Since the appearance of the first volumes of Macaulay’s History there has not been such an event in the publishing world as the appearance of a Life of Gladstone by Mr. Morley. Nor has public expectation been disappointed.
Though I saw a good deal of Gladstone, both in the way of business and socially, I never was nor could I have been, like Mr. Morley, his colleague and a partner of his counsels. On the other hand, I lived in the closest intimacy with men who were his associates in public life, and saw him through their eyes.
This man was a wonderful being, physically and mentally, the mental part being well sustained by the physical. His form bespoke the nervous energy with which it was surcharged. His eye was intensely bright, though in the rest of the face there was nothing specially indicative of genius. His physical and mental force was such that he could speak for more than four hours at a stretch, and with vigour and freshness so sustained that George Venables, an extremely fastidious and not over-friendly critic, after hearing him for four hours, and on a financial subject, wished that he could go on for four hours more. His powers of work were enormous. He once called me to him to help in settling the details of a University Bill. He told me that he had been up over the Bill late at night. We worked at it together from ten in the morning till six in the afternoon, saving an hour and a half which he spent at a Privy Council, leaving me with the Bill. When we parted, he went down to the House, where he spoke at one o’clock the next morning. Besides his mountain of business, he was a voluminous writer on other than political subjects, and did a vast amount of miscellaneous reading. As a proof of his powers of acquisition, he gained so perfect a mastery of the Italian language as to be able to make a long speech, in which Professor Villari could detect only two mistakes, and those merely uses of a poetical instead of the ordinary word.
Like Pitt, Gladstone was a first-rate sleeper. At the time when he had exposed himself to great obloquy and violent attacks by his secession from the Palmerston Government, in the middle of the Crimean War, one of his intimate friends spoke of him to me as being in so extreme a state of excitement that he hardly liked to go near him. Next day, I had business with him. He went out of the room to fetch a letter, leaving me with Mrs. Gladstone, to whom I said that I feared he must be severely tried by the attacks. She replied that he was, but that he would come home from the most exciting debate and fall at once into sound sleep. A bad night, she said, if ever he had one, upset him. But this was very rare. He chronicles his good and bad nights, showing how thoroughly he felt the necessity of sound sleep. In extreme old age he took long walks and felled trees, conversed with unfailing vivacity, and seemed to be the last of the party in the evening to wish to go to bed. At the same time he was doing a good deal of work.
The hero was fond of dwelling on his Scottish extraction. His domicile, however, was Liverpool, and his father was a West Indian proprietor and slave-owner; a circumstance perhaps not wholly without influence on one or two passages of his life. To his Scottish shrewdness and aptitude for business, Eton and Oxford added the highest English culture. Eton in those days would teach him only classics. But there was a good deal of interest in public affairs among the boys, many of whom were scions of political houses. There was a lively debating club, called “Pop,” of which Gladstone was the star. At Oxford he added mathematics to classics, taking the highest honours in both. There, also, he was the star of the debating club. It was a fine time for budding debaters, being the epoch of the great struggle about the Reform Bill. Gladstone led vehemently and gloriously on the Tory side. The result was that his fellow collegian, Lord Lincoln, introduced him as a most promising recruit to his father the old Duke of Newcastle, the highest of Tories, and Gladstone was elected to Parliament for Newark, a borough under the Duke’s influence. I have been allowed to read the correspondence, and there is nothing in it derogatory to the young man’s independence.
Oxford was the heart of clericism as well as Toryism, and the advance of Liberalism threatened the Anglican State Church, as well as the oligarchy of rotten boroughs. The Tractarian movement of sacerdotal reaction was already on foot. Gladstone imbibed the ecclesiastical as well as the political spirit of the place, and formed a friendship, which proved lasting, with the authors of the mediævalising movement. He published a defence of the Anglican State Church, which, as we know, was terribly cut up by Macaulay. The Reviewer, however, ends with a defence of religious establishments really weaker than anything in Gladstone. The State, according to Macaulay, though religion is not its proper business, has some time and energy to spare which it may usefully devote to the regulation of religion.