While I feel very strongly, and acknowledge with sincere gratitude, that you have honoured in my person, making me a sort of standard bearer, the pursuit of art for its own sake, and have so afforded an enduring encouragement to those who, like myself, may be willing to relinquish many good and tangible things for purposes believed to be good, but not likely to meet with general sympathy, still, I feel it would be something like a real disgrace to accept for work merely attempted, reward and payment only due to work achieved.... I should have the ghost of the Lycian chief reproaching me in my dreams! Also the objects to which I wish to dedicate the rest of my life will best be carried out in quiet and obscurity, so please do not be vexed with me if I again beg respectfully and gratefully to decline.... Sarpedon's words[333] always ring in my ears, and so I think you will understand the things I cannot attempt to say.... I am so far from undervaluing distinctions that I should like to be a Duke, and deserve the title.... Still, it is true that, living mainly in a world of my own, my views are narrowed (I hope I may also say simplified), till a sense of the four great conditions which to my mind comprise all that can be demonstrated of our existence, Life and Death, Light and Darkness, so dominate my mental vision that they almost become material entities and take material forms, dwarfing and casting into shadow ordinary considerations. Over the two first, human efforts broadly speaking avail nothing; but we have it in our power to modify the two last (of course I include in the terms all that belongs to good and bad, beauty and ugliness). Labouring by the side of the poet and the statesman, the artist may deal with those great issues, and here I think the art of England has been at fault.... Your overestimate of my work has hastened the execution of an intention I have long had, and which indeed amounts to retirement from the ranks of professional men. [pg 543] I have concluded, dating from June, to undertake no portraits and accept no commissions, but, contented with the little I have to live upon, work only with the idea of making my efforts worthy, at least as efforts, of the nation's acceptance alike before and after my death.
“You have adopted a resolution,” said Mr. Gladstone in his reply, “of the kind that makes the nineteenth century stare or blink, as those blink who stand in a great brightness and have not eyes for it. The course that you purpose is indeed a self-denying, an unworldly, and a noble one.”
Death Of Mill
One packet touches a matter that at the moment did Mr. Gladstone some harm in the judgment of men whose good opinion was worth having. In 1873 John Stuart Mill died, and a public memorial was proposed. Mr. Gladstone intimated that he was willing to co-operate. Then a liberal clergyman attacked the obituary notice in the Times as too frigid, and the author of the notice retorted by tales of Mill's early views on the question of population. He was well acquainted with Mr. Gladstone, and set busily to work to persuade him that Mill in his book on political economy advocated obnoxious checks, that he was vaguely associated with American publications on the matter, and that he did not believe in God, which was not to the point. Mr. Gladstone passed on this tissue of innuendo to the Duke of Argyll. The Duke reported that he had consulted men thoroughly conversant both with Mill and his writings; that he was assured no passage could bear the construction imputed, and that the places which he had himself looked into, clearly referred to prudential restraints on marriage. Certainly a school of social economy that deals only with foreign exchanges and rent and values and the virtues of direct taxes and indirect, and draws the curtain around the question of population, must be a singularly shallow affair. The Duke of Argyll manfully brushed wasps aside, and sent his subscription. So did men as orthodox as Lord Salisbury, and as cautious as Lord Derby. Mr. Gladstone on the other hand wrote to the promoters of the memorial: “In my view this painful controversy still exists. I feel that it is not possible for me, [pg 544] situated as I am at the present time, to decide it or to examine it with a view to decision. The only course open to me is to do no act involving a judgment either way, and, therefore, while I desire to avoid any public step whatever, I withdraw from co-operation, and request that my name may be no further mentioned.” Unfortunately, the withdrawal of such a name could not be other than a public step. To say, moreover, that the controversy still existed, was to go a longish way in public opinion towards deciding it. The curious thing is that Mr. Gladstone had known Mill so well—his singleminded love of truth, his humanity, his passion for justice—as to call him by the excellent name of “the Saint of Rationalism.” A saint of any sort is surely uncommon enough in our fallen world, to claim an equity that is not refused to sinners. Yet fifteen years later he wrote a letter doing Mill more justice. “Of all the motives, stings, and stimulants,” he wrote, “that reach men through their egoism in parliament, no part could move or even touch him. His conduct and his language were in this respect a sermon. Again, though he was a philosopher he was not, I think, a man of crotchets. He had the good sense and practical tact of politics, together with the high independent thought of a recluse.”[334]
A learned Unitarian (Beard) sends him a volume of Hibbert lectures. “All systems,” Mr. Gladstone writes in acknowledging it, “have their slang, but what I find in almost every page of your book is that you have none.” He complains, however, of finding Augustine put into a leash with Luther and Calvin. “Augustine's doctrine of human nature is substantially that of Bishop Butler; and he converted me about forty-five years ago to Butler's doctrine.” Of far earlier date than this (1839) is an interesting letter from Montalembert:—
London, July 4, 1839.—It seems to me that amidst many dissentimens, and although you pass generally in this country for an enemy to my faith and my church, there is a link between us; since admitting every superiority of talent and influence on [pg 545] your side, we stand on the same ground in public life—that of the inalienable rights of spiritual power. I have, therefore, received your book with gratitude, and read it with the sincerest interest. I now take the liberty of offering you a portion of the work I have published, not on matter of actual controversy, but on an unknown and delightful subject of religious history. If you ever find leisure enough to throw a glance on the History of St. Elizabeth, and more particularly on the Introduction, which is a rapid résumé of the thirteenth century, you will perhaps gain some slight information on what the Rev. Hugh McNeile so appropriately called “the filth and falsehood of the middle ages,” in his splendid speech on church extension, at Freemasons' Hall a few days ago. And allow me to add, my dear sir, with the utter frankness which I cannot divest myself of, that what you seem to me to stand the most in need of at present, is a deeper and more original knowledge of the laws and events of Catholic Europe.
Then come others, recalling illustrious names and famous events in English history. There are a dozen letters of business (1837-1846) from the Duke of Wellington. The reader may be curious to see the earliest communication between two such men—
London, Nov. 27, 1837.—I have by accident mislaid the petition from the Cape of Good Hope, if it was ever sent me. But I shall be happy to see you and converse with you upon the subject; and consider whether it is desirable or possible that I can bring the subject before the consideration of the House of Lords at the same time that you will in the H. of C. I would propose to you to come here, or that I should go to you to-morrow, Tuesday, at any hour you will name.—I have the honour to be, dear sir, your most faithful, humble servant,
Wellington.[335]
Once he uses his well-known laconic style—