The Greek maxim that no one can be called happy till his life is closed must, in the case of statesmen, be extended to warn us from the attempt to fix a man’s place in history till a generation has arisen to whom he is a mere name, not a familiar figure to be loved or hated. Few reputations made in politics so far retain their lustre that curiosity continues to play round the person when those who can remember him living have departed. Dante has in immortal stanzas contrasted the fame of Provenzano Salvani that sounded through all Tuscany 479 while he lived with the faint whispers of his name heard in his own Siena forty years after his death.[75] So out of all the men who have held a foremost place in English public life in the nineteenth century there are but six or seven—Pitt, Fox, Wellington, Peel, Disraeli, possibly Canning, or O’Connell, or Melbourne—whose names are to-day upon our lips. The great poet or the great artist lives as long as his books or his pictures; the statesman, like the singer or the actor, begins to be forgotten so soon as his voice is still, unless he has so dominated the men of his own time, and made himself a part of his country’s history, that his personal character is indissolubly linked to the events the course of which he helped to determine. Tried by this test, Mr. Gladstone’s fame seems destined to endure. His eloquence will soon become merely a tradition, for his printed speeches do not preserve its charm. If some of his books continue to be read, it will be rather because they are his than in respect of any permanent contribution they have made to knowledge. The wisdom of his policy, foreign and domestic, will have to be judged, not only by the consequences we see, but also by other consequences still hidden in the future. Yet among his acts there are some with which history cannot fail to concern herself, and which will keep fresh the memory of their author’s 480 energy and courage. Whoever follows the annals of England during the memorable years from 1843 to 1894 will meet his name on almost every page, will feel how great must have been the force of an intellect that could so interpenetrate the story of its time, and will seek to know something of the dauntless figure that rose always conspicuous above the struggling throng.
There is a passage in the Odyssey where the seer Theoclymenus says, in describing a vision of death: “The sun has perished out of heaven.” To Englishmen, Mr. Gladstone had been like a sun which, sinking slowly, had grown larger as he sank, and filled the sky with radiance even while he trembled on the verge of the horizon. There were men of ability and men of renown, but there was no one comparable to him in fame and power and honour. When he departed the light seemed to have died out of the sky.
Footnotes
No “authorised” life of Lord Beaconsfield, nor indeed any life commensurate with the part he played in English politics, has yet appeared.
Disraeli’s family claimed to be of Spanish origin, but had come from Italy to England shortly before 1748.
There are few legal allusions in his novels, fewer in proportion than in Shakespeare’s plays, but an ingenious travesty of the English use of legal fictions may be found in the Voyage of Captain Popanilla, a satire on the English constitution and government. Popanilla, who is to be tried for treason, is, to his astonishment, indicted for killing a camelopard.