“April 1, 1877.”
(Half the words in his apology for not writing would of course have more than sufficed for the letter desired.)
Naturally, after all this, I looked to Mr. Gladstone as a most powerful friend of the Anti-vivisection cause; and though I had no sympathy with his religious views, and thought his policy very dangerous, I counted on him as a man who, since his suffrage had been obtained in a great moral question, was sure to give it his support in fitting time and place. The sequel showed how delusive was my trust.
To return to the breakfast in Carlton Gardens. There sat down with us, to my amusement, a gentleman with whom I had already made acquaintance, an ex-priest of some distinction, Rev. Rudolph Suffield, who had recently quitted the Church of Rome but retained enough of priestly looks and manners to be rather antipathetic to me. Mr. Gladstone ingeniously picked Mr. Suffield’s brains for half-an-hour, eliciting all manner of information on Romish doctrines and practice, till the conversation drifted to Pascal’s Provinciales, I expressed my admiration for the book, and recalled Gibbon’s droll confession that he, whom Byron styled “The Lord of irony, that master spell,” had learned the sanglant sarcasm of his XV. and XVI. chapters from the pious author of the Pensées. Mr. Gladstone eagerly interposed with some fine criticisms, and ended with the amazing remark: “I have read all the Jesuit answers to Pascal (!) to ascertain whether he had misquoted Suarez and Escobar and the rest, and I found that he had not done so. You may take my word for it.”
From this theological discussion there was a diversion when a gentleman on the other side of the breakfast table handed across to Mr. Gladstone certain drawings of the legs of horses. They proved to be sketches of several pairs in the Panathenaic frieze and were produced to settle the highly interesting question (to Mr. Gladstone) whether Greek horses ever trotted, or only walked, cantered, and ambled. I forget how the drawings were supposed finally to settle the controversy, but I made him laugh by telling him that a party of the servants of one of my Irish friends having paid a visit to the Elgin Gallery, the lady’s maid told her mistress next morning that they had been puzzled to understand why all those men without legs or arms had been stuck up on the wall? At last the butler had suggested that they were “intended to commemorate the railway accidents.”
From that time I met Mr. Gladstone occasionally at the houses of friends, and was, of course, like all the world, charmed with his winning manners and brilliant talk, though never, that I can recall, struck by any thought expressed by him which could be called a “great” one, or which lifted up one’s spirit. It seemed more as if half a dozen splendidly cultivated and brilliant intellects—but all of medium height—had been incarnated in one vivacious body, than a single Mind of colossal altitude. The religious element in him was in almost feverish activity, but it always appeared to me that it was not on the greatest things of Religion that his attention fastened. It was on its fringe, rather than on its robe.
That Mr. Gladstone was a sincerely pious man I do not question. But his piety was of the Sacerdotal rather than of the Puritan type. The “single eye” was never his. If it had been, he would not have employed the tortuous and ambiguous oratory which so often left his friends and foes to interpret his utterances in opposite senses. Neither did he appear—at all events to his more distant observers—to feel adequately the tremendous responsibility to God and man which rested on the well-nigh omnipotent Prime Minister of England, during the years when it was rare to open a newspaper without reading of some military disaster like the death of Gordon, or of some Agrarian murder like the assassination of Lord Frederick Cavendish and of a score of hapless Irish landlords—calamities which his policy had failed to prevent if it had not directly occasioned. The gaiety of spirits and the animation of interest respecting a hundred trivial topics which Mr. Gladstone exhibited unfailingly through that fearfully anxious period, approached perhaps sometimes too nearly to levity to accord with our older ideal of a devout mind loaded with the weight “almost not to be borne” of world-wide cares.
The differences between Church and dissent occupied Mr. Gladstone, I fancy, very much at all times. One day he remarked to me—as if it were a valuable new light on the subject—that an eminent Nonconformist had just told him that the Dissenters generally “did not object either to the Doctrine or the Discipline of the Church of England, but that they found no warrant in Scripture for the existence of a State Church.” Mr. Gladstone looked as if he were seeking an answer to this objection to conformity. I replied that I wondered they did not see that the whole Old Testament might be taken as the history of a Divinely appointed State Church. Mr. Gladstone lifted his marvellous, eagle-like eyes with a quick glance which might be held to signify “That’s an idea!” When the little incident was told soon after to Dean Stanley he rubbed his hands and laughingly said, “This may put off disestablishment yet awhile!”
As a member of society Mr. Gladstone, as everybody knows, was inexhaustibly interesting. I once heard him after a small dinner party criticise and describe with astonishing vividness and minuteness the sermons of at least twenty popular preachers. At last I ventured to interpose with some impatience and say: “But, Mr. Gladstone, you have not mentioned the greatest of them all, my pastor, Dr. Martineau?” He paused, and then said, weighing his words, carefully: “Dr. Martineau is unquestionably the greatest of living thinkers.”
Speaking of the Jews, he once afforded the company at a dinner table a lively and interesting sketch of the ubiquity of the race all over the globe, except in Scotland. The Scotch, he said, knew as well as they the value of bawbees! There was a general laugh, and some one remarked: “Why, then, are there so few in Ireland?” Mr. Gladstone answered that he supposed the Irish were too poor to afford them fair pasture. I said: “Perhaps so, now, but when you, Mr. Gladstone, have given the Irish farmers fixity of tenure, so that they can give security for loans, we shall see the Jews flocking over to Ireland.” This observation was made in 1879; and in the intervening twenty years I am informed that the Jews have settled down in Ireland like sea-gulls on the land after a storm. The old “Gombeen man” has been ousted all over the country, and a whole Jew quarter, (near the Circular Road) and a new synagogue in Dublin, have verified my prophecy.