III
At the Lord Mayor's feast in November, the prime minister used menacing language. The policy of England, he said, was peace, but no country was so well prepared for war as ours. If England were to enter into a righteous war, her resources were inexhaustible. “She is not a country that, when she enters into a campaign, has to ask herself whether she can support a second or a third campaign. She enters into a campaign which she will not terminate till right is done.” This was a hardly veiled threat to Russia, it was encouragement to Turkey, it was incitement to a war party in Great Britain. “The provocation offered by Disraeli at the Guildhall,” wrote Mr. Gladstone, “is almost incredible. Some new lights about his Judaic feeling in which he is both consistent and conscientious have come in upon me.”
Still the general feeling was strongly adverse to any action on behalf of Turkey. Mr. Gladstone eagerly noted even the most trivial incident that pointed this way. “Yesterday night,” he wrote (Nov. 26), “in the tory town of Liverpool, when Othello was being acted, and the words were reached ‘The Turks are drowned,’ the audience rose in enthusiasm and [pg 559] interrupted the performance for some time with their cheering. These things are not without meaning.” Men who commonly stood aside from political activity were roused. “Mr. Carlyle,” says Mr. Ruskin, “Mr. Froude, and several other men of creditable name gathered together at call of Mr. Gladstone as for a great national need, together with other men of more retired mind—Edward Burne-Jones for one, and myself for another.”
Conference At St. James's Hall
The reply to the Guildhall speech was a conference at St. James's Hall (Dec. 8), one of the most remarkable gatherings of representative men of every type and from every part of the kingdom ever held in this country. “I have most flourishing accounts of the progress of preparations for the conference of which I have been a promoter from the beginning. They urge me to speak on the 8th, but I should much prefer that others should put themselves in the foreground.” Besides the eminent politicians, great territorial magnates were there, and men of letters, and divines of various churches, and men who had never been to a militant assembly in their lives before,—all with a resolute purpose expressed by Mr. Trevelyan, “No matter how the prime minister may finger the hilt of the sword, the nation will take care that it never leaves the scabbard.” Mr. Gladstone reached London a day or two before. On the 8th, he enters:—
8.—Made notes and extracts for speech. Attended the meetings at St. James's Hall, 12-1-½ and 4-8. Spoke (I fear) 1-½ hours with some exertion, far from wholly to my satisfaction. The meetings were great, notable, almost historical.
The day after this important and impressive gathering he was back at Hawarden, busy at his article upon the life of the Prince Consort. Then came Christmas day,—“The most solemn I have known for long; I see that eastward sky of storm and of underlight!”
At a suggestion from the London foreign office, a conference of the great Powers met at Constantinople in the middle of December. Lord Salisbury went as the representative [pg 560] of England. To a correspondent Mr. Gladstone spoke of this as an excellent selection:—
I think it right at once to give you my opinion of Lord Salisbury, whom I know pretty well in private. He has little foreign or eastern knowledge, and little craft; he is rough of tongue in public debate, but a great gentleman in private society; he is very remarkably clever, of unsure judgment, but is above anything mean; has no Disraelite prejudices; keeps a conscience, and has plenty of manhood and character. In a word the appointment of Lord Salisbury to Constantinople is the best thing the government have yet done in the eastern question.
As the conference met, so it ran a usual course, and then vanished. The Powers were in complete accord as to the demands that were to be made upon Turkey for the protection of the unfortunate Christian rayahs. The Turk in just confidence that he should find a friend, rejected them, and the envoys departed to their homes. Mr. Gladstone, however, found comfort in the thought that by the agitation two points had been gained: the re-establishment of the European concert, and extrication from a disgraceful position of virtual complicity with Turkey.
In the spring of 1877 he wrote a second pamphlet,[342] because a speech in the House could not contain detail enough, and because parliamentary tradition almost compelled a suspension of discussion while ministers were supposed to be engaged in concert with other Powers in devising a practical answer to Russian inquiry. He found that it “produced no great impression,” the sale not going beyond six or seven thousand copies. Still, the gala remained from the proceeding in the autumn, that the government dared not say they had nothing to do with the condition of the Christian rayahs of Turkey, and any idea of going to war for Turkey was out of the question.
Public feeling had waxed very hot, yet without any clear precision of opinion or purpose on the side opposed to Mr. Gladstone's policy of emancipation. Dean Church (Dec. 1876) describes how “everybody was very savage with everybody about Turks and Russians: I think I never [pg 561] remember such an awkward time for meeting people (until you know you are on the same side) except at the height of the Tractarian row.”[343]
J. R. Green's Description
A little later we have one of the best pictures of him that I know, from the warm and vivid hand of J. R. Green, the historian:—
Feb. 21, 1877.—Last night I met Gladstone—it will always be a memorable night to me; Stubbs was there, and Goldwin Smith, and Humphry Sandwith, and Mackenzie Wallace, whose great book on Russia is making such a stir, besides a few other nice people; but one forgets everything in Gladstone himself, in his perfect naturalness and grace of manner, his charming abandon of conversation, his unaffected modesty, his warm ardour for all that is noble and good. I felt so proud of my leader—the chief I have always clung to through good report and ill report—because, wise or unwise as he might seem in this or that, he was always noble of soul. He was very pleasant to me, and talked of the new historic school he hoped we were building up as enlisting his warmest sympathy. I wish you could have seen with what a glow he spoke of the Montenegrins and their struggle for freedom; how he called on us who wrote history to write what we could of that long fight for liberty! And all through the evening not a word to recall his greatness amongst us, simple, natural, an equal among his equals, listening to every one, drawing out every one, with a force and a modesty that touched us more than all his power.
In another letter, says the same ardent man, “I begin to see that there may be a truer wisdom in the ‘humanitarianism’ of Gladstone than in the purely political views of Disraeli. The sympathies of peoples with peoples, the sense of a common humanity between nations, the aspirations of nationalities after freedom and independence, are real political forces; and it is just because Gladstone owns them as forces, and Disraeli disowns them, that the one has been on the right side, and the other on the wrong in parallel questions such as the upbuilding of Germany or Italy. I think it will be so in this upbuilding of the Sclave.”[344]
It was my own good fortune to pass two days with him [pg 562] at this moment at High Elms. Huxley and Playfair were of the party. Mr. Gladstone had with him the printer's proofs of his second pamphlet, and was in full glow against Turkish terrorism and its abettors. This strong obsession could not be concealed, nor was there any reason why it should be; it made no difference in his ready courtesy and kindness of demeanour, his willingness to enter into other people's topics, his pliant force and alacrity of mind. On the Sunday afternoon Sir John Lubbock, our host, took us all up to the hilltop whence in his quiet Kentish village Darwin was shaking the world. The illustrious pair, born in the same year, had never met before. Mr. Gladstone as soon as seated took Darwin's interest in lessons of massacre for granted, and launched forth his thunderbolts with unexhausted zest. His great, wise, simple, and truth-loving listener, then, I think, busy on digestive powers of the drosera in his green-house, was intensely delighted. When we broke up, watching Mr. Gladstone's erect alert figure as he walked away, Darwin, shading his eyes with his hand against the evening rays, said to me in unaffected satisfaction, “What an honour that such a great man should come to visit me!” Too absorbed in his own overwhelming conflict with the powers of evil, Mr. Gladstone makes no mention of his afternoon call, and only says of the two days that “he found a notable party, and made interesting conversation,” and that he “could not help liking” one of the company, then a stranger to him. In his absence at church, we were talking of the qualities that send men forward and keep them back. “I should like to know,” cried Huxley, “what would keep such a man as that back,” pointing to where Mr. Gladstone had been sitting; “why, put him in the middle of a moor, with nothing in the world but his shirt, and you could not prevent him from being anything he liked.” And Huxley was as far as possible from being a Gladstonian.