"Our two Governments," he wrote to an American periodical in 1878, "whatsoever they do, have to give reasons for it; not reasons which will convince the unreasonable, but reasons which, on the whole, will convince the average mind, and carry it unitedly forward in a course of action, often, though not always, wise, and carrying within itself provisions, where it is unwise, for the correction of its own unwisdom before it grow into an intolerable rankness.” Even for his opposition to war, studded as it was with Biblical quotations, he found the most eloquent arguments in the material good, and the resulting moral good, of the average man. His most glowing words have always been inspired, not by abstract dogmas, but by the feeling that an inevitable positive fact of material conditions was supporting him, whether or not that fact had yet brought itself to an entire coherence. One of the most convincing passages about war which Mr. Gladstone has left was written in an article on Tennyson, when, with a characteristic impulse to get away from the centre of his subject, he leaped upon some careless slur on peace: "As the most wicked mothers do not kill their offspring from a taste for the practice in the abstract, but under the pressure of want, and as war always brings home want to a larger circle of the people than feel it in peace, we ask the hero of Maud' to let us know whether war is more likely to reduce or to multiply the horrors which he denounces? Will more babies be poisoned amidst comparative ease and plenty, or when, as before the fall of Napoleon, provisions were twice as dear as they are now, and wages not more than half as high?" Was it Sir James Stephen who described the ideal set up by the prophets of material prosperity as "a lubberland of comfortable farmers"? No such fear troubled Mr. Gladstone. Sentiment, which he had in almost as large measure as he had energy, was early used to bring out the drama in the humble lives of mechanics and labourers. What was life to them? What would they think of a lubberland of comfortable farmers? A land with more food in it, with leisure to think and feel, did not seem to them like a lubberland. If Mr. Gladstone lacked some kinds of passion, he had a sea of vivid sentiment. Armed with that, he found in these lives all the drama, all the poetry, as he understood poetry, all the ethical importance, that any world could have. "Life," he has said, "is still as full of deep, of varied, of ecstatic, of harrowing interests as it ever was. The heart of man still beats and bounds, exults and suffers from causes which are only less salient and conspicuous because they are more mixed and diversified. It still undergoes every phase of emotion, and even, as seems probable, with a susceptibility which has increased and is increasing, and which has its index and outer form in the growing delicacy and complexities of the nervous system. Does any one believe that ever at any time there was a greater number of deaths referable to that comprehensive cause, a broken heart? Let none fear that his age, or any coming one, will extirpate the material of poetry."" To stand for the principle that the world belongs to the many, and that their interest is in peace, required courage and contempt for what many men value; but to go further, and stand for justice between nations, needed still more of the hero. If the artisan was as much a man as the noble, surely humanity did not end with political boundaries. Whatever else may be thought of stopping a war against a weaker people just when England was smarting with a defeat, the courage and grandeur of doing this for justice belong to a hero. The one blot on this part of his career has surely been wiped away. For years he used sophistry about the Crimean War, but in his latest references to it, at least, there is little ambiguity in his acknowledgment that he was wrong. The value of what Mr. Gladstone did to turn hostility into friendship is naturally felt especially by a person in my country at a time like this. A surprising change of feeling is now taking place in the United States. As the long indifference to politics which followed the Civil War is passing away, able men are turning from absorption in commerce to public life, and cheap demagogues are ceasing to be our only statesmen, as they were in the days when no political speech was complete without a bid for the Irish vote. As they look out upon the future, the best Americans turn toward Great Britain with the strongest hope. One by one the barriers between us and the rest of the world are falling. As our material interests spread over the world, we ask what other nations are to stand for the ideals that we stand for. There is but one answer, which seems to grow clearer every day. Had Mr. Gladstone not stood for magnanimity in the Alabama case these tendencies might have been retarded a hundred years. It was just twenty years ago that he published "Kin beyond Sea," saying fearlessly then what many say now. His casual inaccuracy about Jefferson Davis is remembered by few, and one of the reasons that make so many Americans hear the name of Mr. Gladstone with a thrill of emotion is that he has so long been a courageous and a forgiving friend; although, of course, to the mass of the American people he is merely the great champion of those ideals of liberty in which our own civilisation trusts. So long, and under such stirring circumstances, has Mr. Gladstone defended the belief that those principles which are just between men are just also between nations, that a few quotations can serve only as reminders of a hundred more : "Even the sense of duty to one's own country cannot have that moral completeness which is necessary for the entire development of human energies, unless the country which commands the services of her children has herself obeyed the higher laws of public right." "It is certain that a new law of nations is gradually taking hold of the mind, and coming to sway the practice of the world. . . . The greatest ... triumph of our time, a triumph in a region loftier than that of electricity and steam, will be the enthronement of this idea of Public Right as the governing idea of European policy, as the common and precious inheritance of all lands, but superior to the passing opinion of any. The foremost among the nations will be that one which by its conduct shall gradually engender in the minds of the others a fixed belief that it is just." "Partisans exulted in a diplomatic victory and in the increase of what is called our prestige, the bane, in my opinion, of all upright politics." It would be a distraction, in a study of the nature of the man, to discuss these ideas in themselves. They serve as a reminder, amidst the details of Mr. Gladstone's character, that he has fought for large spiritual principles which seem to be gaining on the world. Spirituality, indeed, is a quality that can be seen in the whole of his nature much more surely than morality or religion. He was always spiritualising material things. His human interest never lay far behind any detail, however technical. Of course this led a mind as impetuous as his to support particular propositions with sonorous and inapplicable human principles; but to the constant appeal to admitted spiritual truths he owed much of the influence which so aptly fitted the time and circumstances, especially among the people whose voice he chose to be. If this spiritual note, supported by such courage and impulsive sympathy, is somewhat over-emphasised when Mr. Gladstone is called the knight-errant of history, far more error is contained in the charge that his humanitarian impulses were at the service of his party. "No man," he once said, with unexaggerated truth, "has committed suicide so often as I have." Fox as he was, he was a hero, and, when his heroism was called for, he could fight his party and all the world. From the time when he seemingly killed his political future by a Quixotic resignation to the last hopeless challenge on the Irish question, he has responded with unflagging courage to truths which he thought vital. Against that immediate expediency which he obeyed so constantly, his larger feelings, once aroused, could always win. There was a time for opportunism and a time for simplicity. However mixed with other things, there lived in him much of that moral chivalry which, in defining aidos, he called the noblest of all the ethical indications of the Homeric poems. "It means honour," he says, "but never the base-born thing in these last times called prestige. It means duty, but duty shaped with a peculiar grace. It means reverence, and this without doubt is its chief element. It means chivalry; and though this word cannot be given as a good technical translation, it is perhaps nearer, in pith and marrow, to the Homeric aidos than any other word we know. But aidos excels it, as expressing the faculty of the mental eye turned ever inwards. Aidos is based upon a true self-respect, upon an ever-living consciousness of the nature that we bear, and of the obligation that we owe its laws." Like the times in which he lived, Mr. Gladstone learned as he progressed. His attitude, changing to meet the results of national experience, is not a surprising phenomenon from this side of the Atlantic. In the United States when our educated young men get their degrees they have a distant view of the conditions before them; but the deeper they live the more they accept the principles which guide the democratic tendencies of the time. "I was educated to regard liberty as an evil," says Mr. Gladstone; "I have learned to regard it as a good. That is a formula which sufficiently explains all the changes of my political convictions." What an expanse in the ideas of the world is measured when we look back as far as 1832 and hear these words: "As regards the abstract lawfulness of slavery, I acknowledge it simply as importing the right of one man to the labour of another; and I rest it upon the fact that Scripture, the paramount authority upon such a point, gives directions to the persons standing in the relation of master and slave for their conduct in the relation; whereas, were the matter absolutely and necessarily sinful, it would not regulate the manner." As the world has progressed, Mr. Gladstone has progressed, helping it onward by doing valiantly the work which it had almost decided upon. Opportunism with him meant, not that he would go anywhere with the tide, but that, his course being towards righteousness, subsidiary opinions were made to fit the moment. Mr. Lowell, as late as 1886, jotted down these lines: "His greatness not so much in Genius lies Probably many cultivated Englishmen are equally undiscriminating. Genius is a matter of definition. That of Mr. Gladstone is especially typical of our age. As the spiritual dogma of equality conquers the earth, many fine products of a different civilisation may be lost; but a genius which lies in the power to absorb abstract tendencies, political and economic theories, and execute them in practice-a genius for figures, work, and popular influence-is one of the forms of which evolution promises to make considerable use. To Mr. Gladstone's growth with his times there was one great exception. Probably the real cause of his persistency in theology was that it did not interfere with his usefulness, perhaps increased it. Had some great practical project of liberal advance called for the destruction of his creed, he would have destroyed it. He could, however, do all he needed to do by handling it adroitly. If he was right about Bradlaugh in spite of his creed, and wrong about divorce in accord with his creed, the explanation was that his real judgment was but slightly founded on dogmas He made no changes of theory to which the main current of his instinctive progress did not carry him, but he made all which that progress demanded. It was a harmless luxury to defend the old theology, a charming exercise for his logic as well as for his chivalry. This particular form of chivalry is not rare. Macaulay might have said, with equal accuracy, that "The Foundations, of Belief" was a valiant effort to run an aristocratic race against the rotation of the earth. The younger man uses a closer argument, but both retired behind the same breast works. "We live as men," says Mr. Gladstone, " in a labyrinth of problems, and of moral problems, from which there is no escape permitted us. The prevalence of pain and sin, the limitations of free will, approximating sometimes to its virtual extinction, the mysterious laws of our independence, the indeterminateness for most or many men of the discipline of life, the cross purposes that seem at so many points to traverse the dispensations of an Almighty benevolence, can only be encountered by a large, an almost immeasurable, suspense of judgment. Solution for them we have none." This suspense applies, in Mr. Gladstone's character, only to problems which do not demand solution, or in which any attainable solution would accomplish nothing practical. "It is," he says, "the inevitable impulse of genius to measure itself with genius, and to plunge boldly into the unknown." Mr. Gladstone's genius led him to caution while caution was possible, and to daring when the die was cast. He plunged into the unknown only when he saw what he wished to do, although he might not yet know why he wished to do it. What to do and how to do it he saw with distinctness, but in reasons he was more fertile than profound. In theology, therefore, where he undertook not projects but arguments, he never gained a victory. Probably the whole reccrd of his life contains nothing more futile than his reply when Professor Huxley convicted him of unfair quotation, and it is interesting to compare this feeble evasion with the thorough-going, even if inaccurate and ambiguous, apology for his famous indictment of Austria. In each case he gave what was necessary in the one case to befog the unwary, in the other to puzzle even the astute, and earn him, with many, a reputation for "magnificent indiscretion." In theology and politics alike he is dogmatic, but in one case the dogmas are handled feebly and in the other adroitly. He has cited Scripture against war a hundred times. Let us hear him talk about superannuated superstition when turning the other cheek is in question: "The old superstition of passive obedience and non-resistance, which has been a parasitic growth out of the peculiar incidents of the English Reformation, had speedily lost, after the Revolution, whatever it might theretofore have possessed of consistency or dignity. . . . This longevity VOL. LXXIV. D |