No man has lived in our times of whom it is so hard to
speak in a concise and summary fashion as Mr. Gladstone. For forty years
he was so closely associated with the public affairs of his country
that the record of his parliamentary life comes near to being an outline
of English politics. His activity spread itself out over many fields. He
was the author of several learned and thoughtful books, and of a
multitude of articles upon all sorts of subjects. He showed himself as
eagerly interested in matters of classical scholarship and Christian
doctrine and ecclesiastical history as in questions of national finance
and foreign policy. No account of him could be complete without reviewing
his actions and estimating the results of his work in all these
directions. But the difficulty of describing and judging him goes deeper.
His was a singularly complex nature, a character hard to unravel. His
individuality was extremely strong; all that he said or did bore its
impress. Yet it was an individuality so far from being self-consistent as
sometimes to seem a bundle of opposite qualities capriciously united in a
single person. He might with equal truth be called, and he has been in
fact called, a conservative and a revolutionary. He was dangerously
impulsive, and had frequently to suffer from his impulsiveness; yet he
was also not merely wary and cautious, but so astute as to have been
accused of craft and dissimulation. So great was his respect for
authority and tradition that he clung to views regarding the unity of
Homer and the historical claims of Christian sacerdotalism which the
majority of competent specialists have now rejected. So bold was he in
practical matters that he transformed the British constitution, changed
the course of English policy in the Orient, destroyed an established
church in one part of the United Kingdom, and committed himself to the
destruction of two established churches in two other parts. He came near
to being a Roman Catholic in his religious opinions, yet was for twenty
years the darling leader of the English Protestant Nonconformists and the
Scotch Presbyterians. No one who knew him intimately doubted his
conscientious sincerity and earnestness, yet four fifths of the English
upper classes were in his later years wont to regard him as a
self-interested schemer who would sacrifice his country to his lust for
power. Though he loved general principles, and often soared out of the
sight of his audience when discussing them, he generally ended by
deciding upon points of detail the question at issue. He was at different
times of his life the defender and the assailant of the same
institutions, yet he scarcely seemed inconsistent in doing opposite
things, because his method and his arguments preserved the same type and
color throughout. Any one who had at the beginning of his career
discerned in him the capacity for such strange diversities and
contradictions would probably have predicted that they must wreck it by
making his purposes weak and his course erratic. Such a prediction would
have proved true of anyone with less firmness of will and less intensity
of temper. It was the persistent heat and vehemence of his character, the
sustained passion which he threw into the pursuit of the object on which
he was for the moment bent, that fused these dissimilar qualities and
made them appear to contribute to and to increase the total force which
he exerted. |