Mr. Gladstone sat for sixty-three years in Parliament,
and for more than twenty-six years was the leader of his party, and
therefore the central figure of English politics. As has been said, he began
as a high Tory, remained about fifteen years in that camp, was then led by
the split between Peel and the protectionists to take up an intermediate
position, and finally was forced to cast in his lot with the Liberals, for
in England, as in America, third parties seldom endure. No parliamentary
career in English annals is comparable to his for its length and variety;
and of those who saw its close in the House of Commons, there was only one
man, Mr. Villiers (who died in January, 1898), who could remember its
beginning. He had been opposed in 1833 to men who might have been his
grandfathers; he was opposed in 1893 to men who might have been his
grandchildren. In a sketch like this, it is impossible to describe or
comment on the events of such a life. All that can be done is to indicate
the more salient characteristics which a study of his career as a statesman
and a parliamentarian sets before us.
The most remarkable of these
characteristics is the sustained freshness, openness, eagerness of mind,
which he preserved down to the end of his life. Most of us, just as we make
few intimate friends, so we form few new opinions after thirty-five.
Intellectual curiosity may remain fresh and strong even after fifty, but its
range steadily narrows as one abandons the hope of attaining any thorough
knowledge of subjects other than those which make the main business of one's
life. One cannot follow the progress of all the new ideas that are set
afloat in the world. One cannot be always examining the foundations of one's
political or religious beliefs. Repeated disappointments and
disillusionments make a man expect less from changes the older he grows; and
mere indolence adds its influence in deterring us from entering upon new
enterprises. None of these causes seemed to affect Mr. Gladstone. He was as
much excited over a new book (such as Cardinal Manning's Life) at eighty-six
as when at fourteen he insisted on compelling little Arthur Stanley
(afterward Dean of Westminster, and then aged nine) to procure Gray's poems,
which he had just perused himself. His reading covered almost the whole
field of literature, except physical and mathematical science. While
frequently declaring that he must confine his political thinking and
leadership to a few subjects, he was so observant of the movements of
opinion that the course of talk brought up scarcely any topic in which he
did not seem to know what was the latest thing that had been said or done.
Neither the lassitude nor the prejudices common in old age prevented him
from giving a fair consideration to any new doctrines. But though his
intellect was restlessly at work, and though his eager curiosity disposed
him to relish novelties, except in theology, that bottom rock in his mind of
caution and reserve, which has already been referred to, made him refuse to
part with old views even when he was beginning to accept new ones. He
allowed both to "lie on the table" together, and while declaring his mind to
be open to conviction, he felt it safer to speak and act on the old lines
till the process of conviction had been completed. It took fourteen years,
from 1846 to 1860, to carry him from the Conservative into the Liberal camp.
It took five stormy years to bring him round to Irish home rule, though his
mind was constantly occupied with the subject from 1880 to 1885, and those
who watched him closely saw that the process had advanced some considerable
way even in 1881. And as regards ecclesiastical establishments, having
written a book in 1838 as a warm advocate of state churches, it was not till
1867 that he adopted the policy of disestablishment for Ireland, not till
1890 that he declared himself ready to apply it in Wales and Scotland also.
Both these qualities--his disposition to revise his opinions in the light of
new arguments and changing conditions, and the reticence he maintained till
the process of revision had been completed--exposed him to misconstruction.
Commonplace men, unwont to give serious scrutiny to their opinions, ascribed
his changes to self-interest, or at best regarded them as the index of an
unstable mind. Dull men could not understand why he should have forborne to
set forth all that was passing in his mind, and saw little difference
between reticence and dishonesty. Much of the suspicion and even fear with
which he was regarded, especially after 1885, arose from the idea that it
was impossible to predict what he would do next, and how far his openness of
mind would carry him. In so far as they tended to shake public confidence,
these characteristics injured him in his statesman's work, but the loss was
far outweighed by the gain. In a country where opinion is active and
changeful, where the economic conditions that legislation has to deal with
are in a state of perpetual flux, where the balance of power between the
upper and middle and poorer classes has been swiftly altering during the
last sixty years, no statesman can continue to serve the public if he
adheres obstinately to the views with which he started in life. He
must--unless, of course, he stands aloof in permanent opposition-- either
submit to advocate measures he secretly mislikes, or else must keep himself
always ready to learn from events, and to reconsider his opinions in the
light of emergent tendencies and insistent facts. Mr. Gladstone's pride as
well as his conscience forbade the former alternative; it was fortunate that
the inexhaustible activity of his intellect made the latter natural to him.
He was accustomed to say that the great mistake of his earlier views had
been in not sufficiently recognizing the worth and power of liberty, and the
tendency which things have to work out for good when left to themselves. The
application of this principle gave room for many developments, and many
developments there were. He may have wanted that prescience which is, after
integrity, the highest gift of a statesman, but which is almost impossible
to a man so pressed by the constant and engrossing occupations of an English
minister that he cannot find time for the patient study and thought from
which alone sound forecasts can issue. But he had the next best quality,
that of always learning from the events which passed under his eyes.
With
this singular openness and flexibility of mind, there went a not less
remarkable ingenuity and resourcefulness. His mind was fertile in
expedients, and still more fertile in reasonings by which to recommend the
expedients. This gift was often dangerous, for he was apt to be carried away
by the dexterity of his own dialectic, and to think schemes substantially
good in whose support he could muster so formidable an array of arguments.
He never seemed to be at a loss, in public or private, for a criticism, or
for an answer to the criticisms of others. If his power of adapting his own
mind to the minds of those whom he had to convince had been equal to the
skill and swiftness with which he accumulated a mass of matter persuasive to
those who looked at things in his own way, no one would have exercised so
complete a control over the political opinion of his time. But his mind had
not this power of adaptation. It moved on its own lines--peculiar lines,
which were often misconceived, even by those who sought to follow him most
loyally. Thus it happened that he was blamed for two opposite faults. Some,
pointing to the fact that he had frequently altered his views, denounced him
as a demagogue profuse of promises, ready to propose whatever he thought
likely to catch the people's ear. Others complained that there was no
knowing where to have him; that he had an erratic mind, whose currents ran
underground and came to the surface in unexpected places; that he did not
consult his party, but followed his own predilections; that his guidance was
unsafe because his decisions were unpredictable. Both these views were
unfair, yet the latter came nearer to the truth than the former. No great
popular leader had in him less of the true ring of the demagogue. He saw, of
course, that a statesman cannot oppose the popular will beyond a certain
point, and may have to humor it in order that he may direct it. Now and
then, in his later days, he so far yielded to his party advisers as to
express his approval of proposals for which he cared little personally. But
he was too self-absorbed, too eagerly interested in the ideas that suited
his own cast of thought, to be able to watch and gage the tendencies of the
multitude. On several occasions he announced a policy which startled people
and gave a new turn to the course of events. But in none of these instances,
and certainly not in the three most remarkable,--his declarations against
the Irish church establishment in 1868, against the Turks and the
traditional English policy of supporting them in 1876, and in favor of Irish
home rule in 1886,--did any popular demand suggest his pronouncement. It was
the masses who took their view from him, not he who took his mandate from
the masses. In all of these instances he was at the time in opposition, and
was accused of having made this new departure for the sake of recovering
power. In the two former he prevailed, and was ultimately admitted, by his
more candid adversaries, to have counseled wisely. In all of them he may,
perhaps, be censured for not having sooner perceived, or at any rate for not
having sooner announced, the need for reform. But it was very characteristic
of him not to give the full strength of his mind to a question till he felt
that it pressed for a solution. Those who discussed politics with him were
scarcely more struck by the range of his vision and his power of correlating
principles and details than by his unwillingness to commit himself on
matters whose decision he could postpone. Reticence and caution were
sometimes carried too far, not merely because they exposed him to
misconstruction, but because they withheld from his party the guidance it
needed. This was true in all the three instances just mentioned; and in the
last of them his reticence probably contributed to the separation from him
of some of his former colleagues. Nor did he always rightly divine the
popular mind. Absorbed in his own financial views, he omitted to note the
change that had been in progress between 1862 and 1874, and thus his
proposal in the latter year to extinguish the income tax fell completely
flat. He often failed to perceive how much the credit of his party was
suffering from the belief, quite groundless so far as he personally was
concerned, that his government was indifferent to what are called Imperial
interests, the interests of England outside England. But he always thought
for himself, and never stooped to flatter the prejudices or inflame the
passions of any class in the community.
Though the power of reading the
signs of the times and moving the mind of the nation as a whole may be now
more essential to an English statesman than the skill which manages a
legislature or holds together a cabinet, that skill counts for much, and
must continue to do so while the House of Commons remains the supreme
governing authority of the country. A man can hardly reach high place, and
certainly cannot retain high place, without possessing this kind of art. Mr.
Gladstone was at one time thought to want it. In 1864, when Lord
Palmerston's end was evidently near and Mr. Gladstone had shown himself the
most brilliant and capable man among the Liberal ministers in the House of
Common's, people speculated about the succession to the headship of the
party; and the wiseacres of the day were never tired of repeating that Mr.
Gladstone could not possibly lead the House of Commons. He wanted tact (they
said), he was too excitable, too impulsive, too much absorbed in his own
ideas, too unversed in the arts by which individuals are conciliated. But
when, after twenty-five years of his unquestioned reign, the time for his
own departure drew nigh, men asked how the Liberal party in the House of
Commons would ever hold together after it had lost a leader of such
consummate capacity. Seldom has a prediction been more utterly falsified
than that of the Whig critics of 1864. They had grown so accustomed to
Palmerston's way of handling the House as to forget that a man might succeed
by quite different methods. And they forgot also that a man may have many
defects and yet in spite of them be incomparably the fittest for a great
place. Mr. Gladstone had the defects that were ascribed to him. His
impulsiveness sometimes betrayed him into declarations which a cooler man
would have abstained from. The second reading of the Irish Home-Rule Bill of
1886 would probably have been carried had he not been goaded by his
opponents into words which seemed to recall or modify the concessions he had
announced at a meeting of the Liberal party held just before. More than once
precious time was wasted in useless debates because his antagonists, knowing
his excitable temper, brought on discussions with the sole object of
annoying him and drawing from him some hasty deliverance. Nor was he an
adept, like Disraeli and Sir John A. Macdonald, in the management of
individuals. He had a contempt for the meaner side of human nature which
made him refuse to play upon it. He had comparatively little sympathy with
many of the pursuits which attract ordinary men; and he was too constantly
engrossed by the subjects of enterprises which specially appealed to him to
have leisure for the lighter but often very important devices of political
strategy. A trifling anecdote, which was told in London about twenty-five
years ago, may illustrate this characteristic. Mr. Delane, then editor of
the "Times," had been invited to meet the prime minister at a moment when
the support of the "Times" would have been specially valuable to the Liberal
government. Instead of using the opportunity to set forth his policy and
invite an opinion on it, Mr. Gladstone talked the whole time of dinner upon
the question of the exhaustion of the English coal-beds, to the surprise of
the company and the unconcealed annoyance of the powerful guest. It was the
subject then uppermost in his mind, and he either did not think of winning
Mr. Delane or disdained to do so. In the House of Commons he was entirely
free from airs, or, indeed, from any sort of assumption of superiority. The
youngest member might accost him in the lobby and be listened to with
perfect courtesy. But he seldom addressed any one outside his own very small
group of friends, and more than once made enemies by omitting to notice and
show some attention to members of his party who, having been eminent in
their own towns, expected to be made much of when they entered Parliament.
Having himself plenty of pride and comparatively little vanity, he never
realized the extent to which, and the cheapness with which, men can be
captured and used through their vanity. And his mind, flexible as it was in
seizing new points of view and devising expedients to meet new
circumstances, did not easily enter into the characters of other men. Ideas
and causes interested him more than personal traits did; his sympathy was
keener and stronger for the sufferings of nations or masses of men than with
the fortunes of a particular person. With all his accessibility and
immensely wide circle of acquaintances, he was at bottom a man chary of real
friendship, while the circle of his intimates became constantly smaller with
advancing years. So it befell that though his popularity among the general
body of his adherents went on increasing, and the admiration of his
parliamentary followers remained undiminished, he had few intimate friends,
few men in the House of Commons who linked him to the party at large and
rendered to him those confidential personal services which count for much in
keeping a party in hearty accord and enabling the commander to gage the
sentiment of his troops. Thus adherents were lost who turned into dangerous
foes--lost for the want not so much of tact as of a sense for the need and
use of tact in humoring and managing men.
If, however, we speak of
parliamentary strategy in its larger sense, as covering familiarity with
parliamentary forms and usages, the powers of seizing a parliamentary
situation and knowing how to deal with it, the art of guiding a debate and
choosing the right moment for reserve and for openness, for a dignified
retreat, for a watchful defense, for a sudden rattling charge upon the
enemy, no one had a fuller mastery of it. His recollection of precedents was
unrivaled, for it began in 1833 with the first reformed Parliament, and it
seemed as fresh for those remote days as for last month. He enjoyed combat
for its own sake, not so much from any inborn pugnacity, for he was not
disputatious in ordinary conversation, as because it called out his fighting
force and stimulated his whole nature. "I am never nervous in reply," he
once said, "though I am sometimes nervous in opening a debate." And although
his impetuosity sometimes betrayed him into imprudence when he was taken
unawares, no one could be more wary or guarded when a crisis arrived whose
gravity he had foreseen. In the summer of 1881 the House of Lords made some
amendments to the Irish Land Bill which were deemed ruinous to the working
of the measure, and therewith to the prospects of the pacification of
Ireland. A conflict was expected which might have strained the fabric of the
constitution. The excitement which quickly arose in Parliament spread to the
whole nation. Mr. Gladstone alone remained calm and confident. He devised a
series of compromises, which he advocated in conciliatory speeches. He so
played his game that by a few minor concessions he secured nearly all of the
points he cared for, and, while sparing the dignity of the Lords, steered
his bill triumphantly out of the breakers which had threatened to engulf it.
Very different was his ordinary demeanor in debate when he was off his
guard. Observers have often described how his face and gestures while he sat
in the House of Commons listening to an opponent would express all the
emotions that crossed his mind; with what eagerness he would follow every
sentence, sometimes contradicting half aloud, sometimes turning to his next
neighbor to express his displeasure at the groundless allegations or
fallacious arguments he was listening to, till at last he would spring to
his feet and deliver a passionate reply. His warmth would often be in excess
of what the occasion required, and quite disproportioned to the importance
of his antagonist. It was in fact the unimportance of the occasion that made
him thus yield to his feeling. As soon as he saw that bad weather was
coming, and that careful seamanship was wanted, his coolness returned, his
language became guarded and careful, and passion, though it might increase
the force of his oratory, never made him deviate a hand's breadth from the
course he had chosen. |