Francis Newman, the cardinal's high-minded and accomplished brother, writes to Mr. Gladstone (1878) in a strain of exalted recognition of his services to the nation, and quotes (a little oddly perhaps) the beautiful lines in Euripides, foretelling the approaching triumph of Dionysus over his mortal foe.[331]
The poets are not absent. Wordsworth, as we have already seen (i. p. 269 n.), sends to him at the board of trade his remonstrance and his sonnet on the railway into Windermere. Tennyson addresses to him for his personal behoof the sonnet upon the Redistribution bill of 1884—
“Steersman, be not precipitate in thine act
Of steering ...”
and on a sheet of note-paper at a later date when Irish self-government was the theme, he copies the Greek lines from Pindar, “how easy a thing it is even for men of light weight to shake a state, how hard to build it up again.”[332] Rogers (1844) insists that, “if one may judge from experience, perhaps the best vehicle in our language for a translator of verse is prose. He who doubts it has only to open his Bible.... Who could wish the stories of Joseph and of Ruth to be otherwise than they are? Or who but would rejoice if the Iliad and the Odyssey were so translated? I once asked Porson to attempt it, and he seemed to like the idea, but said that it would be a labour of ten or twelve years.”
Matthew Arnold—Watts
There was one true poet, and not only a poet but a man, as we now see, with far truer insight into the intellectual needs of his countrymen than any other writer of the closing quarter of the century, who is sometimes supposed to have been overlooked by Mr. Gladstone. And here in the Octagon is Matthew Arnold's letter soliciting his recommendation (1867) for the strictly prosaic post of librarian of the House of Commons, which happily he did not obtain. The year before, Arnold had wished to be made a commissioner under the Endowed Schools Act, but a lawyer was rightly thought necessary by Lord Russell or his advisers, and there is no good reason to suppose that Mr. Gladstone meddled either way. He was responsible in 1882 for a third disappointment, but here again it has been truly said that to appoint to the charity commission a man of sixty, who had no intimate knowledge of charity law, and who had [pg 541] recently in his articles irritated all the nonconformists in England by his ironical references to dissent and dissenters, would not have been conducive to the efficient transaction of public business. A year later Mr. Gladstone proffered him, and his friends made him accept, a civil list pension of two hundred and fifty pounds a year, “in public recognition of service to the poetry and literature of England.” Arnold in a letter here tries to soften Mr. Gladstone's heart on the subject of copyright, on which, as I often made bold to tell him, he held some rather flagrant heresies. Here the poet begs the minister to consider whether an English author ought not to have property in his work for a longer time than he has now. “For many books the sale begins late, the author has to create, as Wordsworth said, the taste by which he is to be enjoyed. Such an author is surely the very man one would wish to protect.” I fear he made no convert.
Another poet, with no eye on patronage or pension, hopes to be permitted to say (1869), “how very many of your countrymen whom you have forgotten or never saw, follow your noble and courageous development of legislation with the same personal devotion, gratitude, and gladness that I feel.” Then five years later he still assures him that among men of letters he may have antagonists but he cannot have enemies—rather a fine distinction, with painfully little truth in it as things happened.
To Miss Martineau, who had done hard work in more than one good cause, he proposes a pension, which she honourably declines: “The work of my busy years has supplied the needs of a quiet old age. On the former occasions of my declining a pension I was poor, and it was a case of scruple (possibly cowardice). Now I have a competence, and there would be no excuse for my touching the public money. You will need no assurance that I am as grateful for your considerate offer, as if it had relieved me of a wearing anxiety.”
In 1885 he wrote to Mr. Watts, the illustrious painter, to request, with the sanction of the Queen, that he would allow himself to be enrolled among the baronets of the United Kingdom. “It gives me lively pleasure,” he said, “to have the means of thus doing honour to art in the person of so [pg 542] distinguished a representative of the noble pursuit.” Mr. Watts, in words that I am permitted to transcribe, declined; as he did also a second time in 1894 when the proposal was repeated.