The best proof of his swiftness, his industry, and his
skill in economizing time is to be found in the quantity of his literary
work, which, considering the abstruse nature of the subjects to which most
of it is related, would have been creditable to the diligence of a German
professor sitting alone in his study. As to the merits of the work there has
been some controversy. Mankind are slow to credit the same person with
eminence in various fields. When they read the prose of a great poet, they
try it by severer tests than would be applied to other prose-writers. When a
painter wins fame by his portraits or his landscapes, they are apt to
discourage any other kind of painting he may attempt. So Mr. Gladstone's
reputation as an orator stood in his own light when he appeared as an
author. He was read with avidity by thousands who would not have looked at
the article or book had it borne any other name; but he was judged by the
standard, not of his finest printed speeches, for his speeches were seldom
models of composition, but rather by that of the impression which his
speeches made on those who heard them. Since his warmest admirers could not
claim for him as a writer of prose any such pre-eminence as belonged to him
as a speaker, it followed that his written work was not duly appreciated.
Had he been a writer and nothing else, he would have been famous and
powerful by his pen. He might, however, have failed to secure a place in
the front rank. His style was forcible, copious, rich with various
knowledge, warm with the ardor of his nature. But it had three serious
defects. It was diffuse, apt to pursue a topic into details, when these
might have been left to the reader's own reflection. It was redundant,
employing more words than were needed to convey the substance. It was
unchastened, indulging too freely in tropes and metaphors, in quotations and
adapted phrases even when the quotation added nothing to the sense, but was
due merely to some association in his own mind. Thus it seldom reached a
high level of purity and grace, and though one might excuse its faults as
natural to the work of a swift and busy man, they were sufficient to prevent
readers from deriving much pleasure from the mere form and dress of his
thoughts. Nevertheless there are passages, and not a few passages, both in
the books and in the articles, of rare merit, among which may be cited (not
as exceptionally good, but as typical of his strong points) the striking
picture of his own youthful feeling toward the Church of England contained
in the "Chapter of Autobiography," and the refined criticism of "Robert
Elsmere," published in 1888. Almost the last thing he wrote, a pamphlet on
the Greek and Cretan question, published in the spring of 1897, has all the
force and cogency of his best days. Two things were never wanting to him:
vigor of expression and an admirable command of appropriate words.
His
writings fall into three classes: political, theological, and literary--the
last including, and indeed chiefly consisting of, his books and articles
upon Homer and the Homeric question. All the political writings, except his
books on "The State in its Relations to the Church" and "Church Principles
Considered in their Results," belong to the class of occasional literature,
being pamphlets or articles produced with a view to some current crisis or
controversy. They are valuable chiefly as proceeding from one who bore a
leading part in the affairs they relate to, and as embodying vividly the
opinions and aspirations of the moment, less frequently in respect of
permanent lessons of political wisdom, such as one finds in Machiavelli or
Tocqueville or Edmund Burke. Like Pitt and Peel, Mr. Gladstone had a mind
which, whatever its original tendencies, had come to be rather practical
than meditative. He was fond of generalizations and principles, but they
were always directly related to the questions that came before him in actual
politics; and the number of general maxims or illuminative suggestions to be
found in his writings and speeches is not large in proportion to their
sustained intellectual vigor. Even Disraeli, though his views were often
fanciful and his epigrams often forced, gives us more frequently a brilliant
(if only half true) historical apercu, or throws a flash of light into some
corner of human character. Of the theological essays, which are mainly
apologetic and concerned with the authenticity and authority of Scripture,
it is enough to say that they exhibit the same general characteristics as
the treatises dealing with Homer, which were the most serious piece of work
that proceeded from Mr. Gladstone's pen. These Homeric treatises are in one
sense worthless, in another sense admirable. Those parts of them which deal
with early Greek mythology and religion, with Homeric geography and
genealogy, and in a less degree with the use of Homeric epithets, have been
condemned by the unanimous voice of scholars as fantastic. The premises are
assumed without sufficient investigation, while the reasonings are
fine-drawn and flimsy. Extraordinary ingenuity is shown in piling up a lofty
fabric, but the foundation is of sand, and the edifice has hardly a solid
wall or beam in it. A clever conjecture is treated as a fact; an inference
possible but represented as probable is drawn from this conjecture; a second
inference is based upon the first; we are made to forget that the
probability of this second is at most only half the probability of the
first; the process is continued in the same way; and when the whole
superstructure is complete, the reader is provoked to perceive how much
dialectical skill has been wasted upon a series of hypotheses which a breath
of common-sense criticism dissipates. If one is asked to explain the
weakness in this particular department of so otherwise strong a mind, the
answer would seem to be that the element of fancifulness in Mr. Gladstone's
intellect, and his tendency to mistake mere argumentation for verification,
were checked in practical politics by constant intercourse with friends and
colleagues as well as by the need of convincing visible audiences, while in
theological or historical inquiries his ingenuity roamed with a dangerous
freedom over wide plains where no obstacles checked its course. Something
may also be due to the fact that his philosophical and historical education
was received at a time when the modern critical spirit and the canons it
recognizes had scarcely begun to assert themselves at Oxford. Similar
defects may be discerned in other eminent writers of his own and preceding
generations of Oxford men, defects which persons of equal or even inferior
power in later generations would not display. In some of these, and
particularly in Cardinal Newman, the contrast between dialectical acumen,
coupled with surpassing rhetorical skill, and the vitiation of the argument
by a want of the critical faculty, is even more striking than in Mr.
Gladstone's case; and the example of that illustrious man suggests that the
dominance of the theological view of literary and historical problems, a
dominance evident in Mr. Gladstone, counts for something in producing the
phenomenon noted. With these deficiencies, Mr. Gladstone's Homeric work
had the great merit of being based on a full and thorough knowledge of the
Homeric text. He had seen that Homer is not only a poet, but an "historical
source" of the highest value, a treasure-house of data for the study of
early Greek life and thought, an authority all the more trustworthy because
an unconscious authority, addressing not posterity but his own
contemporaries. With this thorough knowledge of the matter contained in the
poems, Mr. Gladstone was able to present many interesting and permanently
valuable pictures of the political and social life of Homeric Greece, while
the interspersed literary criticisms are often subtle and suggestive,
erring, when they do err, chiefly through what may be called the
over-earnestness of his mind. He sometimes takes the poet too seriously; he
is apt to read an ethical purpose into descriptive or dramatic touches which
are merely descriptive or dramatic. But he has for his author not only that
intense sympathy which is the best basis for criticism, but a real justness
of poetic taste which the learned and painstaking German commentator
frequently wants. That he was a sound and accurate scholar in that somewhat
narrow sense of the word which denotes a grammatical and literary mastery of
Greek and Latin, goes without saying. Men of his generation were more apt to
keep up their familiarity with the ancient classics than is the present
generation; and his habit of reading Greek for the sake of his Homeric
studies, and Latin for the sake of his theological, made this familiarity
more than usually thorough. Like most Etonians, he loved and knew the poets
by preference. Theology claimed a place beside poetry; history came next,
and was always a favorite branch of study. It seemed odd that the
constitutional history of England was by no means one of his strong
subjects, but the fact is that this was preeminently a Whig subject, and Mr.
Gladstone never was a Whig, never learned to think upon the lines of the
great Whigs of former days. His knowledge was not, perhaps, very wide, but
it was generally exact; indeed, the accuracy with which he grasped facts
that belonged to the realm of history proper was sometimes in strange
contrast to the fanciful way in which he reasoned from them, or to the
wildness of his conjectures in the prehistoric region. For metaphysics
strictly so called he had apparently little turn-- his reading did not go
far beyond those companions of his youth, Aristotle and Bishop Butler; and
philosophical speculation interested him only so far as it bore on Christian
doctrine. Neither, in spite of his eminence as a financier and an advocate
of free trade, did he show much taste for economic studies. On practical
topics, such as the working of protective tariffs, the abuse of charitable
endowments, the development of fruit-culture in England, the duty of liberal
giving by the rich, the utility of thrift among the poor, his remarks were
always full of point, clearness, and good sense, but he seldom launched out
into the wider sea of economic theory. He must have possessed mathematical
talent, for he took a first class in mathematics at Oxford, at the same time
as his first in classics, but it was a subject he soon dropped. Regarding
the sciences of nature, the sciences of experiment and observation, he
seemed to feel as little curiosity as any educated man who notes the
enormous part they play in the modern world can feel. Sayings of his have
been quoted which show that he imperfectly comprehended the character of the
evidence they rely upon and of the methods they employ. On one occasion he
astonished a dinner-table of younger friends by refusing to accept some of
the most certain conclusions of modern geology. No doubt he belonged (as the
famous Lord Derby once said of himself) to a pre-scientific age; still, it
was hard to avoid thinking that he was unconsciously influenced by a belief
that such sciences as geology and biology, for instance, were being worked
in a sense hostile to revealed religion, and were therefore influences
threatening the moral welfare of mankind. |