I
We have seen how in 1889 Mr. and Mrs. Gladstone celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of one of the most devoted and successful marriages that ever was made, and the unbroken felicity of their home. In 1891, after the shadows of approaching calamity had for many months hung doubtfully over them, a heavy blow fell, and their eldest son died. Not deeply concerned in ordinary politics, he was a man of many virtues and some admirable gifts; he was an accomplished musician, and I have seen letters of his to his father, marked by a rare delicacy of feeling and true power of expression. “I had known him for nearly thirty years,” one friend wrote, “and there was no man, until his long illness, who had changed so little, or retained so long the best qualities of youth, and my first thought was that the greater the loss to you, the greater would be the consolation.”
To Archbishop Benson, Mr. Gladstone wrote (July 6):—
It is now forty-six years since we lost a child,[285] and he who has now passed away from our eyes, leaves to us only blessed recollections. I suppose all feel that those deaths which reverse the order of nature have a sharpness of their own. But setting [pg 461] this apart, there is nothing lacking to us in consolations human or divine. I can only wish that I may become less unworthy to have been his father.
To me he wrote (July 10):—
We feel deeply the kindness and tenderness of your letter. It supplies one more link in a long chain of recollection which I deeply prize. Yes, ours is a tribulation, and a sore one, but yet we feel we ought to find ourselves carried out of ourselves by sympathy with the wife whose noble and absorbing devotion had become like an entire life of itself, and who is now face to face with the void. The grief of children too, which passes, is very sharp while it remains. The case has been very remarkable. Though with abatement of some powers, my son has not been without many among the signs and comforts of health during a period of nearly two and a half years. All this time the terrible enemy was lodged in the royal seat, and only his healthy and unyielding constitution kept it at defiance, and maintained his mental and inward life intact.... And most largely has human, as well as divine compassion, flowed in upon us, from none more conspicuously than from yourself, whom we hope to count among near friends for the short remainder of our lives.
To another correspondent who did not share his own religious beliefs, he said (July 5):—
When I received your last kind note, I fully intended to write to you with freedom on the subject of The Agnostic Island. But since then I have been at close quarters, so to speak, with the dispensations of God, for yesterday morning my dearly beloved eldest son was taken from the sight of our eyes. At this moment of bleeding hearts, I will only say what I hope you will in consideration of the motives take without offence, namely this: I would from the bottom of my heart that whenever the hour of bereavement shall befall you or those whom you love, you and they may enjoy the immeasurable consolation of believing, with all the mind and all the heart, that the beloved one is gone into eternal rest, and that those who remain behind may through the same mighty Deliverer hope at their appointed time to rejoin him.
All this language on the great occasions of human life was not with him the tone of convention. Whatever the synthesis, as they call it,—whatever the form, whatever the creed and faith may be, he was one of that high and favoured household who, in Emerson's noble phrase, “live from a great depth of being.”
Earlier in the year Lord Granville, who so long had been his best friend, died. The loss by his death was severe. As Acton, who knew of their relations well and from within, wrote to Mr. Gladstone (April 1):—