Conversations
very easiest and most attractive was Clarendon. Constantly regretted that he had never met nor known Sir Walter Scott, as of course he might have done. Thought the effect of diplomacy to be bad on the character; to train yourself to practise the airs of genial friendship towards men from whom you are doing your best to hide yourself, and out of whom you are striving to worm that which they wish to conceal. Said that he was often asked for advice by young men as to objects of study. He bade them study and ponder, first, the history and working of freedom in America; second, the history of absolutism in France from Louis xiv. to the Revolution. It was suggested that if the great thing with the young is to attract them to fine types of character, the Huguenots had some grave, free, heroic figures, and in the eighteenth century Turgot was the one inspiring example: when Mill was in low spirits, he restored himself by Condorcet's life of Turgot. This reminded him that Canning had once praised Turgot in the House of Commons, though most likely nobody but himself knew anything at all about Turgot. Talking of the great centuries, the thirteenth, and the sixteenth, and the seventeenth, Mr. Gladstone let drop what for him seems the remarkable judgment that “Man as a type has not improved since those great times; he is not so big, so grand, so heroic as he has been.” This, the reader will agree, demands a good deal of consideration.
Then he began to talk about offices, in view of what were now pretty obvious possibilities. After discussing more important people, he asked whether, after a recent conversation, I had thought more of my own office, and I told him that I fancied like Regulus I had better go back to the Irish department. “Yes,” he answered with a flash of his eye, “I think so. The truth is that we're both chained to the oar; I am chained to the oar; you are chained.”
II
The electoral period, when it arrived, he passed once more at Dalmeny. In a conversation the morning after I was [pg 492] allowed to join him there, he seemed already to have a grand majority of three figures, to have kissed hands, and to be installed in Downing Street. This confidence was indispensable to him. At the end of his talk he went up to prepare some notes for the speech that he was to make in the afternoon at Glasgow. Just before the carriage came to take him to the train, I heard him calling from the library. In I went, and found him hurriedly thumbing the leaves of a Horace. “Tell me,” he cried, “can you put your finger on the passage about Castor and Pollux? I've just thought of something; Castor and Pollux will finish my speech at Glasgow.” “Isn't it in the Third Book?” said I. “No, no; I'm pretty sure it is in the First Book”—busily turning over the pages. “Ah, here it is,” and then he read out the noble lines with animated modulation, shut the book with a bang, and rushed off exultant to the carriage. This became one of the finest of his perorations.[297] His delivery of it that afternoon, they said, was most majestic—the picture of the wreck, and then the calm that gradually brought down the towering billows to the surface of the deep, entrancing the audience like magic.
Then came a depressing week. The polls flowed in, all day long, day after day. The illusory hopes of many months faded into night. The three-figure majority by the end of the week had vanished so completely, that one wondered how it could ever have been thought of. On July 13 his own Midlothian poll was declared, and instead of his old majority of 4000, or the 3000 on which he counted, he was only in by 690. His chagrin was undoubtedly intense, for he had put forth every atom of his strength in the campaign. But with that splendid suppression of vexation which is one of the good lessons that men learn in public life, he put a brave face on it, was perfectly cheery all through the luncheon, and afterwards took me to the music-room, where instead of constructing a triumphant cabinet with a majority of a hundred, he had to try to adjust an Irish policy to a parliament with hardly a majority at all. These topics exhausted, with a curiously quiet gravity of tone he told me [pg 493]
Question Of Undertaking Government
that cataract had formed over one eye, that its sight was gone, and that in the other eye he was infested with a white speck. “One white speck,” he said, almost laughing, “I can do with, but if the one becomes many, it will be a bad business. They tell me that perhaps the fresh air of Braemar will do me good.” To Braemar the ever loyal Mr. Armitstead piloted them, in company with Lord Acton of whose society Mr. Gladstone could never have too much.
III
It has sometimes been made a matter of blame by friends no less than foes, that he should have undertaken the task of government, depending on a majority not large enough to coerce the House of Lords. One or two short observations on this would seem to be enough. How could he refuse to try to work his Irish policy through parliament, after the bulk of the Irish members had quitted their own leader four years before in absolute reliance on the sincerity and good faith of Mr. Gladstone and his party? After all the confidence that Ireland had shown in him at the end of 1890, how could he in honour throw up the attempt that had been the only object of his public life since 1886? To do this would have been to justify indeed the embittered warnings of Mr. Parnell in his most reckless hour. How could either refusal of office or the postponement of an Irish bill after taking office, be made intelligible in Ireland itself? Again, the path of honour in Ireland was equally the path of honour and of safety in Great Britain. Were British liberals, who had given him a majority, partly from disgust at Irish coercion, partly from faith that he could produce a working plan of Irish government, and partly from hopes of reforms of their own—were they to learn that their leaders could do nothing for any of their special objects?