In 1853 Lord Blachford wrote, just after Mr. Gladstone had unfolded his famous Budget which took off newspapers the additional stamp required for supplements, and imposed a single stamp of a penny for every newspaper of whatever sort: ‘If Gladstone has anything Conservative in him, he will find it difficult to remain in a Ministry which must eventually be thrown upon Radical support. But he is really so powerful a man that, whatever shakes and delays and loss of time there may be, he must come up near the surface. I expect he will show the best—i.e., most politically powerful—side of himself as Chancellor of the Exchequer. Pursuing details is so much his power if he is only not run away with by it. I think, if it is not a paradox, he has not poetry enough for the formation of a first-rate judgment. He has an immense mass of knowledge most methodically arranged, but the separate items must be looked for in their respective boxes, and do not combine. The consequence is not merely want of play, but that crotchety, one-sided, narrowish mode of viewing a matter uncorrected by the necessary comparisons and considerations which people call ingenious and subtle and Gladstonian. He looks at the details, not at the aspects of a subject, and masters it, I should imagine, by pursuing it hither and thither from one starting-point, and not by walking round it; and financial subjects will, I suppose, bear this mode of treatment better than any other.’
In a valuable work by a distinguished German, Dr. Geiffeken, of which an English translation appeared in 1889, the author thus described Mr. Gladstone: ‘His eloquence shows as its prominent quality the acuteness of intelligent methodical thought, and a readiness which, united with the most complete mastery of the matter, seems to require no preparation. He is beyond all cavil the first speaker of his time on subjects connected with public business, and is unsurpassed in power of luminous presentation of complicated economic questions. Relying on a memory that never fails, he knows how to impart life to the dryest array of figures, to group them in attractive forms, and to expound them so that his hearers may have them completely within their grasp. Nor is he less able in mastering the most involved question of law. His imagination is short-winded, dry, and apt to lose itself in speculation. His pathos is without warmth, his diction lacks charm, in spite of his copious command of language, his clear periods, and the inexhaustible staying power of his voice. The most unfavourable side of him as a speaker is seen when he begins to argue. Mr. Escobar never understood so well as he how to use language against the use of language, to involve his thoughts in clouds, to explain away inconvenient facts, to leave himself a back-door open to escape, and to father upon his opponents assertions which they would in nowise acknowledge. He involves the truth so hopelessly that it is impossible to disentangle it.’
Sir Rowland Hill, in his ‘Autobiography,’ writes: ‘There are few public men with whom I have not come on such excellent terms, and from whom I have received so much kindness, as from Mr. Gladstone.’
Archbishop Trench, writing to Bishop Wilberforce in 1864, says: ‘I deeply regret Mr. Gladstone’s Reform speech, which certainly may alter his future—may alter the whole future of England. No man but one endowed with his genius and virtues could effectually do mischief to the institutions of England, but he may do it.’ Again he wrote: ‘Nothing can hinder Mr. Gladstone from being the most remarkable man in England.’
In the autumn of 1859 Sir Archibald Alison, the historian, met Mr. Gladstone at the hospitable mansion of Mr. Stirling, of Keir, near Stirling. ‘I had been acquainted with him,’ he writes, ‘when he was a young man, and he had dined once or twice at our house in St. Colome Street, but I had not seen him for above twenty years, and in the interval he had become a leading Parliamentary orator and a great man. I was particularly observant, therefore, of his manner and conversation, and I was by no means disappointed in either. In manner he had the unaffected simplicity of earlier days, without either the assumption of superiority which might have been natural from his Parliamentary eminence, or the official pedantry so common in persons who have held high office in the State. In conversation he was rapid, easy and fluent, and possessed in a high degree that great quality so characteristic of a powerful mind, so inestimable in discoursing, of quickly apprehending what was said on the other side, and in reply setting himself at once to meet it fairly and openly. He was at once energetic and discursive, enthusiastic, but at times visionary. It was impossible to listen to him without pleasure, but equally so to reflect on what he said without grave hesitation. He left on my mind the impression of his being the best discourser on imaginative topics, and the most dangerous person to be entrusted with practical ones, I had ever met with. He gave me more the impression of great scholastic acumen than of weighty, statesman-like wisdom. Eminent in the University, and transferred without any practical training in the school of life at once from its shades to the House of Commons, he was like the ecclesiastics who in Catholic countries were often transferred direct from the cloister to the Cabinet, and began to operate on mankind as they would do on a dead body to elucidate certain points of physics, and who have so often proved at once the ablest and most dangerous of governors.’
An able writer, Mr. Bagehot, contends Mr. Gladstone is spoilt by applause, as follows: ‘But because his achievements have fallen so much below the standard of his expectations, because destiny has fought against him and proved too much for him, is Mr. Gladstone on that account dejected? On the contrary, although he may experience some passing emotions of chagrin and a pious resentment against circumstances, he cherishes the comfortable conviction that both what he has done and what he has abstained from doing are right. Facts may be against him, but, then, so much the worse for the facts. His view of foreign politics is that every male child born into the world, whether Indian or African, Mussulman, Egyptian fellah or Zulu Kaffir, Aztec or Esquimaux, is capable of being educated into a free and independent elector for an English borough. Parliamentary institutions and representative Government are to him, not only the supreme end at which to aim, but the régime to which all nationalities are instinctively capable of adapting themselves. He makes no allowance for difference of race or climate, historical antecedents, national peculiarities. Herein he displays a lack of imagination, which is more strange, seeing that he possesses a large allowance of the imaginative faculty in other respects, and that he is really poet first and statistician afterwards.
‘Particular causes have combined to confirm this defect. Mr. Gladstone has spent his life in the House of Commons, and cannot imagine a political system or a scheme of popular rule without as accurate a copy as conditions permit of the English representative Chamber. Again, he understands the English people so well, he has so completely identified himself with the ideas and aspirations of the upper class of bourgeoisie, that he considers it scarcely worth while to attempt to understand any other race. If he attempts such an intellectual process he can only measure the unfamiliar by reference to the familiar object.
‘Mr. Gladstone has drunk too deeply of the atmosphere of idolatry and incense by which he has been surrounded. His immense experience of public life, his great capacities as a financier, his moral earnestness, his religious fervour, his scholarship, culture, and conversational powers, have procured for him enthusiastic worshippers in every section of the community—among the lower classes; among the men of commerce and business; among the Whig aristocracy, with whom he has been educated, and who have long since seen in him the bulwark against revolution; among the clergy of the Anglican Church and the Nonconformist ministers; finally, among certain small and exclusive divisions of London society itself. No man can receive the homage that has fallen to the lot of Mr. Gladstone during so many years without experiencing a kind of moral intoxication and forming an excessive idea of his own infallibility. Nor is it good for him that domestic interposition should ward off the hostile expressions of opinions in the newspapers not attached to his cause, but which may, nevertheless, represent the views of a certain section of the English people.’
Mr. G. W. E. Russell, in his charming little book on Gladstone, refers to Mr. Gladstone’s speech on the Don Pacifico debate, as illustrating his tendency ‘to belittle England, to extol and magnify the virtues and graces of other nations, and to ignore the homely prejudice of patriotism. He has frankly told us that he does not know the meaning of prestige, and an English Minister who makes that confession has yet to learn one of the governing sentiments of
‘“An old and haughty nation proud in arms.”