VII. CHATTETH WITH THE GRAND OLD MAN.
Dost thou remember, my dear Mr. Gladstone, a certain warm and pleasant July afternoon when thou didst honour and oppress me with thy Grand Old Presence for a couple or more of weary hours, regardless of the fact that the "House" expected thee to appear and reply on some moot point or other to Mr. Goschen? There in my modest studio thou didst sit, rubbing that extensive ear of thine with one long forefinger, and smiling suavely at such regular intervals as almost to suggest the idea of there being a patent smiling-machine secreted behind thy never-resting jaw!
Ah, that was a day! We talked—but no! 'twas thou didst talk, thou noble old man! and I—as all poor mortals must needs do in thy company—listened. Listened intently; helpless to remove thee from the chair in which thou sattest; hopeless of putting any stop to thine eloquence; while on, on, on, still on, rolled the stream of thy fluent and wordy contradictions, till my mind like a ship broken loose from its moorings, rocked up and down in a wild, dark sea of uncertainty as to what thou didst mean; or whether thy meaning, if it could by chance be discovered, should in truth be meant? Hadst thou been a Book instead of a Man, I should have flung thee aside, walked the room, and clutched my hair after the manner of the intense tragedian; but with thee, thou astonishing Biped, I could do no more than stare stonily at thy careless collar-ends and concentrate all my soul on my powers of hearing. "Listen, fool!" I said to my inner self—"Listen! It is Gladstone who is speaking—Gladstone the old man eloquent; Gladstone the thinker; Gladstone the Bible scholar; Gladstone the Greek translator; Gladstone the Scotchman, Gladstone the Irishman, Gladstone the—the—the—Wood-cutter! Listen!"
And, as I live, I listened to thee, Gladstone; I swallowed, as it were, thine every word, in spite of increasingly lethargic mental indigestion. Specially did I strive to follow thee in thy wild flights up the stairs of many religious theories, when with gray hair ruffled and eyes aglare, thou didst solemnly rend piecemeal "Robert Elsmere," forgetting, O thou grand old Paradox, that if thou hadst never lifted up that clamant voice of thine in Nineteenth-Century-Magazine utterance, Robert and his oppressive religious troubles might scarcely have attracted notice? Didst thou not "boom" Robert, and then feign surprise at the result? Ay, venerable Splitter of Straws and Hewer of Logs, wilt deny the truth? And shall I not advise thee in thine own terms to retire from public life, not "now," but "at present." Or if not "at present" then "now"? Either will serve, before thou dost make more blows with thy hatchet-brain (somewhat dulled at the edge) at the future honour and welfare of thy country.
Ah, what things I could have said to thee, thou Quibble, when thou didst venture to assail me with thy converse, if thou hadst but taken decent pause for breathing! Why, amongst other marvels, didst thou deem it worth thy while to flatter me, or to praise the casual sputterings of my pen? Thy unctuous insinuations carried no persuasion; thy "nods and becks and wreathed smiles" were wasted on me; thy soft assurances of the "certainty of my future brilliant fame" went past my ears like the murmur of an idle wind. For a fame "assured" by thee is nothing worth; and thy Polonius-like approbation of any piece of work, literary or otherwise, is as a mark set on it to make it seem ridiculous. For thou art destitute of humour save in wood-cutting; and thou needest many a lesson from my dear friend Andrew Lang before thou canst successfully comprehend the subtly critical art of proving a goose to be a swan. And so, by monosyllables slipt in like frailest wedges between thy florid bursts of ambiguity, I strove to entice thy wandering wits back to the discussion of personal faith in matters religious, wherein I found thee most divertingly inchoate, but my feeble efforts were of small avail. For lo, while yet I strove to understand whether thou wert in truth a Roman Papist, a Calvinist, a Hindoo, a Theosophist, or a Special Advocate of the War Cry, the subject of Creed, like a magic-lantern slide, disappeared from thy mental view, and Divorce came up instead. Frightful and wonderful, according to thee, goodman Gladstone, are the wicked ways of the married! No sooner are they united than they move heaven and earth to get parted—so it is at any rate very frequently in the free and happy American Republic, where the disagreeing parties need not move heaven and earth, but simply make a mutual assertion. Oh, of a truth here was no smiling matter! No Deity in question, but a very positive Devil, needing thy exhortation and exorcism; and thy jaws clacked on sternly, strenuously, and with a resolute gravity and persistency that seemed admirable. Not every man could be expected to find a Mrs. Gladstone, but surely all were bound to try and discover such a paragon. If all married society were composed of Mr. and Mrs. Gladstones, why, married society would realise the fabled Elysium. And supposing there continued to be only one Mr. and Mrs. Gladstone, and all the rest were quite a different set of hopelessly different temperaments, then, naturally, it was impossible to state what disasters might ensue. It would be a case of Noah and his wife over again—after them the Deluge. In the interim, Divorce was shocking, abominable, sinful, diabolical, ungodly—an upsetting of the most sacred foundations of morality—and it was chiefly because Gladstonian domestic tastes were not universal. This, at least, is what I seemed to gather from thee in thine onslaughts against the large and melancholy mass of the Miserably Married; I say I "seemed" to gather it, because it "seemed" thy meaning, but as thy whole mode of speech and action is only "seems," I cannot be absolutely sure either of myself or thyself. For thou didst set out an attractive row of various learned propositions, gently, and with the bland solicitude of a hen-wife setting out her choicest eggs for sale, then suddenly and incontinently, and as one in a fit of strangest madness, thou didst sweep them up and fling them aside into airy nothingness without concern for the havoc wrought. Thou didst calmly state what appeared to be a Fact, reasonable and graspable; and with all the powers of my being I seized upon it as a grateful thing and good for consideration; when suddenly thy senile smile obscured the intellectual horizon, and thy equably modulated voice murmured such words as these: "Not that I desire to imply by any means that this is so, or should be so, but that it might (under certain circumstances, and provided certain minds were at harmony upon the point) probably become so." Ah, thou embodied Confusion worse Confounded! Had it not been for this constant playing of thine at thy favourite shuffling game of cross-purposes, I should have roused my soul from its stupor of forced attention to demand of thee more of thy profound Bible scholarship. Whether, for example, if Divorce, thy bugbear, were ungodly, and the Bible true, a man should not have two, three, nay, half-a-dozen wives at his pleasure for as long or as short a time as he chose, and find situations for them afterwards as servants, telegraph-clerks, and bookkeepers, when their beauty was gone and snappishness of temper had taken the place of endearing docility. Whether English harem-life, lately set in vogue by certain great and distinguished "Upper" people, could not be easily proved pleasing unto the Most High Jehovah? For did not God love His servant Abraham? and did not Abraham bestow his affections on Sarai and Hagar? and when the hoary old reprobate was "well stricken in years" and "the Lord had blessed him in all things" did he not again take a wife named Keturah, who presented him in his centenarian decrepitude with six sons?—all "fine babies," no doubt. What sayest thou to these morals of Holy Writ, thou "many-sounding" mouthpiece of opinion? Answer me on a postcard, for with thee, more than with any other man, should brevity be the soul of wit!
Some of us younger and irreverent folk oft take to speculating why, in the name of bodies politic, thy days, O Venerable, are so long in the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee? The Lord thy God, friend William Ewart, must have some excellent reason for allowing thee to ruthlessly cut down so many growing oaks of English honour and walk unscathed across the bare, disfigured country, with the wild dogs of Democracy sneaking at thy heels. And I forgot, in speaking of the holy Abraham, that late events have proved the high superiority of thy tastes in morality to those of God's anciently-favoured servant. For didst thou not disown thy sweetest nursling, thine own favourite adopted son, Parnell, simply and solely to publicly clasp and kiss the wrinkled, withering hand of Mrs. Grundy? And knowest thou not, thou gray-haired Conundrum, that nothing has ever seemed more preternaturally absurd to the impartial observer and student of social life in all countries, than this making a public question out of personal matter?—this desertion of a former friend, a man, too, of immense intellectual capability, all because, as the old German ballad goes, "he loved a, to him, temptingly-forbidden lady"? Just Heavens! I could name dozens of men (but I will not), party men too, respectably married likewise, who have their "temptingly-forbidden ladies" tucked snugly away in the innermost recesses of their confidence, and who avoid betraying themselves into such impulsiveness as might lead to a fire-escape and political dissolution. As for Mrs. Grundy, the dear old soul never sees anything now unless she is led up to it with her spectacles on; she is more than half blind, and totally deaf—a poor, frail creature very much on her last legs—and she must have been vaguely flattered and surprised at thy voluntary Grand Old Hand-Shake, given to her in the very face of all the staring world of intelligence and fashion. It must have soothed her aching heart and comforted her tottering limbs to find she still had left to her a pale vestige of past power. Ah, it was a grand and edifying party-split!—almost as exciting as if it had occurred on a question of Beer, which fateful subject angrily discussed, did, I believe, on one occasion actually effect a change of Ministry. And it is rather a notable proof of the curious littleness of the age we live in, that of late, political parties have seldom broken up on great questions—questions of momentous and general interest affecting the welfare of the state and people—but nearly always on petty, personal, nay almost vulgar and childish disputes, such as might make Fox and Pitt turn and groan in their graves. Is there no such thing as unadulterated patriotism left, I wonder?—no real ardent love of the "Mother" England? or hast thou, old Would-Be Despot, choked it all by thy pernicious gabble?
And yet, whatever may be said of thee now or in after history as a Man-Enigma, thy bitterest enemy, unless he be an idiot born, can hardly be blind to thy numerous and extraordinary endowments. Jumbled as they are together with so much confusion that it is difficult to tell which savour most of vice or most of virtue, they are nevertheless Endowments, rare enough to find in any other living composition of mortal mould. And the mystic gift that keeps thee powerful to grasp and retain thy dominance over the minds of the Majority, is simple Genius—a gift of which there are many spurious imitations, but which in itself is given to so few as to make it seem curious and remarkable, aye, even a thing suggestive of downright madness to the men of mere business talent and capacity who form the largest portion of the governing body. Misguided, captious, flighty as caprice itself, it is nevertheless a flash of the veritable Promethean fire which works that busy, massive brain of thine—a kindling, restless heat which is entirely deficient in the brains of nearly all thy fellow-statesmen of the hour. This it is that fascinates the Public—the giant Public that above all the whisperings and squealings of the Press, reserves its own opinion, and only utters it when called upon to do so, with sundry roarings and vociferations as of a hungry lion roused—a convincing manner of eloquence which doth wake to speculative timorousness the wandering penny-a-liner. For Genius is the only quality the Public does in absolute truth admire, without being taught or forced into admiration—and that Genius has ever in reality been despised or neglected by the world, is, roughly speaking, a Lie. Everything noble that deserves to live, lives; and Homer wrote as much for the England of to-day as for the Greece of past time. The things that die, deserve to die; the "genius" who deems himself ill-used, does by his childish querulousness prove himself unworthy of appreciation. For no great soul complains, inasmuch as all complaint is cowardice.
Thus, when I bring the Public well into sympathetic view, and consider thee in relation to it, O Grand Old Gladstone, I understand readily enough what is meant by the feeling of the "majority" concerning thy civic and personal qualifications for power. It is this—that the people feel, that notwithstanding thy chameleon-like variableness, and thy darkly cabalistic utterances on the political How, When, and Why, thou art still the "only" man in the professed service of the country possessing this talisman of Genius which from time immemorial has carried its own peculiar triumph over the heads of all opposers. For when thou shalt be gone the way of all flesh, who is left? Little brilliancy of wit or good counsel is there now in the Commons, and the Lords are but weary creatures, bent on maintaining their own interests in the face of all change. Is there a man who can be truly said to have the gift of eloquence save Thou? Wherefore the attention and interest of the people still continue to revolve round thy charmed pivot, thou Hawarden Thinker, with, as the Scotch say, "a bee" in thy bonnet. And, whether Premier or Ex-Premier, all because thou art a Thinker in spite of the bee. Thy thoughts may be "long, long thoughts" like the "thoughts of youth" in Longfellow's pretty poem—they may be indeed without any definite end at all, but they are thoughts, they are not mere business calculations of the State's expenses. Only being ill-assorted and still worse defined, they are unfit to blossom into words, which they generally do, to the perplexity and anxiety of everybody concerned. And there is the mischief—a mischief irremediable, for nothing will stop thy tongue, thou Grand Old Gabbler, save a certain Grand Old Silence wearing only bones and carrying a scythe, who is not so much interested in politics as in mould and earthworms à la Darwin.