The Life of William Ewart Gladstone Volume I Part 46

The hopes of the speedy fall of Sebastopol brightened in the summer of 1855, but this brought new alarms to Lord Palmerston. 'Our danger,' he said in remarkable words, 'will then begin--a danger of peace and not a danger of war.' To drive the Russians out of the Crimea was to be no more than a preliminary. England would go on by herself, if conditions deemed by her essential were not secured. 'The British nation is unanimous, for I cannot reckon Cobden, Bright, and Co. for anything.'[352] His account of the public mind was indubitably true.

Well might Aberdeen recall to his friends that, with a single exception, every treaty concluded at the termination of our great wars had been stigmatised as humiliating and degrading, ignominious, hollow and unsafe. He cited the peace of Utrecht in 1713, the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748, the peace of Paris in 1763, the peace of Versailles in 1783, and the peace of Amiens in 1801. The single exception was the peace of Paris in 1814. It would have been difficult in this case, he said, for patriotism or faction to discover humiliation 'in a treaty dictated at the head of a victorious army in the capital of the enemy.'

AT PENMAENMAWR

While the storm was raging, Mr. Gladstone made his way with his family to Penmaenmawr, whence he writes to Lord Aberdeen (Aug. 9): 'It was a charitable act on your part to write to me. It is hardly possible to believe one is not the greatest scoundrel on earth, when one is a.s.sured of it from all sides on such excellent authority.... I am busy reading Homer about the Sebastopol of old time, and all manner of other fine fellows.' In another letter of the same time, written to Sir Walter James, one of the most closely attached of all his friends, he strikes a deeper note:--

_Sept. 17._--If I say I care little for such an attack you will perhaps think I make little of sympathy like yours and Lord Hardinge's, but such, I beg you and him to believe, is not the case. Public life is full of snares and dangers, and I think it a fearful thing for a Christian to look forward to closing his life in the midst of its (to me at least) essentially fevered activity.

It has, however, some excellent characteristics in regard to mental and even spiritual discipline, and among these in particular it absolutely requires the habits of resisting temper and of suppressing pain. I never allow myself, in regard to my public life, to realise, _i.e._ to dwell upon, the fact that a thing is _painful_. Indeed life has no time for such broodings: neither in session nor recess is the year, the day, or the hour long enough for what it brings with it. Nor was there ever a case in which it was so little difficult to pa.s.s over and make little of a personal matter: for if indeed it be true, as I fear it is, that we have been committing grave errors, that those errors have cost many thousands of lives and millions of money, and that no glare of success can effectually hide the gloom of thickening complications, the man who can be capable of weighing his own fate and prospects in the midst of such contingencies has need to take a lesson from the private soldier who gives his life to his country at a s.h.i.+lling a day.

'We are on our way back,' he writes at the end of September, 'after a month of sea-bathing and touring among the Welsh mountains. Most of my time is taken up with Homer and Homeric literature, in which I am immersed with great delight up to my ears; perhaps I should say out of my depth.' Mr. Gladstone was one of the men whom the agitations of politics can never submerge. Political interests were what they ought to be, a very serious part of life; but they took their place with other things, and were never suffered, as in narrower natures sometimes happens, to blot out 'stars and orbs of sun and moon' from the s.p.a.cious firmament above us. He now found a shelter from the intensity of the times in the systematic production of his book on Homer, a striking piece of literature that became the most definite of his pursuits for two years or more. His children observed that he never lounged or strolled upon the sh.o.r.e, but when the morning's labour was over--and nothing was ever allowed to break or mutilate the daily spell of serious work--he would stride forth staff in hand, and vigorously breast the steepest bluffs and hills that he could find. This was only emblematic of a temperament to which the putting forth of power was both necessity and delight. The only rest he ever knew was change of effort.

While he was on the Welsh coast Sebastopol fell, after a siege of three hundred and fifty days. Negotiations for peace were opened tolerably soon afterwards, ending, after many checks and diplomatic difficulties, in the Treaty of Paris (March 30, 1856), as to which I need only remind the reader, with a view to a future incident in Mr. Gladstone's history, that the Black Sea was neutralised, and all wars.h.i.+ps of every nation excluded from its waters. Three hundred thousand men had perished.

Countless treasure had been flung into the abyss. The nation that had won its last victory at Waterloo did not now enhance the glory of its arms, nor the power of its diplomacy, nor the strength of any of its material interests. It was our French ally who profited. The integrity of Turkey was so ill confirmed that even at the Congress of Paris the question of the Danubian Princ.i.p.alities was raised in a form that in a couple of years reduced Turkish rule over six millions of her subjects to the shadow of smoke. Of the confidently promised reform of Mahometan dominion there was never a beginning nor a sign. The vindication of the standing European order proved so ineffectual that the Crimean war was only the sanguinary prelude to a vast subversion of the whole system of European states.

II

WORK ON HOMER

Other interests now came foremost in Mr. Gladstone's mind. The old ground so constantly travelled over since the death of Peel was for three years to come traversed again with fatiguing iteration. In the spring of 1856 Lord Derby repeated the overtures that he had made in specific form in 1851 and in 1855. The government was weak, as Mr.

Gladstone had predicted that it would be. Lord Derby told Sir William Heathcote, through whom he and Mr. Gladstone communicated, that as almost any day it might be overturned, and he might be sent for by the Queen, he was bound to see what strength he might rely upon, and he was anxious to know what were Mr. Gladstone's views on the possibility of co-operation. What was the nature of his relations with other members of the Peel government who had also been in the cabinet of Lord Aberdeen?

Did they systematically communicate? Were they a party? Did they intend to hold and to act together? These questions were soon answered:--

On the first point, Mr. Gladstone said, you cannot better describe my views for present purposes than by saying that they are much like Lord Derby's own as I understand them--there was nothing in them to prevent a further consideration of the subject, if public affairs should a.s.sume such a shape as to recommend it. On the second, I said Graham, Herbert, Cardwell, and I communicated together habitually and confidentially; that we did not seek to act, but rather eschewed acting, as a party; that our habits of communication were founded upon long political a.s.sociation, general agreement, and personal friends.h.i.+p; that they were not, however, a covenant for the future, but a natural growth and result of the past.

Then he proceeds to tell with a new and rather startling conclusion the old story of the Peelite responsibility for the broken and disorganised state of the House of Commons:--

We, the friends of Lord Aberdeen, were a main cause of disunion and weakness in the executive government, and must be so, from whichever side the government were formed, so long as we were not absolutely incorporated into one or the other of the two great parties. For though we had few positively and regularly following us, yet we had indirect relations with others on both sides of the House, which tended to relax, and so far disable, party connections, and our existence as a section encouraged the formation of other sections all working with similar effects. I carried my feeling individually so far upon the subject as even to be ready, if I had to act alone, to surrender my seat in parliament, rather than continue a cause of disturbance to any government to which I might generally wish well.[353]

RELATIONS WITH LORD DERBY

This exchange of views with Lord Derby he fully reported to Graham, Herbert, and Cardwell, whom Lord Aberdeen, at his request, had summoned for the purpose. Herbert doubted the expediency of such communications, and Graham went straight to what was a real point. 'He observed that the question was of the most vital consequence, Who should lead the House of Commons? This he thought must come to me, and could not be with Disraeli. I had said and repeated, that I thought we could not bargain Disraeli out of the saddle; that it must rest with him (so far as we were concerned) to hold the lead if he pleased; that besides my looking to it with doubt and dread, I felt he had this right; and that I took it as one of the _data_ in the case before us upon which we might have to consider the question of political junction, and which might be seriously affected by it.' Of these approaches in the spring of 1856 nothing came. The struggle in Mr. Gladstone's mind went on with growing urgency. He always protested that he never at any time contemplated an isolated return to the conservative ranks, but 'reunion of a body with a body.'

Besides his sense of the vital importance of the reconstruction of the party system, he had two other high related aims. The commanding position that had first been held in the objects of his activity by the church, then, for a considerable s.p.a.ce, by the colonies, was now filled by finance. As he put it in a letter to his sympathetic brother Robertson: He saw two cardinal subjects for the present moment in public affairs, a rational and pacific foreign policy, and second, the due reduction in our establishments, economy in administration, and finance to correspond. In 1853 he had, as he believed, given financial pledges to the country. These pledges were by the present ministers in danger of being forgotten. They were incompatible with Palmerston's spirit of foreign policy. His duty, then, was to oppose that policy, and to labour as hard as he could for the redemption of his pledges. Yet isolated as he was, he had little power over either one of these aims or the other. The liberal party was determined to support the reigning foreign policy, and this made financial improvement desperate. Of Lord Derby's friends he was not hopeful, but they were not committed to so dangerous a leader.[354] As he put it to Elwin, the editor of the _Quarterly_: There is a policy going a begging; the general policy that Sir Robert Peel in 1841 took office to support--the policy of peace abroad, of economy, of financial equilibrium, of steady resistance to abuses, and promotion of practical improvements at home, with a disinclination to questions of reform, gratuitously raised.[355]

His whole mind beset, possessed, and on fire with ideals of this kind, and with sanguine visions of the road by which they might be realised--it was not in the temperament of this born warrior to count the lions in his path. He was only too much in the right, as his tribulations of a later date so amply proved, in his perception that neither Palmerston nor Palmerstonian liberals would take up the broken clue of Peel. The importunate presence of Mr. Disraeli was not any sharper obstacle to a definite junction with conservatives, than was the personality of Lord Palmerston to a junction with liberals. As he had said to Graham in November 1856, 'the pain and strain of public duty is multiplied tenfold by the want of a clear and firm ground from which visibly to act.' In rougher phrase, a man must have a platform and work with a party. This indeed is for sensible men one of the rudiments of practical politics.

Of a certain kind of cant about public life and office Mr. Gladstone was always accustomed to make short work. The repudiation of desire for official power, he at this time and always roundly denounced as 'sentimental and maudlin.' One of the not too many things that he admired in Lord Palmerston was 'the manly frankness of his habitual declarations that office is the natural and proper sphere of a public man's ambition, as that in which he can most freely use his powers for the common advantage of his country.' 'The desire for office,' said Mr.

Gladstone, 'is the desire of ardent minds for a larger s.p.a.ce and scope within which to serve the country, and for access to the command of that powerful machinery for information and practice, which the public departments supply. He must be a very bad minister indeed, who does not do ten times the good to the country that he would do when out of office, because he has helps and opportunities which multiply twenty fold, as by a system of wheels and pulleys, his power for doing it.' It is true, as the smallest of men may see--and the smaller the man, the more will he make of it--that this sterling good sense may set many a snare for the politician; but then even the consecrated affectations of our public life have their snares too.

The world was not in the secret of the communications with Lord Derby, but the intrinsic probabilities of a case often give to the public a trick of divination. In the middle of December (1856) articles actually appeared in the prints of the day announcing that Mr. Gladstone would at the opening of the next session figure at the head of the opposition.

The tories, they said, wanted a leader, Mr. Gladstone wanted a party.

They were credulous, he was ingenious. The minority in a party must yield to a majority, and he stood almost by himself. He would be a returned prodigal in the conservative household, for unlike Sir James Graham, he had never merged himself in the ordinary ruck of liberalism.

A tory peer writes to a.s.sure him that there never was such a chance for the reunion of the party. Even the n.o.bleman who had moved Mr.

Gladstone's expulsion from the Carlton said that he supposed reunion must pretty soon come off. A few, perhaps under a score, made a great noise, but if Lord Derby would only form a government, the noisy ones would be as glad as the rest. True--and here the writer came nearer to the central difficulty--'Disraeli ought _at first_ to lead the Commons,'

because he had been leader before; second, he had the greater number of followers; third, because on public grounds he must desire to see Mr.

Gladstone at the exchequer; and to transfer to him both the great subject of finance and the great prize of leaders.h.i.+p would be impossible. So easy do flat impossibilities ever seem to sanguine simpletons in Pall Mall. Another correspondent has been staying at a grand country-house, full of tory company, and the state of parties was much discussed--'There was one unanimous opinion,' he tells Mr.

Gladstone, 'that nothing could save the conservative party except electing you for their leader.' The same talk was reported from the clubs. 'The difficulty was Disraeli, not so much for any damage that his hostility could do the party, as because Lord Derby had contracted relations with him which it would perhaps be impossible for him to disown.'

Meanwhile the sagacious man in the tents of the tories, whose course was so neatly chalked out for him by sulky followers not relis.h.i.+ng his lead, was, we may be sure, entirely wide-awake, watching currents, gales, and puffs of wind without haste, without rest. Disraeli made a bold stroke for party consolidation by inviting to his official dinner at the opening of the session of 1857, General Peel, the favourite brother of the great minister and his best accredited representative. Peel consulted Mr. Gladstone on the reply to Disraeli's invitation, and found him strongly adverse. The public, said Mr. Gladstone, views with much jealousy every change of political position not founded on previous parliamentary co-operation for some national object. Mr. Gladstone might have put it on the narrower ground that attendance at the dinner would be an explicit condonation of Disraeli's misdeeds ten years before, and a direct acceptance of his leaders.h.i.+p henceforth.

Elwin believed that he had the direct sanction of Lord Derby for a message from him to Mr. Gladstone suggesting communication. After much ruminating and consulting, Mr. Gladstone wrote (Dec. 13, 1856) in sufficiently circuitous language to Elwin, that though he should not be justified in communicating with Lord Derby, considered simply as a political leader with whom he was not in relations of party, yet, he proceeds, 'remembering that I was once his colleague, and placing entire reliance on his honour, I am ready to speak to him in confidence and without reserve on the subject of public affairs, should it be his desire.' His three friends, Graham, Aberdeen, and Herbert, still viewed the proceeding with entire disfavour, and no counsels were ever dictated by sincerer affection and solicitude. Your financial scheme, says Graham, is conceived in the very spirit of Peel; it would be most conducive to national welfare; you alone and in high office can carry it; but it must be grafted on a pacific policy and on a moderate scale of public expenditure; it is not under Palmerston that such blessings are to be antic.i.p.ated; but then are they more probable under Derby and Disraeli? Lord Aberdeen took another line, insisting that to make any sort of approach to Lord Derby, after joining Palmerston only the previous year, would be unjustifiable; the bare apprehension of a vicious policy would be no intelligible ground for changing sides; more tangible reasons would be needed, and they were only too likely soon to arrive from Palmerston's foreign policy. Then a reasonable chance might come. Herbert, in his turn, told Mr. Gladstone that though he might infuse vigour and respectability into a party that stood much in need of both, yet he would always be in a false position. 'Your opinions are essentially progressive, and when the measures of any government mast be liberal and progressive, the country will prefer the men whose antecedents and mottoes are liberal, while the conservatives will always prefer a leader whose prejudices are with themselves.' As Graham put it to him: 'If you were to join the tory party to-morrow, you would have neither their confidence nor their real good will, and they would openly break with you in less than a year.' It all reminds one of the chorus in Greek plays, sagely expostulating with a hero bent on some dread deed of fate.

III

MEDITATIONS

In the autumn of 1856 ecclesiastical questions held a strong place in Mr. Gladstone's interests. The condemnation of Archdeacon Denison for heresy roused him to lively indignation. He had long interviews with the archdeacon, drafted answers for him, and flung his whole soul into the case, though he was made angry by Denison's oscillations and general tone. 'Gladstone tells me,' said Aberdeen, 'that he cannot sleep for it, and writes to me volumes upon volumes. He thinks that Denison ought to have been allowed to show that his doctrine, whether in accordance or not with the articles, is in accordance with scripture. And he thinks the decision ought to have been in his case as it was in Gorham's, that the articles are comprehensive, that they admit Denison's view of the Eucharist as well as that of his opponents.'[356]

His closing entry for the year (1856) depicts an inner mood:--

It appears to me that there are few persons who are so much as I am enclosed in the invisible net of pendent steel. I have never known what tedium was, have always found time full of calls and duties, life charged with every kind of interest. But now when I look calmly around me, I see that these interests are for ever growing and grown too many and powerful, and that were it to please G.o.d to call me I might answer with reluctance.... See how I stand. Into politics I am drawn deeper every year; in the growing anxieties and struggles of the church I have no less [interest] than I have heretofore; literature has of late acquired a new and powerful hold upon me; the fortunes of my wife's family, which have had, with all their dry detail, all the most exciting and arduous interest of romance for me now during nine years and more; seven children growing up around us, and each day the object of deeper thoughts and feelings, and of higher hopes to Catherine and me,--what a network is here woven out of all that the heart and all that the mind of man can supply....

FOOTNOTES:

[348] See Appendix.

[349] Herbert to Gladstone, May 27, 1855.

[350] _Many Memories_, p. 229.

[351] Vitzthum, _St. Petersburg and London_, i. p. 170. A full account of these parliamentary events from May to July, 1855, is to be found in Martin's _Prince Consort_, iii. pp. 281-307.

[352] Ashley, ii. pp. 320, 325.

[353] Memo. April 17, 1856.

[354] To Robertson Gladstone, Dec. 16, 1856.

[355] To Mr. Elwin, Dec. 2, 1856.

[356] Simpson's _Many Memories_, p. 238.

CHAPTER VIII

GENERAL ELECTION--NEW MARRIAGE LAW

(_1857_)

No wave on the great ocean of Time, when once it has floated past us, can be recalled. All we can do is to watch the new form and motion of the next, and launch upon it to try in the manner our best judgment may suggest our strength and skill.--GLADSTONE.

In spite of wise counsels of circ.u.mspection, Mr. Gladstone clung to the chances that might come from personal communication between himself and Lord Derby. Under pressure from his friends, he agreed with Lord Derby to put off an interview until after the debate on the address. Then, after parliament met, they took the plunge. We are now at the beginning of February.

This afternoon at three I called on Lord Derby and remained with him above three hours, in prosecution of the correspondence which had pa.s.sed between us.