In the ‘Life of Lord Houghton’ we find another illustrative anecdote. The writer says: ‘One day, a few years before his death, when he was dining at the house of Mr. James Knowles, the conversation turned upon the relative characteristics of Mr. Gladstone and Lord Beaconsfield, and it was remarked by someone that if Lord Beaconsfield was a good judge of men, Mr. Gladstone was a still better judge of mankind. Houghton was asked to turn the epigram into verse, and he did it as follows:
‘We spake of two high names of speech and pen,
How each was seeing, and how each was blind;
Knew not mankind, but keenly knew all men;
Knew naught of men, but knew and loved mankind.’
In connection with these great men it is interesting to note that in 1867, when Parliament met, Mrs. Disraeli was lying seriously ill. Mr. Gladstone, in the opening sentence of his speech on the Address, gave public expression to the sympathy of all parties. Lord Houghton, in referring to the fact, adds: ‘The scene in the House of Commons was very striking; Dizzy quite unable to restrain his tears.’ When Lord Beaconsfield died, however, many were found to censure Mr. Gladstone for not having been present at the funeral of his distinguished rival.
Lord Blachford’s letters contain many short notices of Mr. Gladstone. In 1858 he gives a sketch of him in a conference with Sir Edward Bulwer: ‘It was very absurd to see them talking it over; Gladstone’s clear, dark eye and serious face, and ponderous forehead and calm manner, was such a contrast with Sir E.’s lean and narrow face and humid, theatrical, conscious kind of ways.’ In 1868 he writes to Newman: ‘I have not yet got through Gladstone’s autobiography. . . . Of course, as you say, some of his friends think it injudicious, and I am not sure that it is not injudicious on that very account. One great weight which Gladstone has to carry in the political race is a character for want of judgment, and every addition to that is an impediment.’ In 1874, in July, when Mr. Gladstone appeared in Parliament after four months’ absence to oppose the Bill for the Abolition of Church Patronage in Scotland, Lord Blachford writes: ‘Gladstone’s opposition is curious. I am sorry to say I cannot go with him on either of his points—indeed, I may almost say on any. I see no reason why the Scotch Church should not have their way about patronage. I think the cry against the Public Worship Bill a scare, and I particularly object to the principle and working of the Endowed Schools Act. However, everybody seems to agree that he made a great speech on the Public Worship Bill as a matter of oratory. He does not seem to care much about what was his party, who, I suppose, are dead against him on two out of three of these points.’
Of Mr. Gladstone, John Arthur Roebuck, a bellicose Radical—very noisy in his time—says: ‘He may be a very good chopper, but, depend upon it, he is not an English statesman.’ Of Tennyson, it is said that he loved Mr. Gladstone, but detested his policy.
The late Sir James Stansfeld is reported as saying to an interviewer: ‘Mr. Gladstone’s conduct in the Cabinet was very curious. When I first joined in 1871, I naturally expected that his position was so commanding that he would be able to say, “This is my policy; accept it or not, as you like.” When Sir James Graham was examined before a committee on Admiralty administration, he was asked: “What would happen if a member of your Board did not agree with your policy?” He answered: “He would cease to be a member of my board.” I thought Mr. Gladstone would have taken the same line, but he did not. He was always profuse in his expressions of respect for his Cabinet. There is a wonderful combination in Mr. Gladstone of imperiousness and deference; in the Cabinet he would assume that he was nothing.’
In the Nineteenth Century appeared a curious estimate of Mr. Gladstone by an Indian gentleman. ‘He has,’ he writes, ‘a natural prejudice, almost antipathy, to the name of Turk. His mind, in some respects, resembles that of some pious, learned, but narrow-minded priest of the middle ages; and his unreasoning prejudice against the Turk is indeed mediæval, and worthy of those dark ages of blood, belief and Quixotic chivalry. A person of such character, however graphic and sublime he may be, should not have such a great political influence on the minds of millions of his fellow-beings; he should not be at the head of a vast empire such as that of England of to-day if he cannot constrain his emotions and his ecclesiastical prejudices. He is a sublime moral leader of men; but a statesman of Mr. Gladstone’s position should be more calm, more deliberate, and should weigh his words carefully before he speaks. He should take care that his writings and speeches do not wound the feelings of millions of his fellow-subjects.’
On the defeat of the Liberal party in 1895, the National Review wrote: ‘One can now appreciate the previously provoking description of Mr. Gladstone as a great Conservative force. His Irish escapade has shattered the Liberal party, made the House of Lords invulnerable, and the Church unassailable.’ Dr. Guinness Rogers wrote that Mr. Gladstone’s retirement was one of the causes of the defeat of the Liberal party. ‘It is to a large extent a measure of the enormous influence of that commanding personality. Not until the secret history of that period can be studied will it be known how tremendous was the loss which the Liberal party sustained by the withdrawal from the strife of a leader who towered head and shoulders over all his associates.’
Mr. Gladstone seems seldom to have made a speech but his friends favoured him with their criticisms. Thus, when in 1871 he visited Yorkshire and made speeches at Wakefield and Whitby, Lord Houghton wrote, after praising one of his speeches: ‘I cannot say as much for your Whitby speech, for it confirmed my feelings that on the high mountain where you stand there is a demon, not of demagogism, but of demophilism, that is tempting you sorely. I am no alarmist, but it is undeniable that a new and thoroughly false conception of the relations of work and wealth is invading society, and of which the Paris Commune is the last expression. Therefore one word from such a man as you, implying that you look on individual wealth as anything else than a reserve of public wealth, and that there can be any antagonism between them, seems to me infinitely dangerous.’ Mr. Gladstone replied, writes Lord Houghton’s biographer, with his usual frankness and friendliness to the remonstrances of his old friend, ‘whose criticisms are marked by the kindly tone which is habitual with you, though I do not agree with everything you say about property.’
Sir Francis Doyle will have it that to Mr. Disraeli is due the fact that Mr. Gladstone left the Conservatives. ‘We may all of us recollect,’ he writes, ‘the Irish soldiers who marched up to and then passed a standard erected by William III. Some regiments moved to the right and others to the left, the right-hand division taking service under Louis XIV., the other division submitting to the English Government. On their first separation they were but an inch or two apart, but the distance gradually widened between them till they or their representatives met face to face at Fontenoy. So, after Sir Robert Peel’s death, Lord Beaconsfield’s presence established like that standard a line of demarcation between the two portions of the Tory party. Had it not been for the line fixed across their path, I think Mr. Gladstone, Herbert, and the other Peelites would have joined Lord Derby instead of the Whigs. Nor would Mr. Gladstone’s logic have been in fault (when is it?), or failed to justify abundantly the course he had taken.’