TA LKS WITH Mt< GLADSTONE CFTHE UKlVEPSlTY / y IW^iW'l TALKS-- mmi H MR. GLADSTONE TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE BY THE Hon.. LIONEL A. TOLLEMACHR author of "benjamin jowett" "safe studies" etc THIRD REVISED EDITION Defunctus adhuc loquitur LONDON EDWARD ARNOLD 1903 All Rights Reserved .3 (9 03 PREFACE TO THIRD EDITION Quid volui, demens, humeris imponere tantum Ponderis ? On page 127, Mr. Gladstone is reported by me to have ascribed the Encumbered Estates Act to Peel. It was really passed by Lord John Eussell. On page 128, he is represented as having attributed the Devon Commission to Lord Palmerston. The Com- mission was, in reality, appointed by Peel. How these mistakes arose it is hard to determine. With extreme diffidence I am inclined to attribute them to slips rather of attention than of memory on the part of my great (in a double sense) and lamented friend. It should be borne in mind that any col- loquial inadvertence of his would have for its back- ground and its excuse the pleasant and leisurely freedom — the otiuvi cum comitate — of what was both literally and metaphorically a symposium. The foregoing explanation appears to me plausible. On the other hand, I find it hard to imagine that the words addressed to me by Mr. Gladstone were com- pletely forgotten, or rather mislieard. It is worth noting that the two errors above mentioned occurred in a single conversation, a conversation which took 5 MS32i)'S7 PREFACE TO THIRD EDITION place the last time that Mr. Gladstone ever dined with me. Extra precautions were taken on that occasion. At the dinner-table, in defiance of usage and for the convenience of hearing and being heard, the great man was sandwiclied between Mrs. Tolle- mache and me ; both she and I paid great attention to his remarks ; and my report of them, which was drawn up at the earliest opportunity, was carefully revised by her. I enter into these details because 1 am anxious to clear myself from the charge of what I would designate as the unpardonable sin in a Bos well; for, in very truth, the accuracy of a Boswell ought, like Caesar's wife, to be above suspicion. L. A. T. NOTE I HAVE received a letter from an intimate friend of Mr. Gladstone's, who spent a week with the great statesman shortly after he had left Biarritz for the last time, and who iii the matter now before us is a highly competent authority. "His [Mr. Gladstone's] observa- tions to you," he writes, "must have been due to some misunder- standing, probably caused by his dcafnc5>n." TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE INTRODUCTION Non te facundia, non te Restituet iiietas. I SAW something of Mr. Gladstone between 1856 and 1870 in England ; and, after an interval of twenty years, I saw much of him at Biarritz. In reporting a few of the things that he said to me during the earlier period, I have to trust my memory entirely. His remarks during the later period have been carefully noted down. I am, therefore, con- fident that those remarks are reported with accuracy. Naturally, however, my attention was concentrated on Mr. Gladstone's observations; and I must add that the effort of committing those observations to memory, and likewise of replying to them, was such that I cannot pretend that my own part in the conversation is given with equal exactness. But this, of course, is a matter of minor importance. Another of my Boswellian canons ought, perhaps, to be disclosed. Several times my conversations with Mr. Gladstone were interrupted just when he 8 TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE was entering on an important subject; and I naturally endeavoured, during one or more sub- sequent interviews, to draw him out more thor- oughly. When the drawing-out process had been completed and I had to make a final report of all that he had said, I had to choose between two alternatives, each of them open to objection. Some- times I thought it safer to observe strict accuracy by referring the two or more mutually supple- menting, not to say overlapping, conversations to the times when they respectively occurred. But more frequently I have consulted the convenience of my readers by following a logical, instead of a chronological arrangement, and by soldering together the disunited parts of what was practically a single dialogue. In preparing to add to my literary gallery its most conspicuous portrait, I am confronted with the question : In order to concentrate attention on the portrait itself, ought not its frame to be as simple as possible ? Or, to lay aside metaphor, ought I not to restrict myself to the mechanical office of Boswellizing Mr. Gladstone, and to leave the thank- less task of criticising him to such biographers as are at once compelled and competent to discharge it ? The question, when thus put, seems to answer itself ; but the matter, in fact, is not so simple as at first sight appears. On the whole, the self-denying ordinance which I am inclined to impose on myself is this, that I should in general not presume to sit in judgment on Mr. Gladstone except in cases where TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE 9 my intercourse with him serves to throw light on some misunderstood parts of his character ; or where, on the other hand, some remarks on his character are needed to throw light on my intercourse with him. On neither of these two accounts do I feel called upon to say much about him as a statesman. Being forced to spend three-quarters of every year on the Continent in a sort of valetudinarian exile, I have come to regard myself, not certainly as an outlaw, but as what 1 may call an outpolitics, — as one who can look on party politics only from the standpoint of a philosophical outsider ; so that, for this as well as for other reasons, I abstain from acting the part of a political censor. And this abstinence is, in the present case, made easier by the fact that the tie which bound him to me and mine was not political, but personal. He was a county neighbour of my Conservative father and of my more Conservative father-in-law (the late Lord Egerton of Tatton). When he and they were in the House of Commons together, he met them on a footing of friendly opposition ; and although the political antagonism went on increasing, the friendly relations were perhaps not lessened down to the end of the chapter. The result of all this was that, when he extended his friendship to my wife and me, he showed a manifest disinclination to discuss the politics of the day. He seldom approached burning questions in my presence, and hardly ever in the presence of my wife, I could have wished that he had been 10 TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE less scrupulous ; but perhaps, after all, the loss was not very serious. The political Gladstone has long been, and will long continue to be, in everybody's mouth. It is of the non-political Gladstone that people in general need to learn something. When I pass on from the public to the private character of Mr. Gladstone, I am only too sensible alike of the difficulty and of the necessity of touching on that most delicate part of my subject. To quote Cicero : " Quid dicam de moribus f acillimis, de bonitate in suos, justitia in omnes?" {What should I say of the easy urbanity of his manners, of his goodness to his intimates, of his justice towards all men?) What, in particular, should I say, or forbear to say, about Mr. Gladstone's great kindness to me ? Compliments, however sincere and however well deserved, have nearly always an air of patronage; and, indeed, I have sometimes thought that the step from the sublime to the ridiculous is perhaps less short than the step from an ill-turned or ill-timed compliment to an insult. Those of us who are haunted by any such impression as is here indicated are naturally disposed, in relation to Mr. Gladstone's private virtues, to say less than we feel, or rather to keep silence even from good words. Nevertheless, it would be churlish in us to refrain altogether from bearing our eye-witnessing testimony to his con- siderate and uncondescending graciousness towards such of his juniors as he befriended. And we ourselves are led to do this all the more in order, so to say, to take away the unpleasing taste of the few TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE 11 words of adverse criticism which will perforce make their way into the following pages. Let it, then, be understood once for all that, however we may have differed from his views both on things present and on things to come, we nevertheless judge him to have exhibited an absolutely unique combination of political sagacity Avith an unwavering conviction of the Divine presence and support ; so that we might almost literally apostrophise him in the phrase of the Greek poet — *' dvdpQv ae TrpQrov ^v re ^vfjicpopais j3lov Kplvovres eu re daip.ovcov ^iz/'aXAa^als. " I have mentioned that Mr. Gladstone, in his inter- course with me, seldom penetrated within the recesses of politics. He, however, often led me into what may be called the antechamber of politics. He freely imparted to me his reminiscences ; and those reminiscences were interspersed with suggestive comments, and had always, if I may so express it, a quoTiiin iKirs "magna fid flavour about them. When he was disposed to dwell on this interest- ing subject, I did my best to make him stick to it; and, on other occasions, I threw the subject in his path. His anecdotical reflections on such men as Canning and Peel, as Lord Palmerston and Disraeli, are reported with the utmost possible minuteness. There were, however, subjects on which he con- versed with less interest and effect, and in reference to which my duties as a reporter were less clear. Of those less important remarks of his, should any, 12 TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE or should all, be placed before my readers? An example will serve to show the nature of my perplexity. How much am I to record of my impressions of Mr. Gladstone's views on Homer's ethics and theology? My introduction to those views took place in an odd manner. In my Oxford days I heard a lady ask Jowett what he thought of Mr. Gladstone's then recently published book on Homer. " It's mere nonsense," was the brief answer. Without passing so summary a verdict on Mr. Gladstone's work, or presuming to speak on the subject as an expert, I am at least aware that, as Juvenal might have said, he made the Syrian Jordan flow into the Scamander : he Catholicised Hellenism and almost canonised Homer. Indeed, it was with reference to Mansel's Bampton Lectures and Mr. Gladstone's Homeric speculation that, some forty years ago, the future Bishop Jeune said to Bishop Wilberforce that he "had not expected to see the time when Atheism would be demonstrated from the pulpit of St. Mary's, and when the member for the University of Oxford would advocate the wor- ship of the Pagan divinities " {Safe Studies, p. 247). He evidently held, as I also hold, that Mr. Gladstone was utterly at fault when he tried to discover a defaced or rudimentary Trinity amid the debris of the Hellenic Pantheon. And, for myself, I will further maintain that from Mr. Gladstone's initial error in this matter — from his invention, if I may so say, of an Athanasian Iliad — has arisen a false note in many of his utterances on Homer. How much, TALKS WITH MK. GLADSTONE 13 then, am I to report of such of those utterances as I heard ? To this question I reply that, if the inti- macy with which he honoured me had been con- tinued and continually renewed through many years, instead of being practically confined to a score or so of conversations, I should doubtless, in my report of his sayings about Homer, have used the pruning-knife pretty freely. But, as the case now stands, and as my readers will doubtless wish to see something even of the less interesting aspects of this eminently interesting character, I have thought it better to reduce the pruning process to a minimum. Nor will such an examination of his defective side be unprofitable. For, in very truth, the saying of Cato that " wise men learn more from fools than fools learn from wise men," may be sup- plemented with a corollary that Tuiore is to he learnt fromi the follies of the wise than from the common sense of fools. And to the case now before us such a corollary has a special application. For the Homeric hallucination, as I cannot but think it, of Mr. Gladstone was no mere excrescence or (so to say) lusus sapientice, but was correlated with the rest of his spiritual growth ; it was, in fact, not so much the vagary of a scholar as the sorry refuge of a theologian at bay. Let us see how this is to be explained. The Comparative Method or, let us rather say, the Evolutionary Principle, when applied to the competing religions of the world, tends to bring out what they have in common, to group them all under a single law, and, if I may so say, to lessen 14 TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE the extreme inequality of rank which has hitherto prevailed among them. It is true that to Evolution, interpreted in this wide sense, Mr. Gladstone would have strongly objected. But none the less is it probable that, without knowing it, he had a sprinkling from the impetuous and ubiquitous " stream of tendency." He caught the evolutionary contagion. He became so far a philosophe malgre lui that he more or less levelled up the chief religions, as the alternative to levelling them down. Something of the divine he had to recognise in all of them, lest haply he should be constrained to erase the divine from all of them. Thus he gradually came to regard the greatest poets of Hellenism as more or less inspired, not merely in the colloquial and metaphorical, but in something like the theo- logical sense of the word — inspired, one may say vaguely, not merely from Mount Helicon, but from Mount Zion. So that he essayed to hear, and at last imagined that he really heard, the far-off echo of a revelation in Homer. The general line that I have taken about the indirectly theological views of Mr. Gladstone may be extended to his directly theological views. But between the two cases there is a difference. Most of my readers will probably agree with me in not attaching much weight to his Homeric speculations. But many of them will attach far more weight than I should to his opinions on theology. Therefore, what he said to me on the latter subject is reported almost entire. TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE 15 In conclusion, I need hardly insist that I am entering into no sort of competition with any complete biography of Mr. Gladstone which may have been, or may hereafter be, brought out by one or more distinguished men who have known him intimately both in his public and private character. How, indeed, could I, handicapped as I am, adven- ture on such an unequal race ? **Qmd enim tremulis facere artubus heedi Consimile in cursu possint et fortis equi vis 1 ** Let me then say, or rather repeat, that my present function is to produce what may be called an ethograph of Mr. Gladstone — a photograph of his moral and social physiognomy, exactly as it presented itself to me. Nor can I doubt that, some- what in the spirit of Cromwell, he would himself have wished that impartial justice should be done to that moral physiognomy, a physiognomy which, like his natural face, had its harsh and untoward aspects, but which was all the more truly venerable for its wrinkled and, at first sight, repellent grandeur. It is superfluous for me to add that I shall be more than satisfied if, in the bewildering chapter of accidents, it should be written that even this little book is to contribute its jot and tittle of evidence, at once trustworthy and favourable towards the final judgment which will be pro- nounced on him by posterity. Hahent sua fata lihelli: singular fates they have sometimes, and such as, when little is expected, are not always disappointing. L. A. T. 16 TALKS WITH MK. GLADSTONE NOTE Since v/riting this, I have come across a saying of Tennyson about Mr. Gladstone's Homeric speculations, which confirms the view- taken in the foregoing pages : " Very pleasant and very interesting he [Gladstone] was, even when he discoursed on Homer, where most people think him a little hobhy-horsical : let him be. His hobby- horse is of the intellect and with a grace." This opinion should be compared or contrasted with the opinion entertained by Lake. In a letter of mine, entitled "Dr. Lake at Balliol," which was pub- lished in the Spectator (Jan. 1, 1898), there is a passage which I am tempted to quote, concluding as it does with a high and just compliment paid by the future Dean of Durham to Mr. Gladstone. It should be mentioned that the conversation referred to occurred in my undergraduate days, some forty years ago. "I once found Lake reading Mr. Gladstone's book on Homer, which had then been recently pubb'shed, and I remarked to him that, in Jowett's opinion, the distinguished author had ascribed more to Homer than Homer himself ever dreamt of ; was this criticism just ? ' Possibly to some extent,' answered Lake, with a grim smile, * But Mr. Jowett would allow only a minimum. I think there is more in Homer, just as I think there is more in the Bible, than he would acknowledge.' Then, with an evident allusion to my veneration for Jowett, he touched on the propensity of youth towards somewhat promiscuous hero-worship. His concluding words have stuck in my memory : * In all my life I have only known three men of commanding great- ness — Arnold, Newman, Gladstone.'" TALKS WITH ME. GLADSTONE 1856-1870 *'Nec vero ille in luce modo atque in oculis civium magnus, sed inlus doiiiique prsestantior." Cicero. * * Seen him I have, but in his happier hour Of social pleasure, ill-exchanged for power." Pope. It was a proud moment for me when Mr. Glad- stone, wlio was then canvassino^ the Oxford electors, called on me during my first year of residence at Balliol. Between 1856 and 1870 I saw him several times, chiefly in London and during two visits which I paid at Hawarden. But, instead of weary- ing my readers with the whereabouts and the whenahouts of my interviews with him, I will at once jot down some sayings of his which belong to this first period of our acquaintance. My father, not realising to what extent I was handicapped by physical drawbacks, was continually urging me to go to the Bar. At his request, I laid the matter before Mr. Gladstone. Mr. Gladstone thousrht that my extreme nearsightedness would be an almost insuperable obstacle to my success at the Bar. I asked him if I should try diplomacy. His reply 20 TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE was not encouraging. Indeed, he said that he should not wish a son of his to become a diplo- matist. He did not give his reasons ; but I suspect that a thought was in his mind similar to that which prompted Macaulay to write : " Every calling has its peculiar temptations. There is no injustice in saying that "diplomatists, as a class, have always been more distinguished by their address, by the art with which they win the confidence of those with whom they have to deal, and by the ease with which they catch the tone of every society into which they are admitted, than by generous enthu- siasm or austere rectitude." He went on to recommend to me a Parliamentary career ; Parliamentary work would be less trying to the eyesight than practice at the Bar. He presently spoke of " official " life. Since he had been in office, he had learnt how much of the business could be deputed to trained subordinates; indeed, he had bestowed some pains on the art of thus working by proxy. Had I ever thought of trying to get into the House of Commons ? I replied that I had turned Whig, to the no small perturbation of my kinsfolk. My father, who was then in the House of Commons, and who was a strong aristocrat and a still stronger autocrat, would never have tolerated my voting against him on any question which he deemed important. Mr. Gladstone seemed surprised, and added that public opinion appeared to him to be in an unhealthy state in regard to the nature and limits of the imtrm potestas. If a son of his own TALKS WITH MK. GLADSTONE 21 had differed from him in politics, he would have advised him not to enter public life till he was twenty-six ; after that age, the son would be free to take an independent line. Mr. Gladstone thought it monstrous that Lord Stanley (the late Lord Derby), who was then about forty years old, should be prac- tically compelled to join the Conservative party, in opposition to what were believed to be his private convictions. At the time of this conversation I myself was in my twenty-fifth year. Mr. Gladstone advised me to decide on a profession soon. After twenty-five the mind could not easily take a fresh direction, though it might make great progress in a direction already taken. He did not, let me here repeat, often talk to me about politics ; but I remember his once saying, with great emphasis, that the years which followed the close of the Great War seemed to him to be among the most disgraceful in our history : " The Tory Government passed a new Corn Law." I asked him whether he did not think that the days of the English aristocracy were numbered. Might not what Tennyson says of religious systems be applied to aristocracies: "They have their day, and cease to be " ? In other words, was not De Tocqueville right in thinking that, by an inexorable law, all things make for democracy ? Mr. Gladstone answered that this broad statement of De Tocque- ville appeared to him to be founded on a hasty generalisation. In particular, he thought that the feudal sentiment and traditions were deeply rooted 22 TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE in England. He defended his opinion by citing two examples which, I own, did not appear to me very conclusive. One of them I will repeat, as nearly as I can remember it. He told me that a certain peer, who was a friend of his, had recently died. He himself had consulted the man of business as to the choice of an agent who would give satisfaction to the tenants. The man of business replied that what would please the tenants most would be the appoint- ment of an agent who could claim kinship with the late lord. In July 1864, I was so fortunate as to meet Mr. Mill at breakfast with Mr. Gladstone.^ The two eminent men talked about the probable effect of the war between Prussia and Denmark. Mr. Gladstone mentioned that a high financial authority had expressed the opinion that, if Canada were ever annexed by the United States, the value of land in Canada would be greatly increased (I think he said " doubled ") ; and I understood Mr. Gladstone to add that, in like manner, the value of land in Schleswig- ^ Some fragments of the remarks made by Mr. Mill on this, to me, memorable occasion, are indicated in Bafc Studies, p. 263, and in the Memoir ofJowett, p. 101 (note). I am tempted here to report another observation which Mr. Mill then made. He told me that his father used to say that all war would speedily be brought to an end if only, in every battle, the soldiers on each side would direct all their efforts towards shooting the commander-in-chief of the opposite party. I asked him whether, if this practice were set on foot, commanders-in-chief would not soon learn, like Ahab at Ramoth Gilead, to resort to the obvious expedient of a disguise. " Yes," he replied gloomily, "lam afraid that the causes of war lie too deep for so simple a remedy. " TALKS WITH Mil. GLADSTONE 23 Holstein would be increased by the annexation of those provinces to such an active and progressive nation as Prussia. Mr. Gladstone went on to talk of his own some- what romantic mission to Greece. He appeared to think that the old Greek type of countenance still lingered in Continental Greece more than is com- monly supposed. I reminded him of the statement quoted by Gibbon from a Byzantine historian that "all Greece has been slavonised and become bar- barous." " Yes," replied Mr. Gladstone, " I remember the passage well ; and does not Gibbon go on to say that the language is as barbarous as the idea ? " I have thought this worth recording as serving to show that, little as he sympathised with Gibbon, he yet knew Gibbon's History well. He told Mr. Mill that he had never witnessed such complete and contented idleness as at Corfu. He related that he had there seen three men leisurely occupied in driving two turkeys along the road. Before pronouncing a judgment on this queer otium sine dignitate, one would wish to know what were its antecedent conditions, and how far the instance was a typical one. I well remember a long walk which I took with Mr. Gladstone one Sunday afternoon at Hawarden. In the course of it, I referred to Mill's contention that slave-grown cotton was exhausting the soil of the Southern States, and that, even from a purely commercial point of view, emancipation was likely to be a gain ; was Mr. Gladstone of the same opinion ? 24 TALKS WITH ME. GLADSTONE He replied that he abhorred slavery, but that he nevertheless feared that abolition would, in the first instance at any rate, be attended with financial difficulties. I went on to ask him how he explained the strong antipathy expressed by nearly all Anglo-Americans for coloured men. The repulsion thus inspired by the typical negro is commonly described as physical and as irremediable, being, in fact, of the nature indicated by Sydney Smith in his famous adaptation of Virgil — " Et, si non alium late jactaret odorem, Givis erat." Macaulay had said in conversation that, in his opinion, there was much exaggeration in this and kindred statements; he found it hard to reconcile them with the very close personal relation which not unfrequently subsists between individuals of the two races. Did not Mr. Gladstone also think that the antipathy in question is, in great part, born of imagination? His answer was decidedly in the affirmative. In support of his opinion, he mentioned the case (to which I shall have occasion to revert further on) of a negro gentleman whom he had himself known, and who was, not merely agreeable and accomplished, but distinguished by the refine- ment of his manners. We fell to talking about physiognomy. He gave me the impression of more or less agreeing with Duncan, that there is no art to find the mind's construction in the face. In defence of his view, TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE 25 he cited the example of a distinguished politician who was then in the House of Commons, and who had been one of the pioneers of Free Trade: "I detest his countenance; but I believe that a more upright and honourable man never lived." There was something "intense" in Mr. Gladstone's voice as he said this, which was typical of his mode of conversing. His talk was not rhetorical; but it was emphatically the talk of an orator. In other words, it was not through rounded sentences, nor through a spouting, and, so to say, rounding delivery, but through the frequent use of strong phrases vocally italicised, and perhaps I should add, through the not infrequent accumulation of nearly synony- mous epithets where perhaps a single epithet would have sufficed, that the note of the orator was dis- cernible in his discourse. It was, if my memory serves me, on the evening of the same Sunday that Mr. Gladstone conversed with me about the Classics and likewise about Theology. I asked some questions about the Homeric poems; and when I presently expressed a fear that I was boring him, he very graciously cut short my apology by saying that, after all the tumult and bustle of politics, he felt himself "in heaven " when he was breathing the pure atmos- phere of Homer. He appeared to me, I confess, less to advantage when he passed into the region of Theology. I was so audacious as to make some strictures on the character of David. Were the vindictive and perfidious injunctions given by the 26 TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE dying king to his successor easily reconciled with his claim to be accounted a man after God's own heart? During this part of our conversation the late Lord Lyttelton was present, and made the very natural remark that this was an old crux, but that he thought the difficulty could be got over. What surprised me about Mr. Gladstone was that, in this part of the discussion, he seemed to be treading on new ground. Perhaps his mind was preoccupied, or I may have failed to understand him ; but he certainly seemed to me to speak as if he was puzzled to make out what I meant, and as if this whole class of objections had never crossed his mind. Our controversy on Old Testament ethics was merely an episode in a friendly discussion on one of Mr. Gladstone's favourite topics. He said that he had one fault to find with the Oxford Liberals which he could never get over: they made such small account of Bishop Butler. I did my best to clear up the anomaly which so embarrassed and pained him; but the solution which I offered did not satisfy him. As I shall have occasion to revert to this subject, it may obviate the necessity of further explanation if I state, more explicitly than I ventured to state to Mr. Gladstone, the causes which excite in some Oxford Liberals so strong an antipathy to what he called the " Butlerian " system. It must be premised that many of those Liberals regard Butler as a less logical Mansel ; insomuch that Mansel's Bampton Lectures may be described as Butler's Analogy writ plain. Now, Oxford TALKS WITH MK. GLADSTONE 27 Liberals of the class indicated by Mr. Gladstone generally sympathise with what may be termed the Left Centre of Tlieology, and perhaps, next to that, with the Right Centre, On the other hand, Butler's and Hansel's reasoning is a weapon which the Extreme Rio:ht and the Extreme Left combine to use against the Right Centre and the Left Centre, but which they are powerless to employ against one another. Nay, we may go the length of saying that the weapon which Catholics employ with such deadly effect against the orthodox Protestant is the self- same Butlerian weapon wherewith he himself is wont, so confidently and so pitilessly, to transfix all Liberal Protestants — "The treacherous instrument is in thy hand, Unbated and envenomed." Nor is this all. The argument of the Analogy, if pressed to its conclusions, would interdict the appli- cation of our human standard of ethics to any alleged divine revelation, and would consequently yield everything to the faith which, if the phrase may be allowed, bids highest in miracles. I once heard Jowett make the admission that, on that principle, a strong case might be made out for Brahminism. At all events, without presuming to award the thaumaturgical palm, his disciples are dis- mayed when they reflect with what ease and with what fatal results the too accommodating and trans- ferable, or, as Bunyan might have said, facing both ways, logic of Butler could be turned to account by the enemies of religion. For, as viewed from the 28 TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE standpoint of those enemies, the argument of Butler and Mansel amounts to this, " If we are not prepared to believe everything, we must believe nothing. Gardez-vous de ce premier pas qui coiXte. Give Supernaturalism an inch, and it claims the Uni- verse." And now, before proceeding to my later and longer conversations with Mr. Gladstone, I propose to make one or two of those illustrative comments of which I have already spoken. With this object in view, it will be convenient to go back a little. When preparing myself for my first visit to Hawarden, I had a talk with an able man whose name I will not disclose, but of whom I will say that he knew Mr. Gladstone well ; and I asked him (in effect) so to furbish me up intellectually that I might not be wholly unpresentable when brought face to face with the great man. Especially did I wish to know whether it would be safe to express modern views in his presence. What has already been related may be taken as in some sort answer- ing this question. Nevertheless, it may be of use to report the answer, or rather the general account of Mr. Gladstone, which my experienced informant gave me. He advised me to beware, during my stay at Hawarden, of expressing heretical opinions before my orthodox host. Mr. Gladstone, he went on to say, was distinguished by two great qualities, each of which he possessed in an extraordinary degree, and the combination of which he possessed in a degree almost, if not quite, unprecedented. TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE 29 These qualities were, first, the oratorical faculty, and, secondly, the power of mastering details. But the oratorical faculty has its drawbacks. Being so strongly developed in Mr. Gladstone, it generated in him an abnormal, if not morbid, intensity of pur- pose. Whatsoever his mind or his head found to do, he did it with his might. The result was that his intellect grew to be like the giant oak, wanting in pliancy by reason of its massive strength. His difficulty in sympathising with opponents was measured by his unfaltering conviction — a con- viction as intense as that of St. Paul or of Savo- narola — that his own cause was the cause of God. My friend concluded by telling me that the great orator's eager and, as it were, hypnotic absorption in whatever he took up was sometimes apparent even in trivial matters, and that at such times it was apt to become extravagant, and even oppres- sive : " He will talk about a piece of old china as if he was standing before the judgment-seat of God." " I have," said Charles Lamb, " an almost feminine partiality for old china." Probably this predilection was the only point which Lamb and Mr. Gladstone had in common. And, even in that point of resem- blance, there was a marked difference between the two men. For, in the case of Mr. Gladstone, this " feminine partiality," as it were, put on virility through its contact with his eminently masculine nature. How quixotic, or rather how Quixote-like, how grandly fantastic he was in that infatuation, even as in his infatuation about Helen of Troy ! I 30 TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE never ceased to be grateful to the late Lady de Tabley who, one evening when she and I were guests of the Gladstones, espied me nescio quid mieditantem nugaruTYi in a distant corner, and hurried me across the room just in time to see Mr. Gladstone holding up a piece of old china, and to take note of the flashing eye and the Rhadaman- thine solemnity with which the great enthusiast was winding up his discourse. Passing on to a less quaintly trivial matter, I will add another example of tlie way in which Mr. Glad- stone, in what may be termed his intellectual paint- ings, was apt to lay on the colours too thick. A distinguished Liberal told me, many years ago, that he had asked Mr. Gladstone if he did not think it a matter of regret that the young men of the time seemed to take little interest in the debates in the House of Commons. Mr. Gladstone laid his hand on my friend's arm, and explained with awe- inspiring emphasis that the indifference thus shown by the rising generation appeared to him to be a " plague-spot " in the body politic. My informant, though himself a very earnest man, evidently thought that Mr. Gladstone, by his vehement and, so to say. Apocalyptic use of language, showed a certain want of moral perspective. It will now be understood what Walter Bagehot meant by saying of him : — "He is interested in everything he has to do with, and often interested too nnich. He proposes to put a stamp on contract notes with an eager earnestness as if the destiny of Europe here and TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE 31 hereafter depended upon its enactment. . . . The oratorical impulse is a disorganising impulse. The higher faculties of tlio mind require a certain calm, and the excitement of oratory is unfavour- able to that calm." The latter part of this extract may seem irrelevant ; but I quote it as leading up to a matter on which I wish to touch briefly. I had a talk with Jowett about Mr. Gladstone some forty years ago, that is to say, before he had begun to entertain the antipathy for him which he freely expressed in later years. What, I asked, did he make of the fact that this most religious of our politicians was often charged with being dishonest ? His answer was on this wise : " Gladstone is not dishonest ; but it is natural that persons who do not understand him should think him dishonest." He went on to make some explanatory and other general remarks ; but the only one of those remarks that I can dis- tinctly recall is, that lie expressed a better opinion of Mr. Gladstone than of Bishop Wilberforce. His explanation, however, left certain vague impressions on my mind ; and I have often felt a wish, as an architect might sa}^ to restore that explanation, or rather to give shape to the general impression which I myself have derived from this and from more direct sources. How came it about, let me repeat, that this conspicuously upright and conscientious statesman was so grievously misunderstood ? Such a misunderstanding, if not accounted for as founded on some plausible error, is thought to warrant the suspicion of being founded on fact ; and therefore, 32 TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE without pretending wholly to clear up the miscon- struction under which Mr. Gladstone laboured, I feel bound, after enjoying the privilege of his friendship, to throw out one or two explanatory suggestions. Let me, then, begin by observing that the faults of a great and good man always stand out conspicu- ously in relief. Not only are they conspicuous because he is conspicuous, and because they are seen in broad contrast to his virtues, but also because the high ideal which he sets up is a standing rebuke to the self-complacent mediocrity of his neighbours, and tempts them to indemnify themselves by means of reprisals ; insomuch that to the saint or hero as well as to the Pharisee — to him who, holding high and, as it were, reproachful ideals, strives to act up to them, as well as to him who does not — should the Divine caution be addressed : " With what measure ye mete it shall be measured to you again." Mr. Gladstone, in particular, stood in need of this caution. Being an orator, he was wont to think and to speak with his emotions at red heat, and to give utterance to burning and provocative words when he passed censure on folly and sin. Also, he laid himself open to attack by his political change of front. No doubt this transition of his, in an age of transition, was in a sense appropriate, and furnished one of the many proofs of his conscien- tiousness. " To live is to change," says Newman, " and to be perfect is to have changed often." There is some truth in this observation, though it is too TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE 33 broadly expressed, and though it comes oddly from an upholder of the most unbending of creeds. But, at any rate, to rank changefulness of this kind as a virtue is to set up a counsel of imperfection. " Un- stable as water," says the Scripture, " thou shalt not excel"; and assuredly the man of many changes, the sort of man whom Aristotle would have called a chameleon, cannot hope to inspire confidence. He is liable to excite an apprehension that (if I may so express myself) he may one day become a re-turn- coat, or else may be, not a turncoat only, but a turn waistcoat as well ; in other words, he may either go back, or else go forward too fast and too far. Thus it was that, being at once an orator and (in the literal sense) a renegade, Mr. Gladstone was severely handled, and ran the risk of being overwhelmed by a flood of invectives. In fear of such submersion, he caught at straws, and persuaded himself that they were solid planks. To lay aside metaphor, he was subtle and even sophistical in his explanations of his devious courses. Yet in giving these explana- tions he was perfectly sincere. Sincerity under these conditions would have been impossible to a philosopher; but it came easily to such a typical orator as Mr. Gladstone. For the typical orator, in whom, as in women, feeling is believing, resembles women likewise in their peril- ously convenient capacity for self-deception. But the hallucinations of the orator, those veritable eidola fori, are just what Philistines cannot, and political opponents will not, understand. Nor can 3 34 TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE it be denied that on that ground the opponents of Mr. Gladstone could build up a plausible case. Thus, when Disraeli said of him that "he was inebriated with the exuberance of his own ver- bosity," it must be admitted that in that eminently Disraelitish phrase — itself not conspicuous for the simplicity of its diction — there was the element of truth that Mr. Gladstone was sometimes not the master but the servant of his emotions, and even of his metaphors. The result of all this was that, in the popular imagination, his subtlety of reasoning came to be associated with that moral indirectness which the word subtlety often connotes. Indeed, his unconscious special pleading was at last mistaken for deliberate insincerity. Hence it appears that the dishonesty of which he has often been accused, resolves itself into the seeming dishonesty of an orator who is also a man of action, or (let us say) of a statesman who often unwittingly has recourse to compromises such as he has often eloquently de- nounced; it is, in fact, dishonesty smiulated by impassioned honesty. For, in very truth, a saintly enthusiast, seeking to practise all that he has preached, is trying to maintain himself on a level too high for human nature (ceratis ope Daedalea Nititur pennis)} 1 The difficulty of keeping aloft, during a long period, at the enthusiastically moral, or rather at the apostolic, level is set forth by Kenan forcibly, though doubtless with some exaggeration. Referring to the protracted and checquered career of Mahomet, and apparently making at the same time an indirect allusion to the early death of One greater than Mahomet, he observes : ' * L'homme TALKS WITH Mil. GLADSTONE 35 With this intensity, born of oratorical sensibility, was closely connected another aspect of Mr. Glad- stone's mind, which must be mentioned as throwinpr light on certain parts of his conversations with me. He was not affected or afflicted with that need of laughing to prevent weeping, with that mingled sense of world-humour and of world-pathos — in short, with that appetite for the incongruous — which is a characteristic product of decadence, and which, like a fair plant springing up from a manured soil, derives much of its sustenance from the noisome tragedies of life. Indeed, he had no toleration — I had almost said no comprehension — of that Epicurean and, so to say, Renanesque quality which French writers call "ironie " and Bagehot has called "pleasant cynicism." Perhaps I should be merely expressing the same thought in other words if I were to say that, liimself demanding much from human nature, he had no sympathy or patience with those who demanded little from it. In short, he would not, like Pope, have declared the "ninth beatitude" to be " Blessed is he who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed." Rather would he have agreed with Kingsley in calling that a " devil's beatitude." It is not necessary to dwell further on tins side of Mr. Gladstone's character. Suffice it to say that his rooted aversion to cynicism and scepticism of all sorts may serve to explain the tone est trop faible pour porter longtemps la mission divine, et ceux-lh, seuls sont immacul^s que Dieu a bientot d^charg^s du fardeau de Tapostolat.' 36 TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE of some of his observations recorded in the sequel. Especially may it account for the severity with which he spoke to me of Talleyrand, and even of Matthew Arnold, and for his earnest exhortation to keep alive the sense of sin. Dean Swift, hearing someone described as "a fine old man," petulantly exclaimed: "A fine old man ? There is no such thing. If the man you speak of had either a mind or a body worth a farthing, they would have worn him out long ago." Could such an inhuman outcry of despair have proceeded from anyone who had known our wise orator and statesman when the mellowing hand of time had passed upon him, and who had felt, when the news came that he too had gone to his rest in the eternal, how sad was the loss, not to his friends only, but to his country ? Personally, I have often thought that the noble, if somewhat invidious, tribute of praise which was originally bestowed on Tiresias, and which Cato applied to the younger Scipio, could be transferred to the veteran Gladstone — *''0/y weirvvaOai, toI bh aKcal at(xaovvs that might help us in our sorrows." 44 TALKS WITH ME. GLADSTONE the science of " pre-history " is quite new ; and he went on to remark that the Basques pay greater respect to women now than anyone in Europe paid to them in the Middle Ages. He spoke of the English literature of the nine- teenth century as " quite extraordinary." He thought this strange, " because of the Elizabethan outburst." He said that there had been practically continuity, and that this was very rare, and was, moreover, a great disadvantage to living poets. No book now- adays produces an excitement at all equal to that caused by Walter Scott's novels. The nearest approach was the interest shown in Tennyson's last poems; but this was not at all equal to the interest awakened by Scott. A young lady present sprung a mine by saying that Scott was dull, and adding that she got more pleasure from Thackeray and George Eliot. She was more flattered than provoked by the half angry earnestness with which Mr. Gladstone said, "We shall never agree about novels." The young lady then said that she would recognise Maggie Tulliver if she spoke to her, but that she would not recognise one of Scott's heroines. Scott's queens seemed to her, like a child's notions of a queen, and to have nothing distinctive. " What, does he make no difference between Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth ? " he asked indignantly. She inquired what modern novels he admired. He replied by calling Mr. Baring Gould's Mehalah a very powerful novel ; but he seemed to think that TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE 45 novels are now too much the rage. He spoke of the late Lord de Tablcy as having written good poetry which is not read, and bad novels which are read. We went on to discuss the general question of how far Scott's heroes and heroines are lifelike. It seemed to me that this question could be illus- trated by referring to the more extreme case of epic and tragic heroes. For example, the Homeric iEneas, after challenging Achilles, inflicted on him a somewhat irrelevant versified discourse; and (stranger still) the great Achilles, although in a hurry to kill as many Trojans as possible, listened patiently to his enemy's tedious harangue, instead of vanquishing him at once. So, likewise, Shake- speare represents Prince Arthur, after taking his fatal leap from the Tower, as breathing out his soul in a rhyming couplet. In view of such instances of untimely versification, one was tempted jocularly to say that the heroes of poetry combined the eccentricities of mosquitoes and of swans: they sing before they molest, and they sing before they die! Seriously, if those inopportunely poetical heroes are called natural and lifelike, what poetical heroes can be called unnatural? Do not these considerations apply literally to the heroes of Scott's poems ? and do not similar considerations apply, though of course in a far less degree, to the somewhat rhetorical and tall-talking heroes and heroines of Scott's novels ? Mr. Gladstone's reply was, in effect, that Scott's 46 TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE writings are in "the grand style." He compared them to the paintings of Raphael and of the Old Masters generally; and he went on to say that the pictures of the Royal Academy recall more exactly the men and women in modern novels and life. He added that you have no right to like a book better because you are in sympathy with it ; on that principle, you would prefer the Royal Academy to the National Gallery. He might have gone a step further. " I know nothing of painting, and detest it," writes Byron, '' unless it reminds me of something I have seen or think it possible to see." Probably the great majority of the persons who saunter through picture galleries would, if they had Byron's candour, avow that they share his sentiments. These formalists and art-pretenders, while they feel bound (as the phrase is) to "do" the National Gallery, really derive more pleasure from the Royal Academy ; and, wiutatis mutandis^ they correspond to the startlingly large class of readers who prefer novels descriptive of common life to the novels of Scott. Mr. Gladstone was evidently not well up in Browning; but he said that it was plain that Browning must be a remarkable man : he had got hold of the reading public ; the existence of Browning Societies showed how much trouble people would take to learn the "grammar" of his language. Passing on to Mr. George Meredith, he said that one of his daughters had made him begin Diana of the Crosswa.ys ; but he evidently stuck in it. TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE 47 He thought that Scott was the greatest delineator of human character next to Plomer and Shakespeare. He remarked that in Italy there had been a revival of poetry in Leopardi and others. He maintained that there was a want of "harmony" in George Eliot's novels: "she makes such absurd people marry one another. Why did Adam Bede marry Dinah ? " Is it, one cannot but ask, an objection to a novel that it makes the wrong people marry? If it is, does not the objection apply as much to Kenilworth or The Bride of Laon'inerjiioor as to Adavi Bede'? Surely in all such cases the novelist is simply realistic. He is seeking to embody in fiction the Horatian sentiment which is only too often justified by experience — "Sic visum Veneri, cui placet im pares Formas atque animos sub juga aenea Ssevo mittere cum joco."^ After talking of American novelists and con- trasting them with Scott, Mr. Gladstone said that an American had declared that he did not suppose that there were ten men in Boston equal to Shakespeare. This reminds me that I was once assured by an old Indian judge that he had himself heard a Baboo student ingenuously declare that he had been read- ing Shakespeare and Milton, and hoped soon to produce a poem which would combine the merits of both ! Mr. Gladstone went on to mention some curious ^ "Thus it hath seemed good to Venus, who loveth with cruel jest unequally to yoke together forms and minds unmeet." 48 TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE "survivals." In Yorkshire are two places, Boston and Appleton, called by people on the other side of a ridge Bosby and Appleby. In the same neighbour- hood the same family was called indiscriminately " — ton " and " — by." He regarded this as a survival of an old state of things. He spoke of an odd tenure in land in the Highlands, the land not being held in common, but divided periodically, he thought annually. Keferring to a report in the newspapers that the Comte de Paris acquiesced in the Bepublic, he said he was glad of it. A few years ago especially, when there were so many claimants to the French throne, the conduct of those claimants was "not mischievous merely, but ridiculous." He thought that the Franco-German War was almost entirely the act of the Emperor. The heads of departments had been asked about the general feeling in their own districts, and had in almost each instance answered that it was unfavourable to war; and even in the exceptional instances the feeling for war was described as lukewarm. One of the guests rejoined that he himself had been in Paris when the war was declared, and that then the feeling for it seemed to be very strong. Mr. Gladstone replied that Paris no doubt was more warlike than the provinces, but that it was very easy for the Govern- ment to excite a seeming enthusiasm. He referred to a caricature which appeared at the time, and which represented the words " Ferme jusqu' a la prise de Berlin" as written over the shop of a cobbler TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE 49 who had opposed the war. I asked about plebiscites. He replied : " The plebiscite was a mere imposture, an enemy to hberty. No alternative to the Empire was proposed; so that those who voted for the Empire were choosing between it and anarchy." I asked about the unpopularity of the Emperor Frederick and the Empress. He said that she tried too ostentatiously to Anglicise Germany; and that Frederick, during his three months, had not time to accustom the Germans to a complete change of policy. Mr. Gladstone knew from experience how little can be done in three months. He added that the Germans have had no history of their own for a long time, and this makes them extra-sensitive about foreign innovations. Might not this argument of his be turned the other way? Would not a nation with a satisfactory history have at least as good a cause to complain of imported institutions ? I spoke of the unexpectedly friendly attitude which had recently been adopted by the young Emperor towards England. Mr. Gladstone seemed not over confident about this. I asked about the fall of Bismarck. Gladstone. — " According to English notions, Bis- marck was clearly wrong ; he insisted on his subor- dinates not communicating with the Emperor, except through him." Tollemache. — " Would it make much difference in England if this were done ? " G. — " Immense ; but I find it difficult to give the reason. The working of the English Cabinet can 4 50 TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE hardly be understood ah extra. It grew by degrees, and its history is unrecorded. The best account of it is in Morley's monograph on Sir Robert Walpole." He explained that he did not mean that the subordinate Ministers could appeal to the Crown against the Prime Minister. If they differed from him, of course they would have to resign ; but, in the ordinary discharge of their official duties, they could not be expected to submit all despatches to him. He said that in the Life of the Prince Consort a great exception is recorded. He thought that this occurred in 1851. Lord John Russell, then Prime Minister, insisted on seeing Lord Palmerston's despatches. Mr. Gladstone regretted that he had never cross-questioned Lord John about this. Lord John was well up in constitutional law and custom ; and Mr. Gladstone supposed that he meant his conduct to be regarded as entirely exceptional and pro re nata. I asked him what he thought of Lord Palmerston as a speaker. G. — " He had a happy faculty of making his words exactly fit his meaning. This does not sound a very uncommon thing ; but it really is so. People are so apt to say more than they mean. Parnell is another striking instance of the same guardedness of expression." T. — " My father was much struck by the speaking of Mr. Lowe." G. — " In 1866 Lowe was quite at the top of the tree." TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE 51 January 2, 1892. — Mr. and Mrs. Gladstone dined with us. I said the old grace, Benedictus henedicat, and added that Charles Austin used always to say it. Mr. Gladstone remarked that it was adopted in the Nonconformist College at Oxford. He expressed great satisfaction at there being such a College, or rather two such ; and he wished there was a Roman Catholic one. He said that Newman and the more liberal Catholics wished for one. He regarded the reputed Editor of the Spectator (Mr Hutton) as being, at least since Matthew Arnold's death, the first of our critics. Since his own policy had been each week attacked in the Spectator, he had left off taking it in. He said that this was due to his great regard for the Editor : " I found that reading those weekly attacks tended, to use a vulgar term, to establish a raw." I told the stor}^ that Matthew Arnold, when asked what he thought of Robert Elsmere, replied, "No Arnold could ever write a novel. Otherwise / should have written one ! " G. — " I have been told that Arnold did not con- sider that Robert Elsmere went far enough." T. — "Arnold's theology, I should say, was more negative than Robert Elsmere's. But he clung to the Church as the .symbol of his spiritual life ; he was less of a Theist, but more of a Christian. He was a Neo-Christian, or rather a Neo- Anglican." G. — "I understand that Matthew Arnold con- 52 TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE sidered himself so far an Anglican as to take part in the discussions in Sion College." T. — " I know that he used to take the Sacrament." Being asked what he thought of Lord Rosebery's Life of Pitt, he said that he agreed with the first part of that work, but not with the second. He considered himself a Pittite in regard to the first part of Pitt's career, but a Foxite in regard to the second part. I expressed some surprise at Lord Holland's having protested against Napoleon's being sent to St. Helena. G. — "I believe that Napoleon narrowly escaped being shot, and I understand that Wellington was in favour of his execution. But I am glad that his life was spared." T. — "I believe that this was also the wish of Blucher. How was it that, if the two generals were thus agreed, Napoleon escaped ? " Q. — " The Emperor of Austria was naturally op- posed to the execution of his own son-in-law ; and I believe that, in spite of all that Russia had suffered, the Czar was of the same mind." T. — "Charles Austin would not have minded if Napoleon had been shot after Waterloo. The bloodshed after the return from Elba was more due to Napoleon than to Ney or Labedoyere." G. — "I am not defending the execution of Ney. At the same time, I think that much might have been urofed in favour of Austin's view. But the evils of the French Revolution, and even of the First Empire, TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE 53 should in great part be laid to the account of Louis XIV. and xv., and even of Richelieu. These de- stroyed the sense of duty and of public spirit among Frenchmen. The Terrorists were merely the funguses which sprang up in the corrupt soil." In regard to this reasoning I am tempted to object that, if it may be pleaded in excuse for Robes- pierre and Napoleon that their misdemeanours were in some sort the outcome of previous conditions, may not the same plea be urged on behalf of Richelieu and the Bourbons? In fact, the shield of Philo- sophical Necessity should be cast over every one, or over no one. Especially should we bear in mind that the tyrannical acts of rulers bear some sort of relation to the passivity of the masses. The guilt of Phalaris, when he roasted shipwrecked mariners alive in his sonorous bull, was to some degree shared by his subjects, who tolerated, if they did not enjoy, the pastime of the vfjjvog avfjuvog, of the hideous melody of murder. A less extreme example of the solidarity that subsists between rulers and ruled is well indicated by Cassius in Julius Cccsar — "And why should Caesar be a tyrant then? Poor man ! I know he would not be a wolf, But that he sees the Romans are but sheep : He were no lion, were not the Romans hinds." G. — "Napoleon at St. Helena used to protest against being compared with Cromwell ; he used to say that he had not cut off his king's head, but had merely appeared as the Saviour of Society. Well, it was the Allied Powers, and especially the English, 54 TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE who, by making war on the French, frustrated every attempt of the Republic to set up a durable Government. And in the meantime the English labourer was impoverished. In 1812 he was ten times worse off than he now is. He received only half his present wages, and he had to pay five times as much for bread. At one time corn rose to 21s. a bushel; while now, or at least during the past few years, and until quite lately, he had only to pay 4s. a bushel." Mr. Gladstone urged me to read the Memoirs of Marbot, who had unusual opportunities of seeing Napoleon at close quarters. He admitted, indeed, that Marbot sometimes drew the long-bow, as when he described himself as more than a match for three Englishmen. I compared this with the complete victory won by three Frenchmen over three English men in Les trois Mousquetaires. Mr. Gladstone more appropriately contrasted it with the assertion in Henry V., that one Englishman is a match for three Frenchmen. Charles Kean had told him that, before Magenta and Solferino, the gallery always clapped this passage. After those French victories the clap- ping ceased. Mr. Gladstone quoted this as speaking well for the good sense and fairness of the English people. Is there anything to be urged on the opposite side of the question? At any rate, I am tempted to supplement Mr. Gladstone's view by quoting, for what it is worth, an extract from one of Chesterfield's Letters: "That silly, sanguine notion, which is TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE 55 firmly entertained here, that one Englishman can beat three Frenchmen, encourages, and has sometimes enabled, one Englishman in reality to beat two." The conversation passed on to English politics and lawyers. T. — " My uncle, Lord Mount Temple, used to tell me that lawyers generally fail in Parliament. Was not Cockburn an exception ? " G. — " Cockburn's reputation in Parliament was founded on a single speech, in defence of Lord Palmers ton. Take the case of another great lawyer. Sir George Jessel discussed legal questions with beautiful clearness, but became a mere partizan when discussing politics." T. — "Lord Lansdow^ne once told Charles Austin that he thought Bright, as an orator, fully equal to Charles Fox." This seemed to surprise Mr. Gladstone. I referred to Sheridan's "Begum Speech " as having been ill reported. G. — " The speeches in Parliament are ill reported even now. Questions asked before debate are accurately given; but, as for the rest, I can only apply to the reports what Kingsley said to the friend who consulted him about his poems, 'They are not good, but bad.' This is creditable to the reporters as men." He apparently meant that the reporters thus show that they take a human interest in what they hear and write. G. — "The very same reporters would do their work much better in the country. It takes me twice as long to correct a speech in Parliament as 56 TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE to correct one of equal length in the country." He even complained of the inaccuracy of the reports of speeches in the Times; but other M.P/s have spoken to me far more favourably of these reports in the Times. They think that Mr. Gladstone's difficulty in getting his speeches well reported, arose from the fact that at this time of his life he had, except when strongly excited, lost somewhat of his clear articulation. G. — "Canning's speeches, as published in their collected form, are very different from what they were as originally reported." I asked him if he had heard Canning's famous speech which was delivered in 1826, when the independence of the Spanish Colonies in the West was acknowledged by Great Britain, and which contained the exultant phrase, " I called the New World into existence to redress the balance of the Old." G. — "No. I did not hear that speech but I heard two earlier ones. One was at Liverpool in 1822. It was called the 'Red Lion' speech. In this speech Canning satirised those who made reform a panacea, by comparing them to the painter who could paint nothing but red lions. In boudoirs small red lions were painted, in drawing-rooms bigger ones. Personally, I feel some sympathy with the people thus satirised. Another speech of Canning which I heard, contained a prediction of the future greatness of Lord John Russell; it was (in effect): 'I doubt not that the noble lord will TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE 57 become great, and that his principles will triumph ; but, for myself, I am proud to be on the losing side/" I quoted Victrix causa dels placuit, sed victa Gatoni, and might more appropriately have quoted the exclamation of Brutus after the battle of Philippi — "I shall have glory by this losing day, More than Octavius and Mark Antony By this vile conquest shall attain unto."* Mr. Gladstone spoke of Bethell and Newman as the two most subtle masters of English prose of our time. He said that, in the affair of Sir John Bowring, the Government consulted its law oflficers as to Sir John's conduct towards China. Wortley, the Solicitor-General, seemed to think the case doubtful; but Bethell declared that Sir John had not a leg to stand upon. Afterwards he was called upon in Parliament to defend the Government, and so acute an observer as Sir Erskine May expressed an opinion that he had made out a strong case. I remarked that the view taken of Lord Lyndhurst by Miss Martineau and Walter Bagehot was anything but flattering ; and I mentioned the incident which was afterwards recorded in my article called " Lord Tollemache and his Anecdotes." " Charles ^ I am sorry that I did not repeat, in this relation, the lines from Addison's Cato, which Mr. Gladstone's hero, Sir Walter Scott, when taking up ineflectual arms against a sea of trouhles, manfully applied to himself — *"Tis not in mortals to command success, But we'll do more, Sempronius, we'll deserve it." 58 TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE Austin related a fact illustrative of the bitter indig- nation which prevailed among the Whigs when Copley, like another Strafford, suddenly 'ratted' and turned Tory. So extreme was this resentment that Denman told his servant that, if his old friend called, he was not to be admitted. In spite of the servant, the future Lord Lyndhurst made his way to the door of Denman's chambers, and shouted from outside, 'Let me at least beg that, if you are asked about my change of opinions, you will say that it was honest.' 'If I am asked about your change of opinions,' was the reply from within, ' I will say that you say it was honest.' " ^ Mr. Gladstone cautiously replied that Lord Lynd- hurst was something of a statesman, and that he understood that his legal decisions carried weight. r.— " My father told me that he had heard Peel speak with high praise of what he termed Cobden's ' unadorned eloquence.' ^ I only once heard Cobden speak, and he seemed to me then to be very wanting in fluency ; he could not hit upon the right word. But this was shortly before he died ; and my father afterwards told me that he had never before known him to be so unsuccessful." G. — " I never knew Cobden pause for a word ; it ^ Fortnightly Review, July 1892, p. 74. 2 The classical reader will be reminded of the praise bestowed by Cicero on Caesar's eloquence, which he describes as bare of all ornament, like an undraped human figure {tanquam veste detracta). I am tempted to quote in this jjlace the actual words employed by Peel about Cobden's eloquence : "It is the more to be admired because it is unaffected and unadorned." TALKS WITH MK. GLADSTONE 59 must have been most exceptional. But he was wanting in quickness of perception. I remember his making a speech shortly before the Repeal of the Corn Laws; and on that occasion Peel, who seldom bestowed high praise, muttered, 'This is admirable.' But in this very speech Cobden went on to make use of a very unfortunate illustration : 'My honourable friend, the member for Rochdale, manufactures long yams at a low price ! ' " We talked about Bright ; and I mentioned that I had heard his very line speech at the dinner given to Mr. Garrison after the conclusion of the American Civil War. Mr. Gladstone rejoined that Bright approved of the American War, and seemingly of that war only. Bright had seen that, although the Northern States were not in the first instance consciously fighting against slavery, the practical result of the war would be to abolish slavery ; and he had seen this when hardly anyone else did. T. — " Do you suppose that the condition of the slaves was as bad as might be gathered from Uncle Tom's Cabin ? " G. — " So far as physical suffering is concerned, I think the picture is too darkly coloured. Mrs. Beecher Stowe has combined all the worst details which were reported in various quarters. I will not say that she was morally to blame for this exaggera- tion; it was probably necessary for artistic effect. But I hold the great evil of slavery to have been, not physical suffering, but moral debasement. It degrades God's human creatures below the human 60 TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE level" He also spoke of the bad effect on the masters, who were sinking lower and lower. I men- tioned Chief Justice Shea, U.S.A., as having told me that the negroes are now becoming more and more helpless. Mr. Gladstone, after earnestly recapitulat- ing the chief evils of slavery, such as the separation of families, etc., said that there was no doubt that it furnished some beautiful examples of faithful devo- tion. He confirmed the Chief Justice's opinion as to the present condition of the negroes, by the example of San Domingo, where they are reported (he believed on good authority) to be sinking into brutal idolatry, and even cannibalism. He said that evidence bearing in the same direction had been given him by a coloured President of the Liberian Republic. I reminded him that, twenty- eight years before, he had told me of some coloured man who had struck him, not merely by his intelli- gence, but also by his refined manners. He replied that this was probably the very man. He then suddenly looked startled, and exclaimed, " A formid- able memory ! " He went on to ask whether it was "a naturally strong memory which had been hardened and stimulated by practice." I compared it to a strong current which is made stronger by being forced to run in a narrow channel. My eye- sight, I explained, limits the range of my reading, and cuts me off" from the newspapers, and from many sources of observation. Thus my memory is concentrated upon a few subjects. G. — "Archbishop Benson remarked to me in TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE 61 conversation, that most men's memories are much impaired by the daily practice of reading the news- papers, and of skimming over a variety of un- connected subjects." I asked him whether it was true that he ascribed his own good health to the practice of masticating his food twenty times. He said that, when his children were young, he told them that, when eating, they should think of four bars of common time written in quavers ; by which, as he explained to my unmusical ear, he meant that they were to bite each mouthful thirty-two times ; but he looked upon this as a counsel of perfection. He ate very slowly. I was surprised by this, as he talked so much. Montaigne, who never reached old age, had to increase mastication when he had passed middle life, and found it a bar to talking. Mr. Gladstone added that he had other rules for the preservation of health. He felt the importance of Sunday rest. I asked. Did he get rest in listen- ing to long sermons ? He interrupted, " They are not often long now ; but I do not like to hear more than one sermon which makes me think." He also found that a change of subjects was rest. He had acquired the power of keeping his mind off politics after he was in bed. When Bright was ill, he mentioned this to him. Bright rejoined, "This is just when I think of my speeches." He said that Bright's imprudence about health had been " abominable ! " He thought that men of active minds and of a certain age would do w^ell to consult some first- 62 TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE rate London doctor by way of taking preventive measures : " I do not say any doctor in particular ; but let it be a first-rate one." I cross-questioned him further about Bright. He told me that Andrew Clark, when Bright went to consult him, asked, " To what do I owe the honour of seeing you ? " Bright answered, " Mr. Gladstone made me come. He would give me no peace." After consulting Andrew Clark, he had no more of his nervous attacks. Mr. Glad- stone added that he himself, under orders, had given up bitter beer, which he called a " divine drink " (hloU 'TTOTOV). I asked about Dizzy, and quoted this phrase, once used by him about the Liberal leaders when their Government had been beaten : " I see before me a ranp'e of extinct volcanoes." ^ G. — " Dizzy did not show at his best during the last twenty years of his life. But he showed great ability when attacking Peel. Mind, I am not weighing his sayings in the moral scales ; but they certainly showed great ability." T. — " I understand that Shell spoke of the falling ^ I reported this incicleut to Mr. Gladstone as it had been tokl to me by a living statesman, who, I understood, had been present. Hayward gives a different account of it. He quotes the following extract from a speech delivered by Disraeli at Manchester: "As I sat opposite the Treasury bench, the Ministers reminded me of one of those marine landscapes not very unusual on the coasts of South America. You behold a range of exhausted volcanoes. ISTot a flame flickers on a single pallid crest. But the situation is still dangerous. There are occasional earthquakes, and ever and anon the dark rumbling of the sea." Can Dizzy have used this metaphor twice r TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE 63 off of Disraeli's eloquence after Peel's death, and compared him to a dissecting surgeon without a corpse." G. — " I will give one or two examples of his witty attacks on Peel. Speaking of the Maynooth Grant, he said of Peel: 'To what end is it that he thus convulses tlie country ? That the Maynooth students may lie two in a bed instead of lying three in a bed.' ^ I will not deny that Maynooth was pauper- ised. But I will pass on to another example : Disraeli charged Peel with tracing the steam-engine back to the tea-kettle ! " I suppose that by this illustration Dizzy meant that Peel was too much in the habit of discussino^ political questions on first principles. Mr. Gladstone went on to express surprise that the steam-engine was so long in being invented. I found that he did not know tliat there was a toy steam-engine in the Alexandrine Museum. He asked its date. I looked the question up, and afterwards informed him that Hero of Alex- andria, in his Pneumatica (p..c. 130), says that he invented a steam apparatus for opening and shutting the great doors of a temple, and a toy globe which revolved by reaction from escaping steam. He wanted to ask me about Butler, but remarked, ^ Can Dizzy, when he used this metaphor, have been thinking of the son of the Vicar of Wakefiekl, who, being fain to embark on a tutorial career, was advertised of divers inconveniences of ushenlom ? " * Can you lie three in a bed ? ' ' No ! ' * Then you won't do for a school.' " 64 TALKS WITH ME. GLADSTONE with a smile, " I fear that the time is short, as the question comprises the whole of conduct. I don't wish to speak disrespectfully of a great critic ; but, when Matthew Arnold speaks of conduct as com- prising 75 per cent, of life, he seems to me to have spoken sheer nonsense." T. — "Surely he did not intend it to be taken quite seriously." O. — " Probably not ; but, if he had not meant something, he would hardly have said it." T. — "Do you mean that, in assigning three- quarters of life to conduct, he assigned too much or too little ? " O. — " Too little. Conduct comprises the whole of life." T. — " He divides the other quarter of life between Science and Art. Surely, therefore, when speak- ing of conduct, he uses the word in a technical sense as equivalent to moral conduct; he is re- ferring to le bien as opposed to le beau and le vrai." Mr. Gladstone said that this was probably so; but he did not seem satisfied. He complained of my having spoken in Stones of Stumbling of Nature as being neither moral nor immoral, but "outside morality"; and asked how I applied this to the formation of good and bad habits. I said that the natural capacity of forming good habits, and the advantage resulting from their formation, may have been what Matthew Arnold had in view when he defined God as "the Eternal, not ourselves, that TALKS WITH ME. GLADSTONE 65 makes for righteousness." Mr. Gladstone seemed to dissent from that definition. Keturning to the objection which he had made to my statement, that Nature is non-moral, I quoted Horace's well-known lines to the effect that piety grants no delay to wrinkles and old age. I insisted that, in regard to such visitations as earthquakes, and indeed to all agencies lying beyond human control. Nature is callously impartial in her treatment of good and bad men. The readers of the Record are, on an average, a more pious and praying class than the readers of the Times; and yet, after carefully studying the advertisements in these two journals, Mr. Francis Galton has discovered that the pro- portion of still births to ordinary births announced in the two journals is exactly the same; which is the more noteworthy as expectant mothers, in proportion as they are religious, are wont to be especially diligent in praying that their offspring may live. Mr. Gladstone's answer to me was on this wise : " Notwithstanding the apparently ir- regular distribution of temporal goods in this world, it is, I suppose, undeniable that godliness hath the promise of the life that now is, so far at least that good men, on the whole, have a happier lot than bad ones. If, in reply, we say that there are unexplained and grievous inequalities notwith- standing, may not the rejoinder be : (1) Philo- sophically, that it is unreasonable to suppose that the entire scheme of God's government would be within the comprehension of beings such as the 5 66 TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE generality of men, or even of the most considerable ; (2) morally, in the words of Dante — * Or tu clii sei, clie vuoi sedere a scranna, Per giudicar da lungi mille miglia Con la veduta corta d'una spanna ? ' There is a very startling passage quoted by Southey from John Wesley, in his Life, where Wesley predicts that his followers, converted from vice and ignorance to be sober and regular in life, will infallibly become well-to-do, and will thereby fall into a new set of dangers and temptations. Were any man able humbly and intelligently to say that he had been treated worse than he deserved, this might be supposed to set up a case for him. But I am not such a man, having been treated, not worse, but far better ; so that I cannot travel by his road, even supposing it to be passable. The general experience of mankind seems to offer a firmer basis for indubitable argument than a comparison of the advertisements in the Record or the Times. And, as regards the nee 2netas moram, surely it is undeniable that what we call the virtuous man most commonly lives longer than those of opposite character." In this and other discussions with my revered friend, I was naturally often the victim, not exactly of an arguTYientuTn ad verecundiam, but of a silen- tium oh verecundiam. But naturally, also, my dim religious awe of him has abated with time ; and I will therefore comment on one portion of what I cannot but regard as his inconclusive reasoning. In what sense can a man be treated by Providence TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE 67 " better " than he deserves ? The needs of society compel us to annex suffering, not to all sins, but to crimes, as a punishment, or rather as a deterrent; but, apart from social needs, sin and suffering are incommensurable quantities. Is it not, therefore, as unmeaning to talk of an absolute rela- tion between so much sin and so much suffering, or between so much virtue and so much happiness, as to talk of the distance between the 1st of January and Westminster Bridge ? Present politics, it will be seen, have been hitherto barely touched upon. But, as Mr. Gladstone without present politics seems like the play without the part of Hamlet, I will here add that he afterwards expressed his conviction to one of my guests that at no distant time, not only will Home Rule in Ireland have been carried, but people will have a difficulty in understanding the state of mind which postponed the carrying of it so long. I asked Mr. Gladstone again about Marbot's Memoirs ; and we fell to talking of the first Napoleon, for whom he entertained a quasi-admiration which took me by surprise. An Epicurean God, if he had deigned to bestow a thought on the inhabitants of our planet, would doubtless have regarded Napoleon as the Goliath of Lilliput, as the biggest ant in the ant-hill, and, in a word, as somewhat less insignificant and contemptible than his fellows. Such sages as Bacon and Goethe would have shared this view to the extent of thinking that, in our estimate of human achievements generally, as in our estimate 68 TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE of architecture, mere bulk must count for some- thing. But a saint or a stern moralist would naturally have looked upon the great conqueror as a murderer on a huge scale, who ought to have been executed when convicted of his first crime. It was, therefore, very interesting to me to observe that Mr. Gladstone seemed to feel — what nearly all men of imao^ination sometimes feel — an odd sort of sympathy even with such greatness as Napoleon's : with greatness divorced from goodness, with force which not merely makes history exciting (ut pueris placeas) but also stirs up the stagnant pools of civilisation. I quoted to Mr. Gladstone the ex- clamation reported by Wellington as having been uttered by Talleyrand when someone, on hearing of Napoleon's death, called out, " Quel evenement ! " " Ce n'est plus un evenement," replied the master of epigram ; " Ce n'est qu'une nouvelle." Mr. Gladstone did not like this saying, which he criticised as fol- lows : — " Your anecdote about Talleyrand is singu- larly illustrative of the man, and of the blinding power of a cynical habit of mind. See how this nouvelle struck Manzoni, who thus describes the blank left in the world by the departure of that Giant : — ' Ei fu ; Siccome immobile, Dato il mortal sospiro, Stette la spoglia immemore Orba di tanto spiro, Cos! percossa, attonita. La terra al nunzio sta ; Muta pensando all* ultima Ora deir uom fatale, TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE 69 Ne sa quando una simile Orma di pie mortale La sua cruenta polvere A calpestar verra.' This is the noble beginning of Manzoni's noble ode called the Cinque Maggio." ^ This ode of Manzoni on the death of Napoleon Mr. Gladstone pronounced to be the best thing that was written on the subject. lie thought Byron's ode a failure; and, on my demurring, he said it was certainly not equal to Manzoni's. Goethe had paid Manzoni the compliment of translating the ode into German ; but the translation was not equal to the original. At this point I cannot forbear asking: Was Talleyrand's exclamation really cynical ? In saying that Napoleon's death, occurring when it did, was merely une nouvelle, he was speaking the exact truth. Was it un- generous of him to give utterance to that truth? Or should we not rather say that he was pointing the finger, not at Napoleon in exile, but at the contrast between Napoleon in exile and Napoleon in power, and at the caprice of Fortune by which the bewildering change had been brought about ? In fact, he was laying stress on the tragic pathos of the great Emperor's career, and indirectly at the fragility of human greatness (Insignem attenuat Dews). So that, when he thus contemplated **The Desolator desolate. The Victor overthrown " ^ This ode was translated by Mr. Gladstone. 70 TALKS WITH ME. GLADSTONE or, if you will, Finem aninice quce res humanas "iuiscuit olini, he was only expressing, in regard to Napoleon, the sentiment which Juvenal expressed about Hannibal, Johnson about Charles xii., and Scott about Richard i. — "He left a name at which the world grew pale, To point a moral or adorn a tale." January 2nd,lS9S. — The Gladstones dined with us. Mr. Gladstone never saw such a grand sea and such sheets of foam as on the shore of Biarritz; and he thought that, if Tennyson had seen it, he would have written about it. He is of opinion that Professor Bryce, in his account of the social aspects of America, has not dwelt enouo:h on the influence of wealth. He thinks that the "era of wealth," i.e. of colossal fortunes, is setting in; and he regrets it. He spoke of Mr. A as reported to have two and a half millions a year : " The Duke of Westminster is a pauper to him ! " He expected that in a century's time the chief landed estates in England would still be intact. He spoke of one of his own farmers as beginning with a small farm and borrowing money to work it, and as now being able to pay his way. An Essex farmer had sent to Mr. Gladstone jars of jam in token of gratitude. I spoke of genius as being often one-sided. G. — " No. Talent is ; genius is not." Seeincf that I looked unconvinced, he asked me for an example of lopsided genius. I put tlie case of Milton. TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE 71 G. — " Oh, he is an exception to all rules. He is an enigma — quite inexplicable." He spoke in extremely strong terms against Milton's ideas of divorce which suited so ill with his Puritanism. He objected to the assertion in Paradise Regained that the Greeks had borrowed everything from the Jews. I remarked that even the greatest men are under the influence of the traditions of their time. 0. — "I cannot admit that about Milton. If he had consistently kept to those traditions, I would. But when he broke loose from them completely by writing as he did on divorce, he can no longer be excused on that ground." I cited Shelley as a one-sided man of genius ; but Mr. Gladstone declined to admit the validity of this instance, on the ground that Shelley, dying youug, never quite " broke loose from the egg,shell." I was at the time preparing my article on " Sir Richard Owen and Old World Memories," which was afterwards published in the National Revieio (July 1893). Mr. Gladstone furnished me with a few reminiscences of Owen, which were inserted in the article by his kind permission. It is enough for my present purpose to mention that he said to me, in reference to Owen, that seldom, if ever, had any man of science left on his mind such an im- pression of genius — not talent merely, but genius. Darwin had struck him in the same sort of way ; but Darwin he had only met once in society. And he went on to explain that on the comparative 72 TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE merits of the two men of science he offered no opinion; but that, so far as his personal observa- tion was concerned, Owen was the one who seemed to him to bear the stamp of genius most un- mistakably. T. — "Would you not also say that Huxley is unmistakably a man of genius ? " 0. — "Certainly not. Huxley has talent to any amount, but not genius. One of the younger men of science, Romanes, has struck me a good deal. I should say that he has genius." With the greatest possible respect for Romanes, I was certainly startled at finding him (like the Prince Consort in the Albert Memorial) thus exalted over the heads of his fellows. The orthodox tend- ency of his later years may partly explain his being set above Huxley; but why did his distinguished critic prefer him even to those scientific men who were of the same way of thinking ? May not this preference have been in some measure due to the fact that Mr. Gladstone regarded Romanes as, not merely a Christian, but as a proselyte, nay, as a re- converted pervert? In a word, is it not probable that there is joy among Anglicans over one heretic that recanteth more than over ninety and nine orthodox persons who need no recantation? Per- haps, after all, a recanting heretic is especially interesting because he is thought to be not quite safe, — to be, as it were, a brand pluckahle from the burning. It may be worth adding in this connexion that I TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE 73 once heard Jowett express a doubt whether Mr. Gladstone himself could properly be called a man of genius. An orator of genius, he said, utters many words and phrases which linger in men's memory, and hardly any word or phrase so linger- ing has been uttered by Mr. Gladstone. Surely this is too narrow a test. The faculty of phrase-making is no more the touchstone of genius than is many- sidedness of mind in the siiJ^nification which Mr. Gladstone would have attached to that term, a signi- fication which somehow recalls the satirical saw, Sapiunt, quia sentiunt mecuTn. But, after all, was not Jowett's criticism unjust to Mr. Gladstone in another way ? Were all, or nearly all, the orator's characteristic sayings writ in ivater ? Perhaps I am paradoxical; but I am inclined to think that the very popularity of some of his epi- grammatic sallies may have lessened the permanent credit which he has obtained for them. It may be said of epigrams, as of marriageable daughters, that the cleverer and more pleasing they are, the sooner are they likely to be dissociated from the author of their being. At any rate, the most widely applicable and widely circulated epigrams of a talker or orator, as distinguished from those of a writer, are liable to be thus de-jyersonalised. This may account for the fact that so many of Mr. Gladstone's phrases have, to employ the familiar hyperbole, become Iliads without a Homer. My meaning may be illustrated by his phrases, " the sorrowful evidence of indisputable fact," " prosperity advancing by leaps and bounds," 74 TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE and " turning out the Turks, bag and baggage " ; by his (variously reported) assertion to the effect that Political Economy has now been relegated to the planet Saturn; and perhaps, too, by his allegation that a notorious event had brought a needful reform " within the range of practical politics." How many persons there are who, when they quote these and similar sayings of Mr. Gladstone, have no notion that it was he who uttered them ! The division of the population into the " classes " and the " masses " is said to have been popularised, but not originated, by him. Its real author is apparently unknown. So that here we have a wholly de-personalised epigram ; it has paid for its popularity by anonymity. Let me add that Mr. Gladstone's own expression that England is guarded by a " streak of silver sea " is often fathered on the Shakespearean John of Gaunt. This patriotic exclamation, or, as St. Paul would have said, this "confident boasting" of his, may siiggest another reflection. It is obvious to remark that the watery bulwark which he so highly valued would be, metaphorically as well as literally, under- mined b}^ the Channel Tunnel for which, as we shall see presently, he was so eager. Indeed, it must be understood, once for all, that I am not raising the question whether the Gladstonian apothegms to which I have referred were wisely and seasonably uttered. All I insist on is that they are "such stuff" as proverbs are made of; in other words, they have something about them whicli has brought them into social currency ; and they have continued TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE 75 in circulation, not because of the famous image and superscription which they originally bore, but even after that image and superscription had been gradually effaced.^ Mr. Gladstone said that the Church of England took its form from Henry viii., Elizabeth, and Laud. He thought little of Cranmer on account of his moral weakness; and not much of Latimer. He said that Latimer, when a Catholic, preached a sermon while a man was being roasted on a slow fire. G. — " I have a weakness for Latimer, all the same." Tliinking this too little praise for Latimer, I gave him (as the phrase goes) " a strange bed- fellow," by sa3dng that I had a weakness for Charles L G. — "So have I, although he was unfortunately such a liar ! " I remarked that Sliakespeare, if it had been his supreme misfortune to be one of the Stuart kings, might have found no opening for his dramatic genius, and might now be remembered only as unithig the faults of Charles I. and Charles IL The indifference with wlilcli lie refers to Prince John's treatment of the rebels in Henry IV. Part II. shows that lie had some sympathy with the view that no ^ I have lately come across a remarkable passage which gives independent, if somewhat indirect, support to the general view set forth in this paragraph. "A writer," says Johnson, "who obtains his full purpose loses himself in his OAvn lustre. ... Of an art universally practised, the first teacher is forgotten." 76 TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE engagement was binding between a king and rebel subjects. G. — "I quite agree with you; indeed, I will go further. Shakespeare seems to me to have been a worshipper of the Tudor despotism. I say this with deep regret. The three great poets of the world would, I think, generally be admitted to be Homer, Dante and Shakespeare; the Germans would add Goethe. The morality of Dante is always pure and good. Homer, too, seems always to throw our sympathies on the right side." I demurred, and mentioned the case of Dolon. G. — " That was a night march, and it was neces- sary to meet stratagem by stratagem." T. — "Diomed and Ulysses virtually promised Dolon his life, and should have spared him." G. — " We must make allowance for the morality of Homer's day, and the little value that was then set on human life." To me it seems that the principle that he thus called to his aid is of such wide application that, if it proves anything, it proves more than he intended. Either men of genius are bound to rise above the moral standard of their age, or they are not. If they are, why excuse Homer? If they are not, why condemn Shakespeare ? Mr. Gladstone said that Sir Henry Taylor, in his Correspondence, spoke of Walter Scott's moral judg- ments as being sound, but feeble. In explanation of this, Mr. Gladstone added that, while setting the power of delineating character above any other, TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE 77 he himself thought that it tended to give such " objectivity " to the view of moral and immoral con- duct as to weaken the sense of sin. He promised to send me the reference to the passage in Taylor's Correspondence ; and, as will be seen further on, he kept his word. In return, I drew his attention to the following observations of Ruskin : — ' ' It was necessary he [Sliakespeare] should lean oio way ; that he should contemplate with absolute equality of judgment the life of the court, cloister, and tavern, and be able to sympathise so com- pletely with all creatures as to deprive himself, together with his personal identity, even of his conscience, as he casts himself into their hearts. He must be able to enter into the soul of Falstatf or Shylock with no more sense of contempt or horror than Falstatf ol Shylock themselves feel for or in themselves. He must be utterly without anger, utterly without purpose ; for if a man has any serious purpose in life, that which runs counter to it, or is foreign to it, will be looked at frowningly or carelessly by him." T. — " Do you not call this passage interesting ? " G. — "I call it, not interesting merely, but won- derful." I spoke of Tennyson's admiration for the passage in Paradise Lost about "Tammuz," and for the line — **0f Abana and Pharphar, lucid streams." In regard to this line, Mr. Gladstone agreed with Tennyson, and he went on to quote with sonorous enthusiasm his favourite line in the Odyssey — ''jiir]8i TL x^''P<"'o^ avbpbs evcppalvoifxi vorjfxa,'' and spoke of this as specially fine, because the sentiment is expressed by a woman. Clearly, how- 78 TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE ever, the sentiment is not Penelope's, but Homer's. Would there not have been more point in Mr. Glad- stone's remark if he had agreed with Mr. Samuel Butler in thinking that the Odyssey was written by a woman ? He never quite forgave Walter Scott for the part he took about Queen Caroline's trial, or for his somewhat servile loyalty to "that creature George IV." Also he regarded Scott's Toryism as "silly." I asked whether such Toryism was not inevitable in such an admirer of antiquity. In reply, he expressed a wish that modern Conserva- tives had a greater love of antiquity. Lord Salis- bury had broken too much from old traditions in being at once Prime Minister and Foreign Secre- tary, and also in making Huxley a Privy Councillor. Mr. Gladstone would have preferred some other form of distinction for the great biologist. He was angry with the Conservatives for distributing G.C.B.'s broadcast before leaving office, among men who had no claim to them, and did not expect them. He said that the Liberals were equally wanting in respect for antiquity; but this was excusable in them — such a defect was their besetting sin. I dined with Mr. and Mrs. Gladstone. I quoted the Basque proverb, that "the needle, which clothes others, remains naked itself"; and applied it to France, which, while herself sub- ject to Louis Napoleon, gave free institutions to Italy. He approved of the comparison, and went TALKS WITH MK. GLADSTONE 79 on to speak oi' the dangers of the Republic. But he remarked that eacJi form of government since the Revolution had lasted lonoer than the one before. (He cannot have counted the Republic of 1848.) I said that Charles Austin used to maintain that France had lost her best chance of good government when she got rid of Louis Philippe. Mr. Gladstone said that he was inclined to judge Louis Philippe severely, as having been narrow-minded. I spoke of his Ministers, and asked whether they were not responsible for the faults of his reign. Mr. Glad- stone thought that they had acted under royal pressure, and that if Leopold had been their king the course of French history might have been different. I asked him what value he attached to the study and composition of Latin and Greek verses. I told him that Goethe advised everyone to repeat a few stanzas of good poetry daily, and added that I myself repeated one of Horace's Odes daily. He advised me to set about translating them into English verse. He had done so quite recently. A friend of Bagehot's once said of Mr. Gladstone, " He may be a good Christian, but he is an atrocious pagan." The word " pagan " is here used in a good sense. And, when it was denied that Mr. Gladstone was a good pagan, it was meant that he was not marked, as most Englishmen and philosophers of all countries are marked, by that dislike of extremes, and by those self-sufficing and self - restraining qualities which go to make up the "magnanimous 80 TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE man" portrayed by Aristotle. He was no doubt open to this charge ; yet even in him the whole- some pagan ingredient was not quite wanting. His continued study of Horace proves this. To study Horace is to learn 'nil admirari; and the prolonged effort of translating him must serve to dilute Christian with pagan modes of feeling. Mr. Gladstone found that he could write Latin verses at least as well at sixty as when he was a young man. But he had since given it up. He was in favour of keeping up Latin verses, but was not eager for compulsory English verses. He spoke of Charles Wesley as having written 120,000 lines of English verse — more than all the great epic poems of the world put together. He said there was a differ- ence of opinion about how much Wesley had written ; but he thought that 4000 hymns was a low estimate, and each of them he computed at thirty lines on an average. He thought him a much over-rated writer, " Wrestling Jacob" being the only one he cared for. Does " Wrestling Jacob," I would ask, deserve the praise it so often receives ? Does not this versified allegory, even more than the doxology after the Psalms, impress one as a sort of Vandalism, or, at least, as a jarring anachronism, by engrafting the highly-developed Catholic theology on one of the very oldest and rudest of Israelitish stocks ? I mentioned that it was my habit to repeat Tennyson's " St. Agnes' Eve," and the canto of " In Memoriam " beginning " yet we trust," on Sundays. This canto expresses my religious aspirations better TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE 81 than anything else. He asked me, evidently with an implied negative (equivalent to the Latin Num) discernible in his voice, whether I thought Tennyson a philosopher. I replied that our aspirations point to the conclusion that all evil may be educative. He hinted at the difficulty involved in the pain suffered by the lower animals, and said that he considered " the existence of evil inexplicable." I could not help calling to mind the considerations commonly adduced to prove the indispensability of evil — considerations to the effect that " the rays of happiness, like those of light, are colourless when unbroken," and that even the horticulture of Eden would have grown wearisome without the snake. Or perhaps it would be a juster as well as a more pleasing metaphor to say that the world, like the water of Bethesda^ has to be troubled in order that its latent virtue may be drawn out. But I felt that every such supposition must, at bottom, rest on the assumption that the Deity is limited in power, and that to Mr. Gladstone's mind the notion of such Divine limitation would be abhorrent. I asked him what he thought of Professor Mivart's article in the Nineteenth Century, called " The Happiness in Hell." 0. — " If a man begins by being tipsy sometimes, and ends by being dead drunk daily, — if he begins by beating his wife, and ends by killing her, I see no reason to think he will begin to improve as soon as he dies." I remarked that Dives is represented as testifying 6 82 TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTOKE when in " torments," a sympathy with his surviving kinsfolk ; but I added that I did not pretend to draw from this expression of sympathy the hopeful con- clusion that many Broad Churchmen draw, namely, that he was not m Hell, but in Purgatory. 0. — " I look upon Dives as a very mild instance. As landlords go, he was above the average ; he did let Lazarus have of his superfluities." Mr. Gladstone went on to hint that his case was not represented as beyond hope. I said that surely the text about the impassable gulf suggested the idea that Dives' doom was final ; but Mr. Gladstone was not convinced. His last words about it were, "I will give you something to think over — Have time and space any existence outside the human intelligence?" "Unquestionably," I replied, "they exist for the animal intelligence." He said that he regarded that as the same thing on a small scale. And then came the final " God bless you." I had a talk with Mr. Gladstone in which he told me that he wished above all things to keep up righteous indignation. I replied that anyone who studied heredity, and felt how much some people are handicapped in the moral race, can hardly keep up an acute sense of sin ; and on that account I excused the deficiency of that sense in Shakespeare and Scott. He said that he did not see that Shakespeare and Scott were students of heredity, or that Shake- speare, at any rate, seemed at all conscious of the moral difficulties connected with it. I could not help TALKS WITH Mil. GLADSTONE 83 thinking that, in speakin,']^ thus, he went too far. In Antony and Clecypatra, Lepidus says of Antony's faults that they are "hereditary rather than pur- chased; what he cannot change, than what he chooses." So, too, Hamlet cites the case of certain men having "Some vicious mole of nature in them, As in their birth (wherein they are not guilty, Since nature cannot choose his origin)." But it should be observed that, in these passages, Shakespeare seems to limit the plea of heredity to the case of venial faults, and that he fails to realise the full force of the difficulty. On the other hand, Tennyson felt the difficulty in its widest scope, as is shown in the following passage, which he puts into the mouth of the cultivated villain in " The Promise of May":— " He was only A poor philosopher who called the mind Of children a blank page, a tabula rasa. There, there, is written in invisible ink Lust, Prodigality, Covetousncss, Craft, Cowardice, Murder — and the heat and fire Of life will bring them out, and black enough, So the child grow to manhood." I reminded Mr. Gladstone of the story that Baxter, seeing a criminal on his way to execution, exclaimed, "There, but for the grace of God, goes Richard Baxter ! " I remarked that I had heard a like saying ascribed to Sir Matthew Hale. Mr. Gladstone believed that its date was farther back, and that its author was Bradford, the martyr under Queen Mary. The saying points to the con- 84 TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE elusion that men are to a great extent the creatures of circumstance. Our conversation was thus brought back to the perennial suit in the Court of Morality, which may be designated as the case of Necessity versus Responsibility. Mr. Gladstone had once significantly exhorted me to be careful not to blunt my sense of sin; and I thought that he scarcely understood the process by which the "smiling toleration " commended by Goethe forces itself upon some naturally rigid moralists in their own despite. I was anxious to illustrate clearly my point of view ; and I therefore (in biblical phrase) " took up my parable " as follows : Let us start with the supposition — no matter how extravagant — that a band of Anarchists, incensed against their leading countrymen, revenge themselves by kidnapping many infant sons of bishops, statesmen, and even princes ; that the poor children, captured too young to retain any recollection of their home and parentage, are brought up to prefer evil to good; and that their corruptors, by dexterous lying, in- oculate them with a rancorous hatred against peaceful, and especially against rich citizens. Let it be also assumed that the bereaved parents suppose that their lost ones have been accidentally killed in some manner (as by drowning in the sea), which would account for the disappearance of their bodies, and that they are gradually consoled by reflecting that some at least of their other sons bid fair to earn credit and distinction. Let us now skip twenty or thirty years, and imagine that, just when those TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE 85 early promises of credit and distinction ai-e beginning to be realised, some atrocious murders are brought home to youths who look as if Nature had designed them for better things ; and that, as soon as sentence of death has been passed on the offenders, the original kidnappers, from some safe hiding-place, let it be known that those felons of aristocratic mien are the sons of distinguished parents, and are kinsmen — in a few instances, perhaps, twin-brothers — of some of the most rising men in the country. The law would presumably be left to take its course ; but the irresponsible murderers (so to call them) would excite compassion rather than indignation. They would be thought to have sinned, and to be about to suffer, as it were by accident. Nor would compassion be limited to these particular offenders. Presently, what may be called the intellectualising but demoralising question would begin to be asked : May not many of our worst criminals be men who, but for a caprice of fortune, would have given proof of possessing true hearts and " hands that the rod of empire might have swayed " ? And thus life would come to be regarded as a cruel farce, in which the players act by compulsion, and every player who has to act a villain's part is punished for the villain's crimes. Thus, we seem to be in a vicious circle from which there is no escape. If we acknowledge with Madame de Stael that " Tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner," we are bound to add "Tout par- donner, c'est eteindre la morale." After first listening with exemplary patience to 86 TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE what may be termed these parabolic reflections, and then expressing a doubt whether Madame de Stael meant her mot to be taken quite literally, Mr. Gladstone went on to say : " I will go the length of admitting that, even in the extreme case of pro- nouncing the sentence of death, a judge, if he is really a Christian man, will be liable to say to himself, ' God knows how much that man has been tempted, and though for the sake of society I am bound to punish him, he may on the Judgment Day be preferred before me.' " I rejoined that many modern thinkers would hold that, if full allowance were made for heredity, education and temptation, then judge, criminal, and everyone else would stand exactly on a level. When a man has been thoroughly worsted by another in the moral race, may we not assume that he has laboured under a corresponding disadvantage ? nay, that the extent of the defeat is exactly measured by the amount of the handicap ? 0. — " No ; I cannot admit that." In illustration of the view to which he was opposed, I am tempted to mention that, in one of the most " modern " of Lucian's Dialogues, the ghost of an outrageous criminal, after being condemned to the most varied and unremitting tortures that the nether regions can provide, sets up the plea that he was throughout the victim of Destiny; and Minos is at his wits' end to know how to deal with him. Reverting to a topic referred to in a former conversation, I spoke about the immense popularity TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE 87 which was at the time achieved by Sheridan's Begum Speech, and which modern readers find it hard to understand. Can that speech have been well reported ? G. — "Has any speech of that time, any speech (for example) of either of the Pitts, been well reported ? The younger Pitt is chiefly known, as an orator, for his happy quotations. When contemplating retire- ment from ofiice, he applied to himself Horace's "probanique Pauperiem sine dote qiiaero " — the preceding clause, "mea Virtute me involvo," being conspicuous by its omission. He applied most unjustly to Ireland and England the lines about being under equal laws ; and there was also the quotation from Virgil which he intro- duced into his speech against the slave trade." ^ I reminded him that Pitt quoted the stanza, begin- ning Duris lit ilex, in reference to the attempts made by Napoleon to weaken Great Britain by injuring ^ " He [Pitt] burst as it were into a prophetic vision of the civilisa- tion that shall dawn upon Africa, and recalled the not less than African barbarism of heathen Britain ; exclaiming, as the first beams of the morning sun pierced the windows of Parliament, and appeared to suggest the quotation : — * Nos . . . primus equis Oriens afflavit anliclis, Illic sera rubcns aceemlit luniina Vesper.' " Loud Kosebp:ry's Pitt. The point of comparison seems to have been that the blessing of freedom was granted to the English at the dawn of their history, but that it was being vouchsafed to the negroes only at the eleventh hour 88 TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE her colonies and her trade. He regretted that no such quotations are given or would be understood now. He said that he was " suffused with shame " about the conduct of the English in regard to the Channel Tunnel. It used to be said that the opposition to it came from one man, namely, Lord Palmerston. But then the panic arose. At the request of the English Government, the French took great trouble to make inquiries as to the practicability of the scheme. G. — " We English plume ourselves on our common sense, and are never tired of laughing at the frivolity and vacillation of the French. But, since the Norman Conquest, the English have invaded France at least ten times as often as the French have invaded England. And yet the English now raise this outcry about the risk of a French invasion." I put in a word about the French conscription, and about their army being now much stronger than ours. " From your speaking in that way," he said, with a smile, " I see what line you are disposed to take about the tunnel." The orator in him came out when he made the somewhat extravagant statement, that Pius ix. was more ignorant than he thought any educated man could be ; for his Holiness had said that there were half a million of Catholics in Glasgow. I imagine that his Holiness, if Mr. Gladstone rightly understood him, must have confounded the number TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE 89 of Catholics in Glasgow with that of the entire population. Mr. Gladstone surprised me by knowing accurately the population of Liverpool, and the number of Catholics there. He appeared to think that, if the Scotch Kirk were disestablished, the result might be a fusion of the three Presbyterian bodies. He seemed irritated with the German writers, who taught that the Iliad and the Odyssey were made up, as he said, "of a fortuitous concourse of atoms." Goethe never favoured this view. Mr. Gladstone went on to advert to the extreme clumsi- ness of German prose, always excepting that of a few great writers. He spoke of German prose as being " worthy of African savages." Being asked how he explained this, he compared the German prose of the present day to the English prose of two or three centuries ago. I said that Matthew Arnold spoke of the function of the eighteenth century in England as being to create a prose literature. He replied that he did not know that Matthew Arnold had said this ; but that he quite agreed. A projpos of modern views on eternal punishment, he pronounced the besetting sins of rationalistic writers to be "negation and timidity." I objected that in Mr. John Morley and others we find negation, but certainly not timidity. He said that he was not speaking of such men, and did not use the word "negation" in that sense. He seemed to use the word as equivalent to a conscious or unconscious moral scepticism. 90 TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE He again gave utterance to the opinion expressed by liim in a former conversation, that Matthew Arnold ought to have represented conduct as com- prising, not only three-quarters of life, but the whole of it. In vindication of the great critic, I reminded Mr. Gladstone that he himself in his Romanes Lecture had ranked Bacon amono^ those of whom Cambridge ought to be proud. Now, if conduct comprises the whole of life, every man ought to be judged by an exclusively moral standard ; and, if Bacon were so judged, Cambridge would have no cause to be proud of him. His title to admiration is based on that portion- - Matthew Arnold would say that fourth part — of life which lies outside the domain of morality. This "wisest, brightest, meanest of mankind" is more praised for his wisdom and brightness than he is condemned for his meanness. As a school- boy might say, he obtained more marks for his Philosophical papers and his Essays, than his virtuous contemporaries obtained for their good conduct. Mr. Gladstone replied that he had only been assigning to Bacon his rank in respect of ability. But I could not see that this met the difficulty. Cambridge would not have cause to be proud of having produced a very able conspirator or traitor. Mr. Gladstone went on to say that, when he gave the Romanes Lecture, he thought that before this century Cambridge had had the distinct advantage in regard to poets; but Mr. Arthur Galton had TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE 91 given instances of Cambridge poets who took a dislike to Cambridge, and in some cases preferred Oxford. He said that Dryden spoke, in this relation, of going from Thebes to Athens; and he wondered, if, in thus giving the palm to Oxford, Dryden was a liar, or, as he expressed it, " a rogue." He expressed great admiration for Dryden's power of arguing in verse, as shown in "The Hind and Panther." He spoke of Thomas Cromwell as a wonderful man, though "something of a rogue." He had never heard the famous answer in an examination to the question, " What do you know of Oliver Cromwell ? " " He cut oiF his king's head, and usurped the kingdom. Afterwards he was filled with remorse, and exclaimed, when dying, 'Would that I had served my God as I have served my king ! ' " The conversation passed on to the subject of Malapropisms, which seemed to amuse Mr. Gladstone. Someone mentioned that a lady friend, observing that one of her horses was in much better condition than his mate, was told by the groom, " This one dorriesticates his food better than the other." This was capped by the true story of the lady, who, having complained to her butcher that the meat he had sent her was high, was met with the surprised and surprising rejoinder, "You ^^u^re/^ me with amazement ! " I called Mr. Gladstone's attention to a line in Milton's translation of the Ode Quis mvZta gracilis — "Who, always vacant, always amiable, Hopes thee " 92 TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE and I expressed an opinion that an inverted sentence of this kind is less plain in English than in Latin. This led on to Mr. Gladstone's saying that he was in favour of original classical compositions ; but he owned to having some misgivings. He regarded with "mingled jealousy and admira- tion " the purity of Bright's English, but said that Bright had once fallen into one of the "worst of vulgarisms " ; Bright used the verb " to transpire " in the sense of " to occur." Mr. Gladstone remarked that " transpire " properly meant " to ooze out." I reminded him that " to perspire " in • French was " transpirer," and was surprised to find that this was news to him. He was struck by the way in which some eminent scholars who were also masters of English, such as Roundell Palmer, showed no classical flavour in their English compositions. Lowe was a great exception to this. G. — "If people went into an extreme about Classics, the last half of the nineteenth century has gone into just as great an extreme about modern languages. I believe that science will be the great instrument of education in the future. You may find something to suit all intellectual needs in the various sciences from Astronomy to — what shall I say ? " T.—" To Gastronomy?" Q. {smiling) — " No — to Embryology." He said that he had called Mill the "Saint of Rationalism," and gave as an example of his saintli- ness that, when a rather bitter attack had been made TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE 93 on him by Lowe in a debate on reform, he attempted no retort, but merely confined himself to the point at issue. I referred to the lady who, after talking to Littre, said, " Je viens de parler a un saint qui ne croit pas en Dieu." Mr. Gladstone laughed and said, " Yes ; but I have the advantage of priority. This is not a case of Pereant qui nostra ante nos dixerint. How trying that sort of thing is ! " T. — " Pereant qui nostra post nos dixerint This seems to me to represent a state of things more trying still ; — when one has originated an idea, and some more conspicuous person cribs it, and gets the credit for it." Becemher SOth, 1893. — It may be convenient here to insert some notes of a conversation with Mr. Gladstone with which a learned divine, who lives near Biarritz, has kindly furnished me : — "Mr. Gladstone talked a little on the general principles of Political Economy. On the actual distribution of wealth he felt uneasy, and he thought that the irresponsibility in the condition of holding wealth nowadays, especially in the United States, and the difficulty or impossibility of bringing home to men the responsibility of riches held under their present conditions, was the black spot in the future. " The history of Ireland, he said, was unlike that of any other nation. The oppression of it by Eng- land had not been the oppression of a race who had once been conquerors or dangerous ; like that of the 94 TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE Poles by Russians, or of the Moors by Spaniards. The Irish had done nothing to warrant the oppres- sion : they were only reclaiming that of which they had been gratuitously deprived, and we owe them restoration of the theft. " He told me about the difficulty which he felt in making his ecclesiastical appointments ; he had always endeavoured in parishes to find the best man to carry on the work on the general lines of his predecessor. He was anxious not to appoint a High Churchman to a Low Church parish, nor vice versa. But it was very difficult to tell how a man would be received, or how he might turn out. He instanced his appointment of Dr. L to the parish of . He thought that he had got the very man to follow a good evangelical, with hearty services. To his surprise he received a deputation, with the late incumbent at the head, and a petition with 2000 signatures, protesting against the appoint- ment. He appealed privately to Dr. L to resign, promising some compensatory post, and offering pecuniary indemnity for his expenses. But Dr. L said that he had gone too far to retire with honour, and that his friends in the neighbourliood assured him tliat the opposition was factitious, and that the majorit}^ of the parish was not averse to him. So Mr. Gladstone yielded. A year after- wards he found the Doctor most popular, with a crowded church, hearty services, and not above twenty malcontents in the parish. " He spoke much of the superficiality of popular TALKS WITH MK. GLADSTONE 95 writing on Theology, and of the ordinary sermons, especially those of the Low Church school. The teaching was so loose and vague ; it gave nothing to do, no rule of conduct. ' Only believe all is right with yon, and all will somehow come right at the last.' Many High Churchmen preached more really evangelical sermons than the Low Churchmen did. The popular teaching on Eschatology was most superficial. He praised Mr. Oxenham's book on the subject much, and called it logical and convincing. Universalism really implied dualism ; and it was no vindication to say that in the final casting up of accounts the balance would be found on the side of good. Annihilation could not be the end. The real problem was that of the origin and existence of evil, not its extinction; and this problem was wholly insoluble by man. The unfallen angels and spirits showed that evil was not a necessity, or a necessary condition of created existence. "He agreed that all human knowledge was re- lative ; religious knowledge being no more absolute than any other. Newman was not great as a philosopher ; but in spiritual matters, and in the knowledge of and the power of probing the human heart. He spoke indignantly of the prosecutions of Ritualists by the Church Association. They were a failure always, whether won or lost. They provoked reaction, and produced what they were intended to stop. He hoped that there would be no more of them, and that the bishops would stop them by their veto. In answer to a suggestion that there should 96 TALKS WITH ME. GLADSTONE be Standing Committees of Convocation something like the Congregations and the Holy Office at Rome, not to judge individuals, but to decide on the questions and abstract cases submitted to them, he said that the difficulty would be to find a body of theologians in the English Church whose decisions or opinions would inspire sufficient respect. "He was asked if he had observed the singular absence of the sense of sin in the works of American divines of all schools. ' Ah,' said he slowly, ' the sense of sin — that is the great want in modern life ; it is wanting in our sermons, wanting everywhere ! ' This was said slowly and reflectively, almost like a monologue. " Then he talked of Driver's criticism of the 51st Psalm to the effect that it could not be by David because of the verse, ' Against Thee, Thee only have I sinned.' He had injured Uriah and Bathsheba. " G. — ' Where sin against God is really felt, that absorbs the other. Any sin against man is light in comparison of the sin against God.' " He agreed that Against Thee, etc., is the cor- relative of Who can forgive sins hut God only ? ^ '' Mr. Gladstone's attention was next called to D. G. Azcarates' Discunrso in Spanish at^ the Ateneo of Madrid. The writer speaks of Mr. Gladstone as crowning his unparalleled career by bringing home the responsibilities of wealth to Londoners. Mr. Glad- 1 Is not more conclusive evidence of the post-Davidic, or rather post-Exilian, date of the Psalm furnished by the phrase, "Build Thou the walls of Jerusalem " ? (L. A.T.) TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE 97 stone said that this is not so much needed in London as in the United States : in London they are becoming aware of the responsibility attaching to riches." The friend who has supplied me with the fore- going materials concludes with this comment : — " My impressions of last year as to Mr. Gladstone's earnest piety, immense range of thought and learn- ing, and wonderful physical power, and of the persuasive management of his voice, were but heightened this year. He would have been a great theologian if he had not been so great a statesman." January 2Uh, 1894. — Mr. and Mrs. Gladstone dined with us. I said that I supposed that there were more means for the endowment of research in Germany than in England. Mr. Gladstone rejoined that he thought that the collective sum from which such men as Wordsworth and Tennyson received pensions was £80,000 a year. I called attention to the increased endowment of research at Oxford. He spoke of it as strange that in no other country were there such large sums for the endowment of education, and yet there is no country where education is so expensive. He believed that Eton was more expensive now than in his younger days, and that Harrow was more expensive still. In the case of Eton, the modus operandi of the change was through the masters more and more encroaching on the dames. Being asked whether he did not think that the reason was 7 98 TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE that it was wished to make public schools the especial resort of gentlemen's sons, he said, " No, no ; it is very disgraceful, but not quite so bad as that." I quoted Kenan's saying to the effect that there is no second-rate University in Germany, with its " Pro- fesseurs haves et fameliques," which has not done more for intellectual progress than the great aristo- cratic University of Oxford, "avec ses revenues immenses, ses colleges splendides, ses Fellows pares- seux." He did not agree. " I don't believe a word of it," he said. In confirmation, however, of Kenan's opinion, which was also Mark Pattison's, I will quote a passage from Bagehot, who considered the Satwrday Review, whose contributors in his time were mainly University men, to be a sort of thermo- meter indicating the moral temperature of our English Universities. He says of that Journal : — " We may search and search in vain through this repository of the results of ' University teaching ' for a single truth which it has established, for a single high cause which it has advanced, for a single deep thought which is to sink into the mind of its readers. We have, indeed, a nearly perfect embodiment of the corrective scepticism of a sleepy intellect." Mr. Gladstone quoted a saying of Napoleon from Taine's posthumous volume : " Je ne crois pas aux religions ; mais qui a fait tout ceci ? . . . les pretres valent mieux que les Cagliostro, les Kant, et tous les reveurs d'Allemagne." He chuckled over the refer- ence to Kant. He said : " When next I see Lord Acton, I mean to quote this to him. He is a great TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE 99 admirer of Kant's writings, and it will be good for him to be told what Napoleon thought of them! Generally, when I try to surprise him by a quotation, he tells me exactly where it comes from." He repeated a passage from another French writer in reference to Napoleon : " Nous avons assez entendu parler du Fils de THomme; mais Napoleon etait I'Homme lui-meme." G. — " He put him far above our Saviour." The book increased Mr. Gladstone's sense of Napoleon's supreme greatness, but did not raise his view of the Emperor's moral character. He spoke of Pearson's National Life ami Character. He seemed especially interested in the author's statement that the crowding of men in big towns may force on State Socialism ; but he agreed with me that Pearson's own sympathies were in favour of Individualism, State Socialism being at best a necessary evil. I objected to Pearson's notion that Western Europe would ever allov/ itself to be encroached upon and practically overwhelmed by inuiiigrants from the yellow races. Would not our descendants defend themselves by arms? They might vindicate such a summary proceeding by say- ing (in dog Latin) sahis eivilizationis, suiwenia lex. Mr. Gladstone, however, laughed at the idea of our descendants taking refuge in strong measures : " If the cultivated races cannot defend themselves with- out appealing to brute force, God help them ! " I said that I used to write in preference-books, that I wished that my lot could have been thrown 100 TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE in the distant future, but that now I am satisfied with the nineteenth centviry. G. — " I should have chosen the time of Homer." We spoke of the conservative tendency of such pessimistic views as Pearson's ; and Mr. Gladstone went on to say that he thought he remembered the account that I had given of my own views in my article on my father a year or two earlier/ but he was afraid of misquoting me. I replied that I thought that he was paying me the greatest possible compliment in remembering anything about it. He seemed not to approve of my Whiggism. I explained that by education, tradition and temperament I am strongly Conservative ; but that I call myself Con- servative," not a Conservative. He admitted that he also was Conservative in a certain sense. I spoke of the Conservative influence of ladies' society. He demurred to the implied statement that women are more Conservative than men. He should rather describe them as " more emotional." He, however, agreed that they are more under the influence of the clergy. I spoke of women's influence at municipal elections and at elections for the school board. He doubted whether their influence is Conservative in either of these cases. But he said that the women chosen are scarcely typical women. I quite agreed ; but I explained that I was referring to the influence of the many women who vote at these elections, and not of the few who are elected. ^ " Lord Tollemache and His Anecdotes," Fortniglitly Review, July 1892. TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE 101 From clever women in general, the conversation passed on to George Eliot. Mr. Gladstone con- sidered her rather a man than a woman. Silas Marner is the work of hers that he most admired. But he complained that her novels " were out of tune." I remarked that at the end of the seventh of the eight parts in which Middlemarch first appeared, one hoped that Dorothea would marry Lydgate. Mr. Gladstone intimated his assent. He told me that his great admiration for Scott was tempered by regret that he was weighed down by so much inferior work. A similar criticism he applied to Shakespeare, though in a less degree. I spoke of Lord Lytton's portraiture (in The Last of the Barons) of Gloucester (Richard iii.), and especially of Warwick, as more lifelike than Shake- speare's. To my surprise Mr. Gladstone seemed not to know who the last of the Barons was. He pleaded that it was doubtful whether the latter part of Henry vi. was by Shakespeare, but ad- mitted that there is something very arbitrary in the way in which critics decide by internal evidence what is Shakespeare's and what is not. He said that ' his favourites among Scott's novels were Kenilworth and the Bride of Lamrrieriinoov. I asked whether he did not find the bad endings of these two novels depressing. G. — " I don't mind tliat in such works of art as these." I told him that the Bride of Lammermoor was also Jowett's favourite. 102 TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE G. — " I am very glad to hear it ; and I will quote the statement on your authorit}^" He went on to say that the three novels of Scott which are generally the most popular are Ivanhoe, Old Mortality and Waverley. He ranked those next to the two others. Returning to George Eliot, he surprised me by saying that he had never read Daniel Deronda. Something was said about George Eliot's enthusiasm for the Jews, which at last be- came almost as vehement as Disraeli's. Both those writers sometimes leave the impression of looking forward to the restoration of tlie old Hebrew Monarchy. Might they not (adapting Virgil) have taken for their motto : Ja'in redit et David, redeunt Solomonia regna ? Hence we drifted into the Germans' hatred of the Jews. G. — " I used to think the Irish the most oppressed people on earth ; but now I think that the Jews have been even more oppressed. I believe that Dollinger wrote in favour of the Jews ; and I thought it very creditable of him to do so. I understand that the kings in the Middle Ages, including even King John, often took the part of the Jews against the nobles. Was it because they wished to save the Jews from oppression ? Nothing of the sort. But they considered that the right to torture a Jew and to extort money from him ought to be a monopoly of their own." He did not deny that the Jews had their faults. After praising Finlay's History in high terms, he said that he TALKS WITH ME. GLADSTONE 103 had there learnt that towards the end of the Middle Ages the Greek Christians had a bad time of it ; for, while the Mahometans hated them as infidels, and the Catholics hated them as heretics, the Jews took advan- tage of their weakness to settle old scores with them. G. — " Lord Acton is writing a history of Liberty, and I shall be anxious to see how he will treat the question of the Jews." T. — " In writing such a work, is he not likely to get into trouble with the Roman authorities ? " G. — " His work may be put on tlie Index ; but that is all. They will never excommunicate an English Peer. I always say that, if Lord Acton had written what Dollinger has written, and vice versa, it would still have been the Professor who would have got into trouble, while the Peer would have escaped scot free." We talked about the old Greeks. G. — " I am a great admirer of the old Olympian religion, as it was set forth by the supreme genius of Homer. It was quite different in the hands of the later Greeks ; and the mythology of the Koman poets serves as an opaque curtain which hides it from us. Do the Romans mark the difference be- tween Venus and Diana, as the Greeks do between vVphrodite and Artemis? Look at the contrast between Virgil and Homer ! " T. — " Surely Virgil does not write much about Diana ? " G. — " He has the line : ' Tergeminamque Hecatcn, tria virginis ora Dianas.' 104 TALKS WITH MK. GLADSTONE See, too, how Horace confounds Diana with Proser- pine in the passage : ' Infernis neque enim tenebris Diana pudicum Liberat Hippoly turn. "* I suggested that in this instance Horace seemed to me to refer to Diana, not as identical with Proserpine, but as the goddess whom Hippolytus especially worshipped. Mr. Gladstone frankly said that this was a new idea to him, but that he would think it over. He supposed that Horace, though his Odes were Greek in form, was the best authority for the state of Roman society in classical times. But the dis- crepancies in his account are a puzzle. Sometimes he writes in glowing language; at other times he speaks of the state of society as hopelessly corrupt. Mr. Gladstone could not accept the common inter- pretation of "O utinam nova Incude diffingas retusum in Massagetas Arabasqiie ferrum." This he explained to mean : " Break up our corrupt civilisation, and remould us after the fashion of barbarous tribes." I demurred to this explanation ; but, in support of it, I reminded him of the Arva heata, etc., which seems to have partly suggested the passage in Locksley Hall, beginning — '*Ah, for some retreat Deep in yonder shining Orient." TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE 105 Another passage which he thouglit wrongly inter- preted is — ' ' Nee fortuitum spernere cffispitem Leges sinebant." G. — "I do not think there is any point in the rendering ' chance turf.' What would they do with it ? Not build. Conington suggests that they might make their roofs of it. I know that they so construct their roofs in Iceland and elsewhere, where it is hard to get wood. But otherwise I do not think that they would make their roofs of turf alone. I think it refers to the enclosure of com- mons, and so it touches on a question which has lately been coming to the front." I asked how he explained " spernere," He said that it meant " to disregard the laws which forbid the appropriation of the agev pithlicus." But he admitted that his view was not free from difficulty. I said that we probably learn as much about Roman society from Juvenal, though his account must be taken as a caricature; and I added that, as Matthew Arnold says, we gather from Marcus Aurelius that there must have been a large portion of Italian life free from the corruption which Juvenal describes. Mr. Gladstone quite agreed. We talked about Mr. Gladstone's Romanes Lecture. I told him that in that lecture he appeared to me to ignore the great progress in jurisprudence made by the Romans under the Empire; and that, on the other hand, he laid too great, or at any rate too exclusive, stress on their progress in arms. He 106 TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE replied by calling my attention to the military achievements of Belisarius and Narses. But I con- fess that he seemed to me to be ascribing to progress in the military art what was rather due to the mili- tary genius of a few individuals. I quoted what Maiiie, in his Ancient Law, said about the great development of jurisprudence under the Roman Empire. G. — " I give way on this point to the authority of such an expert as Maine. But in the lecture I was trying to insist that life had departed from the Roman civilisation. What remarkable men did that civilisation produce ? " I mentioned Claudian. G. — " Yes, but that is not saying much. I think that the decline of paganism has never been suffi- ciently explained. Gibbon's account is too one-sided. I wish it could have been discussed by such a writer as Hallam." He spoke in praise of Beugnot's Decadence du Paganisme en Occident Beugnot also wrote a Decadence en Orient, but it was not so good. The former book was Couronnee _25ar r Academic frangaise in 1826. " This is not much of a distinction now, but it was then." He spoke of the long resistance offered by Paganism to Christianity. G. — " Probably many of the ' pagani ' were devout pagans, and there seem to have been also some devout pagans among the educated classes. But these latter were few; and Beugnot traces the different causes, such as historical and family tradi- TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE 107 tions, and more interested motives, which prolonged the life of dying Paganism." T. — "Besides the believers in Paganism, were there not many who bore to Paganism the same sort of relation that Matthew Arnold bore to Chris- tianity ? I refer to such men as Marcus Aurelius, who thought it important that the masses should have a religion, and who held that the best religion for them was the religion of tlie State. Such men would probably have wished to purify the national religion of some of its coarser elements ; but, in general, they would be afraid, to use Bright's meta- phor, of tinkering an old institution." G. — " Very likely there were a good number of these ; and the position of Marcus Aurelius may in some respects have been like that of Ma-tthew Arnold. But Marcus Aurelius did not write about his reli- gion in the patronising way in which Matthew Arnold writes about Christianity. I know nothing that jars me more than the tone he takes." T. — " Was not that partly the peculiar manner of the man ? " G. — " It may have been ; but I often wish that he would make his bow and walk on the other side. To come back to my Romanes Lecture : my object was to combat Pa-ttison's statement that the extinc- tion of the Pagan civilisation by the Church was a great calamity." T. — "I suspect that Pattison, if pressed, would have explained his words to mean that it is deplorable that human nature is such a poor thing that it can- 108 TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE not maintain its civilisation on a rational and pro- gressive footing, and that it is forced from time to time to fall back on supernaturalism." January 29th, 1894. — I dined with Mr. Gladstone. He expressed great interest in the customs of the Basques, and in the unsolved riddle of the origin of their race and language. Had not Scaliger satiri- cally exclaimed : " The Basques say that they under- stand one another, but they lie ! " Mr. Gladstone seemed especially taken with the popular myth explanatory of the high morality common among them : " The Devil took seven years trying to learn Basque, and at last gave it uj9 as a had joh." A saying of Basque origin seemed equally quaint, though in a different fashion : " Our Lord promised to give St. Peter a horse if he would repeat the Lord's Prayer without pause or interpolation. Whereupon St. Peter began : ' Pater noster qui es in coelis' — And, Lord, will he have a saddle ? " Mr. Gladstone had been reading a lecture on the sanitary rules followed by the Jews. I said that I had been told that in England they were less long- lived than Christians. His impression was the other way. He said that they had a special immunity from tubercular disease. Reference was made to a quondam Professor whose too catholic antipathies were especially directed against the Jewish race and modern Liberals; and one of the party reported that this Ishmael, on being told that the Jews had a remarkable immunity from cholera, drily exclaimed, TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE 109 "That is the worst thing I have heard of the cholera ! " G. {smiling) — " He hates the Jews as much as he hates me." The genial tone of this remark may serve to show that Mr. Gladstone was not as ab- normally sensitive to adverse criticism as he was often said to be. He did not take the same high view that many take of the old Hebrew literature, regarded merely as literature. He had been struck by a statement of Professor Max Mliller to the effect that the Jewish intellect made a sudden start after being brought in contact with the Aryan intellect. (Surely Isaiah was an exception.) He did not think much of the old biblical heroes, except Moses. I hinted at a scepticism about Moses being a real person. He said that he thought that, if there had been no historical Moses, the Hebrew imagination would not have been equal to the task of creating one. And then he went off to his favourite subject. G. — " Those who think it too great a miracle that there should have been a Homer who wrote both the Iliad and the Odyssey, are substituting for it a miracle yet greater and yet harder of belief." I remarked that, if the word afJtjVfJbo^v really means " blameless," it seems very odd that in the beginning of the Odyssey this epithet is applied to ^gisthus. He replied that " blameless " is a very inadequate rendering of the word. It may sometimes mean this; but sometimes also it connotes high birth; "just as we apply the word ' illustrious ' to princes — 110 TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE to such princes as the sons of George in. There are other expressions in Homer which we were taught to translate either incorrectly or in too narrow a sense; for instance, at Eton, Edward Coleridge insisted on our translating ai^aj Mpajv, ' king of men.' " I asked Mr. Gladstone why he had not ranked Roh Roy with those novels of Walter Scott which he placed in the first rank. He thought that Rob Roy and Guy Mannering ran them very hard. He was surprised when I mentioned that Lowe had ranked 8t Ronans Well with the Bride of Lmn- niermoor. He agreed with me that this was an instance of the peculiar limitation which is so often found in men of strong individuality. I asked whether he admired Miss Austen much. G. — "Certainly. But I am not so enthusiastic about .her as some people are. An old friend of mine, Rio (he is long since dead), complained that Macaulay ' can neither dive nor soar.' This is true of Jane Austen. Someone said of Randolph Churchill (it was only true of him in his earlier days), that 'ha was a first-rate actor in a third- rate piece.' This also might be said of Miss Austen." T. — " Walter Scott has spoken of himself as suc- cessful in the bow-wow strain, while Miss Austen excelled in the representation of everyday life." G. — " That is Walter Scott's modest way of putting things. He was generosity itself. In all those volumes of his there is a complete absence of self- TALKS WITH MK. GLADSTONE 111 laudation. After all, Miss Austen was parochicd, while Scott was world-historical — Welt-historisch, as the Germans would say." I complained that some of Miss Austen's char- acters seemed to me wooden ; they contrast in that way with some of Miss Ferrier's. G. — " Which of Miss Ferrier's have you read ? " T.—" llarriage." G. — " You should read her Inheritance. It is far her best. She had the great advantage of writing in the interval between the earlier and the later school of novelists." Mr. Gladstone ranked Disraeli as the greatest master of parliamentary wit that had ever been. He looked upon his character as a great mystery, and it pained him to feel that the mystery will never be solved. He quoted Bright 's remark on the representation of minorities : " If the member for a minority dies, will the minority have the power of electing his successor?" This Mr. Gladstone thought a perfectly fair criticism, well expressed. He said that Disraeli disliked the idea of repre- sentation of minorities; but he introduced it into his Reform Bill as a sop to political doctrinaires. Afterwards, when the House of Lords amended his Reform Bill and made it practically a nominal measure, Disraeli threw out all their amendments with the exception of this one, which, though he disliked it, he thought comparatively unimportant. Mr. Gladstone thought that the wittiest thing which Briglit ever said was when he spoke of the party 112 TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE which formed the Cave of AduUam as being like a Skye terrier: "it was so covered with hair that you could not tell its head from its tail." ^ The leading members of the Cave were Lowe and Hors- man, the latter of whom Mr. Gladstone described as . "a mere windbag." He added that Bright meant to imply that both these members uttered such platitudes that those of Lowe were on a par with those of Horsman. Mr. Gladstone spoke of Lowe's inability to defend himself. 0. — "The power of self-defence is implanted in the meanest of all creatures (I don't know whether it exists in rabbits). But at any rate it was absent in Lowe. He, who had attacked our Reform Bill so powerfully, was quite helpless when such an inferior man as attacked him. Dizzy quite cut him to pieces. In one way this told morally in his favour. A member of a Government is bound to defend his colleagues as much as himself ; and, as Lowe did not defend his colleagues, it told in his favour that he also did not defend himself." The wittiest thing that Mr. Gladstone ever heard 1 It is well known that the christening of the party as ' ' The Cave of Adullam " was also due to Bright ; but it is less well known that, in making the comparison, he was in a manner anticipated by- Mr. Gladstone's favourite novelist: "The Baron of Bradwardine, being asked what he thought of these recruits, took a long pinch of snuff, and answered drily, that he could not but have an excellent opinion of them, since they resembled precisely the followers who attached themselves to the good King David at the cave of Adullam ; 'videlicet, everyone that was in distress, everyone that was in debt, and everyone that was discontented, which the Vulgate renders hitter of soul." TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE 113 in Parliament was a retort of Lord John Russell. Sir Francis Burdett had been a strong Radical; and, as is well known, he got into trouble about it. After some years, he became a Conservative. Mr. Gladstone doubted whether his inconsistency was as great as it seemed to be. But at any rate it brought him into opposition with his old colleagues. He made a rather violent speech, in which he said there was nothing he hated so much as the " cant of patriotism." Lord John Russell got up and said that, for himself, there was one thing that he hated worse, and that was " the recant of patriotism." The best thing said in Parliament in this century was, Mr. Gladstone thought, a sentence of Canning. Pitt had been a Free Trader ; but in his later life he took a line which naturally made the Tories claim him as a Protectionist. Canning was thoroughly devoted to his old master, and used to say that his allegiance was with Pitt in his tomb. He said of those Protectionists who appealed to the authority of Pitt: "They are like those savages who pay no honour to the sun when he is in his meridian splendour, but who, when he is under a momentary eclipse, come forth with cymbals and dances to adore him." 1 ^ A few days later Mr. Gladstone, at my request, most kindly repeated his version of Canning's metaphor, and then let me repeat it to him ; so that my account of that version is certainly correct. It differs slightly from the ordinary version, which is as follows : "Such perverse worship is like the idolatry of barbarous nations, who can see the noonday splendour of the sun without emotion, but, when he is in eclipse, come forward with their hymns and cymbals 8 114 TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE Canning was an adept in such rhetorical out- bursts. Some forty years ago, I heard an old gentleman, in a speech at an agricultural dinner, quote with great admiration the following sentence which in his youth he had heard from Canning's own lips : — " The same sun which lighted Lord Wellington into Madrid and which grew pale at the conflagration of Moscow, has yielded us the most luxuriant harvest that has ever blessed man- kind." Surely this rhetoric is overstrained. If it is not mere verbiage, it implies that the stars in their courses had fought against Napoleon; and it seems bo postulate such a belief in the anthropo- morphic and anthropocentric — I had almost said Anglo-centric — government of the physical world as is in nowise warranted by science. I reminded Mr. Gladstone of the saying of Burke about Warren Hastings, which Macaulay has thus recorded: "It was said that at Benares, the very place at which the acts set forth in the first article of impeachment had been committed, the natives had erected a temple to Hastings; and this story excited a strong sensation in England. Burke's observations on the apotheosis were admirable. He saw no reason for astonishment, he said, in the incident which had been represented as so striking. He knew something of the m^^thology of the Brah- to adore liim." Mr. Gladstone's version, liowever, delivered as it was in a voice far more sonorous and rhetorical than was his wont in conversation, seems to me interesting and characteristic ; it is, as it were, Canning Gladstonized. TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE 115 mins. He knew that, as they worshipped some gods from love, so they worshipped others from fear. He knew that they erected shrines, not only to the benignant deities of light and plenty, but also to the fiends who preside ov^er small - pox and murder. Nor did he at all dispute the claim of Mr. Hastings to be admitted into such a Pan- theon." G. — "Did Burke say that on the spur of the moment ? " T. — " I do not know ; but probably he did not." G. — "That makes all the difference. If I am asked who is the greatest speaker that I have known in Parliament, I answer that it depends on what you mean by a great speaker. No one was equal to Bright when he had time to prepare a subject. But he was not strong as a debater, though I once remember his being very successful in debate. I think it was about Ireland ; but I am not sure. I once had an odd experience. It was found con- venient that I, as leader of the party, should make a speech from Bright's notes. I will mention another small experience that I had. A3a'ton was often a very troublesome opponent in debate. I remember once that at three o'clock in the morning he was going to attack me. I saw him go out of the House to eat an orange, and knew that probably meant an hour's speech. This was too much, and I beat a prudent retreat. As you take an interest in these Parliamentary reminiscences, I will give you another. The Conservatives appointed Lord Glenelg 116 TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE to a high official position. He was thoroughly honourable, but was supposed to be inefficient, and had a way of falling asleep during debates. In the course of a very exciting debate, Brougham in the House of Lords expressed regret that he and his party had deprived the noble Lord of so many sleepless days. I reminded Brougham of this after- wards, and was glad to find that he had quite forgotten it. It showed that his wit was so abun- dant that he could affi^rd to forget particular instances of it." T. — " In fact, he was, in Tennyson's phrase, ' Like wealthy men who care not how they give.' " I asked Mr. Gladstone about Peel ; he did not seem to have left on record many witty sayings. (t. — " No ; Peel was not a phrase-maker, like Disraeli or Bright. There were two things especi- ally conspicuous about him. One was his over- mastering sense of public duty ; this never deserted him. The other thing was his sense of measure. He had generally an exact sense of the proportion between one Bill, and the general policy of the Government; also of the proportion between the different parts of the same Bill ; and of the relation in which the leaders of his party stood to their followers. What I mean by this sense of measure will be understood if I give an instance in which such tact was conspicuously wanting. Shortly (I think) after the Reform Bill, the Conservative leaders had got the party into a state of what seemed hopeless confusion. So much so that one TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE 117 night they were preparing to send in their resigna- tion. Fortunately for them, Lord Grey made an attack on the party as a whole. This so irritated the followers that they rallied under their leaders, and the party held its ground." I asked Mr. Gladstone whether Peel was not very unsociable in private life. An old M.P. once told me that, when he dined with Peel, Peel used to beset him with questions, and to give out nothing in return. G. — "Quite right too. If Peel had to do with someone from whom useful information could be got, he was quite right to try and get it. If he was wanting in sociability, the reason was that his mind was too full of the public interest to be able to occupy itself with smaller matters." T. — " But surely he might have given out some- thing on non-political matters; for example, on literature or history." G. — "He sometimes did. I remember his prais- ing to me Hallam as a historian. Also, I heard him express a low opinion of Fox. So far as Fox's private character is concerned, Peel may have been right; but, as a public man. Fox had certainly a remarkable power of grasping general principles." At first these examples of Peel's communicativeness seemed to me conspicuous by their slightness ; but I afterwards reflected that, according to Professor Goldwin Smith, " For personal recollections twenty- three years are Lethe " ; and that twice that interval 1I& TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE divided us from the point of time to which Mr. Gladstone was reaching back. Mr. Gladstone thought that there was a certain resemblance between Rome under Augustus and France under Louis Napoleon. I called attention to the resemblance between the two Caesars in their relation to one another, and the two Napoleons. G. — " Yes. The resemblance is remarkable in many ways; though Augustus was much wiser in his generation than Louis Napoleon." T. — " Was not Louis Napoleon wise in his genera- tion during the earlier part of his career ? " G. — " Certainly not from the time of the Mexican expedition. But what I am insisting on as a point of resemblance between the two despots is that, while Louis Napoleon put down freedom of speech and of writing in general, he allowed a certain freedom to men of letters who were not likely to influence the public. And I suspect it was the same sort of thing with Augustus. So long as Horace made a low bow to the established Government, he was allowed in an indirect way to show his sym- pathy with his old comrades of Philippi." T. — "In the one stanza, Olim Fhilijjpos, there are two phrases which the admirers of Horace try to explain away. Turpe solum tetigere mento, and relicta non bene parmula. It is said that no Roman soldier would have made the latter admis- sion. But surely he meant that he had been so insignificant an enemy, that the conquerors could afford to overlook his youthful folly." TALKS WITH Mil. GLADSTONE 119 G. — "That is what I meant by the low bow. I believe that Louis Napoleon was often indulgent to Orleanist men of letters who veiled their meaning." T. — "Did you personally see enough of Louis Napoleon to form an impression of his ability ? " G. — "No. I dined with him in the Tuileries. But he was most of the time cross-questioning me about English finance." (He said this with a smile which seemed to mean, If Louis Napoleon thus cross-examined, ivhy should not Peel ?) " The con- versation was in English, which he spoke very well. I saw him again during his exile. But I found him then a broken man, and could not judge of his ability." We spoke about Froude, and the question was raised whether, after all, it had been a mistake to confer on him the Professorship of History. Was not such a style as Froude's a supreme merit in a Professor ? His facts might be often inaccurate ; but they were certainly far less so than the facts introduced into Scott's novels ; and yet Scott's novels are valued as carrying a picturesque con- ception of the past into quarters where otherwise there would be no conception of it at all. Scott's Richard I. is more of a permanent possession, more of a living person, than Hume's. Is it not possible that, in like manner, some of Froude's historical portraits will survive Freeman's ? Mr. Gladstone spoke severely of the peculiar bias shown by Froude with regard to Henry VIIL We 120 TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE got on the charm of Froude's diction as contrasted with Grote's, and I mentioned the substance of Charles Austin's comment on Grote, which is thus reported in Safe Studies: "He feared that the History of Greece lost much of its value through the attempt to whitewash Cleon and the other dema- gogues. He also regretted that Mr. Grote had bestowed so little pains on his style ; an inattention which seemed to Mr. Austin all the more strange as the historian was keenly alive to the grace and charm of the classical writings. He was afraid that, in consequence of these two defects, the history of Greece still remained to be written." Mr. Gladstone said that he had heard Grote find fault with the English of John Mill. I said that I thought that Grote may have been very particular in avoiding slipshod sentences. G. — " But are there any such sentences in Mill ? " T. — "I should think very few; but I remember seeing one or two quoted by Professor Hodgson in his Errors in the Use of English." Mr. Gladstone did not seem to have heard of this book. I mentioned that its author had marshalled a long array of blunders from various writers, great and small ; and I told Mr. Gladstone of two instances given by Hodgson of the wrong collocation of words: — "Erected to the memory of John Phillips accidentally shot as a mark of affection by his brother ; " and " A piano for sale by a lady about to cross the Channel in an oak case with carved lesfs." Mr. Gladstone seemed much amused by these TALKS WITH MK. GLADSTONE 121 examples. In reference to the general question, he thought that a sentence ought not to bear more than one construction, and he quoted the familiar Aio te, j^acide, Romianos vincere posse. Mr. Gladstone spoke playfully of a lady as his step-great-niece ; and asked what I made of such a relation. I said in a like tone that, Queen Char- lotte having been godmother of my mother-in-law, I have sometimes spoken of George III. as my step- god-grand-father-in-law. G. (with a STYiile). — "I was going to say that I wished you a better step-god — I forget the rest ; — but I draw a distinction. George ill. in his private character shows to advantage when compared with Charles ii. or George il. But, if George ill. had succeeded in repressing freedom and parliamentary government, we should have had a Revolution, not probably so bad as the French, but resembling it in kind. From such a catastrophe we were preserved by that unworthy representative of good principles, Wilkes." We referred to Macaulay's praise of William iii., and to his speaking less severely of William's private faults than of those of James IL G. — "Of course it was as a public man that Macaulay praised William ; but I have no doubt that Macaulay's bias in favour of William extended to everything about him." While admiring many points in Miss Cholmon- deley's Diana Tempest, Mr. Gladstone found fault with that clever novel, first, because he thought that a 122 TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE novel wifch an abnormal plot requires very excep- tional skill ; and, secondly, because the authoress throws satire broadcast on the clergy and other representatives of tradition. He did not object to Robert Els'mere on this ground, because the orthodox Catherine is represented as narrow perhaps, but on the whole an ideal character. We spoke of the Revised Translation of the Bible. He said that he had advised the translators (or some of them) to bring out, at an early stage, a few specimens of their work and to let the critics say their say about them. To anyone versed in the usages of the House of Commons such an expedient would not seem unnatural. But the translators utterly refused to suffer their unfinished work to be blown on by the popularis aura of inexperts: " They laughed me to scorn ; and the result has been that the Revised Version died almost at its birth." I think it was on this occasion that Mr. Gladstone made a remark to me which has been treasured up in my memory. Taking my arm as we left the dining-room, he said, "Your memory makes you formidable ; but you are so good-natured that one does not feel afraid of you." At first the word " afraid " employed by the great Statesman fairly took my breath away ; I felt disposed to say, " Quid enim contendat hirundo Cycnis ? " But, on second thoughts, I interpreted the hyperbolical compliment to mean, " I am sure that, if you Boswellize me, you will set down nought in malice." In other words. TALKS WITH ME. GLADSTONE 123 lie more than suspected that I was taking notes of our conversations. It is as throwing light on this point that his observation seemed to me worth recording. January ISth, 1896. — Mr. and Mrs. Gladstone and Mrs. Drew dined with us. He remarked on our being in the same rooms as before. T. — "You see I have strong Conservative in- stincts." G. — " So have I. In all matters of custom and tradition, even the Tories look upon me as the chief Conservative that is." T. — "Two years ago a Conservative M.P. spoke of you as the strongest Conservative influence in Parliament. This being so, I wondered why, in the interests of Conservatism, he did not join your party." Mr. Gladstone smiled and seemed pleased. I note, in passing, that my Conservative friend probably regarded Mr. Gladstone as the best con- troller and moderator of the political changes which have become inevitable ; insomuch that the English Government under his guidance might be compared to the Athenian Government under the guidance of Pericles: "it was nominally a democracy, but in reality the supremacy of the first citizen " (Xoyuj fjbh hTjfjjO^cpariK 'ipyco ^l vtto tov Tpdurov aphpog oip-x/i). He spoke with high praise of Purcell's Life of Manning. He said it was the "history of a soul 124 TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE and the dividing of bone and marrow." He had read no biography for some time " which showed so much impartiality and insight." I asked him what he thought of Manning as an orator. He said that he had heard some striking sermons of Manning's while Manning was still in the Church of England. He evidently thought much more highly of Newman as a master of English ; but he called Manning " a great Ecclesiastical Statesman." I asked him about Cardinal Vaughan. G. — " Oh, he is an infinitely smaller man. I am reminded of Canning's lines." ^ This suggested the appointment of Alfred Austin as successor to Alfred Tennyson. T. — " Was it not a pity appointing a new laureate ? The office is now altogether something of an ana- chronism ; why could it not have a grand euthanasia in Tennyson ? " G. — " At any rate I should have waited until some- one of Tennyson's calibre had turned up. I felt a special difficulty in recommending a successor to Tennyson, because by far the greatest of our English poets is practically out of the running." He went on to give reasons for this latter opinion, and spoke of some lines in which the great living poet to whom he referred had touched on the death of the late Czar. I expressed surprise that the difficulty about Mr. William Morris' political opinions could not be got over. * *'Pitt is to Addington As Loudon to Paddington." TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE 125 G. — "Would you place him as a poet anywhere near Swinburne ? " T. — " The two are so unlike that they can hardly be compared. But I confess that I admire much of the Earthly Paradise and of The Life and Death of Jason." I expressed surprise at the extremely high praise which Matthew Arnold and others bestow on Wordsworth. Mr. Gladstone replied that he was also surprised; but he added that he had heard that the late Sir Francis Doyle, whose critical faculty he valued highly, took the same view as Matthew Arnold. Neither Mr. Gladstone nor I could understand why Matthew Arnold ranked Wordsworth so much above Tennyson. I quoted single lines of Wordsworth which Matthew Arnold praised highly. Matthew Arnold seemed to regard the line — "Will no one tell me what she sings?" and the line — **And never lifted up a single stone," as so admirable in themselves that, even when severed from their context, they furnish a sort of touchstone which may help us to discriminate between good poetry and bad. Would Dr. Arnold have thought so highly of either of these lines if they had been written by a Rugby boy ? I added that Matthew Arnold speaks con- temptuously of Macaulay's Lays. 126 TALKS WITH ME. GLADSTOXE G, — "I admire the Lo.ys yqyj much. Th.ey will live!' I called Mr. Gladstone's attention to the extra- ordinary passage in which Matthew Arnold hazards the opinion that Shelley's letters may outlive his poems. Mr. Gladstone seemed to agi-ee with me that criticisms of this kind tend to shake one's faith in the critic's judgment. I asked Mr. Gladstone what he thought of Macaulay as a speaker. He gpcve an account of two famous speeches of Macaulay's and of the effect that they produced; but he admitted that it was only on very rare occasions that Macaula}' achieved such results. I asked him whether he thought Bright the tinest speaker he had ever heard in Parliament. G. — " That is very hard to ansv/er. There is so much that goes to make a great orator. But I will say that there were certain passages in Bright's speeches which I never heard equalled." T. — " Had not these been carefully prepared ? " G. — " They were said to be." T.— " Was Peel a great orator ? " G. — " Not at all in the same way." Mr. Gladstone seemed to think that Peel's reputa- tion as a statesman stands somewhat too high. He did not remember to have read Mr. Thursfield's Life of Peel. But he had spoken to the eminent author about Sir Robert; and he expected that the book would exactly represent his own views. G. — "The great virtue of Peel was that he had TALKS WITH Mil. GLADSTONE 127 such an enormous conscience. Conscience, they say, is a very expensive thing to keep. Peel certainly kept one." T. — " But you will remember that Peel was com- pared (I think by Disraeli) to the Turkish admiral who treacherously steered the fleet under his com- mand into the enemy's harbour ; and, exaggeration apart, I suppose you would say that, on the two great occasions of Catholic Emancipation and Free Trade, other men laboured and he entered into their labours." G. — "Yes. But, when he had finally made up his mind, he stuck to it unflinchingly. His great failure was in regard to Ireland. He thouglit that he could cobble Uj9 the Irish difficulty by endow- ing Maynooth and establishing what the strong- Protestants call godless Colleges. In one instance he, from most conscientious motives, did the Irish a great injury. He passed the Encumbered Estates Act. It is fair to ^nj that, wlien the cottiers im- proved their land, the old landlords did not tread on the heels of tlie improvement. But, after the passing of Peel's Act, when any land came to be sold, the bu3^er naturally wanted to get the full value of his money ; and so the poor tenant lost all the value of his improvement. One thing may amuse you. In the new National Biogrcqyhy only fifteen pages are given to Peel, and twenty- pages to Parnell." " T. — "You once told me that Parnell's speeches reminded you of Lord Palmerston's in their way of expressing exactly what the speaker meant to say. 128 TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE But of course you would call Parnell a pigmy compared with Lord Palmerston." Q. — " I should not call him anything of the sort. He had statesmanlike qualities ; and I found him a wonderfully good man to do business with ^ . . . T. — " What sort of a place, then, would you assign to Lord Palmerston ? " G. — "Taking our former standard of measure- ment, I should say that, if Peel has fifteen pages of the Biography, Palmerston should have ten or twelve. Palmerston had two admirable qualities. He had an intense love of Constitutional freedom everywhere ; and he had a profound hatred of negro slavery. One signal service he rendered to Ireland. He appointed the 'Devon Commission,' which collected facts proving the Irish to be the most oppressed, the most miserable and the most patient population in Europe. But he did not make any practical use of this knowledge. I should not ascribe to him the overpowering conscientiousness which I ascribe to Peel." I quoted as accurately as I could the passage in Bacon's essay " Of Goodness, and Goodness of Nature," in which, after describing certain not very benevolent or trustworthy characters, he says of them : " Such dispositions are the very errors of human nature ; and yet they are the fittest timber to make great politicks of; like to knee timber, that is good for ships that are ordained to be ^ A phrase is here omitted which, I am assured, did not express Mr. Gladstone's deliberate opinion. TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE 129 tossed, but not for building houses that shall stand firm." I suggested that in this passage absolute honesty is recommended to ordinary men, but that a certain amount of dissimulation is conceded to statesmen. Does not this recall Tacitus's remark on Galba's refusal to temporise ? To that high standard, he tells us, jam non pares surplus. G. — "It is only with great hesitation that I should differ from anything that Bacon says in those Essays of his. But surely knee timber is not a thing which bends as an unscrupulous man's conscience bends. It is chosen because it is in the shape best suited to ships." T. — "I suppose that Bacon meant that it is naturally crooked, just as some men's consciences are naturally crooked." G. — " Well, I should not say this of Palmers ton's conscience. An illustration will best show the fault that I find with him. When the troubles were arising between Prussia and Denmark, Palmerston said that, if the Danes were attacked, they would not stand alone. They were attacked; they did stand alone ; and Palmerston did not resign." T. — "Of course, when he said that, he thought that the cause of Denmark would be warmly supported by England." G. — "He had no business to think. There was an Eton master, named Heath, who had an odd sort of dry humour. When he was going to send a boy up to be flogged, and the boy began to make excuses, saying 'I thought so-and-so,' he used to 9 130 TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE say, ' No boy has any business to think until he gets to the Upper Division.' And so Palmerston had no business to think until he had learnt what the country was prepared to do." ^ Something was said about flogging in public schools; and I told the story of how Dr. Vaughan was once flogging a young nobleman, who, not being used to such rough treatment, presently got up and asked the headmaster how many more cuts he was going to give. Vaughan replied in his most mellifluous voice, "That is for me to decide. Lord F. ; kneel down again." A lady told the story of an assistant master sending Keate a list of boys to be confirmed. Keate thought they were to be flogged, and flogged them accordingly. I called Mr. Gladstone's attention to the phrase he had used, " dry-humour," remarking that, accord- ing to the etymology, it would signify dry-wetness. Wishing to draw him out about wit and humour, I mentioned that Matthew Arnold says that Moliere ought to be ranked with Shakespeare, Milton, and Goethe. G. — "Does he indeed say that? I should not call Moliere a poet." T. — " I once expressed some surprise to our friend J M at so high a place being assigned to ^ This may recall a passage in The Rivals : — Ltdia. — "Madam, I tliouglit you once" — Mrs. Malaprop. — ''You thought, Miss! I don't know any business you have to think at all — thought does not become a young woman." TALKS WITH MK. GLADSTONE 131 Moliere ; but he agreed with Matthew Arnold. He said that Moliere had written two plays, which fell only just below the greatest dramas of the world ; and he also spoke very highly of UAvare, and also praised the Bourgeois Gentillioinme!' G. — " Well, I suppose that the Misanthrope and the Tartujfe were the two great plays that he meant. I have been reading them lately, and I should call them both third-class plays. I once asked Dollinger whom he considered the two wittiest men that ever lived. He at once answered, ' Aristophanes and Shakespeare.' This is just what I should have said myself. I am very old now, and cannot hope to learn much more. But I do want to learn what the difference is, which people are so fond of talking about, between wit and humour." I quoted Jowett's saying (Memoir, p. 32) that wit consists in a number of points, while humour is continuous. G. — " I don't see how he would have applied that to individual cases. One of the best things ever said was the remark of Falstati* who, being called on to pay for the satin which he had purchased, said that Bardolph should be his surety.^ Was this wit or humour ? " T. — "At any rate, there can be no doubt that most of Sydney Smith's good sayings were witt}^ * The reference is to Henry IF., Part II. Act i. Scene 2. But I fail to detect in this scene any quotable passage which would not disappoint my readers, after the praise bestowed by Mr. Gladstone. 132 TALKS WITH MB. GLADSTONE rather than humorous. Take the familiar example of the young lady who said to him, 'We want to bring this pea to perfection ' ; Sydney Smith, giving her his arm, replied, 'Let me bring perfection to the pea.' " G. — " Yes, that was wit. By the way, I am told that one of the Pollocks was the author of a saying which I had always supposed to be by Sydney Smith — the saying addressed to the child who tried to please the tortoise by stroking its shell : ' You might as well stroke the Dome of St. Paul's to please the Dean and Chapter.' The little gaviins sometimes say very good things. Someone who applied to us for a clerkship told us that he had already applied to become a clerk to an undertaker in Fetter Lane — not a very lively occupation. But what can have been his feelings when, on going to the office, he found two hundred other applicants ? But the unkindest cut of all was when he saw two small gamins pointing at them, and saying, ' Look at all those clerks; they are going there to be measured for their coffins.' I will give you another instance. A very tall friend of mine was staring up at the Obelisk. He heard one of the gamins say, ' If you were to lie on the ground, you would be half-way home.' " T. — "I know a case of a very tall, gaunt, and plain English lady in Spain, to whom a rude little Spanish boy said, ' You are as long and as ugly as a lawsuit.' " May not, I am tempted to ask, the difference TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE 133 between wit and humour be illustrated by Sydney Smith's definition of wit? "The feeling of wit," he says, "is occasioned by those relations of ideas which excite surprise, and surprise alone." Now, it is manifest that the limitation contained in this last clause would not be required in a definition of humour. Nay, it represents the very opposite of what is required in such a definition. The emotional quality which (according to Sydney Smith) wit lacks, all humour must possess. Why, then, should not humour be defined as Wit touched by emotion ? The conversation drifted to English literature. T. — " I find it hard to think that Carlyle's extreme popularity will last very long." G. (smiling) — "I find it hard to be impartial; for Carlyle did not at all like me." T. — " Also, he did not at all like Disraeli, at least before Disraeli offered him a knighthood." 0. — "Yes, I know that he did not like Dizzy; but, with regard to myself, the hard thing was that I had a long, interesting, and, as it seemed to me, amicable conversation with him at Mentone; and then, to my amazement, I found, when Froude's life of him came out, this very conversation is mentioned in it, and I am described as utterly contemptible and impermeable to new ideas. I don't look upon Carlyle as a philosopher. Tennyson once said to me a very good thing about him. He said, ' Carlyle is a poet, to whom Nature has denied the faculty of verse.' " T. — " This reminds me of what Tennyson said 134 TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE to a friend of mine about Walt Whitman. He said, ' The first requisite of a singer is that he should sing. Walt Whitman has not this requisite ; let him speak in prose.' " G. — " Does not this seem rather inconsistent with what he said to me ? " T. — "I think not. He seemingly regarded both Carlyle and Walt Whitman as poetical torsos, as poets without the faculty of verse. This being so, he blamed Walt Whitman for attempting verse. He would doubtless have commended Carlyle for never (or hardly ever) attempting it." G. — " Are you a great admirer of Carlyle ? " T. — "At Harrow I became a great admirer of Macaulay's directness and plainness, and I often wish that Carlyle would not write Carlylese." G. (smilvag) — " I suppose that it is hardly possible for the same man to be a great admirer both of Macaulay and of Carlyle." The conversation passed on to politics. T. — "I don't want to embark on too wide a subject; but I am tempted to ask in the words of Jehoram, ' Is it peace, Jehu ? ' In other words, are you at all afraid of war, especiall}^ with Germany ? " (7._" Not in the least." T. — " Are you not afraid of our small army being attacked by their liuge army ? " G. — " How are they to cross the Channel witliout ships ? They rvoiild get very wet ! " Mrs. T. — "Might they not use a great number TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE 135 of the German Lloyd steamers to transport their army ? " G. — " We should have twenty ships to their one." T. — "I suppose that some English companies might be induced to supply them with ships and arms." G. — " Oh yes. For filth}^ lucre they would supply arms to the rebel angels against Heaven." T. — " Tliis reminds me of the case of the Alahmna'' G. — " The case of the Alabama is a very difficult and complicated one." T. — " I suppose that you consider the award was extravagantly high." G. — " It was enormous." He went on to mention, if I understood him rightly, a case in which we were mulcted of a large sum through the act of one of our colonies. T. — " What a strong view Froude takes in Oceana about the importance of colonies to the Mother Country ! " G. — " What reason does he give ? " T. — "I think he says that in England the race tends to become enfeebled through being crowded into large towns. He wishes more and more emigrants to be sent off to Australia and the other colonies, so that they or their posterity may return with recruited vigour to do service in England." G. — " Does he propose bringing another Australia into being ? The conditions which he seems to have desired exist already, and I cannot see how he expected to improve tliem. No, I have always 136 TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE maintained that we are bound by ties of honour and conscience to our colonies. But the idea that the colonies add to the strength of the mother country appears to me to be as dark a superstition as any that existed in the Middle Ages." It may not be amiss to compare this with a remark made in conversation many years ago by the late editor of the Times (Mr. Chenery) in regard to the colonies : " They are not feeders, but suckers." Injustice to Froude, I feel bound to say that I understand his contention to be that the colonies must be made to feel that the mother country really regards them as her children, and that she opens her doors to them, and is willing (in Academic phrase) to grant to those who distinguish themselves an ad eundemi degree on her own soil; and that, this being clearly understood, the tie between mother country and colonies will gradually become closer, especially as quickened locomotion cuts short distance. Later on, when Mr. Gladstone and I were left alone, he called my attention to the question raised in my Memoir of Jowett as to whether Socrates had much sense of sin. T. — "Do you remember the passage at the end of the Republic where Socrates speaks of the tremendous and seemingly everlasting punishments which await tyrants in the other world ? Does this not show that he had a strong sense of the heinous- ness of their sins ? " Q. — "I do not doubt that Socrates felt strongly TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE 137 the obligation of his moral code. But he regarded vice and crimes as offences against the social order, rather than as infractions of a law given by God. Of sin, in the latter sense, I think that there is no trace in Plato ; and I am confident that there is none in Aristotle. Even the moral code of the Greeks in the time of Socrates was so elastic as to press very gently on the vice mentioned in the T. — " It is certainly strange that there is nothing about that vice in Homer." G. — " Yes ; Homer had some remains of the sense of sin in his arafr^ockin- But among the Greeks this sense of sin almost died out with Homer." I recalled the declaration of ^Eschylus, which gathers solemnity from its very vagueness, and to which no translation can do justice — the half in- dignant, half incredulous declaration or admission that '* someone denied" that the gods take any heed of mortals; and I asked whether -^schylus had not a deep sense, if not of sin, at any rate of the appalling seriousness of human life. G. — "Yes, there are some remains of the sense of sin in ^schylus. In Homer the Eumenides are passionless beings dispensing impartial justice. In later times they are Furies inflamed by the worst passions. Take, for example, the phrase : Atra flagellum Tisiphone quatit exultans. In ^schylus you have both conceptions together." I could not agree with him in thinking the Homeric gods by any means models of virtue. An 138 TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE example is furnished by the fight of the gods, and the attitude taken by the Supreme Father — " Jove as his sport the dreadful scene descries, And views contending gods with careless eyes." In this couplet, it should be added. Pope has hardly done justice to the frank and refreshing brutality of the original, where the spiteful amusement of the Deity seems to be taken as a matter of course — *' eyeXacrae oe ol cp'iXov rjrop 'yrjOoavvri 6d' oparo deoijs 'ipiSi crwtoz'ras." May not, after all, this divine or diabolic mirth have been flavoured with a Chauvinistic ingredient — with the sweet but unwholesome condiment of Divid- antiir et imperaho ? Mr. Gladstone went on to say that, among the Hebrews in the time of Christ, the belief in the heinousness of sin had struck as deep root as the belief in the Unity of God ; Christ himself did not insist on it, because He knew that His hearers did not dispute it. On the general question I offered this comment : " I quite feel that the word ' sin,' in the theological sense, implies the infraction of a divine law. But is not this word, like some other theological terms (such as inspiration), gradually modifying its mean- ing ? The distinction that we now want to mark, is the distinction between persons who have, and persons who have not, a strong capacity for right- eous indignation. This capacity is not always co- incident with a sense of sin (strictly so called). Rabelais, Montaigne, Shakespeare, IMoliere, and La TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE 139 Fontaine probably believed — they certainly professed to believe — in the delivery of the law from Sinai. On the other hand, Voltaire, tlie two Mills, Mr. Francis Newman and Mr. John Morley have rejected that belief ; and yet, strange to say, the capacity for rig'liteous indignation is far stronger in them than in the earlier writers whom I have named ; and therefore, I should say that, in the modern accepta- tion of the term, they have a stronger sense of the heinousness of sin." In connection with this subject I called ]\Ir. Gladstone's attention to a tremendous passage in Newman's Apologia. "The Catholic Church holds it better for the sun and moon to drop from heaven, for the eartli to fail, and for all the many millions on it to die of starvation in extremest agony, as far as temporal affliction goes, than that one soul, I Avil] not say, should be lost, but should commit one venial sin, should tell one wilful untrutJi, or should steal one poor farthing without excuse." Commenting on this extract, I admitted that Newman's view might be defended by very plausible arguments; but I could not forbear testing it by a homely example. Suppose that a boy, from sheer love of mischief, told his parents falsely that his sister had been drowned. On discovering the falseliood, the parents would doubtless punish the boy well ; but in their hearts they would rejoice. In other words, they would prefer that a small sin should have been committed, ratlier than that a calamit}^ should occur which would be as dust in the balance when compared 140 TALKS WITH MK. GLADSTONE with the calamity imagined by Newman. Would not even Newman himself have sympathised with such parents in their sense of relief ? Mr. Gladstone made no comment on what I urged, probably think- ing that the interval between our respective stand- points was too wide to be bridged over by argument. But he helped on the discussion in another way. He gave me the extract (having himself most kindly copied it out) from Sir Henry Taylor's Correspond- ence, which he had mentioned to me in a former conversation as ascribing to Walter Scott a some- what blunted capacity for moral indignation. The passage occurs in a letter : — " The defect which you mention is attributable to the defect of moral force in Scott's character ; invariable candour and modera- tion in judging men is generally accompanied by such a defect. Scott seems to be always disposed to approve of rectitude of conduct, and to acquiesce in the general rules of morality, but without any instinctive or unconquerable aversion from vice — witness his friendship for Byron. Power of the imagination in conceiving and depicting strongly a great variety of characters seems scarcely com- patible with a strong individuality of character in the person possessing that power. It is some simple, headstrong qualities which make a strong character. Universality of opinions, and especially of sym- pathies, the one generally arising out of extended knowledge, the other out of the poetic sensibilities, are compatible enough with the power of conceiving a strong character, but not with that of being it." TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE 141 Mr. Gladstone added this comment: "Scott is one of my idols ; but I cannot deny that there is force and depth in Taylor's doctrine. It is probably the only hard thing that can be, and has to be, said of Scott with truth. With this drawback, he was a great benefactor to mankind." I could not forbear replying, " I own that Taylor seems to me hard on Scott. I cannot ascribe moral weakness to one who underwent such sacrifices, in order to pay off his creditors. As to his deficiency in the power of moral indignation, is not this found in almost all persons who write novels, or indeed who contemplate human nature from the outside ? I could no more reproach such persons with taking an indulgent view of the moral infirmities of our poor human nature than I could blame a surgeon for guarding himself against feeling excessive sym- pathy for his patients, and for taking what is called a professional view of even the gravest disorders." And, in confirmation of my opinion, I called Mr. Glad- stone's attention to a passage which tends to show that biographers as well as novelists are apt to take a professional view of moral shortcomings. The passage occurs in Plutarch's Lives of Agis and Cleomenes, where, after making mention of the extraordinary moral lapse which dishonoured the old age of Aratus, the biographer goes on to say : "This that we have written of Aratus (who was indued with many noble virtues, and a worthy Graecian) is not so much to accuse him, as to make us to see the frayelty and weakenes of man's nature: 142 TALKS WITH MK. GLADSTONE the which, though it have never so excellent vertues, can not yet bring forth such perfit frute, but that it hath ever some mayme and bleamishe." {Nortlis Plutarch.) Going back to Homer, Mr. Gladstone contended that in the Iliad the Greeks were never charged with doing anything very wrong. T. — "What do you say of the vindictiveness of Achilles?" Mr. Gladstone went through the story of Achilles from the beginning, and thought that Hector might have procured the restoration of Helen. G. — "The Greeks were finer characters than even some of the Hebrew patriarchs. They would never have consented to such an act as the selling of Joseph to the Egyptians. Homer marks his strong disapproval of the abduction of Helen by using the word ?ip'rao'av." T. — " You will remember that Herodotus uses the same word, and yet he thought that the Greeks were altogether in the wrong." Mr. Gladstone seemed surprised, so I quoted in the original the passage, which says of such women as Helen : " It is plain that, if they had not wished it, they would not have been carried off," remarking that this sentence seemed to me very quaint. G. — " Yes, of course, she consented to some extent, as is shown by the deep contrition which she ex- presses in the Odyssey. But was she worse than Bathsheba ? " Referring to Butler's Analogy, he said that he TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE 143 thought Dr. James Martineau had, in some respect, unconsciously misrepresented Butler. I replied that Jowett is reported to have described Butler's work as a " tissue of false analogies " ; and I quoted what he had said to me, namely, that he recoiled from the notion of attributing to a deliberate judicial act of the Deity moral anomalies similar to those which may be inseparable from the scheme of nature. Mr. Gladstone could not at all see the point of Jowett's objection. He said that there was one "audacious" passage in which Butler seemed to hint that this world may have been made as nearly perfect as the necessity of things permitted. Something was said of the contemptuous way in which most Catholics seemed to regard Anglo- Catholics. Mr. Gladstone mentioned a Catholic Peer who compared Ritualism to mock-turtle, and who added that he preferred the real turtle. I rejoined that the antipathy felt by Romanists for what they regard as the sham Rome on the banks of the Isis reminded me of the pathetic melancholy with which Claudian contemplated the new Rome on the shores of the Bosphorus — " Cum subiit par Roma mihi, divisaque sumpsit ^quales Aurora togas." Mr. Gladstone seemed to like this comparison. Reverting to the Life of Manning, Mr. Gladstone expressed surprise that the Cardinal had said that at Harrow he had learnt many things imperfectly ; and Mr. Gladstone added the amazing statement that, when he was at Eton, it was possible either 144 TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE to learn or not to learn, but that, if you learnt at all, you had to learn thoroughly. He wished that a good life of Busby could be written. It was of Busby that the story was told that he begged to be excused from uncovering before Charles ii., because if the boys once saw him owning his inferiority to mortal man, they would lose all respect for him. G. — "He seems to have been the parent of our public schools system; and, if that system were removed, it would be like knocking a front tooth out of our English social life. I am glad to have been at Eton, and especially to have been there under Keate. Keate was a very short man, and was con- scious of thus being at a disadvantage in inspiring the boys with awe. He resorted to two expedients for counteracting this defect. First, he wore a cassock and flowing robes ; and, secondly, he gave the boys the impression of always being in a passion." With Mr. Gladstone's description of Keate it may be worth while to compare that given by Kinglake : — "Anybody without the least notion of drawing could still draw a speaking, nay scolding, likeness of Keate. If you had no pencil, you could draw him well enough with the poker, or the leg of a chair, or the smoke of a candle. He was little more (if more at all) than five feet in height, and was not very great in girth, but within this space was concentrated the pluck of ten battalions. He had a really noble voice, and this he could modulate with great skill ; but he had also the power of quacking like an angry duck, and he almost always adopted this mode of communication in order to inspire respect. He was a capital scholar, but his ingenuous learning had not ' softened his manners, ' and had ' permitted them TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE 145 to be fierce ' — tremendously fierce. He liad such a complete com- mand over his temper — I mean, over his good temper, that he scarcely ever allowed it to appear : you could not put him out of humour — that is, out of the i7Z-humour which he thought to be fitting for a head -master. His red shaggy eyebrows were so prominent, that he habitually used them as arms and hands for the purpose of pointing out any object towards which he wished to direct attention ; the rest of his features were equally striking in their way, and were all and all his own. He wore a fancy dress, partly resembling the costume of Napoleon, and partly that of a widow woman. I could not have named anybody more decidedly differing in appearance from the rest of the human race." I quoted Vaughan's saying (reported to me on direct authority), viz. that it was a great advantage to him as a schoolmaster that, when he was most angry with a boy, he seemed most calm and self- possessed. G. — " There was one excellent institution at Eton in my time. About once a week Keate summoned the boys and gave them a lecture about things in general. Whenever they were displeased they called out '00, 00, 00,' without moving their lips, so that Keate could not tell which boys were making the noise. There was something Homeric in this. When the Trojans murmured, it is said that they x,s}^a^y](Tocv, whereas Homer applies a more respectful word to the applause of the Achseans." He did not say whether the choice of these words, as of some of the Homeric epithets, may not have been due to the exigencies of metre. G. — " I am sorry to learn that this good old Eton custom has died out" 10 146 TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE T. — " Vaughan would certainly not have tolerated it at Harrow." a—" What could he have done ? If he had left off giving the lectures, it would have been a triumph for the boys." T. — " He sometimes deprived the whole school of a half-holiday for less offences than that. By the way, the compliment you paid to Busby startled me. Do you not consider Arnold the great reformer of modern public schools ? " G. — "I doubt whether much of his influence reached Eton. I consider the three men who have recently done most for the religious improvement of Eton to have been Hawtrey, Selwyn (afterwards the well-known bishop), and the Duke of New- castle, who founded the Newcastle Scholarship." T. — "How has the Newcastle Scholarship pro- moted the religious improvement of Eton ? " G. — " There are some divinity questions ; and the competition stimulates the candidates to learn the rudiments of theology in a way in which they would not learn them otherwise." Jan. ISth. — Mr. Gladstone came to tea. G. — " In my younger days I was a great deal in Scotland, and looked upon Presbyterianism as of all religions the least susceptible of change. But all is now different. The Free Church has taken up the traditions of Presbyterianism, and indirectly, if it has not devitalised the Established Kirk, has at least deprived it of some of its essential character- TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE 147 istics. The Established Kirk is in some particulars approaching the Church of England. I believe that its congregations sometimes sing Newman's hymn, " Lead, kindly Light," which would have been Anathema in my youth; and there is even some talk of their having bishops.'* Li illustration of the state of opinion that pre- vailed in Scotland during his youth or middle life, he mentioned that in a Scotch town (I think Perth) he once saw a procession of choristers, and had the curiosity to ask another Scotch boy what those boys were. "They are Puseyites." "And what are Puseyites?" "Next door to Papists." I told the story that in my younger days a captain of militia, when enlisting a recruit, asked what was his religion. " Are you a Protestant ? " "Noa." "Then are you a Catholic?" " Noa." " Then what the devil are you ? — Are you a heathen ? " " Noa, I'm a Puseyite." The captain, after ascertaining what this latter term meant, decided that he should be sent to the Catholic service in the morning, and to the Protestant in tlie afternoon. G. {laughing) — " Was that in England ? " T. — " Yes ; in Chester. The story was told me at the time by one of the captains." Mr. Gladstone spoke a good deal about Manning, whom he regarded with very mixed feelings. He still had the remains of an ardent personal affection for the Cardinal, and an admiration for his states- manlike abilities. But the feelings were tempered 148 TALKS WITH MK. GLADSTONE by a dislike of his policy, and (as he expressed it) of his "craft." He had the strongest aversion to the Ultramontane movement. I said that a Catholic priest of liberal tendencies rejoiced at the decree of the Vatican Council in 1870, on the ground seem- ingly that the Pope — that is, the Church — is now released from the trammels of the past, and can embark on a career of progress. G. — " That means that he prefers personal to con- stitutional authority. Would he have liked the government of the Tudors better than the govern- ment of the Plantagenets ? " Personally, I should have thought that, if com- pelled to choose between living under the Planta- genets on the one hand, and, on the other hand, living either at the beginning of the reign of Henry VII. or at the end of the reign of Elizabeth, — that is, during those portions of the Tudor regiriie which were comparatively exempt from religious troubles, — most of us would have given a decided preference to the England of the Tudors. At the risk of appearing at once cynical and captious, I will offer another comment on the opinion expressed by Mr. Gladstone. In our view of nations, as of individuals of all sorts, it is not always by their periods of perfect sanity and soundness that we are most attracted. Assuredly the aloe is not in a healthy state when it flowers, any more than is the legendary swan when it sings. But I had rather contemplate either of those living things in its brief moribund glory, than during its protracted spell of TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE 149 salubrious dulness. And, for a like reason, I feel a greater interest in the Roman Republic as it was in the age of Cicero and of Lucretius, than as it was in the robuster epoch of Scipio and of Fabius ; thus, too, mutatis mutandis, even were I to grant all that Mr. Gladstone claimed for the orderly sway of the Plan- tagenets, I should still be more drawn towards the England of Shakespeare, and of Raleigh, even than towards the England of Chaucer. I mentioned a fact related by the aforesaid priest, and quoted in my Memoir of Jowett. It is there stated (p. 27) that the priest wrote to me : — *'Did I ever tell you of a saying of Cardinal Manning on the hell question ? A friend suggesting that it was a place of eternal suffering eternally untenanted, he answered: 'If one did not hope that it was so, who could endure life ? ' " According to this ingenious theory, impenitent sinners are in- directly suggestive of Dryden's hind; for they are doomed to hell, hut fated not to hum. But Mr. Gladstone did not see his way either to granting them an escape from the nether fires, or to investing them with the insensibility of the salamander. And indeed, when the Cardinal's merciful special pleading was reported to him, he emphatically replied that the report seemed to him hard to believe. He went on to speak of an article which he had written about Butler's chapter on a future life. He had no sym- pathy with the belief in natural immortality. That belief, he contended, was upheld only by Plato and a few other philosophers in pagan times. It is 150 TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE nowhere to be found in the Bible ; and Origen was, he believed, the earliest Christian writer who adopted it ; afterwards it became so widespread, if not uni- versal, that Servetus, when accused, amongst other things, of the heresy of attacking that belief, openly declared : " If ever I said that, and not only said it, but published it, and infected the whole world, I would condemn myself to death." G. — " Do you believe in natural immortality ? " T. — " I certainly wish to believe it. I am natur- ally disposed in favour of any form of the belief in immortality which does not involve the belief in final retribution." G. — " But the belief in natural immortality is not inconsistent with the belief in final retribution." In strict theory, I suppose that he was right. But, practically, the scientific objections to the belief in natural immortality are so formidable that this belief is obliged in self-defence to throw itself, as it were, on our highest aspirations ; and those aspira- tions undoubtedly point to the elevating hope that good will be the final goal of ill. Probably Lord Sherbrooke had some such thought in his mind when he said, in conversation, " I utterly refuse to believe in a God who is worse than I am." Whereto he might have added as a corollary : " I utterly refuse to believe in a future life which is worse than the present life." Yes; this is the universal postulate of enlightened theology : De Diis nil nisi honuTn. Wishino- to see what Mr. Gladstone would make of the obvious objections to the belief in personal TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE 151 immortality, I expounded them as clearly as I could ; and, with that view, I gave him the substance of a conversation which had taken place between Pro- fessor Tyndall and myself, and which has so much intrinsic interest that I will venture to repeat it here : — In 1886 (or thereabouts) I remarked to Professor Tyndall that Dr. Mandsley somewhere speaks of Mind as "a function of brain, or rather of organisation." "Do you suppose," Tyndall asked, laughing, "that Mandsley is the only man who says that?" He clearly regarded the point as one on which rational biologists are agreed. I then inquired whether he did not find it hard to reconcile this opinion with the belief in immortality. " If the brain is the organ, and consciousness is merely the function, is it not contrary to all analogy to expect that, in this instance, the function will outlast the organ?, Is it not like imagining that the lire will go on burning when the fuel is exhausted ? Huxley would doubtless agree with you on the general principle ; and therefore I am puzzled to find him taking a purely Agnostic attitude on the question. He says, in effect, that, if people tell him that they believe in immortality, he asks them on what they ground their belief; and, if they tell him that they disbelieve in it, he asks them on what they ground their disbelief." In reply, Tyndall took exception to my illustration drawn from fire and fuel. He said that there is no evidence that consciousness, like heat or electricity, is a mode of motion ; but he spoke of consciousness as ' ' dependent " on organisa- tion. Tol. — "Does not the word ' dependent ' involve the whole issue ? " Tyn. {after a pause) — " Do you suppose that, if Huxley had been in this room now, and you had pressed him as you have pressed me, he would seriously maintain that the balance lies evenly between the two opposite hypotheses?" He went on to make it quite clear that, in his opinion, the view of Lucretius that " animi natura nequit sine corpore oriri Sola, neque a nervis et sanguine longiter esse," 152 TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE is in all probability correct. Presently Tyndall added, with a smile, "Huxley does sometimes throw sops to Cerberus " — meaning, doubt- less, that this economy of truth, or economy of logic, was practised unconsciously. That such a comment should have been made by Tyndall, even playfully, on his admired and admirable friend, will surprise some readers more, perhaps, than it surprised me. In explanation of what he said, I will add that, long before this con- versation had taken place, and indeed shortly after Huxley had published his essay on "Administrative Nihilism," I called Tyndall's attention to one or two of Huxley's unexpected utterances, utterances which, though certainly not orthodox, had something dogmatically and aggressively anti-materialistic in their tone. "His mind," replied Tyndall, "is a pendulum which has been going into one extreme, and now inclines towards the opposite one." After hearing what I had to say, Mr. Gladstone expressed strong disagreement with Tyndall. " Scien- tific men," he exclaimed, "talk a great deal too confidently about many points ; and this is one of them." When I insisted that, according to Tyndall, mind is a function of the brain, just as sight is the function of the eye, he interrupted me : " I beg your pardon, sight is not the function of the eye." T. — " At anyrate, you will admit that the eye is the organ of sight." G. — " Strictly speaking, the eye is the carrier of sight." I confess that this objection of his seemed to me very hypercritical, all the more so because, so far as it goes, it rather strengthens than weakens the case for what is called Materialism. Let us grant that the brain is the organ of sight, and that the eye is the mere servant of the brain. The decomposition of the eye extinguishes sight. What TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE 153 vital function, then, will be left when the brain is decomposed ? To speak broadly : If the death of the servant puts a stop to his peculiar form of service, what form of service would be possible when the master and all the servants have perished together ? I was casting about for some safer topic when, suddenly remembering what had recently passed between us about wit and humour, I stumbled on the highly original observation that Charles Lamb seemed to me humorous rather than witty ! But Mr. Gladstone, of course, held the rudder ; and, after drily assenting to what may be termed my leading- platitude, he turned our course away from the smooth water and steered straight towards the Day of Judgment. He began by saying that the Chris- tian doctrine of immortality was that of union with God ; and, by way of illustration, he quoted the text, " As Thou, Father, art in Me, and I in Thee, that they also may be one in us." He then repeated his conviction that natural immortality is not to be found in the New Testament. I pointed out, on the lines laid down by Renan, the difference between the Platonic view of Immortality and the Christian view of the Resurrection of the Body. I repeated what Renan says to the effect that there are at least two distinct views of Immortality. There is the Greek view, which divides man into two parts, body and soul, and which represents the soul as surviving without the body ; this view seems to be entertained by the author of Ecclesiastes, who says, "Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was : and the spirit 154 TALKS WITH MH. GLADSTONE shall return unto God, who gave it." On the other hand, there is the distinctively Christian view of the Resurrection of the Body, which does not assign to the soul an independent existence, but pronounces that soul and body together shall be raised at the last day. Mr. Gladstone seemed to agree ; but, on my saying that one or two texts are not so easily reconciled with this opinion, he asked, " Which texts ? " I quoted the words addressed to the dying thief ; and added that this text cer- tainly implied that the thief's soul would be in heaven while his body was decomposing in the earth. Q. — " Oh, there is no doubt that the New Testa- ment teaches throughout that the souls of the righteous will go to heaven immediately after their death." T. — " If the righteous are to be severed from the wicked immediately after death, what need will there be for a Day of Judgment ? Would it not be a strange anomaly that the dying thief and Dives should be called upon at the last day to make their defence before the Tribunal of God, if each of them, the former in Paradise and the latter in ' torments,' has already learnt by experience what the final sentence on him is to be ? Would not the con- demned be entitled (adapting a famous line) to say of such a proceeding : ' 'Tis like a trial after execution ' ? " I fear that I cannot have made my reasoning plain to Mr. Gladstone ; for he answered with un- TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE 155 usual heat, " I really cannot answer such questions. The Almighty never took me into His confidence as to why there is to be a Day of Judgment." I felt it was impossible to press the matter further, and merely said something to the effect that the ex- pectation of the immediate end of the world prob- ably deterred the apostles from laying much stress on the condition of the dead in the interval before the (j-eneral Resurrection. Sir John Seeley somewhere, while expressing his strong wish to retain the belief in immortality, has spoken of the belief in the Day of Judgment as indicating a certain want of culture in those who maintain it. He was of course referring to his own contemporaries; and his remark would not have applied to persons who, like Mr Gladstone, were a quarter of a century older. In Mr. Gladstone's mind this unsightly and withered branch of the popular theology was as fixed as in the minds of the congregation whom, in the days of my youth, a zealous clergyman edified by exclaiming : " In what form the Angel will appear I know no more than of what metal his trumpet will be made ! " Shall I be thought disrespectful if I remark that this and one or two other sayings of Mr. Gladstone remind me of Walter Bagehot's epigrammatic assertion that, " A Constitutional Statesman is in general a man of common opinions and uncommon abilities — of the powers of a first-rate man and the creed of a second- rate man " ? Mr. Gladstone rose to dej)art. I was always 156 TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE anxious in my conversations with him to refresh myself with a sort of old-world bath by hearing his recollections of his youth and middle life ; and I was disappointed that in this instance the con- versation had drifted from the past and present to the future. As I walked with him to his hotel, I observed that, as Miss Gladstone had been so long at Newnham, he had probably often considered the question of the higher education of women and of their future demands. He replied that he had considered the question very often; he was disposed to open the professions to them, but to exclude them from the franchise ; if they were once given the franchise, it would be hard to prevent their having everything else. T. — " What do you mean by ' everything else ' ? Do you mean that they would want to become Members of Parliament ? " 0. — " Yes, and to become judges and generals." T. — " But surely, if they want to become generals, they would be told that they were, owing to physical causes, unfit for the army." Q. — "Oh, but they would answer that, if they were physically unfit to become generals, they never would or could become generals." T. — " Yes ; this is the kind of argument which Mill illustrated by saying that no law was ever passed forbidding men with weak arms to become blacksmiths." 0. — " One concession, however, I would make to them. It seems to niQ perfectly scandalous that, TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE 15*7 out of the vast incomes of our two Universities, not a sixpence has ever been given to a woman." T. — " Would you have women made professors ? " G. — " There might be difficulties about that. But they might be helpful in other ways. As compared with men, they are handicapped in the race of life ; and they certainly ought to have their share of the University revenues. I remember urging this on Lightf oot at the time of the University Commission ; but he thought that it would be too fundamental a change." January 8th, 1896. — Dined with Mr. Armitstead and the Gladstones; Lord and Lady Cranbourne were present. Mr. Gladstone, speaking of the learned divine whose reminiscences of him I have quoted above, regretted that so excellent a man was obliged by weak health to live abroad. G. — " He would probably have risen to the highest distinction in the Church." T. — " Surely very many able clergymen, for various reasons, do not gain ecclesiastical preferments." G. — " No doubt that used to be the case. At the time of the Newmanite movement, every clergyman who took part in that movement was rigorously placed under a ban. But things are changed now." I spoke of Jowett as a very distinguished clergy- man, who never received ecclesiastical preferment ; and the conversation drifted to Jowett's Sermon on Discourse. I said that on that occasion he chose a 158 TALKS WITH ME. GLADSTONE very odd text. A sermon is generally supposed to bear some relation to the text in its ori2:inal sense ; and in this instance the selection of " 3Ian shall not live by bread alone, but by every ivord tha.t pro- ceedeth out of the mouth," ^ suggests the notion that the dialogue with the Arch-fiend in the wilderness had turned on the best mode of being agreeable in society. Mr. Gladstone smiled, and acknowledged that sometimes Jowett's texts were certainly peculiar ; but, on the whole, the sermons seemed to him to be very interesting and striking. He then came up to me with his edition of Butler's Analogy, and said, " This is my Butler." As I have to wear very peculiar spectacles, the field of my vision is limited ; and Mr. Gladstone happened to hold the book outside that field. I therefore did not see the book ; but, chancing to see a gentleman in evening dress advancing towards me, I imagined that this must be the butler, who was in all probability bringing me my handkerchief, which I might have dropped on the staircase. This trivial incident is worth recording, as the mistake would scarcely have been made but for that peculiar inelastic and, so to say, stereotyped earnestness of manner which made it hard sometimes to tell whether Mr. Gladstone was speaking on a grave or on a light topic. At dinner the conversation began with the rainfall at Biarritz ; and I took the opportunity of raising the question whether a dry or a damp climate is the more favourable to longevity. ^ The text is thus truncated by Jowett. TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE 159 G. — "There are some very curious facts about longevity. I will mention one. The proportion of centenarians in Scotland is about double of what it is in England, and in Ireland it is about double of ■what it is in Scotland." I asked whether that might not be due to the exaggeration of very old people. Were the registers as carefully kept in Ireland and Scotland as in England ? G. — " I am speaking of the most recent returns." I asked whether the registers were kept with equal care in all three countries a hundred years ago, and reminded Mr. Gladstone of the difficulty which arises when one child dies and another, born some years later, is called by the same name. G. — "I know that; but I think that this cause of error would exist equally in the three countries. The result seems to me very remarkable indeed." He went on to talk about Sir G. Cornwall Lewis, for whose judgment, except on matters of " finance," he had the highest respect; but in his scepticism about centenarianism he was, in Mr. Gladstone's opinion, simply wrong. I adverted to my conversa- tion with Sir G. Cornwall Lewis (reported in Safe Studies, pp. 37-43), which occurred only a few weeks before his death, and in which he admitted that a few cases of centenarianism were established. G. — " It appears, then, that, like the vaccinators, he changed his ground." T. — " How have vaccinators changed their ground ?" G. — " They began by saying that, if you are once 160 TALKS WITH MK. GLADSTONE vaccinated, you will never have small-pox; then they said that you must be vaccinated twice; and then that you must be vaccinated once in seven years ! " T. — " But I suppose that nearly all doctors are in favour of vaccination." G. — "Yes; ninety-nine out of every hundred. But at one time medical opinion was in favour of inoculation. Indeed, they were very nearly making inoculation compulsory ; whereas now it is penal." ^ T. — "But does not vaccination greatly diminish small-pox ? " G. — " Yes ; but it has greatly increased the tend- ency to zymotic diseases. Whenever there is a zymotic tendency in the child from which the lymph is taken, that disease is transmitted to the vaccinated child. I should have been afraid to tell my old friend, Sir Andrew Clark, that I always feel a strong repulsion to seeing the clear, pure skin of a child made to break out into pustules." T. — " But are you opposed to vaccination ? " G. — " No ; but I dislike the idea of its being com- pulsory. I don't like the notion of the State stepping in between parent and child when it is not abso- lutely necessary. The State is generally a very bad nurse." ^ There is a passage in She Stoops to Conquer which, even when allowance is made for comic exaggeration, shows how prevalent, in Goldsmith's day, was the belief in the beneficial effects of inocula- tion. "I vow," says Mrs. Hardcastle, "since inoculation began^ there is no such thing to be seen as a plain woman." fortunatcc nimium ! TALKS WITH MK. GLADSTONE 161 T. — " If vaccinators have made a change of front, so, too, have thought-readers and clairvoyants. At one time it was said that, if you could hypnotise me, I might be able to inform you on topics previously unknown either to you or to me. It is now, I understand, merely said that what is in your mind may through some mysterious process be passed on to mine." G. — "I keep my judgment in suspense about thought-reading. I don't let myself be entangled in the belief in it ; but I am not violently opposed to it. There seems to be very strong evidence for the stories of second sight at the moment of death." He then gave an account of an old and faithful servant of his own, who took to drinking, suddenly decamped, and afterwards destroyed himself. On the morning after his disappearance Mr. Gladstone thought that he saw him waiting at the breakfast- table, and asked the butler whether he was not there. Mr. Gladstone had no reason to think that this occurred at the moment of the servant's death ; but he said it was the only occasion on which he re- membered himself to have been the victim of an ocular delusion. One or two instances bearing on the question of second sight were told by a lady at table; and she was advised by him to submit the facts to the Psychical Society. I told the story of a lady whose son died in Australia. She gave me the following account of what occurred: Though she knew that he was at the Antipodes, she suddenly heard his voice calling " Mother," and mentioned II 162 TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE the fact to her daughter. They took a note of the time, which was 5 p.m., and they afterwards learnt that " at that very moment he died." I presently led her on to say that it was at 5 p.m. that he had died. So she evidently had not made allowance for the diiference between English and Australian time. On my subsequently cross-questioning the daughter, I learnt that the mother's attention had been called to this difference, but that she persisted In telling the story in the old way. Also, to the best of the daughter's recollection, it was a mere hallucination of her mother's that she had men- tioned the fact at the time to her. If, under the influence of strong emotion, the wish to believe could produce actual belief in this somewhat extreme instance, might not the same cause be expected to produce belief in other instances ? The sorrowing friends who tell such tales are in a mythopoeic, and, as Burns would have said, " ghaist-alluring " frame of mind ; and for obvious reasons it is generally hard, if not impossible, to cross -ques- tion them. Mr. Gladstone listened ; but evidently thought that my explanation would not cover all the cases. T. — "Suppose that the watchword, after being given to a sentinel, was discovered by the enemy, and that there was no possible way of accounting for the discovery except on the hypothesis either of treachery or of thought-reading." G. {smiling) — " If I was the General, I should have the sentinel shot.' But he said nothing about the TALKS WITH Mil. GLADSTONE 163 significance of sucli a case as a sort of negative evidence against thought-reading. He reverted to what was then his engrossing topic, Mannings Life. G. — " The worst of nearly all biographies is that they contain hardly anything but praise." T. — " Is not that inevitable ? The facts must be furnished by the family of the deceased, and the biographer feels bound to consider their feelings." G. — " This may explain the unfortunate rule, but only adds value to such an exception as Purcell's Life of the Cardinal. Another great exception is Froude's Life of Carlyle." T. — " Some would say that Froude went into the opposite extreme. Do you not think Trevelyan's Life of Macavlay is an excellent piece of work ? ** G. — "Yes; but he had no great difficulties to contend with. By the way, I once asked Dollinger, whose literary discernment impressed me more than that of any other man, what he thought of Macaulay's very peculiar style. I wanted to know how that style would strike a foreigner. Dollinger did not seem to see the exact point of my question, but answered : ' I should admire Macaulay more if I was quite sure that he was not misleading me.' " I quoted Charles Austin's candid-friendly remark to Macaulay: "You always have by you some white and some black paint; when you describe a Tory, you put on the black paint ; and, when you describe a Whig, the white." 164 TALKS WITH MK. GLADSTONE G. — " I am sure that Macaulay was not consciously unfair ; but he was not impartial, like Hallam." T. — "You will remember what Macaulay said about Sir James Macintosh and Hallam. He thought that they were both eminently impartial ; but that Macintosh was always inclined to indulgence, whilst Hallam was a hanging judge." Q. — "Perhaps Hallam's judgments are a little severe; but, on the whole, they are wonderfully just." T. — " Did you ever read the very touching words which he wrote on the tomb of his son Arthur ? " G. — " Did he not use an Italian phrase ? " T. — " I was thinking of the Latin epitaph." And I proceeded, as nearly as I could remember, to quote the words : "Vale, dulcissime Vale, dilectissime desideratissime, Requiescas in pace, Pater ac Mater hie posthac requiescamus tecum Usque ad tubam." T. — " Charles Austin was surprised at Hallam's use of such very orthodox phraseology as that contained in the last three words." G. — "Charles Austin may have been surprised, but I am not. Hallam was a thorough Christian." T. — " You knew Arthur Hallam ; did you not ? " G. — "Very well indeed. He was my greatest friend at Eton. Though we lived at some distance from each other, we used to breakfast each with the other on alternate weeks. He was quite the most TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE 165 rising man that I knew. He was so much above and beyond all the rest of us" — here he lifted up his arm with a symbolical gesture — "that I wondered how he could manage to deal with us." I asked what was Arthur Hallam's age at the time of his death ; and Mr. Gladstone showed how fresh everything about him was in his own memory by stating the month when he was born and the month when he died. T. — " I suppose that you are a great admirer of In Memoriam" G. — "Yes. It is obscure in parts; but, on the whole, I admire it very much." Something was said about Tennyson's extreme sensitiveness. Mr. Gladstone admitted that he was sensitive ; but he added that, for all that, Tennyson did not mind telling a story against himself. The poet himself had mentioned that long ago a friend of his, going to Freshwater, asked a rustic to tell him who were the chief inhabitants. On the names being mentioned of several persons not known to fame, the stranger inquired about Mr. Tennyson. " We don't think much of him," was the reply ; " he keeps only one man-servant, and he sleeps out!" I capped this anecdote by mentioning that Tenny- son had rather enjoyed telling the following story against Carlyle. Carlyle had gone to Cambridge during the long vacation, and, finding a stray undergraduate, asked him the names of some of the Colleges. The young man kindly acted as cicerone, and did the honours of Cambridge. On parting. 166 TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE Carlyle said to him, " Thank you, young man. Per- haps you may like to know that you have rendered a service to Thomas Carlyle ! " Looking somewhat surprised, this Verdant Green, jun., answered affably, "Indeed, Mr. Thomas Carlyle, I am very glad to show Cambridge to a gentleman who has never seen it before." One would like to have seen, or (better still) to have thought-read, Carlyle when the simple- minded undergraduate said that. Mr. Gladstone remarked that he thought that " Guinevere " was the one of Tennyson's poems that he liked best, and asked which was my favourite. After mentioning "St. Agnes' Eve," " (Enone," and the "Passing of Arthur" as the shorter poems which particularly attract me, I said that it seems to me very interest- insf to contrast the tone of the earlier and of the later " Locksley Hall." 0. — " The second ' Locksley Hall ' appears to me to make too gloomy a forecast. I wrote a criticism of it in the Nineteenth Century" T. — "Are you not inclined to take a thoroughly sanguine view of the prospects of this very reform- ing age ? " (t.— "Not altogether. The future is to me a blank. I cannot at all guess what is coming." T. — " Do you mean that you are afraid that Demo- cracy may bring everything to a dead level, or tiiat Science is too hastily moving the old theological landmarks ? " Q, — « I am not so much afraid either of Democracy or of Science as of the love of money. Tliis seems TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE 167 to me to be a growing evil. Also, there is a danger from the growth of that dreadful military spirit." I asked him if he thought that, as is often said, the perfecting of the art of war will make wars more terrible, and therefore more dreaded ; so that Suis et ipsa hella virihiis riient. He seemed uncertain. T. "Is not the moral standard of public men higlier than it used to be ? " Q^ — «I should say that in England the change has been all the other way. About the Continent I am not so sure. (After a pctuse.) Since the retire- ment of Bismarck, Crispi would probably rank as the first of continental statesmen. I am no great admirer of the public career either of Castlereagh or of Metternich. But, judging as a moralist, I should say that the careers of Castlereagh and of Metternich would compare favourably with tliose of Bismarck and Crispi." Being asked by another of the party what he thought of Bismarck, he replied, " He is a very big man, but very unscrupulous." When Mr. Gladstone thus acknowledged that statesmanship had declined, the admission seemed to me suggestive and significant. Was there not also a gradual decline of political ability during the great century of Athens ? Were not the politicians of the time of Cleon smaller men than those either of the time of Themistocles or of the time of Pericles? And may not the deterioration of Athenian states- manship in the fourth century B.C., and that of European statesmanship in the nineteenth century A.D., be due in part to the same cause, namely, the 168 TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE advance of Democracy ? Or, to speak more precisely, do we not commonly find a goodlier fellowship of heroes and patriots when aristocracy and democracy are militant than when either aristocracy or demo- cracy is triumphant ? And, after all, are we not thus brought face to face with one of the aspects of the too familiar question whether, just as each one of us must expect his own physical strength, sooner or later, to dwindle and decay, even so the time must come to every civilised nation when the advancing tide of scepticism will bring destruction on public confidence, and indeed on belief in ideals of all sorts ? 23 ■ 18 Holland, Bernard - 16 Holland, Canon ■ 19 - 20 Holmes, Thomas " 15 - 28 Holt, Ardern - ■ 23 - 20 Hopkinson, A. M. - 27 - 13 Hughes, J. L. . - 18 • 13 Hussey, Eyre - • 14 - 13 Hutchinson, Horace ( J, • 14 - 29 Hutchison, Robert • 28 - 29 India Office Publicati 3ns - 29 - 1 International Educatic m Series 31 5 Johnston, Annie Felio ws ■ 27 ■ 13 Keith, A. ■ 28 - 25 Kelsey, W. R. ■ 28 - 27 Kenney-Herbert, Col. A. - 24 6, 19 Knox, T. W. - - 27 - 13 Knutsford, Lady - 16 13,18 Kuhns, L. Oscar - 18 • 19 Lake, Katharine - 16 - 20 Lang, Andrew - - 18 ■ 17 Le Fanu, W. R. - 16 • 22 Legh, M. H. Cornwal i 26, 27 - 20 Lehfeidt, Dr. R. A. - 28 - 19 Lighthall, W. D. ■ 14 - 25 Local Series - ■ 27 - 23 Lockwood, Sir Frank - 26 • 2S Louis, H. ■ 28 ■ 15 Lucas, St. John - 7 • 13 Macdonald, Lt.-Col. J . R. - 20 - 28 Macdonald, Sir John \. - 16 7.13 IMarkham, Captain F. 2 ■ 13 Marson, C. - 16 - 28 IMaslen, A. J. 18, 23 Mathews, Margaret H - 26 ■ 23 Matthews, C. G. - 28 10-12 Maud, Constance 18,26 ■ 13 • 27 ■ 25 • 15 - 27 - 28 • 17 - 18 6 Maxwell, Sir Herbert ' 23 McNab, Frances - 21 McNulty, Edward ■ 14 Merivale, J. A. ■ 16 Milner, Viscount - 16 Montrdsor, F. F. • 14 Morgan, C. Lloyd - 28 Mott, E. S. ■ - 16 Mudge, G. P. - - 29 • 13 - 17 Munroe, Kirk - • 26 Nash, Henry - - 26 - 20 National Review • 24 PAGE Naval and Military Biographies g Nimrod • - - 22 O'Brien, Capt. D. H Odysseus Oliphant, P. L. Oman, C. Onyx - Osborne, Rev. C. E. Oxenden, Maud Pasley, Louisa M. S. Peel, Hon. G. ■ Peel, Hon. S. - Pearson, Karl - Pembrey, M. S. Percy, Earl Perry, Prof. John Phillipps, L. March Phillips, C. D. F. Pickering, Sidney Pigott, T. Digby Pigou, Very Rev. Francis Pike, Warburton Pilkington, E. M. S. Pinsent, Ellen F. PoUok, Lieut. -Colonel Powles, L. D. . Price, L. L. - Pritchett, R. T. Quiller Couch, A. T, Radford, Mrs. C. H, Raleigh, Walter Ransome, Cyril Raymond, Evelvn Reed, E. T. -' Reid, Arnot - Reynolds, Rev. S. H, Richmond, Rev. Wilfrid Roberts, Morley Rochefort, Henri Rodd, Sir Rennell Roebuck, Rt. Hon. J Roj', Gordon - Rumbold, Sir Horace Russell, W. Clark Scrape, William Seton, Christine Shaw, C. Weeks Shenstone, IMildred Shoriand, F. W. Sidgwick, Mrs. A. Slatin Pasha, Sir Rudolf Smith, A. Donaldson Smith, H. H. - Smith, Thomas Solly, H. S. - Spinner, Alice - Sportsman's Librarj' Streamer, Col. D. Tatham, H. F. W. Taylor, Isaac - The Times Atlas Thompson, Col. R. F. Meysey Thornton, Col. T. ToUemache, Hon. Wallace, Helen Warkv'orth, Lord Watson, E. H. Lacon Weber, Antoinette Webber, T. W. White, C. N. • Wilbraham, Estra Williams, N. Wynne Wilson, Theodora Wingate, Sir F. R. Wyllie, W, L. Yale Bicentennial Publica' tions • RETURN CIRCULATION DEPARTMENT TO— ^ 202 Main Library LOAN PERIOD 1 HOME USE 2 3 4 5 6 ALL BOOKS MAY BE RECALLED AFTER 7 DAYS Renewals and Recharges may be made 4 days prior to the due date. Books may be Renewed by calling 642-3405. DUE AS STAMPED BELOW APR 2 4 1992 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY FORM NO. DD6 BERKELEY, CA 94720 U.C. BERKELEY LIBRARIES 111 III III CD3TSflE7fi3