WILLIAM EfART GLADSTONE

Waikato Times, Volume 114, Issue 18986, 1 July 1933, Page 13 (Supplement)

WILLIAM EfART GLADSTONE

(By Desmond MacCarthy NEARLY TWENTY YEARS AGO I xvrote a short article on "The G.0.M." It was "A Portrait” intended to supply flrst-aid to the imagination in conceiving him "Not a few of my contempoI wrote then, “have half-forgotten or misremember ‘ dauntless old man. . . “As for the youngest generation, . . the y ever think of Gladstone, I am sure they think of him only as a typical Victorian—pompous, prolix, and ‘pi’; as a public character with nothing in him but platform, emotions and a remarkably infectious power of self-decep-tion; as a man with marvellous aptitudes and energy, no doubt, but who, as a personality or a political thinker, was little better than a yawning emptiness. . . When once he had vanished from hearing and sight, then the portraits of him which Disraeli and other opponents had laboured in vain—while he lived —to Paint Upon the General Imagination, began to gather plausibility—the portraits of him as one ‘intoxicated with the exuberance of his own verbosity,’ as ‘an unconscious hypocrite,’ or simply as ‘an old man in a hurry.’ . . . After his death the ironic, commonsense, negative spirits began to have It all their own way. Once the flame was out they could hold up the empty lantern, and 10l It seemed, sure enough, to have been only exceptionally pretentious in design. And they have, unfortunately, been since abetted in their work by some scribes and biographers, unconscious of what they were doing, who thought that the way to render Gladstone’s incandescence was to bleach him white.” I quote the above passage because it marks a moment in the vicissitudes of Gladstone's posthumous fame. These words were not at the time superfluous. When that period-making book, “Eminent Victorians,” appeared a year or two later, the essay on “The End of Gordon” contained the following magnificent., but to my mind misleading, passage on Gladstone: “Compared with Disraeli’s, his attitude towards life strikes one as that of an ingenuous child. His very egoism was simple-minded; Through All the Labyrinth of His Passions there ran a single thread. But the centre of the labyrinth? Ah I the threat might lead there, through those wandering mazes, at last. Only, with the last corner turned, the last step taken, the explorer might find that he was looking down into the gulf of a crater. The flame shot out on every side, scorching and brilliant, but in the midst there was a darkness.” Even as late as 1925, when Mr D. C. Somervell published his excellent and acute duo-biographical study, “Disraeli and Gladstone,” he could assert that the future (he was thinking of the interest of posterity in the two great antagonists) lay with the former. Dizzy had, for a time, two great advantages: he appealed to the literary imagination, for he was picturesque and romantically enigmatic, and he was a matchless phrase-maker. The last few years, however, have seen a marked recrudescence of interest in Gladstone. There is a change in the air, and it is favourable to him. A suspicion is creeping over many minds that humour and a literary imagination—great qualities though they be —are Not the Only Tests of Greatness, or the only qualities in human nature which make it interesting. Lately, in the Memoirs and Biographies of his contemporaries (with the exception of Buckle’s “Disraeli”), when Gladstone has crossed the page, we have been aware of a more respectful and marvelling attention. This has been as noticeable in the memoirs of opponents like Balfour, or in biographies like Mr Garvin’s "Chamberlain," as it has been in the recollections of civil servants like Lord Kilbracken. A number of books and essays about Gladstone have appeared during recent years: Masterman’s abbreviation of Morley’s “Life,” Hirst’s “Gladstone as Economist and Financier,” Lord Gladstone’s “After Thirty Years,” Osbert Burdett’s “Gladstone"—to mention a few. The last Is an interpretation mainly based on the central emptiness theory. The idea running through Mr Burdett’s book is that Gladstone was a man who needed corroboration from others before he could believe anything. This book may almost be said to be an expansion of a passage in Bagehot’s famous essay of 1860, where Bagehot comments on Gladstone’s own Description of the Orator's Temperament. “His work, from its very inception,” Gladstone had written, “is inextricably mixed up with practice. It is cast in the mould offered him by the mind of his hearers. It is an influence principally received from his audience (so to speak) in vapour, which he pours back in flood. The sympathy and concurrence of his time is, with his own mind, joint parent of his work, lie cannot follow or frame ideals; his choice is, to be what his age will have him, or else not to be at all.” (The oratorical temperament, by the bye, has never been better described.)

A GREAT VICTORIAN.

in the Sunday Times.) Bagehot went on to suggest that Gladstone’s mind was adaptive rather than independent. But, he continued, “he has—and it is one of the springs of great power—a real faith in the higher parts of human nature; he believes, with all his heart and soul and strength, that there is such a thing as truth; he has the soul of a martyr with the intellect of an advocate.” Now, Bagehot was writing at the moment when Gladstone was just entering on his period of originality as a financier and as a creator of public opinion. The Interpretation of His Career, Which still lay before him, as the result of an adaptive talent won’t'fit subsequent history. It explains that side of him which made him a great orator; it explains his long subservience to early influences —to Canning, Peel. But it does not explain the Gladstone who dominated Liberal politics of the later nineteenth .century. Nothing emerges more convincingly from Mr Francis Birrell’s short survey than the fact that Gladstone was a creator, not a follower of opinion. I wish to recommend this book as the best bird’seye view, as yet obtainable, of that long intricate life of political activity. It is not a portrait; it is not a “study." A portrait does emerge from its pages, but the author’s interest is primarily (as it should be) in what Gladstone accomplished and failed to accomplish; what he stood for and maintained during an Unparalleled and Chequered Career. That vehemence which a sixteenth-century writer called the perfervidum ingenium Scotorum does emerge. That spontaneiety of emotion, that impression of profound earnestness which raised him above ordinary statesmen, combined with a scholastic habit of intellect which led him to refine upon indistinguishables—a passion for splitting hairs, -so to speak, on a bald head—all these traits do emerge; also the steady passions of his life, hatred of war, extravagance, Imperial pride in possessions, and his faith in democracy. But the focus in this monograph nevertheless remains historical rather than personal. It has the merits of its form; concision and balance, and the reward of concision ana rapidity, an exciting liveliness. What Gladstone Gained and Lost by h-'s Convictions at different times is admirably set before us; and, without undue emphasis, we are also made aware of both of the 'occasions which tested his sincerity most severely, and the drama of circumstance. Readers of correspondence between Gladstone and Queen Victoria may be amused by this curious memorandum found among Gladstone’s papers:— “The force of resemblance really compels me to put a word on paper which I had not intended, which will •stand alone, and will never pass the door of my lips on its passage to the ear of any human being. “In the autumn of 1838 I made the gita of Sicily from Palermo to C.irgenli and the Syracuse or Messina in two or three weeks, riding on the back of a mule. The beast was wholly inaccessible to notes of kindness by voice or hand, and was disposed to lag, so that our muleteer, Michele, used to call out ‘Pugna Signor, Pugnal’—an unwelcome process of only momentary effect. But we rode usually with little interval from 6 a.m. to 4 p.m., and its Undemonstrative, Unsympathetic Servico was not inefflciently performed. In due time we arrived at Messina to take our departure from the island. There my mule and I of necessity parted company. “But I well remember having at the time a mental experience which was not wholly unlike a turn of indigestion. I had been on the back of the beast.for many scores of hours, it had done me no wrong; it had rendered me much valuable service, but it was in vain to argue; there was the fact staring me in the face. I could not get up the smallest shred of feeling for the brute—l could neither love nor like it. “A rule-of-three sum is all that is necessary to conclude with. What that Cicilian mule was to me I have been to the Queen; and the fortnight or three weeks are represented by fll'ty-two of fifty-three years." Note that he, not the Queen, is compared with the mule. There is a winning magnanimity about this private entry, for Gladstone had been deeply hurt by his chilly dismissal at Windsor in January, 1896, after more than fifty years of service. Who really respected the Queen most, Gladstone or his rival who called her “The Fairy” and “Laid Flattery on With a Trowel?” It shows too, that Gladstone had some humour, a quality we over-rate to-day. His own master quality was inconsistent with it, the power to make men feel that everything was of vital importance. But 'humour was latent as it was in Shelley. It might be a better world if more people understood what Shelley meant when ho said that he looked forward to the day 'Of the last joke.