Chapter III. The Octagon.
It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.—Emerson.
Near the end of the eighties, Mr. Gladstone built for himself a fire-proof room at the north-western corner of his temple of peace. In this Octagon—“a necessity of my profession and history”—he stored the letters and papers of his crowded lifetime. He estimated the “selected letters” addressed to himself at sixty thousand, and the mass of other letters that found their way into the Octagon without selection, along with more than a score of large folios containing copies of his own to other people, run to several tens of thousands more. There are between five and six hundred holographs from the Queen, afterward designated by him in his will to be an heirloom. “It may amuse you,” he told Lord Granville, who always wrote the shortest letters that ever were known, “to learn that your letters to me weigh fifteen pounds and a-half.” Probably no single human being ever received sixty thousand letters worth keeping, and of these it is safe to say that three-fourths of them might [pg 527] as well have been destroyed as soon as read, including a certain portion that might just as well never have been either written or read. This slightly improvident thrift recalls the jealous persons who will not suffer the British Museum to burn its rubbish, on the curious principle that what was never worth producing must always be worth preserving.
Correspondence
As for Mr. Gladstone's own share, he explains his case in what he says (1865) to the widow of Mr. Cobden: “Of the kind of correspondence properly called private and personal, I have none: indeed for many long long years it has been out of my power, except in very few instances, to keep up this kind of correspondence.” The exceptions are few indeed. Half of the contents of this crowded little chamber are papers of business,—nightly letters to the Queen, telling her what had gone on in the House and what sort of figure had been cut by its debaters, reports of meetings of the cabinet, memoranda for such meetings, notes for speeches, endless correspondence with colleagues, and all the other operations incident to the laborious machinery of government in the charge of a master engineer. In this region of his true calling, all is order, precision, persistency, and the firmness and ease of the strong. For many years in that department all was action, strength, success. Church leaders again contribute considerable piles, but these, too, mainly concern church business for the hour, and the business has now even for adherents naturally fallen out of memory. The more miscellaneous papers are different. There a long and strange procession flits before our eye—dreams, “little bustling passions,” trivialities, floating like a myriad motes into the dim Octagon. We are reminded how vast a space in our ever-dwindling days is consumed by social invitations and the discovery of polite reasons for evading them. “Bona verba” is a significant docket prompting the secretary's reply. It is borne in upon us how grievously the burden of man's lot is aggravated by slovenly dates, illegible signatures, and forgetfulness that writing is something meant to be read. There is a mountain of letters from one correspondent so mercilessly written, that the [pg 528] labour of decyphering them would hardly be justified, even if one could hope to recover traces of the second decade of Livy or the missing books of the Annals of Tacitus. Foreign rulers, Indian potentates, American citizens, all write to the most conspicuous Englishman of the time. In an unformed hand a little princess thanks him for a photograph, and says, “I am so glad to have seen you at Windsor, and will try and remember you all my life.” There are bushels of letters whose writers “say all that they conscientiously can” for applicants, nominees, and candidates in every line where a minister is supposed to be able to lend a helping hand if he likes. Actors send him boxes, queens of song press on him lozenges infallible for the vocal cords, fine ladies dabbling in Italian seek counsel, and not far off, what is more to the point, are letters from young men thanking him for his generosity in aiding them to go to Oxford with a view to taking orders. Charles Kean, a popular tragedian of those times, and son of one more famous still, thanks Mr. Gladstone for his speech at a complimentary dinner to him (March 1862), and says how proud he is to remember that they were boys at Eton together. Then there are the erudite but unfruitful correspondents, with the melancholy docket, “Learning thrown away”; and charming professors of poetry—as though the alto should insist on singing the basso part—impressively assure him how dreadfully uneasy they are about the weakness of our army, and how horribly low upon the security of our Indian Empire.
Variety Of Correspondence
Some have said that to peruse the papers of a prime minister must lower one's view of human nature. Perhaps this may partly depend upon the prime minister, partly on the height of our expectations from our fellow-creatures. If such a survey is in any degree depressing, there can be no reason why it should be more so than any other large inspection of human life. In the Octagon as in any similar repository we come upon plenty of baffled hopes, chagrin in finding a career really ended, absurd over-estimates of self, over-estimates of the good chances of the world, vexation of those who have chosen the wrong path at the unfair good luck of those who have chosen the right. We may smile, [pg 529] but surely in good-natured sympathy, at the zeal of poor ladies for a post for husbands of unrecognised merit, or at the importunity of younger sons with large families but inadequate means. Harmless things of this sort need not turn us into satirists or cynics.
All the riddles of the great public world are there—why one man becomes prime minister, while another who ran him close at school and college ends with a pension from the civil list; why the same stable and same pedigree produce a Derby winner and the poor cab-hack; why one falls back almost from the start, while another runs famously until the corner, and then his vaulting ambition dwindles to any place of “moderate work and decent emolument”; how new competitors swim into the field of vision; how suns rise and set with no return, and vanish as if they had never been suns but only ghosts or bubbles; how in these time-worn papers, successive generations of active men run chequered courses, group following group, names blazing into the fame of a day, then like the spangles of a rocket expiring. Men write accepting posts, all excitement, full of hope and assurance of good work, and then we remember how quickly clouds came and the office ended in failure and torment. In the next pigeon-hole just in the same way is the radiant author's gift of his book that after all fell still-born. One need not be prime minister to know the eternal tale of the vanity of human wishes, or how men move,