The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3)
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Title: The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3)
Author: John Morley
Release date: April 15, 2007 [eBook #21091]
Language: English
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[Illustration: Walker and Cockrell Photo
Sir John Gladstone
_from a painting by William Bradley_]
THE LIFE OF
WILLIAM EWART
GLADSTONE
BY
JOHN MORLEY
_IN THREE VOLUMES--VOL. I_
(_1809-1859_)
TORONTO
GEORGE N. MORANG & COMPANY, LIMITED
1903
COPYRIGHT, 1903,
BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
Set up, electrotyped, and published October, 1903. Reprinted
October, November, 1903.
Norwood Press
J. S. Cushing & Co.--Berwick & Smith Co.
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.
TO THE
ELECTORS OF THE MONTROSE BURGHS
I BEG LEAVE TO
INSCRIBE THIS BOOK
IN GRATEFUL RECOGNITION
OF
THE CONFIDENCE AND FRIENDSHIP
WITH WHICH
THEY HAVE HONOURED ME
NOTE
The material on which this biography is founded consists mainly, of
course, of the papers collected at Hawarden. Besides that vast
accumulation, I have been favoured with several thousands of other
pieces from the legion of Mr. Gladstone's correspondents. Between two
and three hundred thousand written papers of one sort or another must
have passed under my view. To some important journals and papers from
other sources I have enjoyed free access, and my warm thanks are due to
those who have generously lent me this valuable aid. I am especially
indebted to the King for the liberality with which his Majesty has been
graciously pleased to sanction the use of certain documents, in cases
where the permission of the Sovereign was required.
When I submitted an application for the same purpose to Queen Victoria,
in readily promising her favourable consideration, the Queen added a
message strongly impressing on me that the work I was about to undertake
should not be handled in the narrow way of party. This injunction
represents my own clear view of the spirit in which the history of a
career so memorable as Mr. Gladstone's should be composed. That, to be
sure, is not at all inconsistent with our regarding party feeling in its
honourable sense, as entirely the reverse of an infirmity.
The diaries from which I have often quoted consist of forty little books
in double columns, intended to do little more than record persons seen,
or books read, or letters written as the days passed by. From these
diaries come several of the mottoes prefixed to our chapters; such
mottoes are marked by an asterisk.
The trustees and other members of Mr. Gladstone's family have extended
to me a uniform kindness and consideration and an absolutely unstinted
confidence, for which I can never cease to owe them my heartiest
acknowledgment. They left with the writer an unqualified and undivided
responsibility for these pages, and for the use of the material that
they entrusted to him. Whatever may prove to be amiss, whether in
leaving out or putting in or putting wrong, the blame is wholly mine.
J. M.
1903.
CONTENTS
_BOOK I_
(_1809-1831_)
CHAPTER PAGE
INTRODUCTORY 1
I. CHILDHOOD 7
II. ETON 26
III. OXFORD 48
_BOOK II_
(_1832-1846_)
I. ENTERS PARLIAMENT. 86
II. THE NEW CONSERVATISM AND OFFICE 116
III. PROGRESS IN PUBLIC LIFE. 131
IV. THE CHURCH 152
V. HIS FIRST BOOK 169
VI. CHARACTERISTICS 184
VII. CLOSE OF APPRENTICESHIP 219
VIII. PEEL'S GOVERNMENT 247
IX. MAYNOOTH 270
X. TRIUMPH OF POLICY AND FALL OF THE MINISTER 282
XI. THE TRACTARIAN CATASTROPHE 303
_BOOK III_
(_1847-1852_)
CHAPTER PAGE
I. MEMBER FOR OXFORD 327
II. THE HAWARDEN ESTATE 337
III. PARTY EVOLUTION--NEW COLONIAL POLICY 350
IV. DEATH OF SIR ROBERT PEEL 366
V. GORHAM CASE--SECESSION OF FRIENDS 375
VI. NAPLES 389
VII. RELIGIOUS TORNADO--PEELITE DIFFICULTIES 405
VIII. END OF PROTECTION 425
_BOOK IV_
(_1853-1859_)
I. THE COALITION 443
II. THE TRIUMPH OF 1853 457
III. THE CRIMEAN WAR 476
IV. OXFORD REFORM--OPEN CIVIL SERVICE 496
V. WAR FINANCE--TAX OR LOAN 513
VI. CRISIS OF 1855 AND BREAK-UP OF THE PEELITES 521
VII. POLITICAL ISOLATION 544
VIII. GENERAL ELECTION--NEW MARRIAGE LAW 558
IX. THE SECOND DERBY GOVERNMENT 574
X. THE IONIAN ISLANDS 594
XI. JUNCTION WITH THE LIBERALS 621
APPENDIX 635
CHRONOLOGY 654
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
SIR JOHN GLADSTONE _Frontispiece._
_From a painting by William Bradley._
WILLIAM EWART GLADSTONE _to face page_ 86
_From a painting by William Bradley._
CATHERINE GLADSTONE " 223
_From a painting._
HAWARDEN CASTLE " 337
Book I
_1809-1831_
INTRODUCTORY
I am well aware that to try to write Mr. Gladstone's life at all--the
life of a man who held an imposing place in many high national
transactions, whose character and career may be regarded in such various
lights, whose interests were so manifold, and whose years bridged so
long a span of time--is a stroke of temerity. To try to write his life
to-day, is to push temerity still further. The ashes of controversy, in
which he was much concerned, are still hot; perspective, scale,
relation, must all while we stand so near be difficult to adjust. Not
all particulars, more especially of the latest marches in his wide
campaign, can be disclosed without risk of unjust pain to persons now
alive. Yet to defer the task for thirty or forty years has plain
drawbacks too. Interest grows less vivid; truth becomes harder to find
out; memories pale and colour fades. And if in one sense a statesman's
contemporaries, even after death has abated the storm and temper of
faction, can scarcely judge him, yet in another sense they who breathe
the same air as he breathed, who know at close quarters the problems
that faced him, the materials with which he had to work, the limitations
of his time--such must be the best, if not the only true memorialists
and recorders.
Every reader will perceive that perhaps the sharpest of all the many
difficulties of my task has been to draw the line between history and
biography--between the fortunes of the community and the exploits,
thoughts, and purposes of the individual who had so marked a share in
them. In the case of men of letters, in whose lives our literature is
admirably rich, this difficulty happily for their authors and for our
delight does not arise. But where the subject is a man who was four
times at the head of the government--no phantom, but dictator--and who
held this office of first minister for a longer time than any other
statesman in the reign of the Queen, how can we tell the story of his
works and days without reference, and ample reference, to the course of
events over whose unrolling he presided, and out of which he made
history? It is true that what interests the world in Mr. Gladstone is
even more what he was, than what he did; his brilliancy, charm, and
power; the endless surprises; his dualism or more than dualism; his
vicissitudes of opinion; his subtleties of mental progress; his strange
union of qualities never elsewhere found together; his striking
unlikeness to other men in whom great and free nations have for long
periods placed their trust. I am not sure that the incessant search for
clues through this labyrinth would not end in analysis and disquisition,
that might be no great improvement even upon political history. Mr.
Gladstone said of reconstruction of the income-tax that he only did not
call the task herculean, because Hercules could not have done it.
Assuredly, I am not presumptuous enough to suppose that this difficulty
of fixing the precise scale between history and biography has been
successfully overcome by me. It may be that Hercules himself would have
succeeded little better.
Some may think in this connection that I have made the preponderance of
politics excessive in the story of a genius of signal versatility, to
whom politics were only one interest among many. No doubt speeches,
debates, bills, divisions, motions, and manoeuvres of party, like the
manna that fed the children of Israel in the wilderness, lose their
savour and power of nutriment on the second day. Yet after all it was to
his thoughts, his purposes, his ideals, his performances as statesman,
in all the widest significance of that lofty and honourable designation,
that Mr. Gladstone owes the lasting substance of his fame. His life was
ever '_greatly absorbed_,' he said, '_in working the institutions of his
country_.' Here we mark a signal trait. Not for two centuries, since the
historic strife of anglican and puritan, had our island produced a ruler
in whom the religious motive was paramount in the like degree. He was
not only a political force but a moral force. He strove to use all the
powers of his own genius and the powers of the state for moral purposes
and religious. Nevertheless his mission in all its forms was action. He
had none of that detachment, often found among superior minds, which we
honour for its disinterestedness, even while we lament its impotence in
result. The track in which he moved, the instruments that he employed,
were the track and the instruments, the sword and the trowel, of
political action; and what is called the Gladstonian era was
distinctively a political era.
On this I will permit myself a few words more. The detailed history of
Mr. Gladstone as theologian and churchman will not be found in these
pages, and nobody is more sensible than their writer of the gap. Mr.
Gladstone cared as much for the church as he cared for the state; he
thought of the church as the soul of the state; he believed the
attainment by the magistrate of the ends of government to depend upon
religion; and he was sure that the strength of a state corresponds to
the religious strength and soundness of the community of which the state
is the civil organ. I should have been wholly wanting in biographical
fidelity, not to make this clear and superabundantly clear. Still a
writer inside Mr. Gladstone's church and in full and active sympathy
with him on this side of mundane and supramundane things, would
undoubtedly have treated the subject differently from any writer
outside. No amount of candour or good faith--and in these essentials I
believe that I have not fallen short--can be a substitute for the
confidence and ardour of an adherent, in the heart of those to whom the
church stands first. Here is one of the difficulties of this complex
case. Yet here, too, there may be some trace of compensation. If the
reader has been drawn into the whirlpools of the political Charybdis, he
might not even in far worthier hands than mine have escaped the rocky
headlands of the ecclesiastic Scylla. For churches also have their
parties.
Lord Salisbury, the distinguished man who followed Mr. Gladstone in a
longer tenure of power than his, called him 'a great Christian'; and
nothing could be more true or better worth saying. He not only accepted
the doctrines of that faith as he believed them to be held by his own
communion; he sedulously strove to apply the noblest moralities of it
to the affairs both of his own nation and of the commonwealth of
nations. It was a supreme experiment. People will perhaps some day
wonder that many of those who derided the experiment and reproached its
author, failed to see that they were making manifest in this a wholesale
scepticism as to truths that they professed to prize, far deeper and
more destructive than the doubts and disbeliefs of the gentiles in the
outer courts.
The epoch, as the reader knows, was what Mr. Gladstone called 'an
agitated and expectant age.' Some stages of his career mark stages of
the first importance in the history of English party, on which so much
in the working of our constitution hangs. His name is associated with a
record of arduous and fruitful legislative work and administrative
improvement, equalled by none of the great men who have grasped the helm
of the British state. The intensity of his mind, and the length of years
through which he held presiding office, enabled him to impress for good
in all the departments of government his own severe standard of public
duty and personal exactitude. He was the chief force, propelling,
restraining, guiding his country at many decisive moments. Then how many
surprises and what seeming paradox. Devotedly attached to the church, he
was the agent in the overthrow of establishment in one of the three
kingdoms, and in an attempt to overthrow it in the Principality.
Entering public life with vehement aversion to the recent dislodgment of
the landed aristocracy as the mainspring of parliamentary power, he lent
himself to two further enormously extensive changes in the
constitutional centre of gravity. With a lifelong belief in
parliamentary deliberation as the grand security for judicious laws and
national control over executive act, he yet at a certain stage betook
himself with magical result to direct and individual appeal to the great
masses of his countrymen, and the world beheld the astonishing spectacle
of a politician with the microscopic subtlety of a thirteenth century
schoolman wielding at will the new democracy in what has been called
'the country of plain men.' A firm and trained economist, and no friend
to socialism, yet by his legislation upon land in 1870 and 1881 he
wrote the opening chapter in a volume on which many an unexpected page
in the history of Property is destined to be inscribed. Statesmen do far
less than they suppose, far less than is implied in their resounding
fame, to augment the material prosperity of nations, but in this
province Mr. Gladstone's name stands at the topmost height. Yet no ruler
that ever lived felt more deeply the truth--for which I know no better
words than Channing's--that to improve man's outward condition is not to
improve man himself; this must come from each man's endeavour within his
own breast; without that there can be little ground for social hope.
Well was it said to him, 'You have so lived and wrought that you have
kept the soul alive in England.' Not in England only was this felt. He
was sometimes charged with lowering the sentiment, the lofty and
fortifying sentiment, of national pride. At least it is a ground for
national pride that he, the son of English training, practised through
long years in the habit and tradition of English public life, standing
for long years foremost in accepted authority and renown before the eye
of England, so conquered imagination and attachment in other lands, that
when the end came it was thought no extravagance for one not an
Englishman to say, 'On the day that Mr. Gladstone died, the world has
lost its greatest citizen.' The reader who revolves all this will know
why I began by speaking of temerity.
That my book should be a biography without trace of bias, no reader will
expect. There is at least no bias against the truth; but indifferent
neutrality in a work produced, as this is, in the spirit of loyal and
affectionate remembrance, would be distasteful, discordant, and
impossible. I should be heartily sorry if there were no signs of
partiality and no evidence of prepossession. On the other hand there is,
I trust, no importunate advocacy or tedious assentation. He was great
man enough to stand in need of neither. Still less has it been needed,
in order to exalt him, to disparage others with whom he came into strong
collision. His own funeral orations from time to time on some who were
in one degree or another his antagonists, prove that this petty and
ungenerous method would have been to him of all men most repugnant. Then
to pretend that for sixty years, with all 'the varying weather of the
mind,' he traversed in every zone the restless ocean of a great nation's
shifting and complex politics, without many a faulty tack and many a
wrong reckoning, would indeed be idle. No such claim is set up by
rational men for Pym, Cromwell, Walpole, Washington, or either Pitt. It
is not set up for any of the three contemporaries of Mr. Gladstone whose
names live with the three most momentous transactions of his
age--Cavour, Lincoln, Bismarck. To suppose, again, that in every one of
the many subjects touched by him, besides exhibiting the range of his
powers and the diversity of his interests, he made abiding contributions
to thought and knowledge, is to ignore the jealous conditions under
which such contributions come. To say so much as this is to make but a
small deduction from the total of a grand account.
I have not reproduced the full text of Letters in the proportion
customary in English biography. The existing mass of his letters is
enormous. But then an enormous proportion of them touch on affairs of
public business, on which they shed little new light. Even when he
writes in his kindest and most cordial vein to friends to whom he is
most warmly attached, it is usually a letter of business. He deals
freely and genially with the points in hand, and then without play of
gossip, salutation, or compliment, he passes on his way. He has in his
letters little of that spirit in which his talk often abounded, of
disengagement, pleasant colloquy, happy raillery, and all the other
undefined things that make the correspondence of so many men whose
business was literature, such delightful reading for the idler hour of
an industrious day. It is perhaps worth adding that the asterisks
denoting an omitted passage hide no piquant hit, no personality, no
indiscretion; the omission is in every case due to consideration of
space. Without these asterisks and, other omissions, nothing would have
been easier than to expand these three volumes into a hundred. I think
nothing relevant is lost. Nobody ever had fewer secrets, nobody ever
lived and wrought in fuller sunlight.
CHAPTER I
CHILDHOOD
(_1809-1821_)
I know not why commerce in England should not have its old
families, rejoicing to be connected with commerce from generation
to generation. It has been so in other countries; I trust it will
be so in this country.--GLADSTONE.
The dawn of the life of the great and famous man who is our subject in
these memoirs has been depicted with homely simplicity by his own hand.
With this fragment of a record it is perhaps best for me to begin our
journey. 'I was born,' he says, 'on December 29, 1809,' at 62 Rodney
Street, Liverpool. 'I was baptized, I believe, in the parish church of
St. Peter. My godmother was my elder sister Anne, then just seven years
old, who died a perfect saint in the beginning of the year 1829. In her
later years she lived in close relations with me, and I must have been
much worse but for her. Of my godfathers, one was a Scotch episcopalian,
Mr. Fraser of ----, whom I hardly ever saw or heard of; the other a
presbyterian, Mr. G. Grant, a junior partner of my father's.' The child
was named William Ewart, after his father's friend, an immigrant Scot
and a merchant like himself, and father of a younger William Ewart, who
became member for Liverpool, and did good public service in parliament.
Before proceeding to the period of my childhood, properly
so-called, I will here insert a few words about my family. My
maternal grandfather was known as Provost Robertson of Dingwall, a
man held, I believe, in the highest respect. His wife was a
Mackenzie of [Coul]. His circumstances must have been good.
Of his three sons, one went into the army, and I recollect him as
Captain Robertson (I have a seal which he gave me, a three-sided
cairngorm. Cost him 7½ guineas). The other two took mercantile
positions. When my parents made a Scotch tour in 1820-21 with, I
think, their four sons, the freedom of Dingwall was presented to us
all,[1] with my father; and there was large visiting at the houses
of the Ross-shire gentry. I think the line of my grandmother was
stoutly episcopalian and Jacobite; but, coming outside the western
highlands, the first at least was soon rubbed down. The provost, I
think, came from a younger branch of the Robertsons of Struan.
On my father's side the matter is more complex. The history of the
family has been traced at the desire of my eldest brother and my
own, by Sir William Fraser, the highest living authority.[2] He has
carried us up to a rather remote period, I think before Elizabeth,
but has not yet been able to connect us with the earliest known
holders of the name, which with the aid of charter-chests he hopes
to do. Some things are plain and not without interest. They were a
race of borderers. There is still an old Gledstanes or Gladstone
castle. They formed a family in Sweden in the seventeenth century.
The explanation of this may have been that, when the union of the
crowns led to the extinction of border fighting they took service
like Sir Dugald Dalgetty under Gustavus Adolphus, and in this case
passed from service to settlement. I have never heard of them in
Scotland until after the Restoration, otherwise than as persons of
family. At that period there are traces of their having been fined
by public authority, but not for any ordinary criminal offence.
From this time forward I find no trace of their gentility. During
the eighteenth century they are, I think, principally traced by a
line of maltsters (no doubt a small business then) in Lanarkshire.
Their names are recorded on tombstones in the churchyard of Biggar.
I remember going as a child or boy to see the representative of
that branch, either in 1820 or some years earlier, who was a small
watchmaker in that town. He was of the same generation as my
father, but came, I understood, from a senior brother of the
family. I do not know whether his line is extinct. There also seem
to be some stray Gladstones who are found at Yarmouth and in
Yorkshire.[3]
ANCESTRY
My father's father seems from his letters to have been an excellent
man and a wise parent: his wife a woman of energy. There are
pictures of them at Fasque, by Raeburn. He was a merchant, in
Scotch phrase; that is to say, a shopkeeper dealing in corn and
stores, and my father as a lad served in his shop. But he also sent
a ship or ships to the Baltic; and I believe that my father, whose
energy soon began to outtop that of all the very large family, went
in one of these ships at a very early age as a supercargo, an
appointment then, I think, common. But he soon quitted a nest too
small to hold him. He was born in December 1764: and I have (at
Hawarden) a reprint of the _Liverpool Directory_ for 178-, in which
his name appears as a partner in the firm of Messrs. Corrie, corn
merchants.
Here his force soon began to be felt as a prominent and then a
foremost member of the community. A liberal in the early period of
the century, he drew to Mr. Canning, and brought that statesman as
candidate to Liverpool in 1812, by personally offering to guarantee
his expenses at a time when, though prosperous, he could hardly
have been a rich man. His services to the town were testified by
gifts of plate, now in the possession of the elder lines of his
descendants, and by a remarkable subscription of six thousand
pounds raised to enable him to contest the borough of Lancaster,
for which he sat in the parliament of 1818.
At his demise, in December 1851, the value of his estate was, I
think, near £600,000. My father was a successful merchant, but
considering his long life and means of accumulation, the result
represents a success secondary in comparison with that of others
whom in native talent and energy he much surpassed. It was a large
and strong nature, simple though hasty, profoundly affectionate and
capable of the highest devotion in the lines of duty and of love. I
think that his intellect was a little intemperate, though not his
character. In his old age, spent mainly in retirement, he was our
constant [centre of] social and domestic life. My mother, a
beautiful and admirable woman, failed in health and left him a
widower in 1835, when she was 62.
He then turns to the records of his own childhood, a period that he
regarded as closing in September 1821, when he was sent to Eton. He
begins with one or two juvenile performances, in no way differing from
those of any other infant,--_navita projectus humi_, the mariner flung
by force of the waves naked and helpless ashore. He believes that he was
strong and healthy, and came well through his childish ailments.
My next recollection belongs to the period of Mr. Canning's first
election for Liverpool, in the month of October of the year 1812.
Much entertaining went on in my father's house, where Mr. Canning
himself was a guest; and on a day of a great dinner I was taken
down to the dining room. I was set upon one of the chairs,
standing, and directed to say to the company 'Ladies and
gentlemen.'
I have, thirdly, a group of recollections which refer to Scotland.
Thither my father and mother took me on a journey which they made,
I think, in a post-chaise to Edinburgh and Glasgow as its principal
points. At Edinburgh our sojourn was in the Royal Hotel, Princes
Street. I well remember the rattling of the windows when the castle
guns were fired on some great occasion, probably the abdication of
Napoleon, for the date of the journey was, I think, the spring of
1814.
EARLY RECOLLECTIONS
In this journey the situation of Sanquhar, in a close Dumfriesshire
valley, impressed itself on my recollection. I never saw Sanquhar
again until in the autumn of 1863 (as I believe). As I was whirled
along the Glasgow and South-Western railway I witnessed just
beneath me lines of building in just such a valley, and said that
must be Sanquhar, which it was. My local memory has always been
good and very impressible by scenery. I seem to myself never to
have forgotten a scene.
I have one other early recollection to record. It must, I think,
have been in the year 1815 that my father and mother took me with
them on either one or two more journeys. The objective points were
Cambridge and London respectively. My father had built, under the
very niggard and discouraging laws which repressed rather than
encouraged the erection of new churches at that period, the church
of St. Thomas at Seaforth, and he wanted a clergyman for it.[4]
Guided in these matters very much by the deeply religious temper of
my mother, he went with her to Cambridge to obtain a recommendation
of a suitable person from Mr. Simeon, whom I saw at the time.[5] I
remember his appearance distinctly. He was a venerable man, and
although only a fellow of a college, was more ecclesiastically got
up than many a dean, or even here and there, perhaps, a bishop of
the present less costumed if more ritualistic period. Mr. Simeon, I
believe, recommended Mr. Jones, an excellent specimen of the
excellent evangelical school of those days. We went to Leicester to
hear him preach in a large church, and his text was '_Grow in
grace_.' He became eventually archdeacon of Liverpool, and died in
great honour a few years ago at much past 90. On the strength of
this visit to Cambridge I lately boasted there, even during the
lifetime of the aged Provost Okes, that I had been in the
university before any one of them.
I think it was at this time that in London we were domiciled in
Russell Square, in the house of a brother of my mother, Mr. Colin
Robertson; and I was vexed and put about by being forbidden to run
freely at my own will into and about the streets, as I had done in
Liverpool. But the main event was this: we went to a great service
of public thanksgiving at Saint Paul's, and sat in a small gallery
annexed to the choir, just over the place where was the Regent, and
looking down upon him from behind. I recollect nothing more of the
service, nor was I ever present at any public thanksgiving after
this in Saint Paul's, until the service held in that cathedral,
under my advice as the prime minister, after the highly dangerous
illness of the Prince of Wales.
Before quitting the subject of early recollections I must name one
which involves another person of some note. My mother took me in
181--to Barley Wood Cottage, near Bristol. Here lived Miss Hannah
More, with some of her coeval sisters. I am sure they loved my
mother, who was love-worthy indeed. And I cannot help here
deviating for a moment into the later portion of the story to
record that in 1833 I had the honour of breakfasting with Mr.
Wilberforce a few days before his death,[6] and when I entered the
house, immediately after the salutation, he said to me in his
silvery tones, 'How is your sweet mother?' He had been a guest in
my father's house some twelve years before. During the afternoon
visit at Barley Wood, Miss Hannah More took me aside and presented
to me a little book. It was a copy of her _Sacred Dramas_, and it
now remains in my possession, with my name written in it by her.
She very graciously accompanied it with a little speech, of which I
cannot recollect the conclusion (or apodosis), but it began, 'As
you have just come into the world, and I am just going out of it, I
therefore,' etc.
I wish that in reviewing my childhood I could regard it as
presenting those features of innocence and beauty which I have often
seen elsewhere, and indeed, thanks be to God, within the limits of
my own home. The best I can say for it is that I do not think it was
a vicious childhood. I do not think, trying to look at the past
impartially, that I had a strong natural propensity then developed
to what are termed the mortal sins. But truth obliges me to record
this against myself. I have no recollection of being a loving or a
winning child; or an earnest or diligent or knowledge-loving child.
God forgive me. And what pains and shames me most of all is to
remember that at most and at best I was, like the sailor in Juvenal,
digitis a morte remotus,
Quatuor aut septem;[7]
the plank between me and all the sins was so very thin. I do not
indeed intend in these notes to give a history of the inner life,
which I think has been with me extraordinarily dubious, vacillating,
and above all complex. I reserve them, perhaps, for a more private
and personal document; and I may in this way relieve myself from
some at least of the risks of falling into an odious Pharisaism. I
cannot in truth have been an interesting child, and the only
presumption the other way which I can gather from my review is that
there was probably something in me worth the seeing, or my father
and mother would not so much have singled me out to be taken with
them on their journeys.
I was not a devotional child. I have no recollection of early love
for the House of God and for divine service: though after my father
built the church at Seaforth in 1815, I remember cherishing a hope
that he would bequeath it to me, and that I might live in it. I have
a very early recollection of hearing preaching in St. George's,
Liverpool, but it is this: that I turned quickly to my mother and
said, 'When will he have done?' The _Pilgrim's Progress_ undoubtedly
took a great and fascinating hold upon me, so that anything which I
wrote was insensibly moulded in its style; but it was by the force
of the allegory addressing itself to the fancy, and was very like a
strong impression received from the _Arabian Nights_, and from
another work called _Tales of the Genii_. I think it was about the
same time that Miss Porter's _Scottish Chiefs_, and especially the
life and death of Wallace, used to make me weep profusely. This
would be when I was about ten years old. At a much earlier period,
say six or seven, I remember praying earnestly, but it was for no
higher object than to be spared from the loss of a tooth. Here,
however, it may be mentioned in mitigation that the local dentist
of those days, in our case a certain Dr. P. of ---- Street,
Liverpool, was a kind of savage at his work (possibly a very
good-natured man too), with no ideas except to smash and crash. My
religious recollections, then, are a sad blank. Neither was I a
popular boy, though not egregiously otherwise. If I was not a bad
boy, I think that I was a boy with a great absence of goodness. I
was a child of slow, in some points I think of singularly slow,
development. There was more in me perhaps than in the average boy,
but it required greatly more time to set itself in order: and just
so in adult, and in middle and later life, I acquired very tardily
any knowledge of the world, and that simultaneous conspectus of the
relations of persons and things which is necessary for the proper
performance of duties in the world.
I may mention another matter in extenuation. I received, unless my
memory deceives me, very little benefit from teaching. My father was
too much occupied, my mother's health was broken. We, the four
brothers, had no quarrelling among ourselves: but neither can I
recollect any influence flowing down at this time upon me, the
junior. One odd incident seems to show that I was meek, which I
should not have supposed, not less than thrifty and penurious, a
leaning which lay deep, I think, in my nature, and which has
required effort and battle to control it. It was this. By some
process not easy to explain I had, when I was _probably_ seven or
eight, and my elder brothers from ten or eleven to fourteen or
thereabouts, accumulated no less than twenty shillings in silver. My
brothers judged it right to appropriate this fund, and I do not
recollect either annoyance or resistance or complaint. But I
recollect that they employed the principal part of it in the
purchase of four knives, and that they broke the points from the
tops of the blades of my knife, lest I should cut my fingers.
Where was the official or appointed teacher all this time? He was
the Rev. Mr. Rawson of Cambridge, who had, I suppose, been passed by
Mr. Simeon and become private tutor in my father's house. But as he
was to be incumbent of the church, the bishop required a parsonage
and that he should live in it. Out of this grew a very small school
of about twelve boys, to which I went, with some senior brother or
brothers remaining for a while.
Mr. Rawson was a good man, of high no-popery opinions. His school
afterwards rose into considerable repute, and it had Dean Stanley
and the sons of one or more other Cheshire families for pupils. But
I think this was not so much due to its intellectual stamina as to
the extreme salubrity of the situation on the pure dry sands of the
Mersey's mouth, with all the advantages of the strong tidal action
and the fresh and frequent north-west winds. At five miles from
Liverpool Exchange, the sands, delicious for riding, were one
absolute solitude, and only one house looked down on them between
us and the town. To return to Mr. Rawson. Everything was
unobjectionable. I suppose I learnt something there. But I have no
recollection of being under any moral or personal influence
whatever, and I doubt whether the preaching had any adaptation
whatever to children. As to intellectual training, I believe that,
like the other boys, I shirked my work as much as I could. I went
to Eton in 1821 after a pretty long spell, in a very middling state
of preparation, and wholly without any knowledge or other
enthusiasm, unless it were a priggish love of argument which I had
begun to develop. I had lived upon a rabbit warren: and what a
rabbit warren of a life it is that I have been surveying.
My brother John, three years older than myself, and of a moral
character more manly and on a higher level, had chosen the navy,
and went off to the preparatory college at Portsmouth. But he
evidently underwent persecution for righteousness' sake at the
college, which was then (say about 1820) in a bad condition. Of
this, though he was never querulous, his letters bore the traces,
and I cannot but think they must have exercised upon me some kind
of influence for good. As to miscellaneous notices, I had a great
affinity with the trades of joiners and of bricklayers. Physically
I must have been rather tough, for my brother John took me down at
about ten years old to wrestle in the stables with an older lad of
that region, whom I threw. Among our greatest enjoyments were
undoubtedly the annual Guy Fawkes bonfires, for which we had always
liberal allowances of wreck timber and a tar-barrel. I remember
seeing, when about eight or nine, my first case of a dead body. It
was the child of the head gardener Derbyshire, and was laid in the
cottage bed by tender hands, with nice and clean accompaniments.
It seemed to me pleasing, and in no way repelled me; but it made no
deep impression. And now I remember that I used to teach pretty
regularly on Sundays in the Sunday-school built by my father near
the Primrose bridge. It was, I think, a duty done not under
constraint, but I can recollect nothing which associates it with a
seriously religious life in myself.[8]
II
GENEALOGY
To these fragments no long supplement is needed. Little of interest can
be certainly established about his far-off ancestral origins, and the
ordinary twilight of genealogy overhangs the case of the Glaidstanes,
Gledstanes, Gladstanes, Gladstones, whose name is to be found on
tombstones and parish rolls, in charter-chests and royal certificates,
on the southern border of Scotland. The explorations of the genealogist
tell of recognitions of their nobility by Scottish kings in dim ages,
but the links are sometimes broken, title-deeds are lost, the same name
is attached to estates in different counties, Roxburgh, Peebles, Lanark,
and in short until the close of the seventeenth century we linger, in
the old poet's phrase, among dreams of shadows. As we have just been
told, during the eighteenth century no traces of their gentility
survives, and apparently they glided down from moderate lairds to small
maltsters. Thomas Gladstones, grandfather of him with whom we are
concerned, made his way from Biggar to Leith, and there set up in a
modest way as corndealer, wholesale and retail. His wife was a Neilson
of Springfield. To them sixteen children were born, and John Gladstones
(b. Dec. 11, 1764) was their eldest son. Having established himself in
Liverpool, he married in 1792 Jane Hall, a lady of that city, who died
without children six years later. In 1800 he took for his second wife
Anne Robertson of Dingwall. Her father was of the clan Donnachaidh, and
her mother was of kin with Mackenzies, Munros, and other highland
stocks.[9] Their son, therefore, was of unmixed Scottish origins, half
highland, half lowland borderer.[10] With the possible exception of Lord
Mansfield--the rival of Chatham in parliament, one of the loftiest names
among great judges, and chief builder of the commercial law of the
English world, a man who might have been prime minister if he had
chosen.--Mr. Gladstone stands out as far the most conspicuous and
powerful of all the public leaders in our history, who have sprung from
the northern half of our island. When he had grown to be the most famous
man in the realm of the Queen, he said, 'I am not slow to claim the
name of Scotsman, and even if I were, there is the fact staring me in
the face that not a drop of blood runs in my veins except what is
derived from a Scottish ancestry.'[11] An illustrious opponent once
described him, by way of hitting his singular duality of disposition, as
an ardent Italian in the custody of a Scotsman. It is easy to make too
much of race, but when we are puzzled by Mr. Gladstone's seeming
contrarieties of temperament, his union of impulse with caution, of
passion with circumspection, of pride and fire with self-control, of
Ossianic flight with a steady foothold on the solid earth, we may
perhaps find a sort of explanation in thinking of him as a highlander in
the custody of a lowlander.
Of John Gladstone something more remains to be said. About 1783 he was
made a partner by his father in the business at Leith, and here he saved
five hundred pounds. Four years later, probably after a short period of
service, he was admitted to a partnership with two corn-merchants at
Liverpool, his contribution to the total capital of four thousand pounds
being fifteen hundred, of which his father lent him five hundred, and a
friend another five at five per cent. In 1787 he thought the plural
ending of his name sounded awkwardly in the style of the firm, Corrie,
Gladstones, and Bradshaw, so he dropped the _s_.[12] He visited London
to enlarge his knowledge of the corn trade in Mark Lane, and here became
acquainted with Sir Claude Scott, the banker (not yet, however, a
baronet). Scott was so impressed by his extraordinary vigour and
shrewdness as to talk of a partnership, but Gladstone's existing
arrangement in Liverpool was settled for fourteen years. Sometime in the
nineties he was sent to America to purchase corn, with unlimited
confidence from Sir Claude Scott. On his arrival, he found a severe
scarcity and enormous prices. A large number of vessels had been
chartered for the enterprise, and were on their way to him for cargoes.
To send them back in ballast would be a disaster. Thrown entirely on his
own resources, he travelled south from New York, making the best
purchases of all sorts that he could; then loaded his ships with timber
and other commodities, one only of them with flour; and the loss on the
venture, which might have meant ruin, did not exceed a few hundred
pounds. Energy and resource of this kind made fortune secure, and when
the fourteen years of partnership expired, Gladstone continued business
on his own account, with a prosperity that was never broken. He brought
his brothers to Liverpool, but it was to provide for them, not to assist
himself, says Mr. Gladstone; 'and he provided for many young men in the
same way. I never knew him reject any kind of work in aid of others that
offered itself to him.'
JOHN GLADSTONE
It was John Gladstone's habit, we are told, to discuss all sorts of
questions with his children, and nothing was ever taken for granted
between him and his sons. 'He could not understand,' says the
illustrious one among them, 'nor tolerate those who, perceiving an
object to be good, did not at once and actively pursue it; and with all
this energy he joined a corresponding warmth and, so to speak, eagerness
of affection, a keen appreciation of humour, in which he found a rest,
and an indescribable frankness and simplicity of character, which,
crowning his other qualities, made him, I think (and I strive to think
impartially), the most interesting old man I have ever known.'[13]
To his father's person and memory, Mr. Gladstone's fervid and
affectionate devotion remained unbroken. 'One morning,' writes a female
relative of his, 'when I was breakfasting alone with Mr. Gladstone at
Carlton House Terrace something led to his speaking of his father. I
seem to see him now, rising from his chair, standing in front of the
chimneypiece, and in strains of fervid eloquence dwelling on the
grandeur, the breadth and depth of his character, his generosity, his
nobleness, last and greatest of all--his loving nature. His eyes filled
with tears as he exclaimed: "None but his children can know what
torrents of tenderness flowed from his heart."'
The successful merchant was also the active-minded citizen. 'His
force,' says his son, 'soon began to be felt as a prominent and then a
foremost member of the community.' He had something of his descendant's
inextinguishable passion for pamphleteering, and the copious effusion of
public letters and articles. As was inevitable in a Scotsman of his
social position at that day, when tory rule of a more tyrannic stamp
than was ever known in England since the Revolution of 1688, had reduced
constitutional liberty in Scotland to a shadow, John Gladstone came to
Liverpool a whig, and a whig he remained until Canning raised the flag
of a new party inside the entrenchments of Eldonian toryism.
In 1812 Canning, who had just refused Lord Liverpool's proffer of the
foreign office because he would not serve under Castlereagh as leader in
the House of Commons, was invited by John Gladstone to stand for
Liverpool. He was elected in triumph over Brougham, and held the seat
through four elections, down to 1822, when he was succeeded by
Huskisson, whom he described to the constituency as the best man of
business in England, and one of the ablest practical statesmen that
could engage in the concerns of a commercial country. The speeches made
to his constituents during the ten years for which he served them are
excellent specimens of Canning's rich, gay, aspiring eloquence. In
substance they abound in much pure toryism, and his speech after the
Peterloo massacre, and upon the topics relating to public meetings,
sedition, and parliamentary reform, though by sonorous splendour and a
superb plausibility fascinating to the political neophyte, is by no
means free from froth, without much relation either to social facts or
to popular principles. On catholic emancipation he followed Pitt, as he
did in an enlarged view of commercial policy. At Liverpool he made his
famous declaration that his political allegiance was buried in Pitt's
grave. At one at least of these performances the youthful William
Gladstone was present, but it was at home that he learned Canningite
doctrine. At Seaforth House Canning spent the days between the death of
Castlereagh and his own recall to power, while he was waiting for the
date fixed for his voyage to take up the viceroyalty of India.
CANNING
As from whig John Gladstone turned Canningite, so from presbyterian
also he turned churchman. He paid the penalty of men who change their
party, and was watched with a critical eye by old friends; but he was a
liberal giver for beneficent public purposes, and in 1811 he was
honoured by the freedom of Liverpool. His ambition naturally pointed to
parliament, and he was elected first for Lancaster in 1818, and next for
Woodstock in 1820, two boroughs of extremely easy political virtue.
Lancaster cost him twelve thousand pounds, towards which his friends in
Liverpool contributed one-half. In 1826 he was chosen at Berwick, but
was unseated the year after. His few performances in the House were not
remarkable. He voted with ministers, and on the open question of
catholic emancipation he went with Canning and Plunket. He was one of
the majority who by six carried Plunket's catholic motion in 1821, and
the matter figures in the earliest of the hundreds of surviving letters
from his youngest son, then over eleven, and on the eve of his departure
for Eton:--
_Seaforth, Mar._ 10, 1821.
I address these few lines to you to know how my dear mother is, to
thank you for your kind letter, and to know whether Edward may get
two padlocks for the wicket and large shore gate. They are now
open, and the people make a thoroughfare of the green walk and the
carriage road. I read Mr. Plunket's speech, and I admire it
exceedingly. I enclose a letter from Mr. Rawson to you. He told me
to-day that Mrs. R. was a great deal better. Write to me again as
soon as you can.--Ever your most affectionate and dutiful son, W.
E. GLADSTONE.
In after years he was fond of recalling how the Liverpool with which he
had been most familiar (1810-20), though the second commercial town in
the kingdom, did not exceed 100,000 of population, and how the silver
cloud of smoke that floated above her resembled that which might now
appear over any secondary borough or village of the country. 'I have
seen wild roses growing upon the very ground that is now the centre of
the borough of Bootle. All that land is now partly covered with
residences and partly with places of business and industry; but in my
time but one single house stood upon the space between Primrose brook
and the town of Liverpool.' Among his early recollections was 'the
extraordinarily beautiful spectacle of a dock delivery on the Mersey
after a long prevalence of westerly winds followed by a change.
Liverpool cannot imitate that now [1892], at least not for the eye.'
III
JOHN GLADSTONE AS SLAVEHOLDER
The Gladstone firm was mainly an East India house, but in the last ten
years of his mercantile course John Gladstone became the owner of
extensive plantations of sugar and coffee in the West Indies, some in
Jamaica, others in British Guiana or Demerara. The infamy of the
slave-trade had been abolished in 1807, but slave labour remained, and
the Liverpool merchant, like a host of other men of equal respectability
and higher dignity, including many peers and even some bishops, was a
slaveholder. Everybody who has ever read one of the most honourable and
glorious chapters in our English history knows the case of the
missionary John Smith.[14] In 1823 an outbreak of the slaves occurred in
Demerara, and one of John Gladstone's plantations happened to be its
centre. The rising was stamped out with great cruelty in three days.
Martial law, the savage instrument of race passion, was kept in force
for over five months. Fifty negroes were hanged, many were shot down in
the thickets, others were torn in pieces by the lash of the cart-whip.
Smith was arrested, although he had in fact done his best to stop the
rising. Tried before a court in which every rule of evidence was
tyrannically set aside, he was convicted on hearsay and condemned to
death. Before the atrocious sentence could be commuted by the home
authorities, the fiery heat and noisome vapours of his prison killed
him. The death of the Demerara missionary, it has been truly said, was
an event as fatal to slavery in the West Indies, as the execution of
John Brown was its deathblow in the United States.[15] Brougham in 1824
brought the case before the House of Commons, and in the various
discussions upon it the Gladstone estates made rather a prominent
figure. John Gladstone became involved in a heated and prolonged
controversy as to the management of his plantations; as we shall see, it
did not finally die down till 1841. He was an indomitable man. In a
newspaper discussion through a long series of letters, he did not defend
slavery in the abstract, but protested against the abuse levelled at the
planters by all 'the intemperate, credulous, designing, or interested
individuals who followed the lead of that well-meaning but mistaken man,
Mr. Wilberforce.' He denounced the missionaries as hired emissaries,
whose object seemed to be rather to revolutionise the colonies than to
diffuse religion among the people.
In 1830 he published a pamphlet, in the form of a letter to Sir Robert
Peel,[16] to explain that negroes were happier when forced to work;
that, as their labour was essential to the welfare of the colonies, he
considered the difficulties in the way of emancipation insurmountable;
that it was not for him to seek to destroy a system that an over-ruling
Providence had seen fit to permit in certain climates since the very
formation of society; and finally with a Parthian bolt, he hinted that
the public would do better to look to the condition of the lower classes
at home than to the negroes in the colonies. The pamphlet made its mark,
and was admitted by the abolitionists to be an attempt of unusual
ingenuity to varnish the most heinous of national crimes. Three years
later, when emancipation came, and the twenty million pounds of
compensation were distributed, John Gladstone appears to have received,
individually and apart from his partnerships, a little over seventy-five
thousand pounds for 1609 slaves.[17]
It is as well, though in anticipation of the order of time, to complete
our sketch. In view of the approach of full abolition, John Gladstone
induced Lord Glenelg, the whig secretary of state, to issue an order in
council (1837) permitting the West Indian planters to ship coolies from
India on terms drawn up by the planters themselves. Objections were made
with no effect by the governor at Demerara, a humane and vigorous man,
who had done much work as military engineer under Wellington, and who,
after abolishing the flogging of female slaves in the Bahamas, now set
such an iron yoke upon the planters and their agents in Demerara, that
he said 'he could sleep satisfied that no person in the colony could be
punished without his knowledge and sanction.'[18] The importation of
coolies raised old questions in new forms. The voyage from India was
declared to reproduce the horrors of the middle passage of the vanished
Guinea slavers; the condition of the coolie on the sugar plantations was
drawn in a light only less lurid than the case of the African negro; and
John Gladstone was again in hot water. Thomas Gladstone, his eldest son,
defended him in parliament (Aug. 3, 1839), and commissioners sent to
inquire into the condition of the various Gladstone plantations reported
that the coolies on Vreedestein appeared contented and happy on the
whole; no one had ever maltreated or beaten them except in one case; and
those on Vreedenhoop appeared perfectly contented. The interpreter, who
had abused them, had been fined, punished, and dismissed. Upon the
motion of W. E. Gladstone, these reports were laid upon the table of the
House in 1840.[19]
We shall have not unimportant glimpses, as our story unfolds itself, of
all these transactions. Meanwhile, it is interesting to note that the
statesman whose great ensign was to be human freedom, was thus born in a
family where the palliation of slavery must have made a daily topic. The
union, moreover, of fervid evangelical religion with antagonism to
abolition must in those days have been rare, and in spite of his devoted
faith in his father the youthful Gladstone may well have had uneasy
moments. If so, he perhaps consoled himself with the authority of
Canning. Canning, in 1823, had formally laid down the neutral principles
common to the statesmen of the day: that amelioration of the lot of the
negro slave was the utmost limit of action, and that his freedom as a
result of amelioration was the object of a pious hope, and no more.
Canning described the negro as a being with the form of a man and the
intellect of a child. 'To turn him loose in the manhood of his physical
strength, in the maturity of his physical passions, but in the infancy
of his uninstructed reason, would be to raise up a creature resembling
the splendid fiction of a recent romance,[20] the hero of which
constructs a human form with all the corporal capabilities of a man, but
being unable to impart to the work of his hands a perception of right
and wrong, he finds too late that he has only created a more than mortal
power of doing mischief.' 'I was bred,' said Mr. Gladstone when risen to
meridian splendour, 'under the shadow of the great name of Canning;
every influence connected with that name governed the politics of my
childhood and of my youth; with Canning, I rejoiced in the removal of
religious disabilities, and in the character which he gave to our policy
abroad; with Canning, I rejoiced in the opening he made towards the
establishment of free commercial interchanges between nations; with
Canning, and under the shadow of the yet more venerable name of Burke,
my youthful mind and imagination were impressed.'[21] On slavery and
even the slave trade, Burke too had argued against total abolition. 'I
confess,' he said, 'I trust infinitely more (according to the sound
principles of those who ever have at any time meliorated the state of
mankind) to the effect and influence of religion than to all the rest of
the regulations put together.'[22]
FOOTNOTES:
[1] The freedom was formally bestowed on him in 1863.
[2] Sir William Fraser died in 1898.
[3] Researches into the ancestry of the Gladstone family have been made
by Sir William Fraser, Professor John Veitch, and Mrs. Oliver of
Thornwood. Besides his special investigation of the genealogy of the
family, Sir W. Fraser devoted some pages in the _Douglas Book_ to the
Gledstanes of Gledstanes. The surname of Gledstanes occurs at a very
early period in the records of Scotland. Families of that name acquired
considerable landed estates in the counties of Lanark, Peebles,
Roxburgh, and Dumfries. The old castle of Gledstanes, now in ruins, was
the principal mansion of the family. The first of the name who has been
found on record is Herbert de Gledstanes, who swore fealty to Edward I.
in 1296 for lands in the county of Lanark. The Gledstanes long held the
office of bailie under the Earls of Douglas, and the connection between
the two families seems to have lasted until the fall of the Douglas
family. The Gledstanes still continued to figure for many generations on
the border. About the middle of the eighteenth century two branches of
the family--the Gledstanes of Cocklaw and of Craigs--failed in the
direct male line. Mr. Gladstone was descended from a third branch, the
Gledstanes of Arthurshiel in Lanarkshire. The first of this line who has
been traced is William Gledstanes, who in the year 1551 was laird of
Arthurshiel. His lineal descendants continued as owners of that property
till William Gledstanes disposed of it and went to live in the town of
Biggar about the year 1679. This William Gledstanes was Mr. Gladstone's
great-great-grandfather. The connection between these three branches and
Herbert de Gledstanes of 1296 has not been ascertained, but he was
probably the common ancestor of them all.
[4] John Gladstone built St. Thomas's Church, Seaforth, 1814-15; St.
Andrew's, Liverpool, about 1816; the church at Leith; the Episcopal
chapel at Fasque built and endowed about 1847.
[5] Charles Simeon (1759-1836), who played as conspicuous a part in low
church thought as Newman afterwards in high.
[6] See below, pp. 106-7.
[7] XII 58--'Removed from death by four or maybe seven fingers'
breadth.'
[8] The fragment is undated.
[9] One or two further genealogical _nugæ_ are among the papers. A
correspondent wrote to Mr. Gladstone in 1887: Among the donors to the
Craftsman's Hospital, Aberdeen, established in 1833, occurs the name of
'Georg Gladstaines, pewterer, 300 merks' (£16, 13s. 4d. sterling), 1698.
George joined the Hammerman Craft in 1656, when he would have been about
25 years of age. His signature is still in existence appended to the
burgess oath. Very few craftsmen could sign their names at that
period--not one in twenty--so that George must have been fairly well
educated. Mr. Gladstone replied that it was the first time that he had
heard of the name so far north, and that the pewterer was probably one
planted out. At Dundee (1890) he mentioned that others of his name and
blood appeared on the burgess-roll as early as the fifteenth century. As
for his maternal grandfather, the _Inverness Courier_ (March 2, year not
given) has the following:--'Provost Robertson of Dingwall was a
descendant of the ancient family of the Robertsons of Inshes, of whose
early settlement in the north the following particulars are known: The
first was a member of the family of Struan, Perthshire, and was a
merchant in Inverness in 1420. In the battle of _Blair-na-leine_, fought
at the west end of Loch-Lochy in 1544, John Robertson, a descendant of
the above, acted as standard-bearer to Lord Lovat. This battle was
fought between the Frasers and Macdonalds of Clanranald, and derived its
appellation from the circumstance of the combatants fighting only in
their shirts. The contest was carried on with such bloody determination,
foot to foot and claymore to claymore, that only _four_ of the Frasers
and _ten_ of the Macdonalds returned to tell the tale. The former family
was well nigh extirpated; tradition, however, states that sixteen widows
of the Frasers who had been slain, shortly afterwards, as a providential
succour, gave birth to sixteen sons! From the bloody onslaught at
Loch-Lochy young Robertson returned home scaithless, and his brave and
gallant conduct was the theme of praise with all. Some time thereafter
he married the second daughter of Paterson of Wester and Easter Inshes,
the eldest being married to Cuthbert of Macbeth's Castlehill, now known
as the Crown lands, possessed by Mr. Fraser of Abertarff. On the death
of Paterson, his father-in-law, Wester Inshes became the property of
young Robertson, and Easter Inshes that of the Cuthberts, who, for the
sake of distinction, changed the name to Castlehill. The Robertsons, in
regular succession until the present time, possess the fine estate of
Inshes; while that of Castlehill, which belonged to the powerful
Cuthberts for so many generations, knows them no more. The family of
Inshes, in all ages, stood high in respect throughout the highlands, and
many of them had signalised themselves in upholding the rights of their
country; and the worthy Provost Robertson of Dingwall had no less
distinguished himself, who, with other important reforms, had cleared
away the last burdensome relic of feudal times in that ancient burgh.'
[10] The other sons and daughters of this marriage were Thomas, _d._
1889; Robertson, _d._ 1875; John Neilson, _d._ 1863; Anne, _d._ 1829;
Helen Jane, _d._ 1880.
[11] At Dundee, Oct. 29, 1890.
[12] In 1835 formal difficulties arose in connection with the purchase
of a government annuity, and then he seems to have taken out letters
patent authorising the change in the name.
[13] _Memoirs of J. R. Hope-Scott_, ii. p. 290.
[14] The story of John Smith is excellently told in Walpole (iii. p.
178), and in Miss Martineau's _Hist. of the Peace_ (bk. II. ch. iv.).
But Mr. Robbins has worked it out with diligence and precision in
special reference to John Gladstone: _Early Life_, pp. 36-47.
[15] Trevelyan's _Macaulay_, i. p. 111, where the reader will also find
a fine passage from Macaulay's speech before the Anti-Slavery Society
upon the matter--the first speech he ever made.
[16] 'A statement of facts connected with the present state of slavery
in the British sugar and coffee colonies, and in the United States of
America, together with a view of the present situation of the lower
classes in the United Kingdom.'
[17] In Demerara the average price of slaves from 1822 to 1830 had been
£114, 11s. 5¼d. The rate of compensation per slave averaged £51, 17s.
½d., but it is of interest to note that the slaves on the Vreedenhoop
estate were valued at £53, 15s. 6d.
[18] _Dict. Nat. Biog._, Sir James Carmichael Smyth.
[19] He took Follett's opinion (Aug. 5, 1841) on the question of
applying for a criminal information against the publisher of an article
stating how many slaves had been worked to death on his father's
plantations. The great advocate wisely recommended him to leave it
alone.
[20] _Frankenstein_ was published in 1818.
[21] House of Commons, April 27, 1866.
[22] _Letter to Dundas, with a sketch of a Negro Code_, 1792. But see
_Life of W. Wilberforce_, v. p. 157.
CHAPTER II
ETON
(_1821-1827_)
It is in her public schools and universities that the youth of
England are, by a discipline which shallow judgments have sometimes
attempted to undervalue, prepared for the duties of public life.
There are rare and splendid exceptions, to be sure, but in my
conscience I believe, that England would not be what she is without
her system of public education, and that no other country can
become what England is, without the advantages of such a
system.--CANNING.
It is difficult to discern the true dimensions of objects in that
mirage which covers the studies of one's youth.--GLADSTONE.
In September 1821, the young Gladstone was sent to Eton. Life at Eton
lasted over six years, until the Christmas of 1827. It impressed images
that never faded, and left traces in heart and mind that the waves of
time never effaced,--so profound is the early writing on our opening
page. Canning's words at the head of our present chapter set forth a
superstition that had a powerful hold on the English governing class of
that day, and the new Etonian never shook it off. His attachment to Eton
grew with the lapse of years; to him it was ever 'the queen of all
schools.'
'I went,' he says, 'under the wing of my eldest brother, then in the
upper division, and this helped my start and much mitigated the sense of
isolation that attends the first launch at a public school.' The door of
his dame's house looked down the Long Walk, while the windows looked
into the very crowded churchyard: from this he never received the
smallest inconvenience, though it was his custom (when master of the
room) to sleep with his window open both summer and winter. The school,
said the new scholar, has only about four hundred and ninety fellows in
it, which was considered uncommonly small. He likes his tutor so much
that he would not exchange him for any ten. He has various rows with
Mrs. Shurey, his dame, and it is really a great shame the way they are
fed. He and his brother have far the best room in the dame's house. His
captain is very good-natured. Fighting is a favourite diversion, hardly
a day passing without one, two, three, or even four more or less mortal
combats.
MANNERS AT ETON
You will be glad to hear, he writes to his Highland aunt Johanna
(November 13, 1821), of an instance of the highest and most honourable
spirit in a highlander labouring under great disadvantages. His name is
Macdonald (he once had a brother here remarkably clever, and a capital
fighter). He is tough as iron, and about the strongest fellow in the
school of his size. Being pushed out of his seat in school by a fellow
of the name of Arthur, he airily asked him to give it him again, which
being refused, with the additional insult that he might try what he
could do to take it from him, Macdonald very properly took him at his
word, and began to push him out of his seat. Arthur struck at him with
all his might, and gave him so violent a blow that Macdonald was almost
knocked backwards, but disdaining to take a blow from even a fellow much
bigger than himself, he returned Arthur's blow with interest; they began
to fight; after Macdonald had made him bleed at both his nose and his
mouth, he finished the affair very triumphantly by knocking the arrogant
Arthur backwards over the form without receiving a single blow of any
consequence. He also labours under the additional disadvantage of being
a new fellow, and of not knowing any one here. Arthur in a former battle
put his finger out of joint, and as soon as it is recovered they are to
have a regular battle in the playing fields.
Other encounters are described with equal zest, especially one where
'the honour of Liverpool was bravely sustained,' superior weight and
size having such an advantage over toughness and strength, that the foe
of Liverpool was too badly bruised and knocked about to appear in
school. On another occasion, 'to the great joy' of the narrator, an
oppidan vanquished a colleger, though the colleger fought so furiously
that he put his fingers out of joint, and went back to the classic
studies that soften manners, with a face broken and quite black. The
Windsor and Slough coaches used to stop under the wall of the playing
fields to watch these desperate affrays, and once at least in these
times a boy was killed. With plenty of fighting went on plenty of
flogging; for the headmaster was the redoubtable Dr. Keate, with whom
the appointed instrument of moral regeneration in the childish soul was
the birch rod; who on heroic occasions was known to have flogged over
eighty boys on a single summer day; and whose one mellow regret in the
evening of his life was that he had not flogged far more. Religious
instruction, as we may suppose, was under these circumstances reduced to
zero; there was no trace of the influence of the evangelical party, at
that moment the most active of all the religious sections; and the
ancient and pious munificence of Henry VI. now inspired a scene that was
essentially little better than pagan, modified by an official church of
England varnish. At Eton, Mr. Gladstone wrote of this period forty years
after, 'the actual teaching of Christianity was all but dead, though
happily none of its forms had been surrendered.'[23]
Science even in its rudiments fared as ill as its eternal rival,
theology. There was a mathematical master, but nobody learned anything
from him, or took any notice of him. In his anxiety for position the
unfortunate man asked Keate if he might wear a cap and gown. 'That's as
you please,' said Keate. 'Must the boys touch their hats to me?' 'That's
as they please,' replied the genial doctor.[24] Gladstone first picked
up a little mathematics, not at Eton, but during the holidays, going to
Liverpool for the purpose, first in 1824 and more seriously in 1827. He
seems to have paid much attention to French, and even then to have
attained considerable proficiency. 'When I was at Eton,' Mr. Gladstone
said, 'we knew very little indeed, but we knew it accurately.' 'There
were many shades of distinction,' he observed, 'among the fellows who
received what was supposed to be, and was in many respects, their
education. Some of those shades of distinction were extremely
questionable, and the comparative measures of honour allotted to talent,
industry, and idleness were undoubtedly such as philosophy would not
justify. But no boy was ever estimated either more or less because he
had much money to spend. It added nothing to him if he had much, it took
nothing from him if he had little.' A sharp fellow who worked, and a
stupid fellow who was idle, were both of them in good odour enough, but
a stupid boy who presumed to work was held to be an insufferable
solecism.[25]
KNOWLEDGE AT ETON
My tutor was the Rev. H. H. Knapp (practically all tutors were
clergymen in those days). He was a reputed whig, an easy and
kind-tempered man with a sense of scholarship, but no power of
discipline, and no energy of desire to impress himself upon his
pupils. I recollect but one piece of advice received later from
him. It was that I should form my poetical taste upon Darwin, whose
poems (the 'Botanic Garden' and 'Loves of the Plants') I obediently
read through in consequence. I was placed in the middle remove
fourth form, a place slightly better than the common run, but
inferior to what a boy of good preparation or real excellence would
have taken. My nearest friend of the first period was W. W. Parr, a
boy of intelligence, something over my age, next above me in the
school.
At this time there was not in me any desire to know or to excel. My
first pursuits were football and then cricket; the first I did not
long pursue, and in the second I never managed to rise above
mediocrity and what was termed 'the twenty-two.' There was a
barrister named Henry Hall Joy, a connection of my father through
his first wife, and a man who had taken a first-class at Oxford. He
was very kind to me, and had made some efforts to inspire me with a
love of books, if not of knowledge. Indeed I had read Froissart,
and Hume with Smollett, but only for the battles, and always
skipping when I came to the sections headed 'A Parliament.' Joy had
a taste for classics, and made visions for me of honours at Oxford.
But the subject only danced before my eyes as a will-of-the-wisp,
and without attracting me. I remained stagnant without heart or
hope. A change however arrived about Easter 1822. My 'remove' was
then under Hawtrey (afterwards head-master and provost), who was
always on the lookout for any bud which he could warm with a little
sunshine.
He always described Hawtrey as the life of the school, the man to whom
Eton owed more than to any of her sons during the century. Though not
his pupil, it was from him that Gladstone, when in the fourth form,
received for the first time incentives to exertion. 'It was entirely due
to Hawtrey,' he records in a fragment, 'that I first owed the reception
of a spark, the _divinae particulam aurae_, and conceived a dim idea,
that in some time, manner, and degree, I might come to know. Even then,
as I had really no instructor, my efforts at Eton, down to 1827, were
perhaps of the purest plodding ever known.'
Evidently he was not a boy of special mark during the first three years
at Eaton. In the evening he played chess and cards, and usually lost. He
claimed in after life that he had once taken a drive in a hired tandem,
but Etonians who knew him as a schoolboy decided that an aspiring memory
here made him boast of crimes that were not his. He was assiduous in the
Eton practice of working a small boat, whether skiff, funny, or wherry,
single-handed. In the masquerade of Montem he figured complacently in
all the glories of the costume of a Greek patriot, for he was a faithful
Canningite; the heroic struggle against the Turk was at its fiercest,
and it was the year when Byron died at Missolonghi. Of Montem as an
institution he thought extremely ill, 'the whole thing a wretched waste
of time and money, a most ingenious contrivance to exhibit us as
baboons, a bore in the full sense of the word.' He did not stand aside
from the harmless gaieties of boyish life, but he rigidly refused any
part in boyish indecorums. He was, in short, just the diligent,
cheerful, healthy-minded schoolboy that any good father would have his
son to be. He enjoys himself with his brother at the Christopher, and is
glad to record that 'Keate did not make any jaw about being so late.'
Half a dozen of them met every whole holiday or half, and went up Salt
Hill to bully the fat waiter, eat toasted cheese, and drink egg-wine.
SCHOOL DAYS
He started, as we have already seen, in middle fourth form. In the
spring of 1822 Hawtrey said to him: 'Continue to do as well as this, and
I will send you up for good again before the fourth of June.' Before the
end of June, he tells his sailor brother of his success: 'It far exceeds
the most sanguine expectations I ever entertained. I have got into the
remove between the fourth and fifth forms. I have been sent up for good
a second time, and have taken seven places.' In the summer of 1823 he
announces that he has got into the fifth form after taking sixteen
places, and here instead of fagging he acquires the blessed power
himself to fag. In passing he launches, for the first recorded time,
against the master of the remove from which he has just been promoted,
an invective that in volume and intensity anticipates the wrath of later
attacks on Neapolitan kings and Turkish sultans.
His letters written from Eton breathe in every line the warm breath of
family affection, and of all those natural pieties that had so firm a
root in him from the beginning to the end. Of the later store of genius
and force that the touch of time was so soon to kindle into full glow,
they gave but little indication. We smile at the precocious _copia
fandi_ that at thirteen describes the language of an admonishing
acquaintance as 'so friendly, manly, sound, and disinterested that
notwithstanding his faults I must always think well of him.' He sends
contributions to his brother's scrap-book, and one of the first of them,
oddly enough, in view of one of the great preoccupations of his later
life, is a copy of Lord Edward Fitzgerald's stanzas on the night of his
arrest:--
'O Ireland, my country, the hour
Of thy pride and thy splendour has passed.
And the chain which was spurned in thy moment of power,
Hangs heavy around thee at last.'
The temper and dialect of evangelical religion are always there. A
friend of the family dies, and the boy pours out his regret, but after
all what is the merely natural death of Dr. N. compared with the awful
state of a certain clergyman, also an intimate friend, who has not only
been guilty of attending a fancy ball, but has followed that vicious
prelude by even worse enormities, unnamed, that surely cannot escape the
vigilance and the reproof of his bishop?
His father is the steady centre of his life. 'My father,' he writes to
his brother, 'is as active in mind and projects as ever; he has two
principal plans now in embryo. One of these is a railroad between
Liverpool and Manchester for the conveyance of goods by
locomotive-steam-engine. The other is for building a bridge over the
Mersey at Runcorn.' In May 1827, the Gloucester and Berkeley canal is
opened: 'a great and enterprising undertaking, but still there is no
fear of it beating Liverpool.' Meanwhile, 'what prodigiously quick
travelling to leave Eton at twelve on Monday, and reach home at eight on
Tuesday!' 'I have,' he says in 1826, 'lately been writing several
letters in the _Liverpool Courier_.' His father had been attacked in the
local prints for sundry economic inconsistencies, and the controversial
pen that was to know no rest for more than seventy years to come, was
now first employed, like the pious Æneas bearing off Anchises, in the
filial duty of repelling his sire's assailants. Ignorant of his nameless
champion, John Gladstone was much amused and interested by the anonymous
'Friend to Fair Dealing,' while the son was equally diverted by the
criticisms and conjectures of the parent.
YOUTHFUL READING
With the formidable Keate the boy seems to have fared remarkably well,
and there are stories that he was even one of the tyrant's
favourites.[26] His school work was diligently supplemented. His daily
reading in 1826 covers a good deal of miscellaneous ground, including
Molière and Racine, Blair's _Sermons_ ('not very substantial'), _Tom
Jones_, Tomline's _Life of Pitt_, Waterland's _Commentaries_, Leslie _on
Deism_, Locke's _Defence of The Reasonableness of Christianity_, which
he finds excellent; _Paradise Lost_, Milton's _Latin Poems_ and
_Epitaphium Damonis_ ('exquisite'), Massinger's _Fatal Dowry_ ('most
excellent'), Ben Jonson's _Alchemist_; Scott, including the _Bride of
Lammermoor_ ('a beautiful tale, indeed,' and in after life his favourite
of them all), Burke, Clarendon, and others of the shining host whose
very names are music to a scholar's ear. In the same year he reads 'a
most violent article on Milton by Macaulay, fair and unfair, clever and
silly, allegorical and bombastic, republican and anti-episcopal--a
strange composition, indeed.' In 1827 he went steadily through the
second half of Gibbon, whom he pronounces, 'elegant and acute as he is,
not so clear, so able, so attractive as Hume; does not impress my mind
so much.' In the same year he reads Coxe's _Walpole_, _Don Quixote_,
Hallam's _Constitutional History_, _Measure for Measure_ and _Much Ado_,
Massinger's _Grand Duke of Florence_, Ford's _Love's Melancholy_ ('much
of it good, the end remarkably beautiful') and _Broken Heart_ (which he
liked better than either the other or _'Tis Pity_), Locke _on
Toleration_ ('much repetition').
There is, of course, a steady refrain of Greek iambics, Greek anapæsts,
'an easy and nice metre,' 'a hodge-podge lot of hendecasyllables,' and
thirty alcaic stanzas for a holiday task. Mention is made of many
sermons on 'Redeeming the time,' 'Weighed in the balance and found
wanting,' 'Cease to do evil, learn to do well,' and the other ever
unexhausted texts. One constant entry, we may be sure, is 'Read Bible,'
with Mant's notes. In a mood of deep piety he is prepared for
confirmation. His appearance at this time was recalled by one who had
been his fag, 'as a good-looking, rather delicate youth, with a pale
face and brown curling hair, always tidy and well dressed.'[27]
He became captain of the fifth at the end of October 1826, and on
February 20, 1827, Keate put him into the sixth. 'Was very civil,
indeed; told me to take pains, etc.: to be careful in using my
authority, etc.' He finds the sixth very preferable to all other parts
of the school, both as regards pleasure and opportunity for improvement.
They are more directly under the eye of Keate; he treats them with more
civility and speaks to them differently. So the days follow one another
very much alike--studious, cheerful, sociable, sedulous. The debates in
parliament take up a good deal of his time, and he is overwhelmed by the
horrible news of the defeat of the catholics in the House of Commons
(March 8,1827). On a summer's day in 1826, 'Mr. Canning here; inquired
after me and missed me.' He was not at Eton but at home when he heard of
Mr. Canning's death. 'Personally I must remember his kindness and
condescension, especially when he spoke to me of some verses which H.
Joy had injudiciously mentioned to him.'
II
DEBATING SOCIETY
Youthful intellect is imitative, and in a great school so impregnated as
Eton with the spirit of public life and political association, the few
boys with active minds mimicked the strife of parliament in their
debating society, and copied the arts of journalism in the _Eton
Miscellany_. In both fields the young Gladstone took a leading part. The
debating society was afflicted with 'the premonitory lethargy of death,'
but the assiduous energy of Gaskell, seconded by the gifts of Gladstone,
Hallam, and Doyle, soon sent a new pulse beating through it. The
politics of the hour, that is to say everything not fifty years off,
were forbidden ground; but the execution of Strafford or of his royal
master, the deposition of Richard II., the last four years of the reign
of Queen Anne, the Peerage bill of 1719, the characters of Harley and
Bolingbroke, were themes that could be made by ingenious youth to admit
a hundred cunning sidelights upon the catholic question, the struggle of
the Greeks for independence, the hard case of Queen Caroline, and the
unlawfulness of swamping the tories in the House of Lords. On duller
afternoons they argued on the relative claims of mathematics and
metaphysics to be the better discipline of the human mind; whether
duelling is or is not inconsistent with the character that we ought to
seek; or whether the education of the poor is on the whole beneficial.
It was on this last question (October 29, 1825) that the orator who made
his last speech seventy years later, now made his first. 'Made my first
or maiden speech at the society,' he enters in his diary, 'on education
of the poor; funked less than I thought I should, by much.' It is a
curious but a characteristic circumstance not that so many of his Eton
speeches were written out, but that the manuscript should have been
thriftily preserved by him all through the long space of intervening
years. 'Mr. President,' it begins, 'in this land of liberty, in this age
of increased and gradually increasing civilization, we shall hope to
find few, if indeed any, among the higher classes who are eager or
willing to obstruct the moral instruction and mental improvement of
their fellow creatures in the humbler walks of life. If such there are,
let them at length remember that the poor are endowed with the same
reason, though not blessed with the same temporal advantages. Let them
but admit, what I think no one can deny, that they are placed in an
elevated situation principally for the purpose of doing good to their
fellow creatures. Then by what argument can they repel, by what pretence
can they evade the duty?' And so forth and so forth. Already we seem to
hear the born speaker in the amplitude of rhetorical form in which,
juvenile though it may be, a commonplace is cast. 'Is human grandeur so
stable that they may deny to others that which they would in an humble
situation desire themselves? Or has human pride reached such a pitch of
arrogance that they have learned to defy both right and reason, to
reject the laws of natural kindness that ought to reign in the breast of
all, and to look on their fellow countrymen as the refuse of mankind?...
Is it morally just or politically expedient to keep down the industry
and genius of the artisan, to blast his rising hopes, to quell his
spirit? A thirst for knowledge has arisen in the minds of the poor; let
them satisfy it with wholesome nutriment and beware lest driven to
despair,' et cetera. Crude enough, if we please; but the year was 1826,
and we may feel that the boyish speaker is already on the generous side
and has the gift of fruitful sympathies.
In the spacious tournaments of old history, we may smile to hear
debating forms and ceremony applied to everlasting controversies. 'Sir,'
he opens on one occasion, 'I declare that as far as regards myself, I
shall have very little difficulty in stating my grounds on which I give
my vote for James Graham [the Marquis of Montrose]. It is because I look
upon him as a hero, not merely endowed with that animal ferocity which
has often been the sole qualification which has obtained men that
appellation from the multitude--I should be sorry indeed if he had no
testimonials of his merits, save such as arise from the mad and
thoughtless exclamations of popular applause.' In the same gallant style
(Jan. 26, 1826) he votes for Marcus Aurelius, in answer to the question
whether Trajan has any equal among the Roman emperors from Augustus
onwards. Another time the question was between John Hampden and
Clarendon. 'Sir, I look back with pleasure to the time when we
unanimously declared our disapprobation of the impeachment of the Earl
of Strafford. I wish I could hope for the same unanimity now, but I will
endeavour to regulate myself by the same principles as directed me
then.... Now, sir, with regard to the impeachment of the five members,
it is really a little extraordinary to hear the honourable opener
talking of the violence offered by the king, and the terror of the
parliament. Sir, do we not all know that the king at that time had
neither friends nor wealth?... Did the return of these members with a
triumphant mob accompanying them indicate terror? Did the demands of
the parliament or the insolence of their language show it?' So he
proceeds through all the well-worn arguments; and 'therefore it is,' he
concludes, 'that I give my vote to the Earl of Clarendon, because he
gave his support to the falling cause of monarchy; because he stood by
his church and his king; because he adopted the part which loyalty,
reason, and moderation combined to dictate.... Poverty, banishment, and
disgrace he endured without a murmur; he still adhered to the cause of
justice, he still denounced the advocates of rebellion, and if he failed
in his reward in life, oh, sir, let us not deny it to him after death.
In him, sir, I admire the sound philosopher, the rigid moralist, the
upright statesman, the candid historian.... In Hampden I see the
splendour of patriotic bravery obscured by the darkness of rebellion,
and the faculties by which he might have been a real hero and real
martyr, prostituted in the cause,' and so on, with all the promise of
the _os magna soniturum_, of which time was to prove the resources so
inexhaustible. On one great man he passed a final judgment that years
did not change:--'Debate on Sir R. Walpole: Hallam, Gaskell, Pickering,
and Doyle spoke. Voted for him. Last time, when I was almost entirely
ignorant of the subject, against him. There were sundry considerable
blots, but nothing to overbalance or to spoil the great merit of being
the bulwark of the protestant succession, his commercial measures, and
in general his pacific policy.'[28]
ETON MISCELLANY
As for the _Eton Miscellany_, which was meant to follow earlier attempts
in the same line, the best-natured critic cannot honestly count it
dazzling. Such things rarely are; for youth, though the most adorable of
our human stages, cannot yet have knowledge or practice enough, whether
in life or books, to make either good prose or stirring verse, unless by
a miracle of genius, and even that inspiration is but occasional. The
_Microcosm_ (1786-87) and the _Etonian_ (1818), with such hands as
Canning and Frere, Moultrie and Praed, were well enough. The newcomer
was a long way behind these in the freshness, brilliance, daring, by
which only such juvenile performances can either please or interest.
George Selwyn and Gladstone were joint editors, and each provided pretty
copious effusions. 'I cannot keep my temper,' he wrote afterwards in his
diary in 1835, on turning over the _Miscellany_, 'in perusing my own
(with few exceptions) execrable productions.' Certainly his
contributions have no particular promise or savour, no hint of the
strong pinions into which the half-fledged wings were in time to expand.
Their motion, such as it is, must be pronounced mechanical; their phrase
and cadence conventional. Even when sincere feelings were deeply
stirred, the flight cannot be called high. The most moving public event
in his schooldays was undoubtedly the death of Canning, and to Gladstone
the stroke was almost personal. In September 1827 he tells his mother
that he has for the first time visited Westminster Abbey,--his object,
an eager pilgrimage to the newly tenanted grave of his hero, and in the
_Miscellany_ he pays a double tribute. In the prose we hear sonorous
things about meridian splendour, premature extinction, and inscrutable
wisdom; about falling, like his great master Pitt, a victim to his proud
and exalted station; about being firm in principle and conciliatory in
action, the friend of improvement and the enemy of innovation. Nor are
the versified reflections in Westminster Abbey much more striking:--
Oft in the sculptured aisle and swelling dome,
The yawning grave hath given the proud a home;
Yet never welcomed from his bright career
A mightier victim than it welcomed here:
Again the tomb may yawn--again may death
Claim the last forfeit of departing breath;
Yet ne'er enshrine in slumber dark and deep
A nobler, loftier prey than where thine ashes sleep.
Excellent in feeling, to be sure; but as a trial of poetic delicacy or
power, wanting the true note, and only worth recalling for an instant as
we go.
III
FRIENDS
As nearly always happens, it was less by school work or spoken addresses
in juvenile debate, or early attempts in the great and difficult art of
written composition, than by blithe and congenial comradeship that the
mind of the young Gladstone was stimulated, opened, strengthened. In
after days he commemorated among his friends George Selwyn, afterwards
bishop of New Zealand and of Lichfield, 'a man whose character is summed
up, from alpha to omega, in the single word, noble, and whose high
office, in a large measure, it was to reintroduce among the anglican
clergy the pure heroic type.' Another was Francis Doyle, 'whose genial
character supplied a most pleasant introduction for his unquestionable
poetic genius.' A third was James Milnes Gaskell, a youth endowed with
precocious ripeness of political faculty, an enthusiast, and with a
vivacious humour that enthusiasts often miss. Doyle said of him that his
nurse must have lulled him to sleep by parliamentary reports, and his
first cries on awaking in his cradle must have been 'hear, hear'!
Proximity of rooms 'gave occasion or aid to the formation of another
very valuable friendship, that with Gerald Wellesley, afterwards dean of
Windsor, which lasted, to my great profit, for some sixty years, until
that light was put out.' In Gaskell's room four or five of them would
meet, and discuss without restraint the questions of politics that were
too modern to be tolerated in public debate. Most of them were friendly
to catholic emancipation, and to the steps by which Huskisson, supported
by Canning, was cautiously treading in the path towards free trade. The
brightest star in this cheerful constellation was the rare youth who,
though his shining course was run in two-and-twenty years, yet in that
scanty span was able to impress with his vigorous understanding and
graceful imagination more than one of the loftiest minds of his
time.[29] Arthur Hallam was a couple of years younger than Gladstone, no
narrow gulf at that age; but such was the sympathy of genius, such the
affinities of intellectual interest and aspiration spoken and unspoken,
such the charm and the power of the younger with the elder, that rapid
instinct made them close comrades. They clubbed together their rolls and
butter, and breakfasted in one another's rooms. Hallam was not strong
enough for boating, so the more sinewy Gladstone used to scull him up to
the Shallows, and he regarded this toilsome carrying of an idle
passenger up stream as proof positive of no common value set upon his
passenger's company. They took walks together, often to the monument of
Gray, close by the churchyard of the elegy; arguing about the articles
and the creeds; about Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley; about free will, for
Hallam was precociously full of Jonathan Edwards; about politics, old
and new, living and dead; about Pitt and Fox, and Canning and Peel, for
Gladstone was a tory and Hallam pure whig. Hallam was described by Mr.
Gladstone in his old age as one who 'enjoyed work, enjoyed society; and
games which he did not enjoy he left contentedly aside. His temper was
as sweet as his manners were winning. His conduct was without a spot or
even a speck. He was that rare and blessed creature, _anima naturaliter
Christiana_. He read largely, and though not superficial, yet with an
extraordinary speed. He had no high or exclusive ways.' Thus, as so many
have known in that happy dawn of life, before any of the imps of
disorder and confusion have found their way into the garden, it was the
most careless hours,--careless of all save truth and beauty,--that were
the hours best filled.
ARTHUR HALLAM
Youth will commonly do anything rather than write letters, but the
friendship of this pair stood even that test. The pages are redolent of
a living taste for good books and serious thoughts, and amply redeemed
from strain or affectation by touches of gay irony and the collegian's
banter. Hallam applies to Gladstone Diomede's lines about Odysseus, of
eager heart and spirit so manful in all manner of toils, as the only
comrade whom a man would choose.[30] But the Greek hero was no doubt a
complex character, and the parallel is taken by Gladstone as an
equivocal compliment. So Hallam begs him at any rate to accept the other
description, how when he uttered his mighty voice from his chest, and
words fell like flakes of snow in winter, then could no mortal man
contend with Odysseus.[31] As happy a forecast for the great orator of
their generation, as when in 1829 he told Gladstone that Tennyson
promised fair to be its greatest poet. Hallam's share in the
correspondence reminds us of the friendship of two other Etonians ninety
years before, of the letters and verses that Gray wrote to Richard West;
there is the same literary sensibility, the same kindness, but there is
what Gray and West felt not, the breath of a busy and changing age. Each
of these two had the advantage of coming from a home where politics were
not mere gossip about persons and paragraphs, but were matters of
trained and continued interest. The son of one of the most eminent of
the brilliant band of the whig writers of that day, Hallam passes
glowing eulogies on the patriotism and wisdom of the whigs in coalescing
with Canning against the bigotry of the king and the blunders of
Wellington and Peel; he contrasts this famous crisis with a similar
crisis in the early part of the reign of George III.; and observes how
much higher all parties stood in the balance of disinterestedness and
public virtue. He goes to the opera and finds Zucchelli admirable,
Coradori divine. He wonders (1826) about Sir Walter's forthcoming life
of Napoleon, how with his ultra principles Scott will manage to make a
hero of the Corsican. He asks if Gladstone has read 'the new _Vivian
Grey_' (1827)--the second part of that amazing fiction into which an
author, not much older than themselves and destined to strange historic
relations with one of them, had the year before burst upon the world.
Hallam is not without the graceful melancholy of youth, so different
from that other melancholy of ripe years and the deepening twilight.
Under all is the recurrent note of a grave refrain that fatal issues
made pathetic.
'Never since the time when I first knew you,' Hallam wrote to Gladstone
(June 23, 1830), 'have I ceased to love and respect your character ...
It will be my proudest thought that I may henceforth act worthily of
their affection who, like yourself, have influenced my mind for good in
the earliest season of its development. Circumstance, my dear Gladstone,
has indeed separated our paths, but it can never do away with what has
been. The stamp of each of our minds is on the other. Many a habit of
thought in each is modified, many a feeling is associated, which never
would have existed in that combination, had it not been for the old
familiar days when we lived together.'
In the summer of 1827 Hallam quitted Eton for the journey to Italy that
set so important a mark on his literary growth, and he bade his friend
farewell in words of characteristic affection. 'Perhaps you will pardon
my doing by writing what I hardly dare trust myself to do by words. I
received your superb Burke yesterday; and hope to find it a memorial of
past and a pledge for future friendship through both our lives. It is
perhaps rather bold in me to ask a favour immediately on acknowledging
so great a one; but you would please me, and oblige me greatly, if you
will accept this copy of my father's book. It may serve when I am
separated from you, to remind you of one, whose warmest pleasure it will
always be to subscribe himself, Your most faithful friend, A. H. H.'
A few entries from the schoolboy's diary may serve to bring the daily
scene before us, and show what his life was like:--
_October 3, 1826._--Holiday. Walk with Hallam. Wrote over theme.
Read Clarendon. Wrote speech for Saturday week. Poor enough. Did
punishment set by Keate to all the fifth form for being late in
church.
_October 6._--Fin. second Olympiad of Pindar.... Clarendon. Did an
abstract of about 100 pages. Wrote speech for to-morrow in favour
of Cæsar.
_November 13._--Play. Breakfast with Hallam. Read a little
Clarendon. Read over tenth Satire of Juvenal and read the fifth,
making quotations to it and some other places. Did a few verses.
_November 14._--Holiday. Wrote over theme. Did verses. Walked with
Hallam and Doyle. Read papers and debates.... Read 200 lines of
_Trachiniae_. A little _Gil Blas_ in French, and a little
Clarendon.
_November 18._--Play. Read papers, etc. Finished Blair's
_Dissertation on Ossian_. Finished _Trachiniae_. Did 3 props. of
Euclid. Question: Was deposition of Richard II. justifiable? Voted
no. Good debate. Finished the delightful oration _Pro Milone_.
_November 21._--Holiday.... Part of article in _Edinburgh Review_
on _Icon Basilike_. Read Herodotus, Clarendon. Did 3 props.
Scrambling and leaping expedition with Hallam, Doyle, and Gaskell.
_November 30._--Holiday. Read Herodotus. Breakfasted with Gaskell.
He and Hallam drank wine with me after 4. Walked with Hallam. Did
verses. Finished first book of Euclid. Read a little _Charles XII_.
_February 27_, 1827.--Holiday. Dressed (knee-breeches, etc.) and
went into school with Selwyn. Found myself not at all in a funk,
and went through my performance with tolerable comfort. Durnford
followed me, then Selwyn, who spoke well. Horrors of speaking
chiefly in the name.
_March 20._--My father has lost his seat, and Berwick a
representative ten times too good for it. Wrote to my father, no
longer M.P.; when we have forgotten the manner, the matter is not
so bad.
_March 24._--Half-holiday. Play and learning it. Walked with
Hallam, read papers. Hallam drank wine with me after dinner.
Finished 8th vol. of Gibbon; read account of Palmyra in second
volume; did more verses on it. Much jaw about nothing at Society,
and absurd violence.
_May 31._--Finished iambics. Wrote over for tutor. Played cricket
in the Upper Club, and had tea in poet's walk [an entry repeated
this summer].
_June 26._--Wrote over theme. Read _Iphigenie_. Called up in Homer.
Sculled Hallam to Surly after 6. Went to see a cricket match after
4.
FAREWELL TO ETON
Gladstone's farewell to Eton came with Christmas (1827). He writes to
his sister his last Etonian letter (December 2) before departure, and
'melancholy that departure is.' On the day before, he had made his
valedictory speech to the Society, and the empty shelves and dismantled
walls, the table strewn with papers, the books packed away in their
boxes, have the effect of 'mingling in one lengthened mass all the
boyish hopes and solicitudes and pleasures' of his Eton life. 'I have
long ago made up my mind that I have of late been enjoying what will in
all probability be, as far as my own individual case is concerned, the
happiest years of my life. And they have fled! From these few facts do
we not draw a train of reflections awfully important in their nature and
extremely powerful in their impression on the mind?'
DR. KEATE
Two reminiscences of Eton always gave him, and those who listened to
him, much diversion whenever chance brought them to his mind, and he has
set them down in an autobiographic fragment, for which this is the
place:--
To Dr. Keate nature had accorded a stature of only about five feet,
or say five feet one; but by costume, voice, manner (including a
little swagger), and character he made himself in every way the
capital figure on the Eton stage, and his departure marked, I
imagine, the departure of the old race of English public school
masters, as the name of Dr. Busby seems to mark its introduction.
In connection with his name I shall give two anecdotes separated by
a considerable interval of years. About the year 1820, the
eloquence of Dr. Edward Irving drew crowds to his church in London,
which was presbyterian. It required careful previous arrangements
to secure comfortable accommodation. The preacher was solemn,
majestic (notwithstanding the squint), and impressive; carrying all
the appearance of devoted earnestness. My father had on a certain
occasion, when I was still a small Eton boy, taken time by the
forelock, and secured the use of a convenient pew in the first rank
of the gallery. From this elevated situation we surveyed at ease
and leisure the struggling crowds below. The crush was everywhere
great, but greatest of all in the centre aisle. Here the mass of
human beings, mercilessly compressed, swayed continually backwards
and forwards. There was I, looking down with infinite complacency
and satisfaction from this honourable vantage ground upon the floor
of the church, filled and packed as one of our public meetings is,
with people standing and pushing. What was my emotion, my joy, my
exultation, when I espied among this humiliated mass, struggling
and buffeted--whom but Keate! Keate the master of our existence,
the tyrant of our days! Pure, unalloyed, unadulterated rapture!
Such a [Greek: peripeteia], such a reversal of human conditions of being,
as that now exhibited between the Eton lower boy uplifted to the
luxurious gallery pew, and the head-master of Eton, whom I was
accustomed to see in the roomy deck of the upper school with vacant
space and terror all around him, it must be hard for any one to
conceive, except the two who were the subjects of it. Never, never,
have I forgotten that moment.[32]
I will now, after the manner of novelists, ask my reader to effect
along with me, a transition of some eighteen years, and to witness
another, and if not a more complete yet a worthier, turning of the
tables. In the year 1841 there was a very special Eton dinner held
in Willis's Rooms to commemorate the fourth centenary of the
ancient school. Lord Morpeth, afterwards Lord Carlisle, was in the
chair. On his right, not far off him, was Dr. Keate, to whom I
chanced to have a seat almost immediately opposite. In those days,
at public dinners, cheering was marked by gradations. As the Queen
was suspected of sympathy with the liberal government of Lord
Melbourne which advised her, the toast of the sovereign was
naturally received with a moderate amount of acclamation, decently
and thriftily doled out. On the other hand the Queen Dowager either
was, or was believed to be, conservative; and her health
consequently figured as the toast of the evening, and drew forth,
as a matter of course, by far its loudest acclamation. So much was
routine; and we went through it as usual. But the real toast of the
evening was yet to come. I suppose it to be beyond doubt that of
the assembled company the vastly preponderating majority had been
under his sway at Eton; and if, when in that condition, any one of
them had been asked how he liked Dr. Keate, he would beyond
question have answered, 'Keate? Oh, I hate him.' It is equally
beyond doubt that to the persons of the whole of them, with the
rarest exceptions, it had been the ease of Dr. Keate to administer
the salutary correction of the birch. But upon this occasion, when
his name had been announced the scene was indescribable. Queen and
Queen Dowager alike vanished into insignificance. The roar of
cheering had a beginning, but never knew satiety or end. Like the
huge waves at Biarritz, the floods of cheering continually
recommenced; the whole process was such that we seemed all to have
lost our self-possession and to be hardly able to keep our seats.
When at length it became possible Keate rose: that is to say, his
head was projected slightly over the heads of his two neighbours.
He struggled to speak; I will not say I heard every syllable, for
there were no syllables; speak he could not. He tried in vain to
mumble a word or two, but wholly failed, recommenced the vain
struggle and sat down. It was certainly one of the most moving
spectacles that in my whole life I have witnessed.
IV
AT WILMSLOW
Some months passed between leaving Eton and going to Oxford. In January
1828, Gladstone went to reside with Dr. Turner at Wilmslow in Cheshire,
and remained there until Turner was made Bishop of Calcutta. The
bishop's pupil afterwards testified to his amiability, refinement, and
devoutness; but the days of his energy were past, and 'the religious
condition of the parish was depressing.' Among the neighbouring
families, with whom he made acquaintance while at Wilmslow, were the
Gregs of Quarry Bank, a refined and philanthropic household, including
among the sons William R. Greg (born in the same year as Mr. Gladstone),
that ingenious, urbane, interesting, and independent mind, whose
speculations, dissolvent and other, were afterwards to take an effective
place in the writings of the time. 'I fear he is a unitarian,' the young
churchman mentions to his father, and gives sundry reasons for that
sombre apprehension; it was, indeed, only too well founded.
While at Wilmslow (Feb. 5, 1828) Gladstone was taken to dine with the
rector of Alderley--'an extremely gentlemanly and said to be a very
clever man,'--afterwards to be known as the liberal and enlightened
Edward Stanley, Bishop of Norwich, and father of Arthur Stanley, the
famous dean. Him, on this occasion, the young Gladstone seems to have
seen for the first time. Arthur Stanley was six years his junior, and
there was then some idea of sending him to Eton. As it happened, he too
was a pupil at Rawson's at Seaforth, and in the summer after the
meeting at Alderley the two lads met again. The younger of them has
described how he was invited to breakfast with William Gladstone at
Seaforth House; in what grand style they breakfasted, how he devoured
strawberries, swam the Newfoundland dog in the pond, looked at books and
pictures, and talked to W. Gladstone 'almost all the time about all
sorts of things. He is so very good-natured, and I like him very much.
He talked a great deal about Eton, and said that it was a very good
place for those who liked boating and Latin verses. He was very
good-natured to us all the time, and lent me books to read when we went
away.'[33] A few months later, as all the world knows, Stanley, happily
for himself and for all of us, went not to Eton but to Rugby, where
Arnold had just entered on his bold and noble task of changing the face
of education in England.
FOOTNOTES:
[23] _Gleanings_, vii. p. 138.
[24] A story sometimes told of Provost Goodall.
[25] At Marlborough, Feb. 3, 1877; at Mill Hill School, June 11, 1879.
[26] Doyle tells a story of the boy being flogged for bringing wine into
his study. When questioned on this, Mr. Gladstone said, 'I _was_
flogged, but not for anything connected in any way with wine, of which,
by the by, my father supplied me with a small amount, and insisted upon
my drinking it, or some of it, all the time that I was at Eton. The
reason why I was flogged was this. I was præpostor of the remove on a
certain day, and from kindness or good nature was induced to omit from
the list of boys against whom H. [the master] had complained, and who
ought to have been flogged next day, the names of three offenders. The
three boys in question got round me with a story that their friends were
coming down from London to see them, and that if they were put down on
the flogging list they could not meet their friends. Next day when I
went into school H. roared out in a voice of thunder, "Gladstone, put
down your own name on the list of boys to be flogged."' Mr. Gladstone on
this occasion told another tale of this worthy's 'humour.' 'One day H.
called out to the præpostor, "Write down Hamilton's name to be flogged
for breaking my window." "I never broke your window, sir," exclaimed
Hamilton. "Præpostor," retorted H., "write down Hamilton's name for
breaking my window and lying." "Upon my soul, sir, I did not do it,"
ejaculated the boy, with increased emphasis. "Præpostor, write down
Hamilton's name for breaking my window, lying, and swearing." Against
this final sentence there was no appeal, and, accordingly, Hamilton was
flogged (I believe unjustly) next day.'--F. Lawley in _Daily Telegraph_,
May 20, 1898.
[27] _Temple Bar_, Feb. 1883.
[28] Feb. 10, 1827.
[29] Mr. Gladstone fixed on two of the elegies of _In Memoriam_ as most
directly conveying the image of Arthur Hallam, cviii. and cxxviii.
[30] _Iliad_, iii. 221.
[31] _Ibid._ x. 242.
[32] I have heard him tell this story, and Garrick himself could not
have reproduced a schoolboy's glee with more admirable accent and
gesture.
[33] Prothero's _Life of Dean Stanley_, 1. p. 22.
CHAPTER III
OXFORD
(_October 1828-December 1831_)
Steeped in sentiment as she lies, spreading her gardens to the
moonlight, and whispering from her towers the last enchantments of
the Middle Age, who will deny that Oxford, by her ineffable charm,
keeps ever calling us nearer to the true goal of all of us, to the
ideal, to perfection--to beauty, in a word, which is only truth
seen from another side?--M. ARNOLD.
Glorious to most are the days of life in a great school, but it is at
college that aspiring talent first enters on its inheritance. Oxford was
slowly awakening from a long age of lethargy. Toryism of a stolid
clownish type still held the thrones of collegiate power. Yet the eye of
an imaginative scholar as he gazed upon the grey walls, reared by piety,
munificence, and love of learning in a far-off time, might well discern
behind an unattractive screen of academic sloth, the venerable past, not
dim and cold, but in its traditions rich, nourishing, and alive. Such an
one could see before him present days of honourable emulation and
stirring acquisition--fit prelude of a man's part to play in a strenuous
future. It is from Gladstone's introduction into this enchanted and
inspiring world, that we recognise the beginning of the wonderful course
that was to show how great a thing the life of a man may be made.
CHRIST CHURCH
The Eton boy became the Christ Church man, and there began residence,
October 10, 1828. Mr. Gladstone's rooms, during most of his
undergraduate life, were on the right hand, and on the first floor of
the staircase on the right, as one enters by the Canterbury gate. He
tells his mother that they are in a very fashionable part of the
college, and mentions as a delightful fact, that Gaskell and Seymer
have rooms on the same floor. Samuel Smith was head until 1831, when he
was succeeded by the more celebrated Dr. Gaisford, always described by
Mr. Gladstone as a splendid scholar, but a bad dean. Gaisford's
excellent services to the Greek learning of his day are unquestioned,
and he had the signal merit of speech, Spartan brevity. For a short time
in 1806 he had been tutor to Peel. When Lord Liverpool offered him the
Greek professorship, with profuse compliments on his erudition, the
learned man replied, 'My Lord, I have received your letter, and accede
to the contents.--Yours, T. G.' And to the complaining parent of an
undergraduate he wrote, 'Dear Sir,--Such letters as yours are a great
annoyance to your obedient servant T. Gaisford.'[34] This laconic gift
the dean evidently had not time to transmit to all of his flock.
Christ Church in those days was infested with some rowdyism, and in one
bear-fight an undergraduate was actually killed. In the chapel the new
undergraduate found little satisfaction, for the service was scarcely
performed with common decency. There seems, however, to have been no
irreconcilable prejudice against reading, and in the schools the college
was at the top of its academic fame. The influence of Cyril Jackson, the
dean in Peel's time, whose advice to Peel and, other pupils to work like
a tiger, and not to be afraid of killing one's self by work, was still
operative.[35] At the summer examination of 1830, Christ Church won five
first classes out of ten. Most commoners, according to a letter of
Gaskell's, had from three hundred and fifty to five hundred pounds a
year; but gentlemen commoners like Acland and Gaskell had from five to
six hundred. At the end of 1829, Mr. Gladstone received a studentship
_honoris causa_, by nomination of the dean--a system that would not be
approved in our epoch of competitive examination, but still an advance
upon the time-honoured practice of deans and canons disposing of
studentships on grounds of private partiality without reference to
desert. We may assume that the dean was not indifferent to academic
promise when he told Gladstone, very good-naturedly and civilly, that he
had determined to offer him his nomination. The student designate wrote
a theme, read it out before the chapter, passed a nominal, or even
farcical, examination in Homer and Virgil, was elected as matter of
course by the chapter, and after chapel on the morning of Christmas eve,
having taken several oaths, was formally admitted in the name of the
Holy Trinity.
Mr. Biscoe, his classical tutor, was a successful lecturer on Aristotle,
especially on the Rhetoric. With Charles Wordsworth, son of the master
of Trinity at Cambridge, and afterwards Bishop of Saint Andrews, he read
for scholarship, apparently not wholly to his own satisfaction. While
still an undergraduate, he writes to his father (Nov. 2, 1830), 'I am
wretchedly deficient in the knowledge of modern languages, literature,
and history; and the classical knowledge acquired here, though sound,
accurate, and useful, yet is not such as to _complete_ an education.' It
looked, in truth, as if the caustic saying of a brilliant colleague of
his in later years were not at the time unjust, as now it would happily
be, that it was a battle between Eton and education, and Eton had won.
Mr. Gladstone never to the end of his days ceased to be grateful that
Oxford was chosen for his university. At Cambridge, as he said in
discussing Hallam's choice, the pure refinements of scholarship were
more in fashion than the study of the great masterpieces of antiquity in
their substance and spirit. The classical examination at Oxford, on the
other hand, was divided into the three elastic departments of
scholarship and poetry, history, and philosophy. In this list, history
somewhat outweighed the scholarship, and philosophy was somewhat more
regarded than history. In each case the examination turned more on
contents than on form, and the influence of Butler was at its climax.
CHARACTER OF OXFORD TEACHING
If Mr. Gladstone had gone to Oxford ten years earlier, he would have
found the Ethics and the Rhetoric treated, only much less effectively,
in the Cambridge method, like dramatists and orators, as pieces of
literature. As it was, Whately's common sense had set a new fashion, and
Aristotle was studied as the master of those who know how to teach us
the right way about the real world.[36] Aristotle, Butler, and logic
were the new acquisitions, but in none of the three as yet did the
teaching go deep compared with modern standards. Oxford scholars of our
own day question whether there was even one single tutor in 1830, with
the possible exception of Hampden, who could expound Aristotle as a
whole--so utterly had the Oxford tradition perished.[37]
The time was in truth the eve of an epoch of illumination, and in these
epochs it is not old academic systems that the new light is wont to
strike with its first rays. The summer of 1831 is the date of Sir
William Hamilton's memorable exposure,[38] in his most trenchant and
terrifying style and with a learning all his own, of the corruption and
'vampire oppression of Oxford'; its sacrifice of the public interests to
private advantage; its unhallowed disregard of every moral and religious
bond; the systematic perjury so naturalised in a great seminary of
religious education; the apathy with which the injustice was tolerated
by the state and the impiety tolerated by the church. Copleston made a
wretched reply, but more than twenty years passed before the spirit of
reform overthrew the entrenchments of academic abuse. In that overthrow,
when the time came, Mr. Gladstone was called to play a part, though
hardly at first a very zealous one. This was not for a quarter of a
century; for, as we shall soon see, both the revival of learning and the
reform of institutions at Oxford were sharply turned aside from their
expected course by the startling theological movement that now proceeded
from her venerable walls.
What interests us here is not the system but the man; and never was
vital temperament more admirably fitted by its vigour, sincerity,
conscience, compass, for whatever good seed from the hand of any sower
might be cast upon it. In an entry in his diary in the usual strain of
evangelical devotion (April 25, 1830) is a sentence that reveals what
was in Mr. Gladstone the nourishing principle of growth: 'In practice
the great end is that the love of God may become the _habit_ of my soul,
and particularly these things are to be sought;--1. The spirit of love.
2. Of self-sacrifice. 3. Of purity. 4. Of energy.' Just as truly as if
we were recalling some hero of the seventeenth or any earlier century,
is this the biographic clue.
Gladstone constantly reproaches himself for natural indolence, and for a
year and a half he took his college course pretty easily. Then he
changed. 'The time for half-measures and trifling and pottering, in
which I have so long indulged myself, is now gone by, and I must do or
die.' His really hard work did not begin until the summer of 1830, when
he returned to Cuddesdon to read mathematics with Saunders, a man who
had the reputation of being singularly able and stimulating to his
pupils, and with whom he had done some rudiments before going into
residence at Christ Church. In his description of this gentleman to his
father, we may hear for the first time the redundant roll that was for
many long years to be so familiar and so famous. Saunders' disposition,
it appears, 'is one certainly of extreme benevolence, and of a
benevolence which is by no means less strong and full when purely
gratuitous and spontaneous, than when he seems to be under the tie of
some definite and positive obligation.' Dr. Gaisford would perhaps have
put it that the tutor was no kinder where his kindness was paid for,
than where it was not.
CATHOLIC EMANCIPATION
The catholic question, that was helping many another and older thing to
divide England from Ireland, after having for a whole generation played
havoc with the fortunes of party and the careers of statesmen, was now
drawing swiftly to its close. The Christ Church student had a glimpse of
one of the opening scenes of the last act. He writes to his brother
(Feb. 6th, 1829):--
I saw yesterday a most interesting scene in the Convocation house.
The occasion was the debate on the anti-catholic petition, which it
has long been the practice of the university to send up year by
year. This time it was worded in the most gentle and moderate terms
possible. All the ordinary business there, is transacted in Latin;
I mean such things as putting the question, speaking, etc., and
this rule, I assure you, stops many a mouth, and I dare say saves
the Roman catholics many a hard word. There were rather above two
hundred doctors and masters of arts present. Three speeches were
made, two against and one in favour of sending up the petition.
Instead of aye and no they had _placet_ and _non-placet_, and in
place of a member dividing the House, the question was, "_Petitne
aliquis scrutinium?_" which was answered by "_Peto!_" "_Peto!_"
from many quarters. However, when the scrutiny took place, it was
found that the petition was carried by 156 to 48.... After the
division, however, came the most interesting part of the whole. A
letter from Peel, resigning the seat for the university, was read
before the assembly. It was addressed to the vice-chancellor and
had arrived just before, it was understood; and I suppose brought
hither the first positive and indubitable announcement of the
government's intention to emancipate the catholics.
A few days later, Peel accepted the Chiltern Hundreds, and after some
deliberation allowed himself to be again brought forward for
re-election. He was beaten by 755 votes to 609. The relics of the
contest, the figures and the inscriptions on the walls, soon
disappeared, but panic did not abate. On Gladstone's way to Oxford
(April 30, 1829), a farmer's wife got into the coach, and in
communicative vein informed him how frightened they had all been about
catholic emancipation, but she did not see that so much had come of it
as yet. The college scout declared himself much troubled for the king's
conscience, observing that if we make an oath at baptism, we ought to
hold by it. 'The bed-makers,' Gladstone writes home, 'seem to continue
in a great fright, and mine was asking me this morning whether it would
not be a very good thing if we were to give them [the Irish] a king and
a parliament of their own, and so to have no more to do with them. The
old egg-woman is no whit easier, and wonders how Mr. Peel, who was
always such a well-behaved man here, can be so foolish as to think of
letting in the Roman catholics.' The unthinking and the ignorant of all
classes were much alike. Arthur Hallam went to see _King John_ in 1827,
and he tells his friend how the lines about the Italian priest (Act III.
Sc. 1) provoked rounds of clapping, while a gentleman in the next box
cried out at the top of his voice, 'Bravo! Bravo! No Pope!' The same
correspondent told Gladstone of the father of a common Eton friend, who
had challenged him with the overwhelming question, 'Could I say that any
papist had ever at any time done any good to the world?' A still
stormier conflict than even the emancipation of the catholics was now to
shake Oxford and the country to the depths, before Mr. Gladstone took
his degree.
II
OXFORD FRIENDSHIPS
His friendships at Oxford Mr. Gladstone did not consider to have been as
a rule very intimate. Principal among them were Frederick Rogers, long
afterwards Lord Blachford; Doyle; Gaskell; Bruce, afterwards Lord Elgin;
Charles Canning, afterwards Lord Canning; the two Denisons; Lord
Lincoln. These had all been his friends at Eton. Among new acquisitions
to the circle of his intimates at one time or another of his Oxford
life, were the two Aclands, Thomas and Arthur; Hamilton, afterwards
Bishop of Salisbury; Phillimore, destined to close and life-long
friendship; F. D. Maurice, then of Exeter College, a name destined to
stir so many minds in the coming generation. Of Maurice, Arthur Hallam
had written to Gladstone (June 1830) exhorting him to cultivate his
acquaintance. 'I know many,' says Hallam, 'whom Maurice has moulded like
a second nature, and these too, men eminent for intellectual power, to
whom the presence of a commanding spirit would in all other cases be a
signal rather for rivalry than reverential acknowledgment.' 'I knew
Maurice well,' says Mr. Gladstone in one of his notes of reminiscence,
'had heard superlative accounts of him from Cambridge, and really strove
hard to make them all realities to myself. One Sunday morning we walked
to Marsh Baldon to hear Mr. Porter, the incumbent, a calvinist
independent of the _clique_, and a man of remarkable power as we both
thought. I think he and other friends did me good, but I got little
solid meat from him, as I found him difficult to catch and still more
difficult to hold.'
Sidney Herbert, afterwards so dear to him, now at Oriel, here first
became an acquaintance. Manning, though they both read with the same
tutor, and one succeeded the other as president of the Union, he did not
at this time know well. The lists of his guests at wines and breakfasts
do not even contain the name of James Hope; indeed, Mr. Gladstone tells
us that he certainly was not more than an acquaintance. In the account
of intimates is the unexpected name of Tupper, who, in days to come,
acquired for a time a grander reputation than he deserved by his
_Proverbial Philosophy_, and on whom the public by and by avenged its
own foolishness by severer doses of mockery than he had earned.[39] The
friend who seems most to have affected him in the deepest things was
Anstice, whom he describes to his father (June 4, 1830) as 'a very
clever man, and more than a clever man, a man of excellent principle and
of perfect self-command, and of great industry. If any circumstances
could confer upon me the inestimable blessing of fixed habits and
unremitting industry, these [the example of such a man] will be they.'
The diary tells how, in August (1830), Mr. Gladstone conversed with
Anstice in a walk from Oxford to Cuddesdon on subjects of the highest
importance. 'Thoughts then first sprang up in my soul (obvious as they
may appear to many) which may powerfully influence my destiny. O for a
light from on high! I have no power, none, to discern the right path for
myself.' They afterwards had long talks together, 'about that awful
subject which has lately almost engrossed my mind.' Another
day--'Conversation of an hour and a half with Anstice on practical
religion, particularly as regards our own situation. I bless and praise
God for his presence here.' 'Long talk with Anstice; would I were more
worthy to be his companion.' 'Conversation with Anstice; he talked much
with Saunders on the motive of actions, contending for the love of God,
_not_ selfishness even in its most refined form.'[40]
EVANGELICAL IN RELIGION
In the matter of his own school of religion, Mr. Gladstone was always
certain that Oxford in his undergraduate days had no part in turning him
from an evangelical into a high churchman. The tone and dialect of his
diary and letters at the time show how just this impression was. We find
him in 1830 expressing his satisfaction that a number of Hannah More's
tracts have been put on the list of the Christian Knowledge Society. In
1831 he bitterly deplores such ecclesiastical appointments as those of
Sydney Smith and Dr. Maltby, 'both of them, I believe, regular
latitudinarians.' He remembered his shock at Butler's laudation of
Nature. He was scandalised by a sermon in which Calvin was placed upon
the same level among heresiarchs as Socinus and other like aliens from
gospel truth. He was delighted (March 1830) with a university sermon
against Milman's _History of the Jews_, and hopes it may be useful as an
antidote, 'for Milman, though I do think without intentions directly
evil, does go far enough to be justly called a bane. For instance, he
says that had Moses never existed, the Hebrew nation would have remained
a degraded pariah tribe or been lost in the mass of the Egyptian
population--and this notwithstanding the promise.' In all his letters in
the period from Eton to the end of Oxford and later, a language noble
and exalted even in these youthful days is not seldom copiously streaked
with a vein that, to eyes not trained to evangelical light and to minds
not tolerant of the expansion that comes to religious natures in the
days of adolescence, may seem unpleasantly strained and excessive. The
fashion of such words undergoes transfiguration as the epochs pass. Yet
in all their fashions, even the crudest, they deserve much tenderness.
He consults a clergyman (1829) on the practice of prayer meetings in
his rooms. His correspondent answers, that as the wicked have their
orgies and meet to gamble and to drink, so they that fear the Lord
should speak often to one another concerning Him; that prayer meetings
are not for the cultivation or exhibition of gifts, nor to enable noisy
and forward young men to pose as leaders of a school of prophets; but if
a few young men of like tastes feel the withering influence of mere
scholastic learning, and the necessity of mutual stimulation and
refreshment, then such prayer meetings would be a safe and natural
remedy. The student's attention to all religious observances was close
and unbroken, the most living part of his existence.
The movement that was to convulse the church had not yet begun. 'You may
smile,' Mr. Gladstone said long after, 'when told that when I was at
Oxford, Dr. Hampden was regarded as a model of orthodoxy; that Dr.
Newman was eyed with suspicion as a low churchman, and Dr. Pusey as
leaning to rationalism.' What Mr. Gladstone afterwards described as a
steady, clear, but dry anglican orthodoxy bore sway, 'and frowned this
way or that, on the first indication of any tendency to diverge from the
beaten path.'[41] He hears Whately preach a controversial sermon (1831)
just after he had been made Archbishop of Dublin. 'Doubtless he is a man
of much power and many excellences, but his anti-sabbatical doctrine is,
I fear, as mischievous as it is unsound.' A sermon of Keble's at St.
Mary's prompts the uneasy question, 'Are all Mr. Keble's opinions those
of scripture and the church? Of his life and heart and practice, none
could doubt, all would admire.' A good sermon is mentioned from Blanco
White, that strange and forlorn figure of whom in later life Mr.
Gladstone wrote an interesting account, not conclusive in argument, but
assuredly not wanting in either delicacy or generosity.[42] 'Dr. Pusey
was very kind to me when I was an undergraduate at Oxford,' he says, but
what their relations were I know not. 'I knew and respected both Bishop
Lloyd and Dr. Pusey,' he says, 'but neither of them attempted to
exercise the smallest influence over my religious opinions.' With Newman
he seems to have been brought into contact hardly at all.[43] Newman
and one of the Wilberforces came to dine at Cuddesdon one day, and, on a
later occasion, he and another fellow of Oriel were at a dinner with Mr.
Gladstone at the table of his friend Philip Pusey. Two or three of his
sermons are mentioned. One of them (March 7, 1831) contained 'much
singular, not to say objectionable matter, if one may so speak of so
good a man.' Of another,--'heard Newman preach a good sermon on those
who made excuse' (Sept. 25, 1831). Of the generality of university
sermons, he accepted the observation of his friend Anstice,--'Depend
upon it, such sermons as those can never convert a single person.' On
some Sundays he hears two of these discourses in the morning and
afternoon, and a third sermon in the evening, for though he became the
most copious of all speakers, Mr. Gladstone was ever the most generous
of listeners. It was at St. Ebb's that he found really congenial
ministrations--an ecclesiastical centre described by him fifty years
later--under Mr. Bulteel, a man of some note in his day; here the flame
was at white heat, and a score or two of young men felt its
attractions.[44] He always remembered among the wonderful sights of his
life, St. Mary's 'crammed in all parts by all orders, when Mr. Bulteel,
an outlying calvinist, preached his accusatory sermon (some of it too
true) against the university.' In the summer of 1830, Mr. Gladstone
notes, 'Poor Bulteel has lost his church for preaching in the open air.
Pity that he should have acted so, and pity that it should be found
necessary to make such an example of a man of God.' The preacher was
impenitent, for from a window Mr. Gladstone again heard him conduct a
service for a large congregation who listened attentively to a sermon
that was interesting, but evinced some soreness of spirit. A 'most
painful' discourse from a Mr. Crowther so moves Mr. Gladstone that he
sits down to write to the preacher, 'earnestly expostulating with him on
the character and the doctrines of the sermon,' and after re-writing his
letter, he delivers it with his own hand at the door of the displeasing
divine. The effect was not other than salutary, for a little later he
was 'happy to hear two sermons of good principles from Mr. Crowther.' To
his father, October 27, 1830:--'Dr. Chalmers has been passing through
Oxford, and I went to hear him preach on Sunday evening, though it was
at the baptist chapel.... I need hardly say that his sermon was
admirable, and quite as remarkable for the judicious and sober manner in
which he enforced his views, as for their lofty principles and piety. He
preached, I think, for an hour and forty minutes.' The admiration thus
first aroused only grew with fuller knowledge in the coming years.
ESSAY CLUB
An Essay Club, called from its founder's initials the WEG, was formed at
a meeting in Gaskell's rooms in October, 1829. Only two members out of
the first twelve did not belong to Christ Church, Rogers of Oriel and
Moncreiff of New.[45] The Essay Club's transactions, though not very
serious, deserve a glance. Mr. Gladstone reads an essay (Feb. 20, 1830)
on the comparative rank of poetry and philosophy, concluding with a
motion that the rank of philosophy is higher than that of poetry: it was
beaten by seven to five. Without a division, they determined that
English poetry is of a higher order than Greek. The truth of the
principles of phrenology was affirmed with the tremendous emphasis of
eleven to one. Though trifling in degree, the influence of the modern
drama was pronounced in quality pernicious. Gladstone gave his casting
vote against the capacious proposition, of which philosophers had made
so much in France, Switzerland, and other places on the eve of the
French revolution, that education and other outward circumstances have
more than nature to do with man's disposition. By four to three, Mr.
Tennyson's poems were affirmed to show considerable genius, Gladstone
happily in the too slender majority. The motion that 'political liberty
is not to be considered as the end of government' was a great affair.
Maurice, who had been admitted to the club on coming to Oxford from
Cambridge, moved an amendment 'that every man has a right to perform
certain personal duties with which no system of government has a right
to interfere.' Gladstone 'objected to an observation that had fallen
from the mover, "A man finds himself in the world," as if he did not
come into the world under a debt to his parents, under obligations to
society.' The tame motion of Lord Abercorn, that Elizabeth's conduct to
Mary Queen of Scots was unjustifiable and impolitic, was stiffened into
'not only unjustifiable and impolitic, but a base and treacherous
murder,' and in that severe form was carried without a division.
Plenty of nonsense was talked we may be sure, and so there was, no
doubt, in the Olive Grove of Academe or amid those surnamed Peripatetics
and the Sect Epicurean. Yet nonsense notwithstanding, the Essay Club had
members who proved in time to have superior minds if ever men had, and
their disputations in one another's rooms helped to sharpen their mental
apparatus, to start trains of ideas however immature, and to shake the
cherished dogmatisms brought from beloved homes, even if dogmatism as
stringent took their place. This is how the world moves, and Oxford was
just beginning to rub its eyes, awaking to the speculations of a new
time.
When he looked back in after times, Mr. Gladstone traced one great
defect in the education of Oxford. 'Perhaps it was my own fault, but I
must admit that I did not learn when I was at Oxford that which I have
learned since--namely, to set a due value on the imperishable and
inestimable principle of British liberty. The temper which too much
prevailed in academical circles was that liberty was regarded with
jealousy and fear, something which could not wholly be dispensed with,
but which was to be continually watched for fear of excesses.'[46]
III
TRIES FOR THE IRELAND SCHOLARSHIP
In March 1830 Gladstone made the first of two attempts to win the
scholarship newly founded by Dean Ireland, and from the beginning one of
the most coveted of university prizes. In 1830 (March 16) he
wrote:--'There is it appears smaller chance than ever of its falling out
of the hands of the Shrewsbury people. There is a very formidable one
indeed, by name Scott, come up from Christ Church. If it is to go among
them I hope he may get it.' This was Robert Scott, afterwards master of
Balliol, and then dean of Rochester, and the coadjutor with Dean Liddell
in the famous Greek Lexicon brought out in 1843. A year later he tried
again, but little better success came either to himself or to Scott. He
tells his father the story (March 16th, 1831) and collegians who have
fought such battles may care to hear it:--
I must first tell you that I am _not_ the successful candidate, and
after this I shall have nothing to communicate but what will, I
think, give you pleasure. The scholarship has been won by (I
believe) a native of Liverpool.[47] His name is Brancker, and he is
now actually at Shrewsbury, but had matriculated here though he had
not come up to reside. This result has excited immense surprise.
For my own part, I went into the examination _solely_ depending for
any hope of pre-eminence above the Shrewsbury men on three points,
Greek history, one particular kind of Greek verses, and Greek
philosophy.... It so fell out, however, that not one of these three
points was brought to bear on the examination, though, indeed, it
is but a lame one without them. Accordingly from the turn it seemed
to take as it proceeded, my own expectations regularly declined,
and I thought I might consider myself very well off if I came in
pretty high. As it is, I am even with the great competitor, Scott,
whom everybody almost thought the favourite candidate, and above
the others. Allies, an Eton man, Scott and I are placed together;
and Short, one of the examiners, told us this morning that it was
an extremely near thing, and he had great difficulty in making up
his mind, which he never had felt in any former examination in
which he had been engaged; and indeed he laid the preference given
to Brancker chiefly on his having written short and concise
answers, while ours were longwinded. And in consideration of its
having been so closely contested, the vice-chancellor is to present
each of us with a set of books.... Something however may fairly
enough be attributed to the fact that at Eton we were not educated
for such objects as these.... The result will affect the
scholarship itself more than any individual character; for previous
events have created, and this has contributed amazingly to
strengthen, a prevalent impression that the Shrewsbury system is
radically a false one, and that its object is not to educate the
mind but merely to cram and stuff it for these purposes. However,
we who are beaten are not fair judges.... I only trust that you
will not be more annoyed than I am by this event.
Brancker was said to have won because he answered all the questions not
only shortly, but most of them right, and Mr. Gladstone's essay was
marked 'desultory beyond belief.' Below Allies came Sidney Herbert, then
at Oriel, and Grove, afterwards a judge and an important name in the
history of scientific speculation.
He was equally unsuccessful in another field of competition. He sent in
a poem on Richard Coeur de Lion for the Newdigate prize in 1829. In 1893
somebody asked his leave to reprint it, and at Mr. Gladstone's request
sent him a copy:--
On perusing it I was very much struck by the contrast it exhibited
between the faculty of versification which (I thought) was good,
and the faculty of poetry, which was very defective. This faculty
of verse had been trained I suppose by verse-making at Eton, and
was based upon the possession of a good or tolerable ear with which
nature had endowed me. I think that a poetical faculty did develop
itself in me a little later, that is to say between twenty and
thirty, due perhaps to having read Dante with a real devotion and
absorption. It was, however, in my view, true but weak, and has
never got beyond that stage. It was evidently absent from the
verses, I will not say the poem, on Coeur de Lion; and without
hesitation I declined to allow any reprint.[48]
DEBATES AT THE UNION
He was active in the debates at the Union, where he made his first start
in the speaking line (Feb. 1830) in a strong oration much admired by his
friends, in favour,--of all the questionable things in the world,--of
the Treason and Sedition Acts of 1795. He writes home that he did not
find the ordeal so formidable as it used to be before the smaller
audiences at Eton, for at Oxford they sometimes mustered as many as a
hundred or a hundred and fifty. He spoke for a strongly-worded motion on
a happier theme, in favour of the policy and memory of Canning. In the
summer of 1831, he mentions a debate in which a motion was proposed in
favour of speedy emancipation of the West Indian slaves. 'I moved an
amendment that education of a religious kind was the fit object of
legislation, which was carried by thirty-three to twelve.' Of the most
notable of all his successes at the Union we shall soon hear.
DAILY LIFE
His little diary, written for no eye but his own, and in the use of
which I must beware of the sin of violating the sanctuary, contains in
the most concise of daily records all his various activities, and, at
least after the summer at Cuddesdon, it presents an attractive picture
of duty, industry, and attention, 'constant as the motion of the day.'
The entries are much alike, and a few of them will suffice to bring his
life and him before us. The days for 1830 may almost be taken at random.
_May 10, 1830._--Prospectively, I have the following work to do in
the course of this term. (I mention it now, that this may at least
make me blush if I fail.) Butler's _Analogy_, analysis and
synopsis. Herodotus, questions. St. Matthew and St. John.
Mathematical lecture. _Aeneid._ Juvenal and Persius. _Ethics_, five
books. Prideaux (a part of, for Herodotus). Themistocles Greciae
valedicturus [I suppose a verse composition]. Something in
divinity. Mathematical lecture. Breakfast with Gaskell, who had the
Merton men. Papers. _Edinburgh Review_ on Southey's _Colloquies_
[Macaulay's]. _Ethics._ A wretched day. God forgive idleness. Note
to Bible.
_May 13._--Wrote to my mother. At debate (Union). Elected
secretary. Papers. _British Critic_ on _History of the Jews_ [by
Newman on Milman]. Herodotus, _Ethics_. Butler and analysis.
Papers, Virgil, Herodotus. Juvenal. Mathematics and lecture. Walk
with Anstice. Ethics, finished book 4.
_May 25._--Finished Porteus's _Evidences_. Got up a few hard
passages. Analysis of Porteus. Sundry matters in divinity.
Themistocles. Sat with Biscoe talking. Walk with Canning and
Gaskell. Wine and tea. Wrote to Mr. G. [his father]. Papers.
_June 13. Sunday._--Chapel morning and evening. Thomas à Kempis.
Erskine's _Evidence_. Tea with Mayow and Cole. Walked with Maurice
to hear Mr. Porter, a wild but splendid preacher.
_June 14._--Gave a large wine party. Divinity lecture. Mathematics.
Wrote three long letters. Herodotus, began book 4. Prideaux.
Newspapers, etc. Thomas à Kempis.
_June 15._--Another wine party. _Ethics_, Herodotus. A little
Juvenal. Papers. Hallam's poetry. Lecture on Herodotus. Phillimore
got the verse prize.
_June 16._--Divinity lecture. Herodotus. Papers. Out at wine. A
little Plato.
_June 17._--_Ethics_ and lecture. Herodotus. T. à Kempis. Wine with
Gaskell.
_June 18._--Breakfast with Gaskell. T. à Kempis. Divinity lecture.
Herodotus. Wrote on Philosophy _versus_ Poetry. A little Persius.
Wine with Buller and Tupper.
_June 25._--_Ethics_. Collections 9-3. Among other things wrote a
long paper on religions of Egypt, Persia, Babylon; and on the
Satirists. Finished packing books and clothes. Left Oxford between
5-6, and walked fifteen miles towards Leamington. Then obliged to
put in, being caught by a thunderstorm. Comfortably off in a
country inn at Steeple Aston. Read and spouted some _Prometheus
Vinctus_ there.
_June 26._--Started before 7. Walked eight miles to Banbury.
Breakfast there, and walked on twenty-two to Leamington. Arrived at
three and changed. Gaskell came in the evening. _Life of
Massinger_.
_July 6._ _Cuddesdon_.--Up soon after 6. Began my Harmony of Greek
Testament. Differential calculus, etc. Mathematics good while, but
in a rambling way. Began _Odyssey_. Papers. Walk with Anstice and
Hamilton. Turned a little bit of Livy into Greek. Conversation on
ethics and metaphysics at night.
_July 8._--Greek Testament. Bible with Anstice. Mathematics, long
but did little. Translated some _Phædo_. Butler. Construed some
Thucydides at night. Making hay, etc., with S., H., and A. Great
fun. Shelley.
_July 10._--Greek Testament. Lightfoot. Butler, and writing a
marginal analysis. Old Testament with Anstice and a discussion on
early history. Mathematics. Cricket with H. and A. A conversation
of two hours at night with A. on religion till past 12. Thucydides,
etc. I cannot get anything done, though I seem to be employed a
good while. Short's sermon.
_July 11._--Church and Sunday-school teaching, morning and
evening. The children miserably deluded. Barrow. Short. Walked with
S.
_September 4._--Same as yesterday. _Paradise Lost._ Dined with the
bishop. Cards at night. I like them not, for they excite and keep
me awake. Construing Sophocles.
_September 18._--Went down early to Wheatley for letters. It is
indeed true [the death of Huskisson], and he, poor man, was in his
last agonies when I was playing cards on Wednesday night. When
shall we learn wisdom? Not that I see folly in the fact of playing
cards, but it is too often accompanied by a dissipated spirit.
He did not escape the usual sensations of the desultory when fate forces
them to wear the collar. 'In fact, at times I find it very irksome, and
my having the inclination to view it in that light is to me the surest
demonstration that my mind was in great want of some discipline, and
some regular exertion, for hitherto I have read by fits and starts and
just as it pleased me. I hope that this vacation [summer of 1830] will
confer on me one benefit more important than any having reference merely
to my class--I mean the habit of steady application and strict economy
of time.'
CORRESPONDENCE WITH HALLAM
Among the recorded fragmentary items of 1830, by the way, he read Mill's
celebrated essay on Coleridge, which, when it was republished a
generation later along with the companion essay on Bentham, made so
strong an impression on the Oxford of my day. He kept up a
correspondence with Hallam, now at Cambridge, and an extract from one of
Hallam's letters may show something of the writer, as of the friend for
whose sympathising mind it was intended:--
Academical honours would be less than nothing to me were it not for
my father's wishes, and even these are moderate on the subject. If
it please God that I make the name I bear honoured in a second
generation, it will be by inward power which is its own reward; if
it please Him not, I hope to go down to the grave unrepining, for I
have lived and loved and been loved; and what will be the momentary
pangs of an atomic existence when the scheme of that providential
love which pervades, sustains, quickens this boundless universe
shall at the last day be unfolded and adored? The great truth
which, when we are rightly impressed with it, will liberate mankind
is that no man has a right to isolate himself, because every man is
a particle of a marvellous whole; that when he suffers, since it is
for the good of that whole, he, the particle, has no right to
complain; and in the long run, that which is the good of all will
abundantly manifest itself to be the good of each. Other belief
consists not with theism. This is its centre. Let me quote to their
purpose the words of my favourite poet; it will do us good to hear
his voice, though but for a moment:--
'One adequate support
For the calamities of mortal life
Exists--one only: an assured belief
That the procession of our fate, howe'er
Sad or disturbed, is ordered by a Being
Of infinite benevolence and power,
Whose everlasting purposes embrace
All accidents, converting them to good.'[49]
Hallam's father, in that memoir so just and tender which, he prefixes to
his son's literary remains, remarks that all his son's talk about this
old desperate riddle of the origin and significance of evil, like the
talk of Leibnitz about it, resolved itself into an unproved assumption
of the necessity of evil. In truth there is little sign that either
Arthur Hallam or Gladstone had in him the making of the patient and
methodical thinker in the high abstract sphere. They were both of them
cast in another mould. But the efficacy of human relationships springs
from a thousand subtler and more mysterious sources than either patience
or method in our thinking. Such marked efficacy was there in the
friendship of these two, both of them living under pure skies, but one
of the pair endowed besides with 'the thews that throw the world.'
Whether in Gladstone's diary or in his letters, in the midst of
Herodotus and Butler and Aristotle and the rest of the time-worn sages,
we are curiously conscious of the presence of a spirit of action,
affairs, excitement. It is not the born scholar eager in search of
knowledge for its own sake; there is little of Milton's 'quiet air of
delightful studies;' and none of Pascal's 'labouring for truth with
many a heavy sigh.' The end of it all is, as Aristotle said it should
be, not knowing but doing:--honourable desire of success, satisfaction
of the hopes of friends, a general literary appetite, conscious
preparation for private and public duty in the world, a steady
progression out of the shallows into the depths, a gaze beyond garden
and cloister, _in agmen, in pulverem, in clamorem_, to the dust and
burning sun and shouting of the days of conflict.
IV
In September 1829, as we have seen, Huskisson had disappeared. Thomas
Gladstone was in the train drawn by the _Dart_ that ran over the
statesman and killed him.
Poor Huskisson, he writes to William Gladstone, the great promoter
of the railroad, has fallen a victim to its opening!... As soon as
I heard that Huskisson had been run over, I ran and found him on
the ground close to the duke's [Wellington] car, his legs
apparently both broken (though only one was), the ground covered
with blood, his eyes open, but death written in his face. When they
raised him a little he said, 'Leave me, let me die.' 'God forgive
me, I am a dead man.' 'I can never stand this.'... On Tuesday he
made a speech in the Exchange reading room, when he said he hoped
long to represent them. He said, too, that day, that we were sure
of a fine day, for the duke would have his old luck. Talked
jokingly, too, of insuring his life for the ride.
And he notes, as others did, the extraordinary circumstance that of half
a million of people on the line of road the victim should be the duke's
great opponent, thus carried off suddenly before his eyes.
There was some question of Mr. John Gladstone taking Huskisson's place
as one of the members for Liverpool, but he did not covet it. He foresaw
too many local jealousies, his deafness would be sadly against him, he
was nearly sixty-five, and he felt himself too old to face the turmoil.
He looked upon the Wellington government as the only government
possible, though as a friend of Canning he freely recognised its
defects, the self-will of the duke, and the parcel of mediocrities and
drones with whom, excepting Peel, he had filled his cabinet. His view of
the state of parties in the autumn of 1830 is clear and succinct enough
to deserve reproduction. 'Huskisson's death,' he writes to his son at
Christ Church (October 29, 1830), 'was a great gain to the duke, for he
was the most formidable thorn to prick him in the parliament. Of those
who acted with Huskisson, none have knowledge or experience sufficient
to enable them to do so. As for the whigs, they can all talk and make
speeches, but they are not men of business. The ultra-tories are too
contemptible and wanting in talent to be thought of. The radicals cannot
be trusted, for they would soon pull down the venerable fabric of our
constitution. The liberals or independents must at least generally side
with the duke; they are likely to meet each other half way.'
THE REFORM BILL
In less than a week after this acute survey the duke made his stalwart
declaration in the House of Lords against all parliamentary reform. 'I
have not said too much, have I?' he asked of Lord Aberdeen on sitting
down. 'You'll hear of it,' was Aberdeen's reply. 'You've announced the
fall of your government, that's all,' said another. In a fortnight
(November 18) the duke was out, Lord Grey was in, and the country was
gradually plunged into a determined struggle for the amendment of its
constitution.
Mr. Gladstone, as a resolute Canningite, was as fiercely hostile to the
second and mightier innovation as he had been eager for the relief of
the catholics, and it was in connection with the Reform bill that he
first made a public mark. The reader will recall the stages of that
event; how the bill was read a second time in the Commons by a majority
of one on March 22nd, 1831; how, after a defeat by a majority of eight
on a motion of going into committee, Lord Grey dissolved; how the
country, shaken to its depths, gave the reformers such undreamed of
strength, that on July 8th the second reading of the bill was carried by
a hundred and thirty-six; how on October 8th the Lords rejected it by
forty-one, and what violent commotions that deed provoked; how a third
bill was brought in (December 12th, 1831) and passed through the
Commons (March 23rd, 1832); how the Lords were still refractory; what a
lacerating ministerial crisis ensued; and how at last, in June, the
bill, which was to work the miracle of a millennium, actually became the
law of the land. Not even the pressure of preparation for the coming
ordeal of the examination schools could restrain the activity and zeal
of our Oxonian. Canning had denounced parliamentary reform at Liverpool
in 1820; and afterwards had declared in the House of Commons that if
anybody asked him what he meant to do on the subject, he would oppose
reform to the end of his life, under whatever shape it might appear.
Canning's disciple at Christ Church was as vehement as the master.[50]
To a friend he wrote in 1865:--
I think that Oxford teaching had in our day an anti-popular
tendency. I must add that it was not owing to the books, but rather
to the way in which they were handled: and further, that it tended
still more strongly in my opinion to make the love of truth
paramount over all other motives in the mind, and thus that it
supplied an antidote for whatever it had of bane. The Reform bill
frightened me in 1831, and drove me off my natural and previous
bias. Burke and Canning misled many on that subject, and they
misled me.
While staying at Leamington, whither his family constantly went in order
to be under the medical care of the famous Jephson, Mr. Gladstone went
to a reform meeting at Warwick, of which he wrote a contemptuous account
in a letter to the _Standard_ (April 7). The gentry present were few,
the nobility none, the clergy one only, while 'the mob beneath the grand
stand was Athenian in its levity, in its recklessness, in its gaping
expectancy, in its self-love and self-conceit--in everything but its
acuteness.' 'If, sir, the nobility, the gentry, the clergy are to be
alarmed, overawed, or smothered by the expression of popular opinion
such as this, and if no great statesman be raised up in our hour of
need to undeceive this unhappy multitude, now eagerly rushing or
heedlessly sauntering along the pathway of revolution, as an ox goeth to
the slaughter or a fool to the correction of the stocks, what is it but
a symptom as infallible as it is appalling, that the day of our
greatness and stability is no more, and that the chill and damp of death
are already creeping over England's glory.' These dolorous spectres
haunted him incessantly, as they haunted so many who had not the
sovereign excuse of youth, and his rhetoric was perfectly sincere. He
felt bound to say that, as far as he could form an opinion, the ministry
most richly deserved impeachment. Its great innovations and its small
alike moved his indignation. When Brougham committed the enormity of
hearing causes on Good Friday, Gladstone repeats with deep complacency a
saying of Wetherell, that Brougham was the first judge who had done such
a thing since Pontius Pilate.
OXFORD ELECTIONEERING
The undergraduates took their part in the humours of the great election,
and Oxford turned out her chivalry gallantly to bring in the anti-reform
candidate for the county to the nomination. 'I mounted the mare to join
the anti-reform procession,' writes the impassioned student to his
father, 'and we looked as well as we could do, considering that we were
all covered with mud from head to foot. There was mob enough on both
sides, but I must do them justice to say they were for the most part
exceedingly good-humoured, and after we had dismounted, we went among
them and elbowed one another and bawled and bellowed with the most
perfect good temper. At the nomination in the town hall there was so
much row raised that not one of the candidates could be heard.' The
effect of these exercitations was a hoarseness and cold, which did not,
however, prevent the sufferer from taking his part in a mighty bonfire
in Peckwater. On another day:--
I went with Denison and another man named Jeffreys between eleven
and twelve. We began to talk to some men among Weyland's friends;
they crowded round, and began to holloa at us, and were making a
sort of ring round us preparatory to a desperate hustle, when lo!
up rushed a body of Norreys' men from St. Thomas's, broke their
ranks, raised a shout, and rescued us in great style. I shall ever
be grateful to the men of St. Thomas's. When we were talking,
Jeffreys said something which made one man holloa, 'Oh, his
father's a parson.' This happened to be true, and flabbergasted me,
but he happily turned it by reminding them, that they were going to
vote for Mr. Harcourt, son of the greatest parson in England but
one (Archbishop of York). Afterwards they left me, and I pursued my
work alone, conversed with a great number, shook hands with a fair
proportion, made some laugh, and once very nearly got hustled when
alone, but happily escaped. You would be beyond measure astonished
how unanimous and how _strong_ is the feeling among the freeholders
(who may be taken as a fair specimen of the generality of all
counties) _against_ the catholic question. Reformers and
anti-reformers were alike sensitive on that point and perfectly
agreed. One man said to me, 'What, vote for Lord Norreys? Why, he
voted against the country _both_ times, _for_ the Catholic bill and
then against the Reform.' What would this atrocious ministry have
said had the appeal to the voice of the people, which they now
quote as their authority, been made in 1829? I held forth to a
working man, possibly a forty-shilling freeholder, [he adds in a
fragment of later years,] on the established text, reform was
revolution. To corroborate my doctrine I said, 'Why, look at the
revolutions in foreign countries,' meaning of course France and
Belgium. The man looked hard at me and said these very words, 'Damn
all foreign countries, what has old England to do with foreign
countries?' This is not the only time that I have received an
important lesson from a humble source.
SPEECH AT THE UNION
A more important scene which his own future eminence made in a sense
historic, was a debate at the Union upon Reform in the same month, where
his contribution (May 17th) struck all his hearers with amazement, so
brilliant, so powerful, so incomparably splendid did it seem to their
young eyes. His description of it to his brother (May 20th, 1831) is
modest enough:--
I should really have been glad if your health had been such as to
have permitted your visiting Oxford last week, so that you might
have heard our debate, for certainly there had never been anything
like it known here before and will scarcely be again. The
discussion on the question that the ministers were incompetent to
carry on the government of the country was of a miscellaneous
character, and I moved what they called a 'rider' to the effect
that the Reform bill threatened to change the form of the British
government, and ultimately to break up the whole frame of society.
The debate altogether lasted three nights, and it closed then,
partly because the _votes_ had got tired of dancing attendance,
partly because the speakers of the revolutionary side were
exhausted. There were eight or nine more on ours ready, and indeed
anxious. As it was, there were I think fifteen speeches on our side
and thirteen on theirs, or something of that kind. Every man spoke
above his average, and many very far beyond it. They were generally
short enough. Moncreiff, a long-winded Scotsman, spouted nearly an
hour, and I was guilty of three-quarters. I remember at Eton (where
we used, when I first went into the society, to speak from three to
ten minutes) I thought it must be one of the finest things in the
world to speak for three-quarters of an hour, and there was a
legend circulated about an old member of the society's having done
so, which used to make us all gape and stare. However, I fear it
does not necessarily imply much more than length. Doyle spoke
remarkably well, and made a violent attack on Mr. Canning's
friends, which Gaskell did his best to answer, but very
ineffectually from the nature of the case. We got a conversion
speech from a Christ Church gentleman-commoner, named Alston, which
produced an excellent effect, and the division was favourable
beyond anything we had hoped--ninety-four to thirty-eight. We
should have had larger numbers still had we divided on the first
night. Great diligence was used by both parties in bringing men
down, but the tactics on the whole were better on our side, and we
had fewer truants in proportion to our numbers. England expects
every man to do his duty; and ours, humble as it is, has been done
in reference to this question. On Friday I wrote a letter to the
_Standard_ giving an account of the division, which you will see in
Saturday's paper, if you think it worth while to refer to it. The
way in which the present generation of undergraduates is divided
on the question is quite remarkable.
The occasion was to prove a memorable one in his career, and a few more
lines about it from his diary will not be considered superfluous:--
_May 16th._--Sleepy. Mathematics, few and shuffling, and lecture.
Read Canning's reform speeches at Liverpool and made extracts. Rode
out. Debate, which was adjourned. I am to try my hand to-morrow. My
thoughts were but ill-arranged, but I fear they will be no better
then. Wine with Anstice. Singing. Tea with Lincoln.
_May 17th._--Ethics. Little mathematics. A good deal exhausted in
forenoon from heat last night. Dined with White and had wine with
him, also with young Acland. Cogitations on reform, etc. Difficult
to _select_ matter for a speech, not to gather it. _Spoke at the
adjourned debate for three-quarters of an hour_; immediately after
Gaskell, who was preceded by Lincoln. Row afterwards and
adjournment. Tea with Wordsworth.
When Gladstone sat down, one of his contemporaries has written, 'we all
of us felt that an epoch in our lives had occurred. His father was so
well pleased with the glories of the speech and with its effect, that he
wished to have it published. Besides his speech, besides the composition
of sturdy placards against the monstrous bill, and besides the
preparation of an elaborate petition[51] and the gathering of 770
signatures to it, the ardent anti-reformer, though the distance from the
days of doom in the examination schools was rapidly shrinking, actually
sat down to write a long pamphlet (July 1831) and sent it to Hatchard,
the publisher. Hatchard doubted the success of an anonymous pamphlet,
and replied in the too familiar formula that has frozen so many thousand
glowing hearts, that he would publish it if the author would take the
money risk. The most interesting thing about it is the criticism of the
writer's shrewd and wise father upon his son's performance (too long for
reproduction here). He went with his son in the main, he says, 'but I
cannot go all your lengths,' and the language of his judgment sheds a
curious light upon the vehement temperament of Mr. Gladstone at this
time as it struck an affectionate yet firm and sober monitor.
* * * * *
HEARS HIS FIRST DEBATE
In the autumn of 1831 Mr. Gladstone took some trouble to be present on
one of the cardinal occasions in this fluctuating history:--
_October 3rd to 8th._--Journey to London. From Henley in
Blackstone's chaise. Present at five nights' debate of infinite
interest in the House of Lords. The first, I went forwards and
underwent a somewhat high pressure. At the four others sat on a
round transverse rail, very fortunate in being so well placed. Had
a full view of the peeresses. There nine or ten hours every
evening. Read Peel's speech and sundry papers relating to King's
College, which I went to see; also London Bridge. Read introduction
to Butler. Wrote to Saunders. Much occupied in order-hunting during
the morning. Lord Brougham's as a speech most wonderful, delivered
with a power and effect which cannot be appreciated by any hearsay
mode of information, and with fertile exuberance in sarcasm. In
point of argument it had, I think, little that was new. Lord Grey's
most beautiful, Lord Goderich's and Lord Lansdowne's extremely
good, and in these was comprehended nearly all the oratorical merit
of the debate. The reasoning or the attempt to reason,
independently of the success in such attempt, certainly seemed to
me to be with the opposition. Their best speeches, I thought, were
those of Lords Harrowby, Carnarvon, Mansfield, Wynford; next Lords
Lyndhurst, Wharncliffe, and the Duke of Wellington. Lord Grey's
reply I did not hear, having been compelled by exhaustion to leave
the House. Remained with Ryder and Pickering in the coffee-room or
walking about until the division, and joined Wellesley and
[illegible] as we walked home. Went to bed for an hour,
breakfasted, and came off by the Alert. Arrived safely, thank God,
in Oxford. Wrote to my brother and to Gaskell. Tea with Phillimore
and spent the remainder of the evening with Canning. The
consequences of the vote may be awful. God avert this. But it was
an honourable and manly decision, and so may God avert them.
This was the memorable occasion when the Lords threw out the Reform bill
by 199 to 158, the division not taking place until six o'clock in the
morning. The consequences, as the country instantly made manifest, were
'awful' enough to secure the reversal of the decision. It seems, so far
as I can make out, to have been the first debate that one of the most
consummate debaters that ever lived had the fortune of listening to.
V
READING FOR THE SCHOOLS
Meanwhile intense interest in parliament and the newspapers had not
impaired his studies. Disgusted as he was at the political outlook, in
the beginning of July he had fallen fairly to work more or less close
for ten or twelve hours a day. It 'proved as of old a cure for
ill-humour, though in itself not of the most delectable kind. It is odd
enough, though true, that reading hard close-grained stuff produces a
much more decided and better effect in this way, than books written
professedly for the purpose of entertainment.' Then his eyes became
painful, affected the head, and in August almost brought him to a full
stop. After absolute remission of work for a few days, he slowly spread
full sail again, and took good care no more to stint either exercise or
sleep, thinking himself, strange as it now sounds, rather below than
above par for such exertions. He declared that the bodily fatigue, the
mental fatigue, and the anxiety as to the result, made reading for a
class a thing not to be undergone more than once in a lifetime. Time had
mightier fatigues in store for him than even this. The heavy work among
the ideas of men of bygone days did not deaden intellectual projects of
his own. A few days before he went to see the Lords throw out the Reform
bill, he made a curious entry:--
_October 3rd, 1831._--Yesterday an idea, a chimera, entered my
head, of gathering during the progress of my life, notes and
materials for a work embracing three divisions, Morals, Politics,
Education, and I commit this notice to paper now, that many years
hence, if it please God, I may find it either a pleasant or at
least an instructive reminiscence, a pleasant and instructing one,
I trust, if I may ever be permitted to execute this design;
instructive if it shall point while in embryo, and serve to teach
me the folly of presumptuous schemes conceived during the buoyancy
of youth, and only relinquished on a discovery of incompetency in
later years. Meanwhile I am only contemplating the gradual
accumulation of materials.
The reading went on at a steady pace, not without social
intermissions:--
_Oct. 11th and 12th._--Rode. Papers. Virgil. Thucydides, both
days. Also some optics. Wrote a long letter home. Read a chapter of
Butler each day. Hume. Breakfasted also with Canning to meet Lady
C[anning]. She received us, I thought, with great kindness, and
spoke a great deal about Lord Grey's conduct with reference to her
husband's memory, with great animation and excitement; her hand in
a strong tremor. It was impossible not to enter into her feelings.
Then comes the struggle for the palm:--
_Monday, November 7th to Saturday 12th._--In the schools or
preparing. Read most of Niebuhr. Finished going over the
_Agamemnon_. Got up Aristophanic and other hard words. Went over my
books of extracts, etc. Read some of Whately's rhetoric. Got up a
little Polybius, and the history out of Livy, decade one. In the
schools Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday; each day about six and a
half hours at work or under. First Stratford's speech into Latin
with logical and rhetorical questions--the latter somewhat
abstract. Dined at Gaskell's and met Pearson, a clever and
agreeable man. On Thursday a piece of Johnson's preface in morning,
in evening critical questions which I did very badly, but I
afterwards heard, better than _the rest_, which I could not and
cannot understand. On Friday we had in the morning historical
questions. Wrote a vast quantity of matter, ill enough digested. In
the evening, Greek to translate and illustrate. Heard cheering
accounts indirectly of myself, for which I ought to be very
thankful.... Dined with Pearson at the Mitre. Very kind in him to
ask me. Made Saturday in great measure an idle day. Had a good ride
with Gaskell. Spent part of the evening with him. Read about six
hours. _Sunday, November 13th._--Chapel thrice. Breakfast and
much conversation with Cameron. Read Bible. Some divinity of a
character approaching to cram. Looked over my shorter abstract of
Butler. Tea with Harrison. Walk with Gaskell. Wine with Hamilton,
more of a party than I quite liked or expected. Altogether my mind
was in an unsatisfactory state, though I heard a most admirable
sermon from Tyler on Bethesda, which could not have been more
opportune if written on purpose for those who are going into the
schools. But I am cold, timid, and worldly, and not in a healthy
state of mind for the great trial of to-morrow, to which I know I
am utterly and miserably unequal, but which I also know will be
sealed for good....
Here is his picture of his _viva voce_ examination:--
_November 14th._--Spent the morning chiefly in looking over my
Polybius; short abstract of ethics, and definitions. Also some hard
words. Went into the schools at ten, and from this time was little
troubled with fear. Examined by Stocker in divinity. I did not
answer as I could have wished. Hampden [the famous heresiarch] in
science, a beautiful examination, and with every circumstance in my
favour. He said to me, 'Thank you, you have construed extremely
well, and appear to be thoroughly acquainted with your books,' or
something to that effect. Then followed a very clever examination
in history from Garbett, and an agreeable and short one in my poets
from Cremer, who spoke very kindly to me at the close. I was only
put on in eight books besides the Testament, namely Rhetoric,
Ethics, _Phædo_, Herodotus, Thucydides, _Odyssey_, Aristophanes
(_Vespae_), and Persius. Everything was in my favour; the examiners
kind beyond everything; a good many persons there, and all
friendly. At the end of the science, of course, my spirits were
much raised, and I could not help at that moment [giving thanks] to
Him without whom not even such moderate performances would have
been in my power. Afterwards rode to Cuddesdon with the Denisons,
and wrote home with exquisite pleasure.
HIS DOUBLE FIRST CLASS
I have read a story by some contemporary how all attempts to puzzle him
by questions on the minutest details of Herodotus only brought out his
knowledge more fully; how the excitement reached its climax when the
examiner, after testing his mastery of some point of theology, said: 'We
will now leave that part of the subject,' and the candidate, carried
away by his interest in the subject, answered: 'No, sir; if you please,
we will not leave it yet,' and began to pour forth a fresh stream. Ten
days later, after a morning much disturbed and excited he rode in the
afternoon, and by half-past four the list was out, with Gladstone and
Denison both of them in the first class; Phillimore and Maurice in the
second; Herbert in the fourth.
Then mathematics were to come. The interval between the two schools he
passed at Cuddesdon, working some ten hours a day at his hardest, riding
every day with Denison, and all of them in high spirits. But optics,
algebra, geometry, calculus, trigonometry, and the rest, filled him with
misgivings for the future. 'Every day I read, I am more and more
thoroughly convinced of my incapacity for the subject.' 'My work
continued and my reluctance to exertion increased with it.' For the
Sunday before the examination, this is the entry, and a characteristic
and remarkable one it is:--'Teaching in the school morning and evening.
Saunders preached well on "Ye cannot serve God and Mammon." Read Bible
and four of Horsley's sermons. Paid visits to old people.'
On December 10th the mathematical ordeal began, and lasted four days.
The doctor gave him draughts to quiet his excitement. Better than
draughts, he read Wordsworth every day. On Sunday (December 11th) he
went, as usual, twice to chapel, and heard Newman preach 'a most able
discourse of a very philosophical character, more apt for reading than
for hearing--at least I, in the jaded state of my mind, was unable to do
it any justice.' On December 14th, the list was out, and his name was
again in the first class, again along with Denison. As everybody knows,
Peel had won a double-first twenty-three years before, and in
mathematics Peel had the first class to himself. Mr. Gladstone in each
of the two schools was one of five. Anstice, whose counsels and example
he counted for so much at one epoch in his collegiate life, in 1830
carried off the same double crown, and was, like Peel, alone in the
mathematical first class.
It was an hour of thrilling happiness, between the past and the
future, for the future was, I hope, not excluded; and feeling was
well kept in check by the bustle of preparation for speedy
departure. Saw the Dean, Biscoe, Saunders (whom I thanked for his
extreme kindness), and such of my friends as were in Oxford; all
most warm. The mutual hand-shaking between Denison, Jeffreys, and
myself, was very hearty. Wine with Bruce.... Packed up my
things.... Wrote at more or less length to Mrs. G. [his mother],
Gaskell, Phillimore, Mr. Denison, my old tutor Knapp.... Left
Oxford on the Champion.
_December 15th._--After finding the first practicable coach to
Cambridge was just able to manage breakfast in Bedford Square. Left
Holborn at ten, in Cambridge before five.
Here he was received by Wordsworth, the master of Trinity, and father of
his Oxford tutor. He had a visit full of the peculiar excitement and
felicity that those who are capable of it know nowhere else than at
Oxford and Cambridge. He heard Hallam recite his declamation; was
introduced to the mighty Whewell, to Spedding, the great Baconian, to
Smyth, the professor of history, to Blakesley; renewed his acquaintance
with the elder Hallam; listened to glorious anthems at Trinity and
King's; tried to hear a sermon from Simeon, the head of the English
evangelicals; met Stanhope, an old Eton man, and the two sons of Lord
Grey; and 'copied a letter of Mr. Pitt's.' From Cambridge he made his
way home, having thus triumphantly achieved the first stage of his long
life journey. Amid the manifold mutations of his career, to Oxford his
affection was passionate as it was constant. 'There is not a man that
has passed through that great and famous university that can say with
more truth than I can say, I love her from the bottom of my heart.'[52]
VI
THOUGHTS ON FUTURE PROFESSION
Another episode must have a place before I close this chapter. At the
end of 1828, the youthful Gladstone had composed a long letter, of which
the manuscript survives, to a Liverpool newspaper, earnestly contesting
its appalling proposition that 'man has no more control over his belief,
than he has over his stature or his colour,' and beseeching the editor
to try Leslie's _Short Method with the Deists_, if he be unfortunate
enough to doubt the authority of the Bible. At Oxford his fervour
carried him beyond the fluent tract to a personal decision. On August
4th, 1830, the entry is this:--'Began Thucydides. Also working up
Herodotus. [Greek: exêrtumenos]. Construing Thucydides at night. Uncomfortable
again and much distracted with doubts as to my future line of conduct.
God direct me. I am utterly blind. Wrote a very long letter to my dear
father on the subject of my future profession, wishing if possible to
bring the question to an immediate and final settlement.' The letter is
exorbitant in length, it is vague, it is obscure; but the appeal
contained in it is as earnest as any appeal from son to parent on such a
subject ever was, and it is of special interest as the first definite
indication alike of the extraordinary intensity of his religious
disposition, and of that double-mindedness, that division of sensibility
between the demands of spiritual and of secular life, which remained
throughout one of the marking traits of his career. He declares his
conviction that his duty, alike to man as a social being, and as a
rational and reasonable being to God, summons him with a voice too
imperative to be resisted, to forsake the ordinary callings of the world
and to take Upon himself the clerical office. The special need of
devotion to that office, he argues, must be plain to any one who 'casts
his eye over the moral wilderness of the world, who contemplates the
pursuits, desires, designs, and principles of the beings that move so
busily in it to and fro, without an object beyond the finding food for
it, mental or bodily, for the present moment.' This letter the reader
will find in full elsewhere.[53] The missionary impulse, the yearning
for some apostolic destination, the glow of self-devotion to a supreme
external will, is a well-known element in the youth of ardent natures of
either sex. In a thousand forms, sometimes for good, sometimes for evil,
such a mood has played its part in history. In this case, as in many
another, the impulse in its first shape did not endure, but in essence
it never faded.
His father replied as a wise man was sure to do, almost with sympathy,
with entire patience, and with thorough common sense. The son dutifully
accepts the admonition that it is too early to decide so grave an issue,
and that the immediate matter is the approaching performance in the
examination schools. 'I highly approve,' his father had written (Nov.
8th, 1830), 'your proposal to leave undetermined the profession you are
to follow, until you return from the continent and complete your
education in all respects. You will then have seen more of the world and
have greater confidence in the choice you may make; for it will then
rest wholly with yourself, having our advice whenever you may wish for
it.' The critical issue was now finally settled. At almost equal length,
and in parts of this second letter no less vague and obscure than the
first, but with more concentrated power, Mr. Gladstone tells his father
(Jan. 17th, 1832) how the excitement has subsided, but still he sees at
hand a great crisis in the history of mankind. New principles, he says,
prevail in morals, politics, education. Enlightened self-interest is
made the substitute for the old bonds of unreasoned attachment, and
under the plausible maxim that knowledge is power, one kind of ignorance
is made to take the place of another kind. Christianity teaches that the
head is to be exalted through the heart, but Benthamism maintains that
the heart is to be amended through the head. The conflict proceeding in
parliament foreshadows a contest for the existence of the church
establishment, to be assailed through its property. The whole foundation
of society may go. Under circumstances so formidable, he dares not look
for the comparative calm and ease of a professional life. He must hold
himself free of attachment to any single post and function of a
technical nature. And so--to make the long story short--'My own desires
for future life are exactly coincident with yours, in so far as I am
acquainted with them; believing them to be a _profession_ of the law,
with a view substantially to studying the constitutional branch of it,
and a subsequent experiment, as time and circumstances might offer, on
what is termed public life.' 'It tortures me,' he had written to his
brother John (August 29th, 1830), 'to think of an inclination opposed to
that of my beloved father,' and this was evidently one of the
preponderant motives in his final decision.
In the same letter, while the fire of apostolic devotion was still
fervid within him, he had penned a couple of sentences that contain
words of deeper meaning than he could surely know:--'I am willing to
persuade myself that in spite of other longings which I often feel, my
heart is prepared to yield other hopes and other desires for this--of
being permitted to be the humblest of those who may be commissioned to
set before the eyes of man, still great even, in his ruins, the
magnificence and the glory of Christian truth. Especially as I feel that
my temperament is so excitable, that I should fear giving up my mind to
other subjects which have ever proved sufficiently alluring to me, and
which I fear would make my life a fever of unsatisfied longings and
expectations.' So men unconsciously often hint an oracle of their lives.
Perhaps these forebodings of a high-wrought hour may in other hues have
at many moments come back to Mr. Gladstone's mind, even in the full
sunshine of a triumphant career of duty, virtue, power, and renown.
MEDITATIONS
The entry in his diary, suggested by the return of his birthday (Dec.
29, 1831), closes with the words, 'This has been my debating society
year, now, I fancy, done with. Politics are fascinating to me; perhaps
too fascinating.' Higher thoughts than this press in upon him:--
Industry of a kind and for a time there has been, but the industry
of necessity, not of principle. I would fain believe that my
sentiments in religion have been somewhat enlarged and
untrammelled, but if this be true, my responsibility is indeed
augmented, but wherein have my deeds of duty been proportionally
modified?... One conclusion theoretically has been much on my
mind--it is the increased importance and necessity and benefit of
prayer--of the life of obedience and self-sacrifice. May God use me
as a vessel for his own purposes, of whatever character and results
in relation to myself.... May the God who loves us all, still
vouchsafe me a testimony of His abiding presence in the protracted,
though well nigh dormant life of a desire which at times has risen
high in my soul, a fervent and a buoyant hope that I might work an
energetic work in this world, and by that work (whereof the worker
is only God) I might grow into the image of the Redeemer.... It
matters not whether the sphere of duty be large or small, but may
it be duly filled. May those faint and languishing embers be
kindled by the truth of the everlasting spirit into a living and a
life-giving flame.
Every reader will remember how, just two hundred years before, the
sublimest of English poets had on his twenty-third birthday closed the
same self-reproach for sluggishness of inward life, with the same
aspiration:--
Yet be it less or more, or soon or slow,
It shall be still in strictest measure even
To that same lot however mean or high,
Towards which time leads me and the will of heaven.
All is, if I have grace to use it so,
As ever in my great taskmaster's eye.
Two generations after he had quitted the university, Mr. Gladstone
summed up her influence upon him:--
Oxford had rather tended to hide from me the great fact that
liberty is a great and precious gift of God, and that human
excellence cannot grow up in a nation without it. And yet I do not
hesitate to say that Oxford had even at this time laid the
foundations of my liberalism. School pursuits had revealed little;
but in the region of philosophy she had initiated if not inured me
to the pursuit of truth as an end of study. The splendid integrity
of Aristotle, and still more of Butler, conferred upon me an
inestimable service. Elsewhere I have not scrupled to speak with
severity of myself, but I declare that while in the arms of Oxford,
I was possessed through and through with a single-minded and
passionate love of truth, with a virgin love of truth, so that,
although I might be swathed in clouds of prejudice there was
something of an eye within, that might gradually pierce them.
FOOTNOTES:
[34] Charles Wordsworth's _Annals_.
[35] After Peel had begun his career, Jackson gave him a piece of advice
that would have pleased Mr. Gladstone:--'Let no day pass without your
having Homer in your hand. Elevate your own mind by continual meditation
on the vastness of his comprehension and the unerring accuracy of all
his conceptions. If you will but read him four or five times over every
year, in a half a dozen years you will know him by heart, and he well
deserves it.'--Parker's _Life of Sir R. Peel_, i. p. 28.
[36] On the four periods of Aristotelian study at Oxford in the first
half of the century see Pattison's Essays, i. P. 463.
[37] _Ibid_, i. p. 465.
[38] Reprinted from the _Edingburgh Review_ in _Discussions on
Philosophy and Literature_, pp. 401-559. (1852.)
[39] Tupper (_My Life_, etc., p. 53, 1886) mentions that he beat Mr.
Gladstone for the Burton theological essay, 'The Reconciliation of
Matthew and John'; but Gladstone was so good a second that Dr. Burton
begged that one-fifth of the prize money, might be given to him as
solatium.
[40] Anstice was afterwards professor of Classics at King's College, and
was cut off prematurely at the age of thirty. See below, p. 134.
[41] _Gleanings_, vii. p. 141.
[42] _Ibid._ ii, p. 1.
[43] Purcell (_Manning_, i. p. 46) makes Mr. Gladstone say, 'I was
intimate with Newman, but then we had many friends in common.' This must
be erroneously reported.
[44] _Gleanings_, vii. p. 211.
[45] Sir Thomas Acland gives the names of the first twelve members as
follows: Gladstone, Gaskell, Doyle, Moncreiff, Seymer, Rogers, two
Aclands, Leader, Anstice, Harrison, Cole. Mr. Gladstone in a letter to
Acland (1889) mentions these twelve names, and adds 'from the old book
of record,' Bruce, J., Bruce, F., Egerton, Liddell, Lincoln, Lushington,
Maurice, Oxenham, Vaughan, Thornton, C. Marriott.
[46] At Palmerston Club, Oxford, Jan. 30, 1878.
[47] His father was a Liverpool merchant, and had been mayor.
[48] By the kindness of the present dean of Christ Church I am able to
give the reader a couple of specimens of Mr. Gladstone's Latin verse.
The two pieces were written for 'Lent verses':--
(1829) Gladstone. _An aliquid sit immutabile?
Affirmatur._
Vivimus incertum? Fortunæ lusus habemur?
Singula præteriens det rapiatve dies?
En nemus exaninum, qua se modo germina, verno
Tempore, purpureis explicuere comis.
Respice pacatum Neptuni numine pontum:
Territa mox tumido verberat astra salo.
Sed brevior brevibus, quas unda supervenit, undis
Sed gelidâ, quam mox dissipat aura, nive:
Sed foliis sylvarum, et amici veris odore,
Quisquis honos placeat, quisquis alatur amor.
Jamne joci lususque sonant? viget alma
Juventus? Funereæ forsan eras cecinere tubæ.
Nec pietas, nec casta Fides, nec libera Virtus,
Nigrantes ve
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