately he made the discovery that "there was no party, no individual person probably, in the House of Commons, who was prepared to act on it. I found myself the last man on a sinking ship." He simply could not see himself in the part. He was a man of action.

The way out of this dilemma was to dress the opposite and prevailing opinion in language not dissimilar from his previous defence of the establishment: "it was" (he wrote therefore in the retrospect) "really a quickened conscience, in the country, that insisted on enlarging the circle of State support." Beset by doubt on many matters, Gladstone was finely constant to the faith of his time, that, whatever else we might disbelieve, we could not disbelieve in progress.

Meantime, however, against the indifference of Sir Robert Peel the praise of John Keble could not weigh. Perforce he abandoned his desire, sprung from the "sanguine fervour" of a youth who had noted "the many symptoms of revival and reform within" the Church's borders, to create a theocracy in England; of a youth who "dreamed that she was capable of recovering lost ground and of bringing back the nation to unity in her communion." All was not lost yet. Could he not turn entirely to the theorists, the little band which alone had welcomed him? Gladstone therefore wrote Church Principles, which fell flat. His head was, like Scotland, too misty to handle theology in an interesting way. It required a debatable borderland between theory and practice for his arguments to arouse men made uneasy lest their pockets should be threatened by the application. Expectation or apprehensiveness concerning the politician ever provided the interest taken in Gladstone's ideas.

Following the plan of disposing of recurring issues when they first arise, we may attend to the first of Gladstone's fairly voluminous writings. The influences displayed by his books form an impressive succession, but the style, like the man himself, did not change. If he began as a holy innocent, he ended as a holy elder, indeed the eldest statesman of his time. It was so also with his authorship. Between The State and its Relations to the Church and The Impregnable Rock of Holy Scripture there were to be many pamphlets and books, the eight volumes of Gleanings from Past Years being, literally, no more than gleanings. For the present our purpose is with the first book, which evoked a yet surviving criticism.

In his review, published in the Edinburgh, of the second edition of The State in its Relations with the Church, Macaulay wrote:

His rhetoric, though often good of its kind, darkens and perplexes the logic which it should illustrate. Half his acuteness and diligence, with a barren imagination and a scanty vocabulary, would have saved him from almost all his mistakes. He has one gift most dangerous to a speculator, a vast command of a kind of language, grave and majestic, but of a vague and uncertain import.... The foundations of his theory, which ought to be buttresses of adamant, are made out of flimsy materials which are fit only for perorations.

This is rather hard on perorations, but it was Macaulay's way, and his assertiveness has no illusion now for critical posterity. The intellects of Macaulay and of Gladstone were without subtilty, but whereas Macaulay's was as hard as a nail, Gladstone's was as unsubstantial as an eiderdown. To watch Macaulay industriously hammering his tintack into Gladstone's theological patchwork quilt is a spectacle apt to become exhausting. To read the one upon the other is to read the new journalism upon the old. The bright young man turns upon his earnest colleague in this summary way:

It is not unusual for a person who is eager to prove a particular proposition to assume a major of huge extent, which includes that particular proposition, without ever reflecting that it includes a great deal more. The fatal facility with which Mr. Gladstone multiplies expressions stately and sonorous, but of indeterminate meaning, eminently qualifies him to practise this sleight on himself and his readers. He lays down broad general principles about power, when the only power of which he is thinking is the power of Governments, and about conjoint action, when the only conjoint action of which he is thinking is the conjoint action of citizens in a State.

He first resolves on his conclusion. He then makes a major of most comprehensive dimensions, and, having satisfied himself that it contains his conclusion, never troubles himself about what else it may contain; and as soon as we examine it, we find that it contains an infinite number of conclusions, every one of which is a monstrous absurdity.

To give the devil his due, which is the duty of a Christian, this would pass for a neat decipherment of Gladstone's mental method, did it not overlook, of course, to some extent the earnest purpose, the cloud of yearning feelings, to which the method was no more than a tool in awkward hands. By the simple process of deleting such abstract nouns as Duty, Justice, Righteousness, of curtailing periphrases, of condensing parenthetical qualifications, the bulk of Gladstone's volumes would shrink to normal size. This, however, could not be done without sacrificing their quality, which is none the less a quality because it happens to be a quantitative one. The play of words is the thing; redundancy the virtue; fervour the element of the whole. To bring the Gladstonean canon to an intellectual test is to make a cardinal mistake, very unjust to the author. Read so, the writings would become almost a specific for yawning. Indeed for Gladstone's publications the term writings is a misnomer. The author is orating with his pen. He opines: he does not think. He is a fountain of written speechifying. He is his own stenographer.

To sound moral, to seem earnest, to indulge in sublime sentiments, to produce a hortatory effect, in a word, to edify, was the peculiar gift of Gladstone; but when the clear baritone voice and the graceful pantomime of the speaker's gestures were wanting, when the pen detained the attention that the charm of the voice relaxed, the substance vanishes and the cloud of words condenses into a rain of ink that chills the head of the reader. He professed so much to rely upon eternal truths that the ephemeral interest of his books seems their reduction to "absurdity."

This seeming, however, is not all. To edify was Gladstone's gift, and his power in this kind must be related to the audience that admitted it triumphantly. His art, whether with voice or pen, was the art of homily, not strictly of oratory, literature, or delivery of sermons. The homily is distinct from each of these. A sermon is a speech addressed to an audience or congregation however intimate or small: a homily, on the other hand, is an exhortation or moralising discourse addressed to a homilos or crowd, a throng, a multitude of hearers. The distinction amounts to a specific difference. Littlemore, "that small grey church where the worshippers are few," was a proper spot for sermons. The floor of the House of Commons with men crowding between the benches, the still vaster arena of Blackheath where an assembly of twenty thousand was to hang on Gladstone's words, was the fit amphitheatre for a homily. Would Newman have been equally moving, had he ever inclined himself, to a large crowd? Would Gladstone have had a fair chance at Littlemore? Such a question is invidious to both men. It is its own answer.

Macaulay makes two other criticisms that are worth remembering. The undergraduate said to have known his Bible better than any of his fellow-pupils is convicted by Macaulay of error in the use of a familiar text. If this was the first public occasion when the impregnable rock of Holy Scripture proved to be pregnable in Gladstone's hands, let us remember how few adults even can distinguish between the two versions of similar sayings in St. Matthew's and St. Luke's Gospels. The criticism, which touches us all in a very tender spot, is interesting for another reason. The learning of Gladstone was, like his scholarship, an alluvial deposit rather than the bed-rock that he and the wider public fancied each to be. This fact may serve to introduce perhaps the best general criticism in Macaulay's essay: "When he says that he is where he was, he means only that he has moved at the same rate with all around him."

The criticism proved to be prophetic, and the movement of Gladstone's opinions, the shifting grounds of which he was aware, encouraged his tendency to parenthesis and qualification. There was more logic than is usually admitted in his claim for verbal consistency. His qualifications allowed room for more interpretations than one, and he was never more delighted than when he was referred to some previous statement. This, once his political nonage was passed, would always bear scrutiny because he always shunned directly to commit himself. The involutions of his parenthetical style made his remarks hard to memorise accurately, and, again and again, when some opponent rose triumphantly in a newspaper or in debate to recall a former statement now apparently being contradicted, he was convicted of having overlooked a saving adjective or exempting clause. The general drift had been remembered, but the grammatical reading of the text often allowed more inferences than one. The meaning, at first and afterwards, might indeed be doubtful: the formula could be defended either way. Bad phraseology, in the theological, literary, legal or technical sense, ceases to be bad if it has been designed to be of doubtful interpretation. Gladstone made a crutch of his intellectual crotchet, and, like all men clever enough so to do, was dangerous to his opponents in proportion as they thought him therefore at their mercy. In self-defence he became an adept at this art, and was eventually acclaimed a master of subtilty because he cultivated indefiniteness. It became impossible for him to make a direct statement at last.

To-day, when politicians are at pains to arrange a dispute between two sides opposed in principle to one another, the newspapers tell us that the officials are busy trying "to find a formula." The object of the formula is to obtain a settlement that shall leave the insoluble issue where it was. To "find a formula" has become the official solution of problems arising from collective bargaining both in trade and diplomacy. Its best disciple was Gladstone, the first of parliamentarians to appeal to the mass of electors between election times.

Finally, Macaulay made a certain diagnosis, also of value when we reconsider the ideas that Gladstone imbibed during his youth, accepted implicitly, and endeavoured to apply, or at least to preach, to the world growing up with him. "Mr. Gladstone's book" (Macaulay wrote) ... "is the measure of what a man can do to be left behind by the world." Since both men believed in progress, this verdict was severe, but it was certainly the verdict of the politicians. Gladstone, a shrewd judge of such opinion, promptly discarded his thesis. It was part of his humility not to be the last upholder of a losing cause. In the inimitable sincerity of his own words: "Providence directed that my mind should find its food in other pastures than those in which my youthfulness would have loved to seek it." On consideration he sees that between taking Holy Orders and a seat in the House there is little difference, for "reflection shows me that a political position is mainly valuable as instrumental for the good of the Church, and under this rule every question becomes one of detail only."

"I wish you to know," he wrote to his brother-in-law in 1840, "the state of total impotence to which I should be reduced if there were no echo to the accents of my own voice."