that when church preferment came his way, the prime minister so often found the best clergymen in the worst politicians. They should have remembered that he was of those who believed “no more glorious church in Christendom to exist than the church of England”; and its official ordering was in his eyes not any less, even if it was not infinitely more, important in the highest interests of the nation than the construction of a cabinet or the appointment of permanent heads of departments. The church was at this moment, moreover, in one of those angry and perilous crises that came of the Elizabethan settlement and the Act of Uniformity, and the anglican revival forty years ago, and all the other things that mark the arrested progress of the Reformation in England. The anti-ritualist hunt was up. Civil courts were busy with the conscience and conduct of the clergy. Harmless but contumacious priests were under lock and key. It seemed as if more might follow them, or else as if the shock of the great tractarian catastrophe of the forties might in some new shape recur. To recommend an archbishop in times like these could to a churchman be no light responsibility.
With such thoughts in his mind, however we may judge them, it is not altogether surprising that in seeking an ecclesiastical governor for an institution to him the most sacred and beloved of all forms of human association, Mr. Gladstone should have cared very little whether the personage best fitted in spirituals was quite of the right shade as to state temporals. The labour that he now expended on finding the best man is attested by voluminous correspondence. Dean Church, who was perhaps the most freely consulted by the prime minister, says, “Of one thing I am quite certain, that never for hundreds of years has so much honest disinterested pains been taken to fill the primacy—such inquiry and trouble resolutely followed out to find the really fittest man, apart from every personal and political consideration, as in this case.”[63]
Another ecclesiastical vacancy that led to volumes of correspondence was the deanery of Westminster the year [pg 098] before. In the summer of 1881 Dean Stanley died, and it is interesting to note how easy Mr. Gladstone found it to do full justice to one for whom as erastian and latitudinarian he could in opinion have such moderate approval. In offering to the Queen his “cordial sympathy” for the friend whom she had lost, he told her how early in his own life and earlier still in the dean's he had opportunities of watching the development of his powers, for they had both been educated at a small school near the home of Mr. Gladstone's boyhood.[64] He went on to speak of Stanley's boundless generosity and brilliant gifts, his genial and attaching disposition. “There may be,” he said, “and must be much diversity as to parts of the opinions of Dean Stanley, but he will be long remembered as one who was capable of the deepest and widest love, and who received it in return.”
Far away from these regions of what he irreverently called the shovel hat, about this time Carlyle died (Feb. 4, 1881), a firm sympathiser with Mr. Gladstone in his views of the unspeakable Turk, but in all else the rather boisterous preacher of a gospel directly antipathetic. “Carlyle is at least a great fact in the literature of his time; and has contributed largely, in some respects too largely, towards forming its characteristic habits of thought.” So Mr. Gladstone wrote in 1876, in a highly interesting parallel between Carlyle and Macaulay—both of them honest, he said, both notwithstanding their honesty partisans; both of them, though variously, poets using the vehicle of prose; both having the power of painting portraits extraordinary for vividness and strength; each of them vastly though diversely powerful in expression, each more powerful in expression than in thought; neither of them to be resorted to for comprehensive disquisition, nor for balanced and impartial judgments.[65] Perhaps it was too early in 1876 to speak of Carlyle as forming the characteristic habits of thought of his time, but undoubtedly now when he died, his influence was beginning to tell heavily against the speculative liberalism that had reigned in England for two generations, with enormous advantage to the peace, prosperity and power of [pg 099]
Reconstruction
the country and the two generations concerned. Half lights and half truths are, as Mr. Gladstone implies, the utmost that Carlyle's works were found to yield in philosophy and history, but his half lights pointed in the direction in which men for more material reasons thought that they desired to go.
IV
A reconstruction of the ministry had become necessary by his own abandonment of the exchequer. For one moment it was thought that Lord Hartington might become chancellor, leaving room for Lord Derby at the India office, but Lord Derby was not yet ready to join. In inviting Mr. Childers to take his place as chancellor of the exchequer, Mr. Gladstone told him (Dec. 1, 1882): “The basis of my action is not so much a desire to be relieved from labour, as an anxiety to give the country a much better finance minister than myself,—one whose eyes will be always ranging freely and vigilantly over the whole area of the great establishments, the public service and the laws connected with his office, for the purposes of improvement and of good husbandry.”
The claim of Sir Charles Dilke to a seat in the cabinet had become irresistible alike by his good service as undersecretary at the foreign office, and by his position out of doors; and as the admission of a radical must be balanced by a whig—so at least it was judged—Mr. Gladstone succeeded in inducing Lord Derby to join, though he had failed with him not long before.[66]
Apart from general objections at court, difficulties arose about the distribution of office. Mr. Chamberlain, who has always had his full share of the virtues of staunch friendship, agreed to give up to Sir C. Dilke his own office, which he much liked, and take the duchy, which he did not like at all. In acknowledging Mr. Chamberlain's letter (Dec. 14) Mr. Gladstone wrote to him, “I shall be glad, if I can, to avoid acting upon it. But I cannot refrain from at once writing a hearty line to acknowledge the self-sacrificing spirit in which it is written; and which, I am sure, you will never see cause to repent or change.” This, however, [pg 100] was found to be no improvement, for Mr. Chamberlain's language about ransoms to be paid by possessors of property, the offence of not toiling and spinning, and the services rendered by courtiers to kings, was not much less repugnant than rash assertions about the monarch evading the income-tax. All contention on personal points was a severe trial to Mr. Gladstone, and any conflict with the wishes of the Queen tried him most of all. One of his audiences upon these affairs Mr. Gladstone mentions in his diary: “Dec. 11.—Off at 12.45 to Windsor in the frost and fog. Audience of her Majesty at 3. Most difficult ground, but aided by her beautiful manners, we got over it better than might have been expected.” The dispute was stubborn, but like all else it came to an end; colleagues were obliging, holes and pegs were accommodated, and Lord Derby went to the colonial office, and Sir C. Dilke to the local government board. An officer of the court, who was in all the secrets and had foreseen all the difficulties, wrote that the actual result was due “to the judicious manner in which Mr. Gladstone managed everything. He argued in a friendly way, urging his views with moderation, and appealed to the Queen's sense of courtesy.”