The correspondence is polyglot. In one little bundle, Cavour writes in Italian and French; the Archbishop of Cephalonia congratulates him in Greek on the first Irish Land bill; and in the same tongue the Archbishop of Chios gives him a book on the union of the Armenian with the Anatolian communion; Huber regales him with the luxury of German cursivschrift. The archimandrite Myrianthes forwards him objects from the Holy Land. The patriarch of Constantinople (1896) sends greetings and blessings, and testifies to the bonds of fellowship between the eastern and anglican churches undisturbed since the days of Cyril Lukaris. Dupanloup, the famous Bishop of Orleans (1869), applauds the plan of Juventus Mundi, its grandeur, its [pg 533] beauty, its moral elevation; and proceeds to ask how he can procure copies of the articles on Ecce Homo, as to which his curiosity has been aroused. A couple of notes (1864 and 1871) from Garibaldi, the great revolutionist, are neighbours to letters (1851-74) from Guizot, the great conservative. Three or four lines in French from Garibaldi were given to Mr. Gladstone the day before leaving Cliveden and England (April 24, 1864): “In leaving you pray accept a word of recognition for all the kindness you have heaped upon me, and for the generous interest you have at all times shown for the cause of my country.—Your devoted G. Garibaldi.” The other shorter still (1871) begs him to do something for a French refugee. Minghetti, Ricasoli, and others of that celebrated group commemorate his faithful and effective good will to Italy. Daniel Manin the Venetian thanks him in admirable English for some books, as well as for his energetic and courageous act in drawing a perfidious king (Naples) before the bar of public opinion. Manzoni gives to a friend a letter of introduction (1845), and with Italian warmth of phrase expresses his lively recollection of the day on which he made Mr. Gladstone's acquaintance, and the admiration with which his name is followed. Mérimée, the polished and fastidious genius, presents to him a French consul at Corfu (1858) who in his quality of philhellene and hellenist desires ardently to make the acquaintance of Homer's learned and eloquent commentator. Lesseps, whose hand gave so tremendous and impressive a turn to forces, policies, currents of trade, promises (1870) to keep an appointment, when he will have the double honour of being presented to the Princess Louise by a man so universally respected for the high services he has rendered to the Queen, to his country, and to the progress of the world.
If the language is polyglot, the topics are encyclopædic. Bishops send him their charges; if a divine translates a hymn, he submits it; if he hits upon an argument on the mysteries of the faith, or the vexed themes of theological debate, he despatches pages and pages to Hawarden, and receives page upon page in reply. Young authors, and [pg 534] especially young authoresses pestered him to review their books, though his patience and good nature make 'pester' seem an inapplicable word. A Scotch professor for some reason or another copies out and forwards to him one of Goethe's reflections and maxims:—
How may a man attain to self-knowledge? By Contemplation? certainly not: but by Action. Try to do your Duty and you will find what you are fit for. But what is your Duty? The Demand of the Hour.
As if of all men then living on our planet, Mr. Gladstone were not he to whom such counsel was most superfluous. He replies (Oct. 9, 1880), “I feel the immense, the overmastering power of Goethe, but with such limited knowledge as I have of his works, I am unable to answer the question whether he has or has not been an evil genius of humanity.”
Spirit Of Tolerance
In 1839 Spedding, the Baconian, to whom years later the prime minister proposed that he should fill the chair of history at Cambridge, wrote to him that John Sterling, of whom Mr. Gladstone already knew something, was prevented by health from living in London, and so by way of meeting his friends on his occasional visits, had proposed that certain of them should agree to dine together cheaply once a month at some stated place. As yet Sterling had only spoken to Carlyle, John Mill, Maurice, and Bingham Baring. “I hope,” says Spedding, “that your devotion to the more general interests of mankind will not prevent your assisting in this little job.” Mr. Gladstone seems not to have assisted, though his friend Bishop Wilberforce did, and fell into some hot water in consequence. A veteran and proclaimed freethinker sets out to Mr. Gladstone his own recognition of what ought to be a truism, that he is for every man being faithful to his faith; that his aggressive denial of the inspiration of the Bible did not prevent him from sending a copy in large type to his old mother to read when her eyes were dim; that he respected consolations congenial to the conscience. “I hope,” he says to Mr. Gladstone, “there is a future life, and if so, my not being sure of it will not prevent it, and I know of no better way of deserving it than by [pg 535] conscious service of humanity. The Universe never filled me with such wonder and awe as when I knew I could not account for it. I admit ignorance is a privation. But to submit not to know where knowledge is withheld, seems but one of the sacrifices that reverence for truth imposes on us.” The same correspondent speaks (1881) of “the noble toleration which you have personally shown me, notwithstanding what you must think seriously erroneous views of mine, and upon which I do not keep silence.” Mr. Gladstone had written to him six years before (1875): “Differing from you, I do not believe that secular motives are adequate either to propel or to restrain the children of our race, but I earnestly desire to hear the other side, and I appreciate the advantage of having it stated by sincere and high-minded men.” There is a letter too from the son of another conspicuous preacher of negation, replying to some words of Mr. Gladstone which he took to be disparaging of his parent, and begging him, “a lifelong idealist yourself,” to think more worthily and sympathetically of one whom if he had known he would have appreciated and admired.
A considerable correspondence is here from the learned Bishop Stubbs (1888) on the character of Bishop Fisher of Rochester, the fellow-sufferer of More; on the Convocation Act of 1531 and the other Convocation Acts of Elizabeth; on Father Walsh's letters, and other matters of the sixteenth century. In fact, it is safe to assume that Mr. Gladstone has always some ecclesiastical, historical, theological controversy running alongside of the political and party business of the day. Nobody that ever lived tried to ride so many horses abreast. Another prelate puts a point that is worth remembering by every English school of foreign policy. “In 1879,” writes Bishop Creighton (Feb. 15, 1887), “when foreign affairs were much before the public, I suggested to a publisher a series of books dealing quite shortly and clearly with the political history and constitution of the chief states of Europe from 1815. I designed them for popular instruction, thinking it of great importance that people in general should know what they were talking about, when they spoke of France or Russia.... The result of my attempt [pg 536] was to convince me that our ignorance of the last sixty years is colossal.”
Lord Stanhope has been reading (1858) the “Tusculan Questions,” and confides to Mr. Gladstone's sympathetic ear Cicero's shockingly faulty recollection of Homer,—mistaking Euryclea for Anticlea, the nurse for the mother, and giving to Polyphemus a speech that Polyphemus never spoke. A bishop says Macaulay told him that one of the most eloquent passages in the English language is in Barrow's Seventy-Fifth Sermon, on the Nativity—“Let us consider that the Nativity doth import the completion of many ancient promises....”[329] Letters abound and over-abound on that most movable of topics—“the present state of the Homeric controversy.” Scott, the lexicographer, sends him Greek epigrams on events too fugitive to be now worth recalling—discusses Homeric points, and while not surrendering at discretion, admits them worthy of much consideration. There are many pages from Thirlwall, that great scholar and enlightened man, upon points of Homeric ethnology, Homeric geography, and such questions as whether a line in the Iliad (xiv. 321) makes the mother of Minos to be a Phœnician damsel or the daughter of Phœnix, or whether it is possible to attach a meaning to ἐννέωρος that would represent Minos as beginning his reign when nine years old—a thing, the grave bishop adds, even more strange than the passion of Dante for Beatrice at the same age.
Darwin—Hooker—Huxley
Huxley sends him titles of books on the origin of the domestic horse; Sir Joseph Hooker supplies figures of the girth of giant trees; the number of annual rings in a fallen stump which would seem to give it 6420 years; tells him how the wood of another was as sound after 380 years as if just felled. Somebody else interests him in Helmholtz's experiments on the progression of the vibrations of the true vowel sounds. Letters pass between him and Darwin (1879) on colours and names for colours. Darwin suggests the question whether savages have names for shades of colours: “I should expect that they have not, and this would be remarkable, for the Indians of Chili and Tierra del Fuego [pg 537] have names for every slight promontory and hill to a marvellous degree.” Mr. Gladstone proposes to nominate him a trustee of the British Museum (April 1881), and Darwin replies, “I would gladly have accepted, had my strength been sufficient for anything like regular attendance at the meetings.” Professor Owen thanks him for the honour of Knight of the Bath, and expresses his true sense of the aid and encouragement that he has uniformly received from Mr. Gladstone throughout the course of the labours from which he is now retiring.