It was no use arguing with this learned Japanese; indeed, he was a man so illustrious that disputation with him, on the part of a nobody, seemed to savour of presumption. But I remembered enough of the spectacle of Mr. Gladstone at public worship (during one of his many visits to Brighton at the time of his last Premiership) to be very cautious ever afterwards in attempting to classify the motives of a foreigner. For, if there was one man in England for whom religion was a reality, it was Mr. Gladstone. And if there was one man in England incapable of the altruistic hypocrisy imputed to him it was again Mr. Gladstone. He was even destitute of that knack of saying pleasant insincerities which is generally reckoned as very little of a sin and very much of a social asset. Witness that old story of Disraeli and the pictures. Someone told Mr. Gladstone with great glee how Disraeli went to some picture show, and delighted the artists by most lavish praise. This work showed sublime genius; that recalled the grace of Gainsborough; this the sombre power of Caravaggio; that the splendid colour of Titian; that the severe purity of outline of Mantegna. And then, when Disraeli was well clear of the men he had flattered into frantic worship of him, he murmured to a friend: “What an ordeal; such fearful daubs I never saw!” To this story Mr. Gladstone listened with a steadily increasing frown, and at the end of it he struck the table emphatically with his fist. “I call that—devilish,” was his comment.
It was, probably, this massive seriousness—deriving from his intense sense of the eternal—that was the secret of Mr. Gladstone’s power over nearly all who came into close touch with him. It is not quite true that he altogether lacked a sense of humour. In a certain vein he could be playful and even jocose, and, though he was generally wanting in the compression which belongs to true wit, witty things occasionally escaped him. But all this was by the way, as incidental as the play of sunlight on a rock or the laughter on the surface of the deep sea; he might, in an off moment, play with an idea in much the same spirit that he took his backgammon with Mr. Armistead, but such concessions to the mood of the moment only threw into sharper relief the intense earnestness which was the basis of his character.
Every virtue has its characteristic dangers, and if Mr. Gladstone’s solemn belief in himself and his mission gave him immense power over others it also led to one side of himself exercising too much power over the other. His intellect was often unduly dominated by his prepossessions; from first to last he seldom saw things in a dry light. In his youth Macaulay noted a characteristic which endured throughout life—content with insecure foundations for an argument, he relied too much for victory on his splendid power of impressive rhetoric. He was not the less governed by prejudice because his prejudice might at one time be different from, and even contradictory to, his prejudice at another. Had Mr. Gladstone been a duller man, his temper would have ended by enfeebling the mind which it constantly reduced to subjection. But in his case a mentality already almost preternaturally active was still further stimulated by the necessity of justifying his temper. It was driven to a kind of jesuitry through the despotic conscientiousness of its master. Mr. Gladstone was incapable of consciously deceiving others; he did sometimes unconsciously deceive himself, and others through himself. On certain questions, like finance, which he could treat objectively, his reason had full play; on others his judgment was always liable to subjective disturbance. Where a broad and definite moral issue existed that judgment seldom went astray, but on whole classes of questions more or less indifferent he was governed by the same sort of likes and dislikes which determine a rich man’s wine cellar or picture collection. Thus half his mistakes in regard to Egypt were due to nothing more than want of interest. He was bored with Egypt, and intrigued with other things. Ireland, also, at first bored him; it was to him, as to so many of the Liberals, a tiresome irrelevancy breaking in on the set programme. For some time he felt towards the Irish members as a whist-player might towards some noisy person who insisted that there must be no more whist until everybody in the room had exhausted the possibilities of “tiddleywinks.” But when at last he found that “tiddleywinks” was only a slang name for Irish auction bridge, and that Irish auction bridge was vastly more exciting than any whist, he quickly discovered that the enunciation of a Home Rule policy was what Mr. Balfour called “a moral imperative of the most binding kind.”
This would seem a flippant explanation of a conversion in which Mr. Gladstone renewed his political youth. It is not meant as a flippancy. Most assuredly Mr. Gladstone did not consciously, as some very great opponents maintained at the time, reach his Home Rule position by the road of sordid or ignoble considerations. But his mind was one equally prone to innovation and to routine; it ran in grooves, but had no difficulty, when impelled by any sufficiently powerful stimulus, in jumping from one groove to another. There is a kind of roundabout on which the horses (running on rigidly prescribed lines) seem at one moment to be going straight to a certain point, and then suddenly turn, to the bewilderment of their riders, in a direction exactly opposite. Mr. Gladstone made such a swerve, and it was not surprising that there were tumbles, or that, while he was eloquently explaining that the change of course was natural and necessary, less agile characters were mainly swearing over bumps and bruises. He himself was probably not even conscious that the change was great. For Mr. Gladstone had a way of making himself at once at home in a new situation. He was like a man who often changes his house, but always carries with him the old furniture and—if possible—the old servants. The chief trouble in this case was that some of the household staff declined to join in the new move; otherwise Erin Mansions was not very different from Coercion Row. There was point, if there was also rudeness, in Lord Randolph’s gibe of “the old man in a hurry.” But the hurry was chiefly in the matter of settling down in the new quarters. Once settled Mr. Gladstone never again moved. Under all the superficial bustle of his last Premiership there was essential immobility; what he had become in 1885 he remained till the end.
Of the “rapid splendours” of that last Home Rule fight Lord Morley has discoursed eloquently. It was a wonderful affair, and a most pathetic one. The eloquence which had dazzled two generations had lost little or nothing of its magnificence. The wizardry of Mr. Gladstone’s manipulations of stubborn material still extorted the admiration of those who had known him a quarter of a century before. Half blind, very deaf, dependent on majorities that sometimes sank to eight or ten, faced with the certainty of rejection by the Lords, and the equal certainty that their action would be approved by the country, the old hero never faltered. It was a marvellous and inspiring example of the triumph of a sense of public duty over all the disabilities of age and infirmity. But through the whole splendid performance ran the note of tragedy. Mr. Gladstone knew the thing could not be done by him. He must have more than suspected what was to come when he was gone. The portent of the Newcastle programme could no more have been lost on him than the waning enthusiasm of many of his supporters for the cause of Home Rule. But for the faith which had always sustained him, this last fight must have been sad indeed. “But,” says Lord Morley, speaking of a visit just before Mr. Gladstone’s last appearance in the House of Commons, “there the old fellow was, doing what old fellows have done for long ages on a Sunday afternoon, reading a big Bible.” The same witness speaks of a “sudden solemnity” during the discussion of an intricate point in the Home Rule Bill, when Mr. Gladstone turned to him with “Take it from me, that to endure trampling on with patience and self-control is no bad element in the preparation of a man for walking firmly and successfully in the path of great public duty. Be sure that discipline is full of blessings.” Then, a moment later, he added, “When it’s all over, you and I must have our controversy out about Horace. I cannot put him as high as you do.”
After all, no man is to be pitied who could bear the weight of eighty-four years in a spirit at once so humanly gallant and so Christianly resigned.
CHAPTER V
GEORGE MEREDITH
George Meredith was impatient of talk about life’s ironies; he took things as they came, accepted Fate’s decrees with fortitude, and did not blame Nature for being natural. That is to say, he took up this attitude in debate; internally he might and did lament over things not specially lamentable. And, whatever he might say, he can hardly have failed to feel something of the irony of his position in the Nineties. He had won through long years of total neglect and hard toil. He had passed the hardly less painful period of purely esoteric appreciation. First, nobody cared for his work; then he became the oracle of a small circle; neither fate was pleasing to a nature so large and eager, so avid of fame, with so keen a zest for life, and so imperious an appetite for its best things, material and intellectual. George Meredith liked recognition; he liked also good and even fat living, old vintages, pleasant lodgment, and ease of mind. He wrote best about the sunshine when he saw it through a glass of fine claret, and lark pie was for him the best preparation for an ode to the lark. But it was long before he could afford to translate into practice his theories of good provender. In his youth, it is said, he was so poor that a single bowl of porridge had often to suffice him for the day, and long after he had reached maturity he was so little esteemed that John Morley, coming to London ten years his junior, was soon able to repay his generous welcome by printing two or three novels which would otherwise have stood small chance with the publishers. In his later middle age, though he could afford himself fairly full indulgence in those dietetic fantasies which were his joy, he was so harnessed to the daily task that he could not imagine, so he said, what he would do if turned loose in the paddock of independence. But now in the Nineties and his own sixties, just as he had grown into a cult, he had to live as a recluse at Box Hill, almost a prisoner in his arm-chair, very deaf, and with an impaired digestion.