Studies in Contemporary Biography

by Viscount James Bryce Bryce

I love my country so as only they Who love a mother fit to die for may. I love her old renown, her ancient fame: What better proof than that I loathe her shame?

It was this attitude that brought on him the charge of wanting patriotism, a charge first, I think, insinuated at the time of the Alabama arbitration, renewed when in 1876 he was accused of befriending Russia and neglecting “British interests,” and sedulously repeated thereafter, although in those two instances the result had proved him right. There was this much to give a kind of colour to the charge, that he had scrupulously, perhaps too scrupulously, refrained from extolling the material power of England, preferring to insist upon her responsibilities; that he was known to regret the constant increase of naval and military expenditure, and that he had several times taken a course which honour and prudence seemed to him to recommend, but which had offended the patriots of the music-halls. But it was an unjust charge, for no man had a warmer pride in England, a higher sense of her greatness and her mission.

Was he too fond of power? Like other strong men, he enjoyed it.[70] That to secure it he ever either adopted or renounced an opinion, 452 those who understood and watched the workings of his mind could not believe. He was not only too conscientious, but too proud to forego any of his convictions, and there were not a few occasions when he took a course which considerations of personal interest would have forbidden. He did not love office, feeling himself happier without its cares, and when he accepted it did so, I think, in the belief that there was work to be done which it was laid upon him individually to do. His changes sprang naturally from the development of his own ideas or (as in the case of his Irish policy) from the teaching of facts. He sometimes so far yielded to his colleagues as to sanction steps which he thought not the best, and may in this have sometimes erred; yet compromises are unavoidable, for no Cabinet could be kept together if its members did not now and then, in matters not essential, yield to one another. When all the facts of his life come to be known, instances may be disclosed in which he was the victim of his own casuistry or of his deference to Peel’s maxim that a minister should not avow a change of view until the time has come to give effect to it. But it will also be made clear that he strove to obey his conscience, that he acted with an ever-present sense of his responsibility to the Almighty, and that he was animated by an unselfish enthusiasm for humanity, enlightenment, and freedom.

Whether he was a good judge of men was 453 a question much discussed among his friends. With all his astuteness, he was in some ways curiously simple; with all his caution, he was by nature unsuspicious, disposed to treat all men as honest till they gave him strong reasons for thinking otherwise. Those who professed sympathy with his views and aims sometimes succeeded in inspiring more confidence than they deserved. But where this perturbing influence was absent he showed plenty of insight, and would pass shrewd judgments on the politicians around him, permitting neither their behaviour towards himself nor his opinion of their moral character to affect his estimate of their talents. In making appointments in the Civil Service, or in the Established Church, he rose to a far higher standard of public duty than Palmerston or Disraeli had reached or cared to reach, taking great pains to find the fittest men, and giving little weight to political considerations.[71]

His public demeanour, and especially his excitability and vehemence of speech, made people attribute to him an overbearing disposition and an irritable temper. In private one did not find these faults. Masterful he certainly was, both in speech and in action. His ardent manner, the intensity of his look, the dialectical vigour with which he pressed an argument, were 454 apt to awe people who knew him but slightly, and make them abandon resistance. A gifted though somewhat erratic politician of long bygone days told me how he once fared when he had risen in the House of Commons to censure some act of his leader. “I had not gone on three minutes when Gladstone turned round and gazed at me so that I had to sit down in the middle of a sentence. I could not help it. There was no standing his eye.” But he neither meant nor wished to beat down his opponents by mere authority. One who knew him as few people did observed to me, “When you are arguing with Mr. Gladstone, you must never let him think he has convinced you unless you are really convinced. Persist in repeating your view, and if you are unable to cope with him in skill of fence, say bluntly that for all his ingenuity and authority you think he is wrong, and you retain your own opinion. If he respects you as a man who knows something of the subject, he will be impressed by your opinion, and it will afterwards have due weight with him.” In his own Cabinet he was willing to listen patiently to everybody’s views, and, indeed, in the judgment of some of his colleagues, was not, at least in his later years, sufficiently strenuous in asserting and holding to his own. It is no secret that some of the most important decisions of the ministry of 1880-85 were taken against his judgment, 455 though, when they had been adopted, he was, of course, bound to defend them in Parliament as if they had received his individual approval. Nor, though tenacious, did he bear malice against those who had baffled him. He would exert his full force to get his own way, but if he could not get it, accepted the position with good temper.[72] He was too proud to be vindictive, too completely master of himself to be betrayed into angry words. Impatient he might sometimes be under a nervous strain, but never rude or rough. It was less easy to determine whether he was overmindful of injuries, but those who had watched him most closely held that mere opposition or even insult did not leave a permanent sting, and that the only thing he could not forget or forgive was faithlessness. Himself a model of loyalty to his colleagues, he followed his favourite poet in consigning the traditori to the lowest pit, although, like all statesmen, he often found himself obliged to work with those whom he distrusted.

He was less sensitive than Peel, as appeared from his attitude toward his two chief opponents. Disraeli’s attacks did not seem to gall him, perhaps because, although he recognised the ability and admired the courage of his adversary, 456 he did not respect Disraeli’s character, remembering his behaviour to Peel, and thinking him habitually untruthful. Yet he never attacked Disraeli personally. There was another of his opponents of whom he entertained a specially unfavourable opinion, but no one could have told from his speeches what that opinion was. Against Lord Salisbury, his chief antagonist from 1881 onwards, he showed no resentment, though Lord Salisbury had more than once spoken discourteously of him. In 1890 he remarked to me apropos of some attack, “I have never felt angry at what Salisbury has said about me. His mother was very kind to me when I was quite a young man, and I remember Salisbury as a little fellow in a red frock rolling about on the ottoman.”

That his temper was naturally hot, no one who looked at him could doubt. But he had it in such tight control, and it was so free from anything acrid or malignant, that it had become a good temper, worthy of a fine nature. However vehement his expressions, they did not wound or humiliate, and those younger men who had to deal with him were not afraid of a sharp answer or an impatient repulse. He was cast in too large a mould to have the pettiness of ruffled vanity or to abuse his predominance by treating any one as an inferior. His manners were the manners of the old time, easy but stately. Like 457 his oratory, they were in what Matthew Arnold used to call the grand style; and the contrast in this respect between him and some of those who crossed swords with him in literary or theological controversy was apparent. His intellectual generosity was a part of the same largeness of nature. He cordially acknowledged his indebtedness to those who helped him in any piece of work, received their suggestions candidly, even when opposed to his own preconceived notions, did not hesitate to confess a mistake. Those who know the abundance of their resources, and have conquered fame, can doubtless afford to be generous. Julius Cæsar was, and George Washington, and so, in a different sphere, were Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin. But the instances to the contrary are so numerous that one may say of magnanimity that it is among the rarest as well as the finest ornaments of character.

The essential dignity of Mr. Gladstone’s nature was never better seen than during the last few years of his life, after he had finally retired (in 1894) from public life. He indulged in no vain regrets, nor was there any foundation for the rumours, so often circulated, that he thought of re-entering the arena of strife. He spoke with no bitterness of those who had opposed, and sometimes foiled, him in the past. He gave vent to no criticisms of those who from 458 time to time filled the place that had been his in the government of the country or the leadership of his party. Although his opinion on current questions was frequently solicited, he scarcely ever allowed it to be known, lest it should embarrass his successors in the leadership of the party, and never himself addressed the nation, except (as already mentioned) on behalf of what he deemed a sacred cause, altogether above party—the discharge by Britain of her duty to the victims of the Turk. As soon as an operation for cataract had enabled him to resume his habit of working for seven hours a day, he devoted himself with his old ardour to the preparation of an edition of Bishop Butler’s works, resumed his multifarious reading, planned (as he told me in 1896) a treatise on the Olympian religion, and filled up the interstices of his working-time with studies on Homer which he had been previously unable to complete. No trace of the moroseness of old age appeared in his manners or his conversation, nor did he, though profoundly grieved at some of the events which he witnessed, and owning himself disappointed at the slow advance made by a cause dear to him, appear less hopeful than in earlier days of the general progress of the world, or less confident in the beneficent power of freedom to promote the happiness of his country. The stately simplicity which had always charmed those who saw him in private, 459 seemed more beautiful than ever in this quiet evening of a long and sultry day. His intellectual powers were unimpaired, his thirst for knowledge undiminished. But a placid stillness had fallen upon him and his household; and in seeing the tide of his life begin slowly to ebb, one thought of the lines of his illustrious contemporary and friend:—

Such a tide as moving seems asleep, Too full for sound and foam, When that which drew from out the boundless deep Turns again home.

Adding to his grace of manner a memory of extraordinary strength and quickness and an amazing vivacity and variety of mental force, any one can understand how fascinating Mr. Gladstone was in society. He enjoyed it to the last, talking as earnestly and joyously at eighty-seven as he had done at twenty on every topic that came up, and exerting himself with equal zest whether his interlocutor was an archbishop or a youthful curate. Though his party used to think that he overvalued the political influence of the great families, allotting them rather more than their share of honours and appointments, no one was personally more free from that taint of snobbishness which is frequently charged upon Englishmen. He gave the best he had to everybody alike, paying to men of learning and letters a respect 460 which in England they seldom receive from the magnates who lead society. And although he was scrupulously observant of the rules of precedence and conventions of social life, it was easy to see that neither rank nor wealth had that importance in his eyes which the latter nowadays commands. Dispensing titles and decorations with a liberal hand, his pride always refused such so-called honours for himself.