‘I arrived at Keble at 7.10. Gladstone was not in the drawing-room. I waited for about three minutes when I heard his slow step coming downstairs. He came in with a candle in his hand which he put out, then he came up most cordially and quickly. ‘Mrs. Ward—this is most good of you to come and see me! If you had not come, I should myself have ventured to call and ask after yourself and Mr. Arnold.’
‘Then he sat down, he on a small uncomfortable chair, where he fidgeted greatly! He began to ask about Mamma. Had there been much suffering? Was death peaceful? I told him. He said that though he had seen many deaths, he had never seen any really peaceful. In all there had been much struggle. So much so that ‘I myself have conceived what I will not call a terror of death, but a repugnance from the idea of death. It is the rending asunder of body and soul, the tearing apart of the two elements of our nature—for I hold the body to be an essential element as well as the soul, not a mere sheath or envelope.‘ He instanced the death of Sidney Herbert as an exception. He had said ‘can this indeed be dying?’—death had come so gently.
‘Then after a pause he began to speak of the knowledge of Oxford shown by Robert Elsmere, and we went on to discuss the past and present state of Oxford. He mentioned it ‘as one of the few points on which, outside Home Rule, I disagree with Hutton,’[11] that Hutton had given it as his opinion that Cardinal Newman and Matthew Arnold had had more influence than any other men on modern Oxford. Newman’s influence had been supreme up to 1845—nothing since, and he gathered from Oxford men that Professor Jowett and Mr. Green had counted for much more than Matthew Arnold. M.A.’s had been an influence on the general public, not on the Universities. How Oxford had been torn and rent, what a ‘long agony of thought’ she had gone through! How different from Cambridge!
‘Then we talked again of Newman, how he had possessed the place, his influence comparable only to that of Abelard on Paris—the flatness after he left. I quoted Burne-Jones on the subject. Then I spoke of Pattison’s autobiography as illustrating Newman’s hold. He agreed, but said that Pattison’s religious phase was so disagreeable and unattractive that it did small credit to Newman. He would much like to have seen more of the autobiography, but he understood that the personalities were too strong. I asked him if he had seen Pattison’s last ‘Confession of Faith,’ which Mrs. Pattison decided not to print, in MS. He said no. Then he asked me whether I had pleasant remembrances of Pattison. I warmly said yes, and described how kind he had been to me as a girl. ‘Ah!’ he said—‘Church would never cast him off; and Church is almost the only person of whom he really speaks kindly in the Memoirs.’
‘Then, from the state of Oxford, we passed to the state of the country during the last half-century. ‘It has been a wonderful half-century! I often tell the young men who are coming on that we have had a better time than they can have, in the next half-century. Take one thing only—the abolition of slavery in the world (outside Africa I suppose he meant). You are too young to realize what that means. But I draw a distinction between the first twenty-five years of the period and the second; during the first, steady advance throughout all classes, during the second, distinct recession, and retrogression, in the highest class of all. That testing point, marriage, very disquieting. The scandals about marriage in the last twenty years unparallelled in the first half of the period. I don’t trust my own opinion, but I asked two of the keenest social observers, and two of the coolest heads I ever knew—Lord Granville and the late Lord Clanwilliam—to tell me what they thought and they strongly confirmed my impression.‘ (Here one of the Talbot boys came in and stood by the fire, and Gladstone glanced at him once or twice, as though conversation on these points was difficult while he was there.) I suggested that more was made of scandals nowadays by the newspapers. But he would not have it—‘When I was a boy—I left Eton in 1827—there were two papers, the Age and the Satirist, worse than anything which exists now. But they died out about 1830, and for about forty years there was nothing of the kind. Then sprang up this odious and deplorable crop of Society papers.’ He thought the fact significant.
‘He talked of the modern girl. ‘They tell me she is not what she was—that she loves to be fast. I don’t know. All I can bear testimony to is the girl of my youth. She was excellent!’
‘‘But,’ I asked him, ‘in spite of all drawbacks, do you not see a gradual growth and diffusion of earnestness, of the social passion during the whole period?’ He assented, and added, ‘With the decline of the Church and State spirit, with the slackening of State religion, there has unquestionably come about a quickening of the State conscience, of the social conscience. I will not say what inference should be drawn.’
‘Then we spoke of charity in London, and of the way in which the rich districts had elbowed out their poor. And thereupon—perhaps through talk of the motives for charitable work—we came to religion. ‘I don’t believe in any new system,’ he said, smiling, and with reference to Robert Elsmere; ‘I cling to the old. The great traditions are what attract me. I believe in a degeneracy of man, in the Fall—in sin—in the intensity and virulence of sin. No other religion but Christianity meets the sense of sin, and sin is the great fact in the world to me.’
‘I suggested that though I did not wish for a moment to deny the existence of moral evil, the more one thought of it the more plain became its connection with physical and social and therefore removable conditions. He disagreed, saying that the worst forms of evil seemed to him to belong to the highest and most favoured class ‘of educated people’—with some emphasis.
‘I asked him whether it did not give him any confidence in ‘a new system’—i.e. a new construction of Christianity—to watch its effect on such a life as T. H. Green’s. He replied individuals were no test; one must take the broad mass. Some men were born ‘so that sin never came near them. Such men never felt the need of Christianity. They would be better if they were worse!’