Chapter VI: Characteristics (2)

If faith was one clue, then next to faith was growth. The fundamentals of Christian dogma, so far as I know and am entitled to speak, are the only region in which Mr. Gladstone's opinions have no history. Everywhere else we look upon incessant movement; in views about church and state, tests, national schools; in questions of economic and fiscal policy; in relations with party; in the questions of popular government--in every one of these wide spheres of public interest he passes from crisis to crisis. The dealings of church and state made the first of these marked stages in the history of his opinions and his life, but it was only the beginning.

I was born with smaller natural endowments than you, he wrote to
his old friend Sir Francis Doyle (1880), and I had also a narrower
early training. But my life has certainly been remarkable for the
mass of continuous and searching experience it has brought me ever
since I began to pass out of boyhood. I have been feeling my way;
owing little to living teachers, but enormously to four dead
ones[128] (over and above the four gospels). It has been experience
which has altered my politics. My toryism was accepted by me on
authority and in good faith; I did my best to fight for it. But if
you choose to examine my parliamentary life you will find that on
every subject as I came to deal with it practically, I had to deal
with it as a liberal elected in '32. I began with slavery in 1833,
and was commended by the liberal minister, Mr. Stanley. I took to
colonial subjects principally, and in 1837 was commended for
treating them liberally by Lord Russell. Then Sir R. Peel carried
me into trade, and before I had been six months in office, I wanted
to resign because I thought his corn law reform insufficient. In
ecclesiastical policy I had been a speculator; but if you choose to
refer to a speech of Sheil's in 1844 on the Dissenters' Chapels
bill,[129] you will find him describing me as predestined to be a
champion of religious equality. All this seems to show that I have
changed under the teaching of experience.

And much later he wrote of himself:--

The stock in trade of ideas with which I set out on the career of
parliamentary life was a small one. I do not think the general
tendencies of my mind were even in the time of my youth illiberal.
It was a great accident that threw me into the anti-liberal
attitude, but having taken it up I held to it with energy. It was
the accident of the Reform bill of 1831. For teachers or idols or
both in politics I had had Mr. Burke and Mr. Canning. I followed
them in their dread of reform, and probably caricatured them as a
raw and unskilled student caricatures his master. This one idea on
which they were anti-liberal became the master-key of the
situation, and absorbed into itself for the time the whole of
politics. This, however, was not my only disadvantage. I had been
educated in an extremely narrow churchmanship, that of the
evangelical party. This narrow churchmanship too readily embraced
the idea that the extension of representative principles, which was
then the essential work of liberalism, was associated with
irreligion; an idea quite foreign to my older sentiment on behalf
of Roman catholic emancipation. (_Autobiographic note, July 22,
1894_.)

VII

LIMITATIONS OF INTEREST

Notwithstanding his humility, his willingness within a certain range to learn, his profound reverence for what he took for truth, he was no more ready than many far inferior men to discern a certain important rule of intellectual life that was expressed in a quaint figure by one of our old English sages. 'He is a wonderful man,' said the sage, 'that can thread a needle when he is at cudgels in a crowd; and yet this is as easy as to find Truth in the hurry of disputation.'[130] The strenuous member of parliament, the fervid minister fighting the clauses of his bill, the disputant in cabinet, when he passed from man of action to the topics of balanced thought, nice scrutiny, long meditation, did not always succeed in getting his thread into the needle's eye.

As to the problems of the metaphysician, Mr. Gladstone showed little curiosity. Nor for abstract discussion in its highest shape--for investigation of ultimate propositions--had he any of that power of subtle and ingenious reasoning which was often so extraordinary when he came to deal with the concrete, the historic, and the demonstrable. A still more singular limitation on the extent of his intellectual curiosity was hardly noticed at this early epoch. The scientific movement, which along with the growth of democracy and the growth of industrialism formed the three propelling forces of a new age,--was not yet developed in all its range. The astonishing discoveries in the realm of natural science, and the philosophic speculations that were built upon them, though quite close at hand, were still to come. Darwin's _Origin of Species_, for example, was not given to the world until 1859. Mr. Gladstone watched these things vaguely and with misgiving; instinct must have told him that the advance of natural explanation, whether legitimately or not, would be in some degree at the expense of the supernatural. But from any full or serious examination of the details of the scientific movement he stood aside, safe and steadfast within the citadel of Tradition.

He was once asked to subscribe to a memorial of Tyndale, the translator of the Bible,[131] and he put his refusal upon grounds that show one source at least of his scruple about words. He replies that he has been driven to a determination to renounce all subscriptions for the commemoration of ancient worthies, as he finds that he cannot signify gratitude for services rendered, without being understood to sanction all that they have said or done, and thus becoming involved in controversy or imputation about them. 'I am often amazed,' he goes on, 'at the construction put upon my acts and words; but experience has shown me that they are commonly put under the microscope, and then found to contain all manner of horrors, like the animalcules in Thames water.' This microscope was far too valuable an instrument in the contentions of party, ever to be put aside; and the animalcules, duly magnified to the frightful size required, were turned into first-rate electioneering agents. Even without party microscopes, those who feel most warmly for Mr. Gladstone's manifold services to his country, may often wish that he had inscribed in letters of gold over the door of the Temple of Peace, a certain sentence from the wise oracles of his favourite Butler. 'For the conclusion of this,' said the bishop, 'let me just take notice of the danger of over-great refinements; of going beside or beyond the plain, obvious first appearances of things, upon the subject of morals and religion.'[132] Nor would he have said less of politics. It is idle to ignore in Mr. Gladstone's style an over-refining in words, an excess of qualifying propositions, a disproportionate impressiveness in verbal shadings without real difference. Nothing irritated opponents more. They insisted on taking literary sin for moral obliquity, and because men could not understand, they assumed that he wished to mislead. Yet if we remember how carelessness in words, how the slovenly combination under the same name of things entirely different, how the taking for granted as matter of positive proof what is at the most only possible or barely probable--when we think of all the mischief and folly that has been wrought in the world by loose habits of mind that are almost as much the master vice of the head as selfishness is the master vice of the heart, men may forgive Mr. Gladstone for what passed as sophistry and subtlety, but was in truth scruple of conscience in that region where lack of scruple half spoils the world.

VERBAL REFINING

This peculiar trait was connected with another that sometimes amused friends, but always exasperated foes. Among the papers is a letter from an illustrious man to Mr. Gladstone--wickedly no better dated by the writer than 'Saturday,' and no better docketed by the receiver than 'T. B. Macaulay, March 1,'--showing that Mr. Gladstone was just as energetic, say in some year between 1835 and 1850, in defending the entire consistency between a certain speech of the dubious date and a speech in 1833, as he ever afterwards showed himself in the same too familiar process. In later times he described himself as a sort of purist in what touches the consistency of statesmen. 'Change of opinion,' he said, 'in those to whose judgment the public looks more or less to assist its own, is an evil to the country, although a much smaller evil than their persistence in a course which they know to be wrong. It is not always to be blamed. But it is always to be watched with vigilance; always to be challenged and put upon its trial.'[133] To this challenge in his own case--and no man of his day was half so often put upon his trial for inconsistency--he was always most easily provoked to make a vehement reply. In that process Mr. Gladstone's natural habit of resort to qualifying words, and his skill in showing that a new attitude could be reconciled by strict reasoning with the logical contents of old dicta, gave him wonderful advantage. His adversary, as he strode confidently along the smooth grass, suddenly found himself treading on a serpent; he had overlooked a condition, a proviso, a word of hypothesis or contingency, that sprang from its ambush and brought his triumph to naught on the spot. If Mr. Gladstone had only taken as much trouble that his hearers should understand exactly what it was that he meant, as he took trouble afterwards to show that his meaning had been grossly misunderstood, all might have been well. As it was, he seemed to be completely satisfied if he could only show that two propositions, thought by plain men to be directly contradictory, were all the time capable on close construction of being presented in perfect harmony. As if I had a right to look only to what my words literally mean or may in good logic be made to mean, and had no concern at all with what the people meant who used the same words, or with what I might have known that my hearers were all the time supposing me to mean. Hope-Scott once wrote to him (November 24, 1841): 'We live in a time in which accurate distinctions, especially in theology, are absolutely unconsidered. The "common sense" or general tenor of questions is what alone the majority of men are guided by. And I verily believe that semi-arian confessions or any others turning upon nicety of thought and expression, would be for the most part considered as fitter subjects for scholastic dreamers than for earnest Christians.' In politics at any rate, Bishop Butler was wiser.

The explanation of what was assailed as inconsistency is perhaps a double one. In the first place he started on his journey with an intellectual chart of ideas and principles not adequate or well fitted for the voyage traced for him by the spirit of his age. If he held to the inadequate ideas with which Oxford and Canning and his father and even Peel had furnished him, he would have been left helpless and useless in the days stretching before him. The second point is that the orator of Mr. Gladstone's commanding school exists by virtue of large and intense expression; then if circumstances make him as vehement for one opinion to-day as he was vehement for what the world regards as a conflicting opinion yesterday, his intellectual self-respect naturally prompts him to insist that the opinions do not really clash, but are in fact identical. You may call this a weakness if you choose, and it certainly involved Mr. Gladstone in much unfruitful and not very edifying exertion; but it is at any rate better than the front of brass that takes any change of opinion for matter-of-course expedient, as to which the least said will be soonest mended. And it is better still than the disastrous self-consciousness that makes a man persist in a foolish thing to-day, because he chanced to say or do a foolish thing yesterday.

VIII

MINOR MORALS

In this period of his life, with the battle of the world still to come, Mr. Gladstone to whose grave temperament everything, little or great, was matter of deliberate reflection, of duty and scruple, took early note of minor morals as well as major. Characteristically he found some fault with a sermon of Dr. Wordsworth's upon Saint Barnabas, for

hardly pushing the argument for the connection of good manners with
Christianity to the full extent of which it is fairly capable. The
whole system of legitimate courtesy, politeness, and refinement is
surely nothing less than one of the genuine though minor and often
unacknowledged results of the gospel scheme. All the great moral
qualities or graces, which in their large sphere determine the
formation and habits of the Christian soul as before God, do also
on a smaller scale apply to the very same principles in the common
intercourse of life, and pervade its innumerable and separately
inappreciable particulars; and the result of this application is
that good breeding which distinguishes Christian civilisation.
(March 31, 1844.)

It is not for us to discuss whether the breeding of Plato or Cicero or the Arabs of Cordova was better or worse than the breeding of the eastern bishops at Nicæa or Ephesus. Good manners, we may be sure, hardly have a single master-key, unless it be simplicity, or freedom from the curse of affectation. What is certain is that nobody of his time was a finer example of high good manners and genuine courtesy than Mr. Gladstone himself. He has left a little sheaf of random jottings which, without being subtle or recondite, show how he looked on this side of human things. Here is an example or two:--

There are a class of passages in Mr. Wilberforce's _Journals_,
_e.g._, some of those recording his successful speeches, which
might in many men be set down to vanity, but in him are more fairly
I should think ascribable to a singlemindedness which did not
inflate. Surely with _most_ men it is the safest rule, to make
scanty records of success achieved, and yet more rarely to notice
praise, which should pass us like the breeze, enjoyed but not
arrested. There must indeed be some sign, a stone as it were set
up, to remind us that such and such were occasions for
thankfulness; but should not the memorials be restricted wholly and
expressly for this purpose? For the fumes of praise are rapidly and
fearfully intoxicating; it comes like a spark to the tow if once
we give it, as it were, admission within us. (1838.)

There are those to whom vanity brings more of pain than of
pleasure; there are also those whom it oftener keeps in the
background, than thrusts forward. The same man who to-day
volunteers for that which he is not called upon to do, may
to-morrow flinch from his obvious duty from one and the same
cause,--vanity, or regard to the appearance he is to make, for its
own sake, and perhaps that vanity which shrinks is a more subtle
and far-sighted, a more ethereal, a more profound vanity than that
which presumes. (1842.)

A question of immense importance meets us in ethical inquiries, as
follows: is there a sense in which it is needful, right, and
praiseworthy, that man should be much habituated to look back upon
himself and keep his eye upon himself; a self-regard, and even a
self-respect, which are compatible with the self-renunciation and
self-distrust which belong to Christianity? In the observance of a
single distinction we shall find, perhaps, a secure and sufficient
answer. We are to respect our responsibilities, not ourselves. We
are to respect the duties of which we are capable, but not our
capabilities simply considered. There is to be no complacent
self-contemplation, beruminating upon self. When self is viewed, it
must always be in the most intimate connection with its purposes.
How well were it if persons would be more careful, or rather, more
conscientious, in paying compliments. How often do we delude
another, in subject matter small or great, into the belief that he
has done well what we know he has done ill, either by silence, or
by so giving him praise on a particular point as to _imply_
approbation of the whole. Now it is undoubtedly difficult to
observe politeness in all cases compatibly with truth; and
politeness though a minor duty is a duty still. (1838.)

If truth permits you to praise, but binds you to praise with a
qualification, observe how much more acceptably you will speak, if
you put the qualification first, than if you postpone it. For
example: 'this is a good likeness; but it is a hard painting,' is
surely much less pleasing, than 'this is a hard painting; but it is
a good likeness.' The qualification is generally taken to be more
genuinely the sentiment of the speaker's mind, than the main
proposition; and it carries ostensible honesty and manliness to
propose first what is the less acceptable. (1835-6.)

IX

SPIRIT OF SUBMISSION

To go back to Fénelon's question about his own foundation. 'The great work of religion,' as Mr. Gladstone conceived it, was set out in some sentences of a letter written by him to Mrs. Gladstone in 1844, five years after they were married. In these sentences we see that under all the agitated surface of a life of turmoil and contention, there flowed a deep composing stream of faith, obedience, and resignation, that gave him, in face of a thousand buffets, the free mastery of all his resources of heart and brain:--

_To Mrs. Gladstone._

13 _C.H. Terrace, Sunday evening, Jan. 21, 1844._--Although I have
carelessly left at the board of trade with your other letters that
on which I wished to have said something, yet I am going to end
this day of peace by a few words to show that what you said did not
lightly pass away from my mind. There is a beautiful little
sentence in the works of Charles Lamb concerning one who had been
afflicted: 'he gave his heart to the Purifier, and his will to the
Sovereign Will of the Universe.'[134] But there is a speech in the
third canto of the _Paradiso_ of Dante, spoken by a certain
Piccarda, which is a rare gem. I will only quote this one line:

_In la sua volontade è nostra pace._[135]

The words are few and simple, and yet they appear to me to have an
inexpressible majesty of truth about them, to be almost as if they
were spoken from the very mouth of God. It so happened that (unless
my memory much deceives me) I first read that speech on a morning
early in the year 1836, which was one of trial. I was profoundly
impressed and powerfully sustained, almost absorbed, by these
words. They cannot be too deeply graven upon the heart. In short,
what we all want is that they should not come to us as an
admonition from without, but as an instinct from within. They
should not be adopted by effort or upon a process of proof, but
they should be simply the translation into speech of the habitual
tone to which all tempers, affections, emotions, are set. In the
Christian mood, which ought never to be intermitted, the sense of
this conviction should recur spontaneously; it should be the
foundation of all mental thoughts and acts, and the measure to
which the whole experience of life, inward and outward, is
referred. The final state which we are to contemplate with hope,
and to seek by discipline, is that in which our will shall be _one_
with the will of God; not merely shall submit to it, not merely
shall follow after it, but shall live and move with it, even as the
pulse of the blood in the extremities acts with the central
movement of the heart. And this is to be obtained through a double
process; the first, that of checking, repressing, quelling the
inclination of the will to act with reference to self as a centre;
this is to mortify it. The second, to cherish, exercise, and expand
its new and heavenly power of acting according to the will of God,
first, perhaps, by painful effort in great feebleness and with many
inconsistencies, but with continually augmenting regularity and
force, until obedience become a necessity of second nature....

Resignation is too often conceived to be merely a submission not
unattended with complaint to what we have no power to avoid. But it
is less than the whole of a work of a Christian. Your full triumph
as far as that particular occasion of duty is concerned will be to
find that you not merely repress inward tendencies to murmur--but
that you would not if you could alter what in any matter God has
plainly willed.... Here is the great work of religion; here is the
path through which sanctity is attained, the highest sanctity; and
yet it is a path evidently to be traced in the course of our daily
duties....

When we are thwarted in the exercise of some innocent, laudable,
and almost sacred affection, as in the case, though its scale be
small, out of which all of this has grown, Satan has us at an
advantage, because when the obstacle occurs, we have a sentiment
that the feeling baffled is a right one, and in indulging a
rebellious temper we flatter ourselves that we are merely as it
were indulgent on behalf, not of ourselves, but of a duty which we
have been interrupted in performing. But our duties can take care
of themselves when God calls us away from any of them.... To be
able to relinquish a duty upon command shows a higher grace than to
be able to give up a mere pleasure for a duty....

RESPONSIBILITY FOR GIFTS

The resignation thus described with all this power and deep feeling is, of course, in one form of thoughts and words, of symbol and synthesis, or another, the foundation of all the great systems of life. A summary of Mr. Gladstone's interpretation of it is perhaps found in a few words used by him of Blanco White, a heterodox writer whose strange spiritual fortunes painfully interested and perplexed him. 'He cherished,' says Mr. Gladstone, 'with whatever associations, the love of God, and maintained resignation to His will, even when it appears almost impossible to see how he could have had a dogmatic belief in the existence of a divine will at all. There was, in short [in Blanco White], a disposition _to resist the tyranny of self; to recognise the rule of duty; to maintain the supremacy of the higher over the lower parts of our nature_.'[136] This very disposition might with truth no less assured have been assigned to the writer himself. These three bright crystal laws of life were to him like pointer stars guiding a traveller's eye to the celestial pole by which he steers.

When all has been said of a man's gifts, the critical question still stands over, how he regards his responsibility for using them. Once in a conversation with Mr. Gladstone, some fifty years from the epoch of this present chapter, we fell upon the topic of ambition. 'Well,' he said, 'I do not think that I can tax myself in my own life with ever having been much moved by ambition.' The remark so astonished me that, as he afterwards playfully reported to a friend, I almost jumped up from my chair. We soon shall reach a stage in his career when both remark and surprise may explain themselves. We shall see that if ambition means love of power or fame for the sake of glitter, decoration, external renown, or even dominion and authority on their own account--and all these are common passions enough in strong natures as well as weak--then his view of himself was just. I think he had none of it. Ambition in a better sense, the motion of a resolute and potent genius to use strength for the purposes of strength, to clear the path, dash obstacles aside, force good causes forward--such a quality as that is the very law of the being of a personality so vigorous, intrepid, confident, and capable as his.

FOOTNOTES:

[112] Hawarden Grammar School, Sept. 19, 1877.

[113] Mr. Gladstone on Lord Houghton's _Life_; _Speaker_, Nov. 29, 1890.

[114] _Gleanings_, vii. p. 133.

[115] _Homeric Studies_, vol. iii.

[116] Book ii. § 89, 363.

[117] Non enim solum acuenda nobis neque procudenda lingua est, sed onerandum complendumque pectus maximarum rerum et plurimarum suavitate, copia, varietate. Cicero, _De Orat._, iii. § 30.

[118] _The British Senate_, by James Grant, vol. ii. pp. 88-92.

[119] _Anatomy of Parliament_, November 1840. 'Contemporary Orators,' in _Fraser's Magazine_.

[120] Lord Lansdowne to Senior (1855), in Mrs. Simpson's _Many Memories_, p. 226.

[121] Malmesbury, _Memoirs of an Ex-Minister_, i. p. 155.

[122] _Life of Archbishop Benson_, ii. p. 11.

[123] The noble anti-slavery movement must be excepted, for it was very directly connected with evangelicalism.

[124] Paruta, i. p. 64.

[125] 'Blest statesman he, whose mind's unselfish will' (1838).--Knight's _Wordsworth_, viii. p. 101.

[126] The first chapter in Sir Henry Taylor's _Notes from Life_ (1847).

[127] Marcus Aurelius, ix. p. 29.

[128] Aristotle, Augustine, Dante, Butler. 'My four "doctors,"' he tells Manning, 'are doctors to the speculative man; would they were such to the practical too!'

[129] See below, p. 323.

[130] Glanville's _Vanity of Dogmatising_.

[131] See Shaftesbury's _Life_, iii. p. 495. He refused to be on a committee for a memorial to Thirlwall. (1875.)

[132] First Sermon, _Upon Compassion_.

[133] _Gleanings_, vii. p. 100, 1868.

[134] _Rosamund Gray_, chap. xi.

[135] Mr. Gladstone's rendering of the speech of Piccarda (_Paradiso_, iii. 70) is in the volume of collected translations (p. 165), under the date of 1835:

'In His Will is our peace. To this all things
By Him created, or by Nature made,
As to a central Sea, self-motion brings.'

[136] _Gleanings_, ii. p. 20, 1845.