Chapter I: The Morrow Of Defeat. (1886-1887)

Charity rendereth a man truly great, enlarging his mind into a
vast circumference, and to a capacity nearly infinite; so that it
by a general care doth reach all things, by an universal affection
doth embrace and grace the world.... Even a spark of it in
generosity of dealing breedeth admiration; a glimpse of it in
formal courtesy of behaviour procureth much esteem, being deemed
to accomplish and adorn a man.—BARROW.

I

After the rejection of his Irish policy in the summer of 1886, Mr. Gladstone had a period of six years before him, the life of the new parliament. Strangely dramatic years they were, in some respects unique in our later history. The party schism among liberals grew deeper and wider. The union between tories and seceders became consolidated and final. The alternative policy of coercion was passed through parliament in an extreme form and with violent strain on the legislative machinery, and it was carried out in Ireland in a fashion that pricked the consciences of many thousands of voters who had resisted the proposals of 1886. A fierce storm rent the Irish phalanx in two, and its leader vanished from the field where for sixteen years he had fought so bold and uncompromising a fight. During this period Mr. Gladstone stood in the most trying of all the varied positions of his life, and without flinching he confronted it in the strong faith that the national honour as well as the assuagement (M128) of the inveterate Irish wound in the flank of his country, were the issues at stake.

This intense pre-occupation in the political struggle did not for a single week impair his other interests, nor stay his ceaseless activity in controversies that were not touched by politics. Not even now, when the great cause to which he had so daringly committed himself was in decisive issue, could he allow it to dull or sever what had been the standing concerns of life and thought to him for so long a span of years. As from his youth up, so now behind the man of public action was the diligent, eager, watchful student, churchman, apologist, divine. And what is curious and delightful is that he never set a more admirable example of the tone and temper in which literary and religious controversy should be conducted, than in these years when in politics exasperation was at its worst. It was about this time that he wrote: “Certainly one of the lessons life has taught me is that where there is known to be a common object, the pursuit of truth, there should also be a studious desire to interpret the adversary in the best sense his words will fairly bear; to avoid whatever widens the breach; and to make the most of whatever tends to narrow it. These I hold to be part of the laws of knightly tournament.” And to these laws he sedulously conformed. Perhaps at some happy time before the day of judgment they may be transferred from the tournament to the battle-fields of philosophy, criticism, and even politics.

II

After the defeat in which his tremendous labours had for the moment ended, he made his way to what was to him the most congenial atmosphere in the world, to the company of Döllinger and Acton, at Tegernsee in Bavaria. “Tegernsee,” Lord Acton wrote to me (Sept. 7), “is an out-of-the-way place, peaceful and silent, and as there is a good library in the house, I have taken some care of his mind, leading in the direction of little French comedies, and away from the tragedy of existence. It has done him good, and he has just started with Döllinger to climb a high mountain in the neighbourhood.”

_To Mrs. Gladstone._

_Tegernsee, Aug. 28, 1886._—We found Döllinger reading in the
garden. The course of his life is quite unchanged. His
constitution does not appear at all to have given way. He beats me
utterly in standing, but that is not saying much, as it never was
one of my gifts; and he is not conscious (eighty-seven last
February) of any difficulty with the heart in going up hill. His
deafness has increased materially, but not so that he cannot carry
on very well conversation with a single person. We have talked
much together even on disestablishment which he detests, and
Ireland as to which he is very apprehensive, but he never seems to
shut up his mind by prejudice. I had a good excuse for giving him
my pamphlet,(213) but I do not know whether he will tell us what
he thinks of it. He was reading it this morning. He rises at six
and breakfasts alone. Makes a _good_ dinner at two and has nothing
more till the next morning. He does not appear after dark. On the
whole one sees no reason why he should not last for several years
yet.

“When Dr. Döllinger was eighty-seven,” Mr. Gladstone wrote later, “he walked with me seven miles across the hill that separates the Tegernsee from the next valley to the eastward. At that time he began to find his sleep subject to occasional interruptions, and he had armed himself against them by committing to memory the first three books of the _Odyssey_ for recital.”(214) Of Mr. Gladstone Döllinger had said in 1885, “I have known Gladstone for thirty years, and would stand security for him any day; his character is a very fine one, and he possesses a rare capability for work. I differ from him in his political views on many points, and it is difficult to convince him, for he is clad in triple steel.”(215)

Another high personage in the Roman catholic world sent him letters through Acton, affectionately written and with signs of serious as well as sympathising study of his Irish policy. A little later (Sept. 21) Mr. Gladstone writes to his wife at Hawarden:—

Bishop Strossmayer may make a journey all the way to Hawarden, and
it seems that Acton may even accompany him, which would make it
much more manageable. His coming would be a great compliment, and
cannot be discouraged or refused. It would, however, be a serious
affair, for he speaks no language with which as a spoken tongue we
are familiar, his great cards being Slavonic and Latin.
Unfortunately I have a very great increase of difficulty in
_hearing_ the words in foreign tongues, a difficulty which I hope
has hardly begun with you as yet.

Like a good host, Lord Acton kept politics out of his way as well as he could, but some letter of mine “set him on fire, and he is full of ——’s blunder and of Parnell’s bill.” Parliamentary duty was always a sting to him, and by September 20 he was back in the House of Commons, speaking on the Tenants Relief (Ireland) bill. Then to the temple of peace at Hawarden for the rest of the year, to read the _Iliad_ “for the twenty-fifth or thirtieth time, and every time richer and more glorious than before”; to write elaborately on Homeric topics; to receive a good many visitors; and to compose the admirable article on Tennyson’s second _Locksley Hall_. On this last let us pause for an instant. The moment was hardly one in which, from a man of nature less great and powerful than Mr. Gladstone, we should have counted on a buoyant vindication of the spirit of his time. He had just been roughly repulsed in the boldest enterprise of his career; his name was a target for infinite obloquy; his motives were largely denounced as of the basest; the conflict into which he had plunged and from which he could not withdraw was hard; friends had turned away from him; he was old; the issue was dubious and dark. Yet the personal, or even what to him were the national discomfitures of the hour, were not allowed to blot the sun out of the heavens. His whole soul rose in challenge against the tragic tones of Tennyson’s poem, as he recalled the solid tale of the vast improvements, the enormous mitigation of the sorrows and burdens of mankind, that had been effected in the land by public opinion and public authority, operative in the exhilarating sphere of self-government during the sixty years between the first and second _Locksley Hall_.

The sum of the matter seems to be that upon the whole, and in a
degree, we who lived fifty, sixty, seventy years back, and are
living now, have lived into a gentler time; that the public
conscience has grown more tender, as indeed was very needful; and
that in matters of practice, at sight of evils formerly regarded
with indifference or even connivance, it now not only winces but
rebels; that upon the whole the race has been reaping, and not
scattering; earning and not wasting; and that without its being
said that the old Prophet is wrong, it may be said that the young
Prophet was unquestionably right.

Here is the way in which a man of noble heart and high vision as of a circling eagle, transcends his individual chagrins. All this optimism was the natural vein of a statesman who had lived a long life of effort in persuading opinion in so many regions, in overcoming difficulty upon difficulty, in content with a small reform where men would not let him achieve a great one, in patching where he could not build anew, in unquenchable faith, hope, patience, endeavour. Mr. Gladstone knew as well as Tennyson that “every blessing has its drawbacks, and every age its dangers”; he was as sensitive as Tennyson or Ruskin or any of them, to the implacable tragedy of industrial civilisation—the city children “blackening soul and sense in city slime,” progress halting on palsied feet “among the glooming alleys,” crime and hunger casting maidens on the street, and all the other recesses of human life depicted by the poetic prophet in his sombre hours. But the triumphs of the past inspired confidence in victories for the future, and meanwhile he thought it well to remind Englishmen that “their country is still young as well as old, and that in these latest days it has not been unworthy of itself.”(216)

On his birthday he enters in his diary:—

_Dec. 29, 1886._—This day in its outer experience recalls the
Scotch usage which would say, “terrible pleasant.” In spite of the
ruin of telegraph wires by snow, my letters and postal arrivals of
to-day have much exceeded those of last year. Even my share of the
reading was very heavy. The day was gone before it seemed to have
begun, all amidst stir and festivity. The estimate was nine
hundred arrivals. O for a birthday of recollection. It is long
since I have had one. There is so much to say on the soul’s
history, but bracing is necessary to say it, as it is for reading
Dante. It has been a year of shock and strain. I think a year of
some progress; but of greater absorption in interests which,
though profoundly human, are quite off the line of an old man’s
direct preparation for passing the River of Death. I have not had
a chance given me of creeping from this whirlpool, for I cannot
abandon a cause which is so evidently that of my fellow-men, and
in which a particular part seems to be assigned to me. Therefore
am I not disturbed “though the hills be carried into the middle of
the sea.”

III

_To Lord Acton._

_Hawarden, Jan. 13, 1887._—It is with much pleasure that I read
your estimate of Chamberlain. His character is remarkable, as are
in a very high degree his talents. It is one of my common sayings
that to me characters of the political class are the most
mysterious of all I meet, so that I am obliged to travel the road
of life surrounded by an immense number of judgments more or less
in suspense, and getting on for practical purposes as well as I
can.

I have with a clear mind and conscience not only assented to but
promoted the present conferences, and I had laboured in that sense
long before Mr. Chamberlain made his speech at Birmingham. It will
surprise as well as grieve me if they do harm; if indeed they do
not do some little good. Large and final arrangements, it would be
rash I think to expect.

The tide is flowing, though perhaps not rapidly, in our favour.
Without our lifting a finger, a crumbling process has begun in
both the opposite parties. “In quietness and in confidence shall
be your strength” is a blessed maxim, often applicable to
temporals as well as spirituals. I have indeed one temptation to
haste, namely, that the hour may come for me to say farewell and
claim my retirement; but inasmuch as I remain _in situ_ for the
Irish question only, I cannot be so foolish as to allow myself to
ruin by precipitancy my own purpose. Though I am writing a paper
on the Irish question for Mr. Knowles, it is no trumpet-blast, but
is meant to fill and turn to account a season of comparative
quietude.

The death of Iddesleigh has shocked and saddened us all. He was
full of excellent qualities, but had not the backbone and strength
of fibre necessary to restore the tone of a party demoralised by
his former leader. In gentleness, temper, sacrifice of himself to
the common purpose of his friends, knowledge, quickness of
perception, general integrity of intention, freedom from personal
aims, he was admirable.... I have been constantly struggling to
vindicate a portion of my time for the pursuits I want to follow,
but with very little success indeed. Some rudiments of Olympian
religion have partially taken shape. I have a paper ready for
Knowles probably in his March number on the Poseidon of Homer, a
most curious and exotic personage.... Williams and Norgate got me
the books I wanted, but alack for the time to read them! In
addition to want of time, I have to deplore my slowness in
reading, declining sight, and declining memory; all very serious
affairs for one who has such singular reason to be thankful as to
general health and strength.

I wish I could acknowledge duly or pay even in part your
unsparing, untiring kindness in the discharge of your engagements
as “Cook.” Come early to England—and stay long. We will try what
we can to bind you.

A few months later, he added to his multifarious exercises in criticism and controversy, a performance that attracted especial attention.(217) “Mamma and I,” he wrote to Mrs. Drew, “are each of us still separately engaged in a death-grapple with _Robert Elsmere_. I complained of some of the novels you gave me to read as too stiff, but they are nothing to this. It is wholly out of the common order. At present I regard with doubt and dread the idea of doing anything on it, but cannot yet be sure whether your observations will be verified or not. In any case it is a tremendous book.” And on April 1 (1888), he wrote, “By hard work I have finished and am correcting my article on _Robert Elsmere_. It is rather stiff work. I have had two letters from her. She is much to be liked personally, but is a fruit, I think, of what must be called Arnoldism.”

_To Lord Acton._

_Aston Clinton, Tring, Easter Day, April 1, ’88._—I do not like to
let too long a time elapse without some note of intercourse, even
though that season approaches which brings you back to the shores
of your country. Were you here I should have much to say on many
things; but I will now speak, or first speak, of what is
uppermost, and would, if a mind is like a portmanteau, be taken or
tumble out first.

You perhaps have not heard of _Robert Elsmere_, for I find without
surprise, that it makes its way slowly into public notice. It is
not far from twice the length of an ordinary novel; and the labour
and effort of reading it all, I should say, sixfold; while one
could no more stop in it than in reading Thucydides. The idea of
the book, perhaps of the writer, appears to be a movement of
retreat from Christianity upon Theism: a Theism with a Christ
glorified, always in the human sense, but beyond the ordinary
measure. It is worked out through the medium of a being—one ought
to say a character, but I withhold the word, for there is no
sufficient substratum of character to uphold the qualities—gifted
with much intellectual subtlety and readiness, and almost every
conceivable moral excellence. He finds vent in an energetic
attempt to carry his new gospel among the skilled artisans of
London, whom the writer apparently considers as supplying the
_norm_ for all right human judgment. He has extraordinary success,
establishes a new church under the name of the new Christian
brotherhood, kills himself with overwork, but leaves his project
flourishing in a certain “Elgood Street.” It is in fact (like the
Salvation Army), a new Kirche der Zukunft.

I am always inclined to consider this Theism as among the least
defensible of the positions alternative to Christianity. Robert
Elsmere who has been a parish clergyman, is upset entirely, as it
appears, by the difficulty of accepting miracles, and by the
suggestion that the existing Christianity grew up in an age
specially predisposed to them.

I want as usual to betray you into helping the lame dog over the
stile; and I should like to know whether you would think me
violently wrong in holding that the period of the Advent was a
period when the appetite for, or disposition to, the supernatural
was declining and decaying; that in the region of human thought,
speculation was strong and scepticism advancing; that if our Lord
were a mere man, armed only with human means, His whereabouts was
in this and many other ways misplaced by Providence; that the
gospels and the New Testament must have much else besides miracle
torn out of them, in order to get us down to the _caput mortuum_
of Elgood Street. This very remarkable work is in effect identical
with the poor, thin, ineffectual production published with some
arrogance by the Duke of Somerset, which found a quack remedy for
difficulties in what he considered the impregnable citadel of
belief in God.

Knowles has brought this book before me, and being as strong as it
is strange, it cannot perish still-born. I am tossed about with
doubt as to writing upon it.

_To Lord Acton._

_Oxford, April 8, ’88._—I am grateful for your most interesting
letter, which contains very valuable warnings. On the other side
is copied what I have written on two of the points raised by the
book. Have I said too much of the Academy? I have spoken only of
the first century. You refer to (apparently) about 250 A.D. as a
time of great progress? But I was astonished on first reading the
census of Christian clergy in Rome _temp._ St. Cyprian, it was so
slender. I am not certain, but does not Beugnot estimate the
Christians, before Constantine’s conversion, in the west at
one-tenth of the population? Mrs. T. Arnold died yesterday here.
Mrs. Ward had been summoned and she is coming to see me this
evening. It is a very singular phase of the controversy which she
has opened. When do you _repatriate_?

I am afraid that my kindness to the Positivists amounts only to a
comparative approval of their not dropping the great human
tradition out of view; _plus_ a very high appreciation of the
personal qualities of our friend ——.

_To Lord Acton._

_Dollis Hill, May 13, ’88._—Your last letter was one of extreme
interest. It raised such a multitude of points, after your perusal
of my article on R. Elsmere, as to stimulate in the highest degree
my curiosity to know how far you would carry into propositions,
the ideas which you for the most part obliquely put forward. I
gave the letter to Mary, who paid us a flying visit in London,
that she might take it to Hawarden for full digestion. For myself
I feed upon the hope that when (when ?) you come back to England
we may go over the points, and I may reap further benefits from
your knowledge. I will not now attempt anything of the kind. But I
will say this generally, that I am not so much oppressed as you
appear to be, with the notion that great difficulties have been
imported by the researches of scientists into the religious and
theological argument. As respects cosmogony and _geogony_, the
Scripture has, I think, taken much benefit from them. Whatever be
the date of the early books, Pentateuch or Hexateuch in their
present _edition_, the Assyriological investigations seem to me to
have fortified and accredited their substance by producing similar
traditions in variant forms inferior to the Mosaic forms, and
tending to throw them back to a higher antiquity, a fountainhead
nearer the source. Then there is the great chapter of the
Dispersal: which Renan (I think) treats as exhibiting the
marvellous genius (!) of the Jews. As to unbroken sequences in the
physical order, they do not trouble me, because we have to do not
with the natural but the moral order, and over this science, or as
I call it natural science, does not wave her sceptre. It is no
small matter, again (if so it be, as I suppose), that, after
warring for a century against miracle as unsustained by
experience, the assailants should now have to abandon that ground,
stand only upon sequence, and controvert the great facts of the
New Testament only by raising to an extravagant and unnatural
height the demands made under the law of testimony in order to
[justify] a rational belief. One admission has to be made, that
death did not come into the world by sin, namely the sin of Adam,
and this sits inconveniently by the declaration of Saint Paul.

Mrs. Ward wrote to thank me for the tone of my article. Her first
intention was to make some reply in the _Nineteenth Century_
itself. It appears that —— advised her not to do it. But Knowles
told me that he was labouring to bring her up to the scratch
again. There, I said, you show the cloven foot; you want to keep
the _Nineteenth Century_ pot boiling.

I own that your reasons for not being in England did not appear to
me cogent, but it would be impertinent to make myself a judge of
them. The worst of it was that you did not name _any_ date. But I
must assume that you are coming; and surely the time cannot now be
far. Among other things, I want to speak with you about French
novels, a subject on which there has for me been quite recently
cast a most lurid light.

Acton’s letters in reply may have convinced Mr. Gladstone that there were depths in this supreme controversy that he had hardly sounded; and adversaria that he might have mocked from a professor of the school or schools of unbelief, he could not in his inner mind make light of, when coming from the pen of a catholic believer. Before and after the article on _Robert Elsmere_ appeared, Acton, the student with his vast historic knowledge and his deep penetrating gaze, warned the impassioned critic of some historic point overstated or understated, some dangerous breach left all unguarded, some lack of nicety in definition. Acton’s letters will one day see the light, and the reader may then know how candidly Mr. Gladstone was admonished as to the excess of his description of the moral action of Christianity; as to the risk of sending modern questions to ancient answers, for the apologists of an age can only meet the difficulties of their age; that there are leaps and bounds in the history of thought; how well did Newman once say that in theology you have to meet questions that the Fathers could hardly have been made to understand; how if you go to St. Thomas or Leibnitz or Paley for rescue from Hegel or Haeckel your apologetics will be a record of disaster. You insist broadly, says Acton, on belief in the divine nature of Christ as the soul, substance, and creative force of Christian religion; you assign to it very much of the good the church has done; all this with little or no qualification or drawback from the other side:—

Enter Martineau or Stephen or —— (unattached), and loq.:—Is this
the final judgment of the chief of liberals? the pontiff of a
church whose fathers are the later Milton and the later Penn,
Locke, Bayle, Toland, Franklin, Turgot, Adam Smith, Washington,
Jefferson, Bentham, Dugald Stewart, Romilly, Tocqueville,
Channing, Macaulay, Mill? These men and others like them
disbelieved that doctrine established freedom, and they undid the
work of orthodox Christianity, they swept away that appalling
edifice of intolerance, tyranny, cruelty, which believers in
Christ built up to perpetuate their belief.

The philosophy of liberal history, Acton proceeds, which has to acknowledge the invaluable services of early Christianity, feels the anti-liberal and anti-social action of later Christianity, before the rise of the sects that rejected, some of them the divinity of Christ; others, the institutions of the church erected upon it. Liberalism if it admits these things as indifferent, surrenders its own _raison d’être_, and ceases to strive for an ethical cause. If the doctrine of Torquemada make us condone his morality, there can be no public right and no wrong, no political sin, no secular cause to die for. So it might be said that—

You do not work really from the principle of liberalism, but from
the cognate, though distinct principles of democracy, nationality,
progress, etc. To some extent, I fear, you will estrange valued
friends, not assuredly by any expression of theological belief,
but by seeming to ignore the great central problem of Christian
politics. If I had to put my own doubts, instead of the average
liberal’s, I should state the case in other words, but not
altogether differently.(218)