29 December: Boreham on W E Gladstone

A Sublimated Statecraft
It is pleasant on this, his birthday, to recall the striking personality, the fine features and the noble lifework of William Ewart Gladstone. It is seldom kind to review a political career half a century after it has closed.[1] In many cases the very name has dropped from the memories of the new generation; and, even in the cases of the most outstanding statesmen, few can speak with confidence of the causes that they espoused, or the reforms that they introduced. To some extent this is true of Mr. Gladstone. Born in the 19th century and dying in the 19th century, he belongs to the 19th century; and looking back across the tremendous dramas that have been enacted in the first half of the 20th century, we who live in the central days of this new epoch seem to have very little in common with the era that died when Gladstone died. The Reform Bill; the cleft with Disraeli; the Crimean War; the Irish controversy, and the Farnell Commission; the fall of Khartoum and the death of General Gordon; these things, and the angry debates to which they gave rise, have passed into the dim perspective of remote history.

Yet Gladstone himself lives; his face is familiar; there is still a magic in his name. Old people, who vaguely remember him as one of the Homeric figures of their younger days, like to think of him, to hear of him, to read of him, whether they endorse or repudiate the political doctrines that he represented. And young people, infected by the admiration of their elders, have come to regard the memory of Gladstone with reverence and with awe: his name falls upon their ears like an encrusted tradition, like a golden legend, like an echo of the noble music of a bygone age. How are we to account for this persistent survival of a great man's fame?

Greatness And Goodness Harmoniously Blended
It must, of course, be conceded that his striking personality was marked by all the qualities of real greatness. He possessed a massive intellect combined with a stately and commanding presence. He was, too, a born orator. He magnetised his hearers in the initial act of rising to address them, so that they were half-persuaded before a syllable was uttered. Lord Ponsonby says that his authority over his audience, whether friendly or hostile, was such that, with his fine face, his flashing eye, his eloquent gestures and that organ-like voice whose range and modulation he managed to perfection, he was able to arrest the breathless attention of the most listless of his hearers, and to subdue any crowd into rapt attention. But all these things together do not entirely explain his phenomenal authority. The secret lay deeper. It was in the man himself. He was the undisputed master of every circumstance. You could, as Huxley said, have put him in the middle of a moor with nothing in the world but his shirt, and you could not prevent him from being anything he liked. His greatness was overwhelming and compelling; yet it was inherent rather than acquired.

The indisputable fact is that Gladstone's greatness was the fruit of his goodness. As a youth he passed through a profound religious experience and made up his mind to enter the ministry. Confounded, however, by the sudden offer of a seat in the House of Commons, he recognised in the new development an opportunity of rendering consecrated service in another sphere. "He was nearer to being a clergyman than I was," says Cardinal Manning, "and he was as fit for it as I was unfit." Gladstone turned from his clerical dream with a genuine sigh of regret; to the end of his days he loved nothing more than to read the lessons at the services in the little church at Hawarden; and he pledged himself, by secret covenant and in his letters to his friends, to exercise the spiritual influence in the public life of the nation that he had intended to exert in the ministry of his church.

Master Passion Of A Master Mind
He lived to be nearly 90; remained in harness almost to the last; and never for a moment swerved by a hair's breadth from his youthful ideal. His dazzling powers and masterly rhetoric quickly forced him into office. But as he rose from one exalted and responsible position to a still loftier one, he dreaded increasingly the danger that the blandishments of his social status, and the distractions of his public duties might wean him from his earlier devotion. In his monumental "Life of Gladstone," Lord Morley shows that, at each important step in his career Mr. Gladstone withdrew with his Bible for special intercourse with the unseen, and wrote to his most intimate friends begging them to invoke on his behalf the strength and guidance without which he felt that he must lamentably fail.

Half a century ago, Lord Rosebery and Lord Salisbury were the two outstanding personalities in the rival camps into which the political life of Great Britain was divided. Yet, sharply as they differed on most questions, there was one subject on which their lordships were in perfect agreement. "The world thought of Gladstone as a politician," said Lord Rosebery, into whose hands Mr. Gladstone relinquished the Liberal leadership. "To those of us who were privileged to enjoy his friendship, his politics seemed but the least part of him. Indeed, I sometimes doubt whether his natural bent was towards politics at all. The predominating part, to which all else was subordinated, was his religion. An intimate and vital religious experience was the essence, the savour, and the motive power of his whole life." "He has left behind him," said Lord Salisbury, the Conservative Prime Minister, "the memory of a great Christian statesman. He will be remembered, not so much for the causes in which he was engaged, or the political projects which he favoured, but as an example, of which history furnishes hardly any parallel, of a great Christian man." Our own generation will find itself touched to finer issues by a contemplation of these records of half a century ago.

F W Boreham

Image: W E Gladstone

[1] This editorial appears in the Hobart Mercury on July 12, 1947.