The Personality of Mr. Gladstone
The Speaker, October 10, 1903


Like all sentimentalists, Mr. Chamberlain has a certain dim, but real, kinship with the genuine emotions. He has that mark of the undeveloped and cockney romantic, a tendency to be impressed with a thing, if it is really very big- if it is something like "the illimitable veldt." He is the sort of man who would always write a poem at the correct waterfall, the waterfall which is down in the guide-book. And it is an interesting example of this fact, and of the fact that his rhetoric is his only enduring and genuine quality, that he said an oratorical and conventional, but still a finely accurate thing, about Mr. Gladstone; he said that we were too near the mountain even to understand, as it were, that it was a mountain. There is really this paradox in history of the thing that grows larger as it grows more distant. The more we travel down the valley of the present age, the more we feel that the victory of Gladstone's mental attitude is long and wearisome, and slow, and certain. We have buried that ideal upon the hill behind us, but we know that our avenger liveth, and that he shall appear in the latter days of the earth. I only wish in this article to point out one or two of the matters in which Mr. Morley's Life of Gladstone, and more especially his picture of Gladstone as an individual, as a temperament, gives examples of this inevitable triumph, this essential rightness of his point of view. There are an enormous number of them; but one, I think, towers above all the rest. It is not a lesson from Gladstone's policy, or from his philosophy, or even from his ethics; it is strictly a lesson from his temperament. And with characteristic fundamentalism (to coin a most necessary word) Mr. John Morley raises the fascinating query connected with the characteristic upon the very first two pages of his chapter entitled "Characteristics." He says, with truth, that it has always been a question whether, among Gladstone's marvellous social gifts, humour was really present in any strong degree. And he adds, with what seems to me to be peculiarly penetrating accuracy, that there can be no doubt, at any rate, that gaiety was among them. In these two words, and their relations to each other, seems to me to lie the first and most overwhelmingly important of all the inspirations which are to be drawn from the personal character of Gladstone. He was not without humour- to say that would be to say that he was a monstrosity, which is the very last thing that he was. He was that kind of genuine great man who is an ordinary man magnified- but magnified proportionately, magnified to scale. He was broad as well as long. But he was not pre-eminently possessed with humour, and precisely because he was not pre-eminently possessed with humour he was pre-eminently possessed with gaiety. He took everything seriously- that is, he had found the key to happiness, the key which is commonly lost to us when we lose the gaiety and gravity of babies. He was, perhaps, the happiest of all the children of men. His mighty and cheerful old age, in which the white hair might truly be compared, as in Scripture, to the flowering of the hawthorn, his epic bodily vigour, his translucent intellect, his memory for details, his multitudinous hobbies, his continual cheerfulness, his immortal gaiety; all this is one vast standing protest against the most pitiful of modern idolatries, the modern idolatry of humour. It is the great answer to the philosophy which, in contempt of the image of God, would turn man into a philosophical hyena. Looking at the funny side of things may be the way to be clever, or the way to be amusing, or the way to be famous, or the way to be Prime Minister- it is not the way to be happy. It is not the way to be great. Gladstone stands against his antagonist Disraeli in nothing so fearlessly, in nothing so disdainfully as in this capacity of the delight of gravity. The enthusiast was a happy man; the mocker was a miserable man. Disraeli despised even his victories. Gladstone enjoyed even his defeats. The one looked through the diminishing end of the telescope; the other through the magnifying. It is not difficult to say which came nearer to the stars at which they looked.

At present we seem to be working under the inspiration of Disraeli chiefly; not in politics, I mean, but merely in the ethics and aesthetics of daily life. The humourists of the later nineteenth century, with their strange waistcoats and their strange sins, were perhaps the most miserable people that the world has ever seen. The face of a humourist of our time is like the face of one of the damned. The reason of the failure of our modern politics is that all our politicians at the back of their souls regard a war of statesmen as a war of beetles. Nay, they would regard a war of angels as a war of beetles. They have cultivated humour the malady that makes everything small. But Gladstone regarded a war of statesmen as a war of angels- nay, he would, if his attentions had been fixed on that, have regarded a war of beetles as a war of angels. There is no compromise between the two views. Either we are right in seeing things as Gladstone saw them, as growing larger and larger as we come near them, which ends in thinking, as Gladstone thought, a misprint in a time-table of indescribable importance. Or else we are right in seeing, as Disraeli saw, all things grow smaller and smaller as we pass away from them, which ends in seeing, as Disraeli saw, the convulsions of nations as a joke. Humour is that which makes all things small; but it makes nothing so small as the humourist.

In this sublime tendency to see small things as great we find the chief key to Gladstone's amazing happiness, but we also find the chief key to the things that were misunderstood and vilified in his political character. For instance, nothing appears to have exasperated his opponents more than what they regarded as a habit of making very fine distinctions; of separating one logical hair from another. Some seem to have regarded it as a proof of his futility and smallness; it was, of course, a proof of his joy and immense genius for life. He dwelt on small distinctions because nothing appeared to him small. The moment he set himself to a minute logical distinction, it was as if he had suddenly decided to study fretwork or to collect beetles. There was a right and a wrong way of doing the thing, and he hungered after the right way with the hunger of a saint for heaven. His vitality loved mere logic as it would have loved any other fight. And he stands, as a second example, against that false contemporary notion that the detail is the enemy of the universal. He stands against the notion which is the root of Imperialism, that the tramp knows more of the world than the ploughman. The tramp knows far less of the world, for he has never ploughed. Gladstone ploughed. As Mr. Morley says finely, "He was lowlander as well as highlander."
 

Lastly, and here, perhaps, we touch on the deepest and most essential fact, the temperament of Gladstone stands as a kind of protest against one of the worst delusions of our age. It is the delusion that the man of sharp and strong convictions is not liberal. It is false. Persecution has always come from the vague people; persecution comes in its fullest strength from the people who have no convictions at all. The people to whom the name of Bradlaugh is still a source of a sort of shiver are the people who politely and reverently believe in nothing. The man who defended the unquestionable political rights of Bradlaugh was the man who believed in the absolute truth of the Athanasian Creed. Between those two men all our modern life is an abyss and welter of vague bigotry and sentimental brutality. Across that abyss the two sincere believers saluted each other.